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John Boorman - Adventures of a Suburban Boy

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Book:
Adventures of a Suburban Boy
Author:
John Boorman
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2004
Rating:
3 / 5
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John Boorman came of age as a filmmaker in the 1960sthe golden age of world cinema. Then as now, his celebrated films embrace the spirit of the era: challenging authority, questioning accepted morality, and examining the thin line between civilization and savagery. In Adventures of a Suburban Boy, Boorman delves deeply into these themes, applying his subversive sensibility to his life story as well as to some of the most important political and cultural events of the twentieth century. The result is a heady fusion of personal memoir and cinematic study, as a child of the London Blitz becomes the influential director known for films such as Point Blank, Excalibur, Hope and Glory, Deliverance, and The Generaldiscussing the cultural role of the motion picture and the art of filmmaking along the way.
With a vividly depicted supporting cast that includes Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, among others, this entertaining and witty tour through the life, times, and works of one of the cinemas great practitioners is not only essential for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of Boormans incredible body of work, but is also indispensable resource for anyone who is fascinated by films impact on our lives.

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Table of Contents

MONEY INTO LIGHT: THE EMERALD FOREST DIARY
HOPE AND GLORY
THE GENERAL

as editor
PROJECTIONS 1 12

with Telsche Boorman
WHERE THE HEART IS

If you plant oaks you necessarily take a long view. As with children. Both are acts of faith in the future of a precarious planet. When I came to this simple Georgian house in the Wicklow Hills of Ireland some thirty-four years ago, the ancient oaks I inherited cast their spell on me. They rooted me to the place. Although I was drawn away to distant forests and wild rivers, making movies, I have returned to raise my children and tend my trees.

The great pioneer film director, D. W. Griffith, believed that film was the universal language promised in the Bible that would herald the Second Coming; and so it must have seemed in the glory days of the silent era. In the first twenty years of the last century, film swept the world, effortlessly crossing barriers of class, race and nation. A measure of the speed of this revolution was that scarcely five years after his arrival in Hollywood, Chaplin was the most famous man in the world, and probably the highest paid.

In The Lost Girl , D. H. Lawrence describes Nottingham miners watching those early films: while they looked at the live music hall acts out of the corners of their eyes, embarrassed, uneasy, they stared at the movies, unblinking, mouths agape, like men in a trance, mesmerised.

The power of film lies in its links to the unconscious, its closeness to the condition of dreaming. In my dreaming youth, like so many others, I was as entranced as those miners, coming to believe that film was the ultimate art form, that it could include everything and everybody, reconnect us to all that had been taken from us. I was born in a faceless, mindless London suburb amongst people who had lost their way in the world, who had forgotten who they were, and had fallen from grace.

In the Arthurian legend, the Grail was lost because men had sinned against nature. The world became a wasteland. The Fisher Kings wound would not heal. Only by finding the Grail could wholeness, harmony and oneness be restored, and the King be healed, and grace restored.

I have sought that lost grace in the film-making process, where the material things of the world money, buildings, sets, plastic, metal, people disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow flickering on a wall: matter into spirit, the alchemists would say. Memories are even more shadowy and insubstantial

I was born in a snowstorm, according to my mother. My father set out on foot to fetch the midwife and by the time they struggled back through the blizzard, my head had already ventured into the world.

In the morning, my father left for work as usual. My sister had been parked with grandparents. In the meantime my mother was alone with the newborn child. She recalled those few hours of solitude as the happiest of her life. The house was muted by the silence of snow. Exhausted from the storm, the earth lay quiet. Rosehill Avenue, the suburban street she detested, was transformed, its banality concealed for the arrival of her son. The husband to whom she was never reconciled was conveniently absent. She fell into a reverie of perfect grace and I was enfolded within it.

So my first memory is not mine but my mothers. What I do remember is her face and voice as she told that story, the memory of a memory.

The poignancy of lost perfection, the long shadow that exquisite happiness casts over ordinary pleasure, can make for a life of discontent. For soon the snow melted and the street reappeared, nude and nasty, and her life needed to be lived.

Fifty-five years later I set out to make Hope and Glory , a film of my childhood in the London Blitz. I began by putting down the incidents and episodes that had hung in the memory, but film has its own imperative: as I started to shape these recollections, imagination asserted its function, and I began to invent scenes between my parents and Herbert, who was my fathers best friend and the man my mother loved all her life.I also embroidered my fifteen-year-old sisters relationship with her French-Canadian lover. When I showed the script to my mother and my sister Wendy, they were shocked. How could I possibly have witnessed and recalled these intimacies? Some of the scenes I thought I had invented had occurred in reality, it turned out.

We define ourselves in the stories we tell of ourselves. We hone them; repeat them until we no longer remember the memory, but only the story of the memory. Especially if one is involved in transforming experience into fiction, the functions of imagination and memory become conjoined, but just as we recognise truth in fiction, we can also sniff out the fake in fact.

My mother Ivy in the bow, with her three sisters Jenny, Billie and Bobbie (1920s)

When I brought my mother and her three sisters to the film studio to inspect - photo 2

When I brought my mother and her three sisters to the film studio to inspect the set that reproduced our Rosehill Avenue sitting room they were delighted with its accuracy. They had only minor caveats: The wireless was in the other corner, and Your mother always had a vase of flowers in the window. Working on the designs with Tony Pratt and in the act of writing, long-buried memories were exhumed. In a book of period wallpaper samples I found the very design we had in our living room. It was profligate, but I had new blocks made and reproduced it. After the four sisters had made their small adjustments to the room, they pronounced themselves satisfied. My Aunt Billy said, Its almost perfect. What a pity you got the wallpaper wrong. Was it her memory at fault or mine?

My mother and her sisters, re-creating the original photo (1950s)

Re-creating the photo in Hope and Glory Katrine Boorman front Amelda Brown - photo 3

Re-creating the photo in Hope and Glory : Katrine Boorman (front), Amelda Brown and Jill Baker as my mothers sisters, and Sebastian Rice-Edwards as myself

I reconstructed Rosehill Avenue for Hope and Glory on a disused airfield at - photo 4

I reconstructed Rosehill Avenue for Hope and Glory on a disused airfield at Wisley in Surrey for a cost of three quarters of a million pounds. When I went back to the real Rosehill Avenue I found it did not resemble my memory of it. It was too small, not long enough and had a bend in it. I built the memory an endless, dead-straight street stretching to the very centre of London, where St Pauls Cathedral could be seen festooned with barrage balloons.

The film of Hope and Glory is now a patina, overlaid on my memories, and writing this memoir becomes an archaeological dig. Movies exist only frame by frame; the rest is memory and anticipation. As in life, now is the only reality. A film can be rewound and be seen again, but in life the past is a murky place where imagination may be more reliable than memory.

I was born in 1933 at 50 Rosehill Avenue, Carshalton, a monotonous street of semi-detached houses similar to four million others that were built between the wars. My father bought the house with a deposit of fifty pounds and paid off the mortgage at seventeen shillings and sixpence per week. The purchase price was 676.

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