Bill Douglas: A Film Artist

By Phil Wickham

This book examines the work and art of Bill Douglas, thirty years after his death.

Douglas made only a small body of work during his lifetime: The Bill Douglas Trilogy, based on his deprived childhood in Scotland; and Comrades, his epic on the Tolpuddle Martyrs; but he is acknowledged by many as one of Britain’s greatest filmmakers. His films inspire a depth of passion in those that have seen them, and interest in his work has intensified over the years, both within the UK and overseas.

This is the first work to examine Douglas’s life and career through archive material recently made available to researchers. Editors Amelia Watts and Phil Wickham have carefully selected a range of voices—both scholars and practitioners—to reappraise Douglas’s career from a variety of angles. The book raises important questions about Douglas’s status as an artist, and reflects on his struggles within the film industry of the 1970s and 1980s in order to consider the attendant difficulties of working within a collaborative and commercial medium such as cinema. The volume also explores the wider legacy of this film artist, through the collection on moving image history he assembled with Peter Jewell, which became the foundation of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. It will appeal to film students and scholars, and the small but committed group of general readers who are interested in Douglas’s work.

The book has a foreword by the renowned filmmaker Mark Cousins, who, like many other contemporary directors, is a great enthusiast for Douglas’s work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804130254

Book preview

Bill Douglas

Exeter Studies in Film History

Series Editors:

Richard Maltby, Matthew Flinders Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University

Helen Hanson, Associate Professor in Film History at the University of Exeter and Academic Director of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum

Joe Kember, Professor in Film Studies at the University of Exeter

Exeter Studies in Film History is devoted to publishing the best new scholarship on the cultural, technical and aesthetic history of cinema. The aims of the series are to reconsider established orthodoxies and to revise our understanding of cinema’s past by shedding light on neglected areas in film history.

Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, the series includes monographs and essay collections, translations of major works written in other languages, and reprinted editions of important texts in cinema history.

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

title

First published in 2022 by

University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive

Exeter EX4 4QR

UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

Copyright © Amelia Watts, Phil Wickham and the individual contributors 2022

The right of Amelia Watts, Phil Wickham and

the individual contributors to be identified as authors of this

work has been asserted by them in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Exeter Studies in Film History

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

https://doi.org/10.47788/QQIT1688

ISBN 978-1-80413-024-7 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-80413-025-4 ePub

ISBN 978-1-8041-3026-1 PDF

This book was published with the generous support of The Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell Endowment Fund.

Cover image: Bill Douglas with Michael Clark on the set of Comrades. Image © David Appleby and reproduced by kind permission.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the material included in this book. Please get in touch with any enquiries or information relating to an image or the rights holder.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Mark Cousins

Introduction

PHIL WICKHAM AND AMELIA WATTS

PART I: BILL DOUGLAS IN CONTEXT

1Bill Douglas and the British Film Industry during the 1970s and 1980s

AMELIA WATTS

2The Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell Collection

PHIL WICKHAM

3Bill Douglas’s Favourite film— Il Mare

AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER JEWELL BY ANDY KIMPTON-NYE

4The Unseen Films of Bill Douglas

ANDY KIMPTON-NYE

5Bill Douglas’s Working Papers

AMELIA WATTS

PART II: BILL DOUGLAS’S FILMS

6His Ain Folk?

ANDREW GORDON

7Exploring Questions of Theory and Practice within the Bill Douglas Trilogy

JAMIE CHAMBERS

8True Comrades: Bill Douglas and Bertolt Brecht

CARA FRASER

9Returning to Comrades

DAVID ARCHIBALD

PART III: BILL DOUGLAS’S LEGACY

10 Bill Douglas’s Critical Reputation and Legacy

DUNCAN PETRIE

Notes

Select Bibliography

Filmography

Index

Illustrations

1Jamie and Robert in Egypt from My Way Home , 1978

2Bill Douglas demonstrates the praxinoscope. Bill Douglas interview by Charles Rees, 1978, Special Feature on Comrades DVD (BFI, 2012).

