Bill Douglas
Nobody ever went to see a Bill Douglas film for light relief. His ‘Trilogy’, made in the 1970s, is shot in black and white and, with almost no music, it depicts a bleakness that can be challenging for the viewer. Last weekend I sat down to watch all three films for the first time in 20 years and I wondered if I would find them as moving as I had back then.
The first two films were made in Newcraighall. Many of the actors were local people, including the boy, Stephen Archibald, who played Jamie in all three films. The community involvement in the production meant that there were great expectations about the political messages that these films might give and some disappointment when these expectations failed to be met. His fourth, and last film, ‘Comrades’, appeared in 1987 and there were those who criticised it for its failure to highlight the links between the struggles of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834 and those of trade unionists in the Thatcher years.
Bill Douglas, however, never saw it as his role to follow any particular political agenda. He was much more interested in portraying the quality of the human experiences of the people whose stories he was telling. Before he died in 1991, he was working on a treatment of ‘Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ and, doubtless, he would have focused on the experiences of the individual characters rather than offering a critique of religious fundamentalism.
The society which Douglas portrays is one dominated by authoritarian discipline. All institutions, whether that is the family or the education system or the health service or the world of work, are represented as expecting total obedience from everyone who comes into their sphere. Individuals are not encouraged to express any individual thoughts or desires, but, despite the regime of fear, people do.
There is a scene of incredible tenderness when Jamie pours a kettle of boiling water over a cup which he then places in his grandmother’s hands as a form of comfort. Sometimes, when affection has been expressed characters do not know how to engage with it and destroy the very things, such as gifts, which were intended to give them pleasure. But we are aware that, whatever the circumstances, people are capable of behaving in ways of their own making and sometimes they succeed in behaving with dignity.
Douglas frequently allows the camera to linger over a particular image, not so much as a narrative device as an observational approach to evoke a particular emotion or memory. Several times Jamie is portrayed standing in the corner of a room and, as the camera focuses on him and the door, it generates a sense that he does not properly belong in these settings.
The thing which struck me most strongly on this viewing was the lack of any language of communication between the characters. There is very little sense of dialogue between people and language – little more than a string of disconnected utterances. The person whom Jamie seems closest to in ‘My Childhood’ is a German prisoner of war; despite the barrier of not knowing each other’s language they do care for each other and we see Jamie trying to teach the alphabet to the illiterate Helmut. Before the older man returns to Germany, he gives Jamie a kite but the boy allows it to slip from his hands and it drifts off in the sky as the two friends are separated by events over which they have no control.
Douglas spent several years preparing for a career in films and he approached Films of Scotland, the funding body of the day, when he was ready to start work on the first part of the ‘Trilogy’. He was turned down on the grounds that his films were perceived to be ‘not forward enough looking’. I have struggled to find any evidence of films, forward looking or otherwise, that were financed by this body. It is also interesting that Bill Forsyth, a very different director, was unable to find funding at a similar time in Scotland.
Douglas was fortunate enough to make contact with Mamoun Hassan of the London-based British Film Institute who understood the value of his vision. With his assistance, all three parts of the ‘Trilogy’ were produced with funding which seemed more of a pittance than a proper investment.
Sadly, life did not imitate art for Stephen Archibald, the actor who played Jamie; there were no blossoming trees for him. He was unable to take up the part offered to him in ‘Comrades’ because he was in prison and he died before he was 40, as a result of the accumulation of deprivation and neglect.
The Bill Douglas Trilogy has been compared with the films of Satyajit Ray, such as ‘Pather Panchali’, which focus on the life of an impoverished family in Bengal. He was not really able to produce the substantial body of work that he might have done and the bleakness of the ‘Trilogy’ often scares off the uncommitted viewer. But, while there is a characteristically dour aspect to his work, there is also an outstanding poetic quality and we really should recognise that Bill Douglas was a Scots film maker of international stature.
