I was fortunate to work with Mike Grigsby as his researcher on A Life Apart (1973) and as his creative collaborator on Living on the Edge (1987) and The Time of Our Lives (1994). Mike was a truly cinematic film-maker whose use of sound, image, pacing and tone made his work stand out for its singularity of vision and purpose and for its essentially poetic nature. To be in his ambit was inspirational, as so many of his collaborators and students found.
That he arrived fully formed at 23 as such a unique film-maker with Enginemen (1959) and that he retained that consistency of vision over more than 50 years was remarkable. It's no wonder that in its edition on Mike's retrospective at the Dinard festival in 2006, Cahiers du Cinéma expressed astonishment at the lack of public recognition for a British film-maker they namechecked with Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and John Schlesinger.
At the time Mike asked me to collaborate with him on Living on the Edge, he was keen to extend his creative range. I was the privileged foil for this and found myself once again among the many whom both in his work and in his private life he vitalised with his captivating energy, humanity, good humour and sheer decency.
In his book The Art of Record (1996), John Corner called Living on the Edge "one of the most original documentaries to be shown on British national television during the 1980s". Others have called it a masterpiece and a pinnacle in Mike's canon. With the support of the British Film Institute, it was premiered as a 35mm feature documentary at the ICA in London, pioneering the cinema distribution of TV documentaries in the UK.
Mike recently called me to express his frustration at the difficulties the BFI have been facing trying to obtain the rights to make the film available on DVD, as they have long wished, not least because of its great resonance for our times. Let us hope that they eventually succeed, as there are few British film-makers more deserving of posterity's accessibility to their films.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/mar/26/michael-grigsby
Alexander Payne Alexandra Quinn Alexandra Silk Alexandre Aja
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