Our latest blog comes stipend holder Dr Barry Nevin. Barry is a lecturer in French and Film Studies at the Technological University of Dublin. Barry explored the Bill Douglas working papers to consider the way Bill constructs an emotional narrative through the use of time in his Trilogy.
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Most of my research to date has focused on French cinema between the World Wars and émigré filmmaking in Hollywood. However, Bill Douglas’s poignant and often raw reflections on his childhood and adolescence spoke to my interest in Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, and I grew increasingly interested in how Douglas’s striking mise en scène of history and memory in his Trilogy – My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978) – could be linked with his production methods and Deleuze’s film philosophy. This is a doubly important avenue of inquiry since Deleuze largely ignores British cinema in favour of France, Japan and Italy to focus on auteurs whose work Douglas viewed in the 1960s, such as Jean Renoir, Yasujirô Ozu and Luchino Visconti (cf. Jewell and Kimpton-Nye 2022, 53–55).
I had no clear expectations regarding what insights the Bill Douglas Papers might reveal, but I was struck by a letter entitled ‘Notes during, and thoughts after, viewing of “My Ain Folk”’, in which a frustrated Douglas articulates his aesthetic goals:
"Quite simply I was out to make an autobiographical film. As with My Childhood I was trying to be as simple and as direct and as honest as I can. My Ain Folk does not belong to the tradition of the photoplay. I use the old fashioned [sic] word intentionally, not to offend, after all I have myself a liking for all kinds of cinema, but because the word best expresses the conventional narrative film common to the commercial cinema. Rather than conventional narrative my film can be called ‘emotional narrative’. Or, to be more explicit I must borrow a phrase from one enlightened viewer who said the piece was entirely molecular in structure. In other words it is a film with one long uninterrupted scene. It begins and it ends and the final impression should be a shared emotional experience."
‘Emotion’ is a key word for many scholars who have probed Douglas’s idiosyncratic approach to sound and image. Amelia Watts and Phil Wickham write that his films ‘communicate and share an emotional landscape with the audience’ (2022, 1), and Wickham, considering the influence of silent cinema on Douglas’s work, elsewhere remarks that the filmmaker ‘was inspired by the reliance on the image to create an emotional response in the viewer and as a mode of storytelling’ (2022, 33). Douglas’s own emphasis on a ‘shared’ emotional experience also evokes Peter Jewell’s observation that the Trilogy presupposes an attentive audience rather than a passive one:
"[H]e realized that the audience of the Trilogy, for instance, wouldn’t necessarily follow what was going on, and a lot of people said, well, that was Jamie’s point of view, he didn’t understand what was going on, so the audience was only sharing something as it happened. Bill often said he would like his audience to meet him halfway."(cited in Kimpton-Nye 2022, 55)
Of course, one of the fundamental aspects of classical narrative style in cinema (the ‘conventional narrative film’ noted by Douglas) is the inclusion of characters defined by ‘sharply delineated and unambiguous traits’ with whom spectators can readily identify (Bordwell 1988, 13), yet Douglas eclectically develops the emotional impact of his films through an aesthetic that departs from these norms. Indeed, Douglas himself highlights the gap between the Trilogy and classical narrative style through reflexive references to cinema, such as when Tommy (Hughie Restorick) watches Lassie Come Home (Wilcox, 1943) in a rare Technicolor scene in My Ain Folk and when Jamie (Stephen Archibald) escapes to watch a George Fornby film in My Way Home. Furthermore, Douglas deepens this reflexive texture by evoking pre-cinematic apparatuses. For example, in My Childhood, a rapid travelling shot of the young Tommy running behind a fence creates a Moiré pattern redolent of a zoetrope in motion (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Douglas’s notes are also inviting from a theoretical perspective. To name but one example, his description of his film as ‘one long uninterrupted scene’ evokes André Bazin’s praise for filmmakers who relied on extended takes, deep staging and lateral camera mobility to preserve continuity in space and time and, in doing so, to fulfil what Bazin saw as cinema’s realist vocation. By linking this style with emotional affect, Douglas implicitly prompts us to consider how we, as spectators, experience time in his films. This task is both inviting and daunting due to the various forms of temporality that feature in the Trilogy. On the level of plot alone, these films establish a chronological distance from their production contexts since they unfold during the 1940s and 1950s and are ostensibly autobiographical reflections on his own childhood and transition to adulthood. Yet, rather than solely separating the ‘then’ of the Trilogy from the ‘now’ of the vantage point assumed by his audiences, Douglas’s style of filmmaking – his ‘emotional narrative’ – also sensitises us to the nature of time and duration as well as the imbrication of the past in the present moment, especially though long takes and editing. Where such aspects of Douglas’s narrative is concerned, Deleuze is an enlightening point of reference.
In a ground-breaking two-volume treatise on cinematic time, Deleuze argues that the movement-image engendered by classical narrative style experienced a crisis of narration at different junctures across the globe after the Second World War, leading to the emergence of the time-image. Whereas the movement-image imposes an artificial understanding of temporality on film through clearly-defined characters, linear narratives and continuity (or ‘invisible’) editing (Deleuze 1983), the time-image produces ‘[a] direct presentation of time’ through disjunctive editing, deep space and extended takes, notably in Italian neorealism and French New Wave cinema (Deleuze 1985, 54). Other possible attributes of the time-image include characters whose motives remain elusive, a meta-filmic textuality (such as Douglas’s intertextual references to Hollywood cinema and his allusions to pre-cinematic devices) and a profound engagement with what the machinations of memory potentially involve.