3Menu card for the first private view of the Kinetoscope, 1894 (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum EXEBD 76927)

4Bill Douglas and Peter Jewell with items from their collection (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum EXEBD 48469)

5Press book from Il Mare (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum EXEBD 19153)

6Bill Douglas in Rousdon , 1966

7Gracemary scene in Berwick Street market, 1966

8Bill Douglas in The Party at the Archer Street flat, 1966

9Bill Douglas in Fever , 1967

10 Storyboard from My Way Home Production, BDC 1/TRI/1/3, (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum)

11 Comrades’ Storyboard, BDC 1/COM/1/4 – Plan Corridor Sc 95 (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum)

12 Comrades’ Storyboard, BDC 1/COM/1/4 – Plan Court Room Sc 95 (Bill Douglas Cinema Museum)

13 Jamie from My Childhood , 1972

14 Jamie from My Ain Folk , 1973

15 Jamie from My Way Home , 1978

16 Jamie from My Way Home , 1978

17 Jamie Prepares to ‘helter-skelter’ down the coalfield, My Childhood , 1972

18 Jamie’s expressionist anguish within Father’s Mother’s home, My Ain Folk , 1973

19 Street in Newcraighall. My Way Home , 1978.

20 Train Tracks. My Way Home , 1978.

21 Tommy dejected. My Childhood , 1972

22 Jamie dejected. My Childhood , 1972.

Contributors

David Archibald teaches Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow. His publications include the monographs The War that Won’t Die: The Spanish Civil War in Cinema (2012), Tracking Loach (2022), and essays on film and politics in numerous academic journals. David also makes films, the most recent of which include Drifting with Debord (2020), with Carl Lavery, and Comrades Together Apart/Camarades junts-i-a-banda (2021), with Núria Araüna Baró.

Jamie Chambers is a filmmaker, curator and Lecturer in Film and TV at Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh). He is founder of the Folk Film Gathering, the world’s first folk film festival, and director of the award-winning films When the Song Dies (2013) and Blackbird (2014). He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Film Education Journal with BFI and UCL IoE Press and the director of the Scottish International Film Education Conference.

Cara Fraser is a final year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded doctoral student in Film Studies at the University of Dundee. Her main research interest is the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and his influence on film. Her final and Master’s dissertations focused on French auteur Godard and American writer director Spike Lee, respectively. For her PhD thesis she turned closer to home: she has been researching Brecht and his Epic Theatre’s influence on British Art Cinema by examining the works of four British-based directors highly influential in their own right: Lindsay Anderson, Peter Greenaway, Richard Lester and, of course, Bill Douglas.

Andrew Gordon is a social and military historian who has written drama and short stories for BBC Radio. He has recently published biographies of Captain Denis Garstin MC and William Alexander Stanhope Forbes. He lectures on Cornish art and history and has compiled an extensive catalogue of the works of a major Cornish artist. He first discovered the work of Bill Douglas during a visit to the BFI and has carried out further research of the Trilogy during visits to Edinburgh.

Andy Kimpton-Nye has worked extensively as a television producer and director specializing in film-related documentaries. His work includes a series for BBC R4, In the Director’s Chair, exploring the lives and work of Luis Bunuel, Stanley Kubrick, David Lean and Orson Welles; one-off documentaries for FilmFour on Alan Clarke and Philip Glass; a series of short documentaries for Channel 4, Film Fever, looking at the fans of Julie Andrews, James Bond, Michael Caine, Carry On films, Hammer Horror and Laurel & Hardy; full-length documentaries for Sky Arts on Terence Davies, Bill Douglas and Derek Jarman; and numerous documentary extras for DVD releases from the BFI and UFO Distribution in Paris.

