Quite excited, I now have a copy of this film to watch, perfect while outside is dark and foggy. The director John Grierson hailed as’the father of British documentary’, when writing about the film said;
‘Drifters is about the sea and about the fishermen…….the men do their acting and the sea does its………and if you can tell me a story more plainly dramatic than the gathering of the ships for the herring season, the going out, the shooting at evening, the long drift in the night, the hauling of the nets by infinite agony of shoulder muscle in the teeth of the storm, the drive home against a head sea and the frenzy of a market in which said agonies are sold at ten shillings a thousand and iced, salted, barreled for an unwitting world……’
Reading on I also liked his description about making art and being an artist,
‘it has very little to do with nondescript enthusiasm and a great deal to do with a job of work’.
He continues,
‘in art, the gods are with the big battalions, you march on your subject with a whole regiment of energies, you surround it, you break in here, you break in there, and let loose all the shell and shrapnel you can find, out of the labour comes something, all you have to do then is seize what you want. If you have really and truly got inside, you will have plenty, of whatever it is, to choose from’
Extracts taken from the book, Grierson on Documentary, kindly lent to me by Joanne Jamieson from the Shetland film archive. This description I felt had resonance to the way I feel about my time here in Shetland, ‘marching’ on this subject of the fishing, which as it develops I see more and more as something that is at the heart of a community,a heritage of which they are proud and is important, vital in so many ways.
