Blues Film Lament for Lost Youth (remember "Ebb"?)

I was in my second year at Wadham College, Oxford, aged 19 turning 20, reading English Literature, discovering the blues and European cinema.

Wadham College had one of the only established and active film-making groups at Oxford. The college had a long tradition of undergraduate film-making (Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson were both undergraduates there). The Oxford Mail once described it as "Pinewood College". Others have written about "Hollywood Oxford".

When I was 19, I wrote the script for the film "Ebb", which was originally going to be called "The Court Jester" or "Lorelei". Perhaps it should have been called "Prufrock", because Eliot's poem was one of the influences ("I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"..."In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo").

Having grown up in a Somerset village, I had never seen a European art film before I started going to the Scala Cinema in Oxford, where I was introduced to the works of Bergman, Bunuel, Antonioni and Godard, etc.

The Wadham Film Group gave us the chance to try our hands at making a film, although we had absolutely no experience or training in 16mm techniques, film lighting, graphics, continuity or cinematic make-up (it probably shows).

So I wrote my script, with its subconscious (?) symbolism and intertextual references to Eliot's "Prufrock", to Rodin (instead of Eliot's Michelangelo), to Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries", to Heine's "Lorelei", and even to Shakespeare's "King Lear" ("a tempest in my mind"). Perhaps there's a touch of Camus and 'the Absurd' in there too!

It's really a film about an Everyman Idealist who becomes a detached, cynical outsider and heartbroken (but ever-hopeful) clown as a result of disillusionment and rejection: a melancholic man with the deep, deep blues, in short.

Click here to see the film. 
(NB The film starts after 25 seconds; there is some deteriorioration in the reversal film print and magnetic stripe soundtrack; the 46 year old print has been copied from film to VHS to DVD and then uploaded).The film begins with a few bars from Blind Willie Johnson's haunting Dark Was the Night, Cold the Ground.

Ian Whitwham played the part of "The Fool",  "The Court Jester" or "Everyman", in what I conceived as a "cinemime", a silent film with a continuous blues soundtrack, which was recorded especially for the film by an enthusiastic John Lee Hooker, who was delighted to support a student film. Introducing the film on tape, John Lee said, with feeling:


"EBB is based upon mens and womens. Some have been searching all their lives for things they have never found, and never will find- maybe for love, or for gold, or for happiness; but the flesh is weak, and they cannot materialise what their hearts long for, and they die before they reach their goal."


You can listen to his introduction here (after the two short blues songs).

OK, it is a roughly made, adolescent film, but people say it captures the period in some respects. Simon Brett referred to its "mature integration of symbolism" and "swift evocation of mood". Shooting began in the Michaelmas term 1964. It was completed a year later, at the end of Trinity term, as the script required different seasonal episodes, one to be shot in a cold misty street in the winter, the other a more lyrical summer interlude. It was made on  a budget of £50, on Plus-X reversal film. The budget could only run to one take of each shot. Locations included Port Meadow and Jericho.

The blues lyrics serve as an introspective commentary on the action of the film and the emotional state of the moody outsider around whom the film is centred, and whose life is "ebbing away".

"There is a finely orchestrated sequence from physical cold through non-communication and introspection to a sort of emotional death, the involuntary position of the loveless who turns to mockery and cyncicism." (Simon Brett).

Here's a somewhat pretentious note from the original film launch programme:

"The film ends with a shot of the now old "ebbed man" drowned amongst the reeds in the river, having stripped off his Fool's costume (donned in a desperate gesture of trying to laugh at the absurdities of life after he is faced with the sudden realisation that his youth is gone" - and that his ideal is out of reach, unattainable. Philippa Midgely (swimming in a dirty and freezing river for the sake of art) has the same effect on the symbolically rejuvenated but ageing Everyman as the Lorelei did on the sailors in the folksong: "with a surge of regenerative hope he tries to swim out to reach this Siren-vision of the ideals of his youth, but drowns before he can reach her (the flesh is weak!). Hooker at this stage sings an adaptation of the traditional Death Valley Blues."

Hints of the drowned Ophelia too?

It's hard to wind back the clock, to get inside the head of the person one was at 19 or 20. The film is a painful reminder! But there you are...

Derek Grigs, the Oxford Mail film critic, once wrote:

"Making films is like writing in water. Of today's pictures, only one in a hundred is remembered tomorrow; in Oxford, not even those".

John Birt has written  ("Oxford Today", Trinity issue, 1996, vol 8.3) about Oxford student films generally, that such films are better "remembered with affection through the mists of time".