Dave Robson 0:01
The copyright of this recording is vested in the BECTU biscuit project. The subject is Michael Clark, producer, director and editor of documentary films interviewed by John Legard. The date is 22 October, 1993 this is side one, and the file number is 299,
John Legard 0:29
running, Michael, perhaps you'd like to start by telling us about your childhood, where you were born, and your family and so on, and then carrying on from them. I will probably interpolate the odd question on again.
Michael Clarke 0:44
Okay, well, I'm not quite sure where I was born. Sounds improbable. My post office savings book taken out by my late uncle the day I was born, says Latchford which is now a suburb of Warrington and his uncle was the curious, but I think I was born in the rectory at Anthropos. My mother was the daughter of the rector of Anthropos. Now, wait a minute, I can't have been because he died before I was born, so it must have been somewhere in the Warrington area. I was put on my passport, and I had some difficulty trying to renew the passport in Dakar when the British Embassy couldn't find a Latchford but eventually they got it out of the post office. Guy. Anyway, my father left the army as an unemployed subaltern after the First World War, and eventually got a job through my mother's employer, who was Samuel Gluckstein in Gluckstein, relatives firm Joe Lyon, which he didn't like. And he stayed there until he eventually retired at 71 or two. All the years from 1919 up to the beginning of the war in 1939 he was employed on the basis no notice is given or required. You can imagine how he was continually anxious about being unemployed, though, in fact, he rose to very senior position and firm and refused the job of an employee director. He said, There's nothing lower in the company than an employee director. Anyway, with some difficulty, they sent me to Dulwich college. We were living inDulwich and later in Norwood at that time, and I went to the school, which was an extremely good school. I didn't believe it at the time,
Michael Clarke 2:44
and been born, which still encountered the rigid classical education.
Michael Clarke 2:57
I took the highest certificate. I was put on the classical side, because there's a classical strain in my family. My late aunt, who was a deputy near the ladies College, who was a classical scholar of some repute, and her father, my grandfather, my father, was particular scholar in the work of my property, a deservedly forgotten, I think, fourth century Greek writer. So when my mother, who had tremendous Felicity at school, the house was filled with her prizes from an early age to her, and it was never the Time which isn't so got higher certificate, and eventually got not a larger of scholarship, but an exhibition to Cambridge and went up to Maudlin College, which have been my father's college not As terrible. That's how it worked out in 1938 Maudlin college at that time, was a terrible place. We were 70% Etonians who were very probable with each other, but had the tremendous technique of super serious politeness. Most of my friends in university came outside college in the university, I discovered politics and they discovered tennis better more than school. So I must say, I think it's very important to go to a day school. Because you do meet your friends, sisters and so forth, and you can do things, especially in a large city in the evenings and the weekends, where people will find
Michael Clarke 5:18
anyway at Cambridge, I read classics So like school, it's unbelievable. By Monday, with two Greek verses, by Wednesday, I was also expected to have read the entire canon of Greek and Latin literature within one year, which if we look at the length of certain things like Plato, is questionable. I realized, though I was very good at that and so forth, I never really had to feel. I got rather involved with the socialist love and later, as most people did who were serious against with the student Communist Party. This was, if you remember, 1938, nine, fall of Albania, the fall of Abyssinia, being a little earlier, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the threat of a world war. And we all believe that purity of my with the Russians and all Europe, or the European countries, bent it off, and we had lots and lots of marches and things. And you will see me and my wife in Michael Orange film, fragment of memory, which he made 40 years later, after about university days, I was organizing a march in the second front, the united front.
Michael Clarke 6:50
Now she was on. Many of us have copy of it, and Michael
Michael Clarke 6:58
not and that, of course, brings us to my interest in film. At school in the mid 30s, it had become the thing to be interested in film. I don't mean in a trendy way so much as they were thought to have something a bit better than entertaining. Was entertained. They had a quality that other entertained media didn't have. I can remember we were all entranced by the film 100 men and a girl with Diana Durbin and Leopold Sakovsky, but with the power of the way in which sound recording and the way in which the film was edited gave us dimension which is quite different to any other music that we had, whether it's concerts or making music ourselves and Dulwich was a very musical school. I played the oboe and then then the trombone, and I also relieved relief from the symphony. So I had a lot of musical experience, and I was very lucky that my first form master was Jack Westit?, who became professor of musical
Dave Robson 8:18
Oxford Film Society.
Michael Clarke 8:22
The Regal west Norwood, a wonderful cinema which inside has an amazing decor or like ruins, with everything except the bats flying about, one of those elaborate cinemas which are last and but then we got interested, also, we got interested In sex films. We didn't really know, but when you knew about French films. I can't remember which ones came in what order, the films with Gabin and people like that. And by the time the war came, La Fonf D'illusion?and we didn't have a Film Society. No, we should have
John Legard 9:27
done, did you have an interest at a very early age in cinema? Did your folks? Did your
John Legard 9:36
friends? Yeah,
John Legard 9:39
like myself. I mean, I started probably early age. I was about five when I started visiting those days. I can
Speaker 1 9:54
just remember the something. Are the pavilions Goodge Street. I
Michael Clarke 10:05
remember in Torquay on holiday 15 seeing lady should mention four key, because the first time
John Legard 10:18
I ever mentioned Torquay the first time I went to the pictures in Torquay 1929, they showed a film I never heard of since
Michael Clarke 10:33
George Formby compare George Formby once a week. And it used to be the statistics of first million people once a week. What was it? One Thursday, because they took their shoes off. Survey revealed me anyway, at the university, I met Michael Arden, who has a, I think it was 9.5 camera. The one was, and I got was very, very vague. I thought I remember hitchhiking all the way to Bristol to see him in the vacation and say, let's make a film about Cambridge. And he said, Yes, but what I said film about Cambridge? And he clearly said that ex gree , echoed the remark that I was always to make Stuart Legge when he went up one of his flights. So yes, but where do I put camera? I just had this vague about Cambridge, then I realized, and we started plotting this, which didn't get any further. But meanwhile, Michael, as a matter of routine, covered what he thought was interesting, particularly these things like demonstration, political demonstrations, and Marxist. And of course, there were pacifist, right? And he kept all the stuff Michael saw himself, I think, in the very beginning, as a film director. And that has been, is his life, his consciousness is he knows about a lot of other things His loyalty is to the concept of film, which he now has to make, embrace television and all his thoughts. So then I developed a lot of what I call a great sense of social responsibility. I don't think at all
Speaker 1 12:42
young. People quite often have more decent feeling between the ages 18 and 30
Michael Clarke 12:49
of 18 and they all start compromising. But I had also then I had heard about documentary films. And I've seen Night Mail, and I think I might have seen coal face. I was a great fan of Auden's It was a marvelous feeling of growing up just the natural the world, the world was so full of a number of things. And I think it seemed like that. But, of course, the war came, and I decided to not to take a chance. I thought I'd go into the tanks because I like motor cars
John Legard 13:35
and engine they were, you were in Cambridge?
Michael Clarke 13:38
Yeah, I was in Cambridge until 1940 until August 1940 but I decided to volunteer rather than be called up. He knows my name down, but nothing happened. I switched to English at the University by this time, and was trying to do two years work in one for part one, and also rather elaborate affair with my with my wife, and very involved in politics. And this didn't work out too well. Eventually I resigned from the communist party I sent a letter to John Maynard Smith,
Michael Clarke 14:28
I resigned because they told me they had, as an earlier,
Michael Clarke 14:39
my political duty at that time, I think, for the Soviet, ??????
Michael Clarke 14:54
German peace, conference But whatever it. Was I was determined that I was not going to fail my mother.
Speaker 2 15:07
This is
Michael Clarke 15:13
an important thing. If your mates feel you're just not quite good. Now. Other people charge in with other problems. It's
John Legard 15:44
very well.
Speaker 1 15:55
So I volunteered for tanks finished Cambridge in summer, waiting to be called up to be so I looked at various jobs, and
Speaker 1 16:14
my wife was planning a job. We just got married. We got married in our last year at Cambridge
Michael Clarke 16:24
eventually, I got a job at the Gaumont Palace Lewisham this was remember the figure exactly. I got two pound 14 from nine in the morning.
Speaker 1 16:44
Well, whenever we open two other two until 6 or 4and Lewisham wass too far to go home. So had to do something.
Michael Clarke 17:00
I company. Anyway, I did this, and I had the ordeal of seeing the only film I can actually remember is whatever film was on the other reward, there's one free ticket.
Michael Clarke 17:20
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I thought I'd learn something around filmmaking. I don't think
Michael Clarke 17:36
this was the time when there was a marvelous work piece. Stage.
Michael Clarke 17:49
No business got very
Michael Clarke 17:53
embarrassing. Always got more and more bored until eventually it had to be stopped. Somebody called the police. Interesting, because situation,
John Legard 18:15
no, I didn't have a go on
Michael Clarke 18:18
it once. It was only once, only once a lot, anyway. And then I was in the army. This is taking too
John Legard 18:26
long. It's all good.
Michael Clarke 18:31
And I was called up, went to Farnborough to learn to be a trooper. Now, the film industry came up here again, unwittingly, because in the 52nd training regiments in the barack room opposite me, the opposite bed was Richard Green, later of Robin Hood. At that time, he was called Brylcream Green as model for all the Brylcream advertisments around the buses and tubes. He had come back from Hollywood to join up and, of course, press and made a good press story about this. Photographed him joining as he came through the door. And then the next bed to him was Peter Wills, who became head of drama, first of all, at Rediffusion . And then I think at Yorkshire, he died recently. He was, I think, very well known as the head of drama. He was a bit part actor at that time. Had also been to Hollywood. That's right, that's right. And they used to go up together, meeting all their stagey friends. David Niven was at Aldershot at the time. He was a major, and they knew him. And also, for some reason, Olivier was although he was a naval officer, perhaps he hadn't. joined up this when he was in the district, and they all used to go off and get into trouble through meeting the this lot in pubs where the bars were for other officers only . Well, then we all went to the op field? which was down version of Sandhurst. And then it was all right, because officer cadets, who had all the uniform little white strap stripe on their shoulder, they were allowed in the bars to meet all these people. I never danced with Vivian Leigh on those lovely opportunities that people accused me of having afterwards. My wife, in particular, never met her in fact that I did see her in this pub , there's one particular so I then got posted, and I then became a gunnery instructor. Now in Sandhurst, I was in a building that was hit by a bomb. I was actually in the building. And this is relevant because to being a gunnery instructor, because a tank gunner, tank gunner is a person who fires very powerful guns in closed spaces. And to be an instructor means you have exposed to rather more these loud explosions than would otherwise be the case. And I was then, when I went to the Middle East and was shot out of a couple of tanks was virtually blown up by a nearby shell. And to this, I attribute my deafness, which started to come on, not immediately, by any means, but 45 or 50, and has got progressively worse as nerve damage through loud noises. And it's meant actually, well, not that I'm working anymore, but the last film I made in three years ago. For the last 15 years, I have had to get the sound recorders to make judgments about sound balance and the sound level. And I don't know how many other people in the film industry have had this problem, except there was a sound recordist as to my name, in case he's still living, who we can all swear was because he had the sound level on the monitor doing A dove or recording so incredibly high, rather painful
John Legard 22:22
pause for a second. Okay, we're on
Michael Clarke 22:26
so in the Middle East, I went out on a draft by Cape Town where, incidentally, Africana entertained us, as the inhabitants very kindly did, but try to persuade us to desert because the war again was fundamentally wrong, and Hitler was the safety of the world, but we know. Thank you very much. Went to the Middle East, and I got posted to the first war tank regiment which was then refitting near Cairo and this is in 1942 early 42 and we trained with these new American tanks called grants and honeys. And then the Germans broke through in the area near Tobruk, and we went in a great hurry up to repel them. And I think I had the distinction of commanding the first of these American tanks to be knocked out. And I never, I never saw it coming. As it were, they contained 140 gallons of high uptane Aviation spirit to drive them. They had airplane engines in their back and 100 rounds of 75 mill ammunition. And when they caught fire at the the time, they actually blew up, and I watched mine from rather too near as the whole turret weighing many tons went up in the air. and fell onto me I was not the last by any means, to suffer this fate, and indeed, I suffered it again about a month later, and got blown out of the tank and injured in my foot, in my head and with luckjust managed to get back to the not captured, and taking to hospital in Cairo at this time the Well, this was on the retreat, and the Alamein line was just forming my own hospital, before that had really stabilized and then downgraded one grade, and they didn't know what to do with me, so I was sent to India with three other officers. I was the glory of being a second lieutenant, this time with three other officers and nine sergeants who teach the last horse regiment of the British army. They use the 14th, 20th. We arrived the day they had just said farewell to their 900 steeds, put on the train, and we weren't very popular anyway. We did teach them to use tanks. I was there teach gunnery and wireless procedure radio was called wireless. Those days. I mean, tanks have a lot of radio in them, and this was done, and they were all ready to do something practical when Mountbatten arrived as commander in chief and turned them into jungle infantry. So once again, nobody knew what to do with me, so because I was not to go back to the Middle East until I was upgraded. And meanwhile, the doctors had said I was permanently created B. I'm not quite sure why, but they did well. I didn't want to fight any Germans. If I could do my duty some safer way. I'd done enough of them, so I didn't mind. So I asked to go on an intelligence course at Karachi, which was an enormous fun. We made all sorts of elaborate strategic plans in Russia, Russian invasion through Afghanistan so forth, although the Russians were allies, but it was all good training. And after that, then, once again, nobody knew what to do with me, so I went to New Delhi headquarters for a little and then asked to go back to the Middle East. Back in the Middle East, I was posted to become an intelligence officer at the headquarters in Palestine. When I was there, I was rapidly recruited by what's called the Defense Security Office. This was, in point of fact, an out station of MI five and was concerned with counter espionage and internal security in Palestine. My principal job was to write the political reports, the weekly and the monthly reports for Downing Street, and this meant that I had to know as much as possible everything concerned with the country, and got all the communities, the Arab and the Jewish communities, and all their various strains and stresses and the religious conflicts as well. And it suited me, down to the ground. And I stayed two and a half years doing this marvelous time with many Arab and many Jewish friends. And we all met. It was peace in Jerusalem at that time, and one particular friend, man called Gabriel Jabra recurs. A little later,
John Legard 27:14
I left. Sorry, we're talking about 1943, talking
Michael Clarke 27:17
about 43 to 46 mm. And I remember Roger Manville came out for the British Council, or possibly the army educational thing, and gave some lectures on film. Roger Manville was later described by the late Stuart Legge as a man with a face like a poached egg who stands on the street corner from everything as it passes. I've never forgotten, but at that time, he was still writing his famous Pelican called film, which did a great deal to encourage and interest people in film. And Roger was much mocked afterwards. I went avidly for his lectures in the YMCA Jerusalem, apparently the first
John Legard 28:07
edition of that film. You've got to mint first edition of film by Roger Manville. It's quite valuable.
Michael Clarke 28:14
I have one. I very carefully keep the first edition as well as the second. And you know why, apart from the value.
John Legard 28:21
Well, because of these extraordinary errors, the particular error
Michael Clarke 28:25
was, the one was, why is the film 24 frames, whatever it is, in advance of the relevant frame? He said, Well, it's because, what does it sound takes longer to travel than light? I've kept it for this reason.
John Legard 28:42
Yeah, well, I think that's why it's so precious, because of these one one or two remarks,
Michael Clarke 28:49
also in Jerusalem, had very good bookshops, and I picked up Rosa's book documentary, and that influenced me a great deal. It took me many years and seeing a lot of the films referred to later on to realize so often stills films were better than the films. Is a beautiful still I remember of Cavalcanti We live in two worlds, which enchanted me. And I saw the film. It was really article. Now, I think the still have been taken by Wolfgang. Suchitzky I'm not sure I got interested in films at this point. Had the pleasure of seeing myself in Desert Victory at one point, because the first thing that happened to us when we run up the desert with our tanks, there was a sudden alarm. They all advanced, thinking that the enemy had broken through over a ridge in battle line, and there was an Army kinematic and Corporation camera man filming away. This was this blended shot, which later was used several times next
John Legard 29:49
time I have a look at Desert Victory.
Michael Clarke 29:55
Did you? Yeah? Sure you wouldn't see me, because the tanks had to be closed down working for. Periscope.
John Legard 30:02
Jack Holmes spoke the opening commentary of Desert Victory. Well, I was absolutely astonished because I saw it again, not so very long ago, and Jack Holmes, but I recognize
Michael Clarke 30:17
his voice when I do hear I don't think I've ever seen Desert Victory since, but Jack's voice is the main commentator.
John Legard 30:24
Was Leo Genn , of course, because he spoke voice overs a lot of those war films, but Jack did the particular opening. Yeah, it was interesting point. So Roger Manlaw
Michael Clarke 30:35
and reading Rosa's books, and there were other various film books I can't remember. Of course, you'd
John Legard 30:39
already established your interest in cinema when you were at Cambridge. You can you were at Cambridge. One thought of it as a career. It was more of an interest.
Michael Clarke 30:48
Well, one didn't think of a career when the war was clearly gradually being won or coming to the dreadful thought having to have a problem. I had been earmarked for publishing. My tutor at Cambridge was a friend? of the University Press, and they used to take trainees for the university two a year. And I was going to be one of these. I believe publishing sound as an occupation of the gentleman, as Peter Warner called it in his autobiography. But one realizes now that commercials, any other business anyway, interested in film. But what then happened was that I drew a ticket in the famous leave ballot. Those who've been overseas for more than three years were entitled to enter a ballot for a month's leave in the UK, we would be shipped or flown home, all according to my amazement, I drew a ticket and went home. And of course, I saw Michael Orrem? because he wasn't in the army. He has been directed as an engineer. He was trained as an electrical engineer. He was working for what I think is no EMI, right? And he then had a very bad electric shock, and we made two meals. A result of this has been, so to speak, invalided out, and he knew Rotha, and Rotha had been trying to get him out, to help him on, I think, World of Plenty. But after Michael was ill, he somehow was allowed to go into the film industry to make COI films, in other words, different war effort. And so Michael kindly allowed me, asked Rotha if you'd see me, and Rotha, for some reason, seemed to like me. And he said, you know, you young people who've been fighting you have acquired so much experience, so much savoir faire. Anyway. So he virtually promised me a job when I was demobbed, which would have been about a year length, year further on. Well, I then went back to the Middle East, and finally, having done my appropriate service of I think it was something four years, two months, was hooked back home to the War Office, where they didn't know what to do with me, so they sent me an office trying to see whether the numbers on Russian lorries perceived by our consuls in Eastern Europe made any sense. But did they indicate anything about the Russian Order of Battle? I'm no cryptographer. And anyway, it turned out in the end, all these numbers were quite random. So I spent five minutes in which time Rotha said, Look, can't you apply for an early demobilization because the World is Rich was just starting, which was the successor to World of Plenty. And Michael Orram was the editor, and I was to be the assistant. In the end, I didn't get any advancement, but I went down on a date in June, I can't remember, got my my blue suit and hat from shoes from the demob centre, and put them all and went straight back to 12, D'arblay Street, where Michael showed me what a speaker who was, and what a joiner was, and what film cement, if you can remember that stuff was, and so forth. And I started with Rotha. Well, why I liked about Rotha was, I think, a very important figure for me and for everybody was that he was a realist, in a sense, a politically realist filmmaker, compared with the sort of rather undoubted quality Dreamy Idealist of Basil Wright They were as poles apart. And I like what I liked also about Rotha was that he didn't try to steal the credit from young people. He wanted the credit for having chosen young people, and he never attended. Unlike Arthur Eske? who every film, Arthur wanted films to be called. Elton's film, an Elton film Wilson just had Rotha foregrounded the directors and the editors, and he did everything he could to help or even get better jobs in other companies.
