The Bill Douglas Trilogy

Abstract

A fundamental piece of British cinema in the seventies of the last century and quite unappreciated in his country for a long time, Bill Douglas’ trilogy converts the director’s harsh childhood and adolescence into everlasting images through an exercise in which, in the wake of Chekhov, memory is filtered through a sieve which holds only the essential for recollection. The trilogy is compounded by three great little films that provide us a journey through a sensitivity expressed in an alchemical art of the image in which a terrible family and social experience coalesces and is transmuted with intensity, simplicity and violence.