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A Private Function

Alan Bennett
Chapters (21)
  1. Cover
  2. Landing Page
  3. A Private Function
  4. CONTENTS
  5. INTRODUCTION
  6. The Old Crowd
  7. CAST
  8. A Private Function
  9. PREFACE
  10. CAST AND CREDITS
  11. Prick Up Your Ears
  12. PREFACE
  13. CAST AND CREDITS
  14. 102 Boulevard Haussmann
  15. CAST AND CREDITS
  16. The Madness of King George
  17. PREFACE
  18. CAST AND CREDITS
  19. About the Author
  20. Also by the Author
  21. Copyright

Cover

cover

Landing Page

alt

ALAN BENNETT

A Private Function

CONTENTS

  1. Title Page
  2. Introduction by Alan Bennett
  3. The Old Crowd
  4. A Private Function
  5. Prick Up Your Ears
  6. 102 Boulevard Haussmann
  7. The Madness of King George
  8. About the Author
  9. Also by the Author
  10. Copyright

INTRODUCTION

I have never been smitten with the romance of film or been much of a film buff. When I was a child the cinema seemed a less exciting place to visit than the theatre, partly, I suppose, because I was taken to the theatre less often and never took it for granted.

‘The pictures’, on the other hand, were routine; as a family in the forties we regularly went on a Monday and a Saturday (always to the first house) and sometimes on a Wednesday, too. Programmes changed once and sometimes twice a week and, with half a dozen cinemas within a mile or two, it was seldom hard to find a film you hadn’t seen.

This might make us seem film fans, but not then; in the years before television it was what people did. Thus in the course of my childhood I must have seen some of the classics of the screen at theit first outing – Casablanca, Citizen Kane, My Darling Clementine – with no notion that these were films of a different order from our usual twice-weekly fare. So the romance of film passed me by.

When I came to work with film directors like Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger and Stephen Frears I became more conscious of this gap, a gap not so much in my education (I had seen a lot of films after all) as in my sensibility. I didn’t understand the grammar of film (and still don’t); I didn’t carry a library of shots in my head and couldn’t draw on memories of classic films and how they were cut, the director’s touch and style seldom something I noticed.

I was most conscious of these shortcomings with Lindsay Anderson, whose living room was lined with videos of his favourite films, the virtues of which (sometimes quite obscure) he was always ready to expound. John Schlesinger was less of a teacher than Lindsay and was also more camp in his affiliations, and didn’t like to be thought in any way ‘arty’, so with him I felt less ignorant. Stephen Frears kept his enthusiasms to himself, sometimes seeing or contriving similarities with his favourite films, but never so explicitly as to be dubbed hommages, though his first film, Gumshoe, written by Neville Smith, was packed with such references, most of which were lost on me.