Paul Rotha

Paul Rotha (3 June 1907 – 7 March 1984) was an English documentary filmmaker, film historian, and critic. Born Paul Thompson in London, he attended Highgate School and later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art.

Rotha worked closely with John Grierson, and cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky collaborated with him on several projects. He directed and produced numerous documentaries, including *Contact* (1933), *Air Outpost* (1937), *The Face of Britain* (1935), *World of Plenty* (1943), *Land of Promise* (1947), *A City Speaks* (1947), and others. *The World Is Rich* (1947) and *Cradle of Genius* (1961), both of which received Academy Award nominations, as well as the BAFTA-nominated feature film *No Resting Place*. Rotha served as Head of the BBC TV Documentaries Department from May 1953 to May 1955.

Rotha shared an interest in visual communication techniques with Otto Neurath, and the two collaborated on several films that incorporated Neurath's ISOTYPE pictorial statistics as a key element of their visual arguments. Initially opposed to the use of sound in film, Rotha later developed the multi-voice commentary technique, in which a film's argument is presented through dialogue among multiple distinct voices. This approach was used in *New Worlds for Old* (1938), *World of Plenty* (1943), *The World Is Rich* (1947), and *Land of Promise* (1946).

In 1958, Rotha wrote, produced, and directed the crime drama *Cat & Mouse*, based on a novel by John Creasey and starring Lee Patterson and Ann Sears.