Basil Wright

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Conference of "World Union of documentary films" in 1948 Warsaw: Basil Wright (on the left), Elmar Klos, Joris Ivens and Jerzy Toeplitz.

Basil Charles Wright (12 June 1907 – 14 October 1987) was an English documentary filmmaker, film historian, film critic and teacher.

Biography

Basil Wright was born in

Harry Watt. Wright had introduced his friend W. H. Auden
to the film unit and the poet's verse was included in the film.

Wright left the GPO to form his own production company, The Realist Film Unit (RFU). There he directed Children at School with money from the Gas Industry and The Face of Scotland for The Films of Scotland Committee.

During World War II, Wright worked only as a producer, first at

The Crown Film Unit between 1945 and 1946 as producer-in-charge. Among the best known films he produced for Crown are Humphrey Jennings' A Diary for Timothy (1946) and A Defeated People (1946) and Instruments of the Orchestra (1946) featuring Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.[2] Returning to direction in the early 1950s, his films included Waters of Time (1951) made for the Festival of Britain, World Without End (1953) directed with Paul Rotha for UNESCO and Greece: The Immortal Land (1958) in collaboration with his friend the artist Michael Ayrton
.

Writing throughout the 30s and 40s, Basil Wright had contributed to the theoretical development of documentary in the movement's journals Cinema Quarterly, World Film News and Documentary Newsletter. He was the film critic for The Spectator after Graham Greene left. Wright was a regular contributor to the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound during the 1940s and '50s. He published a small book: The Uses of Film (1948) and his personal (extensive) history of cinema The Long View (1974). He taught at the University of Southern California (1962 and 1968), The National Film and Television School in London (1971–73) and Temple University in Philadelphia (1977–78). He was Governor of the British Film Institute, a fellow of the British Film Academy and President of the International Association of Documentary Filmmakers.

In his films Wright combined an ability to look closely and carefully at a subject with a poetic and often experimental approach to editing and sound. In Britain he is commemorated with a film prize awarded biennially by the

Royal Anthropological Institute
.

Wright died in Frieth, Buckinghamshire, England in 1987.

Centenary celebrations

In honour of Basil Wright's centenary year, his career, and the careers of his colleagues and fellow centenarians: Edgar Anstey, Marion Grierson, Humphrey Jennings and Paul Rotha, were celebrated with a season of films between August and October 2007 at the British Film Institute in London. Following this season, the BFI released a four-disc DVD set Land of Promise, containing films from leading figures in the British Documentary Film movement. A further three volumes of GPO films are available from the Bfi.

Films by Basil Wright online

You can watch Song of Ceylon on the Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire Website here: Entry for Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon.

If you have institutional access to the British Film Institute's Screenonline or Inview Websites you can watch a number of Wright's other films online. Further links below.

Filmography as director

Selected filmography as producer

See also

References

  1. ^ Pronay, Nicholas, "Wright, Basil Charles (1907–1987)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, September 2004. Retrieved 15 March 2024. (subscription required)
  2. ^ (BBC Radio 4 "Tales from the Stave," 2012.
  • Scott Anthony & James Mansell (eds), The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit, BFI/Palgrave, (2011).
  • Ian Aitken, The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology, Edinburgh University Press (1998).
  • Martin Stollery, Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and the Cultures of Imperialism, University of Exeter Press (2000).
  • Basil Wright, The Uses of Film, Bodley Head, Oxford (1948).
  • Basil Wright, The Long View: An International History of Cinema, Secker & Warburg, London (1974, updated second printing 1976).

External links

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