Ernest Rose

2022 - 2023

Ernest Rose
December 23, 2022
Ernest D. Rose, documentary film maker, professor of documentary film, Fulbright recipient, early music lover and beloved father passed away December 23, 2022 after complications from abdominal surgery. He was 96.
Following service as a World War II Navy pilot, Rose attended UCLA and was part of the first class of film students there. He was later awarded a Mass Media Fellowship by the Ford Foundation, which he used to do research on propaganda at the Hoover Institute. He earned an unusual multi-discipline Ph.D. from Stanford University synthesizing advanced studies in the fields of social psychology, cultural anthropology, political sociology and international relations.
Rose worked on nearly 200 documentary films and taught filmmaking at ten universities in the US and abroad. Starting as a writer, director, cinematographer and editor, he was active in his field for more than 70 years, from the time movie camera motors needed to be wound by hand to today. In the 1960s he headed the Film & TV Production Unit at UC Berkeley, serving all UC campuses. He spent the following decade at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he was invited to create a documentary film program in the highly respected Radio and Television department.
Rose was a film consultant for the U.N. and U.S.I.A. and worked with governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the late 1990's, he was hired by the U.S. Department of Justice to work on appraising the value of Abraham Zapruder's famous film footage of JFK's assassination. At the time of his death, he was still running a decades long series, "Documentary Film Masterworks", at senior living communities throughout Santa Rosa, where he lived.