Duncan Petrie is Professor of Film and Television at the University of York. His books include Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry (1991), The British Cinematographer (1996) Screening Scotland (2000), Contemporary Scottish Fictions (2004), Shot in New Zealand (2007), Educating Film-Makers (2014) and Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (2019). He is co-editor of Bill Douglas: A Lanternist’s Account (1993) and was director of the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter from 1996 to 2003.

Amelia Watts has recently completed her PhD at the University of Exeter, where her research focused on the British film industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Her project extensively examined the work of Bill Douglas, and utilizes his largely unseen Working Papers. She has guest lectured on Bill Douglas and The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Glasgow and the University of Exeter.

Phil Wickham is the Curator of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter. He also lectures in the film team at the university and has written extensively on British film and television. He was previously a curator at the BFI.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all the contributors to this book. We are very grateful to Mark Cousins for his foreword and to David Appleby for permission to use the cover photograph. Anna Henderson, her colleagues and readers at the University of Exeter Press have been extremely helpful throughout the process. We are especially thankful to Peter Jewell for all his support and generosity. This book is also in memory of Simon Relph, the producer of Comrades and an enthusiastic supporter of Bill Douglas’s work. When Simon died in 2016 there should have been a greater recognition of his huge contribution to the British film industry As we went to press we heard of the death of Mamoun Hassan, the other great figure that helped Bill Douglas in his career and a significant loss to British cinema; Mamoun and Simon made Bill’s films possible.

In addition, Amelia would like to thank Josh Norton-Cox, Teresa Sanders and Laura Baker for their support throughout this process. Phil thanks his family; colleagues, board members and volunteers at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum; and especially Helen Hanson.

Foreword

How Many Ls are there in Wonderful?

Mark Cousins

Dear Bill Douglas,

There’s a new book about you. Three decades after you died, people are still writing about you. I’m writing a foreword to the book. This is the foreword.

The book has multiple writers. They look at your work and life from many directions. I love your films, so thought I knew most things about you, but the book reminds me of the funding crises you had; how the Films of Scotland committee rejected your application for funding in 1971 for what became My Childhood because the script ‘didn’t depict a forward looking country’.

That must have been a blow upon a bruise. The authors quote you as saying ‘I hated reality’, and talk of your fear of nuclear war and the hostility of some of the people in Newcraighall, near Edinburgh, where I live, when you were shooting your trilogy. No wonder you felt some hatred for the world. I know that framing of a shot was crucial for you and the immobile frame was sacred, so I was shocked to read that your cinematographer let some shots ‘breathe’, in other words reframed and made adjustments, without telling you.

And one of the writers talks about what he calls ‘delayed decoding’—a phrase that he borrows from writings about Joseph Conrad—to describe how you show us a small moment and make us feel its shock, and only later reveal where it sits in your story. You were good at that.

And what did you mean when you said, ‘every shot is a verb’? I wish I could ask you that. The book is studded with such moments. Another is your love for Giuseppi Patroni Graffi’s film Il Mare. I just watched it. Holy fuck. How had I not seen this film before? You are continuing to teach me.

There’s a moment in My Way Home, the third in your trilogy, which you released in 1978, that I’ll never forget. For nearly three hours, we’ve watched your main character, wee Jamie, grow up. We’ve seen his solitude, his rejection, his timidity. We’ve seen the rock-hard poverty of his life in the coal-mining village of Newcraighall, in Scotland.

But then he meets a serviceman, Robert. Robert is well read, middle class, refined and handsome. Towards the end of the film, as you know, Jamie and Robert are in Egypt, in the RAF mess. Robert seems to have no interest in gangly, rough-spoken Jamie. Robert’s reading. Jamie says, ‘What a lot of books you’ve got.’

‘I’ve got a lot more at home’.

Jamie looks at one by Maxim Gorky.

Then Robert is polishing the buttons on Jamie’s air force jacket—a slightly intimate thing to do.

