15th
Alan Clarke
In America, we think of made for TV movies as pretty much the bottom of the barrel. It’s Tony Danza as a homeless guy who learns the meaning of Thanksgiving. It’s Valerie Bertinelli playing a single mom who just can’t meet Mr. Right. It’s bullshit. You don’t really get anything out of it.
For awhile, England had a television director by the name of Alan Clarke, who was making made for TV stuff that could have been right at home in any theater. He made movies that were really compelling and dove right into the darker side of things in England. There was Scum, which was a movie about how brutal life was in British juvenile detention centers. There was The Firm, which starred Gary Oldman and painted a picture of football hooligan culture that went way beyond the cartoonish sketches that we hear about. There was Made in Britain, which introduced a teenaged Tim Roth as a skinhead who was angry simply for the sake of being angry.
And then there was Elephant, which was less of a film and more of a statement on Northern Ireland. I think it was a masterpiece. Whenever Hollywood took on the conflict in Northern Ireland, they always seemed to drape it in allure and romanticism. Clarke stripped all of that away. There were about two lines of dialogue throughout the whole film, and there weren’t characters as much as there were gunmen and victims. And that’s all it was, just one senseless killing after another, and watching it makes you want to tear your hair out. Which was the point, really. The title is a reference to Bernard MacLaverty’s description of the conflict in Northern Ireland as “the elephant in our living room,” meaning it’s completely obvious but nobody talks about it.
Just bear in mind that these amazing films were not put in theaters. They were BROADCAST in the seventies and eighties. In that context Alan Clarke seems pretty brave, and the BBC deserves credit for airing his work.
