Three substantial obituaries for Jonathan Gili from the Guardian,
Independent and Times


  Obituary: Jonathan Gili: Distinguished filmmaker who brought charm,
insight and human sympathy to his work

      From Guardian - 06/10/2004 (1362 words)
      Patrick O'Connor
      Jonathan Gili, who has died of leukaemia aged 61, was not only an
award-winning filmmaker, but a designer, publisher, photographer and
collector of eclectic tastes and insatiable curiosity. His documentary
films, most of them for the BBC in the 1980s and 90s, were evidence of his
subtle wit, deep knowledge of history and, above all, sympathy for the
human spirit and its quirks.
      Jonathan was born in Oxford, where his parents, the publisher and
translator Joan Gili and his wife Elizabeth (McPherson), had moved to
escape the Blitz. Before the second world war, with his business partner
Henry Warren, Joan had established the most celebrated Spanish- language
bookshop in Britain, Dolphin Books, in London's Cecil Court. Before he was
10, Jonathan began to design and construct toy theatre sets. He would
demonstrate the plots of operas with the aid of his parents' record
player. One childhood friend, Laura Cecil, recalls being given a present
of a scene from The Love Of Three Oranges, "which, of course, I had never
heard of. He made the figures from scraps of material from his mother's
evening dresses."
      Jonathan was educated at the Dragon school, Oxford, and at Bryanston
school, Dorset, where his passion for film really began. He won an
exhibition to read greats at New College, Oxford, but later confessed that
he had done very little work, instead going to the cinema, often several
times a day. At one of the regular Sunday morning drinks parties given by
the historian Lord David Cecil and his wife Rachel, he was introduced to
Phillida Stone, daughter of the wood engraver and carver Reynolds Stone.
Years later, Jonathan said that he had taken one look at her and thought,
"That's the woman I would like to marry."
      As one of the editors and film critic of the student magazine Isis,
Jonathan devoted a whole issue to Joseph Losey's The Servant. When Losey
came to Oxford to film Accident, Jonathan, Phillida, Laura Cecil and the
young John Birt were all roped in as extras. Later, while Phillida studied
at St Martin's School of Art and Jonathan searched for work as an
assistant film editor, they lived opposite each other in flats in Frith
Street, Soho.
      With a legacy of 50 from Henry Warren, in 1967 Jona- than launched
his own publishing enterprise, Warren Editions; its first publication, The
Other Side Of The Alde by Kenneth Clark, with engravings by Reynolds
Stone, was printed on Stone's own press. While they were working on the
proofs, Jonathan asked Reynolds whether he would mind if he married his
daughter. "Just one question," Reynolds replied, "Is there any insanity in
your family?" Warren Editions, all des- igned by Jonathan, continued for
many years, publishing original work by John Betjeman, Jane Grigson, Iris
Murdoch, Robin Jacques, Harold Jones, Ian Beck, Glynn Boyd Harte and
Phillida Gili, who became a successful children's book illustrator.
      In 1969, Jonathan edited Ben Platts-Mills's film Bronco Bullfrog.
His own directorial debut came in 1971 with Incident, an experimental film
for the British Film Institute, starring the young Stephen Frears; that
same year, he was assistant editor on Frears's Gumshoe (1971).
      Although both Bronco Bullfrog and Gumshoe became cult movies of the
early 1970s, it proved a lean time until Jonathan won an award for his
editing of Stuart Cooper's D-Day drama-documentary Overlord (1975). This
led to his first directorial commissions, from London Weekend Television
and other studios.
      Even on his first engagement as assistant editor for the BBC, Edward
Mirzoeff, with whom Jonathan later worked regularly, recalled, "He would
arrive lugging carrier-bags full of second-hand books, strange objects and
all sorts of printed ephemera. I had never met anyone like him."
      Jonathan's collections filled every room, the staircase and any
other space in the Gilis' Fulham house. Decorative pencil sharpeners, snow-
scene paperweights, odd-looking pens, cards, labels, sardine tins (later
the subject of a book), jostled for position with signed first editions,
pop-up books, artists' proofs and thousands of 45rpm singles.
