Fires Were Started

The celebrated docudrama Fires Were Started, Jennings’s only feature film, is an perfect illustration of why filmmaker Lindsay Anderson was prompted to call Jennings “the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced.”

Fires portrays 24 hours in the lives of fictional firefighters in London during the Blitz. Jennings is able to create something more than documentary realism by having real firemen fight real fires kindled among the blitzed warehouses of London’s docklands. (74 mins., 35mm)