Index For a Film
On Peter Treherne’s Matter of Britain
Becca Voelcker
Matter of Britain
Director
PETER TREHERNE
Year
2026
Country UK
This text is a guide for looking, taking the form of an index to structure the themes, concerns, and formal elements of Peter Treherne’s Matter of Britain. It is a kind of concrete poetry—itself an experiment in the form of a programme text.
ACTING: as play; as politics.
AGRICULTURE: and agri-business in England; in art history; and Enclosures; as land-scaping; traditional.
ANACHRONISM: as historiographic inevitability (making jump cuts through history to what matters now); as hoody under knight’s armour; as humour. See also trainers.
ANIMALS: as companion species; deer at dawn, hunted; as livestock.
ARCHIVE: and film as repository; and land as mnemonic. See also Museum of English Rural Life.
BOOK OF HOURS, the: as Christian vision of natural harmony; cycles of seasons in; as indicator of social oppression; as influence for filmmaker Peter Treherne.
BRESSON, Robert: and the automatic gesture; and a focus on hands and manual labour; removal of self-consciousness through repetition in the technique of. See also acting; performance.
BRITAIN: as too broad and too bland a name for this patch of southern England, between woods and white cliffs. See also myth; nation.
BROWNLOW, Kevin and Andrew Mollo: documentary reenactment of 17th-century struggle for common land; and history as lens on the contemporary. See also costume; documentary; film; land; reenactment.
CELLULOID: grain and materiality of; industrial production of; as plant cellulose; and the sun (photography and photosynthesis).
CLIMATE: breakdown (as unspoken presence); political; weather as symptom of.
COLLABORATION: artistic; improvised; long-term; shared feasting in celebration of.
COSTUME: and anachronism; and Cosplay; in church; as custom. See also habit.
CYCLES: and cyclical time (history like a cartwheel); of daily and seasonal work; as rhythm (milking cows, a panting ewe in labour, shearing sheep into leaping lightness, a wheatfield, a year-long film).
DOCUMENTARY: as fiction; and truth; political potential of.
DOORS: as portals (at dawn a man steps over documentary’s threshold into fabulation); through time.
ECOSYSTEM: and community; disrupted.
ENVIRONMENT: as matter hanging in the air as parts per million; as omnipresent; and polycrisis.
FAMILY: ancestral; as cast and crew; names (in credits, like clans).
FARM. See agriculture.
FIELDWORK: as ethnography; and farming; long-term.
FILM: 16mm; collective production of; and community screening; to wander in (as if also in that land, walking).
FUTURE. See past.
GATHERING: family; as fold, flock, herd; of over 300 people to make a film; of knights, angels and devils.
GENRE: as convention; disruption of; scenes from ordinary life.
HABIT: as long, loose garment worn in religious contexts; as repeated tendency or practice (what we wear and what we do as habitation, placemaking)
IDENTITY: collective; constructed; emplaced; historical.
INDUSTRIALISATION: milking machines and; of wheat.
JACKDAW: as metaphor (“The artist cannot be extricated from the climate, just as the sower cannot avoid the siege of rooks and jackdaws”—Peter Treherne).
KNIGHT: in hoody and dressing-up-box armour; toasting marshmallows. See also acting; quest.
LABOUR: agricultural; artistic; collective; of love.
LAND: cinema; cultivated; and sea in a plastic dinghy; as soil; as nation.
LANDSCAPE: and memory; and power; traditions in painting. See also genre; portrait.
LANGUAGE: agricultural; archaic; Christian; English; literary; scripted; slow cinema as.
LEGEND: Arthurian.
LITERATURE: as inspiration; and narrative structure (chapters).
MATTER: as problem; as subject under consideration; as physical substance; repeated as a word turned from matter as meaning into matter in your mouth; etymology of (from materia, mater, mother)
MEDIEVAL: paintings as inspiration. See also agriculture; labour; literature.
MUSEUM of English Rural Life; research by filmmaker Peter Treherne in the. See also film: archive.
NATION: island; and soil; as construct. See also Britain; identity; myth.
NATURE: as concept; domination of; living with; rights of.
NARRATIVE: emplaced; historical; manipulation of; retelling.
