I'm under the soil, curled into a soft moss bed
I decided that since it's been almost a week and I am still vocally breaking out in hives over it, I am legally entitled to bitch in my own space when someone is wrong on the internet about Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale (1944).
As wrongnesses go, I admit it was minor, just very nettling: turning the film's notion of getting close enough to the past to hear its voices into a gotcha line about whether the viewer will listen to Lincoln or Hitler. Point the knee-jerk, the film was written in 1943 by a Jewish refugee who put, as his grandson has documented, so much of his own love and anxiety for the enduring fragility of history and tradition into the basement rock of the screenplay that bringing Hitler into it just feels like a cheap shot. Point the relevant, A Canterbury Tale already contains a critique of conservative nostalgia, the past used as a pretext for stasis instead of the grounding of the future: it's the arc of Colpeper's blessing and penance, the exposure of his earnest fool's errand to pour knowledge into the heads of his narrowly envisioned audience when there are people already out there on the wavelength of the land, overlooked and excluded because of their gender in a fashion distinctly retrograde to the modernizing equality of the women's war effort. It's why that penultimate shot under the credits is so important, that the crowd flocking to the sixteenth-century timber frame of the Colpeper Institute is composed at last of both soldiers and their girls, side-by-side inheritors of the coins and roads and rivers of their land. The film insists on an inclusive past, its accessibility inherent in its very layers when the continuity of the road goes back through Chaucerian pilgrims and Roman legionaries to the Iron Age and can be followed by anyone today, including fans of A Canterbury Tale. I guessed the first time I saw it that Alison's thirteen perfect days in a caravan with her fiancé at the bend of the road had not been chaste; Powell confirmed in his memoirs that the character was meant to have lost her virginity there, which makes her even more initiatorily linked with the site: the third in her marriage bed was time. It doesn't read as a supersession of Colpeper's queer claim, although it does rebuke the misogyny with which he staked it; the film rests so surely on the interrelation of strangers through the land they share, across nationalities and centuries, that as only befits an emigré writing of his chosen home, the literal lines of ancestry or progeny seem the least important connections that can be made with a place. The film forged its own out of story and plain air, embedding its 35 mm ghosts as indelibly in history as the archaeology that came before them. Of course there was a real film shoot, actors who left the transient shapes of their bodies in the summer grasses of the hillside, crew who did just as much tramping as legionaries or pilgrims for set-ups on location, since Chillingbourne only ever existed in the cutting-room composite of multiple villages in the ambit of Canterbury: it hasn't stopped lovers of the film over the decades from visiting each time-changed fragment of location as if reconstructing—potsherds of a place—that cinematically spectral, immemorially anchored world which the film deliberately opened to anyone in sympathy with it and lessoned its would-be gatekeeper otherwise. In not very short, if you want a movie to accuse of leaving room for uncritically reactionary Miniver Cheevyism, A Canterbury Tale is one of the worst examples you could pick and it bugs me that someone tried. It was produced as propaganda and confused most of its audience on release; it closes with a soldiers' service in Canterbury Cathedral and nothing that includes a rendition of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" has ever looked less like Christian nationalism. The past that is always underlying the present in that film has too many voices to count and they are still bubbling up.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme sent me the song to which I have been listening while writing out this complaint: Anna B Savage's "Agnes (feat. Anna Mieke)" (2024), earth-bedded relevance obvious. It has interested me from my first viewing that A Canterbury Tale doesn't deal in the language of the dead, only in intermingled and unfading time.
