Changing the World: Sean Graham

Abstract

Sean Graham was born Hans Friedrich Eisler in 1920 in Germany. His parents were from well-established Jewish families. His mother died soon after he was born and he was brought up by his maternal aunt and uncle in Hamburg. The family left Germany with the rise of anti-Semitism, bringing Sean and his sister to England. He was educated at Aldenham and Bryanston public schools and studied law at Cambridge, although he aspired to be a poet and preferred attending English literature lectures. During the Second World War, Graham was promoted to the rank of colonel beyond his years in order to interrogate high-ranking German prisoners of war. Graham forged a brief but significant career in postwar documentary which was defined by a decisive encounter with John Grierson. Graham had worked for Paul Rotha and Gaumont-British Instructional before meeting Grierson, who was then Head of the Films Division of the Central Office of Information. Upon meeting Grierson, he was sent to colonial Ghana in 1948 to lead the Gold Coast Film Unit (GCFU) in Accra, based at the Information Services Department and headed by Victor Lillie-Costello with his deputy James Moxon. When Graham first returned from Ghana to live in the UK in 1957, he continued to work in film, and spent some time in post-independence Tunisia. Finding it difficult to get sufficient film work, Graham became a writer. He has published a number of novels, his most recent being The French Odalisque (2009). We interviewed Sean Graham in 2010 for the ‘Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire’ project, an online academic and archival resource and catalogue where some of the films Graham directed for the GCFU can be viewed. The website also contains brief