Mr. Page and his two sons and two daughters live a primitive life in the woods in southern England. They’re not hippies who’ve gone off grid, but the last members of an agricultural community driven to extinction by modern machines.
EN
“It’s a good job the moon’s well up there too, I’ve got room enough to swing a sledgehammer without hitting him.”
Mr. Page
“Although the film opens and closes with shots of cars wending their way down a suburban English street, the only vehicles glimpsed during the balance of Philip Trevelyan’s 1971 documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer are of a considerably less contemporary orientation. That’s because the film’s subjects, the Page family, lead an isolated, defiantly pre-modern (though not pre-industrial) life, subsisting without electricity or running water while confining themselves to their six acres of wooded property south of London. While the women occupy themselves with gardening and embroidery, the men take on intensive mechanical work, rehabilitating an old steam engine, building a boat from scratch, their labor a throwback to an outmoded artisanal tradition that, in concert with the men’s stated philosophies, stands as a corrective to the prevailing curse of ‘push-button machinery.’”
Andrew Schenker1
“Fantasies and philosophies unfolding in random upsurge.
The trees above them and the world beyond them.
Hermetically sealed within their pastoral echo chamber, yet universal themes ricochet amongst its arboreal clutter.
The detail is beguiling and their culture confusing.
There is no reality to their world, moreover it is a world of self-imposed narrative illusion. They live, as we still live, amongst the detritus of contingency, solidarity and irony. They live between what’s real and what’s fantasy. Their truths might even appear eccentric or quaint, but they are truths manifest as trace elements from the haptic events of their lives. Hands-on.”
Andrew Kötting2
- 1Andrew Schenker, “The Moon and the Sledgehammer,” Slant Magazine, 1 June 2009.
- 2Andrew Kötting, “The Moon and the Sledgehammer,” www.andrewkotting.com, 2016.
