Mark Kidel | |
---|---|
Born | London, England | 6 July 1947
Education | BA |
Alma mater | Oxford University (UK) |
Occupation(s) | Documentary filmmaker, writer |
Notable work | Rod the Mod Has Come of Age, Boy Next Door, Naked and Famous, Balthus the Painter, Ravi Shankar, Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask |
Mark Kidel (born 6 July 1947) is a documentary filmmaker, writer and critic, working mostly in France and the UK.
His award-winning films include portraits of Cary Grant, John Adams (composer), Elvis Costello, Boy George, Ravi Shankar, Rod Stewart, Bill Viola, Iannis Xenakis, pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, Derek Jarman, Brian Clarke Balthus, Tricky, Robert Wyatt and American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars.
A pioneer of the "rockumentary", [1] Kidel was also the first rock critic of the New Statesman and contributed pieces on rock, soul, and world music, to The Observer , The Sunday Times , and The Guardian .
Kidel grew up in Paris and Vienna [2] and attended the Lycée français de Vienne and Bedales School in England. In 1965, he won a scholarship to the University of Oxford where he studied for a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at New College, graduating in 1968, and edited Isis, the renowned student weekly. During his tenure, Kidel interviewed Jimi Hendrix on his first UK tour with Emma Rothschild. Kidel subsequently earned a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1969 with an MA in International Relations.
In 1970 Kidel got a job at the BBC in London as a researcher in the General Features department. There he made his first 10-minute film (about cheap weekend holidays to Majorca), and in 1972 joined the production team on the newly formed BBC2 Saturday night program Full House later known as Second House and The Lively Arts. There he made longer film portraits of a variety of British artists and craftsmen.
He followed with the feature-length The Man They Couldn't Hang: Babbacombe Lee for the BBC with the folk-rock group Fairport Convention.
In 1975 Kidel made a cinéma vérité film about the Kursaal Flyers as they toured Britain in a Ford Transit van called So You Wanna Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star? Recognized as a pioneering rock doc [3] (listed in Time Out's 50 Best Music Films, for example) [1] this now classic inspired British comedians' group the Comic Strip's Bad News Tour which some believe in turn inspired Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap.
Kidel's next film, another classic rock doc, Rod the Mod Has Come of Age was 'a ruthless account of the rock promotion circus in full action'. In early 1976, Kidel was in charge of "Arena: Art and Design", one of the precursors of the long-running BBC Arena series. During his six-month editorship, "Arena" featured an entire program devoted to video art, a then-relatively new art movement.
In 1976, frustrated by what he saw as television's increasing superficiality and the professional pressure to make formulaic films to please as wide an audience as possible, Kidel left the industry altogether to work in communications and public relations for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon, a role he occupied for the next decade. Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her husband Leonard's non-profit foundation was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore and served as an experiment in rural reconstruction which included projects in education, agriculture, rural industry and the arts. Over this period, Kidel also taught in the music department at Dartington College of the Arts, for three years.
Kidel was director of the "New Themes for Education" conference held at Dartington Hall for the years from 1984 to 1986. During this time, the conference explored the experience of illness and brought together people from the worlds of medicine, psychology and the arts. The 1985 conference led to Kidel's co-editing with Susan Rowe-Leete, The Meaning of Illness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986). [4]
Kidel invited James Hillman to Dartington Hall in 1984 to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this they collaborated, with Susan Rowe-Leete, on seven films based on Hillman's ideas:
-The Heart Has Reasons: a film about the way in which the heart is imagined by scientists and poets
-Kind of Blue: an essay in defence of melancholia
-The Architecture of the Imagination: a series of five ground-breaking films, 30-minutes each, about architecture and symbolism, with ones about the doorway, the staircase, the window, the tower and the bridge. [5] The films included many examples drawn from the history of art and classic cinema.
From 1972 to 1976, Kidel wrote music reviews for Time Out's music section.
