Dear friends,
I recently watched a film with one of the most unpromising concepts imaginable. It’s an 18-minute compilation, made up entirely of a background actor’s brief and inconsequential appearances on screen. There’s no narrative, just clip after clip of the same woman, Jill Goldston, who spent decades as a film and TV Extra.
We see her as a nurse, a patient, a waitress and a party guest, in courtrooms and barrooms and trains, attending medieval banquets, Regency balls and Ancient Roman revels. Image piles upon image, with Jill’s face the only thing connecting them.
The idea behind Jill, Uncredited is absurd: a showcase of one Extra’s fleeting performances. It’s like compiling a record containing only the tambourine parts of classic songs. Why would you? Who’s it for?
Last week I wrote about ‘the shock of the ordinary’ and how powerful it can be to bring the background into the foreground. Jill, Uncredited is nothing but background. And the result is a strange, and strangely moving, viewing experience.
What ought to be banal becomes fascinating, even haunting, as we watch an unknown figure passing through irreconcilably different settings, living dozens of different lives, cutting through the centuries like a discreet and endlessly versatile time traveler.
‘Extras are the lowest’, Jill Goldston told The Guardian in a recent interview. Nevertheless, she ‘had no wish to become famous’ and loved ‘getting paid to have fun’. Background acting became her life, taking her onto the sets of everything from Mr Bean to The Clockwork Orange, from the Carry On films to The Elephant Man.
Jill, Uncredited was assembled by Anthony Ing, who was watching old films and found himself ‘wondering about those peripheral figures who live in the margins of the narrative.’ While investigating the subject he made contact with Jill, who is now eighty and gave him a list of her 1,951 appearances as an Extra. From that point on, searching for Jill ‘became a surreal pastime’.
Searching for Jill becomes the viewer’s pastime too. Jill, Uncredited is the film equivalent of a Where’s Wally book. You scour each shot, getting a hit of satisfaction each time you find her. To make this easier, the clips are shown in slow-motion, elongating her split-second appearances.
In filmmaking, Extras fulfil a function, bulk out a scene, but they are not meant to stand out. Here, at last, Jill becomes the focal point. We concentrate on her to such an extent that we barely register the people who are supposed to be the centre of attention.
As a playful rebuttal of our culture’s obsession with linear heroic narratives, Jill, Uncredited reminded me of the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin’s proposal for an alternative form of storytelling: her ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’. The hero, she writes, decrees ‘that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there with a THOK!’ Instead of these neat, uni-directional stories, Le Guin is interested in narratives that have the form of a bag or a sack, where there is space ‘to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else.’ Instead of heroes, Le Guin wants stories that ‘have people in them’.
Jill, Uncredited is a carrier bag. It’s playful and charming, but it’s also quietly radical, shifting the frame and inverting ideas of who or what is important and interesting. Watching it, I found myself asking: Which lives and stories tend to dominate our narratives? What tends to get left out? When we’re invited to look in one direction, what is happening in all the others?
Jill Goldston is a remarkable person. She has a Guinness World Record for the highest number of appearances of any film and TV Extra. But what I appreciate most about Jill, Uncredited is the way it reminds us that anyone, if we offer them our sustained attention, will come to seem remarkable. It’s an invitation to slow down, zoom in and notice the people and things that feel like the backdrop of our lives.
As well as a celebration of Jill, and all of cinema’s Extras, the film is an 18-minute meditation on how much is always going on behind and beneath whatever is in the spotlight.
Describing her own experience of watching the film, Jill says: ‘I wasn’t watching me. I was watching the people in the background of me.’
Warm wishes,
Matt
Composite images created by Loop.
Wow! Fascinating. I love this idea. Also YES the carrier bag theory of fiction! A banger