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The Edge Is Where the Centre Is: David Rudkin and Penda's Fen: An Archeology
Penda’s Fen, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, is one of the key films in the pantheon of what has been called The Old Weird Albion. A radical archaeology of Deep England, a work of dark pastoral, a praise-song to anarchistic transformation, as militant a rejection of imperial identity as Lindsay Anderson’s If…, it culminates with perhaps the most euphoric revelation in British cinema: “My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure!”
The Edge Is Where The Centre Is, the first book devoted to this visionary and never-commercially-released film, has at its heart a rare and far-ranging interview with Rudkin (b. 1936), a writer who for more than fifty years has, in the words of Gareth Evans, “charted a vast topology of viscerally-realised primary narratives for our troubled times”. It also features new essays by its editors — Gareth Evans, William Fowler and Sukhdev Sandhu – that explore the film’s status as a radical horror film, an experimental topography, a work that anticipates subsequent political debates about Englishness.
The expanded second edition of The Edge Is Where the Centre Is published by Texte und Töne, in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, to mark the screening of the film at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Saturday 5 September 2015. Printed in an edition of 500 on a Risograph machine by Keegan Cooke at The Circadian Press, Brooklyn.
The Edge Is Where The Centre Is, the first book devoted to this visionary and never-commercially-released film, has at its heart a rare and far-ranging interview with Rudkin (b. 1936), a writer who for more than fifty years has, in the words of Gareth Evans, “charted a vast topology of viscerally-realised primary narratives for our troubled times”. It also features new essays by its editors — Gareth Evans, William Fowler and Sukhdev Sandhu – that explore the film’s status as a radical horror film, an experimental topography, a work that anticipates subsequent political debates about Englishness.
The expanded second edition of The Edge Is Where the Centre Is published by Texte und Töne, in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, to mark the screening of the film at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Saturday 5 September 2015. Printed in an edition of 500 on a Risograph machine by Keegan Cooke at The Circadian Press, Brooklyn.
100 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 2014
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