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Clip description
Dale (David Field) has received a distressing letter from his girlfriend, Lorraine. He keeps a picture of her hidden in his cell. The prison officers trick him into believing that she has come to visit. Instead, the priest who beat him savagely at a boys’ home has come to ask his forgiveness. Dale is dismissive, telling the priest that the beatings were the best thing he could have done for him. Back in his cell, prison officer Gilchrist (Billy Tisdall) again tells him that Lorraine has come to visit. Dale does not believe him, but he is desperate to see her. At the door of the visiting area, Mr Gaunt (Simon Woodward) tells him there is no visitor. Dale cracks, so the prison officers beat him again.
Curator’s notes
The visit from the priest does not come from the original play, but it did happen, according to the playwright Ray Mooney. Christopher Flannery spent time in a brutal boys’ home in Victoria, where Mooney says he was savagely beaten. The director Alkinos Tsilimidos inserted the scene in the script, presumably to give a sense that what Dale experiences in H Division is a continuation of the brutality of a whole system, not simply one part of that system.
This scene also gives a sense of the psychological manipulation practised by the prison officers. They have succeeded in making Dale physically weak through repeated bashing, but they take it further, to attack his mental strength, by identifying the thing he wants more than anything – a visit from his girlfriend. Using Gilchrist to deliver the false message is clever, because Gilchrist is not as brutal as the other guards. Dale might not have believed the same trick twice if it had come from Gaunt or Berriman or Kert, the three main abusers.
This scene is a good example of the way that cinematographer Toby Oliver uses wide-angle lenses and deep focus to great effect. Note the shot inside Dale’s cell, where Dale is in extreme close-up on the right and everything else is in focus behind him. It gives the scene a harder edge, and most of the film is shot that way.
