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STONEY BOTHAR
It was supposed to be a book. When the Great Book was hatching and great things of it were spoken, PNE (Malcolm MacLean’s Gaelic Arts Agency) and Canongate, the publishers of the GB, thought that a book on the whole process as seen from our film’s point of view would be good. We sent them an outline; they approved; we sent them a blurb and they printed it in their catalogue. I started keeping a diary on the film and its environs.
It turned out to be my best way both to remember what happened and to try to translate what we saw and what we thought we knew into some sort of useful preparation for the film. But you can probably see that this text could not in any way be filmed. I didn’t see this at first. I would try to squeeze a poet into a paragraph and supposed that if the paragraph was sharp enough the poet would be captured within; and this is possible but not in any way useful to a film. Eventually I had to move on and boil everything down into a script. But I kept up the prose anyway. And it was a great encouragement that the thing was supposed to be growing into a book
We thought we had a deal – no contract, just an agreement. Then PNE mentioned, by the way and incidentally, that the book deal is now between Canongate and them - we produce for PNE who pass it on to Canongate. Odd.
As it turned out, we were not being told what they were telling us. This was the brush-off. The whole Great Book project was getting complicated, deadlines were slipping, the craft was in danger of sinking and some things had to be thrown overboard, including us. So we were; and I didn’t even notice. We heard nothing – a sound publishers often make. There was so much of this that we started sending them emails. No replies.
Murray and I went on as before. We only began to notice what had happened months later when nobody in Canongate would answer our calls or emails. Eventually it was assumed that the book would not happen. Nobody told us; it was assumed that the silence would do its usual work and I suppose it did.
All this happened without anybody reading a word of this piece, or even seeing it. Most of the people involved are still willing to talk to each other. I think that none of the people who casually jettisoned us think they did anything wrong or discourteous or even unusual and that is because this kind of thing happens all the time in the arts. No wonder so many makers of arts are such mad paranoid bastards. The surface of the arts is benevolent, is all about beauty, the sublime. But that is the work. Behind it all is often a cast of gremlins.
I kept on with the diary, wrote it when I could and added non-diary bits, then revised it. This is the result - with bits of diary sticking out here and there. Blame Canongate. I do.
I am interested in versions of visibility. You are in the arts; applause, approval and the love of strangers are part of the deal, are often the whole deal regardless of how fancy your explanations of love or of strangers can get. So how do you imagine yourself receiving all this? Publicy - awards, prizes, ceremonies? Respect, the award of authority? Or anonymous, safisfactory silence.
I have know artists for whom a good silence was applause enough, but it has to be the silence of an audience. The audience has to exist, or the real prospect of an audience. With the film, the fact that it would exist in more or less permanent form, on film, was enough. We didn’t have to count heads. The diary fiasco was bad for a while. I felt I was talking to myself and it took a while for me to pull myself together and write this with some attempt at craft, at fashioning an object of interest to others. Then the object itself keeps you going, and the business of forming it.
The experience increased my respect for writers in Gaelic. Our poets often address themselves to a more or less respectful silence. Their feeling of having an audience must be limited. This can be true of all poets. But for Gaelic poets, even the best known, the silence must often be deadening and the lack of response can make you careless. Why bother if any old thing will do so long as it’s in Gaelic? Listen to Gearóid MacLochlainn’s Aistriucháin in the film, in a way our saddest poem of all.
As we learned more about all this my great respect for the poets increased. The liveliest of them constructed networks of support and criticism - small worlds into which the poems could go and in which normal things could happen to them: like, dislike, criticism, disagreement. It’s a heroic life they are doing their level best to lead.
So I shouldn’t complain. While the film was going on, it was its own small, encouraging world and writing to avoid Cassandra’s scorn or to make her laugh was more than enough for a while.
Anyway, some of that was later. This was still then – some of it - we were still travelling, meeting, inventing.
It’s still August, 2001 and it’s the Monday after the Sunday in Donegal. I digress, often, but it’s not always my fault. The diary way of writing this kind of thing would do fine well if things in the world would arrive and explain themelves to me in a convenient order, ready to fit in to the story I hope I’m telling. You do not need me to tell you that the order in which things happen is seldom convenient.
