HI and welcome to my
wonderful film blog. I know many of my
fellow classmates from various other film courses, but if this is your first
time getting to know me, I want to introduce myself. I’m Ashley and I’m a senior English/Lit major
and Film and Media Studies minor. A few things about moi: my favorite film is Night of the Living Dead ('68), I love Clint Eastwood, and I can recite every line of the Eagles' "Hotel California". Seminar in Cinema Studies is actually my last film course as an
undergraduate, so it’s a little bitter sweet.
I entered college as an English major only, but after taking a film
genre course with Dr. Lucia in the fall of 2010, I fell in love with the
program.
Enough about me! I wanted to share some thoughts on The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1962). It’s the film I have chosen to
adopt for the film symposium this year, and I viewed it again for the second
time this weekend and fell in love with it.
I never thought I would desire subtitles for a film in English, but
these England accents are ridiculous. To
set the scene, the film centers around Colin Smith, a teenager who has been
sent to a reform school/detention camp after he robs a bakery. The school prides itself on its unity, and
all of the boys wear the same clothes, shower together, work together, and eat
together. There is an awfully creepy
scene where an auditorium full of boys sing a hymn in unison. Smith becomes singled out by the headmaster
after he learns the boy is an exceptional runner. Smith then spends the movie training for a
competition against another school for boys which takes place at the end of the
film.
Between Smith’s workouts we get flashbacks of his life.
We learn that he comes from a poor, working class family, his father has just died, and that there
is some definite tension Smith and his mother, who has moved on quickly after her husband's death. I found there to be many themes that run
through this film. There is definitely
tension between lower and upper class, and even region. This is evident in the way Smith treats money,
and the way his mother spends all of it after her husband dies. There is also tension between the idea of
conformity and authority. Smith appears
to resent both, but finds himself in between the two at many points in the
film. He conforms to the rules/ways of the reform school, but was obviously unable to do this in the outside world, because his repeated stealing and lying ultimately gets him in trouble. Along with these themes, we also glimpse into the teenage life of Smith, who spends his time balancing between the 'typical' (finding a girlfriend) and 'atypical' (becoming a father figure).
I
did a little bit of poking around on the internet to see what the UK was like
during the sixties. In ’62, The Beatles,
and The Rolling Stones were emerging.
The British New Wave occurred during the early years of the sixties,
where filmmakers were producing films that were based around social
realism. There was an emphasis on the
working class, location shooting, and London.
I see very obvious connections to The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
For starters, many scenes were filmed with a hand held camera, adding to
that aspect of real life. The film also
centers on Smith, who is from a lower, working class background. Many scenes take place on location, in worn
down, tiny neighborhoods and streets.
There is some animosity toward Smith’s hometown and his desire to live in
London, which could stem from the stress his family causes him. Aesthetically, Loneliness differs from its Hollywood
counterparts. The handheld camera (which
I’m a sucker for) gives it a more realistic, rough look, which is the complete
opposite of Hollywood’s more polished films (think Splendor in the Grass). You should check out The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which can be found here.