During his time in Devon and onwards, Kidel produced more writing on contemporary music, specifically rock, folk, soul, R&B, blues, and world music, contributing pieces to The Observer , The Sunday Times , The Guardian and the New Review. [6] He was the founding rock columnist for the New Statesman in 1976 through 1980 and alternated every other week with John Peel on a regular column in The Listener.
Kidel and Peter Gabriel, with whom he had become friends after interviewing him for The Observer , discovered they were both interested in exploring music from other cultures. This led to a collaboration on the creation of a world music and rock festival that eventually became WOMAD. Kidel fed ideas which came from looking at successful world music festivals in France, the yearly event in Rennes, run by Chérif Khaznadar and Françoise Gründ. [7] Kidel was on the first board of directors but resigned owing to other commitments. A group that included Jonathan Arthur, Thomas Brooman, Martin Elbourne, Bob Hooton, and Steve Pritchard eventually brought the festival to fruition in 1982.
In 1987, Kidel returned to television: That year, he worked as joint commissioning editor-in-chief for the inaugural broadcast of the French cultural channel La Sept – later known as ARTE France. He also worked as a consultant to Channel 4, BBC Wales, and United Television, a large UK-based independent producer of TV programmes, through 2004. Kidel also produced and directed many films from 1987 until the present, working in collaboration with a number of production companies, in the UK – Dibb Directions, Third Eye and Antelope Films – in France with Les Films d'ici, and Agat Films & Cie – Ex Nihilo and also a regular guest producer with the BBC's Music and Arts Department.
One notable project involved collaborating with British producer and director Mike Dibb and the world-renowned American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax – creating two films for Channel 4 out of 500 or so hours of material he had shot in the United States over a 10-year period: American Patchwork and Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old. [8]
Many of Kidel's most successful films in the field of world music and cultures have been the result of collaborations with distinguished specialists: Le Paris Black and Pygmies in Paris with French music writer (and ex-editor of Jazz Magazine ) Gérald Arnaud, [9] Under African Skies: Mali and Bamako Beat with ethnomusicologist and BBC broadcaster Lucy Durán , [10] and New York:, The Secret African City with the Yale Africanist Robert Farris Thompson.
A major shift occurred in Kidel's work starting in 1997: he started shooting his own films. The intimacy achieved in "Naked and Famous", his film about Tricky, owed a great deal to this new low-impact approach. Subsequently, Kidel shot many of his own films or the parts of them using this approach.
Kidel founded the production company Calliope Media in 2003. Calliope Media was renamed Mark Kidel Films in 2022. He continues to work as a freelance director, mainly in the UK and France. Recent films include Becoming Cary Grant (2017), an official selection at the 2017 Cannes Festival, The Juilliard Experiment (2016), a feature-length film about the French artist Fabienne Verdier's collaborations with musicians in New York. Current projects include a feature documentary about Leonard Cohen, co-written with Sylvie Simmons, author of the acclaimed biography and 'I'm You Man, a film about the French pianist Shani Diluka as well as other music and arts projects. He is an active freelance writer, notably writing for Dasha Zhukova's art magazine Garage and Doris Lippitsch's architecture and design magazine QUER. He is a regular contributor on music, film and theatre for The Arts Desk, [11] an online review of the arts founded in September 2009 by a group of freelance arts writers.
Kidel has been married twice. His first marriage was to Caroline Wyndham, who had a daughter Sarah, whom Kidel adopted. The couple subsequently had Leo and Chloe. His second marriage was to Susan Rowe-Leete, from whom he was divorced in 2018. They have two children, Sam and Anna.
