Programme Notes: CineMasters: Bill Douglas

Entering the world of Bill Douglas's films, one is faced with real-life situations captured poetically, obliquely, elliptically. They allow a space for you to settle and let loose your imagination. In becoming a master of stark monochrome, Douglas took seriously the advice of the French film director, Robert Bresson, who wrote: ‘Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.’ Like Bresson, he made films that were not a little mysterious, but also spoke as damning reports on poverty, cruelty, class struggle and colonialism. Often, the perspective of his films is that of a child: everything is possible, yet the world is constrained, unknowable and frequently hostile.

Leaving behind his Scottish roots in the crumbling mining town of Newcraighall, Douglas found latitude in 1960s Swinging London. Living in Soho with Peter Jewell, a friend he met during National Service in Egypt, he started in acting for Joan Littlewood's Theatre. There he found the grounding for directing and dramatic situations: ‘I learnt about working with actors and how to de-actorise them in a marvellous way and get them interrelating with each other on a stage [...] faster than they knew it was happening.’ Soon after, with Peter, he made 20 Super 8 films in all sorts of styles and genres – they were an explosion of DIY enthusiasm and daring (watch Fever here). This year's Glasgow Short Film Festival audiences were able to witness the rebirth of these films with a live score. Extracts from them form the backbone of Jack Archer's new documentary Bill Douglas - My Best Friend (2023) – the definitive introduction to Douglas as an artist and person.

Archer uses Douglas's flamboyant amateur films as a springboard to reframe his cinematic beginnings in colour, joy and experimentation, rather than stately black and white. And who better to guide us here than Peter, Douglas's lifelong beloved friend and collaborator. Peter's ongoing role in the preservation and interpretation of Bill's work is crucial, through the establishment of the Bill Douglas Museum and continued donations of scripts and working papers. Treasured early cinema gadgets: dioramas, panoramas, praxinoscopes and such like fill the Museum and reveal to us Douglas as a cinema historian and collector – an important legacy which the pair started assembling in those early sunny days. Archer's film also features testimonies by Lynne Ramsay and Lenny Abrahamson, who celebrate Douglas as their inspiration and a filmmaker's filmmaker.

The apprenticeship undertaken through the Super 8 films took Bill to formal film training and his graduation piece, the perfectly observed, blistering Come Dancing (1971). Set on a deserted pier, this loaded two-hander is now recognised as a gay classic. Soon after, Douglas broke through with his autobiographical film My Childhood (1972) - the beginning of his acclaimed trilogy centring on a boy named Jamie. In returning to Newcraighall, Douglas reimagined the silences, the neglect and thwarted opportunities of his early years. Simultaneously, he painted a panorama of a post-war village punched out of a coal pit, now slated for demolition and in the process of being depopulated. He was almost 40 when he conducted this personal exorcism and made a statement of film style which earned him the Silver Lion in Venice. Douglas's distinctive poetic realism was seen as closer to European cinema than local social realism, yet it was to become recognised as a British milestone. He explained at the time that his films did not have a ‘conventional’ but an ‘emotional narrative’. When he came to teaching film later in life, Douglas was known to say that ‘every shot is a verb’ and ‘between the scenes there are no full stops, just commas.’ His films are stories, but also propulsive, interlinking, emotional tapestries.

Making the Trilogy involved Douglas working on tight budgets and pushing himself and his collaborators to the limit. Jamie's boyhood pains continued through My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978), the more angular and muscular follow-ups. Jamie's disorientation caused by fractured families and betrayals is faithfully followed – the audience never knows more than the boy. Fragments of reveries, moments of connection, violent confrontations and closed horizons are organised in a rhythmic tone poem reminiscent of the silent cinema of Dovzhenko or Buñuel.

In Douglas's words: ‘Surely it is imagery that is the language of cinema, a brand new language that almost a hundred years after its discovery is still to be properly learnt. The silent cinema started to learn it…Sometimes I fear it may be a lost language.’ The Trilogy's final sequence is a homecoming for Jamie and all of us, into a world of primal images. Watching these three films together on the big screen is an unforgettable experience and I envy those of you who will be seeing them for the first time.

As fate was to have it, Comrades (1987) was to be Douglas's final film before his untimely death in 1991. It is an expansive account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, England's trade union pioneers (brethren of the Calton Weavers). Douglas's cinematic style is here unleashed on a huge canvas, recreating in full colour the village life of craftsmen and labourers in Dorset and the penal labour they faced through their transportation to Australia. We are immersed into their deeply religious and earthy everyday, which is untypically surrounded by the ethereal music of Hans Werner Henze and Douglas's distinctive fragmentary style.

Eight years in the making, the film arrived in the desolate aftermath of the Miners' Strike. There was nothing obvious or obviously heroic about it. It was monumental, thoughtful and playful: the story is told by a travelling Lanternist (an entertainer telling tales with his magic lantern and shadow play) who transforms into 13 different characters along the Martyrs' journey. While the Trilogy shows a community dissolved and destroyed, Comrades celebrates working class resistance, ingenuity and togetherness. In this sense, through Comrades, Bill Douglas offers us the ultimate vision of redemption, in the here and now.