We're delighted to present the BFI's release on DVD and Blu-ray of this unique British film, available exclusively from MovieMail.
The Kevin Brownlow / Andrew Mollo duo are among the most challenging and idiosyncratic of independent filmmakers. They have made only two films, It Happened Here (1966) and this one. Although both made friends and enemies in equal measure, they are at last enjoying wider recognition as outstanding, and important films.
Brownlow, a first rank film historian and restorer and director of many documentaries about the medium, and Mollo, historical consultant on such iconic masterpieces as Dr Zhivago and Downfall, used mainly amateur actors to create both films on shoestring budgets, working at weekends and driven by a fanaticism for historical accuracy and a fascination with the subject matter, which is the playing-out of big social visions (fascism, socialism) in the lives of ordinary people.
Winstanley chronicles the attempt during the mid-17th century of a small band of ‘Diggers’, inspired by Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard, to set up a self-sufficient socialist commune on common land at St. George’s Hill in Surrey. It also chronicles its subsequent destruction at the hands of an alarmed establishment who instinctively and rightfully saw in it the seed of a new world order in which their status and privilege would disappear.
Filmed in black-and-white, it is intensely beautiful visually, quite comparable in places to the work of Eisenstein, Dreyer, or Brownlow’s hero of the historical epic Abel Gance. Indeed the meticulous accuracy of the sets and costumes alone would justify its inclusion in any film lover’s collection. But over and above this it tells the heart-rending story of the visionary Winstanley’s beautiful dream overturned by the might of the entrenched aristocracy and the common people’s fear of change. The acting, particularly that of amateur Miles Halliwell in the title role, is outstanding.
Why then, has Winstanley gone relatively unsung? Perhaps it’s because of the inherent difficulty of the underlying concepts: you need to be able to open your mind to what Winstanley is actually saying, both in his writings and their embodiment in the film. You need to be able to imagine ‘The World Turned Upside Down’, and I’m not sure how many of us have the willingness or the ability to do that.
David Gardiner on 1st April 2009
Film Description
Brownlow & Mollo's second film, after It Happened Here, sees them recreating the story of the 17th Century social reformer and writer Gerrard Winstanley, who, along with a small band of followers known as the Diggers, tried to establish a self-sufficient farming community on the common land of St. George's Hill near Cobham in Surrey.
With meticulous attention to detail (armour was borrowed from the Tower of London for example) and nods in the direction of filmmakers such as Gance and Dreyer in its style, this is a unique British film, and it is a great loss to British cinema that Brownlow and Mollo never made another.
We're sure that many of you will be interested in this excellent making-of (or, how-not-to-do-it!) book by the director.
In the words of Kevin Brownlow:
"My first book was How It Happened Here, about the making of my first film. As a film historian, I thought I should keep a careful record of the making of Winstanley as well. It was written immediately after the events had occurred, when my memory was vivid. The manuscript sat on the shelf for thirty-four years, but reading it back recently I found some of the verbatim dialogue, especially the excuses from the laboratories for ruining our precious film, very amusing - which I certainly didn’t at the time.
David Gardiner of UKA Press suggested putting it into print at last, since they had already reprinted How It Happened Here. UKA Press have been very generous with photographs, and combined with the DVD, just released by MovieMail, the book makes a fascinating example of how-not-to-do-it for any budding film-maker."
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley beautifully sets before us the story of ex-soldier Gerrard Winstanley's post-Civil war dream to live out a Utopian vision ... more >
Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's Winstanley beautifully sets before us the story of ex-soldier Gerrard Winstanley's post-Civil war dream to live out a Utopian vision of brotherhood and equality. In a film shot through with democracy, a film that's broad, bold and authentic, Miles Halliwell's Winstanley shoots from the earth, an everyman and an evangelising spirit. It is a wonderfull performance. A wonderful, unforgettable film. The Winstanley revival starts here. < less
By d.gardiner@virgin.net on 7th May 1999
You poor take courage, you rich take care,
This Earth was made a Common Treasury for everyone to share,
All things in common, all people one.
Leon Rosselso... more >
You poor take courage, you rich take care,
This Earth was made a Common Treasury for everyone to share,
All things in common, all people one.
Leon Rosselson "The Diggers' Song"
"But everyone shall put their hands to till the earth and bring up cattle, and the blessing of the earth shall be common to all; when a man hath need of any corn or cattle, take from the next store-house he meets with. There shall be no buying and selling, no fairs or markets, but the whole earth shall be the common Treasury for every man"
Gerrard Winstanley
We don't really live in an age of idealism any more. There is a cycle to the comings and goings of such things. But many of us are old enough to remember the posters of Che Guevera that bedecked the wall of every student bedsit through the late 60s and early 70s, and the passionate all-night student arguments, with stained and chipped mugs filled with black coffee on the floor beside us and Bob Dylan wailing softly in the background, when we worked-out all those definitive blueprints for human society: characterised typically in terms of what society would not contain, such as governments, armies, money, possessive sexual relationships, private property, national boundaries, social classes, privilege, end of term exams, nagging parents........ One thing we knew for certain: when our turn came, we would not be the same. We would not participate in and recreate the world into which we had been born. Sometimes I still wonder where it all went wrong.
