Alan Clarke may well be the anti-Leigh. They made movies at the same time, both primarily for British TV, and they covered a lot of the same bases; that is the lower, and working classes of Great Britain. Clarke seems to focus more on big problems, and characters that typify those problems, while Mike Leigh creates characters that are less intertwined with those problems, and instead just live their lives depite them.
Clarke, who is dead, was a much more action-oriented filmmaker, and, like Leigh’s TV work, the scenes are very well composed and blocked, though they’re not showy or flashy. Reynolds will therefore call them bland. A new box set of Clarke’s work is out in the US and this marks the first time most of these have been seen here.
Made in Britain (1982) This was Tim Roth’s first filmed role. It came two years before he appeared in Leigh’s Meantime, which is an interesting film with which to compare this one. In Meantime Roth plays a slightly retarded young man who falls under the spell of Gary Oldman’s skinhead character; here, it’s Roth who plays the skinhead. It’s much more outrageous, over the top, seething and ridiculous than Leigh’s, but Roth’s character, Trevor, is
meant to be the archetype of the skinhead problem – the manifestation of the public’s fears – and as such he succeeds by being so bombastic and crazed.
Trevor has no allies, no gang. He has been arrested several times and is on the verge of being sent away for a long time. He doesn’t care. He thinks he’s part of a revolution, or the future man.
There’s a scene where he’s locked up where he speaks (spits the words actually) at length about how "your" system is crumbling and his is taking over. It’s chilling – not b/c anyone thinks he’s right any more – but due to the force of Roth’s conviction. This is wild, and well worth watching. I think Roth has said he’s done with violent films. Lord knows, he’s made a lot of them, but none of the stylized bloodletting Tarantino had him do matches up to this.
The Firm (1988) This film addresses one of my favorite sociological events: What happens when the members of a sub-culture, particularly a nihilistic or violent one, grows up? In this case Gary Oldman (a well-established actor by this point, if not a star) is a football "supporter" who, while trying to unite three "firms" (gangs) into one for a European game, ends up fighting the other two firms. Unlike Made…, this doesn’t feel over the top or exaggerated, or at least less so. Oldman’s character, Bex, tries to walk the line between a real job with a wife, child and semi-detached home with his hooliganism, with sometimes horrible results.
If Trevor had been a less extreme skinhead in his youth, he might have grown up into the character of Bex, unable to leave behind the excitement of youth for the normalcy of a family and job. Watching Oldman here brings home a comment Chris made earlier about how embarrassing it must be for him to utter some of the lines that he has to in paychecks like Batman.
The Firm was almost the last film Clarke made before his death. It was
the last narrative film he made.
The last he made is Elephant (1988), which is indeed where Van Sant took the title of his own film. And if Van Sant was exploring the Perils of Minimalism, well, Clarke took it much deeper here. It’s presumably about the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, and so it can neatly function as a comparison piece to Leigh’s Four Days In July. And as with Meantime and Made in Britain, you couldn’t come up with two more different films. The film shows executions, one after another, with no idea given as to why or which side. After each execution the camera stays on the dead body for many seconds. There is no dialogue. The camera work here is very impressive; each scene depicts a completely new set-up, but always with the same sickening result. Even at only half an hour, without any context this film would either be unwatchable or pornographic. Luckily, there’s an excellent audio commentary by the film’s producer, who happens to be Danny Boyle. It goes a long way in explaining the
film, and the time and place (Belfast), in which it was made. It’s a bit of luck that I saw the film this week, the week that the IRA claims to have laid down their weapons. After our own involvement the past 4 years of war and bombings in the Middle East (and in the West), it’s easy to forget that these people lived in a war zone whose similarities to Palestine / Israel are uncomfortably close. (Elephant and The Firm are on a single DVD)
Unlike the awfully executed Leigh films, these Clarke movies are splendidly done. They look great, have subtitles, and some audio commentary and interviews. They’re well worth watching, and as usual, I’d love to hear from someone (except Reynolds) who can provide more light on Clarke and the reactions to these films when they first showed on TV.
I’m sure there are more sophisticated comparisons to make between the 2 filmmakers, and maybe someone has written significantly about them; to say nothing about the influence of Clarke on Van Sant, Boyle, Leigh and Tarantino. I need more time to absorb these (and to watch Scum), but I feel like I’ve found a bit of the Rosetta Stone with this guy.
These sound pretty interesting. I put Elephant/Firm in my queue. And then I’ll post on ’em, a lot. You love my comments. You’re just still mad about that time I made fun of black-shirt-wearing, cloves-smoking, Marguerite-Duras-reading high schoolers and made your ears burn.
by the way, I’ve started my own blog.
http://backgammonmotherfucker.blogspot.com/
check it out.
