THE MOON AND THE SLEDGEHAMMER

Product Information

All films are being shown free of charge thanks to the generosity of the film makers. Booking is essential and can be done through Eventbrite. Masks must be worn throughout.

A peaceful and cheerful walk taken by two little girls in the middle of nature, away from the eyes of grown-ups. But the joy gradually starts disappearing and the reverie becomes nostalgia, while at the edge of the road, among the rotting summer fruit, faint faces appear. The cycle of life does not diminish the magic of the world, no matter whether it is lit by the moon or by the sun. Picturehouses Central is the flagship cinema of the Picturehouses group, located in the heart of London in Piccadilly Circus. It is the former Trocadero Centre and has now been transformed into a luxury 7 Screen cinema, all boasting huge screens and probably the most comfortable and spacious seats in the country. De Natura and The Moon and the Sledgehammer will be available with descriptive subtitles. The live conversation on Tuesday 13 September will be live-captioned.Over an hour, a remarkable vision of genuine freedom is explored, far from the constraints of conventional ways of being.”

Drew Pendergrass is a PhD student in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University. His current research uses satellite, aircraft and surface observations of the environment to correct supercomputer models of the atmosphere. His environmental writing has been published in Harper’s, the Guardian, Jacobin, and Current Affairs.

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The world’s all to pieces, isn’t it? They’re like a lot of rats and mice in England. They don’t know what they are going to do. It’s a good job the moon’s well up there too, I’ve got room enough to swing a sledgehammer underneath him without hitting of him. He’s well out of my way. But if they had their way they’d get the moon down you know and they’d be trying to wheel him along the road on two wheels. The woodland is their only world and within it we experience a man-powered-steam-driven-sweat-soaked-metal-wonder, alive to the noise of physical exertion and out-of-tune pianos. It is littered with heavy metal, rusty spanners, disemboweled car carcasses, manicured lawns, embroidered doilies and carefully pruned roses. It is a paradox fresh-out of Samuel Butler’s Erewohn. It has been a very tough time for the industry and continues to be challenging due to seating restrictions so please support your local cinemas. The unthinkable alternative is quite simply that we will lose them, and what an unwonderful world that would be. Cut off from society and its influences, their bizarre personal fantasies and philosophies reveal a true independence of existence. Their seemingly eccentric lifestyle shows a family at one with nature, but at odds with society and each other. Yet for all their eccentricities they ably demonstrate that they are remarkably successful at looking after themselves in a way few of us are today and indeed make us question the accepted sanity and values of today’s ever more homogenized society Giveaway Featuring a short film by Lucile Hadžihalilović, cult documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer , and a discussion of a plan for a sustainable future on Earth

Alastair McIntosh is a writer whose many books include Soil and Soul, Riders on the Storm and Spiritual Activism and a leading light in Scotland and beyond as defender of the natural world. He is involved with Scottish land reform, especially on Eigg and campaigned successfully against the Harris super quarry. He is a fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology, and helped to set up the Govan based GalGael Trust of which he is a non-executive director. In 2006 he was appointed to the honorary position of Visiting Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, (Department of Geography & Sociology) – the first such post in Human ecology in a Scottish university – and is now an honorary professor at the University of Glasgow. We are in the world of Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and The Sledgehammer. It is 1971 and the spell has been cast. It was maybe ten years later that I saw the film. Transfixed, it transformed the way in which I would make my own work. A template for the believable heaviness of making. This conversation will be hosted by Julia Brow, founder and programmer of No Planet B – an arts organisation inspiring environmental activism through film and culture. He spent six years as a professor, lecturing on film at the famous University of Southern California whose alumni include John Carpenter and George Lucas.Markku Lehmuskallio’s remarkable and mesmerising film is a symphony to the beauties of the earth and its creatures in all its harmonies, simplicities and complexities. But where does man fit into this symphony? A reception for all audience members will be held after the discussion session. This will be filmed and will include many interviews with the select gathering. Watch out for it as an extra on the DVD in the future. His marvelously offbeat tragicomedy takes less than seventy minutes to present an indelible microcosm, complete with ditties banged out on the family’s wheezing harmonium and out-of-tune piano, which Kath plays standing up. Darrell Hartman THE L MAGAZINE The Measure Thursday, June 4, 2009 There will also be occasional musical interludes between films as harpists and other musicians explore the unusual acoustics of the venue, which, being round, promises something very different.