Mark Kidel

Mark Kidel (born 6 July 1947) is a documentary filmmaker, writer and critic, working mostly in France and the UK.

His award-winning films include portraits of Cary Grant, John Adams (composer), Elvis Costello, Boy George, Ravi Shankar, Rod Stewart, Bill Viola, Iannis Xenakis, pianists Alfred Brendel and Leon Fleisher, Derek Jarman, Brian Clarke Balthus, Tricky, Robert Wyatt and American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars.

A pioneer of the "rockumentary", Kidel was also the first rock critic of the New Statesman and contributed pieces on rock, soul, and world music, to The Observer, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian.

Kidel grew up in Paris and Vienna and attended the Lycée français de Vienne and Bedales School in England.

In 1965, he won a scholarship to the University of Oxford where he studied for a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at New College, graduating in 1968, and edited Isis, the renowned student weekly.

During his tenure, Kidel interviewed Jimi Hendrix on his first UK tour with Emma Rothschild.

Kidel subsequently earned a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1969 with an MA in International Relations.

In 1970 Kidel got a job at the BBC in London as a researcher in the General Features department.

There he made his first 10-minute film (about cheap weekend holidays to Majorca), and in 1972 joined the production team on the newly formed BBC2 Saturday night program Full House later known as Second House and The Lively Arts.

There he made longer film portraits of a variety of British artists and craftsmen.

He followed with the feature-length The Man They Couldn't Hang: Babbacombe Lee for the BBC with the folk-rock group Fairport Convention.

From 1972 to 1976, Kidel wrote music reviews for Time Out's music section.

During his time in Devon and onwards, Kidel produced more writing on contemporary music, specifically rock, folk, soul, R&B, blues, and world music, contributing pieces to The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the New Review.

In 1975 Kidel made a cinéma vérité film about the Kursaal Flyers as they toured Britain in a Ford Transit van called So You Wanna Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star? Recognized as a pioneering rock doc (listed in Time Out's 50 Best Music Films, for example) this now classic inspired British comedians' group the Comic Strip's Bad News Tour which some believe in turn inspired Rob Reiner's This is Spinal Tap.

Kidel's next film, another classic rock doc, Rod the Mod Has Come of Age was 'a ruthless account of the rock promotion circus in full action'.

In early 1976, Kidel was in charge of "Arena: Art and Design", one of the precursors of the long-running BBC Arena series.

During his six-month editorship, "Arena" featured an entire program devoted to video art, a then-relatively new art movement.

In 1976, frustrated by what he saw as television's increasing superficiality and the professional pressure to make formulaic films to please as wide an audience as possible, Kidel left the industry altogether to work in communications and public relations for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon, a role he occupied for the next decade.

Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her husband Leonard's non-profit foundation was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore and served as an experiment in rural reconstruction which included projects in education, agriculture, rural industry and the arts.

Over this period, Kidel also taught in the music department at Dartington College of the Arts, for three years.

He was the founding rock columnist for the New Statesman in 1976 through 1980 and alternated every other week with John Peel on a regular column in The Listener.

Kidel and Peter Gabriel, with whom he had become friends after interviewing him for The Observer, discovered they were both interested in exploring music from other cultures.

This led to a collaboration on the creation of a world music and rock festival that eventually became WOMAD.

Kidel fed ideas which came from looking at successful world music festivals in France, the yearly event in Rennes, run by Chérif Khaznadar and Françoise Gründ.

Kidel was on the first board of directors but resigned owing to other commitments.

A group that included Jonathan Arthur, Thomas Brooman, Martin Elbourne, Bob Hooton, and Steve Pritchard eventually brought the festival to fruition in 1982.

Kidel was director of the "New Themes for Education" conference held at Dartington Hall for the years from 1984 to 1986.

During this time, the conference explored the experience of illness and brought together people from the worlds of medicine, psychology and the arts.

Kidel invited James Hillman to Dartington Hall in 1984 to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales.

Following this they collaborated, with Susan Rowe-Leete, on seven films based on Hillman's ideas:

-The Heart Has Reasons: a film about the way in which the heart is imagined by scientists and poets

-Kind of Blue: an essay in defence of melancholia

-The Architecture of the Imagination: a series of five ground-breaking films, 30-minutes each, about architecture and symbolism, with ones about the doorway, the staircase, the window, the tower and the bridge.

The films included many examples drawn from the history of art and classic cinema.

The 1985 conference led to Kidel's co-editing with Susan Rowe-Leete,'The Meaning of Illness'' (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1986).

In 1987, Kidel returned to television: That year, he worked as joint commissioning editor-in-chief for the inaugural broadcast of the French cultural channel La Sept – later known as ARTE France.

Kidel also produced and directed many films from 1987 until the present, working in collaboration with a number of production companies, in the UK – Dibb Directions, Third Eye and Antelope Films – in France with Les Films d'ici, and Agat Films & Cie – Ex Nihilo and also a regular guest producer with the BBC's Music and Arts Department.

One notable project involved collaborating with British producer and director Mike Dibb and the world-renowned American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax – creating two films for Channel 4 out of 500 or so hours of material he had shot in the United States over a 10-year period: American Patchwork and Dreams and Songs of the Noble Old.

Many of Kidel's most successful films in the field of world music and cultures have been the result of collaborations with distinguished specialists: Le Paris Black and Pygmies in Paris with French music writer (and ex-editor of Jazz Magazine) Gérald Arnaud,

He also worked as a consultant to Channel 4, BBC Wales, and United Television, a large UK-based independent producer of TV programmes, through 2004.