Mark Kidel (born 6 July 1947) is a documentary filmmaker and writer who lives in Bristol, England.
His award-winning films include portraits of Boy George, Ravi Shankar, Rod Stewart, Bill Viola, Iannis Xenakis, pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, Derek Jarman, Balthus, Tricky, Robert Wyatt and American theater 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.

Early life [link]

Kidel grew up in Paris and Vienna^[2] and attended the Lycée français de Vienne and Bedales School in England. French was his first language: Kidel is bilingual. In 1965, he won a scholarship to Oxford where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at New College 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.

Career [link]

Kidel was offered a research fellowship at Columbia University in New York City to start a PhD there in 1970, but realised he wanted to work in film so returned to Europe and 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. Fairport Convention had made a concept album around the real story of a Victorian murder case, and a researcher, Terry Barbour, got in touch with Kidel with the idea for a film which included the group's songs and a silent movie made in Australia.

[edit] So You Wanna Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star?

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? He auditioned Ace, Kokomo and the Kursaal Flyers and although all were interesting musically, the filmmaker felt it was the individual members of the Kursaal Flyers that expressed a number of key personae from rock mythology - all of them slightly caricatured, as they were a very self-knowing band, from the first moment in rock (just before punk) when intelligent musicians were hyper-aware of rock history and the games people played within the music world. There was the hard-drinking Dionysiac bass and banjo-player Richie Bull, drummer Will Birch, a dedicated Lothario, Graeme Douglas, the sombre and monosyllabic lead guitarist, Vic Collins, the pedal steel player and vocalist Paul Shuttleworth (modelled on a sleazy used car salesman). Collins and Shuttleworth were also the "well-behaved" duo of the band who never drank and holed up in the hotel room watching TV. The band's manager, Paul Conroy, in a blonde Afro, was a wisecracker, marshalling the band, and went on to bigger things – including co-signing the Spice Girls to EMI.

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.

[edit] Rod the Mod Has Come of Age

Rod Stewart's manager Billy Gaff approached Kidel with the idea of doing a similar fly-on-the-wall film about Stewart. Rod the Mod Has Come of Age is a ruthless and funny ccount of the rock promotion circus in full action and made when rock singers were still relatively innocent. It shows Stewart's instinctive ability to play to the camera, ad libbing and providing material. It also stars actress Britt Ekland, Stewart's girlfriend at the time, somewhat comically trying to steal as much screen time as possible. Rod the Mod Has Come of Age has been repeated on BBC many times.

Promoted video art on BBC2 [link]

Kidel was in charge of "Arena: Art and Design," a programming strand at BBC2, which among other things helped launch the filmmaking career of Nigel Finch, one of the program's star directors. Kidel was interested in the then-relatively new video art movement, and had gotten the BBC to commission a piece by the video artist Peter Donebauer when Kidel was working on The Lively Arts. "Arena" featured an entire program devoted to video art without a presenter (novel in British television at the time) that Kidel co-edited with Anna Ridley, including a new commission by David Hall. Several of the pieces had been generated on half-inch tape, a form that was not allowed to be broadcast at the time because of its low definition.

Dartington Hall [link]

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 in 1976 to work in communications and PR for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon for the next decade. Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her husband Leonard's unique nonprofit 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.

Brainstormed on WOMAD [link]

While teaching part-time in the music department at the Dartington College of Arts, Kidel browsed his way through the school's extensive collection of recorded world music, marking the beginning of a longstanding interest. Kidel met Peter Gabriel at a Talking Heads concert in London in 1979, leading 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.^[4] Kidel was on the first board of directors but resigned owing to other commitments. A group that included Thomas Brooman, Martin Elbourne, Bob Hooton, and Steve Pritchard eventually brought the festival to fruition in 1982.

Dartington Conference [link]

Kidel was director of the "New Themes for Education" conference for the years from 1984 to 1986. In the latter two years, 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 (later his wife) The Meaning of Illness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986).^[5]

Work with James Hillman [link]

Kidel originally 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.^[6] The films included many examples drawn from the history of art and classic cinema. There are clips from F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu as well as films by David Lean and Hitchcock in The Door; The Window had scenes from, among others, Monsieur Hire and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and the paintings of Carpaccio, Magritte, Caspar David Friedrich, and Bonnard.

