For the centenary of Humphrey Jennings’s birth, Anthology Film Archives will screen a slate of classics this weekend by the inspiring British documentarian. Tucking the series away in the Thanksgiving break proves an apt fit for the wise sense of community and interconnectedness in these films. In Jennings’s poetic, musical portraits of wartime England, the filmmaker showed an unblinking interest in his countrymen as they pressed on and turned everyday life into a precious emblem of dignity and stoic courage in the face of the Blitz.

Jennings (1907–50) came up in the 1930s under the seminal GPO Film Unit headed by John Grierson, who is credited with coining the term “documentary.” Jennings, a lively young filmmaker at the time, who also painted and even co-organized an early surrealist exhibition in London, later helped found the ambitious Mass Observation project. Seeking to turn an anthropological curiosity back on England, the voracious effort chronicled the stuff of life: how ordinary Brits lived, ate, and socialized.

That eye for detail, fused with a formal ambition and an enthusiastic curiosity about people, well served Jennings, who bound together his renditions of human experience with popular and classical music and lilting montage. “Listen to Britain” (screening Friday and Sunday), whose title could be Jennings’s motto, lyrically interweaves scenes across London: a circle of schoolchildren dancing and singing, a man walking to work with his air-raid helmet in hand, a chalkboard menu listing cod and chips. The 20-minute short is like an audiovisual album, with drifting segues that include the drone of fighter planes shifting into the chatter of a music hall.

Jennings shot only one dramatic feature, 1943’s “Fires Were Started” (screening Friday and Saturday), which took an interesting tack to convey the invaluable role of firemen during the Blitz. To chronicle a day in the life of a squad, the filmmaker enlisted actual firemen to stage scenes, and their presence lends an authenticity as we watch them chase alarms and bond over cards and tea at the firehouse. Setting fires in already bombed-out buildings in order to film them might seem like strange practice for a documentarian, but it let Jennings get close and represent the risks and heroism involved. (The dialogue, however, is a bit much.)

In every case, Jennings’s camera shows a fresh affection for people that smartly resists hokeyness. You can sense it in a letter the filmmaker wrote to his wife during the making of “Fires Were Started,” which turns into a list of remembered acquaintances and anecdotes: “T.P. Smith ex-international banquet waiter — Fred Griffiths ex taxi-driver — Loris Rey ex Glasgow School of Art — Sadie the girl at the Artichoke — Mr. C at the warehouse who upset a precious bottle of Soir de Paris all over the safe and then insisted on drenching everybody’s hankies in it — and what the Sub-Officer’s wife said when he came home smelling like that.”

But Jennings wasn’t a Pollyanna about his wartime country. A certain cynicism creeps through in “Diary for Timothy” (screening Saturday and Sunday), a short film addressed to a baby born in 1944 as the Nazi threat recedes. A movie that might have been sentimental propaganda in other hands manages to mix an appreciation for the historic moment with wary anticipation and a foreboding sense of responsibility in the new freedom. Beachfront mines are cautiously cleared, toasts are delivered to “absent friends,” soldiers in hospitals slowly recover, and life goes on, but Jennings, aided by E.M. Forster’s voice-over text, underlines the burden of being born to an irrevocably changed world.

Besides Jennings’s films, Anthology’s series includes a Channel 4 documentary made in 2000 by Kevin MacDonald (who most recently directed “The Last King of Scotland”), which helps demonstrate Jennings’s importance to other filmmakers grappling with the task of shaping reality.

Jennings died young, in 1950, when he slipped off a cliff in Greece while working on a shot. His films may seem simple at times to modern documentary audiences, which are used to being told more than shown. But there’s a reason that Anthology counts Jennings’s contributions as part of its purist Essential Cinema collection.

Through Sunday (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).