Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and sharks, and whose features included one about a Mexican-American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and another about a woman who takes revenge on His attacker died on February 6. In Los Angeles. He was 99 years old.
The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrés.
In an interview with the directors guild of america In 2005, Young recalled what attracted him to film.
“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to have adventures, I wanted to live in the world.”
He more than fulfilled that ambition.
In the 1950s, he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and on a reef near the Bahamas that portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, seahorses, lobsters, jellyfish and stingrays.
In 1960, NBC News hired him for their new documentary series, “White paper.” That year he directed “Sit in,” about the black college students whose protests led to the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The following year she worked on a report. about the Angolan war of independence against Portugal, for which he walked hundreds of kilometers with the Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was not happy with the report.
“They lodged a formal protest,” Young told American Film magazine in 1982, “and said if I ever went to Portugal, they would put me on trial.”
A few days before the show aired, he said, NBC forced him to cut footage of the fragments of two American-made napalm bombs that had been dropped on the Angolans.
His final project for “White Book” was about a poor family, the Capras, who lived in a poor neighborhood in Palermo, Sicily. But NBC pulled it a few days before it aired in May 1962. These were evidently editorial liberties taken by Mr. Young and his co-producer, Michael Roemer, including the decision to stage a scene in which the central character appeared to be giving birth, which the network said violated its journalistic standards.
Mr Young said he had made the scene because he was leaving Italy before the woman gave birth; his solution was to add a disclaimer. He rejected NBC's demands for changes and was fired.
Mr. Young believed that NBC destroyed the negative, but someone surreptitiously made copies, which were shown at film schools and festivals. His son Andrew and Andrew's wife, Susan Todd, produced an updated documentary, “Children of Destiny: Life and Death in a Sicilian Family” (1993), about four generations of Capras, interspersing footage from their film father.
Mr. Young expanded his passion for cinematic travel with a documentary series for the National Film Board of Canada on the life of the Netsilik indigenous people in the desolate land now called Nunavut Territory.
Mr. Young was one of several cameramen on the 24-part series and the director of “The Eskimo: fight for life” which he photographed on the sea ice at a Netsilik winter camp for several weeks. It won an Emmy Award after being broadcast on CBS in 1970.
“Early Eskimo filmmakers had used zoom lenses and tripods,” Young told American Film. “They were trying to be anthropologists and they were left behind. What they got were profiles. But when a man looked at his wife, I wanted to see his face and hers. I would shoot close. “I used the cameras the same way the Eskimos use the harpoon.”
Robert Milton Young was born on November 22, 1924 in the Bronx. His father, Al, was a film editor who in the 1920s helped start DuArt Film Laboratories, which processed and printed feature films, documentaries, newsreels, television news footage, and commercials. His mother, Ann (Sperber) Young, kept house.
At his father's urging, Bob studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare for a career at DuArt. He entered MIT at age 16, but he did not like his classes and dropped out at the end of 1942, during his second year, to enlist in the Navy. He joined the photo unit and filmed behind the lines for two years in New Guinea and the Philippines.
After his discharge, Mr. Young resumed his education at Harvard, where he studied English literature and made his first film, about a turtle crossing a street. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1949.
Young began working in feature films in 1964 as director of photography for “Nothing but a Man,” directed by Roemer, about a black couple (Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln) facing racism in the Deep South.
In 1977, after working on several National Geographic specials, he directed “Ojos Cortos,” a prison drama adapted from the work of Miguel Piñero, and “Alambrista!”, the fictional story of a Mexican who illegally crosses the United States border. United to make money. to support his wife and his little daughter.
John J. O'Connor of The New York Times praised Young's use of documentary techniques to convey the frustrations his protagonist encounters in his search for a better life. “Mr. Young,” he wrote, “he captured, with surprising freshness, an old, very old story of almost unbearable pain.”
“Alambrista!” It won the Camera d'Or award for best first film at the Cannes Film Festival.
Edward James Olmos, who had a small role in “Alambrista!”, was producer and star of “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” (1982). He hired Mr. Young to direct the film, which was based on the true story of a farmhand who flees a chase in 1901 after killing a sheriff in Gonzales, Texas.
“To me, Bob Young is obviously one of the best, if not the best, American filmmakers we've ever had,” Olmos said. wrote in A.Frame, the digital publication of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 2019. “But not all of us know that.”
“The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry in 2022. “Alambrista!” It was added in 2023.
Among Mr. Young's other films are “Dominico and Eugenio” (1988), starring Ray Liotta and Thomas Hulce as fraternal twins with different mental abilities; “Triumph of the Spirit” (1989), about a Greek Jewish boxer (played by Willem Dafoe) who fights in Auschwitz, where the film was filmed, to the amusement of his Nazi captors; and “Extremities” (1986), starring Farrah Fawcett as a woman who thwarts a rapist's attack and takes revenge on him.
After a screening of “Extremities,” Young recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he saw a woman in the audience crying. She was a victim of sexual assault, she told him angrily and added: “This is not life. In life, women do not escape.”
“I'm not interested in just reflecting life,” he said he told her. “I'm interested in taking people on an experience that may ultimately be enlightening or eye-opening.”
He told the woman about his daughter Melissa Young, who had been sexually assaulted for three and a half hours in a Greenwich Village apartment. She couldn't defend herself, she said, but she told him that she “was very proud of herself for surviving.”
In addition to his son Andrew, Mr. Young is survived by his daughter Melissa and another daughter, Sarah Young, both from his marriage to Ellan Ulery, which ended in divorce in 1975; his wife, Lili (Partridge) Young, whom he married that same year; his sons, Nick and Zack; and nine grandchildren. His brother, Irwin, who died in 2022, ran DuArt after his father's death in 1960 and helped train young filmmakers like Spike Lee and Michael Moore.
In 1965, Young and Peter Gimbel, heir to the Gimbels department store chain, dove into the waters off eastern Long Island to film a short documentary, “Into the World of Sharks.”
They and a third diver descended into a cage that Gimbel had designed. Mr. Young then swam freely out of the cage with a 35-millimeter camera, capturing stunning close-ups of a school of 12-foot-long big blue sharks, one of which tried to bite him.
“It could have been a sexist movie, but it's not,” Young told American Film. A shark hit his camera with its eyeball. Another time he tried to surface and hit his head on the belly of a shark.
“It felt like hitting a waterbed,” he said.