      When picture discs and, later, hologram CDs became a fad, he
acquired every one he could. In an article about his collection in 1986,
he wrote, "Who could resist records shaped like Elton John's hat or Barry
Manilow's nose? They have poor sound and often can't be made to play at
all . . . but as art objects they are sublime."
      This obsessional questing was reflected in the way Jonathan wrote,
directed, edited and chose the music for his films. Mirzoeff says that
everyone who worked with Jonathan wanted to repeat the experience, and
long after producers and sound engineers had been promoted, they would
volunteer to go back to their assistant status to work with him again. His
first, full-length film for the BBC, in 1979, about Westminster school (a
project at first opposed by the school's hierarchy), attracted 12.5m
viewers.
      Shortly afterwards, Will Wyatt, then head of documentary features
for BBC television, tried to enlist Jonathan as a permanent member of the
film unit. "What he was so good at was finding subjects that were bizarre
yet attractive," says Wyatt. "Things might be strange and curious, but he
would then uncover the emotional situations behind them."
      Early features for the BBC included a portrait of Angus Wilson and
his partner Tony Garrett for The Other Half series, and there followed
such diverse subjects as the No 31 bus (To The World's End, 1985), Mixed
      Blessings (about two babies accidentally swapped at birth), Coming
Home about servicemen and evacuees returning at the end of the war) and
Chocolate! (1990), a study in obsession and addiction. Later, for the
series Timewatch, Jonathan made a number of films about aspects of the
American west: Typhoid Mary, Pocahontas: Her True Story, Gold Rush
Memories, and Tales From The Oklahoma Land Runs, which won an award that
particularly delighted Jonathan - from the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

      Lucinda Lambton, with whom Jonathan made three of his most
delightful films (Animal Crackers, A Cabinet Of Curiosities and The Great
North Road, between 1985 and 1988), recalls, "The whole process, from the
first meeting to the last day of shooting, would be filled with laughter,
not ordinary laughter, but tears running down the cheeks. He gave one the
sense of total freedom so that one felt boosted, and the finished film was
always more than you'd hoped for."
      In 1984, Jonathan was diagnosed with leukaemia, and the doctors
predicted that he would live at most three years. At Hammersmith hospital,
west London, he was treated with a new, auto-transfusion technique (in
which his bone marrow was replaced by his own frozen blood). Although
dangerous, the process was repeated twice, and proved effective. For the
rest of his life, he was able to continue working, and his resilience,
courage and optimism proved inspirational.
      With Phillida and their children, Oliver (now a painter), Daisy (who
runs a film school) and Orlando (studying politics and history at
university), Jonathan was a wonderful host, often cooking the most
elaborate meals, with recipes from his grandmother's Spanish cookbook. One
of his last films was the two-part feature on the life of Queen Elizabeth,
the Queen Mother, which was shown over two days just after her death in
2002. Strangely, at first Jonathan resisted the idea of this commission,
but it was a gently irreverent, charming and wistful tribute.
      The filmmakers Jonathan most admired were Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls
and Jacques Demy. Their special qualities might be summed up as compassion
and wonder at the world and its love stories (Renoir), a delight in the
tricks and deceptions of time as interpreted by the camera (Ophuls), and
an ability to see the world for ever through a child's eyes (Demy). These
were all things that Jonathan understood and aimed for.
      His final films, earlier this year, were for the BBC 4 series
Historians Of Genius. Last year, he was made an OBE. He is survived by his
mother, his wife and their children.
      Jonathan Francesc Gili, film-maker, born April 19 1943; died October
1 2004
      Copyright 2004 Guardian Newspapers Limited



      From Independent - 06/10/2004 (1840 words)
      NICOLAS BARKER Wholly original: Gili among his picture discs, 1986
Tim
      Mercer
      JONATHAN GILI'S documentary film work was something wholly original,
      unlike anything else, certain in execution, exciting and complete.