Deleuze’s insights invite us to consider how characters, settings, dialogue, music, framing and other aspects of mise en scène inscribe temporality in the Trilogy. The opening scenes of My Childhood, as penned by Douglas, evoke contrary experiences of embodiment and chronological time. The counterpoint in the opening shot between the sound of air-raid sirens and the appearance of the film’s title underscores the absence of idyllic domestic tropes in Jamie’s early years in Newcraighall. A similar strategy features in the film’s following scenes, as indicated by Douglas’s scripts. When Jamie and Tommy’s grandmother sings in beginning, ‘She is lost for one brief ecstatic moment in the memory of her own girlhood’ (Douglas 1993, 31). This contrast is inverted by Tommy, who ‘appears strangely out of place. His eyes have the seriousness of a person double his age. It is as if the carefree pleasures of childhood had past [sic] him by’ (31). More generally, both he and Jamie evoke Deleuze’s observation that, in the time-image, ‘[t]iredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body’ (1985, 246), rather than the clear goals and motivations featuring in classical cinema. This approach to characterization leaves these characters’ respective histories and futures equally unclear at the beginning of the film. As John Orr writes, My Childhood involves ‘the quest to know what we normally expect to know in the first place’ (2010, 167).
Rather than solely illustrating how associations with childhood and adulthood are embodied counterintuitively, Douglas occasionally draws our attention to the slow passage of time, notably in My Way Home, where numerous shots in Egypt emphasise the slow passage of time and lead us to question whether Jamie can plot a fundamentally new course in life. For example, a stationary long take lingers on Robert (Joseph Blatchley) and Jamie outside on the sand while the former reads and the latter aimlessly lifts and drops handfuls of sand (Figure 2). Although this shot ends with Jamie saying, ‘I want to do something’, the promise such a statement holds is undermined by the following scene which, in keeping with Douglas’s visual style, frames them following the course of the barbed-wire fence that separates their camp from the desert in another extended take (Figure 3).
Figure 2
Figure 3
Yet the same film also discreetly charts Jamie’s eventual liberation from the stultifying influence of his bleak childhood and the often-monotonous pace of his life in military service in ways that recall Deleuze’s discussion of how Jean Renoir’s characters can create a genuinely new future by assuming new ‘roles’ in a world where dividing lines between life and theatre often cease to exist (1985, 114–115). Although Douglas generally refrains from examining the theatricality of everyday life in his Trilogy, such a vital break is evident when Jamie tells Robert he would like to be ‘an artist, maybe even a film director’, and the narrative cuts to Jamie posing for Robert like a young T. W. Lawrence and finally smiling for the first time (Figure 4).
Figure 4
A full examination of time is also invited by Douglas’s unfilmed screenplays. 'Flying Horse’, completed in September 1991, juxtaposes the life of photography pioneer Eadward Muybridge in the late-nineteenth century with a writer conducting research on Muybridge in the 1940s. The Phaedra-esque narrative of ‘The Widow’, adapted by Douglas from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s short story of the same name (published in The New Yorker in 1963), depicts Durga and her young object of desire passing one another in the dark on a narrow staircase in a moment where ‘It is as if time itself is suspended’. Later in the story, she gazes at her face and body in her mirror as though to reassure herself she is still young.
With Douglas’s reflection on the ‘emotional narrative’ in mind, my main priority at present is an article on temporality in his Trilogy, building on Jamie Chambers’s observation that the Trilogy’s core meaning is created in ‘[an] abstracted narrative space transcending the exactitudes of space and time’ (2022, 136). From there, I hope to develop a more inclusive study that considers Douglas’s Comrades, his lesser-seen short films and unfilmed screenplays with my three interconnected points of departure: Deleuze’s film philosophy, Douglas’s Trilogy and the production documents held in the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
References
Bazin, A. 2008. ‘L’évolution du langage cinématographique’, in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, pp. 63–80, Paris: Cerf-Corlet.
Bordwell, D. 1988. ‘The classical Hollywood style, 1917–60’, in D. Bordwell, J. Staiger and K. Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, 11–22, London: Routledge.
Chambers, J. 2022. Exploring Questions of Theory and Practice within the Bill Douglas Trilogy’, in A. Watts and P. Wickham (eds), Bill Douglas: A Film Artist, pp. 109–139, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Deleuze, G. 1983. Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement. Paris: Éditions de minuit.
Deleuze, G. 1985. Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Paris: Éditions de minuit.
Douglas, B. ‘My Childhood’, in E. Dick, A. Noble and D. Petrie (eds), Bill Douglas: A Lanternist’s Account, 31–54, London: BFI.
Douglas, B. 1973. ‘Notes during, and thoughts after, viewing of “My Ain Folk”’. BDC1/TRI/1/2, Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
Jewell, P., and A. Kimpton-Nye. 2022. ‘Bill Douglas’s Favourite film – Il Mare’, in A. Watts and P. Wickham (eds), Bill Douglas: A Film Artist, pp. 50–60, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Kimpton-Nye, A. 2022. Bill Douglas’s Favourite Film – Il Mare’, in A. Watts and P.
Wickham (eds), Bill Douglas: A Film Artist, pp. 31–49, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Orr, J. 2012. Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Watts, A., and P. Wickham. 2022. ‘Introduction’, in A. Watts and P. Wickham (eds), Bill Douglas: A Film Artist, pp. 1–10, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum for providing me with a Visiting Researcher Stipend, and I would also like to thank Phil Wickham and all the staff at the museum for facilitating my access to Douglas’s production files during my visit.