How it Happened Here (Paperback)

"How It Happened Here" tells the story of the making of a film and the subsequent reception that the film received and the controversy and alarm that it stirred up when it was first released. The film-makers were two teenagers (18 and 16) and they started out with no budget and a borrowed 16 mm camera. The project took 8 years to complete. Part of the book is a humorous and detailed account of how the boys overcame all the practical and financial hurdles of amateur film making and saw the project through to completion and national release. This in itself would qualify the book as a thoroughly entertaining read and a sound basis for a course in film making or media studies of any kind. But this was no ordinary film. Kevin and his co-director Andrew Mollo took as their theme the "what if?" idea of a conquered and occupied England, after a hypothetical defeat and invasion following the Dunkirk retreat. As they grew up with the project and developed their own political understanding the film departed from its "war adventure" origins and developed into a low key and terrifying Orwellian fantasy confronting its audience with the detailed reality of life under Fascism, darkened by all the moral compromise that is forced on everyone who wants to survive under such a regime. "It Happened Here" is a provocative and challenging film that demands of everyone who sees it "What would I have done?". The British people had never before been able to imagine with such clarity the fate that they had so narrowly (some would say, unaccountably) avoided. A nation lulled by Churchillian rhetoric into complacent self-satisfaction was shaken more than anyone could have foreseen by this vision of what might have been. But in telling his story, Kevin had allowed genuine British Fascists to speak their mind, and therein lies the starting point of the second part of the book, the battle to confront the misunderstanding and hostility of Jewish organisations and other well-meaning people who had failed to appreciate the irony of Kevin's allowing the Fascists to be themselves in front of his camera. The six minute sequence became more famous than the film itself, a symbol of every serious artist's struggle with the forces of censorship and narrow-mindedness. The story of Kevin's attempts to overcome the wall of misunderstanding that stood between the completed film and its general release touch on just about every issue of artistic freedom and will serve as an inspiration to anybody who believes in free speech and the other things that distinguish England as it is from England as it might have been. Arguably Kevin and his film have never been fully accepted and his career has never completely recovered from this early brush with the arbiters of artistic good taste and the boundary setters of what we may and may not say. But what he did say was profoundly worth saying. Almost thirty-five years after its initial publication this book has lost none of its impact, freshness and relevance. And none of its quietly understated humour. The UKA Press is privileged to be entrusted with its re-issue. (The book contains almost 100 pictures, mostly stills from the film, and an introduction by David Robinson).

Since starting his own film collection at the age of eleven, Kevin Brownlow has worked in the cinema – either as a filmmaker in his own right, or as a historian. He entered documentaries in 1955 with World Wide Pictures and became an editor in 1958. In the 1960s, he worked as editor with Lindsay Anderson on The White Bus and was supervising editor on Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). With Andrew Mollo, he directed two feature films, It Happened Here (1964) released by United Artists, about an imaginary German occupation of England, and Winstanley (1975), made for The British Film Institute, set in the aftermath of the English Civil War.

In 1980, with David Gill, Brownlow produced and directed a thirteen-part television series, Hollywood, based on Brownlow’s book The Parade’s Gone By. Thanks to the series, Thames sponsored the showing of Brownlow’s reconstruction of Napoleon as part of the 1980 London Film Festival. The five-hour Abel Gance epic was accompanied by a full orchestra playing a specially commissioned score composed and conducted by Carl Davis. The outstanding success of the event demonstrated to a modern audience the power and excitement of a period in filmmaking so long dismissed as primitive and inaccessible.