Winstanley

With all the fanfare surrounding this low-budget indie, I guess I was expecting a bit more than a series of disjointed scenes and poorly exposed cinematography. The film opens with great promise showing a well-executed battle scene interspersed with text explaining the political landscape of the mid-1600 but then rapidly goes downhill with below average technical production. There's no drama or tension to speak of. I've seen much better historical "documentaries" when I was in grammar school. A valiant effort but it doesn't hold a candle against other indie films of the period. A '4' in my book, and that's being generous.

Wonderful film. Cinematogaphy is brilliant. Story is one long overdue in telling (few people knew of the diggers prior to this film, outside of a small alternative community). Memorable scenes, such as the crossroads confrontation between the Puritan parson and Winstanley. The battle scenes at the start are artfully, sparingly, and convincingly drawn.

Winstanley himself may come off as a bit saintly, but he's nonetheless compelling, and a good choice for the role (he was a schoolteacher by trade and amateur actor). The attention to historical detail borders on the fanatical, and is well worth watching. And much of the dialogue is drawn from actual writings of Winstanley himself.

Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – 1676) was an English Protestant religious reformer and political activist during the period after the English Civil Wat under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. He was one of the leaders of a movement which called itself the True Levellers, was known by others as the Diggers, and could be characterised as a form of Christian Communism.

This little-known and well-intentioned film about the radical movement - directed and co-written by Kevin Brownlow - will not be to all tastes. Visually, it reminds one of the best of early cinema such as that of Eisenstein: 4:3 ratio, black and white, distant shots of figures, close up shots of faces, a variety of framed shots. And it is a vivid and authentic reaction of the period. But much of the acting is very amateurish and there is a lack of both characterisation and narrative.

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo's minor classic – a sort of pastoral Spartacus that develops into a chilly Mosquito Coast – regards the 17th century reformist-activist leader Gerrard Winstanley, and it really puts the period in period drama. Made for tuppence, it memorably recreates a time and place too often the reserve of buttoned-up aristocrats. Here it is the domain of the common digger, eking the living on God's land. Problem is, General Lord Fairfax reckons the land belongs to him.

You just have to zip over to IMDb and click on each cast member to get a taste of what an achievement this film is. Other than Jerome Willis (Fairfax himself), you're hard-pushed to find another professional actor among the cast. So yes, some of the performances are amateurish by default. But others are remarkable: aside from Miles Halliwell's titular visionary (whose brow is the very definition of furrowed), David Bramley's Parson Platt in particular stands out as a model of eerie poise and stern implacability.

But it's the photography that really brings the film to life. In sharp monochrome, all the colour of rural England seems to breathe. The faces of the ex-soldiers, scarred like land masses, look like they're filmed in 3D. And then there is the constant mood of inventiveness, with the editor (Sarah Ellis, hacking the frame with Schoonmaker-esquire skill and savagery) unafraid to lurch from extreme close-up to echoing long shot, and the directors even shifting focus to a first-person perspective during one of the many attacks on the diggers' settlement.

With its timeless themes of the stricken many versus "the covetous few", Winstanley is as relevant now as ever (not least when one offscreen character compares Winstanley's celebrity prophet to a certain Muhammad). Its unique atmosphere, striking visuals and strong plotting elevate it to essential viewing.

Today the term "indie film" is a bloated cliché, misapplied to any movie with a budget under $50 million and not too much CGI, regardless of how conventional and hackneyed the film is. To see really independent cinema you have to go back to the 60s and 70s, when revolutions in the technology allowed eccentrics and visionaries, working totally outside the industry and with virtually no money, to make truly unique movies. Folks like Warhol and Waters and Anger in the US, Herzog in Germany, and the team of Brownlow and Mollo in the UK. All very different from one another (and everyone else), which is part of what makes them authentic independents. Starting when they were just 18, Brownlow and Mollo made two extraordinary history-based films. First they spent eight years (and something like 20,000 pounds, minuscule even in 1970s currency) making "It Happened Here," a what-if fantasy about England occupied by the Nazis during World War II that looks so realistic you could be fooled it's a documentary if you're history-challenged. Then, with an equally tiny budget and fierce attention to detail, they made the true-to-history "Winstanley," about the proto-democracy (and proto-Quaker, and proto-hippie) revolt of the Diggers, Levellers and Ranters in 17th-century England. Again it looks so real it's like a documentary somehow shot in the 1640s, but it's also beautiful, poetic and philosophical in a kind of Herzogian way. They're both remarkable little films, unlike anything else, that should be remedial must-see's for anyone who likes or is involved in what's called indie film nowadays.