Fleapit revisited:Requiem For A Village.

What a strange time the seventies were. If the past is, as so often said, a foreign country then how does the even more remote past appear to us when we look at it from, say, forty-five years ago. There's been quite a lot of emphasis on retrofuturism in recent years, antiquated spaceships and futuristic plans that never quite materialised, but there's been a lot less looking at how, in the past, we looked at the past.

If all that sounds confusing then that would be completely appropriate when trying to precis David Gladwell's 1975 Requiem For A Village. A film that can be charming, horrific, meditative, disconcerting, and, often, just plain weird. Most of the time, though, it's confusing. Confusing and strangely beautiful. Even a little hypnotic.

It's a BFI arthouse film being shown in a room above a pub as part of a cult film club so I wasn't expecting too much in the way of character development or narrative thrust. Which is just as well. I'd have left disappointed. The plot, if we're feeling generous, concerns an elderly gentleman who cycles around a small village in Suffolk and tends a country graveyard. Between amiable and perfunctory chats with the local rector he has what appear to be visions of dead bodies rising from the ground.

This is all interspersed with scenes of diggers clearing the land ready for the building of a motorway, a wedding that seems to be set at least a century earlier, a terrifyingly strict Victorian school room, a gang of bikers who mildly terrorise the villagers, close ups of the rear ends of horses, wanton amphibian cruelty, and scenes of sexual coercion that both border on and cross over into actual rape.

It's hard to know who the film was made for! There's very little dialogue and even when there is the accents are often impenetrably rustic. It'd work as a document of the ordinary life of an ordinary village over the years (through the mellow mind of an averagely eccentric cyclist) but the supernatural scenes undo that. But, equally, there's never a point in which the film falls squarely into the now much loved genre of folk-horror.

It's as if we're witnessing the life of a man (a man who looks a bit like Bill 'the Gaffer' Maynard) just as it flashes in front of his eyes at the point of his death. There are lucid memories, blurred ones, and possibly incorrect ones. It's a world of Morris Minors and Ford Cortinas, quiet suburban streets with milk bottles on door steps, grim and virtually abandoned concrete shopping centres, unflattering underwear, and really really heavy bedlinen.

I could almost feel the weight of the blankets as a dissatisfied, but resigned, wife pulled them over herself to keep out the cold, and I could almost feel the weight of the burden of her life as her presumably drunken, and fumbling, husband returned home to claim his conjugal rights in front of their now tarnished children.

The wedding scene sees people drinking out of large earthenware mugs, singing folk songs, and listening to a speech dotted with ribald and macabre jokes. There's a romantic scene as the happy couple slip out of the service to consummate their union but when we reach their small bedroom and she undresses, he turns away either ashamed or uncertain. That the action cuts straight to a fairly graphic scene of birth suggests he got over those first night nerves.

It's an awkward watch but it's as nothing compared to the creepy men who, during a break in harvesting, sneak off into the fields so that one of them can hold a woman down while another jumps on top of her to do as he will. Obviously, discomfiting at the best of times, it's hugely incongruous juxtaposed with scenes of pastors addressing their flocks and an old man snipping grass with a pair of shears.

For the most part I was engrossed, I treated the film almost as I'd take in the countryside and the people I meet during a walk and let it all wash over me, but there were times when my attention drifted a little and I started thinking about what I'd have for dinner (pizza, it turned out) which is never a great sign.

That's a disservice to Requiem For A Village though. It was never made to compete with Jaws, Rocky, A Star Is Born or other blockbusters of the era. It was made by, and pretty much for, the BFI and was meant for the art house crowd. It would have been a curio at the time and, on that score, age has only matured it. If I wasn't blown away by it then that's hardly a surprise. The film makers clearly had different intentions. I'm still not sure exactly what they were but it was certainly fun thinking about it, and discussing it, afterwards and that was, to be fair, exactly what I'd expected of the night.

I liked the film (conditionally) but I loved the evening. Balham Bowls Club is a rather fantastic pub (in a former, actual, bowls club). Run by the Antic company, it combines their usual ingredients of shabby chic, mismatched furniture, ales, roasts, odd ornamentation, and decent music with a surprisingly large function room (sorry, ballroom) upstairs in which the film was shown.

As part of the Cunning Folk Film Club. An offshoot of SELFS, the South East London Folklore Society, whose wonderful series of monthly talks I've been attending, and enjoying, for over a year now. The next SELFS talk, about mermaids, is next Thursday. The next Cunning Folk Film Club is next month. All being well, I'll be attending both.