Penda’s Fen

Pendas Fen
Penda's Fen

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 20 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Writer: David Rudkin

Cast: Spencer Banks, John Atkinson, Georgine Anderson

UK 1974

90 mins

Alan Clarke’s visionary coming-of-age dream still lingers in the minds of 1970s children.

‘You can tell he’s not a nice man because of his television plays.’

So says Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks), possibly the screen’s least hip tortured teenager, referring to a fellow inhabitant of the village of Pinvin, the lefty playwright Arne (Ian Hogg). Stephen is wholly on the side of the Mary Whitehouse-alike figure popping up in the papers in wanting all this 70s permissiveness and insurrection off the air. He prefers Elgar to rock n’ roll, believes in supporting ‘the Aryan national family on its Christian path’ and is, generally, a priggish, self-righteous, eminently slappable sort. But all this is about to change in writer David Rudkin’s utterly unique 1974 Play for Today. The line seems wryly prescient about Alan Clarke, who hadn’t become pegged as the controversial chronicler of Britain’s violent criminal underclass yet – that reputation began in earnest three years later with Scum. Penda’s Fen would appear to be an odd item on his CV:* it’s rural rather than urban, mystical and elliptical rather than plain speaking, and is largely concerned with the kind of Worcestershire villagers that Radio 4 makes dramas about, rather than the working class ne’er-do-wells that would come to dominate his later social realist works. And this most definitely goes beyond the bounds of social realism.

For Stephen, military cadet, church organist and son of a parson, starts to have dreams and visions, and dreams that turn to visions, interfering with his certainties and upsetting the status quo. He has dreams of sweaty heaving rugby scrums that it wouldn’t take an advanced Freudian to interpret (underlining the repressed enthusiasm he has for the saucy milkman). He will see an angel on the riverbank and a demon in his bed, cracks growing in the church floor, and an unsettling image of smiling mutilation in the Elysian grounds of a country mansion. He will see an aged Elgar himself during a rainstorm and chat with him about the secret of the Enigma Variations. Even his village’s identity becomes slippery. Is it Pinvin, Pinfin, Pendefen? Could it be Penda’s Fen, burial place of the last pagan king of England? Already an outcast at school for his grating piety he will be subjected to increasing humiliations that the masters ignore or condone. He is not what he thought he was. Certainties of race, sexuality and religion are stripped from him, leading to his climactic acceptance of his new identity during a strange confrontation in the Malvern Hills.

Penda’s Fen is an odd beast, a coming-of-age drama of sorts laced with elements of folk horror, full of psycho-geographical ruminations about the layers of history and endless meanings contained within the English landscape. The camera seeks out the sacred and arcane, the choir sings William Blake. It wouldn’t be a 1970s TV drama without earnest political arguments in the Parish hall. But here conversation also turns to the heresy of Manichaeism and the fact that the word ‘pagan’ originally meant ‘belonging to the village’. Modern music and media are unseen and unheard. Clarke’s treatment of the weirder elements is deft and physical and unfussy, his demon is a dark gargoyle straddling Stephen as he wakes from his wet dream slumber, like Fuseli’s nightmare, winningly sticking around when the light’s turned on. He drops out the sound for the hazy visionary sequence where children queue to get their hands lopped off save for the noise of the chopper hitting home. The appearance of Graham Leaman as Elgar sticks in the memory, in his dotage and wheelchair-bound, a ghost haunted by memory. But Clarke was always good with actors, and there are a fair few striking performances here.

It’s not perfect, a sub-Quatermass strand about a horribly burned youth and secret military bases underground is unceremoniously shelved after a substantial build-up. The pacing is uneven, dragging in the early stages, going bonkers in the latter, with a penchant for dense theological discussions in the cornfields in a decidedly ‘tell, don’t show’ mode. It’s a tying together of disparate elements into an ungraspable whole, and I doubt even its biggest fans would claim to wholly get what Rudkin’s getting at in places, but the mysterious is part of its DNA and part of its charm. It carries a rare emotional heft, aims for the visionary and actually gets there. Stephen’s ‘I am nothing pure!’ speech at its climax is unexpectedly rousing, a rallying cry for an alternative England. You can see why it lit a spark in the likes of the young Grant Morrison.

The fact that there were only three channels meant that the one-off TV plays of the 70s could draw a sizable audience no matter how abstract or intractable they were. Beamed once or twice into millions of homes and then never seen again they would often linger as a series of singular images and ideas long after the title and tale had been forgotten. Penda’s Fen is a perfect example of this, a film with followers who might not know its name but remember gargoyles in bedrooms and burning men on green hillsides. It’s wonderful that it’s finally getting a decent release 40-odd years after it first came into the world, its themes still resonant, a strange and impure child.

Mark Stafford

* Then again, this is the man who gave you Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, cinema’s only snooker-based horror musical. Which is an odd item on anybody’s CV.

Penda’s Fen screens at Close-Up Film Centre on 26 June 2016. For more information and to buy tickets visit the Close-Up website.

Baal

Bowie Baal
Baal

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 13 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Based on the play by: Bertolt Brecht

Translated by: John Willett

Cast: David Bowie, Robert Austin, Jonathan Kent

UK 1982

64 mins

David Bowie brings star swagger to Alan Clarke’s take on Bertolt Brecht’s dissolute poet.

