SILVER SCREEN

NOTHING EXPLAINED, NOTHING RESOLVED: THE CINEMA OF ALAN CLARKE

MICK HARGREAVES

May 22, 2025

Alan Clarke (1935–1990) made films that didn’t explain, redeem, or resolve—they exposed. He chronicled addiction, incarceration, racism, and violence not as exceptions, but as systems. No score, no sentiment, no moral lesson, just raw confrontations with British reality. In a world of spectacle, Clarke’s cinema remains a brutal refusal to look away.

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Alan Clarke didn’t tell you what to think. He didn’t wrap things up. He didn’t even always offer a story. What he gave was raw exposure: a youth detention center, a Belfast backstreet, a boy with a swastika tattoo on his forehead screaming at the system and daring it to care. Clarke’s films do not offer redemption, nor traffic in catharsis. They are brutal transmissions from the edges of British society, unsentimental dispatches from a country rotting in its institutions, its families, its ideologies.

Born in 1935 in Liverpool, Clarke came of age in a postwar Britain attempting to present itself as stable, progressive, and classless. But he knew better. The war hadn’t cured the country’s illnesses, it had only delayed the diagnoses. Clarke made his way through the BBC, starting out by directing episodes of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today, the crucibles of British television drama in the 1960s and 1970s. He emerged as a ruthless stylist, allergic to sentiment, with a near-clinical obsession for social reality.

By the 1980s, Clarke’s voice had sharpened. Margaret Thatcher was in power. Public housing was crumbling. Youth unemployment was soaring. Britain was splitting open at its racial and economic seams. The government was criminalizing dissent and privatizing belief. Clarke didn’t argue with these forces. He filmed what they left behind. 

He’s sixteen, pissed off, and smarter than you (Made in Britain, 1982)

Made in Britain (1982) is one of the clearest examples. It begins with not action, but defiance. Trevor, played by a teenaged Tim Roth, is a skinhead. A racist, violent, articulate force of nature. The camera follows him with unsettling intimacy as he stalks through juvenile courts, foster homes, job centers. Trevor is not reformed. He doesn’t learn a lesson. The film isn’t about change; it’s about confrontation. It exposes the futility of state institutions, the hollowness of liberal rehabilitation, the failure of adults who’ve already surrendered. Trevor is a product of Britain. He knows it, and he hates it.

Clarke refuses to explain Trevor. He doesn’t turn him into a victim, nor does he indict him outright. The power of Made in Britain lies in its refusal to comply with ideological categories. Trevor is terrifying because he believes in nothing but his own agency. He destroys every system he encounters because he can see through it. They are all empty.

Seven years later, Clarke made Elephant (1989), a film that barely qualifies as narrative cinema. Shot in Belfast during the tail end of the Troubles, it is a sequence of assassinations. No dialogue. No character development. No motive. Just a man walking, entering a building, shooting someone in the head, and leaving. Repeat. Seventeen times.

The title comes from a metaphor used by Bernard MacLaverty, who compared the Troubles to an elephant in the room—something massive and present that no one dares address. Clarke turned that metaphor into a visual strategy. The film is shot almost entirely with Steadicam, tracking the killers from behind. The audience walks with them. We are not asked to identify or to judge, just to follow. There is no score. The violence is quick, intimate, unglamorous. The repetition becomes numbing, then unbearable.

In Elephant, Clarke strips away every conventional element of drama until only the violence remains. It is an indictment of narrative itself, of the human need to justify horror. Clarke offers none of that. He shows the mechanism: One person kills another. Then again. Then again. It becomes banal. That’s the point. 

Bang. Walk. Repeat. Northern Ireland, distilled (Elephant, 1989)

Compare Clarke to his contemporaries, and the distinction becomes clear. Ken Loach sought justice, however elusive. His films are filled with humanism, with an aching for fairness. Mike Leigh, especially in, also captured the grungy paralysis of Thatcher’s Britain, but his emphasis was on emotional interiors, on the small devastations of everyday life. Lindsay Anderson attacked British institutions with surrealist flair, but never abandoned the idea of transcendence. Clarke had no such illusions. His was a cinema of materialism and rage.

What unites all of Clarke’s best work is his formal precision. He favored long takes, frequently used Steadicam, and resisted traditional editing rhythms. The effect was cumulative. Viewers are not guided emotionally, but left to sit in the duration of moments. In Christine (1987), for instance, the titular character wanders through housing estates selling heroin. The film is composed almost entirely of long, silent walks. Christine enters a flat, exchanges money for drugs, leaves. The camera follows her each time, almost identically. There is no drama, no backstory, no redemption arc. Clarke renders addiction as routine—mechanical, unfeeling, inevitable. The horror isn’t in the needles. It’s in the repetition. 

