In the South Bank Show’s Michael Powell, the director is characterized as one who “challenges the usual ideas of what British cinema should be”. And Powell’s own role in the film-portrait is both that of the puckish sage and the darkly self-aware director. Parts of this hour-long film might have been conceived by Powell himself – particularly those parts which place him in dark-humored proximity to projected images from his own work. There is an alluring array of vivid, pristine-looking excerpts from Powell’s films here and they evoke the range of an unusual career – spy thrillers, patriotic films, musical fantasies, celebrations of countryside life and films that turn inward on art, on its images. But Powell’s own remarks also make an extraordinary impression, for here is a man who says, “The sky is the limit. Art is worth dying for”. The film was shown in 1987 when Michael Powell received the Kurosawa Award.

Peter Hogue, San Francisco International Film Festival 2011, San Francisco 2011

David Hinton worked for ten years on the ITV arts programme The South Bank Show where he made documentaries about artists of all kinds, including surrealist Glen Baxter (1983), rock musician Little Richard (1985), playwright John Godber (1986), comedian John Cleese (1986), and choreographers Siobhan Davies (1985), and Karole Armitage (1986). His South Bank Show film on the painter Francis Bacon (1985) was […] the winner of a Rocky Award at Banff. His films about writer Alan Bennett (1984) and film-maker Michael Powell (1986) were both nominated for BAFTA awards. He won a BAFTA in 1988 for the documentary Bernardo Bertolucci and The Last Emperor […]
He then went to America to direct The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind (1989), a two-hour documentary for Turner Television. This film won the Archival Achievement Award of the British Film Institute. […] He collaborated with the comedian Rowan Atkinson to make Visual Comedy (1993) for the BBC series Funny Business, and his documentary Children of the Revolution (1995), won the BAFTA award for best arts programme in 1995. […] He has worked with several choreographers to create dance works specially for Tv. Late Flowering Lust (1994) is a 55-minute dance-based music drama, starring Nigel Hawthorne, which was created in collaboration with Matthew Bourne and Adventures in Motion Pictures. Touched (1995) is a short dance film created in collaboration with choreographer Wendy Houstoun. Birds (2000) and Snow (2003) are both experimental dance films created entirely from library footage, the latter in collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Lee. His dance films have won many awards, including an Emmy.

echo-arts.info