American Cinematographer - February 2010 - 48

◗ Artistry and Conscience Near right: Menges (right) deplanes with journalist Michael Parkinson in 1964 while covering the Cyprus Civil War and Zanzibar Revolution for the British TV program World in Action. Far right: Menges gives young actor David Bradley a “butcher’s look” while shooting Kes (1970). He was a great teacher.” By the time Forbes returned to the United States, at the end of the 1950s, Menges had cut his teeth on a number of gritty social documentaries and dramas. He had also built up some useful industry contacts, and he quickly found a job in the cutting room at Derek Knight & Partners in Soho, which in turn led to work as a cameraman for Alan King Associates. One particularly influential person to whom he was introduced by Forbes was cinematographer Brian Probyn, BSC. Menges describes Probyn as “another very good teacher” and worked sporadically as his assistant on short films, including The Saturday Men (1962), which came straight out of the naturalistic tradition of Free Cinema. In 1963, Menges joined the World in Action team at Granada Television and swiftly became a highly experienced cameraman. Over the next few years, his working relationship with Probyn continued; it was for Probyn that he operated on Loach’s Poor Cow, Menges’ first taste of feature-film work. World in Action was a hardhitting, investigative-journalism program that aired in Britain from 1963 to 1998. “They sent me all over the place with really good journalists like Alex Valentine, Stephen Peet and Michael Parkinson,” says Menges. 48 February 2010 “We covered news stories such as the fighting in Angola, the uprising in Zanzibar, the civil war in Cyprus, Spain under Franco, and, most importantly for me, we went to South Africa during the time of apartheid. “The things I go for are good writing and a good story, and hopefully something with political energy.” — Chris Menges, ASC, BSC Armed with a Bolex and looking a bit like a student, I went up to Bulawayo in Matabeleland with Alex Valentine to make a documentary about the Ndebele’s support for the African National Congress, which was a real education. All of these things were American Cinematographer amazing — to be that age and to be traveling, learning and seeing — but South Africa was important because when I was asked to direct A World Apart [1988], I knew I could film it in Bulawayo. I knew I’d have political support from the ANC groups I’d met and could give the city enough of a feel of Johannesburg, because, obviously, we couldn’t actually shoot the film in South Africa.” Experiences such as these made Menges an international filmmaker from the earliest years of his career. Many of the documentaries he shot involved traveling to dangerous regions and taking extraordinary risks, especially the films he made with director Adrian Cowell. Their first collaboration was Raid Into Tibet (1966), a 30-minute documentary that followed a group of Khamba guerrillas as they crossed the border into Tibet and attacked a Chinese military convoy. Menges, Cowell and journalist George Patterson accompanied the Khambas on a grueling trek across the mountains and filmed the raid. Several Chinese soldiers were killed during the attack, and the raiding party eventually fled when one of the guerrillas was shot. Menges and Cowell also worked together on a series of films about illicit opium production in the

American Cinematographer - February 2010

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