There’s a reason why Alan Clarke (1935-1990) is one of the least known of recent British directors. His films have been virtually unseen in the United States, and our modern xenophobic mindset dictates that no filmmaker exists until we Yanks say so. However, this oversight of Clarke will be posthumously corrected with the retrospective Rude Britannia, an eight-part program of hardcore English surliness that begins snapping in your face July 20 at the Wexner Center.
Surliness is one of the operative terms for Clarke’s work. Though he spent most of his career within the seemingly polite confines of the BBC, Clarke’s embittered and highly naturalistic films were a direct link to angry-young-man school of the 1950s and the social decay of the ‘80s. Before his premature death in 1990, Clarke directed an extensive list of slash ‘n’ burn critiques on working-class rage and middle-class ennui. He was both a colleague of, and a source of inspiration to, other British directors such as Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette and The Snapper), Mike Leigh (High Hopes and Naked) and Ken Loach (Riff Raff). Furthermore, Clarke was the most uncompromising of the group.
That may be the other reason why he never became well known in the States. Americans are often uncomfortable with – even mystified by – the nearly inarticulate, but vehement, anger contained within the English political cinema. Clarke, especially, was unflinching as he focused his cameras on an England that gave birth to skinheads and rampaging soccer fans. Instead of tea and crumpets, Clarke served viewers double whiskeys, as he tore into a Britain built on institutionalized inequality and violent forms of political repression.
These ugly realities are directly captured in Made in Britain and Psy-Warriors. In the former, Tim Roth (Van Gogh in Vincent and Theo) plays a racist punker who’s filled with enough venom for a rattle snake convention. He’s hell bent on digging himself into the English penal system as deeply as possible. In many ways, prison is a career move for him.
In Psy-Warriors (whose interrogation chambers look like neo-realist revamping of The Outer Limits), three supposed terrorists are subjected to increasingly intense psychological bombardment by a special security force. In fact, they’re not terrorists, they’re soldiers who are being trained for psychological warfare. But the training itself is so extreme that it’s impossible to survive mentally intact.
The rest of Rude Britannia is devoted to drug addiction (Christine), sexual abuse (Diane), corruption (Beloved Enemy), alcoholism (Read) and just plain hooliganism (The Firm).
As relentlessly dark as his work is, remember that Clarke didn’t create this England – he simply filmed it.
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