Creativity and Constraint: Bill Douglas and the British Film Industry in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

This thesis is a revisionist project that uses Scottish writer-director, Bill Douglas, as a case study, to make an original contribution to British film history scholarship on the 1970s and 1980s, and independent British cinema more broadly. This research takes a production-centred approach to uncover extensive new detail on the production of Douglas’s films My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), My Way Home (1978) (collectively titled The Bill Douglas Trilogy), and Comrades (1987). It contributes to the existing scholarship on Douglas and works to go beyond the narratives that exist so far of the productions. The field of production studies has largely been dominated by the American film and television industry; this thesis examines the interplay between creativity and constraint during the 1970s and 1980s with a distinctly British focus. This project engages in micro, mid and macro-level analyses, examining mid-level negotiations, decision-making, and reanimates traces of work during the production of Douglas’s films of both above and below-the-line workers. It also situates the films within the institutional frameworks of film funders, which enabled their production, including the BFI, the National Film Finance Corporation, and Channel 4 and it examines the involvement in the productions of key individuals who worked there. This thesis is built upon extensive and original archival scholarship drawing upon largely unresearched materials including Bill Douglas’s Working Papers housed at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum at the University of Exeter, the Simon Relph Collection at the BFI Special Collections Archive, materials pertaining to the production of Comrades at Film Finances Archive and the Lindsay Anderson Archive at the University of Stirling.