VERDICT: This thoughtful compilation film draws our gaze to something unregistered across decades of British cinema and television - the face of a particular extra, Jill Goldston.
Though she made appearances in more than two thousand projects across a fifty-year career in film and television, you would be forgiven for not recognising the face or name of actress Jill Goldston. A background artist par excellence, she has made a career out of blending in. Now, director Anthony Ing has created a moving portrait of a star whose best work occurs just beyond the limelight. Goldston’s roles have ranged across all manner of titles, from British television series like Upstairs, Downstairs (1971-75), Bergerac (1981-91) and Peep Show (2003-15) to films ranging from Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! (1973) and John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) to Flash Gordon (1980) and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987). Jill, Uncredited premiered at the London Film Festival and now competes in the Berlinale Shorts competition.
Ing’s film is a work of delicate excavation and thoughtful compilation, sifting through what must have been thousands of hours of footage to find the sequences – and sometimes just blink-and-you’ll-miss-them instants – in which Goldston steps onto the screen. Often, Ing slows these clips down, either allowing the viewer eye time to find Goldston’s face in the crowd or sometimes punching in to bring attention more forcefully to her presence. Whether she is talking on the phone as part of the backdrop in a Carry On… film or observing the work of Anthony Hopkins in The Elephant Man, Ing’s intervention drags her centre-stage. The sound design – which features a recurring set of mechanical clunks that call to mind the manual editing process – emphasises this fact.
It is not only that we the audience are being reconditioned to notice Goldston’s visage, or that we are having our eyes drawn to her. This evocation of the process reminds us that we are having our perspective re-framed by the filmmaker, in the very same way that the images we’re seeing would formerly have been composed by the crew working on the original production. Through this process, Ing manages not only to make Goldston the primary subject of his film, but he recasts the footage in such a way that she seems to become – for a fleeting moment, in a handful of frames – the protagonist of the work she appeared in. It’s a terrific and fitting tribute to a wonderful artist who would otherwise be consigned to the background.
Director, editing, music: Anthony Ing
Cast: Jill Goldston
Producers: Catherine Bray, Anthony Ing, Charlie Shackleton
Sound design: Tom Jenkins
Production company: Loop (UK)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale Shorts)
In English
18 minutes
