Viva Brighton Issue #39 May 2016

CINEMA
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The Moon and the Sledgehammer
Field of dreamers
“I was absolutely fascinated by them the moment
I got there,” says Philip Trevelyan, of the Page
family, the subject of his 1971 documentary The
Moon and the Sledgehammer, which is being given
a rare screening as part of the Brighton Festival.
Trevelyan, then a young ambitious film-maker
(he now makes artisan farm tools) was introduced
to the Pages by a friend. The family consisted of
patriarch ‘Oily’ Page and four of his grown-up
children, two men and two women, who lived together
in a field near Chiddingly in a ramshackle
house set amid a few acres of woodland.
“They were threshers by trade,” he continues,
“so they needed a lot of land for their machinery.”
They also ran a couple of steam engines,
which the two sons are constantly tinkering with
throughout the film, as if the twentieth century
has passed them by. Their father is building what
appears to be a submarine. For entertainment
they sing round an old piano. They eat rabbits
the father shoots in the woods.
The beauty of the film lies in the fact that the
family, while they appear on the surface to be
dysfunctional, also make the audience realise that
the modernisation they’ve avoided hasn’t necessarily
made ‘normal’ people’s life better.
“[Oily Page] realised that a lot of ordinary people
he saw [when he left his wood] didn’t have time
to enjoy things they once had; they didn’t have
enough time for the family. They would get on
the train to London, get a paper, go to the office,
leave the office, get another paper, and get on the
train again. The only time they’re with their family
was when they’re asleep, and it’s very sad.”
The Pages might have had more time together
than most families, but it wasn’t all harmonious.
The domineering character of the father comes
through more and more as the film progresses.
Despite the bickering he captures, Trevelyan
wasn’t aiming to portray a negative image of the
family. “I was looking for the riches within the
characters,” says Trevelyan. “For that reason I
didn’t try to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
I wanted the people I was filming to put forward
what they had to offer.”
What they do have to offer is a lot of home-spun
philosophy which makes you realise how far we
have moved on from the world they are so comfortable
in, which predates the oil age, let alone
the computer age. And what makes for uncomfortable
viewing is that even though you know
that their way of life is doomed, you can see that
in many ways it all makes sense. And that the
family are masters of their own universe, however
eccentric that universe might be.
It’s a beautifully made film, with no narration or
extraneous explanation to distract you from the
strange world that you become immersed in from
the moment you meet Oily Page, playing up to
the camera, reciting an old cockney rhyme, with a
shotgun in one hand, a rabbit in the other.
Alex Leith
Brighton Festival, Duke of York’s Picturehouse,
Sun 29th May, 4.30pm, followed by a Q&A with
Philip Trevelyan
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