Academy Award-winning filmmaker Robert Snyder died March 21 at home after a long illness. He was 88. A resident of Pacific Palisades since 1962, he produced and directed numerous films about some of the ‘greats’ of the past century: Pablo Casals, former Palisades residents Henry Miller and Buckminster Fuller, Anais Nin, Claudio Arrau, Will and Ariel Durant, Willem de Kooning and Michelangelo. He also made motion pictures ranging in subject matter from insects (‘The Hidden World,’ narrated by Gregory Peck) to an American ‘Sketchbook’ (on the lives of Igor Stravinsky, Willem de Kooning and Fuller) and ‘Looking at Modern Art’ (a 12-part series). In 1950, he won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his film ‘The Titan: The Story of Michelangelo’ and was again nominated in 1957 for ‘The Hidden World.’ In addition to his many film production credits, Snyder wrote three books: ‘This is Henry, Henry Miller from Brooklyn,’ ‘Anais Nin Observed: Portrait of the Woman as an Artist’ and ‘Buckminster Fuller, An Autobiographical Scenario.’ During World War II he was in charge of propaganda analysis on enemy film for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). ‘I got to know a little about filming because I was in charge of captured enemy film,’ he recalled in a 2001 Palisadian-Post interview about his start in the medium. ‘I still to this day say I just happened to get into it.’ Then in 1945 he was assigned by the OSS to the U.S. State Department to direct the inaugural UN conference in San Francisco. He went on to produce, in 1947, the first Billie Holiday concert at Town Hall in New York City and, in 1948, the first Louis Armstrong concert at Carnegie Hall. Last year he completed the definitive feature-length documentary ‘Pablo Casals: A Cry for Peace,’ on the great cellist and humanitarian. Born and educated in New York City, Snyder met Allegra Fuller, the daughter of architect Buckminster Fuller, on a blind date there when she was a Bennington College dance student spending a semester studying the filming of dance. They married on her graduation day, June 30, 1951. Allegra Fuller Snyder was professor emeritus and former chair of the Dance Department at UCLA until her retirement in 1991. Snyder was often called upon to lecture about film in general, as well as his own works, at museums, universities, film festivals and other events in this country and abroad. At one such event, a special screening of ‘Michelangelo, Self-Portrait’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he said: ‘When this museum opened a one-month-only exhibit of Michelangelo’s drawings, director J. Carter Brown was quoted as saying he had a sense of awe in being involved with the show. We, too, share that sense of awe, for here we are doing the impossible by bringing the only kind of traveling exhibit of Michelangelo’s works that could be’on film. And with the master himself personally guiding us through it. All of the words you hear are carefully researched from his letter, diaries, and other writings.’ In 2001, Snyder told the Palisadian-Post, ‘The nonverbal are vital forms of our being. You can’t have words about important things, they come from the inside. In the case of Michelangelo, the images are so fantastic, you don’t have to think about them. You just feel them.’ In addition to his wife of 52 years, Allegra, he is survived by his daughter, Alexandra May; his son, Jaime; grandchildren Olivia and Rowan May; step-grandchildren Mira Speare and Elizabeth Demaray; and two sisters, Judah Shapiro of New York City and Roslyn Katz of Sebastopol, California.
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