Then you cut to them in the sun, Bill. Jamie says, ‘Want to dae something. I’m bored.’ Robert’s reply is startling, cutting. He draws an X in the sand and says that it’s Jamie. Far away from it, he draws another X in the sand, and says that’s him. Then he draws a line between them.

He’s saying that they’re far apart. They’re separated by learning, by class. Jamie’s as working class as you can get. Robert’s as middle class as you can get. Lines can’t be crossed in life. Or can they, Bill? There are all sorts of lines. Class lines. Sex lines.

But soon after Robert draws his line in the sand, Jamie is reading one of his books—by Kafka. It seems like the line has been crossed, slightly. And then they are sitting together, and Jamie is writing a letter home. And he asks Robert a question, one of the most touching questions in cinema. He says, ‘How many Ls are there in wonderful?’

He asks it in a deadpan way, but suddenly we realize that … what? Could it be? That … he’s happy? Jamie might just be happy. When Robert says ‘S’pose I’ll go to university’, Jamie replies, ‘I want to be an artist. Maybe even a film director.’

Wow. On the outside, Jamie looks the same as he always has. But inside him there’s been a world shift. The lonely working class boy has reimagined himself.

But this isn’t the moment that jolts me, Bill. A second comes a few scenes later, when Jamie and Robert are in a mosque in Cairo. They take their shoes off and explore. I’ve been in that mosque. They look up, together, in the same direction. Their looking has become one. They stand close.

And then comes the moment, the visual cattle-prod. Jamie leans his head on Robert’s shoulder.

Figure 1: Jamie and Robert in Egypt from My Way Home

Jamie doesn’t ask permission, he just does it. He isn’t nervous. He just does it.

Look at the smile on Jamie’s face. We haven’t seen that before. Look at their hands. They almost touch.

The touch. The intimacy. How many Ls are there in wonderful?

You cut away from the moment so quickly, Bill, that the first time I saw it, I wondered if I had imagined it. Why so quick? Jamie’s been sad all his life and now he’s happy, and you don’t let us enjoy it! Maybe you wanted to avoid sentimentality. Maybe you wanted to show that such moments are only fleeting…

But then Robert says, ‘If you feel like it, look us up sometime. No need to feel shy. If you like, you can stay. If you want, you can call it home.’

I’ve called your films home.

Thank you, Bill.

Mark Cousins

Introduction

Phil Wickham and Amelia Watts

This book looks at several aspects of the work of Bill Douglas, one of Britain’s most singular and visionary filmmakers, and arguably the greatest ever from Scotland.1 Thirty years after his death, his films retain their potency and have gained many new, committed supporters around the world, including leading filmmakers as varied as Lynne Ramsay, Peter Mullan, Lenny Abrahamson and Nicholas Philibert. His influence is felt now more than when he was alive and making films. While their intensity means the Bill Douglas Trilogy and Comrades are not for all tastes, those who fall under the spell of the lingering long shots, the stillness and clarity of the compositions and the emotional power invested in the visual language of the films that he wrote and directed are particularly ardent in their passion. As Derek Malcolm wrote, ‘He may not be everybody’s filmmaker. He is certainly his own man. And whether you like them or not, every film he makes is unique.’2

