David Rudkin – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Penda reborn

Penda’s Fen is one of the most important British television dramas of the 1970s, and would increasingly be recognised as such if the licensing problems which have dogged an official DVD release could be resolved.

That was how I ended the section about Penda’s Fen in the David Rudkin essay I wrote last year for Andy Paciorek’s Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies. The book had only been out for a couple of months when the BFI announced that Penda’s Fen would at long last be given a DVD and Blu-ray release, together with a collection of other TV dramas directed by Alan Clarke. A few months later and Penda’s Fen is now on sale, so those of us served by the European DVD region (or those with region-free players) no longer have to point people to a low-grade YouTube recording of the film.

There’s no need for me to rhapsodise further about Rudkin’s work in general or Penda’s Fen in particular when I’ve already done so in the Folk Horror Revival piece, and in this lengthy post from 2010. The film itself looks the best I’ve ever seen it, slightly desaturated compared to the DVD I made of my own VHS recording (but then the BFI transfer is closer to the film elements) but with a fuller frame than in the TV screening. The one striking difference is in the title sequence which in the 1990 screening had a red cast throughout, something that’s missing from the BFI version. I don’t know why this is but the red cast always made the jump to the titles from a still shot of the Malvern hills more abrupt than it needed to be.

The extras on this release are minimal, with a short collection of interviewees apparently taken from a longer documentary about Alan Clarke’s work that will be in the Clarke collection out next month. The booklet features a new essay about the film by Sukhdev Sandhu, editor of the excellent Penda’s Fen tribute, The Edge Is Where The Centre Is. The Folk Horror Revival book is listed in the notes at the end of Sukhdev’s piece so I’m hoping this may prompt some of the people encountering Rudkin’s work for the first time to also look at his stage plays and that other sui generis television film, Artemis 81. David Rudkin, who will be 80 this year, was one of the many unique writers shunted out of the TV world by the very “entertainment barons” that Arne the playwright condemns in Penda’s Fen. I’m glad he’s lived to see this overdue reappraisal of his finest work for the medium.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies
• The Living Grave by David Rudkin
• The Edge Is Where The Centre Is
• Afore Night Come by David Rudkin
• White Lady by David Rudkin
• Penda’s Fen by David Rudkin
• David Rudkin on Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr

Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies

The particularly British sub-genre of folk horror receives a substantial examination in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, a 500-page collection of essays, interviews and artwork edited by Andy Paciorek.

Featuring essays and interviews by many great cinematic, musical, artistic and literary talents, Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies is the most comprehensive and engaging exploration to date of the sub-genre of Folk Horror and associated fields in cinema, television, music, art, culture and folklore.

Includes contributions by Kim Newman, Robin Hardy, Thomas Ligotti, Philip Pullman, Gary Lachman and many many more.

100% of all profits from sales of the book will be charitably donated to environmental, wildlife and community projects undertaken by The Wildlife Trusts.

Nuada rising, 1973 & 1976.

Among the contents there’s my 4000-word essay Sacred Demons: The Dramatic Art of David Rudkin, parts of which will be familiar to readers of my previous posts about Rudkin’s work. I’m not sure Rudkin would appreciate being subjected to such a narrow focus when his plays and TV films are much more personal and cerebral than most generic entertainments. But there is an intersection in a number of them with folk horror at its widest reach, and Rudkin did happen to adapt The Ash-Tree (1975) by MR James for the BBC’s series of ghost stories at Christmas. My piece covers this along with other TV films such as Penda’s Fen (1974) and Artemis 81 (1981), and many of the stage plays including Afore Night Come (1962), The Sons of Light (1965/76) and The Saxon Shore (1983). The stage plays I only know from their scripts which makes them difficult to appraise; maybe the renewed interest in Rudkin’s work will spur some revivals.

Sight and Sound, August 2010. Illustration by Becca Thorne.

Paciorek’s book isn’t solely concerned with British subjects, other essays include studies of Weird Americana, the music of The Cremator and Morgiana, and Czech folk horror. The Lulu page apparently didn’t allow the listing of a full table of contents so I’m posting the details below.

Continue reading “Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies”

Weekend links 285

Some of the art from my collage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray appears on the cover of The Graphic Canon: Volume 2, published this month in a German edition by Verlag Galiani. Out next month (although possibly available now) is the same book in a Brazilian edition from Boitempo Editorial. One of the disappointments this year was having to abandon plans to contribute to Russ Kick’s forthcoming graphic canon of crime fiction. I was overstretched during the summer, and what with projects slipping their deadlines and the trip to Providence there wasn’t any time left for other things.

• For those who missed the first edition, a second and final expanded edition of the Penda’s Fen study/celebration The Edge Is Where The Centre Is.

• Whipping up a storm: how Robert Mapplethorpe shocked America; Kevin Moore on the photographer’s Perfect Moment exhibition.

In the best scenario, metaphysical art distributes the work of understanding among cultural traditions and symbolic systems, and it is along these lines that Carrington’s work has been described as a productive combination of Mexican, Egyptian, Hebrew, Celtic, Greek, and Mesopotamian elements. Her paintings, plays, and stories mix the symbols of alchemy, astrology, Tarot, herbalism, magic, witchcraft, and a personal iconography.

