Education This article is more than 16 years oldObituaryGeorge Brandt
This article is more than 16 years oldAcademic who made film and television university subjectsEmeritus Professor George Brandt, who has died aged 86, introduced practical film and television studies to British universities. When, in the late 1960s, the foundation of a national film school was mooted, George, who had already spent two decades in Bristol University's drama department, campaigned for it to be in Bristol. But when it was decided to locate the school in Beaconsfield, George founded a one-year, professionally focused postgraduate radio, film and television course in his department - and it still flourishes, now as an MA course.
George was born in Berlin and left Germany with his family shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He eventually arrived in Britain and was educated at King Alfred's school, Hampstead. He then read modern languages at University College London, but, in 1940, at the end of his second year, in the post-Dunkirk panic, he was held as an alien. However, he successfully pleaded to be allowed to take his finals before being interned, first near Liverpool and then for 16 months in Canada. In 1945, having gained an MA from the University of Winnipeg, he was invited by the legendary film-maker John Grierson to join the National Film Board of Canada, where he wrote, directed and edited documentaries. In 1949 he married Toni, a Canadian, and shortly after they returned to London.
In 1951, he became a junior fellow in the four-year-old Bristol drama department, Britain's first. The departmental ethos was built around both practice and library study, and George directed and acted in a variety of stage productions, as well as being instrumental in the staging of Harold Pinter's first play, The Room, in Bristol in 1957.
In 1971 he was appointed to the new post of director of film studies. An outstanding film editor, he provided generations of students with challenging but generous attention, pushing them to discover creative possibilities with sometimes tough, always perceptive comments on professional, creative, frame-accurate approaches to structure, rhythm and timing.
His edited British Television Drama (1981), one of the first books to approach the subject as a serious academic study, and British Television Drama in the 1980s followed in 1993. He edited German and Dutch Theatre, 1600-1848 (1993), and published Modern Theories of Drama in 1998, contributed to The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre (2002) and articles for New Theatre Quarterly on subjects as diverse as Bristol's Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory Company (2002) and the first staging, in 1782, of The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller (2006). Despite being diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2004, George kept up his research and writing, completing his contributions to the forthcoming Cambridge History of German Theatre shortly before his death.
Following his retirement in 1986, George, often with Toni, continued to attend university events and was an active supporter of the University Theatre Collection. He was a distinctive figure around Clifton in his dark blue mac and beret, where a chance encounter with him left friends smiling.
George chose the music for his funeral, starting with the overture from Citizen Kane and concluding with Give a Little Whistle from Pinocchio, his two favourite films. That in itself points to the breadth of his interests - his lack of pomposity, infectious sense of fun and wit, and he is remembered too for his physical vigour - he was a judo brown belt - and intellectual rigour. A brilliant extempore speaker, he loved language: bilingual in English and German, he was fluent in French and Spanish, spoke good Italian and Dutch, and in the early 1980s learned Japanese as a visiting professor at Shizuoka University.
George once wrote of film and television that it should "be able to relate individual experiences to an implicit moral structure and scale of values, able to broaden the viewer's sympathies beyond their normal confines, to lead them to a greater insight into interpersonal and social relationships". He was himself a passionate campaigner on social and political issues, always valuing what it meant to be human and engaged. "Always let your conscience be your guide," proclaimed the Pino- cchio song. It is a fitting epitaph for this remarkable and lovable man.
He is survived by Toni, and their children Peter and Maya.
· George William Brandt, academic, born October 8 1920; died September 24 2007
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