It does, though, reflect the stuff going on in our heads. We have an outline and this is inevitably a sort of thesis with examples. Then we start meeting people and nobody fits into somebody else’s thesis completely. So now there is a growing population of characters inside our outline, talking, behaving and rumpling up the outline of the outline. It’s interesting and it’s the best thing that can happen to an outline. But it is digressive. Because it has to be. Hasn’t it?
We drive in from our hilltop at Cleggan and enter smooth Belfast, to meet Rita Duffy, one of the few who can take Belfast’s rough with its smooth.
Rita Duffy is so hospitable she doesn’t even realise she’s doing it. She arranged to meet us, was already committed to the opening of the West Belfast Festival, to an interview with the Irish Times, to the care of two sons and their father and of course to the business of being a bloody great artist. Nevertheless, she took us under her wing - the wing she wasn’t using for all that other stuff - and included us in her day.
We started at a coffee place on the Stranmillis Road - smooth Belfast, very - which now looks as though nothing but meetings ever happen there. Men in suits are plentiful and there is an urban myth that David Trimble used to haunt these streets, itching to get his hands at the first possible moment on the latest issue of The Spectator. This is the sort of thing you have to believe - because it’s true - but you can’t. How can any Ulster Unionist feel in any way at home with such a foppish piece of public-school frippery as The Spectator? How come a politician who would be much happier in South Kensington ends up leading the Ulster Unionist Party?
This is the sort of silly question that always occurs to people like me. It happens because I find it almost impossible to believe in Ulster Unionism. I can respect unionists, am willing to stand up for their rights to be what they are; but I still can’t believe they can take the Unionism seriously. But they do. David Trimble will not find any contradiction between his South Ken appetites and his staunch politics. Neither should I and I should be reminding myself about all this while thinking about Rita, who is in very many respects one of us but also a northern person, completely Belfast, having more in common with David Trimble than I have. I’m from Dublin and it’s always possible inany Irish company that nobody will like me, just because.
Mind you, if I spent more time on the Stranmillis Road I might be able to believe anything and maybe to understand David Trimble, whose accent sounds to me exactly like Paul Muldoon’s – another unlikely but true bit of Belfastery.
Rita is just as good with complicated gentlemen as she is with everybody else. She came, we talked - meeting stuff, nondescript except for her. We went to the Falls Road and to her old school – St Dominic’s (boy’s name, girls’s school, as is the custom). Here, inside a black-framed glass case, in the centre of the empty school study hall is her chocolate Kalashnikov, back from its trip to London and ageing well, its Portadown chocolate going grey, mouldering disgracefully, acquiring experiences. It went off to London and the airport x-ray machines took it for a real gun. Solid chocolate shows up on the screen as solid, as is only right.
Portadown chocolate is no frivolous matter; nor is Ballymena tobacco (Gallagher’s) or Bushmills whiskey. The Protestant Province lives on the vices of others. They have a football team called ‘Distillery’. It takes some restraint to stop yourself calling all this a wee bit ‘Irish’.
Rita is explaining. An Irish Times artsjournalist youngperson is waiting with a few questions she didn’t prepare earlier, and whose answers would enlighten no-one. Murray is interested, though, and starts into a normal conversation with Rita. Irish Times readers will undeservedly benefit from this next day and so will the artsjournalist, who deserves it as little as artsjouranists usually do - people so busy putting their ears to the ground they can never see the writing on the wall.
Mind you, Rita Duffy is hard to handle within the prison walls of The Average Arts Piece. In Ireland these walls are sometimes built so close together that even gifted camels with eye-of-a-needle experience need not apply. Irish artists - of all sorts - can be covered but only from the point of view of success. This success has to be achieved abroad (if we’re paying for it in Ireland, it doesn’t count; but then we hardly ever are); it has to be quantifiable in terms of money or prizes (money is better obviously; it sort of does the sums for you); and it has to be based on some recognisable version of Irishness.
Rita would qualify under all these headings but none of them would occur to her. She just talks about what is going on inside her head and there’s always a crowd of things going on. We join the crowd and try to keep up.
