Night Mail

Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway LMS mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. The film ends with a verse commentary by W. H. Auden, written for existing footage. Benjamin Britten scored the film. The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. The Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti was sound director. The locomotive featured in the film was Royal Scot 6115 Scots Guardsman, built in 1927. The film has become a classic of its own kind, much imitated by adverts and modern film shorts. Night Mail is widely considered a masterpiece of the British Documentary Film Movement.

As recited in the film, the poems rhythm imitates the trains wheels as they clatter over track sections, beginning slowly but picking up speed so that by the time of the penultimate verse the narrator is at a breathless pace. As the train slows toward its destination the final verse is more sedate. The opening lines are This is the Night Mail crossing the border Bringing the cheque and the postal order. The copyright on the film expired after 50 years, but some sources assert that the W.H. Auden poem remains protected by copyright as a written piece. The musical score was first published in 2002. Brittens score imagined the real sounds of the train and incorporated these imaginary sounds into his score. At over fifteen minutes, it is one of Brittens most elaborate film scores.According to Forsyth Hardys biography of Grierson, Auden wrote the verse on a trial and error basis. It had to be cut to fit the visuals, edited by R. Q. McNaughton, working with Cavalcanti and Wright. Many lines were discarded, ending as crumpled fragments in the wastepaper basket. Some of Audens verbal images the rounded Scottish hills heaped like slaughtered horses were too strong for the film, but what was retained made Night Mail as much a film about loneliness and companionship as about the collection and delivery of letters. It was that difference that made it a work of art. Night Mail was a genuinely collaborative effort. Stuart Legg spoke the verse, timed, with Brittens music, to the beat of the trains wheels. Grierson himself spoke the moving culmination passage And none will hear the postmans knock without a quickening of the heart, for who can bear to feel himself forgotten? ........

Source: Wikipedia