British Industries
More than any other type of work, industrial production leaves its indelible mark on people and their environment.With the industrial film, documentary filmmaking developed an independent, truly British, genre, which had its heyday in the 1930s. Suschitzky was among the cofounders of the Documentary Technicians Alliance (DATA), which produced MINING REVIEW, a monthly newsreel cine-magazine for Britain’s coalmining communities. On show in 300 cinemas throughout the country, these cine-magazines dealt with new technical developments in coalmining, the miners and their families, their social environment, their clubs
and unions.
In his photographs from this period, Suschitzky not only documents work in a Welsh steelworks, the Newcastle shipyards, in Scottish coalmines or on the enormous coal barges in central London, but also the social environment of an industrial culture no longer extant in this form p. 122/123 today; a culture characterised by a strong sense of community spirit, displayed, in ways both big and small, in the tightly crammed rows of houses joined together like hooks and eyes. Steam locomotives, too, have long since disappeared from the British countryside. This unusual picture p. 113 was taken in Scotland in 1943. “I was not running in front of the moving train. The engine pushed a flat, open carriage, called a bogie, in front of it.We had a tripod with a large camera on it for filming Scottish landscape for future back-projection. Of course, I had my stills camera with me. Looking back at the engine, I noticed the engine driver watching us and the smoke almost hiding the sun.”
and unions.
In his photographs from this period, Suschitzky not only documents work in a Welsh steelworks, the Newcastle shipyards, in Scottish coalmines or on the enormous coal barges in central London, but also the social environment of an industrial culture no longer extant in this form p. 122/123 today; a culture characterised by a strong sense of community spirit, displayed, in ways both big and small, in the tightly crammed rows of houses joined together like hooks and eyes. Steam locomotives, too, have long since disappeared from the British countryside. This unusual picture p. 113 was taken in Scotland in 1943. “I was not running in front of the moving train. The engine pushed a flat, open carriage, called a bogie, in front of it.We had a tripod with a large camera on it for filming Scottish landscape for future back-projection. Of course, I had my stills camera with me. Looking back at the engine, I noticed the engine driver watching us and the smoke almost hiding the sun.”
