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Karel Reisz

Uprooted from a secure and comfortable home at the age of 12, Karel Reisz emigrated from his native Czechoslovakia one step ahead of the Nazi invasion and arrived in his adopted England knowing scarcely a word of its language. He went about becoming as English as possible, returning after a brief repatriation to a Czechoslovakia much changed by the war to study at Cambridge. Teaching grammar school brought him in contact with working-class students and their parents, broadening his teenage socialism and fascination with the disenfranchised. Writing for the influential film journals Sequence and Sight and Sound placed him in close proximity to the likes of Tony Richardson and Lindsay Anderson, with whom Reisz championed the British version of the auteur theory, believing that the best movies were those that expressed the personal vision of a single artist--the director. In 1953, he published "The Technique of Film Editing" (co-authored with Gavin Millar), a landmark study encompassing the theory, history and practice of editing. His extensive research for the project served as a great training ground for the would-be director.