Winstanley

With its bold and graceful black-and-white evoking the muscular tonal juxtapositions of a woodcut print, this 1975 film from Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mello is a stark and beautiful effort. When Gerrard Winstanley set up camp on a Surrey hillside in 1649, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, his sect of "Diggers" envisioned a communal utopia where those who'd been dispossessed by Cromwell could start anew, without the harsh social stratifications of the time, in a place where "everyone that is born in the land may be fed by the earth." Such radicalism did not sit well with the powers that were, and in one increasingly vicious attack after another the Diggers were routed. Well, it was a nice idea at the time . . .

The filmmakers' reverence for historical accuracy is near-religious: the narration is all from Winstanley's own pamphlets, and the movie features rare breeds of animals specific to the time. Most striking, though, is the way the substantive characterizations and the sparse lyricism of the perfectly composed close-ups bring vitality to what could easily have been a painfully dry subject.

-- Mike Miliard