Pillory, Pillocks!

Stephen, the protagonist of the 1974 BBC TV film Penda’s Fen is devoutly conservative and unlikeable. He embodies a particularly English haughtiness. Unearthed through the rural and illusory English Midlands, Stephen’s adolescent certainties about his identity, sexuality, and faith are challenged and shattered through a series of revelations and mythical visions.

In one such vision Stephen dreams of male schoolmates playing rugby – tight white rugby shorts smeared in mud as they scrum. What follows is a motif of Stephen raising his arms to protect his face from incoming mud hurled from behind the camera. The mud, however, doesn’t hit Stephen, instead his crisp white shirt is protected by a clear pane of glass revealed between his tense body and the assailant.

Pillory, Pillocks! appropriates and recreates this short motif, expanding the artillery of material to include eggs, gunge, cream pies and food waste. Historically used to humiliate subjects in acts of persecution, protest, punishment and entertainment, the materials pound a false screen as if thrown from the position of the viewer. Mud threatens to soil Stephen’s staunch notions of self and purity. In Stephen’s dream, the glass protects him from the abuse of his schoolmates and separates him from his concurrent desire toward their mud-caked muscles, and particularly the vile sadistic charge of the class bully.

Akin to our protagonist Stephen’s tormenting dualisms, in Pillory, Pillocks! the world of the image and world of the viewer respond to each other, penetrated only by a stare. The austere motif is punctured by the perspective of a handheld VHS camera, seeking to situate it in a sexual politics where humiliation is uniquely active and transgressive.

Words of Edward Gwyn Jones