Submitted by
Dibyaduti Purkayastha (Tipu)
Movie-making experience on remote site changed lives
By Peter M. Nichols
New York Times
Documentaries about making movies are a staple these days,
particularly on DVD, but few project a passion as well as Return to
the Edge of the World, by British director Michael Powell. In 1936
Powell made his feature film The Edge of the World on the gale-
bent Shetland Island of Foula. It was decades before helicopters
delivered actors and camera crews to cliff tops in the middle of
nowhere, and clearly none of the filmmakers who washed in and out by
boat ever forgot it.
Return to the Edge, made in 1978, is appended not to a DVD but to
a videotape of the movie made from a new 35-millimeter print and
released this week by Milestone Film & Video. Emerging from an
aircraft on Foula's airstrip (no planes at all in the old days),
actor John Laurie, who had a lead role in the feature shot 40 years
earlier, greets each surviving Shetlander who took part with the
profuse and genuine warmth of someone recalling a life-enhancing
experience.
Powell, who died in 1990, is best known for films he made with
screenwriter, producer and director Emeric Pressburger, among them
I Know Where I'm Going (1945), Stairway to Heaven (1946),
Black Narcissus (1947), The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales
of Hoffmann (1951). After frustrating years filling his 'quickie
quota' as a contract director for Warner Bros., Powell got the
chance to make The Edge of the World, financed by an American
producer named Joe Rock.
Martin Scorsese, a champion of Powell's, came across the film in
the '80s. "I saw that he had this personal vision even before his
work with Pressburger," Scorsese says. For months Powell and his
crew lived in isolation on Foula filming the story of a culture
slowly being forced into evacuation and extinction on the Scottish
mainland.
In the movie, the island is named Hirta, or 'Death'. For centuries
its now failing businesses were fish, wool and peat. Sheep dogs
huddle against houses and walls of beautifully fitted stone, and a
mute old woman stares knowingly at the windswept bluffs. "We'll live
through this winter but not another," says James Gray (Finlay
Currie), a patriarch and perpetual pipe-puffer.
His son, Andrew (Niall MacGinniss), favors trying to survive on
Hirta, a position supported by Peter Manson (Laurie). Manson's son,
Robbie (Eric Berry), advises the islanders to evacuate, and in an
ancient tradition he and Andrew advocate their differing viewpoints
by racing each other to the top of a sheer headland. Robbie falls
into the sea.
"On one hand there is a documentary; on the other there is a very
mystical, romantic feeling," Scorsese says. "It has the elements of
all: documentary, drama, avant-garde." By avant-garde, he adds, he
means "cinema language." At one point a young woman (Belle
Chrystall) stands at the top of a cliff contemplating suicide while
the image of ocean waves plays across her face. "Creating images
like that hearken to American underground film," Scorsese says.
"You wouldn't think of images coming together that way."
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
Information about ordering Edge of the World: (800) 603-1104 or
www.milestonefilms.com.
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