Rita is now into the day in earnest and weaving away at paragraphs as we look, leave, walk in the rain, and even as we enter the Further Education College next door for the Festival launch. It’s a sort of glorified school building - corridors, halls, advice posters - except that it’s all in earnest. The place is heaving; we walk along corridors and into rooms
The Irish language is here, some of it everywhere. I am used to the language being an ornament of Irish nationalism, an accessory. I’m not used to this. It’s not exactly the content that is surprising, it’s the way content engages with the everyday, the way the language is assumed, is taken seriously.
We go into the hall, where there will be speeches. This is Ireland, there will be speeches, always. My grandmother used to go to the last night of a play because on the last night there’s a better chance of speeches. The place is hot and dense with people. There’s a long display the length of one side of the hall - linked quilts commemorating the dead of the Troubles, made by their families. In front of the quilts are the makers, mostly women, matriarchal, dressed up, controlled and coherent. The quilt panels are surprisingly playfull, commemmorating their dead with quilted glasses of Guinness, football insignia, fragile and graceful icons. There is strong stuff as well, of course. ‘Killed by the State’ is often mentioned.
We do our best in the crush to see the whole thing and get quite upset by the film crews posing all over the room. We’re afraid we might resemble them. Mind you, we would have to make a big effort, find a few televisual combat jackets, try to fit ourseles into those trousers with empty buttoned pockets all up and down the legs, find glamorous assistant females, speak with that subtle media stammer that shows that you have read a book, would like to write a book and that you sympathise with the aspirations of the people. The quilt women know about media people and don’t give a tinker’s curse. We heard one of them explaining the absurdity of IRA ‘decommissioning’, insisting there should be none of it, in front of a memorial to her son.
After a dance piece by a Native American group and a composed piece of inaugural prose about the quilt, Gerry Adams speaks unrhetorically to his friends and neighbours, the audience, about the quilt, about mourning and reconciliation. Murray has never been allowed access to an Adams paragraph - in Scotland all the BBC and their like usually allow is a gnomic pronouncement which his Ballymurphy accent minces, for Scottish ears, into a sort of aural Ogham. At paragraph length, you hear the man, a child of his time and place, doing his best and doing it very well.
Rita Duffy tells us later about SDLP canvassers during the recent General Election - her’s is a prosperous middle class area and they called to confirm that local Catholics would be doing their duty for the SDLP, the non-violent nationalist, party. They had nothing to say but they did have boxes to tick and a long night’s canvassing ahead of them and a dying political party to support. Then Sinn Fein came round, bubbling over with politics, ideas, practical eagerness.
There is a tide, John Hume and the SDLP created it and Sinn Fein is riding on it. The hope and the vigour are wonderful. We pick up a brochure, tourist-looking, Belfast but full of green. It turns out to be a guide to West Belfast, full of invitations to while away tourist time visiting culture except that the culture consist of Nationalist murals, Miltown Cemetry with the Hunger Strikers’ graves, a converted factory building now full of studios and galleries but also with two reprobates outside burning a three-piece suite. West Belfast is so far ahead it’s sometimes ahead of itself as well, bilingually.
Tá traidisiún níos sine de mhúrmhaisithe dílseacha, cuid mhór acu a rinne tóglálaithe coistí le lúil a chomóradh. Bhain an chuid is mó acu le King Billy . . . . Eolas: Tacsaí Dubh Bhéal Feirste Tuaidh 02890 328 775
There is an older tradition of Loyalist murals, many of which were painted by coach builders to mark the 12th July celebrations. Many of the earlier murals centered around image of King Billy . . . . . Contact: North Street Black Taxi 02890 328 77
Eventually, long after the fact, Merri Snow, my editing friend from the Mid West by way of Southern California, asks me which Native Americans these were. It never occurred to me to ask. Native American troupes are regular visitors to the nationalist side of Belfast. Gearóid MacLochlainn knows a lot about them, has made programmes about them and in our film wears a t-shirt with a Native American slogan – ‘Saoirse do Leonard Peltier’ (Freedon for Leonard Peltier) – and I don’t bother to find out which tribe is performing. I’m from Dublin.
