James Quinn R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

The Times
February 22, 2008

Obituary: James Quinn
Director of the British Film Institute who helped to create the London Film
Festival, and producer of Herostratus (1967) and Overlord (1975)


As director of the British Film Institute (BFI) for a decade from the
mid-1950s to mid-1960s, James Quinn was instrumental in setting up the
infrastructure to deliver films from overseas and from outside the Hollywood
studio system to the people of London and elsewhere in Britain.

He played a key role in getting the London Film Festival off the ground in
1957. It was during his term of office that the National Film Theatre was
built and the BFI's remit was extended to include television. He also helped
to establish the national network of subsidised "regional film theatres" and
to advance the idea of film studies as an academic subject.

Quinn had two credits as a film producer. One of his films, Overlord (1975),
stemmed directly from his position as a trustee at the Imperial War Museum,
after his departure from the BFI. He approached the director Stuart Cooper
in the hope of persuading him to make a documentary about the Overlord
Embroidery, a tribute to the D-Day soldiers from the Royal School of
Needlework. But Quinn and Cooper ended up making a feature film that blended
the fictional story of a young British soldier with historic footage from
the Imperial War Museum archives, with Quinn putting up his own money to get
it made.

It had very little impact in cinemas at the time, though it did win a Silver
Bear Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and it was, in effect,
"lost" for 30 years. But just recently it has been rediscovered and
reassessed. It was screened at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in
2004. "It was acclaimed as a lost masterpiece," noted Geoffery Macnab in
Sight and Sound magazine. Quinn introduced a screening at the London Film
Festival in 2005. The film, which took its title from the codename for the
invasion, was re-released in British cinemas at the beginning of February,
with a DVD release to follow in March.

James Charles Frederick Quinn was born in Belfast in 1919, the son of a
minister. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and studied economics and
politics at Christ Church, Oxford. During the Second World War he served as
an officer in the Irish Guards and was Town Major in Paris from 1945 to
1946. After the war he worked in management with the Courtaulds textile
company before accepting the post of director of the BFI in 1955.

The BFI had been set up before the war, but was restructured at the end of
the 1940s, the production of educational films was hived off and the
organisation was given the task of developing public appreciation of film as
an art form.

The NFT had been opened in temporary premises before Quinn's arrival, but he
oversaw its transfer to the present site on the South Bank in 1957. Recently
it has been expanded and rebranded as BFI Southbank.

The idea of the London Film Festival emerged from a dinner party hosted by
Dilys Powell, the film critic for The Sunday Times, and her husband Leonard
Russell, the paper's literary editor. Quinn was one of the guests.
Edinburgh, Cannes, Venice and Berlin already had film festivals and the
London festival was conceived as a "festival of festivals", which would
bring the best of world cinema to the English capital.

There were only 15 films at the initial festival, though they did include
Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Fellini's Nights of Cabiria and Bergman's The
Seventh Seal. It would be several years before the festival found room for
an English film. Now the programme features hundreds of films, many of which
are home-grown.

A world television festival followed in 1964, Quinn's final year in office
at the BFI. During that time he served on the festival juries at Cannes and
Venice and chaired the Berlin jury in 1961. He was also involved in
establishing the first British university course in film studies at Slade
School of Fine Art, University College, London, and presided over the
development of the BFI's Experimental Film Fund.

Quinn left the BFI in 1964, although the Experimental Film Fund was one of
the main backers for Herostratus (1967), a feature film on which Quinn was
producer. Michael Gothard played a young man who intends to commit suicide
and recruits an advertising agency to maximise publicity. It was written and
directed by Don Levy and the cast included a young Helen Mirren.

The BFI's own Monthly Film Bulletin magazine said of it: "Don Levy's wildly
ambitious first feature was made with almost epic heroism against
overwhelming odds. Originally conceived in 1962, it took two years to
finance and nine months to shoot, with most of the unit working without
pay." The reviewer was not overly enthusiastic about the film however,
accusing the director of pretentiousness.

Quinn served as chairman of the International Short Film Conference,
1971-78, and subsequently became life president. He was chairman of the
National Panel for Film Festivals, 1974-83, and a member of the General
Advisory Council of the BBC, 1960-64.

Stuart Cooper, the director of Overlord, is quoted in the current issue of
Sight and Sound, saying: "Timing is everything, and while there's a big
difference between World War Two and Iraq politically, the business of war
doesn't change much. We shot the film in the 1970s but we made it appear as
if we'd made it from the archive during the war and the reality of that has
been an eye-opener for audiences. Because of Iraq, it has caught people's
imagination and made them think."

Quinn's daughter, Christie, took news of the latest developments on Overlord
to her father in hospital. "He was, of course, very pleased; probably the
last thing to give him pleasure before he died," she said.

Quinn's wife, Hannah, died in 2002. He is survived by his daughter and son.

James Quinn, director of the British Film Institute, 1955-64, was born on
August 23, 1919. He died on February 11, 2008, aged 88