James Hitchcock
"Air Post" was one of a number of documentaries produced in the 1930s by the famous GPO Film Unit. The Unit was originally set up with the purpose of producing short films publicising the work of the British Post Office, and this is one of them, although it was later to widen its remit and to make documentaries dealing with other aspects of British life. The Unit's best-known film was the famous "Night Mail", which managed to make something as ordinary as the journey of a mail train from London to Scotland seem poetic with the help of music by Britten and words by Auden. "Air Post" is a rather more prosaic film, even though it deals with a subject- the opening up of a new worldwide communications network- which would seem more inherently romantic. The reason, apart from the lack of music by a famous composer and poetry by a famous poet, must surely have been cost. It was obviously within the Unit's budget to track a letter on its journey from London to Aberdeen. Tracking a letter on its journey from London to the other side of the globe would have been out of the question, so all we see is the British end of the operation. We see plenty of shots (perhaps too many) of letters addressed to exotic destinations being franked and sorted by hand, then a shot of an Imperial Airways biplane airliner ready to take off from Croydon airport, then the film ends. Flying round the world today is something we take for granted; in the 1930s, when the great majority of the population had never flown in an aircraft, it was still an adventure. The air mail service, which the film was made to promote, was a very new phenomenon, enabling letters and parcels to reach foreign destinations in a matter of days whereas previously, in the days when all foreign mail went by ship, they would have taken several weeks. What a film could have been made about this adventure had the budget allowed it.
