THE ROCKING HORSE

THE ROCKING HORSE 

UK | 1962 | B&W | 25 mins

Credits:

Director: James Scott

Co-director: Drewe Henley

Camera:

Keith Raven
Tom Honeyman

Sound: Robert Higham

Music: Simon Standage

Equipment/Facilities: University College London Film Society

Made with Assistance from: British Film Institute’s Experimental Film Fund

Cast:

Drewe Henley
Jenny Lousada
Neil Costa
Brigitte McWilliam
Clarissa Pepperell
Angela Holt

Synopsis

There are two characters in this short fictional film - Eddie and Marie. Eddie comes from a working class London East End family, and has no fixed occupation, and no interests outside of his motorcycle, coffee-bars, girls, and rock-and-roll. We see Eddie and his friend Neil wandering about the town in search of distraction. Eddie is young, good looking, outwardly assured, and enjoying himself. Then he meets Marie, a painter, alone and recently come to London. Though quieter than Eddie, she has more confidence and is living a richer life materially and culturally. By chance they talk and strike up an acquaintance. Finally Eddie goes back with Marie to her studio flat and spends the night with her.

When Eddie wakes in the morning he finds himself alone in Marie’s bed. He begins to doubt himself and his own experience. In a resentful, perhaps envious mood, he explores the bedroom and the kitchen. Then he finds Marie at work on a self-portrait. In the background of the picture she has painted Eddie standing with his leather jacket. In a blind flash Eddie grasps a knife from the table and slashes the canvas. Marie looks blankly at the painting and slowly touches the gash. Through the deserted early morning streets, Eddie runs away as fast as he can to get back to his bike. He flings himself onto the machine and madly bashes the kick-starter, but the engine is cold and dead. The camera tracks back until all we see is a tiny figure, kicking, stroke after stroke, senselessly defeated.

Production Notes:

The film came out of a collaboration between myself and Drewe Henley while we were in our first year at the Slade School of Art, part of University College London, studying painting. He wanted to act and I wanted to write and direct. 

It was in the same year that the Cinema course under Thorold Dickinson was started at the Slade. But it was just a theoretcial course - there was no practical work involved and no film making resources were to be found at the Slade. 

The Slade screenings were held in the Physics Theatre and the sophistication of their projection exceeded even the National Film Theatre.  Although I attended the screenings and the seminars we had to look beyond the Slade for the technical means to shoot a film.  

We found these at the University College London Film Society* which was not only well equipped but were looking for a project that they could work on. Funding for the film was originally turned down by the British Film Institute Experimental Film Fund although later when they saw the rough-cut they agreed to make a grant of 250 pounds (370 U.S. dollars) for the post-production. 

The music, from a score by Simon Standage, was recorded in the University of London Union and the sound was mixed from five ¼” tape recorders running simultaneously and re-recorded  onto a Bell and Howell 16mm double-headed magnetic projector. 

Later the film achieved notoriety as it was given an X certificate and there was a certain news value in the fact of students making an X film. (See copy of article in Today Magazine 6/62). The film was later selected as one of the British entries to the Venice and Vancouver festivals. 

It was my first film and I think reflects my interest in certain formal questions as well as a certain psychological situation. It was shot in London over a period of about five weeks. It was shown publicly by The Other Eye in 1962. 

* Over 30 years later Christopher Nolan also started his career with the University College Film Society. UCL Film Society had come a long way!

Reviews

"Not for the family" by Michael Ratcliffe 

Films and Filming - Clubs, Jan 1963 

"A teenage folk-hero on the town" - The Rocking Horse

 As the youthful hero of "The Rocking Horse" (Drew Henley) kicked his bike into action and rode up west muttering "I ain't gonna get dragged down. Gonna make a bloody noise. Wake the bastards up", the mind went back to Arthur Seaton's "Nine hundred and ninety bloody nine" and countless other blackjacked operas of recent years, and the heart sank. 

Not again. But so it continued: the bars, the jukes, the arrogance, the sad urban moan, the pick up (Jenny Lousada). So far, we have been here before. But the moment when, back in her flat, the girl speaks for the first time, and with a weary drawl parries an honest pass, the film fairly hums with controlled tension. In the short remaining space of about ten minutes, an intimate situation, an absence of relationship is evoked with some skill by the director and scriptwriter, James Scott. The bed scene is most accomplished, and the morning after, with the girl coolly returned to her painting before the boy is even awake, is bleakly eloquent.

The Rocking Horse seems to me an important little film if only because it attempts that very rare thing -  the cinematic short story. When the cinema adapts a one-act play or a story of novella length, convention demands an expansion of the original. The unsatisfactory results of such expansions are with us all the time -currently, for example, in The Dock Brief and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The Rocking Horse, once over its derivative scene-setting, is an absorbing piece of cinema, and discovers in Drewe Henley an actor to whose perfectly judged combination of charm, gentleness and aggression it owes a great deal of its modest success.

THE ROCKING HORSE
REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER DUPIN (EXCERPT)

“The film's truthful portrayal of contemporary British youth, the location filming in London's crowded West End, and the atmospheric juxtaposition of images and largely unsynchronized soundtrack recall Free Cinema documentaries such as Nice Time (d. Claude Goretta/Alain Tanner, 1957). Other contemporary influences were John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959) and, for the love scene, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (France, 1959).

The film's young hero is a cross between James Dean's troubled teenager in Rebel Without a Cause (US, 1955) and Albert Finney's defiant mechanic in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Karel Reisz, 1960). Initially portrayed as a self-assured, arrogant and immature teenager, his chance meeting with a pretty, sophisticated middle-class artist reveals a more insecure, fragile side. Despite genuine mutual attraction, there is a certain awkwardness to their relationship. But Scott's conclusion about the irreconcilability of their respective worlds (classes?) is rather pessimistic, as demonstrated in the bleak final sequence.

The climactic love-making scene earned Scott the first X certificate given to an amateur filmmaker. Yet, far from being crude, this intimate scene is shot in a sensual, rather poetic way that wouldn't trouble today's censors. In the filmmaker's words, "we wanted to show a boy and a girl as they are today. Not to have shown the love scenes would have been false to this aim. There's no point in being squeamish. We prefer reality."