Eventually – because I’m afraid the Merri will ask me – I look up Leonard Peltier. He’s a Native American Political Prisoner who has been in jail in the US for the past 27 years – http://www.freepeltier.org
We come back home feeling excited and useful. If we had any sense we’d feel confused but we don’t. We feel full of stuff – other people’s stuff. But it feels like our stuff because we’re making a film about it and the Film Gaze dominates all it surveys. We will very likely end up feeling we are more or less the authors of every poem in our film. I think arts administrators get to feel this kind of thing as well but we don’t have to talk about them again, do we?
So here we are in Scotland, full of lots of things, including ourselves. Our next step would surely be taken quickly; we would pour all this energy into a script, work things out and get doing things. Surely we’ve done enough, and had enough of, outlines, pitches, meetings. Time to get on with it. It’s autumn, a brisk but relaxed time of year. Things that should be done can be done.
Then nothing happens. Film is so collaborative when it’s happening that the silence when it’s not happening is freezing. You get your head down and work as creatively as you can but when you look up there’s nobody there. And there should be; it’s a film; it’s collaborative.
I diagnose the leisurely demeanour of the documentary maker. Documentaries document; what they document is there, usually a more or less real object in the real world; it stays still while the film maker films it. It’s not an easy thing but it’s not like making the whole thing up either. If Documentary people see the subject organising itself nicely or interestingly and doing what it does, they sit back and wait. I’m not a Documentary person; I prefer to make up the facts, and to make them up to correspond with the real ones. I like scripts, written, worked-out things. I like playing the games beforehand, to make the afterwards games all the better. So I feel abandoned, as if nothing is happening. Murray feels everything is happening. Cassandra will turn up eventually and expect everything else to be happening and several things to have happened already.
Then we notice that we have another deadline - National Lottery Film Fund in several days time. Our second application. Cassandra writes what offices would regard as a memo, a gently explosive device causing misery, trouble and unrest - in fact, just what we need. Energy makes itself apparent and we start doing another outline - a funding outline - for Scottish Screen. The Outline is a strange thing, as I remember saying once or twice. But we can still remember the first one and, until we actually sit down and remember the difficulties, think the second one will flow like clockwork, or work like a mountain stream, or whatever.
At this stage, Murray gets very very filmic. He does this with Seamus McGarvey, cinematographer, Murray’s son-in-law with Phoebe’s collaboration, and beginning to be referred to as ‘famous Seamus’ - the Heaney effect. That particular Seamus was called Famous Heaney by Robert Lowell, and soon every Seamus had better get himself famous or, unless and until, be known as Hamish. This Seamus is famous already, so don’t you go round worrying about him. He’s fine.
On the eve of our application I regard Murray’s filmic tendencies as almost suicidal for the Lottery Fund. He and Seamus are having very precise filmic conversations - lenses, lighting, colour, ways of producing very strong, exact and interesting effects for certain poems, real ways to make sound and sense visible.
But. The more precise this gets, the further it all gets from the Outline idea. I have an idea of the Lottery Reader - a general purpose arts person who responds to the subtleties of arts sexiness but to no other sexiness whatsoever. But lenses? Cameras? In a film? Too esoteric. You can’t talk professionally any more to other professionals when you’re supposed to be talking funding, access, the general public.
Enter Cassandra on an email with a beginners guide to making applications. Excellent. Some things you always do as a beginner no matter how often you’ve done them before. Applications do this to you. To have somebody on hand with a manual is essential. It doesn’t matter if it’s the wrong manual, any bloody manual will do. There’s a poem by Miroslav Holub about soldiers trying to get through unfamiliar mountains. Fortunately, one of them has a map. They perk up. They get through the mountains. The map turns out to be of the wrong mountains, but having a map was what counted - any map.
We scrub away for a day or so at elements of outlines, lego-like bits that are supposed to fit together. We meet on another Saturday morning to heave them into place. We heave away for a while, give up, start melting them down and end up with an outline we think is much better than the one we started with, which is related to the original but also unrecognisable, one which shows that this blind man’s buff way of doing outlines, though apparently confused, confusing and undisciplined is in fact Nature’s Way.
If God had intended outlines to be done logically, He would have created logical people to do them. It takes a day - 10 hours, as I worked it out on the way home, deciding how much I should congratulate myself. I decide that even enough congratulation is not enough. But of course we’ll phone each other tomorrow and congratulate away all over again.
