Written by Rachael Johnson.
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards took place on Sunday night. One of the films nominated for “Best Outstanding British Film” was the critically acclaimed The Selfish Giant (2013). It lost out to the sci-fi juggernaut Gravity, but it is a powerful, low-budget film that deserves a greater audience. The Selfish Giant was, also, the only nominated film in that category written and directed by a woman. The director’s name, of course, is Clio Barnard and my primary aim, this post-BAFTA Tuesday, is to appeal to readers to seek out her films, if you haven’t already done so.
The Selfish Giant is a beautifully made film about the friendship between excluded boys on the margins of British society but the director has also made another remarkable film about alienated, disadvantaged women. I’m talking about The Arbor (2010), Barnard’s innovative and involving documentary about the life and career of British playwright Andrea Dunbar. The Arbor was also critically acclaimed. Barnard won Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the Tribeca Film Festival of 2010 as well as a British Independent Film Award.
Andrea Dunbar was a teenaged, working-class literary star and mother of young children from a deprived area of Bradford in West Yorkshire. Her autobiographical plays were produced at The Royal Court Theatre in London in the early 80s. An important cultural voice of underprivileged youth in divided Thatcherite Britain, the playwright died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990 after collapsing in a pub. She was only 29 years old. But the documentary not only tells the story of the dramatist’s extraordinary short life; it also focuses on the tragic fate of her eldest daughter, Lorraine Dunbar. Let’s take a closer look at The Arbor before returning to the current success of The Selfish Giant.
Andrea Dunbar grew up on the run-down Butterworth Estate in Bradford, on a street called Brafferton Arbor. She wrote about the world around her and drew from her own life. Her thematic concerns included intergenerational and interracial relationships, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism. Dunbar’s play, The Arbor (1980) is about teenage pregnancy while Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) is about two teenaged girls who are having an affair with the same older, married man. For Dunbar, the role of the writer is to tell the truth about her world. In a featured TV interview, she observes, “Nowadays, people want to face up with what’s actually happening coz it’s actually what’s said. And you write what’s said. You don’t lie. If you’re writing about something that’s actually happening, you’re not going to lie and say it didn’t happen when it did all the time.”
Clips are shown of the film adaptation of Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) but Barnard adopts a more original approach with The Arbor. The documentary features excerpts of an open-air performance of the play on the same estate today. The Arbor is, in fact, a deeply absorbing and stylistically adventurous documentary. Fiction and fact echo and combine. The film does offer interesting glimpses of the writer, and her family, in archival footage, but what makes it inventive is the sustained use of actors to voice the people who knew Dunbar. Their observations and memories of her are quite perfectly lip-synched and performed. Barnard is intrigued by verbatim theatre where actors speak the words of interviewees. Of particular interest to her was A State Affair, a verbatim play by Robin Soans that revisited Andrea Dunbar’s home in 2000. Barnard states in the production notes of The Arbor that her radical intention to apply verbatim techniques to film is to “make the audience aware they are watching a construct.” This makes for an artistically and intellectually stimulating viewing experience. The distancing effect encourages the viewer to question orthodoxies about documentary filmmaking, particularly questions regarding truth and representation.
Dunbar’s life was eventful and extraordinary. How many writers have been teenaged literary stars and mothers? She did not conform to culturally conservative, working and middle class norms of feminine behavior. She was a right-wing tabloid’s living nightmare: a young working-class mother with three children by three different fathers. Barnard’s approach does not serve to pass any judgment on the writer. Family members and former partners recall Dunbar and their reminiscences and attitudes towards the writer sometimes conflict; Dunbar herself is glimpsed in interviews and comes across as an intense, shy-looking figure. She was, it seems, a complicated character. Lip-synched voices of her family testify to child neglect and hard drinking but it is equally evident that Dunbar was a young woman with deep insecurities. A victim of male exploitation and violence, she spent time in women’s refuges. She, also, most likely suffered from depression and alcoholism.
The Arbor also examines the difficult relationship between Andrea and her biracial daughter, Lorraine. Lorraine’s father was of Pakistani heritage and she observes that her mother’s situation was very unusual on her “all-white, very racist estate.” Virulent racism was commonplace in Yorkshire in the 80s and Lorraine’s memories of the racism she experienced within her own family are disturbing to hear. She even recalls overhearing her own mother- back from the pub- make the sickening, soul-destroying confession to another that she did not love her as much as her other children because of her race. Her relatives, she maintains, also denied her Asian heritage. Lorraine further maintains that her mother was uncaring and unloving in general.
