Akenfield (DVD + Blu-ray)

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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.

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

His debut feature was the comedy Work Is a 4-letter Word (1968), though he worked on his first real cinematic success, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the same year. 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. 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.It’s a cinematic device that Andrei Tarkovsky would use the following year in Mirror (1975), another impressionistic, rural time-collage. Though almost cascading at times in its slips in time, Hall also brings a seasonal cyclic quality to his drama, showing the landscape at differing heights of the year. 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.

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. He soon became good friends with the creative circles there thanks to curating several Aldeburgh festivals, which included socialising with Benjamin Britten, E. 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. Cameraman Ivan Strasburg had began his career a few years before Akenfield, chiefly with documentary work.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. 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. The lead character of Tom Rouse was played by Garrow Shand, who, in Hall’s own words, was actually an “agricultural contractor”. The main professional actors used were comedian Stanley Baxter, who plays the village blacksmith, and Peter Tuddenham, who voices the film as old Tom. 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).

Pinter himself would sit in on a cut of Akenfield to help with advice on the film’s various dubbing.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. Much of the film’s intergenerational narratives focus on the grounds of the church: for Tom’s grandfather’s funeral and for various baptisms, weddings and sermons. The film was his first feature narrative production and allowed a balance between documentary and fictional camera techniques, especially when it came to documenting the landscape. 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. 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.

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? Hall is clearly taking great delight in exploring the copse-ways of East Anglia whose openness is the total opposite to Pinter’s closed heterotopia.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). 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. Akenfield’s drama builds to the difficulty caused between Tom’s desire to leave the village and Jean’s reluctance to follow suit.