Dennis led fab life of neat movies

By PETER CALDER

Jonathan Dennis had planned to take it easy for a while when his last book was published late last year.

And it was typical of the grim humour he managed when confronted by inoperable cancer that he remarked that "I hadn't quite planned to spend the time dying".

It was one of the bleakest ironies of his death at 48, at his home in Wellington on Thursday night, that he never got to take that break.

Another, as New Zealand Film Festival director Bill Gosden noted yesterday, was that a man who had devoted so much energy and expertise to preserving our shared history would never enjoy an old age from which to survey his own past.

Jonathan, whom I was privileged to call a friend, established the New Zealand Film Archive in 1981 and was its director until 1990. It was a role for which he prepared himself by travelling, at his own expense, to study at major archives in Europe and North America.

Under his enthusiastic leadership, the archive searched out, rescued and restored thousands of feet of historical film and thousands of film-related materials which would otherwise certainly have been lost, and he became widely respected among the international community of film historians.

He curated major retrospectives of New Zealand film, notably in Italy and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and since 1990 undertook the painstaking job of sourcing and programming retrospectives of major filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Alfred Hitchcock and Len Lye for the pleasure of audiences at the annual film festivals.

Jonathan grew up in scenic splendour, first at the Chateau and then at the Hermitage, where his father was the manager, and was educated in Christchurch.

In the 1970s he was a member of the distinguished Wellington experimental theatre troupe Amamus but his true genius lay in bringing the performances of others to light.

That he did so with a keen critical intellect was evidenced by his work as the film critic for National Radio. Film Show, which ran from 1994 to last year, was a showcase not only of his wide knowledge and often acidulous critical acumen but also his impatience with the formulas of mainstream cinema.

It also demonstrated his passion for the medium. His interview with Bud Boetticher, director of classic westerns, was itself a classic and will doubtless be replayed over coming days.

Jonathan's crowded CV includes award-winning broadcasts; a film (Mouth Wide Open, about pioneer New Zealand filmmaker Ted Coubray); several books (Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, which he edited with Jan Bieringa, is the definitive critical survey of our cinema); and historical recordings made with the Alexander Turnbull Library.

But he was as far as might be imagined from a fusty archivist. Given to Hawaiian shorts and luridly coloured spectacle frames and fond of adjectives like fab and neat, he lived in a confectionery-coloured house only metres from the end of Courtenay Place and strode the streets of the city he loved, handing out smiles at every step.

He leaves a space impossible to fill, on the air, in the cultural life of the nation and in the lives of all who were lucky enough to know him.