John Legard 35:15
This is very interesting, because about the only produced documentary I never worked for, never even I probably should handle them once. So I'm very interested, and I think it's important.
Michael Clarke 35:25
Well, of course, he had all the things against him. He somehow destroyed everything he worked for. This pattern seemed to be repeated again and again, and Films of Fact, as the company I joined was called eventually, a year later, folded up. Rotha had a lot of very good political contacts, but he sometimes used them too often to get, to try to get, so to speak, more consideration than he than his work warranted. But his films were world of plenty, and the world is rich, and the housing one. Now, there was
John Legard 36:06
one he did about Manchester.
Michael Clarke 36:08
That's A City Speaks, directed by Francis Guyson, with marvelous music by Bill. I saw it again recently. He also did the famous film, the Fourth Estate for the types, which was suppressed for 40 years you saw at the LSE? last year, especially to see it.
John Legard 36:33
Yes, because that was his peak, wasn't it, when you, when you joined him. The World, world of plenty in the world is rich. Those are his really sort
Michael Clarke 36:39
of famous. Absolutely,
John Legard 36:43
he'd been making films several, I mean, before the war,
Michael Clarke 36:48
he was the man who was sent to, let's go back. Flaherrty was sent by Grierson to make a film which later became called industrial Britain. And he went to, I think there was Manchester to the north, industrial north. And after some months, the budget had run out, and Flaherty was still shooting tests, and Rotha was sent by Grierson to Manchester to the Royal Hotel. I think it was to tell Flaherty that his bill, the hotel bill, given the crew, would not be honored after the next morning, after breakfast, and he was to come back, and Flaherty was furious, and knocked Rotha downstairs. But in the end, that film was edited from Flaherty's so called tests, and though I think Stuart Legge denigrated it rather in print, I thought it was really an extremely interesting, purely impressionistic, as it were, brave play phrase of British skills in obviously, the iron and steel and steam age that
John Legard 38:00
was quite early, wasn't it? That was industrial Britain was 38 what I think it might have been earlier than that.
Michael Clarke 38:06
Yes, but of course,
John Legard 38:10
it also his claim to fame was his books that Rotha the Film till Now, exactly.
Michael Clarke 38:17
And he always went on writing and when during there was a terrible cold week when I joined Earth, as when none of us could work, there was no power and Rank, had just made some small gesture towards British films by allowing some Tiny quota of British made Non, non Hollywood majors films to have exhibition. I remember writing an article at home for something to do called Mr. Ranks gesture, which I sent to the New Statesman and Norman McKenzie, who later became professor in Sussex. And a friend of mine remembers passing that and it was printed. I was absolutely amazed. I put it in the post, and two days later, a proof arrived for correction. This really made my day to I thought the New Statesman was, well, it was a major paper of two sorts, politics in beginning, but literature and arts in the other half ,Rotha said when he thought everybody took the Statesman I saw him a Friday morning when he obviously opened it with his breakfast. And he said, Article now, whatever you do, don't give up your writing. And he said that to me several times. I did give it up. Actually, at that time, I was also a film critic on a rather left wing general magazine called Our Type, edited by Randall Swindler, who's rather Humphrey Swindler became an MP, and also married.
John Legard 39:49
Correction there, Steven Swingler became an MP. Steven Swingler, sorry, joined us at Crown. Actually,
Michael Clarke 39:57
Steven swingler married Pamela Bunch. Was an editor, that's it, yes, and was a school chum of Margot Fleischner, who became Margot. And Randall Rwingler was always the poet and novelist, and Monty Slayton and others were involved anyway. So Rotha said, don't give up your writing, whereas Edgar Anstey, later, when I wrote, wrote a broadcast for BBC on what it on the Cotswolds, from the point of view of one was making a film about the Cotswolds, was furious with me and said, You should have asked my permission, although I was only a freelance and I should have seen the text first.
John Legard 40:37
Isn't that fascinating? Yes, that is actually understandable. Yes, I can imagine, like
Michael Clarke 40:40
taking that I wasn't on the staff. They were freelance at that time. We'll get to that event.
John Legard 40:51
Yeah, I'm being very slow. Actually, you're talking about in the cutting rooms on the world is rich, and that presumably what you say it was the part that must have been the winter of 1946/47 and you were editing in you Yes, Darblay street,
Michael Clarke 41:07
there was the most. It was a stick shot film, almost Yes. And I was actually employed to get the assent of George Elvey as an assistant librarian, Assistant
John Legard 41:18
film librarian. Oh, I see Yes,
Michael Clarke 41:21
because I got six pounds, 10 shillings a week, you were doing well, I would say that time, yes, not too bad. I thought,
John Legard 41:30
yeah, as we were just
Michael Clarke 41:31
about to have a baby, it was a good thing. And so I learned all this, and that time, I suppose you do the same thing today, the source, every source that they use, or whatever it might be, had a trade? number. And this was scratched every 12 frames, only 15 frames on the sound mask by me with a needle.
John Legard 41:57
Did you not have a numbering machine? Then?
Michael Clarke 42:00
Did you not
John Legard 42:03
actually nothing where I did you could. I mean,
Michael Clarke 42:06
I've never actually seen a numbering machine. I've sent things away to be numbered, but um
John Legard 42:14
120 different sources is it probably is the only way, because you and you had so much stuff coming in, and you wanted to get it as you were logging it, you wanted to get it marked again, whereas if you sent it away, there's always
Michael Clarke 42:29
over 100 different sources, you have to develop a different sort of system for your unused takes and cuts and overs and spares from what you would for a continuous production, I think continuous, original material.
John Legard 42:42
It sounds like a bit of a drudgery, having to scratch on
Michael Clarke 42:46
1000s of feet. I didn't mind. I, you know, I was so chuffed to be a professional filmmaker. But for a while, I used to go around with my scissors sticking out of this pocket, so that people in Soho know
John Legard 42:58
that exactly what you were trade. I was really shocked.
Michael Clarke 43:03
Don't forget that one had spent six years in the services, and one came out according to Rotha experience in some ways, but quite immature in some other ways, never having had to find out what peacetime life was like and the normal sort of competition for work or decisions of that kind. And of course, Paula, Sow? whom we knew, suffered from this all his life, who was a script writer at British Transport, you have been called up as a boy soldier. And I remember his telling me that when he left the army, the agonies he suffered having to go and choose a foot for a pair of socks. He said he won't believe it, but he was desperately nervous for months. Well, I wasn't the least nervous, but I was immature enough to be very proud of myself walking about with my scissors in my pocket. And I love the physicality of film. I mean, I like to rewind. You know, I like the skill that one developed these trivial things, not making a build up in the middle, all that sort of thing, simple manual techniques. And my friend Ralph Sheldon has always said that the reason he will not go into electronic editing ever is simply because he likes the tactile nature. Who was he? I think it'd be good idea put Ralph in through this as well, because he had so very wide
John Legard 44:38
indeed, Ralph, should certainly be interviewed. Yeah.
Michael Clarke 44:41
Anyway, well, the world is rich eventually got made. I had the curious job of supervising the studio, linking sequences rather caricature figures of Indian Rajahs and greedy Italians to symbolize attitudes to food, because I'd been in the. Army had been to India. I was, as it were, in charge of costume for the Indian sequence and so forth. And I remember we had to get special permission for the Ministry of Food for the eggs and ham and flour to make the dish that was to be eaten. And the lovely lady was the PRO Ministry of Food, said, I never have Quiche Lorraine. None of us ever heard of Quiche Lorraine it's thought to be an exotic, exquisite thing nowadays. Course, i..............................................................
Michael Clarke 0:01
Side two the quiche Lorraine, which was the great dish to be shown being wolfed by greedy profiteers. All this was made and filmed in a studio in Cursitor Street, which I think, then became worldwide premises for a time, and then they gave it up and went to the place in the alley, now off Wardour Street. Are they not? Well? Films of fact continued with the world is rich, and it was really sorry.
John Legard 0:32
Were you abide by this time? Were you a member of ACTT?
Michael Clarke 0:36
I was a member of ACTT after, can't remember. I think I had to be employed for three probationary months as a probationary member. That's right, he did probation. That's right, I was a probationer, and then after whatever the due period was, I was a member. The world is Rich was finished, but Rotha had several other contracts, and the next thing I had to do was to make act as assistant director on two films, both made for the Royal National life boats institution, a short film to be directed by Michael Orrom called night launch, which was 10 minutes long, and a long film directed by Jack Holmes called, I think a fisherman's yarn, and that film was written by Frank O'Connor, the Irish poet and famous short story writer and great friend of Jack Holmes. These films were both made in Hastings with the fishing community there at the eastern end of Hastings, where there's lovely black net lofts and so on, some of which are still there. And in the old town, the little old town that climbs and its narrow streets up the hill. And the significant thing about the Hastings lifeboat, from the point of view of the film, was that it did not slide into the sea down a slipway. It had to be hauled by a couple of dozen volunteers whenever there was an alarm along the promenade, along the foreshore, to as a slipway further away. This was simply because of the geography of the place at the time. And Michael Orram's film night launch was a, I think, virtually uncommentated film, certainly from Michael's point of view, it was a true Film, film and editors film. I mean, we were all Podovkin ?and Eisenstein filmmakers, and we'd all studied things like the first film book I ever bought, I think was Vladimir Nilsson's cinemas graphic art, good, some great work, I think. And this was the first film that Michael was directing. And I had not been an assistant director before, but I soon learned what it was
John Legard 2:56
and who was young, who else worked on that. Jimmy Ritchie
Michael Clarke 2:59
was the principal camera man. And what a beautiful lighting camera man from night exterior, he was wonderful. I always felt he was wasted as a producer, marvelous cameraman, understanding a filthy tempered, marvelous bloke, one of my greatest friends in the end, lovely man. And John Reed was a second camera man with an Eymo, it was agreed that the night launch was, it was a one off. I mean, you had these 40 or 50 people launching this lifeboat lifeboat with Mole Richardson's, my entire stock of lights, of the largest light then, I think, was 5k and so more than one camera. I seem to remember, there was a third camera, I'm not sure. And Michael had got it all worked out very precisely planned. And after the first night shooting, he told me the next morning he simply couldn't sleep. He couldn't sleep at all because he kept recutting the shots in his head. He was terrified that it wouldn't work, and so forth. Jack Holmes's film was quite different. It was a long yarn, and I can't remember what the yarn was now, but it was about some conflict in the fishing community, and the apparent villain of the piece was a man who actually, in real life, was called Nasty Bumstead. He was always known as Nasty. Nasty was a nickname, but it was reused affectionately by everybody who say morning Nasty. And of course, Frank O'Connor couldn't resist using this name in the film as well. And there was some I just cannot remember what the plot of it was. I remember the making of it because we were out at sea and back again, it was something to do with a false call. But Jack Holmes is a
John Legard 4:47
different, lovely man to work because he was a very experienced director, wasn't he, my goodness, like to be
Michael Clarke 4:53
served in the features films manner. He wants to be told what he was shooting the next morning he had a script which was precise. And he wanted to be reminded that they were down on the down by the post office this morning, and we're going to begin with the scene with Nasty and the policeman. And he would go ahead and do it. He was, I think he could be an improviser, but he wasn't at all. He was meticulous.
John Legard 5:19
As far as I was concerned as an editor, editing his film, Ocean Terminal. I remember we went through the whole script after with all the shot lists and so on with all the shooting records. But he was, we spent about a day and a half. You know, he knew exactly where everything wanted to go. He was
Michael Clarke 5:36
how you can it always worried me as a documentary director that the reality would never turn out quite like that. It was a studio based tradition, wasn't it? Because if the reality wasn't good enough, you altered the reality. You know, had the building moved or enlarged, yeah. But
John Legard 5:51
he always said, I remember that, you know, but if you find a better way of doing it, you know, go ahead. You know. He did say that, yeah. He always made those alarms.
Michael Clarke 5:58
He was also very articulate about methods of things that I think I would otherwise have picked up just by chance. I mean little techniques like you pan with a person and then stop and let as the person leaves the camera, it reveals something quite different. But people were very worried about transitions in the in the 40s and presumably earlier. I had long arguments many years later with my dear friend ArchieMcNaughton, not arguments, but discussions, because he had been brought up to the notion that the film should always flow. And I took the view that an informative film, not necessarily instructional one, but an informative documentary, should sometimes let the audience know that we have finished this bit, and now we're going to do that bit, that, as it were, it should intimate by anticipation, yes. And he felt that the construction should always be just a continuous flow, like a sort of continuous waveform. And so he took the point and then did it very, very well. But it's just he said, Well, that's how Grierson brought me up, and I said, well, but the other people, like McAllister, who didn't have things that always flowed, he said, Ah, but they did always flow. And then so we analyzed what the always flow was. And it was often that the always flow was nothing to do with sense continuity, so much as the fact that the eye stayed in the same bit on the incoming frame as it was a bit of the frame on the incoming picture as it was on the outgoing picture. So he argued that there was always flow of some sort. And I came from the next generation. Said, sometimes we want discontinuity.
John Legard 7:43
You can argue in different directions, of course. And I think nowadays, when people break the rules all the time, don't they with them? Well,
Michael Clarke 7:50
the rules have almost disappeared, I think. But nevertheless, I still think that they are worth keeping, if it is easy to keep them, simply because the moments of no moments of even being lost for a millisecond can be avoided if you know the train is moving that way and the next time is moving that way. Though I've never mastered quite if the train is seen from the outside moving that way, and you're inside the train which way you should be looking, because it's a question of whether you're looking forward to the train at right angles to it.
John Legard 8:25
We suffered from this for years and years and years working with Edgar on films about trains. And some people would come up with a shot and tell you afterwards if you got the shot in the wrong place because the
Michael Clarke 8:35
train was well. Films of fact packed up before the lifeboat films were finished, and in the end, Jimmy Cart?worldwide took them on. Oh, really, yes, yes. And I think films of fact, I think, had to go into liquidation.
John Legard 8:53
Films of fact were before data. Weren't they data? Well, they
Michael Clarke 8:57
overlapped. They were different. Paul Rotha productions. PRP was an earlier Rotha thing in which Donald Alexander had worked and many others, Michael Orram and others. But He then started films of fact with a man called John Wales
John Legard 9:13
Oh, I remember John Wales.
Michael Clarke 9:14
He went to the educational foundation for visual aids. Tall chap, yes. Curly hair, yes. He took me to lunch at the Flats? club.
John Legard 9:22
Once stood Yes. He worked with us for Crown, filming it for a time.
Michael Clarke 9:31
Yes, as in, you know, north Wales and so on. He went to the educational foundation for visual aids as its director, until a man, and then he left it. And the man called Harrison, I think, was approached of whom, Arthur Elton, immemorial, is said. I mean Memorial memorably, at that time, for various reasons, it was necessary that a second rate person should be appointed to the E, F, E, A, and Harrison was that person.
John Legard 10:00
A secondary person.
Michael Clarke 10:03
Yes, I hardly knew this man, Harrison, though I did, in fact, write a film for them a little later, scientific film. Well anyway, films, in fact, packed up, and we all started scurrying around for jobs. And I was offered a job by Donald Alexander and Jack Chambers at Data. And I tried to get my resignation in, but John Wales handed me my dismissal. He got it in first. I had mine in my hand. Okay, it was all very amicable. And I started with Data as an assistant because there the tradition was that more or less you were an assistant editor and or assistant director, according to the stage, according to the leads, or according to sort of flexible film. I mean, one might well be an assistant director on film, and then the director or an editor would edit it, and one might be the assistant so you
John Legard 10:56
move across from production. Yeah, both of you, yes, which is what happened that Sheryl tried to look to. And this was actually where were you operating from? There Data, where Data
Michael Clarke 11:09
Data was in not two Soho square, I can't remember the number. It was over the passage that leads up to Charing cross Road, around the corner next to the Italian cafe. Now, data was interesting because data was a cooperative, a true cooperative, in the sense it was actually a member of the cooperative productive Producers Federation, together with lots and lots of shoe firms in Leicester corset firms and part of the cooperative movement, as it was, the cooperative Producers Federation, those who manufacture, as opposed to the top cooperative wholesale society, which supplied the cooperative retail societies all over the country. And it had something of the ideals of stretching right back to Robert Erwin of cooperation. And it was always a left wing unit data. In that sense, it had a lot of people who were in the Communist Party in it, and rather more who weren't. I had briefly rejoined the Communist Party, but I can't say I was particularly active, because life was, life was too full to get too involved. But there was a fairly strong, you see, I say the word communist nowadays, so blenches with horror, but very strong, let us say, far left element in the film industry at that time, there was people like Sid Cole, of course, and so forth, who are famous for it, and not to mention, Ivor
John Legard 12:44
Montague of all people, Ralph Bond
Michael Clarke 12:48
and Ralph Bond and Betty, Betty. So this was nothing strange, but there wasn't much time for politics. As far as I was concerned, what with, you know, having a marriage and a new child, and later another one, and all this exciting work and but it was a cooperative, and it had some of the defects these things can have, because if ever there's any trouble, people would try to call a Unit meeting. A unit meeting could be called, a meeting of the members of the cooperative. We called on the resolution of, I've forgotten six or maybe 10 people, and there was a bit of a tendency to stop work in order to make decisions about how to do the work. Donald Alexander was the boss, and he had, I suppose, I owe him a lot for suggesting me for a job. He had a lot going for him, in some ways, in others not. I think he had been, he was a public school boy from Shrewsbury with, I think, tremendous success, lots and lots of prizes. And he, too, I think, had a classics degree. He was, he died last a few months ago. Yes, I suppose he was three or four years older than myself, but he had had time to become, as it were, someone with a school master mentality, I think, and he knew what was best. He believed in cooperation and democracy and listening to everybody, but he knew what was best, which is what made him, I think, on the whole, a fairly good producer. But he was a bit pie, I thought. And I remember one outrageous thing he said when we had a unit meeting in the new building we'd acquired in Greek Street, and Jimmy Ritchie was there, and I was there, and various other people, lot of them had been in the army or the RAF or naval Film Unit. Ron Bicker was another one was in the naval Film Unit, and at one point, doing some mild argument, Alexander said, well, a lot of people here had better. Member that they weren't good enough at their job to be reserved. And this didn't go down too well with Jimmy Ritchie, who had been flying on bombing raids over Germany, this sort of thing. And he and Budge Cooper also wanted to they wanted to start what would nowadays be called a commune. They wanted to move the entire unit out to the Cotswold somewhere. I think they must have heard of the famous Cotswold community, which still exists, actually. And there were many such sort of proto communes before the war, of people with various kinds of tendencies or beliefs. I mean, they might. They are the origin, I think, of the Tory myth of the sandal, wearing liberal sandal, wearing vegetarian liberal, who is sort of occurs in conservative party conferences every year, without fail. He wanted us all to give it all up and start this, this collective and the unit would buy a huge house, old manor house, or something of that sort, and we would all live and our socialist principles weren't as socialist as all that. And we told him where he got off on that one. But that was at the same period when Grierson? surfaced again from the States. God is here, as they used to
John Legard 16:24
see. Yes, he came back about 47 and I
Michael Clarke 16:26
remember Grierson was sent, sent to give us a pep talk, and we were supposed to listen rapt to, raptly, to this, this great man of whom we'd heard so much. And He came and tore us all off a strip. He said, You're all suffering from the carpet slipper mentality. He said, it's quite sickening. I come back to England and I find you having children and wives and homes buying houses. He said, The documentary movement will come to pieces if you don't snap out of it. The carpet slipper mentality is the death of creative film. And I said, Well, you've got a wife. And he said, Well, it's never stopped me making films. And he made us all very angry. Actually, I had something to do with Grierson later, when I was with the British Transport, and I personally was not turned on by him. I mean, I can see as he had enormous force, and he brought people together, but I didn't like him. I I think we jarred on each other. Somehow, I can come to that in a minute over this film, the South Wales film, yes, well, of
John Legard 17:35
course, he came to crown Film Unit at about that time too. I mean, he was the producer in charge there, and he was like a well to some people. They thought exactly the same as you did. I found him as a junior editor. I found him an enormous help, because he helped me over a particular film when he was actually directly involved in a production. He could be very stimulating and very encouraging.
