Product: The Bill Douglas Trilogy (1972)
Rating: 5.0
From Bleakness, a Triumph of Integrity and Redemption through Art
Confession - I had never heard of Bill Douglas until a recent fortunate accident connected me with the legendary TRILOGY.If you define a masterpiece as art with a power and appeal that defies analysis, yet connects you with something profound and truthful, this collection of monochrome autobiographies of "Jamie" (immediately identifiable as Bill Douglas himself)is without question a masterpiece. A boy drags himself out of terrifying poverty into a self-created world of hope and creativity. This is not Dickensean cinema, Oliver re-visited, or a Scotish Bleak House. One soon realizes a subtle artist is at work, for Mr Douglas' shots are squeezed dry of sentimentality. There is no manipulation of the audience, no compromising sweetness, no orchestration of response through a music score. Cuts are as jarring as Jamie's life itself. The audience's intelligence is respected when there are omissions of chronology and brutality is neither explained nor resolved. The films' artistry fashions beauty from the most unpromising images and themes, and at the end you will not know how the director achieved it. Slag heaps, coal lifts dropping men like refuse into the shafts, tenement pathways never offering an exit from the slums, awful toys in undarned Christmas stockings, lumpen food, silent dinner tables, adults incapable of joy, kids unable to smile -hardly a wholesome or hopeful world for the central character (superbly played by non-actor Stephen Archibald, whose casting is itself a stroke of genius by Bill Douglas). Yet the narrative culminates in Jamie breaking through the grimey surface of poverty, triumphing over his shattering beginnings, and finding a friend and a purpose. These films feature the quiet Bill Douglas style of lingering on the human face, or holding a shot of an empty space, so that the silence speaks. Look for reviews of Bill Douglas and his work, and you see the word "poetic" repeatedly summoned to describe what he does with a camera. He lives up to his billing as a poet of the visual, and these films are, in my opinion, works of genius.