Autobiography and the autobiographical in the Bill Douglas Trilogy.

Bill Douglas's death in 1991 was followed by a book of essays, scripts, and biographical accounts: Bill Douglas: A Lanternist's Approach. There has been some, but limited, subsequent critical interest. Where he is known, it is mostly likely to be through the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at Exeter University, or for the three films--My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978)--commonly referred to as the Trilogy. It is common also to describe these as autobiographical: following a discussion of the films of Terence Davies, Sarah Street noted that "Bill Douglas's major work was similarly autobiographical"; the biographical note accompanying the Connoisseur Video release of the films refers to the "autobiographical Trilogy"; and for the initial London release of My Childhood, Douglas himself was quoted as saying that the "autobiographical factor is the main component. The childhood of the title is literally my childhood and the incidents that I recount are with a few variations things that actually happened to me." (1)

The films are not documentaries. The first draft of My Childhood had initially been titled Jamie, and the name of Jamie was retained for the central character, played in each of the three films by Stephen Archibald in a cast of professional and non-professional actors. The draft was apparently shown to the film director Lindsay Anderson, who, "to Douglas's great consternation, immediately intuited that it was autobiographical," suggested dropping "its evasive title and calling it simply My Childhood," and who when interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 arts program Kaleidoscope at the time of the release of My Ain Folk, described that film as having "the quality of really superb autobiographical writing." (2)

However, queries have been raised about such descriptions. Anderson's interviewer, Paul Vaughan, was apologetic when he went on ask about Douglas, "Do you think, I mean can you see him stepping beyond this, oh I shouldn't say beyond it, that implies a criticism in a way, but stepping away from this kind of autobiographical picture, into something less personal?" Adrian Noble expressed stronger reservations in his writings on the Trilogy. While Noble noted Anderson's intuition in recognizing the autobiographical nature of Douglas's initial script, he also argued that Douglas "was a visionary storyteller, not a factualist," and wrote that "although the Trilogy is often seen as autobiography, this is too simplistic a response" ("Bill Douglas" 13, 24).

Noble was here raising slightly different questions, since leaving aside the question of whether the autobiographer needs to be a "factualist," the autobiographical and autobiography are not necessarily the same. One approach to discussing film as autobiography has been to make a distinction between autobiography and autobiographical fiction--hence P. Adam Sitney's argument that specific examples of avant-garde cinema, such as Stan Brakhage's Scenes from Under Childhood (1967-1970), function as autobiography, but need to be distinguished from the autobiographical fiction of a film such as Francois Truffaut's Les Quatres Cents Coups (1959) (60-61). Elizabeth Bruss does discuss the Truffaut film in her article on "autobiography in film," identifying it as "close to autobiography," but in her argument, film is seen as upsetting "each of the parameters--'truth-value,' 'act-value' and 'identity-value'--that we commonly associate with the autobiographical act to such an extent that even deliberate attempts to re-create the genre in cinematic terms are subtly subverted" (301).

It is not argued here that Bill Douglas's Trilogy belongs to a genre of film autobiography. The films do have affinities with other groups of films which follow a central character from boyhood to manhood: Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy, and the three Mark Donskoi films based on Maxim Gorky's autobiography are probably the most obvious examples. However, the gap between the director's life and the films he made is narrower in the case of Douglas. While Noble's insistence on Douglas as a "visionary storyteller, not a factualist" suggests that to understand the films simply as autobiography is to limit them, this discussion is an attempt to examine some of the complexities in the autobiographical nature of My Childhood, My Ain Folk, and My Way Home, and how differences between film and the written word can be illuminating. My concern is not simply the films themselves, but also the production process, their reception, and the ways in which they have been framed. Using the parameters that Bruss identifies (truth-value, act-value, and identity-value) as a starting point, I will examine the issue of the films' fidelity to Douglas's life, and the extent to which they can be understood in terms of personal performance, before focusing in particular on the second film of the Trilogy: My Ain Folk. Here the relationship between film and written language will be explored through an examination of the relationship between the opening sequence of My Ain Folk, the script which in its published form was described as the "final draft which was the basis of that film's production," and a brief written account that Douglas gave of his childhood, which has been given the title "The Palace of Dreams: The Making of a Film-Maker." (3) Thus the aim is to examine the relationship between literary autobiography and the autobiographical film, the particular way in which Bill Douglas's Trilogy is autobiographical rather than an autobiography, and the practice as well as the theory of the autobiographical film.

FICTIONAL NARRATIVE AND TRUTH-VALUE

The Trilogy follows Jamie from his poverty-stricken …