Date: 10 October 2012 | Season: London Film Festival 2012 | Tags: London Film Festival
THE POOR STOCKINGER, THE LUDDITE CROPPER AND THE DELUDED FOLLOWERS OF JOANNA SOUTHCOTT
Wednesday 10 October 2012, at 6pm
London ICA Cinema 1
Luke Fowler, The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, UK, 2012, 61 min
The new work by Luke Fowler, a current nominee for the Turner Prize, explores the role played by left wing intellectuals in the working class communities of post-war Yorkshire. At night schools organised by the Workers’ Educational Association, adults with no other access to further education were taught by progressive thinkers such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson, from whose treatise The Making of the English Working Class the film takes its long-winded title. As in previous studies of R.D. Laing and Cornelius Cardew, Fowler makes effective use of archival and contemporary materials. The result is far from a conventional documentary: in place of objective commentary, the soundtrack features the lilting voice of artist Cerith Wyn Evans reading Thompson’s class reports (pointed and often droll). For the present-day images of municipal buildings, West Riding towns and surrounding landscapes, Fowler shot in collaboration with American independent filmmaker Peter Hutton. (Mark Webber)
The screening on 10 October will feature an extended introduction by Dr Tom Steele.
Also Screening: Sunday 21 October 2012, at 4pm, BFI Southbank NFT 3
PROGRAMME NOTES
THE POOR STOCKINGER, THE LUDDITE CROPPER AND THE DELUDED FOLLOWERS OF JOANNA SOUTHCOTT
Wednesday 10 October 2012, at 6pm
London ICA Cinema 1
THE POOR STOCKINGER, THE LUDDITE CROPPER AND THE DELUDED FOLLOWERS OF JOANNA SOUTHCOTT
Luke Fowler, UK, 2012, video, colour, sound, 61 min
The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott focuses on the work of the Marxist historian Edward Palmer-Thompson, who, from 1946 (at the age of 24), was employed by the Workers’ Education Association (WEA) to teach literature and social history to adults in the industrial towns of the West Riding. These classes provided education to people who had been historically unable to access a university education. E.P. Thompson became synonymous with the discipline of ‘cultural studies’ that emerged in Post-War Britain, along with fellow northern socialists Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart.
Fowler’s film explores the issues that were at stake for progressive educationalists. Like E.P. Thompson, many desired to use their teaching to create ‘revolutionaries’ and pursue the original WEA values of delivering a ‘socially purposeful’ education. The film captures a moment of optimism, in which E.P. Thompson’s ideas for progressive education came together with those of the West Riding and its existing tradition of political resistance and activism.
The film draws together archival material from television, the University of Leeds Department of Extra-Mural Studies and the Workers’ Education Association. These archival documents are set against present-day film footage and sounds gathered on location in the former West Riding region of Yorkshire.
In realising this new commission, Fowler has worked in collaboration with acclaimed American independent filmmaker Peter Hutton and Yorkshire-born writer/filmmaker George Clark. The film was first exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield in Summer 2012 before touring to Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
Commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, and Film and Video Umbrella, through the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award for Museums: commission to collect. Supported by Arts Council England. Special thanks to the Yorkshire Film Archive.
The screening on 10 October 2012 will be introduced by Dr. Tom Steele, Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. From 1973-1987, he was a Tutor Organiser for the WEA in Leeds. His latest book, with Richard Taylor, is “British Labour and Higher Education 1945 to 2000: Ideology, Policy and Practice” (Continuum Publishing, 2010).
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