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19
GERALD NOXON
filter.
him.
demolished.
in another country."
I first met Humphrey Jennings in 1928 when
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:20:
HUMPHREY JENNINGS:
he gave to it.
When I first met Humphrey he presented a
striking physical appearance which seemed to
aesthetic climate which prevailed in Cambridge at the time. From it Humphrey certainly derived almost as great a stimulus as
other.
ideas down on paper, so the piece finally appeared over both our names. It was mostly
Elizabethan drama and poetry. A specific research project which he was carrying on with
the aid of a small grant from the college was
the production of a revised text of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis." The idea was to
study all the existing folios and other text
sources and to come up with a definitive version. Humphrey eventually completed the
project and I published his version of the text
under the imprint of the Experiment Press. It
was a paperback book because we wanted to
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: HUMPHREY JENNINGS:
tant part of his broader background of knowledge in world literature, philosophy, and art
history, which he had begun to acquire at an
21:
something of an infant prodigy, already thoroughly grounded in Latin, Greek, and English
English "public school," where sports activities
were often stressed at the expense of intellec-
naturally to him that self-expression and selfrevelation through painting were an integral
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22:
SHUMPHREY JENNINGS:
productions including, I seem to recall, Stravinsky's Histoire d'un Soldat, Honegger's King
David, and Purcell's King Arthur.
conjunction with Bruce Woolf of G-B Instructional Films, Humphrey confined his practical
designing.
In the summer of 1932, when both Humphrey and I had left Cambridge and Experi-
During those months at St. Tropez Humphrey was living off a small legacy which
there was anything left of the legacy, continued to devote all his time to painting. At
that time he had no notion whatsoever of
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:HUMPHREY JENNINGS:
by the General Post Office in 1933 John Grierson asked me to take on the job of organizing
and directing a nontheatrical road-show distribution system for the G.P.O. films. I worked
at this for about a year and then left to set up
down of ordinary motor oils and the consequent formation of a mythical substance referred to constantly in the advertising as
the shape of a baby girl. I knew that Humphrey was very hard up. There was no real
m23:
lighting.
The visual content of the film consisted
turn, Humphrey was always moved to enthusiastic response by fine craftsmanship in any
form. His reaction to the cut-away engine was
almost ecstatic.
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:HUMPHREY JENNINGS:
:24
abstraction.
tended to do.
interlaced fingers.
The film turned out to be a minor triumph
Grierson. It was not until later on, after Humphrey had worked with Stuart Legg in a quite
different connection, that he committed himself seriously to film making for the G.P.O.Crown group. This was almost certainly due to
the influence of Stuart Legg rather than that of
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:25 :
m HUMPHREY JENNINGS:
time.
Ministry of Information whose ponderous bureaucracy and continuous internal struggles for
had achieved any notable and widely recognized success in his film work, that is, before
he made London Can Take It. How his war-
In the meantime, on a different level, Humphrey had become increasingly involved in the
Surrealist movement. As I have mentioned
David Gascoyne. This was Remove Your HatTwenty Poems by Benjamin Peret, "selected
Jennings and David Gascoyne with an introductory note by Paul Eluard," published in
1936. In his next appearance in print, in
1937, Humphrey managed to achieve the highest degree of anonymity he could hope for in
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26:
:HUMPHREY JENNINGS:
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