The basic biographical facts of Bill Douglas’s life are well documented.3 Born into poverty in the East Lothian mining village of Newcraighall (now an outer suburb of Edinburgh) in 1934, his childhood was deprived and loveless. The Trilogy that made his name as a filmmaker, comprising My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978), reflected on this upbringing from his life as a small boy at the end of the Second World War to his national service in the Royal Air Force in Egypt in the mid-1950s. The Trilogy contains many truths about his young life through the central character Jamie, played across all three films by Stephen Archibald; in the setting, elements of the familial relationships, the emotional cruelty and trauma of his childhood, and the friendship Jamie forms with an Englishman in Egypt that gives him the confidence to shape his life in a new artistic direction. It is, however, much more than ‘autobiographical’.4 Instead, the films are a creative imagining of his life to communicate and share an emotional landscape with the audience. Douglas ruefully said, ‘I don’t think I had the talent to make it as black as reality.’5 In the late 1950s, Douglas moved to London, taking on a student role for a year at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop before embarking on a career as a jobbing actor. In 1961 he moved into a flat in Maddox Street, Mayfair with his friend from Egypt (the character of Robert), Peter Jewell, and they relocated to Archer Street in Soho in 1964 where he spent most of the rest of his life. As Jewell has explained, ‘he had decided that the world of the arts held something for him’.6 Douglas acted, painted and wrote before he began experimenting with amateur filmmaking from 1966, and eventually successfully applied to study at the London Film School from 1969 to 1970 after submitting his paintings.7 His graduation film, Come Dancing (1970), demonstrated a distinctive style, particularly a feeling for shot composition and an emotional power communicated through the image rather than dialogue. This led to a commission from the BFI Production Board under Mamoun Hassan to film Douglas’s script for My Childhood, and subsequently its sequel My Ain Folk. Although these productions were fraught, the films received many critical plaudits and international awards, and a third part of the Trilogy, My Way Home, was produced by the BFI and released in 1978. Moving away from his own life as subject matter, Douglas wrote the script for his ‘poor man’s epic’, Comrades (1987), which tells the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, founding fathers of the trade union movement in Britain. Again, the pre-production of the film proved very difficult, and it was eight years before the completed film was shown at cinemas. Comrades used colour instead of the Trilogy’s black and white, and was three hours long rather than under seventy-five minutes.8 This proved to be the last film Douglas was able to make: lack of funding thwarted further work, not helped by his reputation for uncompromising perfectionism, although two further scripts—an adaptation of James Hogg’s eighteenth-century novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Flying Horse, about moving pictures pioneer Eadweard Muybridge—were in the process of pre-production in the last years of his life. After doctors failed to diagnose lung cancer and it became inoperable, Douglas died in the summer of 1991 at the age of just 57, spending his last weeks cared for at his great friend Jewell’s family home in North Devon. Douglas is buried in the churchyard in the village of Bishops Tawton, and his memorial stone bears the epitaph ‘Film-maker, Friend’ followed by a line from his script of Comrades: ‘we only have to love another to know what we must do’.

This summary only outlines the trajectory of Douglas’s fascinating and complex life, a life that contains both dynamics of light and shade, peaks of achievement and troughs of disappointment. There is plenty of material for a biography concentrating on his life story to be published in the future, but this book sets out to do something different. The chapters in the book look again at Douglas’s work in its fullest sense, inevitably touching on how his life impacted his art, but they examine his body of work from new perspectives.

In 1993, two years after Douglas’s death, the BFI published Bill Douglas: A Lanternist’s Account, edited by Eddie Dick, Andrew Noble and Duncan Petrie. An obvious question would be why another book on Douglas, given his small body of work. There are good reasons for this. First, in the intervening three decades much has changed, not least many of the practices and structure of the film industry itself. Douglas’s critical reputation has risen as the opportunities to see his work have increased, and we will be considering his influence on the contemporary cinematic landscape both in Britain and beyond, notably in the third section in which Duncan Petrie examines his legacy.

