Eric Liknaitzky, a Labia Theatre legend on SA's independent cinema landscape, dies in London

Born in Johannesburg on 13 September 1951, he migrated to Cape Town after a stint in the army and a job with a mainstream film distributor in 1975. Already a film enthusiast with a prodigious knowledge, he was employed by a 16mm film library specialising in offbeat cinema owned by Cape Town entrepreneur Tony Velkes. 

Tony had seen, on a tour of Europe, how a taste was emerging among younger filmgoers for challenging, artistic cinema outside of the Hollywood vein. Taking a leap of faith, he made a deal with the owner of the Labia Theatre in Gardens to hire the theatre on an ongoing basis. 

The theatre, owned by a Polish émigré, Wolf Miknowski, was going through a bad period. The Nico Malan Theatre (now Artscape) had opened and productions which would have gone to the Labia were decamping to the new venue. The Labia was fairly run down, with ancient carbon arc projectors and an alcoholic projectionist, so, romantically speaking, it was a perfect venue for offbeat cinema. 

Eric was the man with film knowledge and Velkes could not have gone forward without him. Under the advertising banner of “Five good reasons why the face of cinema is changing” (the five reasons being Tony Velkes, Eric Liknaitzky, myself, Gordon Nichol (technical) and Mario C Veo – who became the Labia proprietor from 1979 to 1989), the tentative first week of programming drew a rapturous response and the Labia was reborn as an independent cinema, as it still is.

Eric programmed the Labia until 1978 when he emigrated to London and those years, 1975 to 1978, became legendary for iconoclastic programming and an anarchic contempt for mainstream cinema. The Labia operated more like a commune than a bioscope and frequently barefooted patrons mingled with arty cognoscenti. Apartheid laws were ignored and those who sold the tickets became colour blind and the telltale whiff of cannabis often permeated the auditorium. 

The weekly programme written by Eric (EL), myself (TST) and a polyglot of others eschewed all the advertising rules of middle-class society. If we didn’t like a film, we said so. We still showed the film though to allow audiences to make up their own minds. The Dope section at the bottom of the programme page was the anarchic crème de la crème and it became a regular section.

In London, Eric worked for some of the emerging art film distributors such as Gate Cinemas (run by New Yorkers David and Barbara Stone who had produced several left-wing films in America) and Artificial Eye whose director, German film critic Andi Engel, had been a close associate of the New German Cinema.

Eric, outside of the cinema world, was an ardent Bob Dylan specialist and would attend every concert when Dylan played the UK. When he finally left Artificial Eye, his goodbye present was a pristine copy of the four-and-a-half-hour cut of Dylan’s only directorial venture, Renaldo and Clara.

Eric then joined one of the UK’s oldest distributors of artistic cinema, Contemporary Films, run by Charles and Kitty Cooper who, apart from an enormous library of films, ran two of London’s premier art houses, the Paris Pullman in South Kensington and the Phoenix in East Finchley. The Coopers were ageing and Eric brought new life into the firm, acquiring rights on classics such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s