As wrongnesses go, I admit it was minor, just very nettling: turning the film's notion of getting close enough to the past to hear its voices into a gotcha line about whether the viewer will listen to Lincoln or Hitler. Point the knee-jerk, the film was written in 1943 by a Jewish refugee who put, as his grandson has documented, so much of his own love and anxiety for the enduring fragility of history and tradition into the basement rock of the screenplay that bringing Hitler into it just feels like a cheap shot. Point the relevant, A Canterbury Tale already contains a critique of conservative nostalgia, the past used as a pretext for stasis instead of the grounding of the future: it's the arc of Colpeper's blessing and penance, the exposure of his earnest fool's errand to pour knowledge into the heads of his narrowly envisioned audience when there are people already out there on the wavelength of the land, overlooked and excluded because of their gender in a fashion distinctly retrograde to the modernizing equality of the women's war effort. It's why that penultimate shot under the credits is so important, that the crowd flocking to the sixteenth-century timber frame of the Colpeper Institute is composed at last of both soldiers and their girls, side-by-side inheritors of the coins and roads and rivers of their land. The film insists on an inclusive past, its accessibility inherent in its very layers when the continuity of the road goes back through Chaucerian pilgrims and Roman legionaries to the Iron Age and can be followed by anyone today, including fans of A Canterbury Tale. I guessed the first time I saw it that Alison's thirteen perfect days in a caravan with her fiancé at the bend of the road had not been chaste; Powell confirmed in his memoirs that the character was meant to have lost her virginity there, which makes her even more initiatorily linked with the site: the third in her marriage bed was time. It doesn't read as a supersession of Colpeper's queer claim, although it does rebuke the misogyny with which he staked it; the film rests so surely on the interrelation of strangers through the land they share, across nationalities and centuries, that as only befits an emigré writing of his chosen home, the literal lines of ancestry or progeny seem the least important connections that can be made with a place. The film forged its own out of story and plain air, embedding its 35 mm ghosts as indelibly in history as the archaeology that came before them. Of course there was a real film shoot, actors who left the transient shapes of their bodies in the summer grasses of the hillside, crew who did just as much tramping as legionaries or pilgrims for set-ups on location, since Chillingbourne only ever existed in the cutting-room composite of multiple villages in the ambit of Canterbury: it hasn't stopped lovers of the film over the decades from visiting each time-changed fragment of location as if reconstructing—potsherds of a place—that cinematically spectral, immemorially anchored world which the film deliberately opened to anyone in sympathy with it and lessoned its would-be gatekeeper otherwise. In not very short, if you want a movie to accuse of leaving room for uncritically reactionary Miniver Cheevyism, A Canterbury Tale is one of the worst examples you could pick and it bugs me that someone tried. It was produced as propaganda and confused most of its audience on release; it closes with a soldiers' service in Canterbury Cathedral and nothing that includes a rendition of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" has ever looked less like Christian nationalism. The past that is always underlying the present in that film has too many voices to count and they are still bubbling up.
ashlyme sent me the song to which I have been listening while writing out this complaint: Anna B Savage's "Agnes (feat. Anna Mieke)" (2024), earth-bedded relevance obvious. It has interested me from my first viewing that A Canterbury Tale doesn't deal in the language of the dead, only in intermingled and unfading time.
no subject
Rage Reviews could be a whole thing, IJS.
no subject
Thank you!
Rage Reviews could be a whole thing, IJS.
Tragically, I have an entire stack of movies about which I want to write actual reviews for positive or at least interested reasons, but the selection of A Canterbury Tale of all films as a loophole for conservatism just bothered me so much.
no subject
no subject
Thank you!
no subject
I was going to say "Well, maybe Androcles and the Lion," but no, A Canterbury Tale definitely wins.
no subject
Finding out how personal it was to Pressburger made so much sense.
(Androcles and the Lion still gets to be extremely weird for technically Christian fiction.)
no subject
This.
You have the eyes and insight of a filmmaker, though your medium is words.
Nine
no subject
*hugs*
Thank you.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! Of all the films to miss the point of.
(Glad you enjoy "Agnes" too.)
I loved it! It could have been a fanvid for "The Bryomancer."
It always pisses me off when stories like this are claimed for cheap nationalism. I want an INCLUSIVE PAST t-shirt.
Would also wear one. Don't suppose you have any friends who are designers?
Though you had me at "the third in her marriage bed was time." Holy crap, I love that.
Thank you! There's so much in that movie. Which is appropriate: like time.
*hugs*
no subject
no subject
Yes. "Least" got into it because A Canterbury Tale does such a matter-of-fact job of decoupling land-love from any kind of biological inheritance that I didn't think about it for years, it seemed so reasonable and natural to me. It's one of the pieces of the film that clicked into place with the discovery that it was so personal for Pressburger. I am the most geographically stable of my family in three or four generations and I had to build so much of my affinity with the place where I was born. I was raised to carry home with me, independent of landscape.