The most underrated of the wartime films of Humphrey Jennings, Words for Battle is a montage documentary largely shot at the height of the Blitz in 1940. By linking sensitively observed and masterfully edited fragments of contemporaneous life with poems by John Milton, William Blake, Robert Browning, and Rudyard Kipling as well as iconic speeches by Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln, Jennings mobilizes the rhetoric of the past to address the urgent crises of the present, and suggests new creative possibilities for cinema itself. Restoration courtesy British Film Institute.