Interesting film. Title is DREAM OF A WORLD. Not great but a very worthwhile oddity. political british cinema like this always gets me and makes me wonder about an alternative universe where this was a more prominent strand in contemporary film.
Here’s what I wrote at letterboxd:
The BFI programme described this as “unfathomably rare” and screening for the first time in decades from a print that came from “compromised materials”. We had a brief intro from a curator who explained that only two prints were ever struck and one of them was stolen and never recovered in the 1970s. A complete 16mm print was deposited in the BFI national archive among Gosling’s own archive after his death in 2017, and an incomplete set of negatives were deposited from the studio that developed them into film at some point (? I could be misstating this part). Because they didn’t want to risk the only complete print they didn’t screen it on 16mm but from a scan of the 16mm print, which has faded quite a lot, and it doesn’t always have great sound, although they’d done some basic passes to try and make it better for screening.
I didn’t have a problem with the print — I’ve seen old pink faded films before at the BFI and it’s often just a natural consequence of age, and I’d rather see a faded print than just consign films like this that are unlikely to ever be properly restored to never being shown again. It did have the odd effect here that I couldn’t easily tell the difference between portions that were shot in colour and portions that were shot in black and white — if the introduction hadn’t mentioned this aspect of the production I might not have noticed. Both portions are quite pink now but you can see some other colours in the pink in the colour sections if you look for them.
There were parts of the film where the sound and image were quite muddy. Specifically there is a recurring setting — a living room with a group of young people talking about whether or not they should join in with the fighting (?) or whether violence can be ended, that I couldn’t make much sense of. It’s a shame because the women in this recurring setting are the women with the most subjectivity in the film, even though I suspect they’re there to be bourgeois and infuriating. Are women bourgeois, always the pertinent question.
I’m being glib. Because there are women throughout this film, as non-speaking communists and as nurses with brief lines, and very briefly as sex workers and nightclubbers (?) and also as objects who are seen injured or killed by bombs, or as objects who are being forced into trucks and moved on by the American forces. But the vast majority of speaking roles in the film, as commentators and intellectuals and doctors and everybody else, are men.
Which is an interesting reflection of the times this film was made in — 1968/69, which is interesting as it has a lot of resonances with the radicalisms of the 1970s, as well as with more recent conflicts and wars imposed by the imperial core of the USA and Western European nations (largely the UK), so much that if you didn’t know that this was based on the Vietnam War you might not realise it through the lens of today. Soldiers talking about killing children and not regretting it because children can hold a gun, because children will grow up to hate the USA and be terrorist murderers. The rhetoric recurs and recurs and obviously also recalls Israeli and US/western rhetoric about and justifications of the mass killing of civilians and children in Gaza today.
But the dominance of men is also troubling as it shows some of the limitations of this kind of work. It’s very much a piece of didactic film made on a tiny budget, with many non-professional actors of all ages. It has the sense that you’re watching communities of people collaborating to tell a story. But these are communities of white men and boys, with women usually relegated to being objects. Where are the stories of the women who were abused by the soldiers? We see men being tortured but it feels incomplete. Like the film flinches.
It’s of course worth remembering that this film was made during the Vietnam War and doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight. I’m also not sure a film like today, so consciously taking a conflict inflicted upon a country in South East Asia and relocating it to England (“southern Britain”) would be made in the same way. Of course a book that uses the recent conflicts in Syria as its inspiration but relocates them to Ireland did win the Booker Prize a couple of years ago. But still… I think the politics of this kind of thing have inevitably changed but I still think it is an interesting narrative device and it’s led to a piece of art that I do think should be preserved and watched, for all that I don’t think it’s perfect or even particularly sophisticated.
I’ve buried the lede a bit because I think the best and most valuable part of this film is an odd portion around the middle of the story where we see a kind of communist folk pageant in the communist north of Britain (called something like The Democratic People’s Republic of Britain?). There are two comedians telling a mixture of communist jokes and groan-worthy classics. There are workers doing folk dances and putting on little plays in the street about the evil nature of bosses and capital, which culminates in a person in a lion costume jumping on the person dressed up as a boss. There is an Uncle Sam figure on stilts who controls the boss like a life-sized puppet on strings — of course Uncle Sam himself being even bigger than life-sized.
The pageant ends with a real landlord who has been captured for his part in betraying a local village to the US forces (it was wiped out, no survivors) presented to the people onstage by communists with guns. His sins are told, both by his captors and the people watching, who were evicted or swindled out of their land by him. And then, instead of shooting him, those captors throw him to the people. The lions, not in costume. But there’s no doubt that this is how he dies. The film doesn’t shy away from violence, or showing it on all sides, for all that it lacks the budget for effects as we might have learned to expect them from even independent films. The violence is very real. Now that it’s begun, how can it be stopped.
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