It Happened Here
With Pauline Murray, Sebastian Shaw, Honor Fehrson, Rex Collett, Nicholas Moore, and Colin Jordan
With Miles Halliwell, Alison Halliwell, David Bramley, Dawson France, Phil Dunn, and Terry Higgins.
This was certainly my reaction when I first saw Winstanley in London a year after it was completed. At that point it still didn’t have an English distributor and had turned up for only a limited run shortly after the release of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. It was difficult not to see the films as doing similar things: both directors had previously made SF films–in Kubrick’s case, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange–before delving into the remote past. Though we tend to regard the past as known and the future as unknown, Brownlow and Kubrick understood that the past is just about as unknowable as the future–and just as worthy of wonder. (Incidentally, Kubrick furnished Brownlow with some of his leftover 35-millimeter film stock from Dr. Strangelove to shoot It Happened Here; another commercial director, Tony Richardson, later helped pay for its completion.)
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It Happened Here launched the filmmaking careers of two notable collaborators. Production assistant Peter Watkins subsequently made many meticulous and powerful pseudodocumentaries, including The War Game and The Battle of Culloden, and his methods show him clearly indebted to Brownlow and Mollo. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky went on to shoot Leo the Last, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back, Mars Attacks!, and all the films of David Cronenberg since Dead Ringers, including eXistenZ; the focused dramatic intensity associated with these later movies is found only sporadically in It Happened Here and Winstanley, which are relatively studied and distanced by comparison.
Insofar as Winstanley’s presocialist “experiment” was an abysmal failure, it has an enduring sense of pathos that reflects the filmmakers’ effort to do the impossible. There’s also a remarkable sense of immediacy in the handheld camera work of both Brownlow’s pictures that reveals how shopworn and streamlined the supposedly innovative Normandy-landing sequence of Saving Private Ryan actually is. Indeed, if nothing else, It Happened Here and Winstanley offer lessons on how stupefyingly insulting the period re-creations of most commercial movies are; much as It Happened Here diminishes Spielberg, Winstanley makes the period plushness of Shakespeare in Love and of Merchant-Ivory look like window dressing. And as SF movies with an enduring sense of wonder about the world, despite a conspicuous lack of special effects and production values, they surpass virtual-reality games like The Matrix and eXistenZ, which for all their provocative and eye-filling virtues can’t hold us much longer than their running times. Even if you don’t enjoy these black-and-white movies every moment that you’re watching them, my guess is you won’t forget them. They seep into your consciousness like the photos in the most intimate of family albums, redefining who you are in the process.
