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"Winstanley"; or, Kevin Brownlow Camps Out on St. George's Hill
Literature Film Quarterly, 2003 by Tibbetts, John C
While freely admitting that some of these qualities stem directly from budgetary constraints and the inexperience of the crew, Brownlow defends this admittedly rough-hewn quality, particularly with regard to the use of nonprofessional actors. "Any conviction is killed as soon as most professional actors start 'acting,'" he says, "and this is the trouble with the kind of film Andrew and I like to make. They are supposed to show events that are happening [italics mine] while you watch them, as opposed to enacted historical pageants. If you don't feel these people are real and convincing, . . . then we have failed."9 It is the very absence of calculation and professional polish, adds Brownlow, that is to be desired.
Winstanley thus belongs to a select company of history films that is rare in the cinema. While it reconstructs a vanished world that displays what historian Simon Schama describes as "an unruly completeness," it also "challenges the truisms of linear history, where the order of events is progressive in both a temporal and a moral sense." In sum, continues Schama:
These are the films that have respected the strangeness of the past, and have accepted that the historical illumination of the human condition is not necessarily going to be an edifying exercise. . . . These are also films that embrace history for its power to complicate, rather than clarify, and warn the time traveler that he is entering a place where he may well lose the thread rather than get the gist.10
In addition, Winstanley, like It Happened Here, is a presentist view of history. Brownlow and Mollo project contemporary concerns and considerations onto the screen of a meticulously constructed past. In other words, what Brownlow has called a "trip in a time machine back to the seventeenth century" gradually emerges as more of a commentary on our immediate present. In the first place, at the time of the film's conception, hippie communards calling themselves Squatters and New Diggers and Ranters had recently sprung up in England and the United States, including Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. So many of the characteristics presumed to be part of the original Diggers's life style-dropping out, pacifism, even free love (at one point Plait's wife complains to her husband, "Communal wives, communal living, the children bastards; shameless, godless, they live like animals")-were finding new currency in the Era of the Flower Child. Thus, Brownlow found a group of New Diggers, led by one Sid Rawle, a leader in the Squatter Movement in Camden, and promptly impressed them into service as the Ranters who invade the commune and rebuke Winstanley for his impractical ideals. In these scenes it is difficult to separate Art from Life. As Rawle explained, "In so many ways the modern-day freak, hippie-call them what you will-are very much the counterpart of the old Ranters. . . . So by acting ourselves we had the effect of getting out of them the reaction that the Ranters got out of the real Diggers."11
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