The Shetland Experience

Last updated

The Shetland Experience
The Shetland Experience film Opening titles (1977).jpg
Directed by Derek Williams
Written byDerek Williams
Produced byDouglas Gordon
Narrated by Eric Porter
CinematographyMaurice Picot
Edited byMike Gascoyne
Music by Patrick Gowers
Distributed byShetland Oil Terminal Environmental Advisory Group
Release date
  • 1977 (1977)
Running time
25 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

The Shetland Experience is a 1977 British short documentary film directed and written by Derek Williams and narrated by Eric Porter. [1] [2] It concerns environmental measures taken by the oil industry at the Sullom Voe Terminal in Shetland. It was a sponsored film, produced for the environmental advisory group of the Sullom Voe Association, to which the Shetland Islands Council and oil companies belonged. [3] [4]

Contents

Cast

Reception

Russell and Piers Taylor wrote in Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain: "The Shetland Experience is the rare Williams film integrating people into the bigger picture without strain. A lovely scene is based around fiddle-playing and knitting in crofters' cottages. A montage of Shetland faces set to music is a gentle riposte to TV vor pops (pops minus vox). Each subject-sketch reverberates with the others: their sequencing suggests a year's seasons passing simultaneously with the dawn-to-dusk of a single day. The symbiosis of industry with idyll, symbolised by Picot's rapid reverse zoom from an offshore platform to a smallholding onshore, has a long lineage in British documentary's history. The film's conclusion is optimistic if subdued, speculating about a future founded on similar benign partnerships. The hopeful prognosis has remained valid for Shetland itself, at least. The film's emotional climax lies in twilit scenes of silhouetted Viking helmets against fire: Shetland's Up Helly Aa festival, 'an expression of identity: an assertion that these are not the sons of Saxons, or of Celts, but of Norsemen'. Though a romantic exaggeration, such impassioned ethnology, married to elemental imagery, is clearly what set the film-makers' pulses racing: and their viewers too." [5]

BFI screenonline wrote: "The film is methodical, rational and pragmatic, like the incoming engineers glimpsed in several sequences. Its structure is superbly designed, the more so for being so self-effacing. Much of this is down to sound directorial planning, helped by Williams writing his own script, which alternates explanatory with elegiac passages. The images are matched to this prose with a logic and concision alien to more anarchic, intuitive filmmakers, 'pure' romantics of the Flaherty type. Like Williams' cerebral The Shadow of Progress (1970), The Shetland Experience engages the mind, then surprises us by causing our hearts to leap." [2]

Accolades

The Shetland Experience was nominated for a 1978 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. [6]

Home media

The film is included on the British Film Institute DVD Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain 1951–1977. [2]

References

  1. ↑ "The Shetland Experience". British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  2. 1 2 3 Russell, Patrick. "Shetland Experience, The (1977)". BFI screenonline. Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  3. ↑ "Shetland Experience, The (1977)". BFI Screenonline. British Film Institute . Retrieved 27 August 2014.
  4. ↑ "The Shetland Experience". BP Video Library. Retrieved 7 October 2025.
  5. ↑ Russell, Patrick; Piers Taylor, James (2019). Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain. British Film Institute. p. 541. ISBN   9781838718121.
  6. ↑ "The 50th Academy Awards (1978) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. 5 October 2014. Retrieved 24 May 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.