      His talent, always there, first reached a wider audience in 1979,
when Public School - Westminster, directed by Gili and over an hour long,
 appeared on BBC1. With ITV on strike, it drew 12.5 million viewers, and
won the Bafta Best Editing award. The film was the inspired idea of Eddie
 Mirzoeff, senior producer in General Features, who already knew his work.
It showed the whole complex of education and ancient buildings with
non-judgemental accuracy. Gili's eye for figures in a landscape and ear
for the quirks of human nature made it moving and funny. It also gave him
a lasting distaste for the Q-and-A interview; afterwards, he preferred to
let the dramatis personae speak for themselves, with often only an unheard
prompt from himself.
High Hopes, the first film that he wrote, produced and directed all
himself, followed in 1981. This had an even more dramatic genesis. He had
just finished making The Pool of Life (1980) for Granada, about Liverpool
docks, and was back at the National Film School, where he had taught
before, this time as stand-in Head of Editing. He saw in the newspapers
that Columbia Pictures was going to hold an audition for John Huston's
film Annie (1982) in the ballroom of the Dorchester Hotel in London, and
realised that this could spark a film about children in show business.
Mirzoeff was supportive, and the project went to the temporary head of the
department at the BBC, but he said no. Gili, full-time at the NFS, could
see no way forward, but his wife Phillida, taking a hand for the first and
only time, got Columbia and the Dorchester to agree to let him film for
nothing, and made sure the idea got to all the ITV companies. They too
said no. Then a miracle happened: his agent, Linda Seifert, persuaded her
husband to pay for it on the off-chance that whoever took over at the BBC
would buy it.
The lighting in the Dorchester was dim, but Ernie Vincze, the cameraman,
made the best of it, and the children, especially Dexter Fletcher, came
over well. Footage and Gili's minimal script went back to the BBC, and
Phillida, greatly daring, rang the new head, Will Wyatt. "My husband is a
brilliant film-maker," she said. "You don't have to tell me," he said.
"I'm already a fan of his work." The project was on, with Laura Gavshon as
researcher and Ian Stone and Geoff Tookey, camera and sound. The follow-
ups, Dexter Fletcher in Midsummer Night's Dream at Glyndebourne, the
Haleys, interviewed on a low wall with a hand-held camera below, Marsha
Bland and her silver shoes, the "Seaview Singers" at Margate, caught all
the accidents, joys and pathos of child stars on the way up.
High Hopes was edited by Neil Thomson, a friend made (as also were Jamie
Hay and Jon Bignold) over long hours in the cutting room at Document in
Broadwick Street, Soho. Editing (by hand, not digitally, as now) was where
Gili began his career.
Going yet further back, he was born in Oxford, in 1943, the son of
Elizabeth and Joan Gili, the distinguished Catalan bookseller and
translator of Lorca. Thence he went to Bryanston, returning with a
Classics exhibition at New College. It was now that he discovered the
cinema, and as film critic for Isis, with no editorial control, he devoted
an entire issue (now a rare and sought-after item) to Losey's The Servant
(1963).
      He had found out what he wanted to do, but interviews in London,
working in between at his father's bookshop, always came up short against
the same block: no union card, no job. Finally, he was taken on as
assistant editor to Ted Roberts at Stewart Films, a small non-union
outfit, remote in St John's Wood. Holding the trims, watching the snip-and-
patch of hand- editing, he began to learn the mechanics of the trade. It
was through Roberts, who cut Jerusalem the Golden (1968) for Eddie
Mirzoeff, that he first met him. Then a disaffected Stewart employee was
sacked, and shopped the firm to ACTT. Faced with either closing the whole
business or giving everyone in it a card, the union chose the latter
course. At last, the  door was open, and Gili was through it in a trice.
