Night Mail — The Poetic Gaze

When the eminent film scholar Amos Vogel was forced to flee Vienna to the United States in 1938, the 17-year-old had already made the decision to devote his life to film. One experience that would define his future was a screening of "Night Mail" (1936) and this film still doesn’t fail to impress today.

In the 1930s, the British Post Office (General Post Office — GPO) was forced to fend off looming pri­va­tiz­a­ti­on plans. The GPO’s dedicated Film Unit was com­mis­sio­ned to produce a series of films that would enhance the public image of the insti­tu­ti­on, while at the same time combating low morale among the workforce by restoring fasci­na­ti­on and pride in the service. Directors Harry Watt and Basil Wright were tasked with por­tray­ing the London-Glasgow-Edinburgh-Aberdeen main postal train route.

Set to the music of Benjamin Britten and a poem by W.D. Auden, the b/w images of the Postal Special’s journey from London to Glasgow have a sug­ges­ti­ve effect.

Panning across a bleak Scottish landscape, the whistling of the wind overlaid by a beat, the dis­tinc­ti­ve white smoke of the train in the valley and a voice-over to the hard rhythmic beat of the steam engine.

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The store at the corner, the girl next door.

The train works its way power­ful­ly up the mountains as the stoker feeds the fire in the furnace with coal, shovel after shovel.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

The ascent is complete as dawn breaks, set to a sublime score, the view opens up to the brigh­tening sky as the engineer wipes his sweat from his brow.

Dawn frenshens, Her climb is done.
Down toward Glasgow she descends.

In the staccato of the rapid descent, we learn about the variety of letters, prac­ti­cal­ly the whole spectrum of life that the mail train has on board.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

At the end of the 23:23 min long docu­men­ta­ry it’s probably the last 3:14min that so closely resemble an inde­pen­dent film, that makes “Night Mail” such  a masterpiece.

The fact that “Night Mail” is not just a  regular image film, but a work of art, is due in no small part to John Grierson, one of the narrators in the film, who actually cri­ti­ci­zed the end of the rough cut version. He com­p­lai­ned that the images docu­men­ted merely the “machinery” of mail dis­tri­bu­ti­on, yet did not show the people who write and receive the letters. The filmma­kers then decided to create an addi­tio­nal sequence with a poem spoken to music.

Lastly I will deal with the opening 20 minutes of the film, which show this “machinery” in detail, in the second part of “Night Mail”. This section is more con­ven­tio­nal­ly designed, but also offers us a closer look at the working world of the 1930s.