Stanley Forman, the documentary producer, distributor and founder of ETV Films (Educational Television Films) and a longtime friend to BUFVC has died after several years of ill health.

His funeral will take place at 1PM on Monday 18 February at the Stonefall Cemetary, Wetherby Road, Harrogate HG3 1DE.

John Riley wrote a profile of Stanley for the BUFVC’s Viewfinder magazine in 2009 and we reprint his tribute below:

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Despite film’s centrality to Soviet propaganda, the mainstream British Left often ignored its motivational and educational power.  Yet, for over fifty years, Stanley Forman, through his distribution companies Plato and ETV, brought left-wing films from throughout the world to the UK.

Stanley Forman at BUFVC in April 2001.

Stanley Forman was born to a lower-middle-class Jewish family in London’s East End on Boxing Day 1921. As a teenager, encouraged by Ted (later Lord) Willis, he joined the Mile End Young Communist League. By 1937 Stanley was the cultural secretary, organising film screenings and trips to the opera. He concluded an active war as a ‘deNazification’ officer but when his communist background was discovered he was, ironically, hastily demobbed.

Joining the British Soviet Friendship Society (BSFS), he became a national organiser but exhausted by the constant travelling turned to his friend, the communist-aristocrat and filmmaker Ivor Montagu. Using the BSFS film collection Stanley set up Plato Films to show left-wing non-fiction films from all over the world while, in a parallel operation, Contemporary Films looked after feature films. They were aimed at sympathetic audiences: friendship societies, unions, churches and others.

The films hovered between propaganda and education. Condemnations of US foreign policy which, however tendentiously edited, used actual news footage, and documentaries about the Left’s history were balanced by innocuous travelogues and language-learning materials.

Necessarily some were controversial. DU UND MANCHER KAMARAD (aka THE GERMAN STORY, 1956), a documentary tracing the growth of German militarism, proved difficult to place because of scenes of the Warsaw ghetto. On another occasion, questions were asked in the Commons when the National Film Theatre put on a season of East German films with Stanley’s help.

But the biggest problem came with OPERATION TEUTONIC SWORD (1958). Hans Speidel was allied forces’ C-in-C in Europe, and the film claimed that, as a wartime Wehrmacht general, he had been privy to the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Supported by the West German government Speidel sued. Facing the very real possibility of Plato being bankrupted, Stanley set up a new company, Educational and Television Films (ETV). In the end Speidel was satisfied by the film’s withdrawal from distribution.

By now, disappointingly lukewarm support from the Labour Party and slowing demand from their traditional markets led ETV to look elsewhere for income. Films from all over the world, supplemented by collections from left-wing organisations, including Montagu’s Progressive Film Institute, made an invaluable commodity. Stanley saw an opportunity in television sales: over the next few years many documentaries about Russia, USSR, China, Cuba and Britain in the 1930s drew on the material.

Stanley also moved into production and, though he only made a few documentaries, he counts them amongst his greatest achievements. He concentrated on films about Chile and particularly the singer Victor Jara who was assassinated by Pinochet in 1973. The hour-long BAFTA-nominated COMPAÑERO VICTOR JARA (1974), co-directed with Martin Smith, is the best of these, centring on a long and very moving interview with Victor’s widow Joan, who had escaped to London, smuggling out footage of him.

In 2002 Plato-ETV celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a season at the NFT and shortly afterwards, Stanley wound up the company. The holdings were divided between the BFI National Film Archive and the Society for Cooperation in Russian and Soviet Studies.

Stanley had already agreed to make hundreds of hours of material available through the Jisc Media Hub (previously known as Film and Sound Online) and the material was catalogued and the digitisation overseen by the BUFVC’s MAAS. The internet had eased the distribution of the films, which had sometimes proved so difficult and its educational value could be more easily recognised.

John Riley
A writer and lecturer, John Riley’s publications include Shostakovich: A Life in Film (2004, IB Tauris) and Discover: Film Music (2008, Naxos).