A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy
To mark the English-language premiere of a new ARTE documentary about Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange, we explore some of the ideas featured in the film.
A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy is the first documentary about Anthony Burgess to have been made for 25 years. The film has been broadcast by ARTE, the pan-European public service channel dedicated to cultural programming. It is co-directed by Elisa Mantin and Benoit Felici.
Anthony Burgess on Screen
Burgess was no stranger to television, both as a subject and presenter. His induction into the world of factual programming came in May 1963, when he appeared in a documentary by Christopher Burstall titled Sex in Literature. Burgess and his first wife Lynne were filmed at their home in Etchingham, Sussex, and he read a bawdy passage from his novel, Inside Mr Enderby.
In 1965 he presented his own script for Silence, Exile and Cunning, a documentary about James Joyce, produced for the BBC’s Monitor series. In the film, again directed by Burstall, Burgess travelled to Dublin, retracing the footsteps of Joyce and his fictional characters, such as Leopold and Molly Bloom, in locations from the novel Ulysses. It is a serious piece of television, and Burgess improvises to camera with authority and clarity.
Other documentaries followed on subjects such as Rome (Anthony Burgess’s Rome, 1976); Ernest Hemingway (Grace Under Pressure, 1978); his home city of Manchester (Celebration: Burgess in Manchester, 1980); the last days of the British Empire in Malaya (A Kind of Failure, 1981); James Joyce and Igor Stravinsky (Make it New, 1982); and D.H. Lawrence (The Rage of D.H. Lawrence, 1985).
Burgess was also the subject of documentaries, beginning in 1971 with a BBC film shot on location in Rome, directed by the writer Nigel Williams. A later film, Burgess at Seventy, directed by Kevin Jackson and presented by Russell Davies, follows Burgess to Venice for a production of his opera, Oberon. This programme includes interviews with other notable writers such as Martin Amis and Paul Theroux.
Kevin Jackson returned to Burgess in a two-hour documentary, The Burgess Variations, broadcast in 1999. He wrote to Liana Burgess to outline the idea: ‘By taking Burgess’s passion for music — from the pub piano and popular songs of his childhood to the classical universality of Beethoven, from the genius of Mozart to Burgess’s own compositions — we would map out his life in chronological sequence but divide it into thematic sections (something like Elgar’s Enigma Variations).’ The film provides a detailed exploration of Burgess’s life and work.
A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy
A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy, is the first new documentary to focus on Burgess since The Burgess Variations in 1999. Drawing on archive footage, startling new animations, and interviews with major cultural figures, this documentary reconsiders the 60-year history of A Clockwork Orange as a novel, film, stage play and cultural influence.
The programme begins with Burgess’s unfinished manuscript, ‘The Clockwork Condition’, discovered in the archive of the Burgess Foundation in 2019. In the manuscript, Burgess considers the role of violence in modern-day society, and attempts to defend his novel against accusations that it celebrates or glorifies anti-social behaviour.
The documentary also analyses the relevance of the novel in today’s cultural milieu, with contributions from leading artists such as novelist Will Self, theatre director Alexandra Spencer-Jones, and Campino, the vocalist of the German punk band Die Toten Hosen. To highlight the ongoing importance of A Clockwork Orange, the dissident artist Ai Weiwei connects the novel’s depiction of a totalitarian state to his own experience of being detained without charge by the Chinese government.
A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy was partly filmed at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, and it includes new footage of the city at night, bringing the novel back to the streets which shaped it.
The directors of the film are Elisa Mantin and Benoit Felici.
Elisa Mantin has been making television documentaries for more than 30 years. Her previous subjects include Salman Rushdie, John Berger, Roberto Saviano and Colette. In 1997 she directed a 45-minute programme about Anthony Burgess for the French TV series Un siècle d'écrivains. She is an honorary patron of the Burgess Foundation.
Benoit Felici’s previous films include: Unfinished Italy, an exploration of Italy’s modern-day ruins; The Real Thing, a film about architectural replicas of national monuments around the world; and a film about the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, famous for his portraits consisting of vegetables and other inanimate objects.
A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy has been released in French and German on ARTE, and a Spanish version is scheduled for broadcast. We hope that the English-language version of the documentary will soon find a distributor in the UK and US.
To watch the French version, Orange méchanique: les rouages de la violence, click here.
To watch the German version, Clockwork Orange: Im Räderwerk der Gewalt, click here.