ginally broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series, Pendas Fen was directed by social realist director Alan Clarke and written by David Rudkin.
"I am nothing pure, my race is mixed, my sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure. I am mud and flame."
"Penda’s Fen is perhaps the most significant film to be made during the rural turn that, as William Fowler has noted, British cinema took in the early 1970s. A decline in manufacturing had led to the shrinkage of many urban centres, and that, combined with a post-sixties vogue for communes, free festivals and pre-industrial ways of being, inspired artists such as Derek Jarman (Journey to Avebury, 1971), William Raban (Colours of This Time, 1972), and Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo (Winstanley, 1975) to explore the submerged histories, altered states and radical possibilities of the British landscape.
Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of becalmed continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground and in constant turmoil. It offers wormholes and geysers, faultlines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy. It’s a philosophy of pastoral – and of what makes a nation – that sloughs off Little Englandism and Middle Earthism in favour of something less self-satisfied and more attuned to its lurking darknesses."
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