MUMBAI: Veteran film historian, critic and filmmaker Ron Holloway died in Berlin on Wednesday morning at the age of 76.
Hailing from IIlinois, Holloway came to Paris at the end of the 1960s as a Rockefeller Fellow on a two-year grant and completed a doctoral thesis on The Religious Dimension in the Cinema with particular reference to the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson at the University of Hamburg.
He had just completed his dissertation when an offer came from Variety to serve as the US trade paper‘s correspondent for Germany and Eastern Europe. He and his wife Dorothea Moritz moved to Berlin in 1976 after Ron was invited by the newly appointed Berlinale festival director Wolf Donner to become a member of the Berlinale selection committee with responsibility for Russia. In addition, he played an instrumental role in the setting up of the German Films sidebar which Donner launched in 1977 to spotlight certain types of cnema which had been neglected beforehand.
In 2007, Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick recognised the Holloways‘ special contribution to the festival over 30 years by presenting them with the Berlinale Camera Award.
Holloway directed two documentaries on the filmmakers Elem Klimov and Sergei Paradjanov as well as two TV features about film - Made in Germany and Sundance for public broadcaster ZDF. He was also a co-founder of the Chicago Center for Film Study and the Cleveland Cinematheque.
