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| Clio Barnard. |
Clio Barnard is a British director of documentary and
feature film. She grew up in the town of Otley in Yorkshire. Her father was a
lecturer and her mother was an artist who later became a jazz singer. She has
been hailed as a significant new voice in British cinema for her first feature
film The
Selfish Giant (2013). Building on the award winning[1]
success of The Arbor in 2010, which was
described as an ‘experimental documentary’. It was the story of the working
class Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar who died of a brain haemorrhage at the
age of 29 and who was described by Shelagh Delaney[2] as
‘a genius from the slums’. Best known
for her novel Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which
most of you will remember was adapted into a film in 1986 and directed by Alan
Clarke. Dunbar lived in a rundown council estate in Bradford Yorkshire. At the
age of 15 while still at school she was encouraged to write her first play also
called The Arbor after Brafferton
Arbor, a street where her family lived. The film uses actors performing
lip-synching to pre-recorded interviews with Andrea, her family and friends.
It’s a technique known as ‘verbatim theatre’ a process the director described as
“to create a deliberate gap between
reality and representation or at least make you aware of the gap”. The film
raised the social issues introduced in her writings with all there raw
emotions. Most striking parts of this “documentary” were the ones performed in
the grounds of the Buttershaw estate surrounded by actual tenants. The movie is uncomfortably realistic and
certainly not a relaxing watch, but well worth the effort.
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| The Estate. |
It was during the filming of The Arbor that Clio Barnard got the inspiration for tonight’s film.
She tells us in an interview ‘there a
local lad called Matty (a boy who had been scrapping since the
age of eleven) who was around the set a
lot and he had a horse that he would ride through the set, which was not very
helpful. The film is very much inspired by him and his relationship with his
best friend. The pair of them was working for somebody who there was a real
ambiguity about, whether he was exploiting them or whether he was giving them
opportunities. He became the selfish giant of the title. So there were two
staring points, a very loose adaptation of a Victorian fairy tale by Oscar
Wilde and meeting the boy Matty and somehow bringing these two things together.[3]
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| Oscar Wilde's short story. |
Barnard has been accused of bringing
fresh sensibility to British Loachian social realism. The film has been likened to Ken's 1969 classic Kes
but I would suggest The Navigators
(2001) or perhaps Lynn Ramsey’s Ratcatcher
(1999) its
not merely a kitchen sink drama but an examination of the foul smelling, leaky
plumbing work beneath[4].
As I’ve pointed out it was inspired by an Oscar
Wilde's Victorian short story, a
symbolic representation of the blooming of England’s dead garden, which features
a giant who hates children and bans them from his garden. The writer-director
Clio Barnard employs this parable as a metaphor for contemporary Britain, where
the wealthy reside in their guarded, gated communities while the poor live
beyond the fence.
Once again filmed on the Bradford Estate
this contemporary realist fairy tale concerning what Tony Blair termed
"feral kids" - those that are excluded from school and who survive on
the streets. Yet its roots lie a few decades earlier, when kids played on
post-war bombsites before the days of community parks, never a suitable
alternatives but much more fun. This film's protagonists are two such children.
Arbor is skinny and sharp, while Swifty is bigger and slow. They find
friendship in each other, since the latter saves the former from being bullied
and, inevitably, due to their misdemeanors they get excluded from their school
which virtually gives up on the boys and like many children of there age feel
they don’t belong and a ‘caring community’ that should be a safety net is non
existent.
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| Arbor (Conner Chapman) |
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| Swifty (Shaun Thomas) |
This weeks Robert Burns Centre Film Club
audience was bowled over by the emotional power of the two young lads who
played the lead parts, both never having any previous experience of acting, the13
year old Conner Chapman who plays Arbor was plucked from the local school while
15 year old Shaun Thomas was given the part of Swifty because of his natural
skill with horses.
Peter Bradshaw claims that ‘crusading social realism may have long since
ceased to be fashionable in Britain’s theatres and television drama, but in the
cinema the flame stubbornly continues to burn’. For example films like Sweet Sixteen (2002), Fish Tank (2009) and Ratcatcher (1999) all depictions of
social deprivation from the point of view of children and teenagers. With Mark
Kermode opining. ‘Barnard’s version is
more political (than Wilde’s short story with its religious overtones) a portrait of a post industrial landscape
in which selfishness has become an ideology, with children once again
marginalized to devastating effect’.
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| Wouldn't it been marvellous if these two lads could have retained there childhood? |
Who or what is the giant of Barnard’s
story, Kitten (Sean Gilder), the massive power pylon that seems to stand guard
over its ‘treasures’ or is it the
formless shadow of Thatcherite greed that lurks in the background of Barnard’s (accurately)
written script?[5]
It’s a film that
hold’s up a mirror to reality and how families, with their
worried mothers and useless male role models, suffer under a shameful austerity
plan, which introduced legal loan sharks, social security spies and bullying
bailiffs. A brilliant, but harrowing, social realist film that is a sign of the
changing times and shows how divided modern day Britain has become, with film
critic Jeff Sewall commenting that the film should be ‘compulsory viewing to all those self-seeking politicians who promote
the "big society" or "one nation" theories’.
[1] The Arbor (2010) won several awards including Best New Documentary Filmmaker at
Tribeca Film Festival New York, Best Newcomer and Sutherland Awards at The
London Film Festival, Douglas Hickox Award at British Independent Film Awards, The
Guardian First Film Award, Best Screenplay at the London Evening Standard
Film Awards, the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival Innovation Award and the
Jean Vigo Award for Best Direction at Punto de Vista International Documentary
Film Festival. She was nominated for the BAFTA Outstanding Debut Award in
February 2011.
[2] The English dramatist and
screenwriter, who was best known for her debut work, A Taste of Honey (1958).
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