Submitted by
Donna Bowman
Original at
Nashville Scene
(Issue Date: September 21, 2000)
End of the Line
British director's early masterpiece about remote Scottish island returns
to theaters
The Edge of the World
Dir.: Michael Powell
NR, 74 min.
Opening Friday at the Belcourt Theatre
When director Michael Powell picked up the London Observer in June
of 1930, he was the cinematic equivalent of an assembly-line worker. For
years, the British film industry had been turning out "quota quickies" --
cheap pictures made to fulfill a law mandating that theaters show a few
local films alongside American imports. Powell worked as a gofer, still
photographer, editor, comic star, and finally director on a few forgotten
features while looking for something that would take British film in a new
direction. When he opened the paper that day, he saw it in a column of random
news snippets:
"The evacuation of St. Kilda is proving a more difficult problem than was
expected. It is not the men but the sheep." St. Kilda was an island in the
Hebrides, the Scottish-held chain of remote, rocky outposts that had produced
fishermen and fine wool for centuries. But in this century, with the islands'
young men leaving for jobs on the mainland, the community could no longer
keep up its self-sustaining practices. One by one, the islands were seeing
their populations of humans and animals packed onto boats and shipped away.
Powell saw a story in this tragic clash of ancient ways and modern realities.
He called it The Edge of the World. Seven years later, it became
one of the first British films to be shot on location, and the tale of the
production crew's adventures is as dramatic as the movie's narrative of
love, family, conflict, and inevitable change. At the time of the filming,
it became a cause célébre, as the London papers printed screaming
headlines about the weeks-long gale that cut the crew off from mainland
supply boats and made them, in the public mind at least, a cinematic Swiss
Family Robinson. More important for modern audiences, Edge of the World
was the first major writing and directing effort for a man who would
become half of the Archers, the team that transformed British film into
a high and mystical art form.
Powell's idea was to use the broad outline of the St. Kilda evacuation as
the basis for a fictional story, set on Hirta, the largest island in St.
Kilda's vicinity. Two families lead the island's small population: the Mansons,
whose son Robbie plans to leave for mainland fishing work, and the Grays,
whose son Andrew is fiercely loyal to his home. Robbie's sister Ruth plans
to marry Andrew, but when the young men's feud spills over to the island
parliament, it's decided that the issue will be settled with an ancient
custom: a race to the top of the highest cliffs in the Outer Isles.
Unable to secure St. Kilda for filming, Powell's team chose Foula in the
Shetlands, which boasted similar geographical features. The only access
to Foula was the weekly mail boat -- and in bad weather, that weekly visit
was sometimes postponed for months. Director, crew, and stars landed in
June 1936. Islanders everywhere have a special character, Powell believed,
so he photographed the weathered faces of Foula's tiny indigenous community
as much as he could, supplementing them with imported actors, including
himself and his beautiful wife Frankie in a prologue.
September came and went on Foula, the season of nonstop gales was approaching,
Powell had shot nearly 200,000 feet of film, and the cliff-climbing sequence
was not yet in the can. In the normal course of events, this was the kind
of scene that would be tricked up in the studio. But Powell was determined
that the viewers of his film see the real thing -- his actors hanging on
the rocks hundreds of feet above a raging sea. Day after day, the storms
continued, and while the crew was unable to get the series of shots from
small boats at the cliff's base, it got plenty of material for the movie's
second climactic moment -- the gale that prevents Ruth's baby from getting
to the mainland hospital.
While the film crew waited out the weather and dined on tins of kippers
from its dwindling stores, the British press ran a series of sensational
stories on the "marooned" company (although, in true British tradition,
the supposed castaways only worried about getting the needed footage). In
the end, with the crew members facing a food shortage and worsening weather,
the film's American producer pulled them off the island. But Powell took
the unusual step of bringing several islanders with him, so that his final
37 shots would have those unique faces.
Edge of the World was released in 1937, along with a book Powell
had written about the production. Despite the film's revolutionary combination
of recent history, drama, and authenticity, the British critics weren't
too sure about it or its writer-director. The standard for shooting in exotic
locales had been set by Robert Flaherty, whose Irish film Man of Aran
had been released in 1934. Powell's film, with its explicit drama and
special photographic effects, went in a different direction from Flaherty's
documentary realism. It never found an audience in England, and its only
immediate consequence for the director was an invitation to work with Hollywood
producer Alexander Korda, who introduced Powell to his future collaborator
in the Archers, Emeric Pressburger.
Students of the Archers' masterpieces -- The Red Shoes, The Life
and Death of Colonel Blimp, Tales of Hoffmann -- have searched
Edge of the World for clues to what Powell brought to the Powell-Pressburger
collaboration. The film's naturalism is difficult to compare to the Archers'
famously artistic style. But Powell's insistence on authenticity, his stoic
wit, and his passionate take on relationships are inimitably his own --
as is his willingness to put not only his own life, limb, and career on
the line for his vision, but also those of his cast and crew.
In many ways, Edge of the World marked the true beginning of Powell's
creative career as an author of movies. Fittingly, one of his final works
was Return to the Edge of the World, a revamped version of the same
film with a prologue and epilogue added for BBC television in 1978. The
story remained dear to Powell's heart and is reflected most strikingly in
the Scottish setting of the lovely Powell-Pressburger romance I Know
Where I'm Going! (1945). But in fact, every time Powell trained his
camera on one of the character-filled faces or places, real or imagined,
that he loved to capture, the promise of Edge of the World was fulfilled.
--
Donna Bowman
(PnP list member)
[snip non P&P items in article]
Peeping Tom
Donna Bowman writes eloquently this week about The Edge of the World
, the movie that helped launch director Michael Powell's career; this
week at the Belcourt, you can also see the movie that practically ended
it. Powell's 1960 horror film about a creepy cameraman (Carl Boehm) who
kills women with a spike attached to his movie camera made Powell disreputable
in the British film industry; today, it just looks prescient in its linkage
of voyeurism, perversion, and moviegoing. It starts Friday in a two-for-one
double feature with The Edge of the World.
[snip non P&P items in article]
-- Jim Ridley
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