We were not the first generation to feel these things and to dream these dreams. Very far from it. Since the days of Plato and Socrates and long before people have looked at the way their societies worked and dreamed of fundamental changes. And of course it didn’t always stop at theory. Most of the present-day nations of the West and many of those of the Third World and the East have emerged from social revolutions and civil wars: America, Russia, China, France, Viet Nam, South Africa and Ireland to name but a few. It might surprise a lot of educated British people to be told that our nation too belongs on this list, but such is the case. In the middle of the 17th Century we executed our king and fought a bloody civil war to determine what kind of a society our children were going to live in. Not only soldiers and gather-up armies battled against one another, ideas did too. It was an age of great and largely forgotten visionaries: men and women who believed that they could see a way forward to a new and better form of social organisation, some principle whereby we could share the wealth of the earth more equitably and live our lives in peace without hurting one another, some way to smash the "mind-forged manacles" that held all the different strata of society equally in bondage.
One of the foremost of these visionaries was Gerrard Winstanley. He argued that the ordinary people of Britain had been enslaved ever since the Norman invasion, by the control of the land, the most fundamental of all "means of production", by the Lords of Manors, and he suggested in the most peaceful possible terms, how the earth, our common Treasury, might be shared out again.
In April 1649 a band of about 40 Diggers, inspired by Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard began to dig uncultivated common land on Saint George's Hill in Cobham, Surrey, building simple houses in which to live, sharing all their goods and produce in common. As word spread, and the privileged woke up to the implications of this tiny token action, the authorities turned hostile. The commune was dispersed by government troops, Everard and Winstanley arrested, tried, and heavily fined. Each new attempt to get the community started was crushed, by violence, harassment and intimidation. Nevertheless, despite all government opposition to the experiment, the Cobham colony lasted until 1651. The Diggers inspired other colonies in other parts of England also, but ultimately none of them could stand up to the forces mobilized against them. Winstanley's dream was a wonderful, humanitarian vision of a gentler, more just and happy world; a dream that came again to other people in succeeding centuries, but for whose realization we are still waiting.
The film "Winstanley" attempts to paint a portrait of this extraordinary man, his personality and motivations and the times in which he lived. There are no compromises. It was created by the same team who, twelve years earlier, produced "It Happened Here", a chilling fantasy of a wartime England under German occupation. Andrew Mollo, the Artistic Director and Co-Director on both projects, is simply incapable of compromise where historical accuracy is concerned. From the agricultural tools that the people use, to the breeds of pigs and chickens that they tend, to the willow from which the walls of the poor peoples' houses are woven, to the stitching in their tunics - wherever you look, everything is simply right. This is the closest to 17th Century England that you are going to get, short of time-travel. The film deserves to be seen for that alone.
But in addition to the sheer treat of the perfection of the costumes and sets, the film also contains some of the most harrowing emotional content of any historical drama of which I am aware. There are no crude "good guys" or "bad guys" in "Winstanley", nobody is demonized or trivialized or one-dimensional. It is a story almost entirely of well-intentioned people who are either inspired by or profoundly threatened by the idea of a whole new human order, and who react accordingly. This could not be further removed from a simple-minded political tract. It is a serious attempt to understand the social and individual psychology of idealism. More simply, it is an examination of the way people hurt one another without wanting to in the pursuit of what they genuinely believe to be the best. Idealists are never easy to cope with, never comfortable people to know.
Winstanley himself is played by a teacher and amateur actor, Miles Halliwell, who played the Nazi lecturer in "It Happened Here". He is a very fine choice for the role, having enormous screen presence, a compelling single-mindedness and total integrity about his personality, and exactly the right quality of being "a man apart". He is just as convincing as Winstanley as he was when he played the smooth apologist for Fascism in the earlier film: an arresting thought in itself! The only professional actor in the cast is Jerome Willis, who gives a powerful but never aloof performance as General Fairfax, radiating the confidence of noble birth in every scene in which he appears. He epitomizes the system of social class and privilege in the face of which the Diggers seem puny adversaries indeed.
The film, like the novel on which it is based, is shot through with a sense of inevitable tragedy. From its opening scene on a windswept hillside where Parson Platt (David Bramley) and Winstanley try vainly to communicate with one another, their voices almost drowned-out by the roaring gale, to the heart-rending close-up of Winstanley's face in his final despair, seen through the pouring rain in the film's closing moments, we know that this bright socialist vision is not to be. At least not yet. And this is the thought with which the film leaves us, stated like all of the narration, in Winstanley's own words. Social visions do not in fact die with their creators, they are merely set down like burdens carried a certain distance along the roadway, to be taken up by other fresh young travelers and carried a little further on another day.
There are not many books, or films, to which one can honestly attach a description like "inspirational". This is one of them. < less
Kevin Brownlows 1975 Winstanley is a true gem of a production, and the only one to focus on arguably the most important and influential radical thinker of the time (pl... more >
Kevin Brownlows 1975 Winstanley is a true gem of a production, and the only one to focus on arguably the most important and influential radical thinker of the time (played with gentle conviction by relative unknown Miles Halliwell), who led his followers the Diggers in sustaining themselves on an untended scrap of arable land by way of re-enacting early Christian proto-communist communities. Winstanley was indeed the True Leveller, the Digger who, unlike Lilburne, did believe in the levelling of property, and in this sense was a proto-Marxist, an early socialist who was completely ahead of his age (for the most in-depth study of his ideas I am aware of see David W. Petegorskys Left-Wing Democracy in the Age of Civil War Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement). Brownlows documentary-style film is as gritty as it is beguiling, in its stark black-and-white photography and naturalistic acting, and has a purity to its approach which compliments the lived ideals of its protagonists beautifully; a little masterpiece, and by far, in my opinion, the most compelling depiction of the sky-gazing radicalism of the time. < less
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Winstanley
