He served with the 8th Army in North Africa, where as an officer cadet he was among those deployed to surround the Abdin Palace, King Farouk's residence in Cairo, while tanks were moved into the square, a show of force to oblige the King to call on the Wafd leader Nahas Pasha to form a government.
Gibb was then with the 8th Army in its drive into Italy, before transferring to Intelligence, to be parachuted into Yugoslavia to join the British units helping Tito's partisans.
After the war in which he was mentioned in despatches - Gibb returned for a short time to work at Lloyd's before going to the Far East as a journalist for the Sunday Times and other papers.
In Singapore he switched to photography and was one of the first to realise the potential of 16mm film for television. Operating from South-East Asia and the Far East, he quickly became a master of documentary film.
A key point in Gibb's career as a film-maker occurred in the Great Caves of Niah in Borneo in 1954, when he watched the dangerous process whereby birds' nests were gathered from the roofs of the caves and turned into delicacies for the Chinese table: out of that moment grew his prize-winning Borneo series.
Drawn by the legendary appeal of the Angkor complex of ruins, Gibb rebased himself in 1960 in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to which he drove from Singapore in his Land Rover.
Gibb's enduring interest in Khmer architecture and sculpture, of which Angkor is the supreme expression, was accompanied by an awareness and admiration for the French archaeological achievement in Indo-China. He became a close friend of the late Bernard-Philippe Groslier, the last French curator of the Angkor ruins, and was a frequent guest at the Conservation in the days before Cambodia was engulfed by turmoil.
This Anglo-French intellectual entente proved to be an enduring influence on Gibb's work. Earlier this year Gibb was in close contact with the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, which was interested in his films for their archives; and his Angkor films are to be shown at a commemorative ceremony at the Musée Guimet in October.
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He served with the 8th Army in North Africa, where as an officer cadet he was among those deployed to surround the Abdin Palace, King Farouk's residence in Cairo, while tanks were moved into the square, a show of force to oblige the King to call on the Wafd leader Nahas Pasha to form a government.
Gibb was then with the 8th Army in its drive into Italy, before transferring to Intelligence, to be parachuted into Yugoslavia to join the British units helping Tito's partisans.
After the war in which he was mentioned in despatches - Gibb returned for a short time to work at Lloyd's before going to the Far East as a journalist for the Sunday Times and other papers.
In Singapore he switched to photography and was one of the first to realise the potential of 16mm film for television. Operating from South- East Asia and the Far East, he quickly became a master of documentary film.
A key point in Gibb's career as a film-maker occurred in the Great Caves of Niah in Borneo in 1954, when he watched the dangerous process whereby birds nests were gathered from the roofs of the caves and turned into delicacies for the Chinese table: out of that moment grew his prize- winning Borneo series.
Drawn by the legendary appeal of the Angkor complex of ruins, Gibb rebased himself in 1960 in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to which he drove from Singapore in his Land Rover.
Gibb's enduring interest in Khmer architecture and sculpture, of which Angkor is the supreme expression, was accompanied by an awareness and admiration for the French archaeological achievement in Indo-China. He became a close friend of the late Bernard-Philippe Groslier, the last French curator of the Angkor ruins, and was a frequent guest at the Conservation in the days before Cambodia was engulfed by turnmoil.
This Anglo-French intellectual entente proved to be an enduring influence on Gibb's work. Earlier this year Gibb was in close contact with the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, which was interested in his films for their archives; and his Angkor films are to shown at a commemorative ceremony at the Musée Guimet in October.
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XV
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