In the late 20s or early 30s, a story about the exodus of Scottish island folk from their home captured the imagination of Michael Powell, the British director of such classics as BLACK NARCISSUS and THE RED SHOES. The result was 1938s THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, long difficult to find and recently released by Milestone in a splendid DVD edition.
The story is a symbolic love story. A boy Robbie, a girl, Ruth, and her brother, Andrew, deal with a tragedy that separates the lovers and presages he changes to come for the remote island of Hirta, which translates, in perhaps too obvious a metaphor, as death. Andrew, recently returned from working off the island wants to leave for good. His father and the other men of the island see it as a betrayal of the community, whose population is dwindling. At the island council, the so-called boat parliament, both sides make compelling arguments for and against tradition. Finally, its decided that the question should be decided in the traditional way, with a race between Robbie and Andrew to climb a sheer rock face on one side of the island. The outcome will decide if the inhabitants should try to hang on, or move to the mainland leaving everything they know behind.
This is an early work of Powells, shot under the most difficult of conditions on location on the island of Foula as we learn in the excellent commentary track. Nonetheless, but there are moments of startling brilliance, done with a low key style that is gauged to tell a simple story of strong emotion rather than dazzle with style. The editing, in particular, is masterly. In key sequences, fragments of time are woven together to tell the larger story from many perspectives while never losing the dramatic focus intended. The funeral sequence and the mill scene that follow bespeak the personal sorrow of the individuals, but also, the long march of time and people that this remote island has seen over millennia. Its viscerally moving both for the overwhelming feeling loss they both encompass and for the equally palpable sense of time moving along, taking the worst of the sorrow with it.
Tradition, that sense of time moving in a place that has remained the same for thousands of year, is the key to the film. That was the theme that attracted Powell and drove him to document a way of life, until now viable and vigorous, that was quickly disappearing in the face of changing technology. In this case, the fleets of trawlers overfishing the waters. Powell contrasts the technology by firmly placing his characters in the framework of the islands spectacular scenery. From carefully composed long shots that make people minor components of the scenery, a woman in long shot standing on the edge of a cliff looking out to sea after her departed lover, to tighter shots focusing on the stuff of daily life, sheep-shearing or digging peat, the setting is an integral part of the story as well as the characters personalities.
The acting styles are sturdy and unstudied. In addition the native islanders of Foula, where the film was shot for verisimilitude, Finlay Currie and John Laurie, as the fathers of our star-crossed lovers, adding both gravitas and the peculiar eccentricities that island life engenders. The exception is Belle Krystall, the leading lady, who is a bit more melodramatic than modern tastes call for and wears much more mascara than an island woman of the time would have.
The technical difficulties are enumerated by Powells widow and film historian Ian Christie. This being 1938, Foula was just short of completely inaccessible. Actors, crew and supplies had to be shipped in along time-consuming routes. Money was in short supply forcing Powell to appear in the film as the tourist whose trip to the now-deserted island triggers the story. The weather included gales that swept cameras away and threatened to take the company as well, the images brought to mind by Daniel-Day Lewis reading of Powells memoirs of making the film, make the drama of the finished product pale a bit in comparison.
The most striking thing about THE EDGE OF THE WORLD is its unsentimental nostalgia for an old way of life. Powell includes a line in the script about the harsh island life being fine until now, people were no better off anywhere else, but times had changed. Still, there is in some of the moments he evokes an ache for the ending of things. As the men of the island gather in their age old boat parliament to discuss the islands affairs, they site on ancient stones beside a timeless sea and the matters of fishing and sheep are the matters that have occupied the meetings on this spot for thousands of years. There is a wrenching quality to the continuity that is about to be broken, the sure knowledge that this sense of timelessness and of community and of fellowship has no place in the world that they are shortly to inhabit.
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