My Ain Folk (Bill Douglas, 1973)

I suppose a question exists as to how fully I can evaluate My Ain Folk, given that it is the middle section of an autobiographical trilogy, the first and final parts I have not yet seen. (I have found those a bit harder to attain.) At the same time, Douglas's medium-length film about the death of his maternal grandmother and its impact on his childhood feels very complete to me, articulating a distinct perspective around a set of events that are bounded, if impressionistically delineated.

From viewing My Ain Folk, it is easy to see why the "Bill Douglas Trilogy" has acquired such a mythic stature in cinephile circles. It's not only that the Scottish director is remarkably sure-footed in terms of atmosphere and tone. It's also that, in the 1970s, work like wasn't really being done in British cinema. It's possible, as some have, to connect Douglas's work to the "Angry Young Man" cycle that was happening at the time. But My Ain Folk is altogether starker and more sculptural in its treatment of rural poverty. 

As is so often the case, the primary point of comparison is Bresson. Douglas employs a regimented frame and defines figures and objects in space with the kind of precision you might expect from certain Walker Evans photographs or Ash Can School canvases. My Ain Folk does not completely avoid "realism" as such, but Douglas uses a fixed camera frame to lend his scenes a feeling of claustrophobia and social inevitability. This is quite the opposite of so-called "Kitchen Sink" realism that tries to accomplish cinematic transparency on the way to sociological meaning. We know that the sad story of Jamie (Stephen Archibald) and his older brother Tommy (Hughie Restorick) resonates beyond its own particulars. And yet every element of cinematic inscription emphasizes its singularity, the plight of this child in this place.

Because of Douglas's preference for temporal ellipses and nonlinear narration, it takes a little while to discern what is happening. But the two boys are removed from their home when their grandmother dies. Jamie is grudgingly taken in by his paternal gran (Jean Taylor Smith), while unwanted Tommy is sent to an orphanage. We meet the two kids' fathers, different men who fail in different ways. Tommy's dad (Bernard McKenna) explains to his son that his presence would disrupt his new family. Meanwhile, Jamie's father (Paul Kermack) seems to me a mental semi-incompetent, coddled by his mother and incapable to taking responsibility for his own son. 

As all this is seen from Jamie's point of view, Douglas allows for the fact that the world of adults is mystifying and their choices make very little sense. The boy goes from feral wandering through the rundown Scottish village to looking on at his caregivers with a world-weary consternation. My Ain Folk compresses time in a manner that both reflects Jamie's childlike experience of seemingly random events and that emphasizes the instability of the boy's world. The only respite from this insecurity comes from his friendly relationship with his grandfather (Mr. Munro), who is marginalized by his overbearing wife. The film depicts these moments as unexpected spikes of joy in the open countryside, almost immediately supplanted by the return to the old, oppressive cottages of the village center.

But Douglas's canniest formal maneuver occurs at the very start of the film. We see the Scottish countryside in Technicolor, only to realize that Jamie is in a cinema watching Lassie, Come Home. The real world offscreen is rendered in the crisp, relentless black and white of Carl Th. Dreyer. It's a space of complicated memory, and one can easily discern the line of influence from Bill Douglas to Terence Davies.