Drifters

Before John Grierson was appointed the first director of the GPO Film Unit, he worked for its predecessor organization, the Empire Marketing Board. His masterpiece Drifters, a film about herring fishing in the North Sea, dates from this phase and in its poetic force directly echoes the avant-gardes of the 1920s. His unleashed camera does not want to capture idyllic fishing net impressions, but "an epic of steam and steel". With his depiction of work on a North Sea cutter, Grierson developed the sober and haunting realism that would make English documentary cinema famous for the next two decades: The drama of the everyday rather than the dramatization of the extraordinary. (Lukas Foerster/Harry Tomicek)

At the piano: Gerhard Gruber

Photo: Austrian Film Museum