I am reprising my initial responses to #TheDig, which @rokewife & I watched last night, to create a separate thread

#TheDig is an outstanding film. An exquisitely-crafted bitter-sweet love letter to a ravishingly beautiful, class-ridden, bureaucratised, ‘deep England’—obscurely but inescapably part of, yet desperately menaced by, *Europe*, past & present: early medieval ships & modern aircraft

Accepting that film & novel take some liberties with events & personalities, #TheDig parses its big metaphors of excavation, earth & sky, with true grace: an old landed order passing away; an emergent bureaucracy & its own class hierarchies; the proximity of barbarism & beauty

Resonances are many & contemporary. The dig itself is an excavation of the origins of England: its deep roots in invasion & violence, inescapably entangled with a glittering Northern European civilisation from which new invaders threaten—an archaic past illuminating the present

On its own pivot of British history, #TheDig is also poised plangently between pathos & affirmation. Hence I do hope it takes audiences back to the past revealed at #SuttonHoo. Locus today of some acerbic debate, the Anglo-Saxons remain interwoven with the fabric of these islands

Here are some books which take you to the heart of the historical episode and its modern ramifications. #SuttonHoo itself first

The modern scholarship, general & specialist, is vast. So my two quirky choices on how the Anglo-Saxon past of #TheDig interacts with the present (including today’s frequently astringent controversies over race & empire, exclusion & ideology) are these

Ending thread by commending the production of #TheDig itself. The lead acting is skilfully restrained & understated. The landscape photography blends great beauty with subtlety of detail. The era & its eve of war atmosphere are captured impressionistically yet free of nostalgia

Notice I said all that without mentioning #Brexit? #TheDig will be claimed as a Brexit movie. And in many senses it is, but I hope these few observations help show that neither in design nor execution is this a straightforward correlation