What message does John Grierson want to transmit in his films Night Mail and Drifters? John Grierson (1898-1972) was a British intellectual who believed in the political role of the artist and emphasized social purpose through the creation of documentary films. Grierson is considered to be the father of documentary film. I am going to discuss two of his films: Night Mail (1930) and Drifters (1929). Night Mail is one of a number of films associated with his work, who led a group including Basil Wright, Stuart Legg, Paul Rotha and Arthur Elton. Night Mail was the first of its kind in terms of Short Film with documentary styling. The film promoted a government agency, the GPO that was a monopoly that covered mail and telegraphs as well as other new electronic systems linked to defense and national security. The GPO film unit made documentaries to promote British industry to the British public. The film was under the direction of Basil Wright and Harry Watt working with John Grierson as a producer. The film documents the struggle and processes gone through by the Royal Mail Train Delivery service that travels from London to Scotland in the 1930's. Night Mail is a propagandistic film that looks at various things such as the way the post was sorted, dropped and collected from various places by catching the bags at high speeds in retracting net and the teamwork spirit of the post office employees. The journey that the train does provides the narrative structure of the film and the places that the train passes through are used to construct a particular representation of Britain. However, in what the film seems more interested about is in persuading and promoting the ideas of the government. The film is trying to show us how reliable the mail delivery is as it can deliver the mail on time, how powerful and useful the service is and how caring the government employees who do their task are. Night Mail is a didactic, inspirational and propagandistic documentary with the intention of revealing and informing about how efficient the government employees are. It uses propaganda techniques in a more indirect way than the audience might have expected. The train works in both a political and social function. The film focuses on the skill of workers and the importance of their role for maintaining Britain's success as a world power. Through the shots of the trains carrying the post overnight and their arrival in different cities as well as the hard work of the workers doing their best to process the mail on time, Grierson invites the audience into the realistic representation of the postal service working class and their dedication towards the British nation. A completely proud positive statement is made in this film about working life in Industrial Britain and it's achieved through the union of poetry and realism. Night Mail starts with a voiceover commentary describing how the mail is collected. Then, as the train continues with its journey, we can see the different railway stations at which it stops to collect and drop the mail. Grierson explains every meaning of the postal service to the audience showing various scenes like the bags of mail exiting and entering the train. The characters of the film had a scripted dialog and they communicated with each other which add to its nature of being a film that pushes for a social issue to influence its viewers. In this film Grierson wants to present the working class as heroes, he doesn't show much about the characters personality and hides their personal lives (how much they earn, how they eat or how they live) and this just makes the audience realize that what's important in this film is not the workers lives but the dedication they have towards Great Britain, and that's what Grierson wants the vital message for the film to be. This short documentary wants to impress its viewers and influence them into thinkin