OGAWA Shinsuke: as comparison to filmmaker Peter Treherne in reenactment of local legends with Japanese farmers; practice of community filmmaking; as land cinema. See also Brownlow; Rodríguez; Watkins.
PAST: narratives of the; nostalgia for the; as path to present.
PERFORMANCE: as fabulation; and play. See also acting; identity.
PLACE: and belonging; changes in; as space of significance.
PORTRAIT: collective; film; as pictorial orientation and philosophy (every landscape is a portrait of the people who shaped it).
QUEST: for elusive reward; as pretext for play; as narrative conceit; as question.
REENACTMENT: and remembering; as ritual. See also acting; anachronism; performance.
RITUAL: and gesture; playful; religious; as scripted words.
RODRÍGUEZ, Marta: as comparison to Peter Treherne in collaborative filmmaking with Indigenous farmers in Colombia; and land dispossession; and reenacted myths. See also collaboration; documentary.
SCALE: to see the landscape at; time.
SCRIPT: as collective part to perform; as habit; prayer as; social.
SEASONS. See Book of Hours; cycles; weather.
SOIL: and stories; as sustenance; vitality of. See also matter.
SPECIES: as community; loss.
TIME: and anachronism; feeling of; filmic; historical; seasonal.
TRADITION: agricultural; in art history; as invention; as limitation; as politics.
TRAINERS: as anachronism; and costume. See also knight.
TREHERNE, Peter: as filmmaker; as villager.
VILLAGE: community; Mayfield; as opposed to city; and slow time.
VOICE: as agency; collective; scripted.
WATKINS, Peter: as comparison to filmmaker Peter Treherne in reenactment of Paris Commune; and labour; Leftist politics of. See also anachronism; costume; documentary.
WEATHER: as atmospheric condition; and emotion; as verb (to wear away, to withstand).
WALKING: at dawn; on land; in mud.
YEARS: as chapters; seasons compiled into; as what it took to make this film.
ZEITGEIST: as haunting; as spirit of an era; as time performing itself.
Becca Voelcker is a writer, academic, and BBC New Generation Thinker. Her first book, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction, was published by the University of California Press in 2025, alongside a BBC Radio programme and a curated film season at the Barbican.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Matter of Britain at Barbican Cinema, 18 April 2026.
ACTING: as play; as politics.
AGRICULTURE: and agri-business in England; in art history; and Enclosures; as land-scaping; traditional.
ANACHRONISM: as historiographic inevitability (making jump cuts through history to what matters now); as hoody under knight’s armour; as humour. See also trainers.
ANIMALS: as companion species; deer at dawn, hunted; as livestock.
ARCHIVE: and film as repository; and land as mnemonic. See also Museum of English Rural Life.
BOOK OF HOURS, the: as Christian vision of natural harmony; cycles of seasons in; as indicator of social oppression; as influence for filmmaker Peter Treherne.
BRESSON, Robert: and the automatic gesture; and a focus on hands and manual labour; removal of self-consciousness through repetition in the technique of. See also acting; performance.
BRITAIN: as too broad and too bland a name for this patch of southern England, between woods and white cliffs. See also myth; nation.
BROWNLOW, Kevin and Andrew Mollo: documentary reenactment of 17th-century struggle for common land; and history as lens on the contemporary. See also costume; documentary; film; land; reenactment.
CELLULOID: grain and materiality of; industrial production of; as plant cellulose; and the sun (photography and photosynthesis).
CLIMATE: breakdown (as unspoken presence); political; weather as symptom of.
COLLABORATION: artistic; improvised; long-term; shared feasting in celebration of.
COSTUME: and anachronism; and Cosplay; in church; as custom. See also habit.
CYCLES: and cyclical time (history like a cartwheel); of daily and seasonal work; as rhythm (milking cows, a panting ewe in labour, shearing sheep into leaping lightness, a wheatfield, a year-long film).
DOCUMENTARY: as fiction; and truth; political potential of.
DOORS: as portals (at dawn a man steps over documentary’s threshold into fabulation); through time.
ECOSYSTEM: and community; disrupted.
ENVIRONMENT: as matter hanging in the air as parts per million; as omnipresent; and polycrisis.
