Ken Wlaschin: Film historian and festival organiser who brought the best of world cinema to London
Hyfler/Rosner
brought the best of world cinema to London
By Phil Davison
Saturday, 21 November 2009
As programme director of the National Film Theatre and
organiser of the London Film Festival for more than 25
years, the American Ken Wlaschin became a highly influential
figure in British cinema.
Not only did he help put London on the map as a serious film
festival venue but he was the man who, according to his
peers, brought world cinema to Britain by setting his sights
away from the UK or Hollywood and screening movies from
around the globe. Thus did the influx of foreign films to UK
cinemas begin, a tradition of which Britain has remained in
the vanguard in large part due to Wlaschin's vision.
Of course there were the French films, the Scandinavian and
the sexually explicit ones the National Film Theatre was
able to screen, much to the disgust of moral decency
campaigner Mary Whitehouse, because it was a "membership
only" cinema. But then came the South American movies,
others from Eastern Europe, Croatia, Israel, Asia, mostly
low-budget and often by unknown directors, which Wlaschin
first brought to British, and therefore eventually,
worldwide audiences. He organised the first African Film
Festival as part of the LFF and was the first to screen what
were considered at the time "underground" US movies
previously snubbed by Hollywood.
Inspired by the Zagreb school of animation, he organised a
Croatian Film Season in 1971 when that country was still
part of Tito's communist Yugoslavia, a visionary move that
would lead in this century to the "Closer Croatia" Film
Festival in Hammersmith. He also launched the popular
all-night shows and debates with the audience at the LFT on
the south side of Waterloo Bridge and introduced the idea of
retrospectives on subjects from Hitchcock to Metro Goldwyn
Mayer.
Wlaschin had been an arts columnist on the Daily Sketch
newspaper in London and was an editor at London Weekend
Television in 1968 when he was hired to organise the LFF by
the man who had founded the festival, the then British Film
Institute Controller Leslie Hardcastle. He would run the
festival, and the NFT, until 1984.
On hearing of Wlaschin's death in California at the age of
75, Hardcastle, still a governor of the BFI, said: "Ken
turned the National Film Theatre [now known as BFI
Southbank] into a pioneering organisation, and the London
Film Festival from a very small venue into a globally
respected and much copied celebration of the film industry.
When I hired him in 1968, the movie industry was dominated
by American screen. British people were to a large extent
ignorant of movies from elsewhere. Ken literally gave
Britain world cinema. He also brought us serious subjects,
showed us the artistic side of cinema. He was the best
programme officer, or director the NFT ever had, and the
longest-serving. He gave us, and himself, international
standing."
After leaving the NFT and LFF in 1984, Wlaschin, of Romanian
origin on his paternal side, went back to his native US to
do a similar job for the American Film Institute (AFI). He
took over as interim director of their struggling festival,
Filmex (the Los Angeles Film Exposition), and helped replace
it with the now highly-respected AFI FEST (Los Angeles
International Film Festival) which he ran from 1984 to 1993,
again changing the emphasis away from Hollywood and towards
small, independent productions from around the globe. During
those years, he also directed the National Film Theater at
the Kennedy Center in Washington. For the subsequent decade,
until his retirement in 2003, he remained the AFI's Director
of Creative Affairs and Vice-Chairman of the National Center
for Film and Video Preservation.
A film buff all his life, Wlaschin became equally known
among his peers as the author of around 20 books, mostly
about movies and several considered classics of the genre,
notably The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Great
Movie Stars and Their Films, written in 1979 during his time
in London. Others included Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen
(2004), Silent Mystery and Detective Movies (2009), Bluff
Your Way in the Cinema (1974) and The Silent Cinema in Song
(2008), the latter explaining that most "silent movies" at
the start of the 20th Century relied heavily on live music.
As a film historian, he was in constant demand in the US
media and also wrote novels, poetry, travel articles and
film reviews, once describing the American actress Jane
Wyman, Ronald Reagan's first wife, as "tearful, noble and
plucky, with a face like a worried baby squirrel."
In 1970, a year after the appearance of the classic Michael
Caine movie The Italian Job, he wrote a "novelisation" of
the film whose screenplay had been written by his
brother-in-law, Troy Kennedy Martin, the Scots-born creator
of the Z Cars TV series who died in September. Wlaschin
changed the ending from the famous "cliff-hanger" in the
film, which Kennedy-Martin admitted was not his idea, to the
one in the latter's original script.
Kenneth Wlaschin was born in 1934 in Bradish, Nebraska,
which later became a ghost town and is now buried under
cornfields. He attended high school in nearby Scottsbluff,
where he did his first writing for the Scottsbluff
Star-Herald newspaper. He won a scholarship to the
prestigious Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, the
smallest college of the Ivy League, graduating with a BA in
English. He went on to get an MA in English at University
College, Dublin, where, in 1956, he met his future wife and
lifetime love, the Glasgow-born Scots-Irish Maureen
Kennedy-Martin. (She always used the hyphen whereas her
brother Troy dropped it).
Wlaschin served in the US army's Counter-Intelligence Corps
from 1958-61, training at Ford Holabird, Maryland, and
serving mainly in Poitiers, France, where he also studied
French at the University of Poitiers. He and his wife lived
in England for a while, where their son Scott was born in
Guildford in 1961, before moving to Italy, first in the
northern city of Vercelli and later in Rome.
As art critic of the Eternal City's English-language
newspaper, the Rome Daily American, Wlaschin found himself
at a party alongside Martin Luther King in the home of the
renowned American singer, dancer and socialite Ada
"Bricktop" Smith. After meeting the film director Albert
Band, he got a small part as a bartender in the "spaghetti
western" The Tramplers, starring Joseph Cotton, in 1966.
His wife Maureen, better known as Mo, became a highly
respected folk singer in London in the late 1960s and '70s,
mostly as lead singer and guitarist with The Tinkers, who
became known for their versions of Irish songs such as The
Rifles of the IRA.
Wlaschin received an MBE from the newly-wed Prince Charles
and Princess Diana in the bar of the National Film Theatre
in London in 1981. He is survived by his wife and son.
Kenneth Wlaschin, film festival organiser, author and cinema
historian; born Bradish, Nebraska 12 July 1934; married 1961
Maureen Kennedy-Martin (one son); died Palm Springs,
California 10 November 2009.