CRITICAL MASS : Humane trilogy is legacy of offbeat UK filmmaker
Posted on Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Never show the audience something they can imagine better than you can show it.
— Bill Douglas Scottish writer-director Bill Douglas is not a filmmaker you are likely to have heard much about, seeing as how he’s been dead for 17 years and his movies never made much of an impression outside his native United Kingdom; even there he’s often omitted from books about British film. If he’s known at all, it’s usually as a lost genius, the cinematic equivalent of playground basketball legends never able to convert their miraculous games into a commercial property. In a career that lasted more than 20 years, Douglas made but four films, three of which are shorts that form a semi-autobiographical trilogy. These films — made over a five-year period in the 1970 s and released in a two-DVD set by Facets on Sept. 23 as The Bill Douglas Trilogy ($ 39. 95 ) — are extraordinary, shatteringly unsentimental portraits of a poor illegitimate boy’s coming of age in the doomed mining town of Newcraighall (now a suburb of Edinburgh best known for its upscale shopping center ).
Douglas was born in Newcraighall in 1934 and passed from relative to relative in the same manner as Jamie, the fictional protagonist of the three films (played by a slum kid named Stephen Archibald whom Douglas met at a bus stop when the 12-year-old asked him for a cigarette ). Douglas was originally raised by his maternal grandmother. When she died, he was taken in by his paternal grandmother.
His family was one of the poorest in a poor town, yet Douglas was taken by the cinema at an early age. Though “there was never any money to buy a ticket” he found ways to regularly patronize the local “Flea Pit.” “I could get into The Pavilion... for the price of two jam jars, washed or unwashed,” he later wrote. “How exactly did the jam jar system work ? Well, it began with the war years when waste of anything was discouraged. Whereas before children had used the jars for target practice, now they could make it rich by returning them to the grocer (one penny each ) or simply leave the business transaction to the picture house. Sometimes, when I could not find any jars, I had to sneak in by a side door.” Douglas escaped Newcraighall by enlisting in the Royal Air Force, serving in Egypt, where he met Peter Jewell, an educated middle-class intellectual whom Douglas credited with exposing him to art and books. Jewell would become Douglas ’ lifelong companion (and the model for a major character in the trilogy’s final installment, My Way Home ).
After returning to England, Douglas moved to London to pursue acting and writing, working for a time with the Theatre Royal Stratford East. In 1961 he was cast in the TV series The Younger Generation. He also wrote a musical, Solo, which was staged in 1962 in Cheltenham in southwest England.
Douglas enrolled in the London International Film School in 1968 where he wrote the screenplay for a short autobiographical film that was originally to be called Jamie. The screenplay found its way to the offices of the British Film Institute, where it was discovered in 1971 by Mamoun Hassan, the agency’s head of production. Hassan was immediately taken with Douglas ’ unorthodox, poetic script.
“Bill’s screenplay was different from any I had ever read,” Hassan told the London Guardian earlier this year. “One could see the film immediately. He eschewed the convention of scene headings; there was no generalized description and no emotional padding. It was lucid and concretely imagined. It unfolded in a series of descriptions, some deliberately ungrammatical, that without technical terms evoked the shot, size of frame, and who and what was in it. Dialogue was spare. It was almost a silent movie.” Hassan was able to secure the equivalent of about $ 7, 500 to produce the film, which included a fee of about $ 380 for Douglas. While the result — shot in 16 mm and printed (though not shot ) in black-and-white — caused a sensation on the festival circuit, the institute was reluctant to finance any of Douglas’ future projects. Hassan subverted the board by arguing that Douglas had all along intended a trilogy and that the institute had agreed to back the project. The second and third films, My Ain Folk (1973 ) and My Way Home (1978 ), had larger but still modest budgets — about $ 36, 000 and $ 82, 000 respectively.
The films are spare and gritty, populated by amateur and professional actors. Jamie and his half brother Tommy share a sad little house with their aging grandmother. Both of their fathers are absent and their mother has been committed to an asylum for some unnamed and possibly unspeakable illness.
They are, we can see, disadvantaged and deprived but accepting of life’s cruelty as they are of the rare moments of kindness and humor that seep into the darkness. We apprehend the world through Jamie, and everything is filtered through the character’s subjectivity.
Douglas often employed static cameras, long takes and left gaps between scenes which the audience would have to logically leap across. He wrote that he was always “working from memory,” less concerned with the explicable facts of a situation than their emotional effect.
While nearly all the characters in the film have a real-life counterpart, the story is fictional, or at least a version of events warped by the specific gravity of the director’s point of view. Douglas insisted he was not working for personal catharsis or as therapy but to present a compassionate, artistic vision.
In My Childhood Jamie befriends a German prisoner of war named Helmuth who becomes a kind of surrogate father figure. When the war ends, Helmuth returns home, leaving Jamie with a sense of abandonment. Douglas’ trilogy is autobiography in the same sense that it is practiced by the Canadian surrealist Guy Maddin — true but not necessarily factual.
My Ain Folk (1975 ), the second film, has Jamie and Tommy separated after the death of their grandmother. Tommy is incarcerated in a children’s home while Jamie is taken in by his dissolute and ineffective father, who lives with his overbearing and overprotective mother. (We watch as Jamie exchanges jam jars for movie tickets. )
My Way Home (1978 ) follows Jamie from a children's home in Edinburgh back to his father’s house in Newcraighall. Faced with the prospect of going down in the mines, Jamie rebels, telling his uncomprehending family he intends to be an artist. He runs off back to Edinburgh where he eventually lands on the streets.
On the brink of being drafted, he returns to Newcraighall to find that all the vestiges of his previous life have been bulldozed and the members of his family have moved. Jamie’s draft notice is something like a miracle — it delivers him to the possibility of a life beyond the grinding poverty of his hometown. In the deserts of Egypt he meets cultured Robert, and the two young men share a love of cinema.
While the trilogy earned Douglas the esteem of cinephiles and critics, he was never able to earn a living strictly by filmmaking. In 1978, Hassan helped Douglas secure a teaching position at the National Film and Television School, where Douglas earned a reputation as an inspiring and supportive teacher.
Hassan was also able to help Douglas get financing for his only feature-length film, a three-hour epic featuring Vanessa Redgrave called Comrades: A Lanternist’s Account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and What Became of Them (1987 ) about a group of British farm laborers who were arrested and transported to Australia in 1834 after forming a trade union. (The film — which I’ve never seen — is largely told through the use of period optical devices such as the Magic Lantern and thaumatrope. )
Comrades was a laboriously troubled multiyear production, hampered in part by Douglas ’ perfectionism as well as the inherent difficulties in filming in England and Australia on a limited budget. (The film’s initial producer was Ismail Merchant, who left before production was complete to work with James Ivory on A Room With a View. )
Douglas died of cancer at 54 in 1991 with several projects unfinished. We can regret that he never had the chance to make the sort of films that employ movie stars and aspire to matter beyond some private economy. But there are all kinds of voices, and Douglas was as close to a poet as a moviemaker; he seemed to have no desire to mesmerize his audience with spectacle or to tell stories of superheroes. He worked with a camera to spade up the ordinary, interesting and un-looked-upon things in his backyard garden, his interior life. He had no desire to be a giant of cinema, just something human and life-size. E-mail pmartin@arkansasonline. com
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