Jerome Kuehl

Jerome Kuehl (widely known as Jerry Kuehl) was a television producer and historian who made substantial contributions to three landmark series ''The Great War'', ''The World at War'', and ''Cold War'', as well as serving as a director of the production company Open Media from 1986 until his death in London in 2018.

Birth and academic background

Born in Milwaukee in 1931, Kuehl read Philosophy and History at the Wesleyan University in Connecticut where he developed an interest in the history of newsreels. After studying at the Sorbonne he moved to the UK in the late 1950s as a post-graduate at St Antony's College, Oxford.

Film and TV

After tutoring at the University of Oxford and teaching intellectual and German history at Stanford University Kuehl joined the BBC in 1963 as a historical adviser for its documentary series ''The Great War''. His subsequent television production career was primarily in the field of film archive research. Kuehl worked for the NBC European Unit in the 1960s and wrote the documentary ''Chicago Blues'' for director Harley Cokeliss in 1970. He was then to specialise in writing and producing what he called "visual history" on television. As well as his work on ''The Great War'', ''The World at War'' and ''Cold War'', he made significant contributions to, among many other programmes, '' Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution''' and '' Vietnam: A Television History''. The ''Financial Times'' dubbed him “Officer Commanding Archive Integrity”. For France 3 he wrote and co-produced ''La Grande Aventure de la Presse Filmée'' (The Great Adventure of Newsreels).

In 1982 Channel 4 began transmission of the first of three series of his programme ''Today's History'', described as looking at "official newsfilm and discover(ing) discrepancies between the way events have been presented and accounts of what actually happened". These programmes - which ran until 1984 - were a co-production between the magazine ''History Today'' and Visnews, with Kuehl as the executive producer. Subjects featured in the first series included: Poland (with Neal Ascherson), Women (with Juliet Gardiner) and Marx (with Stuart Hall). Each month ''History Today'' carried a supplement in the magazine linked to the programme.

An intriguing series produced by Kuehl was his follow-up to ''The World At War'' called ''The World At War: Another Look'', a Channel 4 series re-examining the original programmes with the benefit of a decade's hindsight. Transmitted at the end of 1983 and early 1984 - one episode a month - it features a number of academic historians and news cameramen who were responsible for filming some of the archive footage used in ''World At War''. The first episode was described in ''The Times'' as dealing “with the political, ethical and strategic pressures on cameramen covering war, and asks how much we should believe of what we are shown.”

''After Dark''

Kuehl made a considerable contribution to the British television discussion series '' After Dark'' between 1987 and 2003. As one of his responsibilities as director of the production company responsible, Open Media, he prepared a job description for potential staff. They would require, he wrote, “considerable experience of current affairs television, versatility, good humour and, above all, sympathy with and knowledge of many different viewpoints and people, not all of them sympathetic.” The historian Taylor Downing commented:

Other work and later life

He was Head of General Studies at the National Film School from 1979 to 1981 and extended his work to write about the role of the television historian, for instance in ‘History on the Public Screen’ in ''The Historian and Film'' (1976) and in the first edition of the ''History Workshop Journal''.

In 1998 the ''Observer'' newspaper quoted Kuehl on what he called the misuse of archive film in British television:

He was a member of the consortium that bought the magazine ''History Today'' from Pearson, acting as a director from 1981. In 1986 he was a co-founder of the television production company Open Media. For many years he was a Council member of IAMHIST, the organisation that publishes the '' Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television''. In 2004 he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by FOCAL International, the Federation of Commercial Audiovisual Libraries.

He died in London on 16 September 2018, aged 86 and was buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery.

The Office Cat

In his long-running column "The Office Cat", he wrote:

Juliet Gardiner said of his work: "Jerry stuck firmly to his creed of popularisation without vulgarisation. His mission (was) to make scholarly history accessible."

Publications

Kuehl wrote for many historical, media and general interest publications, including

*''Broadcast''
*'' Cineaste''
*''International Affairs''
*''International History Review''
*The ''Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists''
*The ''Journal of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts''
*''Journal of War and Culture Studies''
*''Sight & Sound''
*'' TLS''
New book by Jerome Kuehl
', Sebastian Cody, IAMHIST, 26 October 2021, accessed 7 January 2022

References

External links

Kuehl's Reels
short online lectures by Jerry Kuehl
*
Lies About Real People
', Jerry Kuehl, 1996 (later published in ''Why Docudrama'', edited by Alan Rosenthal, Southern Illinois University Press, 1999)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kuehl, Jerome
1931 births
2018 deaths
Burials at Highgate Cemetery
People from Milwaukee
20th-century British historians
20th-century American historians
21st-century British historians
21st-century American historians
Alumni of the University of Oxford
British television producers
Wesleyan University alumni
University of Paris alumni