The Moon and The Sledgehammer
A while ago I was knocked sideways by The Moon and The Sledgehammer: half-dream, half-documentary.
Filmed in 1971, the subject is a gently malfunctioning family, the Pages. They live in six chaotic acres of Sussex woodland without gas, electricity or other modern appurtenances. Mouldy patriarch Mr. Page (above) rules the roost, barely. The Pages live in a kind of paradise: a junkyard implosion of previous Englands, filled with rotting church organs, gutted steam-engines and prowling cats. Summers unwind like a drunken afternoon, and the film neatly collapses stream-of-consciousness clowning and cast-iron elephants into a weird, charmed English pastoral. But disaster awaits. The Page encampment is yards from an audibly encroaching civilisation, the nearness of which hangs like doom.
The effort to live with the past (and not just in it) is what gives this film its real heft, looming tragedy preventing The Moon from being simply a sentimental portrait of a soon-to-be vanished way of life.
It's extremely funny, veering into fine Cold Comfort Farm territory. Mr Page clowns in the dust, impersonates an elephant in gas-mask, counsels against machine-monkey-interference with authority.
Long-since retired director Philip Trevelyan was in evidence at the screening, politely deflecting inane questions, as were spiritual descendent and fighter of the good fight Andrew Kotting, plus long-term fan Nick Broomfield, both on hand to deliver brief encomia.
Broomfield recalled queues round the block for late-night screenings on Portobello Road, as word grew about this dizzy, one-off wonder. Now finding itself somewhere between truly surreal comedy and wordless ethnography, this is the kind of unhurried, unsentimental film that British broadcasters have successfully eradicated from schedules, itself a further exhibit in the museum of obsolete beauty.
Finally: the word 'cult' is a dangerous one, especially when placed next to 'film' but this is in every possible way the real deal, insofar as to know The Moon and The Sledgehammer is to love it.
