This month on the Raymond Williams Society blog we have a post by Colm McAuliffe on three Raymond Williams films recently screened at Birkbeck, University of London. One of these, The Country and the City, demonstrates Williams’ thinking at its best, as he critiques a landscape dotted by neo-classical mansions and ‘great’ houses. He writes in the book of the same name: ‘Stand at any point and look at that land. Think it through as labour and see how long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale’. The film can be viewed here and, as Colm writes, it provides a fascinating insight into the continued relevance and importance of such critical analysis…
Perhaps everybody does love Raymond (Williams), cultural theorist, border-crossing Welshman, television critic, elegant pipe smoker. A special event during Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2018, Landscapes of Culture: Raymond Williams Thirty Years On, depicted Williams across three separate television landscapes traversing 1970, 1979 and 1988, through the Welsh borders of his home, the class upheaval of Cambridge where he taught, and the country house of Tatton Hall, to its natural finale: a strangely lit television studio where his legacy was discussed by an ideologically unusual array of politicians, academics and writers.
