’My Childhood’ illuminates life in a mining village and was voted best Scottish film of all time

A poet friend once sat next to a director of the publishers Faber & Faber at a dinner and asked how important he considered its world-famous poetry list to be to the company (don’t worry, this is not going to be another column about poetry). The director replied that poetry accounted for 7 per cent of Faber’s turnover, a figure that accurately represented the importance of poetry to the company. My friend was shocked, and I think rightly so. In this case percentages did not tell the whole truth. Who would ever have heard of Faber if the house had not been the publisher of Eliot, Auden and MacNeice?

What percentage, in terms of numbers of tickets sold and money received, is represented by so-called art cinema compared with mass-market cinema? It is probably tiny, much smaller than 7 per cent and shrinking, but in this case the bare percentages tell the opposite of the truth. What is truly important to the human spirit, and enduring, in cinema is enshrined in works that rarely enjoy mass distribution. Or so two recent cinematic experiences have shown me.

The first was an outing to the latest Harry Potter epic, a film with no discernible plot or purpose, beyond the continuation of good-natured joshing between the rather charming trio of young leads, and of some vintage or possible over-ripe jamón from the likes of Michael Gambon (how could he get away with such a half-baked Irish accent?), Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith (how are the mighty fallen).

At the other extreme was a four-hour discussion at the National Film Theatre of the first 13 minutes of Bill Douglas’s My Childhood, led by Mamoun Hassan who got funding for the film (the budget, unbelievably, was a mere £3,500) as head of production at the British Film Institute in the early 1970s. In a recent internet poll, Bill Douglas’s My Childhood (the first in what became a trilogy of his formative years) was voted best Scottish film of all time, topping Trainspotting or Local Hero .

I doubt you could enjoy or learn much from spending four hours analysing the first 13 minutes of either of those films. Mind you, the opening sequences of My Childhood are exceptional in their poetic depth and density.

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We spent some time discussing why the first shot after the title is of sky, bright sky, before the camera tilts down to take in the colliery buildings and terraced houses of the poor mining town where the action takes place. In one sense this is a scene-setting shot, narrowing down the location from anywhere on planet earth to this particular town. But it also achieves something of the effect of the ending of Larkin’s poem “High Windows”, only in reverse: “Beyond it the blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” In other words, there is a dimension beyond the poverty and deprivation that the film mostly shows.

Douglas liked to explain nothing in his films and did not want to include the minimal information that appears after the opening shot: “1945. A Scottish mining village. German PoWs work the fields.” If you think of him as a cinematic poet, which he was, then his attitude is entirely understandable. The last thing a poem needs is an explanation. An explanation shortcuts the essential process by which a poem takes you into its world and forces you to experience things anew.

You could certainly argue that Bill Douglas is hard on the audience; mind you, the lack of explanation at least in plot terms has become something of a cliché in contemporary action cinema. “You’re tough on the audience,” the filmmaker and exhibitor George Hoellering once complained to Douglas. Swiftly came back the answer: “They only have to put up with it for an hour or so. I had to endure it for a lifetime.” That sounds angry and aggressive, and there are those elements in his trilogy. But they are a defence against an extreme sensitivity and tenderness that shine out without the faintest trace of sentimentality.

But what is truly extraordinary, difficult and rewarding about Douglas’s trilogy, we came to understand over the four hours of discussion, is something to do with the composition of shots and the rhythm of editing. Time and again Douglas uses jump-cuts of extreme contrast (and with nothing to soften the contrast); one of the most famous is the cut from the two boys fighting like cats to the shot of them stretched peacefully in front of the fire, Tommy reaching out his arm to caress his younger cousin.

Watching the Bill Douglas trilogy is like listening to a spiky piece of 20th-century music – Bartok’s Third String Quartet, say: harsh, demanding, ultimately rewarding. The triumph of the trilogy is that a true artist emerged out of extreme poverty and deprivation. How sad then that after it, apart from Comrades (just released on DVD), he was able to find funding for no more feature films. Bill Douglas was one in a million and that one in a million can make all the difference.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres