Film-maker whose documentaries allowed the subjects to speak for themselves
The documentary film-maker Michael Grigsby, who has died aged 76, strove to convey the experiences of ordinary people, and those on the margins of society. His subjects ranged from Inuit hunters in northern Canada and North Sea fishermen to Northern Irish farmers, Vietnamese villagers and, most recently, ageing American veterans of the Vietnam war.
He made more than 30 films – many of them for Granada TV's World in Action and Disappearing World – which were marked by the way in which they allowed their subjects to speak for themselves. Taking his films back to the communities he had filmed for their approval became a vital part of Grigsby's process of securing trust. Some – like the Inuit – would subsequently use his films to explain their lives to outsiders.
Grigsby's questions were never heard and he abhorred commentary, preferring brief captions or the overlaid voices of interviewees to establish the setting. His work was characterised by long, steady shots, and a meditative pace. Landscape was also a vital element, with memorable sequences filmed on a train crossing India for his epic three-part Before the Monsoon (1979), on the Mekong Delta for Thoi Noi (1993), in rural Ireland for three films about the Troubles, and in small-town Texas, where he first met traumatised Vietnam vets in 1970 for I Was a Soldier. The Scottish town of Lockerbie, which became famous when a Pan Am plane disintegrated overhead in 1988, became the setting for a compelling study of how its inhabitants had reacted to life in the public eye during the subsequent decade.
Grigsby fought regularly with his sponsors for sufficient time and funds to gain the trust of subjects. His hero and partial model was Humphrey Jennings, one of the founders of the British documentary movement of the 1930s, and he particularly admired Jennings's A Diary for Timothy, which contrasted the lives of four representative figures as the war ended in 1945. Jennings's characters were rarely heard, but Grigsby's invariably speak, although he was sceptical about the vogue for cinéma vérité intrusion into people's lives. In 1987, his feature-length Living on the Edge followed three families, in Devon, Wales and Birkenhead, as they struggled to survive in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, consciously echoing the structure of Jennings's state-of-the-nation film. Composing the soundtrack as carefully and sparingly as the images would become a hallmark of his later work.
Grigsby was born in Reading, and described his Berkshire family as "lower middle class". After an extended bout of childhood rheumatic fever, he was sent to Abingdon school as a boarder, and it was there that he made his first amateur films. In 2003, he would repay this debt by helping found a film unit at the school.
Grigsby was fortunate to arrive at Granada Television in 1955, as Sidney Bernstein's dynamic new Manchester-based company was training its first staff, who included the future directors Michael Apted and Mike Newell. Taken on as a television cameraman, Grigsby formed an amateur film group, Unit Five Seven, whose first film, Enginemen, about railway workers facing the challenge of new technology, was shown as part of Lindsay Anderson's Free Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre in 1959.
Two films linked Grigsby directly with the tradition that John Grierson, the Scottish documentary pioneer, had inaugurated with his fishing documentary Drifters in 1929. Deckie Learner (1965) concerned a young trawler apprentice, and with A Life Apart (1973) Grigsby became polemical, revealing the stark gulf between North Sea fishermen and their employers.
Later, deprived of Granada's support, Grigsby proved adept at persuading the new ITV companies to back his projects. In 1979, ATV supported an ambitious and controversial study of Indira Gandhi's state of emergency in Before the Monsoon, for which Grigsby brought one of its subjects, a railwayman, to London to participate in the editing process, while Thoi Noi helped to launch Carlton Television.
From the 1980s onwards, Grigsby was honoured by many festival awards and retrospectives, with the BFI's National Film Theatre hosting regular premieres and the Franco-German television channel Arte featuring his work. He also taught at the Danish National Film School.
He always saw collaboration as vital to documentary: with production colleagues, with the cinematographers Chris Menges, Ivan Strasburg and Jonas Mortensen, and with the sound recordists Peter Walker and David Lindsay. His last film, We Went to War, made in partnership with his friend Rebekah Tolley, revisited the Vietnam vets of 1970, and has attracted wide praise for revealing the lifelong impact of post-traumatic stress. It will be screened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 29 March until 4 April.
Three marriages ended in divorce. Grigsby is survived by two sons, Simon and Danny, and two grandchildren.
• Michael Grigsby, film-maker, born 7 June 1936; died 12 March 2013