Brook: Lord of the Flies (1963)

For his adaptation of William Golding’s iconic novel, Peter Brook took an original approach, casting a large group of young boys, most of whom had never acted, would never act again, and were unfamiliar with the story, its reception and legacy. In lieu of a script, Brook simply told the boys, day to day, what they would be filming, with the key characters being given lines a little further in advance. Apparently, this was designed to draw out the savagery of the novel in a totally realistic way, as well as to – presumably – allow the cast to discover their own inner pack mentality, under controlled conditions. What’s perhaps surprising, then, is that Brook’s approach actually plays up the innocence of his young cast, and the bucolic, utopian overtones of their first few days on the island, where they’re stranded after an air disaster. In part, that’s because the group of boys is large and disparate enough in age to allow Brook to capture them in an odd space between acting and not acting, caught up in the infectious adventure of making the film, while not quite settled or stable in their roles; at any one point, there’s bound to be a small group of them who’ve been left to their own devices, caught almost inadvertently by the camera. And that’s quite true to the spirit of Golding’s novel, or at least the first part of it – his characters are play-acting as much as the actors themselves, meaning that the film often feels like incidental footage of boys having fun, shot through with a faintly ethnographic interest in how English boys might react to a Carribean landscape. While that innocence certainly produces a horror of its own, the horror of anticipating how all this is going to come apart, it requires a different language, a movement away from ethnographic naturalism, to actually evoke the group’s descent into madness.  It’s no coincidence that the film gets quieter and more self-consciously surreal as it proceeds, which is not to say that it feels like the boys are acting more, but that they’re less contextualised by Brook’s directives, which gradually come to feel more remote, opaque and problematic, not that distinct from whatever it is that turns the boys back to the jungle and against each other. By the end, there’s something downright disturbing about the fact of the film itself – as the surrealist perspectives collapse the boys into the skin of the island, it becomes uncomfortably clear that it’s their skin that’s acted as our venue all along, in keeping with the Theatre of Cruelty Brook developed from Antonin Artaud. Yet, as a Cinema of Cruelty, it’s an odd artefact – without the live element so critical to Artaud’s theories, it feels that the best audience for the film are the boys themselves, or that Brook’s project could only be fulfilled by finding a way to confront his cast with the film, day by day, as they were actually shooting it. That makes the actual audience irrelevant, but viscerally irrelevant – like a film tattooed onto someone else’s skin, it forces you to sympathise more tortuously with the surfaces on the screen, precisely because they’re not your own.