Director, screenwriter, and film editor.
Cecil Holmes's career as a filmmaker spans more than forty years, beginning in New Zealand during the early 1940s and continuing in Australia well into the 1970s. Although much of his work was largely unheralded during his career, he was instrumental in mentoring a number of directors during the 1970s' Australian film renaissance. His achievements were eventually recognised in 1985, when he was honoured as an Australian Cinema Pioneer. In 1995, following his death the previous year, the Australian Directors Guild also honoured his memory by establishing the Cecil Holmes Award.
Born in Waipukurau, Holmes was the son of English-born farmer Alan Holmes and his wife, Ivy Marion Watt. He attended Palmerston North Boys' High School between 1934 and 1937, where he came under the influence of a socialist history teacher. In 1939, he joined the Communist Party of New Zealand, beginning a lifelong commitment to political radicalism. After leaving school, he worked as a clerk in an accountant's office in Palmerston North. When New Zealand entered the Second World War, he enlisted in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, but, after being injured in a flying accident in January 1941, he transferred to the Royal Navy. Holmes served for the next four years, seeing action in the English Channel and the North Atlantic, and attaining the rank of temporary lieutenant. On 27 March 1945, in New York City, he married Margaret M. Enns, a Russian-born Canadian.
A film buff from an early age, Holmes had the opportunity to observe prominent film-makers at work in England while he was on leave during the war. When he returned to New Zealand in 1945, he joined the National Film Unit, quickly graduating from newsreel editor to director. He also helped found the New Zealand film society movement in the 1940s. Holmes later achieved notoriety through the highly publicised exposure of his communist activity as a New Zealand Public Service Association (PSA) delegate in the National Film Unit. His involvement led to him being sacked from the NFU.
Among the documentaries he made during his New Zealand career are Children and Music, Karapiro, Power from the River, and Mail Run (all 1947) and The Change-Over (1948). Perhaps the best known of Holmes's NFU films was The Coaster (1948), which explores the life of seamen working on a coastal trader. It is distinguished by a commentary written in alliterative blank verse by Denis Glover.
In 1949, Holmes moved to Australia to direct The Food Machine (1950), a documentary produced under the auspices of the Shell Film Unit (q.v.). Three years later, at the invitation of Colin Scrimgeour, a prominent figure in Australian and New Zealand radio, and Benjamin A. Fuller (son of Sir Benjamin Fuller, q.v.), he took on the responsibility for directing his first feature film, Captain Thunderbolt (1953).
Holmes followed Captain Thunderbolt with Words for Freedom (1952), a documentary for the trade union movement. He soon afterwards began devoting much of his energy towards a distribution enterprise called New Dawn Films, which specialised in Russian cinema. In 1957, he directed Three in One, a trilogy of films that explored a number of socialist issues, including unionism, mateship, and poverty. His interest in political activism remained with him throughout his life.
Holmes directed wrote more than forty film and television documentaries during his career in Australia, notably a history of Australian union struggles and a series of ethnographic films for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. He also taught film-making to emerging Aboriginal filmmakers. One of his last films as writer/director was Gentle Strangers, made in 1972 for Film Australia (q.v.).
After separating from his first wife Margaret, Holmes formed two later relationships in Australia, the first with Elsa Sandra Dingly Le Brun, with whom he had a daughter. The second, beginning around 1981, was with Elizabeth Florence Warner. He died at their home in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst in 1994.
