|
Kevin Brownlow is better known as a film historian than as a director of
feature films, but he brought an historian's passion for authenticity and detail
to the production of Winstanley. Together, he and co-director Andrew Mollo, a
costumier and historical consultant, recreated a small patch of 17th century
England on which to stage the tragic drama of Gerrard Winstanley and his
Diggers, a small band of Christian communists who farmed in common on St
George's Hill in Surrey.
Though expert, the production was amateur. Unable to acquire funding,
Brownlow and Mollo filmed at weekends over the course of a year, as and when
participants were available. Schoolteacher Miles Halliwell's performance as
Winstanley is otherworldly, balanced by the steady menace projected by the sole
professional actor Jerome Willis as General Fairfax. Winstanley makes the most
of informality and improvisation in scenes of the commune, while the words of
Winstanley himself, taken verbatim from his tracts, are narrated by
Halliwell.
Although Winstanley strips its literary source, David Caute's Comrade Jacob,
of some of its reflectiveness, the film is also subject to contemporary
influences. The English Left has always remembered the English Civil War, and
the noble but doomed struggle of the Diggers to establish a fair and equitable
society had a particular appeal after the political and social upheavals of the
late 1960s. Though Sid Rawle, who plays the leader of the radical religious dissenters
the Ranters, was in real life leader of a hippy commune known as the 'New
Diggers', the Ranters' violent ideological contempt for the Diggers' practical
communism (while accepting their hospitality) could also be seen as analogous to
the relationship of hippies to the political movements of the 1960s and 70s.
Completed with support from the BFI Production Board, Winstanley might have
been an amateur production, but is certainly not a naive one. From the opening
battle montage and the use of Prokofiev's score for Alexander Nevsky (USSR,
1938), it is a film steeped in cinema history as much as social history.
Winstanley was warmly received in many quarters, but Brownlow and Mollo never
directed another feature together. It wasn't for lack of trying: an uncertain
and cash-strapped British film industry never gave them a chance. Despite its
radical subject-matter, Winstanley is not the product of an experimental or
avant-garde British cinema, but an extraordinary example of a mainstream British
cinema that never came into being.
Danny Birchall *This film available on BFI DVD and Blu-ray.
|
1. The Civil War (5:55)
Original Poster 
