The Man Who Wasn’t There
The Films of Alan Clarke

Alan Clarke (Source: Wikipedia)

2,494 words

Underground filmmakers are often cited as an influence by subsequent directors while going unrecognized in the mainstream of their time. But during the peak years of his truncated career, and although never exactly a household name, British director Alan Clarke was far from being underground. His films found a considerable audience in the United Kingdom in an era in which television was still a serious artistic medium, and his peers have nothing but professional respect for a hardworking maverick. The often brutalist realism of Clarke’s work and the reception of his films by the comparatively squeamish British public of the 1970s and ‘80s found a place for him in the slim pantheon of British cinema, and the controversy surrounding two of his films, Elephant and Scum, sounded loud in the largely empty vessel of British filmmaking.

This was a period in which television drama was still culturally important in the UK. In the 1960s and ‘70s, audience ratings for TV plays made them a serious vehicle for ideas which were politically and socially engaged, especially for the BBC, seen as it was as more middle class than its commercial rival, ITV. A series called Play for Today was innovative and popular, providing ordinary people with talking points the day after something controversial had aired. Television, with the help of directors such as Clarke, proved a straightforward and popular way of adapting theatrical drama, and director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette, The Grifters) claimed that all good British films of the period came from the theater.

Alan Clarke was born in Liverpool in 1935 to working-class parents, his father Catholic, his mother Protestant. After completing national service, a stint in Canada saw him take a radio and TV arts course at the same time as he discovered the literature of Camus and Sartre, and the films of Kurosawa, Antonioni, and Truffaut. Back in England, he served an apprenticeship with the production company Rediffusion before cutting his directorial teeth at the BBC, out of place as a rogue, working-class scouser in what was then an Oxbridge safari park.

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Clarke was a TV director far more than a movie director, and made only three feature films: the sleazy sexual comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too, a curious (and brilliantly scored) musical about snooker entitled Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, and the cinematic version of a play that would guarantee his notoriety, Scum. Many who have seen this cult movie could not name the director and, in an article for the British Film Institute, Michael Pattison calls Clarke “the man who wasn’t there of British cinema.”

Clarke was dead of pancreatic cancer at 54, but his relatively short career was prolific. He directed over 60 plays for television, one of which gave him his first brush with controversy in 1972. Derek Bentley was a familiar name to the British public, having been hanged for the murder of a policeman despite being educationally subnormal, as well as his partner in crime having actually pulled the trigger. Clarke’s TV film on the case, To Encourage the Others, shone a light on a subject the establishment wanted kept in the dark. Today, this light has gone out in British art, and the media have an easy task obscuring by omission whatever the new establishment tells them to throw a cover over. The brilliant English director Ben Wheatley (Kill List, High Rise) is another Clarke acolyte:

It was all risky, that stuff, and if you look at what goes on now, where’s Alan Clarke, where’s Dennis Potter? They don’t exist in our modern world at all.

Clarke’s film presented evidence which twice forced the government to reopen the case of Derek Bentley, who was finally given a posthumous pardon in 1993. Clarke never shied away from politically antagonistic art.

Clarke’s 1977 documentary on Soviet activist Vladimir Bukovsky, just released from jail in the Soviet Union, was overtly political for obvious reasons. Bukovsky was imprisoned for criticizing the Soviet weaponization of psychiatry to silence dissent. Critics of the regime were routinely incarcerated with psychiatric diagnoses of “creeping schizophrenia,” and the Soviets had a track record of demoting legitimate criticism to the status of mental illness.

Echoes of this could be heard in the 2018 French court’s recommendation that Marine Le Pen be psychiatrically assessed after she tweeted images of Islamic State executions. Court documents record that the judge “wants to assess whether she suffers from any mental illness that could have affected her understanding of what she was doing when she posted the tweets.” Le Pen responded in disbelief. “How far will they go?” she asked. How far indeed. Bukovsky is straight documentary, but its focus on this scandalous chapter in the USSR’s unsavory history hits as hard today as it did then.

