The White Bird Passes (1980) & Another Time, Another Place (1983)
Director Michael Radford | UK | cert 12
It’s wholly appropriate that The White Bird Passes, the first of two fine early-1980s collaborations between novelist
Jessie Kesson and director Michael Radford, begins with a female voice exhorting its listener to pay proper attention
to places and people that many routinely overlook. In voiceover narration, adolescent central protagonist Janie
recalls how her dead mother would remark that “if you rush doon the High Street” of an unnamed Highland town “in
a hurry, you’d never have noticed Lady’s Lane at all… but it will almost certainly see you.” This film, like its successor
Another Time, Another Place and a significant part of Kesson’s distinguished literary oeuvre overall, seeks to
document and dignify a whole series of ladies’ lanes and women’s ways. The unhappy and unfair routes in question
are the painfully circumscribed early-twentieth-century life journeys imposed upon and endured by many female
working-class northern Scots.
Through its semi-autobiographical account of Janie’s poverty-stricken urban childhood and subsequent internment
in a state-run children’s home, The White Bird Passes simultaneously paints a picture of an entire culture defined by
its active tendency towards the repression and demonisation of women who refuse to conform to patriarchal social
norms. If the young Janie understands her removal to the home to be in effect an open-ended from of
imprisonment—“When will I get out? No-one will tell me”—it should also be said that this fate, while unfortunate, is
hardly unrepresentative. The Duchess, an aged inhabitant of Ladies’ Lane and the first female character that The
White Bird Passes shows onscreen, is (according to Janie’s voiceover) a regular inhabitant of the local prison,
“forcibly removed to… jail for ten days without the option.” Indeed, all of the most significant women in the young
girl’s life—her mother and Maisie Walsh (both prostitutes), a local travelling woman “dancing defiance in the jangle
of her lang brass earrings”—live on the law’s wrong side and are accorded semi-human status as a result.
But Kesson and Radford take care to paint their women as more than simply victims, despite their generally unhappy
existences and/or ends. If it is the unenviable situation of women like The Duchess, Maisie and mother that gives
Janie/Kesson something to narrate in her subsequent literary creations, it is the remarkable spirit and self-expression
of those females that teaches her how to tell stories in the first instance. Janie remembers, for example, how
Maisie’s “voice gaithered you right intae it… her sang seemed tae come frae you too,” and gratefully acknowledges
“all the things” that her own mother’s songs and stories “taught me… ah masel now would be blind if she had never
leant me her eyes.” It is surely no accident in this regard that the most visually expressive moments in The White Bird
Passes are each brought into being by a female character’s momentary attainment of unfettered self-expression and
Janie’s enduring memories of those transient epiphanies: Maisie dancing in the street to the strains of the fish-andchip shop’s gramophone, mother singing a traditional ballad while walking through the woods, mother narrating the
historic depredations of the fourteenth-century Earl of Buchan (popularly named the Wolf of Badenoch),
grandmother playing her cherished piano outdoors, and so on. In this sense, Kesson seeks to locate herself within a
local tradition of feminine experience and expression, rather than presenting herself and her own story as an
individualistic aberration or exception to the general rule.
Kesson and Radford’s second collaboration, the 1983 Channel 4-funded feature film Another Time, Another Place,
further extends many of the central thematic preoccupations visible in The White Bird Passes. Janie, a profoundly
unfulfilled Black Isle woman who may or may not be an older version of the main character in The White Bird Passes,
embarks on a doomed WWII romance with Luigi, an Italian prisoner of war. Another Time… offers a moving (but also
unsparing) account of the many forms that individual incarceration can take. In this regard, the film revolves around
the bitter central irony. Janie (a free woman) may well never escape the shackles that her native culture imposes on
her by virtue of her biological sex and gender; by contrast, Luigi and his compatriots (who are literal prisoners of the
British state) have a better prospect of attaining literal and spiritual release from their unhappy situation.
It is tempting (because easy) to read Another Time… as an alienated insider account of a brutalising rural Highland
culture and way of life. The POWs are stunned by the rigours of the local climate and rural economy that often
seems to offer its inhabitants no more that (in Luigi’s words) “tatties, neeps, wind and rain.” By the same token,
Janie’s attraction to the emotional exuberance and expressiveness of the Italians—warm people hailing from a warm
place—seems all-too-understandable in light of the near-total taciturnity displayed by her fellow Scots. Indeed, the
film ends with a chastening shot of its central female protagonist weeping uncontrollably against the backdrop of a
Highland landscape that offers her no meaningful measure of personal support or comfort. Ultimately, however, it
might be more accurate to say that Kesson and Radford identify and explore a range of social problems and
prejudices that, while undoubtedly present in the Scottish place that forms the setting for their story, are not
necessarily wholly peculiar to it.
Amongst other things, for instance, Another Time… offers a notably clear-sighted analysis of the potentially
brutalising effects of any small and isolated agricultural economy, Scottish or otherwise. While Janie is repeatedly
associated with sentimental ideals of Nature as a source of beauty and fertility (she is always seen wearing period
floral prints, and the latter also decorate the fittings of her home), the culture within which she lives and works is
one forced to approach the land, and who and what it produces, as economic commodities. This is particularly so in
relation to female bodies. Close-ups of Janie’s chaffed hands performing various seasonal tasks in the fields are
numerous, for example. More pointed and subtle yet in this regard, however, are two shots of her husband Dougal’s
hands quite literally extracting value from female bodies. At one point, we see him pull a new-born calf from its
mother’s womb; he then remarks on the governmental subsidy that will be payable to the tenant farmer as a result.
This image then finds a depressing echo in the image of Dougal’s digits freeing a year’s carefully hoarded savings
(much of which has been earned by Janie’s engagement in a range of gruelling seasonal labours) from beneath the
marital bed, an item of furniture which thus comes to symbolise a source of profit, rather than pleasure. Although he
is not an especially unfeeling or misogynistic man, Janie’s angry accusation that he “[doesn’t] care so long as I make
money” is impossible to discount or discredit.
Both The White Bird Passes and Another Time, Another Place are little-seen today. But that regrettable fact should
not be taken for a reliable guide to the creative accomplishment or cultural importance of the films in question. The
sensitivity, skill and bravery that characterise Kesson and Radford’s depictions of (to quote Janie in The White Bird
Passes) “an auld world rid wae pain” make these movies profoundly valuable works to (re)discover three decades on
from the moment of their original production and distribution.
Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art