I loved this film. A time and a place is as worthy of documentary as a film about a "thing" or a new invention. The soul of a community is as worthy of record as a film about NHS malpractice or Cherie Blair's smile. The realm of documentary should be able to chart the dialogue between a people and a place. The landscape around us shapes the landscape of our mind. Places have a soul and a feel about them. I love anyone that documents that. If this is done - and it's genuine and earnest - it seems to provide any film with a foundation of soul - it feels undeniably rooted - there is a history and a past - the heart of the film-maker is bound up in the subject they are filming. "Pretty Shitty" does this. In short it documents a little town in Wales called Porth, wedged between two sides of a valley like a piece of slate clamped in a vice. It is not a film that you can commision to anyone other than the person who felt the calling to make the film. Martin Scorcese couldn't make a film about Porth. (He could - but it would be a piece of crap). Tim Burton couldn't make a film about Porth. (Again - he could - but it would likewise be a piece of crap). To make a film about Porth you can't just earn it overnight - you have to have put in the hours, months and years to feel the rhythm of a place, to be in tune with its heart and soul. Emma Jane Richards has clearly put in the hours...
...the film charts, what was probably a mad couple of days, schlapping about with a camera, like a swansong goodbye to the town, before she boarded a train and left...and the film aches with both this affection for a crappy town and the need to escape to bigger and brighter pastures...
...the air is heavily saturated with moisture...the stones of the houses are dank and damp...it seems like such a heavy, sodden place...almost permanantly under mist...
...set against this backdrop we have the imagery of cars, coaches and trains making their entrances and exits throughout the night...always hinting at and beckoning towards some form of escape...ghostly shuttles that offer the chance to ferry you out of the mist...
...what makes the spectre of escape so powerful is its unspoken nature...there is no tedious narration of Emma saying, "Ooh...I have to leave this town..."...rather, it is gradually built up in the shots of trains arriving at platforms...coaches leaving stations......you just intuit it from the camera perspective...(an opening shot looking out through a window...the landscape suddenly slipping away as you realise you're in a coach)......a concern unspoken is more claustrophobic, more oppressive, burdensome on the spirit...and the fact that the narrator's own personal escape is not explicitly referred to, helped create a build up of pressure in which the need to escape became insurmountable...
Don't get me wrong - this is not a morbid film. Emma's natural humour, warmth and enviable ease with her subjects is a pleasure to watch. Hanging out with the pigeon man......kids at the bus-stop...it's always nice to watch someone who's not up their arse and who doesn't treat their subjects like little piglets to squeeze an "oink" out for the camera. She doesn't assume the role of documenteer firing cold, clinical journalistic questions at her subjects - (like some frankenstein raised in a BBC laboratory) - but rather she comes across as a human being having a chat and a laugh with her subjects. And why not? Why should a documenteer suddenly assume some Sigmund Freud posture when engaging with their cast? She doesn't cut out banter with her subjects but rather understands that this banter is probably the most important thing you could capture on film to bring out the warmth and soul of a place. A community interacts with chit-chat and banter...it doesn't interact with journalistic joustings and cold questions aimed at the listener like a scalpel...
This ease with her subjects and the town manifests itself in other ways - most notably the use of sound. Emma uses it to great effect. Thus we hear people's chat about Porth being set against ghostly shots of streets...voices bouncing against empty fences and abandoned car lots...streets echoing with life that took place there...
...at the same time...the footage is all filmed either very early or late at night...it was always on the cusp of dusk or twilight...creating a bit of a ghost world...lonely, empty streets...the buzzing lunar landscape of street-lamps and empty stairwells...she captures all this...
At the end of the film when Emma gets on her train - it made me think of that scene at the end of "Billy Liar" when Tom Courtenay has a chance to leave the town he's fantasised all his life about leaving. Billy Liar didn't have the bottle to make that decision and he accepted his lot. And this question of escape is suggested to her contributors, who as a matter of course refer to Porth as a crappy little town, boring, rubbish, "pretty shitty". Ultimately the escapism of the kids consists of spitting in a bus shelter - or showing your arse on a train platform......smoking pot or drinking beer......wanting to go to Ibiza but going to McDonalds. It's pretty bleak and it is a shitty town. And you do feel kind of sorry for them. But that would be patronising. It's up to the individual how they choose to engage with their surroundings. Emma has sailed away but a part of her heart is clearly still anchored in this valley. Yes, Porth seems like a shit town. But the shittiness is indeed pretty - and it takes someone who has absorbed the landscape and spirit of this town to show it to others.
EMMA RESPONDS:
Well, it's great to recieve such a warm and honest review and to hear that you picked up on what I was experiencing. Watching Pretty Shitty is like reading my old diaries, but I'm happy that those innermost thoughts can be heard.
I was really ready to leave Wales, having spent all my 25 years there, but I was already feeling sad about that desire for escape. The first time I arrived in Porth it hit me, instinct shouted 'this is it, you have to catch this'. I was struck by the landscape and the features of the town, that magic cobbled-together feel, careworn, patched up garages under the grand mountains and colourful hotch-potch homes, bridges and fixtures unpainted since the seventies, certainly a welcome contrast to the clinical city (Cardiff ) I was living in.
I was brought up in a valleys town a little further east, and arriving in Porth was like a nostalgic vision of the same place but once removed, a more objective perspective of 'home' and how life within this landscape has its effect.
The title, Pretty Shitty, is the Dylan quote 'ugly lovely town' - twisted in the Welsh film Twin Town and regurgitated by the lads in the film. Ever since Dylan the Welsh have been voicing this feeling - acknowledging the awesome and beautfiul landscape we live in, but under the shadow of having 'fuck all else to do'.
But as with Ivor and his pigeons there are those people of the valleys who have so much warmth, amusement and acceptance of their lot, they talk about leaving but there's a humour in their voices that says they're not going anywhere. It's a tradition in these places to have that dream of elsewhere, that mantra of 'it's crap round here'. Watching now I see I was trying to understand why I needed to run, why I couldn't settle in the place where I was born, despite the hiraeth (the longing) and my love for the place. I still feel curious about that now.