Lorraine’s white half-sister, Lisa, disagrees with her characterization of their mother and claims it covers deep hurt over her loss. What is clear is that Lorraine simply unravelled after her mother’s death. Her life was blighted by bullying and drug addiction. She fell into sex work to pay for her habit and, like her mother, became a victim of domestic violence. Lorraine was imprisoned in 2007 for the manslaughter–through neglect–of her two-year-old son who died after ingesting methadone whilst in her care. It perhaps comes as no surprise to learn that she actually preferred prison life.
The Arbor is a unique, evocative portrait of creative talent and inter-generational pain. Both mother and daughter suffered from terrible demons but Barnard’s approach does not offer easy explanations. The young literary star from the streets of Bradford remains a mystery, in many ways, and we are encouraged to ask if we ever really know the truth about someone. The documentary is about an extraordinary woman from a particular place but it deals with the universal theme of family. Are we not all shaped by our families, if not haunted by them? The poet Philip Larkin wrote in This Be The Verse: “They fuck you up, you, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” Whether you concur with his darkly amusing observation, The Arbor makes you think about what we inherit from our parents. Another theme is the nature of creative talent and I took away from the documentary an acknowledgement that creativity does not always come in clean, little packages. The film also makes the viewer reflect on the impact of poverty, class, and racism on the psyche of human beings.
The Arbor contributes to our understanding of the dramatist in a compelling, original ways. It is an important feminist work too in that it restores to the collective memory the story of a young, disadvantaged female cultural figure while drawing attention to the plight of young girls struggling to survive in societies where racism, lack of opportunity, and masculinist violence are all-pervasive.
In the narrative film, The Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde short story of the same name, Barnard addresses the troubles of two young boys growing up in the same economically deprived area of Bradford. It is, of course, important for female filmmakers to examine masculinity as well as femininity. The Selfish Giant sheds light on both the aggressiveness and vulnerability of boys. Barnard’s lads are lost and disadvantaged. Arbor (Conner Chapman) has a drug-addicted older brother and Swifty (Shaun Thomas) comes from an extremely large, needy family. Both have been excluded from school for discipline problems. Arbor is an angry, insecure lad with ADHD. Swifty is more unassuming. An animal lover, he is a natural with horses. Kicked out of school, the boys resort to scrap metal dealing and get involved in illegal “sulky” (or harness) racing. Arbor feels left out when Swifty is chosen to be the sulky rider of a scrap metal dealer called Kitten (Sean Gilder). He also steals from him. Punishment is a risky but potentially profitable mission that ends in tragedy.
The Selfish Giant highlights the exploitation of children by adults but it is also a sensitive study of male friendship. Arbor can be belligerent but he can also be engaging, even affectionate. He loves his friend and the friendship moves the viewer because we realize that it is his only authentic relationship. Barnard understands that his bravado masks raw sensitivity. Arbor’s home, for Swifty, is a refuge from the insecurity and turmoil of his family life. Chapman and Thomas, it must be said, deliver persuasive, natural performances as the boys.
The Selfish Giant is a hard-hitting, sometimes harrowing, film. Of course, there are those who would charge Barnard with exploiting poverty as well as giving a too depressing picture of the lives of poor people in the UK. I would not, however, accuse the director of being a class tourist. Although the daughter of a university lecturer, she grew up in West Yorkshire and knows the area in question well. The Selfish Giant is not manipulative. It engages you emotionally but it is not sentimental. In fact, it grows more powerful and beautiful as the story unfolds. Stylistically, The Selfish Giant is a social realist tale with a modern, picaresque feel. The spiritual themes of Wilde’s story also become more apparent as the film develops. Barnard’s formidable sense of place is, again, manifest. The Selfish Giant’s post-industrial, semi-rural landscape is shot with skill and imagination. This world does not lack poetry but Barnard endows it with an austere power. In short, The Selfish Giant is a beautifully made film that that needed to be made, and needs to be seen. It critical successes–BAFTA nomination and Europa Cinemas prize at Cannes in 2013–are richly deserved.
Clio Barnard is not frightened of tackling tough subjects. She is concerned with the marginalized and the forgotten–untutored children, abused women, anguished addicts and wayward, natural-born artists. Both films explore the alienation of the English underclass and working class. They are not directly political but it is clear where the director’s ideological sympathies lie. The films show what poverty does to people psychologically. This is, in fact, what they are ultimately about. There is a sureness and artistry in Barnard’s directing and her work has been both aesthetically striking and intellectually engaging. Stylistically, her films so far have revealed experimental daring as well as strong social commitment. I hope she goes on to make many more beautiful, thought-provoking films. Let’s celebrate her rise.