Geoffrey Barkas
| Geoffrey Barkas | |
|---|---|
In uniform in the First World War
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| Born |
Geoffrey de Gruchy Barkas 27 August 1896 Richmond, Surrey |
| Died | 3 September 1979 (aged 83) Esher, Surrey |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | Film maker |
| Known for | Operation Bertram |
Geoffrey Barkas (born Geoffrey de Gruchy Barkas, 27 August 1896 – 3 September 1979) was an English film maker active between the world wars.
Barkas led the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate in the Second World War. His largest "film set" was Operation Bertram, the army-scale deception for the battle of El Alamein in October 1942.
Barkas was born in 1896 to parents from Jersey families. His father was Albert Atkin Barkas (b. 1861) and his mother was Anna Julia de Gruchy (b. 1863); both were from St. Helier.
In the First World War, he served in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign at Suvla Bay, and then in the later part of the Battle of the Somme in France, where he won a Military Cross.
Between the wars, Barkas worked on silent films and then feature films, starting as a writer and producer, and then directing his own films such as The Manitou Trail and The Lumberjack (1925) and The Third Gun (1929), the latter being a three-reel short filmed in the Phonofilm sound-on-film process. He co-directed with Michael Barringer (Blockade, Q-ships, The Infamous Lady), Anthony Asquith (Tell England),Berthold Viertel (Rhodes of Africa) and Milton Rosmer (The Great Barrier), he also edited Red Ensign directed by Michael Powell. Work became increasingly difficult to find in the economic depression of the 1930s, and after directing the critically acclaimed African exteriors for Robert Stevenson's King Solomon's Mines in 1937, it dried up altogether.
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