Reply With QuoteSorry to hear that you've lost a good friend Pen.
Condolences,
Smudge
Dave Berry, Wales’ finest The Bioscope
A perennial figure on the international silent film circuit, we shared many a pint over chats on old film - and speedway - over the years. I'll miss him enormously.
Sorry to hear that you've lost a good friend Pen.
Condolences,
Smudge
That is a big shock - and a great loss. He was a most helpful guy. His book Wales and Cinema is a magisterial work. A sad passing.
There's a nice tribute today on Walesonline:
FRIENDS and colleagues have paid tribute to one of the foremost experts on the Welsh film industry.
Dave Berry, 66, passed away at Llandough Hospital yesterday morning after a long illness.
The former South Wales Echo journalist, who lived in Roath, Cardiff, and had a partner in Germany, wrote Wales and Cinema � The First Hundred Years, considered the bible of Welsh film.
He was heavily involved in the film industry in Wales, encouraging young directors and working at the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, where he was a research officer.
Film critic Mr Berry worked on the Echo from 1974 to 1989 and contributed to a number of publications on cinema in Wales.
He received the Anthony Hopkins Award for contributions to film in Wales in 2002.
Shortly before his death, Mr Berry, who had asthma, was still working on a project at Canton�s Chapter Arts Centre on the 1943 film Silent Village. The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.
Stuart Minton, his former news editor, described Mr Berry as a �real character�.
�Dave was an investigative reporter and he loved being part of that scene. He never looked after himself as well as he ought to,� he said.
�He always wanted to check and recheck that he had got everything right. He was diligent and meticulous. He was a first- class news man.�
BBC Radio Wales arts show presenter Nicola Heywood Thomas said: �If anybody knew anything there was to know about film in Wales it was Dave.
�He was absolutely the sweetest man with a great sense of humour; very dry and deadpan but also a very private man. It will somehow feel wrong to be in Chapter and not see David there.�
Professor Peter Stead, a cultural historian, said: �Nobody could talk about the cinema in Wales without referring to his book. He was a scholar and a cultural critic. As a result of Dave�s work, we know that Wales played an important part in the early days of film.�
Christopher Monger, director of The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain, starring Hugh Grant, said: �I shall miss his passion for film, his good humour, his genial smile � and Columbo raincoat.�
Friend Steve Groves, a columnist for our sister paper, the Western Mail, said: �A moment in Dave�s company was something to treasure. Acerbic, fun, funny and generous, he was one of the great practitioners of journalism in Wales as well as one of its great characters. Our feelings for him went way beyond friendship and affection � but he was too self-effacing to recognise that.
�He�d interviewed everyone from the Rolling Stones to prime ministers.
�And of course he loved films. Spending the early hours in a freezing cinema with him while he reviewed the latest offering from Hollywood for the South Wales Echo was a delight. His use of English was extraordinary. He was an original � and irreplaceable.�
Janek Alexander, Chapter director, said: �Cinema was in his blood and his knowledge of film encyclopedic, but it was his ability to excite and enthuse people about his lifelong passion that was his special gift.�
David Berry: Historian and critic of film and television in Wales
Monday, 15 March 2010
INDEPENDENT
David Berry: Historian and critic of film and television in Wales - Obituaries, News - The Independent
Berry: a kindly and modest man with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film and TV
"Film was never made to feel very welcome in Wales. As a two- or three-year-old infant, stinking slightly of gin and the sweat of the fairground, it ran slap up against Evan Roberts and the religious revival of 1904, and was severely mauled. It survives, but remains retarded to this day," wrote the distinguished film-maker Wil Aaron in The Arts in Wales 1950-1975, a symposium I edited for the Arts Council in 1979.
David Berry set out to test the veracity of this provocative statement by researching the origins of cinema in Wales and showing, the fire-and-brimstone evangelist notwithstanding, that there had been a thriving industry in places like Cardiff, Swansea and the old coal and iron towns of upland Glamorgan from about 1894, when entertainments such as Edison's Peepshows had been very popular. Two years later Birt Acres' Kineopticon had put on a display of early movies at the Fine Art and Industrial Exhibition held in Cardiff at which a film of the visit by Edward VII had been screened.
In his magnum opus, Wales and Cinema: the First Hundred Years (University of Wales Press in association with the Wales Film Council and the British Film Institute, 1994), Berry charted the rise of travelling picture showmen, mountebanks and pioneers who operated at fairgrounds and music halls in Edwardian Wales, which was his favourite era because it was the moment when the movies emerged from still photography.
