St Kilda / Film review: The Edge of the World

Maps have always held a fascination for me, and I have spent many an hour poring over my atlas. More recently, trawling around the more isolated islands on the fringes of the Hebrides on Google Maps, I was startled to come across an island which didn't appear on the map, and which was caught on the satellite view apparently halfway through fading into or out of existence. (They've since added it on the map, and provided a high resolution satellite view, but you can still see the half-present island if you zoom out.

It turns out this is actually the island of Boreray, St Kilda, west of the Outer Hebrides. For some reason, though, St Kilda maintained a fascination for me, and I kept coming back to it. Google maps showed a settlement and roads on Hirta (the main island), but I learned from Wikipedia that the island had been evacuated in 1930 at the islanders' own request.

The Wikipedia page also talks about how the island's extreme isolation affected the way of life there:

( Read more... )

I also learned from Wikipedia how Michael Powell of later Archers fame (no, not that Archers, this Archers) read about the islands' evacuation in 1930, and in 1937 made a film about it, entitled The Edge of the World. Powell couldn't get permission to make the film on St Kilda itself, as its owner had dedicated it after the evacuation as a birdlife sanctuary; and shot the film instead on the similarly remote Shetland island Foula (which, years after first spotting it on maps, I can now report is pronounced like in "fool", even though the name derives from the Norse for bird [i.e. fowl] island).

I've just watched the film, after ordering it from easyCinema. The plot centres, as it should, on the characters involved, of whom Robbie Manson wants to leave the island, and Andrew Gray does not, leaving Ruth, Robbie's sister and Andrew's girlfriend, torn between them; but really the island is one of the characters of the film itself. We see the traditions of life on the island, including herding sheep without sheepdogs, scaling precipitous cliff-faces in search of birds' eggs, and the above-mentioned "St Kilda mailboat"—along with the breathtaking vistas the island itself offers.

[ETA: Actually, the film is set not on St Kilda itself, but on the fictitious island of Hirta, located a hundred miles west of the Orkneys; the characters refer at one point to the evacuation of St Kilda. Confusingly Hirta is also the name of the main island of the St Kilda group, and the map of the island shown is identical to that of Foula.]

The DVD also contains a short (fifteen minute) tourism film from 1923 depicting a cruise up the Hebrides to St Kilda; much of what the fiction film depicts is mirrored in the earlier documentary one. The DVD includes an optional commentary to this silent film, revealing that, for example, when the film-makers showed the islanders a film of life on the mainland, a shot of a steam train caused the islanders to panic and flee from the makeshift cinema.

As well as the 1923 film, the DVD also includes a 1978 short documentary, in which Powell and many of those involved in the making of The Edge of the World returned to Foula forty years later and met up again. We also hear a little from modern (for 1978 values of "modern") Foulans, who talk of the benefits the film brought to the island in terms of increased recognition, but also how it made successive governments loath to invest in the island's infrastructure, fearing they would be the next to request evacuation.

One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen any mention of on the DVD, Wikipedia or elsewhere on the web, is what the erstwhile St Kildans themselves thought of the film. If I'm lucky, this might be mentioned on the DVD commentary track (featuring, inter alia, Powell's widow), which I haven't yet finished watching. [ETA: It wasn't, IIRC.]

Naomi Chazan talk

I've just been to hear Naomi Chazan of the New Israel Fund talking at Moishe House on the current, most worrying, trend towards de-democratisation in Israel. I've been following this (and Chazan's personal involvement as victim of a witch-hunt^*) on the Israel Religious Action Centre newsletters; however Chazan's talk threw it into stark perspective.

Chazan was, she said, a Zionist wishing Israel to practise the principles outlined in its Declaration of Independence:

Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the "Ingathering of the Exiles"; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all [my emphasis] its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

But Israel recently has not been moving in that direction at all. The trend has only been going for a few years, but has become extremely intense in the last six months.

I'm not going to blog everything she said here, but here are a few bullet points:

Left-wing protesters in Sheikh Jarraḥ are being repeatedly arrested by police on Friday, kept in jail cells over Shabbos... and then released by judges on Sunday, because they'd been illegally arrested. The police are interfering with the legitimate right of Israelis to protest.

Following the presence of Haneen Zuabi, a fiercely pro-Arab Arab MK, on the Marmara (the troublemakers' ship in the recent activists' flotilla), the Knesset has tried to strip her of her parliamentary immunity... for expressing the views of her constituents. And MKs tried to drag her from the podium in the Knesset. Is this how a functioning democracy works? Democracies are judged by how they treat their minorities.

Most people she knows sneak into Ramallah [an Area A city, forbidden to Jewish Israelis] about once a month. But generally, Jerusalem is the only place nowadays Jewish Israelis and Palestinians can get to see each other. It's as if someone is trying to make sure the only Israelis Palestinians see are soldiers and settlers, and the only Palestinians Israelis see are purported terrorists on TV.

* The right-wing organisation Im Tirtzu, which has some strange bedfellows (such as right-wing Christians), mounted a campaign which must have cost millions depicting Chazan with a horn coming from her head—something you'd have thought any Jew would have had better sense than to do—saying that 92% of negative references to the IDF in the Goldstone Report came from NIF-funded organisations. In fact, this was an outright lie: only 2% did; most came from official governmental sources.

There are two bills in the Knesset at present which would wipe out funding for almost all the civil rights, human rights and Arab rights organisations.

This is something we all need to sit up and do something about, because what happens in Israel will send seismic waves through the global Jewish community. America is already sitting up and doing something, though the advent of J Street; one audience member said something like J Street is on its way here. And, though what Chazan had to report is extremely worrying, she says it also fills her with hope, because the average Israeli is beginning to wake up and perceive what is going on, and start to do something about it. There was, she said, a much higher turnout than normal at the Gay Pride march in Tel Aviv last Friday, not because the number of gays in Israel has suddenly gone up, but because heterosexuals were turning up to show their solidarity.

Chazan will be speaking again this week, on Monday at the Northwood and Pinner Synagogue at 8pm, on Wednesday at North Western Reform Synagogue (aka Alyth), and on Thursday at Bromley Reform Synagogue [if I interpret my scrawl correctly]. If you want to know more, if you agree with what I've written, or even if you don't—there was plenty of time for audience questions—I urge you to go along.