Armand Denis

Biography

Armand Denis was an Anglo-Belgian filmmaker known known for his documentaries for both the silver screen and television, primarily about Africa. The son of a judge, he was born on December 2, 1896 in Brussels. He moved to England after his World War One military service, where he studied chemistry at Oxford. After working for a chemist in England and Belgium, he moved to America in 1926. His invention of an automatic volume control for radio brought him enough income to travel and shoot movies of exotic locales. He worked as a cameraman in Hollywood in the late silent era before hooking up with Theodore Roosevelt's French-born cousin Andre Roosevelt to travel to Bali in 1928, which they documented on film. Roosevelt wanted to develop the tourist industry in Bali in the 1920s in order to preserve the native culture by turning the island into a national park. As part of his aspirations, he wrote the screenplay for the 1932 movie "Goona-Goona, An Authentic Melodrama" (a.k.a. Kriss (1931)) that he co-produced and co-directed with Denis. The two had begun filming Bali on their '28 trip and eventually combined their documentary footage with a fictional romantic story about the love between a native prince and a servant girl. The first version of the film, called "Love Powder", was released in 1930. Two years later, a re-edited version that conformed to censorship strictures was released and was a hit, creating a Bali craze in The States. Denis subsequently married Roosevelt's daughter Leila and they had four children. Denis capitalized on the success of the picture and directed the 1934 African jungle adventure film Wild Cargo (1934), which starred great white hunter Frank Buck. Subsequently, he and Leila traveled to the Belgian Congo in 1934-35 and shot sound footage that could be used in movies set in Africa. Their footage included the first recordings of the dances and music of the Tutsi and Mangbetu tribes. In addition to releasing the music commercially, the created a movie of their trip, called "Wheels Across Africa" (1936). The couple worked making documentary shorts in the 1930s and '40s, but Denis divorced his wife to marry English dress designer Michaela Holdsworth, whom he met in 1948. Along with Michaela, with whom he lived in Nairobi, Kenya, Denis continued to make documentaries in Africa. Their TV program "Filming Wild Animals" was broadcast on the British Broadcasting Co. in 1954, and thereafter, they regularly contributed African documentaries to the BBC and ITV. Armand Denis died from Parkinson's disease on April 15, 1971. He was 74 years old.