Film: Silent days in the park: a film-maker's eerie record

They were days when Hyde Park was packed but scarcely a sound was heard. Richard Alwyn was determined to document the mood: the result is a disturbing TV film called `The Shrine'. He talked to Liese Spencer about mass mourning as seen through the camera lens.

A grainy video image of a hearse fills the screen. Pitched by unseen hands, bunches of flowers bombard the vehicle as it snails relentlessly down the street. Giant speakers dangle from the sky, tin-bottomed acoustics relating an unseen funeral to the silent crowds below. In the early morning a couple cling together singing in whispers, their disembodied heads floating in the darkness.

Surreal scenes taken from a remarkable film to be shown next week. Made for the BBC's Modern Times strand, "The Shrine" describes the outpouring of public grief that greeted news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. A lyrical record of spontaneous devotion, it is a documentary that captures the eeriness of mass mourning without seeking to package it as narrative or laden it with the banal reportage of outside news broadcasts.

Thanks to the popularity of ratings-friendly "factual soaps" such as The Airport and Driving School, the sight of such meditative, impressionistic work is becoming rarer on our screens. But having already snatched a prime spot in the packed Christmas schedule, "The Shrine" now looks set for limited cinematic release in the United States. Not bad for a film that nearly didn't happen.

"It started as a kind of collective dare," says the director, Richard Alwyn. "On the Thursday I'd been down to Kensington Palace with my family to have a look, and it was a very odd atmosphere. Thousands and thousands of people and an uncanny hush. Far too many people for the lack of noise."

Alwyn went into work the following day and "niggled away" at the series editor Stephen Lambert to make a documentary about what was going on. "It seemed ludicrous not to do something, but the size and suddenness of it all caught everyone by surprise."

It wasn't until the day before the funeral that the team finally made up its mind to shoot. "We kept sitting around thinking, `Oh God, we've missed it,'" remembers Lambert, "until we finally reached critical mass at about five o'clock that afternoon. By seven, we were out with cameras."

Taking shifts, a team of directors and cameramen filmed night and day throughout the next week. Never sure what they could make of the footage or how long the "Diana" phenomenon would last, the film-makers were taking a big risk.

"I didn't really worry about media saturation," says Alwyn, "because I was aware that I was looking at it all with a very different eye. I wasn't under pressure to get `a story' on screen the next day. I think the curse of television is the need to parcel things up and explain them before the dust has settled. For me, the obvious thing to do just seemed to be to go down there and watch what was going on."

Arriving at Hyde Park, Alwyn was amazed by what he saw. "Suddenly this rather genteel park in London was transformed into a torrid site of Catholic devotion. I actually shot some footage of people being brought to the park in wheelchairs, which didn't make it into the final film, but it did feel like Lourdes. You almost expected someone to get up and walk."

More fascinated than tearful, Alwyn set about photographing and interviewing the crowds. "As time went on I did begin to think that it was becoming London's largest tourist attraction," he says. "Inevitably such a massive event attracts eccentrics, but it seemed rather facile to focus on them. One man did tell me he had seen Diana in a tree and wanted to contact Earl Spencer about it, but I felt that including that kind of thing would have been reductive. I didn't want to laugh at what was going on. For me, the whole thing was rather more mysterious."

Evoking a febrile spirituality little seen in our secular nation, "The Shrine" is a disturbing film to watch, but Alwyn insists that it simply records what went on in the park that week. "There's nothing in the editing that doesn't belong to the experience. If there's a surrealism about the film it's because there was a slight unreality about the whole thing. It was like stepping back into a pre-Reformation world. Statues were having their heads put back on. Mourners were furiously creating icons and shrines, tying flowers to trees, lighting candles. There was even a whiff of revolution, with people reclaiming the palace gates by tying teddy bears to them ..."

Longer and more languid than the prime-time docu-soaps, Alwyn's documentary has an unusual stillness about it. "What I wanted to do was to try and give people the space to look at things long enough to make them think again," says the director. "Television tends to be so quick in its cutting and programming that you don't have time to think about your responses."

Without narration, what hits the viewer most strongly is the brooding silence that Alwyn noticed on his first visit to the park, although the director occasionally introduces his own soundtrack.

"I used the music not to underline the emotion but to deflate the sentimentality. To try and keep people thinking, rather than just sinking into the images," he explains. "During the funeral procession, for instance, I used jazz to try and break the solemnity, suggest the carnival air of a New Orleans funeral. I wasn't trying to be irreverent, just to keep people looking with new eyes."

"The Shrine" goes out next week, within hours of ITV's tribute to Diana. "The two films will be completely different creatures," argues Lambert. "ITN's programme will be an extended news feature with the sensibility and aesthetics of news. `The Shrine' is far more intimate."

Whatever its form, no documentary is going to make sense of the tragedy, and for Alwyn that's not the point. "I'm sure some people may be expecting a more mawkish raking over of Diana's life, but `The Shrine' isn't really about who she was, it's about people's response to her death."

Every morning after the funeral when Alwyn arrived to film there would fewer and fewer people. "I'd think, `Oh, it's over, it's drying up,' " he says. "Then by mid-morning there would be thousands turning up from all over the country. From Newcastle and Liverpool. Flying in from America. It was as if people just couldn't leave it alone. As if they wanted a sign, something more to happen."

Now that this mournful expectancy has subsided, the crowds have dispersed. Floral offerings are dwindling. Once the re-seeded grass has grown back it will be as though that bizarre vigil never took place. Luckily, "The Shrine" bears witness to what one man interviewed calls "a quiet madness".

`The Shrine' is on BBC2 on Tuesday 30 December.