I am a Londoner who
grew up in the drab 50s which seemed to brighten
up by the time I got to university in the
mid-60s, when it also got very political.
Actually my earliest political memory dates from
1951, when a mere toddler, I went on a holiday
with my parents to the seaside in Belgium. We
left home on election day, and in the evening,
after arriving, went out to look for a cafe which
had a television so they could find out the
results. Today, I am a news junkie.
Culturally, my
formative musical memories belong to the late 50s
and early 60s when I went as frequently as I
could to concerts at both the Royal Festival Hall
and the BBC Maida Vale Studios, which was only a
short bus ride from home. I also followed the
theatre, especially the Royal Court and the Royal
Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych, but
eventually theatre would be displaced for me by
cinema. Music, however, would never cede its
place in my life to anything else, and since I
wasn’t cut out to be a performer, I grabbed the
chance to get paid for going to concerts and
opera as soon as I discovered that I had certain
facility for writing about
them.
Film-wise, London for
me is now a cognitive map of the cinemas I
frequented as a child and a teenager which no
longer exist. Five of them on Kilburn High Road
alone. But as an experience of equal aesthetic
power to music and theatre, I date my initiation
very specifically to age fourteen, when my
brother took me to see La Regle du
Jeu.
I learnt about
Marxism from a relative, Solomon Trone, my
grandmother's cousin, who had been a
revolutionary in Russia in 1905 and was somehow
involved in the events of 1917. He came to live
in London in the 50s, and ended his life in Italy
in 1969 aged 95. I am now making a film about
him.
I spent much of my
last year at school eagerly reading Freud. I
studied philosophy at Sussex University, and then
went on to Oxford to work on history of ideas
with Isaiah Berlin, while writing music criticism
and making films on contemporary music for BBC
Television. I was hardly a model philosophy
student, but bonded with Isaiah through our
shared love of music.
I then caught the bug
of travelling - one summer when in the space of
two months I spent a fortnight each in Mexico
City, New York, Bucharest (my first academic
conference), and then visiting family in Israel.
It was Latin America which I was most drawn back
to, and where I would find myself working in the
1980s, writing a history of Cuban cinema and
making films for Channel Four and others.
That was after a
spell teaching film in London, when I felt like
an unemployed film maker teaching other people to
become unemployed film-makers. I returned to
teaching in the '90s, and with the development of
digital video and desktop editing, I have
recently found myself drawn back into documentary
film-making.
Curriculum
Vitae