Matter of Britain

An ethnographic fantasy which documents an English country village’s performance of the Holy Grail myth. In that myth, King Arthur’s knights quest for the Holy Grail in order to heal their wasted land.

We enter the film as if entering a secret, tiptoeing around whispering nature and human breath. We emerge without being entirely sure that we have cracked the code, which is that of a place (a forest awash with ferns in the south of England) and the ritual that unfolds there, turned back towards another time and another set of beliefs, which Matter of Britain documents and embraces in a single gesture. ‘Ethnographic reverie,’ is how the filmmaker describes this impressive first film, and it would be difficult to define it in any other way. We might think that we are entering the film with a few points of reference, having seen similar (rigorous, autarkic) reconstructions of the past in other films. But generally, the past is only a carnival mask, through which the present is examined. Here, ancient beliefs (the Grail of Arthurian myth) and present-day lives (agricultural work in the county, using today’s methods) intertwine in a luminous mist, like the links of the same talisman: the performance captured by Peter Treherne includes the film itself, which immerses itself in these vapours of magical thinking with striking formal power. However, it is not a question of dissolving the contemporary into the wonderland of another era: there is a clear resonance between the object of feverish Arthurian prayers and the growing anxiety that the fate of the natural world has inspired in us in recent times.

Jérôme Momcilovic