Michael Clarke 18:05
Well I can see that he didn't really have to read his writing.
John Legard 18:08
There was one particular film that we that we made where the director had shot an enormous amount of stuff, and Grierson wasn't happy about the work, and he got rid of the director, and all this material was handed over to me for editing, and I did a rough cut. And he was Grierson, was over the moon. He said, My God. He said, I shouldn't have sacked this guy. This stuff does come together very well. I mean, I thought, Oh, this is all my own work. But, of course, in fact, the material was there. But anyways, the next few weeks, we worked very closely, and on the strengths of that, he gave me a job at Group Three, so I was always grateful to Grierson but that was one individual. But I mean, you're talking about a much broader aspect.
Michael Clarke 18:52
He had been brought in, as you know, the Archangel Gabriel, sorry, had descended to earth again, or something of the sort, later on, when I was working on a film with Jimmy Ritchie in Wales, Edgar was worried about his and never explained silly ass why he was worried. And Jimmy Rich and I were trying to make one film, they come onto something quite different. Grierson was brought in, and he saw the rough cut. And the factor that we hadn't really been told was that really they wanted to the film that would help to revivify the Welsh docks, but our film was about changes in transport pattern in South Wales and their social effects. And Grierson said, You haven't given me any information. I want to know the height of those cranes, how many tons each of them will lift? What's the draft of the ships that will come in to these harbors, and how do they vary? What are the characteristic loads? And so forth. Because he'd been told about the dock thing, and I could see vaguely what he was driving at, and I thought, of course, also what he was driving at. Was then getting Stuart Legge or somebody like that, to use all these sort of as it were, related data to produce impressive commentary
John Legard 20:12
in that style.
Michael Clarke 20:13
And I ll tell you about the commentary to the shell film on international airlines later on, and what Stuart could do with words on that. So I didn't get on very well with Groerson on that occasion, but the cooperative went on, and it was marvelous training, because they had two principal ongoing, as we say, assignments. One was mining review, which started at Data
John Legard 20:39
no two correction there. I started a Crown Film Unit. Yeah, because I was involved in the first six and I was in the cutting rooms, was, I think I did one myself and and just, just, Justin Jackson, Pat Jackson sister edited the rest of them. And we had a number of people. Had Max Anderson, yes, directing some, and Graham Wallace and
Michael Clarke 21:00
various I think what I what I was implanted, was, you're not incorrect. It didn't begin at the Cobalt? film unit formed. Anyway, mining review had to produce a reel a month with four stories in it, and usually of about the same length, and so it meant marvelous opportunities for practice. The other comparable thing was the contract to cover from the beginning to its final commissioning, the construction of the big strip mill for the steel company of Wales at Margam Port Talbot, so that every week there was at least one crew going off on one of these things, usually two or three. And the principle that was adopted as a general guide was that an experienced cameraman could have an inexperienced director, and vice versa. So sometimes Ron Bicker, who was an assistant, I think at that time, would be the lighting cameraman for a job with a yet junior
John Legard 22:03
wonderful training,
Michael Clarke 22:04
and somebody like Jack Chambers, or somebody would be directing some more experience she doesn't know, Francis Guyson, and this allowed one to get enormous experience of also the non filmic things that matter, like how you actually persuade people that you should be allowed into the no go area and the docks, how you get up to the top of a crane, how you ask nice old ladies to put the camera up in their best bedroom to get better viewpoint, and the whole organization of things and so on. I always like that. I like doing my own organization, actually Jack Holmes,
John Legard 22:42
and the fact that you were working fast too, because you had deadlines and so on, that's very good discipline.
Michael Clarke 22:46
But one of the significant things that I always remember about data and Alexander is that he had extremely strict views on that which will cut or that which will not cut. And he, I think he certainly got me terrified for some years that what I shot would not cut. It took me until 1954 I think, really, to really feel that I knew what I was doing with points of view lenses and camera movements. I was very scared of camera movements to begin with. One forgets that. One began with these two. Film companies are very poor. They began with Newman Sinclair clockwork cameras on wooden Vinten tripods that were very heavy, that things like panning movements and so on. One had these hydraulic what you call them, tripods, fluid head tripods, because the great problem in the film industry earlier has been the smoothness of pans. So it was rather difficult to do whip pans and zip pans to begin with, unless you had friction head tripod, which was always frowned upon, and the whole grammar of film was over emphasized. I think we were still getting questions like, if he doesn't come in left, how will we know that it is him and so forth. And I think audiences were probably more attuned to the image even then than we realized we were actually using the worries of about the 1920s really, the worries that people like Chaplin had.
John Legard 24:30
But a lot of a lot of well, quite distinguished directors never actually mastered that. I mean, for take the Flaherty, I would have thought would probably never, I don't suppose he knew it ever really got it right. Did either grammar that maybe he did by the time he made Louisiana story. But there are certain people who were great shooters. Weren't they. They weren't actually directors. In that sense, they were people who were
Michael Clarke 24:50
Several of them John Armstrong was always described as John Armstrong. described everybody as a great shooter. Oh, really, I don't know that. Yeah, something you lose. I mean, John Armstrong, who went to Shell? Not John Armstrong. Was it worldwide? I
John Legard 25:06
know the one you mean, yes, the one I went to Shell did all those marvelous films like Coupe des Alpes and so on, yeah. But
Michael Clarke 25:12
I mean, really instinctive, the grammar thing wasn't as difficult. It sounded the concept of the Golden line, I think is once you realize that the golden line, the golden line can exist between the camera and an object just as much as it can between one person and another person, and that the golden line is not necessarily horizontal, but it can tilt, you know. So the reverse of if I'm looking down at an object on the bench, the reverse of me looking must be preferably for the same sort of sides as, Oh yes, Desmond David, thing, that's all is really to it. But there are, and it was obvious that sometimes someone who's wearing a white chef's hat would be recognized as a chef. If there's any one chef in the story or in the sequence, whether he came in the right way or
John Legard 26:01
not didn't really matter. But Alexander was very pedantic
Michael Clarke 26:06
about this indeed, and he used to be very severe with people, but always as a dreaded news when you ring up about the rushes, I'm sorry, but it won't cut. And why it wouldn't cut was not always easy to explain. You know, orally, verbally, on the phone. Well, I got over that in the end, and I was eventually asked to make a film, a scientific film, by a sub company of data called nucleus, run by Jack Chambers. Jack Chambers had actually written the script of this with a very precise description of the exact lens to be used in terms of degrees of angle, subtended none of the how many inches or millimeters was the 35 degree lens and the 50 degree lens and so forth. It was a lovely script. And point of fact, of course, when it came to the actuality, it had to be altered. But I was terribly lucky, because the cameraman on this film, which was about tracing cross infection in maternity wards , or in hospitals, generally maternity wards Wolfgang Suschitzky was the cameraman who is one of the immortals, as far as I'm concerned, particularly through his utter effortlessness in doing almost everything, and his apparent ability to light things with almost no lights. But the first shot I asked him to do, and remember, there were no zoom lenses at this time, or anything of the sort, was a track in a large ward from holding the whole of the ward to a close up of a small pimple on the arms of a newborn baby, one all in one shot, and he just said, okay, okay, I'll be five minutes. It was a beautiful shot. I didn't know how difficult. I had no idea how difficult it was. It came up. We only had two takes, and the second one was just just insurance. So I made this film, and indeed edited it, as far as I can remember. And I think that possibly Margot Fleischner was my assistant.
John Legard 28:12
I didn't realize Margot was there.
Michael Clarke 28:14
Margot Comes from Surbiton Girls High School to data. And I'm pretty sure she was my assistant editor on several things, though not an assistant director, and she had much more talent than she would allow herself to recognize. I think, I think it's a pity she's not editing now.
John Legard 28:37
Yes, well, I've said to her that to her once or twice in recent years, because she turns up at our BTF reunion.
Michael Clarke 28:47
Yes, yes. Well, she told me on the phone that she was coming. Oh, good. So I directed this film and but otherwise, things seem to be getting a bit poor. The prospects for data. And indeed, the industry had a bit of a slump at this point. Now, in 1949 49 it seemed so. And I had a friend who was the political the diplomatic correspondent of Associated Press, which was the American owned equivalent of Reuters. One of the Reuters and AP were the two big agencies. And he said, Well, why don't you go it all up and come and work with us. And I'd always had another ambition, to be a political journalist, and some end up as editor of a New Statesman or something of that sort, or later the Listener. And so experimentally, I went and worked there at night for a week, but I soon found that what you're actually doing was simply re editing the cables you've kept coming in from all over the world to send them out to sub editors on newspapers who re edit them again. And it seemed a bit pointless, but they said, you know, you're an Associated Press, and you can go anywhere in journalism. But that was that was too much for me, and I decided. Not to take up this offer, my friend was very cross, and in fact, we've been somewhat estranged at this point, Edgar Anstey offered me the job. As far as I can recall, I was the first staff director at the newly formed British Transport
John Legard 30:19
had you known Edgar all but, I mean, presumably you met him once,
Michael Clarke 30:22
only vaguely. I sort of met him at meetings and things during all this period, we all started to think called British documentary. We still believe that documentary was, so to speak, a vocation and the movement and things of this sort, which I suppose it had been. And Michael Oram and I were and Humphrey Jennings were three most active people. We used to meet in film centers, top room in when they were in Soho square, and we were trying to, so to speak, revivify the idea of, I can only say, a movement. I don't think we really knew what it was all about. I don't think we knew what we meant, but we've had this gut feeling that there was somehow a kind of sort of comradeship between people in basic and realist and data and rotas and all the rest of it, that we had sort of common aims that were of some value to ourselves and to and to The world at large, because it
John Legard 31:21
was a slight decline, a period of decline just then, wasn't it in documentary films, because a COI Crown Film Unit were, you know, having difficulty. Were just folding. They were still going, but they were well past their period when
Michael Clarke 31:36
John Taylor, I think, had just gone, he was there to fold it up. John
John Legard 31:40
had left. Well, he was all right until Grierson came on the scene, and I gather, sort of started moving together posts a bit. And then they had this row And
Michael Clarke 31:41
they had this row about whether John Taylor thought there should be several centers of activity and Grierson and said there must be run by one man. Taylor said, I'm not that man.
John Legard 31:56
So he left, and he was, he was replaced by his brother in law, I suppose Donald Taylor, yeah, that's right, yes, and and he stayed for a couple of years, but there was a decline. I suppose budgets were getting tighter. It was a posterity period,
Michael Clarke 32:17
in a way. It was a pity that that phrase, the documentary movement, ever took hold so early on, I think, because it then slightly veiled from us, because we were all rather young and inexperienced in the ways of business, the fact that actually, as Mrs. Thatcher would point out, in the end, there must be a source of source of funds for everything, and everything has got to break even somewhere, somehow, and we rather too idealistic about it. When we'd all been in the Army or the Navy, or called up, if you like, into engineering and other jobs, the common wheel had been, as it were, the source of all the funds. We never asked. Was there enough money for a new microscope or a new machine gun. I mean, there either was a new machine gun or there wasn't, and you did what you could. And so there was this sort of vague feeling. But actually, if you look back, there wasn't as much idealism as all that. If there was among the makers of housing problems and industrial Britain and so on, I think it was a naive idealism, funded by quite a lot of private income on the parts of many of the early participants in the 30s and by an extremely successful PR job by Grierson. This is what Grierson really was good at, was getting funds, getting the Empire marketing board and then the GPO Film Unit to start happening, creating these sort of foci, absolutely enthusiasm in people like Stephen Talents and so forth, someone like Gerald Barry too. There was, there were allies in the fields of journalism and politics. It wasn't part of the entertainment business. And so everybody was rather impressed with the documentary movement by the time the 39 war began. I think just as they were impressed with the poets of the Auden Spender generation and things of this sort, just as they're impressed with certain kinds of architecture, it seemed part of the modern movement, and then it started to become assimilated. And the assimilation began, if you like, with the creation of the coal board and the transport
John Legard 34:32
coal board film unit started in about 47 didn't it? I think, or 48 something like that.
Michael Clarke 34:35
47 48 and I this is why I find the book by Elizabeth Sussex, which you may know, yes, the rise and fall of British documentary. I think it's got the wrong title, and it's written from the wrong point of view, quite apart from the fact that oral reminiscences like this one today are fallible And there are several states points of view, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. But on statements of fact, they are not she. She claims that her these recordings are historical data, and no historian would say that they are do other than round out or confirm and add to atmosphere and impressions. There are several things in the reported speech of Rotha and Legge and Elton points of fact, which I think I can controvert. So it's not as historical as all that. But she starts from the point of view of wanting a dramatic structure of a rise and fall. The processes of history themselves are less interesting than that. I think what has happened is there's a rise and acceptance and incorporation of documentary types of movie movie making, but that's not exciting, and it's not a good title. The rise and acceptance of documentary wouldn't sell any books. But consequently, she believes that by the time we're talking about 1948, the documentary movement was almost dead. And I would say that in fact, in the period for 15 years after that, there were really extremely significant developments in the use of film, in information
John Legard 36:17
and in industry,
Michael Clarke 36:18
quite apart from what's happening in television, which represented a branching out, rather than a decline. Absolutely, yeah, and that period oughtn't to be neglected, and that's really what I would like to talk about. And I'm getting so hung up boring you with my
John Legard 36:38
No, the memories This is all very important for very important you
Michael Clarke 36:43
come streaming back. I mean, I've had to think about it, and you see, I've typed out some notes.
John Legard 36:48
No, it just changed. It rose, and then it changed its spots, the documentary. I mean, it was going on and well, as you no doubt we'll be talking about later. Well, one was a new service of industry. I mean, this is what Edgar was always championing, wasn't he, anyway,
Michael Clarke 37:04
that's right. And in the end, it didn't matter what one's politics was that it was things like railways or oil companies or nuclear power, if you like. These are the things which are actually making everything else possible and paying out the money and should not be ignored. I mean, the fact that you might think it's terrible for a multinational to be so domineering wouldn't alter the fact that amazing things are being done in and by and for some of those companies in terms of human development, human achievement. Yeah, I want to talk about that, about shell in a minute. Well, at this point you say things sort of branched out. One of the branches out was the creation of the film units of two major industries, of coal and of transport. Transport, I think was more interesting socially, because it incorporated docks, busses, lorries, railways. This is the British Transport Commission. This was the British Transport Commission, and those of us who had voted for the Labor government felt that this was the fruition of our ambitions, in a way, and to be a transport filmmaker, to me, was fine, at least for several years, I was prepared to call myself a transport man whose job was making films, just a filmmaker who was good enough to lend his abilities to transport.
John Legard 38:23
Were you on the were you on the staff there?
Michael Clarke 38:26
Yes, I was as I think I'm certain that I'm right, that I was the first staff film director,
John Legard 38:34
regular staff, established staff. Yes. And Ron Craigen had been appointed, yes, he was a founder member, wasn't he?
Michael Clarke 38:40
Yes? And Edgar, of course. And then various other people recruited around the same time, Jimmy Ritchie, Ian Ferguson, I think Ian Ferguson, yes, he was already there as production manager, Colonel Ferguson. And the first films that were made, as I recall, there may have been some sort of little bit so there were the Cine gazettes because David Watkin had been imported from London Transport. And before I forget, David Watkin, of course, is now a celebrated cameraman, highly paid cameraman. He came in with his 16 mil camera from London Transport. He only got the job according to because his father was a director of one of the railways, right?
John Legard 39:28
Yes. And I thought he was southern southern region or something. It might have been together with Basil, basil Sangster and Bobby Allen, yes. Who was his right? Southern Region.
Michael Clarke 39:39
His father was a director or some highly paid chap, anyway, and David Watkins was always regarded to begin with, this rather sort of Second Class 16 mil chap, because 16 mil had been what he'd been told to work with,
John Legard 39:52
known as substandard film there was a company called substandard film finishes anyway.
Michael Clarke 39:59
They did. David Watkins worked on a number of these films. And of course, we were working in 16 when, once we went into color British Transport. This is leaping ahead a bit. But it was John Taylor who said to Edgar, this chap is brilliant. And Edgar was as toffee nosed about David Watkins, everybody else. I think finally, David had persuaded him to let him have 1000 feet, a 35 millimeter film, and an assistant and a week, and you must have seen the test roll that he shot.
John Legard 40:30
Yeah, I had to look. I looked after it for quite a long time after he left, because David used to ring me up and say, Could I borrow the cutting copy? And I knew that lovely stuff, yeah, and he used it. That's how he got
Michael Clarke 40:43
now, I suppose, a common place, but it was
John Legard 40:45
called Image de Gare and it was about Paddington Station, and it was just a country I'd love to have seen that. I only saw the rushes. The cutting copy is with Barry Coward who runs the British Transport films archive, if you ever want to see it anyway.
Michael Clarke 41:10
It was John Taylor who spotted that this diffident chap actually had real talent. And Edgar was very reluctant to believe it. And finally, I don't know how David got his sort of real first real break.
John Legard 41:23
Well, John Taylor allowed him to shoot the Blackpool film called Holiday, which Ralph Sheldon cut. Oh yes, that was David's first, I think that was his first credit as a cameraman. Oh, good, good. Which was a tremendous success, of course, well,
Michael Clarke 41:41
so the first films, there were two films. One was being made outside a Pathe by Peter Bradford, and this was about an engine driver and his fireman mate. And I was to make a film which whose working title was speed up. But in the end it was called work in progress, and John Sherman was the Assistant Producer there, I should have said. And work in progress was a film with five separate sections all linked together. We had a huge relief map of the whole of the British Isles made by Phillips in the Strand who did these things. It was about 20 feet long, and so we linked one section to another by going from the Woodhead tunnel. This was one of the sequences the Woodhead tunnel has just been closed by British Rail, but this was the new Woodhead tunnel to replace the old ones. That was quite frightening. We nearly got killed when the whole couple 1000 tons of rubble on the train ran away and came back against smashed themselves against the wall, right at our feet. Another really interesting bit to me was the first sequence on marine radar ever used in a public film. There were military films, of course, but this was crossing the Channel in the Maid of Orleans with Captain Larkins. And we had a week to shoot this sequence, which, in the end was, I suppose, only about six, seven minutes long. And the first four days of the week, it was brilliant sunshine. Fortunately, on the last day or the mist, arrived in time for the fog. Without the without the fog, the radar sequence would have been purely an exposition, sort of educational sequence, and we then had to film this very early radar on extremely slow film. But John Craigen solved the problem very nicely by relying on the initial really. He pre fogged the film. He left a tiny little bit of light in the dark room in which the radar screen was kept, just to overcome the initial inertia of the emulsion, to get an exposure on this very dim radar screen. And I was always rather proud of having filmed the First Marine radar. And every time I go across the channel now I look affectionately two or three radar scanners there are on all the ships. Yeah. And there was another sequence on lorries, a timed lorry service between Argyleshire and Glasgow. Another one radio controlled shunting.
