Established 2005
Manchester(UK)
Manchester(UK)
BROADCASTS / PUBLICATIONS
Interview: Queer Horror, Marxism and Hollywood
September 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Darren Elliot-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender at the University of Stirling (UK).
September 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Darren Elliot-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Film and Gender at the University of Stirling (UK).
Interview Start: 40 minutes 33 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name's Brett Gregory. Over recent weeks, we've been exploring cinema, not only as a playground for entertainment, escapism, and egos but also as an economic, political, and ideological battleground for social class, gender, ethnicity, technology, and, as we're going to discover in this evening's episode, sexuality.
DES: Hi, my name is Darren Elliott-Smith. I'm a senior lecturer in film and gender, and I teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland in the UK. My research specialisms are in the representation of LGBTQ people in the horror genre, and I'm arguing that it's more recently that this has moved out from the shadowy realms of implicit and symbolic representation of yesteryear.
BG: So how are we to understand queer theory as a critical approach to cinema and its relationship to, say, Marxism?
DES: I suppose it depends on your understanding of queer as a theory and how the term and the ideology have altered in recent years. For me, it's often kind of obvious that there are at least two strands to queer theory. One being around identity politics and attempting to offer what Harry Benchoff describes as an oxymoronic community of difference. So this is a kind of paradox, I suppose, in itself that captures the problematic existence within queer culture and queer theory. But queer, as a word and as an ideology, in my understanding, also still disturbs some people, depending on your social persuasion, or your generation or background, in lots of different ways. And in terms of where this fits with Marxism, queer activism all drew upon socialist rhetoric that called for change, a change whereby the queer collective were being marginalised, crushed, and effectively killed by capitalist, imperialist, middle-class, white CIS hetero patriarchy. And Pride, though far removed from the activist origins of Pride marches in the 1970s, 1980s, still retains some of that need for change to look after the collective and therefore the individual as they exist within the mass, free from the oppression of that ruling elite.
BG: And how does this inform a queer understanding of the horror genre in particular?
DES: Interestingly, many of the works of early horror film theorists in the 1970s, particularly the definitive work of queer film scholar Robin Wood, utilised both a lesbian and gay approach with a socialist and Marxist approach as well. So he argued that, using a little bit of psychoanalysis merged with Marxism, that those ideals and energies that don't fit the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist, and white patriarchal culture of production and reproduction are cast out as other across this imaginary border, which then sets up the binary of us versus them. The problem is that actually within horror and within a lot of Gothic narratives, the ‘them’ or ‘they’ sometimes come back. The fact that they always come back, repression and oppression eventually is shown to fail in the horror narrative, causing this monster, creature, killer, or infection, whatever it is, to come back and threaten that pure individual that's meant to represent the US.
BG: Can you give us a specific film example where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary becomes blurred?
DES: in kind of focusing on this theory. He collapsed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary, and we see this most critically skewered in films like George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ whereby the undead, the zombie, the returned, kind of reanimated corpse who once was human, once was us, become a ‘them’ figure, and then they return to assimilate everybody else into this undead horde, where children eat parents, and the Soul Survivor, which in this case is Ben, black male, is gunned down by white vigilantes at the end of the film, who stake him for one of them, even though he's not zombified; he's actually still human and very much alive. And Romero's point is that the gun-toting white male doesn't see any difference; actually, all exist in an othered state.
BG: So what is the scope of horror films and television shows which is under consideration here?
DES: Queer horror, although I'd argue that all horror is queer in that it seems to represent the odd, the strange, the non-normative, and as a genre, it seeks to distress, to upset and to challenge, and to scare. It's for me a set of films and TV shows that are made, normally by LGBTQ creatives, that foreground queerness as an element of representation in some way, but this subgenre also includes historical considerations as influences upon these newer out contemporary horror films and shows. So, in order to do that, we have to look at what a lot of academics and myself call closeted texts like, Interview With a Vampire, The Hunger, Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, all these films that kind of clearly have LGBTQ themes running through them but never really explicitly kind of outwardly state that they are. So they involve some kind of symbolic interpretation or reading.
BG: From a historical perspective. The Hays Code, which was introduced in the 1930s, clearly had a resounding effect on cinema's representations, narratives, and themes. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
DES: So, the Hays Code was set up after a series of scandals rocked Hollywood, and people were worried about the deplored world of filmmaking as one that might infect supposedly decent heteronormative family life. One particular case that's often cited is the star Fatty Arbuckle being accused of raping a young starlet in the early 1920s. So, Will Hays set up a production code that would monitor the content of all film productions and those that were released in US cinemas, preventing certain elements and themes and narratives that they deemed would seek to poison US ideology. It's Vito Russo's documentary and book ‘The Celluloid Closet’ outlines this really well in terms of the impact on LGBTQ+ folks. The rule that existed within the Hays Code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was called "sex perversion," impacting any explicit representation of any non-normative sexuality or romance. So, Some films had to get around this by using symbolism, inference, suggestion so as to ensure that their true audience were being represented in and seen in films. Some directors, queer-affiliated directors, were kind of doing this deliberately, coding their films in a way.
BG: For example?
DES: The Universal franchise of horror films from the '30s and the '40s were actually playing with the limitations of the code as well. It's been kind of recently introduced so the suggestion here becomes quite pointed at times, and there's a practice of rebellion in a small way, and this was more pushed, I suppose, by the makers of these films. So if we can kind of go to certain auteurs, film directors like Todd Browning, whose sexuality was often kind of questioned but never fully defined, he made the pre-code film ‘Freaks,’ which is problematic but also really interesting kind of queer film in its representation of non-normative body types. There's also James Whale, who is a gay British director who ramped up the suggestion in his version of ‘Frankenstein,’ that he directed and even more so in the kind of more comedic and kind of almost parodic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ where we have this homo-erotic triangle literally exploding off the screen between Frankenstein the creature and Dr Pretorius as well.
BG: And once again Social Class is at play in such horror films as well isn’t it?
DES: Class definitely comes into it again, drawing on those early Marxist readings from Franco Moretti on the nature of the capitalist blood-sucking vampire configured more recently as a corporate CEO or landed gentry or an aristocrat versus the underclass working class proletariat of the zombie or a mindless slave. And we see a kind of a literal version of this in the depiction of Haitian voodoo in early RKO texts like ‘I Walk with a Zombie.’ But the queerness present in the upper classes, something I suppose that's reflected on as a consideration of effete queer men, idiosyncratic in their taste, often overindulged with an emphasis on the pursuit of overwhelmed senses, and that kind of stereotypical depiction of upper-class queerness is existent in early Gothic texts like ‘Jekyll and Hyde' and ‘Dorian Gray,’ where the upper classes are seen to wallow in debauchery that's propped up by generations of wealth, them having the time, the money, the power to indulge in seemingly perverse desires.
BG: And queer horror is still disrupting and destabilising popular conservative sensibility today as well, isn't it?
DES: Well, the recent remake of Hellraiser wasn't received so well by so-called purist horror fans. Um, they took against this more explicit queer content and they rejected in particular the idea of trans actor Jamie Clayton as the new Pinhead. I mean, not realizing that this film was written by a gay male author, directed by the same man, Clive Barker, and inspired by his experiences of BDSM queer practices that he saw in Berlin nightclubs. And it's quite clear that it's queer from the get-go.
BG: And your academic work presents is exploring the relationship between queer horror, trauma, and mental health, is that correct?
DES: So my recent work looks at the impact of neoconservative, neoliberal ideologies upon LGBTQ individuals' mental health and how horror and Gothic are often the go-to genre for the representation of this. So recently, we've seen a few films that foreground this, utilising horror tropes. ‘Hypochondriac’ from 2022 focuses on this young man who fears that he's inherited his mother's mental illness but sees himself split into two versions of himself: one is a wolf man, the other is this kind of non-normative, seemingly kind of normal queer individual. Other films like ‘Thelma’ from 2018, which is a Swedish supernatural film about a girl with Carrie-like powers who comes to terms with her own lesbianism that has been repressed by her staunch religious parents. And even the recent series of ‘American Horror Story: NYC’ tends to come to terms with personal and cultural trauma that's affected the queer community and also across the world, but particularly in New York. Via various, albeit from my perspective, they're quite clunky allegories and explicit narratives around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
BG: And we must never forget that with the current rise in right-wing attitudes in both the US and the UK, there are real lives at stake here.
DES: So it seems that in the past few years, things have become even more obvious that being different, being LGBTQ in today's world can be scary. Our rights are being taken away one by one, these hard-won equalities that have been rolled back, and our existence as legally equal is increasingly becoming very precarious. So it's a really interesting time, I think, for theorists to And also from filmmakers to kind of think about the ways in which we can start to kind of think about how cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised queer people is now being reinterpreted, re expressed, and represented to allow queer filmmakers and theorists to take up that mode of address that can offer critiques of the establishment and of also our own subcultures and of those that still oppress us.
BG: Fantastic Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Your cinematic observations have been both illuminating and important. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers!
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name's Brett Gregory. Over recent weeks, we've been exploring cinema, not only as a playground for entertainment, escapism, and egos but also as an economic, political, and ideological battleground for social class, gender, ethnicity, technology, and, as we're going to discover in this evening's episode, sexuality.
DES: Hi, my name is Darren Elliott-Smith. I'm a senior lecturer in film and gender, and I teach at the University of Stirling in Scotland in the UK. My research specialisms are in the representation of LGBTQ people in the horror genre, and I'm arguing that it's more recently that this has moved out from the shadowy realms of implicit and symbolic representation of yesteryear.
BG: So how are we to understand queer theory as a critical approach to cinema and its relationship to, say, Marxism?
DES: I suppose it depends on your understanding of queer as a theory and how the term and the ideology have altered in recent years. For me, it's often kind of obvious that there are at least two strands to queer theory. One being around identity politics and attempting to offer what Harry Benchoff describes as an oxymoronic community of difference. So this is a kind of paradox, I suppose, in itself that captures the problematic existence within queer culture and queer theory. But queer, as a word and as an ideology, in my understanding, also still disturbs some people, depending on your social persuasion, or your generation or background, in lots of different ways. And in terms of where this fits with Marxism, queer activism all drew upon socialist rhetoric that called for change, a change whereby the queer collective were being marginalised, crushed, and effectively killed by capitalist, imperialist, middle-class, white CIS hetero patriarchy. And Pride, though far removed from the activist origins of Pride marches in the 1970s, 1980s, still retains some of that need for change to look after the collective and therefore the individual as they exist within the mass, free from the oppression of that ruling elite.
BG: And how does this inform a queer understanding of the horror genre in particular?
DES: Interestingly, many of the works of early horror film theorists in the 1970s, particularly the definitive work of queer film scholar Robin Wood, utilised both a lesbian and gay approach with a socialist and Marxist approach as well. So he argued that, using a little bit of psychoanalysis merged with Marxism, that those ideals and energies that don't fit the bourgeois capitalist, imperialist, and white patriarchal culture of production and reproduction are cast out as other across this imaginary border, which then sets up the binary of us versus them. The problem is that actually within horror and within a lot of Gothic narratives, the ‘them’ or ‘they’ sometimes come back. The fact that they always come back, repression and oppression eventually is shown to fail in the horror narrative, causing this monster, creature, killer, or infection, whatever it is, to come back and threaten that pure individual that's meant to represent the US.
BG: Can you give us a specific film example where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary becomes blurred?
DES: in kind of focusing on this theory. He collapsed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary, and we see this most critically skewered in films like George Romero's ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ whereby the undead, the zombie, the returned, kind of reanimated corpse who once was human, once was us, become a ‘them’ figure, and then they return to assimilate everybody else into this undead horde, where children eat parents, and the Soul Survivor, which in this case is Ben, black male, is gunned down by white vigilantes at the end of the film, who stake him for one of them, even though he's not zombified; he's actually still human and very much alive. And Romero's point is that the gun-toting white male doesn't see any difference; actually, all exist in an othered state.
BG: So what is the scope of horror films and television shows which is under consideration here?
DES: Queer horror, although I'd argue that all horror is queer in that it seems to represent the odd, the strange, the non-normative, and as a genre, it seeks to distress, to upset and to challenge, and to scare. It's for me a set of films and TV shows that are made, normally by LGBTQ creatives, that foreground queerness as an element of representation in some way, but this subgenre also includes historical considerations as influences upon these newer out contemporary horror films and shows. So, in order to do that, we have to look at what a lot of academics and myself call closeted texts like, Interview With a Vampire, The Hunger, Psycho, Bride of Frankenstein, all these films that kind of clearly have LGBTQ themes running through them but never really explicitly kind of outwardly state that they are. So they involve some kind of symbolic interpretation or reading.
BG: From a historical perspective. The Hays Code, which was introduced in the 1930s, clearly had a resounding effect on cinema's representations, narratives, and themes. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
DES: So, the Hays Code was set up after a series of scandals rocked Hollywood, and people were worried about the deplored world of filmmaking as one that might infect supposedly decent heteronormative family life. One particular case that's often cited is the star Fatty Arbuckle being accused of raping a young starlet in the early 1920s. So, Will Hays set up a production code that would monitor the content of all film productions and those that were released in US cinemas, preventing certain elements and themes and narratives that they deemed would seek to poison US ideology. It's Vito Russo's documentary and book ‘The Celluloid Closet’ outlines this really well in terms of the impact on LGBTQ+ folks. The rule that existed within the Hays Code strictly prohibited any depiction of what was called "sex perversion," impacting any explicit representation of any non-normative sexuality or romance. So, Some films had to get around this by using symbolism, inference, suggestion so as to ensure that their true audience were being represented in and seen in films. Some directors, queer-affiliated directors, were kind of doing this deliberately, coding their films in a way.
BG: For example?
DES: The Universal franchise of horror films from the '30s and the '40s were actually playing with the limitations of the code as well. It's been kind of recently introduced so the suggestion here becomes quite pointed at times, and there's a practice of rebellion in a small way, and this was more pushed, I suppose, by the makers of these films. So if we can kind of go to certain auteurs, film directors like Todd Browning, whose sexuality was often kind of questioned but never fully defined, he made the pre-code film ‘Freaks,’ which is problematic but also really interesting kind of queer film in its representation of non-normative body types. There's also James Whale, who is a gay British director who ramped up the suggestion in his version of ‘Frankenstein,’ that he directed and even more so in the kind of more comedic and kind of almost parodic ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ where we have this homo-erotic triangle literally exploding off the screen between Frankenstein the creature and Dr Pretorius as well.
BG: And once again Social Class is at play in such horror films as well isn’t it?
DES: Class definitely comes into it again, drawing on those early Marxist readings from Franco Moretti on the nature of the capitalist blood-sucking vampire configured more recently as a corporate CEO or landed gentry or an aristocrat versus the underclass working class proletariat of the zombie or a mindless slave. And we see a kind of a literal version of this in the depiction of Haitian voodoo in early RKO texts like ‘I Walk with a Zombie.’ But the queerness present in the upper classes, something I suppose that's reflected on as a consideration of effete queer men, idiosyncratic in their taste, often overindulged with an emphasis on the pursuit of overwhelmed senses, and that kind of stereotypical depiction of upper-class queerness is existent in early Gothic texts like ‘Jekyll and Hyde' and ‘Dorian Gray,’ where the upper classes are seen to wallow in debauchery that's propped up by generations of wealth, them having the time, the money, the power to indulge in seemingly perverse desires.
BG: And queer horror is still disrupting and destabilising popular conservative sensibility today as well, isn't it?
DES: Well, the recent remake of Hellraiser wasn't received so well by so-called purist horror fans. Um, they took against this more explicit queer content and they rejected in particular the idea of trans actor Jamie Clayton as the new Pinhead. I mean, not realizing that this film was written by a gay male author, directed by the same man, Clive Barker, and inspired by his experiences of BDSM queer practices that he saw in Berlin nightclubs. And it's quite clear that it's queer from the get-go.
BG: And your academic work presents is exploring the relationship between queer horror, trauma, and mental health, is that correct?
DES: So my recent work looks at the impact of neoconservative, neoliberal ideologies upon LGBTQ individuals' mental health and how horror and Gothic are often the go-to genre for the representation of this. So recently, we've seen a few films that foreground this, utilising horror tropes. ‘Hypochondriac’ from 2022 focuses on this young man who fears that he's inherited his mother's mental illness but sees himself split into two versions of himself: one is a wolf man, the other is this kind of non-normative, seemingly kind of normal queer individual. Other films like ‘Thelma’ from 2018, which is a Swedish supernatural film about a girl with Carrie-like powers who comes to terms with her own lesbianism that has been repressed by her staunch religious parents. And even the recent series of ‘American Horror Story: NYC’ tends to come to terms with personal and cultural trauma that's affected the queer community and also across the world, but particularly in New York. Via various, albeit from my perspective, they're quite clunky allegories and explicit narratives around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
BG: And we must never forget that with the current rise in right-wing attitudes in both the US and the UK, there are real lives at stake here.
DES: So it seems that in the past few years, things have become even more obvious that being different, being LGBTQ in today's world can be scary. Our rights are being taken away one by one, these hard-won equalities that have been rolled back, and our existence as legally equal is increasingly becoming very precarious. So it's a really interesting time, I think, for theorists to And also from filmmakers to kind of think about the ways in which we can start to kind of think about how cultural theory that once oppressed and stigmatised queer people is now being reinterpreted, re expressed, and represented to allow queer filmmakers and theorists to take up that mode of address that can offer critiques of the establishment and of also our own subcultures and of those that still oppress us.
BG: Fantastic Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Your cinematic observations have been both illuminating and important. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers!
Interview: AI, Hollywood and the SAG-AFTRA strikes
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Dominic Lees, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Reading (UK)
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Dominic Lees, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Reading (UK)
Interview Start: 35 minutes 57 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. The SAG-AFTRA strike has been raging now since July 14th, 2023. As my special guest this evening explains, however, those on the picket lines right now are not simply fighting for fair labour contracts and streaming residuals; they are fighting for the very future of cinema itself.
DL: Hi, Brett. My name is Dominic Lees, and I'm an associate professor in filmmaking at the University of Reading, which is in the southeast of the UK. My research and my work are all about how artificial intelligence is impacting the film and television industries. Now, before I entered academia, I was a director of television drama for many years, producing a large amount of TV drama for the BBC, Channel 4, and independent television in the UK.
BG: Excellent, Dominic. You're precisely the man we need. So, tell us a little bit more about AI.
DL: So, if we think very broadly about what artificial intelligence is, the key thing is that it's not human or animal intelligence; it's machine-based intelligence.
BG: And what's the point? What are the goals?
DL: The goals of AI research have always been to get computers to perform recognizable human mental processes. To try and get a computer to reason, to look for things, to learn, to perceive - these have become key goals of artificial intelligence.
BG: I'm starting to get visions of HAL from ‘2001’. Anyway, when did all this start gaining traction?
DL: So, back in 2017, there was a breakthrough of deepfakes, and that was a key development of synthetic media. What the developers proved is that you could get a computer to learn about a subject's face and then learn about a target face. It could then replace one face in the movie image with another. This is a process of feeding hundreds of thousands of images of a subject into the computer. On that basis, the computer will learn about that face and then do the same for the target. For example, you could feed in thousands of images of Gal Gadot, and the computer will understand how her face is moving, how her expressions develop as she speaks, and it will use that knowledge when you come to the next task, which is to replace her face with another actor.
BG: I remember this story in the news. It doesn't turn out well.
