THEATER; The Misty, Mystical Start of a Film Career
The great British director Michael Powell never realized his dream to film
Shakespeare's "Tempest," but he did complete several movies set on islands
both enchanted and benighted. They include "The Spy in Black" (1939), "I
Know Where I'm Going!" (1945) and "Age of Consent" (1969). Yet the least
seen of Powell's island films was the one that put him on the map as a
filmmaker even as it traced an island's demise.
"The Edge of the World," as the black-and-white 1937 drama was called (and
showing at Film Forum in Manhattan, Friday through Jan. 20), was inspired
by a newspaper article Powell had read about the evacuation of the
Scottish archipelago of St. Kilda, or Hirta, which lies in the Atlantic
some 50 miles west of the Outer Hebrides. On Aug. 8, 1930, the 36
remaining inhabitants of treeless St. Kilda were brought to the Scottish
mainland to begin new lives as foresters.
This primitive community of fowlers and fishermen was the least integrated
of British island peoples, one that had never risen above subsistence
living or seen a telephone. Its fate was sealed in the 19th century by
emigration, a tetanus epidemic and the depletion of the peat bogs and
pastures. Crop failures and famine in the 1920's spelled the end. ("Ill
Fares the Land," a 1982 film about St. Kilda, contended that in-breeding
had also contributed to the decline.)
Powell, who had begun directing in 1931, felt he was squandering his
talents making "quota quickies," cheap movies that supplied British
theaters with the requisite domestic product. Stirred by a memoir about
St. Kilda by Alasdair Alpin MacGregor (who later sued him for plagiarism),
Powell determined to make "The Edge of the World."
"I didn't see why this folk epic should cost any more per foot than the
trash I was canning," he recalled in his autobiography. His deliverer was
the producer Joe Rock, who agreed to finance the project.
Powell rebuked anyone who implied that his film would resemble "Man of
Aran," Robert Flahertys pioneering 1934 documentary about Western Ireland
fishermen. Powell wrote the script in eight days and, in June 1936, led
a
cast and crew of 23 to Foula, an island in the Shetlands as geologically
imposing as St. Kilda. (He had been forbidden to film on St. Kilda by its
owner, Lord Dumfries, who feared for his bird sanctuary there.) The
gale-torn five-month shoot culminated in the crew's being airlifted to
safety; Powell's book, "200,000 Feet on Foula," reveals both the
production's hardships and the author's brinkmanship.
The movie is a lyrical montage enfolding expressive cutaways to the
island's terrain and its wildlife. It starts with a prologue, in which a
yachting couple, played by Powell and his wife-to-be, Frankie Reidy,
arrive on Hirta (Norse for "death"). Their skipper, Andrew (Niall
MacGinnis), explains that Hirta had been abandoned 10 years before. The
ghosts of its former occupants drift past him in a double exposure
reminiscent of the concluding shot of "All Quiet on the Western Front."
In a flashback, Andrew and his friend Robbie (Eric Berry) quarrel over
Hirta's future. Andrew, who is in love with Robbie's twin, Ruth (Belle
Chrystall), intends to stay; Robbie plans to leave and marry his girl on
the mainland. They decide to resolve their differences by racing up a
cliff, but Robbie falls to his death. Then Ruth bears a child -- a sign
of
hope. In the elegiac final passage, a fog engulfs the island as the people
prepare to leave their homes forever, and the twins' stern father (John
Laurie) embarks on a perilous search for a souvenir fulmar egg.
Powell's story is undeniably thin, but his film demonstrates his
burgeoning visual mastery and appreciation of magic. Although the film
shows the St. Kildan customs in quotidian detail (the outdoors meeting of
the all-male parliament; the tossing of "mail boats" into the sea in the
hope of eventual retrieval), it is charged with mysticism. Sightings of
the mist-wreathed hills of Scotland auger death, and there's a suggestion
that Robbie's blind, crippled grandmother knows the instant of his death.
Moments like these also crop up in other Powell films as diverse as "I
Know Where I'm Going!" with its cursed whirlpool and castle, and "Peeping
Tom" (1960), with its all-seeing blind mother.
And an image of Robbie and Ruth lying intimately (perhaps too intimately)
on a clifftop, and a long shot that reduces Ruth and her father to
Lilliputian figures on the horizon, as well as the soundtrack's abrupt
crescendos and fleeting fanfares, would be echoed, again, in "I Know Where
I'm Going!" and "A Canterbury Tale" (1944), the films that say much about
Powell's sense of himself as an Anglo-Celtic magus.
"The Edge of the World" was the 24th film directed by Powell, and it won
him a contract with the producer Alexander Korda, as well as the New York
Film Critic's Circle award for best international film of 1937. An
ancestor of the epiphany-laden 1996 film "Breaking the Waves," it remains
an apprentice's film -- with a touch of sorcery. Over the years it has
been shown at differing lengths, but Film Forum will present a new
35-millimeter print of the full 81-minute version. At the time of its
release, Powell described it as "a picture about man's defeat"; he later
recalled it as "a turning point of my life in art." A film embracing death
and birth, it signified the end of the dues-paying first act of a great
auteur's career and the beginning of his illustrious second act.
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