MEDIA STUDY/BUFFALO - the Vasulkas

The American Film Institute Presents
The British Film Institute :
Independent Films 1951 -1982
Produced on the occasion of the British Film Institute's 50th anniversary, The American
Film Institute Presents the British Film-Institute: Independent Films 1951-1982 -
showcases a number of significant films funded by the BFI in over 25 years of
production funding . The works display a range of engaging social, aesthetic and
political issues ; few would have been produced without the BFI's recognition of
independent filmmakers as a vital creative force with definite financial needs and
a unique aesthetic agenda for British cinema .
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Scene from My Childhood by Bill Douglas .
April 6 (Friday)
8:00 PM
207 Delaware Avenue
THE BILL DOUGLAS TRILOGY
My Childhood (1972)
Directed and written by Bill Douglas .
With Stephen Archibald, Hughie
Restorick, and Jean Taylor Smith . 48
minutes .
My Ain Folk (1973)
Directed and written by Bill Douglas .
With Stephen Archibald, Hughie
Restorick, and Jean Taylor Smith . 55
minutes .
My Way Home (1978)
Directed and written by Bill Douglas.
With Stephen Archibald, Paul Kermack,
and Jessie Combe. 72 minutes .
Bill Douglas's autobiographical
trilogy-consisting of My Childhood,
My Ain Folk, and My Way Homerepresents
one of the signal achievements
of narrative cinema in the 1970s .
Told in a rigorously spare style equally
suggestive of Bresson and of the classic
English documentary, the story
describes Jamie's trajectory of development,
beginning in the mid-1940s in a
poverty-stricken mining village south of
Edinburgh where he and his brother
Tommy live with their grandmother, and
ending in the mid-1950s with Jamie stationed
in Egypt doing military service .
What happens in between charts the
formation of Jamie's identity, a protrait
of the filmmaker as a boy and young
man, growing up within a nearly incomprehensible
yet clearly oppressive family
structure of absent and substitute
parents .
This program was organized and coordinated by the AR and programmed
in cooperation with the Walker Art Center. It has been made possible in part by
the British Embassy (Washington, D.C .) and the Film Department of the British
Council (London) .
Admission : $2 .00 ; $1 .50 students and senior citizens .
The following notes are excerpted from those written by Bill Horrigan for the AFI's
program guide .
Scene from My Ain Folk by Bill Douglas .
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