We have, though, been given some of the secured funding as development money - development, so we can use it without jeapordising the new application, can make plans to do things soon - things like filming. We have been talking to possible participants as conditionally as we can - ‘this film may never be made’, that kind of thing - but nobody ever believes us; they know that anybody so straightforwardly claiming to be telling the truth must be lying. Arts people never believe each other, or believe conditionally, until a better looking lie comes along.
They gave us money, so we realise that a film - and maybe the film - will be made; that up to now we have never entirely believed this; and that people who have not yet given us money are more likely to because other people have. If they believe, then we have to believe. I feel my thinking stiffen up. What we now have to make is not every possible film but one particular film. This feels a little like being trapped. I’m supposed to write the film now. I need encouragement, so I get on the phone. Talking is a great cure.
Biddy Jenkinson has arrived from Sarajevo. I phone her, offend the young man (her son) who answers her phone by suggesting he control her movements more carefully. He tries politeness on me, I try innocent eagerness on him, the call becomes super-businesslike, brisk and clinically clean. She phones me back, claiming to have noticed nothing. I apologise, but nothing happened apparently. It was a son. The young do not do performance-art phone calls.
A performance artist is coming to Dundee, we prepare to film, but he’s not performing, just making an image. We get ready to go, then don’t go. We’re practicing. There is a small clatter of things happening, I’m talking on the phone a lot. I don’t really know how to do these phone calls. I’m hoping to do a good phone call, convey character – preferably the sort of character I like – and not get myself into a chain of promises I can’t get out of.
Some artists have great difficulty talking to me at all. They seem to suspect a great dirty conspiracy, as though we’re about to demand insincere behaviour and a lease on their soul - all because we are going to make a film. I keep doing my best to explain that we have no glamour, no film aura, no aggression whatsoever. I often describe our lack of glamour, but they probably suspect me of disingenuousness. I do see that anybody who’s willing to write ‘diningenuousness’ and is willing to attempt to spell it must be up to something.
It’s a pity they can’t see me, because at the moment my reading glasses have dots of white paint all over - I’ve been painting a ceiling. There are tiny flecks round my nails. I’ve forgotten how to use a nail brush and I keep leaving the house in the wrong pullover - when you’ve been painting a ceiling the idea of power dressing is remote, dressing barely achieveable. Murray has been going round the Edinburgh Festival looking like Scotland’s Honorary Consul to Ruritania - well dressed, but for a slightly different age and place – usually for the future of a much-improved Scotland. Cassandra dresses to discourage freeloaders and midnight ramblers - elegant, organised, free of invitations and encouragements. If you saw us together you might think we worked for a cranky, shambolic but well meaning special school, very special; you would not think we had Oscar, acceptance speeches-in-waiting in our knapsacks like field-marshall’s batons.
The phone calls are more important than usual because I am writing this film as though the poets and artists in it were characters in a fiction. This is now a script. I’m trying to put all the prose in here and the action and visuals in the film. We more or less know who the cast will be and I’m trying to understand the artists. I heard Edward Bond on the radio yesterday say that his characters tell him some things about themselves and not others. Our poets are like that. They tell us things, mostly in their poems. We are writing roles for them based on these things. The only biography we’re doing is the biography of what’s in the poems.
When we started out I wondered about why films about dead poets were so much more interesting than films about live ones. I supposed it was because you can get the scandal, the gossip and the personal stuff in about the dead but not about the living. I didn’t envy the scandalous stuff. It often gets in the way. I had spent years and years being bored by all the smutty stuff about Byron, then hearing Don Juan read on the Third Programme (by Marius Goring, brilliantly) and there he was.
What I envied was how easy it is to convey character, lots of dimensions of it, when you can show people naturally – stuff impossible to reach or ever allude to under the interview spotlights, the question-and-answer, the paralysed foolishness of most arts television. I thought we could try character and do it through poems, settings and personality. The camera can do things. I’ve seen Murray make it do lots of things.