DL: The really unpleasant thing that happened back in 2017 is that the reverse was going on. The first developers of this form of synthetic media used deepfakes to take out the faces of porn stars and replace them with actresses such as Gal Gadot. So, it became an extremely offensive and destructive use of women's images and the appropriation, non-consensually, of women's faces into adult movies. Deepfakes got an extremely bad reputation.
BG: Indeed. So, where do we go from here?
DL: I believe we're in a really difficult interim stage. Right now, If you see a video online and you think it might be a deepfake, there's no way you can tell unless you know how to identify the little glitches. But sometimes, defects are beautifully made and may be completely convincing. We don't have any processes, mechanisms, or good practices that media producers have to abide by. But those processes are just beginning. Watermarking of videos is coming in; these will be invisible ways in which you can tell whether or not a piece of video has been manipulated. The Content Authenticity Initiative is a great thing, which means that you'll be able to click on a picture and see through the metadata exactly when this was first produced and how this picture has been manipulated in its history before it reaches you.
BG: Hmm, still sounds a bit like the Wild West. How is the industry responding?
DL: In terms of film and television, I think we're going to agree on shared standards of disclosure. We found that audiences really care about whether or not a filmmaker tells them that they've been using synthetic media. The documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville made a film about Anthony Bourdain called 'Roadrunner,' and in it, he used voice cloning, an artificial intelligence process, in order to make it seem like Anthony Bourdain was reading his own email. But Morgan Neville didn't tell his audience that this is what he did, and when it came to light, he found that a really significant part of his audience was really angry that they hadn't been told that this fake artificial intelligence process had been used.
BG: And rightly so. But there is the Chechnya story, though, isn't it?
DL: David France, when he was making his film 'Welcome to Chechnya,' which was about the genocide of lesbian and gay people in Chechnya, used face replacement technology to protect the identities of the subjects of his film. David France gained huge respect for how he protected his subjects and also how he made sure that his audience was always aware of the artifice of the face replacement. It was always obvious to us while we were watching it that the faces were not those of the original people.
BG: See, conscientious and ethical practice in the media is possible. Please go on.
DL: So, filmmakers are making up, as they go along, different ethical approaches to how they use artificial intelligence and how they communicate with their audiences about the use of that artificial intelligence. When common standards have been established across the film and television industries, what will happen is we’ll move out of this rather confusing interim period where people really don't know how to use artificial intelligence. Audiences don't know whether artificial intelligence has been used in the material that they're watching, and what enters appears where everything is much more clear.
BG: So, basically a rule book. What are your thoughts on fictional filmmaking, you know, the movies?
DL: In terms of the film industry, we have to see this development of AI alongside what was already existing, which is the visual effects industry. We are very familiar with CGI (computer-generated imagery), being able to create extraordinary scenes, especially in action films. We've seen thousands of orcs charging down the mountainside, all created through visual effects means. And you can use visual effects to replace the faces of actors who've been recorded in a digital film.
BG: Now we're getting somewhere. The uncanny. Tell the Star Wars story.
DL: More than 20 years before director Gareth Edwards made the Star Wars film 'Rogue One,' Peter Cushing, the actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin, had died. Gareth Edwards wanted him resurrected in his film. So, he shot the scenes for Grand Moff Tarkin with the British actor Guy Henry and then used visual effects processes to replace Guy Henry's face with that of Peter Cushing. Now, that's a tremendously expensive process, as you know from watching the credits on blockbuster films; the number of visual effects supervisors credited can be in the hundreds. What artificial intelligence offers the movie industry is quicker, cheaper, and perhaps better quality ways of doing the same processes.
BG: Baudrillard and hyperreality, that's what I'm thinking right now.
DL: In the industrial revolution, manufacturers found ways to replace people with machines for labour, and that was cheaper, so done deal, that's what happened. But in the movies, do we want to replace human images? Do we want to replace actors with synthetic thespians? If we do that, would audiences want to see those synthetic characters on screen? Can we emotionally respond to synthetic movie characters? These are questions that are still out there.
BG: The owners of the means of reproduction searching for, paradoxically, authenticity.
DL: I think you're totally right. I think human authenticity is what we look for in most films. Films that lack that human authenticity are the ones that may suffer in the future. In the same way, there's an insignificant portion of the film audience that's sick to death of Hollywood tentpole movies and action sequences and seeks out independent films with more meaningful content relevant to our lives today. We may well find the same in the future, where we have some movies that are very driven by artificial intelligence-generated images, and a lot of the audience will turn their back on that and look for indie fare.
BG: Fingers crossed. So, what do you think is going to happen next?
DL: What I think is going to happen is that creative producers in the film industry are going to carefully evaluate artificial intelligence and think about exactly what kind of role they want it to play within movie making. There will be trials and failures. Sometimes it might look like a complete gimmick. Sometimes audiences might really relish it. We have to remember that gimmicks in the movie industry don't last. Look at the experience of 3D film, which has had two surges in the history of filmmaking, both of which fizzled out really quite quickly.
BG: Yeah, ‘Jaws 3-D’ was rubbish.
DL: More recently, if you look at Ang Lee's film 'Gemini Man,' in which Will Smith played himself and ended up fighting against a younger version of himself, that film failed and cost upwards of $200 million to the studios that produced it. There may have been several other reasons why the film wasn't a success, but the producers clearly thought that Will Smith against Will Smith, using technology to achieve that, would be a really attractive thing for audiences. And they were wrong.
BG: That's a shame. I really like Ang Lee as well. Anyway, let's get back to the industry, let's get back to industrial relations.
DL: Now, 2022, 2023 is the time when everything seems to have changed for artificial intelligence in the film industry. Remember that synthetic media means not just image but text. And last November, ChatGPT became publicly available, and we've all been playing with that chatbot to generate text. You can generate film scripts with that, as well as treatments or concepts for movies. And this has meant that artificial intelligence plays an absolutely central role in the disputes between the Writers Guild of America and the producers and studios.
BG: See, this is where it all goes dark.
DL: What the SAG-AFTRA strike is bringing up is the future of the industry. Imagine what it looks like if you're a young actor currently in drama school looking forward to your career. If the prospect for you is that when you go on set for your first movie, you're asked to go into a booth and your image and performance are completely captured for future use. What kind of career could you ever have?
BG: Hmm, exactly.
DL: Let's be really accurate, though, about what's going on in the strike. The Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers are talking about background actors. You know how small the image of a background actor is in the frame now. Artificial intelligence doesn't have much of a problem in replacing a small part of the frame, which is why producers know that the first screen performers they can replace are the background artists. So, leading actors right now are not so threatened by the technology for face replacement. But it's been terrific to see during the strike how most leading actors have been really supportive of defending the rights of background artists. And they certainly know that the technology isn't going to stop here. It may well develop to a state where it can start replacing leading actors on screen.
BG: Hmm, come on, Dominic, give us some good news.
DL: I'm really optimistic at the collective action of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA around artificial intelligence begins to make me think that creative freelance professionals in the film and television industries will be able to say no to producers when particular demands are made on them around artificial intelligence. There's really terrible levels of financial distress for creative professionals involved. But I think what they're doing is they're creating the building blocks for a future in which artificial intelligence in the movie industry will be used in a more responsible way.
BG: That's the spirit. They may take our dignity, but they'll never take our freedom. Nice one, Dominic. You've been great and given us loads of food for thought about this ongoing war between humans and robots. Take care. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and my name is Brett Gregory. The SAG-AFTRA strike has been raging now since July 14th, 2023. As my special guest this evening explains, however, those on the picket lines right now are not simply fighting for fair labour contracts and streaming residuals; they are fighting for the very future of cinema itself.
DL: Hi, Brett. My name is Dominic Lees, and I'm an associate professor in filmmaking at the University of Reading, which is in the southeast of the UK. My research and my work are all about how artificial intelligence is impacting the film and television industries. Now, before I entered academia, I was a director of television drama for many years, producing a large amount of TV drama for the BBC, Channel 4, and independent television in the UK.
BG: Excellent, Dominic. You're precisely the man we need. So, tell us a little bit more about AI.
DL: So, if we think very broadly about what artificial intelligence is, the key thing is that it's not human or animal intelligence; it's machine-based intelligence.
BG: And what's the point? What are the goals?
DL: The goals of AI research have always been to get computers to perform recognizable human mental processes. To try and get a computer to reason, to look for things, to learn, to perceive - these have become key goals of artificial intelligence.
BG: I'm starting to get visions of HAL from ‘2001’. Anyway, when did all this start gaining traction?
DL: So, back in 2017, there was a breakthrough of deepfakes, and that was a key development of synthetic media. What the developers proved is that you could get a computer to learn about a subject's face and then learn about a target face. It could then replace one face in the movie image with another. This is a process of feeding hundreds of thousands of images of a subject into the computer. On that basis, the computer will learn about that face and then do the same for the target. For example, you could feed in thousands of images of Gal Gadot, and the computer will understand how her face is moving, how her expressions develop as she speaks, and it will use that knowledge when you come to the next task, which is to replace her face with another actor.
BG: I remember this story in the news. It doesn't turn out well.
DL: The really unpleasant thing that happened back in 2017 is that the reverse was going on. The first developers of this form of synthetic media used deepfakes to take out the faces of porn stars and replace them with actresses such as Gal Gadot. So, it became an extremely offensive and destructive use of women's images and the appropriation, non-consensually, of women's faces into adult movies. Deepfakes got an extremely bad reputation.
BG: Indeed. So, where do we go from here?
DL: I believe we're in a really difficult interim stage. Right now, If you see a video online and you think it might be a deepfake, there's no way you can tell unless you know how to identify the little glitches. But sometimes, defects are beautifully made and may be completely convincing. We don't have any processes, mechanisms, or good practices that media producers have to abide by. But those processes are just beginning. Watermarking of videos is coming in; these will be invisible ways in which you can tell whether or not a piece of video has been manipulated. The Content Authenticity Initiative is a great thing, which means that you'll be able to click on a picture and see through the metadata exactly when this was first produced and how this picture has been manipulated in its history before it reaches you.
BG: Hmm, still sounds a bit like the Wild West. How is the industry responding?
DL: In terms of film and television, I think we're going to agree on shared standards of disclosure. We found that audiences really care about whether or not a filmmaker tells them that they've been using synthetic media. The documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville made a film about Anthony Bourdain called 'Roadrunner,' and in it, he used voice cloning, an artificial intelligence process, in order to make it seem like Anthony Bourdain was reading his own email. But Morgan Neville didn't tell his audience that this is what he did, and when it came to light, he found that a really significant part of his audience was really angry that they hadn't been told that this fake artificial intelligence process had been used.
BG: And rightly so. But there is the Chechnya story, though, isn't it?
DL: David France, when he was making his film 'Welcome to Chechnya,' which was about the genocide of lesbian and gay people in Chechnya, used face replacement technology to protect the identities of the subjects of his film. David France gained huge respect for how he protected his subjects and also how he made sure that his audience was always aware of the artifice of the face replacement. It was always obvious to us while we were watching it that the faces were not those of the original people.
BG: See, conscientious and ethical practice in the media is possible. Please go on.
DL: So, filmmakers are making up, as they go along, different ethical approaches to how they use artificial intelligence and how they communicate with their audiences about the use of that artificial intelligence. When common standards have been established across the film and television industries, what will happen is we’ll move out of this rather confusing interim period where people really don't know how to use artificial intelligence. Audiences don't know whether artificial intelligence has been used in the material that they're watching, and what enters appears where everything is much more clear.
BG: So, basically a rule book. What are your thoughts on fictional filmmaking, you know, the movies?
DL: In terms of the film industry, we have to see this development of AI alongside what was already existing, which is the visual effects industry. We are very familiar with CGI (computer-generated imagery), being able to create extraordinary scenes, especially in action films. We've seen thousands of orcs charging down the mountainside, all created through visual effects means. And you can use visual effects to replace the faces of actors who've been recorded in a digital film.
BG: Now we're getting somewhere. The uncanny. Tell the Star Wars story.
DL: More than 20 years before director Gareth Edwards made the Star Wars film 'Rogue One,' Peter Cushing, the actor who played Grand Moff Tarkin, had died. Gareth Edwards wanted him resurrected in his film. So, he shot the scenes for Grand Moff Tarkin with the British actor Guy Henry and then used visual effects processes to replace Guy Henry's face with that of Peter Cushing. Now, that's a tremendously expensive process, as you know from watching the credits on blockbuster films; the number of visual effects supervisors credited can be in the hundreds. What artificial intelligence offers the movie industry is quicker, cheaper, and perhaps better quality ways of doing the same processes.
BG: Baudrillard and hyperreality, that's what I'm thinking right now.
DL: In the industrial revolution, manufacturers found ways to replace people with machines for labour, and that was cheaper, so done deal, that's what happened. But in the movies, do we want to replace human images? Do we want to replace actors with synthetic thespians? If we do that, would audiences want to see those synthetic characters on screen? Can we emotionally respond to synthetic movie characters? These are questions that are still out there.
BG: The owners of the means of reproduction searching for, paradoxically, authenticity.
DL: I think you're totally right. I think human authenticity is what we look for in most films. Films that lack that human authenticity are the ones that may suffer in the future. In the same way, there's an insignificant portion of the film audience that's sick to death of Hollywood tentpole movies and action sequences and seeks out independent films with more meaningful content relevant to our lives today. We may well find the same in the future, where we have some movies that are very driven by artificial intelligence-generated images, and a lot of the audience will turn their back on that and look for indie fare.
BG: Fingers crossed. So, what do you think is going to happen next?
DL: What I think is going to happen is that creative producers in the film industry are going to carefully evaluate artificial intelligence and think about exactly what kind of role they want it to play within movie making. There will be trials and failures. Sometimes it might look like a complete gimmick. Sometimes audiences might really relish it. We have to remember that gimmicks in the movie industry don't last. Look at the experience of 3D film, which has had two surges in the history of filmmaking, both of which fizzled out really quite quickly.
BG: Yeah, ‘Jaws 3-D’ was rubbish.
DL: More recently, if you look at Ang Lee's film 'Gemini Man,' in which Will Smith played himself and ended up fighting against a younger version of himself, that film failed and cost upwards of $200 million to the studios that produced it. There may have been several other reasons why the film wasn't a success, but the producers clearly thought that Will Smith against Will Smith, using technology to achieve that, would be a really attractive thing for audiences. And they were wrong.
BG: That's a shame. I really like Ang Lee as well. Anyway, let's get back to the industry, let's get back to industrial relations.
DL: Now, 2022, 2023 is the time when everything seems to have changed for artificial intelligence in the film industry. Remember that synthetic media means not just image but text. And last November, ChatGPT became publicly available, and we've all been playing with that chatbot to generate text. You can generate film scripts with that, as well as treatments or concepts for movies. And this has meant that artificial intelligence plays an absolutely central role in the disputes between the Writers Guild of America and the producers and studios.
BG: See, this is where it all goes dark.
DL: What the SAG-AFTRA strike is bringing up is the future of the industry. Imagine what it looks like if you're a young actor currently in drama school looking forward to your career. If the prospect for you is that when you go on set for your first movie, you're asked to go into a booth and your image and performance are completely captured for future use. What kind of career could you ever have?
BG: Hmm, exactly.
DL: Let's be really accurate, though, about what's going on in the strike. The Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers are talking about background actors. You know how small the image of a background actor is in the frame now. Artificial intelligence doesn't have much of a problem in replacing a small part of the frame, which is why producers know that the first screen performers they can replace are the background artists. So, leading actors right now are not so threatened by the technology for face replacement. But it's been terrific to see during the strike how most leading actors have been really supportive of defending the rights of background artists. And they certainly know that the technology isn't going to stop here. It may well develop to a state where it can start replacing leading actors on screen.
BG: Hmm, come on, Dominic, give us some good news.
DL: I'm really optimistic at the collective action of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA around artificial intelligence begins to make me think that creative freelance professionals in the film and television industries will be able to say no to producers when particular demands are made on them around artificial intelligence. There's really terrible levels of financial distress for creative professionals involved. But I think what they're doing is they're creating the building blocks for a future in which artificial intelligence in the movie industry will be used in a more responsible way.
BG: That's the spirit. They may take our dignity, but they'll never take our freedom. Nice one, Dominic. You've been great and given us loads of food for thought about this ongoing war between humans and robots. Take care. This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
Interview: The Hollywood Renaissance and The Blacklist
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Andy Willis, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford (UK)
August 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Andy Willis, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Salford (UK)
Interview Start: 8 minutes 30 seconds
Interview Transcript
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and I'm Brett Gregory. My guest this evening is the curator of a unique season of controversial yet compelling Hollywood movies from the 1960s and seventies. In collaboration with National Film Festival organisers Cinema Rediscovered, global distribution company Park Circus, and the esteemed British Film Institute, will be touring cinemas in the UK and the Republic of Ireland over the next two weeks.
AW: Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Andy Willis. I'm a professor of film studies at the University of Salford in the UK. Alongside that, I'm also a senior visiting curator for film at HOME, which is a multi-arts centre in the middle of Manchester in the North West of England.
BG: And what is this curated film program, this creative project, about exactly?
AW: So, this project is on the Hollywood blacklist, but particularly on how those people who were involved in the Hollywood blacklist ended up going back into the American film industry in the 1960s. It's particularly focused on those who contributed in the broader sense to what's now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. It went really from the early stirrings of the Hollywood blacklist, which began at the end of the Second World War. In the trade papers within the film industry, such as the Hollywood Reporter, articles began to appear accusing people who worked in the Hollywood film industry of having communist sympathies. This is quite ironic, seeing as when the Soviet Union was an ally, many people were encouraged to make pro-Soviet films. But after the war, when they were now the enemy, suddenly those films were held against people when they were accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. This came to a peak in October 1947 when The House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, often known as HUAC, subpoenaed 19 people to appear before them to be questioned about their loyalty and communist sympathies.
BG: Reds under the bed. So initially, you say 19?
AW: They actually called only 11 people, and one of those people was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who did talk to the committee. But then, realising that the writing was on the wall, very soon after, he got a plane to East Germany and had one of the most legendary careers in European theatre. The 10 who were left were all held in contempt of the committee and were eventually sent to prison for a year. They became known as the Hollywood 10, which included mostly writers, but also a couple of directors and writer-producers. I think that reflects how influential and important writers were seen at the time within the Hollywood film industry. It was the writers who could put ideas within the films.
BG: And then what happened?
AW: Things got worse just after that. In 1947, there was a statement made by key people in the Hollywood film industry, known as the Waldorf Statement. They met at the Waldorf Hotel. People like Louis B. Mayer from Metro Golden Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn from Columbia Pictures were in attendance. They all came together and said that if they had anyone working for them under contract who was seen to be a communist sympathiser or a Communist Party member and didn't renounce that, then they would terminate their contract. That started the Hollywood blacklist.
BG: All very sinister. And there was some sort of in-your-face propaganda campaign going on as well, wasn't there?
AW: Very shortly afterwards, in June 1950, there was the publication of a pamphlet by Counterattack called 'Red Channels.' 'Red Channels' really stuck the boot in even more to progressive practitioners within the Hollywood film industry. It named 151 actors, writers, musicians, as well as broadcast journalists and other people working in the media. After they were named, they were effectively blacklisted and unable to work.
BG: And how long did this reign of terror go on for?
