Mr Jones is an elderly resident of this English town, and today, as on most days, he mounts his bicycle and sets off into the countryside for the village where he lived most of his life, to tend to the graveyard there, clipping the grass on the plots and generally tidying up. This is all with the vicar's blessing, but he has other things on his mind as today in the church hall there is a meeting about what to do concerning the plans to build on the surrounding area, for this will surely spell the end of the village as the locals know it...
David Gladwell made his name in filmmaking circles as an editor - If.... was probably the most famous effort he worked on - but he directed his own short films throughout that time. He did not make many feature length movies, and neither did his endeavours exactly become the most celebrated in their field, yet they did gather a small following among those in the know who caught their rare screenings. Requiem for a Village saw him round up the locals of two villages to populate his story, so they were all amateur performers - indeed, some were not acting at all, and merely shown going about their everyday business, documentary-style.
The point to this was to highlight the way the modern world was changing the landscape, seeing tradition fall by the wayside and stomping over the memories of the past, all illustrated with shots of earthmoving equipment flattening the environment in order to prepare it for a presumably soulless new urban area. But these documentary aspects were melded to a more mystical approach which saw Mr Jones witness the dead rising from their graves as he tends them, Plague of the Zombies fashion, only they look pretty much the same as they were in life and not rotting corpses as they would be in a horror movie.
This is the cue for flashbacks down through his life as Gladwell filled in the details of what existence was like for the villagers, and had been for countless years without much change. All that was about to come crashing down, was the implication as the developers moved in, but where other filmmakers could have offered up rosy nostalgia to make us emotional about what was being lost to the ages, here things were rather different. Yes, there were the passages where we saw, for instance a cartwheel being manufactured in the time-honoured manner, but there was also a strangely sinister tone to a lot of what we were shown.
All this generating a sense of far more powerful forces at work than simple folk going about their everyday lives as they pretty much always had done. Such scenes could take the form of a frog being turned into some arcane magical totem, or those aforementioned rising dead who traipse into the church to recreate Mr Jones's wedding, suggesting that there was a ritualistic structure to the rural goings-on. It was almost as if nature itself was marshalling its influence in a way that none of the mortals could quite grasp, and rather than a religiously Christian take on this, here we had more of a heathen observation in place. And not all the imagery we saw was sunny and beneficial, as closer to the end are a montage of sexual assaults from various episodes in the village's experience, contributing to a genuinely odd and almost unknowable texture to the vista as afforded by Gladwell's wide-ranging lens. Music by David Fanshawe.
