director Terence Davies on the set
SUNSET
SONG A-
Great Britain Luxembourg (135
mi) 2015 ‘Scope d: Terence Davies
And out she went,
though it wasn’t near kye-time yet, and wandered away over the fields; it was a
cold and louring day, the sound of the sea came plain to her, as though heard
in a shell, Kinraddie wilted under the greyness. In the ley field old Bod stood
with his tail to the wind, his hair ruffled up by the wind, his head bent away
from the smore of it. He heard her pass and gave a bit neigh, but he didn’t try
to follow her, poor brute, he’s soon be over old for work. The wet fields
squelched below her feet, oozing up their smell of red clay from under the sodden
grasses, and up in the hills she saw the trail of the mist, great sailing
shapes of it, going south on the wind into Forfar, past Laurencekirk they would
sail, down the wide Howe with its sheltered glens and its late, drenched
harvests, past Brechin smoking against its hill, with its ancient tower that
the Pictish folk had reared, out of the Mearns, sailing and passing, sailing
and passing, she minded Greek words of forgotten lessons — Nothing
endures.
And then a queer
thought came to her there in the drooked fields, that nothing endured at all,
nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually
changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of them had set
the Standing Stones by the loch of Blawearie and climbed there on their holy
days and saw their terraced crops ride brave in the wind and sun. Sea and sky
and the folk who wrote and fought and were learned, teaching and saying and
praying, they lasted but as a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land
was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to
it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurt you. And she had
thought to leave it all!
She walked weeping
then, stricken and frightened because of that knowledge that had come on her,
she could never leave it, this life of toiling days and the needs of beasts and
the smoke of wood fires and the air that stung your throat so acrid, Autumn and
Spring, she was bound and held as though they had prisoned her here. And her
fine bit plannings!—they'd been just the dreamings of a child over toys it
lacked, toys that would never content it when it heard the smore of a storm or
the cry of sheep on the moors or smelt the pringling smell of a new ploughed
park under the drive of a coulter. She could no more teach a school than fly,
night and day she’s want to be back, for all the fine clothes and gear she
might get and hold, the books and the light and learning.
The kye were in sight
then, they stood in the lithe of the freestone dyke that ebbed and flowed over
the shoulder of the long ley field, and they hugged to it close from the drive
of the wind, not heeding her as she came among them, the smell of their bodies
foul in her face-foul and known and enduring as the land itself. Oh, she hated
and loved in a breath! Even her love might hardly endure, but beside it the
hate was no more than the whimpering and fear of a child that cowered from the
wind in the lithe of its mother’s skirts.
—passage from Sunset
Song, first of a novel trilogy known as A Scots Quair by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 1932, A
Scots Quair - Page 119 - Google Books Result
Based on the 1932 Scottish novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon,
the pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, part of a collective trilogy known
as A Scots Quair consisting
of three novels, Sunset Song published
in 1932, Cloud Howe in
1933, and Grey Granite in
1934, completed shortly before his death the following year at the age of
33. For decades afterwards his books were all but impossible to buy,
though they have steadily come back into print. The first, Sunset Song (mandatory reading in
Scotland), is considered the best Scottish book of all time according to a 2005
poll from The List magazine
conducted in association with the Scottish Book Trust (BBC NEWS | UK |
Scotland | Mearns classic lifts book honour), though it caused a moral
scandal when it was released. While not explicit by modern
standards, the book dealt openly with sexual matters in a frank manner that
caused many to reject it at first, but eventually the book was embraced by the
same northeast Scotland Aberdeenshire community being depicted in the
novel. Mitchell’s father was an impoverished farmer who was bitterly
hostile to a child’s education interfering with his livelihood, so he read
everything he could get his hands on, loathed farmwork, considered it slave
labor, and instead ran away from home at the age of 16 to become a young
reporter. A fierce advocate of socialism, he was blacklisted by the
