Noel Chanan obituary | Documentary

My older brother Noel Chanan, a documentary movie editor and photographer, who has died aged 86, educated on the BBC in his 20s and labored on the pioneering present affairs programme Tonight within the early Sixties. Then in 1966, he left to go freelance and arrange his personal reducing room.

Noel was in fixed demand as a movie editor and he additionally directed quite a few modest however elegant movies of his personal, significantly on pictures. These included contributions to Granada Television’s Camera: Early Photography collection in 1979 and movie biographies of latest photographers together with Bert Hardy, George Rodger and David Goldblatt.

As a photographer himself, Noel was significantly good at portraiture and through the years took outstanding pictures of cultural figures together with Pierre Boulez and Isaiah Berlin, and particularly of the artist Leonard Baskin, with whom he grew to become shut buddies, and thru him, the poet Ted Hughes. Several of Noel’s pictures at the moment are held by the National Portrait Gallery, the Bodleian Library and the University of Exeter. In 2009 he recovered a conversation he had recorded in 1983 between Baskin and Hughes, and made a movie, The Artist and the Poet, about their collaboration.

Noel was born in London, the second of the 4 sons of Elchanan Chanan, a small businessman, and his spouse, Miriam. The seeds of his future profession had been sown in his teenagers when he was given an 8mm Paillard-Bolex digital camera for his barmitzvah. After leaving Hendon grammar college, he went to Ealing College to review pictures after which in 1962 joined the BBC as a trainee movie editor.

On 22 November 1963, our household was gathering for the Friday night meal when he rang from the Tonight places of work to say: “In case you haven’t heard, Kennedy’s been assassinated and I’m not coming home until further notice.”

In 1966, Noel met June Stanier, who shared his ardour for pictures. They married two years later, across the time she grew to become image editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

In the Seventies, Noel and I labored collectively when he edited and/or produced a few of my first movies for tv. He labored on extra movies than I may sustain with, and would telephone to let me know when one he was significantly pleased with was going to be screened – amongst these had been a movie on the conquest of Everest, a few movies with Malcolm Muggeridge and a collection on the Algerian battle.

When he retired from modifying in about 2000 and moved to Devon, Noel focused on pictures. He had three solo exhibitions, together with one on the Atelier Gallery at Exeter University, and assembled a fantastic assortment of books and paperwork on the historical past of movie and pictures.

He additionally wrote about forgotten English pioneers, together with a monograph on William, Earl of Craven, printed in 2006, and one other in 2013 on John Dillwyn Llewelyn. He was within the means of getting ready one other e book when he succumbed to Alzheimer’s and was unable to see it via.

June died in 2018. Noel is survived by his youthful brothers, Gabriel and me.