Music criticism [link]

From 1972 to 1976, Kidel wrote music reviews for Time Out's music section.

During his time in Devon and onwards, Kidel also focussed more on writing about contemporary music, specifically rock, folk, soul, R&B, blues, and world music, contributing pieces to The Observer, The Sunday Times, through the early 1980s, and The Guardian, ongoing. 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.

Return to television [link]

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 Four, BBC Wales, and United Television, a large UK-based independent producer of TV programs, 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/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 US ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax – creating two films for Channel Four out of 500 or so hours of material he had shot in the United States over a ten-year period: American Patchwork and Songs and Dreams of the Noble Old.

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,^[7] Under African Skies: Mali and Bamako Beat with ethnomusicologist and BBC broadcaster Lucy Durán ,^[8] and New York:, The Secret African City with the great Africanist at Yale University, Robert Farris Thompson.

A more intimate way of working [link]

A major shift occurred in Kidel's work starting in 1997: He started shooting his own films, at first tentatively. This was allowed with the advent of Sony's DCR-VX1000, the first relatively idiot-proof small digital video camera. Kidel used it when he was researching his film about Tricky for Naked and Famous, which allowed him to get to know the Bristol musician without the presence of a full crew: Kidel strongly feels the material he was able to get with Tricky would never have been possible without this less intrusive method of filming. Subsequently Kidel shot many of his own films or the parts of them using this approach – the Varanasi sequences in the Ravi Shankar film, for which Kidel could spend a long periods of time doing as he didn't have to pay a DP (at up to £400 a day). Similarly, he was able to shoot the long days of rehearsal with Peter Sellars, the theater and opera director.

This technique also helped Kidel in his projects with Alfred Brendel. The Austrian pianist was familiar with and admired Kidel's films, especially those on Xenakis and Varèse, and also because he felt more comfortable filming in the presence of just the director and a sound engineer, Kidel's was the first documentary ever made about him.

Current work [link]

Kidel founded Calliope Media in 2003. He also continues to work as a freelance director, mainly in the UK and France. He is a regular contributor on music, visual arts, and theater for The Arts Desk,^[9] a premiere online review of the arts founded in September 2009 by a group of Daily Telegraph and freelance arts writers.

Since 2009, Mark Kidel has been a trustee of St George's Bristol. He has also been a tutor for the last two years in the European Community Media Programme-funded Documentary Campus Masterschool, teaching filmmaking.^[10]

Selected awards [link]

• Grierson Award for the Best History Documentary, 2007, for Hungary 1956: Our Revolution
• FIPA D'Argent Special Prize, Biarritz, 2002, for Ravi Shankar: Between Two Worlds^[11]
• Grand Prix, Classiques en Images festival, Paris, 2002, for Leon Fleisher: Lessons of a Master
• Royal Television Society Award, Best General Education Film, 1995, for Kind of Blue

Personal life [link]

Kidel has been married twice. His first marriage was to Caroline Wyndham, a healer, who had a daughter whom Kidel adopted, Sarah. The couple subsequently had Leo and Chloe. Kidel married Susan Rowe-Leete, a psychotherapist, in 1989, with whom he has collaborated on a number of works. They have two children, Sam and Anna. Sam, also known as Sam Kidel and El Kid, is an accomplished musician and makes experimental electronic music."^[12] He wrote his first soundtrack for his father's film Colouring Light: Brian Clarke – An Artist Apart. Anna is at Kings College London.

Filmography [link]

75 min. and over [link]

Set the Piano Stool On Fire, 2010, 77 min.^[13][14]
Journey With Peter Sellars, 2007, 90 min.^[15] – Telluride Film Festival selection, 2007; San Francisco International Film Festival selection, 2008;
Golden Prague nomination, 2008
Soweto Strings, 2007,^[14][16] 89 min. – Best Arts Documentary nomination, Grierson Awards, 2007
Paris Brothel, 2003, 75 min.^[14]
Glastonbury, 2002, 2 hrs.^[17]
Ravi Shankar: Between Two Worlds, 2001, 90 min.^[18] – Telluride Film Festival selection, 2001; FIPA D'Argent Special Prize, 2002
Alfred Brendel: Man and Mask, 2000, 75 min.^[18]
Les Hopitaux Meurent Aussi (A Hospital Remembers), 2000, 77 min.^[18][19] – Grand Prix du Documentaire, UNESCO Festival International du Film d’Art; Selection Hot Docs, Toronto; World Culture Forum Vienna TV Award; Newport International Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival, all 2002
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.

