Derek Williams (filmmaker)

Derek Williams (20 August 1929 – 2 August 2021) was a British documentary film director, writer and historian, who was active in film craft from the 1950s until 1990. His films received four British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTAs) and five Oscar nominations (four as director and writer and one as writer only) all in the short documentary classification.

Derek Williams was born in 1929, in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne within half a mile of Hadrian’s Wall, an association that was to shape his life.^[1][2] His father, Edward W Williams (who worked for J Collet, a Luton-based milliner) had married his mother, Gertrude (née Scheinman, of Russian Jewish descent) the previous year in Hackney, London.^[3][a] Williams attended the Newcastle Royal Grammar School, where he indulged his childhood passion for cinema, joining the Tyneside Film Society in 1937 when it took up residence in the Tyneside Cinema, and which frequently ran documentaries. Williams was inspired by British filmmakers such as John Grierson, Paul Rotha, Harry Watt and Basil Wright.^[4] He was also drawn to foreign language features by filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, who had just released his La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939),^[b] Marcel Carné working with Alexander Korda in England exploring surrealism, and adapting plays to film such as Vittorio De Sica.^[4]

Williams was evacuated from Newcastle with his school to Penrith at the outbreak of War in 1939, along with contemporaries Brian Redhead and Peter Taylor.^[6][7] After the War, Williams enlisted for mandatory National Service, which he served in Northern Germany before returning to England in 1949, matriculating to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to read the Historic Tripos.^[7]

Williams' first film, Hadrian's Wall was self-financed and was made during term holidays in 1950 while he was at Cambridge, and which the university accepted in lieu of his undergraduate dissertation.^[1] On the basis of this film he was able to enter the film industry as a trainee assistant for World Wide Films in 1952. His first commercial release was in 1955, Oil Harbour, Aden, made for the sponsor George Wimpey Ltd who had the contract to build a port to service an oil refinery being built in Aden by BP. Williams had spent two years living in Aden as cameraman, as well as writer and director for location filming.^[1]

His first big break came in 1955 when World Wide Films was appointed by BP to film the British Trans-Antarctic Expedition, under Dr Vivian Fuchs, which Shell was sponsoring.^[8][9] Williams became a member of the sixteen-person party who sailed to the Weddell Sea aboard MV Theron with the intention of establishing an advance base for the main party due to arrive the following year. During the outward journey the ship became frozen in sea ice and so had to depart more rapidly than originally intended, having deposited the shore party who were to remain onshore throughout the Antarctic winter. After 5 months in Antarctica, when Williams was on location as a one-man-crew equipped with film stock and a 35 mm camera, the resulting film, Foothold on Antarctica, was released in 1956.^[10] It received a private viewing at Buckingham Palace and went on to receive an Oscar nomination.^[1][c]

His next film, Oxford, made in 1956, was commissioned by the Central Office of Information as part of their efforts to attract overseas students but in 1957 Williams moved from World Wide Films to Greenpark Films, the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership. Williams initially wrote and directed three commissioned documentaries with Greenpark, featuring social content, like There Was a Door (1957), which examined the care of the severely learning disabled and was sponsored by the Manchester Regional Hospital Board, which was subsequently televised by the BBC. Regular commissions from industry encouraged Williams to become a freelance writer director, when he was able to release at least one documentary a year from 1960 to 1967, beginning with a collection of dramatised documentaries,^[d] before releasing a series of films sponsored by BP, earning him two SFTA awards (the forerunner to BAFTA) and an Oscar nomination.^[11][e] His favourite film from his freelance days was Turkey the Bridge, because it indulged his other great passion, which was history, and in particular, the archaeology of Asia Minor.^[10]

In 1969, Williams rejoined Greenpark Films, beginning with a light dramatisation - The Taking Mood - followed by one of his most celebrated documentaries, The Shadow of Progress. By now, Williams was a trusted hand and the most celebrated of Greenpark’s directors.^[13] The Shadow of Progress was an early foreshadowing of an environmental crisis starkly presented but with an upbeat message that global catastrophe could be averted with the right technology. "There is a balance" Williams wrote "if we can find it".^[14][15] The film exposed the consequences of industrialization from pollution, and the visual impact and damage to wildlife and the lived environment, which was an unparalleled success winning 25 film and environmental awards.^[10] Over 1,900 copies of the film were printed and circulated in a number of languages and the film was twice shown by the BBC on prime time. Williams received a BAFTA award for the film, presented to him by Princess Anne.^[16][17]

Three of Williams' next five films received awards or were nominated for Oscars but the 1973 oil crisis meant that crucial sponsorships from oil giants like BP and Shell started to dry up just as Williams’ own career peaked.^[f] The industry of shorts and documentary films were in sharp decline, partly because there was no distribution outlet for new releases.^[g] In his last significant budget film, The Shetland Experience, Williams worked under the sponsorship of the Sullom Voe Association to record the history, nature and culture of Shetland as the oil began to come ashore to Sullom Voe Terminal.^[18] The film was a contemplative portrayal of the Shetland Islands and its place in the oil industry and was arguably Williams' best film, which was Oscar-nominated.^[19][h]

Williams was unable to produce his own films, lacking the business skills or the inclination, relying completely on sponsorships, which were increasingly hard to come by in the late 1970s and 1980s. He continued making documentaries freelance for an increasing variety of clients,^[i] and working on films in an advisory capacity in both the United States and the Soviet Union in the 80s.^[10] It wasn't until 1990 that Williams had the opportunity to return to an environmental theme with A Stake in the Soil as writer director, which focused on the exhaustion of soil by intensive farming, and which included an exposition on the history of soil science.^[7] This was followed in 1991 with Oman - Tracts of Time (1992), which explored the geological history of Oman and was to be his last film.^[j] Patrick Russell writes that these last two films marked a return to form for Williams but a short episode of ill health in Oman brought his film-making career of 40 years (in challenging, often hostile environments around the world) to a close at the age of 62.^[20]

Williams had spent forty years shooting films in some fifty countries on every continent on the globe, acquiring a particular reputation for adventurous filmmaking in remote, inhospitable locations. All his films were sponsored, mostly by industry, but he managed to avoid any marketing or commercial content in so-called prestige documentaries of the period.^[10] Millions saw his films, which were acclaimed by the film industry accumulating fifty-eight international gold prizes.^[25] Williams achieved four Oscar nominations in the live action short subject category, which hasn't been equalled by any other British Writer Director.^[10] And yet, when he stopped making films, he started a new life publishing two books on Roman history. The first traced the Roman frontier from where he was born in Newcastle all around Europe, the Euphrates across North Africa to Morocco. The second examined the cultural contrasts created by the border itself, arguing that it had more to do with preserving Roman culture inside than keeping Barbarians out.^[26]

Derek Williams' films and the awards and nominations they received made him one of the leading post-war UK documentary film directors. He was the subject of a retrospective at the British Film Institute on 6 December 2010.

Williams married Olive Minnie Warren on 19 November 1960.^[27] They lived in Kent, England from 1961.^[1]

Williams died on 2 August 2021, at the age of 91.^[4]

• Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-war Britain edited by Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor. A British Film Institute publication by Palgrave Macmillan 2010

• Derek Williams at IMDb