John Legard 44:13
I think that was it. Radio controlled shunting up at March. Yes, Cambridge. That
Michael Clarke 44:19
was a time when Jim Garret, who was the assistant director, had about 150 pounds in rolled up money and on the little old fashioned train from Cambridge station to March, where there was one of very old fashioned loo it fell out of his pocket in a roll and fortunately, didn't disappear down the hole. I I think it was Jim Garrett. It was a jolly good unit to work for. So that was a 1951 day. Yeah,
John Legard 44:53
work in progress. Yes, work in progress. Number one. I think they made another one. Don't think so. Perhaps. I'm thinking of something else. Well,
Michael Clarke 45:01
I then got put on something quite different, which was permanent. Way maintenance, part two, lane line and part three, switches and crossings part one have been made by a chap who's name. I've forgotten it was a feature film. Assistant Director, it was about,
John Legard 45:19
probably Ken Fairbairn. Was it
Michael Clarke 45:22
something? No, it was a tall chap who wasn't an editor at all. He was He came from features, but I think he'd been an assistant director, and he did wonderful shots................................................................
Michael Clarke 0:01
Side three Well, we were talking about after work in progress. I got put on to instructional films on how to maintain the railway track, and spent a lot of time at a place called Crossbar and a very good hotel. So just south of Darlington in Yorkshire, in the depth of winter. It was very, very cold when the weather was bad. We were taught ferreting by the Bob Taylor, the ganger and his three men, because they always took their ferrets with them. They lived on the rabbits that they caught when they couldn't do their work, or before and after their work. We got extremely cold the hotel, this was in the rationing time. The hotel was a wonderful hotel. It had enormous stocks of the few things that were not rationed. Game, in other words. And so we ate in a princely way every evening at the compulsory maximum price of, I think it was five shillings for a meal, was the national compulsory maximum price, if you remember,
John Legard 1:05
was the meals. But we had lunch. We had dinner wss seven and six.
Michael Clarke 1:08
We had partridge and pheasant and grouse and heaven knows what a real old style country Hotel. So we ate well, and my cameraman about this time was a chap called Michael Coward Briggs,
John Legard 1:20
oh, yes, who later became a television producer. He was, he was,
Michael Clarke 1:25
yes. He had a wonderful house in St John's Wood, which I think had been his parents house. The thing about making instructional films is that you it really does test your ability to use the camera and the editing process together to explain and demonstrate, rather than to give an impression. The trouble with the part one film was some wonderfully eloquent shots of how to lay new tracks had been made by this director, whose name I don't remember, but the whole thing did not succeed in explaining to the trainees how to do it. It was just impressionistic. So the trouble with instructional films, though, especially if one had a producer like Donald Alexander, who was very pedantic about the editability of things, as if you were not careful in a simpler sort of film with a narrative film, if you're not careful, you would shoot a whole instructional sequence on how to go through a door. Establish a man approaching, him approaching, establish the door. Establish that he is going towards the door, establish that the door has a handle, establish how his hand goes on it. Make sure you establish which way the handle turns, what then happens to the door when all this it opens in a certain direction, and then how to go through the door. And it took me a bit of a while to get over just the sort of sheer habit of shooting detail that, though relevant, was unimportant. I don't suppose it took me very long, but there was a sort of automatic habit of saying, got this, got that, this one and that one, and I had to break through of it and start to become more impressionistic, I suppose
John Legard 3:13
But I mean, instructional, of course, were, I mean, for example, there was a five reel film we made about level crossing gates. I don't direct that, did you? No, no, that was 35 mil five reels of operating, of level crossing gates. And that sounds a bit like that sort of going through the door syndrome. Well, when those interests of safety, anyway, sorry,
Michael Clarke 3:34
at this time, Edgar Ansley had also resolved to make what we used to think of as intelligent travelogues. In other words, the idea was to encourage the notion of enjoying the beauties and the, what we now call heritage of Britain, because that would encourage people to travel
John Legard 3:53
I think Edgar's expression was creating an appetite for travel. That's
Michael Clarke 3:56
That's right. Well, that puts it exactly yes and N percent of people would go by car, but the other 100 minus n would go by and that was the
John Legard 4:09
idea for the other 45% that didn't have cars.
Michael Clarke 4:11
The other, as it were, maxim that we had, though nobody ever put it in a pithy way, was that we were not making what used to be called Fitzpatricks, the ones which ended with the legendary phrase, and so we leave the happy people. So that I was asked to make a film about the Cotswold area, or the heart of England. It became called, rather
John Legard 4:36
your part of your territory,
Michael Clarke 4:38
which is now, yes,
John Legard 4:40
that's why you're living there now,
Michael Clarke 4:43
before and when I said this film ought to be about the Cotswolds, not really about the bus services and the trains, I mean, Edgar absolutely agreed. And I then thought that the film ought to be based in the seasons inter alia that. persuade people that the winter was also a time to travel. And also the Cotswolds looked particularly beautiful in certain kinds of winter day. And I also had read the very popular books of a writer called John Moore, who wrote a book called Brensham village, which was actually about Breedon, where he lived, and a book called Portrait of Elmbury, which he wrote, which is actually about Tewkesbury. And I decided to get to know this man. So I went to Breedon it was very clear that he always had a drink to a local pub, and somebody pointed him out to me, and we became good friends. Actually,
John Legard 5:36
I'm interested to hear this, because I got to know him very well later on, because I worked on his later films. He then became
Michael Clarke 5:41
Edgar's friend. Yeah, Edgar captured him. Was way, a little way he had, and also he was, they were both members of the Saville club.
John Legard 5:50
Perhaps he was already a Savile was he John Moore by then?
Michael Clarke 5:53
Yeah, he was a lovely man. John Moore, I thought. I mean, he was of a kind of, he's a bit responsible for the countryside myth, which does a bit of harm. Now, I think, I mean, it does bit of harm. And people driving their city suits and their Range Rovers and then put on their country wear, nobody who lives on when they wear weather clothes. Some rich yuppies wear and they think it's Saturday, but no, he, he was a conservationist before the word was used, really, he was a lovely, lovely man. He was He who gave me the introduction to the man in the Midland BBC, Midland the service, who suggested I write the article, the write the broadcast about looking at the Cotswolds through a filmmakers eye that made Edgar Ansty so annoyed that I had not asked his permission. That time, I had left British Transport for six months and left the permanent staff and I had been to Iraq to make a film in Iraq for Film Centre, which is why I was not a staff member anymore. I was a freelance and doing other bits and pieces as well. But I suppose perhaps the time to this is the time to mention that I was asked by Arthur Elton if I would like to go to Iraq to make a film about building the world's, at that time, the world's longest pipeline from the oil wells in Kirkuk all the way to the Mediterranean and Edgar to do him credit. Said, Elton has asked me if you'd be interested, but you wouldn't want to a thing like that, would you? And I said, Well, I'm not so sure. So in the end, I did go and do it, and then went back to British Transport for a year or two as as a freelance and that was when some of the, I think, more interesting films were made.
John Legard 7:48
But did you do? You did the Heart of England before you went to
Michael Clarke 7:53
but this is what my memory has failed me on. And I haven't been up into the roof space to find a file.
John Legard 7:59
I have an idea. It might have been, I think you might have made it after you went. I think it was yes, because something John Sherman said the other day, he said that you made the Third River before he went out. And of course, John went up Baghdad, I think in 1952 probably,
Michael Clarke 8:16
and he went for a recce in 52 three,
John Legard 8:20
yes. And you see, I don't think that from Heart of England was
John Legard 8:26
until, yeah. That,
John Legard 8:29
in a way, it's not all important. But
Michael Clarke 8:32
the thing I had forgotten is that after I'd gone to Iraq, John Sherman took over the finishing of I made a Cine Gazette for London Transport, which was the thing that the unit did on two principal themes. One was taking a tube train to pieces, which they do every 100,000 miles, and take every bit of it, take the body off the wheels and the motors out of the motor, yes, and clean them all up and repair them and put them together again, I think I omitted that. And the other piece was the place where they made the canteen with marvelous sausage machines and a little piece on the skid patch, yes, and I said that I wanted improvised music cool jazz. And we chose a pianist called Dick Texas, and John Sherman possibly yourself, supervised this recording, and he did two takes, I think, for each piece. And it was lovely music. I wish I had the track of it
John Legard 9:36
. Yes, so do I? Yes. That was a very successful little film.
Michael Clarke 9:41
I was very lucky. I think I never made a film with pre recorded music unless it's pre recorded music I wanted specifically in Data I was editing a film with Mary Orram Mary Beals, as she was then on displaced persons. and we had not much money for music, but I actually sang the first verse of the first song in the winter. Gute Natt, you know the cycle in the minor p for the loneliness of this chap in the sexes were segregated for these displaced persons. And they were in two different camps, and this Slav whatever he was singing, this all lonely, and then, as Schubert himself does it in the last verse, it changes into the major key. And for that, we just use the piano in the Pathe studio just to bring in the same theme in octaves, sort of piano behind there because we were strapped for money for music. And since then, I last film I ever made, I had to do the music myself, because around money and I performed it on a synthesizer
John Legard 10:50
How did you Yeah So you always use so
Michael Clarke 10:54
improvised music struck me as the best way of dealing with this, just because it seemed right for such a thing, and also because it was cheap, whereas when we used Edward Williams, who wrote for another film I did on country houses, incredibly naive juvenile film, but he wrote some very beautiful music for a wind, yes, I remember, yes. Very nice indeed. He also wrote some lovely music for a film that Rod Baxter made on canals called There go the boats ,There go the boats where he used five four times to simulate the pop, pop, pop of the diesel engine. Most people are unfamiliar with five four time, except in the second movement the Tchaikovsky sixth symphony. Well, it's familiar, but otherwise, it's usually people thinking threes, fours and sixes,
Michael Clarke 11:43
And this pop pop pop op goes very well to the boats, yes. So shall we? Shall I have finished British Transport, including those years, and then we can go back to Iraq, which led on to my next geo global. Yes, so we finished this British Transport before the sandwich. Yeah, right. Well, the other films in British Transport were not so happy, really, the Heart of England. I think I enjoyed making it in four seasons. Very much though once again, I look at look at it again. The other day, I got a tape of it, and there's the camera is not lively at all. I mean, not in the way at all. It was rather timid static, relying more upon editing and the relation of shot changed to verbal emphasis and that sort of thing to give it any sort of dynamic, and to the music. And if I remember, the music was Elizabeth Lutyens, so I'm not certain of that. It was yes, yes, first time I met her. No, it wasn't. She did the music for the Iraq film in 1952 Oh, the third river. I think she I
John Legard 13:00
think she, I think it was probably the first film that she done for British Transport.
Michael Clarke 13:05
She did this one for film center. It was a suggestion I knew knew of her work, that I hadn't heard it was, I think either Neil Matheson or Ken Cameron who suggested her. I became very friendly with Liz.
John Legard 13:17
. She was an interesting person, wasn't she? I liked her very much. So did I.
Michael Clarke 13:24
But the other travel films I got involved in were less happy. Was a film in East Anglia.
John Legard 13:30
Oh, yes, yes, I edited that for you
Michael Clarke 13:36
that I think the trouble with Edgar, in my view, was that he did not let one be the director of One's film. One was only the director of the shooting.
John Legard 13:44
Yeah, that's right, that's why I said I directed. I edited it for you, or for somebody. Well, because, in fact, you were not in
Michael Clarke 13:50
on, I'm afraid you edited it for Paul Lasaux who was a nice man I thought was, I found him an absolute disaster. He went through a
John Legard 13:59
very interesting stage. I rather liked his use of words, great word spinner. Not everybody liked him
Michael Clarke 14:04
But I mean, I suppose something had to be done, the fact the film was was bedeviled by weather. It was never the shooting never finished. And so something had to be made. I never forgave him, though, for the poem about the boats go like old violins. Robert Graves, man, I think poetry should be economical and spare and should be nothing but meaning.
John Legard 14:28
You know, it is a very successful film. Very successful. It went around on the Odeon circuit, or whatever it was, as a supporting film for one of the features, well, the other day, and it got reviewed in films and filming by Ken Gay, who said, right, it's called East Anglian holiday, a very simple title. Well, I suppose it did something, and it was the music was composed by a nice lady called Doreen Carwitham That's right, she had entirely strings.
Michael Clarke 15:03
Yes, she had a bit of a steam at that period from sight. Well,
John Legard 15:08
she didn't she marry Bill Orwin. I haven't heard she ah. Then she disappeared
Michael Clarke 15:14
when things switched off. Remind me to talk to you about such relationships.
John Legard 15:21
Well, I didn't like it because I enjoyed working on it. I thought it was great fun well, because I always got on rather well with Paul. You know, we have it clearly worked so well. I remember your expression on your face when you saw it, because you've been doing something else while we were finishing it off.
Michael Clarke 15:42
I think there's a very dangerous trend in the use of words, and it's summed up by the way in which every school child used to be taught Maesfield's poem Fargo?, the one that begins a quinquereme of Nineveh from distant over here, rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine. And so it goes on. Now Robert Graves, in his essay the common Asphodel, really takes this film apart. He deconstructs it, as they say. Now, he points out, first of all, that ophio is landlocked, which is about 1000 miles from the nearest sea. Next that quinqueremes were a late Roman invention. So that was they were a Roman invention of Roman ladies, and they drew about 15 feet of water, and that there's no evidence that the Euphrates have at any time being such as to support a quinquereme which either would have to have been transported 600 miles over land or gone round the Cape of Good Hope and up the Red Sea, up the Persian Gulf 400 miles up to Nineveh, no evidence that that could have happened. And so on. Every verse of it. In other words, these are emotive words put together to give a warm, jumbled mush.
John Legard 17:07
Oh, I thought it was marvelous, location, atmosphere of those days.
Michael Clarke 17:10
The last verse, if you remember, is the salt cake smokes stack butting up the channel in the Mad March days, was cargo or something other, and cheap tin trays. Now, in those days, Graves was right to point out the chin tin trays would have been made in the very place it was going to it might have been carrying coals to Newcastle. These days, of course, they come from Turin? He hadn't done his research right, putting emotive words together. And that tradition is carried on by Stuart Legge. In the worst cases, in the best cases, it was incomparable. In the worst cases, it was meretricious, wasn't it? I thought the soul's work was meretricious. I mean, he was a very nice, very nice man. But you see, I think, in the end, Anthony's judgment, I think, was fallible in this respect, he he didn't realize what stereotypes he himself was a victim of. And this came out in the film, which is now called every valley. Oh, right, yes, which I wrote and directed, and Jimmy Ritchie shot with me, and we're very much colleagues on this. Interesting enough, I had a Welsh wife and he had a Welsh wife from the same region. And it was agreed that that film would be about the way in which life was changing in South Wales because of the transport, among other things, of the transport systems that in the past there had been the coal and the steel operating at the heads and along vertical valleys running roughly north, south, and all communication was was north, south and to the main road and rail at the Cardiff Newport area. And so the valleys were closed communities and people would walk over to the next valley, and that sort of there was very little employment for women. The improvement in busses and roads made it possible to have lateral communication and enabled the diversification of industry, as the coal industry, even then, was running down, enabled new industries like the trading Estates at Treforest and other places of quite different kinds, to be brought in. The mining tradition had encouraged education, and the great tradition of education and of music created a great sense of social solidarity, because this was all being spread, both to women and to new opportunities in work, and it was agreed that this was what film should be about, and it wasn't let on to me that the docks were anything more than incidental. Part of it. Turns out that in the end, the whole film was intended to be financed from the docks board, whatever it's called at the time. Anyway, Jimmy and I made this film, and the BBC had just started producing films in a title, which I think was called 40 minutes all those years ago. Certainly, the 40 minuteer was a standard documentary length, and we made a cut 40 minutes long. And I can't remember who edited it, and perhaps I did it myself. I really can't remember which a lot of people were really rather pleased with. And the thing was based on a quasi realist story. I found a ticket collector, Merthyr Tidvyll station, who was called, oddly enough, Glyn Wales. He really was called that. He was a county counselor and a local counselor and a lay preacher in Welsh and English, and he was a full time ticket collector, quite a local figure, and his he had descended from immigrants who came to work for forsy??. in the early steel mills and iron blast furnaces of the early 19th century. He probably came from England. And we based the film on him and also on a young couple living further south with a working wife criss crossed on all this, and we felt that it should be this kind of there was some possibility that was possible occasionally to get film shown on BBC. And Edgar was aware of this, but he wouldn't push it at all. I said,
John Legard 21:36
look, let's just show it. Wasn't it
Michael Clarke 21:39
someone like this, yeah, and I wanted to show it to Rotha. In fact, Rotha saw it really and took a fairly good view of it, made some good suggestions, but I then went back to Iraq to do well, partly to Iraq to do another film. And so
Michael Clarke 21:55
it vanished, didn't it, rather than for a bit
Michael Clarke 21:56
Well, what happened was that I thought it was a terrible mistake. It was turned into a cod Welsh film. I mean, it took every Welsh stereotype that is, and it even had that
John Legard 22:11
Donald, Donald, Donald Houston, Houston,
Michael Clarke 22:14
sort of music hall Welshman. He did very well, and it threw it all. poor, yeah, there's those totally false things. Like the chap says at one point, I'm not sure if he says it of himself, or commentator says, commentators plays it off him. You know, this is everyone calls him Dai The footer , you see, absolute nonsense. I mean, this sort of thing. This is the stereotype. And the whole film was made to support the very opposite case to what we made it about. It was made to support the case that despite industrialization, despite the employment of women, despite the changes in transport and so on, who else was all the same, dear old hymn singing, sentimental people,
John Legard 22:58
that's right. And they had the hit. You had the choral sequence, of course, and John Trumper, who edited it, used the bits of the Messiah, didn't he? That's why I called it. That's why they called it Every valley. When it was finished, it was called Every valley
Michael Clarke 23:09
Well, that's right. I mean, I decided that it would be cowardice not to have a Welsh choir in a film about South Wales, just because it seemed corny and things to use it. And it was my only experience, actually, of shooting a large chorus and a small orchestra to playback with the first recording with Ken Scrivner and his band Oh, really. And then we shot them to play back way music recording was done in those days. In other words, they they mind it all mass and then the closer shots. And we use that all we, like sheep have gone astray, see to indicate that, and that sequence was kept to some extent that to indicate the diversity of life nowadays, or then a days compared with the old days of the mining industry and scrubbing her husband's back. We got back from Pitt, and there were, there was John Armstrong. The other lovely shot, Jimmy did a wonderful shot. We ended at the end of the chorus. It goes sort of and under Adagio, and into the minor key. And the iniquity of them is visitors on us all, or something. This is John Armstrong kissing the deputy librarian, very romantic scene. And it all got changed into this sentimental thing. But I know a number of very sentimental, boring, middle class or aging, led people who also thought it was lovely. Really took me back a bit.
