late teens, the same age as Barry, who was dreaming of overthrowing our own hierarchy here in East London. Had Barry ever considered that his life as a filmmaker might have been easier if he’d been born in France rather than East Ham? He would be a countryman to one of his heroes, New Wave director Jean Luc Godard, but also now be working in a country with a thriving independent film business. He thinks for a second and comes back with ‘and it would probably be easier to finance my films’. But if you ask Barry he’d probably prefer to have been a Russian in the time of pioneer director, Sergei Eisenstein, maker of Battleship Potemkin in 1920s Moscow, or maybe a German chair designer in the Bauhaus Design School. This period of revolution, both in politics and art, is undoubtedly the one that inspires Barry the most, both in his anecdotes and his filmmaking. Sadly, with what befell those two radical movements, one crushed by Stalin and the other by Hitler, he’s probably better off here in 21st century Walthamstow. Barry’s politics largely reflect those of his father. He says his dad was politicised by the sight of a crowd of fascist blackshirts rounding on a young Jewish man who had dared to speak out against them. It wasn’t long before his father, along with his friends, had become communist agitators. Barry Bliss was born in East Ham, his dad was an electrician and his mum a dinner lady who also worked as an usherette at the local cinema. Aged six, Barry decided he wanted to be a painter, but it was a chance viewing of Buster Keaton’s silent masterpiece, The General, that fuelled his fascination for film. After being thrown out (a common theme) of school at 16, he started a local foundation course as a painter before quickly discovering that apparently “painting was dead”, and “concept was king”, so he left. He then tried a course in art and design, got involved in a bit of acting, fell in love with filmmaking, and joined his first mini uprising as part of a group of students demanding that they be able to make films as part of the course. They won and were promptly delivered a whole pile of filmmaking equipment. ‘Pretty impressive stuff,’ he remembers, and also a pretty impressive new tutor, Bill Stair, who’d just worked on John Boorman’s Point Blank. So it was that at 17 Barry began his first film, a short inspired by a poem his father
had written about the final hours in the life of Virginia Woolf. Amazingly Barry blagged his way into spending a couple of weeks at the Woolf’s house in Sussex to film it. Virginia’s husband, Leonard, had recently died and the house was just as he’d left it. Barry tells of writing letters on Leonard’s letterhead and discovering a forgotten portrait of Virginia by Vanessa Bell hidden behind some rubbish in the garage. ‘I could have just taken it and no one would ever have known,’ he says with a glint in his eye. He didn’t. What do you think of the finished film now I ask, curious as to what must be an amazing record in the formation of an artist as a young man. ‘Ah,’ he replies. ‘We had a friend who worked in a processing lab. He offered to do a little late night processing for £50 instead of £500. We leapt at the chance, only for him to lose most of film. I was left with just a couple of sequences.’ He was gutted and the Arts Council who’d provided the funds were livid. The college never embraced the film making course in the end and he was asked to leave. It was now that politics took control of Barry’s life and he joined the Workers Revolutionary Party, working in their famous bookshop in Charlotte Street by day and campaigning on the streets by night. It was in the early 70s, and Britain was buckling under soaring inflation and constant strikes. It seemed truly possible that the old order could be brought down, and for the revolutionaries to succeed where the French had failed in ’68. Barry completely immersed himself in the party to such an extent that in the end he realised he’d either had to get out or burn out. That was when he turned again to film. After a couple of shorts, in 1982, he was commissioned to make his first feature film, Fords on Water. It was a road movie where a couple of young men, one black and one white, fed up of life on the dole and seeking colour and excitement, took off across Thatcher’s Britain in a stolen motor. The film was well received, given a theatrical release and also shown on the then new Channel 4. Barry was now a filmmaker. Following some more scripts and his first novel, he embarked on his second feature, Poppies, in 2005. The film tells of an obsessive man writing about the Battle of the Somme where his grandfather was killed. The lead role was played by Paul McGann (The Monocled Mutineer and
Doctor Who), and Barry remembers their first encounter. ‘I was amazed; I went to meet him and he knew my work.’ Paul went on to become a good friend to Barry, alongside Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, who also appeared in the film. The film gathered quite a bit of interest with The Imperial War Museum offering to host its premiere, not only in London but at their newly opened IWM Manchester. Barry recalls, ‘I arrived before the screening and, looking across the empty seats, I saw right in the middle this cannon. “That’s the gun that fired the first shot in the First World War,” I was told’. Once the film had been shown, he returned to the stage for a Q&A to see many of the front row with tears in their eyes. ‘It was the most moving moment of my career,’ he remembers. Both Paul and Gary appear in Barry’s most recent film Art is..., which also features a real life family member – his actor son, Will. The film examines the idea of art from the perspective of why we make it, why we like it and what it’s for. True to his socialist roots, Barry briefly pokes fun at BritArt in the film, which he cites as an example of how art has been demoted to a commodity, with unsold work kept in dealers’ vaults to keep the prices high. For a film that challenges how we perceive art the major surprise comes with the insertion of some musical numbers. The film is intellectual, but not too intellectual, and only served to remind me how rarely films ask you to think these days. Before I head for the door, we talk about the subject that every filmmaker dreads – finance. I know he is in the process of trying to raise the cash for his next film, the final part in a trilogy, of which Art is… is the second. ‘It will be a comedy – that is, if it ever gets made,’ he says wryly. Films obviously take a lot of time and people to produce, so wouldn’t he prefer an art form that’s a lot more immediate, like those French poster designs we saw in the hall. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I love film. I like the process and the artistic control, and I love the idea that it’s a collaborative project.’ I get the fact that he is what the French New Wave called an auteur, in that he selects what interests him, writes the scripts and then directs. However, in line with his socialism, Barry has little time for his ego; the pleasure comes with the collaborative process, and he is keen to stress the value of every member of the team. In the end I guess it just another big happy family for Mr Bliss. 21