Home movie — The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe.
I THINK THAT MY CHIEF SURPRISE is that it's all happening, as they say. The preliminaries have been so protracted and the idea so threatened by various aspects of the malaise affecting the film industry generally, that Peter Hall and my-self, glancing at each other across the farmyard, often find it amazing that we are actually shooting Akenfield. Initially I had great reservations about filming the book at all. In the first place, the tendency of film companies or television to want to turn every successful book into a picture is questionable. Writers are often mangled in the process. Anthony Burgess continues to protest about what occurred to his novel A Clockwork Orange when the film-makers got hold of it. My book presented unique difficulties inasmuch as it involved many friends and neighbours as well as deeply personal experiences drawn from a whole lifetime in the Suffolk countryside. Also, there was the problem of continuity; how did one film three generations in terms of work, belief, education and climate. For this is what Akenfield is really concerned with.
I met Peter Hall in London a few weeks after the book had been published and he told me of his Suffolk home; how my work had touched a deeply personal element in his life, and how, like all creative people, he felt a great need to express important things concerning himself and his family in artistic terms. He thought that a film based on Akenfield might achieve this. There would be no actors and as little as necessary of the general elaborations which accompany the making of a big film. That autumn I wrote a script based on the ideas in the book, on what people said and did. Roughly speaking, the pattern of this script involves a day in the past and a day in the present, a day of life and a day of death, and a day of summer and a day of winter. Within this pattern a century of Suffolk life works itself to a present-day conclusion.
It is a feature film and not a documentary, although every-body in it would be ploughing, shoeing, praying, marrying, harvesting, teaching, rook-scaring, factory-farming, digging up the past or concealing the present with all the actuality which the camera could catch. Peter Hall and I talked of Robert Bresson and his remarkable films of French country life. I even mentioned Man of Aran. A Suffolk friend of mine, Hugh Barrett, had accompanied Flaherty when he was making this classic. The script written, the agreements settled as to how we would resolve things generally, it took the super-human tact and imagination of a young producer named Rex Pyke to get our film financially and practically into motion. Then suddenly, after two years of negotiation—we started.
For myself it has meant starting off in hundreds of directions, returning, on the whole triumphantly, with the necessary spoils. Permissions to use old schools, fields, churches and chapels. Advice or artefacts from everybody within a thirty-mile radius and, most important of all, people. We auditioned scores of East Anglians for the little group of main roles and then literally went out into the highways and byways to collect country children, men and women for the large scenes. Many of the results deriving from this spontaneous casting have been a revelation to us all. I 'shall never forget seeing the first rushes of the 1900 village school scene and the forty or so local children miraculously slipping back in time (under the influence of hob-nailed boots, slate-rags, pinafores and thunderous iron desks) until they had become, by some mysterious chemistry better known to themselves than our costume department, the distant children in the sepia photographs which I had brought from our splendid Rural Industries Museum at Stowmarket.
The school building itself was fascinating. It lies just across the meadows from my house and was built in 1858, but has not been used for over thirty years. It was the little building which Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, used to visit when he felt like instructing the children. Several of the old people in my book were educated there and after we had re-furnished it with all the things discovered in the East Suffolk Education Department's store at Ipswich, swept the chimney—full of jackdaws' nests—lit the fire in the massive Victorian grate and chalked 'Tuesday 3rd January 1900' on the blackboard, I thought of those neighbours of mine who had actually sat in this tall room and heard about the Boer War.
It was foolhardy, we realised later, to have begun filming Akenfield with a particularly elaborate and subtle scene involving seventy people, if one included such kind assistants as the Vicar's wife and the headmistress of the nearby primary school, but when we saw the results on a vast screen in a little cinema in Wardour Street, we were delighted that we took so bold a plunge. I think it was John Constable who said that 'a big canvas will tell you what you cannot do' and this first weekend of shooting, appropriately enough in Debach school, was a real education for everybody working on Akenfield. It did indeed tell us what we could not do in the circumstances of this unusual film, and this was never to go beyond the reality of what existed before our very eyes. The reality was the fun, the sadness, the poetry and the truth. And thus all the drama that we required.
The fun certainly came over in a big way—and accompanied by big-band music—when we held a 1943 village dance. Mr Arbon, who had blacked-out the hall for Hitler's war, blacked it out all over again for us. People of all ages, the Young Farmers' Club, farm workers and their families, teachers, every kind of person, danced to Glen Miller and the Inkspots, while the bombers from the nearby aerodrome (now the site of a vast mushroom factory) boomed overhead. Searchlights, sandbags, uniforms of the Suffolk Regiment, free beer from the Ipswich brewers whose wartime ads were mixed up with posters which said, 'Be like Dad, Keep Mum', and some drastic haircuts created the kind of nostalgia you could cut with a knife.
But the real test of filming Akenfield has been re-creating the old horse economy of Suffolk for the early scenes, finding those small fields of heavy clay, with their dense hedges, discovering workable forges which have not progressed from leather bellows to acetylene welding and, above all, searching out young farm workers who are able to do the old traditional crafts. We soon found out that the best way to do anything of this nature was not by appeals in the local press or on local television, although each of these mediums have given us the most generous help, but by good old bush telegraph. Not the least disturbance to my normally extremely quiet existence is the unknown voice on the telephone, full of Suffolk diffidence, saying, 'I hear you're looking for a man who can use a reaper...' Or giving me invaluable advice on costume, weather, hymns, pigs, stone-picking, battery chickens or just life itself as we aim to show it.
Perhaps our best scene, and certainly the one which most excites us, is the great harvest scene of about 1911, with the magnificent Suffolk waggons, the biggest in England, in the field and with heroic punches to draw them. We intend to cut two fields according to the old manner and have even arranged for them to be delightfully, if inefficiently, starred with poppies and scabious. We are praying for traditional harvest sun and moonshine so that we can capture something of those toiling idylls reflected in the Suffolk Photographic Survey, a wonderful collection of old pictures showing every facet of rural life in the county since the 1870s. The survey is the basis of our authority in such matters and I find it deeply moving to see these glimpses of Suffolk long ago brought into the present, as it were--principally by local faces. 'Hands last', said the blacksmith in my book. So do faces, of course. The youngster climbing out of his car, a bit awkwardly, for the old clothes are massive compared with jersey and jeans, takes the plough-reins and plunges off to the horizon behind delicately stepping shires, and, certainly for all the intents and purposes of our film, is his grandfather.
We have to shoot across the seasons, of course, so the making of the film is abnormally protracted. It is an enormous film, maybe two hours long and full of time and music, as well as work. Also love and death. Peter Hall calls it his home movie, thinking of his special involvement and of the weekend shooting schedules. In between filming, we all rush back to our 'normal' tasks, Peter to the National Theatre, the camera crew to various studios, the producer to cutting Pinter's The Home-coming, the designer, the make-up girls, wardrobe mistresses, and so on to a variety of professional quarters and myself to writing a book called The Art of the English Diary which makes a change. And our cast hurries back to keep half a dozen surrounding villages running.
If we succeed, we shall have challenged a lot of myths connected with the orthodox film industry, particularly those dealing with money. Our company, which we have registered as 'Angle Films', is really a co-operative from which nobody takes his usual professional fee until the film itself makes a profit. If its soul, or whatever, finally emerges into the un-common light of an East Anglian day, it will be due to the marvellous help of the country people themselves, who have been swift to recognise the special nature of the enterprise, and due a bit also to Peter Hall and myself coming from many generations of 'Suffolk'.
Home movie: The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe. Reproduced here with the kind permission of both Ronald and The Countryman. First published in The Countryman, summer 1973.
