'Fifteen years ago the death of Alan Clarke was followed by belated career recognition in the form of BBC rebroadcasts and a retrospective at the National Film Theatre. Another retrospective at the 1998 Edinburgh International Film Festival rekindled interest, and some sparks came off an American box set of four DVDs released in 2004. Nonetheless, like one of the marginalised characters to whom he gave voice (or like another politically provocative British director, Peter Watkins), Clarke seems again to be flickering out of discussions of film history. Yet – and one grows tired of writing that “yet” – he ranks among the top British directors of his generation alongside Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Stephen Frears and, as he consolidated his style in the 1980s, formalist auteurs like Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway.
'His oeuvre features that rare virtuoso combination: attention to performance and extensive critique of social institutions at a consistent level of formal control and quality, all the more impressive for the number and variety of works he directed. Clarke inspired a generation of actors, writers and directors, including Paul Greengrass, Stephen Frears, Tim Roth, Ray Winstone, Gary Oldman, Danny Brocklehurst and Iain MacDonald. Filmmaker Harmony Korine has cited Clarke as a major influence on his work.
'Clarke's ability to direct so often and his low critical profile today stem from the same reason: his films were for television, where a weekly feature slot meant numerous directing opportunities and instant ubiquity during transmission, but subsequently (in this pre-DVD era, at least) just as complete a vanishing into studio archives. While the sociopolitical issues he explored in his films and equally the nonjudgmental, unresolved way of presenting them would have made a career outside television challenging, Clarke's work in television was also a choice, an embrace of the high-volume pseudo-studio-system setup that nationally funded television at the time afforded. The medium was not without its challenges (and, in one notorious case, successful censorship), but the efficiency and strength of his productions, supported by deep ranks of creative and technical admirers, allowed him the leeway he needed. ...
'It is a rare director who is at once one of the foremost stylists and pioneering realists of cinema, but Alan Clarke falls into both categories. His relentless and innovative examination of contemporary British society, paired with the integrity of his approach, makes him an exemplar for socially conscious filmmaking. While speculation is a mug's game, the final scene of The Firm, in which hooligans that survived Bexy's death offer muddled tributes, suggests Clarke was nowhere near stagnating: a cut reveals that the thugs are all making their lugubrious pitches to a documentary filmmaker, in Clarke's acknowledgment of the ever-growing distorting potential of his own medium and the media. In this and other prescient themes, and in all his many willful walkers, he made, as one critic put it, “genuine motion pictures – the tracings of our times.”' -- Nicolas Rapold, Senses of Cinema
'You know who I love and who no one really knows about? Alan Clarke, the British director. He's a real influence. He did Scum, Made In Britain, this film Christine, about this girl growing up in council flats with size 14 feet. She walks around with a cookie tin under her arm and hooks her friends up with dope. She'll go into houses and kids will be lying there with a box of Ritz crackers on the television. You'd have these really long tracking shots of her walking. And he used real people or people who seemed right. He did this other film I like, Elephant, which is just 16 separate executions, one after the other. There'll be all these Steadicam shots. You see a hit man walking through a gymnasium, walking up stairs and corridors. And then he'd shoot the janitor and he'd fall on a pile of jockstraps. But the intention wasn't comedy. After he died in 1988 of cancer, there was a retrospective of Clarke's work at MoMA and there were only about 10 people in the audience. I was watching this film, Elephant, and in the beginning it was a little bit disturbing. And then I started to find this humour in the repetition -- watching some Indian car washer get his head blown out on a squeegee. I start cracking up, and this British bastard in front of me turns and says, "Don't you know what this represents? This is the IRA, you son of a bitch!" He wanted to kill me. I liked that idea. He thought it was about the IRA and I thought it was about Ritz crackers.' -- Harmony Korine
Arena documentary on Alan Clarke, pt. 1
pt. 2
pt. 3
pt. 4
pt. 5
__________
from Penda's Fen (1974)