      The first film that he edited was Bronco Bullfrog (1969), a sort of
East End West Side Story redeemed by Bronco, escaped from Borstal, with no
actors, only real live skinheads. It was made, like its successor Private
Road (1971), by Barney Platts-Mills, and is still a cult movie. The first
film that Gili directed, Incident (also 1971), about a man who comes home,
sits down, hears a street accident, leaps to his feet to look out of the
window, returns and sits down, and then does the same thing twice more,
each time less engaged, starred Stephen Frears, later director of
Dangerous Liaisons and High Fidelity. After Incident Gili worked on
Paradise Garden (1973), Sidney Nolan's drawings and poems narrated by
Orson Welles. Wedding Day (1977), contrasting an Anglican with a Greek
Orthodox wedding, and Soldiers (1978), three cameos of the Salvation Army,
began to show Gili's distinctive style of letting real life make its own
points; both were made with Nick Elliott at London Weekend. Public School -
 Westminster won the Bafta Best Editing award, then came the miracle of
High Hopes, and
      Gili's career took off. Year of the French (1982) was a set of four
portraits, a ticket- inspector, a farmer on the Lot, a manufacturer of
crowd-barriers and the octogenarian woman who ran the wine co-operative at
Fleurie in Beaujolais (who became a family friend in the process); The
Second Oldest Profession (1983) disclosed the tricks of salesmanship, from
door-to-door to tele- selling; and To the World's End (1985) charted the
31 bus route for London Transport's centenary.
Then came a series of 40-minute films for BBC2. With Lucinda Lambton he
made Animal Crackers (1985), A Cabinet of Curiosities (1986) and The Great
North Road (1988), all three wild and unforgettable films. Stop the
Wedding (1985), on weddings called off at the last minute, reached an
audience of 8.1 million; Mixed Blessings (1988), about two babies swapped
at birth, was the BBC Prix Italia entry and won a special jury
recommendation at the 1st European Documentary Biennale; and Chocolate!
(1990) was a memorable exploration of chocoholism. Fire in the Blood
(1992) explored Spain with Ian Gibson. The Seven Deadly Sins (1993), 10
minutes each, featured Stephen Oliver's last opera, an early appearance of
Simon Schama and an impassioned plea from the Pope's Latin secretary.
Timewatch, also for BBC2, produced Typhoid Mary (1994), the story of the
New York cook who did not have but carried the disease, ending with a
poignant view of Roosevelt Island where she was eventually isolated. Tales
from the Oklahoma Land Runs (2000) won the Western Heritage Best
Documentary award, and with it an immensely heavy sub-Remington statuette
of a cowboy. The rushes of Tales of the Eiffel Tower (1999) show Gili's
hand gently removing a prepared script from the hand of a charmingly camp
expert, who succumbs unconsciously to unheard prompting; the waxwork
figure of Eiffel in his sky-high office came almost eerily to life.
Coming Home (1995) commemorated the end of the Second World War. In 2002
came Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, prepared over five years earlier,
and shown on two consecutive evenings after her death, which probably got
the widest audience of all. Earlier this year Historians of Genius - In
Their Own Words pitted Simon Schama against Edward Gibbon, Lord Macaulay
and Thomas Carlyle.
This outpouring of work was the more remarkable, since, 20 years ago,
Jonathan Gili was diagnosed with leukaemia. To all but him, this was a
dreadful blow. He refused even to consider it as a problem. Life was
increasingly punctuated with visits to hospital, but his own determination
and that, no less, of Professor John Goldman, in whose care he was,
enabled him to go on working as if it did not exist. There was so much
else to do, besides. The eye that gave his films an effortless beauty made
his still photography as magical. An Instamatic in his hands produced
prints, in black and white and then colour, that professional
photographers could envy; they made the annual David Game College
calendars collectors' pieces.
Gili was himself a collector on an heroic scale, of books, of course, and
pictures, too; long before others, he amassed the first editions of the
Thirties, Forties and Fifties, art deco in any medium, the work of Barnett
Freedman in particular. He wrote as well, easily and well, and he and
Phillida set up Warren Editions to print and publish books they liked.
"Warren" was for Joan Gili's first partner in the Dolphin Bookshop (Henry
Warren, who left Jonathan pounds 50), and its first publication, Kenneth
Clark's The Other Side of the Alde (1968), was set in Janet type, designed
by Phillida's father, Reynolds Stone. Next year came John Nash's Flower
Drawings, a portfolio of prints from the original blocks.
