Portraying Neonazis, Pessimism and the Works of Alan Clarke

Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer 

   Alan Clarke is a criminally underrated filmmaker, albeit one who never truly reached mainstream commercial success. Whether this would've meant personal success or failure to him is debatable, a lot of his work champions the underdogs in society, often pessimistic and anti-authoritarian in tone. His chief mode of output were BBC television plays, which perhaps clarifies the reason for his being overlooked owing to the snobbery against the medium. Yet his inability to expand beyond the small screen only attests to the politics behind his work. If he wasn't given the opportunity for bigger productions, it serves as a fitting parallel to the oppression his characters faced. If he was, it's convincing evidence that he stuck to his principles; the TV was the medium of the masses, it didn't have the glitz or the dishonesty of Hollywood. 

His anti-authoritarianism ran to the core of his film making; a lot of his work depicts a bleak, post-industrial Britain, with angry and misunderstood characters filmed from a cold distance. The audience are detached onlookers rather than active emotional participants. Often there is no music to goad us into a certain frame of mind and the narratives are simple rather than complex and involving, appearing as a series of incidental rather than interconnected events. Clarke's style was carried to its logical excesses in his penultimate film, Elephant (1989) [watch here], set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The film is 40 minutes long, features no dialogue, and is made up of 18 scenes which all feature long tracking shots (Clarke's most potent stylistic motif) and culminate in murder. It was the inspiration for Gus Van Sant's later film about the Columbine shooting, also called Elephant (2003), which mimicked a lot of Clarke's stylings. It's within this sparse, alienating approach that his anti-authoritarianism was most significantly manifested. The viewer is given full reign to interpret the events how they wish, completely subverting the fascistic trappings drawbacks usually associated with film. This brings to mind Jean Cocteau's remark about Jean Genet, "He is also a moralist, in the fullest sense of the word – but a moralist is not to be confused with a man who moralizes."

Everywhere American History X (1982) goes wrong, Clarke's collaboration with screenwriter David Leland, Made in Britain (1982), goes right, for the very reasons mentioned above. Both attempt to explore the mindsets of neonazis, however the former's heavy handed plotting is far too reminiscent of its subject matter's less sympathetic traits (Nazism), whereas the latter's is analogous to its protagonist's alienation and pessimism, something the audience can truly sympathise with. American History X never really gets to the bottom of its protagonist's outrage and disillusionment, but in Made in Britain, the main character is constantly surrounded by it. Setting plays such a significant role in character development, and exposition can be incorporated effectively into a location depending on the actor's ability to interact with it. In the case of Tim Roth's performance as Trevor, his presence perfectly compliments the decaying urban scenery. He rebels against authority in his very manner of occupying a space. The long walking shots are testament to this, seemingly encapsulating the entirety of the character through his angry strutting, all without a single word being uttered. As he looks into a shop window at a group of mannequins posed as a family there is a pervading sense of the uncanny, echoed later when he ends up at his social worker's flat before dawn, sharply juxtaposed by a scene within a prison cell. The film gives the audience time to exist within the places it presents, needless explaining and artificial mood-enhancers (music, excessive camera angles) are traded in for silence and atmosphere.

Clarke gives the characters room to breathe and grow through, perhaps a skill learnt from his work as a play director. That being said, there appears to be little explicit growth in Tim Roth's character, his performance is instead beautifully nuanced and it's as if through overt character development Clarke runs the risk of moralising and departing from the film's sacred social realism. Trevor's self-centred volition and refusal to change is as much a product of his environment as anything else. In these underlying politics, the film corresponds closely to our own world and, while its now over 30 years old, it still presents an alarmingly familiar situation. One could easily pass it off as nihilistic, but its inherent pessimism is as much a call to arms as anything else. The unresolved purgatory we see on screen, one that resembles our own social climate, gives us a chance to get up and fight for our own happy ending. This exemplifies the importance of pessimism in social realist film making, as Mark Fisher points out in Capitalist Realism, "[A]nti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism... [a] film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity." Supplanting the term "capitalism" with something along the lines of "current social climate", the statement is a lot closer to explaining Made in Britain's lack of clear-cut moralising. When clearly shown the way on film, we're a lot less inclined to find it ourselves in real life.

Recently television has become a much more highly esteemed medium. Programmes like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead are causing a much bigger stir than anything the film industry has to offer. With this, though, has come more public focus and executive control over content. Clarke's TV work really excelled because of his ability to fully realise his visions using the medium, his only real problem being post-production censorship issues. Perhaps if he were alive today his primary mode of output would be independent film, his work fits closer into that canon than anywhere else, with all his BBC work recently released on blu-ray by the BFI. He treads a similar filmic path to Ken Loach whom, in comparison, appears soupy, sentimental, and too much a social justice warrior. In Loach's Cathy Come Home (1966) we know who to root for, but that is part of the problem, it comes off as mere pamphleteering against the poetry of Clarke's work. Building on the point made by Mark Fisher; Loach has done our crusading for us, but Clarke leaves the sword to be taken up by his audiences, the thousands who watch behind small screens.

Alan Clarke's steadicam shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIpeGVdr_60