newspaper and eventually joined the army, becoming a clerk in the RAF for
nearly a decade, traveling to the Middle East, before devoting his life to
writing. Drawing heavily upon his childhood, Sunset Song is a revolutionary
work, a mixture of stream-of-conscience and social realism, cleverly crafted in
an innovative blend of English and Scots language (while his other works are
written in plain English), noted for its use of humor, politics, and worldly
characterization, showing amazing insight into a woman’s mind, a deep
understanding of the complexity of human behavior, and a compassion for the
human race, creating one of the strongest female characters in modern
literature, following her as a young 14-year old girl in a tight-knit farming
community through the passing seasons, weddings, funerals, and the eventual
toll of World War I, becoming a testament to Scotland’s agricultural past that
was wiped out and destroyed by the war, becoming a powerful statement about
waste, loss of tradition, and social deterioration in the modern
world. Writing a first draft for the film in 1997, Terence Davies
noted the film has languished in a kind of funding purgatory for nearly two
decades following repeated rejections from funding sources, claiming “That kind
of thing erodes your soul, and I almost gave up. I’m not a
mainstream filmmaker and the UK Film Council was set up to try and ape
Hollywood. So the climate was terrible for the type of film I wanted
to make.” (News
News - The Sunday Times)
Without subtitles (which would definitely enhance the
experience), much of the language is missed, while initially there is an odd
and peculiar style that takes some getting used to, especially the blend of
artifice and searing realism, but the wrenching power is unmistakable, creating
a haunting and elegiac work of ultimate devastation. Davies is a
master at getting to the heart of the matter, and by the end, much like his
best works Distant
Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The
Long Day Closes (1992), his poetic literacy is just
stunning. Opening with a rapturous look of the golden wheatfields,
the novels are set in a fictional village in “The Mearns,” a sparsely-populated
area characterized by farmlands, forestry and empty hills that rise heading
inland from the coast towards the peaks of the Grampian Mountains, while the
film is haunted by the foreshadowing of early words spoken by the protagonist’s
mother, “You’ll need to face men for yourself.” Chris, played by Agyness
Deyn, English fashion model, actress and singer, is a 14-year old farmer’s
daughter with a thirst for education, harboring ambitions of becoming a
teacher, which is viewed as among the noblest professions. We soon
recognize the dichotomy of the family, a bullying and overly pious father
(Peter Mullan) and an overburdened mother (Daniela Nardini), where the father
continually picks on her older brother Will (Jack Greenlees), finding him weak
and fragile, singling him out for harsh punishments that include beatings,
while also brutalizing his own wife with uncontrolled lust, where the
prevailing view of marriage at the time, supported by religious dogma, was for
women to be bound by a man’s wishes and desires, treated as little more than
personal property, leaving her utterly demoralized. This was the
path of righteousness in her father’s eyes, yet what they witnessed in his
ruthless behavior only made them cower with fear, and in Will’s case, generated
outright hatred, where he wanted to get as far away from him as he
could. The merciless patriarchal behavior on display is not only
disconcerting but grotesque, yet in one extraordinary shot the anguished cries
coming from the bedroom lead to the protracted wailing of child delivery,
reminiscent of the agonizing screams in Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972),
among the most extended uncomfortable moments in film. When it’s
announced that twins are born, instead of elation, it only adds to a perception
of deepening misery, further exacerbated by scenes of the entire family moving
to a larger countryside home in a deluge of rain, eventually settling into the
Blawearie place on the fictional lands of Kinraddie. In no time, the
mother poisons herself and the newborn twins after discovering she is pregnant
again. Davies leaves no mistaking the brutal harshness of the
conditions, rendering a faithful portrait of Scottish life dominated by men,
where women silently suffer in perpetuity. Chris assumes the role of
her mother, but is torn between competing versions of herself, an English Chris
that loves books and wants to go to University, and a Scottish Chris that loves
the land of her birth, but also develops a growing resentment at the
arduousness of farming life.
