Penda's Fen (DVD)

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The Dream of Gerontinus is considered by many to be Elgar’s masterpiece. It was composed for the Birmingham music festival of 1900 and its first performance was at Birmingham Town Hall. Due to its Roman Catholic theology, it was difficult for it to be played in Anglican cathedrals so a revised version was used until 1910. Both Elgar and Hubert Parry who wrote the music for Jerusalem were influenced by European composers. Again reiterating the point that nothing is really ‘pure’. Penda's Fen, with its discussions of Manichean philosophy, dream sequences and the appearance of mythical creatures, seems somehow out of place in Alan Clarke's output. Indeed Clarke himself, who was recruited to direct the play at the behest of Rudkin who saw him as one of the best TV directors in Britain at the time, claimed he never fully understand what the play was about. Nevertheless, the exploration of white English masculinity is a theme common to many of Clarke's dramas. While Stephen is far removed from the aggressive, urban and often working-class (anti) heroes typical of Alan Clarke dramas, he shares their disenfranchisement and their desire to rebel against his surroundings. Penda’s Fen is visually striking and director Alan Clarke, later admitted that he didn’t really understand it. During an interview about his work, Rudkin said, ‘I am afflicted by images, by things that are seen, pictures of things, they are extraordinary, momentary, but they stay with me.’ He was talking about his play Afore Night Come, but could easily be talking about Penda’s Fen which features, angels, demons and other striking scenes. The first idea for the film came to me from something that happened a couple of years ago. It almost grew out of a village or, rather, its name (I won’t say what the name was because I use it for a special reason in the film). My wife was coming home one day when she found the road to the village closed. There was a diversion sign—and the name of the village had been misspelt by one letter. But it didn’t look like a mistake, more as if the painter had a different pronunciation. I found that the name had been spelt and pronounced this way—but centuries ago. And this was a corruption of an older, 12th-century version, itself a corruption of the oldest name of all, dating from pre-Christian times. You could, if you like, be fanciful and say that the misspelling was the old, primeval ‘demon’ of the place opening half an eye… 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.

West Country Tales 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 (UK) 14 x 30 minute episodes This supernatural anthology drama series was… 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. Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of becalmed continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground and in constant turmoil. It offers wormholes and geysers, faultlines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy. It’s a philosophy of pastoral – and of what makes a nation – that sloughs off Little Englandism and Middle Earthism in favour of something less self-satisfied and more attuned to its lurking darknesses.In 2006, Vertigo magazine described "Penda's Fen" as "One of the great visionary works of English film". [6] But I didn’t want to think merely of the past—I wanted to open a futuristic window on the landscape, too. So into the story is borne Arne, the embittered neighbour who offers Stephen a savage political outlook on tomorrow’s world… Matthew Harle is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Barbican Centre and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

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. The story is helped along with phantasmagorical imagery, both dark and light, by way of the young man's dreams and imagination. But ultimately these become set pieces in the greater story and its resolution. Pretty bold fare, I would think, for what was then a 1974 TV movie originally airing on British television. Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signupPenda's Fen" is the 16th episode of fourth season of the British BBC anthology TV series Play for Today. The episode was a television play that was originally broadcast on 21 March 1974. "Penda's Fen" was written by David Rudkin, directed by Alan Clarke, produced by David Rose, and starred Spencer Banks. [1] Plot [ edit ] No account of the film’s making would be complete without mention of its commissioning editor, David Rose. Tasked in 1971 by David Attenborough to head a new regional television drama department at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, he immediately set about developing adventurous projects – by writers such as Alan Bleasdale, Alan Plater, Michael Abbensetts and Willy Russell – that were steeped in the lore and soundworlds of non-metropolitan Britain. He has described Penda’s Fen as ‘a milestone, if not the milestone, of my career’, though, 40 years after it was first broadcast, he also admitted, ‘I didn’t understand it at all, but that’s as it should be.’ Arne tells the villagers to think about what is really underneath them: ‘Farmland and pasture now, an ancient Fen. The earth beneath your feet feels solid there. It is not. Somewhere there the land is hollow. Somewhere beneath is being constructed, something – We’re not supposed to know. A Top Secret: we locals are not supposed to know it’s even there!’ The seventies was in the midst of the cold war with the constant threat of nuclear strikes as Russia and the US sought to outdo each other in arms. Britain was building a series of bunkers in readiness and living under the four minute warning. He discovers that he was adopted and that he is not the pure-bred Briton he thought himself (he talks fondly of supporting the “Aryan national family on its Christian path”) but a mongrel son of foreigners. 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.

At the film’s climax, Stephen’s birth parents – whom his superego has conjured up – seek to wrest him from his newly chosen path as an adult embracing his impurity as a being of mixed race and mixed sex.Odd how, like me, a lot of men seem to have seen the play in their teens and been unaccountably but deeply moved by it. It’s a kind of English Death of Salesman maybe, in that it cuts down beneath the defences and is saturated in the dilemmas and historical legacies & dilemmas of one particular culture.