John Legard 24:47
They're all London, where it's been. It's been shown on television a couple of times, revival, and just recently, because Barry Coward
Michael Clarke 25:00
Edgar kept saying to me at that show at the NFT just before he died, he said, I still think that Every Valley is the pinnacle of your career.
John Legard 25:10
And how did you reply,
Michael Clarke 25:12
Edgar you know, I've never agreed with you about it, and I don't agree now. He said, I'm very sorry about that. I mean, I felt so proud of having selected you, and then you came up with a wonderful film like that. I said, Oh, well, see I think a lot of I mean, Edgar had a lot of terrific qualities, but he did. He was a victim of stereotyping. I can remember much later, when I was at the Royal College of Art, and he was, for some reason, I never defined on the governors of it for many, many years, on the council. And he I got him in as an external examiner in the baby film school there was then, and he found a student who didn't like the work of sort of Heals, furniture of Gordon Russell, didn't like Ben Nicholson's abstractions, didn't like the Bauhaus, didn't like any of the received rubies of the 30s and early 40s. And Edgar was absolutely astonished at this. He couldn't imagine that tastes could change. I was, I was astonished at him
John Legard 26:29
being,
Michael Clarke 26:29
on the other hand, he had just leaping ahead. He had some judgment. We had a student called Lawrence Moore, the very first output, who made a film, his diploma film, on Michael Rosenstein and Edgar tried to get the BBC to see it, because he said, you know that that is a very distinguished documentary. I mean, this is the time when John Reed was making his sorts of films about us, films about artists, yes. And so he perceived that. But he somehow, it's very odd. He, well, I suppose it's show business. He had to stick to things that would sell in a certain milieu. That's right, yeah, that we weren't being paid to make a socially progressive or informative documentary. I wanted the film to be informative, and so did Jimmy. He wanted it to give an impression. I think this is the difference between the real documentalist. Documentarian, to me, is the person who, with an whatever art or craft he can muster and seems appropriate, can inform, rather than just please, he can please and enforce.
John Legard 27:39
Yeah, I think we should never break us.
Michael Clarke 27:45
So we were talking before the break about British Transport and the film about South Wales, and one or two discontents about who was supposed to be doing what, with and for whom. And such discontents are often at the center of rows about films, I think you'd agree, John, yes,
John Legard 28:05
indeed, yes. I think that's very true. Yes. What about now? We're going to talk about that film, which you directly called Link Span.
Michael Clarke 28:13
Yes, that I was pleased to do that because I like ships and boats and having they made the short sequence on the cross channel ferry some years earlier, on the radar, yes, on the radar. This was a chance to make a film about the train ferries, which were not only the well known train ferry that used to begin with the sleepers that left Victoria station at, I think it was 11pm at midnight, and go straight through to Paris, having been conveyed onto a ferry boat and off the other end in France, there are also other train ferries that ran from Harwich to Zeebrugge I think, yes, that's right, Harwich to Zeebrugge was the freight and these were freight ferries, and these were lovely old tubs. So we made this film about train ferries. And of course, the International train the one from London, Victoria to the garden Noel, had to take precedence. And we spent a great deal of time going back and forth between Dover and Dunkirk and between Harwich and Zeebrugge. And filming ships is always fun. Filming trains is always fun. And the great thing about most filming of any kind is fun. And I suspect that when it isn't fun one way or another, it probably shows in the result. However, when the shooting of this film had been completed and before the editing began, I was asked by Film Center, who were a well known firm started by John Grierson in 1939 and Arthur Elton to go back to them to work abroad. And I think we might talk about that in a moment. But before we do, I'd like to make the point that directors in British Transport films after the early years, when, for instance, I edited myself my own film, work in progress. Directors were directors of shooting, and the producer, Edgar Anstey see who sometimes delegated to John Sherman or Ian Ferguson, the producer was the person who had the real voice in how the film finally shaped and we directors, younger directors, all unknowing, were the precursors of what came to be called the auteur theory, the author theory in film criticism, which suggests that the director, in most cases, the true author of the final work that emerges, well, British Transport, you hadn't much chance of being there. I've explained, I think, how the South Wales film changed from being a film about social change and the role of transport therein, through an impressionistic film about the somewhat stereotype view of Wales and the Welsh Well, in the case of linkspan, it was not quite as cosmic a problem as that, but nevertheless, I found that the way the film had been edited eventually edited, in particular, the way the commentary, the soundtrack had been made, seemed to me to be so so much in a sort of kindergarten style, very often the words simply describing what could well be Seen visually on the screen that I was quite upset with, what the French would call the banalisation, the banalizing of the material.
John Legard 31:49
Surely, didn't you have the opportunity of insisting or suggesting involved in I have in the post production stage?
Michael Clarke 31:57
Yes, I could have. I was not invited. I was quite busy writing the new film. You were on your next film. I was on my next film, or Film Center, another company, but nevertheless I was most of the time available in London. And I'm not quite sure of the dates, but in principle, I feel I could have been phoned in and asked if I had any comments. But to the best of my recollection, I never was.
John Legard 32:18
, because one of the problems with British Transport was that we tended to shoot films based on treatments rather than on exact shooting scripts and so on. And I mean, it isn't nature of the work documentary in those days,
John Legard 32:44
fair enough.
Michael Clarke 32:47
Well, you ll take it the other way around.
John Legard 32:49
I'm just saying. You know that in view of the fact that we didn't have the usual detailed shooting scripts, it was therefore even more important that the director should
Michael Clarke 33:00
be. It was a fairly detailed treatment, as I recall, but I think I probably lost it. But I mean, as an editor, surely you ought to welcome the creative possibilities.
John Legard 33:11
I look at it from your point of view entirely. As an editor, I was delighted, as we were talking about East Anglian holiday earlier, and I was delighted to have the opportunity of working on this material. Eventually, it is very highly on that
Michael Clarke 33:24
as a film director, I would say that anyone who wants an exact shooting script about what can only be described as a general activity or trend or something in the world or practice is living in a world of Fairyland. It's almost never possible unless we built as in the television series casualty, where, if you build everything, you can make it go exactly as you want. The studio production anyway,
John Legard 33:51
sort of detailed treatment. A lot of the stuff that we made was the treatment was on one side of a postcard. For example,
Michael Clarke 34:01
you should talk sometime to the microphone about Stuart McAllister. Very happy to do so, yeah, I remember when, eventually, I think I'm trying to remember which the attractive young assistant lady film editors I'm talking about. I think it was Margot Fleischner? . Yes, it was when Stuart McAllister was given a lot of material, and she had very carefully indexed it and put it together in reels related to the particular themes of the various sequences. I can't remember for life of me what film it was, and she'd made a good assembly of, for example, the Dock sequences, the railway sequences, whatever it may be, and he got very angry with her, tore it all to pieces. Said, I don't want to see that sort of thing. I want it jumbled up. Join it together again. Jumbled up because he was looking for serendipitous ideas, very reasonably serendipitous.
John Legard 35:00
Yeah, by definition, haphazard links or whatever.
Michael Clarke 35:06
Anyway, I was asked, as I said, to join Film Center, and we moved to a different sort of plane, not higher or better, but just different, because this went on with the sort of international things I got rather involved in in two senses, one in working in other countries, and two in dealing with international organizations, both capitalistic financial organizations and international bodies like the UN and the United Nations agencies I had already worked abroad in France and Belgium and Germany, a little bit on British Transport films and in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon on the film. I mentioned about pipeline in 1952 which was interpolated into my period with British Transport 1952 I was asked to make this film about building a 30 inch pipeline between Kirkuk and the Mediterranean at that time, this was very long and thought to be rather adventurous. And to me, it was a great adventure. I had to go away for some three or four months, which didn't seem long, compared with four and a half years abroad in the war, but nevertheless, from the family's point of view, was a lot, and all I knew was that there was a promising Iraqi cameraman called Karim Majid who had been recommended by a person called Alex Shaw, whom others were, oh, Right, well, who'd been filming in the Middle East,Alexander Shaw, and that I had to make this film, and I better get out there quickly, because the last ship load of pipe was arriving in Basra. But Basra docks on a certain date. So off I went to Iraq, armed by armed with an Austin raised full feet dinner jacket and all the rest of it, because Arthur Elton said you must have dinner jacket, black tie and so forth for all that, for dinners at the embassy. In the event, I didn't unpack it from start to finish. It was made of thick wool. It proved invaluable later to me and later to my sons, who wore it for the various jazz gigs they performed in, and it's still being used by my eldest son. Anyway. So I went off and I met this cameraman, Karim Majid, who turned out to be also a pornographic photographer of considerable distinction. And when I had to go off on my own, on the local airplane, up the pipeline and over to Syria and back, he said, You will be a lonely you will be lonely. You will be a lonely person. Here are 100 of my pictures. Take take 10 or 20 to help you. I was quite astonished at the degree of clinical close ups he had taken of his girlfriends, quite extraordinary, but he was, he was a dedicated guy. He had a rich uncle who had bought him an Eymo camera, and he'd already taken some pictures of the arrival of these pipes in Basra. And we flew to Basra and got some rather nice shots of the last load coming off. It was my first experience of filming things that are really rather monumental in size, when a whole pile of these brick pipes, which were something like 40 yards long, 30 inches each pile on top on a railway flat, started puffing away with an American type cow catcher steam locomotive pulling them. This gave a sort of sense of scale and difference of place that was quite marvelous. It was incredibly hot I remember. And the other thing is, I suddenly started to see connections that will seem very naive now. But for instance, we went out in a boat on the waters at the head of the Shatt al Arab where Basra is, and we found vast flocks of hundreds, if not 1000s, of flamingos taking off in squadrons at the same time. And I filmed these taking off, and that actually made a marvelous transition to the old Constellation aircraft taking off in a later film in which the protagonist, an Iraqi professor, flew to Europe, and things of that sort that didn't seem to occur to them. Somehow, when making films on permanent way maintenance, quite so much. Anyway, we made this film. We had a crew, a promising young man called Peter Kelly, whom Arthur Elton had discovered from somewhere his first film as a cameraman. And that taught me early on that cinematography isn't quite the mystery that for many years, people tried to pretend it was the kind of closed speciality that. These years of apprenticeship. This young man was very talented. He went to Canada, actually, immediately afterwards and never, I think, he works the National Film Board to this day. We had a camera assistant called Kelvin Pike. He was an Iceland whose father was called. He was named Kelvin because his father was an electrical engineer to whom Lord Kelvin was one of the great figures in history. And I think that's great. And Karim Majid was my assistant director, and, if necessary, standby camera man. But he, of course, was not socially well received. I don't think he was known for his porno photography activities, but he was not of the sort of top people. And the oil company, of course, dealt only with the top people, the top social classes. But nevertheless, he came and we filmed all along, all over the Iraqi desert. We filmed in Palmyra and places like this. And eventually I edited the film with Ralph Sheldon as my assistant. Ralph Sheldon had just lost his job on the disillusion of the crown Film Unit, and somebody had passed his name to me, and this started a friendship. I hope I'm right in saying, which began then and has gone on ever since, and also taught me the value of a thorough reading of the works of SJ Perelman to any conversation. Yes, because Ralph Sheldon depends more than he knows, perhaps, on the works of that celebrated author. And we edited the film, and Liz Lutyens wrote the music, and it was premiered with due ceremony in the Grosvener House Hotel, and an Iraqi version was made interestingly, one of my great friends in Jerusalem, Gabriel Jabra, whom I mentioned earlier, had, after the departure of the British from Palestine, had escaped to Jordan and then to Iraq, and had converted, I suspect, for reasons of prudence, more than he else to Islam and called himself Jabra Ibrahim jablah, and was teaching impoverished in a primary school somewhere In Baghdad. But I was able to locate him, and he became the translator of the Arabic version of this film. The Arabic version was very important because the film was designed to reconcile the oil company to the population right, much more than to describe its operations to the English speaking audiences in Europe, and it is clear that the oil resources have made and can make enormous money and produce enormous benefits to Iraq, whatever is happening there at the moment, and this was the beginning of jabras rise to some distinction, because he was, he had a Cambridge degree in English and a master's degree from Harvard, which he had taken after I had known him in Palestine. He was a poet and something of a painter, and he brought an outpost of contemporary Euro, American style culture to a basically Islamic country which was not dominated in quite the same way as some countries by fundamentalism, certainly not in the 50s. And as John Sherman would perhaps has recounted, Jabra was responsible for the first sort of private views, and indeed vernissage and particulate painters works, and there's tremendous amounts of rather derivative art. But it was art. It was the liberation of the imagination from the very restricted Islamic forms which are ll study in themselves but are denied
Michael Clarke 43:58
figurative
work in and
Michael Clarke 44:03
this, of course, actually stirred up certain resentments. Making a film in Iraq was difficult because the sponsor, the oil company, wanted to keep on the right side of the religious organizations. I remember being taken to see the editor of the principal religious painter, who said he saw no objection to figurative images, provided they were vegetables, of trees and fruits and flowers, but not of living creatures that he called them animals, let alone people. And this was the sort of narrow tightrope that always had to exist between the modernizers and the strict religionist, just as in Jerusalem, there had always been the struggle between the Hasidim and the strict Sabbath observers and the European assimilates, who brought some Rhineland type culture. Anyway, that's how jablah got involved, and he then was involved in. Other film they wrote made later in 55 because so I guess to the third river.
John Legard 45:07
I mean, did you was it properly used when it was made
Michael Clarke 45:10
and you get proper distribution widely? Yes, 35 and 16, it was shown every cinema in Iraq, really. This is so different from the specialized film with the all too specialized distribution that we were used to in most of the documentary. I..............................................................
Michael Clarke 0:06
Take two.side 4
John Legard 0:09
yes, take two. And what was it shown in the cinemas in this country?
Michael Clarke 0:15
Well, the third river Yes,
or rather No, it wasn't as far as I showed in the cinemas, except possibly privately. But it was shown, as far as I know, in every cinema in Iraq and more than once. And indeed, there were said to be interesting reactions, because although the railways and airplanes and roads not always very good, nevertheless there were reactions such as people in the North, up in the Kurdish north, saying, Did you see the sea? We have never seen the sea before, and the port and those great ships and that port, that sort of thing. Other people saying, we've seen the mountains of Kurdistan. I didn't know much at that time about the independence movement in Kurdistan. All the areas, which now in nine areas, which, now in 1993 in revolt against Saddam Hussein, were then marvelous mountain areas which we we ventured on mules provided by the Iraqi army. We had a camera mule and a mule eat and I think, yes, we had a tripod mule and a camera mule, and then a mule eats, and our escort had mules, and we went right up towards the Iranian and almost towards the Soviet border, I believe. But it was said that people were not aware of the nature of their country, how much the Kurds really felt any sense of union with Iraqis and the Deep South and the marsh Arabs and so on. I think there's all too much worry about whether people feel they belong to nation states. I'm against it. I want to be international. And that's another story. Well, I was asked to go back in 1955 to make a different film to explain to Iraqis, the nature of the oil economy and its relationship, a to the world economy, the energy economy, and B to their own general national economy. In other words, the oil company, I think, wanted people both to understand the importance to them of the oil that it was not just a piece of exploitation, or they would say, not at all a piece of exploitation. They had their share, but Iraq had the major share in the profits of this wonderful asset. At the same time, they wanted them to realize that Iraqi oil was in competition, not only with other oils, but with wave power, wind power, coal, imperative energies, all other forms of energy. And this was partly because the populations reaction seemed to be divided into two extremes, those who said that the oil company was pure, purely exploiters, just dreaming of that which was rightfully Iraq's and the others who said that it was an almost infinite source of riches. So why there wasn't? Was there not always the money for a new operating theater, a new museum, a new bridge, a new road. So I took this as a brief, simply to explain the bare elementals of the economy of selling energy in a world has other sources of energy. And we wrote a, I think, really very banal and simple structure, taking a professor of geography in a man called Jassim LL, Khalaf, who, now, indeed, I believe, is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Baghdad, but was then a professor, or rather No, it wasn't as far as I showed in the cinemas, except possibly privately. But it was shown, as far as I know, in every cinema in Iraq and more than once. And indeed, there were said to be interesting reactions, because although the railways and airplanes and roads not always very good, nevertheless there were reactions such as people in the North, up in the Kurdish north, saying, Did you see the sea? We have never seen the sea before, and the port and those great ships and that port, that sort of thing. Other people saying, we've seen the mountains of Kurdistan. I didn't know much at that time about the independence movement in Kurdistan. All the areas, which now in nine areas, which, now in 1993 in revolt against Saddam Hussein, were then marvelous mountain areas which we we ventured on mules provided by the Iraqi army. We had a camera mule and a mule eat and I think, yes, we had a tripod mule and a camera mule, and then a mule eats, and our escort had mules, and we went right up towards the Iranian and almost towards the Soviet border, I believe. But it was said that people were not aware of the nature of their country, how much the Kurds really felt any sense of union with Iraqis and the Deep South and the marsh Arabs and so on. I think there's all too much worry about whether people feel they belong to nation states. I'm against it. I want to be international. And that's another story. Well, I was asked to go back in 1955 to make a different film to explain to Iraqis, the nature of the oil economy and its relationship, a to the world economy, the energy economy, and B to their own general national economy. In other words, the oil company, I think, wanted people both to understand the importance to them of the oil that it was not just a piece of exploitation, or they would say, not at all a piece of exploitation. They had their share, but Iraq had the major share in the profits of this wonderful asset. At the same time, they wanted them to realize that Iraqi oil was in competition, not only with other oils, but with wave power, wind power, coal, imperative energies, all other forms of energy. And this was partly because the populations reaction seemed to be divided into two extremes, those who said that the oil company was pure, purely exploiters, just dreaming of that which was rightfully Iraq's and the others who said that it was an almost infinite source of riches. So why there wasn't? Was there not always the money for a new operating theater, a new museum, a new bridge, a new road. So I took this as a brief, simply to explain the bare elementals of the economy of selling energy in a world has other sources of energy. And we wrote a, I think, really very banal and simple structure, taking a professor of geography in a man called Jassim EL, Khalaf, who, now, indeed, I believe, is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Baghdad, but was then a professor,
John Legard 3:49
I guess you ll that name. For example, I was just thinking of the person who is going to transcribe. You spell it,
Michael Clarke 3:54
Jassim J, double, s, I, M, L, A L, which means the and Khalaf, K, H, A L, A, F, or rather, you don't spell it, you transliterate it.
Michael Clarke 4:04
Yeah. Anyway,
Michael Clarke 4:06
Yes, I'll come to me being a pesant and Dennis foreman in a minute this, this man traveled in Europe and saw what was happening about the competing energy sources, and then also what was happening of the benefits of oil in his country. It was pretty damn naive, actually. But at the same time, from my purely selfish point of view, it allowed me some wonderful filming opportunities. And at last, I felt I knew what I was doing when joining shot with shots, as it were, to the fury of audiences, because in the sort of traffic sequences in Europe, I would cut a shot going around the Coliseum in Rome to a shot going around the Place de la Concorde to going around Hyde Park corner, without naming them. And people said, but where was that shot? And I was a European before my time, obviously.
