Edouard De Laurot (1922–1993)

Édouard de Laurot was born Edward Lada Laudański to a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland. During World War II, he served in the Polish Resistance and the Warsaw Uprising. He then worked for the British Secret Service. After the war, he studied at Cambridge University and obtained a diploma in English studies in 1950. From the early 1950s, de Laurot was involved in film and film criticism. He co-founded Film Culture magazine with Jonas Mekas in 1955. De Laurot directed two documentaries with his production company, Cinema Engagé, founded in New York City in 1964. The first was Black Liberation (1967, also known as The Silent Revolution), narrated by Ossie Davis and featuring voice recordings of Malcolm X and others of the Black Power movement. Black Liberation won the Agis Cup at the Festival Del Popoli, Florence Italy, the Silver Lion for Documentary at the Venice International Festival, and the Ducat for Best Short Documentary at Mannheim West Germany in 1968. His second film was Listen, America! (1968), televised on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. It included images shot on location at some of the most memorable demonstrations of 1967 and 1968, including the Pentagon, the Chicago Democratic Convention, Columbia University, and the Central Park Be-In. It included interviews with Noam Chomsky and others, and focused on the political polarization of the New Left and the Right, the anti-war movement, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the 1968 Presidential elections. He wrote articles, interviews, and film scripts, and contributed to Cinéaste magazine, which in 1971 published his series of articles on Cinema Engagé over several issues.