The most effective art allows us to see the world in a different way He is the largely forgotten Belfast writer who was name-checked by Joanna Lumley from the stage at last Sunday’s Bafta awards ... but who was Forrest Reid, and why does he matter?
Andrew Doyle, who scripted the Absolutely Fabulous star’s closing speech, on how the late novelist’s creative vision can be used to link ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art and why it’s time his adoptive city learnt to cherish one of its most significant sons
Last Sunday saw the 72nd annual British Academy Film Awards at the Royal Albert Hall in London, hosted by the eternally glamorous Joanna Lumley. I was privileged enough to be asked to write her closing speech and I decided to invoke the little-known Belfast novelist Forrest Reid in order to make a point about the role of the artist.
The anecdote was taken from Reid’s first autobiography, Apostate (1926), in which he recalls visiting the Palm House in the Botanic Gardens as a small boy.
As Joanna Lumley recounted in front of the Bafta audience: “He went into the conservatory and looked out through the tinted glass, but through the vivid colours of the windowpane it wasn’t a garden that he saw, but a tropical landscape of tigers and panthers burning in the shrubberies, and blue parrots screaming soundlessly in the trees.
“We all have our own perspective, our own unique way of interpreting the world, and the role of the artist is to invite you into their mind to allow a few precious glimpses of what they see through the tinted windows of their imagination.
“So, to all of you who are here tonight, thank you for sharing with us your visions and dreams.”
It might seem an odd choice for a ceremony dedicated to the film industry, given that Reid’s work has yet to be adapted for the big screen. But my intention was to find some way to connect the wide range of artists who were being rewarded for their efforts at this year’s event.
There was the blockbuster superhero movie Black Panther, the comedy biopic Stan and Ollie, the hard-hitting biographical story BlacKkKlansman, the stop-motion animated comedy Isle of Dogs and the historical drama Mary, Queen of Scots, to name but a few.
Forrest Reid’s view of the artist
seemed to be an apt way to find common ground in such a diverse pool of talent. The films couldn’t be more different, but I share Reid’s view that the most effective art is that which allows us to see the world in a different way. The writer Emile Zola once described art as “life seen through a temperament”. Filmmakers, novelists, painters, poets, musicians — all are striving to recreate their own particular worldview and share it with the rest of us.
Is it pretentious to describe superhero movies as art? Perhaps it is, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t spring from the same creative impulse. For every challenging and thought-provoking arthouse film I enjoy, I’ll watch a trashy, bullet-ridden action flick.
I loved every single one of The Conjuring horror film series, even the utterly absurd gore-fest The Nun, but that doesn’t mean I can’t admit that a story about a psychotic demon in a habit terrorising the occupants of a Romanian convent isn’t high art.
What I like about the Baftas is that cerebral and weighty work, like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, or 2017’s astonishing love story Call Me By Your Name, is rewarded on the same platform as Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and Mary Poppins Returns.
The key to the success of these films is that they are not pretentious. A great writer like James Ivory can produce a piece like Call Me By Your Name because he knows how to tackle a profoundly human story with a lightness of touch.
In addition, his script benefitted hugely from the directorial talents of Luca Guadagnino and a strong central performance from Timothee Chalamet. It evaded pretentiousness simply by being so good.
But Mary Poppins Returns deserves its accolades too, because the value of entertainment for its own sake should never be underestimated. Even someone like Forrest Reid, who despised sentimentality in literature from an artistic point of view, still couldn’t resist the lure of saccharine stories.
One of his favourite films was They Shall Have Music, a charming, but undeniably sentimental film starring the young Gene Reynolds (who is soon to turn 96).
It’s a simple, but effective tale of a working-class lad who manages to join a musical school in spite of his economic hardship.
Along the way, he befriends a scruffy dog and gets to meet his hero, the violinist Jascha Heifetz. Reid saw the film in August 1940 as the first part of a double feature, but was so moved by Reynolds’s performance that he walked out and missed the second film because he did not want to “destroy the impression”.