Background
Alan Clarke was born on 28 October 1935 in Seacombe, Cheshire, United Kingdom. He was a son of a brick-layer.
(Written by David Leland, is about a skinhead (Tim Roth) w...)
Written by David Leland, is about a skinhead (Tim Roth) with a swastika tattoo on the bridge of his nose, who is headed for Borstal and seeks only violence, absurdity, and nihilism. The film never addresses why he is as he is, so “antisocial” and intransigent. But the kid, Trevor, is also so lively, so much Tim Roth, that we are left to ponder whether such cases are hopeless or whether soeiety needs to go hack to zero.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002Z1YX0/?tag=2022091-20
1983
(Is Ireland again, taken to a terrible, surreal extreme: i...)
Is Ireland again, taken to a terrible, surreal extreme: it is— no more, no less—the filming of eighteen murders. The people are actors and the deaths are arranged “action,” filmed with something like beauty. But there is no talk, no hint of context or explanation, just the list, the monotony, and the wonder in so many deaths (the real Ireland has had over two thousand sectarian killings). Viewers can walk away, become connoisseurs of slaughter, go into outrage, or face their helplessness.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J2V4LOI/?tag=2022091-20
1989
Alan Clarke was born on 28 October 1935 in Seacombe, Cheshire, United Kingdom. He was a son of a brick-layer.
He worked as a laborer, and did his best as an insurance salesman before two years of National Service in Hong Kong. Then he emigrated to Canada, and while there he began to study acting and directing. In 1961, he returned to Britain and became a floor manager in television. From that, he worked his way into directing, and by 1969 he was at the BBC. In the rest of his life he made only three theatrical films: a second version of Scum (80), to evade the BBC ban; the Green Baize Vampire (85), an apparent disaster; and Rita, Sue Bob. Too (86), a rowdy, randy sexual comedy about unglamorous people.
The rest is television in the British tradition of filming “plays”—i.e., worthwhile scripts commissioned from established writers and newcomers—that had something to say about life in Britain, something constructive maybe, but often something dangerous and angry. These plays were filmed modestly, on 16mm, yet with outstanding casts and crews. For example, Chris Menges photographed some of Clarke’s plays, and they feature actors such as Gary Oldman and Tim Both.
Clarke filmed some short stories in his early days, including work by Alun Owen, Edna O’Brien, and William Trevor; he made a biopic on Horatio Bottomley, a famous British swindler from the years 1900-30; he filmed a David Hare script, a story from Solzhenitsyn, a version of Buchner’s Danton’s Death, and an episode from Love for Lydia. David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen was rural, Arthurian, and mythic; To Encourage the Others was a treatment of the Bentley-Craig case filmed again later by Peter Medak as Let Him Have It (91). Clarke even directed Bertolt Brecht's Baal. The director in British TV was dependent on what the writer provided—that may be the lesson of this last great example of the studio system.
Still, by the time of his maturity, Britain was in or close to the Thatcher era, and Clarke’s best work is an unflinching but haunted view of a country savaged by that lady’s revolution and of the hopelessness felt—and acted out—by those excluded from the revolution’s benefits.
The power of his films is cumulative, and Clarke is an amazing director, lucid, quick, pungent, very entertaining, unsentimental, a master with actors, and a poet for all those beasts who pace and measure the limits of their cages. No one has ever grasped the central metaphor of cramped existence in walking as well as Alan Clarke.
(Written by David Leland, is about a skinhead (Tim Roth) w...)
1983Contact
(Is a war film that might have been made by Anthony Mann i...)
1985Road
(rom a play by Jim Cartwright, is set on a bleak housing e...)
1989(Is Ireland again, taken to a terrible, surreal extreme: i...)
1989(Written by Roy Minton, is set in a juvenile prison, a pri...)
The Finn
(Written by Al Hunter, is a band of soccer hooligans. But ...)
1989Alan Clarke was a genius of TV—which means that he was better (or, to use Stephen Frears’ phrase, “more formidable”) than most regular theatrical filmmakers. He believed TV was an opportunity for looking beneath the rocks of the social order and giving voice to the anonymous, the wretched—the scum, even. One of his films was actually called Scum, and for years it frightened its makers, the BBC. They banned it, because it was exaggerated, too dramatic, too documentary, too disturbing, or too true. These are the flavors in Clarkes talent.