Director Jamie Chambers wants his film, screening at this year's Edinburgh film festival, to be more than an elegy for the nation's oral tradition of singing and storytelling
Home advantages don't come much stronger than the one the new Scottish film Blackbird will have when it screens this week at the Edinburgh film festival. It isn't just that the picture's writer-director, Jamie Chambers, was born and raised in the city, or that he is artistic director of Transgressive North, a community of Scottish artists that has collaborated with the likes of Irvine Welsh, Jarvis Cocker, Alexander McCall Smith and Four Tet. Nor is it merely that this movie, inspired partly by Powell and Pressburger's Hebridean romance I Know Where I'm Going!, will be vying for the prestigious Michael Powell award. The very subject of Blackbird is Scotland – specifically, the oral tradition of singing and storytelling. Despite initiatives to keep that tradition alive, including Edinburgh's own Tradfest, the portrait in Blackbird of an entire branch of cultural history withering away is an entirely plausible one.
The film follows the efforts of a passionate young man, Ruadhan (pronounced Rowan, and played by Andrew Rothney), to keep alive the traditions in his sleepy village, where the singing is scarce and the jobs are scarcer. Seeing new businesses arrive, and elderly bards and songsmiths die out or give up the ghost, Ruadhan takes it upon himself to fight back and prove that his past has a place in the future. The anger that motivates him is offset by delicate imagery; the camera keeps being distracted, Malick-style, by the natural beauty of Ruadhan's disappearing world. Chambers admits rather sheepishly that his fiery protagonist inherits a lot of his own characteristics. "I have been very stubborn and blinkered about things," he tells me. "Ruadhan is someone who can't see the dangers of that idealism. While his fight is an important one, he ends up dragging himself and other people down with him."
Chambers first connected with folk culture after hearing the music of Martyn Bennett, the Canadian-born Celtic fusion musician, who died in 2005 and whose song Blackbird lent the film its title (it can also be heard over the closing credits). "Growing up in Edinburgh I was listening to Goldie and Leftfield and Orbital, but it was thrilling to realise that Martyn's music could stand alongside those things. As a young Scot I'd been looking for a long time for something that I felt was authentic within my culture. Obviously there are lots of cultural things that are immediately apparent – kilts and tartan and haggis and all that – but none of it ever rang true for me. Now here was something that was deep and important and still alive in Scotland."
One of Chambers' most impressive achievements has been to transfer intact to Blackbird the music's simultaneous sense of the vital and the elegiac. He has been helped in this task by a cast peppered with legends of the folk music and storytelling scene, none mightier than the great, witty polymath Norman Maclean. While his name will be unfamiliar to most English-language audiences, his fame among Gaelic speakers is assured. He's a storyteller, stand-up comic, writer, piper and Gaelic TV star (he had his own much-loved sketch show, and was also the voice of Danger Mouse in its Gaelic dubbed version, Donnie Murdo). In Blackbird, he plays Alec, the town bard, whom Ruadhan tries to enlist in his struggle against the forces of change. Chambers wrote the part for him after they met in 2010 while making When the Song Dies, a short preparatory documentary and companion piece to Blackbird.
I call Maclean at his home in Uist in the Outer Hebrides. He is, he says, hoarse from an unprecedented wave of speaking engagements at local schools. "I've been plagued by an infestation of helicoptering tiger mothers who want me to help their little ducklings become swans," he says, chewing happily over each delicious word. He tells me he suffers from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). "I'm 76 and, until midday, I feel it too. I didn't treat my body like a temple and I'm paying for it now." His long decades of alcoholism were documented in his memoir The Leper's Bell but he sounds to me sprightlier than most people a third his age. "Well, I'm ambulatory and the computer still works."
Blackbird isn't Maclean's first film – he was part of the mix-and-match cast alongside Tilda Swinton and the poet Liz Lochhead in the 1989 curiosity Play Me Something, though his addiction cost him a part in Bill Forsyth's Comfort and Joy. But he remains amused and admiring about the film-making process. "Orson Welles said that a poet needs but a pen, a painter a brush and a film-maker needs an army. When I got to the Blackbird set, that's what it was: an army! There were so many of them. And so young – I've got plants at home older than these kids. They were scarily good and it brought out the competitive side of me. I don't know if they were Method actors but they were doing press-ups before their scenes. I was only shooting for five days – you turn up, they give you your pages and you make love to the leading lady – but they were there for 30. That's almost Heaven's Gate, isn't it?"
Maclean concedes that the role of Alec overlaps generously with his off-screen self. "What I've been doing for the past few years – oh, this will sound terribly pompous – is furnishing a lot of young people with stories to recite at these folk festivals, teaching them singing skills, making them more confident. In a strange way I'm doing what Alec is doing in the film with Ruadhan. I find myself increasingly bellowing at these young people, exhorting them to greater effort, calling on the stories I heard at their age."
Chambers seems wary of making the film's message too alarmist: "There is some good preservation work being done and we are at a point where the oral tradition is valued. But it's a complex point in Scottish history. There's a question about how to take it forward. To a certain degree erosion is inevitable as things become more globalised and homogenised."
Even Maclean, who is instrumental in keeping the oral tradition's heart thumping, does not sound overly hopeful. "It's so tenuous now, it's on the point of dying," he says. "We simply have a different mode of acquiring knowledge. In this age of individualism the kids just go to Wikipedia and Google if they want to know things. They're encouraged to detach themselves. They don't talk to their parents the way kids do in southern European and Mediterranean families. But some information can only be passed on orally. You can't find how to douse sheep or deliver cattle on Wikipedia. You have to have your Uncle Archie or whomever to tell you about it. I hate using pseudo-sociological terms but once the oral thing and the communality go, you end up with is anomie."
Film, then, could be one way forward for the preservation of oral culture. Indeed, Chambers made Blackbird as part of Transgressive North's Strange Home project, dedicated to bringing community folklore to cinema. "When we were in pre-production, we went to a forum in France to pitch Blackbird to people from Bulgaria and Germany and so on. We were describing it as being about a town undergoing change, which was endangering certain traditions, with all these new elements and influences coming in. And people kept saying to us that this was happening all over Europe. What they liked about the idea was always the specificity of it, the local flavour. [The English film director] Shane Meadows said once that if you want to say something universal, you've got to start from somewhere very particular."
• Blackbird screens on Thursday 27 and twice on Sunday 30 June as part of the Edinburgh film festival. Earlier today it was named a Best of the Fest.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jun/27/blackbird-edinburgh-film-festival-2013
No comments:
Post a Comment