A collection of Reynolds Stone's engravings, The Old Rectory, appeared in
1976. The Lost Ears (1970) had Phillida's enchanting drawings (the hero,
an earless teddy bear, still survives), and Murderer's Cottages (1976)
started a series of books illustrated by Glynn Boyd Harte, among them
Metro-land (1977), with verses by John Betjeman, A Weekend in Dieppe
(1981), retracing Ardizzone's steps, and most recently Les Sardines a
l'huile (1985).
This was based on another collection. But boxes (numbered 1-7) full of
sardine-tins were only a few among the walls of boxes, carefully labelled
("Little Packets and Wrappers"), that filled the house in Fulham, along
with visitors, music, food and wine, all greeted with equal enthusiasm.
Crisp packets, jugs, snowstorms, lighters, salt-and-pepper sets, wine-
bottles commemorating the bicentenary of the French Revolution, and
picture discs in all their wild (and now obsolete) profusion, filled every
available space, and some that was not; out-housing was under serious
discussion when he died.
     Last year Gili was appointed OBE, an unexpected but well-deserved
recognition, and on 8 November he was due to receive the highest award of
the Grierson Trust, the Trustees' Lifetime Award for an outstanding
contribution to documentary film-making. He would have enjoyed the
occasion as well as the honour. Not long ago, at a Sheffield Documentary
Film Festival full of young directors used to the smallest crew or none,
he was asked how, with one much larger, he got such remarkable revelations
from his interviewees - why didn't they clam up? He smiled to himself and
said, "Direction." That was all.
      Jonathan Francesc Gili, documentary film-maker: born Oxford 19 April
1943; OBE 2003; married 1968 Phillida Stone (two sons, one daughter); died
London 1 October 2004.
      Copyright 2004 Newspaper Publishing PLC


From Times - 05/10/2004 (1084 words)

      Jonathan Gili, television film-maker, was born on April 19, 1943. He
died on October 1, 2004, aged 61. Film-maker who enlivened his many
television documentaries with scholarship and good humour COMBINING a
scholarly mind with a good-humoured lightness of touch, Jonathan Gili
brought to the television documentary a rare integrity,
originality and dedication.
      He could tease human stories from the most humdrum of subjects. In
1985 his film To the World's End, for instance, took the No 31 London bus,
and to the music of Carl Davis's Variations on a Bus Route, reflected the
ethnic diversity of London: there was not a Cockney to be seen en route.
They came from Vienna, Tipperary, Ukraine, the Caribbean. Even the bus
conductor was a Midlander married to an exotic Brazilian wife. And since
Gili took time to get to know his subjects, each emerged with a
distinctive individual voice: Mr Tony Tobias, the newsagent with the
enormous nose, whose mother had told him, "It's not your nose that's big,
it's the rest of your face that's small." And Mary Devlin of Kilburn
recalling her late husband: "One of the nicest husbands that stood in shoe
leather".
      Jonathan Francesc Gili was born in Oxford in 1943. His father, Joan
Gili, a Catalan-born bookseller and Anglophile, had arrived from Barcelona
in the 1930s and set up shop in Cecil Court with Henry Warren, one of a
fading breed of men of letters.
From the Dragon School, Oxford, Jonathan won a scholarship to Bryanston,
where he shone at Greek verse speaking. He gained an exhibition to New
College, Oxford, to read Greats, but spent most of his time reviewing
films - he commandeered a whole issue of Isis to extol Joe Losey's film
The Servant. At a party thrown by Lord David Cecil, he espied Phillida,
daughter of the engraver Reynolds Stone, who was studying at the Ruskin
School of Art, and decided she would be his wife - thus forming an
important connection with the worlds of art and fine typography. When
Henry Warren left him 50 he founded Warren Editions, publishing
lithographs and books.