Leif Schenstead-Harris on the life, art and fiction of Leonora Carrington

• Mixes of the week: Hieroglyphic Being collects favourite cosmic jazz of the 1970s; NTS Radio presents an hour of Annette Peacock.

• At Kill Your Darlings: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas enthuses about Dario Argento’s delirious masterwork, Suspiria.

• Pye Corner Audio releases a new album (only limited vinyl at the moment—boooo!) and remixes Stealing Sheep.

• The Trip Planners: Emily Witt meets the founders behind Erowid, the online drug encyclopedia.

• Woven Processional (1985), music on the Long String Instrument by Ellen Fullman.

• “The Paris attacks prove Charlie Hebdo’s critics wrong,” says Dorian Lynskey.

• Photographs by Danila Tkachenko of abandoned Soviet technology.

• Come Wander With Me / Deliverance by Anna von Hausswolff.

• The collages of Guy Maddin.

• CAN HALEN

• Let’s Take A Trip (1965) by Godfrey | Trip On An Orange Bicycle (1968) by The Orange Bicycle | Last Trip (1968) by We Who Are

Weekend links 283

Behind by Lisa Wassmann.

• “Without space art, nobody would know what Mars would look like.” Artist David A. Hardy talking to Nadja Sayej about a life spent painting the cosmos and—briefly—working for Hawkwind. Visions of Space, an exhibition of astronomical art, is at the Wells & Mendip Museum throughout November.

• Mixes of the week: Something Beautiful Happened by Cafe Kaput; Autumn Vybes: Mist, Mystery and Motion by Abigail Ward; and Secret Thirteen Mix 166 by Ron Morelli.

• More Ghost Box: Two new singles in the Other Voices series will be released next month. And the label is profiled in the latest issue of Electronic Sound magazine.

It breaks my heart when one writer tells another what she can or cannot do. I once knew a woman, a professor of literature, who said that Flaubert had no right to write Madame Bovary because he was a man. Such dangerous foolishness! This is just another form that dogmatic thinking takes. And it seems to me that the imagining mind—which is also a profoundly human mind—must be unfettered, boundless. To write from the perspective of another’s world demands a generous and a rigorous leap of the spirit; it demands empathy and mindfulness. Writing is so much about subverting dogmatisms of all kinds, above all the ones that insist you cannot go there! You must not say that! Writers need to go anywhere, to take anything on. And the only rule is to do it well.

Rikki Ducornet in a retrospective feature at Dennis Cooper’s blog

• “Horror at its best has always existed outside the mainstream,” says Brian Ennis in another celebratory piece about Thomas Ligotti.

• Alan Clarke & David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives another cinema screening next week at the Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton.

• “[David] Lynch’s films abound with gnomic pronouncements and incantations,” says Dennis Lim.

• Stars of the Lid play a tremendous hour-long set at St. Agnes Church in Brooklyn.

• Drawn in Stereo: a book of music-related art and illustration by Michael Gillette.

• At Dangerous Minds: Only the coolest people get to sit in the wicker peacock chair.

• Everything Is Erotic Therefore Everything Is Exhausting by Johanna Hedva.

• Moon Mist (1961) by The Out-Islanders | River Mist (1989) by Brian Eno | Black Mist (Long Version) (2013) by Pye Corner Audio

Weekend links 273

Byronic I by Boris Pelcer. Via Full Fathom Five.

• “Music determines everything in terms of our narrative. Music demands, music suggests. Whereas traditional Hollywood animation is all based on character development—you know, there’s Toy Story and it’s Tom Hanks’s voice pushing the thrust of the action. For us, décor is all part of it. It’s the objects, a sense of atmosphere, the stimmung (mood) of what’s happening in this landscape where the puppet is just, invariably, a tiny element.” The Brothers Quay talking to JW McCormack about their films, and about Quay, a short documentary by Christopher Nolan.

• Croissants with Cthulhu: Stephanie Gorton Murphy reports on the Cthulhu Prayer Breakfast at last week’s NecronomiCon. I didn’t attend this: abject silliness is the last thing I want at 8 o’clock in the morning.

• “…a light daze for the rest of the afternoon, detrimental to studying but advantageous for daydreaming.” Italo Calvino on his cinema-going youth.

Only in that brief moment of absolute uncertainty – when both options seem equally plausible and implausible, when neither thought can be accepted or rejected, when everything can be explained and nothing can be explained – only in that moment do we really have this horror of philosophy, this questioning of the principle of sufficient reason. It is for this reason that Todorov qualifies his definition by stating that the “fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.”

Eugene Thacker in an extract from Tentacles Longer Than Night (Horror of Philosophy, vol. 3), Zero Books, 2015

• It’s always good to hear some new rumblings by Emptyset. The Guardian has a stream of side 1 of the latest release, Signal.

• David Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen receives a film screening at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, on Saturday, 5th September.

• Sea Calls Me Home, another song from the forthcoming Julia Holter album.

• Digital visualizations of imagined future landscapes by Mike Winkelmann.

• Mix of the week: The Ivy-Strangled Path Vol. IX by David Colohan.

• Cherchez la femme: Women and Surrealism at Sotheby’s, NYC.

• At It’s Nice That: 50 years of A Humument by Tom Phillips.

• April 16, 1963: Housewife on LSD

• Tentaclii: a Lovecraft blog

• Signal (1981) by Phew | Signals (1983) by Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno | Signals (2010) by The Soundcarriers