Becoming Cary Grant, 2017, 85 min, Official Selection Cannes Festival 2017 [13]
The Juilliard Experiment, 2016, 90 min [13]
Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance, 2013, 90 min [14]
Set the Piano Stool on Fire , 2010, 77 min [15] [16]
Journey With Peter Sellars, 2007, 90 min [17] – Telluride Film Festival selection, 2007; San Francisco International Film Festival selection, 2008;
Golden Prague nomination, 2008
Soweto Strings, 2007, [16] [18] 89 min – Best Arts Documentary nomination, Grierson Awards, 2007
Soweto Strings in Performance, 2007 [16] – Selection FIPA, Biarritz ; DokuArts, Amsterdam, both 2008
Paris Brothel, 2003, 75 min [16]
Glastonbury, 2002, 2 hrs [19]
Ravi Shankar: Between Two Worlds, 2001, 90 min [13] – Telluride Film Festival selection, 2001; FIPA D'Argent Special Prize; Grand Prix du Documentaire, UNESCO Festival International du Film d'Art; World Culture Forum Vienna TV Award; Newport International Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival, all 2002
Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask, 2000, 75 min [13]
Les Hopitaux Meurent Aussi (A Hospital Remembers), 2000, 77 min [13] [20] – Selection Hot Docs, Toronto
Rod the Mod Has Come of Age (Rod Stewart), 1976, 90 min [2]
So You Wanna Be A Rock’n’Roll Star (The Kursaal Flyers), 1975, 90 min [2]
The Man They Couldn’t Hang: Babbacombe Lee, 1974, 90 min
Martin Amis's England, 2014 [13] [21]
Road Movie: A Portrait of John Adams, 2013 [13] [22] Selection at FIFA (Montreal), 2013 [23] and Telluride Film Festival, 2013 [24]
Fabienne Verdier: Painting the Moment, 2013 [13] [25]
Colouring Light: Brian Clarke – An Artist Apart, 2011 [26] [27]
Saved By Music: The Wallfisch Family, 2010 [16]
Leon Fleisher: A Fleur De Touches (Two Hands), 2007 [20]
Hungary 1956: Our Revolution, 2006 [16] – Grierson Award for Best History Documentary; Historical Film of the Year Award, History Today Awards, both 2007
Mario Lanza: Singing to the Gods, 2005 [16]
Susheela Raman: Indian Journey, 2005 [13]
Joe Zawinul: A Musical Portrait, 2005 [16]
Imber: England's Lost Village, 2004 [13]
Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart, 2003 [16] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 2004
Free Will and Testament: The Robert Wyatt Story, 2002 [13]
Ravi Shankar in Concert, 2002 [13]
Leon Fleisher: Lessons of a Master, 2001 [13] [20] – Classiques en Images festival Grand Prix, 2002; Grand Prix Musique, UNESCO Festival International du Film d'Art, 2002
Naked and Famous: Tricky, 1997 [13]
Wild Ballerina: Karole Armitage, 1997 [13] [20]
Balthus the Painter, 1996 [13] – Biennale Internationale du Film sur l'Art, Paris, official selection, 1996; FIFA, Montreal, 1997
Norman Foster, 1995 [13]
Edgard Varèse, 1995 [13] [20] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 1997
Boy Next Door (Boy George), 1994 [13] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 1995
Derek Jarman: A Portrait, 1991 [13] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 1992
Something Rich and Strange: The Life and Work of Iannis Xenakis, 1991 [13]
Le Paris Black, 1990 [13] – Selection Suoni dal Mondo, Firenze, 1998
Under African Skies: Algeria, 1989
Under African Skies: Mali, 1989 [13] – Selection Suoni dal Mondo, Firenze, 1998
Under African Skies: Rai, 1989 [13] – Selection Suoni dal Mondo, Firenze, 1998
New York: The Secret African City, 1989 [13]
Songs and Dreams of the Noble Old, 1988
American Patchwork, 1988
The Island of 1000 Violins, 2015, 52 min [13]
Brendel in Performance, 2000, 50 min [13]
Tricky Live, 1997, 50 min [13]
Just Dancing Around: Richard Alston, 1996, 52 min [13]
Dreamtown: An Anatomy of Blackpool, 1995, 50 min [13] – Golden Gate Awards Certificate of Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1996
Kind of Blue: An Essay on Melancholia and Depression, 1994, 52 min [13] – Telluride Film Festival selection, 1993
The Heart Has Reasons, 1993, 52 min [13]
Pygmies in Paris, 1992, 45 min [20]
Bamako Beat: Music From Mali, 1991, 50 min [13]
Sounds Off the Beaten Track: WOMAD, 1987, 52 min
Henri Oguike: Second Frame, 2006, 26 min [20]
Karole Armitage: Rave, 2003, 26 min [20]
The Architecture of the Imagination, 1994: [2] The Door, The Staircase, The Window, The Bridge, and The Tower (5 films, 30 min each)
A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan, co-directed with Tony Harrison – Telluride Film Festival selection, 1994