AW: It lasted for a good 10 to 15, for some people coming up to 20 years, where they were unable to work. They were unable to have their names on films or television programs they wrote. It's a very dark period for Hollywood and caused great rifts that lasted for decades after, with people not being happy with those who had named names. One of the things people may know is that as part of the HUAC trials, people would be invited to name names of Hollywood's communists or communist sympathisers. Famous people like Elia Kazan, the theatre and film director, did name names, which caused great disruption in their working relationships. For example, Kazan worked a lot with Arthur Miller, and after he named names, Miller refused to work with Kazan again. When Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Oscar, people like Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were sitting on their hands, not clapping and looking stony-faced. Outside, people like Abraham Polonsky, the writer-director, and Walter Bernstein, the writer, were protesting about giving a lifetime achievement Oscar to someone who had named names and destroyed the careers of many of their friends and work associates.
BG: Yeah, I watched that ceremony with Ed Harris and Nick Nolte on YouTube years ago. Totally awkward. Anyway, let's move on to the films you selected for the program.
AW: One of the key films we chose for the season was 'Serpico' from 1973. It's directed by Sidney Lumet, with a stellar performance by Al Pacino. But what people may not know is that the first early drafts of the screenplay were written by Waldo Salt, who had been blacklisted. Another film we selected was 'Midnight Cowboy' from 1969. It's really the film that brought Waldo Salt back into focus. He had made a couple of other films after his blacklist, notably 'Taurus Bulba' from 1962. But he was unhappy with those kinds of adventure films and wanted to do something more weighty. When John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman were looking for someone to adapt the novel, it was Waldo Salt who found a way to do that.
BG: Midnight Cowboy is a great film, but why is it a key film for this program?
AW: It is still the first X-rated film to win the Best Film Oscar. Waldo Salt was also rewarded with an Oscar for his work on the film. This seemed to be an important film, emblematic of the new Hollywood and its challenging ideas. I wanted to highlight that Waldo Salt, who suffered from the blacklist era, was able to contribute to the progressive politics of a film like 'Midnight Cowboy.'
BG: Tell us more about the movie 'Uptight.' I've never heard of it.
AW: 'Uptight' is an interesting example among the films in the season. It's much lesser known than 'Serpico' or 'Midnight Cowboy.' It's directed by Jules Dassin, who was also blacklisted in the early 1950s. He moved to Europe and rebuilt his career there, known for 'Rififi.' 'Uptight' was the first film he made back in America. It's an adaptation of the same novel that John Ford adapted for 'The Informer' in the 1930s. Jules Dassin, who suffered from the blacklist, I think was interested in this idea of the guilt at the core of this film.
BG: And there were political shenanigans going on behind the scenes, is that right?
AW: It's a fascinating film, but the making of the film is also really interesting. Shot in Cleveland, there was so much tension among the extras that they had to take the production back to Los Angeles. The FBI reportedly tried to get people working on the film to inform them about the politics of the film. Jules Dassin takes the setting from Ireland and the IRA of the original novel and places it into the Black Power movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. It's a fascinating film.
BG: Black Power, the IRA. What else do you have lined up?
AW: Yes, another film that focused on the Black experience in America and had a contribution from someone blacklisted is 'Claudine.' It's a much smaller, quieter film set in Harlem around a single mother played by Diahann Carroll. She meets a well-meaning garbage man played by James Earl Jones, and they try to make a go of things in 1974. The film is directed by John Berry, who had been blacklisted and went on to work on this film. It's an important historical film, I think, and has been a little forgotten.
BG: A film that hasn't been forgotten, though, is Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H.'
AW: 'M*A*S*H' is another familiar film in the season. It's remembered for breaking Robert Altman and introducing his filmmaking style, with sound and image combining in a unique way. For this season, 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist,' I wanted to focus on the screenwriter of 'M*A*S*H,’ Ring Lardner Jr. He had been one of the Hollywood 10, one of the first victims of the blacklist.
BG: Why is Ring Lardner Jr.'s work on 'M*A*S*H’ so important?
AW: Ring Lardner Jr.'s contribution was vital to 'M*A*S*H.’ He brings progressive politics and attempts to portray the horrors of war. It also looks forward to the cynicism of the 1970s. 'M*A*S*H’ is one of the great anti-war movies. America was still in the thrall of Vietnam in 1970, and I don't think anybody needed any pushing to relate the film to the Vietnam reality that many Americans were experiencing.
BG: And you focus on a particular female actor in your program as well, don't you?
AW: Yes, I didn't want to focus only on writers. I included Hal Ashby's 1975 film 'Shampoo,' which is set in the late 1960s and is about the excesses and vanity of America during that period. It features a standout performance by Lee Grant, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lee Grant had been an actor who, in the 1950s, was on the cusp of real fame but was blacklisted. She reappeared in the 1960s in films like 'The Heat of the Night' and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Landlord.' Lee Grant is a great example of how an actor can come back from the blacklist and reestablish themselves at the centre of the Hollywood film industry during the Hollywood Renaissance.
BG: Hollywood, the dream factory with nightmare working conditions.
AW: The Hollywood film industry sees itself as the dream factory, offering a particular version of society as the aspirational one we should seek out. The Hollywood blacklist era shows that when people were writing other versions of potential future societies or contemporary societies that weren't supported by the capitalist studios, they were quick to act and marginalise those people. Let's hope there are writers, directors, actors, and musicians willing to offer alternatives and challenge the status quo.
BG: Great stuff, Andy. It's always healthy to end with a clenched fist in the air. It's been a pleasure having you on the show, and I wish you the best of luck with 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.' This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BG: Hi, this is the UK desk for Arts Express, and I'm Brett Gregory. My guest this evening is the curator of a unique season of controversial yet compelling Hollywood movies from the 1960s and seventies. In collaboration with National Film Festival organisers Cinema Rediscovered, global distribution company Park Circus, and the esteemed British Film Institute, will be touring cinemas in the UK and the Republic of Ireland over the next two weeks.
AW: Hi Brett, thanks for having me on the show. My name is Andy Willis. I'm a professor of film studies at the University of Salford in the UK. Alongside that, I'm also a senior visiting curator for film at HOME, which is a multi-arts centre in the middle of Manchester in the North West of England.
BG: And what is this curated film program, this creative project, about exactly?
AW: So, this project is on the Hollywood blacklist, but particularly on how those people who were involved in the Hollywood blacklist ended up going back into the American film industry in the 1960s. It's particularly focused on those who contributed in the broader sense to what's now known as the Hollywood Renaissance. It went really from the early stirrings of the Hollywood blacklist, which began at the end of the Second World War. In the trade papers within the film industry, such as the Hollywood Reporter, articles began to appear accusing people who worked in the Hollywood film industry of having communist sympathies. This is quite ironic, seeing as when the Soviet Union was an ally, many people were encouraged to make pro-Soviet films. But after the war, when they were now the enemy, suddenly those films were held against people when they were accused of being communists or communist sympathisers. This came to a peak in October 1947 when The House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee, often known as HUAC, subpoenaed 19 people to appear before them to be questioned about their loyalty and communist sympathies.
BG: Reds under the bed. So initially, you say 19?
AW: They actually called only 11 people, and one of those people was the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who did talk to the committee. But then, realising that the writing was on the wall, very soon after, he got a plane to East Germany and had one of the most legendary careers in European theatre. The 10 who were left were all held in contempt of the committee and were eventually sent to prison for a year. They became known as the Hollywood 10, which included mostly writers, but also a couple of directors and writer-producers. I think that reflects how influential and important writers were seen at the time within the Hollywood film industry. It was the writers who could put ideas within the films.
BG: And then what happened?
AW: Things got worse just after that. In 1947, there was a statement made by key people in the Hollywood film industry, known as the Waldorf Statement. They met at the Waldorf Hotel. People like Louis B. Mayer from Metro Golden Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Harry Cohn from Columbia Pictures were in attendance. They all came together and said that if they had anyone working for them under contract who was seen to be a communist sympathiser or a Communist Party member and didn't renounce that, then they would terminate their contract. That started the Hollywood blacklist.
BG: All very sinister. And there was some sort of in-your-face propaganda campaign going on as well, wasn't there?
AW: Very shortly afterwards, in June 1950, there was the publication of a pamphlet by Counterattack called 'Red Channels.' 'Red Channels' really stuck the boot in even more to progressive practitioners within the Hollywood film industry. It named 151 actors, writers, musicians, as well as broadcast journalists and other people working in the media. After they were named, they were effectively blacklisted and unable to work.
BG: And how long did this reign of terror go on for?
AW: It lasted for a good 10 to 15, for some people coming up to 20 years, where they were unable to work. They were unable to have their names on films or television programs they wrote. It's a very dark period for Hollywood and caused great rifts that lasted for decades after, with people not being happy with those who had named names. One of the things people may know is that as part of the HUAC trials, people would be invited to name names of Hollywood's communists or communist sympathisers. Famous people like Elia Kazan, the theatre and film director, did name names, which caused great disruption in their working relationships. For example, Kazan worked a lot with Arthur Miller, and after he named names, Miller refused to work with Kazan again. When Elia Kazan was given a lifetime achievement Oscar, people like Ed Harris and Nick Nolte were sitting on their hands, not clapping and looking stony-faced. Outside, people like Abraham Polonsky, the writer-director, and Walter Bernstein, the writer, were protesting about giving a lifetime achievement Oscar to someone who had named names and destroyed the careers of many of their friends and work associates.
BG: Yeah, I watched that ceremony with Ed Harris and Nick Nolte on YouTube years ago. Totally awkward. Anyway, let's move on to the films you selected for the program.
AW: One of the key films we chose for the season was 'Serpico' from 1973. It's directed by Sidney Lumet, with a stellar performance by Al Pacino. But what people may not know is that the first early drafts of the screenplay were written by Waldo Salt, who had been blacklisted. Another film we selected was 'Midnight Cowboy' from 1969. It's really the film that brought Waldo Salt back into focus. He had made a couple of other films after his blacklist, notably 'Taurus Bulba' from 1962. But he was unhappy with those kinds of adventure films and wanted to do something more weighty. When John Schlesinger and Jerome Hellman were looking for someone to adapt the novel, it was Waldo Salt who found a way to do that.
BG: Midnight Cowboy is a great film, but why is it a key film for this program?
AW: It is still the first X-rated film to win the Best Film Oscar. Waldo Salt was also rewarded with an Oscar for his work on the film. This seemed to be an important film, emblematic of the new Hollywood and its challenging ideas. I wanted to highlight that Waldo Salt, who suffered from the blacklist era, was able to contribute to the progressive politics of a film like 'Midnight Cowboy.'
BG: Tell us more about the movie 'Uptight.' I've never heard of it.
AW: 'Uptight' is an interesting example among the films in the season. It's much lesser known than 'Serpico' or 'Midnight Cowboy.' It's directed by Jules Dassin, who was also blacklisted in the early 1950s. He moved to Europe and rebuilt his career there, known for 'Rififi.' 'Uptight' was the first film he made back in America. It's an adaptation of the same novel that John Ford adapted for 'The Informer' in the 1930s. Jules Dassin, who suffered from the blacklist, I think was interested in this idea of the guilt at the core of this film.
BG: And there were political shenanigans going on behind the scenes, is that right?
AW: It's a fascinating film, but the making of the film is also really interesting. Shot in Cleveland, there was so much tension among the extras that they had to take the production back to Los Angeles. The FBI reportedly tried to get people working on the film to inform them about the politics of the film. Jules Dassin takes the setting from Ireland and the IRA of the original novel and places it into the Black Power movement in Cleveland in the late 1960s. It's a fascinating film.
BG: Black Power, the IRA. What else do you have lined up?
AW: Yes, another film that focused on the Black experience in America and had a contribution from someone blacklisted is 'Claudine.' It's a much smaller, quieter film set in Harlem around a single mother played by Diahann Carroll. She meets a well-meaning garbage man played by James Earl Jones, and they try to make a go of things in 1974. The film is directed by John Berry, who had been blacklisted and went on to work on this film. It's an important historical film, I think, and has been a little forgotten.
BG: A film that hasn't been forgotten, though, is Robert Altman's 'M*A*S*H.'
AW: 'M*A*S*H' is another familiar film in the season. It's remembered for breaking Robert Altman and introducing his filmmaking style, with sound and image combining in a unique way. For this season, 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist,' I wanted to focus on the screenwriter of 'M*A*S*H,’ Ring Lardner Jr. He had been one of the Hollywood 10, one of the first victims of the blacklist.
BG: Why is Ring Lardner Jr.'s work on 'M*A*S*H’ so important?
AW: Ring Lardner Jr.'s contribution was vital to 'M*A*S*H.’ He brings progressive politics and attempts to portray the horrors of war. It also looks forward to the cynicism of the 1970s. 'M*A*S*H’ is one of the great anti-war movies. America was still in the thrall of Vietnam in 1970, and I don't think anybody needed any pushing to relate the film to the Vietnam reality that many Americans were experiencing.
BG: And you focus on a particular female actor in your program as well, don't you?
AW: Yes, I didn't want to focus only on writers. I included Hal Ashby's 1975 film 'Shampoo,' which is set in the late 1960s and is about the excesses and vanity of America during that period. It features a standout performance by Lee Grant, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lee Grant had been an actor who, in the 1950s, was on the cusp of real fame but was blacklisted. She reappeared in the 1960s in films like 'The Heat of the Night' and was nominated for an Oscar for 'The Landlord.' Lee Grant is a great example of how an actor can come back from the blacklist and reestablish themselves at the centre of the Hollywood film industry during the Hollywood Renaissance.
BG: Hollywood, the dream factory with nightmare working conditions.
AW: The Hollywood film industry sees itself as the dream factory, offering a particular version of society as the aspirational one we should seek out. The Hollywood blacklist era shows that when people were writing other versions of potential future societies or contemporary societies that weren't supported by the capitalist studios, they were quick to act and marginalise those people. Let's hope there are writers, directors, actors, and musicians willing to offer alternatives and challenge the status quo.
BG: Great stuff, Andy. It's always healthy to end with a clenched fist in the air. It's been a pleasure having you on the show, and I wish you the best of luck with 'Look Who's Back: The Hollywood Renaissance and the Blacklist.' This has been the UK desk for Arts Express, and I've been Brett Gregory. Cheers.
BOOK REVIEW
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
August 2023
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
August 2023
Review Start: 38 minutes 48 seconds
One of the joys of this academic monograph is that it reminds us that the field of cinema studies, through the macro lens of research, theory and perspective, can introduce us to narratives of knowledge, understanding and experience which stretch far beyond the edges of the screen.
Here John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of 21st century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for.
The United Kingdom is ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’ wrote Disraeli about the ruling class and the working class in his novel Sybil in 1845.
One hundred years later, between 1945 and the late 1970s, Professor Pat Thane argues that, following three successful decades of the Welfare State and its free provision of healthcare, education, housing, living allowances and state pensions, the chasm of quality and quantity of life between the rich and poor actually began to narrow.
This truly egalitarian post-war relationship between the nation and its citizens – a social contract intrinsically binding one another to a shared sense of security, belonging and liberty – turned out to be, tragically, just a fleeting dalliance however when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power, a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s, The Constitution of Liberty, tucked away in her handbag.
Most memorably, under the direction of her Conservative government, the British state –the police, the judiciary and the right-wing press – launched a vicious, vindictive and ultimately victorious assault upon what they perceived to be their biggest obstacle to socio-economic progress: the democratic entitlements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. In turn, by way of the newly formulated Trade Union Act in 1984, every member of every other trade union up and down the country shuddered.
This once-in-a-lifetime lightning war left mining communities decimated across the North of England in particular. Furthermore, the fuse of ‘fast-burn capitalism’ had been lit and an unceasing bonfire of workers’ rights and protections began to rage. As cherished public services such as British Gas and British Telecom were packaged and privatised throughout the 1980s, the neoliberalist deforestation of the British way of life commenced.
Now in the first quarter of the 21st century the UK workforce, unable to hear itself speak above the incessant beat of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and convenience, has been gifted one of the postmodern wonders of the world: the gig economy.
As White explores in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You from 2019, Orwellian cyber-Squealers would have us believe that this new-fangled way of working is going to make entrepreneurs of us all, liberating us from silly distractions such as time-keeping, lunch breaks and rest, as well as stupid administrative chores like sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay and a pension. Moreover, we are reassured that it isn’t just delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and online strippers who can benefit from this cornucopia of late stage capitalism: lecturers, journalists and registered nurses, to name but a few, are all invited to the party as well.
These days many Britons, particularly the young adults I used to teach, reluctantly accept that we no longer live in a society at all but instead precariously function, hand-to-mouth, on the outskirts of a network of simulated marketplaces where absolutely everything is a commodity to buy or sell, manage or service: our labour, our time, our bodies, our dreams. According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, what we are experiencing here is called ‘the direct commodification of experience itself’.
While the mainstream British media continues to gawk at the peacocking of North American bazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as if their vanity, gluttony and hubris are something to aspire to, White cites Shoshana Zuboff’s solemn observation that around the world there are ‘concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history’.
Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom is the 5th richest nation in the world with $2.6 trillion in its coffers, but if this ranking is accurate then why in 2014 did Oxfam declare the five richest families in the country to be wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, i.e. 12.6 million people? Furthermore, why in 2020 was it reported by Health Equity in England that in some regions more than one child in two is growing up in poverty? Crucially, the academic broadcasters Lansley and Mack ask: why is Great Britain ‘one of the most unequal and socially fragile countries in the world today?’
Believe it or not, the official rationale behind these stark socio-economic inequalities was actually submitted to the British public on May 6th 2023 in the form of a £100 million multi-venue theatre production called ‘The Coronation of King Charles III’. The mise-en-scene for this historic live performance featured the full artillery of ancient and modern regalia, including the Diamond Jubilee State Coach at £3.2 million, St. Edward’s Crown at £45 million and, famously, the Sword of State at £500,000. In turn, an original signature soundtrack was composed by Lord Lloyd-Webber, a commemorative poem was scripted by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage CBE, and coronation costumes were designed by Bruce Oldfield OBE. Moreover, as good fortune would have it, the entire British Establishment was able to make itself available to serve as the supporting cast: prince and princesses, lords and ladies, political leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, all proudly draped in the nation’s traditional liveries of hereditary, exceptionalism and pomposity.
As stated in the title of John White’s rigorous and thought-provoking book, it is deep-seated divisions reinforced by institutions like the Royal Family which have defined the United Kingdom’s psyche, character, outlook and actions throughout the ages. Whether it is in terms of wealth, power or nationalism, social class, regionalism or education, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, there has always been an obsessive and oppressive belief in binary oppositions: ‘Here and There’, ‘Then and Now’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Self and Other’.
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from 2018 dramatises one of the most despicable events in the country’s political history. In 1819 over 60,000 working men, women and children gathered in Manchester at midday to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. By 2pm however they had been ruthlessly cut down by the sabres of the mounted 15th Hussars at the behest of wealthy landowner, factory owner and magistrate, William Hulton. 18 protestors were slain and 700 were maimed.
In the immediate aftermath of this massacre the British government, haunted by the ideological alternatives thrown up by the French Revolution 25 years earlier, was quick to enforce its sovereignty and suppress any further political dissent from the public. Draconian Acts of Parliament were hurried through in a manner which would cause our current Home Secretary and Tory ultra, Suella Braverman, to positively swoon. Attendance numbers at parish political meetings, for instance, were restricted; the judicial powers of magistrates trying the cases of reformers were expanded; and the taxes imposed on newspapers were increased so they became too expensive for ordinary people to buy.
