Amber Online

The inspiration for Seacoal undoubtedly came from the staggering visual location in which it is filmed; the industrial landscape of power station and pit framing the blackened beach of Lynemouth where, for generations, local people and travellers have made their living from collecting waste coal washed ashore.

Into this harsh way of life come Betty and her daughter Corinna. Her introduction is through Ray, an ex-seacoaler returning from a job with ICI. His offer of a caravan on a cliff top and promises of the “Klondyke” that awaits them at least seem preferable to the violent marriage she has left behind.

The film sets Betty’s struggle for survival against the wider struggles of the Seacoal community “surviving” on the fringes of capitalism. Despite the exploitation of their labour by a local entrepreneur, runnings with “dole snoops” and School Board men and the ever encroaching regulations of a hostile council their lives retain a kind of “anarchic romance” which is reflected in the film’s lyrical style.

Seacoal continues Amber’s experiment with the mixing of a drama and “real life”. The production team lived with the seacoalers on and off for two years, and the daily events of the camp were incorporated into the film as straight documentary, improvised sketches or fully dramatised reconstructions.

In its visual style Seacoal has links with some of Amber’s earliest productions like Maybe and High Row, but its form is more ambitious in terms of the relationship between film-makers, actors, and a particular community. Equity, the actors union, granted Amber special concessions to work with the seacoalers themselves on the condition that they did not script for, or direct them. This presented Amber with numerous problems, like never being able to predict a response to an improvisation between actors and coalers, which means that the scripting had to be done piecemeal as the plot developed. However the technique paid off in terms of the film’s spontaneity. This seems to be confirmed by the most common response to the film from both critics and public alike which is to its “authenticity” or “realness”, a description that seems to go beyond the simple label of “realism”.

After screening on Channel Four, Sean Day Lewis, from the Daily Telegraph, while devoting most of his TV Choice column to this “haunting unsung film”, nevertheless expressed surprise that this was in spite of it being made by Amber Films, “a co-operative too devoted to equality to acknowledge the existence of a director or cameraman”. Winner of the Munich European Film Award 1986 and the Marks & Spencer Award 1985.

• The Laidler Family
• Critch
• Val Waciak
• Gordon Tait
• John Cook
• Stan Robinson

1985
Running time: 82 mins

Awards

Marks & Spencer Award, Tyneside (85)

European Film Award, Munich (86)