Luke Fowler - The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott @ The Hepworth Wakefield

To the Hepworth Wakefield today for a look at their new commission, an elegiac hour-long film essay by Duncan of Jordanstone alumnus and 2012 Turner Prize nominee Luke Fowler. The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott reflects on the life of Marxist historian Edward Palmer-Thompson, whose Workers’ Education Association sought to teach night classes in literature and history to miners, factory workers and the unemployed across the West Riding of Yorkshire. The film cuts together archive TV clips of Thompson’s speeches with footage of the current Yorkshire landscape, as Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans reads out a selection of Thompson’s class reports, occasionally cursing the noises clattering away from the mike in his kitchen. The film nicely conveys the optimism and utopian impulse evident in the original WEA programme, all now forgotten in our present moment of neo-liberal individualism-above-all-else. We see a contemporary poster that advertises the reclaiming of Payment Protection Insurance against the banks, and we cannot help but ask: is that really all that’s left for us?

'The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott' by Luke Fowler (excerpt) from Film and Video Umbrella on Vimeo.