Why people's stories are at the heart of folk cinema

The ‘collective idea’ is at the heart of the Folk Film Gathering’s (the world’s first folk film festival, 27th April – 12th May, www.folkfilmgathering.com) notion of a folk cinema – a cinema that tries to get as close as possible to the experience and concerns of ‘the people’, whoever they might be. ‘Folk’ in Scotland, for me, refers to activities embodying the ‘democractic muse’ (as Ailie Munro, author of ‘The Folk Music Revival in Scotland’ described it); activities for the people, of the people, close to people, about people, performed by people, empowering people. Hamish Henderson – activist, poet and one of the leading figures of the Scottish folk revival - said that ‘“nothing can be called folksong which has not been submitted to the moulding process of oral transmission”, meaning that unless a song had gone through the process of being passed from one singer to another, a process spanning years, decades and even centuries, it could not be called folk music. Hamish used to talk of the ‘Niagara’ he heard in the Scottish oral tradition: the silent, yet deafening sound of the thousands of voices who had sung and shaped a song before the moment in which it was sung.

Arguably much of Scottish folk culture is a play between the community and the individual; a common, collective inheritance that nonetheless is brought to life moment-to-moment through the singular energy and expression of individual performers. The late, great Scottish traveller singer Sheila Stewart used to talk about the “conyach” (a notion similar to the Spanish concept of “duende”), the personal authenticity with which a given performer brings a song or story to life. When Sheila sang a song like ‘Queen Amang the Heather’, which had been passed down to her by her mother Belle Stewart, and passed to Belle by subsequent family generations before that, the song was at once very much Sheila’s and yet also belonged to the wider folk community in Scotland. The song exists before the singer, yet is articulated in any given moment by a performer drawing upon their own life experiences in order to express something specific. Seen in this light, the song belongs simultaneously to the community and to the individual.

More controversial for some are the moments in which songs and stories are changed by particular performers, creating small ruptures into the ongoing continuities of the oral tradition. I have personally heard the same story told in Orkney as a comedy, and in Aberdeenshire as a tragedy, both times containing the same basic structure yet articulating very differently when filtered through the prism of a different storyteller. The story – of a young man who slips, knocks his head and falls into a boat one Summer’s evening and wakes up as a woman – feels very different depending on who is telling it, and what life experiences they use to bring it to life. The Italian author Italo Calvino, in his retelling of Italian folk tales, was guided by the Tuscan proverb that “the tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it ... in other words, its value consists in what is woven and rewoven into it. I too have thought of myself as a link in the anonymous chain without end by which folktales are handed down, links that are never merely instruments or passive transmitters but … its real “authors”.

Yet how do we square Calvino’s the endless chain or Henderson’s Niagara – the voluminous presence of many hands and many voices - with our preoccupation with Great Men and Great Women, artists, auteurs and geniuses? The tension between the ‘peopled’, collective voice of folk culture, and the solitary individual genius of the great (usually male) artist is present in the work of Henderson, Robert Burns, the Dundonian song-writer and trade unionist Mary Brooksbank, Jessie Kesson (author of The White Bird Passes and Another Time, Another Place), the Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard, author Nan Shepherd and Leith’s Irvine Welsh in Scotland, Italo Calvino in Italy, and the author and folklorist Amadou Hampate Ba in Mali – all of whom drew upon the oral traditions of the communities in which they were a part, balancing an engagement with the people with their own tastes, peculiarities and perspective.

For Henderson, ‘poetry became people’. Timothy Neat’s two-part biography charts how Henderson moved from the high-art aspirations of Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (for which he won Somerset Maugham Award, subsequently won by V.S. Naipaul and Seumas Heaney SEAMUS? ) to a commitment to a more peopled register via folk song and vernacular poetry. The English historian E.P. Thompson advised Hamish by letter to

“remember always who you are writing for - the people of Glasgow, of Halifax, of Dublin …. I don't mean always, today, or for all of them - but for the vanguard of the people, the thoughtful ones. … You, more than any other poet I know, are an instrument through which thousands of others can become articulate. And you must not forget that your songs and ballads are not trivialities - they are quite as important as the Elegies”.

