Alan Clarke

Biographical essay by Dave Rolinson

Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting (1996), 28 Days Later (2002) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), described Alan Clarke as ‘one of the most gifted, innovative and radical British film-makers’, who ‘transcended the boundaries of his profession’ ^[1]. Paul Greengrass, director of Bloody Sunday (2002), United 93 (2006) and two Bourne films to date, has eulogised ‘unquestionably the finest body of work created by a British director’ ^[2] And yet, because Clarke’s career was spent largely in television – of his approximately sixty screen credits between 1967 and 1989, only three were cinema films – he was neglected by film critics for far too long. At last, this may be changing – see Richard Kelly’s 1998 book of interviews ^[3]), and my book from 2005, the first (and, I hope, not last) critical study of Clarke’s work. ^[4]) But arguments for Clarke the major director are often, understandably, skewed towards his mid-to-late 1980s work. What of the dozen productions he made for Play for Today, which represents around one-fifth of his total output?

In the Introduction to this site, I mentioned claims that the television play could form a kind of ‘studio system’ in which directors could develop: few directors grasped this opportunity as powerfully as did Clarke, whose Play for Today work epitomises W. Stephen Gilbert’s description – in an obituary after Clarke’s untimely death from cancer at the age of 54 – as ‘an unswerving champion of the individual voice and the noncomformist vision’ ^[5]. These pieces give a hearing to the ‘individual voice’ of characters (often unsympathetic characters): underdogs, the institutionalised (A Life is For Ever, A Follower for Emily, Funny Farm, Scum) and the brutalised (Nina, Psy-Warriors). This would be valuable enough if Clarke’s style was an anonymous articulation of those voices, but in fact it was allied to a distinctive voice of his own, a ‘noncomformist vision’ which made him one of British cinema’s most consistent innovators and stylists. On Play for Today he developed his own style and became, in the phrase of David Hare, a ‘driven filmmaker’, motivated to speak ‘on behalf of people whom he feels are getting a raw deal [and] by a passion to express what he doesn’t see expressed anywhere else in the culture’. ^[6]

Like several other key writers and directors from this period, Clarke came from a working-class background (the BFI’s database records his birthplace as Seacombe ^[7]) and passed his Eleven Plus to go to grammar school. Taking an unorthodox route into television, Clarke emigrated to Canada in 1957 (after National Service), and, according to the Questors Theatre’s newsletter Questopics, had a ‘masterfully improvised’ career: ‘furniture remover, income tax assessor, miner, railway brakesman and chain-ganger, baker’s assistant, dance M.C. and a disc jockey at a skating rink’ ^[8]. Between 1958 and 1961 he studied Radio and Television Arts at the Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto, a pioneering course which gave him ‘training in broadcast methods’, including opportunities to make ‘closed-circuit productions of which several are taped and kinescoped during the year for further telecasting by co-operating private television stations’ ^[9]. Returning to Britain after graduation, Clarke worked as an Assistant Floor Manager at ATV and later Associated Rediffusion, on various productions including Ready Steady Go. Between 1962 and 1966 he also directed various plays at the Questors Theatre in Ealing, and gained his first television credit when a touring production of James Saunders’s Neighbours was broadcast late at night in Berlin. Finally gaining entry onto a director’s course, Clarke served an apprenticeship directing Epilogues. At ITV between 1967 and 1969 Clarke directed various plays for the strands Half Hour Story (1967-68), Company of Five (1968) and Saturday Night Theatre (1969-71), and several episodes of series: the Ian Hendry vehicle The Informer (1966-67), the hugely acclaimed serial A Man Of Our Times (1968) and the massively publicised hit The Gold Robbers (1969). His early work is surprisingly distinctive, particularly his plays with Alun Owen; indeed, ITV awarded him Director of the Year for 1967 ^[10].

More biographically-based critics than myself have drawn correlations between the director and his films. Like some of his protagonists, Clarke was an individual who collided with institutions: for the dissident Yuri in Nina, welcomed into a different class group in which his causes are empathised with but patronised, read Clarke the director and defender of threatened cuts to Funny Farm or the banning of Scum; for Trevor in Made in Britain hurling a paving stone through a Job Centre window, read Clarke, sometimes with writer Roy Minton, trashing restaurants or being arrested barely hours into arriving on location in Halifax (see Richard Kelly’s book for these and other stories) ^[11]. However, the commitment is a definite connection: as fellow filmmaker Clarke was described as ‘his own man’, just as Roy Minton described the lead character of Scum: ‘Carlin is his own man, not one of the shadows of this world. You meet him and you remember him’. ^[12])

Realist innovations are often associated with the extension of representation to previously neglected social groups, and, according to Stephen Frears, Clarke was attracted to the medium because ‘one of the things that television told was the history of ordinary working-class people in England’. ^[13] Such concerns made Clarke synonymous with a tough, sparse observational style, and the visceral social realism and unyielding concern with institutional life that drove Scum. And yet, his work was strikingly varied. He brought a masterful surety of tone to the collosal, mythic Penda’s Fen, the intimate emotion of Diane and Nina, the disorienting multi-camera conceptualising of Psy-Warriors and Stars of the Roller State Disco, or his rigorous stagings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Love-Girl and the Innocent, Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death and Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. Belying his reputation for mischief is the professionalism required to build such a vast output – David Hare speaks for many of Clarke’s collaborators in saying that ‘Underneath Alan’s apparently casual manner – often late, often saying he didn’t know what he was doing, scruffy, apparently undisciplined – hours and hours of thought had gone in, mostly at night, where he’d been working on the script in bed at three o’ clock in the morning’ ^[14].

