(John Krish, 1959-77; BFI, 15)
John Krish entered the cinema as a teenager early in the second world war, working for the Crown Film Unit (on Harry Watt's Target for Tonight and Humphrey Jennings's Listen to Britain) and the Army Film Unit (as an editor on Carol Reed and Garson Kanin's The True Glory), before joining British Transport Films. It was with the latter group that he made his classic The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), a beautiful movie about London's last tram journey. It was shown in a much acclaimed quartet of his pictures that travelled the country in 2010, and was included, along with his infinitely moving I Think They Call Him John (1964), in Shadows of Progress, the BFI's four-disc survey of postwar British documentary.
Now, in Krish's 90th year, the BFI help clinch his reputation as one of Britain's most distinctive and distinguished documentarians with a compilation of his work, centring on Captured, the remarkable 1959 docudrama he made for the Army Kinematograph Corps as an instructional film following the revelations about different forms of interrogation used by the enemy in the Korean war. Performed by such actors as Alan Dobie, Ray Brooks and Wilfrid Brambell, it's a harrowing movie that illuminates its time and has immediate relevance for our own. It was, however, marked "restricted" and withheld from the public until 2004.
The disc also contains his fine 55-minute HMP, about the training of prison officers, several public service pictures, and The Finishing Line (1977), a surreal 21-minute comedy made to dissuade children from trespassing on railway lines by staging a sports day there. In a 35-minute interview, Krish speaks frankly about his career and the way he reshaped to his own ends the projects offered him by civil servants. He also explains why he was unhappy with the feature movies that resulted from his occasional ventures into the commercial film industry and TV. A major work accompanied by an informative booklet.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/28/captured-john-krish-classic-dvd
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