Significantly however, strategies for surveillance and espionage were also endorsed by the authorities and pursued by a network of spies, informants and agent provocateurs in an effort to deny, or at least to undermine, the ability of the country’s citizenry to express, discuss or even understand their freedom to protest.
This may seem like some dusty cloak-and-dagger yarn from the distant past but, in order to illustrate how little the British State has evolved as a democratic entity over the last 200 years, White draws our attention to the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry which began in 2015. That is, quite incredibly, it has been revealed that serving Metropolitan police officers such as Mark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and/or Mark Flash) were instructed by their superiors between 2003 and 2010 to pose as political activists in order to infiltrate and surveil environmental campaign networks such as Climate Camp. In turn, with their superiors’ knowledge, a number of these police officers entered sexual relationships with female activists as a part of their undercover duties, even fathering children with them, before suddenly skulking back into the shadowy system from whence they came.
As Mike Leigh himself writes in the foreword to Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in 2018: ‘Despite the spread of universal suffrage across larger parts of the globe poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.’
The scope of John White’s meticulous research and diligent critical application can only be lightly brushed by the fingertips of this overeager review.
For example, in the 16th century we are led along the schism between women and men under patriarchy and Protestantism in Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). In the 20th century we revisit the genocide which defined the partitioning of India and Pakistan under Mountbatten’s rule in Viceroy’s House (Chadha, 2017). And, in the 21st century, we are urged to heed the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of globalised industrial farming that churn up our country’s ‘green and pleasant land’ in The Levelling (Leach, 2017) and Dark River (Barnard, 2017).
In conclusion, the United Kingdom can be seen to be a nation which stands divided upon an historical legacy of conflict, violence and oppression, fuelled by a fear of the masses, of the ‘Other’, of what they might think and of what they could do.
Following 13 years of Tory-led austerity cuts, the bigotry and bloodshed of Brexit, the crimes committed in the name of COVID and the current crippling cost-of-living crisis, thoughts about political reform and even revolt have begun to creep into the minds of ordinary, exhausted citizens, especially those who work in the public sector. It is hoped, at the very least, and in this particular context, that the commercialised conservatism which generally characterises the British film industry can be circumvented so more original feature films are able to harness and frame the real world hopes and fears of the country.
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.
Here John White unfurls an ambitious tapestry of five hundred years of history, politics, economics and culture as related to us by a selection of 21st century British feature films. Moreover, interweaving itself through their tall and terrible tales of wealth, poverty, love and war is a myth which millions of us still believe in today; a quaint oxymoron which tens of thousands are still prepared to die for.
The United Kingdom is ‘two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’ wrote Disraeli about the ruling class and the working class in his novel Sybil in 1845.
One hundred years later, between 1945 and the late 1970s, Professor Pat Thane argues that, following three successful decades of the Welfare State and its free provision of healthcare, education, housing, living allowances and state pensions, the chasm of quality and quantity of life between the rich and poor actually began to narrow.
This truly egalitarian post-war relationship between the nation and its citizens – a social contract intrinsically binding one another to a shared sense of security, belonging and liberty – turned out to be, tragically, just a fleeting dalliance however when in 1979 Margaret Thatcher came to power, a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s, The Constitution of Liberty, tucked away in her handbag.
Most memorably, under the direction of her Conservative government, the British state –the police, the judiciary and the right-wing press – launched a vicious, vindictive and ultimately victorious assault upon what they perceived to be their biggest obstacle to socio-economic progress: the democratic entitlements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the Miners’ Strike in 1984-85. In turn, by way of the newly formulated Trade Union Act in 1984, every member of every other trade union up and down the country shuddered.
This once-in-a-lifetime lightning war left mining communities decimated across the North of England in particular. Furthermore, the fuse of ‘fast-burn capitalism’ had been lit and an unceasing bonfire of workers’ rights and protections began to rage. As cherished public services such as British Gas and British Telecom were packaged and privatised throughout the 1980s, the neoliberalist deforestation of the British way of life commenced.
Now in the first quarter of the 21st century the UK workforce, unable to hear itself speak above the incessant beat of global competitiveness, productivity, efficiency and convenience, has been gifted one of the postmodern wonders of the world: the gig economy.
As White explores in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You from 2019, Orwellian cyber-Squealers would have us believe that this new-fangled way of working is going to make entrepreneurs of us all, liberating us from silly distractions such as time-keeping, lunch breaks and rest, as well as stupid administrative chores like sick pay, holiday pay, redundancy pay and a pension. Moreover, we are reassured that it isn’t just delivery drivers, warehouse operatives and online strippers who can benefit from this cornucopia of late stage capitalism: lecturers, journalists and registered nurses, to name but a few, are all invited to the party as well.
These days many Britons, particularly the young adults I used to teach, reluctantly accept that we no longer live in a society at all but instead precariously function, hand-to-mouth, on the outskirts of a network of simulated marketplaces where absolutely everything is a commodity to buy or sell, manage or service: our labour, our time, our bodies, our dreams. According to the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, what we are experiencing here is called ‘the direct commodification of experience itself’.
While the mainstream British media continues to gawk at the peacocking of North American bazillionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, as if their vanity, gluttony and hubris are something to aspire to, White cites Shoshana Zuboff’s solemn observation that around the world there are ‘concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history’.
Indeed, according to the International Monetary Fund, the United Kingdom is the 5th richest nation in the world with $2.6 trillion in its coffers, but if this ranking is accurate then why in 2014 did Oxfam declare the five richest families in the country to be wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population, i.e. 12.6 million people? Furthermore, why in 2020 was it reported by Health Equity in England that in some regions more than one child in two is growing up in poverty? Crucially, the academic broadcasters Lansley and Mack ask: why is Great Britain ‘one of the most unequal and socially fragile countries in the world today?’
Believe it or not, the official rationale behind these stark socio-economic inequalities was actually submitted to the British public on May 6th 2023 in the form of a £100 million multi-venue theatre production called ‘The Coronation of King Charles III’. The mise-en-scene for this historic live performance featured the full artillery of ancient and modern regalia, including the Diamond Jubilee State Coach at £3.2 million, St. Edward’s Crown at £45 million and, famously, the Sword of State at £500,000. In turn, an original signature soundtrack was composed by Lord Lloyd-Webber, a commemorative poem was scripted by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage CBE, and coronation costumes were designed by Bruce Oldfield OBE. Moreover, as good fortune would have it, the entire British Establishment was able to make itself available to serve as the supporting cast: prince and princesses, lords and ladies, political leaders, military leaders, religious leaders, all proudly draped in the nation’s traditional liveries of hereditary, exceptionalism and pomposity.
As stated in the title of John White’s rigorous and thought-provoking book, it is deep-seated divisions reinforced by institutions like the Royal Family which have defined the United Kingdom’s psyche, character, outlook and actions throughout the ages. Whether it is in terms of wealth, power or nationalism, social class, regionalism or education, gender, ethnicity or sexuality, there has always been an obsessive and oppressive belief in binary oppositions: ‘Here and There’, ‘Then and Now’, ‘Us and Them’, ‘Self and Other’.
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo from 2018 dramatises one of the most despicable events in the country’s political history. In 1819 over 60,000 working men, women and children gathered in Manchester at midday to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. By 2pm however they had been ruthlessly cut down by the sabres of the mounted 15th Hussars at the behest of wealthy landowner, factory owner and magistrate, William Hulton. 18 protestors were slain and 700 were maimed.
In the immediate aftermath of this massacre the British government, haunted by the ideological alternatives thrown up by the French Revolution 25 years earlier, was quick to enforce its sovereignty and suppress any further political dissent from the public. Draconian Acts of Parliament were hurried through in a manner which would cause our current Home Secretary and Tory ultra, Suella Braverman, to positively swoon. Attendance numbers at parish political meetings, for instance, were restricted; the judicial powers of magistrates trying the cases of reformers were expanded; and the taxes imposed on newspapers were increased so they became too expensive for ordinary people to buy.
Significantly however, strategies for surveillance and espionage were also endorsed by the authorities and pursued by a network of spies, informants and agent provocateurs in an effort to deny, or at least to undermine, the ability of the country’s citizenry to express, discuss or even understand their freedom to protest.
This may seem like some dusty cloak-and-dagger yarn from the distant past but, in order to illustrate how little the British State has evolved as a democratic entity over the last 200 years, White draws our attention to the ongoing Undercover Policing Inquiry which began in 2015. That is, quite incredibly, it has been revealed that serving Metropolitan police officers such as Mark Kennedy (also known as Mark Stone and/or Mark Flash) were instructed by their superiors between 2003 and 2010 to pose as political activists in order to infiltrate and surveil environmental campaign networks such as Climate Camp. In turn, with their superiors’ knowledge, a number of these police officers entered sexual relationships with female activists as a part of their undercover duties, even fathering children with them, before suddenly skulking back into the shadowy system from whence they came.
As Mike Leigh himself writes in the foreword to Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre in 2018: ‘Despite the spread of universal suffrage across larger parts of the globe poverty, inequality, suppression of press freedom, indiscriminate surveillance and attacks on legitimate protest by brutal regimes are all on the rise.’
The scope of John White’s meticulous research and diligent critical application can only be lightly brushed by the fingertips of this overeager review.
For example, in the 16th century we are led along the schism between women and men under patriarchy and Protestantism in Mary Queen of Scots (Rourke, 2018). In the 20th century we revisit the genocide which defined the partitioning of India and Pakistan under Mountbatten’s rule in Viceroy’s House (Chadha, 2017). And, in the 21st century, we are urged to heed the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of globalised industrial farming that churn up our country’s ‘green and pleasant land’ in The Levelling (Leach, 2017) and Dark River (Barnard, 2017).
In conclusion, the United Kingdom can be seen to be a nation which stands divided upon an historical legacy of conflict, violence and oppression, fuelled by a fear of the masses, of the ‘Other’, of what they might think and of what they could do.
Following 13 years of Tory-led austerity cuts, the bigotry and bloodshed of Brexit, the crimes committed in the name of COVID and the current crippling cost-of-living crisis, thoughts about political reform and even revolt have begun to creep into the minds of ordinary, exhausted citizens, especially those who work in the public sector. It is hoped, at the very least, and in this particular context, that the commercialised conservatism which generally characterises the British film industry can be circumvented so more original feature films are able to harness and frame the real world hopes and fears of the country.
John White’s ‘British Cinema and a Divided Nation’ makes you feel strangely patriotic, that through passion, persistence and protest there is still something worth fighting for. As a result, it is highly recommended.
This review originally appeared in Counterfire in August 2023.
BOOK REVIEW
Jeremy Carr's 'Kubrick and Control’ (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
July 2023
Jeremy Carr's 'Kubrick and Control’ (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
By Brett Gregory
July 2023
Interview Start: 36 minutes 50 seconds
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Carr ‘Kubrick and Control: Authority, Order and Independence in the Films and Working Life of Stanley Kubrick’ (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
by Brett Gregory
Like many eager teenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the Gilded Age of VHS in the 1980s, you genuinely felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving and the uncanny ominously unfold.
The absolute exactness of everything on screen, in concert with the hypnotic electronic orchestration by Wendy Carlos, drenched with such doom and dread, overwhelmed and compelled you to return to its psychopathy again and again until, without knowing it, you had soon learned the dialogue verbatim as if it was a lyric from some obscure prog-rock album entitled ‘Grand Guignol’.
Jeremy Carr’s comprehensive hagiography of Stanley Kubrick’s career of creative compulsions and authorial control conjures up many, many youthful memories such as this and, as a consequence, it is a must-read for anyone who pines for the serious aesthetics of mainstream cinema to return.
Kubrick first began to learn to ‘direct his subjects, to control light and shade, to understand lenses, composition, exposure, and balance within the frame’ as a precocious 17 year old staff photographer working for Look magazine in New York between 1946 and 1950. According to Dr James Fenwick, ‘[he] seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine … [attempting] to broaden his autonomy … [and] invest his own personality into his work.’
Onwards and this competitive attitude and approach to producing cinema with distinct authority was helped and honed throughout the 1950s by way of the chess matches he played against the regulars in Washington Square in the shade or under street lamps; a meticulous métier which he would introduce to the cast and crew on the movie sets he was later to govern. As the director himself explains in John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1998), if chess had any relationship to filmmaking ‘it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’
Day of the Fight became Kubrick’s first motion picture at the age of 23, a 16 minute black-and-white documentary which follows Irish-American middleweight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares to fight Bobby James on April 17, 1950. Here, in between the staging and the spit, the uppercuts and the close-ups, Carr identifies the shadow of a leitmotif which would eventually loom over the director’s entire oeuvre: the driven man.
In The Killing in 1956, for instance, his first proper studio picture for United Artists, veteran ex-con, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), strides across the screen as he confidently describes to his fiancée the herd of hoodlums he is about to corral with the sole purpose of pulling off a daring $2 million robbery at the racetrack.
In turn, in 1957 Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) can be seen in Paths of Glory to be a character cut from the same thick cloth, single-minded in his lofty and loquacious attempts to hold the French military command to account as he defends three soldiers who have been arbitrarily accused of cowardice during World War I.
Crucially, this incipient interpretation of the masculine desire to confront, combat and conquer – against the odds, against authority, against nature, against destiny – famously evolved into Kirk Douglas’ portrayal of the titular militant messiah in Universal Pictures’ Spartacus in 1960. This sword and sandal saga about a humble gladiator rising up to lead the largest ever slave revolt against the imperious Roman Republic was the most expensive and prestigious film production Kubrick had helmed. Furthermore, its subsequent commercial and cultural success helped to solidify his own personal and professional ambitions to be recognised as a leading figure within the industry, a true American auteur.
As Carr explains:
He was at the mercy of an egotistical group of actors (heavyweights Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton bickering with each other and questioning the authority of this young filmmaker), an equally obsessive producer/lead performer (Kirk Douglas), and the constraints dictated by a film of this size and scope.
This said, as Peter Kramer continues:
[Spartacus] established him as an important player in Hollywood … [enabling] him to negotiate with financiers and distributors from a position of strength so that from then on he could produce medium- to big-budget films … yet made without much interference from them.
The male drive to succeed however is not enough in itself. Such a raw and potentially ruinous emotion needs discipline, direction and order if it is to achieve its aims effectively, reach its destination intact and claim its prize. As a consequence, iconographic tropes such as maps, plans and/or schematics, either handmade or technological, often feature prominently in Kubrick’s mise-en-scène as a visual connotation of the characters’ need for organisation, method and control.
In his first production shot in colour, for example, the 30 minute promotional documentary The Seafarers from 1953, he explores how the Seafarers International Union in Maryland recruits and regulates its mariners, fishermen and boatmen before they work the oceans. To illustrate the scope and influence of this huge endeavour Kubrick pans across a large world map as the narrator asserts: ‘Antwerp, Cape Town, London, Marseilles, Singapore … You name it: picking his destination is the right of every Seafarer.’
More memorably of course is the mesmeric overhead push-in on the scale model of the hedge maze in The Shining in 1980. Restless in the reception hall of the Overlook Hotel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leans over and into it like a disturbed divisional general surveying his battle plans for the next day as his wife and son appear superimposed like mere insects, happily oblivious that they are wandering through a metaphor for their patriarch’s decaying mind.
Indeed, Carr reiterates this recurring Kubrickian conceit in his epilogue when he cites the screenplay for Napoleon, the unrealised biographical epic which many critics agree would have proved to have been the director’s raison d'être, the totality of his cinematic aesthetic:
Scene 31: INT—NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ—DAY
Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.
In line with his increased production budgets, abilities and aspirations Kubrick advanced his ruminations on order, control and power considerably with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971. On the one hand these three films can be seen to mirror the theoretical work carried out by one of his 1960s contemporaries, Marshall McLuhan, in terms of technology serving as an extension of man: his physicality, his consciousness, his ethics and his will. And, on the other, it could be argued that they also echo Karl Marx’s position in the 19th century with regards to technological determinism and the hegemonic role this plays in the socio-economic relations and cultural practices of wider society.
For example, the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove is heaving with ‘a smorgasbord of lights, switches, maps, gauges, radars, and guides’ as it transports a hydrogen bomb to its intended Soviet target. The message from the military to the body politic is very loud and clear: Everything is under control. We have the technology. God bless America.
With the incomparable 2001: A Space Odyssey the audience, and cinema itself, are invited to take a giant leap forwards as Kubrick propels us from the prehistoric broken bones of homicidal Hominids and into the nervous system of the spacecraft Discovery: its intricate network of hibernation pods and plasma pipes, scanners and closed-circuit cameras all interconnected and centralised within the mainframe brain of HAL, the supercomputer whose sole duty is to transport the crew to Jupiter to investigate an alien radio signal. We can only assume that, hypothetically, if this fully-funded, interplanetary mission is successful then it would surely herald the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialism out of this world and throughout the cosmos.
Returning to earth with A Clockwork Orange Kubrick explicitly intertwines technology and hegemony by way of the Ludovico Technique, a state-sponsored behavioural aversion procedure which is tested on one desperate experimental subject: the untamed, ultra-violent rapist droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Here scientific research, knowledge and needles are employed by the British Ministry of the Interior to physically inculcate self-control and conclusively cure him of his own destructive free will. The treatment leaves working-class Alex meek and defenceless and, against our better judgement, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for him. Prof. Philip Kuberski argues however that the film’s narrative should not be regarded as a defence of free will at all but instead as a reminder to the audience that we are also ‘conditioned in some way or another’ and the day-to-day freedoms we think we enjoy are just an ‘illusion’.
With this in mind we can thus posit that Kubrick’s driven men, whether they know it or not, are also suffering from a similar existential crisis. That is, their desire to confront, combat and conquer is just that, a desire, and not a logical decision which they are able to make. As a result, their attempts to control and direct their impulses with plans, maps or technology are ultimately unsustainable due to the impermanence and vicissitudes of the wider world, the people within it and the forces in between. Thus, their turbulent and tragic character arcs can only lead their sense of purpose, and their sense of self, to overexposure, disorder and defeat.
In Lolita in 1962, for instance, the upstanding university lecturer Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is ultimately undone by his illicit infatuation with the 14 year old Dolores Haze, deliriously dissolving into ‘a mere shell of himself, totally out of control and forcibly subdued by … hospital staff’.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), the self-serving 18th century Irish scoundrel and gambler in Barry Lyndon in 1975, swears that he will never ‘fall from the rank of a gentleman’ but, inevitably, he comes tumbling down the social ladder following a messy duel against his stepson where he loses his leg and is banished from England forever.
Then there is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) who, in Full Metal Jacket in 1986, humiliates and belittles his squad of new recruits, stripping them, one by one, of their egos and their dignity in order to transform them into marines, into killing machines who are ‘ready to eat their own guts and ask for seconds’. It is ironic that this brutal training regime proves to be more successful than anyone could of imagined when, during one sleepy evening, the maligned and malfunctioning Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) executes Hartman, his nemesis, with a bullet to the chest.
As can be seen nearly all of the male protagonists mentioned are leaders and/or patriarchs who, while memorably constructed and beautifully performed, are also narcissistic, naïve, deluded and alone. Consequently, one critical lesson we can learn from Stanley Kubrick’s exceptional oeuvre, as well as from Jeremy Carr’s fine book, it is that as audience members and as mindful citizens we should always be extremely careful about the kind of men we choose to bestow authority, control and power upon in political, corporate and cultural life.
Brett Gregory is an independent screenwriter, director and producer based in Manchester (UK). His critically acclaimed debut feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ is currently available in the US and UK on Amazon Prime.