'The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and radical polemic–as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the last quarter of the twentieth century.' -- Howard Schuman, Sight & Sound
__________
from Scum (1979)
'This is the hard and shocking story of life in a British Borstal for young offenders. Luckily the regime has changed since this film was made. The brutal regime made no attempt to reform or improve the inmates and actively encouraged a power struggle between the tough new inmate and the old hands. The film was originally made as a BBC play but it was banned before ever being shown. So Alan Clarke and Roy Minton got it re-made as a film. This is a tough and brutal film and should not be viewed lightly.' -- Cinema of the World
__________
from Baal (1982)
'Baal is a musical by Bertolt Brecht. It was translated to English by John Willett and adapted for television by Alan Clarke and John Willett. David Bowie played the main character, Baal. The play is set in the ten years leading up to the war (the 1st), when the German empire was booming, and consists of a string of episodes in the life of an amoral poet singer. 'Baal's hymn' outlined his stoic, almost animal philosophy - never mind viciousness, disease and death, naked or drunkeness. You embrace our world because you know the endless sky is above you. Baal is taken up by a rich patron of the arts and seduces the man's elegant blonde wife. A middle-class student admires him. He coolly takes the student's fifteen year old girlfriend, who later drowns herself. Two years go by and he picks up a new, more worn and vulnerable mistress whom he publicly humiliates in the filthy cabaret where he is now singing.' -- Eyal Perek, Teenage Wildlife
__________
from Made in Britain (1983)
'First screened on ITV in 1983, Made in Britain was the third collaboration between Alan Clarke and screenwriter David Leland. The play focuses on teenager Trevor, a violent, racist skinhead who refuses to cooperate with any attempts by the courts or social workers to rehabilitate him. Formally, Made in Britain marked the start of the kinetic camera style that would dominate Clarke's later works. Always keen to bridge the gap between actors and audience and famously impatient when arranging complex tracking shots, Clarke's discovery of the Steadicam while` making Made in Britain added a fluidity to the film and to subsequent dramas like Contact, Road, Christine, Elephant, and The Firm. Made in Britain was written as a companion piece to Leland's Rhino, the story of a disenfranchised young black girl, and the two plays were first broadcast on consecutive Sundays.' -- Justin Hobday, BFI Screenonline
__________
from Road (1987)
'Your tour guide for the night is one drunken man called Scullery. Prepare yourself for the experience of your lifetime as he shows you an average night along a derelict Lancashire road in the 1980s.' -- IMDb
__________
from Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987)
'The urban decay of Bradford's Buttershaw estate provides the setting for Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The story of a married man's illicit affair with two teenage babysitters, the film is part sex comedy and part critique of the social division of 1980s Britain. With elements of both the social realist films of the 1960s and the bawdy Confessions... series of the 1970s, Rita, Sue and Bob Too was released in the mid-1980s when the fear of an AIDS epidemic was at its height and its comic treatment of promiscuity flew in the face of various initiatives aimed at discouraging casual sex amongst the young.' -- Cinema of the World
__________
from The Firm (1989)
'When Alan Clarke's The Firm was first broadcast in 1988, it was greeted with the same kind of outrage that greeded earlier Clarke films like Scum and Made in Britain - the usual drearily predictable demands for it to be banned, accompanied by luridly sensationalised distortions of the film's content and purpose. True, if you read a plot summary or watch a scene at random, it seems to more than live up to its notorious reputation: it's both graphically and verbally violent (there's surprisingly little swearing, given the subject matter, but a director and cast as good as this don't really need that kind of punctuation to achieve maximum impact), it's relentlessly nihilistic right up to the open-ended conclusion, and on the face of it it appears to glorify mindless thuggery - an impression made all the stronger by some frighteningly convincing performances, including arguably a career-best effort from Gary Oldman. But far from being a piece of mindless exploitation, in retrospect it's all too clear that The Firm is one of the definitive films about the Eighties in general and the Thatcherite mentality in particular.' -- Home Cinema
