Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus

I recently went to a lecture given by Rex Bloomstein, a documentary maker who’s been filming in and around the criminal justice system since the 1970’s. Organised by the Prisoner’s Education Trust, the event gave a fascinating insight into the enormous changes that have happened in the prison estate over four decades and the way that film has been used to capture, and in Bloomstein’s case, influence that process.

Clips from early films such as ‘The Sentence’, (1975) ‘Release’, (1976) ‘Prisoners’ Wives’, (1977) ‘Parole’, (1978) ‘Lifer’ (1982) and ‘Strangeways’ (1980) showed a system where prisoners still slopped out every morning, adjudications happened behind closed doors and there was widespread concern about the rising prison numbers. The prison population hit 40,000 for the first time in the early 70’s (compared to today’s figure of over 80,000), causing a huge debate about how prisons were run and a desire to open the system to scrutiny to an extent which actually allowed Bloomstein unprecedented access to prisons like Strangeways.

The films gave fascinating portraits of individuals: the wife of a serial criminal sent down yet again; the lifer who’d been in care most of his life who had no intention of submitting to the system at awful cost to his quality of life in prison – revisited again thirty years later in another film in terrible health but somehow finally at peace with himself; and the transvestite lifer who told the story of how he’d found himself in the middle of a police siege – at the beginning of the night demanding a million pounds and a helicopter, and at the end, a bottle of Pernod...

Bloomstein’s style is laconic, slow-moving, allowing the situations to unfold and subjects to speak for themselves. At the same time, he asks pointed questions in voice-over – why does so much happen behind closed doors? When will it change? And his questions prompted further questions, and sometimes answers. His films showed the public a hidden world and had a direct effect. At the end of the talk a member of the audience stood up to comment: it was Martin Narey, former head of the prison service and now Chief Executive of children’s charity Barnadoes. Narey had watched Bloomstein’s film about Strangeways and had been inspired to join the prison service as a result.

Bloomstein is still making films addressing fundamentally important subjects: the Holocaust (KZ 2005) , freedom of expression (An Independent Mind 2008) and the criminal justice system – he made a film about children in prison in 2005. He talked about the need to keep making his films simply and with integrity – moving in the opposite direction to the majority of factual programming on TV today. At the same time, the filming environment has changed, although with his track record Bloomstein has more clout than most. Compliance, the spectre haunting TV in the noughties and presumably the decade to come, means the filming process has changed radically and film-makers are much less able to film opportunistically and spontaneously.

Still, as we move into a new decade, Bloomstein’s classic, thoughtful films are a beacon of light in a sea of formatted drivel. Proof that film-making can still be powerful, influential, affecting.

Naomi Delap, Managing Director, Inside Job Productions