‘Enys Men’ and the Cornish Revival
Mark Jenkin’s latest, Enys Men, Cornish for ‘Stone Island’, is notable not just because of its unflinching folk-horror tones or its enthusiastic critical reviews, but because it is the first film ever with Cornish-language marketing materials. Jenkin’s oeuvre revolves around Cornwall. In his BAFTA-winning debut Bait (2019), Jenkin navigates the tensions between the traditional fishing industry and tourism of a small Cornish coastal town. In Enys Men, Jenkin turns to an uninhabited Cornish island and focalises on psychological torment and Wicker-Man-esque horror experienced by a conservation worker. Collectively, his work shows Cornwall’s valid place on the creative map. Despite the county’s distance from the major creative, economic hubs of England and the fraught place of Cornwall in modern politics and language, Jenkin’s films and marketing strategy platform the county’s rich significance.
Those who’ve heard of the ‘Celtic Alliance’ may know that Cornwall was once its own country, and then a broadly autonomous state from the rest of England. Under Tudor rule, it was forced under centralised jurisdiction (enter the Cornish Rebellion of 1497), until it was then finally administered into Great Britain with the rest of England in the late 1700s. Part of this gradual erosion of Cornish autonomy was the systematic overwriting and decline of the Cornish language. Up to the mid-1900s, the language was extinct. Recent revival movements meant that, in 2002, the government recognized the Cornish as an official minority language. It is still, however, a ‘critically endangered’ language: one tier from being dead.
There are now a small number of bilingual Cornish and English speakers. Around 3000 road signs in the county now have Cornish on them and some Cornish schools teach the language. There is a new dictionary and certain brands like Korev and St. Austell incorporate it into their marketing. Many of us now know the word ‘Kernow’, Cornish for Cornwall.
Jenkin’s use of Cornish in the film and its marketing is obviously participating in the resurgence of the language. But, as much as Jenkins creates space and opportunities for Cornish speakers, I think he is trying to show that Cornwall has its own language and history in the first place.
Empowering Cornishness is important because Cornwall is so often undervalued on a national stage, politically and creatively. Cornwall is the second poorest region in Northern Europe. It has no motorways, one university, and one major hospital. Its industries are so concentrated around the coast and dependent on tourism that the county faces vast economic depressions in winter and there is no stable, year-round income for locals. Second-home owners and gentrification have driven up house prices and the cost of living so drastically that people who have lived there their whole lives can no longer afford to stay. Inland, the former tin mining industry that helped prop up the region have gone into significant decline. Of course, this is not to diminish from the north-south economic divide, itself a very real political demarcation perpetuated by Westminister for centuries and re-entrenched under modern conservative politics. But Cornwall has its very own tangible history of being quietly taken over and overlooked by Parliament so that differs it from many of its southern counterparts.
Jenkin’s use of Cornish then pays attention to Cornish history. It acknowledges Cornwall’s complex relationship with government, a hegemonic England, and showcases Cornwall’s distinct social identity. Enys Men and Bait empower the county’s creative character by situating its stories and mythologies in a way that is unfetishized, distinctly itself. With Enys Men’s marketing, Jenkin’s Cornish in creative essence and language proffer the ways that we can reconceptualize our understanding of the county; the ways we can more appreciatively realise it as a place of political and creative interest.
By Mia Fulford
Featured image credit: Mia Fulford