Alfred Brendel on Music: Three Lectures, 2011, 225 min [28]
Dartington (Webb & Bower, Exeter, 1983)
Learning By Doing (Green Books, Hartland)
The Meaning of Illness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986) [4]
The photo essay "Mapping the Body" in Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1, ed. by Michel Feher (Zone Books, 1989) [29]
Ravi Shankar was an Indian sitarist and composer. A sitar virtuoso, he became the world's best-known expert of North Indian classical music in the second half of the 20th century, and influenced many musicians in India and throughout the world. Shankar was awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999.
The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
Uday Shankar was an Indian dancer and choreographer, best known for creating a fusion style of dance, adapting European theatrical techniques to Indian classical dance, imbued with elements of Indian classical, folk, and tribal dance, which he later popularised in India, Europe, and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a pioneer of modern dance in India.
Nishat Khan is an Indian sitar player from an illustrious musical family and the foremost sitar virtuoso of his generation.
Raga is a 1971 documentary film about the life and music of Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar, produced and directed by Howard Worth. It includes scenes featuring Western musicians Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison, as well as footage of Shankar returning to Maihar in central India, where as a young man he trained under the mentorship of Allauddin Khan. The film also features a portion of Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha's acclaimed performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
Jan Schmidt-Garre, German film director and producer.
David Acomba is a Canadian television and film producer/director whose television programmes have been featured on CBS, ABC, PBS, CBC, CTV, BBC, Channel 4, Showtime, and HBO.
Ravi Shankar had numerous solo recordings published, including these:
Harutyun Khachatryan is an Armenian film director, script writer, director of photography, film producer, General director of the Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, Meritorious Artist of the Republic of Armenia and voting Member of European Film Academy since 2006.
Alphan Eseli(Turkish: [Alphan Eşeli]); born March 7, 1973, is a Turkish film director, screenwriter, producer, and photographer. Eseli's critically acclaimed first feature film The Long Way Home (2013) has won the Fipresci Prize and the Golden Zenith Award at the 37th Montreal World Film Festival as well as the Best New Talent Award at the 7th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival.
Ravi Shankar's Music Festival from India was an Indian classical music revue led by sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar intended for Western concert audiences and performed in 1974. Its presentation was the first project undertaken by the Material World Charitable Foundation, set up the previous year by ex-Beatle George Harrison. Long a champion of Indian music, Harrison also produced an eponymous studio album by the Music Festival orchestra, which was released in 1976 on his Dark Horse record label. Both the CD format of the Ravi Shankar's Music Festival from India album and a DVD of their performance at the Royal Albert Hall in London were issued for the first time on the 2010 Shankar–Harrison box set Collaborations.
Chants of India is an album by Indian musician Ravi Shankar released in 1997 on Angel Records. Produced by his friend and sometime collaborator George Harrison, the album consists of Vedic and other Hindu sacred prayers set to music, marking a departure from Shankar's more familiar work in the field of Hindustani classical music. The lyrical themes of the recorded chants are peace and harmony among nature and all creatures. Sessions for the album took place in the Indian city of Madras and at Harrison's home in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, following his work on The Beatles' Anthology (1995). Anoushka Shankar, John Barham, Bikram Ghosh, Tarun Bhatacharaya and Ronu Majumdar are among the many musicians who contributed to the recording.
