YLA at Push the Boat Out, Edinburgh
Hair
12.15-2pm, Saturday 25 November 2023 at the Red Lecture Theatre, Summerhall, Edinburgh
After the screening, former artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival Hannah McGill will talk to award-winning author Nadine Aisha Jassat, dynamic writer Khadijah Ibrahiim and esteemed former Professor of History at Birkbeck Joanna Bourke about all things ‘hair’ and its importance past, present and future. Poet Francesca Beard will read a brand-new poem inspired by Hair.
Your Local Arena is a unique project featuring iconic films from the archives of BBC TV’s Arena, the pioneering cultural documentary series. It includes new poems inspired by the Arena films and panel talks to explore the continuing relevance of the Arena archives today. The Your Local Arena concept was developed by Lucy Hannah and Speaking Volumes, with Arena’s award-winning director/editor Anthony Wall as creative consultant, and funded by Arts Council England.
‘Ode to My Hair’
Your Local Arena Roving Poet in Residence, Francesca Beard, wrote this new poem in response to the film. She performed ‘Ode to My Hair’ at the screening and panel event at Push the Boat Out. You can watch her read it here, and read it yourself by clicking below. Scroll down to find out more about Francesca.
“You can escape from your home, the life you’ve lived, your friends & family but not your hair.”
Producer Anthony Wall reflects on Hair.
Anthony Wall spent his early years in the east end of London. He studied at King’s College Cambridge. In 1974 he joined BBC radio as a studio manager. The same year he became the rock critic of the Morning Star and was the first journalist to interview Bob Marley for a national newspaper. Wall moved into television in 1978 and soon joined Arena, becoming one of the core directors/producers (1978-85) and then Series Editor from 1985 to 2018. He has won three BAFTAs, with numerous nominations and other awards from all over the world. His project Night and Day – The Arena Time Machine, a 24-hour evocation of a single day in the life of the planet, made entirely from the Arena archive, screened at the 2019 San Francisco Film Festival, where Wall and Arena received the Mel Novikoff Award, one of the festival’s highest honours, for their ‘contribution to cinema’.
Arena: Hair is a straightforward film. The director, Ted Clisby, chose not to rely on commentary or history or analysis, but instead on the testimony of a series of individuals, each displaying and talking about their own particular way of cultivating their hair. The film was made in 1983. By then Arena was expected to go for subjects that previously would have been considered inappropriate, not to say outlandish, for the attention of a series in the Music and Arts Department of the BBC. It began with an examination of the extraordinary appeal of the song My Way to the egos of the many people who thought it summed up their lives. Films about songs are commonplace today, but in 1979, the reaction to the idea was invariably, “How can you make a film about a song?” The film was a big hit and seemed to inhabit a space that hadn’t been revealed before. Its success allowed for further films – Heroic Failure; Desert Island Discs; the Ford Cortina, Britain’s most popular car at the time and then Hair.
There’s no getting away from hair. You can escape from your home, the life you’ve lived, your friends and family but not your hair. Within the restricting parameters of what your hair will allow you to do with it, your hair inevitably becomes an expression of who you are and how you wish to be seen, even if you’ve had the misfortune to lose most of it. In a memorable edition of Desert Island Discs, the film director Otto Preminger, whose eight discs were all soundtracks of his own films, berated Roy Plomley, who invented and presented the programme, for not properly facing up to his baldness. Preminger was a pioneer of the totally shaven head and mocked Plomley for not getting rid of the stuff on the back and the sides. Strategies for hair loss are among the myriad approaches adopted in Arena: Hair.
In Preminger’s day the shaven head was provocative and hair has always been a potential source of subversion. In another Arena, the Everly Brothers recalled being on tour in the far east in their 1950s heyday and their magnificent pompadours “literally stopped traffic” in Singapore. On a more parochial level, my own experience at a Catholic grammar school in south London in the 1960s was of draconian and regular haircut inspections. Woe betide any boy whose hair was anywhere near his collar. This of course was a response to the concerning influence of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, both unimaginable without their iconic hair styles.