Contrasting the beauty of the landscape with the violence
inflicted upon one another, the film is luxuriously shot by cinematographer
Michael McDonough, where the outdoors resembles painterly masterpieces hanging
on museum walls, using 65mm for the lush exteriors as well as a digital camera,
where the literary aspect of Chris’s inner narration offers a kind of
unapologetic pastoralism that provides the guiding light of the film, “But the
land was forever. It moved and changed below you, but it was
forever.” Using a stylistic technique known as “memory realism,”
Davies portrays everyday life with a vivid naturalism, which allows him to
delve into the inner psychology of Chris, whose maturity, represented by her
changing mindset, continues to advance the story. The surrounding
land of Kinraddie is seen as mythical, viewed in almost utopian terms, where it
is a land and tradition worth defending, even if the inhabitants remain stuck
in their own backward ways, where one of the strongest impressions
counteracting her father’s viciousness comes from a neighboring farmer, Chae
Strachan (Ian Pirie), a strapping physical specimen whose gentle kindness
always feels welcomed and appreciated. His presence throughout the
film becomes synonymous for the mindset of the other farmers, where he is
always viewed as a virtuous man. When her father suffers a
debilitating stroke, paralyzed and bedridden afterwards, barely able to speak,
totally reliant upon his daughter, yet his abusive mindset never changes, where
he attempts to impose his wrath upon his daughter, with suggestions of
incestuous rape. With a blasphemous justification of his lust for
Chris, and his brutality towards Will, we see the destructive possibilities of
his harsh, single-minded religious belief. When she ignores him
afterwards, shutting him out of her life as if traumatized, it’s hard not to be
sympathetic for her position, even when he dies. As if a dark cloud has
been removed from hovering overhead, her demeanor changes instantly, emboldened
by her own freedom, as for the first time she takes charge of her
life. Inheriting the farm, as her brother ran off to Argentina, she
takes an interest in one of her brother’s friends, Ewan Tavendale (Kevin
Guthrie), humorously realized in a street scene where both are overwhelmed by a
flock of sheep that suddenly appear in the middle of a conversation as the
sheep are herded down the middle of the street. In no time at all
they are married, where the meticulous nature of the extended wedding sequence
is sumptuously realized, an uplifting and joyous occasion with plenty of drink,
dancing, and song, where Chris drops hearts with an a capella rendition of “The
Flowers of the Forest,” a sad lament with historical roots that may as well be
the Scottish National Anthem. This punctuates their marital bliss
with a particularly appropriate spiritual blessing, resulting in the birth of a
child, named after Ewan, where their lives, never happier, feel beautifully
intertwined and in perfect harmony with the surrounding fields, whose rhapsodic
harvest resembles Dovzhenko’s mythic pastoral depiction in EARTH (1930), where
this brief rural idyll seamlessly evolves into poetic literary description
where only the land endures, becoming “the splendour of life like a song, like
the wind.”
It came on Chris how strange was
the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land and sky in
dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who had seen
their lives and loves sink away in the years, things wept for besides
sheep-buchts, remembered at night and at twilight. The gladness and
kindness had passed, lived and forgotten, it was Scotland of the mist and rain
and the crying sea that made the songs.
While Chris feels relieved when her father dies, it is from
him mainly that she inherits her peasant spirit, where she is drawn to the
presence of the Standing Stones (Pictish
stones) that dominate the landscape, relics of a pre-Christian era that connects
them all to their pasts, that embody a sense of timelessness, yet whose meaning
remains elusive and lost. At the onset of World War I, which is the
first moment we really get a firm sense of time, there is a jingoistic spirit
in the air, where Chae Strachan enlists, believing it will bring about a new
socialist era, thoroughly misled by the newspapers to volunteer for the army in
1914, where those that didn’t were called cowards. Ewan has no
interest in fighting, as his life is running a farm, but he’s goaded into
joining the thousands of other young men sent to the European front for
prolonged trench warfare, where the idea of honor and nobility becomes confused
with masculinity, as his entire perspective undergoes a crude transformation,
where the influence of war turns him into a ruthless savage, returning shortly
after training where he is little more than a bullying beast, the spitting
image of her father, coarse, brutal, and vulgar, drunk nearly the entire time,
treating her horribly, where Chris needs to grab a knife to defend herself from
his boorish advances, leaving again shortly afterwards for France without so
much as a word from Chris. But the reality of the war is a distant
event and is barely noticed in Kinraddie, yet the magnitude of its impact
leaves an indelible impression, as so many men that left never returned,
including Ewan Tavendale, who we learn afterwards was shot as a deserter, where
there are fleeting moments that remind one of the absurdity of the military
trials in Kubrick’s PATH’S OF GLORY (1957). In the aftermath, the
sweeping aerial shot of the abandoned war zone is a stark reminder of those who
lost their lives trapped in a vile and meaningless existence of barbed wire and
mud, a kind of hell on earth that is both beautiful and appalling, yet also a
