Penda's Fen (DVD)

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Rural Worcestershire. 17-year-old pastor's son Stephen Franklin sits in his room writing about Elgar's 'The Dream of Gerontius' in an exercise book. The following morning, Stephen plays the organ at his school assembly and takes part in a debate in which he condemns a TV program that questioned the gospels' account of Jesus' life. He goes on to champion the role of family in Christian England. Robin Carmody. "Penda's Fen". Elidor.freeserve.co.uk. Archived from the original on 4 September 2012 . Retrieved 5 September 2012. There has to be an Alan Clarke film in this season. Although it’s a real outlier in terms of his body of work, this was a touchstone when I was developing Enys Men. I’d be lying if I said I fully knew what the film means. As with Robert Bresson’s work, I prioritise feeling over understanding. Besides, even Clarke claimed to not really know what it was about.

I also wanted wanted to show that as far as earthly life is concerned, death is an absolute parting and a farewell. The old Mr and Mrs Kings, living in their cottage and growing their neat vegetable garden also show the strength of those people who can accept this…Strikingly, it is even more than this. Penda's Fen presciently maps onto the current moment, countering nationalism, the conservatism of the provinces, war-mongering and the suppression of an emerging identity politics. Rudkin’s film was broadcast months before the impeachment of a corrupt, duplicitous President in a world threatened by thermonuclear destruction. In the year that Moonlight triumphed under the presidency of Donald Trump, it is important we remember its archival forebears, as Penda also contributes to the same radical filmic tradition — a pregnant counter-cinema — where the everyday becomes newly estranged, old certainties are sloughed off, and entrenched shibboleths don’t bear scrutiny. Rudkin’s play wasn’t a one-off, his other work is equally powerful, engaging and fascinating. A later film for the BBC, the wildly ambitious Artemis 81, is three hours in length (!) and explores similar themes, albeit in a less coherent fashion. It also includes Daniel Day-Lewis’s first screen appearance and has Sting playing Hywel Bennett’s angelic object of homoerotic desire. Rudkin’s stage work is fiercely imaginative, using Joycean dialogue to striking effect, and I’m continually surprised that no one seems interested in re-staging remarkable plays such as The Sons of Light. As for Penda’s Fen, whenever a TV executive tries to argue that television hasn’t dumbed down I’d offer this work as Exhibit A for the prosecution. Rudkin and Clarke’s film was screened at 9.35 in the evening on the nation’s main TV channel, BBC 1, at a time when there were only three channels to choose from. A primetime audience of many millions watched this visceral and unapologetically intelligent drama; show me where this happens today. Sukhdev, Sandhu (2016), "Penda's Fen", essay in Blu-ray booklet published by the British Film Institute, 23 May 2016. Child be Strange, A Symposium on Penda’s Fen is at BFI Southbank on Saturday June 10th Information here

Tales of the Gold Monkey 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 (USA) 22 x 60 minute episodes Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) was a… because the impulse of political institutions is always reductive: to limit us to identities that can be mechanically satisfied, thereby managed – i.e. controlled; to reduce us to identities that are predictable. I see it as our human identity to resist that reductive pressure; as our existential duty to subvert it at every turn.’ Matthew Harle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Penda’s Fen follows pompous and priggish young vicar’s son Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks from Timeslip) through a summer in which he reacts both to the forthcoming pressures of adulthood (he’s about to turn 18), to his moral confusion, and to the mysterious landscape and dark forces of nature around him in the idyllic rural village of Pinvin, Worcestershire (although the actual filming location was in and around Chaceley, Gloucestershire). At school, Stephen tells his class of a dream he had about a demon sitting in the roof of his father's church. One of his classmates says Stephen does nothing for their house and should be boiled in oil. Later, at Arne's house, Reverend Franklin shows Arne the local paper's account of the burned youth. It claims that he was burned by a weather balloon. Arne doesn't believe it. On the way home, Stephen and his father discuss the Manichean belief that Jesus was just one of the sons of light in the eternal battle between good and evil. That night, Stephen dreams about an angel, the naked body of a classmate and of a demon sitting on his bed. The next morning, Stephen doesn't attend his school's military marching class and, on the way home, sees the reflection of an angel in the stream.Penda’s Fen is perhaps the most significant film to be made during the rural turn that, as William Fowler has noted, British cinema took in the early 1970s. A decline in manufacturing had led to the shrinkage of many urban centres, and that, combined with a post-sixties vogue for communes, free festivals and pre-industrial ways of being, inspired artists such as Derek Jarman ( Journey to Avebury, 1971), William Raban ( Colours of This Time, 1972), and Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo ( Winstanley, 1975) to explore the submerged histories, altered states and radical possibilities of the British landscape. This revelation from Stephen crowns Penda’s Fen. It is a final and utter rejection of a cloistered purview and likely an entirely accurate reflection of the typical social ambit of a vicar's son growing up in the Midlands countryside: his world is limited to solitary meditation in his bedroom, the stifling male environment of his school, and lonely bicycle rides in the lonely expanses of the surrounding hills. Moreover, it is an acceptance of Stephen’s emergent homosexuality, that we see glimpses of in his teenage infatuation with his milkman. The more typical adolescent world of drinking and carousing is seen only briefly early in the film—a car full of young revellers pulling over so someone can get out and have a pee—a snapshot of normality that is brutally cut short. However, we never see any of these manifold threads truly tie up. Penda is a film full of interruptions, distractions and incompletions; it demands multiple viewings, as it wanders like the itinerant gaze of Alan Clarke’s camera over the Worcester landscape. It deserves interrogation: Penda is myth, music, ecocriticism, gender and folklore, buried in celluloid.