Clarke was working during the Thatcher years, and his work reflects both the tension in the UK and the desperate lives lived in bleak, council-estate surroundings. Road (1987) was another adapted play, this time showing the shabbiness of the lives of a group of people in a northern town. The production is Brechtian, with the characters speaking more to the viewer than to each other, and Clarke had notably directed David Bowie in a TV adaptation of Brecht’s Baal five years earlier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWI3-d1tezU

A year after Road, Clarke directed another piece of social realism, this time focusing on the shift in football hooliganism from its working-class origins in the 1970s to the lower middle class in the late ‘80s: The Firm. A young Gary Oldman gives one of his best performances as Bex, leader of a “firm” of football hooligans who are devoted not to the game but the vicious fighting that attached itself to football in the affluent ‘80s. The emphasis on violence is reflected by the fact that the only football shown in the film is a game featuring some of the main characters right at the start. Again, Clarke is working at the sharp end, and while the censors wanted the film cut heavily, Clarke held out to get his vision of moneyed violence across. This was the violence perpetrated by those who had their liberty, but Clarke’s most famous film would look at the pressure-cooker violence of incarcerated youth in 1977’s Scum.

Scum was originally scheduled to be aired as a Play for Today, but whereas the BBC had originally passed it for screening, a change in management saw it pulled. It was not shown until 1991, a year after Clarke’s death. The director shot it again for cinema with the same script and almost the same cast, and once theatrical release made it available to a cinema audience, it became something of a cult classic. Set in a young offenders’ institution, or “borstal” as they were known colloquially, Scum has a consistent brutality which has to be seen in its time to appreciate just how shocking it was for a British audience.

The film centers around Carlin, a young man transferred from another institution for assaulting a prison officer. His reputation precedes him and he soon imposes himself on his new fellow inmates, becoming the “Daddy” of his wing. Carlin is played by a young Ray Winstone, along with Oldman — probably the biggest name to emerge from Clarke’s work, and who was later to star in Sexy Beast as the foil to Ben Kingsley’s psychotic Don Logan, as well as the almost unbearably bleak Nil by Mouth. Years later, Winstone stated that he preferred the original, Play for Today version of Scum, and credits Clarke’s crucial instruction to the cast of the movie not to try and “do it better” for the movie remake. The TV version is tighter, and in my view superior to the movie. Clarke made another noted TV film about youth detention in 1982, Made in Britain, starring Tim Roth as a sociopathic skinhead, and I covered this in a piece on British skinhead culture here at Counter-Currents.

Clarke’s final film gained notoriety not for its subject matter, which was contentious enough, but its treatment of that subject. The Troubles, always capitalized when referring to the sectarian violence endemic to Northern Ireland throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, is the subject of Clarke’s 1989 short film, Elephant, but in an oblique way. The 38-minute film features no dialogue, plot, or character development, which doesn’t seem to leave a director much to work with. Elephant features 18 mafia-style executions, one after the other, relentless and nearly identical. Although set in Northern Ireland, there is no clue as to whether the killers or victims represent the Unionists or the Nationalists. With each hit, a man or sometimes two men walk a route to their deadly assignation, often walking through large, empty warehouses. A man is shot dead, the killer retreats quickly the way he came, and the camera returns to linger on the fresh corpse.

The odd title refers to the now-ubiquitous “elephant in the room,” and the film aired on January 25, 1989. By the next day the BBC had received 500 calls complaining about it, a modest-sounding figure but significant for the time. One intelligent and erudite caller on a BBC program spoke to Clarke by telephone. Apart from reinforcing stereotypes about Northern Ireland, she said, the film “failed utterly . . . it had no plot, no change of pace, no exploration or development of character, no atmosphere and did not set the piece within a context.” Sound and accurate criticism, but Clarke’s reply was that while other world events got plenty of media coverage, people were inured to the endless and repetitive violence in Northern Ireland, and he simply wanted to show it raw. Elephant is bleak, morally desolate, and empty at its heart — and that, said Clarke, was the whole point. The film is avant-garde in its way, and its lack of anything but repetitive, identical acts of violence was the plot.

