The Edge is Where the Centre is

Penda’s Fen, written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, is one of the key films in the pantheon of what has been called The Old Weird Albion. A radical archaeology of Deep England, a work of dark pastoral, a praise-song to anarchistic transformation, as militant a rejection of imperial identity as Lindsay Anderson’s If…, it culminates with perhaps the most euphoric revelation in British cinema: “My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure!” The Edge Is Where The Centre Is, the first book devoted to this visionary and never-commercially-released film, has at its heart a rare and far-ranging interview with Rudkin (b. 1936), a writer who for more than fifty years has, in the words of Gareth Evans, “charted a vast topology of viscerally-realised primary narratives for our troubled times”. It also features new essays by its editors — Gareth Evans, William Fowler and Sukhdev Sandhu – that explore the film’s status as a radical horror film, an experimental topography, a work that anticipates subsequent political debates about Englishness. The Edge Is Where The Centre Is is a Risograph book produced in a very limited edition of 200 copies. It is published by Texte und Töne, in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture, to mark both the fortieth anniversary of Penda’s Fen and a rare 16mm-screening of the film at The Horse Hospital, London on 15 November 2014, the very day on which Penda, Britain’s last pagan king, died in 655 AD. It was designed by Rob Carmichael, SEEN and was printed by Keegan Cooke at Circadian Press.