David Gladwell is perhaps best-known for his celebrated work as editor on Lindsay Anderson’s If.… and O Lucky Man! Requiem for a Village, along with the four exquisite and startling short films also included in this BFI Flipside Dual Format Edition, released on 18 July, reveal him to be an unfairly overlooked director of ground-breaking work.
The idyllic, rural past of a Suffolk village rises to life in Requiem for a Village (1975) through the memories of an old man who tends a country graveyard. With influences that range from the poet TS Eliot to the artist Stanley Spencer, and using real village residents as amateur actors, the film powerfully suggests that history and memory are ever-present in our lives, regardless of the unrelenting drive towards modernisation.
This extraordinary, little-seen film, an archetypal Flipside discovery, is preserved in the BFI National Archive and newly transferred in High Definition.