Email: brett@seriousfeather.com
Jeremy Carr ‘Kubrick and Control: Authority, Order and Independence in the Films and Working Life of Stanley Kubrick’ (Liverpool University Press, 2023)
by Brett Gregory
Like many eager teenagers who found themselves sleepless and cinephilic during the Gilded Age of VHS in the 1980s, you genuinely felt the presence of the director of The Shining at your shoulder as you sat alone in the living room and watched his vision of the unfamiliar, the unnerving and the uncanny ominously unfold.
The absolute exactness of everything on screen, in concert with the hypnotic electronic orchestration by Wendy Carlos, drenched with such doom and dread, overwhelmed and compelled you to return to its psychopathy again and again until, without knowing it, you had soon learned the dialogue verbatim as if it was a lyric from some obscure prog-rock album entitled ‘Grand Guignol’.
Jeremy Carr’s comprehensive hagiography of Stanley Kubrick’s career of creative compulsions and authorial control conjures up many, many youthful memories such as this and, as a consequence, it is a must-read for anyone who pines for the serious aesthetics of mainstream cinema to return.
Kubrick first began to learn to ‘direct his subjects, to control light and shade, to understand lenses, composition, exposure, and balance within the frame’ as a precocious 17 year old staff photographer working for Look magazine in New York between 1946 and 1950. According to Dr James Fenwick, ‘[he] seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine … [attempting] to broaden his autonomy … [and] invest his own personality into his work.’
Onwards and this competitive attitude and approach to producing cinema with distinct authority was helped and honed throughout the 1950s by way of the chess matches he played against the regulars in Washington Square in the shade or under street lamps; a meticulous métier which he would introduce to the cast and crew on the movie sets he was later to govern. As the director himself explains in John Baxter’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (1998), if chess had any relationship to filmmaking ‘it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.’
Day of the Fight became Kubrick’s first motion picture at the age of 23, a 16 minute black-and-white documentary which follows Irish-American middleweight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares to fight Bobby James on April 17, 1950. Here, in between the staging and the spit, the uppercuts and the close-ups, Carr identifies the shadow of a leitmotif which would eventually loom over the director’s entire oeuvre: the driven man.
In The Killing in 1956, for instance, his first proper studio picture for United Artists, veteran ex-con, Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), strides across the screen as he confidently describes to his fiancée the herd of hoodlums he is about to corral with the sole purpose of pulling off a daring $2 million robbery at the racetrack.
In turn, in 1957 Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) can be seen in Paths of Glory to be a character cut from the same thick cloth, single-minded in his lofty and loquacious attempts to hold the French military command to account as he defends three soldiers who have been arbitrarily accused of cowardice during World War I.
Crucially, this incipient interpretation of the masculine desire to confront, combat and conquer – against the odds, against authority, against nature, against destiny – famously evolved into Kirk Douglas’ portrayal of the titular militant messiah in Universal Pictures’ Spartacus in 1960. This sword and sandal saga about a humble gladiator rising up to lead the largest ever slave revolt against the imperious Roman Republic was the most expensive and prestigious film production Kubrick had helmed. Furthermore, its subsequent commercial and cultural success helped to solidify his own personal and professional ambitions to be recognised as a leading figure within the industry, a true American auteur.
As Carr explains:
He was at the mercy of an egotistical group of actors (heavyweights Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton bickering with each other and questioning the authority of this young filmmaker), an equally obsessive producer/lead performer (Kirk Douglas), and the constraints dictated by a film of this size and scope.
This said, as Peter Kramer continues:
[Spartacus] established him as an important player in Hollywood … [enabling] him to negotiate with financiers and distributors from a position of strength so that from then on he could produce medium- to big-budget films … yet made without much interference from them.
The male drive to succeed however is not enough in itself. Such a raw and potentially ruinous emotion needs discipline, direction and order if it is to achieve its aims effectively, reach its destination intact and claim its prize. As a consequence, iconographic tropes such as maps, plans and/or schematics, either handmade or technological, often feature prominently in Kubrick’s mise-en-scène as a visual connotation of the characters’ need for organisation, method and control.
In his first production shot in colour, for example, the 30 minute promotional documentary The Seafarers from 1953, he explores how the Seafarers International Union in Maryland recruits and regulates its mariners, fishermen and boatmen before they work the oceans. To illustrate the scope and influence of this huge endeavour Kubrick pans across a large world map as the narrator asserts: ‘Antwerp, Cape Town, London, Marseilles, Singapore … You name it: picking his destination is the right of every Seafarer.’
More memorably of course is the mesmeric overhead push-in on the scale model of the hedge maze in The Shining in 1980. Restless in the reception hall of the Overlook Hotel Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) leans over and into it like a disturbed divisional general surveying his battle plans for the next day as his wife and son appear superimposed like mere insects, happily oblivious that they are wandering through a metaphor for their patriarch’s decaying mind.
Indeed, Carr reiterates this recurring Kubrickian conceit in his epilogue when he cites the screenplay for Napoleon, the unrealised biographical epic which many critics agree would have proved to have been the director’s raison d'être, the totality of his cinematic aesthetic:
Scene 31: INT—NAPOLEON’S PARIS HQ—DAY
Pencil between his teeth, dividers in one hand, [Napoleon] creeps around on hands and knees on top of a very large map of Italy, laid out from wall to wall. Other large maps cover the table, the couch and any other available space.
In line with his increased production budgets, abilities and aspirations Kubrick advanced his ruminations on order, control and power considerably with Dr. Strangelove in 1964, 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971. On the one hand these three films can be seen to mirror the theoretical work carried out by one of his 1960s contemporaries, Marshall McLuhan, in terms of technology serving as an extension of man: his physicality, his consciousness, his ethics and his will. And, on the other, it could be argued that they also echo Karl Marx’s position in the 19th century with regards to technological determinism and the hegemonic role this plays in the socio-economic relations and cultural practices of wider society.
For example, the cockpit of the B-52 in Dr. Strangelove is heaving with ‘a smorgasbord of lights, switches, maps, gauges, radars, and guides’ as it transports a hydrogen bomb to its intended Soviet target. The message from the military to the body politic is very loud and clear: Everything is under control. We have the technology. God bless America.
With the incomparable 2001: A Space Odyssey the audience, and cinema itself, are invited to take a giant leap forwards as Kubrick propels us from the prehistoric broken bones of homicidal Hominids and into the nervous system of the spacecraft Discovery: its intricate network of hibernation pods and plasma pipes, scanners and closed-circuit cameras all interconnected and centralised within the mainframe brain of HAL, the supercomputer whose sole duty is to transport the crew to Jupiter to investigate an alien radio signal. We can only assume that, hypothetically, if this fully-funded, interplanetary mission is successful then it would surely herald the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialism out of this world and throughout the cosmos.
Returning to earth with A Clockwork Orange Kubrick explicitly intertwines technology and hegemony by way of the Ludovico Technique, a state-sponsored behavioural aversion procedure which is tested on one desperate experimental subject: the untamed, ultra-violent rapist droog, Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Here scientific research, knowledge and needles are employed by the British Ministry of the Interior to physically inculcate self-control and conclusively cure him of his own destructive free will. The treatment leaves working-class Alex meek and defenceless and, against our better judgement, we are encouraged to feel sympathy for him. Prof. Philip Kuberski argues however that the film’s narrative should not be regarded as a defence of free will at all but instead as a reminder to the audience that we are also ‘conditioned in some way or another’ and the day-to-day freedoms we think we enjoy are just an ‘illusion’.
With this in mind we can thus posit that Kubrick’s driven men, whether they know it or not, are also suffering from a similar existential crisis. That is, their desire to confront, combat and conquer is just that, a desire, and not a logical decision which they are able to make. As a result, their attempts to control and direct their impulses with plans, maps or technology are ultimately unsustainable due to the impermanence and vicissitudes of the wider world, the people within it and the forces in between. Thus, their turbulent and tragic character arcs can only lead their sense of purpose, and their sense of self, to overexposure, disorder and defeat.
In Lolita in 1962, for instance, the upstanding university lecturer Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is ultimately undone by his illicit infatuation with the 14 year old Dolores Haze, deliriously dissolving into ‘a mere shell of himself, totally out of control and forcibly subdued by … hospital staff’.
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal), the self-serving 18th century Irish scoundrel and gambler in Barry Lyndon in 1975, swears that he will never ‘fall from the rank of a gentleman’ but, inevitably, he comes tumbling down the social ladder following a messy duel against his stepson where he loses his leg and is banished from England forever.
Then there is Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) who, in Full Metal Jacket in 1986, humiliates and belittles his squad of new recruits, stripping them, one by one, of their egos and their dignity in order to transform them into marines, into killing machines who are ‘ready to eat their own guts and ask for seconds’. It is ironic that this brutal training regime proves to be more successful than anyone could of imagined when, during one sleepy evening, the maligned and malfunctioning Private Pyle (Vincent D'Onofrio) executes Hartman, his nemesis, with a bullet to the chest.
As can be seen nearly all of the male protagonists mentioned are leaders and/or patriarchs who, while memorably constructed and beautifully performed, are also narcissistic, naïve, deluded and alone. Consequently, one critical lesson we can learn from Stanley Kubrick’s exceptional oeuvre, as well as from Jeremy Carr’s fine book, it is that as audience members and as mindful citizens we should always be extremely careful about the kind of men we choose to bestow authority, control and power upon in political, corporate and cultural life.
Brett Gregory is an independent screenwriter, director and producer based in Manchester (UK). His critically acclaimed debut feature film, ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ is currently available in the US and UK on Amazon Prime.
Email: brett@seriousfeather.com
Interview: Wickermania
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Chris Nunn, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Birmingham (UK)
July 2023
With Brett Gregory, UK Desk for Arts Express on WBAI-FM Radio (New York) and Dr. Chris Nunn, Associate Professor of Film at the University of Birmingham (UK)
July 2023
Interview Start: 2 minutes 34 seconds
Interview Transcript
Introduction
The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodwood, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, was released in 1973. It was directed by Robin Hardy, written by Anthony Shaffer and produced by Peter Snell. A seemingly simple story about a police officer searching for a missing schoolgirl on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, it is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema. A mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness itself: its past, its present and its people; its conservatism, its paganism and its radicalism; its habits, its hopes and its horrors.
Full Interview
BG: My name’s Brett Gregory, and here at the UK desk for Arts Express we have a very special guest with us this evening who is currently working on a project which, incredibly, is about to add another layer of meaning to this stone-cold classic film, another perspective and another dimension.
CN: So, my name is Chris Nunn. I am an assistant professor of film at the University of Birmingham, and I am the producer of an upcoming feature documentary currently called Wickermania. It follows two half-brothers who are the sons of the original director of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy. So we follow Justin and Dominic as they try to understand their father – who they both had a slightly problematic relationship with – through his cult film and actually end up, perhaps, finding each other instead.
BG: That's a totally unique angle. So why now?
CN: The 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man is why we started this project. It's taken on its own characteristics and has moved quite organically in the direction that it has, but it's still very much tied to the fact that we're still talking about this film 50 years later.
BG: In your role as producer on this particular project, what's your approach?
CN: My main duties in that role are quite interesting, really, in this context, because I keep calling myself a sort of creative producer as opposed to the producer who sort of finds money and schedules everything. I have found some money, which has been mildly useful, but I have not really done schedules and, you know, spreadsheets and other things. It's been much more about having an overview of what the film is; an overview of how it might come to fruition, etc., etc.
BG: And it's still a work in progress at the moment. What's the footage like?
CN: The film is working best when the brothers are literally standing where their father stood. We have some wonderful footage in Scotland of the brothers at this at the remaining stumps of the Wicker Man, and footage of Robin Hardy in the same place, and it resonates.
BG: So the production is starting to take its own course?
CN: Originally, when we started the project, I would have said that it was targeted at people who are fans of The Wicker Man. The longer we go on the more I think it's actually a very personal documentary, an almost therapy film, which is for anyone, really, who has a family.
BG: Related to that, what's this I hear about family heirlooms being hidden in the attic?
CN: We are using some newly discovered original sources, which are papers from Robin Hardy's study during the production of The Wicker Man, and the years preceding it and about a year afterwards. So, letters, photographs … and they tell a very interesting story. They tell the story from Hardy's perspective, which I don't think we've particularly had. Alan Brown's book on The Wicker Man sort of seemed to privilege Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter's perspective. So, it's quite nice, really, to be looking through these documents and going, ‘Ah, right, so there were all these people saying Hardy was a terrible director, but what were his experiences?’ And there are a few letters in there that give us a sort of insight into that.
BG: So history is being rewritten? Sounds like there's much more to this, though.
CN: From my best understanding, unfortunately, when The Wicker Man bombed at the box office, Robin Hardy left his family, which is a key moment in our film, and left his then-wife Caroline, Justin's mother, with a huge amount of debts, in excess we think of kind of £600,000 in today's money. So, they had to sell their house. They moved, and I think it's the house they moved to, is where the materials were just put in the loft and clearly left in the loft and had sat there fairly authentically for about the last 50 years until someone wrote to Justin saying, I found all the stuff. Do you want it, or shall I burn it?’ [LAUGHS] And as Justin recounts every time we do an interview about this, he very nearly said, ‘Well, burn it. I don't want anything to do with this.’ And, indeed, when you see the film you will start to understand why.
BG: Total drama. You gotta tell us a bit more, Chris.
CN: So they don't know each other very well as brothers, I guess. They didn't grow up together, and they've come together to be academics again. Justin is a lecturer at University College, London, and Dominic is at the University of Quebec, Montreal, as a professor of Art History. And, of course, I'm an academic too, so this is a very academic lead film, which is appreciating the value of having new primary sources to base a narrative around and, I suppose, the brothers have discovered through those primary sources just what an impact The Wicker Man had on their family, on Robin Hardy's health, on Robin Hardy's finances, but really by extension on the finances of the Hardy household, and particularly Justin's mother, Caroline. And I would be lying if I said that hasn't been a very painful process for them. That again, I suppose my role on this film is to be as objective as possible, given the subjectivity that arises when the brothers interact with each other and get talking. So there are some emotional, very emotional moments in the film.
BG: Sounds like it. Pretty heavy. So what role is the University of Birmingham playing in all this?
CN: Justin and I had worked originally together at the University of Greenwich in London, and when I moved to the University of Birmingham, there was a sense that we could – as many universities can these days – actually pull together a feature doc using the resources that we have, using, you know, whatever kit that the university possesses and, indeed, whatever talent the university possesses. And this is how we've been able to put this film together on a very small amount of money. Again, down the track, we hope to sell it, make some money, and indeed pay all the fabulous people who've worked with us.
BG: Is that the end goal, or is there more?
CN: The end goal is tricky, really, it's bigger than the film. The film feels like a catalyst for further discussions, part of which is the legacy of The Wicker Man, but part of which is also looking at that kind of independent filmmaking landscape. You know, kind of appreciating The Wicker Man as a radical text, Robin Hardy, in his cult film here, as a radical first-time feature director. At the time when The Wicker Man was reviewed in 1973 it was really well-received by critics, saying this is what British film needs to be, and here we are 50 years later wondering if we need to be having more creative conversations about what British film can be. Moreover, Justin and I have long-term ambitions, we're both academics, we're both in education, we have long-term ambitions to set up some kind of film education, filmmaking education school up in the area where The Wicker Man was shot. We might call it the ‘Cult Film School’ or something, a space for young emerging filmmakers who want to come and want to workshop ideas that are gonna push boundaries. That is what we're really hoping we're able to achieve from this.
BG: That's a fantastic idea, and essential.
CN: This is a sort of low to no-budget film. We don't really have any resources. We did just have a successful Kickstarter, which was fantastic, but we're keeping that money aside to clear archive, particularly The Wicker Man footage.
BG: So you need investment?
CN: We're more than happy to have conversations with anyone who's happy to invest, noting, of course, here in the UK, particularly at the moment, there is a cost of living crisis, so we don't really expect people to be able to bankroll quirky documentaries. But if anyone's listening and they are thinking, ‘Yes, actually, I could bankroll your quirky documentary,’ then we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media, on Twitter @Wickermania, on Instagram @Wicker_mania, any contact through there will come straight to me, and we hope to share this film with you later in the year.
BG: Amazing, Chris, sounds like you're on a proper filmmaking journey. It's a fantastic project and deserves support. Anyway, nice one.
CN: Thanks very much again for having me.
Introduction
The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodwood, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland, was released in 1973. It was directed by Robin Hardy, written by Anthony Shaffer and produced by Peter Snell. A seemingly simple story about a police officer searching for a missing schoolgirl on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, it is one of the most important films in the history of British cinema. A mystical, multi-layered microcosm of Britishness itself: its past, its present and its people; its conservatism, its paganism and its radicalism; its habits, its hopes and its horrors.
Full Interview
BG: My name’s Brett Gregory, and here at the UK desk for Arts Express we have a very special guest with us this evening who is currently working on a project which, incredibly, is about to add another layer of meaning to this stone-cold classic film, another perspective and another dimension.
CN: So, my name is Chris Nunn. I am an assistant professor of film at the University of Birmingham, and I am the producer of an upcoming feature documentary currently called Wickermania. It follows two half-brothers who are the sons of the original director of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy. So we follow Justin and Dominic as they try to understand their father – who they both had a slightly problematic relationship with – through his cult film and actually end up, perhaps, finding each other instead.
BG: That's a totally unique angle. So why now?
CN: The 50th anniversary of The Wicker Man is why we started this project. It's taken on its own characteristics and has moved quite organically in the direction that it has, but it's still very much tied to the fact that we're still talking about this film 50 years later.
BG: In your role as producer on this particular project, what's your approach?
CN: My main duties in that role are quite interesting, really, in this context, because I keep calling myself a sort of creative producer as opposed to the producer who sort of finds money and schedules everything. I have found some money, which has been mildly useful, but I have not really done schedules and, you know, spreadsheets and other things. It's been much more about having an overview of what the film is; an overview of how it might come to fruition, etc., etc.
BG: And it's still a work in progress at the moment. What's the footage like?
CN: The film is working best when the brothers are literally standing where their father stood. We have some wonderful footage in Scotland of the brothers at this at the remaining stumps of the Wicker Man, and footage of Robin Hardy in the same place, and it resonates.
BG: So the production is starting to take its own course?
CN: Originally, when we started the project, I would have said that it was targeted at people who are fans of The Wicker Man. The longer we go on the more I think it's actually a very personal documentary, an almost therapy film, which is for anyone, really, who has a family.
BG: Related to that, what's this I hear about family heirlooms being hidden in the attic?
CN: We are using some newly discovered original sources, which are papers from Robin Hardy's study during the production of The Wicker Man, and the years preceding it and about a year afterwards. So, letters, photographs … and they tell a very interesting story. They tell the story from Hardy's perspective, which I don't think we've particularly had. Alan Brown's book on The Wicker Man sort of seemed to privilege Anthony Shaffer, the screenwriter's perspective. So, it's quite nice, really, to be looking through these documents and going, ‘Ah, right, so there were all these people saying Hardy was a terrible director, but what were his experiences?’ And there are a few letters in there that give us a sort of insight into that.
BG: So history is being rewritten? Sounds like there's much more to this, though.
