Lord Of The Flies
LORD OF THE FLIES (1963) d. Peter Brook. Under exclusive license from
Janus Films. © 1963 Lord of the Flies Company. All rights reserved.
Once a staple of the VCE syllabi, the William Golding's dystopian vision of a society "free" of rules is timelessly powerful. It used to screen on tv every now and then (my first viewing left me utterly horrified as a child), but it seems to have fallen out of favour with television programmers.
Not to worry. Watching it on DVD is eminently more rewarding. The sound and image restoration is superb.
A group of young schoolboys being air transported to safer accommodation during the war, is left stranded on a deserted island, after their plane crashes in the sea.
While the warm, sunny weather, plentiful fruit, and freedom from rules and regulations fills them with unbridled joy at first, it quickly becomes clear that they are indeed stranded, and that they must work out how to survive.
The ensuing power play and divergence of the boys into benevolent and malevolent groups is, as the story as a whole, a powerful metaphor for society. The pursuit of power is ruthless, yet without it, society can't be sufficiently organised to ensure survival.
These boys are innocents, yet without civilising influences, they succumb to animal instinct, depravity and a competitive survival of the fittest mentality.
What would have been episodic bullying in their civilized homeland, becomes a savage hunt on the island where brutal instincts are unbridled by the constraints of civilised codes of conduct.
Peter Brook had worked as a director for years in the theatre and had little experience of film direction prior to making Lord Of The Flies. Yet it is a most accomplished piece of cinema. Brook's subsequent films were predominantly adaptations of Shakespeare and operatic tales, marrying his love of theatre and film most admirably.
Brook's loyal adaptation of Golding's intricately symbolic novel is as stunning as it is chilling and remains a most powerful and disturbing film.