ABSTRACT
It is no surprise that after World War II the position in which British documentary film-makers found themselves was somewhat precarious. With the urgency of war now dissolved, many practitioners sought a new purpose for their craft. The demands of the war had seen the Grierson-inspired beginnings of the sponsored documentary film expand from the Government’s own GPO Film Unit (renamed the Crown Film Unit from 1940) and a small number of independent production companies, most notably the Strand and Realist Film Units, to a wider selection of units all capable of producing documentary and informational films.1 In 1938-9 upwards of thirty documentary films would have been considered a good output from the units located in London’s Soho Square. However, well over 500 films for the Ministry of Information (MOI) were produced between 1941 and 1945, by a small handful of independent documentary outfits; combined with the Ministry’s own Crown Film Unit’s, the immediate post war offered a sizeable potential for documentary film-making.