So I put Pól Ó Muirí doing a turn by Lough Neagh as a Gaelic Don Quixote – he has written a poem called ‘Don Quixote’. I write a road-movie sequence. The car wanders from Belfast and off the straight and narrow. There’s a lot of wide and crooked in Northern Ireland only you don’t usually get to notice it on account of the number of people standing around expostulating about the straight and narrow.
I take my stand by the Ulster names,
Each clean hard name like weathered stone;
Tyrella, Rostrevor, are flickering flames:
The names I mean are the Moy, Malone,
Strabane, Slieve Gullion and Portglenone.
Ulster Names, John Hewitt (from Freehold)
The motorway is under the strict control of versions of the English language. As you leave Belfast you pass the factory of Spendlove C. Jebb on the Grosvenor Road. Take a left at the next big roundabout and you’ll pass by Empire Street and Kitchener Street and even Ulsterville Avenue, streets named after Edinburgh, Windsor and Surrey. You go by Saintfield and Sprucefield and by the time you pass the sign for Hillsborough you feel like giving up hope.
But get anywhere near Lough Neagh and even the Ulster Scots sometimes forget how Roman they’re supposed to be, forget to tell their roads where to go and allow them to dawdle around the Lough and even to sometimes appear to be going nowhere in particular. Then you get down among the serious placenames and a confusion of tongues– Lurgan ( An Lorgain, long low shin of land) and Soldierstown (a garrison in 1641) and then Athagallon (Achadh Gallán, the field of standing stones).
Is mise Don Quixote d’Achadh Gallán. Lá den tsaol, fadó fadó, d’iompair Á, nach cuma? Tá mé íon i gcroí. An foclóir mar chathéide chaite. |
I am the Don Quixote of Aghagallon Once upon a time, long, long ago, she bore But what the hell! I’m an innocent. The dictionary like rusting armour. |
| (Don Quixote, from Is Mise Ísmáél, Lagan Press, 2000) | |
Pól Ó Muirí probably started off in life as Paul Murray. I didn’t ask. When I first entered Northern Ireland as a responsible adult I decided I shouldn’t ask anybody who their ancestors were; and never even to ask some things that would be mere banter in Dublin, like what side of the river did your mother come from? I thought this would keep me out of trouble. I was aware that sailing under the Anderson flag was a flag of inconvenience in the Dublin 1950’s and then a sort of disguise in Edinburgh. I was once mistaken for a Free Presbyterian by our neighbour Mrs Paterson - because I’d played music in St Giles during a service that included Pastor Jack Glass – Scotland’s Ian Paisley. Even though I went on behaving in a way which all the other neighbours regarded as hilariously Hibernian and a potential threat to the gentility level of the stair, I was treated for ever afterwards with respectable respect by Mrs Paterson, who wouldn’t allow the common stair to be painted green because green is Roman Catholic.
But I got into trouble in the North anyway. I assumed, for example, that a man called Oliver must be a Prod – he was called Oliver, he ran a community council and behaved like a Quaker and he also smoked cigars.
He turned out to be a Catholic, a member of a Christian Socialist party and was interned when the British Government decided to lock almost everybody up, just in case. Oliver Frawley of Crumlin. Apparently Frawley is a Limerick name. He told me all about it when we knew each other better. He was still smoking a cigar but he was getting the ash all over the place and about to go off to teach on a project for Travellers and always had far too many things to say to bother about ash or any other incidentals.
Cassandra – who thinks of herself as one of the Latvians of Schotts (Central Belt Scotland, very) but with evident Irish complications - tells me she thinks McGrogan is a Protestant name – somebody told her something like that in Glasgow. But I knew a guy in Dublin, from the Liberties, deep Dublin, worked in my Grandmother’s butcher shop and he was called Tommy Grogan, holy water everywhere, and the boy loved his mother. Cassandra still thinks she has Protestant credentials. She wants them. When she gets over to Ireland, she’ll have to have them. She’s a sensible person, and is waiting for us Catholics to horrify her. And we will. Maybe we’ll horrify her by showing her she’s one of us. I have people in mind for her, confusing people, people with relatives who used to be in the RUC but went off to join the West Midlands Police, but who behave like one of us.
