A documentary maker who was handed other people's briefs and gave back films about people: the trams, the widower alone with his kettle, the children and the railway. The features are a footnote. The short films made to order for ministries and charities are where he lives.
Fi1m perspective
An old man makes his tea. The camera does not move and nothing is added to the sound. That, as far as we can reconstruct it, is I Think They Call Him John (1964), and it is as close as we can get to the thing John Krish did that nobody else in British sponsored film quite managed: take a brief from a charity or a government department and hand back a film about a person.
He started as an assistant editor at the Crown Film Unit during the war, working with Humphrey Jennings among others, and the lesson seems to have taken. From the late 1940s to the mid-1980s he made documentaries and public-information films for British Transport Films, the National Union of Teachers, charities and government departments. The famous one is The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), an elegy for London's trams made against instructions, which became one of British Transport Films' most popular titles. Of his sponsors he said: "I was never handed a brief by a civil servant that would make a film. And, because I had the backing of Leon Clore… I was at liberty to suggest an alternative. This is what I did every single time."
The method was not sabotage. He kept the sponsor's message and found the feeling underneath it, and he was willing to borrow from fiction to do so, bringing surreal and narrative devices into safety films that were meant to be plain instruction. The Finishing Line (1977), about railway vandalism, is still spoken of as shocking. They Took Us to the Sea (1961) is the other title regularly held up as a brief that turned into a film. The long static takes and near-silence of I Think They Call Him John are the technique at its barest, and we admit the stillness got to us: routine shown at its true length is hard to sit through and harder to shake off.
The 1960s and early 1970s also brought features and television. Unearthly Stranger (1963), made cheaply, has a cult following now. He directed episodes of The Avengers (1961), which we like a good deal for its wit and its partnerships, though the pleasure there belongs to Macnee, Rigg and the format rather than to any one director's hand; we could not pick his episodes out blind. That is the recurring complaint about his fiction: Decline and Fall… of a Birdwatcher (1968) and the rest lack the personal stamp of the documentaries. Later came children's features, Jesus (1979) as co-director, and more public-safety films before he retired.
The verdict is lopsided in a way he might not have minded. The features can wait. The short films made to order for people who wanted something else are the work, and most of them run about as long as it takes to boil a kettle, so there is no excuse.
Biography
John Krish (4 December 1923 – 7 May 2016) was a British director and screenwriter. Born in London, he began his career in the 1940s at the Crown Film Unit, where he worked as an assistant editor on wartime documentaries including Target for Tonight (1941) and Listen to Britain (1942). He later directed sponsored shorts for organisations including British Transport Films, the Central Office of Information and various charities.
Krish directed episodes of the television series The Avengers (1961) and The Saint (1962). His feature films include the science-fiction film Unearthly Stranger (1963) and Decline and Fall... of a Birdwatcher (1968). He is also known for documentaries and public information films such as The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), They Took Us to the Sea (1961), I Think They Call Him John (1964), Searching (1974) and The Finishing Line (1977). He co-directed Jesus (1979).
