Bill Douglas
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Bill (William Gerald Forbes) Douglas (April 17, 1934 - June 18, 1991) was a Scottish film director.
He was born in Newcraighall on the outskirts of Edinburgh. He was brought up initially by his maternal grandmother; following her death, he lived with his father and paternal grandmother. He undertook his National Service in Egypt, where he met his lifelong friend and companion, Peter Jewell. On returning to England, Bill moved to London and began a career of acting and writing. After spending some time with Joan Littlewood’s ‘Theatre Workshop’ company at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, he was cast in the Granada television series, The Younger Generation in 1961 and had a musical, Solo, produced in 1962 at Cheltenham.
Having been interested in film-making all his life, in 1968 Bill enrolled at the London International Film School, where he wrote the screenplay for a short autobiographical film called Jamie. After initial difficulties in finding support for the project, he eventually obtained funding from the British Film Institute to make the film, now called My Childhood (1972). The film gained critical acclaim on the international festival circuit, which paved the way for the second and third instalments of what became a trilogy of Bill’s formative years: My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978).
The Bill Douglas Trilogy recounts the harrowing experiences of a young boy, Jamie, growing up in crippling poverty: material and emotional impoverishment; harrowing privations at the hands of his paternal grandmother; incarceration in a children’s home; living in a hostel for down-and-outs. Eventually the call-up for national service allows Jamie to find freedom through his friendship with Robert, a young middle class Englishman who introduces him to books and the possibility of a more optimistic and fulfilling future. The austere black and white images of the films embody a stillness and intensity reminiscent of silent cinema and this visual style is augmented by the equally spare and precise use of sound. Just as the stillness of the image forces the audience to look, so the relative silence encourages greater attention to specific sounds – boots scraping on asphalt, the chirping of birds and the timbre of voices – granting an emotional power lost in the aural bombardment characteristing much contemporary cinema.
The Trilogy gained a wealth of critical plaudits but Bill struggled to raise finance for his next project, and was forced to find other ways of earning a living. Mamoun Hassan, the former head of BFI Production, invited him to teach at the National Film and Television School from 1978 and he proved to be an inspiring presence. Hassan was also able, in his role as director of the National Film Finance Corporation to help realize the project of Comrades, Douglas’s film about the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, six Dorset farm labourers who in 1834 were arrested and tried for forming a trade union and subsequently transported to Australia. Even so, the film did not appear until 1987, seven years after the screenplay had been completed. Dubbed a ‘poor man’s epic’, Comrades continues Douglas’s interest in the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of material adversity. It also brings to the fore his fascination with the world of optics and image-making, through a number of references to various forms of Victorian optical entertainments such as the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the peep show and the camera obscura. The story itself is mediated by the character of an itinerant magic lanternist who reappears in a number of roles.
Comrades was to be Bill Douglas’s last film. He died of cancer and is buried in the churchyard of Bishop’s Tawton in Devon. He left behind him two unmade screenplays: Justified Sinner, an adaptation of James Hogg’s celebrated novel, and Flying Horse, based on the life of pre-cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge. Another posthumous script, Ring of Truth, written during a fellowship to Strathclyde University in 1990, was produced by BBC Scotland in 1995.
Bill’s legacy was not confined to his films. Along with Peter Jewell (Robert of the Trilogy) he was a voracious collector of books, memorabilia and artefacts relating to the history and prehistory of cinema. This collection was the base for the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture (housed at the University of Exeter), when it opened six years after Bill’s death, and it remains the core of the Centre’s collections.
[edit] Filmography
Student films (London Film School):
- Charlie Chaplin's London (1969)
- Striptease (1969)
- Globe (1969/70)
- Come Dancing (1970)
The Trilogy:
- My Childhood (1972)
- My Ain Folk (1973)
- My Way Home (1978)
Comrades (1987)
Unproduced scripts:
- Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1988)
- Flying Horse (1990)
- The Ring of Truth (1990)