Secondly, there have been changes within the field of Film Studies and how film texts and filmmakers are critically examined. A Lanternist’s Account had at its centre the scripts from the Trilogy with contributions from a variety of authors, most of whom knew or worked with Douglas. It documented the making of his films, partly through interviews with some of his collaborators, as well as analyses of themes seen as recurrent within the films, particularly those redolent of a wider Scottish culture.9 New generations of scholars and researchers bring different ideas to bear on the films, and cultural changes since the early 1990s enable new ways to think about Douglas’s work. Some of the contributors to this book were not born or were infants when Douglas died, while others discovered his work as teenagers before they embarked on a career researching film.10 Some chapters are by senior academics within British higher education, while others come from doctoral students just starting their careers. Three contributors are not officially academics at all, but experienced researchers or practitioners steeped in Douglas’s work. While all the contributors to A Lanternist’s Account were from Scotland (bar Mamoun Hassan’s coda), this new volume mixes Scottish voices with English ones, including its editors. In the last thirty years, the political situation and notions of national identity in Scotland have utterly transformed and, interestingly, the perspectives from many of the Scottish contributors are not concerned with his representation or embodiment of Scottish culture, but broader aesthetic or political considerations. Cara Fraser looks at the influence of Bertolt Brecht on Comrades and how Douglas employed Brechtian techniques to elicit responses from his audience. Jamie Chambers offers a detailed analysis through close-reading and application of the theories of Alain Bergala in merging film theory with the principles of film practice to examine aesthetic decision-making and patterns of intentionality in the Trilogy. David Archibald considers his own history of watching Comrades in light of his roles both as a political activist and a film critic. Continuity from the earlier book comes from Petrie: having just started his career in 1993, he was keen to reassess the filmmaker and his work and his responses to them after three decades. Petrie looks at Douglas’s legacy and the renewal of critical interest in his work to position him within Scottish, British and international art film traditions.

Thirdly, we have at our disposal a great deal of new material that sheds light on Douglas’s work. This creates new ways of thinking about Douglas’s films but also looks beyond them to a broader reflection on his art. Not long after A Lanternist’s Account was published, Jewell donated a collection of 50,000 moving image artefacts that he and Douglas had painstakingly accumulated since the beginning of the 1960s to the University of Exeter, to found a museum. This was always their intention as collectors, a genuinely altruistic gesture to share their passion for moving images with others, including new generations who could feel the same sense of wonder they did. In his chapter, Phil Wickham, co-editor and the current curator of The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, argues that the collection is part of Douglas’s art and the patterns and choices within his collecting echo many of those within his films. Since childhood, famously documented in his essay ‘Palace of Dreams’, Douglas had been devoted to cinemagoing, but from the late 1950s he began to take an interest in international art cinema, an interest that clearly influenced the films he would make and his aspirations as a filmmaker.11 Andy Kimpton-Nye has interviewed Jewell on this passion and in particular their favourite from this period, the now little known Italian film Il Mare (1962), and why it was such a formative influence on his work. Kimpton-Nye, a filmmaker himself who made the documentary Bill Douglas: Intent on Getting the Image in 2006, also looks at another new resource: the 8mm films made by Douglas and Jewell from when the former received a camera and accessories from the latter as a Christmas gift in 1965 to his entry to the London Film School in 1969. These films were dismissed in interviews during his career by Douglas as where he ‘learned what not to do’, and were unseen for five decades at Jewell’s Devon home.12 Persuaded that they were worth looking at again, the films offer a fascinating glimpse of both Douglas’s life in Soho at that time and his developing skills as a filmmaker, which over three years shows an increase in skills, a willingness to try out new ideas and create a distinctive style. They are now digitized, and a documentary by Kimpton-Nye examining them in the context of Douglas’s life and career is planned. In talking about these personal elements of his work, which are entwined with his private life, the usual dictates of referring to the subject and his chief collaborator as ‘Douglas’ and ‘Jewell’ feels jarring and out of place, so in these chapters they become ‘Bill’ and ‘Peter’, while in others examining his professional career they are denoted as usual by their surname.

Lastly, over the last five years or so, Jewell has kindly donated a vast amount of material concerning Douglas’s career to the museum. These script versions, correspondence, journal writings, notes and business memos reveal the pressures and decisions that shaped the making of his films. They offer insight into Douglas’s perspective on the work, but in addition to his own archive, the museum has also acquired production materials from others involved in the Trilogy and Comrades, enabling different interpretations on the texts. Amelia Watts, co-editor of this book, has been studying these materials over the last