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    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    Posted By: Someonelse
    Date: 1 Nov 2012 09:01:00
    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978)
    DVD9 + DVD5 | ISO+MDS | PAL 4:3 | 166 mins | 7,70 Gb + 4,24 Gb
    Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 320 Kbps | Subtitles: English | Cover + Booklet
    Genre: Drama

    Bill Douglas's award-winning films - My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home - which the BFI is releasing together in a two-disc DVD set with special features, are three of the most compelling and critically acclaimed films about childhood ever made.
    The narrative is largely autobiographical, following Jamie (played with heart-breaking conviction by Stephen Archibald) as he grows up in a poverty-stricken mining village in post-war Scotland. In these brutal surroundings, and subject to hardship and rejection, Jamie learns to fend for himself. We see him grow from child to adolescent - angry and bewildered, but playful, creative and affectionate.

    Watching the Trilogy is far from a depressing experience. This is cinematic poetry: Douglas contracted his subject matter to the barest essentials - dialogue is kept to a minimum, and fields, slag heaps and cobbled streets are shot in bleak monochrome. Yet with its unexpected humour and warmth, the Trilogy brims with clear-eyed humanity, and affection for an ultimately triumphant young boy.

    DVDBeaver

    There are notable directors whose output is sparser than Bill Douglas (1934-1991), but not many. To put that into perspective, it terms of running time this DVD set contains one half of his commercially-released output. That output comprises one early short (provided here as an extra), the trilogy under review (two short films and one barely feature-length one) and the two-and-three-quarter-hour “Poor Man’s Epic” about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Comrades, which is not included and which I’ll mention further later on. Further film-school work, not to mention 8mm home movies (all dismissed by Douglas as “rubbish” and as apprentice work) are unlikely to see commercial release, so that is all Douglas’s life’s work.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    There are several reasons for this. One was, and is, the difficulty of making films in the UK that aren’t overtly commercial. The Seventies, after all, was the decade where such talents as Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Stephen Frears spent most of their time working for television. And if you look at the career of Terence Davies, who also began a BFI-produced autobiographical trilogy in that decade, someone who has just made his first film in eight years, you shouldn’t be surprised that Douglas was only able to make one feature after his Trilogy, before his untimely death from cancer. It’s hard to argue that much is different now: the Eighties and Nineties are littered with directors who made one, or maybe two, well-regarded features and have since worked on the small screen, as yet unable to follow them up – take a look on IMDB for Edward Bennett, David Drury, Hettie McDonald and Mary McMurray, to name but four. Granted, in many cases this is TV’s gain – but even so you couldn’t imagine Douglas directing series television. And that’s without his acknowledged difficulty to work with. Integrity can have its prices, and a sparse output can be one such.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    William Gerald Forbes Douglas was born in Newcraighall, a Scottish mining village just outside Edinburgh. By any standard he had a deprived childhood, with a mentally ill mother and an absent father. Only the movies offered an escape. He was brought up by his grandmother until her death. After times spent with his father and his father’s mother, with time spent in care and at a Salvation Army hostel, he went on National Service and was posted to Egypt. There he met Peter Jewell, who became his closest friend. Once back in England, they shared a flat in London until Douglas’s death. Living within walking distance of the famous, if now defunct, Academy Cinema in Oxford Street and of the National Film Theatre, Douglas sustained a passion for the cinema, which led to him enrolling in the London Film School in the late 1960s. The short film Come Dancing, described below, was his graduation film.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    In the mid 1960s, Douglas had written to Lindsay Anderson asking his advice about a screenplay he had written called Jamie. He had not told Anderson that the script was autobiographically-based, but Anderson guessed that immediately and with his encouragement, plus the support and funding of Mamoun Hassan at the BFI Production Board, Douglas made the first of his Trilogy, My Childhood. As his surrogate (called Jamie) and his older half-brother Tommy, Douglas cast two young Newcraighall boys, Stephen Archibald and Hughie Restorick, whom he had met at a bus stop.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    My Childhood (44:34, IMDB) begins in 1944. Jamie and Tommy are in school, living at home with their Granny (Jean Taylor Smith) across the street from Jamie’s father (Paul Kermack) and his second family. German POWs work in the fields, and one of them, Helmuth (Karl Fieseler), strikes up a friendship with young Jamie. There isn’t a great deal of “plot” as such in the film, more a series of images, as if vividly recalled: we are left to fill in much of their context. The film was shot in 16mm on colour stock, but intentionally printed in black and white apparently for a “charcoal drawing” effect. (A colour print of My Childhood has been shown, inadvertently, on at least one occasion.)

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    The film has its rough edges, no doubt due in part to the tiny budget. There’s also a sense that Douglas is gaining in fluency and confidence with each part of the Trilogy. Yet Douglas’s eye for an image is obvious from the outset. This is a film where place and mood supersede narrative. Often moving but without an ounce of sentimentality, My Childhood contains several scenes that are hard to forget. But it’s also a preparation for what was to come.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    My Ain Folk (52:56, IMDB), made a year later, begins with a burst of Technicolor, the only colour footage in the entire Trilogy. This is a scene from Lassie Come Home. We draw back from the colour to see black-and-white Jamie, rapt, in the cinema. In the meantime, Granny has died and Tommy is sent away. Jamie is sent to live with his father and paternal grandparents. “Polish” is probably the wrong word for material like this, as it implies a slickness and a superficiality that Douglas’s films do not possess. But there is a sense of a greater fluency in the camerawork and editing. Douglas rarely moves his camera, instead inviting us to look: at a person’s face, at an object. Many shots resemble perfectly-composed still photographs. Yet sometimes it is what he does not show which gives the film its power: a late scene where Jamie receives a beating is all the more powerful for being done offscreen and conveyed through sound alone, with a cut to a single unmoving image at the end of the scene.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    Douglas delayed production of the third film, My Way Home (68:46, IMDB), until Stephen Archibald was old enough to play Jamie once again. Now Jamie is living in a care home, until his father (played in all three films by Paul Kermack) comes to take him back. Halfway through the film there is a cut. The moving camera (mounted on the back of a vehicle) is shock enough. So is the contrast, between the near-white of sand and the deep black of trees, a jolt to the eye after the dour greys of Scotland. We are now in Egypt, and Jamie is on National Service. He meets Robert (Joseph Blatchley), an educated Englishman, and they become friends. But the legacy of his upbringing isolates Jamie. By now Douglas has refined his style to such a point that images are held like still tableaux before there is any movement within it. At the end of the film, as Jamie and Robert part, promising to keep in touch when back home, Douglas pans his camera around an empty room. The final image is of a tree in blossom: a symbol of new life, and the beginning of Jamie’s (Douglas’s) life as an artist.

    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    Despite his sparse output, around six hours in total, Bill Douglas is one of the major British – not just Scottish – filmmakers of the last forty years, and this DVD set does a handsome job of presenting his autobiographical Trilogy. All we need now is whoever has the rights to release a DVD of Comrades…but this DVD will keep us occupied for the time being.
    Homecinema @ The Digital Fix
    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]

    Special Features (DVD2):
    * Bill Douglas: Intent on Getting the Image (2006, 63 mins), a new documentary about Bill Douglas's life and work.
    * Come Dancing (1970, 15 mins), Douglas's remarkable, rarely-seen student short.
    * Rare archive interview with Bill Douglas (4 mins)
    * Illustrated booklet containing newly commissioned essays, notes and credits.
    Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972-1978) [ReUp]


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