I finally got to watch #TheDig tonight. An astonishingly beautiful film about the past then, the past now, the present then, and maybe even the present now.

I can't hope to sum up the brilliant things about the film and responses to it, but see the @britishmuseum #SuttonHoo and European early medieval curator @SueBrunningBM's thread here. https://twitter.com/SueBrunningBM/status/1356926211792986112?s=20

It's equally clear that the film's gender politics reflect the novel it adapts, and that between them film and novel do disastrous things to the legacies of the women behind both Sutton Hoo archaeology and photography. See @preshitorian, for example. https://twitter.com/preshitorian/status/1355258893174239232?s=20

Likewise, as @MiraAssafK says here, the film's romantic evocations of a past imagined as 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'not the dark ages' are revisited with a kind of choric repetition which make them the keynote of the film. https://twitter.com/preshitorian/status/1355258893174239232?s=20

All of this is painfully familiar and ironic. The film is charged with a kind of anger that the achievements of certain kinds of people get forgotten, all the while merrily making sure that the achievements of certain kinds of people get forgotten.

Ralph Fiennes ftw, actual irl women who did the archaeology and photography, who on earth are they

But missing from all the discussion of the film is what made it most distinctive at a technical level, I think: I've never seen a mainstream film that disaggregated dialogue from image so consistently

The film asks us to watch people who are not speaking, whilst listening to dialogue from people who are not in shot, but are also the same people we are watching

Everything is predicated on this divorce between what we see, what we hear, and when these things are happening

And I loved that, because this film celebrates archaeology in ways that feel new and newly public

Archaeology asks us what is under our feet, rather than in front of our face

What we can hold in our hands, rather than holds in our heads

It asks us to put aside what we read and hear from words, dialogue and text and instead look at and touch the visual, the physical and the tangible

So yes, still thinking through the things #TheDig has made us dig up, but its cinematic insistence on making us think through our eyes and ears at different times, to fragment our sensory engagement in real time, is really exciting, I think