You will have wondered at the higher-even-than-usual degree of irrelevance in the last few paragraphs. Does this book get more and more irrelevant as it goes on? Not necessarily. But at the moment it’s more amusing to write about my grandmother’s butcher shop than about what I’m supposed to be writing about - the ‘script’ of this film. You see, by this time we have gone way beyond the stage of flirting with ideas. Now we have to write them; and write them so as to persuade not only ourselves but also those who will either allow us to, or prevent us from, making this film.
For example: The next set of people who could say no are the poets and artists. The stage at which an arts project can break down completely is at every stage. They can break down without anything definite seeming to happen. Look at this non-book. Nothing happened. Nobody is committed to being in our film. This is partly because this kind of film does not think of doing contracts with its cast. With what it regards as its essentials – crew, producer, director and eventually editor – it certainly does. But it is assumed that the subjects will be there ready and waiting when we arrive, so long as we keep in touch.
But there’s Biddy who certainly does not need us or anybody else and seems to dislike the filming process even if she decides to approve of us. Remco de Fouw, whose complicated photographic process we want to film, is having doubts because we would have to summarise it – either that or stay up all night with him. There’s John Murray. I called him a poet by mistake. He writes the odd poem and is in the Great Book as a poet; but he’s a prose and plays writer. There’s Christopher Whyte. I wrote a wee squib of publicity about him and he didn’t like it.
Most of these are my own failures of tact and happen because the momentum of the project carries me away. I assume that it is us – the artists, poets and the film – and then the rest of the world. We can do the usual tricks – publicity, exaggeration - with the rest of the world but will retain a different understanding inside the tent. But there is no reason why others should trust me as I seem to trust myself; there is no tent; so before we do another round of visits I’m going to have the entire script finished and that will be the bond between film and cast.
I have ambitions for this. What I’m trying to do is to put them in control when the camera starts, but the version of themselves I imagine being in control is my version. I am doing my best, though. They can disagree and, as you can see, they often do.
On film and TV sets I have always felt dominated by the apparatus of the mediums, as in recording studios. The studio should be there to serve the performer, to enable. But they don’t promote or enable, they demand. You usually have to smuggle a performance through in the middle of the demanding and alien process of proving to the geek at the recording desk that you can play your instrument, know what you’re doing, understand as much as you need to understand about the process, and can reproduce bits of music as often as he likes while he rearranges the furniture, experiments with mikes, thinks, grunts and bullies his apprentice - and there always is one. Performance technology demands and takes, it hardly ever gives - or not without a fight.
I was doing a thing for STV in Glasgow once, for a children’s programme. Francis Cowan and I had written a piece called The Wolf and Peter – a jazz rebuke to the Prokofiev. We had six or seven little girls and it was agreed they would read the first bit of the story, each doing a few words, each on screen for her own words. So I take the girls off, we sit down and rehearse. The cameraman saw this and followed. After a minute or two we were going great, one girl taking the baton from the one before and the whole thing building a very nice rhytm. We did it a few times and the cameraman practised too and eventually we were doing it wonderfully and he was turning his camera from one little head to another; there was visual and verbal rhythm; we were really cooking.
The director, of course, came over and slapped our wrists. This kind of fraternisation was not allowed. No, each little girl had to learn her own few words again, stand in a corner getting nervous and waiting her turn, walk to her appointed spot, wait until the lights and the camera had wound themselves up and then eventually be allowed to try to speak naturally and accurately. It took ages; it was stilted; nobody felt good about it; when it was broadcast, it looked like television.
As far as I’ve seen it, films like ours usually do this. The writer is interviewed like a politician, as somebody who is promising he’ll stop beating his wife soon, very soon, really soon. There’s no reason why this would work and it hardly ever does. Our idea is to get our subjects to say the most interestiing things they can, on subjects they have already said very interesting things about. These sayings will often be poems, with the presence of the poet, well presented and acting the part of themselves; it should be like meeting them while they are at their best and doing their damndest. You can’t do this if the machines are allowed to be in charge; and they always will be, unless you get in there first. I thought that was what scripts are for. It’s what my script will be for.
You can probably see that I find it hard to believe it will all work out like this. You can probably sense my jaw tightening up a bit, that I’m preparing some stubborness for later on. We all know that getting people to agree to things is one thing, getting them to act on the agreement is another.