Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley deserves to be far better known than it is. Made on a shoestring over several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and shot in a stark, almost ascetic black and white, the film recounts the brief and doomed attempt by Gerrard Winstanley and a band of landless poor to cultivate common ground at St George’s Hill, Surrey, in 1649 — an episode largely written out of the popular memory of the English Revolution, in which the establishment narrative prefers to dwell on constitutional wrangling between Crown and Parliament rather than on the class forces beneath it.
That the film exists at all is remarkable. Brownlow and Mollo financed it independently, outside the structures of the British film industry, with a budget that would barely cover catering on a studio production. The cast, drawn overwhelmingly from historical re‑enactment societies and ordinary volunteers rather than professional actors, gives the film an unpolished, documentary-like authenticity that no amount of studio finance could purchase. Faces are weathered, movements unrehearsed, speech halting in a way that paradoxically brings the seventeenth century closer than any glossier costume drama has managed. This aesthetic choice is not incidental but political.
The historiography of the English Revolution that emerged from the postwar period — above all in the work of Christopher Hill, whose account of the radical undercurrents of the 1640s gave the Diggers and Ranters their due as serious historical actors rather than eccentric footnotes — insisted that the revolution had a submerged current far more radical than Cromwell’s Independency, one that anticipated later socialist and communist thought by centuries. Winstanley’s own writings, with their demand that the earth “be made a common treasury for all” and their attack on buying and selling, on landlordism, on the very basis of private property, place him unmistakably in that current. Brownlow and Mollo’s film, whatever its limitations, is one of the few serious attempts by anyone to bring this history to a mass audience through the medium of cinema.
The film’s weaknesses are real. Cromwell never appears, a curious absence given that he — far more than Fairfax, who does — was the chief architect of the crushing of the Levellers, Diggers and the left wing of the revolution generally, and his political logic (that the “levelling principle” if allowed to run its course would abolish the distinction between landlord and tenant altogether, and must therefore be suppressed) is essential to understanding why the Digger colony was doomed almost from its founding. Its absence leaves a gap in the film’s account of the forces arrayed against Winstanley: the violence he faced came not only from hostile local landowners and the soldiery but from the political calculation of the new bourgeois state consolidating itself in the aftermath of the king’s execution. A film with greater resources might have found room to dramatize that conflict more fully. Yet this is a criticism of degree, not of kind.
What Brownlow and Mollo achieve, with almost nothing, is a portrait of poverty, hunger and resolve that avoids both sentimentality and condescension — the two besetting sins of nearly every subsequent attempt at “peasant” historical drama. The commune’s poverty is shown as material fact, not picturesque suffering; its members are not saints but people driven to an extraordinary political conclusion by extraordinary circumstances. Miles Halliwell’s Winstanley is not an inspirational speechmaker but a man working out, with visible effort, what it might mean to act on the conviction that the earth belongs to no one and to everyone.
Brownlow made the film at a moment — the tail end of the 1960s radicalization — when the question of what had gone wrong with official politics pressed on him directly; he later spoke of his disillusionment with a Labour Party and Conservative Party that had become indistinguishable from one another. That disillusionment does not make the film didactic or present‑minded in any crude sense — there is no attempt to dress the seventeenth century up as an allegory of 1968 — but it does explain the seriousness with which the film treats its subject, and its refusal to condescend to a movement whose defeat did not make it any less prescient.
Cinema and Bourgeois Historical Consciousness
This seriousness also marks Winstanley out from the broader landscape of British historical cinema, which has long been shaped by the ideological limits of bourgeois historical consciousness. Bourgeois culture can tolerate Cromwell the statesman, Fairfax the gentleman, even the Levellers as proto‑liberals. What it cannot accommodate — what it must repress — is a movement that exposes the class foundations of the society that remembers it. The Diggers are unassimilable because they represent a negation of the very property relations on which bourgeois society rests. To show them truthfully is to show that capitalism was not the inevitable outcome of the seventeenth century but the result of a political defeat.
Mainstream cinema cannot show this defeat because it cannot show the class struggle that produced it. The conventions of bourgeois historical drama — the focus on “great men,” the fetish for costume, the smoothing of conflict into personal dilemmas — obscure the structural antagonisms that drive history. Cromwell becomes a man wrestling with conscience rather than the representative of a rising bourgeois order; the Levellers become democratic idealists rather than the petty‑bourgeois left wing of a revolution whose logic they could not control; the Diggers disappear entirely or are rendered as picturesque eccentrics.
Winstanley breaks this pattern not through rhetorical radicalism but through its aesthetic refusal of heritage cinema. Its stark photography, non‑professional cast, and attention to hunger, cold and labour reject the visual luxuries through which bourgeois cinema domesticates the past. The film’s poverty becomes a political resource: it forces the seventeenth century to appear as a world of material struggle rather than decorative nostalgia. In doing so, it exposes the ideological poverty of mainstream historical cinema, which cannot imagine a past in which capitalism was not the horizon of human development.
The rarity of such a film is itself a historical fact. Bourgeois society can tolerate many kinds of dissent, but it cannot tolerate a representation of its own birth as a moment of counter‑revolution. To show the Diggers truthfully is to show that capitalism emerged through the suppression of a communist alternative — and that is a truth bourgeois cinema, almost by definition, cannot speak.
Conclusion
More than three and a half centuries after St George’s Hill, the conditions that produced Winstanley’s movement — landlessness, social inequality, a political establishment offering no way out — have not disappeared; if anything, the gulf between the propertied and the propertyless has widened enormously since 1975. Winstanley is not, and does not pretend to be, a complete history of the revolution’s left wing. But as a serious, unglamorized attempt to put the Diggers and their ideas before an audience, it remains close to unique, and repays the effort of seeking it out.
