Having been interested in film-making all his life, in 1969 Douglas enrolled at the
London School of Film Technique, where he wrote the screenplay for a short autobiographical film called
Jamie. After initial difficulties in finding support for the project, he eventually found a champion at the
British Film Institute in the newly appointed head of Production,
Mamoun Hassan, who secured funding on the basis that
Jamie should form part one of a trilogy – echoing the great childhood trilogies of
Ray and
Gorky. The film was renamed
My Childhood, and its success on the international festival circuit paved the way for the second and third instalments of the trilogy of Douglas's formative years:
My Ain Folk (1973) and
My Way Home (1978). The
Bill Douglas Trilogy recounts the harrowing experiences of a young boy, Jamie, growing up in material and emotional poverty with his brother and grandmother; followed by incarceration in a children's home, and then living in a hostel for down-and-outs. Eventually the call-up for national service allows Jamie to find freedom through his friendship with Robert, a young middle class Englishman who introduces him to books and the possibility of a more optimistic and fulfilling future. The austere black and white images of the films embody a stillness and intensity reminiscent of silent cinema and this visual style is augmented by the equally spare and precise use of sound. Just as the stillness of the image forces the audience to look, so the relative silence encourages greater attention to specific sounds – boots scraping on asphalt, the chirping of birds and the timbre of voices – granting an emotional power that many considered lost in the aural bombardment characterising much contemporary cinema. The
Trilogy gained a wealth of critical plaudits but Douglas struggled to raise financing for his next project, and was forced to find other ways of earning a living.
Mamoun Hassan, the former head of BFI Production, invited him to teach at the National Film and Television School from 1978 and he proved to be an inspiring presence. Hassan was also able, in his role as director of the National Film Finance Corporation to help realise the project of
Comrades, Douglas's film about the '
Tolpuddle Martyrs', six
Dorset farm labourers who in 1834 were arrested and tried for forming a trade union and subsequently transported to Australia. Even so, the film did not appear until 1986, six years after the screenplay had been completed. Dubbed a 'poor man's epic',
Comrades continues Douglas's interest in the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of material adversity. It also brings to the fore his fascination with the world of optics and image-making, through a number of references to various forms of Victorian optical entertainments such as the
magic lantern, the
zoetrope, the
peep show and the
camera obscura. The story itself is mediated by the character of an itinerant magic lanternist who reappears in a number of roles.
Comrades was to be Bill Douglas's last film. He died of cancer and is buried in the churchyard of
Bishop's Tawton in Devon. He left behind him two unmade screenplays:
Justified Sinner, an adaptation of
James Hogg's celebrated novel
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and
Flying Horse, based on the life of pre-cinema pioneer
Eadweard Muybridge. Another posthumous script,
Ring of Truth, written during a fellowship to
Strathclyde University in 1990, was produced by
BBC Scotland in 1996. ==Personal life==