Akenfield (DVD + Blu-ray)

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The lead character of Tom Rouse was played by Garrow Shand, who, in Hall’s own words, was actually an “agricultural contractor”.

In pictures: on location on Peter Hall’s rural time-collage

Blythe’s work also had a similar Suffolk peer in the form of ethnographer George Ewart-Evans and his book The Pattern under the Plough (1966). Akenfield’s drama builds to the difficulty caused between Tom’s desire to leave the village and Jean’s reluctance to follow suit.

To reflect the documentary precision of Blythe’s book, Hall worked largely with genuine Suffolk residents and non-actors for almost every role in the film. Though almost cascading at times in its slips in time, Hall also brings a seasonal cyclic quality to his drama, showing the landscape at differing heights of the year. Filmed across nine months in the fields of Suffolk, Peter Hall’s beautiful 1974 film Akenfield has drawn comparisons to Tarkovsky’s Mirror for its poetic use of time and the countryside. His debut feature was the comedy Work Is a 4-letter Word (1968), though he worked on his first real cinematic success, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the same year.

Perhaps more so than any other film from this period, Akenfield captures the shifting elements of English village life with a deep affection that is devoid of the usual oversimplifying lens of nostalgia.Akenfield was his third book and instantly channelled his admiration for the region but also for the workers of the Suffolk furrows and the very landscape itself. Much of the film’s intergenerational narratives focus on the grounds of the church: for Tom’s grandfather’s funeral and for various baptisms, weddings and sermons. Pinter himself would sit in on a cut of Akenfield to help with advice on the film’s various dubbing.