Abstract
This article offers an in-depth analysis of 2010 British film The Arbor by Clio Barnard. The director's debut feature is a groundbreaking work dedicated to the lives of 1 Research for this article was supported by FAPESP – São Paulo Research Foundation, Brazil. Lorraine Dunbar stands on an empty stage and reads out the final words from the verbatim play A State Affair by Robin Soans (2000) . Her presence on screen and on stage seems uncanny, almost phantasmagorical. It is her voice we hear, reading from the book of the play ten years after it was first staged by the "Out of Joint" theatre company at the Soho Theatre in London, under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark. Then, Lorraine's words, extracted from interviews conducted with her at the Buttershaw estate in Bradford, were declaimed by actor Emma Rydal. Now Lorraine speaks the words again, yet on screen we see actor Manjinder Virk lip-synching to their sound. What follows is one of the most powerful ellipses of contemporary British cinema, sending us back to the 1980s. Sitting at the audience is none other than Lorraine's mum, Andrea Dunbar. She smokes a cigarette and listens to what her daughter has to say about her, a speech that ends with these words: "One night, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her say she wished she'd had an abortion with me. How could she say that? Every day I feel hurt, pain, anger, hate. That's why I went on heroin…to block out those feelings". [Figs. 1-2.] This scene belongs to the film The Arbor, made in 2010 by artist filmmaker Clio Barnard. The director's debut feature, co-produced by art organization Artangel, is a groundbreaking work dedicated to the lives of playwright Andrea Dunbar and her eldest daughter Lorraine. Andrea grew up in the Buttershaw estate in Bradford, England, and drew on her own experiences to write her first play The Arbor in 1977, at the age of 15. The play was later developed and performed at the Royal Court Theatre "Young Writer's Festival" in 1980, under director Max Stafford-Clark, who was so impressed by Andrea's precocious talent that he commissioned a second play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) , also set at the Buttershaw estate and equally based on the author's own experiences. Through the 1980s, Andrea's work was critically acclaimed and she received a great deal of media attention, but at the same time she struggled with alcoholism and died from a brain haemorrhage in 1990, at the age of 29. Ten years after Andrea's untimely death, director Max Stafford-Clark and writer Robin Soans revisited the Buttershaw estate and collected interviews with several of its residents, later placed in a dramatic context and edited as the verbatim play A State Affair, written from the actual words and phrases recorded on site. In a community weakened by heavy drugs and crime, Stafford-Clark and Soans came across Lorraine, the fruit of Andrea's inter-racial relationship with Yousaf, originally from Pakistan. Lorraine's life had followed down a difficult path after her mum's death, as she became addicted to heroin and crack cocaine. The Arbor thus appears as third in a lineage of works concerned with life at the Buttershaw estate, and was also inspired by a wish to return to this place and not only reflect on its current condition but also on its previous representations in theatre and on film. For two years, director Clio Barnard recorded lengthy interviews with members of Dunbar's family, neighbours and friends, most still residents of the estate. It was during this time that Barnard found out how Lorraine's life had taken a turn for the worse since the production of A State Affair: in 2007 she had been jailed for manslaughter by gross neglect for the tragic death of her two-year old son Harris, who overdosed on his mum's methadone. Lorraine then became a focal point of Barnard's interviews, and in more than one occasion the director uses Andrea's plays, personal letters and footage from old television programmes as a means to trigger Lorraine's childhood memories. The interviews were then edited in the manner of an audio screenplay, which became the main guiding line for the film, composed from a variety of sources such as television programmes, an outdoors performance of Andrea's eponymous play and, most notably, the technique by which actors lip-synch to the pre-recorded interviews collected by Barnard, in order to reconstruct the two tragic lives. In this article, I will endeavour to show how The Arbor's aesthetic experience with mixed media and the lip-synching technique puts into question accepted notions of fiction and documentary in film, connecting realism and intermediality in an original way. I will first reflect on how its complex editing structure manages to interweave different media, namely theatre, television and radio, to generate a cinematic experience defined by multiple registers and multiple voices. I will then look at how this original structure works towards creating as much as conserving individual and collective memories, highlighting a question analogous to the paradoxical nature of this film, that is, the fictional nature of real memories. This leads towards a reflection on the interview and the lip-synching techniques, employed as the main vehicle for memory in the film, which provokes as much emotion as it does critical thinking, thus turning Brecht's binary equation reasonemotion in its head. I will conclude by suggesting that The Arbor cannot be contained or explained by dualisms such as fiction-documentary, reason-emotion, form-content, history-poetry. It is a film that dares to speak of the real and of realism through an overtly reflexive and mediated structure, both continuing and departing from a certain tradition of British audiovisual media.
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