‘Oh my God, what a story you’re going to make’: Director Kevin Brownlow talks ‘It Happened Here’ and ‘Winstanley’ | film

AAnyone who has sat in the dark and watched the beautiful, glowing images of a silent film come to life on the screen has a lot to thank Kevin Brownlow for. Since the 1960s, he has been seeking to collect, preserve and restore these fragile artifacts of early cinema – thousands of which have been lost, discarded or melted down due to their silver content. He even received an honorary Academy Award in 2010 for his efforts. But Brownlow’s career as a film director is perhaps less well-known. Not only with documentaries and various TV shows relating to his passion for silent films, but also in feature films that are no less good than any of the most famous productions of the golden age of British cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.

Brownlow, in collaboration with co-director (and historian) Andrew Mollo, has two great features on his resume: It Happened Here, released in 1964, and Winstanley, released more than a decade later in 1975. But that was about it. Brownlow, now 87, seems very optimistic about this. “We tried,” he says. “If the producers had been enthusiastic, I’m sure we would have made at least one more movie.”

Things might have been different if they hadn’t been fired (by Brian Forbes, no less) from The Breaking of Bumbo, an adaptation of Andrew Sinclair’s graphic novel, after a casting dispute. (Pompo eventually came out in 1970, with Sinclair as director, and without Brownlow and Mollo cast in the lead role.) But it’s not as if Brownlow didn’t have anything else going on: he published The Parade’s Gone By, his seminal history of silent cinema, in 1968 (and followed it with two more books: War, West and Wilderness in 1979, and Behind the Mask of Innocence in 1979). 1990); He was also editor of Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (also 1968), an authentic masterpiece of the period.

The two Brownlow/Mollo films that were completed and released were essentially self-produced, on a small budget, but they were astonishingly powerful in their impact, then and now. From our perspective, both films seem strangely prescient – ​​which is why filmmaker and curator Stanley Stinter is hosting a rare cinema screening of both films at the Close-up Film Center in London tomorrow.

The previous film, It Happened Here, is perhaps the most obvious. A kind of drama-alternate-historical hybrid, it posits that England is occupied by the Nazis, and its inhabitants are trapped between kneeling to the invaders and standing up to them. As much as anything else, it goes against the idea that England has a natural sense of liberalism. Not only do we hear at length about dyed-in-the-wool English Nazis – played, Brownlow says, by real fascists, including a BUF leader called Frank Bennett – but we also see the increasing subjugation of middle-of-the-road “apolitical” types (including the central character, an Irish nurse). The British “partisans” described by Brownlow and Mollo are no less brutal than their German counterparts, enthusiastically shooting captured soldiers in a field.

The story behind the film’s genesis is fascinating. Brownlow says he was inspired to hear a man shouting in German on a street in London’s West End. “I was doing the dreary work of transporting cans of film to the local laboratory, and a Citroën, the type the Gestapo had owned during their occupation of Paris, pulled up alongside me. The driver shouted to someone at the entrance to a delicatessen in German. I was just reading George Orwell stuff and I thought: Oh my God, what a story you would make.”

Most remarkably, Brownlow was only 17 when he began shooting the film in 1956: “I was earning four pounds 10 a week, and I was completely addicted to film. This was my feeble attempt to make a big film.” Mollo was younger, but fortunately Brownlow had a job at Woodfall, the film company co-founded by Richardson, who gave the couple £3,000. “Andrew insisted that everything be completely original – even the tank that opens the picture. He had an uncanny ability to find exactly what we needed for the next part of the shoot. I don’t know how he did it.”

The cherry on top was a chance meeting with a legendary figure in the café of what was then the National Film Theatre. “Andrew and I were watching a von Stroheim film, and at intermission we went to a café – and there was Stanley Kubrick. We admired him greatly for what he had done with Paths of Glory, so we went to him. Kubrick said to us: ‘I once did what you do but I ran out of stock. Can you use more?” He was great and sent us a huge box full of raw 35mm stock from Dr. Strangelove, which he was doing at the time. He was very generous, and helped us get going at a time when no one was interested. But we were very worried that we were going to get double exposure with Peter Sellers!

Looking back, It Happened Here is a wonderful oddity, for a piece with the kind of radical television that was being shown at the time, such as Peter Watkins’s pseudo-documentary Culloden, which was broadcast in 1964, the same year that Brownlow’s film premiered at the Cork Film Festival. Even more surprising is that Watkins – soon to make his famous nuclear bombing film War Game – was Brownlow’s assistant, and actually helped film parts of It Happened Here. “I can tell you, we used to have great disagreements about movies and how to do scenes that looked realistic. It was really cool,” Brownlow says.

Brownlow and Mollo got stuck in a censorship dispute over their fascist footage; Not surprisingly, the film’s Hollywood distributors refused to show such blatantly anti-Semitic material and removed it. Brownlow felt it was necessary: ​​”I tried to write the words myself, and I asked other people to do it. But it never felt right until we put a group of these people in front of the camera. It was very scary.” With the help of Kubrick’s lawyers, Brownlow and Mollo eventually regained the rights and recreated the scene — which, he says, was chilling.

Cut to a decade later. The flip side of The Charge of the Light Brigade, Bumbo and The Parade’s Gone By, Brownlow and Mollo released the Winstanley version in 1975. As here, it was filmed almost entirely with non-professionals; The lead actor, Miles Halliwell, was a teacher who brought the source material, David Cow’s Comrade Jacob, to the attention of the filmmakers in the first place. Original and disconcerting, imbued with a profound sense of spirituality and radical political consciousness, Winstanley is perhaps the closest British cinema has ever come to Pasolini. The film follows Gerard Winstanley’s diggers and their attempt, just after the English Civil War, to seize the common lands of St George’s Hill, near Weybridge in Surrey.

Winstanley’s messianic socialism linked the film to the New Left politics of the period—even if Cote later criticized the film for what he saw as its reluctance to “penetrate the intense religious impulses of the time.” I’m not sure that’s true. Halliwell’s Winstanley emerges as a deeply spiritual figure, albeit a little better spoken than a historical figure would have been.

Historical accuracy was, of course, a vital component of Winstanley, with Mollo once again coming to the fore. “He went straight to the guy who was the keeper of the armory at the Tower of London, who gave us all the original 17th-century armor we needed for the opening battle scene,” says Brownlow. But a large part of the film’s importance was because of the way it exploited slum culture in the 1970s; In another coincidental connection, the notorious “King of the Hippies”, Sid Rawle, is depicted as an alarming “braggart”. “I was very interested that the squatters were reflecting a lot of what happened in the 17th century,” Brownlow says. “Sid knew a lot about that period and spoke about it loudly.”

Brownlow’s lateral move towards silent film preservation may be a loss for British cinema, but it is certainly a gain for wider film culture. At the same time, we should all celebrate these two unique films as much as we can, born from the partnership between two extraordinary people. “Andrew was very difficult to please, but when he was satisfied, I knew we had it. I kept going until we did.”