Alberto Cavalcanti (1897-1982) was a jobbing director who had worked with the industry in coalition with the avant-garde in France. He joined forces with fellow realist John Grierson in 1934. Their GPO Film Unit had just acquired its own sound recording equipment and Cavalcanti had a profound interest in experimenting with sound. Under Cavalcanti's tutelage, the whole unit involved itself in a devil-may-care parody of middle-class suburbia titled Pett and Pott; A Fairy Story of the Suburbs, for which they recorded the sound first, incorporating the picture last.
Cavalcanti continued to salvage a good deal of archived material that had been filmed without sound. The outstanding case of this would be 1935's Coal Face, which consisted of coal mining shots that had been lying around for over twenty years, Cavalcanti padded it with additional material shot by nearly everyone in the unit. The director proceeded to edit this all together with a befitting soundtrack that was based on one of W.H. Auden's poems and in accompaniment was the music of Benjamin Britten, both artists were virtually unheard of at the time. Auden was a close,personal friend of Basil Wright whose contribution to the success of a collaboration resulted in 1936's acclaimed short Night Mail.
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| The train kept-a-rollin' all night long - from 1936's seminal Night Mail |
Before Night Mail, Wright had completed the breathtaking Song of Ceylon (1934). The film was interdependent on its own sound track, on which Wright worked with the composer Walter Leigh who was famous for his harpsichord concerto that was composed earlier in the year .
Of all the films of the 1930's, Night Mail was certainly the most culpable for putting the British documentary on the map. It made first-rate entertainment out of a simple overnight sojourn of a mail train en route to Glasgow from London.
Coal Face (1935, dir. Alberto Cavalcanti)