Penda's Fen (DVD)

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David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: An Expository Study of His Drama 1959-96 by David Ian Rabey, Oxford, Routledge, 1998 ISBN 90-5702-126-9 Yes, Rudkin is naturally going to be identified with Arne but that doesn’t necessarily prevent him from using his own interests or experience for one or more characters in the same piece. Many authors will tell you that there’s a piece of themselves in all their characters, good or bad. One place to look for further information might by an academic study by David Ian Rabey, David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: an expository study of his drama 1959–96. Another book I don’t own… Rudkin, who saw himself as a political writer placed himself into the film as the reactionary playwright, Arne (Ian Hog) who lives with his wife (Jennie Heslewood, unfortunately only named ‘Mrs Arne’). At a debate in the local village hall, Arne is answering a question about the strikes which ground Britain to a halt during much of the 70s concluding in the ‘winter of discontent’. Arne is arguing against the assertion that the strikers are holding the country to ransom which was a common refrain at the time. Arne instead tries to divert attention to the government which he sees as secretive and malevolent.

Penda’s Fen is a very simple story; it tells of a boy, Stephen, who in the last summer of his boyhood has a series of encounters in the landscape near his home which alter his view of the world… What makes Penda’s Fen particularly prescient is that it locates these hybrid transformations in the English countryside. The 1970s saw a number of artists offering new versions of pastoral – Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) was a creepy documentary about a family living without electricity in a wood; Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973) introduced readers to what would later be known as edgelands; Jeremy Sandford’s Tomorrow’s People (1974) portrayed the Dionysian longings of free-festival revellers. Rudkin shows rural England to be a place of struggles and heresies, of antagonisms and anguish. The film even turns to etymology, arguing that “pagan”, which originally meant “belonging to the village”, referred to the politics of local governance as much as it did to theological doctrine. All these markers of a certain conservatism are brought into question by Stephen’s growing doubts about his sexuality. Penda’s Fen is not a film about homosexuality; it doesn’t depict it as a subculture, a lifestyle, a social category, far less a cause. But it is, long before the term was first used to describe the work of directors such as Todd Haynes and Isaac Julien, a queer film. Stephen’s vagrant, barely understood desires are fundamentally destabilising. They lead him to see through the values he used to espouse. The military masculinity of his school, mainstream Christian doctrine, the eternal benevolence of English pastoralism: all of these come to seem like fronts and conspiracies. Homosexuality provokes climate change, inspires heterodoxy, is a gateway drug to a new enlightenment.

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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 ] Forthcoming from Strange Attractor Books, the critical anthology Child be Strange will not only include new scholarship ensuing from the conference — written by the participating academics, critics, and medievalists — but a wealth of other material. Child be Strange will be a sourcebook for Penda’s Fen, and collect original archival texts and images, creative responses, walking guides, chronologies, glossaries relating to the myths and landscapes of Penda’s Fen, recommended reading, watching, and summaries of peripheral works. 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.” 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… Raby, David (1998). David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience: an expository study of his drama 1959-96. Oxford, Routledge. ISBN 90-5702-126-9.

Spencer Banks is the principal actor in Penda’s Fen, playing Stephen Franklin, an 18-year-old in his final days at school. The BBC’s Radio Times magazine described the film briefly: 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.

There were many socio-political changes in the 70s, including a clash between liberals and conservatives as censorship legislation was loosened. TV, film and books were changing what was considered acceptable viewing. Many people weren’t happy with the changes and took it upon themselves to monitor the ‘arts’. Mary Whitehouse was campaigning against the permissiveness of society and founded a group called the Clean up TV Campaign in 1964, and their first meeting was in Birmingham’s Town Hall. West Country Tales 1 9 8 2 - 1 9 8 3 (UK) 14 x 30 minute episodes This supernatural anthology drama series was…

I am nothing pure. My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man. Light with darkness. Mixed. Mixed. I nothing special. Nothing pure. I am mud and flame.” 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. 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. 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.’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... There is so much to say about Penda’s Fen. It is, as the poet and curator Gareth Evans has written, ‘an outrider of its origins and the era of its making, a singular, far-seeing and multi-chambered work of art that has unravelled and reconstituted very many who have encountered it.’ It is ceaseless and profound, dangerous and delirious. It is, in words that are spoken to Stephen at a crucial scene in the film, ‘strange, dark, true, impure, and dissonant.’