chilling reminder of how a nation so willingly sacrificed their own sons in an
excessive display of warmongering at the expense of human conscience and
genuine humanity. A thought provoking film, where the overriding tenderness
lies in the aftermath of war, punctuated by Scottish folk songs, languorous
images of a timeless landscape, time-altering 365 degree pans, and dissolves
between shots that make it appear people are melting into the earth and sky,
where it’s hard not to be swept away by the sheer painterly beauty of the
film. But the emotional intensity of the last fifteen minutes is
utterly transfixing, deeply tragic and profoundly uplifting, that begins with
an eloquent tracking shot following the inhabitants of the entire town, one by
one, walking through the wheatfields on their way to a church memorial service,
where the thunderous sounds of a mournful chorus accompany them throughout, Glasgow Phoenix Choir - 'All
in the April Evening ... - YouTube (3:39), where the elegiac
music becomes the unspoken sermon. But nothing is as memorable as
the final outdoor memorial service, where the names of the Kinraddie men killed
at war are inscribed in the Standing Stones, where a new reverend makes an
impassioned speech with clear communist leanings, denouncing the British
government’s war policy, comparing it to imperial Rome, “They have made a
desert and they call it peace” (A
Scots Quair - Google Books Result), while a Highlander in kilts and
bagpipes is silhouetted against the sky, much like the bugler against the red
sky in John Ford’s She
Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), playing “The Flowers of the Forest,” not
really a folk song, but a national song of reverence commemorating the Scottish
dead at the Battle of Flodden against England in
1513, now reserved almost exclusively for funerals or memorial
services.
In the sunset of an age and an
epoch we may write that for epitaph of the men who were of it. They went quiet
and brave from the lands they loved, though seldom of that love might they
speak, it was not in them to tell in words of the earth that moved and lived
and abided, their life and enduring love. And who knows at the last what
memories of it were with them, the springs and the winters of this land and all
the sounds and scents of it that had once been theirs, deep, and a passion of
their blood and spirit, those four who died in France? With them we may say
there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants,
the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them
not, except as a memory in a song, they pass with the things that seemed good
to them, with loves and desires that grow dim and alien in the days to be. It
was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again
will the old speech and the old songs, the old curses and the old benedictions,
rise but with alien effort to our lips. The last of the peasants, those four
that you knew, took that with them to the darkness and the quietness of the
places where they sleep. And the land changes, their parks and their steadings
are a desolation where the sheep are pastured, we are told that great machines
come soon to till the land, and the great herds come to feed on it, the crofter
is gone, the man with the house and the steading of his own and the land closer
to his heart than the flesh of his body. Nothing, it has been said, is true but
change, nothing abides, and here in Kinraddie where we watch the building of
those little prides and those little fortunes on the ruins of the little farms
we must give heed that these also do not abide, that a new spirit shall come to
the land with the greater herd and the great machines. For greed of place and
possession and great estate those four had little heed, the kindness of friends
and the warmth of toil and the peace of rest – they asked no more from God or
man, and no less would they endure. So, lest we shame them, let us believe that
the new oppressions and foolish greeds are no more than mists that pass. They
died for a world that is past, these men, but they did not die for this that we
seem to inherit. Beyond it and us there shines a greater hope and a newer
world, undreamt when these four died. But need we doubt which side the battle
they would range themselves did they live today, need we doubt the answer they
cry to us even now, the four of them, from the places of the sunset?
And then, as folk stood
dumbfounded, this was just sheer politics, plain what he meant, the Highlandman
McIvor tuned up his pipes and began to step slow round the stone circle by
Blawearie Loch, slow and quiet, and folk watched him, the dark was near, it
lifted your hair and was eerie and uncanny, the ‘Flowers of the Forest’ as he
played it . . .
It rose and rose and wept and
cried, that crying for the men that fell in battle, and there was Kirsty
Strachan weeping quietly and others with her, and the young ploughmen they
stood with glum, white faces, they’d no understanding or caring, it was
something that vexed and tore at them, it belonged to times they had no knowing
of.
He fair could play, the piper, he
tore at your heart marching there with the tune leaping up the moor and echoing
across the loch. Folk said that Chris Tavendale alone shed never a tear, she
stood quiet, holding her boy by the hand, looking down on Blawearie’s fields
till the playing was over. And syne folk saw that the dark had come and began
to stream down the hill, leaving her there, some were uncertain and looked them
back. But they saw the minister was standing behind her, waiting for her,
they’d the last of the light with them up there, and maybe they didn’t need it
or heed it, you can do without the day if you’ve a lamp quiet-lighted and kind
in your heart.