After working in his father's bookshop and freelance film-editing, he made
his directing debut in 1971, with a one-and-a-half-minute film called
Incident, in which a youthful Stephen Frears is seen sitting quietly in
his flat, reading his newspaper, until he hears the sound of a car crash
outside.
Gili, a man of quiet charm and irreverent humour, was constitutionally
unsuited to corporate life- he was incapable of self-promotion or
competitive office networking - but after he had made several
documentaries for London Weekend, Edward Mirzoeff asked him to take on a
major BBC documentary about Westminster School, which won an audience of
12 million and a Bafta award.
    So began the most fulfilling period of his career, cycling to the BBC
daily, directing and writing documentaries such as his four-part Year of
the French, and The Other Half, about the novelist Angus Wilson and his
lover, Tony Garrett, a film that managed to be both sensitive and funny.
Among his memorable films for Mirzoeff's Forty Minutes series were those
made with Lucinda Lambton. Lambton's exuberant enthusiasms for bizarre
architecture, animal tombs and curious collections chimed exactly with
      Gili's, and made their collaborative explorations hilarious. In
Cabinet of Curiosities, while they were filming at Erdrigg, seat of the
Yorke family, Philip Yorke rode a penny farthing bicycle down the drive
and showed them a collapsing ceiling: "We call this the state bedroom," he
said, "because it's in such a state."
      Lambton remembers Gili leaping from her moving car to buy a Michael
Jackson doll to add to his astonishing collection of ephemera. Fridge
magnets, matchbooks, erasers, chewing-gum wrappers, Snoopy dogs and Barbie
dolls - nothing was too kitsch - were stacked in shoe-boxes that cluttered
Gili's tall, narrow Fulham house.
      Apart from this eccentric habit, which caused friends to heap all
manner of rubbish on him under the guise of birthday presents, he also
refused to possess a television set, so that when his own films were
shown, his family had to decamp elsewhere to watch. But there was room at
home for an eclectic collection of antiquarian books and fine pictures,
many from his own Warren Editions imprint.
      In the mid-1970s he was among the first (along with Tom Stoppard) to
recognise the brilliance of Glynn Boyd Harte's drawings. He encouraged
Boyd Harte to start making lithographs and published several exquisite
little books, including Weekend in Dieppe, Sardines a l'Huile and
Metroland, illustrating John Betjeman's verses for a television film about
the Metropolitan line. At the book's launch, Betjeman himself read his
verses through a megaphone.
      As in the world of publishing, where more and more books are
produced with less and less authorship, television offers a proliferation
of programmes but scant evidence of original writing and editing skills.
Gili ploughed his own furrow, never compromising his own high standards.
      His 2001 film Debutantes, about the last deb season before the
Second World War, involved subtle interviews with octogenarian aristocrats
without resorting to cheap shots about pampered princesses curtseying to a
cake. Instead, women such as Ruth Sebag-Montefiore recalled, "We thought
we looked ridiculous. And we were right." The war had whisked these
privileged women into ambulances and on to the factory floor. Like his
elegant two-part Portrait of the Queen Mother (2002), this was perceptive
and truthful without being obsequious: the result of patient interviewing
and an acute ear.
      His Tales of the Eiffel Tower, commended by the Grierson Award
judges, was followed by The Empire State Story. Though he had suffered
from leukaemia for 20 years, Gili flung his seemingly limitless energy in
recent years into a Timewatch series of films about America and its myths:
Typhoid Mary, Pocahontas: Her True Story, Gold Rush Memories, Remember the
Alamo, The Oklahoma Outlaw. Tales from the Oklahoma Land Runs won an award
at the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
      This year, Historians of Genius - In Their Own Words, for BBC Four,
had the distinctive Gili stamp, featuring Samuel West portraying Macaulay
in the guise of a contemporary historian describing the Monmouth Rebellion
and Monmouth's beheading.
      Jonathan Gili is to be awarded the Grierson Award's highest
accolade, for outstanding contribution to documentary, on November 8.
He is survived  by his widow, the illustrator and author Phillida Gili,
and by two sons and a daughter.
      Copyright 2004 Times Newspapers Limited