Hamish liked to say that ‘when you become anon, you’ve arrived’, and perhaps the greatest vindication of his changing commitment from poetry to people was the way in which his folk songs travelled. You’re unlikely to find many songs in Scotland more ubiquitous than Henderson’s Freedom Come All Ye (a song I’ve seen many rightly argue should be the national anthem of an independent Scotland). Even more remarkable is the story of Henderson’s Rivonia (Free Mandela) which reportedly travelled by word of mouth from Scotland to Robben Island in Cape Town where it was sung by fishermen in the hope it would carry to the prisoners beyond the walls.

But how does this all translate to cinema? That sense of the ‘democratic muse’ - the notion that anyone can get involved - gets quite complicated when we start to think about film culture. Despite the so-called digital revolution, to make a film still takes considerable resources. We still associate cinema with starred individuals, whether those be actors, directors or big-name producers and - despite the enormous collective effort involved - our way of understanding films and talking about them frequently boils down to singular individuals to whom we attribute ultimate authorship. For me, a folk cinema, a People’s Cinema, is a cinema which is somehow closer to the experience and real-world concerns of communities around the world, both in terms of the stories it tells and the way it is made. In 2018, I feel that is a cinema we urgently need.

As a filmmaker myself, I can see both sides of the coin. In the editing suite at film school I first heard the saying ‘films don’t get made by committee’ and indeed it would seem to me that one of the crucial battles in filmmaking is always the assembling of a dizzying array of different components (performance, camera, lighting, music, staging, etc) so that they articulate as if they had one voice. Frequently then, one person is needed to ‘direct’ the many jostling elements involved so that they articulate a coherent aesthetic or ‘conyach’. And yet, my friends in Newcastle’s Amber Collective (whose films Byker and Today I’m With You – two films about the experiences of communities on the Byker and Byker Wall estates in Newcastle - screen at Filmhouse on 6th May) stand by another saying: ‘the clapper loader can have as many good ideas as the director’. Whilst Amber films are largely still directed by individuals, the Collective avoid directoral credits, instead attributing the ultimate authorship of an Amber production to the many voices that took part in the process. Whilst you could argue perhaps that the net result is the same, Amber’s particular way of making films seems significantly informed by Raymond Williams’ ‘collective idea’ in a way most filmmaking is not.

Another way to think about the intersection of the community and the individual in folk cinema is the notion of a bard. Timothy Neat’s essential Scots oral history collection Voice of the Bard documents some of Scotland’s last living exponents of the village bardach tradition - township bards and poets who had taken up the responsibility of giving voice to the experience and concerns of their community. Amber hold true to a similar notion, drawing on the ideas of art theorist R.G. Collingwood; that ‘‘the artist must talk of the problems of the community he serves, not his own, because they are interested in their own dilemmas, not those of the artist”. The great Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene was frequently referred to as a ‘griot’, a filmmaker taking on the traditional role of storyteller and history-keeper to document, celebrate and champion the experiences of the communities of which he was a part. Here, cinema could be seen as a direct inheritor of the rich West African oral tradition. One generation on from Sembene, the Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis’ film Tey opens with the voice of an unseen griot, and the answering voice of a community. The griot: ‘a tale’. The audience: ‘tell us’. Griot: ‘Once upon a time’. Audience: ‘It really happened’. Griot: ‘were you there?’. Audience ‘It’s up to you to tell’.

The Folk Film Gathering’s programme this year explores multiple different ways in which the community and the individual cross paths. From Norway, Nils Gaup’s PATHFINDER (30th April at Filmhouse) is an exhilarating example of the indigenous Sami oral tradition transposed into cinema, taking a Lapp legend about a young boy who tries to avenge the death of his family that the director was told by his grandfather and reimagining it within the expansive canvas of adventure cinema. Katja Guariloff also takes up the storytelling mantle from her great-grandmother Kaisa Gauriloff in KAISA’S ENCHANTED FOREST (7th May at Filmhouse), using a broad palette of imaginative cinematic techniques (animation, documentary) to give voice to her grandmother’s interweaving folk tales and life-story.