Such strictures had pretty much disappeared when Arena: Hair was made. The protagonists are all free to have their hair styled in exactly the way they want. They present a snapshot of the demography of Britain in 1983, which sustains forty years later in 2023. The film’s cast covers the waterfront of class, ethnicity, religion and gender. For some it’s a matter of simple tidiness, for others a matter of faith and, for others, their hair offers an opportunity for creative expression as rich as writing, music or painting. Like art itself, its purpose and meaning are beyond definitive explanation. Suffice it to say that these creatives bring joy to themselves and everybody else, in and out of the film.
Anthony Wall, Arena editor and producer, 12 November 2023
FOR Hair: Film cameraman: NIGEL WALTEIIS, Director TED CLISBY, Arena editor ALAN YENTOB
Biographies
Responding to the film
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the prize-winning author of fifteen books, as well as over 120 articles in academic journals. Among others, she is the author of Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War, An Intimate History of Killing (which won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize), Fear: A Cultural History, What it Means To Be Human, The Story of Pain and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading Our Lives. In 2022, she published Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence and Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Education for Working People. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish and Greek.
Khadijah Ibrahiim is a writer, literary activist and theatre-maker born to Jamaican parents in Leeds. Her work has featured in poetry anthologies and university journals, on BBC radio and in numerous exhibitions. In 2014, she published her book Another Crossing (Peepal Tree). Khadijah has performed internationally, including in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia; she was the first writer-in-residence for El Gouna Writes in Egypt in 2010. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Leeds Black Awards for ‘Community Hero’ and The Legacy Awards for ‘International Impact’. Khadijah is the Artistic Director of Leeds Young Authors and executive producer of the award-winning documentary We Are Poets. She was a creative associate for Ode to Leeds (2017) and Assistant Director for Nine Nights (2022), both at Leeds Playhouse. Khadijah is an associate artist with the Geraldine Connor Foundation, Associate Director with The Performance Ensemble, co-coordinator for Inscribe Readers writers’ development program for Peepal Tree Press. She is a 2023 Forward Prize judge for best single poem and performance.
Nadine Aisha Jassat is an award-winning writer and author of poetry collection Let Me Tell You This, shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her writing has featured in numerous prose and poetry anthologies, and she has taught and performed across the UK and internationally, from appearing on BBC's The Big Scottish Book Club to South Africa's Cape Talk Radio. The Stories Grandma Forgot (And How I Found Them) is her debut novel for children, described by Sophie Anderson (The House With Chicken Legs) as ‘one of those books that truly makes the world a better place.’
Hannah McGill is a writer, broadcaster and critic, born in Shetland and currently based in South Lanarkshire. She has been the music editor of The List, the television critic for The Scotsman, the film critic for The Herald, a columnist for the Times and the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2007–2010), as well as teaching and lecturing widely on film studies and film festival history. She writes for Sight and Sound, the Times and the Financial Times, and is a regular guest on BBC radio arts and news commentary programmes. She is also a published author of short fiction, and a contributor to Radio 4’s fiction and drama slots.
Francesca Beard is a poet who has worked with audiences and artists in over twenty-three countries through her work with the British Council. She collaborates with communities and institutions to create public-facing experiences that ask challenging questions with kindness and good humour. She facilitates creative projects with a range of age groups, from babies and their carers in libraries to people living with dementia in care homes. Recent commissions include poems for The British Geological Survey, WikiMedia and Wellcome. She has been artist in residence with B3 Media at The Banff Centre, Canada and The Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University to research possible ways of telling different stories. Her solo shows, Chinese Whispers, How to Survive A Post-Truth Apocalypse and Confabulation, were made in conversation with scientists and researchers, supported by Arts Council England. She comes from Malaysia and lives in London.
To find out more, please visit www.francescabeard.com