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 رحيل مخرج الافلام الوثائقية حول السودان و قضاياه Arthur Howes
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Arthur Howes
Documentary-maker passionately involved in the griefs of Sudan
Jeffrey Geiger
Tuesday December 07 2004
The Guardian
Arthur Howes, who has died aged 54 from lung cancer, was an award-winning
filmmaker. As an expert on the Sudan, he was often asked for his views
during its recent years of political crisis. His documentaries, most of
them made on tight budgets, were screened on Channel 4, acclaimed at
international festivals and are taught on film courses the world over.
Filmmaking was only one facet of Arthur's talents (he painted, spoke five
languages and was a charismatic storyteller), but his films are his chief
legacy, revealing passion and respect for the people he filmed and for
cinema itself.
His films show keen sensitivity and a knack for engaging people, whether he
was working in Brixton (his home for 30 years), the Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya,
or Brazil in Bacchanalias Bahianas 1-5.
He was born and educated in Gibraltar, and migrated to London to find the
intellectual and creative stimulation that he craved. He did art and
teacher training at Furzedown College, applying his avant-garde interests
to experiments with super-8 cameras.
In the mid-1970s he did a BA in film studies at the Polytechnic of Central
London, where he made Threatened Assassins, a deft fictional work that was
influenced both by French New Wave and genres like film noir.
Arthur was unafraid to challenge the filmmaking status quo. He had been a
teacher in Kadugli, Sudan (1980-82), and in 1984 he brought his
experimental technique to the National Film and Television School.
Under the tutelage of Colin Young, he came into his own, showing a strong
affinity for the fluidity and immediacy of the vérité style of Jean Rouch
and DA Pennebaker. He made, with Amy Hardie, Kafi's Story (1990), about
Sudanese labour and migration from Torogi in the south to Khartoum.
It won the BP Expo/BBC Documentary Award, the Amsterdam International
Documentary Film Festival award and other prizes.
Despite this, funding was never easy to find and Arthur bemoaned the
funding culture at institutions such as the BBC, where documentary seemed
to be valued only if it had heightened dramatics, voyeuristic intrusion,
and the heroic presence of on-camera directors.
Arthur had a great love for celluloid aesthetics, but adapted brilliantly
to digital technology. The filmmaker, carrying his camera, could now move
across borders with the ease of a tourist, and Arthur took full advantage
of this, making Oromo - Human Rights (1996) in Ethiopia and Kenya, and Nuba
Conversations (2000), in the Kenyan refugee camp at Kakuma and across the
war-damaged regions of Sudan, where 60,000 Nuba children had been abducted
to "peace camps" and then forcibly recruited into the Sudanese army.
Nuba Conversations showed Arthur's gift for putting people of all walks of
life at their ease; his empathy for human suffering; his hatred of
injustice; and his unwavering photographic eye, which captured life in all
its beauty and tragedy.
The Village Voice called it "searing journalism and a document of what has
to many western eyes remained an invisible cataclysm". A Nairobi screening
helped inspire UN ceasefire talks between the Sudanese government and the
SPLM (Sudanese People's Liberation Movement).
Benjamin And His Brother (2002) returned to Kakuma, further tracing
Sudanese displacement and forced migrations. It follows two young men in
their attempts to emigrate to the US; only one manages to secure visas for
the journey, leading to a painful separation. Benjamin found wide success,
including screening at New York's Margaret Mead Festival, the Pacific Film
Archives in Berkeley, and Brixton's Ritzy.
Arthur, always interested in other media, was visual director for the
multimedia shows Kaddish (1995) and Physical Cinema (1999), mounted by the
avant-garde group Towering Inferno; produced videos for the "krautrock"
band, Faust; and did installations for London nightclubs.
He taught film for years at Brixton College, and also held posts at Essex
University, Napier University, Edinburgh, and the London College of
Printing. He was an inspiring teacher who encouraged students to make
documentaries as far afield as West Africa and Ethiopia, and wrote
scholarly pieces on documentary history and theory.
Arthur's last, unreleased, work is a meditation on his battle with lung
cancer while in Bahia, Brazil. Highly experimental, it visualises his
deterioration in health, as the camera becomes progressively heavier and
the images grow increasingly painterly and static.
In many ways it brought his life and career full circle, returning to the
world of the African diaspora, to the pleasures of light, food and the
body; and to the sea, which he always associated with his beloved home,
Gibraltar.
He is survived by his son, Eli Hardie-Howes.
· Arthur Christopher Joseph Howes, filmmaker, born July 15 1950; died
November 29 2004
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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