Last week, Close Up cinema in east London showed a retrospective of the German filmmaker Peter Nestler.

Nestler’s films are beyond documentaries. He is not engaging in mere journalism. Nor are these films essays, whereby Nestler expounds on working class life or the ravishing changes of industry.

Rather, Nestler is a kind of poet connecting the dots between environmental shifts and the resilience of human beings. Whether it is the innocence of schoolchildren, or the contemplative suffering of community elders, Nestler presents us with the enduring joy of the human heart.

Dike Sluice tells the story of a seaside village undergoing the changes brought by post war development, but from the point of the small river itself.

Through the slightly ironic monologue of the sluice, Nestler captures the fragility of man’s place in the wider ecology, and without preaching he emphasises the loss of that place through technological change. The film shows us what is being lost, without descending into polemic of Jeremiad.

In Up The Danube, we return to the subject of rivers. This time the beauty of the east European landscape is shown to us in grand, wide shots as a narrator tells the stories of uprisings, peasant revolts and battles that have shaped the personalities of culture.

Ordinary working people are seen going about their daily tasks, working the river as they have done for centuries. Children play on the banks. Castles and fortresses rise up from the lush greenery and pierce the grey, historic skies.

What results is a testament to the many thousands of years of suffering and bloodshed that have formed the beauty and peacefulness of the European countryside. Nature and culture don’t just exist side by side, they create each other and augment each other. Where there is beauty, there has been death. Where there is change, there is the durable consciousness of history.

A Working Men’s Club In Sheffield was the masterpiece of this programme. Shot in and around the Dial Working Men’s Club in Sheffield in 1965, we are transported to way of life that was already vanishing at the time of filming. This is a moving and at times breathtaking account of the vibrant community that surrounded the dark metalworks and factories of Sheffield before the collapse of British industry.

Nestler immerses himself in this community, resisting any temptation to sentimentalise working class life, or to rage about the injustices of the grinding toil at the heart of this way of life. As always, Nestler is interested in the personalities that create the world he is filming, whether it is the personality of the city or the people that populate it.

There is humour and joy, pathos and melancholy, but all presented in an intimate way, never distancing us from the subjects of the film, but bringing us closer to them, and to ourselves.

For all the hardship and graft, the lives of these talented and forgotten people were untouched by the homogeneity and toxic noise of brand coffee shops and pedestrian high streets. This is an England of a calm, dutiful work ethic, a witty, unselfconscious endurance.

Local people take to the stage throughout the film, each displaying their own talents for song or performance. The level of ability it striking. One man, perhaps a recent immigrant to England, has a voice like Frank Sinatra. A young couple sings a Bob Dylan song with aching promise, captured in the glamour of a 16mm glow. A pedal steel guitar player plays daring and rambunctious lines of music with the steady glance of a butcher cutting his daily meat.

All of this is spliced with shots of the dark furnaces of metal factories, or the smokey backstreets of city slums. The flower of the human soul bursts open wide despite the blackening creep of industrial life.

Instead of sitting round a TV showing Pop Idol, people lived their lives as actors upon a self-made stage. Obscured by class and back-breaking work, they nevertheless were able to walk with dignity. Today, working life is luxurious and dull in comparison, but one wonders whether we have the same room for personal flourishing and self-respect that people did 50 years ago.

Nestler achieves a masterful voice through remaining responsive to his subjects. He does not impose an auteuristic vision upon the world he strives to capture, but instead listens to that world, searching for the stories want to be told.

This is a director who makes films in the same way Woody Guthrie wrote songs. There is a humility and simplicity in his technique, a sense of service towards the human spirit for its own sake.