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’. 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. In the pastoral landscape of Three Choirs England, a clergyman's son, in his last days of school, has his idealistic value-system and the precious tokens of his self-image all broken away - his parentage, his nationality, his sexuality, his conventional patriotism and faith... Join the BFI mailing list for regular programme updates. Not yet registered? Create a new account at www.bfi.org.uk/signup Kids 1 9 7 9 (UK) 13 x 60 minute episodes Debuting on 27 April 1979, LWT's Kids provided 13 hour-long episodes…

Raby, David (1998). David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: an expository study of his drama 1959-96. Oxford, Routledge. ISBN 90-5702-126-9.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… Penda'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 ] 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. It was conceived as a film and written visually. Some people think visual questions are none of the writer’s business—that he should provide the action and leave it to the director to picture it all out. For me, writing for the screen is a business of deciding not only what is to be shown but how it is to be seen…

Through a series of real and imagined encounters with angels, demons, and England’s pagan past, Stephen begins to question his religion, politics and sexuality. Penda’s Fen was produced by David Rose who was head of English Regional Drama at the time and responsible for nurturing some incredible British writers and directors such as Alan Bleasdale, David Hare and Mike Leigh. It was Rose’s idea to bring David Rudkin and Alan Clarke together for Penda’s Fen. In his notes to the screenplay Rudkin wrote: In 2011, "Penda's Fen" was chosen by Time Out London magazine as one of the 100 best British films. It described the play as a "multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines. Fusing Elgar's ‘Dream of Gerontius’ with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness, ‘Penda's Fen’ is a unique and important statement." [7]It is through the benign paternal influence of Reverend Franklin, as well as the more strident one of Arne, that Stephen’s Blakean visions work against his previously held convictions — by the end of the film, he is no longer in danger of growing up into Nigel Farage. Before he is redeemed by the “true” Jesus and the pagan King Penda, he must escape the attentions of the “Mother and Father of England”, the embodiment of the censorious establishment reaction to the social revolution of the 1960s. 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… This is a post I’d been intent on writing for the past four years but kept putting off: why go to great lengths to describe another television drama which people can’t see? And how do you easily appraise something which haunted you for twenty years and which remains a significant obsession? My hand has been forced at last by a forthcoming event (detailed below) so this at least has some fleeting relevance, but before getting to that let’s have some facts. 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…

When I think of The Ghost Stories for Christmas series, I think of Lawrence Gordon Clark more than MR James. But of all the James adaptations, this is my favourite – a highly atmospheric piece of visual storytelling with a chilling climax. I find the simplicity of the filmmaking invigorating. No doubt born of limitation, this is cinema by way of TV. Sorrell and Son 1 9 8 4 (UK) 6 x 50 minute episodes This six-part miniseries from Yorkshire Television begins during Britain's economic slump… Another, more famous figure’s hidden historical reality is also unearthed in the film—Elgar. But it’s more than Elgar’s music that haunts Penda’s Fen: there’s something of his spirit, too… He dreams of naked classmates and of a demon (Geoffry Pennells) sitting on his bed. He sees an angel in a stream (Martin Reynolds) and meets quintessential (deceased) English composer Edward Elgar (Graham Leaman) who tells him the secret of his Enigma Variations.Some still think of Elgar as the archetypal country gentleman whose music enshrines the noblest sentiments of patriotism and faith. That way of looking at him is similar to Stephen’s outlook on the world at the beginning of the film Elgar was, in fact, a tradesman’s son who married above himself and was socially over-sensitive all his life… 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.