DOCUMENTARY
FILMS 1970-1975
During my time at the London School of Film Technique (now the London
Film School), I was asked to join a group of students who were travelling
to South
Africa under cover of a boycott-busting tour by the Cambridge Dryden Theatre
group. The idea was to shoot a film of daily life under Apartheid, and
I had experience as a newsreel type cameraman in the Israeli army
during 1967-68.
The result was a 45 minute documentary – END
OF DIALOGUE (PHELANDABA)
which was released as an anonymous production under the aegis of the Pan
Africanist Congress. The team involved in the production was composed of
a number of political exiles, Nana Mahomo, Vusumzi Make and Rakhetla Andrew
Tsehlana, based in London; and the shooting team was Antonia Caccia and
myself. Chris Curling, later a distinguished film maker and producer, was
also involved
in co-ordinating the project and the tour. Antonia Caccia has since produced
a number of widely praised documetaries on the Palestinian people, namely
On Our Land, Voices From Gaza, Stories of Honour and Shame, and Bethlehem
Diary.
END OF DIALOGUE became a kind of “Gone With
the Wind” of underground political cinema, winning several awards
for Nana Mahomo (the only named partner of the production) and widely
seen in the U.S. in a recut version as “A Black View of South Africa,” for
which he won an Emmy Award for his narration. The other members of
the team remained anonymous until recently, when a remastered video
version
of the film has been prepared.
Remaining at the London School of Film Technique,
I became involved with two Greek students in a subsequent 50 minute
documentary on the Colonels’ regime in Greece, GREECE
OF CHRISTIAN GREEKS,
which focused on the aftermath of the military coup d’etat of
April 1967, and was shot in the summer of 1971. I then continued, with
the
same colleagues, Costas Chronopoulos and George Nolas (who wished for
some reason to be credited as Jorge Tsoucarossa) to plan with our distributors,
Contemporary Films in London, a new documentary on the Israel-Palestine
conflict, which was eventually shot during 1971 and 1972 and completed
as TO LIVE IN FREEDOM. This film was circulated in student and independent
circles, and had a limited theatrical release in London, but was subjected
to a strong boycott initiated by Israeli embassy sources, and their
lobbies in Europe and the U.S., with the result that I was unable to
find funding
for several proposed projects in the U.S. in subsequent years. The
tale of the making of this film became part of the background of my
first
published book, A MOMENT OF SILENCE, printed in London in 1979. The
book, too, faced blacklisting the United States, an experience which
was used
in fictional form in the subsequent THE DEATH OF MOISHE-GANEF.
A last documentary film project of my 1970’s
was a collaboration with Antonia Caccia in her National Film School production
of a movie on the British coal-miners’ strike of 1975 – THE
BIG `K’.
All four films were distributed, and the films on Greece and Israel
were partly funded and produced by the radical London distributor
Charles Cooper, of Contemporary
Films, who was the most prominent distributor and mentor of international
(what used to be called “foreign”) films in Britain,
enabling audiences to see a vast swathe of global productions from
the classic Soviet cinema thru
to the cinema of Eastern Europe, China, India, and many new independent talents.
Charles died in 2001 aged 91, having transformed the way an entire generation,
myself included, was able to view the movies.
Feature involvement:
In the summer of 2000, a feature film was produced in London based on
my script, initially titled MILLENNIUM BLUES, then retitled MAD DOG BLUES
and then shot and released as MAD DOGS. Although the preparation and
shooting of the film was carried out with my complete involvement (with
the benefit of an enthusiastic crew and cast), and credited as “A
Film By” the director and myself, the film was subsequently recut
by the director against the wishes and advice both of myself and the
credited editor, and then released by the director (who had raised the
funds for the film and therefore owns it) in DVD format, with further
alterations achieved by some optical gizmo. I cannot recommend the result,
but it is I suppose an object lesson in the hazards of independent film
making. It is available online via and other online sales
networks.
It’s all right, Ma, I’m only bleeding…
Unproduced scripts:
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
THE REMAINDERED (based on The Days of Miracles and Wonders)
THE ARMENIAN BATHROOM or A SHORT FILM ABOUT EVERYTHING.
(Don’t all rush.)
