Blythe even eventually ended up acting in the film, playing the clergyman of the local church where the main funeral, an event centred on throughout the film, takes place. Cameraman Ivan Strasburg had began his career a few years before Akenfield, chiefly with documentary work.

In pictures: on location on Peter Hall’s rural time-collage

Its key feature was the mixing of ethnographic documentary with the raw emotional content of tough rural livelihoods lived by several generations of Suffolk farmers. A summer breeze can turn to a winter chill in the merest and subtlest of cuts and edits, but the key element brought over from Blythe’s work is the difficulty of agricultural work (of both arable and pastoral forms) no matter what the season or weather is like.Blythe himself wrote an initial treatment of the book though it would take a number of years and the help of producer Rex Pyke to solidify the project financially. To reflect the documentary precision of Blythe’s book, Hall worked largely with genuine Suffolk residents and non-actors for almost every role in the film. Akenfield was his third book and instantly channelled his admiration for the region but also for the workers of the Suffolk furrows and the very landscape itself. Tuddenham, who was also native of Suffolk, is perhaps better known for another voice role, playing the part of Zen the spaceship in the TV series, Blake’s 7 (1978-81). Though almost cascading at times in its slips in time, Hall also brings a seasonal cyclic quality to his drama, showing the landscape at differing heights of the year.

Filmed across nine months in the fields of Suffolk, Peter Hall’s beautiful 1974 film Akenfield has drawn comparisons to Tarkovsky’s Mirror for its poetic use of time and the countryside. Though the film is ambiguous as to whether Tom eventually escapes, the old story of his grandfather walking 40 miles to find (and fail to get) a job plagues Tom: would he be as stuck as his grandfather eventually was?Blythe’s work also had a similar Suffolk peer in the form of ethnographer George Ewart-Evans and his book The Pattern under the Plough (1966).

Shand gives a remarkable performance of three generations of men, owing in some part to Hall’s work with him and the other actors on improvisation techniques brought over from the theatre. Akenfield and Requiem for a Village pair well in the same way that Blythe’s and Ewart-Evans’ books complement each other as they explore the idiosyncrasies and natural drama surrounding belief, work and magic(k) in the rural Suffolk communities. Pinter himself would sit in on a cut of Akenfield to help with advice on the film’s various dubbing.Being great admirers of each other’s work, Blythe and Hall collaborated closely on adapting Akenfield into a film. Much of the film’s intergenerational narratives focus on the grounds of the church: for Tom’s grandfather’s funeral and for various baptisms, weddings and sermons. The main professional actors used were comedian Stanley Baxter, who plays the village blacksmith, and Peter Tuddenham, who voices the film as old Tom. Hall is clearly taking great delight in exploring the copse-ways of East Anglia whose openness is the total opposite to Pinter’s closed heterotopia.