Baal is a debauched poet and boozy douchebag who leaves a trail of ruined women and exploited friends behind him. He has an enthusiastic following amongst the drunken crowds in the cafes where he performs, but has nothing but contempt for bourgeois society and its measures of success. Opportunities for publication are squandered, patrons are insulted and wives and daughters are shagged, only to be abandoned when boredom or unborn children arise. His poems reveal a certain yearning tenderness for the natural world, his words and actions an utter callousness towards everything else. Finally, inevitably, he murders a man, becomes a fugitive and dies alone. But he never lied about what he was, which makes him a kind of hero, existentially.

I remember hearing, gawd knows where, that the British film industry, in its early years, had a massive inferiority complex, being seen, in the land of Shakespeare, as a vulgar novelty when set before the venerable art of theatre. The result of which was that a good chunk of UK output didn’t really trouble itself with the aesthetics of the new medium, with all that movement and montage, and the average brit-flick more resembled a night at the Lyceum with a camera plunked front and centre of the stalls, occasionally panning left and right to keep the performers in shot.* I bring this up because Alan Clarke’s treatment of Bertolt Brecht’s first play Baal most resembles that notional idea of moribund British film. Except that it all works rather well. Each scene takes place on a new set (a drawing room, a bar, a junk-strewn flat), with the actors artfully arranged therein. It’s lit, at times, like a Caravaggio painting, except when it’s not, and the sets disappear entirely. There are no edits, each scene is played through in its entirety. And the only close-ups occur in short chapter-heading sequences between scenes where we are informed what is about to occur by text on screen whilst Baal engages us directly with a little performance of his dyspeptic poetry. The result compels. What would seem natural techniques on stage acquire a distinctive strangeness on screen, appropriately enough, ‘Brechtian alienation’ and all that.

A large part of the reason it plays well in 2016 is that Baal is portrayed by David Bowie, whose death has given his screen appearances a poignant vibrancy. During his lifetime there was often a debate as to whether he was a ‘good’ actor or not. What seems obvious now is that he could be terrific used by the right director in the right way, especially if the role played up to his recurring artistic themes of alienation and reinvention. His Baal here hits all the right notes of arrogance and disdain, augmented with a healthy dose of rock god swagger. His first speech to camera, a monologue about the Ichthyosaurus refusing to board the ark and preferring to die, sets out his stall with admirable concision. All life here is miserable and wretched, he says, as he regards us with an insolent, mocking, black-toothed grin, and dares us to claim that we care.

Mark Stafford

* In this version of events it took the likes of Hitchcock and the Kordas and Powell and Pressburger to shake out the cobwebs and drag us all kicking and screaming towards the Art Of Cinema. Discuss.

Elephant

ELEPHANT
Elephant

Format: Blu-ray

Part of Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969 – 1989) limited edition 13 disc box-set

Release date: 13 June 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Alan Clarke

Writer: Bernard MacLaverty

Cast: Gary Walker, Bill Hamilton, Michael Foyle

UK 1989

39 mins

Alan Clarke’s bold, stripped-down take on sectarian killings in Northern Ireland remains as provocative as when it was first screened on the BBC.

Through spaces industrial and domestic men move, in pairs or alone, tracked relentlessly by fluid Steadicam, negotiating doorways and traversing empty halls, down roads and paths and corridors, encountering nobody, until somebody is located, a gun is produced, and they are killed. Alan Clarke’s legendary (at least in my school) Elephant traces murder after murder after murder, with no music or context or explanation, 18 in all, over 39 minutes, with only a title card to clue us in to the fact that it’s based on actual sectarian killings in Northern Ireland. The title is a reference to the phrase ‘the elephant in our living room,’ which Belfast-born writer Bernard MacLaverty used to describe the conflict.

Elephant may well be the most audacious piece of film ever screened by the BBC. It’s blunt and difficult and simple and achieves whatever effects it does through repetition. We get a Steadicam killing, then a lingering still shot of the corpse for a few seconds, then on to the next. There are variations and surprises, but the emphasis is decidedly upon the repetition: the steady pace, the footfalls, the gunshots. Shock gives way to confusion gives way to a kind of numb dread, the brief running time and relentless forward motion staving off a slide into traumatised boredom. Tossed into the last years of the Thatcher reign like a bilious little hand grenade it evaded the usual controversy and clumsy censorship through its Spartan nature; robbed of telling information, you couldn’t accuse it of taking sides, or collusion. You can only say for sure that it was anti-killing, laying bare the grubby, brutal acts that are usually cloaked in partisan bullshit and political rhetoric.

I missed it on TV at the time, goddamnit, but can remember the reaction of friends at the time being one of disbelief that such a thing had been made and screened on TV. Going by their descriptions it actually sounded like an inevitable endpoint for all those stalk and slash horror movies we were dragging home from the shelves of Star Video on a Thursday night: the film that was all murder and nothing else: the political nuances lost on hormonal teenagers with a pitiful grasp of the Troubles. I wonder if a teen catching it today would see it as an uncool warm-up exercise for the first–person-shooter aesthetics of Hardcore Henry and the like; doubtless most modern audiences will only possibly be aware of it as a key inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s austere high school massacre movie of the same name, or be familiar enough with the idea of the film that they don’t feel obliged to actually watch the thing. They should, though, because it’s a strange and unsettling film, provoking reaction after reaction. What would it be like longer, or shorter? What‘s happened to these huge spaces, are they all developed now? Gentrified or demolished? You wonder if the peace process will hold. You wonder about murder as the background noise of your weekly shop. You wonder at the blood that flows under every civilised street.

Mark Stafford