Daily Grind Of Still Water

UKApress ) somewhat economical with the truth about how many “soldiers” would be appearing in the Square.Still unhappy with the footage, he realised that he needed a technical adviser to deliver the much-needed uniforms for the film. Having begged and borrowed uniforms, weapons and regalia, and dressed his “actors”, he invaded the 1956 May Day Rally. But the evidence is on film for all to see.He began with an easy scene: a Nazi rally in Trafalgar Square. There were no actors either, Brownlow believing that he could save money by simply asking people in the street and the pub to be in his movie.It is hard to reconcile the massive chutzpah this must have taken with the endearingly diffident, quietly spoken 67 year-old man sitting opposite me. Drafting a one-page synopsis, he borrowed a 16mm camera and started shooting. There was no script, no money and very little equipment – aside from the borrowed camera which was then stolen on the second day of filming.

The boy began to imagine what England might have been like in an alternative universe – one in which the Nazis had won the war. We were watching a silent version of Oliver Twist one Sunday and I had sat as close to the projector as I could get The projector jammed and the film fell out. I picked up a discarded piece of film and later in bed shone a torch through it in the hope of projecting the image onto the wall. That’s how technically adept I was.”But the feel of celluloid in his fingers was like a narcotic and Brownlow began collecting old films and showing them to his friends on the projector he eventually received for Christmas.

At this stage, he says, he had no ambitions to make movies himself.”My mother was afraid I’d end up as a projectionist,” he says. “She encouraged me to be creative and bought me a camera.”At the time, the teenage Brownlow was steeped in dystopian fiction; he cites Orwell’s 1984, the novels of John Wyndham, the Boulting Brothers’ film, Seven Days to Noon and Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio play as possible sources of inspiration behind his debut movie.Brownlow recalls seeing a black Citroen pull up one day, and a man getting out and running into a shop, turning at the entrance to shout back at his companion in German. His initiation into the world of celluloid, he recalls, goes back to 1947 and his unhappy days in a Sussex boarding school at the age of 11.”The only good thing about it was that the headmaster used to show films every third Sunday,” he says “There was no sound so it was always silent movies. It was a triumph of the amateur will to finish what he’d started.Quentin Tarantino may have established the idea that film geeks could make movies, but Brownlow got there first. And I am hopeless at raising money.”Nonetheless, in between collecting old movies and working on documentaries, Brownlow managed to finish his film after eight years. “I wanted to be the next Orson Welles,” he tells me over lunch “But I never even put on the weight.

Through the story of its leading protagonist, nurse Pauline Murray, it tells of partisan resistance to the Vichy-like state, and how survival and compromise can easily slide into collaboration. Shot in black and white, in 16mm and 35mm, in the manner of a documentary, it has the jackbooted kick of authenticity.
It is hard to believe that Brownlow, now a distinguished film historian and the planet’s most accomplished film restorer, was just 18 when he began making the film. In actual fact, it is a scene from the 1964 British feature film, It Happened Here. The intervening decades have done little to diminish its worrying, subversive power.

Made by debutante director Kevin Brownlow, together with his colleague Andrew Mollo, It Happened Here rewrites history to suggest what might have happened if Britain had been occupied by the Nazis. It is one of the most striking scenes in British cinema: Nazi stormtroopers marching through Parliament Square. Clearly designed to alarm and provoke, it is an image that could have been ripped from a WWII Nazi propaganda film. Unfit for children? Not at all – they are radiant with a beauty that was still in its infancy.Silent Comedy, NFT, to Sunday, 020 7928 3232; ‘Throw of the Dice’, www.barbican , 020 7638 8891; ‘Silent Britain’ will be shown on BBC4 at the end of next month. Which five? I’d say Buster Keaton’s The General, Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, F W Murnau’s Sunrise and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Run five silent films for your children, and just see what happens.