__________
from Elephant (1989)
'Elephant is without question Alan Clarke's bleakest film. Essentially a compilation of eighteen murders on the streets of Belfast, without explanatory narrative or characterisation and shot in a cold, dispassionate documentary style, the film succinctly captures the horror of sectarian killing. The lack of narrative removes any scope for justification of the killings on religious, political or any other grounds and the matter-of-factness of Clarke's approach debases the often-heroic portrayal - by all sides - of the individuals involved in sectarian murder. Moreover, Clarke's use of a Steadicam to follow the killers before and during the murders casts the viewer as at best a willing voyeur, at worst an accomplice. After each killing, the camera dwells on the bodies slumped on floors or draped over desks for longer than is comfortable, forcing the viewer to confront the brutality of their deaths.' -- BFI Online
----
'Clarke's ability to direct so often and his low critical profile today stem from the same reason: his films were for television, where a weekly feature slot meant numerous directing opportunities and instant ubiquity during transmission, but subsequently (in this pre-DVD era, at least) just as complete a vanishing into studio archives. While the sociopolitical issues he explored in his films and equally the nonjudgmental, unresolved way of presenting them would have made a career outside television challenging, Clarke's work in television was also a choice, an embrace of the high-volume pseudo-studio-system setup that nationally funded television at the time afforded. The medium was not without its challenges (and, in one notorious case, successful censorship), but the efficiency and strength of his productions, supported by deep ranks of creative and technical admirers, allowed him the leeway he needed. ...
'It is a rare director who is at once one of the foremost stylists and pioneering realists of cinema, but Alan Clarke falls into both categories. His relentless and innovative examination of contemporary British society, paired with the integrity of his approach, makes him an exemplar for socially conscious filmmaking. While speculation is a mug's game, the final scene of The Firm, in which hooligans that survived Bexy's death offer muddled tributes, suggests Clarke was nowhere near stagnating: a cut reveals that the thugs are all making their lugubrious pitches to a documentary filmmaker, in Clarke's acknowledgment of the ever-growing distorting potential of his own medium and the media. In this and other prescient themes, and in all his many willful walkers, he made, as one critic put it, “genuine motion pictures – the tracings of our times.”' -- Nicolas Rapold, Senses of Cinema
'You know who I love and who no one really knows about? Alan Clarke, the British director. He's a real influence. He did Scum, Made In Britain, this film Christine, about this girl growing up in council flats with size 14 feet. She walks around with a cookie tin under her arm and hooks her friends up with dope. She'll go into houses and kids will be lying there with a box of Ritz crackers on the television. You'd have these really long tracking shots of her walking. And he used real people or people who seemed right. He did this other film I like, Elephant, which is just 16 separate executions, one after the other. There'll be all these Steadicam shots. You see a hit man walking through a gymnasium, walking up stairs and corridors. And then he'd shoot the janitor and he'd fall on a pile of jockstraps. But the intention wasn't comedy. After he died in 1988 of cancer, there was a retrospective of Clarke's work at MoMA and there were only about 10 people in the audience. I was watching this film, Elephant, and in the beginning it was a little bit disturbing. And then I started to find this humour in the repetition -- watching some Indian car washer get his head blown out on a squeegee. I start cracking up, and this British bastard in front of me turns and says, "Don't you know what this represents? This is the IRA, you son of a bitch!" He wanted to kill me. I liked that idea. He thought it was about the IRA and I thought it was about Ritz crackers.' -- Harmony Korine
__________
Media: Arena/Alan Clarke BBC Documentary
Arena documentary on Alan Clarke, pt. 1
pt. 2
pt. 3
pt. 4
pt. 5
__________
Further
__________
8 films
__________
from Penda's Fen (1974)
