Frances Whorrall-Campbell: The subject of Early Years, Barbara Samuels, has such a compelling assurance as a storyteller/narrator of her own life. With an astonishingly light touch she guides viewers through the ups and downs of her childhood maintaining an absolute evenness of manner. Could you tell us more about your relationship to Samuels, and how you began with her story? What were you responding to in her, or perhaps in society more generally, in the film?

Morgan Quaintance: Well Barbara’s my mum, and the film really came out of us just having conversations about her life. The reason I’m not really pitching the film as a work about my mum, is that it’s a film about Barbara and not her relationship to me, or her ‘role’ as a ‘mother’, so to speak. I’m trying to foreground and preserve her subjectivity and autonomy rather than trying to erase or nest it under my own.

In making the film, I was responding to Barbara’s talent for narration, and also some of the compelling twists and turns of her life. Over the years we’ve had lots of conversations like the one in the film and I’m always struck by how much she’s seen and done, and also how lightly she imparts that information. I remember once watching a video of the famous free Rolling Stones gig in Hyde Park, she happened to walk past the room, stuck her head in and told me that she was there. Stuff like that happens all the time.

Now, I think in my filmmaking practice, although I don’t follow a set thematic flow, one of the things that does come up quite a bit is a focus on unique individuals who, by virtue of their inherent creativity, intelligence and sensitivity, lead unconventional or counter cultural lives. People who have the potential to expand our notions of what is possible in society, if we care to listen. So in a wider sense this aspect of Barbara’s story fits with that.

I should say there wasn’t an intention to make the film to begin with. We just decided to record Barbara talking about her life, but then when I listened back to the sessions, I realised I needed to stop working on the film I was already making (which was terrible by the way) and produce Early Years. It’s one of those instances where the work really happen organically and in an unselfconscious and unpremeditated way.

FWC: The film progresses through a series of still or slow-moving shots of family photo albums, newspaper clippings and magazines, interspersed with some home videos and a (truly radiant) film-portrait of Samuels herself. The space of the story is very intimate, indeed familial – almost like going through family photographs with a relative. But as I was watching I became aware that there were two authorial voices running through the film – yours and hers.

Your role is perhaps more like that of an editor, choosing which images and clips to match to her narration, shining a light on the historical backdrop or providing viewers with a certain emotional resonance. Realising this brought home a sense that Samuels was enmeshed in all these other relationships and social forces that were shaping her without her knowledge or consent, but that she could somehow intuitively sense or recall them (as I could sense your hand in the film). Can you speak about how you see a narrative that is ostensibly focused on, or told by, one individual relating to a much more tangled web of people and histories?

MQ: Aspects of this film, like all the best ones I’ve done, function like those ink blot tests psychologists use. It’s a very particular story, from a particular life, but that singular focus has the potential to reach many universals. But (and this is where the ink blot comparison comes in), the particular universals that appear for people will be those that are most significant to them.

So, in a way, peoples’ reactions to the film will say more about issues and ideas that are particularly present in their own lives or epochs than are necessarily in Barbara’s or my own. What may stand out as a really significant aspect in the narrative for some, may only be a fleeting moment, and a relatively insignificant one for her.

This potential to move from particulars to universals is there because the film itself ranges across so much time and geographical space. It then has the potential to be recognised as ‘social’. For example, Barbara’s boat journey from Jamaica to England has the potential to be depersonalised, taken up and subsumed into those wider narratives about migration and so on. Which means people might watch it and latch on to that event, especially as they’ve been primed in contemporary life to see migration and its processes as ‘societally’ significant, when in fact, at the personal level, they may not be so key.

Then, I think the familial feel that you’re talking about comes from the fact that we’re family. And my sort of lingering fascination with the images (from a cinematographic perspective) comes from the fact that I’m seeing nearly all of them for the first time. I’m discovering them as the audience is.

FWC: Watching, I was really struck by the family dynamics that Samuels relates. There is a great deal of tenderness expressed towards her mother, May Thompson, but also a recognition of the damage that the nuclear family is capable of (in particular, the cruelty of her father’s family and his withdrawal during her mother’s post-natal depression). Further to that, the most powerful image of mothering comes not from May herself, but from the West Indian nurses who cared for her in the hospital.

From this, I was reflecting on the role the adult Samuels plays in Early Years, now that she’s a black woman, like her mother and the nurses before her. How do you see her and this film partaking in a much broader conversation about race, gender (and even age)?

MQ: I think I’d refer back to the above answer in response to that. In other words, how Barbara’s story partakes in those broader conversations (reductive and simplistic as most of them are) will be determined by the viewers, and whether or not they have the capacity to recognise the complexity of the narrative or not.

For example, it’s interesting that in the question you focused on Barbara’s relationship with May Thompson, and on May’s story. This is understandable, again, because I think audiences have been primed to do that, but also because May’s story and May herself is so compelling, such a force. Some people who saw film sympathised and celebrated May as a kind of heroine, but the story is much more complex than that. Geoffrey Barton, her partner, my grandad, is the one who brings up the children as a single father, struggling to make ends meet. He was the one who was there as a constant support.

