Acknowledgements
Living On The Edge, the late 1980's documentary I made with Mike Grigsby, has been noted for its innovative aspects (see Reviews). But the central ideas which I brought to the film also owed a great deal to the enormously stimulating influence of David Hopkins, whose obituary I wrote for The Guardian in May 2004 (see below). It was an attempt to do some justice to one of British independent cinema's neglected visionaries.
The obituary mentions Independent Cinema West (ICW), the Bristol-based workshop founded and run by Dave and Jane Hopkins, another stimulating source for me and other filmmakers. ICW in turn owed a great deal to David Lascelles, who provided financial and practical support as well as producing skills. He produced Dave's Zastrozzi for Channel Four, the remarkable Tibet - A Buddhist Trilogy and subsequently indie movies and TV dramas like Inspector Morse.
Dave Hopkins' successor as the Arnolfini Cinema's Director of Programming was Archie Tait. On my recommendation as the ICA's cinema consultant Archie went on to run the ICA Cinema in London with Chris Rodley. Archie and Luke Randolph, the ICA's business manager, later moved into film development and producing.
Archie, an outstanding script and project consultant, and Luke, an equally outstanding co-producer, were instrumental in sustaining me over the many, frequently dispiriting years it took to get my feature film Blind Flight made. Without all their creative and practical work, support and judgement it simply wouldn't have made it to the starting blocks of financeability and production.
Documentary filmmakers Roger Graef and Michael Grigsby have also been enormously supportive and influential as colleagues and friends over many years. Indeed I owe a great deal to them for their introductions, promotion and active support on a significant amount of my work.
'THE GUARDIAN' OBITUARY ON DAVID HOPKINS by JOHN FURSE (May 2004)
David Hopkins
In 1990 Jeremy Isaacs named a four-hour dramatisation of an early Shelley novel, Zastrozzi (1985) as one of the 10 programmes of which he was most proud during his tenure as Channel 4's chief executive. It was the work of David Hopkins, film-maker, writer, cinema programmer and dramatist, who has died of cancer aged 64. After Zastrozzi came the international award-winning animated post-nuclear satire Sweet Disaster (1986), which David wrote, produced and directed, and, in 1992, Redundant Warrior his HTV/C4 documentary about photographer Don McCullin.
While running the Arnolfini Cinema in Bristol (1970-1973), David had pioneered the contextualised and themed programming that now extends across the arts as with Nicolas Serota's 2002 Tate Modern launch. David clustered new and old films, both mainstream and avant garde, brought back live music to silent classics, and provided some of the first screenings outside London of African and South American radical cinema.
After the Arnolfini he founded, in 1973, Independent Cinema West (ICW). ICW demonstrated David's abiding interest in new technologies for independent film. He planned for production and distribution to be integrated under film makers' control, for Super 8mm (the home movie medium) and video technology to be incorporated with 16mm and 35mm formats for low-cost production; and to bypass conventional distribution with mobile cinemas and mail-order marketing. He used the then infant desktop computer publishing to promote the British independent sector. But his resistance to the ICW being overseen from London meant that it received scant public funding.
In 1975, in Bristol he initiated and ran the first Festival of Independent British Cinema. This took in indie features, shorts, political, experimental, "expanded cinema" and multiscreen work on everything from 35mm to Super 8mm and provided film-makers like Derek Jarman with their first significant forum.
David, with his then wife Jane a close partner in his endeavours, then initiated the Independent Cinema Magazine. Its documentation of independent film unearthed by the Festival contributed to C4's subsequent support for independent film-making on its launch in 1982. It was after meeting David at ICW that Isaacs commissioned Zastrozzi.
David was the only son of a sculptor and of a painter. His first novel African Comedy, (1988), drew on his upbringing in the Sudan and at an English boarding school. After studying zoology and drama at Bristol University, he worked at BBC Bristol as a documentary director under John Boorman before becoming a documentaries and educational film-maker in West Africa. Then came the Arnolfini and eventually his work with C4.
But David's star waned with regime changes at the channel and what was becoming a market-driven independent film-making climate. So he turned to novel writing and theatre. So impressed was he by dramatist Charlotte Meehan's talent that he directed her work in Bristol and New York.
It was in New York that he found a home for his energies and in 1999 he settled there with Charlotte, whom he later married, to continue their collaborations to produce off-Broadway theatre and to lecture on film and television at New York University. He later taught his own courses on film acting and digital video film making at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts.
Trenchant, irreverent - fellow leftists were as much a target of his chuckling insights as any - he possessed an exuberant, anarchic imagination. And he had a farsighted vision of film making which inspired many of us to venture beyond our horizons.
He is survived by Charlotte, and their three-year-old daughter, Margot; his first wife Jane and their two children Dan and Kate.
John Furse
David Graydon Hopkins, cinema programmer, film maker, dramatist and writer, born February 7 1940; died May 19 2004.
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