363 6.3. Humphrey Jennings at the Fair: Spare Time, Family Portrait, and the Rhetoric of National Identity Kevin M. Flanagan The popularizing support of critic and ilmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) has long dominated public understanding of the work of ilmmaker and intellectual polymath Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950). An aspiring auteur himself, Anderson’s oft-cited essay “Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings” champions the recently deceased director as a major ilmmaker, “the only real talent the British cinema has yet produced.” 1 Anderson is concerned with the quality and convictions of Jennings’s ilms, and therefore reads them as forming a coherent body of work that culminates with a series of wartime productions—Words for Battle (1941), Listen to Britain (1942), Fires Were Started (1943), and A Diary for Timothy (1946)—which he underscores as “the ilms in which […] we can see that completely individual style developing from tentative discovery and experiment to mature certainty.” 2 The ilms he made before and after the war deserve less acclaim, since he supposedly “needed the hot blast of war to warm him to passion, to quicken his symbols to emotional as well as intellectual signiicance.” 3 However, Jennings’s work on wartime Britain extends beyond the ilms made during the war itself: he made movies for the New York World’s Fair and the Festival of Britain that book-end his nation’s struggle. His Spare Time (1939), a documentary on the leisure habits of working class people in the industrial north of Britain, and Family Portrait (1950), his meditation on the legacy of British identity during the nation’s days of enforced economic and material austerity, both speak to the peculiar circumstances of their production. Given the variety of this work, Anderson’s hierarchical auteurist model is not enough. Anderson’s clarion call about Jennings’s wartime documentaries has since prompted historical work that ties the ilmmaker’s idiosyncratic talents to the war efort. 4 For Anthony Aldgate and Jefrey Richards, the docudrama Fires Were Started (a story of East End ireighters who gallantly battle the frequent blazes that accompanied the aerial bombing of London) is exemplary because it balances the informational and educational dictates of the British documentary movement with the personalized demands of the stars and subjects of the story, thus maintaining a balance between the “intensely and deliberately personal” on the one hand, and the “resoundingly public” address to the “nature of the