Bill Douglas – His Way Home
“If he’d been French he would have made twenty-five films.”
This telling observation of British film culture comes from Lynne Ramsay, the Glasgow born auteur behind Ratcatcher (1999), Morvern Callar (2002) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). Ramsay is talking about the late Bill Douglas, the Newcraighall born director who first came to prominence by way of his acclaimed autobiographical trilogy of short films, My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978). He followed this with just one feature, the epic Comrades (1986), before he died.
Ramsay is speaking in Bill Douglas: My Best Friend, Jack Archer’s lovingly put together documentary charting the lifelong friendship between Douglas and Peter Jewell. Douglas and Jewell met in Egypt while on National Service, and bonded over literature and film, with Jewell becoming mentor, co-conspirator and intimate right up until Douglas’ death in 1991 aged 57.
Following a Glasgow Film Festival screening earlier in 2024, Bill Douglas: My Best Friend received its Edinburgh premiere on a Friday afternoon in September. This low-key screening formed part of the community based The Local Cinema programme at Craigmillar Now, the arts centre a lump of coal’s throw from the tiny mining village where Douglas was born. With Archer in attendance, the Craigmillar event featured a short post show conversation with artist Kenny Munro and actor Alex Norton. This was chaired by artist Andrew Crummy, who, as a child, fleetingly appeared in one of Douglas’ trilogy.
Munro and Norton also appear in Archer’s 77-minute film. While Norton plays no less than fourteen parts in Comrades, Munro has made two sculptures honouring Douglas. One, Reflected Vision, can be seen at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum in Exeter. The other, A Place of Dreams, is closer to home at Newcraighall Station, and now forms part of the Greater Craigmillar Art Trail.
Crucially, Bill Douglas: My Best Friend puts interviews with Jewell at its centre alongside clips from a series of largely unseen 8mm films. These were made by the pair on the hoof with a circle of friends and Soho housemates that included actor Clive Merrison and Verity Bargate, founder of Soho Theatre, originally known as Soho Poly. These rough sketches point the way to Douglas’ singular vision honed in the films that followed.
The Trilogy is filmed in mesmeric black and white as beautifully bleak visual poems charting a young boy’s rites of passage. Comrades is an impressionistic three-hour hymn to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the six Devon agricultural workers who in 1834 were convicted of forming a trade union and transported to Australia. Their story is framed by Norton, whose Zelig-like Lanternist appears in multiple guises.
As well as Norton, Comrades features Quadrophenia’s Phil Davis, alternative comedy provocateur Keith Allen and contemporary dance enfant terrible Michael Clark. These then relatively young guns appear alongside elder statespeople of stage and screen including Vanessa Redgrave, Robert Stephens, and former Theatre Workshop protégés under Joan Littlewood, Barbara Windsor and Murray Melvin. Douglas had also worked as an actor at Theatre Workshop.
Such maverick casting alongside Norton’s breaking of the fourth wall as the various incarnations of the Lanternist gives Comrades a glorious non-naturalistic theatricality. Norton’s past outings with 7:84 Theatre Company as part of the original production of The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil make his straight-to-camera Brechtian vaudeville interludes a perfect fit here.
When Comrades came out, it was the height of Margaret Thatcher’s second term as UK Prime Minister. Counter to this, community arts initiatives were thriving, not least in Craigmillar, where Craigmillar Festival Society had been founded by Andrew Crummy’s mother Helen Crummy and a group of local mothers seeking arts provision for their children. It is as telling that interview footage of Crummy appears in the film as it is that it premiered in Craigmillar Now, which has picked up the baton of Craigmillar Festival Society.
While Comrades isn’t a polemic, to see such a significant piece of social history dramatised on the big screen in such a radical style was making a statement counter to the Thatcherite ideology that would soon attack any art it didn’t like or understand, starving it of resources and all the gains made in the 1960s and 1970s.
Despite this, the contradictions in such a system went on. Fellow travellers of Douglas such as Terence Davies and Derek Jarman were also making their mark with similarly individualistic approaches to film. In different ways, all three artists were by turns experimental, painterly and poetic. Each was fused with a stylistic daring that showed what British film could be beyond literary realism.
While some critics have lazily dismissed Douglas’ films as grimly miserabilist affairs, in Bill Douglas: My Best Friend, Ramsay puts them into an international context, comparing Douglas to Andrei Tarkovsky.
I’d seen the Trilogy on BBC 2 in what must have been the very late 1970s or very early 1980s. From memory, they showed one a week over three Saturday teatimes, but I could be wrong about that. Either way, while my fuzzy black and white portable TV didn’t do justice to Douglas’ monochrome expanse, the fact that you could watch the films on terrestrial TV on a Saturday afternoon without anyone batting an eyelid speaks volumes. And where else was I supposed to see them?
I remember seeing Comrades at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh when it was first released. It was a big deal, this first feature by a Scottish filmmaker that beamed out its 182 minutes on the wide screen of Filmhouse’s biggest space, Filmhouse 1. I think I remember there was an interval, but I can’t be sure. Like I say, it was a big deal. And then it was gone, seemingly disappearing from view for decades following its all too brief run.
I did see the Trilogy on the big screen at Filmhouse a few years back, but that was a one off. There have been DVD/Blueray releases of both the Trilogy in 2008 and Comrades in 2009 that are easy enough to pick up, and they were all on BFIPlayer for a while, though they’ve gone again now.
Like Davies and Jarman, Douglas is also gone. For now, at least, the Filmhouse, where I saw the films of all three directors way back when, has gone too. With Douglas, all that is left are the might-have-beens. These aren’t just about what films Douglas could potentially made had he lived longer. One must consider whether in the current climate he would even be supported enough to be able to embark on such serious and unsentimental meditations as his trilogy, without being forced through the Kafkaesque form filling treadmill arts funding bureaucracies are made of.
Similarly, could the uncompromising sweep of Comrades too have been brought to the screen these days without it being dumbed down into some cap-doffing historical action thriller? We’ll never know the answer to either notion. What we do know from Kenny Munro is that 2025 will be the fortieth anniversary of Comrades, and wouldn’t it be wonderful for that to be honoured in some way, with screenings, discussion, a new box set, perhaps? A symposium?
Maybe Craigmiller Now and Local Cinema could host a Bill Douglas day, with some kind of walking tour to all the Newcraighall locations that don’t exist anymore, having fallen prey to the foibles and follies of town planners.
In terms of those what-might-have-beens, we also know from Alex Norton’s revelation at the end of the Bill Douglas: My Best Friend post-show discussion that he had a meeting with Douglas in a Soho boozer not long before he died. This was to discuss Norton playing the diabolical Gil-Martin in Douglas’ proposed film version of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Imagine that.
Seeing Bill Douglas: My Best Friend at Craigmillar Now was a long overdue homecoming of sorts for Douglas’ work. Beyond this prodigal’s return, imagine him making another twenty-five films. If only he had been French.
Bill Douglas: My Best Friend is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from September 27th.
Details of further cinema screenings at Craigmillar Now can be found here - https://www.craigmillarnow.com/opportunities/cinema-screenings
Full details of the Local Cinema programme across all Edinburgh venues throughout Autumn 2024 can be found here - https://www.whalearts.co.uk/local-cinema/
ends
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