Clarke is best known in Britain for ‘Scum’ starring a young Ray Winstone. It was made for TV, but then the BBC refused to show it, and it was remade as a feature-length movie for general release. It deals with life in a borstal (juvenile detention center), and it is absolutely searing. Relentless in the way the camera moves in on the violence (some of it expressed physically, but much of it in the language and expressions of the actors), I remember feeling assaulted when I first saw it.
The anti-Leigh is right. The incredible thing about Clarke is that he never makes the slightest concession to the audience. He wants to show the way that social deprivation, but also certain kinds of welfare policies produce this barely suppressed anger that every so often erupts in violence. Mauer’s description of Roth spitting out words, precisely captures the rage of his characters.
Clarke’s influence is all over ‘Nil by mouth’ (another movie that makes you cringe at the level of everyday domestic violence), and since Winstone and Oldman cut their teeth with him, it makes sense.
I want to buy Scum when Nicola goes to visit her family but its damn expensive (60+ british pounds). Would like to see it though, we’ll see. I too shall check out Firm/Elephant.
Terrence Davies anyone?
I see that Netflix does indeed have all of Clarke’s films! Excellent.
Mr. Lucky Doubles?
Mr Lucky Doubles at your service…
The US Clarke box has 5 DVDs, includes both versions of Scum, for $85. Still some serious bucks.
Scum . . . searing? Well, not for me. I’ve seen a hell of a lot of youth in crisis films (youth in detention centers, youth rebellion films, etc.); the most recent and most interesting being Singapore filmmaker Royston Tan’s 15. Scum seemed overtly schematic and disappointingly melodramatic (I like a little bit of ambiguity). Searing? Linda Blair’s 1974 made-for-TV film Born Innocent was more shocking, Canadian television’s The Boys of St. Vincent (1992) more horrific, Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968) more experimental and revolutionary. Even Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge (also released in 1979) captures the complexity of adolescence at odds with the system with more nuance and stronger character development. I was excited to see this film but its one dimensional characters and plot made it a disappointment. Has anyone seen Ken Loach’s Kes? What a great film. I will watch Elephant though as I am a fan of Van Sant’s film and quite curious about its namesake.
I agree with Jeff: Chris should be barred from the blog.
I’m still in mourning over the death of Nate Fisher, so it is hard to drag my mind back to Scum. Jeff may be right. I’d have to see it again. I saw it as a teenager when it was released, and it seemed pretty damn intense to me. Of course, the other movie I remember getting a release pass from my school to see in that period was ‘Grease’ so maybe my basis for comparison was skewed.
My memory of Scum, and the reason it had such an impact on me at the time, was that it fed into a sort of punk aesthetic of towering, sputtering, wordless rage against authority and polite society. Its utter hopelessness (unlike ‘Kes’ which is a great film but has an underlying sentimentality in which salvation is still possible) seemed deeply subversive to my teenage mind. But, as I say, I’ll have to watch it again.
Now, I must return to the flickering collage of images of poor self-obsessed, depressive Nate. Nathaniel Samuel Fisher Jr. RIP.
Yeah the last two Six Feet Under episodes have been very strong. I was glued to the screen Sunday night and was very surprised by the ending. And there are, what . . . three or four episodes left? It will be interesting to see where it all goes.
Paraphrasing Lionel Trilling in the Times the other day, Virginia Heffernan wrote that authenticity “is a confrontation not with the self, which its practitioners regard as elusive and false, but with death, horror, being and nothingness.†For Heffernan, striving for authenticity is rough stuff—a man’s job—and she makes her point by foregrounding HBO’s “The Sopranos†and “Deadwood†over the “upper-middlebrow melodrama†offered up by “Six Feet Under.†I read this curious essay a few hours after watching Alan Clarke’s Elephant. In particular, I recalled listening to the commentary track provided by Danny Boyle and some academic wanker who basically repeated over and over again that Elephant was one fucking AUTHENTIC movie. It is a clinically brutal, cold-hearted, art-school snuff film set in Northern Ireland, but there wasn’t anything necessarily on view to say this was Northern Ireland (as opposed to Wales or Scotland or the Isle of Wight). The Northern Irish context is obviously very important, but Clarke must have taken it for granted that his viewers knew that going in (how the film might read to a 23rd century anthropologist is another question altogether). Anyway, back to authenticity. I found nothing authentic at all in the film. In fact I might argue it is bound up in artifice. It is a work of realism in its effort to make uncomfortably visible that which we do not want to see, but the film’s style continually reminded me that I was watching a film (do I have a problem with that . . . no; does it lessen the film’s impact . . . no; does the film tell the truth . . . no). All of the killings take place in isolated locations stripped clean of human existence (convenience stores, gas stations, abandoned—or at least curiously empty—factories, deserted streets, lifeless homes). It’s not a pretty film (though its compositions are thoughtfully artistic) but it is a poetic one (even if it lacks the Baroque lyricism of Van Sant’s homage). I’m rambling and, therefore, will stop. I’m glad I saw it.
