A failed masterpiece. (British film history)
By Jonathan Coe
New Statesman: August 15, 1997
For the next four weeks this column is going to be looking backwards, or
even, with any luck, backwards and forwards at the same time. The present
moment in British film history - a moment of unparalleled optimism as well
as uncertainty - seems a good time to reflect on the things we used to do
well, and to ask whether we can ever recover some of that vision and expertise
which has drained away over more than two decades spent in the cinematic
doldrums.
The best way to frame this question, I think, is by looking at specific
films. They won't be the best British films ever made, let alone the most
famous. If I begin, for instance, with Powell and Pressburger's Gone to
Earth, this is not to claim it as their finest hour, but simply to argue
(as I'll try to argue with my other three choices) that there's at least
one aspect of the filmmaker's art Which is here served supremely well; one
that has fallen, moreover, into almost total neglect, and that we'd do well
to recapture.
Let's put this into some kind of context, though. By common consent these
are exciting times for British films. We are starting to remember how to
make movies again. Trainspotting has shown that we can target the young
audience just as cannily as Hollywood, and Anthony Minghella's The English
Patient suggests that we might have another David Lean in our midst. Substantial
lottery handouts are lining the coffers of a few lucky consortia, and Gordon
Brown's tax breaks will now make it easier for medium-budget films to get
financed (although it takes an accountant to explain why). Above all production
is rapidly on the increase. At the industry's low point, in the mid-1980s,
we were making between 30 and 40 films a year. Last year we made 128. Already
we have made more feature films in the 1990s than in the whole of the previous
decade.
There's a drawback to all this, of course. Fewer than half of those 128
films made it into British cinemas, already clogged up with American blockbusters.
Some of them didn't even get a video release or an outing on television.
These films are thwarted by a combination of low budgets, poor scripts and
little-known actors: understandably, the distributors and exhibitors prefer
to play it safe with Demi and Arnie every time. We may have remembered how
to make movies again, in other words, but now we have to remember something
more difficult: how to make movies that people want to watch.
The real problem here is a loss of continuity. British film production went
into steep decline in the early 1970s, and although the influx of American
productions here has meant that there's been no falling-off in technical
skills, there has been little scope for people at the more creative end
of the spectrum (writers and directors, in particular) to acquire the solid
base of experience which would make them fluent in the vocabulary of cinema.
It's not that we don't have talented individuals, then. Rather more seriously,
what we have lost is an entire culture. A culture, specifically, of collaboration,
in which the emotional impact of films derives from the interplay of four
or five different creative sensibilities - director, writer, composer, cinematographer,
art director, and so on - each one absolutely at ease with the syntax of
the feature-length cinema film.
Gone to Earth was directed by Michael Powell in 1950 and, like many British
films of its era, it typifies this lost culture of seasoned collaboration.
But there's another reason for singling it out, too: it's also one of the
great British regional films, and marks one of the few occasions when we
managed to break out of the studio and photograph the endlessly surprising,
endlessly lovely British landscape in all its Technicolor strangeness.
Set in the hill villages of Shropshire at the turn of the century, and based
on a novel by Mary Webb about an untamed country girl (Jennifer Jones) torn
between the amorous attentions of the lusty squire and a sexless parson,
Gone to Earth is in many ways an over-literary and madly schematic film.
But Powell was prepared to overlook his own reservations about the material.
Having tried and, by his own admission, failed to capture the spirit of
his beloved Kent in A Canterbury Tale a few years earlier, he was "determined
that this should be a genuine regional film", and spent weeks scouring the
Welsh Marches for locations with his cinematographer, Christopher Challis.
See the film again today and its melodramatic story soon recedes into the
background. What ravishes the eyes and pierces the heart is an astonishing
series of pastoral tableaux: the long shadows of birch trees as they lean
into the wind against a sky of impossible blue; a bleak mountainside at
twilight, its rocks sculpted into the semblance of contorted monsters; silvery
trails of mist shrouding a desolate country house at dawn.
Years later Challis was proudly to claim that "the final result was, I think,
one of the most beautiful films ever to be shot of the English countryside
and in all its moods. Hours of patient waiting in rain, cold and sleet,
for just the right angle of sunlight across a landscape, 5am calls day after
day to catch the early morning mist: it was all so very worthwhile."
Does anyone today have that kind of patience, I wonder and, more importantly,
is there a contemporary writer or director who has that kind of feel for
landscape as one of the vital components of a film? We've caught glimpses
of it in the work of Michael Winterbottom, most notably in the despondent
motorways and northern beaches of Butterfly Kiss. And it was also one of
the most heartening aspects of a new British movie I saw recently called
Loop, which is a curious amalgam of urban thriller and family comedy.
Loop is directed by Allan Niblo, but the most significant name on its credits
is that of Tim Pears, who wrote the original screenplay. Pears' novels In
the Place of Fallen Leaves and In a Land of Plenty - vivid sagas of village
and provincial life - have done their bit to drag the English novel away
from its metropolitan obsessions, and most of Loop is set in the Norfolk
fenlands, where a dysfunctional family comes to terms with its history against
a backdrop of luminously photographed cornfields, shimmering canals and
sun-dappled orchards. It's just as awkward as Gone to Earth, in parts, but
it also has the same rich and instinctive regionalism: the landscape of
Loop is no mere backdrop, but a real emotional state, a register of character
and temperament.
As yet, I gather that the film has no distributor, but it would be a great
pity if it wasn't widely seen. Rather than bowing every time to studio-bound
convention, it's important to attempt these rare, mysterious excursions
into Britain's unvisited corners - as Michael Powell's failed masterpiece
continues so potently to remind us.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1997 New Statesman, Ltd. in association with The Gale Group and
LookSmart. COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to index
