Harold Pinter & Joseph Losey

Although the Nobel presentation speech concentrated wholly on Pinter's writing for the theatre, his work as a screenwriter is increasingly appreciated by scholars and audiences.

Of all his work for that medium, nothing matches the brilliance of his work with director Joseph Losey. BFI Southbank is currently hosting a Losey season, featuring all three films that they made together: The Servant; Accident; and The Go-Between. Accident is a newly restored version, first shown in Cannes this year (42 years after scooping the Grand Prix du Jury, where it ceded the Palme d’Or to Blowup), and it will be touring the UK over the summer.

For all the exact wit and style of The Servant, I have always preferred the more languorous Accident, a film that meanders with horrific precision back to the tragic denouement that opens the film. Pinter himself has a comic turn in the offices of an achingly voguish television arts programme, a hilarious yet prescient cameo (a mix of South Bank and the Culture Show avant la lettre).

To accompany the season, curators at the BFI have staged a fascinating display on the mezzanine level that features scripts, letters, and other production ephemera from the BFI’s own Losey archives, including a number of letters from Pinter. As well as treating each of the three collaborations, this enticing exhibit also looks at their unrealised adaptation of Proust’s A la recherche…, a work that was never screened, but did find an audience at the National Theatre in 2001 through a theatrical version with Di Trevis.

The Pinter archive contains drafts of all his film scripts, and letters from Losey, while the Sound Archive has a live recording of the theatrical adaptation of the Proust screenplay.

Comments

[Basil Chiasson]

I managed to see the new print of Accident on the 'big screen'and must say it was quite something. I certainly place Accident before the others in the Pinter-Losey trilogy; its meanings and effects opening and expanding with every viewing. What struck me about seeing it at the BFI is the great bursts of laughter it so often engendered in the audience--very reminiscent of sitting through any number of Pinter's plays. There's been a few Guardian articles emphasising how Losey changed British cinema, how via his neorealist influences he attached British cinema to the European art house tradition while giving it an identity. All very true; however, Pinter's role in this cannot, I think, be over emphasised given his own youth as a cinephile and the centrality of the image in his writing in all the mediums in which he works: poetry, drama, film, and of course his activist discourse (just think of his discussion in the Nobel lecture of the image's importance and then his subsequent demonstration of this position as he details the US-funded and inspired atrocities that comprise foreign policy since WWII). In the special features of the recent DVD of Accident, Pinter offers quite soberly that Losey 'was like a father to me'. The extent to which they both taught and learned from each other indeed shows how one was both parent and child to the other and vice versa. We really are lucky for the 'accident' that was their coming together. The beautiful and haunting films that are the Pinter-Losey trilogy are a rare and precious event in Britain's cultural legacy. He's only been gone for a short time but I think it's safe to say that we'll never recover from Pinter, as he once remarked of his old friend Shakespeare.

[best acting classes los angeles]

Hi,

I agree with Mr. Biasil. Pinter's role in this cannot be over emphasized given his own youth as a cinephile and the centrality of the image in his writing in all the mediums in which he works: poetry, drama, film, and of course his activist discourse

-peter

[Dissertation Writing]

Excellent post and wonderful blog, I really like this type of interesting articles keep it up.

Nice job keep it up again!