Simon Hartog
| Simon Hartog | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 8, 1940 London, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | August 19, 1992 (aged 52) London, England, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Film director |
Simon Hartog (8 February 1940 – 18 August 1992) was a British filmmaker who worked as both director and producer. He helped develop an independent film industry in the United Kingdom (UK), founding London Film-Makers' Co-op in the 1960s, key to the avant-garde; working on independent documentaries, and founding the production company, www.largedoorltd.com Large Door Ltd. Through the Independent Filmmakers' Association, he campaigned for an independent Channel 4 (UK). Through his company, Hartog produced a series on world cinema, Visions, that ran on the channel for three years.
Long interested in the Third Cinema of African and Latin American nations, Hartog at one time worked for The Other Cinema, a distribution company in the UK, to gain such films wider audiences. In the 1970s, he served as a consultant to help the newly independent Mozambique set up a film industry.
After having grown up from age eight in the United States, he returned to England and Italy in the 1960s for graduate work and settled in the UK.
Hartog was born in England but lived in Chicago, Illinois from the age of eight with his mother, after his parents divorced. He attended local schools until college. He always retained what the British perceived as an American accent, but, after many years in England as an adult, he no longer sounded entirely American to people from the United States. In the 1960s, trying to avoid being drafted for the unpopular Vietnam War, which he opposed, he returned to England for graduate work after college.
Hartog took a higher degree in politics at the LSE and studied film-making at the Centro Sperimentale, the Italian film school. There he met Antonella Ibba, who became his longtime companion and wife.
His first taste of film-making in Britain was acting in Peter Watkins' The War Game (he had the role of the jumpy GI who triggers the nuclear strike). He worked for a time as a producer/director for BBC Panorama, making programmes on Ronald Reagan, then governor of California; the May 1968 events in Paris, and censorship. But the programme's editors proved unreceptive to some of his other proposals, and Hartog soon left the BBC to work freelance.
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