CN: From my best understanding, unfortunately, when The Wicker Man bombed at the box office, Robin Hardy left his family, which is a key moment in our film, and left his then-wife Caroline, Justin's mother, with a huge amount of debts, in excess we think of kind of £600,000 in today's money. So, they had to sell their house. They moved, and I think it's the house they moved to, is where the materials were just put in the loft and clearly left in the loft and had sat there fairly authentically for about the last 50 years until someone wrote to Justin saying, I found all the stuff. Do you want it, or shall I burn it?’ [LAUGHS] And as Justin recounts every time we do an interview about this, he very nearly said, ‘Well, burn it. I don't want anything to do with this.’ And, indeed, when you see the film you will start to understand why.
BG: Total drama. You gotta tell us a bit more, Chris.
CN: So they don't know each other very well as brothers, I guess. They didn't grow up together, and they've come together to be academics again. Justin is a lecturer at University College, London, and Dominic is at the University of Quebec, Montreal, as a professor of Art History. And, of course, I'm an academic too, so this is a very academic lead film, which is appreciating the value of having new primary sources to base a narrative around and, I suppose, the brothers have discovered through those primary sources just what an impact The Wicker Man had on their family, on Robin Hardy's health, on Robin Hardy's finances, but really by extension on the finances of the Hardy household, and particularly Justin's mother, Caroline. And I would be lying if I said that hasn't been a very painful process for them. That again, I suppose my role on this film is to be as objective as possible, given the subjectivity that arises when the brothers interact with each other and get talking. So there are some emotional, very emotional moments in the film.
BG: Sounds like it. Pretty heavy. So what role is the University of Birmingham playing in all this?
CN: Justin and I had worked originally together at the University of Greenwich in London, and when I moved to the University of Birmingham, there was a sense that we could – as many universities can these days – actually pull together a feature doc using the resources that we have, using, you know, whatever kit that the university possesses and, indeed, whatever talent the university possesses. And this is how we've been able to put this film together on a very small amount of money. Again, down the track, we hope to sell it, make some money, and indeed pay all the fabulous people who've worked with us.
BG: Is that the end goal, or is there more?
CN: The end goal is tricky, really, it's bigger than the film. The film feels like a catalyst for further discussions, part of which is the legacy of The Wicker Man, but part of which is also looking at that kind of independent filmmaking landscape. You know, kind of appreciating The Wicker Man as a radical text, Robin Hardy, in his cult film here, as a radical first-time feature director. At the time when The Wicker Man was reviewed in 1973 it was really well-received by critics, saying this is what British film needs to be, and here we are 50 years later wondering if we need to be having more creative conversations about what British film can be. Moreover, Justin and I have long-term ambitions, we're both academics, we're both in education, we have long-term ambitions to set up some kind of film education, filmmaking education school up in the area where The Wicker Man was shot. We might call it the ‘Cult Film School’ or something, a space for young emerging filmmakers who want to come and want to workshop ideas that are gonna push boundaries. That is what we're really hoping we're able to achieve from this.
BG: That's a fantastic idea, and essential.
CN: This is a sort of low to no-budget film. We don't really have any resources. We did just have a successful Kickstarter, which was fantastic, but we're keeping that money aside to clear archive, particularly The Wicker Man footage.
BG: So you need investment?
CN: We're more than happy to have conversations with anyone who's happy to invest, noting, of course, here in the UK, particularly at the moment, there is a cost of living crisis, so we don't really expect people to be able to bankroll quirky documentaries. But if anyone's listening and they are thinking, ‘Yes, actually, I could bankroll your quirky documentary,’ then we would love to hear from you. You can find us on social media, on Twitter @Wickermania, on Instagram @Wicker_mania, any contact through there will come straight to me, and we hope to share this film with you later in the year.
BG: Amazing, Chris, sounds like you're on a proper filmmaking journey. It's a fantastic project and deserves support. Anyway, nice one.
CN: Thanks very much again for having me.
GUEST BLOG: ‘How to be angry, how to tell stories …’ Brett Gregory on his influences and origins
June 2023
June 2023
Although I was born on an RAF base in Buckinghamshire I was raised on a run-down council estate in a Nottinghamshire mining town from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.
After my alcoholic stepdad was arrested for assault for the umpteenth time, my mum became a single parent on benefits with three children. We had no money: we ate salad cream sandwiches, we used the local newspaper as toilet roll and I could only afford to go to the cinema once over this period of time, and that was to watch ‘Tron’ at the ABC Cinema in 1982 for my 11th birthday.
Every other movie I watched was either on a black and white portable television in my bedroom or on pirated VHS tapes on the colour television in the living room downstairs.
As a result, I have no spiritual affinity with cinema-going or any of its mystical rituals like many other filmmakers claim to have. With television however it’s a different story.
For example, in 1982 I also grew aware of the power of the British State by following Newsnight reports about the Falklands Conflict throughout the spring. This was far removed from reading about World War I or World War II in history books; this was seemingly happening in the present tense right before my very eyes.
It was around this time as well when I became fascinated by a puzzle book called ‘Masquerade’. The author, Kit Williams, had buried a bejewelled golden pendant in the shape of a hare somewhere in England, and in the book – which told the story of Jack Hare – he’d hidden textual and pictorial clues in order to pinpoint the pendant’s exact location. I never solved the puzzle, and the treasure was discovered by way of fraud in 1988. The 2009 BBC documentary ‘The Man Behind The Masquerade’ tells the story.
In 1984 the Miner’s Strike broke out and, as hundreds of working-class communities were torn apart across the Midlands and the North, I then became aware that the British State would attack its own citizens just as readily as it would foreign entities. Watch video footage of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ online and you’ll see what I mean.
Such familicidal tendencies were further demonstrated in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government launched a completely unhinged and homophobic public health campaign using the slogan: ‘AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance’ which infected an entire generation of adolescents with paranoia, distrust and self-doubt. The original leaflet is archived by the Wellcome Trust.
Surrounded by all this new knowledge and real life horror, it’s no surprise that by this point I’d started to read Stephen King novels and Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’. In turn, I’d also begun to take the family’s Jack Russell, Shandy, on three hour long walks across farmers’ fields and to a nearby forest, as faraway from civilisation as possible.
Obviously I wasn’t a monk however, and would lead a double life by hanging around the front of the shops on the estate with older teenage lads in the evening: learning how to smoke, how to spit, how to swear, how to be angry and how to tell stories ‘that had better be fucking funny!’
When everyone eventually wandered home I’d then return to my bedroom and switch on the Acorn Electron personal computer which my mum had bought on hire purchase to keep me quiet.
Interestingly, if you wanted to play ‘free’ DIY games like ‘Tomb Hunter’ or ‘Spy Raider’ on a personal computer you had to type in hundreds of lines of BASIC code which were published in magazines like ‘Electron User’. However, if you made one single error – missed out a number or a letter, or typed a colon instead of a semi-colon – then the game wouldn’t work.
Little did I know at the time but this painstaking transcription process taught me extremely close reading skills and these would later prove very useful when I studied literary theory and literary criticism as a part of my BA and MA degrees in English Literature in the 1990s and, in turn, when I began to write, direct and edit short films in the 2000s.
In 1988, while writing a crappy ‘Twilight Zone’-style short story on a second-hand Olivetti typewriter in the kitchen, I noticed that Thatcher’s Tory government had now begun to mute all television broadcasts that featured representatives of Sinn Féin, a practice that would only end in 1994. It was at this very moment when it was confirmed for me that I didn’t live in a free society, and I probably never had.
Why was I was being denied access to this information? Why was I being denied the opportunity to make up my own mind about things, or gauge how I felt about such things? Or consider how I should or should not react to them? Or even learn from them? Furthermore, what other information was being withheld from me? What else didn’t I know? And why?
Naturally, as a young man desperate for answers which he was never going to receive, I grew frustrated and started searching out alternatives to the mainstream like I was on some sort of survival mission. I began to read the work of ‘troublemakers’ like George Orwell, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, as well as whatever biographies I could lay my hands on at the local library in town.
In turn, I also started watching Moviedrome on BBC 2. A late night television series which started in 1988, it was basically film school for poor people. Subversive film director Alex Cox (‘Repo Man’, ‘Sid and Nancy’) was the presenter. He would enthusiastically discuss the origin, production, style and themes of films which I’d never heard of. These films would then be screened and I’d suddenly feel my imagination expand, feeling a little less insane and a little less alone. Science fiction classics like ‘X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes’, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ or ‘The Fly’ (with Vincent Price), and newer experimental fare like ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. Rugged 1970s films like ‘Five Easy Pieces’, ‘Point Blank’, ‘Badlands’ and ‘The Parallax View’.
What this four year study programme of ‘cult’ films taught me, as well as the literary books I was now rifling through on a regular basis, was that it wasn’t simply what you thought that mattered but, if you desired to feel vaguely like yourself on your own terms, then how you thought was just as necessary.
After finishing my BA and MA about eight years later I started claiming housing benefit for this damp, solitary bedsit I was confined to while I worked part-time at the library at the University of Derby for the next six years. The main reason for this was so I could have free access to all the books which I’d never had the opportunity to read while in formal education. I gorged myself on Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Bukowski, Gustav Meyrink, Jean Genet, Umberto Eco, James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alasdair Gray and Franz Kafka.
After watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre on television on September 11, 2001, I realised that the human race and its leaders were never going to improve during my lifetime, and so I decided I might as well study to be a teacher, sharing what I’d learned, before it was too late. In 2003 I then managed to secure a job teaching A Level Film Studies and A Level Cultural Studies at a college in Manchester.
These recollections of my early personal and cultural life form the basis of my aesthetic approach in ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’. For example, as well as the myth of Sisyphus and Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, the narrative structure is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, and the Lacanian phallocentric ‘I’ - which is associated with this novel’s subtext. In the film, Young Jack even points to the Stoodley Pike monument at one stage and exclaims, “And that big tower looks like a lighthouse, dunnit?”
In turn, different types of storytelling are addressed in an effort to try and understand how and why these represent, and even help to construct, who we think we are. For example, there are numerous ‘storytellers’ present throughout, but who is telling the truth? What about gossip, rumour, poor memory or falsehoods? Who should we trust? The dominant third-person narrator; the newsreaders on the mobile phone; Boris Johnson; the Granny’s voicemails; the female interviewees’ recollections; the protagonist as a boy, as a youth or as a man; Brett Gregory the screenwriter or Brett Gregory the director?
A copy of Kit Williams’ ‘Masquerade’ appears in one of the opening scenes as an intertextual prompt. The characters Young Jack, Jack and Old Jack each tell the audience that they’re looking for their missing dog, Shandy, who keeps getting lost while chasing rabbits. So all three ‘Jacks’ are chasing an invisible ‘Jack’ Russell who, in turn, is chasing the fictional ‘Jack’ Hare from ‘Masquerade’ in the hope that this will ultimately lead to… what? Treasure? The Truth? The Prelapsarian Past? This idea of losing oneself within oneself is also flagged up in the opening Borges’ quote from ‘Labyrinths’, and reiterated in the print of M.C. Escher’s ‘Relativity’ which appears on one of the doors in the protagonist’s flat.
The monologues delivered throughout were written to function as the characters’ streams-of-consciousness, rather than spoken words, since what they’re saying and how they’re saying it is far too complicated to be deemed to be a part of the social realist genre.
In these ways then the film is structured like a working-class modernist novella and, I suppose, this is why a general audience finds it difficult to understand. If my name was David Lynch and/or the film had been distributed and marketed by A24 I presume people would be inclined to put more effort in.
This said, I have great faith that the film will find a wider audience over time. Co-producer, Jack Clarke, who’s around twenty-five years younger than me, has promised to make sure the film is still available to audiences long after I’m gone.
After my alcoholic stepdad was arrested for assault for the umpteenth time, my mum became a single parent on benefits with three children. We had no money: we ate salad cream sandwiches, we used the local newspaper as toilet roll and I could only afford to go to the cinema once over this period of time, and that was to watch ‘Tron’ at the ABC Cinema in 1982 for my 11th birthday.
Every other movie I watched was either on a black and white portable television in my bedroom or on pirated VHS tapes on the colour television in the living room downstairs.
As a result, I have no spiritual affinity with cinema-going or any of its mystical rituals like many other filmmakers claim to have. With television however it’s a different story.
For example, in 1982 I also grew aware of the power of the British State by following Newsnight reports about the Falklands Conflict throughout the spring. This was far removed from reading about World War I or World War II in history books; this was seemingly happening in the present tense right before my very eyes.
It was around this time as well when I became fascinated by a puzzle book called ‘Masquerade’. The author, Kit Williams, had buried a bejewelled golden pendant in the shape of a hare somewhere in England, and in the book – which told the story of Jack Hare – he’d hidden textual and pictorial clues in order to pinpoint the pendant’s exact location. I never solved the puzzle, and the treasure was discovered by way of fraud in 1988. The 2009 BBC documentary ‘The Man Behind The Masquerade’ tells the story.
In 1984 the Miner’s Strike broke out and, as hundreds of working-class communities were torn apart across the Midlands and the North, I then became aware that the British State would attack its own citizens just as readily as it would foreign entities. Watch video footage of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ online and you’ll see what I mean.
Such familicidal tendencies were further demonstrated in the mid-1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government launched a completely unhinged and homophobic public health campaign using the slogan: ‘AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance’ which infected an entire generation of adolescents with paranoia, distrust and self-doubt. The original leaflet is archived by the Wellcome Trust.
Surrounded by all this new knowledge and real life horror, it’s no surprise that by this point I’d started to read Stephen King novels and Clive Barker’s ‘Books of Blood’. In turn, I’d also begun to take the family’s Jack Russell, Shandy, on three hour long walks across farmers’ fields and to a nearby forest, as faraway from civilisation as possible.
Obviously I wasn’t a monk however, and would lead a double life by hanging around the front of the shops on the estate with older teenage lads in the evening: learning how to smoke, how to spit, how to swear, how to be angry and how to tell stories ‘that had better be fucking funny!’
When everyone eventually wandered home I’d then return to my bedroom and switch on the Acorn Electron personal computer which my mum had bought on hire purchase to keep me quiet.
Interestingly, if you wanted to play ‘free’ DIY games like ‘Tomb Hunter’ or ‘Spy Raider’ on a personal computer you had to type in hundreds of lines of BASIC code which were published in magazines like ‘Electron User’. However, if you made one single error – missed out a number or a letter, or typed a colon instead of a semi-colon – then the game wouldn’t work.
Little did I know at the time but this painstaking transcription process taught me extremely close reading skills and these would later prove very useful when I studied literary theory and literary criticism as a part of my BA and MA degrees in English Literature in the 1990s and, in turn, when I began to write, direct and edit short films in the 2000s.
In 1988, while writing a crappy ‘Twilight Zone’-style short story on a second-hand Olivetti typewriter in the kitchen, I noticed that Thatcher’s Tory government had now begun to mute all television broadcasts that featured representatives of Sinn Féin, a practice that would only end in 1994. It was at this very moment when it was confirmed for me that I didn’t live in a free society, and I probably never had.
Why was I was being denied access to this information? Why was I being denied the opportunity to make up my own mind about things, or gauge how I felt about such things? Or consider how I should or should not react to them? Or even learn from them? Furthermore, what other information was being withheld from me? What else didn’t I know? And why?
Naturally, as a young man desperate for answers which he was never going to receive, I grew frustrated and started searching out alternatives to the mainstream like I was on some sort of survival mission. I began to read the work of ‘troublemakers’ like George Orwell, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, as well as whatever biographies I could lay my hands on at the local library in town.
In turn, I also started watching Moviedrome on BBC 2. A late night television series which started in 1988, it was basically film school for poor people. Subversive film director Alex Cox (‘Repo Man’, ‘Sid and Nancy’) was the presenter. He would enthusiastically discuss the origin, production, style and themes of films which I’d never heard of. These films would then be screened and I’d suddenly feel my imagination expand, feeling a little less insane and a little less alone. Science fiction classics like ‘X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes’, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ or ‘The Fly’ (with Vincent Price), and newer experimental fare like ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’. Rugged 1970s films like ‘Five Easy Pieces’, ‘Point Blank’, ‘Badlands’ and ‘The Parallax View’.
What this four year study programme of ‘cult’ films taught me, as well as the literary books I was now rifling through on a regular basis, was that it wasn’t simply what you thought that mattered but, if you desired to feel vaguely like yourself on your own terms, then how you thought was just as necessary.
After finishing my BA and MA about eight years later I started claiming housing benefit for this damp, solitary bedsit I was confined to while I worked part-time at the library at the University of Derby for the next six years. The main reason for this was so I could have free access to all the books which I’d never had the opportunity to read while in formal education. I gorged myself on Jorge Luis Borges, Dante Alighieri, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Bukowski, Gustav Meyrink, Jean Genet, Umberto Eco, James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Primo Levi, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alasdair Gray and Franz Kafka.
After watching the attacks on the World Trade Centre on television on September 11, 2001, I realised that the human race and its leaders were never going to improve during my lifetime, and so I decided I might as well study to be a teacher, sharing what I’d learned, before it was too late. In 2003 I then managed to secure a job teaching A Level Film Studies and A Level Cultural Studies at a college in Manchester.
These recollections of my early personal and cultural life form the basis of my aesthetic approach in ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’. For example, as well as the myth of Sisyphus and Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, the narrative structure is loosely based on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, and the Lacanian phallocentric ‘I’ - which is associated with this novel’s subtext. In the film, Young Jack even points to the Stoodley Pike monument at one stage and exclaims, “And that big tower looks like a lighthouse, dunnit?”
In turn, different types of storytelling are addressed in an effort to try and understand how and why these represent, and even help to construct, who we think we are. For example, there are numerous ‘storytellers’ present throughout, but who is telling the truth? What about gossip, rumour, poor memory or falsehoods? Who should we trust? The dominant third-person narrator; the newsreaders on the mobile phone; Boris Johnson; the Granny’s voicemails; the female interviewees’ recollections; the protagonist as a boy, as a youth or as a man; Brett Gregory the screenwriter or Brett Gregory the director?
A copy of Kit Williams’ ‘Masquerade’ appears in one of the opening scenes as an intertextual prompt. The characters Young Jack, Jack and Old Jack each tell the audience that they’re looking for their missing dog, Shandy, who keeps getting lost while chasing rabbits. So all three ‘Jacks’ are chasing an invisible ‘Jack’ Russell who, in turn, is chasing the fictional ‘Jack’ Hare from ‘Masquerade’ in the hope that this will ultimately lead to… what? Treasure? The Truth? The Prelapsarian Past? This idea of losing oneself within oneself is also flagged up in the opening Borges’ quote from ‘Labyrinths’, and reiterated in the print of M.C. Escher’s ‘Relativity’ which appears on one of the doors in the protagonist’s flat.
The monologues delivered throughout were written to function as the characters’ streams-of-consciousness, rather than spoken words, since what they’re saying and how they’re saying it is far too complicated to be deemed to be a part of the social realist genre.
In these ways then the film is structured like a working-class modernist novella and, I suppose, this is why a general audience finds it difficult to understand. If my name was David Lynch and/or the film had been distributed and marketed by A24 I presume people would be inclined to put more effort in.
This said, I have great faith that the film will find a wider audience over time. Co-producer, Jack Clarke, who’s around twenty-five years younger than me, has promised to make sure the film is still available to audiences long after I’m gone.
This article originally appeared in Strange Exiles in June 2023.
BOOK REVIEW
David Archibald, ‘Tracking Loach’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
by Brett Gregory
April 2023
David Archibald, ‘Tracking Loach’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
by Brett Gregory
April 2023
Review Start: 38 minutes 48 seconds
David Archibald’s book, ‘Tracking Loach’, is an academic celebration of Ken Loach’s 60 year career in socialist filmmaking and political activism.
