Michael Kenneth Christian Grigsby (7 June 1936 – 12 March 2013) was an English documentary filmmaker.
With a filmography spanning six decades and nearly 30 films, Grigsby occupies a unique position in British documentary filmmaking, having witnessed and commented on many of the dramatic changes in British society (and beyond) from the late 1950s into the next century. As a critic noted, "from Michael Grigsby back to John Grierson runs an unbroken tradition in British documentary-making: a passionate commitment to the poetry of everyday life."
Early life and career
Born in Reading, Berkshire, Grigsby's passion for documentary dates back to his time at Abingdon School, an independent boarding school for boys, where he attended from 1949 through 1955. There, he ran the school's film society and discovered the films of John Grierson's documentary movement. These had an amazing impact on then 14-year-old boy. While at school, he also talked the headmaster into funding his first attempts at documentary filmmaking. He produced Ut Proficias in 1953, which was placed with the British Film Institute. Another film, No Tumbled House (1955), deals with the realities faced by a boy in a boarding school.
Career
After leaving Abingdon, he gained his first job as a trainee assistant editor at Granada Television in Manchester, working with Harry Watt, who had co-directed the short film Night Mail (1936). Unfortunately, Watt left shortly afterwards, and Grigsby was then offered a job as a studio cameraman, which by his own admission was very dull, but gave him a chance to purchase his own 16mm Bolex camera.
Along with a bunch of disaffected Granada colleagues, he set up a filmmaking collective, Unit Five Seven, and spent several years shooting and editing Enginemen, a short film about work in a locomotive shed, in his spare time. By chance, the critic and filmmaker Lindsay Anderson heard of his project. Anderson was particularly impressed by the rushes, and with fellow filmmaker Karel Reisz, he helped Grigsby secure funding from the British Film Institute to complete the film, which was included in the last Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre in March 1959, alongside Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys and Robert Vas’ Refuge England. Growing in confidence, Grigsby made another short documentary with the Unit Five Seven, Tomorrow’s Saturday (1962), about mill workers in Blackburn, Lancashire preparing for the weekend. After these two well received shorts, he succeeded in persuading Granada to support his work and was finally allowed to direct his first documentary for the company, Deckie Learner (1965).
Later work
His work continued to demonstrate a fidelity to the concerns and principles embodied in these early films. Grigsby set out to make films about ordinary people, and those at society’s margin. He gained a reputation as a filmmaker who – to use his own words – "gives a voice to the voiceless". Thus, whether he's filming trawlermen (Deckie Learner, 1965; A Life Apart, 1973), the survivors on both sides of the Vietnam War (I Was a Soldier, 1970; The Search, 1991; Thoi Noi, 1993), ordinary inhabitants of Northern Ireland (Too Long a Sacrifice, 1984; The Silent War, 1990; Rehearsals, 2005), families facing up to social disintegration in Thatcher's Britain (Living on the Edge, 1987) or the traumatised Lockerbie community 10 years after the Boeing 747 disaster (Lockerbie, A Night Remembered, 1998), Grigsby does his utmost to let people speak for themselves. Hence his belief in the importance of long research periods (up to six months) prior to shooting, to gain the participants' trust; hence also the still frames, the long meditative shots and the moments of silence, allowing people the space in which to get their points across. This unhurried pacing appears truly daring when compared to the frenetic filmic vocabulary more favoured today.