FAMILY: ancestral; as cast and crew; names (in credits, like clans).
FARM. See agriculture.
FIELDWORK: as ethnography; and farming; long-term.
FILM: 16mm; collective production of; and community screening; to wander in (as if also in that land, walking).
FUTURE. See past.
GATHERING: family; as fold, flock, herd; of over 300 people to make a film; of knights, angels and devils.
GENRE: as convention; disruption of; scenes from ordinary life.
HABIT: as long, loose garment worn in religious contexts; as repeated tendency or practice (what we wear and what we do as habitation, placemaking)
IDENTITY: collective; constructed; emplaced; historical.
INDUSTRIALISATION: milking machines and; of wheat.
JACKDAW: as metaphor (“The artist cannot be extricated from the climate, just as the sower cannot avoid the siege of rooks and jackdaws”—Peter Treherne).
KNIGHT: in hoody and dressing-up-box armour; toasting marshmallows. See also acting; quest.
LABOUR: agricultural; artistic; collective; of love.
LAND: cinema; cultivated; and sea in a plastic dinghy; as soil; as nation.
LANDSCAPE: and memory; and power; traditions in painting. See also genre; portrait.
LANGUAGE: agricultural; archaic; Christian; English; literary; scripted; slow cinema as.
LEGEND: Arthurian.
LITERATURE: as inspiration; and narrative structure (chapters).
MATTER: as problem; as subject under consideration; as physical substance; repeated as a word turned from matter as meaning into matter in your mouth; etymology of (from materia, mater, mother)
MEDIEVAL: paintings as inspiration. See also agriculture; labour; literature.
MUSEUM of English Rural Life; research by filmmaker Peter Treherne in the. See also film: archive.
NATION: island; and soil; as construct. See also Britain; identity; myth.
NATURE: as concept; domination of; living with; rights of.
NARRATIVE: emplaced; historical; manipulation of; retelling.
OGAWA Shinsuke: as comparison to filmmaker Peter Treherne in reenactment of local legends with Japanese farmers; practice of community filmmaking; as land cinema. See also Brownlow; Rodríguez; Watkins.
PAST: narratives of the; nostalgia for the; as path to present.
PERFORMANCE: as fabulation; and play. See also acting; identity.
PLACE: and belonging; changes in; as space of significance.
PORTRAIT: collective; film; as pictorial orientation and philosophy (every landscape is a portrait of the people who shaped it).
QUEST: for elusive reward; as pretext for play; as narrative conceit; as question.
REENACTMENT: and remembering; as ritual. See also acting; anachronism; performance.
RITUAL: and gesture; playful; religious; as scripted words.
RODRÍGUEZ, Marta: as comparison to Peter Treherne in collaborative filmmaking with Indigenous farmers in Colombia; and land dispossession; and reenacted myths. See also collaboration; documentary.
SCALE: to see the landscape at; time.
SCRIPT: as collective part to perform; as habit; prayer as; social.
SEASONS. See Book of Hours; cycles; weather.
SOIL: and stories; as sustenance; vitality of. See also matter.
SPECIES: as community; loss.
TIME: and anachronism; feeling of; filmic; historical; seasonal.
TRADITION: agricultural; in art history; as invention; as limitation; as politics.
TRAINERS: as anachronism; and costume. See also knight.
TREHERNE, Peter: as filmmaker; as villager.
VILLAGE: community; Mayfield; as opposed to city; and slow time.
VOICE: as agency; collective; scripted.
WATKINS, Peter: as comparison to filmmaker Peter Treherne in reenactment of Paris Commune; and labour; Leftist politics of. See also anachronism; costume; documentary.
WEATHER: as atmospheric condition; and emotion; as verb (to wear away, to withstand).
WALKING: at dawn; on land; in mud.
YEARS: as chapters; seasons compiled into; as what it took to make this film.
ZEITGEIST: as haunting; as spirit of an era; as time performing itself.
Becca Voelcker is a writer, academic, and BBC New Generation Thinker. Her first book, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction, was published by the University of California Press in 2025, alongside a BBC Radio programme and a curated film season at the Barbican.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Matter of Britain at Barbican Cinema, 18 April 2026.