Wow. You are one hard guy to please! But thought-provoking. I know we are playing with words here (and god forbid anyone sounds like an academic wanker), but is authenticity the same as realism, when describing a movie? You seem to be saying that Elephant was not realistic, and I’m not sure I’d disagree, but when I characterize a movie as authentic, or read a review that uses the term, I suppose it to mean stripped of artifice; simple almost documentary-style movies. Bleak, though I suppose that bleakness for bleakness sake is artifice. That’s a little (or a lot) simplistic, but Elephant has the feel, and the look and the composition I associate with authenticity. Maybe that’s the problem.
Well, I guess I wrestle with the word authenticity because it implies some sort of absence of bias or intent or ideology or even memesis, whereas I associate realism with the movement beginning in the late-nineteenth century where literature, theatre and even photography and film utilize artifice (structure, style, metaphor, imagery, etc.) to drive home an ideological perspective (usually undermining the middling classes’ sense of security and the norms that maintain that class-bound privilege while also drawing attention to those marginalized elements of society slipping through the cracks). In theatre studies, at least, many scholars (most notably WB Worthen) have argued that, within a few decades, dramatic realism worked diligently to protect the very audience the dramatic action meant to critique, keeping audiences (the theatre’s bread and butter) at a distance from the atrocities or social problems on display and allowing them to return to their homes without feeling in any way complicit. Now, I do think Elephant to be a pretty remarkable work of realistic filmmaking (daring, provocative) but I have a problem thinking that it is in any way authentic because, really, how could it be? I might also argue (perhaps incorrectly) that Clarke’s minimalist mise-en-scene allows the viewer to maintain aesthetic and emotional distance from the actions on the screen. Is it possible that Clarke’s unwillingness to take sides allows everyone to not make choices, ultimately concluding that murder is bad and I’m glad I don’t live on that side of town (or in that little war-torn country)? Now what I don’t know is how this film was received by the British, but after listening to Danny Boyle blather on I didn’t get the impression that the film accomplished much beyond politcial and aesthetic admiration. Now I’m sounding like the academic wanker I am but that’s another post.
I might have to rethink my impressions of Boyle’s commentary on Clarke’s Elephant. I guess I was just grateful it was there, b/c at first watch I might as well have been a 23rd century anthropolgist. I did surmise that this was Belfast, but I had no idea how much I was “getting.” Were these all one sided killings? All retaliations? Connected? Any or all specifically based in reality?
The commentary let me know that I wasn’t missing a whole lot more than what I was seeing. Except for maybe the very last killing, which I won’t go into here for the benefit of those who havent seen it: the comments here did actually give me some insight.
An interesting little cribbed IMDB comment:
“I notice nobody actually from Northern Ireland seems to have commented on this… I grew up in Belfast through some of the worst of the troubles (and have been personally affected by the actions of both loyalist and republican terrorists) and I have to say that for me this film is pretty much it in a nutshell. The desensitising effect mentioned by some of the other comments is precisely what happens in real life; the fact that stuff blows up occasionally and every so often someone gets shot dead eventually starts to just become part of the scenery. I’ve lost count of the number of times I saw people walking through Belfast stop in their tracks for a second or two as a bomb was detonated nearby then just continue on their way. You learn to live with it, and that’s the real horror, which I think is something Clarke portrays here with an extraordinary degree of empathy. Possibly some of it’s because so many of the places in the film were so familiar to me but it really hit home in a way that no other film explicitly about Northern Ireland has ever done for me.”
I also read a very angry comment on IMDB about this film: He also claimed it was not “authentic” but for very horrifying reasons:
“In Northern Ireland during the troubles both loyalist and republican terrorists ( Both of which contain men and women , young and old ) viewed anyone from the other side as a legitimate target , it didn`t matter about your politics or religion , your age or sex as long as you lived in the Shankhill or the Falls you were fair game. And the method of murder dealt differs somewhat from ELEPHANT , a car bomb in a street of Saturday shoppers was a favourite with republicans while capturing an innocent passer by and torturing them to death with a stanley knife and red hot poker was a common practice amongst loyalists . Watching ELEPHANT you`d believe that people die quick and painless deaths – untrue. Many of victims of terrorism had their coffin lids screwed shut at their funerals so their families wouldn`t be allowed to see the horrific mutilations they`d suffered”
The last thing I’d mention is this: The film DID cause a media sensation before it showed in 88 (and its airdate was pushed back a few times due to controversy about it), so everyone knew what it was going in. By this time Clarke was probably quite well-known and respected for his films, especially coming off of Scum. He obviously wanted to use that power and recognition to make a heavy statement about the war, and us looking at it now – well – it’s just not what he intended.