'The most ambitious of Alan Clarke’s early projects, Penda’s Fen at first seems a strange choice for him. Most scripts that attracted Clarke, no matter how non-naturalistic, had a gritty, urban feel with springy vernacular dialogue (and sometimes almost no dialogue). David Rudkin’s screenplay is different: rooted in a mystical rural English landscape, it is studded with long, self-consciously poetic speeches and dense with sexual/mythical visions and dreams, theological debate and radical polemic–as well as an analysis of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. But though Penda’s Fen is stylistically the odd film out in Clarke’s work, it trumpets many of his favourite themes, in particular what it means to be English in the last quarter of the twentieth century.' -- Howard Schuman, Sight & Sound
__________
from Scum (1979)
'This is the hard and shocking story of life in a British Borstal for young offenders. Luckily the regime has changed since this film was made. The brutal regime made no attempt to reform or improve the inmates and actively encouraged a power struggle between the tough new inmate and the old hands. The film was originally made as a BBC play but it was banned before ever being shown. So Alan Clarke and Roy Minton got it re-made as a film. This is a tough and brutal film and should not be viewed lightly.' -- Cinema of the World
__________
from Baal (1982)
'Baal is a musical by Bertolt Brecht. It was translated to English by John Willett and adapted for television by Alan Clarke and John Willett. David Bowie played the main character, Baal. The play is set in the ten years leading up to the war (the 1st), when the German empire was booming, and consists of a string of episodes in the life of an amoral poet singer. 'Baal's hymn' outlined his stoic, almost animal philosophy - never mind viciousness, disease and death, naked or drunkeness. You embrace our world because you know the endless sky is above you. Baal is taken up by a rich patron of the arts and seduces the man's elegant blonde wife. A middle-class student admires him. He coolly takes the student's fifteen year old girlfriend, who later drowns herself. Two years go by and he picks up a new, more worn and vulnerable mistress whom he publicly humiliates in the filthy cabaret where he is now singing.' -- Eyal Perek, Teenage Wildlife
__________
from Made in Britain (1983)
'First screened on ITV in 1983, Made in Britain was the third collaboration between Alan Clarke and screenwriter David Leland. The play focuses on teenager Trevor, a violent, racist skinhead who refuses to cooperate with any attempts by the courts or social workers to rehabilitate him. Formally, Made in Britain marked the start of the kinetic camera style that would dominate Clarke's later works. Always keen to bridge the gap between actors and audience and famously impatient when arranging complex tracking shots, Clarke's discovery of the Steadicam while` making Made in Britain added a fluidity to the film and to subsequent dramas like Contact, Road, Christine, Elephant, and The Firm. Made in Britain was written as a companion piece to Leland's Rhino, the story of a disenfranchised young black girl, and the two plays were first broadcast on consecutive Sundays.' -- Justin Hobday, BFI Screenonline
__________
from Road (1987)
'Your tour guide for the night is one drunken man called Scullery. Prepare yourself for the experience of your lifetime as he shows you an average night along a derelict Lancashire road in the 1980s.' -- IMDb
__________
from Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987)
'The urban decay of Bradford's Buttershaw estate provides the setting for Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The story of a married man's illicit affair with two teenage babysitters, the film is part sex comedy and part critique of the social division of 1980s Britain. With elements of both the social realist films of the 1960s and the bawdy Confessions... series of the 1970s, Rita, Sue and Bob Too was released in the mid-1980s when the fear of an AIDS epidemic was at its height and its comic treatment of promiscuity flew in the face of various initiatives aimed at discouraging casual sex amongst the young.' -- Cinema of the World
__________
from The Firm (1989)
'When Alan Clarke's The Firm was first broadcast in 1988, it was greeted with the same kind of outrage that greeded earlier Clarke films like Scum and Made in Britain - the usual drearily predictable demands for it to be banned, accompanied by luridly sensationalised distortions of the film's content and purpose. True, if you read a plot summary or watch a scene at random, it seems to more than live up to its notorious reputation: it's both graphically and verbally violent (there's surprisingly little swearing, given the subject matter, but a director and cast as good as this don't really need that kind of punctuation to achieve maximum impact), it's relentlessly nihilistic right up to the open-ended conclusion, and on the face of it it appears to glorify mindless thuggery - an impression made all the stronger by some frighteningly convincing performances, including arguably a career-best effort from Gary Oldman. But far from being a piece of mindless exploitation, in retrospect it's all too clear that The Firm is one of the definitive films about the Eighties in general and the Thatcherite mentality in particular.' -- Home Cinema
