My Childhood
Director : Bill Douglas
UK, 1972
There's probably not much more than I can add on 'Institute Benjamenta', except to say that it is at its heart a silent film; a sound progression of German expressionism. There are many sounds and conversations, but the film will often overlay speech with music or other sound, returning us to the silent era. A similar throwback to the silent era is found on the next disc along on my shelf, 'My Childhood', the first of the Bill Douglas 'Trilogy'. The film details the chief obsession in Bill Douglas' life, his awful childhood. While he originally tried to pitch it as non-autobiographical, it didn't take long for someone to realise that this wasn't fiction. At times it might seem impossible for anyone's upbringing to be so bleak, but interviews with childhood friends indicate that his life was just what you see on the screen.
Douglas originally wrote to Films Of Scotland to seek funding, but was quickly rejected. They were only interested in films that portrayed Scotland in a positive, forward-thinking light, and this proposal did not seem to fit those criteria. It was the British Film Institute that stepped in to get the project rolling, and after seeing the early results, they suggested that the film be the first of a trilogy.
It's easy to see why Films Of Scotland's 'lochs and shortbread' image wanted nothing to do with this film. From the moment we begin the film with Jamie, the boy portraying Douglas himself, digging in the slag heap for lumps of coal, coated in dirt in his ragged, torn clothes, it feels as if we are being pulled down into the dirt ourselves. He lives with his brother and his granny in a bare house, where the little furniture remaining occasionally has to be chopped up to provide heat. As the bleak story unfolds, we learn that both boys have different fathers, but the same mother. The father of Tommy, the elder brother, visits briefly for his son's birthday but is chased off by the grandmother, who despises him. Jamie's father turns out to live just a few doors away, where the absent father is absolved from blame by his mother, who tells him that all women are whores. The mother of the children is initially said to be dead, but later turns out to be in a mental hospital. Jamie is taken to visit her later, but she is unable to speak, and wants only to pull the bedsheets over her head, a gesture later imitated by Jamie himself.
Jamie befriends Helmut, a German prisoner of war working in the fields nearby, and the two form a kind of father-son relationship. Jamie brings him a school book and begins teaching him English, and before too long Helmut is able to communicate with him directly. Any chance of a happy ending is soon dashed with the end of the war, and Helmut abruptly breaks from teaching Jamie to fly a kite with the announcement that he has to go home now, leading Jamie to end up lying in bed imitating his mother's gesture.
Helmut is not unique in this film, as anything that briefly offers Jamie a sense of hope, escapism or brief enjoyment is mercilessly ripped away from him. He has a cat which he is only seen interacting with a couple of times, once playfully and comically chasing it outdoors, another trying to pet it and have it sit on his knee indoors, which the cat does not appreciate. Even the cat seems to want to reject him. Tommy is given a budgie by his father on his visit, and he finds the grandmother attacking the cage as a proxy for attacking the father. The budgie and its battered cage are safely removed, but when the community have to head to the pathetic corrugated air-raid shelter, they return to find that the cat has eaten the budgie. Tommy then kills the cat in revenge.
At the end, the grandmother is dead, and Tommy tells Jamie that he better go and get his father. Jamie is understandably not keen, and runs away to place his head on the railway line. At length he gets up, and on hearing a train approach, runs to the railway bridge. Earlier we saw Tommy run to this bridge, in a memorable visual moment when Tommy's running is shown through the metal railings to look like the motion of a zoetrope. While Tommy wanted only to stand and be engulfed by the heat and smoke from the train, we see Jamie climb over the bridge and jump. We're not sure if this is a suicide leap, but he is soon shown safe, sitting in the coal car of the train, returned to the dirt where we first encountered him, and the film exits with a long shot of the train leaving Newcraighall, the mound of Arthur's Seat in the background.
The zoetrope scene and the extremely sparse dialogue are a couple of the signs of the influence of silent cinema and other early forms of the moving image. Like 'Institute Benjamenta', 'My Childhood' does not ignore more contemporary technologies, but also never threatens to become part of them. But while the Quays film belongs to a surrealist art world, Douglas' film is more clearly aligned with the Italian neo-realist movement. Douglas enhanced this sense by using non-professional actors, and famously always instructed his actors to "stop acting". The effect is at once real and unreal, shaking us out of our notions of what a 'performance' should entail. Douglas believed that acting was done with the eyes and face, that all the hidden emotion came out there and not through grand gestures. The end impression is of the cold camera staring into the soul.
'My Childhood' is not a cheerful and pleasant watch, nor is it intended to be. Nor should it. Neither of the two boys ever 'acted' in anything again, and both suffered early deaths. Stephen Archibald, who played Jamie, died at age 38, and Hughie Restorick, who played Tommy, died 18 years after the completion of 'My Childhood'; while no date of birth is given, it's safe to assume he couldn't have been much more than 40. The world portrayed is now gone, both in time and in actuality. The coal mines are closed, and the village of Newcraighall in which filming takes place has since been completely demolished and rebuilt. While Films Of Scotland and others may like to forget about such things, Stephen Archibald and Hughie Restorick, both in their screen portrayals and in their actual lives, are reminders of how harsh lives of grinding poverty churn people up.