My colleague Eric Liknaitzky, who has died aged 71, was the pioneering director of London’s long-running arthouse distributor Contemporary Films.
Eric first achieved underground fame as the programmer for the Labia cinema in Cape Town between 1975 and 1978. The Labia made history in the alternative culture scene in South Africa when Liknaitzky and his associates transformed an elderly and shambolic theatre into a thriving cinema.
After he emigrated to London in 1979, Eric soon found a position as manager with the newly formed Gate cinemas, run by the New Yorkers David and Barbara Stone. They had taken over the ailing cinema in Notting Hill Gate and turned it into a specialist picture house, where they introduced the public to work by independent film-makers such as Derek Jarman.
In 1980 he joined the distributor Artificial Eye, run by the German film critic Andi Engel and his wife, Pam, in Camden, north London. From his office above the cinema he ran the flourishing 16mm distribution wing. An expert on Bob Dylan (he could quote his lyrics with precision), his gift when he left Artificial Eye in the late 1980s was a 16mm complete print of Dylan’s four-and-a-half-hour 1978 directorial epic, Renaldo and Clara.
He then joined Contemporary Films, run by Charles and Kitty Cooper. In the halcyon days of London’s alternative cinema network, their venues – the Paris Pullman in Chelsea and the Phoenix in East Finchley – were renowned for their late-night programmes. From offices in Soho, Contemporary had amassed a vast library of international cinema. Proudly leftwing, the Coopers had distributed South African resistance cinema and a vast array of films from China, Cuba, India and the USSR.
Cementing relationships with British luminaries such as the film-maker Peter Whitehead and the producer and director Jack Bond, and re-animating the work of the independent American director Joseph Strick, he aimed to make Contemporary a significant force in global cinema. After Charles Cooper died, Eric took over Contemporary Films from Kitty and ran it until his death.
Eric was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Raphael Liknaitzky, an architect, and Milly (nee Smith), and attended Highlands North high school. He met Shen Attwell when she came to the Labia to complain about a review I had written in our weekly programme – which she thought was misogynistic – for Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries and Whispers. They married in 1978.
He is survived by Shen, their daughter, Jude, their grandchildren, Milly and Vincent, and his brothers, David and Barry.