60 min. [link]

Colouring Light: Brian Clarke – An Artist Apart, 2011 ^[20]
Saved By Music: The Wallfisch Family, 2010^[14]
Leon Fleisher: A Fleur De Touches (Two Hands), 2007^[19]
Soweto Strings In Performance, 2007^[14] – Selection FIPA, Biarritz ; DokuArts, Amsterdam, both 2008
Hungary 1956: Our Revolution, 2006^[14] – Grierson Award for Best History Documentary; Historical Film of the Year Award, History Today Awards, both 2007
Mario Lanza: Singing to the Gods, 2005^[14]
Susheela Raman: Indian Journey, 2005^[18]
Joe Zawinul: A Musical Portrait, 2005^[14]
Imber: England’s Lost Village, 2004^[18]
Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart, 2003^[14] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 2004
Free Will and Testament: The Robert Wyatt Story, 2002^[18]
Ravi Shankar In Concert, 2002^[18]
Leon Fleisher: Lessons Of a Master, 2001^[18][19] – Classiques en Images festival Grand Prix, 2002; Grand Prix Musique, UNESCO Festival International du Film d’Art, 2002
Naked and Famous: Tricky, 1997^[18]
Wild Ballerina: Karole Armitage, 1997^[18][19]
Balthus the Painter, 1996^[18] – Biennale Internationale du Film sur l’Art, Paris, official selection, 1996; FIFA, Montreal, 1997
Norman Foster, 1995^[18]
Edgard Varèse, 1995^[18][19] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 1997
Boy Next Door (Boy George), 1994^[18] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 1995
Derek Jarman: A Portrait, 1991^[18] – Selection FIFA, Montreal, 1992
Something Rich and Strange: The Life and Work Of Iannis Xenakis, 1991^[18]
Le Paris Black, 1990^[18] - Selection Suoni dal Mondo, Firenze, 1998
Under African Skies: Algeria, 1989
Under African Skies: Mali, 1989^[18] – Selection Suoni dal Mondo, Firenze, 1998
Under African Skies: Rai, 1989^[18] – Selection Suoni dal Mondo, Firenze, 1998
New York: The Secret African City, 1989^[18]
Songs and Dreams Of the Noble Old, 1988
American Patchwork, 1988

50 and 52 min. [link]

Brendel In Performance, 2000, 50 min.^[18]
Tricky Live, 1997, 50 min.^[18]
Just Dancing Around: Richard Alston, 1996, 52 min.^[18]
Dreamtown: An Anatomy of Blackpool, 1995, 50 min.^[18] – Golden Gate Awards Certificate of Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1996
Kind Of Blue: An Essay On Melancholia and Depression, 1994, 52 min.^[18] – Telluride Film Festival selection, 1993
The Heart Has Reasons, 1993, 52 min.^[18]
Pygmies In Paris, 1992, 45 min.^[19]
Bamako Beat: Music From Mali, 1991, 50 min.^[18]
Sounds Off the Beaten Track: WOMAD, 1987, 52 min.

30 min. and less [link]

Henri Oguike: Second Frame, 2006, 26 min.^[19]
Karole Armitage: Rave, 2003, 26 min.^[19]
The Architecture of the Imagination, 1994:^[2] The Door, The Staircase, The Window, The Bridge, and The Tower (5 films, 30 min. each)

Collaborations [link]

A Maybe Day in Kazakhstan, co-directed with Tony Harrison – Telluride Film Festival selection, 1994
Alfred Brendel on Music: Three Lectures, 2011, 225 min.^[21]

Books [link]

Dartington (Webb & Bower, Exeter, 1983)
Learning By Doing (Green Books, Hartland)

Co-authored with Susan Rowe-Leete [link]

The Meaning of Illness (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986).^[5]
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) ^[22]

External links [link]

Kidel talks about Soweto String Ensemble on PlushMusic Live
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

References [link]