In the words of producer-director Mark Littlewood, Orwell Against the Tide is “a film about George Orwell from the freedom fighter perspective.”1 With near-enough dramatizations of passages from Homage to Catalonia and highly charged comments from philosophers Richard Rorty and Noam Chomsky, the international co-production wears its radical sympathies on its sleeve.
The mood is set in the opening few minutes, when Stanford University’s Professor Rorty posits that wherever people are struggling for political freedom, they will recognize figures like O’Brien and institutions like the Ministry of Truth. “Wherever the high are oppressing the low,” he says “there will be something that Orwell has diagnosed.” Professor Chomsky, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is no less forceful. “Orwell is not writing about classical Athens,” he says. “We are living in the world that he was working in, writing about, commenting on and so on.”
Littlewood’s world—or at least his immediate locality—is Scotland, where he co-founded Pelicula Films in 1971.2 Working with media students from the University of the West of Scotland in 1999/2000, he heard about the Orwell centenary from their lecturer, Tony Grace. In Littlewood’s opinion, his schoolteachers had presented Orwell’s work in the most boring, unimaginative way possible. Over the years, he’d thought about exploring another side of the author for the benefit of a non-academic audience.
“I suppose it was my idea, really,” says Grace, “and we sort of developed it together. I wrote the treatments and the initial scripts. It had a fairly protracted development.”3
With the promise of funds from the European Commission and Scottish Screen, Littlewood trekked around the film festivals of Europe, securing modest contributions from eight countries. One of the main selling points was the involvement of Chomsky, who’d met Grace on a visit to Scotland years earlier and was happy to grant him an interview. Backers were hard to find, but just as Littlewood was on the verge of giving up, Barcelona-based independent film-maker Oriol Porta signed on as co-producer, bringing his Catalan film crew on board. It was, says the director, a turning point.
Grace’s recollection is slightly different. “The key person was a guy called Jordi Ambros, who was commissioner for TV3 Catalonia. The influence he had in the European documentary community was substantial, so a lot of people then followed on.”4
The last pre-production challenge—copyright—took Littlewood to the London headquarters of AM Heath, which represents the Orwell estate. Ushered into a lawyer’s office, he explained that he was a cash-strapped documentary-maker who wanted permission to quote from everything Orwell had written. The lawyer’s eyes widened, then widened some more, until at last he granted the rights for £250, much less than the sum Littlewood had in mind.
Perhaps, he thinks, the lawyer was impressed by the “bold thoroughness” of his proposal. “He later told me that he’d had to pacify Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, who had already paid a small fortune for the exclusive rights to make a feature film of Homage to Catalonia,” he says. “He’d explained to Hudson that any dramatization I might do wouldn’t really be dramatization, but more what he called ‘a creative realization of reality.’”
In May 2003, The Scotsman reported that the film would cost £300,000, be shown as part of Scottish Television’s Artery series (making it the most expensive documentary the company had ever commissioned) and air in at least ten other countries. According to Littlewood, it would concentrate on Orwell the man, bringing out his humor and humanity. “He was a freedom fighter with great physical and mental courage,” the newspaper quoted him as saying, “and not quite the dowdy old man in a sports jacket who appears in the photographs at school.”5
From his birth in Motihari, India, to his burial in a quiet Oxfordshire village, the film provides a comprehensive overview of Orwell’s life. Pathé’s film of the 1921 Eton wall game, so narrowly missed by The South Bank Show, “just happened to come as were putting the thing together,” says Grace.
In some respects, though, it is decidedly less conventional than its predecessors. For a start, roughly half of its 55-minute running time is devoted to Spain, because Grace (who’d developed a fascination with the civil war during his postgraduate research on Orwell) considers it “a turning point” in the author’s life and thinking. Leaving aside its short dramatizations of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s torture scenes, it’s also devoid of dialogue to all intents and purposes, relying on narrator Siobhan Redmond to explain the context of its splendid archive footage. As Orwell, Scottish actor John Kay Steel looks and sounds authentic, but the only time he speaks is when he’s reading passages in voiceover.
Considering his avowed anti-imperialism, few Orwell documentaries are quite as hard-hitting about the empire Eric Blair grew up in. Here, however, Chomsky notes with calm authority that his father Richard, a civil servant in charge of opium harvests in India, helped to run the biggest narco-trafficking trade in history. Rorty, filmed in Paris, brings up the oppression of the Burmese and says that Blair’s police duties gave him material for the rest of his writing career.
In one of the film’s few real scoops, the POUM Youth’s former general secretary, Wilebaldo Solano, reminisces about 1937 Barcelona. “He arrived at the barracks,” he says, “and people wondered about this man who seemed so dull and then so shy.” Yet thanks to his Burmese days, Blair knew more about military discipline and weapons than most of his comrades. Sequences shot around Monflorite evoke the atmosphere of the Aragon Front, as Steel reads accounts of the classless militia, lice infestations, parties in a commandeered country house and shouted boasts about delicious buttered toast (designed to make the enemy troops feel jealous). Orwell’s reluctance to shoot a fascist who’d just been to the toilet is amusingly conveyed. His bullet to the throat, less so.
As his time in Spain is curtailed, and his friend Bob Smillie dies at the hands of the communist secret police, the documentary makes a point of examining Orwell’s attitude to Scotland. Earlier, it had noted that St. Cyprian’s School was strangely in awe of Scottish culture, because only the richest families in England could vacation there. It also mentioned that in Orwell’s novels, Scots were often the most unsavory characters. But he was full of admiration for Smillie, a fearless, 22-year-old Glasgow University student. “Orwell,” says the narrator, “would never again profess to hate the Scots.”
Made on a shoestring and scored by Jim Prime from the band Deacon Blue, Orwell Against the Tide aired on Scottish Television on 17 November. South of the border, it had a Leicester Square premiere, a screening at Oxford University and public showings at The Guardian newspaper offices in London. Bafta Scotland nominated it for a documentary award.
The film is a reminder, in many ways, of the febrile atmosphere in 2003, when opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was at its peak. Rorty warns that Orwell’s worst nightmares “may come true in the old democracies as a result of terrorism”—one of several remarks that Grace thought might date the film. “Unfortunately,” he says, “many of the comments [he and Chomsky] make seem almost more relevant than they did at the time.”
Orwell Against the Tide
Writer/co-producer: Anthony Grace
Produced & directed by: Mark Littlewood
Writer/editor: Andy Boyd
Music: Jim Prime
George Orwell: John Kay Steel
Eileen Blair: Natalie Haverstock
O’Brien: Melvyn Williamson
Winston: Raymie Day
Big Brother: Joe MacFadyen
Narrator: Siobhan Redmond