This is my first post in months. Since then I've had an emergency re-admission to hospital so I guess it's fair to say I've had better years. My only film-related work so far is an overdue return to writing the final draft script for the Tilo project and my voting duties for the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) in the Raindance Maverick category - this year there are 57 entries.
Those following this blog might know my story but sometimes I wonder myself how much of it is true. An online search for "May Miles Thomas" or "Elemental Films" lists articles about me/my work but virtually none tells the whole story, lost among trivial errors; misspelt names, incorrect dates and misquotes. Does it matter?
Well, yes and no. From an ego perspective, I don't care because having to watch 57 films has a humbling effect and besides, it's always about the work, not me. However, what does matter is when false information about my work, if consigned to posterity, is unearthed decades later by some academic or researcher and presented as fact or worse, excluded on a false premise. When omissions and partial truths are reincarnated as fact what are we expected to believe?
Why this matters to me will become clear. Meanwhile it’s gratifying to announce that 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of Elemental Films. It's also the 25th anniversary of my debut feature, One Life Stand - a title invented by yours truly 10 years before Hot Chip used it for one of their albums. Same goes for the theatrical production of One Life Stand, produced by the Scottish Playwrights Studio.
No-one, I realise - at least very few - are aware of these anniversaries, lost in the morass of obscure British films. So in June, when an article on the BFI website listed One Life Stand as one of 10 great modern British black-and-white films, I felt bouyed. Who wouldn't? That is, until I realised the piece, written by George Bass, denied my debut's status as the UK's first end-to-end digital feature, describing it merely as ‘Scottish’ - thereby relegating it as a ‘regional’ film.
Via X/Twitter I contacted George to stake my claim. During our cordial DM exchange he cheerily offered, "for some reason I always thought that honour belonged to 28 Days Later (2002, dir. Danny Boyle) before graciously adding, "another gong your film deserves," conceding my film was THE first. Too late. That ship had sailed and my film's rightful status sank with it.
Yet George's assumptions made me think - how can a work of cultural significance (if not commercial success) be quite so demoted? Because it didn't originate in London? Or lacked the cachet of a theatrical release? Or is it because George didn't look deep or far enough? He's not at fault, I concluded, but our cultural institutions are.
The BFI serves a useful purpose in the culture, not least for the preservation of film and other media. It also develops and funds production, but in ways that are becoming increasingly opaque, if not chilling, aimed at the 'young' and focused on DEI, training and business development. The Institute's in-house journal, Sight and Sound attracts a number of freelancers who write about films with passion, but whose subjects tend towards the pet: English hauntology, Queer Cinema of the 1980s or Working Class Realism during the Blair years.
From my own corner of the British Isles, I observe Londoncentric film commentators denying credit to original, innovative, maverick films made in the UK's satellites at the expense of others. It's not intentional. Indeed most of them - mainly young, educated middle-class men - hail from far-flung English counties themselves and have gravitated towards London to pursue a career.
Some years ago, while on voter duties for BIFA, I watched a film produced in Bristol and read how its makers claimed they were producing the first feature film made in the city since Some People (1962, dir. Clive Donner). Which by coincidence was the year Pasolini made Mamma Roma, the motherlode for One Life Stand although my take of his Italian Neo-Realist drama is a twisted inverse on a working-class mother-son relationship - a prostitute mother who loves her son too much in an urban tale, in its aura reminiscent of my own childhood growing up in Glasgow. In my version the mother unwittingly creates a prostitute of her son and through her own blind love, loses him to an older woman.
OLS is more deeply European in its DNA than many reviewers and academics acknowledge. In the journal, Cencrastus, eight pages are devoted to an essay by Tom McKibbin who extolled the film as a work of pure, genuine working-class storytelling. The script, written in Berlin during the last quarter of 1998, marked a productive end of my Fellowship with the Nipkow Programm, marking two or more years of my becoming a better screenwriter. I could have shot it in any city but, knowing my time in Berlin had come to an end, for financial and practical reasons, I chose Glasgow.
Reflecting on George Bass' piece for Sight and Sound, I despair - why should I accept a pseudo-history written by people half my age from another country? While any recognition of my work is well-intentioned, why should I take the booby prize, as my character, Trise Clarke did in OLS? Or perhaps it’s somehow inconvenient to give an unheard-of filmmaker their due for a film made outside the system.
“History is written by the winners.” Indeed. It’s also written by those born with inviolate confidence, just as it's written with determination by those with little resource to pursue an enquiry. So in pursuit of my claim as the first end-to-end UK digital feature, as ever I’m encouraged by Owen – my husband and partner in Elemental - who recalls an article in the screen industry bible, Screen Digest, that cites – definitively – how OLS is the first Digital Feature Film, and - importantly - made in the UK explicitly for cinema.
The question is - can we be sure? Having learned the National Library of Scotland holds an archive of Screen Digest, we made the trip from Glasgow to peruse the physical copies. After gaining membership (him) and a Day Pass (me) we were directed to a desk and handed a box of journals, only to be dismayed when they turned out to be some obscure Dutch magazines. And so a day was wasted.
Undeterred, Owen next approached Glasgow University Library who also hold copies of Screen Digest. Privately I felt this was a Quixotic quest, involving many people in many buildings with no guarantee that we would be granted access.
Several emails and calls later, Owen made an appointment to visit an annexe of the GU library and was given access to the journals where he discovered an interesting article, about how Pixar's Toy Story 2 and One Life Stand were the first two films in the UK to be screened using digital projection. Ours was the first, in January 2000, whereas TS2 screened in February. My other evidence is that BBC's Tomorrow's World did a feature on the OLS screening that same month.
