Peter Brook was one of the greatest directors in the history of theatre, but he experimented with film in the first half of his career. ‘Lord of the Flies‘ (1963) is his second and last full-fledged venture into the world of cinema – one of only two feature films he directed that had no connection to theatre. He chose to adapt William Golding‘s highly successful and influential novel (a book studied in schools in many parts of the world) with great awareness of the differences between the two arts. Decades later he wrote about this experience: ‘I believed that the reason for translating Golding’s very complete masterpiece into another form in the first place was that, although the cinema lessens the magic, it introduces evidence.’ For him the book vs. film comparison makes no sense. Does cinema really diminish the magic? Does the concreteness of the image kill the imagination? This very film is one of the proofs to the contrary.
This cinematic version of the novel ‘Lord of the Flies’ is both faithful in spirit and free in form. To film, Brook selected a team of child and adolescent actors and took them to an island where he filmed for several weeks in chronological order of the events on screen. Every day he explained to the young actors the essence of what would happen that day and let them find their own gestures and words. This is how the story of the group of children from a very bourgeois English school who are evacuated from London during an unspecified historical war and who end up – without any adults – on a deserted island when their plane crashes in the middle of the ocean came to life. The children apply the survival skills learned at school or in the family, follow or invent rules of behavior, discover social instincts in themselves and try to apply them to the situation they suddenly find themselves in. However, conflicts, social differentiations, prejudices and especially the instincts of survival through force and at the expense of others soon appear – all those hidden ballasts and facets of human nature that are repressed by education. Within a few days, the social order falls apart, children reconstruct the division of adult society, those who try to act rationally to ensure the survival of the group become a marginalized minority, while fear, ignorance and idolatry generated by these appear, and violence becomes the mode of expression of relations between group members. A more eloquent metaphor of the dangers of the breakdown of the social structure is difficult to imagine.
Peter Brook shot about 60 hours of black and white film, and worked for a year in post-production to create the two versions that reached the screens. The post-apocalyptic theme was not entirely new when the film was made, but Brook‘s approach is profound and emotionally impactful, as well as politically charged. The technique of minimal directorial intervention by giving the actors almost complete freedom to interpret the scenes is still considered a novelty today, but it was imagined and used by Peter Brook as early as the early 1960s with very young and amateur actors. (Only two of the film’s participants pursued an acting career in the following decades). ‘Lord of the Flies‘ captivated and shocked me with the expressive power and direct emotion it conveys. Peter Brook broke new ground in theatre and left a significant impact on this art form. If he had devoted himself entirely or more to film, his influence on cinema would, in all likelihood, have been similar.