Elephant also featured what was by then Clarke’s signature use of the Steadicam, a revolutionary camera stabilizer which allowed long tracking shots. The Steadicam shot was something Clarke was noted for using and developing, and there are many shots of individuals walking in streets or interiors in his work. Sometimes this is accompanied by monologue, as in Road, and sometimes by silence, as in Elephant. In The Firm, there is a 30-second shot of Gary Oldman’s character Bex walking down the corridors of a council estate before arriving at a flat in which he commits one act of psychological violence and one of actual violence. 30 seconds doesn’t seem long, but in the context of a TV film it is, and a long tracking shot of someone walking anywhere in an Alan Clarke film guarantees that there will be nothing pleasant at the end of that journey. Clarke described some of his work as “walking movies.” Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant, about the Columbine shooting, is obviously an homage to Clarke in its title, but ten minutes in and we have probably one of the longest tracking shots ever of someone walking — and the film has many such shots. In terms of being a walking movie, Van Sant’s Elephant out-Clarkes Clarke.

A good indication that for all his influence within the directing profession, Clarke is not a money-spinner today, is that all the titles I have mentioned are available in full on YouTube. After a week of what I believe is called “binge watching” Clarke’s work, the film I went back to was 1974’s Penda’s Fen. Clarke confessed himself slightly mystified by the dialogue and multiple themes of this strange and very English film, superbly scripted by David Rudkin. Penda’s Fen defies categorization. A 17-year-old boy, obsessed by English composer Edward Elgar and wracked by both his dawning homosexuality and vivid religious hallucinations, may embody the fulfilment of the rule of the last pagan king of England. It doesn’t sound like an enviable pitch to make to a studio executive, but the result is a haunting and haunted film which is English to its core. One scene shows a strange contrast between then and now, when a fiercely Left-wing playwright curses what he calls “technocrats” and “the management class,” terms and concepts now used more by the dissident Right. Penda’s Fen takes Clarke from his usual habitat of the British urban working class into a middle-class world set in the bucolic heartland of England, and is a curio worth watching.

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For the British film industry, whatever woke state it finds itself in today, Ben Wheatley’s question remains unanswered: Why are there no Alan Clarkes working today? There is more filmic output than at any time in history, but no one has the opportunity to present anything even remotely contentious to the British public via mainstream television. Clarke may be an obscure 1970s/’80s TV director lost in the media jungle of today, and even that in a country that never really cut it on the international scene when it came to feature-length cinematic releases, but his voice was strident and committed, and his vision of Britain was both oblique and focused.

I have no idea of televisual output in Britain today. The TV comes to you these days, however, and the media image I get of contemporary British drama is that the overriding priority is to cast as many black people as possible, preferably in traditionally white roles or playing historical figures who were unquestionably not black. What would count as “controversial” today? A play about the reality of black crime, the myth of multiple genders, the Islamization of Britain, Jewish influence in the media? If so, what are the chances of such films being made and shown on prime-time TV with open public discussion afterwards? Pitch any of those to a studio and you would probably end up on a government watchlist.

The English novelist Ian McEwan once said, in response to some of the psychological darkness and pessimism of his early fiction, that in troubled times the novel should also be troubled. McEwan was likewise working out of the Thatcher era, a time of political turbulence to which all Britain’s ills at the time were attributed. Now, with more turbulence buffeting the nation around, where is the accompanying troubled art, the engaged and socially realistic dramatic or literary output? Who is making the equivalent of Scum, Made in Britain, or The Firm in the UK today? A colleague of Clarke’s described the director’s position as “always on the side of the underdog,” but the underdog then was a creature allied broadly with the Left, whereas now we on the Right are the David facing a media/corporate/governmental Goliath.

Where is our Right-wing Alan Clarke, and the writers who supplied this maverick crafter of Britain’s dark underbelly? Art, like everything else, has been swallowed by the corporate-funded blob substituted for culture, and no more will offices, pubs, bus-stop queues, and shops hear the concerned and eager question: “Here, did you see that play on telly last night?”