Foremost among them was William Haggar, maker of 34 films distributed by Gaumont; the most controversial was The Life of Charles Peace (1905), which appealed to audiences in south Wales weaned on penny dreadfuls but shocked many progressively-minded people with its brutal hanging scene. In north Wales Haggar's counterpart was Arthur Cheetham; Berry's research into the work of both men brought him great acclaim as a historian of early film in Britain.
The book's first section focussed on the silent melodramas made when Wales was "discovered" by Hollywood and on the career and influence of Ivor Novello, who starred in D. W. Griffith's film The White Rose (1923), Cutts' The Rat (1925) and Hitchcock's The Lodger (1926). Berry was the first to bring a critical mind to these films and put them in the context of their time. Suddenly, it seemed, Wales had a tradition of film-making that was far from being retarded, and had produced actors and film-makers who could be compared with the most famous stars and technicians of their day.
With the coming of sound and the boom of the inter-war years, Wales became the setting for films portraying working-class communities, often with quasi-propagandist messages. Berry wrote a detailed analysis of such films as The Citadel (1938), based on a novel by A.J. Cronin, Proud Valley (1940), starring Paul Robeson, and John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941).
He was particularly informative in his account of how Ford, who was of Irish descent, shot his version of Richard Llewellyn's famous novel in the back lot of 20th Century Fox's studios and on its ranch near Malibu, employing with just one exception a cast of American-Irish actors (including Maureeen O'Hara, Roddy McDowall and Walter Pidgeon) whose accents were, at best, only approximately Welsh. The film presented a heavily romanticised vision of industrial south Wales which went round the world and was to retain its mythic quality, even for the Welsh themselves, until critics like Berry began to deconstruct it.
He also delved into the film careers of some of the best-known screen actors produced in Wales, including Emlyn Williams, Stanley Baker, Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins, showing how their talents had been nurtured in their home country before they won wider fame.
A final section discussed television and film-making since the second world war and up to the creation in 1982 of S4C, the fourth channel in Wales, casting a cold eye over reputations which had hitherto not had much critical attention paid them. The directors John Grierson, John Ormond, Karl Francis, Endaf Emlyn, Chris Monger, Colin Thomas, Joanna Quinn and Stephen Weeks featured prominently at this point in Berry's narrative. The book had a useful filmography of actors and directors and some fascinating photographs unearthed during his research, and a comprehensive appendix listing about 400 films of specifically Welsh interest.
Dave Berry first came to Wales in 1974 and was by trade a print journalist. Born in Farnworth, Lancashire, in 1943, he had worked on the Lancashire Evening Post in Preston, The Journal in Newcastle, the Birmingham Post, the Bristol Evening News and for Northcliffe Newspapers in London, where he had honed his skills as a sports correspondent. A proud Lancastrian, he was a lifelong supporter of Bolton Wanderers, rugby league, speedway and cricket. From 1974 to 1989 he worked in Cardiff for the South Wales Echo as Education Correspondent and until 1994 as Film Critic.
He was Research Officer with the Wales Film Council and from 1997 to 2004 with the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. In 1986 he wrote and directed a four-part series for HTV about the film industry, The Dream that Kicks � the title is taken from a poem by Dylan Thomas -- which was also shown on Channel Four and S4C.
Among the mysteries which exercised him was why a silent film depicting David Lloyd George had been "lost" shortly after it was made in 1918: he concluded that it had almost certainly been banned by the Government for not showing the statesman in a wholly favourable light. Berry discovered the spools in 1994 and made the film available again for general release; Norman Page played the part of Lloyd George and Alma Reville, who became Alfred Hitchcock's wife in 1926, played his daughter Megan. With Simon Horrocks, Berry wrote David Lloyd George: the Movie Mystery (1998).
A kindly and modest man, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of film and television, Dave Berry was always ready to share it, his infectious enthusiasm inspiring others, especially young film-makers and animators, and this role gave him oracular status. In 2002, for his services to the industry, he received the Anthony Hopkins Award and at the Cyfrwng Conference held at the University of Glamorgan in 2005, where Kenneth Griffith was among those who paid him tribute, he was given the equally prestigious Si�n Phillips Prize.
Dave Berry's partner of many years, Gerhild Krebs, who survives him, is a film archivist in Saarbr�cken, Germany.
Meic Stephens
David John Berry, journalist and film historian: born Farnworth, Lancashire 29 December 1943; features writer, South Wales Echo, 1974-94; Research Officer, Wales Film Council 1989-97; ) Research Officer, National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, 1997-2004; died Cardiff 22 January 2010.
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