Here, I can slip into personal experience for a moment. My grandad was one of the most gentle and kind men I’ve ever met. He was the quiet and dependable person, while my grandmother was fiery, intense, sometimes cruel and pretty inconstant. That isn’t to paint one as the hero and the other as the villain (neither is the case), it’s just to highlight the fact that people are far more complex than they may first seem. On the one hand, I think viewers will be ready to empathise with May’s experience, because in some ways they are familiar. On the other, Geoffrey, my grandfather, is a man who never really appears in narratives, and is also in the background in life, to a degree. That tendency to overlook him gets re-enacted in people’s interpretations of Early Years too.

FWC: Early Years has a strong affection for the arts, both as it appears in formal institutions (such as Samuels’s dance school) and in more fluid networks and activities (I am thinking of her relationship to the hippy subculture).

Art seems a place where Samuels is both ‘at home’ perhaps for the first time in her life, but there are also some darker underlying complexities. I have mixed feelings about her effervescent output as a pre-teen, which as this great tsunami of self-expression speaks perhaps to the repression she previously encountered, and perhaps feared she might encounter again. More heartbreakingly, this fear of being silenced seems to come true when she and a friend are picked up by the police and her closeness to the arts (dressed as a hippy) and her blackness are criminalised. I wonder how you navigated this moment as an artist yourself, and whether you believe there is something in this diagnosis of Samuels’s creativity?

MQ: For me, creativity is the core of the film. Barbara’s creative burst as a pre-teen really foretells the energy and dexterity with which she’d approach the rest of her creative life. In the last segment of the film, there are page shots of her journalism, and the theatre direction she undertook. The article I focused on was a profile on the Sex Maniac’s Ball she wrote for an old radical feminist journal in the 1990s called Body Politic, and then there’s a letter that explains her appointment as the director, in the 1980s, of Harmony Theatre Company, and her production of a satirical musical she wrote, produced, directed and designed the posters for, called Alice in Wonderland Via Bank. There’s a short clip of the curtain call on opening night at Battersea Arts Centre in London in the film.

Aside from journalism and theatre, Barbara was also involved in contemporary dance, art and graphic design, and utilised them for whatever project she was working on. Speaking from a personal perspective again, this was and is really important to me because it is what I remember from my childhood. A house that struggled financially and didn’t have many mod cons, but was always active and alive with art, creativity and politics. There were always other artists or interesting people from all over the world coming to stay or live with us, musicians using the piano to practice, or friends who would invite us to performances and so on. It was a very dynamic, multicultural, LGBTQ friendly environment. So the value of counterculture, of going against the system, of inhabiting the margins, was never a disposition I adopted after reading about it in books, it was a natural thing.

In hindsight, I recognise I was really lucky that I had a working class (and yes artists can be working class), metropolitan, art saturated childhood. This wasn’t unique in London, I know lots of people who grew up on council estates, had free school meals, and the same or similar creative exposure. It enabled me to inhabit a position of surety and epistemological sophistication in relationship to art and cultural production in general, from an early age.

In the end I, like Barbara, am an artist who works across the spectrum (writing, music, filmmaking, etc.), and I think in making this film I realised how similar we are. I had the same creative burst as a teenager, and the same rebellious tendencies (I went to eight different schools and was expelled from two before I was eighteen).

FWC: The film’s ending is so tantalising. It comes just at the ‘turning point’ of Samuels’ life, when she meets her husband-to-be at fourteen. She tells us: ‘that was the beginning of life to come for a while’. I found this an unsatisfactory resolution despite the fact that Samuels clearly found closure in this moment. I think I chafed at the neatness of this: her leaving childhood and coming into adulthood without seemingly crossing the hinterland of adolescence, moving from this great freedom into another familial institution (that of marriage). As I’ve alluded to, it seems to me that much of Early Years’ political weight is held under the surface or at arms’ length, and I wondered whether the act of cutting the film here was part of this same project of suggestion?

MQ: It’s funny, lots of people have mentioned the tantalising ending. There’s a couple of reasons for ending it where I did. One of them is purely practical. Lots of things happened in Barbara’s life after the point at which the film ends, but there was only so much I could squeeze into the film. I had a certain amount of film stock (which dictated film length), and I also wanted to create a concise picture of a concentrated time period, hence the title Early Years.

But, you know, that’s life in a way. The richness of people’s experience is really hard to pull into a concise narrative, because lives really go in directions that may feel improbable and contrived when squeezed into a short story. So the end may have felt less liberatory or expansive than the events that preceded it, but I can say that Barbara’s creative life certainly didn’t reach anything like its peak in the period shown in the film.

I can also see what you mean about the crossing of that hinterland, but I suppose that’s part of her life story, as is how she negotiated that crossing, and ultimately moved out of something that was less than ideal, into a much more sustained period of independence and creativity, and existential ups and downs. I just didn’t have enough film to fit it all in! That said, maybe we’ll do it in the future. If Barbara wants to, and I manage to get my hands on enough stock, I’d be up for it.