OBITUARY
HUGH GIBB
Mr Hugh Gibb, a long-term Member of Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, died in August 1990. With the permission of The Daily Telegraph, we reproduce here an obituary which appeared in that newspaper on Friday, August 24, 1990.
HUGH GIBB, who has died aged 75, was a maker of sensitive documentary films, chiefly about Asia, which combined artistic distinction, rigorous research and a strong cultural message.
His much applauded seven-part series, The Borneo Story, made in the mid-1950s, won a Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film Festival. Another seven-parter, Images of the East shot in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand for BBC television during the 1960s gave a unique record of the old Indo-China, particularly of the monuments at Angkor in Cambodia.
Gibb was re-working his Angkor films, in the hope that they would widen sympathy for the Cambodian people and perhaps lead to the neutralisation of the site under UNESCO's aegis, when he was struck down by a sudden illness.
A stickler for detail, Gibb was perhaps the last of the "one-man" producers: he did the research, wrote the scripts, filmed, edited, wrote and even spoke the commentaries of his films.
His style on location was exigent, authoritarian and sometimes irascible, and this discouraged many of his would-be collaborators. Gibb's extreme individualism perhaps accounts for the incomplete state of his later work. Several ambitious films about China, particularly its great waterways, were never finished.
A Lloyd's broker's son, Hugh James Gibb was born in London on March 15, 1915, and educated at Rugby and Oriel College, Oxford. He followed his father into Lloyd's before enlisting in the Royal Artillery on the outbreak of the Second World War.
Page 15
Page 16