__________
from Elephant (1989)
'Elephant is without question Alan Clarke's bleakest film. Essentially a compilation of eighteen murders on the streets of Belfast, without explanatory narrative or characterisation and shot in a cold, dispassionate documentary style, the film succinctly captures the horror of sectarian killing. The lack of narrative removes any scope for justification of the killings on religious, political or any other grounds and the matter-of-factness of Clarke's approach debases the often-heroic portrayal - by all sides - of the individuals involved in sectarian murder. Moreover, Clarke's use of a Steadicam to follow the killers before and during the murders casts the viewer as at best a willing voyeur, at worst an accomplice. After each killing, the camera dwells on the bodies slumped on floors or draped over desks for longer than is comfortable, forcing the viewer to confront the brutality of their deaths.' -- BFI Online
----
*
p.s. Hey. Hm, nothing much is going on with me that's worthy of a headline today, so ... ** Oscar B, Trippy. I'd never heard of this Blu fellow until I got Toniok's post in the mail. What's up way up there on the third floor, pal? Talk to you later? ** David, Well, thank you, David, but of course now I'm curious about what you'd expected. ** Pilgarlic, I think I mostly liked, uh, what was it called ... 'The Sun, the Rain, and ... '? Their first big hit. Thing is, I was a real innocent once, believe it or not. My first ever concert was The Monkees. Or a schizoid innocent. The first time I ever went into a record store with money in my pocket, I bought 'More of The Monkees' and 'Freak Out' by the Mothers of Invention. When I think 'The Association', I think 'Windy'. No, I never picked up Coil's 'Black Antlers'. Hold off? Okey-doke. *Rubs his palms together* ** Bernard Welt, Man oh man, does that guy suck or what? ** David Ehrenstein, I had a crush on one Cowsill. Let me see if I can justify that. Okay, the one on the far right. The proto-Emo hair probably explains it. ** Toniok, I'll check to make sure, but I'm pretty sure I don't have a teleportation machine, sadly. Unless it has an iPhone app. Well, surely we'll get to meet and talk very slowly -- that will be a challenge for me -- one of these near days. Be sure to document your show, okay? And show the documents somewhere. Oh, and thanks again so much for yesterday, man. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey. I didn't know about that NYT quote. I think Courtney must fax that article to everyone who interviews her since it so often seems to get mentioned. The play is inspired by parts of 'Blue Movie'? How very interesting. How so? No, I haven't done an Anna Kavan Day. I think I tried a couple of times but didn't find much online to use. But that was a while back, and she is a great idea for a post, so I'll make another attempt. My personal favorite of Kavan's is 'Ice', so I guess I'd recommend starting there. ** Alan, I never spoke to you about your work's Austerian cadences and honey-soaked experimentation for dummies? Oh, surely I must have, ha ha. (insert a battalion of winky face emoticons). ** Killer Luka, Oh gosh, God or Someone love your mom for that. Also thank that Someone that you answered Bernard's question. I was chomping at the bit over here. Theo Derville, yes, I actually met him once. Jealous much? Ha ha. Let's just say he's very photogenic, if that's any comfort. ** Esther Planas, Hi, Esther! Yeah, I'm trying to sort through my Gisele-related schedule and possible Xmas in LA plans and stuff and figure out if I can do it. It's not looking bright at the moment, but I'm not giving up yet. Word soon. A whole bunch of love to you. ** Sypha, Well, the world can always use nightmarish fiction. Maybe the key is to think 'nightmarish' rather than 'horror' because that broadens the field of a play, no? ** Bernard Welt, I knew Rick a little, as I think you already know. Really sweet and really anxious all the time simultaneously. His novel was quite good, and it really should be reprinted. Don Weise, who headed up the recently defunct Alyson Books, just started a new queer publishing house called, I think, Magnus. He's the kind of guy who might have the brains to reissue Rick's novel. I'll query him. ** Allesfliesst, When