‘It’s put together like a poem, and largely instinctively....and how they blend together and how they contrast from moment to moment.‘

            ‘…I was very struck by the way that it looks backwards and forwards….forwards in the way it fitted in with contemporary pre-occupations about ecology, about the environment, but it also struck me particularly that it’s looking backwards.  Backwards not only in its subject matter; but backwards because this is a traditional way of life, which even then round 1970 was quickly disappearing, but it’s also aesthetically looking backwards, or it’s rather, part of a great tradition; the tradition like the films of Humphrey Jennings for instance, and other documentaries of the 30’s which were constructed poetically, rather than literally. Not only Jennings, but Song of Ceylon and other Basil Wright films..  It’s put together like a poem, and largely instinctively I think because of the feeling of being here and interest of things in it, and how they blend together, and how they sometimes contrast from moment to moment.

            It’s also specifically English, in a way which is now almost forgotten, and really looked down on. It refers back to a lot of British artists, English artists of the 30s like Eric Ravilious with their passionate feeling for the English countryside, the English landscape, the way that English poets, writers, have responded always to these things.

            This is organized in a poetic way.  It’s put together with the film makers going with the flow, seeing what works with what and combining it all into a wonderfully poetic whole.

  And that I think is something which could be, and clearly is, every now and then, influential on the way films are made today.  It’s a return to a sort of art film making, which sounds derogatory, but it isn’t.  Film is an art and why should it not be treated that way and among its artistic potentials, why should not the poetic potential… the poet’s way of putting things together, not be exploited and celebrated?  That is what The Moon and the Sledgehammer does.

> More interviews >> Richard Stanley, Cameraman >> Barry Vince, Editor >> Robert Erskine, partner in Vaughan Films