Elsewhere, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (2nd May at Filmhouse) is a dizzying evocation of the thousands of perspectives that make up a city. The camera passes from one set of experiences to another, documenting the intersecting lives of factory workers, African university students and young holocaust survivors alike. At the end of the film Rouch and Morin shoot CHRONICLE’s participants watching and responding to the film for the first time, thus concluding with a collective, multi-voiced sense of what its participants think about the film they have just participated in. Rouch and Morin may be the film’s directors and editors but CHRONICLE gives voice to a choir of perspectives across the city, to give us some sense of the knotty, interconnected perspectives that make up Paris in 1960. Elsewhere still, Robert Guédiguian’s LA VILLE EST TRANQUILLE (8th May at Filmhouse) articulates a remarkable, highly topical portrait of post-industrial, urban society – of the many different clashing experiences and perspectives within Marseilles. LA VILLE EST TRANQUILLE’s multi-perspective, interlocking narratives and ensemble cast are perhaps how we are most used to seeing community experience and collective perspective expressed within cinema, a sense again of a choir of voices that nonetheless is under the control of an individual director like Robert Altman (in films like Short Cuts, The Player or Gosford Park which typically feature not one main character but 12) or the French director Agnes Jaoui. And yet, as Guédiguian’s film illustrates, such a cinematic device can reach beyond narrative complexity to explore the tensions between different lives, different classes, and different cultures constituting a complex, sprawling city like Marseilles. The film is particularly resonant in 2018 for its depiction of the rise of the populist right, its sensitive depiction of the fraught lives of immigrant communities, and some of the violent clashes between the two. There is an almost sociological feeling to Guédiguian’s film that feels reminiscent of David Simon’s exploration of Baltimore in The Wire, through the way the film reaches for complex understandings of what leads marginalised communities to unimaginable acts of desperation.

LA VILLE EST TRANQUILLE is one of many films Robert Guédiguian has made in and about Marseilles, and so it’s fitting it was initially recommended to me by the Amber Collective, a group of filmmakers, photographers and artists who have made a commitment of almost half a century to Newcastle and wider Tyneside. Over the past 50 years Amber have lived and worked in wider Tyneside making long-term, deeply-rooted engagements with particular communities that have flowered into some of the most remarkable films in British cinema such as Eden Valley, a ‘father and son’ story set admist the ‘Horsy’ travelling community in County Durham, or Dream On, a magical-realist story of friendship and community survival set in the North Shields darts team. This long-term commitment to a particular city and a particular set of communities is highly notable within a wider film culture that is constantly drawn to the ‘new’ and the exotic. Seen within this context, long-term commitments such as that of Guédiguian to Marseille or Amber to Newcastle are rare and should be highly prized. Amber return to the Folk Film Gathering this year to share two films (BYKER and TODAY I’M WITH YOU, 6th May at Filmhouse) which chart the changing experiences of communities within Byker, in inner-city Newcastle. BYKER looks at memories from the communities who lived in the narrow, back-to-back Victorian terraces which were torn down in the late 60s, whilst TODAY I’M WITH YOU returns to Byker to explore the lives of those now living in the Byker Wall Estate that was built in their place. Between them the films demonstrate a profound, ongoing commitment to the experiences, memories, concerns of communities at the whim of governments and institutions to whom they are at best a fringe concern. Amber are perhaps one of the best examples within world cinema of the filmmaker – or, in Amber’s case, a filmmaking collective – serving the role of the bard or griot. In the words of founding-member Murray Martin, any film made by Amber represents an attempt

‘to reflect and record on behalf of a culture something which is important to them and accurate for them, so that a dialogue can take place… You have to engage with those communities or those individuals and say things about their lives which you believe to be accurate and ultimately they believe to be accurate, however difficult those statements are. At the end of the day the success or failure of a piece of work by Amber is the community you make it about looks at it and says “That’s right”.’

The Folk Film Gathering is the world’s first festival of folk cinema. This year the festival runs from 27th April to the 12th May at Edinburgh Filmhouse, the Scottish Storytelling Centre and Summerhall as part of TradFest. Full details of the programme can be found at www.folkfilmgathering.com.

Jamie Chambers is the founder and curator of the Folk Film Gathering, who also works as a film scholar and filmmaker, the director of the films Blackbird (2013) and When the Song Dies (2012)) about Scottish folk culture.