John Legard 4:59
Make a film,
Michael Clarke 5:01
We buit a studio, or rather, we built a set in a disused film studio. Unbelievably, it was made not with flats, but with breeze blocks and mortar, because there was no source of materials for flats, but we could build an actual set, which was the office of this professor and my cameraman was Billy Williams, who had been very cameraman in British Transport films, whose father was a well known news and cinema cameraman. And I'd had this experience of working with young people. And I wasn't that old myself, but Billy was younger than me, and Peter Kelly taught me that young people could be some good and I knew Billy, so I offered him this job, and a year or so ago, he came up to me at some meeting, hadn't seen him for ages, and said, I just want to thank you for giving me my first break, because having got that film, he bought an Arriflex would have beenan Arriflex at that time, perhaps. And that set him off in a career which has now been very, very distinguished. Absolutely, I was really touched at that, because I didn't ever think of, I hadn't thought of taking the credit, the credit for, did Billy Williams come from British Transport films? Then to you, I mean, yes, right, yeah. And then, of course, he went on to Jimmy Garrett, I think was he then features Generally, yes, yes. I mean, he had to decide to make the break British transport, as I had to decide, because Edgar is going to employ me again after leaving twice. So we made this film, and I edited it again. Were you shooting in 30 Well, obviously 35 Eastern color Eastman color. Yes, we haven't mentioned that river, I think, was in black and white, wasn't it? The Third River was in black and white. The British Transport travel films were in 16 mil Kodachrome which was later blown up. This was about the time of the royal wedding. The first Eastman color film I ever saw was that wonderful one taken by the Canadian film unit when the happy couple departed in a rainstorm from Nova Scotia or Newfoundland or somewhere, I realized how wonderful color film is if you can get away from Sunshine, sunshine is the enemy in my view of color photography. Watch, what you need is something like only about three stops contrast. Difference between highlights and shadow four stops and color is it was a bit of a problem in Middle East, but at least the shadows were very vertical, very vertical.
John Legard 7:42
Sounds very short. So you didn't get some too much shadows.
Michael Clarke 7:46
Those shadows were real embarrassment, this sort of U shaped shadow in the middle of the day. And yet, if you put reflectors on people, they look so awful. Anyway, it was color. Color was fine by then, and it was 35 mil and but when I got back to the Shell film, you later, a year or two later, we were back on the Newman Sinclair camera and all the staticness. I ll talk about that in a moment. Anyway, this film was notable for the fact that it was made in colloquial Arabic. And I, far as I know, it, was the first film ever made in colloquial Arabic because of the custom in Egypt or Iraq or Arabia, wherever that films should be in the classical language. This was a convention that a feature film. It was as though in a love scene, the hero said to the heroin, May I kiss thee. And my friend Jabra, who had a very natural sense of language, he wrote a sort of what he called heightened colloquial, in other words, the colloquial used by educated people, as opposed to the colloquial the classical which is the same as the language of the Quran. The convention is that all formal occasions should be in classical, including, say, a Prime Minister's speech or the opening of a building or something. Anyway, this caused a little bit of a sensation, and also helped to project Jabra to the nearer the front of the cultural scene. It was funny moment when it was had to be seen by the Minister of Information and the foreign minister, because all films were made under very close supervision. Every shot had to be every sequence had to be approved before it could be used, and at the end of showing the complete film, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister and several others were quite approving the Minister of Information, who was a little chap, sort of scheming for promotion, quite obviously, a repulsive little man, he said in English, for my benefits. It, I'm sorry to hear educated people in this film speaking this filthy colloquial and the foreign minister said to him, also in English, it may have escaped you that you made that comment in the same filthy Colloquium. Anyway, I'm sorry to say that they were all shot a year or two later in the revolution. I've left out the fact that when I went to Iraq in 52 to make that film, I was also asked, half way through the shooting of it, to set up a Film Unit for permanent or semi permanent residents in Baghdad to work for the oil company and to do various sort of socially useful things, it was said, as well as making instructional and other films for the oil company. And indeed, I was offered the job, but I turned it down for a number of reasons that are not really important. One of them was the fact that my wife, as a scientist, had a perfectly good job, and was just as it were starting to make her name and publish back in the UK. But John Sherman, my great friend and mentor in British Transport films, was interested and came out on spec, and he took it on, and I'm sure that he has talked or will talk about this and that unit lasted for quite a long time. I'm not sure how many years. And of course, it was there when I made the film I'm just talking about, which was called, by the way, nah. Nahnu.al,allam how do you spell that? Then, n, a, h, n, u, w, apostrophe, a, l, space, apostrophe, a l, a m, the apostrophe before the words signifies the vowel ein which or EIN, which is a kind of glottal noise is not really easy to make, so one says, well, Arlen, not arlem, but Harlem, like that. The world and ourselves and the title is self explanatory. The film was re edited after the revolution to exclude all the scenes that had photographs of the king on the walls, any rooms or sets, things of that sort. As I said, all these people who attended the approval show were all shot in or after the revolution.
Michael Clarke 7:46
Running. How long did John Sherman stay after the revolution? That's what I can't I'm really not sure.
Michael Clarke 11:45
So after this, the Shell Film Unit asked me to join them, in particular, to do an investigation of a possible film for the you un the United Nations Technical Assistance Program. It was a film on the importance of what was nowadays called technology transfer, technical assistance in various forms of development in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, but particularly Asia. And I set off on what transpired to be an amazing Swan that took me from London to Beirut, from Beirut to Bombay and New Delhi, from there to Colombo, from Colombo to Singapore, from Singapore to Sarawak and Borneo from there, back to Singapore and to Thailand, Thailand to Burma, to Pakistan. Never got to Afghanistan because the weather was not suitable for flying the whole week. Then to Tehran. And I wrote a treatment and a report on film that Shell would sponsor and pay for but will be made would be made for World distribution, about the work of the United Nations in assisting the evolution of things as diverse as cheap methods of construction, of community housing, to the prevention of arthropod born diseases like sand flagged even to the construction of dams, it covered so many different themes, all concerned with development in the widest sense of trying to improve the lives of people In what we now call the third world used to be called underdeveloped countries, then, because what became called Developing countries, whether to do with medicine or public health or transport or the improvement of industrial techniques. And one of the things that became very clear in Asia was that the example of China was as important as anything being done in Europe or America. And I got myself as far as Hong Kong. It was clear that China was important. But I think I went to Hong Kong at. As much through reading novels that famous lady, Chinese writer, and trying to remember,
John Legard 15:06
oh yes, Han Soo Han Soo Yes.
Michael Clarke 15:10
Anyway, I seem to be a chartered libertine because I arrived at around the world air ticket and you could almost change, sort of change these and add to them. And the local shell company said, Oh, you want to go from wrong Hong Kong, from Rangoon back to Hong Kong. Okay, we'll fix a ticket. And in Hong Kong, I had been given strict orders not to enter Republican China. The relations with Shell were very tricky, because China was a potential enemy power and multinationals were not supposed to supply war material, including oil, petrol. And I went to see the head of Shell in Hong Kong, who invited me to a tremendous party up on the peak. I told him this, and he said, rubbish. I can have you in Canton tomorrow evening, which he did. And I was a good boy, but I wrote a treatment suggesting that really, to get a picture of development and the role of the UN therein in Asia, without China would be a hamlet without the prince scenario, and this led to a magnificent lunch in the Savoy grill. The only time I've ever been there with people who probably don't remember Colin Phillips was a PR chap in the Film Unit and a representative of the Republican Chinese Embassy. And as a result of this luncheon, the discussion took place whereby we would be allowed to film in China, for I can't remember the figure, but let us say 100,000 barrels of crude oil, something of this sort. And in the end, that project was dropped because it taught me a tremendous amount about international organizations. And I had actually applied for a job at one point with UNESCO to run a sort of development Film Unit in Syria, which I had not got. So I got more and more interested in, as it were, the field of international endeavor, and then I went to Shell, and all I was in Shell, and the possibility came up of a film for the World Health Organization. And this was my next assignment. It was an elaborate film on communicable diseases in Asia and international efforts to subdue them, and if necessary, get rid of them. If possible, get rid of them. So I made an investigation in Europe, including Spain and Yugoslavia. I was interested in Yugoslavia as a country damaged by war, and how they rebuilt their health services. And then interestingly, they were in different ways. In what is now Slovenia, there's a British GP type system, whereas in what are now Croatia and Serbia, there was the more central European polyclinic system, where nobody had a GP and you always went to a great big place. Anyway, I wrote, I did a lot of investigatory work on this film, I suppose it took about five months to investigate and write it, including various travels. And we eventually called the film Unseen Enemies, because it was about basically bacteria. And
John Legard 18:14
I should remember that title. I must have seen the finished film.
Michael Clarke 18:16
Well the film had a very, very wide circulation, and it was one of the few Shell films that were shown on television. And so that it was tracing the way in which we deal with these invisible organisms that are communicated pass from one to another, either directly, or via insects or whatever. And we filmed in Lebanon in Spain, Trachoma, all those tourist areas that are now the Costa del Sol, were ridden with Trachoma in the late 50s. In fact, the Spanish government were very worried that we were filming this campaign in the village that I went to look for two or three years ago. I can't find it now. It's just covered with hotels, but at that time, so did you actually, when you scripted, that you did the treatment from script or script and you directed it, I scripted, I directed it and I edited it.
John Legard 19:13
Yeah, very much. In the Shell tradition that isn't it too absolutely directly our own stuff,
Michael Clarke 19:18
we filmed the school children in learning learning to treat their parents with trachoma by putting the terramycin ointment in their eyes. Same school, children who in school were writing out, and we filmed this right out 50 times an angel is a Spirit sent from God, and draw a picture of an angel. But the children were also treating their parents. We filmed, we never included in the end, we traced malaria, sorry, a smallpox contact who arrived in Switzerland, filmed with the Swiss CID trying to trace this man in the Beau Rivage Hotel. Things of this sort. We filmed malaria in Turkey, east of Ankara, and in Mexico. CO on horseback. We filmed elephantiasis campaigns in India. We filmed malaria in Sarawak also going up the river with Johnson outboards at the back. Terrifying thing is, we filmed them being given these outpours in order to be able to go to a new piece of jungle and cut it down and burn it in order to grow crops.
John Legard 20:23
Who photograph this? Who is your Who is it? What is your unit on this one,
Michael Clarke 20:27
Sydney Beadle was the staff, sort of engineering type cameraman, and Sydney Beadle was never happier than with a clockwork camera on a very heavy tripod pointing straight at an object. But as a second camera, we took an Arriflex, which is a camera designed to be used handheld whenever necessary. It was just before the Nagra, I think, or only just during. We didn't have any sound of that sort. Or we would use it, at least for effects. But for example, I mean, when we arrived in a town in the middle of Colombia where the government yellow fever campaign was setting up a stall in the great market held on Good Friday, the Easter celebrations, tremendous market, the Newman Sinclair, camera had failed, but this cameraman was not happy with the Arriflex. He was extremely lost. And we were filming this incredibly lively scene in this market. You can't imagine what you probably can if ever there was a handheld sequence to be shot, but we did all this on a tripod and this sort of thing. And it may be that that accounted for a telegram sent to me by Stuart Legge. I told him we had 500 kilograms of freight with our equipment. He said, Can here 500 kg of equipment being moved between Shot and Shot? I knew just what he meant. We we had a tremendous row. This chap was cumbersome. Was a very talented engineering cameraman, but he was not the right person for this film, and it's astonishing how well it did, considering so he can't have been as bad as all that. He was a decent man, actually, but he was a different kind of person.
John Legard 22:22
It was probably very technically, absolutely sound, wasn't it? I mean, it was probably
Michael Clarke 22:29
everything was perfect. Yes, it just didn't it. Just occasionally, it could have taken a week but it was made very, very closely with WHO, in fact, so closely that by the time we got to the assemblies or the rough cut stage, the head of Shell chemicals was a Canadian who came from a different commercial tradition, and he saw this and said, What the hell are we making these films about diseases? We don't sell anything for he said, stick to insecticides. We make them. We don't make things to cure trachoma. Who the hell cares about antibiotics. But he was persuaded, I think not just neither the PR value of the film, the ordinary audience, was far more important than the relevance to their direct line of production, and that was the the Shell line that was the first sign of it being eroded, actually. But the new site, how can you prove this doesn't make good unless you can prove it a test marketing area in East Anglia or something, then it's a waste of money, which is actually, as Lewis Carroll point out, is not a logically sound opposition. So that was a very big film. It took a long time because I had to teach myself. And so one guy set up on microscopy, and we're now in 57 and 8 57. eight , right? The whole film took about a year and a half, I guess. But considering that, it was circulated in at least 30 of possibly 40 languages, sounds as though being so still well, two years ago, it was still the second most popular Shell film. So they're still available, so the non theatrical market. And then I did various other things, whereas then I was put in charge of a film about the evolution of the Royal Society for the Tercentenary. But there was a row about that, and I was accused of being too interested in the subject. Now, this led me to thing that was most interesting about that period, that the treatment became the sort of minor art form film would follow. Somehow, the great thing was to write the treatment. Now, one of the things that sold the Iraq film seven or eight years earlier, I think, was Stuart Lwgge's treatment. Just to give you an example of one line in it, which I've always remembered about this pipeline. It describes the sort of dust and sand swirling about and. And and through it all inert by the ditch side the great pipe itself successively attacked by swarms of bee like workers. Now that is real treatment is because it's left to the director to decide how the hell to put this into reality. But it's the kind of slightly heightened language that at one time seems seemed to be very popular, seemed to seem to sell films.
John Legard 25:27
Yes, it's a slightly sort of portentous way of presenting. It's a very good adjective, yes, because I noticed that a lot of films at that time looking back on them, seeing them well,
Michael Clarke 25:37
Stuart Legge had a great reputation for this, and it is fairly easy to imitate, actually, but or to parody, I think I'll say, but I'm a very good example in the film that Shell made with John Armstrong directing about international aviation, whose name I have momentarily forgotten, but it was, it was about the whole business of the enormous growing traffic, both in goods and in people, and how people were being enabled to move all over the world. And in a rather beautifully shot sequence of a child asleep in a then piston engine BOAC plane coming back from India, an Indian child, and relating this to radio beacons, Stuart Legge wrote the line again. I've never forgotten it of this child, Meera, sleep, little Meera in your cradle in the sky. Now it sounds dead corny until the next line, the unseen sounding beacons of the dark are watching over you. Now this is heightened poeticism, but it was right with the shot, and it was a good way of just as it were, referring to the radio beacons that make navigation possible. But in the same film, he wrote, I think, an absolutely unforgivable line, because untrue, as I know, to fill in a shot on the tarmac at Tehran of some DC four or something describing the growing trade in goods and freight. Said there's a regular trade in sausage skins from Tehran to the stock markets of Chicago. But it's just not true. There was no such trade. It produced, like Masefield's, cargo with far away names. Far away places produced a far away feeling. And I think that's insupportable.
John Legard 27:27
I take your point. Yes, it's sort of location. When we heard that Stuart talking about powered flight, there were you? There was another film , though.
Michael Clarke 27:36
This is film called something of the skies. It was an enjoyable film, yeah, but we're talking about Stuart language. He we used. We used to say that this was parody of all we heard once when he had left shell that he was writing a film for some manufacturer of carpets, and we all vied with each other. I think Ralph Sheldon, I did this with sort of test lines from it like you are on the carpet in front of the boss in Milwaukee, or you're on a prayer mat in far away Isfahan, because that's the way you play it. You have some cards with names of places, you have some cards with some adjectives. But nevertheless, this is also how poets work, and somewhere in between the two.
John Legard 28:24
Stuart, with his rather sardonic humor, I imagine, in a way, that he was sort of sending up in his himself, in a way, wasn't having it all slightly,
Michael Clarke 28:32
and yet he was very keen on the concept of being a good journalist. Oh, right, yes, he was. He regarded himself as an historian when he is, I said, can you learn from history? He said, I wish you'd stop asking that question, but the main thing is to be a good journalist anyway. So that was Shell. And then I was on this Royal Society film, but I was accused of being too interested the subjects as I said, this was because of treatment I wrote. I felt that with the record I had acquired, whatever such as it was, I wrote a treatment one of what we ought to be doing, but it wasn't glorious. It wasn't grand. It didn't describe the majesty of meteorology. It didn't describe the thrills, the potential risks of crevasses of virology.
John Legard 29:18
So perhaps you were too close,
Michael Clarke 29:20
and I wasn't too close to it. It was that the treatment did not impress as itself, as a work of art, a work of minor art. And I was given a week to rewrite it. So I rewrote it again with more purple words, you know, with two pots of ink, a little purple one, the big black one. And no, I was taken off. It was being too in you're too interested in it. And I said, it's because I'm so interested I want to make it. And having lived amongst rather weird people, are thinking, well, they were weird. I mean, there were weird All right, but the weirdness was part of the price you pay. For their good causes. So Ramsay Short , who was my assistant, was put in charge of it. But in point of fact, he had, very largely, used my treatment. But he wasn't as thrilled as I was.
John Legard 30:13
Actually, he was able to stand back a bit. Was he? Well, he wasn't.
Michael Clarke 30:17
He wasn't excited by it. Wasn't enormously successful, whereas the two films made for our society, doesn't he read Denham film got the revealing eye is one of the great scientific films of all time. It's a compilation film of the uses of cinematography from about 1896 or seven to the then present day. I've shown this to art students who think it's quite wonderful, and I keep asking Shell if I could update it for them. I said I'd even do it for no money, if it's very expensive, but it really is a great film that ought to be terrific.
