"John Krish, who has died aged 92, was a film director and documentary maker with a remarkable knack for packing an emotional punch with whatever brief he was given; he was under-recognised for most of his career, but in 2011 he won the Evening Standard award for best documentary after A Day In The Life: Four Portraits of Postwar Britain, a selection of shorts made in the 1950s and early 1960s, was screened by the British Film Institute. Krish’s work ranged from sci-fi features and television (including the colour credits for The Avengers) to documentaries and public information films. The latter included a notable trio of public safety films made during the 1970s at a time when directors did not feel constrained by sponsors’ briefs and did not hold back in ramping up the horror and suspense. Sewing Machine (1973), warning parents about the dangers of leaving children on their own near traffic, featured a mother busy sewing while her daughter plays in the street outside as an on-screen counter ticks down from 60 seconds to inevitable disaster. In Drive Carefully, Darling (1975), a car journey is experienced through the eyes of the driver, his thoughts conveyed in an increasingly urgent narrative which culminates in carnage – suggested by a cut to a butcher slapping meat on a counter for his wife. Krish’s most controversial film was The Finishing Line (1977), a 20-minute “comedy” made for the British Transport Commission, warning children of the dangers of trespassing on railway tracks. It portrayed a fantastical school “sports day” held on a working railway line, where schoolchildren participate in such games as “Fence-breaking”, “Stone-throwing”, “Last Across” and “The Great Tunnel Walk”. The end result is a row of bloodied bodies, “like the Somme from 1914”, in Krish’s words. “I made it as an emetic,” he explained. At initial screenings in schools the film had a huge impact, with some children fainting and others stunned into silence. When it was shown on television, however, there was an outcry which led to the film being banned for more than 20 years. Krish’s gift for grabbing his audience by their vitals was evident too in A Day In The Life, his award-winning quartet evoking an era when British streets were almost empty of traffic and children still dressed like their parents. The first film of the quartet, however, The Elephant Will Never Forget (1953), commissioned by British Transport Films to commemorate the closure of London’s tramways, led to his being fired when people who watched the first screenings burst into tears. Edgar Anstey, head of BTF, had wanted a fairly dry record, but what he got was a elegiac farewell to an era which included footage of an elderly couple taking their last shilling-all-day tram ride around town. The final minutes featured haunting images of the tram carcasses after demolition “standing, blinking in the sun, like mourners at their own funerals”. The other films in the quartet were They Took Us to the Sea (1961), about an NSPCC-funded trip to Weston-super-Mare for deprived Birmingham children; Our School (1962), a touching depiction of life in a Hertfordshire secondary modern, and I Think They Call Him John (1964), a portrait of a widowed war veteran going about his solitary daily rituals. What made them so special, one reviewer observed, was Krish’s eye for detail: “The crestfallen expressions of the children on their day trip when they are served institutional-looking trifles for dessert; the mute consternation of the schoolgirl asked by a crisp schoolmistress just what she would bring to the marriage she counts on for her future. The way widower John lowers himself into a chair, pauses, scans his neat little council flat taking an inventory of the traces of his late wife that still remain.” John Jeffrey Krish was born in London on December 4 1923. His father, Serge, was a pianist who had come to Britain as a Jewish refugee from eastern Europe – as had both sets of grandparents. Aged 17, Krish wangled a job as assistant-assistant director to Harry Watt at Denham studios, making Target for Tonight (1941), an account of a British bombing raid over Germany. Promoted to assistant editor at the Crown Film Unit, he worked with such figures as Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister on Listen to Britain (1942). After being called up later in the Second World War, he was deployed to the US Office of War Information, editing footage of the conflict into weekly newsreels. In 1945 he and his colleagues were given a can of film marked “Belsen”. It contained the first images of the concentration camps, but Krish and his fellow editors were told not to talk about what they had seen. “The footage was not released until the war ended,” he recalled. “It made absolutely no sense.”" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/05/16/john-krish-film-director--obituary/
