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- guardian.co.uk,
- Friday June 27 2008 16:12 BST
In the early 1970s Bill Douglas came out of nowhere to make three sequential short films that established, practically on their own, a coherent idea of British alternative cinema. Douglas came from Newcraighall, a battered mining village outside Edinburgh, and his films chronicle his bleak and often brutal upbringing.
But they are no social-realist tracts: Douglas films with the eye of a Bergman-esque poet, conjuring images of extraordinary power out of the hard Scottish landscape. Douglas had predictable difficulties fitting into the conventional industry after this brilliantly personal start, and completed only one more film, Comrades, about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, before his death in 1991. This DVD box set, which includes an hour-long documentary, is a small but fitting tribute.