we moved from the Recollets to that apartment in the Marais where we lived for a year, we tried to avoid the cost of movers, which meant I had to move everything myself on foot, and I ended up with bronchitis, so ... well, I think I did intend some sort of moral of that story, but I don't what it was. I think you should reinsert that Kafka tidbit into your paper right this second, young man. ** Steven Trull, Oh, Richard Loranger, my future introducee. My City Lights microphone sharer-to-be. Curious about him. Lonely Christopher sings his work's praises big time. I want your magazine, yes. In fact, I insist. You know my address by now, no? If not, I ended up writing it out yet again down below. I don't know Peter Sotos well, but I get the sense he's neither an excessively lonely type nor a man with a crowded social life. He's just like you and me, Steven, I think. Lonely-ish. ** Steevee, Green's 'Fuck You', okay. I'm on it. That would be sad about Mary Ann's. I walked by it when I was in NYC and thought, ah, one the rare survivors of the NYC I used to know. ** _Black_Acrylic, There's my humble Alan Clarke foray. Yeah, the shit going down in London is super exciting! ** Statictick, Hey, man. You sound good. Well, that's ace about the seriousizing (that's not a word?!) of your distant relationship. So, will this lead to a closing of the physical gap? I mean, cross-country gap, obviously, since I'm sure the physical gap has been long since taken care of. Mm, I'm going to go out on a long, scrawny limb here and guess ... 'Enter the Void'? ** Kier, Doesn't Noway get those kinds of winters where the nights are huge and days are really brief? Could that be a sleep-increasing thing? Glad you liked Zurn. I thought or hoped you might. What are you working on, art-wise? I'm guessing you're totally settled into the big city and okay with living there by now? Is it more, I don't know, fun? ** Patrick deWitt, Hey, Patrick! How did everything go when you were over here? Do you have a minute to tell me? You good? What's new? You working on something? ** Andrew, I think I'm going to end up getting another standard Mac laptop even though I like the Air thing in theory. Its thinness kind of bugs me a little when it comes down to it though. If you can do a post, cool, and if you can't, no prob at all, of course. Yesterday I was out looking at some art, and there was gallery with a show by Rick Owens. And I said to myself, 'Rick Owens is a visual artist too?!' But unless he makes lifesize realistic sculptures of soldiers sitting on horses, it wasn't the same guy. ** Mark Ward, Hey, Mark! Great to see you, man! Let me add myself to the crowd of people who think your play sounds very enticing. When is that happening? I'd love more of your music, and, since I can't seem to be in the same city with Steven, a cd-r of that tape would be most welcome. When my boyfriend Yury saw 'Jerk', the only thing he said afterwards was, 'I liked the music'. So, there you go. If it helps you plan ahead, the escort posts are always on the 15th or 16th of the month, and the slave posts are always on one of the last two days of the month. My address: c/o Centre International des Recollets, 150 rue du Faubourg St. Martin, 75010 Paris, France. Take care, M! ** Misanthrope, I'm a dropout too, man. No big. No money, but no big. Well, yeah, be cautious about your heart, but, and I can't imagine you doing this, some yoga wouldn't hurt your ticker, for instance. And it works. Take it from the younger me. I'm hoping that the 'Them' return engagement happens. Signs seem good, but I don't know. ** Nb, Lonely space movies rule. But I even thought 'Zardoz' was really lonely. Does 'Apollo 13' count as lonely? No, right? The Italian countryside is nice. Woodsy in the north, scrubby in the south, sort of like California. When you visit, you can pump Oscar about that. ** Postitbreakup, Writing a few sentences is good, man. Keep at it. Get the habit going again. It'll get easier. It'll get that whole masturbation-like allure back. Or, rather, that whole edging-like semi-allure, I guess. ** Laurabeth, And a big hi to you, LB. And a batch of love to go with it. ** Slatted Light, Oh, well, if it's agitating you, give it a breather for sure. The agitation is probably a solid portion of the problem. I say just let your thinking keep revisiting and revising it theoretically until the ideas' excitement squashes the hitchhiking stress. I don't know that Alf MacLochlainn book at all. How did you find out about it? Hm, I'll order it. What a good length. Thanks, pal. ** Okay. Alan Clarke is your special blog delivery of the day. Check him out. I'll head back into my novel now. See you tomorrow.
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