Written in Germany, inspired by an Italian, OLS was shot in Glasgow, in a total of 70 locations during a 24-day shoot, a shoot completed ahead of schedule and on budget thanks to Karen Smyth, the film’s producer, who ran everything smoothly and to whom I am eternally grateful.
For the edit, I used a radical piece of software called Speed Razor on a hardware setup called Spitfire, one of the first NLE (Non Linear Edit) systems designed for ordinary PCs. It was a leap in the dark. Until then, editing video to a professional standard cost tens of thousands, and was a mysterious world of offline and online edits, differing timecode systems, time-based correctors, EDLs and other jargon-heavy technical gadgetry.
Re-reading my journals, the journey from my apartment in Schöneberg to a shopfront studio in Prenzlauer Berg in the former East was thrilling. The year was 1997 and the city, more than any other German city was still acclimatising to reunification. And in this little shop my future was sealed.
Here’s an extract from my journal.
22nd August: Earlier we went up to Schonhauserallee to take a look at the DV Master Pro set-up and I'm very impressed. The interface is great, very elegant and simply laid out. There was no demo as such to look at but what I saw cut in real time looked pretty smooth. So I think it's a definite. All that has to be decided now is from where and for how much we'll buy it.
To this day I have notebooks filled with what looks like secret code but which was a method of tracking each take of each shot of each scene.
I also have my journals, kept since 1971 - sadly with some years lost.
In October 1999, I collapsed through sheer exhaustion. We took a few days off and travelled to the Isle of Mull for two precious nights at the Western Isles Hotel in Tobermory that boasts a small treasure of items, props and photos of the film shoot of I Know Where I’m Going! (1945) made by the cherished filmmakers, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Refreshed by a good dose of Scottish west coast weather, no sooner did I return to work than I became aware of the bogeyman of YK2 that threatened every computer on the planet, from nuclear weapon systems to my first movie.
On Hogmanay, we closed down all systems and, knowing nothing, brought in the Bells with a cup of tea and some bun (Scottish for traditional New Year cake, e.g. Madiera, Dundee and Shortbread) while watching scenes from the Millennium Dome in London, noting how the late Queen was bewildered by the proceedings. At five past midnight we switched the computers on again. And, of course, nothing bad happened.
Days later we travelled to London to do a grade at The Farm, Soho. We were greeted by Perry Gibbs, our colourist who told us he had just returned from a long holiday and how we were his first clients of the new millennium. We began at 8pm, their downtime, having only enough money for a 4-hour 'tidy-up' of the film.
But no sooner did Perry see the first shots than he volunteered to work through the night and insisted on doing a full grade despite our lack of funds. It was an amazing act of generosity. I was lifted even higher when one of our actors, Gary Lewis, in town working on another film, Billy Elliot - (re-voicing his dialogue to make it more comprehensible to a US audience) entered the suite, declaring, 'It's like f***ing Star Wars in here.' Hours later, while Owen slept on the sofa, I worked with Perry, one shot at a time, getting all we could out of the low-end format.
Cut to: 8am the following morning as we staggered out into a grey Soho Square with a fully-graded film in our hands. My first thought was to go to Bruno's on Wardour Street for a fry-up where the radio played Robbie Williams' Angels and I cried my heart out from sheer joy and exhaustion before taking the train back to Glasgow a day before the cast and crew screening at the Glasgow Film Theatre, which hosted the first-ever digital screening of a digitally-acquired film in the UK.
The rest, they say, is history. On the opening page of this site, I mention the value of the experiential. There are a thousand stories I could tell about how One Life Stand was made, how it originated, how it was received, the people who made it, their stories and their experiences, the festivals, the awards. I'm aware too of how trivial filmmaking can be, how ephemeral, how fleeting an experience it is. But isn't that the whole point? The experience?
Shortly before Christmas 2024, I was contacted by Mark Furse, former Head of Law at Glasgow University and a passionate writer on Scottish film in all its iterations. In relation to a new version of his book, Scottish Films, he asked why my second feature, Solid Air (2003. dir. May Miles Thomas), wasn't more available and - perhaps using the wrong form of words - why Voyageuse was my last film.
Last month I was delighted to receive a letter from Mark and a copy of his revised version of Scottish Films. I want him to know how much I appreciated his efforts trying to watch Solid Air at the Scottish Film Archive, since it hadn't been digitised by them until he made his request. I'm also delighted to announce that only this week the British Film Institute, after lengthy negotiation, has completed the legals on my company to allow me to donate three 35mm prints of Solid Air into the National Archive.
"Because it lasts forever" Owen wrote in a copy of Time Out's Film Guide he gifted in 2000. That much is true.
The above image is a floodlight, one of the opening images of the titles of One Life Stand. It was shot in the photographic studio of the Graphic Design department at the Glasgow School of Art in June 1999, our access made possible by my late brother, Ross Eakin, whose suicide I remember today - September 18th. It's the 15th anniversary of his death, aged 40.
I tried an online search for him - and found nothing. Not a single entry.
Ross was a photographer, a graduate and post-graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. He mounted a few exhibitions of his work in Glasgow and did a series of portraits he called 'Tribes' of marginal groups: Goths, Cowboys, Battle re-enactment soldiers. He was also the official photographer of Nelson Mandela's visit to Glasgow on October 9th 1993. After his death it took me two years to gather his portfolio which I have to this day, mostly shot on 35mm and large format film.
One day I might make sense of him, his work, his death - and my loss.