Brilliant film at the Showroom, Sheffield on Thursday 14th June: Luke Fowler's 'The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott' which closes with E.P. Thompson, wearing the sea-green rosette of the Levellers, quoting William Blake as above (The photo is a still from that moment in the film). Extracts from Thompson's reports of WEA classes in the towns of the West Riding from the late forties to late fifities are read over WEA archive shots and contemporary film of the towns and interiors of the municipal buildings that the classes were held in. Thompson frets about the 'university' expectations of the WEA whilst struggling to persuade his students to link the oppressions of the industrial working class in the past to the their post-war present. This dialectic between the objectivity necessary for (Marxist) history, in Thompson's view, and the subjectivity of the students, rooted in hometown and daily life, and rarely the committed trade unionists and Labour activists that Thompson hoped to encounter, gives the film its dynamic. Some brilliant, shimmering, distorted cinematography of the townscape and the semi-rural, drystone wall country in between the towns allows to the film to be haunted around its edges by the esoteric spirit of the eighteenth-century sects and secret societies that Thompson was researching (and rescuing from, 'the enormous condescension of posterity') at the time for his magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class. As the film ends, the orange neon glare of a modern Yorkshire city is transformed into a multichromatic universe of sparkling, pinpricks of light.
