The Arbor, Clio Barnard / + Chat with Laura Mulvey

The Arbor, Clio Barnard, UK, 2010, 94'

The title of the film, The Arbor, is the same title Andrea Dunbar gave to her play when she was only 15 years old in 1977. The playwright lived in Bradford, a city in West Yorkshire (England) strongly marked by the post-industrial crisis that had devastating consequences for a working class condemned to poverty and violence, with alcoholism, abuse and racism among their problems. The play was first performed in the theatre in 1980. It was such a success that Dunbar was commissioned to write another play in 1982 (Rita, Sue and Bob Too), which Alan Clarke adapted for film in 1986. The last play Dunbar wrote, Shirley, was written in the same year. 

The playwright’s successful career was accompanied by a very hard life as a teenage single mother of three children (each from a different father) and an alcoholic, until she died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 29.

In 2010 director Clio Barnard took Dunbar’s life as the starting point for her film The Arbor. One of the most interesting features of the film is the combination of the different cinematic devices it uses. The first, and one of the most original proposals, involved Clio Barnard interviewing people close to Dunbar for two years. Then, after making a sound montage of the interviews, she worked with actors who interpreted the different conversations by lip-synching. Barnard also selected different scenes from the play The Arbor and staged them in the playwright’s neighbourhood, filming the interaction between the actors and the locals live. Finally, she also used existing archive footage of Andrea Dunbar from a 1980 BBC story on her. 

The result is a film in which the director finds the appropriate distance from which to approach a very tough story with the respect it deserves, and which will make us reflect on the working classes in post-Thatcherite England, motherhood, memory and cinema itself.  

Laura Mulvey visits Tabakalera as a guest of EQZE, regarding the Research Program on the History of Education and Cinematographic Pedagogy, specifically in the research project Genealogías del aprendizaje: educación, pedagogías y metodologías cinematográficas promoted by EQZE.

At the end of the film Laura Mulvey will chat with Lur Olaizola about the projected film.