It is also an extremely timely publication in that Loach’s latest film, ‘The Old Oak’, will be receiving its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
The author’s unique approach is to prioritise the contextual mechanics of film production studies over the theoretical speculation of critical screen studies, arguing that the reflective observation of the methodologies and logistics involved in preparing, shooting and exhibiting a feature film should elicit a complementary understanding of a filmmaker’s aesthetic.
This reminds me of a television interview with David Niven from the 1970s where he asks something along the lines of: ‘How can a critic write a decent review if he’s never actually made a movie himself?’
During Archibald’s ethnographic pursuit of Loach’s poetic and political process his primary sources of data are the annotations, interviews, shooting documents, digital footage and photographs he accrues while being physically present during the production and exhibition of Loach’s working-class comedy-drama set in Glasgow, ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
It should be noted that to be granted access to such a complex and sensitive creative environment and its extremely busy and anxious workforce – its technicians and performers – and, in turn, to enjoy the company and trust of its leaders who have the weight of a major production bearing down on them – Ken Loach (Director), Paul Laverty (Screenwriter) and Rebecca O’Brien (Producer) – is a memorable achievement in itself.
To accompany him on his journey the author also draws on a wide variety of historical and theoretical secondary sources, including the BFI’s Ken Loach Archive, and I personally found a number of his scholarly citations to be just as illuminating as his on set observations.
For example, when working alongside his early screenwriting partner, Jim Allen, Archibald highlights that Loach’s television productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by the political ideas of Leon Trotsky in that the UK’s established democratic system was seen to be inadequate with regards to the economic interests of the proletariat.
Following on from this it is argued that Loach’s films generally aim to reveal to the audience, either explicitly or implicitly, the harsh realities, exploitation and despair of working-class experience and, in turn, that capitalism is not a natural, normal or inevitable way of ordering or governing society.
With this in mind the socialist concerns of Loach’s oeuvre have generally transitioned from addressing issues such as organised labour in ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) and ‘The Rank and File’ (1971), to unorganised labour in ‘Riff Raff’ (1991) and ‘The Navigators’ (2001), and then on to unemployed labour in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016).
While such films could be viewed as a war artist’s mournful depiction of socio-economic casualties lying strewn across a neoliberalist battlefield, Archibald posits with reference to the Italian historian, Enzo Traverso, that they can also be understood as evidential ‘open wounds’ which the Left need to nurse so the embers of possibility can once again be reignited.
Aware of Raymond Williams’ contention that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, the author proceeds to cite Newland and Hoyle’s view that in some ways Loach’s creative output in the 21st century has begun to move away from the wholly melancholic art cinema of, say, ‘My Name Is Joe’ (1998), and on towards the Ealing comedy tradition with films like ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009) and ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
Indeed, as Loach himself states in a footnote, ‘not every film has to end with a fist clenched in the air.’
Loach is a social realist director with the eye of a sympathetic documentarian, influenced by, amongst other things, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, the Free Cinema Movement and the 20th century current affairs programme, ‘World in Action’.
Moreover, similar to the generic conventions exhibited in films from the Italian neo-realist movement such as ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) and ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948), Archibald frequently underscores Loach’s overarching quest to, paradoxically, recreate spontaneity, authenticity and ‘truth’ in his fictional work by employing predominantly naturalistic filmmaking techniques.
By shooting on a ‘real’ location instead of within an ‘artificial’ studio Loach’s objective is to not only encourage the actors to respond to their surrounding environment like recognisable, everyday human beings, but to also display the historical power relations which are inscribed into, for example, the municipal buildings which overshadow them.
Echoing John Grierson’s principle of ‘actuality’, Loach tends to shoot static medium long shots with the filming apparatus and its crew as far away from the ‘action’ as possible, a tactical attempt to motivate the audience to decide what is important and what to focus on, as if they themselves are simply observing matters from across the street.
In turn, this sense of things ‘really happening’ is often reinforced by natural lighting during a shoot via the sky for exteriors or windows for interiors, and by way of continuity editing in post-production so as not to ‘interfere’ with the actors’ on screen performances and the linear story they are striving to tell.
Of course, to achieve ‘the illusion of the first time’ casting is crucial, and Loach’s production team frequently enlist non-professional or amateur actors as a consequence. David Bradley as Billy Casper in ‘Kes’ (1969), Crissy Rock as Maggie Conlan in ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ (1994) and Martin Compston as Liam in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) are just three notable examples.
As well as providing a real world opportunity for a filmmaker to collaborate, explore and develop a character more or less from scratch, Jennifer Beth Spiegel points out that casting non-professional or amateur actors is also good for marketing in that it draws the attention of the popular press by way of the presumption that these ordinary individuals are pure and unsullied by the elbow grease of the film industry and the ego of show business.
An important factor in this process is, unlike most other independent British production companies, Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien’s ‘Sixteen Films’ has become well financed and self-sufficient over the decades and so, as a result, they have the time to carry out lengthy scouting missions in order to locate and secure the right actor for the right role.
That is, to achieve a sense of verisimilitude on screen and in the minds of the audience, Loach et al seek out and cast performers who, besides their physical appearance, not only share similar personality traits with the characters they are pencilled in to play, but who also originate from similar socio-economic backgrounds or circumstances.
This approach is exemplified by the casting of Paul Brannigan as Gareth O’Connor in ‘The Angel’s Share’ in that the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, first encountered him while conducting research at Strathclyde Police’s Violence Reduction Unit. As Archibald relates, in line with his on screen character, Brannigan, born in Glasgow’s East End, had been imprisoned for violent crimes and gangland feuding, but was also ‘attempting to go straight’.
Of course, critics will argue that the casting of non-professional actors undermines the history and craft of acting, the experience involved, the knowledge accumulated, the techniques learned, the talent nurtured. For example, in an interview with the author, the actor Roger Allam points out that amateur actors ‘would be at a loss in a Molière play’.
While this may be true, a reasonable response would be: what other practical routes are there available in the UK for the working-class to climb up on to the silver screen and represent their identities, communities and histories fairly?
In an industry predominantly based in London and owned, run and populated by the middle class and their superiors, the costs involved to train as an actor are astronomical to an ordinary person and the distance to travel, particularly for those in the North, preposterous.
Indeed, the few British working-class actors who are lucky enough to enjoy a public platform have consistently highlighted this socio-cultural system of privilege, prejudice and exclusion over recent years.
While Christopher Eccleston asserts that the ‘working-class … are not wanted in the arts anymore’, James McAvoy argues that the dominance of privately educated British actors in the 21st century is ‘damaging for society’. In turn, Gary Oldman has stated that he is unable to direct a follow-up to his incendiary ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) because ‘They don’t want another one. They want ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’’.
In light of these socio-economic and ideological realities, Loach’s casting of non-professional and amateur actors – together with the working-class stories he tells and the working-class worlds he creates – should be regarded not simply as an aesthetic choice or even socialist posturing. That is, under the stifling, reductive right-wing administration we are all currently enduring in the UK, enabled on a day-to-day basis by numerous obsequious and self-serving cultural institutions and organisations, it could be reasonably argued that such an approach is, in truth, a revolutionary act.
In his epilogue Archibald includes an apposite quote from the Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel:
‘A writer or painter cannot change the world but they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts.’
In ‘Tracking Loach’ there is so much more to discover and learn from its unique, rigorous and genuinely heartfelt exploration of one of the maestros of modern British cinema and modern British politics, Ken Loach.
It is highly recommended.
It is also an extremely timely publication in that Loach’s latest film, ‘The Old Oak’, will be receiving its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023.
The author’s unique approach is to prioritise the contextual mechanics of film production studies over the theoretical speculation of critical screen studies, arguing that the reflective observation of the methodologies and logistics involved in preparing, shooting and exhibiting a feature film should elicit a complementary understanding of a filmmaker’s aesthetic.
This reminds me of a television interview with David Niven from the 1970s where he asks something along the lines of: ‘How can a critic write a decent review if he’s never actually made a movie himself?’
During Archibald’s ethnographic pursuit of Loach’s poetic and political process his primary sources of data are the annotations, interviews, shooting documents, digital footage and photographs he accrues while being physically present during the production and exhibition of Loach’s working-class comedy-drama set in Glasgow, ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
It should be noted that to be granted access to such a complex and sensitive creative environment and its extremely busy and anxious workforce – its technicians and performers – and, in turn, to enjoy the company and trust of its leaders who have the weight of a major production bearing down on them – Ken Loach (Director), Paul Laverty (Screenwriter) and Rebecca O’Brien (Producer) – is a memorable achievement in itself.
To accompany him on his journey the author also draws on a wide variety of historical and theoretical secondary sources, including the BFI’s Ken Loach Archive, and I personally found a number of his scholarly citations to be just as illuminating as his on set observations.
For example, when working alongside his early screenwriting partner, Jim Allen, Archibald highlights that Loach’s television productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s were influenced by the political ideas of Leon Trotsky in that the UK’s established democratic system was seen to be inadequate with regards to the economic interests of the proletariat.
Following on from this it is argued that Loach’s films generally aim to reveal to the audience, either explicitly or implicitly, the harsh realities, exploitation and despair of working-class experience and, in turn, that capitalism is not a natural, normal or inevitable way of ordering or governing society.
With this in mind the socialist concerns of Loach’s oeuvre have generally transitioned from addressing issues such as organised labour in ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) and ‘The Rank and File’ (1971), to unorganised labour in ‘Riff Raff’ (1991) and ‘The Navigators’ (2001), and then on to unemployed labour in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) and ‘I, Daniel Blake’ (2016).
While such films could be viewed as a war artist’s mournful depiction of socio-economic casualties lying strewn across a neoliberalist battlefield, Archibald posits with reference to the Italian historian, Enzo Traverso, that they can also be understood as evidential ‘open wounds’ which the Left need to nurse so the embers of possibility can once again be reignited.
Aware of Raymond Williams’ contention that ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’, the author proceeds to cite Newland and Hoyle’s view that in some ways Loach’s creative output in the 21st century has begun to move away from the wholly melancholic art cinema of, say, ‘My Name Is Joe’ (1998), and on towards the Ealing comedy tradition with films like ‘Looking for Eric’ (2009) and ‘The Angel’s Share’ (2012).
Indeed, as Loach himself states in a footnote, ‘not every film has to end with a fist clenched in the air.’
Loach is a social realist director with the eye of a sympathetic documentarian, influenced by, amongst other things, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, the Free Cinema Movement and the 20th century current affairs programme, ‘World in Action’.
Moreover, similar to the generic conventions exhibited in films from the Italian neo-realist movement such as ‘Rome, Open City’ (1945) and ‘Bicycle Thieves’ (1948), Archibald frequently underscores Loach’s overarching quest to, paradoxically, recreate spontaneity, authenticity and ‘truth’ in his fictional work by employing predominantly naturalistic filmmaking techniques.
By shooting on a ‘real’ location instead of within an ‘artificial’ studio Loach’s objective is to not only encourage the actors to respond to their surrounding environment like recognisable, everyday human beings, but to also display the historical power relations which are inscribed into, for example, the municipal buildings which overshadow them.
Echoing John Grierson’s principle of ‘actuality’, Loach tends to shoot static medium long shots with the filming apparatus and its crew as far away from the ‘action’ as possible, a tactical attempt to motivate the audience to decide what is important and what to focus on, as if they themselves are simply observing matters from across the street.
In turn, this sense of things ‘really happening’ is often reinforced by natural lighting during a shoot via the sky for exteriors or windows for interiors, and by way of continuity editing in post-production so as not to ‘interfere’ with the actors’ on screen performances and the linear story they are striving to tell.
Of course, to achieve ‘the illusion of the first time’ casting is crucial, and Loach’s production team frequently enlist non-professional or amateur actors as a consequence. David Bradley as Billy Casper in ‘Kes’ (1969), Crissy Rock as Maggie Conlan in ‘Ladybird, Ladybird’ (1994) and Martin Compston as Liam in ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (2002) are just three notable examples.
As well as providing a real world opportunity for a filmmaker to collaborate, explore and develop a character more or less from scratch, Jennifer Beth Spiegel points out that casting non-professional or amateur actors is also good for marketing in that it draws the attention of the popular press by way of the presumption that these ordinary individuals are pure and unsullied by the elbow grease of the film industry and the ego of show business.
An important factor in this process is, unlike most other independent British production companies, Ken Loach and Rebecca O’Brien’s ‘Sixteen Films’ has become well financed and self-sufficient over the decades and so, as a result, they have the time to carry out lengthy scouting missions in order to locate and secure the right actor for the right role.
That is, to achieve a sense of verisimilitude on screen and in the minds of the audience, Loach et al seek out and cast performers who, besides their physical appearance, not only share similar personality traits with the characters they are pencilled in to play, but who also originate from similar socio-economic backgrounds or circumstances.
This approach is exemplified by the casting of Paul Brannigan as Gareth O’Connor in ‘The Angel’s Share’ in that the film’s screenwriter, Paul Laverty, first encountered him while conducting research at Strathclyde Police’s Violence Reduction Unit. As Archibald relates, in line with his on screen character, Brannigan, born in Glasgow’s East End, had been imprisoned for violent crimes and gangland feuding, but was also ‘attempting to go straight’.
Of course, critics will argue that the casting of non-professional actors undermines the history and craft of acting, the experience involved, the knowledge accumulated, the techniques learned, the talent nurtured. For example, in an interview with the author, the actor Roger Allam points out that amateur actors ‘would be at a loss in a Molière play’.
While this may be true, a reasonable response would be: what other practical routes are there available in the UK for the working-class to climb up on to the silver screen and represent their identities, communities and histories fairly?
In an industry predominantly based in London and owned, run and populated by the middle class and their superiors, the costs involved to train as an actor are astronomical to an ordinary person and the distance to travel, particularly for those in the North, preposterous.
Indeed, the few British working-class actors who are lucky enough to enjoy a public platform have consistently highlighted this socio-cultural system of privilege, prejudice and exclusion over recent years.
While Christopher Eccleston asserts that the ‘working-class … are not wanted in the arts anymore’, James McAvoy argues that the dominance of privately educated British actors in the 21st century is ‘damaging for society’. In turn, Gary Oldman has stated that he is unable to direct a follow-up to his incendiary ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) because ‘They don’t want another one. They want ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’’.
In light of these socio-economic and ideological realities, Loach’s casting of non-professional and amateur actors – together with the working-class stories he tells and the working-class worlds he creates – should be regarded not simply as an aesthetic choice or even socialist posturing. That is, under the stifling, reductive right-wing administration we are all currently enduring in the UK, enabled on a day-to-day basis by numerous obsequious and self-serving cultural institutions and organisations, it could be reasonably argued that such an approach is, in truth, a revolutionary act.
In his epilogue Archibald includes an apposite quote from the Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel:
‘A writer or painter cannot change the world but they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts.’
In ‘Tracking Loach’ there is so much more to discover and learn from its unique, rigorous and genuinely heartfelt exploration of one of the maestros of modern British cinema and modern British politics, Ken Loach.
It is highly recommended.
This book review originally appeared in Culture Matters in April 2023 and in The Morning Star in May 2023.
Arts Express interviews Brett Gregory about 'Nobody Loves You ...' and British Politics for WBAI 99.5FM in New York
December 2023
December 2023
INTERVIEW:: Mike Quille, editor of Culture Matters, interviews Brett Gregory about his debut feature film and the role of social class in British Cinema
December 2022
December 2022
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the background to making the film?
My best friend and cinematographer died from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome in 2013. He was 26 years old.
In turn, following decades of absence and estrangement, I was abandoned by my mother’s working class family in Nottinghamshire and my long-lost father’s middle class family in Oxfordshire in 2014.
They just didn’t want to know.
Moreover, following the UK government’s unprecedented £141bn bail out of the corrupt British banking system in 2008, austerity cuts finally sank their teeth into the education sector in 2015.
As a consequence, after 11 years of service, I was made redundant from my position as a lecturer in A Level Film and Cultural Studies.
This tragic succession of events, which literally left me with no one to turn to, ultimately coalesced into an intense period of angst, depression and sense of utter worthlessness.
In turn, with the stench of Brexit in the air, I slowly began to realise that I didn’t understand my country anymore; I didn’t understand its people; and I didn’t understand myself.
I had lost my focus and I had lost my faith.
With my redundancy money I spent months and months reading and writing and, now and again, glancing over at the large print of Hieronymus Bosch’s, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, that hung on the living room wall in my rented flat in Manchester.
It then finally dawned on me, after yet another drunken stupor, that my only way out of this existential nightmare was to expel a full-throated, blood-curdling ‘Wilhelm Scream’: a semi-autobiographical screenplay based on Bosch’s 15th century painting in relation to the tragedy, trauma and truth of Broken Britain, i.e. the 1980s under Thatcher, the 1990s under Major and the 2000s under Cameron and Johnson.
Q. What’s the film about? What are its main themes?
In terms of plot we find Old Jack in his gloomy flat in Hulme in 2020 under Boris Johnson’s rule as he appears to awake from a fever dream about sex and murder in Manchester, overshadowed by the city’s Gothic architecture, civic statues and towering skyscrapers.
Still half-asleep and hung-over in bed he then reads an old text from the wife of a good friend who informs him that her husband is on a ventilator with COVID and that she is struggling to breathe herself.
In turn, in the mausoleum which is his study, Old Jack discovers that he has an unwelcome voicemail on his phone from his long-lost grandmother in Oxford who wishes to secretly meet up with him after four decades before she dies.
All of this proves too much for him however, and he takes a fistful of anti-depressants and washes them down with a mug of vodka.
Thus begins his descent into his own private rabbit-hole wherein he meets himself as a young boy in 1984, living on an abusive council estate under Margaret Thatcher during the Miners’ Strike, and fantasising about escaping into a world of fiction and illusion.
He is then later confronted by himself as a university student in 1992 during John Major’s tenure, riddled with Class A drugs, alienated from his peers and his studies, and questioning his purpose and sanity in violent messianic outbursts.
Moreover, these arduous, psychotic visitations are intercut with imagined interviews with a number of women from Old Jack’s past who seem to appear not only as witnesses, but also as judge and jury: his half-sister, his old English teacher, his former college manager, his ex-girlfriend’s Christian mother, and his nervous next door neighbour.
Overcome by the weight of his own history in a country where he doesn’t believe he belongs, Old Jack finally embarks on a pilgrimage to the historical Stoodley Pike monument in West Yorkshire, on the outskirts of society, to find some sort of answer which will put an end to his existential misery.
In terms of themes the film can primarily be understood to be about morality and ethics, about how those in power treat us and about how we treat each other.
In turn, it is also about abandonment, loneliness, mental health and a breakdown in communication between the working and middle classes.
Furthermore, the film’s narrative focuses on the socio-political cost of the North/South divide: how this is continually reinforced by right wing ideological forces in order to distract and weaken any serious collective opposition to the systematic asset stripping of what remains of the United Kingdom.
Q. What were you aiming for with the film, and how did those aims change in the making of the film?
A crucial aim of the film was to represent the Northern working class on screen, externally and internally, with intelligence, authenticity and dignity in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures which are regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media based in London.
Such a genuine independent creative decision directly challenges the popular status quo currently being maintained by the ideological state apparatus and so, understandably, we received no funding or investment or support from any public or private organisation at all.
