Robert Vas events: registration open
John Wyver writes: Registration is now open for the one-day symposium on 27 March centred on the films of the great television documentary filmmaker Robert Vas. The symposium is complemented by a rare screening of Vas’ remarkable film about the 1926 General Strike, Nine Days in ’26, made in 1974. More details about Vas and both events are below. The events, which are ticketed separately, are free, but registration is required; if you are interested, please sign up via these links:
Symposium details and how to book: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/59932/robert-vas-in-context
Screening details and how to book: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/59952/nine-days-in-26
Symposium: Robert Vas in Context
9.00am-5.00pm, Friday 27 March, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY
Born in Hungary, the filmmaker Robert Vas (1931-1978) fled his country in 1956 and came to London, where he made two notable shorts for the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, Refuge England (1959) and The Vanishing Street (1962). His first film for BBC Television was The Frontier (1964).
In the next decade and a half he directed BBC films about, among other subjects, the story of the magic lantern, Alexander Korda, the work of Humphrey Jennings, the music of Bela Bartok, the Katyn Forest Massacre, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the television archive, Stalin, Laurel and Hardy, and the survivors of Hiroshima. All this despite the “Christmas Tree” mark on his personnel file identifying him as a potential political subversive.
As Alan Rosenthal wrote in The Documentary Conscience,
Robert Vas [was a unique and important figure in the history of documentary… The key to all Vas’s s work was his moral fervour. Concern, commitment, passion – these were the words he used over and over again, and which guided him.”
This symposium marks two anniversaries. One is the 100th anniversary of the May 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom, about which Vas made his most controversial film, Nine Days in ’26 (1974). The other is the 70th anniversary of the October 1956 uprising in Budapest against the Soviet-controlled government, the crushing of which led Vas and his family to flee their homeland and settle in Britain.
The symposium is conceived to spotlight Robert Vas’ achievements, to celebrate his productions, and to extend the processes of critical and creative engagements with his legacy. At the same time, the symposium is concerned to situate and contextualise Vas and the central themes of his work within creative documentary practice that similarly explores those themes with personal and poetic approaches.
(Details of the symposium programme will appear in a future post.)
Screening: Nine Days in ’26
Nine Days in ’26 is a remarkable 95-minute documentary made by Robert Vas about the General Strike of 1926. Vas expertly weaves together archive footage and the testimonies of a wide group of participants, including aristocrats and miners, in the May events of nearly fifty years before. The filmmaker later reflected that he had set out to challenge the cosy, consensus, middle-class viewpoint on the Strike ‘which ignores the real price in human suffering, and the complexity of ideas and beliefs that went on behind the strike’.
The BBC delayed the original transmission for three months because of a threatened miners’ strike, indicating the film’s potency in suggesting the parallels between 1926 and 1974. Fifty-two years on, parallels with today remain powerful too. The film was never repeated, and it has only recently been fully digitised. We believe this rare screening is the first public showing for more than half a century.
With an introduction by John Wyver, Professor of the Arts on Screen, University of Westminster
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