She deals heroin like she’s making tea—quiet, polite, deadly (Christine, 1987)

In Scum (1977, banned by the BBC, and remade for cinema in 1979), Clarke exposed the brutal regime of the British Borstal system (a reformatory system for young-adult offenders). Ray Winstone plays Carlin, a boy who rises to power through sheer violence. The film features rape, suicide, and systematic abuse—all presented without melodrama. Clarke’s Borstal is a concentration of British authoritarianism that teaches nothing but cruelty and produces nothing but wreckage. That the film was banned only confirmed its accuracy.

Road (1987), adapted from a stage play by Jim Cartwright, is Clarke at his most poetic—but the poetry is industrial, broken, full of rot. The film moves through a working-class street in northern England, connecting characters through monologues and silent tableaux. People drink, scream, collapse. The voice-over guides us like a specter. It is a film of ghosts—living people made spectral by poverty, by alcohol, by failed dreams. Clarke’s camera floats, but what it sees is anchored in despair. 

Reform school? Try Fight Club with trays (Scum, 1979)

In The Firm (1988), Clarke turns his eye to football hooliganism. Gary Oldman plays Bex Bissell, a middle-class man leading a gang of casuals (a British subculture of the 1980s and 1990s rooted in football hooliganism and defined by an obsession with designer sportswear and violence). The violence is tribal, performative, unmoored from ideology. Clarke refuses to sensationalize the fights. Instead, he shows how the same impulses driving hooliganism—dominance, identity, violence—are present in family life, work life, even romantic relationships. The Firm is about masculinity as pathology. It’s about men performing power because they have nothing else.

Clarke’s politics are never abstract. They are spatial, institutional. The camera is often locked into corridors, streets, government offices—places that produce pressure, not ideas. Clarke mistrusted ideology, and his work refuses both leftist piety and right-wing moralism. He didn’t want to teach you. He wanted to show you what was already there, but too often ignored.

The fact that Clarke worked primarily in television is no coincidence. The BBC, despite its bureaucracy, gave him room to experiment. Most of his films were made on tight budgets and aired without fanfare. But they were absorbed. They imprinted themselves. Clarke’s influence, while rarely celebrated, is deeply embedded in British media culture. Directors and writers who want to confront systems rather than individuals, to render violence without psychology, to interrogate Britain without resolving it, owe him a debt. 

Blokes, blazers, and broken noses (The Firm, 1988)

Clarke died in 1990, just as British cinema was about to enter another phase—new money, new optimism, a dash of postmodernism. But his work stands as a brutal benchmark. He made films that didn’t explain, didn’t resolve, and didn’t blink. In a media landscape crowded with commentary, they are striking for what they withhold. There are no music cues, no moral epiphanies, and certainly no safe distance. Just the facts on the ground. And the facts are often horrifying.

These are not comfortable films. They weren’t meant to be. 

Poetry and lager in a post-industrial wasteland (Road, 1987)

There is no anniversary prompting this return to Clarke. No rerelease, no trending hashtag, no restoration gala. Just the persistent relevance of what he saw and how he showed it. His work matters now precisely because it was never tethered to topicality or fashion. Clarke filmed the systems—racism, addiction, violence, incarceration, masculine performance—not as aberrations, but as constants. He showed how the institutions meant to rehabilitate or contain only replicate harm. These problems haven’t vanished. If anything, they’ve become more opaque, more administratively elegant, less visible in form but just as brutal in function. Clarke’s films resist nostalgia. They don’t ask us to mourn the past; they force us to see the continuity. Watching Scum or Christine or The Firm now is like watching a patient that never got better. Clarke didn’t believe in closure. He believed in exposure. That is why he still matters. Clarke’s cinema isn’t about awakening conscience, but about removing the anesthesia.

If you want comfort, look elsewhere. If you want solutions, Clarke offers none. But if you want to see the mechanics of violence, of collapse, of a country at war with itself, watch Clarke. Not because he tells you what it means. But because he refuses to look away.

The camera doesn’t flinch. Neither should you.

The urgency now is not just to remember Clarke, but to demand his successors. Where are the filmmakers documenting today’s institutional failures with that same icy clarity? Where are the unsentimental depictions of addiction, migration, housing collapse, bureaucratic cruelty? Not dramatized, not polished—just shown. We live in a time of endless image production, yet so few of those images are honest. Clarke’s absence today is not just a gap in memory, but a hole in our collective seeing. We need new Clarkes. Not imitators, but filmmakers who know the stakes, who trust the image, who don’t look away, not to mourn what has passed, but to reveal what persists.

Mick Hargreaves (b. 1965 in Leeds) is the son of a steelworker and a dinner lady. He left school at sixteen to begin an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. It was around that time—watching “Scum” on a black-and-white telly in his mum’s front room—that he first encountered the films of Clarke. The rawness, the silence, the refusal to explain—it all hit like nothing else. A few years later, Hargreaves made the unlikely leap into film editing. He now works between Bradford and Manchester, mostly on documentaries and independent shorts.

Cover image: Alan Clarke: no frills, just fists