Akenfield (DVD + Blu-ray)

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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. Akenfield captures a moment in the creative British psyche where there is a fear of rural and agricultural ‘old ways’ being lost under motorways and tarmac. Pinter himself would sit in on a cut of Akenfield to help with advice on the film’s various dubbing.

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

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. 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.

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).

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. In spite of having five feature films soon under his belt, almost the whole time he had been working on a potential film adaptation of the novel Akenfield; a desire first born from reading the book when it was published in 1969.Though initially focusing on one day in the life of Tom – a young man with plans to escape the village life to Australia – the film also falls gently back into the lives of the previous generations: the loves and losses of Tom’s father and grandfather. He manages to capture some of the most haunting and beautiful evocations of Suffolk ever committed to film, with a dreamlike soft-focus permeating throughout. 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. 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.

Being great admirers of each other’s work, Blythe and Hall collaborated closely on adapting Akenfield into a film. Akenfield’s drama builds to the difficulty caused between Tom’s desire to leave the village and Jean’s reluctance to follow suit. 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. 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.Shand gives a remarkable performance of three generations of men, owing in some part to Hall’s work with him and the other actors on improvisation techniques brought over from the theatre. It’s a cinematic device that Andrei Tarkovsky would use the following year in Mirror (1975), another impressionistic, rural time-collage. 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. 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).