Akenfield (DVD + Blu-ray)

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Filmed across nine months in the fields of Suffolk, Peter Hall’s beautiful 1974 film Akenfield has drawn comparisons to Tarkovsky’s Mirror for its poetic use of time and the countryside. Akenfield was his third book and instantly channelled his admiration for the region but also for the workers of the Suffolk furrows and the very landscape itself. Pinter himself would sit in on a cut of Akenfield to help with advice on the film’s various dubbing.

In pictures: on location on Peter Hall’s rural time-collage

It’s a cinematic device that Andrei Tarkovsky would use the following year in Mirror (1975), another impressionistic, rural time-collage. Akenfield’s drama builds to the difficulty caused between Tom’s desire to leave the village and Jean’s reluctance to follow suit. Akenfield and Requiem for a Village pair well in the same way that Blythe’s and Ewart-Evans’ books complement each other as they explore the idiosyncrasies and natural drama surrounding belief, work and magic(k) in the rural Suffolk communities. Hall collaborated with Harold Pinter to adapt his play The Homecoming – a claustrophobic tale of disturbing family power-play all taking place in a cramped Hackney household – into a film.Perhaps more so than any other film from this period, Akenfield captures the shifting elements of English village life with a deep affection that is devoid of the usual oversimplifying lens of nostalgia.

In spite of having five feature films soon under his belt, almost the whole time he had been working on a potential film adaptation of the novel Akenfield; a desire first born from reading the book when it was published in 1969. Blythe even eventually ended up acting in the film, playing the clergyman of the local church where the main funeral, an event centred on throughout the film, takes place. Though initially focusing on one day in the life of Tom – a young man with plans to escape the village life to Australia – the film also falls gently back into the lives of the previous generations: the loves and losses of Tom’s father and grandfather.

Tuddenham, who was also native of Suffolk, is perhaps better known for another voice role, playing the part of Zen the spaceship in the TV series, Blake’s 7 (1978-81). The main professional actors used were comedian Stanley Baxter, who plays the village blacksmith, and Peter Tuddenham, who voices the film as old Tom.

Though Hall wanted to adapt Akenfield since it was published, the resulting film feels like a release for him as he enjoys the vast rural landscapes and the abundance of space and light. Being great admirers of each other’s work, Blythe and Hall collaborated closely on adapting Akenfield into a film. Travelling back to the period of the First World War, Hall creates a beautiful temporal cut between soldiers singing before going off to fight and the modern-day funeral; a deeply emotional moment with the sort of fluidly temporal dexterity that directors like Terence Davies would later experiment with in more urban settings.The film pairs well with David Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village (1976), another film that deals more viscerally with the culture of English village life in Suffolk, though threatened by urban development rather than a sheer exodus of its youthful population. He manages to capture some of the most haunting and beautiful evocations of Suffolk ever committed to film, with a dreamlike soft-focus permeating throughout. Shand gives a remarkable performance of three generations of men, owing in some part to Hall’s work with him and the other actors on improvisation techniques brought over from the theatre. To reflect the documentary precision of Blythe’s book, Hall worked largely with genuine Suffolk residents and non-actors for almost every role in the film.

Hall had already written to Blythe in the year of the book’s publication, expressing both his admiration and desire to adapt it into a film. The landscape is seen through a human prism, showing it to be both of a constant natural beauty and a tough working environment where men and women have toiled for generations. Blythe himself wrote an initial treatment of the book though it would take a number of years and the help of producer Rex Pyke to solidify the project financially. A summer breeze can turn to a winter chill in the merest and subtlest of cuts and edits, but the key element brought over from Blythe’s work is the difficulty of agricultural work (of both arable and pastoral forms) no matter what the season or weather is like. Cameraman Ivan Strasburg had began his career a few years before Akenfield, chiefly with documentary work.Blythe’s work also had a similar Suffolk peer in the form of ethnographer George Ewart-Evans and his book The Pattern under the Plough (1966). The lead character of Tom Rouse was played by Garrow Shand, who, in Hall’s own words, was actually an “agricultural contractor”. He soon became good friends with the creative circles there thanks to curating several Aldeburgh festivals, which included socialising with Benjamin Britten, E. Though the film is ambiguous as to whether Tom eventually escapes, the old story of his grandfather walking 40 miles to find (and fail to get) a job plagues Tom: would he be as stuck as his grandfather eventually was?