Peter Symes Archive

Description

Archive of the director Peter Symes, principally covering his work with Tony Harrison.


Symes and Harrison collaborated on several film-poems, including the Loving Memory (1987) series ('Letters in Rock', 'Mimmo Perrella Non è Piu', 'Muffled Bells' and 'Cheating the Void'); The Blasphemers' Banquet (1989); The Gaze of the Gorgon (1992); Black Daisies for the Bride (1993) and Metamorpheous (2000).


Archive files illustrate the intensively collaborative process through which the films were made. In an interview (Cooper, N. 2018 'Tony Harrison season pays tribute to film-poet behind controversial V' [online] The Herald, 13 Nov 2018 ) Symes described their work: “Tony had a room next to the cutting room, and that enabled us to merge his writing with our images. He would change things in response to what we did, and we would change something in response to his words. He was enormously generous in that way, and was happy to explore things and throw stuff away, and we worked out a system that worked for both of us.”


Files contain material relating to film development, production and reception and often include notes addressed to Symes from Harrison, draft scripts, production material (schedules, budget material etc) and post production material (including marketing, correspondence and press cuttings).


The collection also includes AV copies of many of the films; material relating to unrealised projects; more general correspondence with Harrison and files relating to Symes' other work with poets on the Words on Film documentary series (1992).

Biography or history

Peter Symes has had a long career in documentary films. He began as a film editor at the BBC, working on many well-known documentary series such as the award winning “Hospital” and “Strangeways”, before moving on to direct many series and single films for both BBC channels.


His documentary series, “Nurses” (1985) influenced “Casualty”, the well known primetime BBC1 series; “Byline”, a BBC1 platform for opinionated individuals ran for a very successful four years; and his many other series - “Loving Memory”, “Words on Film”, “Enterprise Culture”, “Men With Splendid Hearts” to name a few, have consistently won awards and achieved critical and public acclaim.


As a director, his credits include “The Blasphemers’ Banquet” (a defence of Salman Rushdie that was nominated for the 1989 Prix Italia and was screened on BBC1) and “Black Daisies for the Bride” (a film poem about Alzheimer’s disease for BBC2, awarded the 1994 Prix Italia) both made with the poet Tony Harrison. His work with Tony and many other poets in the documentary form has gained international recognition and awards. In addition to this television work, he has published commentaries on verse in film in “Tony Harrison, a critical anthology” (Bloodaxe 1991) and in “The Shadow of Hiroshima and other film/poems” by Tony Harrison (Faber and Faber, 1995). “Tony Harrison, Collected Film Poems”, a new complete edition of the film/poem scripts with an introduction from Peter outlining the techniques used, was published by Faber in 2007.


While at the BBC he was the commissioning editor for the BBC2 documentary series “Picture This” which was instrumental in introducing large numbers of new and talented directors into the documentary field. The series gained a Royal Television Society award for Network Newcomer in 1996 and was short-listed for the best UK documentary series in 1997. There were six series, with 55 films in total.


In 2001 he joined the Bristol company, Available Light, where he worked both as a director and executive producer, including a 3 part series with Ray Gosling, one of which won a Grierson award, and the much acclaimed 2009 BBC4 series “Mud, Sweat and Tractors”.



He has worked as a documentary tutor with various organisations, including StoryDoc (Athens), Ex Oriente (Prague), the Scottish Documentary Institute, Crossing Borders (Malaysia), DocWok (India) and in Tbilisi, Georgia. From 2005-2009 he was the Head of the Documentary Campus Masterschool based in Germany, concentrating on international co-production and mentoring long single documentaries.



In 1990 he was responsible for forming a committee to set up the hugely successful Sheffield International Documentary Festival, becoming its first Chairperson when it launched in 1994. From 2002 to 2010 he was a trustee of the Grierson Trust, the charity set up to commemorate John Grierson, the founder of documentary in the UK. In 2000 he received the RTS Cyril Bennett Award for services to television.

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