Uncanny Landscapes in 21st-Century British Cinema. The Pestilence in the Ditch by Lawrence Jackson (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
The distinctive phrase chosen as the book’s subtitle comes from the author’s interview with Lila Rawlings, a film producer whose credits include Clio Barnard’s ‘The Selfish Giant’ (2013) and ‘Dark River’(2017). Lawrence Jackson uses the image to conjure up visions of “pestilent landscapes, through which lost figures wander.” In this provocative study, the British countryside on screen is envisaged as an impure anti-landscape rather than the place of benign beauty.
The films examined are shown to occupy a malign “disorientating interzone” inhabited by marginalised characters. From this it is argued that “What unites filmmakers and cultural historians of the new century is this shared sense that our present is a barren space where nothing grows.” This is a bleak but, in my view, accurate summary of the current state of British cinema.
Less convincingly, I don’t see filmmakers like Andrea Arnold, Cleo Barnard, Paddy Considine, Shane Meadows and Ben Wheatley as following in the British literary tradition of Blake, Clare, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lawrence Jackson, however, goes so far as to call these directors as “nature poets of the screen.” Given the transgressive, violent and even nihilistic nature of the films under discussion, I find this cosy literary analogy somewhat far-fetched. To my mind, it would have been more fruitful to limit links to current social issues as Jackson does when he writes how “the contemporary British films in this study portray individuals at the bottom of the social scale, in post-industrial communities marked by disunity and marginalisation from what could be termed functional, mainstream society.”
Another minor criticism I have is that Chapter 6 is mainly devoted to the Red Riding trilogy broadcast on Channel 4 in 2009. Since the title of the book refers to British cinema, to devote so much space to three films made for television seems odd. Although the trilogy was released in movie theatres in the US, this does not truly qualify them as cinematic works.
In spite of these reservations, I find the link the book draws between anti-landscape and anti-nation to be convincingly argued. The twenty-first-century British films Jackson discusses are rightly shown to represent aesthetic visions that are more authentic than other fabricated ideas of connectivity because they are based on “true histories, rather than falsifications of the past.”
I was primarily drawn to this book through the fact that it covers some of the same territory as my own recently published Reflections on British Cinema and Identity. Despite my scepticism towards the literary links, the author and I seem to be broadly on the same page. For instance, I wholly endorse Lawrence Jackson’s dismissal of heritage cinema as offering little more than a “commodified façade”, and I share his distaste for overly glossy period drama. The thorough analysis of Andrea Arnold’s radical makeover of ‘Wuthering Heights’ is one of the best sections.
Above all, while the subtitle of this book may conjure up unpleasant thoughts of contagion and disease, this well-researched study gives exposure to an influential group of British filmmakers whose creative ‘contaminations’ are a welcome antidote to sterile works that depend on stereotypical ideas of nationhood.