As a result, what changed was not only the timescale of the production from one year to six and half years, but also my personal finances.
Even though every one of the cast and crew members committed their time and talents for free – a testament to the ongoing industriousness and inventiveness of Greater Manchester by the way – the production still left me around £56,000 in debt by way of personal loans, two credit cards and two overdrafts.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about reactions to the film from critics and from working-class people?
Since its release on Amazon Prime in May 2022 we have won over 50 international film festival awards and nominations, and received over 100 informed and passionate reviews on IMDb, Letterboxd and various arts and culture websites.
In the main these reviews praise the film’s anger, insight and originality, its production values, its performances and its soundtrack, comparing it to the works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and even Theodor Dreyer.
Standout quotes such as ‘A Searing Portrait of Modern Britain’ are incredibly validating and prove that a large international audience – who are also going through their own individual horrors under this self-serving global capitalist system – need authentic stories like this to remind them that they’re not alone and they’re not going mad.
We hosted a free screening of the film on a working class Manchester housing estate in Moston, for instance, and while a number of attendees still strongly believed that cinema should be ‘entertaining’ and ‘escapist’, many others recognised the role poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic abuse has played in their day-to-day lives.
Q. What do you think of British cinema, the kind of films that get made and the roles these play in our society?
In my personal experience, due to the deeply embedded hierarchical character of the United Kingdom’s social system, and the real world advantages and disadvantages this creates for different social groups in different parts of the country, the history of British cinema can primarily be understood in terms of the presence, or absence, of class and class division.
Many of us alive today first learned of the existence and influence of the rules and rewards of social class as children while watching, for instance, David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1946), Carol Reed’s ‘Oliver!’ (1968) or Richard Fleischer’s ‘The Prince and The Pauper’ (1977).
Repeated screenings of these movies usually took place in a school assembly or in the family living room over the Christmas period and, I would argue, such public exhibitions contributed to a cultural normalisation of social prejudice, inequality and exclusion by disguising these conditions as simply an inevitable part of British history and tradition.
While the 1960s’ new wave ‘Angry Young Man’ arrived and blew a plume of cigarette smoke in the face of authority, articulating alternative expectations and aspirations for white working class British males, such insubordination was given short shrift.
Despite dynamic and memorable performances from Richard Burton in ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1959), Albert Finney in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) and Richard Harris in ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963), it is telling that their character arcs always concluded with them being either abandoned or emasculated as punishment for not knowing their place.
Against the childish backdrop of the ‘Carry On’ franchise and its production line of pathetic proletariats, the trajectory of Michael Caine’s filmography throughout the 1970s provides an interesting counterpoint in that his commercial success rested largely upon the re-appropriation of his Cockney origins, persona and on-screen roles.
For example, only five or so years after the incendiary, anti-establishment release of ‘Get Carter’ (1971), he was suddenly battling on behalf of Queen and Country in ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ (1975) and ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (1976).
In turn, it is no surprise that, when he left to further pursue the capitalist dream of Hollywood fame and fortune later in the decade, he was more or less deified by the country’s mainstream media.
Of course, everything exploded when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and cultural war was openly declared on the men and women of the labour movement and their representation across Britain’s sterling silver screens.
In the blue corner were David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough and Merchant-Ivory, and in the red corner were Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke.
Noticeably, state school kids were far too busy reciting profanities in the playground from ‘Scum’ (1979) and ‘Made in Britain’ (1982) to give a toss about the posh swag bag of Academy Awards accrued by state-supported nostalgia narratives such as ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981) or ‘Ghandi’ (1982).
I should note here that Michael Caine did go some way to redeem himself in this decade by supporting Julie Walters’ wonderful working class lead in Willy Russell’s intellectually aspirational ‘Educating Rita’ in 1983.
Under the tenures of John Major and Tony Blair in the 1990s the changing of the guard necessarily took place, and Richard Curtis and Kenneth Branagh dutifully took up their well-financed positions with ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’ (1994) and ‘Notting Hill’ (1999), ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1993) and ‘Hamlet’ (1996).
Meanwhile, as a reflection of the ongoing embourgeoisement of mainstream British culture and society, authentic working class cinema not only had to search for its roots and values in the iconography of the underclass, it had to also search for its funding abroad.
Films such as Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1996), Gary Oldman’s ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) and Ken Loach’s ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) highlighted that the remnants of working class togetherness and community could now only subsist on the margins by way of the narrative ritualisation of petty crime, drugs or alcohol.
Indeed, during the 21st century, as the British Empire suffers its death throes and the country’s post-Elizabethan standing on the world stage rapidly dwindles away, the Establishment has reacted accordingly in its attempt to remain in power by re-asserting outmoded notions of cinematic representation that are increasingly reductive, intolerant and undemocratic.
While commercially successful film franchises like ‘Harry Potter’, ‘James Bond’, ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘The Crown’ continue to suffocate the growing diversity and demands of our shared culture, the mediated elevation of privately educated white male screen actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddy Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston has seemingly transported us back to the post-war performances of Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness and David Niven.
To end, it is no coincidence that the working class white male protagonist in my self-funded ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ (2022) has no community at all: he sleeps alone, he drinks alone and he weeps alone.
In turn, during the film’s climax, and in response to a wider right-wing society that continues to disrespect, mock and ignore working people’s invaluable economic and cultural contributions to the nation, it is somewhat inevitable that he finally disappears.
Q. How could trade unions and their activists get involved with ‘Nobody Loves You …’?
A first step would be for trade unions to show active support for ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ by directly recommending it to their members, their friends and their families.
The film explicitly explores in detail the human consequences of redundancy, unemployment and the debilitating process of claiming Universal Credit, for example.
Of course we have no marketing budget whatsoever, and so if there are any trade union activists out there who genuinely believe in the film and wish to help spread the word across social media, via email and beyond, then please contact me at brett@seriousfeather.com and hopefully we can sort something out.
Co-producer Jack Clarke and I have been doing exactly this for over 8 months now and, I can assure you, it is a very frustrating and mind-numbing process.
Moreover, if there are activists who have access to screening facilities, I’ll be more than happy to send them a free copy of the film for exhibition if they discuss with me the details, promote the event positively and, ideally, provide photographs and audience feedback which can then be shared with our cast, crew and online followers via the Serious Feather website and our social media channels.
In relation to this, if anyone is in the Greater Manchester region in January, we are holding an exclusive free screening at the Leigh Film Factory in Wigan on the 20th from 7pm onwards.
Book your seats here on Eventbrite and come along to see what all these film fans abroad are buzzing about, and what the frightfully conservative UK is blatantly ignoring.
In turn, if people are situated further afield, they can always watch the film right now on Amazon Prime for about 5 quid.
As mentioned above, I have debts to pay.
Such a public display of support and solidarity from the trade unions and their activists would of course alert other filmmakers and documentarians up and down the country that there exists a real-world alternative to the ‘colour-by-numbers’ period dramas, CGI extravaganzas and quirky lifestyle stories plopped out by the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and the British Film Institute.
It will inspire them to work together in creating challenging and humane narratives from a non-corporate perspective so the effects of, say, austerity cuts, COVID corruption, the cost-of-living crisis and industrial strike action etc. can be faithfully and memorably dramatised as we continue to suffer under this nice and shiny neo-liberalist kleptocracy of ours.
Just look at the ruckus RMT leader, Mick Lynch, has been causing on a weekly basis on inane television programmes like ITV’s ‘This Morning’ or ‘BBC Breakfast’, and the real hope this has inspired within everyday people who are sitting at home right now, worrying about switching their heating on.
Just think about what else we could do?
Just think about how much further we could go to bring back honour, dignity, fairness and intelligence back to the British Isles?
My best friend and cinematographer died from Sudden Adult Death Syndrome in 2013. He was 26 years old.
In turn, following decades of absence and estrangement, I was abandoned by my mother’s working class family in Nottinghamshire and my long-lost father’s middle class family in Oxfordshire in 2014.
They just didn’t want to know.
Moreover, following the UK government’s unprecedented £141bn bail out of the corrupt British banking system in 2008, austerity cuts finally sank their teeth into the education sector in 2015.
As a consequence, after 11 years of service, I was made redundant from my position as a lecturer in A Level Film and Cultural Studies.
This tragic succession of events, which literally left me with no one to turn to, ultimately coalesced into an intense period of angst, depression and sense of utter worthlessness.
In turn, with the stench of Brexit in the air, I slowly began to realise that I didn’t understand my country anymore; I didn’t understand its people; and I didn’t understand myself.
I had lost my focus and I had lost my faith.
With my redundancy money I spent months and months reading and writing and, now and again, glancing over at the large print of Hieronymus Bosch’s, ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, that hung on the living room wall in my rented flat in Manchester.
It then finally dawned on me, after yet another drunken stupor, that my only way out of this existential nightmare was to expel a full-throated, blood-curdling ‘Wilhelm Scream’: a semi-autobiographical screenplay based on Bosch’s 15th century painting in relation to the tragedy, trauma and truth of Broken Britain, i.e. the 1980s under Thatcher, the 1990s under Major and the 2000s under Cameron and Johnson.
Q. What’s the film about? What are its main themes?
In terms of plot we find Old Jack in his gloomy flat in Hulme in 2020 under Boris Johnson’s rule as he appears to awake from a fever dream about sex and murder in Manchester, overshadowed by the city’s Gothic architecture, civic statues and towering skyscrapers.
Still half-asleep and hung-over in bed he then reads an old text from the wife of a good friend who informs him that her husband is on a ventilator with COVID and that she is struggling to breathe herself.
In turn, in the mausoleum which is his study, Old Jack discovers that he has an unwelcome voicemail on his phone from his long-lost grandmother in Oxford who wishes to secretly meet up with him after four decades before she dies.
All of this proves too much for him however, and he takes a fistful of anti-depressants and washes them down with a mug of vodka.
Thus begins his descent into his own private rabbit-hole wherein he meets himself as a young boy in 1984, living on an abusive council estate under Margaret Thatcher during the Miners’ Strike, and fantasising about escaping into a world of fiction and illusion.
He is then later confronted by himself as a university student in 1992 during John Major’s tenure, riddled with Class A drugs, alienated from his peers and his studies, and questioning his purpose and sanity in violent messianic outbursts.
Moreover, these arduous, psychotic visitations are intercut with imagined interviews with a number of women from Old Jack’s past who seem to appear not only as witnesses, but also as judge and jury: his half-sister, his old English teacher, his former college manager, his ex-girlfriend’s Christian mother, and his nervous next door neighbour.
Overcome by the weight of his own history in a country where he doesn’t believe he belongs, Old Jack finally embarks on a pilgrimage to the historical Stoodley Pike monument in West Yorkshire, on the outskirts of society, to find some sort of answer which will put an end to his existential misery.
In terms of themes the film can primarily be understood to be about morality and ethics, about how those in power treat us and about how we treat each other.
In turn, it is also about abandonment, loneliness, mental health and a breakdown in communication between the working and middle classes.
Furthermore, the film’s narrative focuses on the socio-political cost of the North/South divide: how this is continually reinforced by right wing ideological forces in order to distract and weaken any serious collective opposition to the systematic asset stripping of what remains of the United Kingdom.
Q. What were you aiming for with the film, and how did those aims change in the making of the film?
A crucial aim of the film was to represent the Northern working class on screen, externally and internally, with intelligence, authenticity and dignity in direct opposition to the demeaning stereotypes and caricatures which are regularly churned out by the corporate mainstream media based in London.
Such a genuine independent creative decision directly challenges the popular status quo currently being maintained by the ideological state apparatus and so, understandably, we received no funding or investment or support from any public or private organisation at all.
As a result, what changed was not only the timescale of the production from one year to six and half years, but also my personal finances.
Even though every one of the cast and crew members committed their time and talents for free – a testament to the ongoing industriousness and inventiveness of Greater Manchester by the way – the production still left me around £56,000 in debt by way of personal loans, two credit cards and two overdrafts.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about reactions to the film from critics and from working-class people?
Since its release on Amazon Prime in May 2022 we have won over 50 international film festival awards and nominations, and received over 100 informed and passionate reviews on IMDb, Letterboxd and various arts and culture websites.
In the main these reviews praise the film’s anger, insight and originality, its production values, its performances and its soundtrack, comparing it to the works of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke and even Theodor Dreyer.
Standout quotes such as ‘A Searing Portrait of Modern Britain’ are incredibly validating and prove that a large international audience – who are also going through their own individual horrors under this self-serving global capitalist system – need authentic stories like this to remind them that they’re not alone and they’re not going mad.
We hosted a free screening of the film on a working class Manchester housing estate in Moston, for instance, and while a number of attendees still strongly believed that cinema should be ‘entertaining’ and ‘escapist’, many others recognised the role poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic abuse has played in their day-to-day lives.
Q. What do you think of British cinema, the kind of films that get made and the roles these play in our society?
In my personal experience, due to the deeply embedded hierarchical character of the United Kingdom’s social system, and the real world advantages and disadvantages this creates for different social groups in different parts of the country, the history of British cinema can primarily be understood in terms of the presence, or absence, of class and class division.
Many of us alive today first learned of the existence and influence of the rules and rewards of social class as children while watching, for instance, David Lean’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1946), Carol Reed’s ‘Oliver!’ (1968) or Richard Fleischer’s ‘The Prince and The Pauper’ (1977).
Repeated screenings of these movies usually took place in a school assembly or in the family living room over the Christmas period and, I would argue, such public exhibitions contributed to a cultural normalisation of social prejudice, inequality and exclusion by disguising these conditions as simply an inevitable part of British history and tradition.
While the 1960s’ new wave ‘Angry Young Man’ arrived and blew a plume of cigarette smoke in the face of authority, articulating alternative expectations and aspirations for white working class British males, such insubordination was given short shrift.
Despite dynamic and memorable performances from Richard Burton in ‘Look Back in Anger’ (1959), Albert Finney in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ (1960) and Richard Harris in ‘This Sporting Life’ (1963), it is telling that their character arcs always concluded with them being either abandoned or emasculated as punishment for not knowing their place.
Against the childish backdrop of the ‘Carry On’ franchise and its production line of pathetic proletariats, the trajectory of Michael Caine’s filmography throughout the 1970s provides an interesting counterpoint in that his commercial success rested largely upon the re-appropriation of his Cockney origins, persona and on-screen roles.
For example, only five or so years after the incendiary, anti-establishment release of ‘Get Carter’ (1971), he was suddenly battling on behalf of Queen and Country in ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ (1975) and ‘A Bridge Too Far’ (1976).
In turn, it is no surprise that, when he left to further pursue the capitalist dream of Hollywood fame and fortune later in the decade, he was more or less deified by the country’s mainstream media.
Of course, everything exploded when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and cultural war was openly declared on the men and women of the labour movement and their representation across Britain’s sterling silver screens.
In the blue corner were David Puttnam, Richard Attenborough and Merchant-Ivory, and in the red corner were Mike Leigh, Dennis Potter and Alan Clarke.
Noticeably, state school kids were far too busy reciting profanities in the playground from ‘Scum’ (1979) and ‘Made in Britain’ (1982) to give a toss about the posh swag bag of Academy Awards accrued by state-supported nostalgia narratives such as ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981) or ‘Ghandi’ (1982).
I should note here that Michael Caine did go some way to redeem himself in this decade by supporting Julie Walters’ wonderful working class lead in Willy Russell’s intellectually aspirational ‘Educating Rita’ in 1983.
Under the tenures of John Major and Tony Blair in the 1990s the changing of the guard necessarily took place, and Richard Curtis and Kenneth Branagh dutifully took up their well-financed positions with ‘Four Weddings and A Funeral’ (1994) and ‘Notting Hill’ (1999), ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (1993) and ‘Hamlet’ (1996).
Meanwhile, as a reflection of the ongoing embourgeoisement of mainstream British culture and society, authentic working class cinema not only had to search for its roots and values in the iconography of the underclass, it had to also search for its funding abroad.
Films such as Mike Leigh’s ‘Naked’ (1993), Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ (1996), Gary Oldman’s ‘Nil by Mouth’ (1997) and Ken Loach’s ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) highlighted that the remnants of working class togetherness and community could now only subsist on the margins by way of the narrative ritualisation of petty crime, drugs or alcohol.
Indeed, during the 21st century, as the British Empire suffers its death throes and the country’s post-Elizabethan standing on the world stage rapidly dwindles away, the Establishment has reacted accordingly in its attempt to remain in power by re-asserting outmoded notions of cinematic representation that are increasingly reductive, intolerant and undemocratic.
While commercially successful film franchises like ‘Harry Potter’, ‘James Bond’, ‘Downton Abbey’ and ‘The Crown’ continue to suffocate the growing diversity and demands of our shared culture, the mediated elevation of privately educated white male screen actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddy Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston has seemingly transported us back to the post-war performances of Lawrence Olivier, Alec Guinness and David Niven.
To end, it is no coincidence that the working class white male protagonist in my self-funded ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ (2022) has no community at all: he sleeps alone, he drinks alone and he weeps alone.
In turn, during the film’s climax, and in response to a wider right-wing society that continues to disrespect, mock and ignore working people’s invaluable economic and cultural contributions to the nation, it is somewhat inevitable that he finally disappears.
Q. How could trade unions and their activists get involved with ‘Nobody Loves You …’?
A first step would be for trade unions to show active support for ‘Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist’ by directly recommending it to their members, their friends and their families.
The film explicitly explores in detail the human consequences of redundancy, unemployment and the debilitating process of claiming Universal Credit, for example.
Of course we have no marketing budget whatsoever, and so if there are any trade union activists out there who genuinely believe in the film and wish to help spread the word across social media, via email and beyond, then please contact me at brett@seriousfeather.com and hopefully we can sort something out.
Co-producer Jack Clarke and I have been doing exactly this for over 8 months now and, I can assure you, it is a very frustrating and mind-numbing process.
Moreover, if there are activists who have access to screening facilities, I’ll be more than happy to send them a free copy of the film for exhibition if they discuss with me the details, promote the event positively and, ideally, provide photographs and audience feedback which can then be shared with our cast, crew and online followers via the Serious Feather website and our social media channels.
In relation to this, if anyone is in the Greater Manchester region in January, we are holding an exclusive free screening at the Leigh Film Factory in Wigan on the 20th from 7pm onwards.
Book your seats here on Eventbrite and come along to see what all these film fans abroad are buzzing about, and what the frightfully conservative UK is blatantly ignoring.
In turn, if people are situated further afield, they can always watch the film right now on Amazon Prime for about 5 quid.
As mentioned above, I have debts to pay.
Such a public display of support and solidarity from the trade unions and their activists would of course alert other filmmakers and documentarians up and down the country that there exists a real-world alternative to the ‘colour-by-numbers’ period dramas, CGI extravaganzas and quirky lifestyle stories plopped out by the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and the British Film Institute.
It will inspire them to work together in creating challenging and humane narratives from a non-corporate perspective so the effects of, say, austerity cuts, COVID corruption, the cost-of-living crisis and industrial strike action etc. can be faithfully and memorably dramatised as we continue to suffer under this nice and shiny neo-liberalist kleptocracy of ours.
Just look at the ruckus RMT leader, Mick Lynch, has been causing on a weekly basis on inane television programmes like ITV’s ‘This Morning’ or ‘BBC Breakfast’, and the real hope this has inspired within everyday people who are sitting at home right now, worrying about switching their heating on.
Just think about what else we could do?
Just think about how much further we could go to bring back honour, dignity, fairness and intelligence back to the British Isles?