John Legard 30:53
Hearing all this about these films, because you're now sort of showing what happened after so called documentary movement had reached the zenith and gone into its decline. So called it was carrying on, you know it well,
Michael Clarke 31:05
this was, I think, the point I made. I'm not sure if I spoke on the record about Elizabeth Sussex on her No, she did mention her book, The so called Rise and Fall of documentary. I would say that the fall, fall was a dramatic word, looking for a dramatic story, that in point of fact, it was the increasing acceptance of and incorporation of factual film techniques, informative film techniques, in all their variety, the maturity, maturity into the maturity. But what also happens which gets forgotten? I think that some of the films made by others, directed by others, quite a few of which were produced by me in a fairly active way. In particular, I'm thinking of directors like Peter de Normanville films on scientific or technological processes were films of great and appropriate beauty. I don't mean they were picturesque or picturesque. They were beautiful because of their truth. To subject, a film made a little later for AEI by MacNaughton on the particular gear system is just so beautiful to look at because and the beauty of it reflects the beauty of the thinking of this particular innovation. Film is about interesting
John Legard 32:26
about Mac Yes, because we interviewed him last year, yes, I think he mentioned
Michael Clarke 32:32
that there is a wonderful kind of filmmaking as the exposition of process which has not quite been replaced or improved on by television. Most people in this field have moved into television. I myself have done so to some extent, but television tends to be more colloquial, more discursive. The films that we're talking about had, per force, to be made in a way that can make them easily translatable. Therefore they couldn't rely on colloquial dialog to nearly the same extent. If it was used in a crucial explanatory role, then it had to be in some way subtitled or translated another language put over the top, so that these films were very film mixed in the old, if you like, sort of Russian sense of using images and their relationship through editing and relationship with sound to explain the process. They were more visual films, whereas the really splendid, often splendid programs like Equinox and Horizon, two of which I've written myself are nevertheless much more discursive with a camera is a reporting tool, rather than explaining,
John Legard 33:53
much more journalistic. And
Michael Clarke 33:55
it's a pity, in a way, that this sort of tradition has disappeared from all these marvelous industrial processes, because, parallel with the evolution of television, has come the evolution of the accountant as a power force in industry and the advertising agent working in collusion with the accountant, who said, you cannot prove that the film made for the World Health Organization or whatever, and distribute in the way it has been, has been of any benefit to the company. Therefore, it has been of no benefit. Whereas, if you make a product, film on a lubricating oil or an electric light bulb, you can test market that in particular areas, and you can evaluate the tests, and you can also measure the return you're getting. But this is the struggle that public affairs or public relations departments have all the time. They cannot prove that some things are not easy to measure, but nevertheless, we often know in our hearts that they ought to be done. Um, so the sponsor film of the kind I'm talking about is not quite as obvious as public relations measure, as keeping on good terms with the government or something, but it is in the order of saying that there are some expenditures where you have to back a hunch, but then make the best choices you can find. And companies like BP and Shell and to a lesser extent, Unilever, to a greater extent, ICI and several others in smaller numbers, went on preserving this tradition of a film that was for public service in the area of their expertise, rather than a product advertising film, which an awful lot of people wouldn't want to see at all, just because it was an advertising film. Advertising film. So it's a matter of where you put your resources. But I'm sorry that the with all the interest in technology that there is now and in science and all the need for wider education, that this tradition of filmmaking has disappeared, which is also a rather cheap tradition, but not such an instantaneous one. With television, you can go and shoot a sequence in somebody's lab in MIT or Cambridge or whatever, and come back with a presentable 30 or 40 minutes in a very short time, whether it's been actually a good explanation of the difference between influenza A and influenza B, and what the world is doing about it isn't necessarily proven because of the shortness of time and the economy. So I won't wake up. Actually, Shell and I'm just thinking there are some other things that ought to be mentioned. I think one is in connection with these. This sort of film that I'm talking about, Arthur Elton had a very good phrase, the esthetics of clarity. And I don't know whether this is art or craftsmanship. And I hate all these sort of pecking order distinctions, actually. And I don't know whether the great arts and crafts, carpenters and Cotswolds, artists or craftsmen, if you put a marquetry design or here is this carved chest, whether is this art or is it crafts, but the esthetics of clarity is a good phrase. I got into trouble later on from students in the late 60s who said, you know, this really shows how you are really so goddamn anally fixated with all your interest in clarity, all this accuracy, why don't you give all those compulsions up see a good analyst and make the essential confrontation with yourself. You have never thought about who you are. I said I've thought about who I am. What I make is what I am. That was 10 years later when talking about it.
John Legard 37:50
So anyway, right? But you're now at the stage of having left shell.
Michael Clarke 37:56
Well no, I'm at the stage actually, in the late 50's 59, or so having been taken off making a great earth shaking film about the Tercentenary of Royal Society, and being put on to preparing our own project in chemistry to be made with Associated Rediffusion in the person of Enid Love, who used to be head of education of schools in Associated Redffusion. There was to be a rather grand scheme whereby there would be a co production between Shell International and Rediffusion, whereby there would be prepared programs for schools of different levels on different aspects of I suppose, physics and chemistry, mathematics. The film component of which will be made by the Shell Film Unit, and the English versions of which will be provided in television format by Associated Rediffusion. But the Shell would have the right to sell, or rather to give the film components and English language scripts of the programs to educational television people in Swaziland or Hong Kong or wherever, for making in the appropriate language. In other words, the film sequences would be all translatable. It would be commentary, voice owner types. And we went quite a long way in developing this until finally, the Independent Television Authority, as it was then the ITA, banned it on they banned it on the grounds that a potential advertiser was taking part in the nature of program material. A little later, when Arthur Elton of Film Center and Shell went to AEI as their head of public information, he and I planned a series of one minute commercials on the great inventors of the electrical and electronic age, on the. On Graham Bell, for example, and Edison and so forth, one minute potted documentaries on Kelvin so forth. And these two were banned by the ITA on the grounds that they would be too like a program, that advertisement must not be mistaken for program. No, fair enough. It's not a rule that's kept anymore. And they say, Well, yes, I suppose. Well, sometimes if you're looking at a temporary drama of Philip Savile or something, you cut to a commercial, you didn't realize it, or rather, you it's in the commercial break on the next commercial, you think we've gone back to the drama. That's
John Legard 40:37
quite true, actually. Yes, very the end of a photo. Again. Why? I mean the symbols are gone. Yes, issue goes cut straight from one
Michael Clarke 40:49
Channel 4 sometimes it sometimes has it on for about 10 Frames. Just see the four goes away again. Well, Arthur Elton in 1960 I think, or possibly late 59 left Film Center. Theoretically, though I don't think he sold his shares and became head of public information for associated electrical industries. AEI, a very large electrical combine which has now been swallowed up over the last good few years by GEC general electrical but AEI had the huge works making turbine generators in Manchester, Metropolitan Vickers, it had British Thompson Houston rented an early sound system at Rugby and research labs in Woolwich and elsewhere, and Arthur Elton decided to set up a film unit on The Shell model, which will be run by Film Center, needless to say, called the AEI Film Unit. And Film Center at the same time, had just taken over the Shell photographic units. This is a big mistake all around Shell decided they ought to put out things, or to privatise, as it were, part of their operations. And they also wanted to get rid of the shell Film Unit from their own premises. So Film Center opened up a huge set of offices in Oxford Street and up close to the Euston Road, Warren Street, to house, in the latter case, the photographic unit. In the former case, not only the AEI Film Unit, but also the Shell Film Unit, which moved to Oxford Street and I started by being the producer of the AEI Film Unit. There we made the first film we made. We made with our R Q McNaughton. Again, it was a film called the AEI 1010 computer. This was a computer which occupied the space of, say, a large sitting room. It had many hundreds of valves gave off several kilowatts of heat, and it will do what nowadays you're the cheapest Macintosh. Can do a great deal more than but it was one of the earliest digital computers, and devised by some signal engineers who originally had tried to invent a computer using a Decatron valve, using decimal arithmetic, such as we use in everyday life. They hadn't, at that point, even heard of binary they were just resolute electrical engineers working with a 10 channel valve, but eventually this, this was a binary system, and it we had to write very complicated animation to describe the way it would do what they nowadays call multitasking. It will do several things at the same time while printing this. It would look up the cost of that and add to the stock record of the other and the RAF bought two of it. They're stock records. I think they're probably too big to preserve, but it really was one of the largest computer ventures, first large computer ventures in the whole of Britain. And we made this film about it. And we set on, went on, making films of the greatest interest to me, we made, I think, the first film ever made on radio astronomy with the present Astronomer Royal and Jodrell Bank Professor Graham Smith, the Radio Sky. I was really proud of that film.
John Legard 44:16
Who did your animation? In fact, from those days, did you have different people who was them?
Michael Clarke 44:21
That's one which was not a linear sort of thing. I used to use huge pieces of graphene. I think it was Roy Pace, Jack chambers. Jack Chambers. I became very friendly and collaborative with Roy ace, who eventually set up on Roy Pace had a very good setup, and I worked with him a great deal. The first film we made after the computer film, actually was a film called on electron microscopy. They make electron microscopes, but in the Shell tradition, the film was not about them. It was about electron microscopy. We had the same old problem that to introduce people to electron microscopy, we had to show some of the firsts achieved by electron. Microscopes other than those made by AEI, and they tried to say that we mustn't have the first shot of a virus or whatever it was, because it was a Phillips machine. But we overcame them and said, look, the prestige of this is the truth to subject. Your prestige is from the truth to subject and your involvement in the subject. But it was quite a struggle. They wanted only the great truths revealed by their microscopes, but we got over it.
Speaker 1 45:25
Who else was with you at the AEI Michael Crossfield, was he? Yes, really?
Michael Clarke 45:32
He had come back from Africa
John Legard 45:36
saw him yesterday...........................................................................................................................
Michael Clarke 0:01
Side 5 after the computer film, the next film for AEI, the first one for a while, rather wider public, was a film on electron microscopy, which Michael Crossfield made with Peter Griffiths having come in as the production manager for this very small unit. We set up a nucleus, and then we anticipated, if you like, the trend of having a very tiny unit, with taking everybody on freelance basis, picture by picture and Crossfield came to make this film. It soon transpired that it was a huge subject, and we wondered if it was getting a bit beyond us, until I realized that the caption is everything, and if the film was called not electron microscopy, but electron microscopy an introduction, we would be all right. And it was a perfectly good and valid introduction to the subject. And it made Arthur Elton feel that some, as he said, some new spirit has been born. I thought it was a perfectly well known spirit of his own Shell Film Unit. But nevertheless, he was very pleased with this film, sure and publicized us within this huge company, and we had a great deal of work. The film on the Radio Sky was made, I think, very successfully. And yes, we made a film with a man called Brian Kaufmann, who's now moved to Canada on mass spectroscopy, and a second one on the introduction to control systems, negative and positive feedback. My Indian friend from Shell at Malam?, a Bombay film director came to make the film The peaceful revolution in India. Sponsor, photographed by Wolfgang Sushitzky. This was a film of technological optimism, but nevertheless, with truth, the revolutionary effect on village life and culture of electrification. It, in a way, it took Lenin's phrase about socialism plus electrification equals communism to a different level that Indian culture plus electrification permits enormous developments and diversification. And Atmalan? who had lived the war years in a bomb the threatened Bombay in darkness from the eve or in a village near Bombay, the evening was a great one to film the way in which in a village, light equals time and people can learn to do things, learning to read. Even Michael Oram made a film based on a Faraday lecture the world of semiconductors interesting because the semiconductors that were demonstrated then in, I suppose, 1963 now you can place over a million of them on a chip the size of a fingernail. That shows how fast things have evolved in 30 years. McNaughton made that beautiful film, the Circart? gear, which I referred to, Joe Mendoza, made a film describing the multiplicity of communications equipment that they made, which was more of a product film and less successful. Interestingly, it was actually about a misfortune that happened, happened to a ship off Africa, but it was somehow too made to measure to be a true documentary, though it was well made within its lights,
John Legard 3:25
but it well made. Was it well received? And did it get widely shown
Michael Clarke 3:30
Well, it was really meant as a kind of film could show at marketing parties, I think. Oh, right, yes. So it probably it was not a film. You were limited audience, but nevertheless important audience. It was a functional film, but it wasn't really a public film. Meanwhile, at this time, I've just got the notes of some of the people I feel ought to be forgotten at Shell because really this was, I think, the height of the Shell film in its period, the period that began in 1939 when Jeffrey Bell and Arthur Elton made a film called Transfer of Power, the history of the toothed wheel. Now that was the beginning, historians will say, of the film about scientific and technical processes, it simply described how power is transmitted in mills with wooden gear systems of tank, tooth wheels and so forth, from the wind in one direction, all the water to turn millstones, pump water, and so forth. And that tradition went straight on, and I'm not sure that it does still go on, except in universities. And the people that ought not to be forgotten are Dennis Segalla, who I mentioned, a chemist by training, who was always somehow oppressed by Arthur Elton. Arthur Elton hated real scientists. He hated my wife, who was a real scientist and a very successful one. I say he hated, but he was not comfortable, because he had made a pretension of being the apostle of science in film, and fair enough, but he was not comfortable with the real article. He was never comfortable with Dennis Segalla, who was a weak and a decent man, and weak in the sense that he didn't fight. He was too decent to fight. He hadn't got the combative skills that make for success in television, even more than in film he should not be forgotten. And he has been making teaching films in Thailand these 20 years, and I believe still is. He started in the UN and then became a Thai citizen, having acquired a Thai second wife, and he lives at a house called I can't remember, it's funny name like Pet and Powell lane, Ramsey, Short, who alas died of a brain tumor about five years ago. He was taken on by BBC Two or by Aubrey Singer BBC in 1963 and I ll come to how Aubrey made an offer to me as well. He was an architect by training, and he made some admirable television films, especially the one on Frank Lloyd Wright, which was one of his best. Douglas Gordon took over from me, running the Shell Film Unit and took over from me. And several other things, as far as I can remember, Alan Pendry, who now, I think, is a historian. His wife, Cynthia Pendry, was the editor of the only Shell film that ever won what was then a British Film Academy Award film called The Threat in the Water, which I wrote and produced, and Richard Bigham directed,
John Legard 6:41
name I haven't heard for long time, he became a lord, didn't he became Lord.
Michael Clarke 6:47
And there were other events connected with Richard Bingham, he, he and I later on. This is back in 1969 later, were asked to do a pollution film for Shell we went into in good faith, and I resigned from it, because, in my view, they the only way that they could operate as a prime contributor to pollution was make the sort of film that say the BBC would have made, but they wouldn't stick to it. Then ICI tried the same tack, and I was not involved in that, but Richard also resigned from that for the same reason.
John Legard 7:26
He lives just up the road here.
Michael Clarke 7:27
Yes, that's right, he does, but he had some other contretems which are none of our business. You know, he had some difficulties in his life, but I think now he's he's working again then, I mean, we've mentioned Stuart Legge quite often as a producer. Jeffrey Bell was often neglected by Arthur Elton, who first gave him a job and allowed him to become a distinguished director. I believe he's still working. John Armstrong moved from Shell. John Armstrong was always, always described as the best shooter in the business, but he actually is the most determined filmmaker. I've been working with him in the last few years on a series on the history of the Earth, which Douglas Gordon has also taken over. Then there were Ian Brundle in Singapore, Lionel Cole, who was abroad nearly all the time that I was in Shell. I once got a cable when I was in Africa from Elton, saying, you are required to move to Caracas to replace Cole on leave. Your future career depends on this
Michael Clarke 8:31
challenging statement.
Michael Clarke 8:32
Well, I think it was insupportable, and I was sent for by the Shell general manager, who said, I have to send to me. And I only met him saying in Lagos, he said, I owe an apology. I'm deeply sorry. I said, Well, he said, I received this cable in clear, it's unforgivable. So I got my own back on Arthur by sending my cable. We're in the middle of this whole film, which is always in various bits, not things needed. Rushes, sent, stock required. And I used to use the journalist conceit of saying primo secondo for each section. I finally got down to octavo. I got to Elton. For Elton, cable received Thanks, but no we then flew to South America. Cable was waiting for me from Stuart saying Elton deeply hurt by your cables. That's the nice story, isn't it? I replied, Clark, deeply hurt by suggestions should abandon film to which he is so dedicated. However, the only thing to do with Elton was to stand up to him. What happened to me? As I said, thanks. But no, I telephoned my wife, who was, you know, was doing fine as a lecturer in biochemistry, you see. And I mean, you just wanted us to throw up everything. Sounds a bit like Grierson. Well, exactly she, yeah, but you. Us have to pay those people back in time. Here's the Norman Hills film, Frontiers of Friction was a quite beautiful explanation of friction and the development of new materials like PTFE to overcome it. Allan Pendry, his film, the River must Live was an eloquent, impressionistic films, the other Shell trend was the great films on great cosmic subjects of the river must live, was one which Stuart Legge's, talents played a big part in, both in shaping and in word writing. Then there were simple films, like Pattern of Refining that Michael Heckford, the painter, made a lovely film by Michael Heckford on the glazing of the new Liverpool Catholic Cathedral. The point being, the Shell made the remarkable adhesives and the techniques for coloring the glass that were used by these famous stained glass maker. I've forgotten his name, very well known, John Piper. Was it? No, it wasn't John Piper. Actually, it was another chap, Laurentian, yes. Then the famous Shell film malaria received its third update with Admiram? and myself, again. That is one of the classic films shown in languages all over the world as the exposition which keeps changing as the morganism keeps changing and knowledge keeps changing. The way in which the malaria parasite spreads through the mosquitoes, certain types and into the bloodstream and what can be done about it. All. This was a it was a great tradition, very rich period. That wasn't it. I'm not saying it should have lived, because two things changed, television changed, and as I say, accountancy and business methods changed.
John Legard 11:44
You'd think that some of those films should be resuscitated and shown to the world in general, because one felt that they were shown to a sort of closed circle. So many of them
Michael Clarke 11:53
I think you're gonna run an NFT series now that would be quite popular.
John Legard 11:57
I mean you see, they still go on trotting out the old British Transport stuff, you know, which means shown over and over again. I'm delighted they are shown. But once it films, there's so many films being made at that time by other people, like Sheldon particularly
Michael Clarke 12:08
well, of course. Now everybody makes films and but nevertheless, these films can now be distinguished from films made. Now, that's right, yes, they have a time. Maybe this
John Legard 12:17
is something we ought to discuss with Barry Coward, who runs our archive, because he's in in that business.
Michael Clarke 12:24
He's quite an entrepreneurial chap. He is indeed, yes,
John Legard 12:27
bringing it up next time I see him, anyway. So yes, .
Michael Clarke 12:35
1963 I decided I wanted to change, and I found out there was a job going at the Royal College of Art in the almost non existent, what was then called the Department of film and television. The Royal College of Art had started the film school, as it became, under a man called George Haslam, who was a stage designer and theater set designer, but who died, and then a man called Peter Newington took it over for a year and blotted his copy book in some way that I never understood and didn't stay. And Keith Lucas, who had been a RCA painter and then head of graphics at the London press exchange for commercial making, was suddenly appointed as the head of the department of film, and it was clear that he needed someone who'd made some films, because he had never made a film in his life. But the RCA, his view was that film is a visual medium, and one of our painters is a good chap, and he should be able to cope with this sort of thing. And indeed, he'd been an art director for commercials, but this was back in the 50s and 60s, and I heard there was this vacancy, and I applied for it. And Edgar Anstey later said, why don't you tell me you're interested? You could have had the head ship if you wanted, because he Edgar Ansley was on the council of the College of Art, as are on almost everything. And I vowed at that time that when I became 65 I would not try and stay on everything, because Arthur Elton and Edgar Ansley stayed trying to keep a finger in various eyes, almost until they died. And I vowed I wouldn't do this. I would go on making rather than trying to control. But I understand all too well now the impulse both to say, well, after I do have some experience, it should be of some value, and indeed, so it should up to a point until there comes a point where it is a decreasing value, anyway. So I went along as sort of head of production, as what's called a tutor, which was the equivalent of a lecturer, university salary is all the same, and I found the department was really under graphic design. I tried to get that separated and made it a medium in its own right. The bad moment came when Keith Lucas, while I. Was away on an agreed holiday before the college opened again, appointed a cameraman that I had never heard of. And it was not, I think, conceited to say that if I hadn't heard of him, he would be unlikely to be worth appointing. Not only I hadn't heard of him, and he turned out to be a chap who, unfortunately was a near alcoholic, and later on, when the great attempts to become the National Film School in which we and the University of Bristol drama department in competition, came round, George Elvin, who was on the national the Lloyd committee National Film School, took one look at this cameraman and said, Well, that's finished. If you appointed a man like this, there's no way that we could recommend you. He was a decent bloke. He just kept, you know, a bottle of plunk in his drawer, and he had no feel at all. He could expose a shot that was about it. And Keith Lucas made this tragic mistake. Then he, after a year, he had, he was a probationary year, and he could have fired him, and he was too sorry for what happened to him to fire him. Oh, I see this sort of figure. I mean, I understand how his bloody heart fired people, but I've been very lucky that I haven't had to. But this man should have gone. Everybody knew it. But anyway, nevertheless, it was interesting to go to a film school where almost everybody had had an art training. And I actually managed to bring about the people with it was a post graduate institution, so people had to have degrees or degree of evidence that we should get in people with language or literature or science or history degrees or whatever. And indeed, we did. We had no equipment to begin with except three wooden cameras and intercommunication system for television to pretend to be a television studio. Unbelievable. But this was used by this sector designer man and an Arriflex, and I think some sort of 16 mil pic sync. But it all got moving in the end, and we started by collaborating with the nothing Nuffield foundation television course that they used to run for overseas people. And eventually the I realized that we got some very talented people. And after the first three years, Dick Cawston, the BBC, rang up and said, I ll take your best student. Who is it? I said, Paul Watson. Took Paul Watson ended family, you remember, and recently did this, series of the Australian family. Oh, so much trouble. He's a producer. He's now a very senior producer, but he was a quite brilliant painter, a brilliant lad, very aggressive. His diploma film was a very sweet film about an old lady and surrounded by memories and so on. Very corny, beautifully made. Lawrence Moore, who is not well known, but is, I think, a very stirling director whose film I mentioned earlier, I think, on Michael Rothenstein was of such distinction, I gave him his first job when I had to make a film on the life of John Dalton, the great scientist of Manchester for ICI which was a mixture of working with existing old woodcuts, and also Manchester, song as it is now. And Lawrence did this most imaginatively. Who else was there?
