Hacker Cinema
Night Mail
1938 · Film · documentary · 25 min
Directed by Harry Watt, Basil Wright
This documentary short examines the special train on which mail is sorted, dropped and collected on the run, and delivered in Scotland on the overnight run from Euston, London to Glasgow.
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3 comments on Hacker News
full film: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-night-mail-1936-online
> No other English poet wrote successfully in so many structural forms, or summoned so many of the language’s ancestral voices […] claiming as personal playground the entirety of English versification.
An interesting example, not mentioned in the article, is Auden's "verse commentary" in Night Mail, a documentary by the General Post Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0 (full film: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7utm3o)
Auden wrote his lines "timing the spoken verse with a stopwatch in order to fit it exactly to the shot". Wikipedia says the director Watt had only grudgingly agreed to the idea in the first place, but came around:
> Watt cared little for Auden's fame and well known work, calling him "a half-witted Swedish deckhand" and complained of his frequent lateness during filming. Watt later wrote: "[Auden] was to prove how wrong my estimation of him was, and leave me with a lifetime's awe of his talent".
See also the charming "Night Mail" (1936): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHOHbTL3mpk
Auden and Benjamin Britten collaborated on what is surely the most talent-heavy documentary about a postal service to exist.