My colleague Eric Liknaitzky, who has died aged 71, was the pioneering director of London’s long-running arthouse distributor Up to date Movies.
Eric first achieved underground fame because the programmer for the Labia cinema in Cape City between 1975 and 1978. The Labia made historical past within the various tradition scene in South Africa when Liknaitzky and his associates remodeled an aged and shambolic theatre right into a thriving cinema.
After he emigrated to London in 1979, Eric quickly discovered a place as supervisor with the newly shaped Gate cinemas, run by the New Yorkers David and Barbara Stone. They’d taken over the ailing cinema in Notting Hill Gate and turned it right into a specialist image home, the place they launched the general public to work by impartial film-makers equivalent to Derek Jarman.
In 1980 he joined the distributor Synthetic Eye, run by the German movie critic Andi Engel and his spouse, Pam, in Camden, north London. From his workplace above the cinema he ran the flourishing 16mm distribution wing. An professional on Bob Dylan (he might quote his lyrics with precision), his present when he left Synthetic Eye within the late Eighties was a 16mm full print of Dylan’s four-and-a-half-hour 1978 directorial epic, Renaldo and Clara.
He then joined Up to date Movies, run by Charles and Kitty Cooper. Within the halcyon days of London’s various cinema community, their venues – the Paris Pullman in Chelsea and the Phoenix in East Finchley – had been famend for his or her late-night programmes. From workplaces in Soho, Up to date had amassed an enormous library of worldwide cinema. Proudly leftwing, the Coopers had distributed South African resistance cinema and an enormous array of movies from China, Cuba, India and the USSR.
Cementing relationships with British luminaries such because the film-maker Peter Whitehead and the producer and director Jack Bond, and re-animating the work of the impartial American director Joseph Strick, he aimed to make Up to date a major power in world cinema. After Charles Cooper died, Eric took over Up to date Movies from Kitty and ran it till his loss of life.
Eric was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Raphael Liknaitzky, an architect, and Milly (nee Smith), and attended Highlands North highschool. He met Shen Attwell when she got here to the Labia to complain a couple of evaluate I had written in our weekly programme – which she thought was misogynistic – for Ingmar Bergman’s movie Cries and Whispers. They married in 1978.
He’s survived by Shen, their daughter, Jude, their grandchildren, Milly and Vincent, and his brothers, David and Barry.
