Signis

Ecumenical Film Critic Ron Holloway Dies Aged 76

Brussels, December 18, 2009 (Guido Convents/SIGNIS/WACC) - An American gentlemen in Berlin: this is not the title of a film but it is the depiction of Ron Holloway by many members of SIGNIS and Ecumenical juries.

(JPEG) In 1988 at the Berlin film festival a man named Ron Holloway came to see the OCIC jury when he learned that the film The Commissar was awarded. He said that he was very happy about the award. At the closing evening of the festival he introduced the jury to a number of filmmakers and to the director Aleksandr Askoldov. From that moment on he was like a guardian for the new man at OCIC that I was at that time. Ron and his wife Dorothea were present at the main international film festivals and knew what happened in the film world. Not the gossip, but those things which matter. Young or almost forgotten directors from (eastern) Europe but also from Asia or other continents with their latest film which could be of interest to OCIC or later on to SIGNIS. In 2009 Ron and Dorothea were also at the ecumenical reception at the Berlin film festival - they always attended the events SIGNIS or the Ecumenical jury organized. There we spoke about the publication of a book on cinema and politics. He told me that he thought about it but didn’t have the time yet, so that could be something for later. At the same time at that reception he was helping a young woman who started a study on spirituality and cinema. Ron Holloway was a man of action, who saw films, filmmakers and critics and who was always ready to share his experiences and insights.

Born 26 November 1933 in Peoria, Illinois, USA, Ron Holloway studied at Loyola University Chicago, where he received his BA in Philosophy and MA in Religious Philosophy. Ordained as a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1959, he worked at adult Education Centres, co-founded the National Centre for Film Study in Chicago and served there as Chaplain. He spent his summers in Latin America (in Mexico at the Ivan Illych Institute in Cuernavaca, and tramping through Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela).

Committed to civil rights, Holloway marched with Jesse Jackson in Chicago, and was living in Harlem when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968. That same year he received a two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to research the religious aspects of cinema. He obtained his Ph.D at the University of Hamburg with a dissertation on “The Religious Dimension in the Cinema, with particular reference to the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Bresson”. It was published in 1977 by the World Council of Churches (WCC) in co-operation with the protestant international filmorganisation INTERFILM as Beyond the Image.

Ron was the first Catholic to complete a doctorate in Evangelical Theology at the University of Hamburg, writing on the films of Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson. For over 30 years Ron was a Berlin-based correspondent in film, television, and the media for Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Moving Pictures International and International Film Guide. He wrote articles on film, theatre and cultural affairs for the Financial Times and The Herald Tribune. Author of six books on film history and criticism, he has researched and originated a databank (3,500 names) on film directors from the republics of the ex-USSR.

Since 1979, he together with actress wife Dorothea Moritz have published without public subsidy the journal KINO German Film and International Reports, Film with more than 95 issues. KINO has published special editions on the cinema in the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, plus a tribute to the new ‘film lands’ entering the European Union in a special edition for the Film by the Sea Festival. He personally handed them out at the major international film festivals in Cannes and Berlin. But his support of German cinema went well beyond that publication alone. He and Dorothea collaborated on four documentaries and both served on juries at several international film festivals.

As a journalist Ron received several awards, including: Polish Rings (1982), together with Dorothea (given by Andrzej Wajda, Association of Polish Filmmakers); Verdienstkreuz am Bande des Verdienstordens der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1999), given by the Berlin Senator for Cultural Affairs); the Golden Medal Cannes (2000), awarded by Gilles Jacob and Pierre Viot; and the American Cinema Foundation Freedom Award (2002) ‘for opening our eyes to the East’.

Ron Holloway contributed several articles to WACC’s international journal Media Development, most recently ‘Films in post-Taliban Afghanistan’ and ‘Documentaries on Afghanistan’ in the 1/2009 issue. He was always in the service of cinema, responding promptly and affably to any request. He had a particular interest in the films of Eastern Europe, but it was a ‘passion without borders’ and his deep and perceptive understanding will be greatly missed.

Films of Ron Holloway
  1985: Film - Made in Germany (ZDF TV documentary)
  1986: Sundance (ZDF TV documentary on Sundance Institute)
  1988: Klimov (Channel 4 TV documentary on Elem Klimov)
  1994: Parajanov (documentary on Sergei Parajanov, Venice festival entry)

Publications of Ron Holloway
  1972: Z Is for Zagreb (Zagreb Animation Studio)
  1977: Beyond the Image (The Religious Dimension in the Cinema)
  1979: O Is for Oberhausen (Oberhausen International Short Film Festival)
  1985: KINO Slovenian Film
  1986: The Bulgarian Cinema
  1996: Goran Paskaljevic: The Human Tragicomedy (Valladolid festival publication)
  1997: KINO Macedonian Film

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