Michael Clarke 18:22
how many people were there on that course?
Michael Clarke 18:30
I think there were about eight per year at that time, we took 12 per year. And we also did a one year course for postgraduate crash course, Introduction to film and TV. We had a very good tutor in Tim O'Brien, who was a stage designer for the RSC in the Royal Opera and so forth. But he was a good general, sort of part time tutor. And I began to realize that although it wasn't very easy to quote in a didactic way. I mean, I started by trying to say that all I want you to know about film, photographic and camera technique is all I need to know, I think, as a film director, as a director and one who is interested, to some extent, in photography, and I tried to teach him about things like lens choice, depth of field according to lighting conditions and aperture, aperture and lighting conditions and things. But in the mid 60s, where there was bitter results about being against being taught, let us just find out. The trouble is, we're very short of money. We'll stop, which is why, once television and videotape came in, that was great deal easier to talk about things like, what you what you would call the rules, you know, of the Golden line of shooting dialog and knowing where you are, and establishing shots and so on television is wonderful for
John Legard 19:52
you. Had to do all this yourself. I mean, did you bring in other people
Michael Clarke 19:56
to some extent, yes, but there was not much money for doing that.
John Legard 19:59
Brought. along friends for friendship. So people get individuals on an ad hoc basis, but they were a small group, but they're a bright lot and exclusive, right? Isn't it rather nice? I mean,
Michael Clarke 20:09
I think it was. I realized actually that it's this old business if I belong to a privilege daily. It was a lot of rubbish that, in point of fact, that people can learn to make films of a sort, really quite quickly. And of course, the technically equipment becomes easier and easier, and also this, and also that, and the talent will out,
John Legard 20:34
like doing those film courses, which I was involved in Dillington house in Somerset, where you had a week in which put across your knowledge to a lot of people who came in from all over with their cameras and their film, and we scripted the first day and we shot the second day, and we edited the fourth, the third and fourth days, and then we had a screening at the end of the week through all the course, yeah, and they came, they presumably went away much the wiser. I mean, they paid quite a bit for it, but this is sort of basic filmmaking,
Michael Clarke 21:05
but people are more talented than one thinks. You've got to speak,
John Legard 21:09
but even in that week, you can see who the good ones were.
Michael Clarke 21:13
But I used to start from the position that nothing is going to be much good. I now tend to think that things are likely to be good ish anyway. And now that I look at the school locally, we have a very well equipped comprehensive, and my wife's now governor of it, and I know the people quite well. And the work they do on video these young children, oh yes, yes, and video editing and so on is so competent, I bet it is. They haven't necessarily read any books at all, but somehow, just as with electronics and computers, somehow the generation seem to accustom themselves to things. My grandson can program the video. This is
John Legard 21:53
started off with it. It's there
Michael Clarke 21:55
at their school. Everything is covered on video, and they're terribly good at it. They aren't just where you see tourists holding a camera and waving around. It's all, it's all some clearly worked out stuff. So I think this really taught me to have faith in people going to this to the RCA, and we had this great struggle to become the national film school, but in the end, there was no question. It wouldn't have been right. The department, however, still exists. It's called the School of Film, television, and it's it has a very good reputation. It's produced a lot of people. They're always winning prizes in these international student film competitions. One of the students there is still there as more or less Head of Production. Think a chap called Derek Wallbank. I haven't seen him for a long time. Stuart Hood took it over at one time, but he was both too delphic and too revolutionary. He used to speak in rather arcane words, but he also believed that he was a Sorbonne 1968 sort of type of person, very strange man, very educated guy, wonderful translator from Italian, really. He taught himself Italian while the prisoner of war in Italy, and he has an income on the side from translating from the Italian. Then I think I'm going to have to stop, because I really would like to talk a little bit more about this and then about the university scene, but I think it would have to be another day
John Legard 23:21
fair enough.
Michael Clarke 23:23
Also got very we're starting at the Royal College of Art. I got very interested, of course, in the theory of why I had been doing in my working life. What I had been doing, I was asking questions like, Is film a language, or are images and sounds together, a language system separate from a language of images, or a language of words, of sounds. And I got rather deep into what is often called semiotics or semiology, the science of signs, whether they are signs on a page or road signs or films or whatever. And I made a lot of friends and acquaintances, people like Richard Gregory, who afterwards became well known exponent of, he's a psychologist of illusion, and also of the history of science. Raymond Williams, Whom I knew well quite well, had become something of a guru of the sort of left wing theorists of literature. And he was actually a best man at our wedding on our last day at Cambridge all those years ago. And Colin Cherry, who was Professor of Communication at Imperial and I then got involved with the Council for national academic awards, which was the body that gave degrees to polytechnics that validated, rather the giving of degrees to non what were then non University bodies. And I was on the photography board in their capacity as a film person and vice chairman of that and also on the communications panel. All trying to investigate the nature of communication. And all this came at the same time as I persuaded the Royal College to join the British University's Film Council, which had started as a small group of enthusiasts, biologists and similar people using film as a tool. But I was interested, as were some others in using the wider kind of film communication, as opposed to film observation as a way of providing information training and education in various fields. And the BUFC still exists and has gone from strength to strength as an important body of liaison into communication, and at this time also, the famous Bryn Mawr Jones committee on audio visual aids in education was set up by the university grants committee to study the contribution that film, television, photography and so on could make to in the first instance, scientific communication, though its results, were broadly taken to cover higher education of all kinds. And that committee recommended the institution in universities of service units, as they were called, to do film and television production, tape, slide, similar work, even printing and so forth. And the University of London decided to set up a central one servicing the some 50 colleges, medical schools and institutes of that university. And I had heard that they could not find a princ, a director for it. At the same time, I got the impression, later confirmed, that with with the film school being turned into a school proper, with a chair and a professorship at the top, Keith Lucas would be competing, and I had been asked to compete with him for the professorship, and I felt that this would be a rather rotten trick. We had built the thing up together by agreement. He had his role as it were, and yeah, I had mine, but I also learned that Edgar Anstey was hoping that possibly he might end his days with the full academic glory of being called a professor. And that part of the scheme was that Keith Lucas and I would be competing level pegging for different reasons, and perhaps the problem could be solved by Edgar Anstey, or possibly it was suggested another distinguished person, possibly
John Legard 27:25
Sir Arthur Ash?. I was gonna say it might have been Arthur, yes.
Michael Clarke 27:25
And o I decided to pull out of this. And I asked the University of London if they still were looking for somebody. And they said yes. And I asked them and showed them some things and so forth. And I was asked to take up the job and start up this film unit. Meanwhile, Keith Lucas had had his interview for the chair and got the job the same day. It was a very sweet moment. He was going to be a full professor. I was going to be paid a professorial salary, though not called a professor, and I went in to see to see him, and said, How did it go? And that afternoon, he said, meet Professor Lucas. So I said, Congratulations, meet Professor Clark. Though I was never called professor, and it turns out that Edgar Anstey was on the College Council had said to Keith, had drinks after he got the job. Well, in the end, you were right, Keith, it wouldn't have been right for some old buffer from documentary to have taken the place over, would it? And this confirmed my suspicions, which were grounded more in intimation. You had an intuition. But it turned out I was right. So I went to set up this rather large unit in London, which didn't stay large when the great cuts of the 80s and the late 70s began, which had the duty of making film, television and anything else you can think of, from signs on doors to photography and tape and slide sequences and so on. For whoever wanted, it was a huge university with 10s of 1000s of students and 1000s of academic staff, so that it could never be big enough. Consequently, despite the scorn and suspicion heaped upon it by many, many academics, we always had far more work than we could ever cope with, and we slowly developed this into, first of all, using old fashioned black and white television and a mobile unit, multi camera unit through a really extremely nice, well equipped, medium size, working sort of job size, sensible studio for doing this type of work, and some drama in the Senate house in central London. But of course, the cuts came and came, and because it was centrally funded, all the colleges were being cut. So they were all jealous of their share of our budget, and our budget not very high. I mean, perhaps it was 100,000 a year in 1981 or two divided among 50 institutions. That wasn't. Very much, but nevertheless, and of course, they all also wanted their own small units, and all the people in small units were anxious that we should be dissolved so that they could take it over. It was a very understandable thing. And what we tried to do was to do only the things that the colleges couldn't do, such as elaborate drama and also elaborate animation,
John Legard 30:21
which happens to a lot of this sort of university stuff. I went to finish films. Well, what did they get? I know they had, well, every year they had in
Michael Clarke 30:29
in my time, from when we actually started serious production, which would be in about 71 to 1983 we had made 1000 programmes, every one of them, except two, at the request of some academic or academic body, right? And these were all circulated, and we had made enough income from renting them through the university Film Council and to other institutions in Britain and overseas, more or less, to pay to keep up with the technology to move into colour and then to go from opposite to componenet video
John Legard 31:03
and then you were going out the video later on, of course, yes.
Michael Clarke 31:05
And we had some capital support. We very sensibly, any profits, quote, profits, unquote, that we made. We were allowed to keep abuse, I don't mean for ourselves, but to put back into the business. Whereas in some financials in local governments or something. I was talking to a man in the print work for the county who said, If they ever made more money than it cost, they had to go pull it back into the county. So there was no incentive, really, to improve on their performance. And we became quite the largest unit and certainly the most active simply because not so much of our or my skills, but because London has is a kind of it's got much of the cream of scholarship in Britain. Not all of it, but much of it. And consequently, things produced in a particular field of scholarship and study in London were of interest to people in that field elsewhere. Well, we started with Ampex one inch. Ampex one inch. Then we moved to IVC. Then we went over to U matic, the various grades of U Matic, and I think there's, there's now on, well, they've now closed, but units that remain on the new professional one inch, and with dubbing on, usually on to Umatic, you know, working with three machine editing, and, of course, releases In into, at one time, VHS and and into what was it called Sony, not beta, beta cameras, the camera, beta max. Betamax, yes, for the old one that's disappeared, Michael Erwin made the mistake of buying Betamax. Now he can't get through he's had to buy another video recorder. Oh, so all that went on and was really, I think, a great success, but it was being cut down in the 80s, but we moved into a lot of work in interactive video. I mean, we taught ourselves computing, taught ourselves how to programme video discs for making diagnostic programmes and so forth. I started by buying a copy of Richard Attenborough's birds of British gardens disc and producing a completely phony ornithology teaching program on broad recognition, where you've got various choices and you had to key 123, or four on the keyboard, and all that sort of stuff, which is now done so many Yes, you said Richard David Attenborough. I mean, yes, sorry. And I left in 84 and the unit continued, mostly in this kind of specialist development, but it became it had inquiry after inquiry. The last inquiry I was subjected to, a man from GEC was in charge, and he said, How do you justify all this making things for others, and why aren't you charging commercial rates? The answer to which, of course, was they wouldn't pay commercial rates. And I said, Well, I actually believe in things like, you know, mutual aid and cooperation, and we do things that they can't do, and we do it for them and not for us. And he said, Well, you've got those sort of belief, it's a good thing you're retiring soon, isn't it? This was Thatcherism at its most virulent at this point. Then after I'd retired, they brought in Keith Ross to who had the instruction to provide a report that said the unit wasn't viable. And it, I mean, it could have been viable in various ways. It could have become just another film unit, like competing with all the others, or it could have gone it had then been instructed, really, to do development work, because our brief had always been to develop the use of audio visual techniques. So the work on interactive video things of this sort, the work of using. video disc for archiving and so on. Was quite important. But then two shorts came in and they asked me to come all the way up to London to say what I thought of it. And I said, Well, I thought of it. And the chap said, well, chap was in charge in the moment. Is he a good manager? And I said, Well, I don't say because I've never worked for him. He's worked for me. I suspect he wasn't a very good manager. He said, nobody in this place has had any management training, and I think this is an important thought. I said, Well, look like other people like me. I have spent, I suppose, 40 years getting it together with various numbers of groups of people, either on location and or in foreign lands, or starting up units that have to work productively and harmoniously together, and we seem to have done it. And myself, I haven't had a day out of work during all that time, nor have most of my friends. And we don't call it management, but I reckon by God, we can manage. And he said, Well, yes, I mean, we, we often hear that sort of story, Mr. Clark, and of course, we respect everything you've done, but you haven't even begun to understand what management is. Management is not the same as managing. Anybody can manage something, but management is is a science. And I thought, this is all bullshit . I accept that there are tools of management that I may not know about, but in the end, management is about getting results with people. You said exactly, and that is what is the scientific part of it. So I said, Oh, and that, I think, is that sounds very good. The end of my story, except to say that all the work we did, the medical work of those 1000 programs, is now in either the Wellcome for institutes library or the British Medical Association and nearly all the other stuff, including the sound recordings of Beckett plays made in association with that great man and so on in the National Film Archive or the National Sound Archive
John Legard 37:02
So how many professional people do you have come in from time to time on this? Professional people? Well, I mean yourselves. And you know, because I mean you this is a student organization.
Michael Clarke 37:12
No, no, I had six producers. Yeah, six. They weren't all trained in film schools, but they all had one or three of them were ex RCA students. One had a PhD in Chemical Physics. Another had a PhD in biology, and he then became head of the similar unit in Warner?, the first one I mentioned, took over after me. He's also called Clark. He's very brilliant guy, difficult sometimes, but brilliant. Now we had three producers who all still have successful careers elsewhere, right? I had chief engineer who'd been chief engineer of TWW, and then at Harlech Tv who got wants to get out of the rat race. Ray Bradley, probably the most knowledgeable man on non broadcast formats and so forth, a real innovator, marvelous engineer, and another good engineer from Marconi, John Wynn. We had fascinating, two high quality rostrums. We had very good graphic designers. Will you say how I think we were all professional, but we were in that profession of informative film and television. Yeah, we, I mean, we produced drama programmes of various sorts. We made films on almost every subject we can think of
John Legard 38:21
This is an area, of course, which one doesn't grow nobody's first time it's been just discussed, I should think or talked about.
Michael Clarke 38:32
I could go into much more detail, the medical work. We had a regular monthly program GP TV, which was circulated on cassette and at one time on the network that we had in London to general practitioners on updating. There's a lot of work in continuing medical education, because all doctors are out of date all the time, and they know it. They know that they must continually update themselves. Some of the great medical and biological scientists of the present day were all as young persons on our programmes. All those are in the Wellcome archive. Now, to see some of this stuff, some of it is very didactic, but we've we have to allow for the fact that some people were entirely in the kind of giving a lecture mode. That's it had to be stoked to be slightly more outgoing, but we had to make material that a given audience would deal with. Sometimes the thing that would interest very much a third year structural engineer wouldn't interest someone who watches a Horizon program on bridges because it was too detailed. And it's very much a matter, I think, of pitching the level, and here we had to be guided, to some extent, by the academics who really they were making the programmes, and we were their midwives in the whole role was the role of being people used to, like, say, approche of their. Ideas and practices. But the idea of being on television has sunk in so hard that quite often, at first, people used to come in and say, Well, I've agreed to do this programme on, you know, immunology and the struggle to eradicate smallpox. So here I am. What do you want? It isn't like this. What you've agreed to is to do is take part in one of what is called the scientific basis of medicine series for the postgraduate medical Federation. And as you know, these are addressed to co workers, not in your special field. In other words, your audience will be doctors and medical scientists. What do you how do you want to tell them, we can offer you the following. And we had a standard system of something like, I think we could do two days location filming within 25 miles of London, or one day if we had to pay for overnight accommodation, that sort of thing. Anything more than this. Out of this, you choose what you want. Do you want us to come to your lab? And so forth, and we now it is much more common people asking for these facilities.
John Legard 41:11
I think that's fascinating. Yeah, I must like say I'd like to see some of this stuff. Maybe we can dig some
Michael Clarke 41:17
It's all there at the BMA. Some of it, you will find banal. Some of it very elementary. Some of it is really quite advanced. I'm quite proud of it. We did a lot of filmic films as well, on things like the changing of the coastline. And there's only one complete copy of the catalog left. I don't think I've got it. It's a great pity. In the end, when they decided to sell close the place down, they waited till my successor had gone on a lecture tour, by request to Australia, and said the place is closing in three weeks, and appointed the manager, lady that he had appointed as the liquidator, and she just sold us everything in double quick time. really, I had to work terribly fast, or literally all the original tapes and films are going to go in the in, you know, in the skip outside. So I really had to pull my finger out and get the archives to work. And National Film Archive was very good on this. And after that, I left through age, and I went to World Health Organization to write a report on how they should improve their Audio Visual Services.
John Legard 42:26
Oh, really, with the show 1984 was this
Michael Clarke 42:29
1985 and I spent a few weeks in Geneva, which I knew very well. I'd been doing a lot of work with the Mental Health Division anyway, which I haven't discussed. And I wrote the report, which was very unpopular because it meant putting the nose out of joint of five or six tiny little units with tape recorders or computers or something. And in the end, all its recommendations were actually made operational, except that it wasn't called working on the Clark report. They all done bits and pieces by a clever Director General, who knew that if you let the reporter be report be unpopular, that its provisions could be instituted one by one?
John Legard 43:08
Michael, I think we've come to the end of our time. Thank you very much indeed. And if you want to say any more, we'll have to do it on another occasion. But I went really well.
Michael Clarke 43:18
No, the only other things I was going to talk about in brief, were, I ll just tell you I wrote an IMAX film. Oh yes, Radford, I wrote an IMAX film.
Speaker 1 43:33
We've run out of time, so that's the end of the interview, but there is a possibility that we may record some more at a later date...................................................................
