Akenfield

"Akenfield" is a film made by Sir Peter Hall in 1974, based loosely upon the book "Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village" by the historian Ronald Blythe (1969). It can claim a degree of cult status as a work of rural realism, unusual in relation to East Anglia (which is often misrepresented in the media by 'Mummerset' accents and other falsifications). Ronald Blythe himself plays the vicar and all other parts are played by real-life villagers.

"Akenfield" is a made-up placename based partly upon Akenham (a small village just north of Ipswich, the county town of Suffolk) and probably partly on Charsfield, a village just outside the small town of Wickham Market, Suffolk, about ten miles north-east of Akenham. The film of Akenfield was made on location in the villages just west of Wickham Market, notably Hoo, Debach, Charsfield, Monewden, Dallinghoo, Letheringham and Pettistree. The actors in the film were non-professional, drawn from the local population, and therefore speak with authentic accents and play their parts in a manner unaffected by the habit of stage or screen performance. After making the film, most returned to usual rural occupations.

Ronald Blythe's book of Akenfield is a gritty work of hard scholarship, rooted in detailed statistical data, presenting a very realistic grounded understanding of the economic and social life of a village. Life in Ronald Blythe's written Akenfield is less anecdotal than, for instance, John Moore's "Brensham" or "Elmbury". The film, which was made in collusion with the author, and in which he plays a cameo role (the vicar), is a remarkable translation of this scholarly view into a portrait of a rural community told through the eyes of one of its members. In seeing through his eyes, we also see through the eyes of his ancestors.

Plot

The central character (Tom - Garrow Shand) is a young man living alone in a cottage with his widowed mother (Peggy Cole) in the present (1974). The setting is within the few days surrounding the funeral of Tom's grandfather, who originated from the village in late Victorian or Edwardian times, experienced much poverty and hard work, went to the First World War (where he lost most of his comrades), returned, made a failed attempt to escape the village by walking to Newmarket for a job, took a wife in the village and lived in a tied cottage on the farmer's estate for the rest of his life. His son, Tom's father, was killed in the Second World War and Tom has grown up hearing all sorts of stories from his grandfather. Everyone around him says what a good old boy his grandfather was, and remembers the old days, but all Tom can hear is the words of his grandfather ringing in his ears, and now in 1974 he is making his own plans to get away, with or without his girlfriend. The cycle goes round and round, and all the time the customs and the landscape are so colourful and beautiful, to the setting of Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis", but with the skull-like menace of poverty, entrapment and war grinning through the veil of rural beauty. Will Tom be defeated by the land and the hard work, just as his grandfather was? Shand plays all three generations, grandfather, father and son.

Literary environment

*For East Anglian folklore, perhaps in such scenes as 'Hollering largesse', there is an allusion to the work of John Glyde Jnr in "The New Suffolk Garland".
*Past and present, and the experiences of successive generations, merge in the way suggested by T. S. Eliot in "East Coker", in an eternal recurrence through cameos and flashbacks.
*A courtship scene in which the future bride steals the clothes of a young man while he is swimming in the river, and is then chased by him naked across the fields, is borrowed from H.E. Bates' Uncle Silas story "The Revelation" ("My Uncle Silas", 1939).
*A scene in which the grandfather as a young man is reaping, and weeps when he accidentally crushes a bird's egg, is derived from a Thomas Bewick miniature in his "History of British Birds". This is a homage to the oral historian George Ewart Evans of Blaxhall, a village near to Charsfield, who used the Bewick image on the title page of his first Blaxhall study "Ask the Fellows Who Cut The Hay" (Faber and Faber, London 1956).Peter Hall and Ronald Blythe therefore drew richly on the literary imagery of rural life in order to embed the hard underlying reality.

References

External links

* [http://www.akenfield.com Akenfield film site]
* [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0400146 Akenfield on INDB]