"This is the important thing about educational films, I believe. Films made for the movie houses of the world -- although many are made with great artistry and devotion -- are essentially made to make money. Films made for television are made mostly to fill up the time between commercials. The makers of educational films are not entirely ignorant of the values of money, but essentially they have other ideas in view... But I have an idea -- a faith, I suppose it really is -- that some of my films -- or a single film, or even a single sequence in a film or a shot in a film -- will light up a young mind somewhere: -- light it up so that nothing -- unsympathetic teachers, lack of a decent place to live, or lack of love -- can ever plunge it into darkness."
- John Barnes, 1966
The following autobiography was written in 1997:
"Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, I left the University of Chicago without taking a degree. My first choice of profession: the theater, but for various reasons (mostly a compelling need to make a living) drifted into radio, film, and later television. Thus began a number of incomparable years of working and living (together with my wife and an ever-growing family) in England, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Canada and America as a film-maker (writer, director, producer, sometimes editor and cameraman) of documentary, theatrical, non-theatrical, and art films -- perhaps a hundred or more with such titles as The Living City, The Odyssey, Spirit of the Renaissance, John Keats, The Portable Phonograph, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Magic Prison, Chartres Cathedral, Marcel Marceau's Art of Silence, Shaw versus Shakespeare, The Cherry Orchard, and so on.
"AWARDS picked up along the way: Academy Award Nomination; Venice, Edinburgh Film Festivals, New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Atlanta, and American Film Festivals; Golden Eagle; Freedom Foundation; NVPA; others; some several times. At some point, the awards ceased altogether. Reason? I was told (off the record) that Britannica execs were angry at all festivals, considering them unfair and stopped entering them. The underlying reason, I was told, was that my films were the only EB productions which got awards. Whether any of this was true, I can't say; might have been, might not have been."
Nominated for Documentary (Short Subjects) 1953: THE LIVING CITY - Producer
1 nomination