The Asian Music Circle was an organisation founded in London, England, in 1946, that promoted Indian and other Asian styles of music, dance and culture in the West. The AMC is credited with having facilitated the assimilation of the Indian subcontinent's artistic traditions into mainstream British culture. Founded by Indian writer and former political activist Ayana Angadi and his English wife, Patricia Fell-Clarke, a painter and later a novelist, the organisation was run from their family home in the north London suburb of Finchley.
Ravi Shankar: In Celebration is a compilation box set by Indian classical musician and composer Ravi Shankar, released in 1996 on Angel Records in conjunction with Dark Horse Records. The four discs cover Shankar's international career, from the 1950s to the mid 1990s, and include recordings originally released on the World Pacific, HMV, Angel, Apple, Dark Horse and Private Music record labels. Shankar's friend George Harrison compiled and co-produced the set, which was issued as part of year-long celebrations for Shankar's 75th birthday.
Viji Subramaniam, also known as Viji Shankar, was an Indian singer. She was the daughter of singer Lakshmi Shankar and Rajendra Shankar. Like her mother and uncle, Viji was a musician and trained in both the Indian classical systems.
Collaborations is a four-disc compilation box set by the Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar and the former Beatle George Harrison. Released in October 2010 on Dark Horse Records, it compiles two studio albums originally issued on that label – the long-unavailable Shankar Family & Friends (1974) and Ravi Shankar's Music Festival from India (1976) – and Chants of India, first issued on Angel Records in 1997. Although all three albums were originally Shankar releases, for which Harrison served in the role of music producer and guest musician, both Shankar and Harrison are credited as artists on the box set. Each of the collaborative projects represents a departure from Shankar's more typical work as a sitarist and performer of Hindustani classical ragas, with the box set showcasing his forays into, variously, jazz and rock, Indian folk and orchestral ensembles, and devotional music.
Live: Ravi Shankar at the Monterey International Pop Festival is a live album by Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar, released on the World Pacific record label in November 1967. It consists of part of Shankar's celebrated performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in California on 18 June 1967. Shankar was accompanied throughout by his regular tabla player, Alla Rakha, who performs a frenetic five-minute solo on the recording.
Ravi Shankar's Festival from India is a double album by Indian musician and composer Ravi Shankar, released on World Pacific Records in December 1968. It contains studio recordings made by a large ensemble of performers, many of whom Shankar had brought to the United States from India. Among the musicians were Shivkumar Sharma, Jitendra Abhisheki, Palghat Raghu, Lakshmi Shankar, Aashish Khan and Alla Rakha. The project presented Indian classical music in an orchestral setting, so recalling Shankar's work as musical director of All India Radio in the years before he achieved international fame as a soloist during the 1960s.
The Kinnara School of Music was a music school founded in Mumbai, India, in 1962 by Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar. With his increased popularity and influence in the West, he opened a second branch of the school at 8718 West 3rd Street in Los Angeles in May 1967. Shankar's concept for Kinnara was to further the strict guru–shishya tradition of musical education that he had experienced under his teacher, Allauddin Khan, in the 1940s. The Mumbai centre staged productions of orchestral works by Shankar, including Nava Rasa Ranga.
The Juilliard Experiment: An Adventure with Music and Musicians is a 2016 British documentary film directed and produced by Mark Kidel. It follows French abstract painter Fabienne Verdier's experience during her semester at the Juilliard School as its first artist-in-residence in 2014. Verdier is shown developing work, reflecting on her process, and developing more paintings back at her studio in Le Vexin, France.
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ignored (help)CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Kidel's obituary of James Hillman in The Guardian
Short biography on Calliope Media website
Full biography on Calliope Media website
Contributor's page on The Arts Desk website
A sequence in Rod the Mod Has Come of Age that shows Stewart having fun with an inept radio journalist
Clips from Naked and Famous
Clips from A Hospital Remembers, another film shot on a Sony DCR-VX1000 camera