Paul Rotha

Paul Rotha (3 June 1907 – 7 March 1984) was a British documentary film-maker, film historian and critic.

He was born Paul Thompson in London, and educated at Highgate School and at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Rotha was a close collaborator of John Grierson, and Wolfgang Suschitzky was one of his cinematographers. He directed dozens of documentaries including Contact (1933), The Face of Britain (1935), World of Plenty (1943), Land of Promise (1947), A City Speaks (1947) and many others. The World Is Rich (1947) and Cradle of Genius (1961), both of which were nominated for an Academy Award, and feature films including the BAFTA-nominated No Resting Place. Rotha was Head of BBC TV's Documentaries Department between May 1953 and May 1955.

Rotha shared with Otto Neurath an interest in the techniques of visual communication, and the two men worked together on several films, where Neurath's ISOTYPE pictorial statistics were animated as an important component of the films' arguments. He was a major opponent of sound in movies.

Rotha wrote, produced and directed the 1958 crime drama Cat and Mouse, based on a novel by John Creasey and starring Lee Patterson and Ann Sears.

Rotha married Irish actress Constance Smith in 1974. Smith had twice (1961 and 1968) been charged with attacking Rotha and stabbing him.

Rotha died on 7 March 1984 in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

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