MY CHILDHOOD
MY CHILDHOOD
MY CHILDHOOD is the first part of an autofictional trilogy by Bill Douglas, a Scottish director who combines poetic subjectivity with the harshness of social realism. The story of a boy living with his brother and grandmother in extreme poverty in a mining town is also a story of great social trauma.
Bill Douglas was among the most formally daring yet least recognised Scottish filmmakers within British cinema, particularly its social-realist tradition. He created an autofictional trilogy MY CHILDHOOD (1972), MY AIN FOLK (1973) and MY WAY HOME (1978), at once a lament and an ode to his own childhood in the mining town of Newcraighill and his early adulthood during military service in Egypt.
The first part of the trilogy is a portrait of a boy, Jamie, the director's alter ego, raised by their grandmother amid grinding poverty and the crumbling houses of a neglected community. Shot in stark black and white, the film casts a poetic, almost contemplative light over an existence of deprivation, refusing any trace of sentimentality. The tension between the deeply subjective lens of lived memory and the concrete harshness of social realism yields a work of rare intensity. At the same time, MY CHILDHOOD is a depiction of the decline of the local community and the weakness of the social system in post-war Britain.
Douglas’s trilogy reads as a cinematic working-through of trauma, not only personal, but also collective, both class-bound and national. Jamie’s fate becomes a reproach to the conscience of an entire British society.
Text: Karolina Kosińska
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