He has been praised and cited as a major influence by those who have worked with him including Danny Boyle, Tim Roth and Gary Oldman – or those who simply met him – Paul Greengrass – or those who admired his films – Shane Meadows (critics seized on the look of This is England (2007) or Harmony Korine, whose namedropping prompted one critic to call Clarke the ‘father of NYC cool’ ^[15]. However, in the wider film culture his work was ignored for too long – the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema seemed to discover a new talent after Clarke’s Elephant(1989) was cited by Gus Van Sant as an influence on his own Elephant (2003). ^[16] BAFTA’s greatest honour to his work came posthumously, naming their Outstanding Creative Contribution to Television award after him. A handful of critics made polemical and perceptive claims for his greatness: David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film (in which some sacred cows of Hollywood and British cinema fare rather less well) ^[17] and Richard Kelly’s invaluable passion, compiling a book of interviews and overseeing a two-month retrospective at the National Film Theatre in 2002, the point of both being to argue for Clarke as ‘the most important British film-maker to have emerged in the last thirty years’. ^[18] Mark Shivas bemoans the lack of acknowledgement during Clarke’s lifetime, remembering that he told Clarke that ‘had he been called Clarkovsky rather than plain old Alan Clarke, he would have had an international reputation’ ^[19]. Like Ken Loach, during Clarke’s lifetime he was more appreciated abroad, winning international television prizes.

One of the possible explanations for Clarke’s relative obscurity amongst critics may be the perceived ephemerality of the television play – although seen by more people than many cinema films of the time, they are now harder to get hold of. None of his television plays has been repeated on terrestrial television since 1991, and although all three of his cinema films (the Scum remake (1979), Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1986) and Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987)) have been released on DVD, releases of his television plays have been more haphazard, until the Blue Underground Alan Clarke Collection. It’s contradictory to the nature of Clarke’s work and the way it engaged with audiences that we can only view his work in isolation in film archives, or at cinema screenings, as wonderful as the global retrospectives of Clarke’s work have been. As David Thomson wrote of the NFT season in 2002, ‘if only the season was playing where it ought to be, and where it is most needed – on the television screen’ ^[20]. Film critics and academics (with notable exceptions like Julian Petley and John Hill) neglected television work with generalisations about it being ‘uncinematic’ (oddly, the same neglect does not apply to European directors who worked for television, like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Spider’s Stratagem (1970).)

Even critics comfortable with television have found it hard to write about television from the point of view of the director. Howard Schuman has summarised the reasons for this:

In the context of British television, the title ‘director’ invokes deeply ingrained prejudices. Auteurist critical approaches to the golden age of television drama… usually focus on the writer, because television prided itself on being a writers’ medium. Directors were often regarded as little more than opinionated camera-movers. ^[21]

I discuss academic debates on television directors as authors – the prioritisation of writers, the ‘uncinematic’ aesthetic debate and so on – in my book. ^[22] Even after television became more director-led due to the shift to single camera work, the director’s role remains under-represented. ^[23] However, even if his Play for Today work often demonstrates a director ‘serving’ the script, there is more to those plays than this indicates. If Penda’s Fen is distinctively David Rudkin’s vision, Rudkin has spoken highly of Clarke’s treatment of it. ^[24] Even when Clarke had work allocated to him by television’s ‘studio system’, it helped him develop according to David Thomson, who said Clarke was lucky ‘to be a director in a writers’ medium. Every film school in the world would benefit from seeing how a directorial personality can be sharpened and matured by keeping company with adventurous producers and good writing’. Clarke learnt ‘to acquire versatility with the camera and sure speed with the actors’, and when his ‘own style and preoccupations’ emerged, ‘they were all the stronger in their solid grounding’ ^[25]. Emerge they did. As Simon Hattenstone argues, ‘Although Clarke hardly ever wrote his own films, he was an auteur. He cajoled and teased every nuance out of the scripts, and the finished work always seemed to belong more to him than the writer’. ^[26] Many others would agree, including producer Mark Shivas, who felt that Clarke’s films had ‘an unmistakable individuality and authenticity’ which made him ‘a real auteur in a way that very few British directors are’. ^[27]

This is a sound description of Clarke’s later work, a brilliant string of films in the 1980s which dissect Thatcher’s Britain, shot through with formal innovation and his distinctively personal use of Steadicam: Made in Britain (1983), Christine (1987) and Road (1987), the Northern Ireland films Contact (1985) and Elephant, and his final film, The Firm (1989). His Play for Today work may seem less personal, and some of it is recorded on video on multi-camera and Outside Broadcast rather than critically-accepted celluloid. However, these plays are not simply a foreshadowing of his later auteur period (indeed, the studio Psy-Warriors (1981) is paradoxically one of his greatest pieces of film-making).

The balance between the voice and the vision, or, as Mark Shivas puts it, ‘individuality and authenticity’, epitomises his Play for Today work. ‘Authenticity’ sums up the near-to-the-knuckle performances, the researched journalistic drive behind his more overtly crusading pieces, a concern for the everyday realities of previously-undocumented lives, and a complex realist style which can balance observation of and a strident invitation to participate with his characters. The thematic concerns of these plays include authority and the inner space of individuals, institutionalisation, and incarceration in both literal and figurative terms. Promoting Beloved Enemy (1981), Clarke identified his interest in ‘boxes – people being somewhere they don’t want to be, or wanting to be somewhere they can’t get into’ ^[28]. It’s appropriate that he should choose the imagery of a box, as arguably only Dennis Potter can rival his dedication to the box – television. Clarke exploited the freedom television drama (during this period of experimentation and institutional confidence) gave him in contrast to commercial cinema. Television mattered, and as a result Clarke leaves behind a body of work without comparison in television, of which his Play for Today productions are an esoteric, spiky and impressive part. ^[29]