Ray Phoenix
Ray Phoenix (b. Zeehan, Tasmania, 03/11/1902 – d. Pietermaritzburg, 05/08/1983) was a cinematographer and documentary filmmaker.
Biography
Cyril Raymond Phoenix was born in the Tasmanian mining town of Zeehan to William Phoenix and his wife Susan Jane Hocking. His father had been a miner in Denbighshire in Wales and came out to Australia in 1890. Here he came to specialise in mining ventilation and, in fact, in 1923, as a government inspector of mines, he visited South Africa to investigate how the Transvaal mines coped with the dust problem. Shortly after Ray’s birth the family moved to Kalgoorlie and the boy grew up in Western Australia. By 1925 he was living in Perth and worked as a cinematographer. Eventually he became a cameraman for Fox Movietone News in that city and by 1944 he was an accredited war correspondent for British Movietone , sent to join the South-East Asia Command on behalf of the Newsreel Association of Great Britain and Ireland. After that he became a cameraman for the United Nations and filmed in various countries, including India, Malaya and in what was then the Netherlands East Indies during the Indonesian struggle for independence.
He first came to South Africa in December 1948, during which he filmed fire walking ceremonies in Pietermaritzburg. This footage was later bought by the South African State Information Office and issued as Hindu Fire-Walking in South Africa (1952). Though he continued to travel, South Africa became his base and he began to specialise in filming tribal traditions and customs. One of these documentaries, The Bavenda , brought him into conflict with the censor board, which rejected its exhibition because it was “offensive to decency” – it showed bare-breasted Venda women performing the traditional python dance. As a result, this and two of his other films, The Abakhwetha and Against the Swirl of Time, were withdrawn from screening at the 1955 Durban Film Festival. Ironically, footage from these documentaries eventually found its way into somewhat sensationalist American compilations, Naked Africa (1957) and The Mating Urge (1958). He does not seem to have been a fulltime filmmaker and in 1982 there was a newspaper report that Ray Phoenix and Koos Meintjes (another filmmaker) responded to an accident on behalf of the mobile emergency unit of the Brixton ambulance department.
He married Thelma Taylor in 1927, but they were divorced in 1936/1937. In 1939 he married Beryl Jardine, who accompanied him on his work for British Movietone, providing the text for the reports he shot. She died in 1972 and in 1973 he married his third wife, Delys Daphne. Ray Phoenix died in Pietermaritzburg at the age of 80.
Sources
Kalgoorlie Miner, 14 December 1923
The Daily News, Perth, 9 June 1945
The Daily news, Perth, 11 November 1945
Western Mail, Perth, 8 July 1948
Sunday Times, Perth, 3 December 1950
Sunday Times, Johannesburg, 6 November 1955
Archival correspondence between Ray Phoenix and the Secretary of the Interior
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