The World Turned Upside Down, Again: Hauntings of the English Revolution and Archaeologies of Futures Past in Contemporary British Films

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, the period of the Civil War and the English Revolution featured prominently in a variety of films ranging from the mainstream historical drama Cromwell to the independent Winstanley and the folk horror film Witchfinder General. Film-makers’ interest in the period at that time coincided with the cultural, social and political turmoil of 1968 as well as with the increasingly popularised revision of the period in Marxist historiography, such as Christopher Hill’s seminal book The World Turned Upside Down. Recently, there has been a renewed interest of British film-makers in Hill’s focus on the subcultures of the English Revolution, such as the Diggers, as well as in the aesthetics of earlier films about the period. This article analyses two contemporary films about the period, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Thomas Clay’s Fanny Lye Deliver’d, and through historicisation and contextualisation within film, genre and media history seeks to understand the significance of their return to the historical material of the seventeenth century as well as to the style of their filmic models from the 1960s and 1970s. The article argues that the two films perform an ‘archaeology of the future’ (Jameson) that excavates utopian ‘futures past’ (Koselleck) in British cultural history as well as in British film and media history. By analysing Wheatley and Clay’s films as hauntological and archaeological texts, the article explores the potential of the cinematic image for engaging with national and film history as well as with visions of the past and the future.