Showing posts with label Land and Freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Land and Freedom. Show all posts

Monday 31 August 2015

Air-brushed from history ?

This is a Festival preview of Héroes Invisibles (Invisible Heroes) (2015)

More views of or before Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


29 August

This is a Festival preview of Héroes Invisibles (Invisible Heroes) (2015) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

Héroes Invisibles (Invisible Heroes) (2015) is subtitled Afroamericanos en la Guerra de España (The part played by Afro-Americans in The Spanish Civil War [NB an interpretative rendering of the title (which is in Spanish) for this blog]).

It is the mark of a well-thought-through documentary that, in little more than an hour, it can not only tell its story, but also although much of what we are told about has happened in the late 1930s, and in Spain have us conclude its significance to where we are now, in the States (amongst many other places), with regard to 'respecting' everyone’s civil rights [dare one say human rights ?], i.e. that euphemism for the fact that such rights are not always respected (?) :

As directors Alfonso Domingo and Jordi Torrent clearly appreciate very well, black-and-white photographs (the visual record mainly takes that form here) can so often, when simply displayed, just somehow invoke disconnection, both from when they were taken, and, as a result, from the lives of those pictured*. On one level, of course, it is a little as if one looks at one’s parents (or grandparents) if lucky enough to have known them without being able to conceive of their having (or ever having had) childish, irrational or lustful desires.

[Not least given that, as fifteen-year-olds, we cannot easily (pleasantly ?) imagine the act that brought us into being], then, on another level, we are at four potential removes, at least, from men such as James Yates (author of From Mississippi to Madrid, and whose life the film partly takes time following) :

(1) He was still a young man at the time of the Spanish Civil War (19361939) [the link is to an article in the Encyclopædia Britannica]

(2) Before going to Spain, and because of being a black man (or some would prefer to say 'a person of colour'), as well as someone who had stood, in various places of work, for unions to be recognized, Yates had experienced discrimination and persecution

(3) He then took part in a conflict : although Yates was a driver, not a combatant², the conflict was fierce, and he most certainly saw action in this role (and saw others die, or, in the case of a good friend, Yates only learnt of his death once he had newly arrived in Spain)

(4) When he came back, from a place where he had been treated very differently from at home, his support for what he still believed in had probably hardly begun


By taking steps to make these points clear to us (please see below), this film ensures that there are no hiding-places for what seems, unless checked, to be our human tendency to apathy or lack of compassion, and so it makes better use of monochrome images than did Still the Enemy Within (2014) [a review is still to come...], which had converted some of what it presented to us to 3D : doing so almost became a distraction³ to seeing what participants in the strike by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) had shot (or those very few journalists who troubled to cover the story on the ground) ?


Instead (by using various means), Héroes Invisibles much more imaginatively⁴ visualizes how the Afro-Americans who fought in the International Brigades (specifically, the Lincoln Brigade) have, in our non-specialist conception, been effectively air-brushed from history (though that phrase is not heard in the film). Which is to say that Torrent and Domingo enlarge our understanding of this supposed civil war (please see below), partly because we probably have not had reason to see black American soldiers, nurses, drivers amongst those who stood against the fascist forces under General Franco.

Actually, that is because we do not usually have ready access to the visual evidence, whereas at least half-a-dozen historians, at various points, make appearances in the film to share what their research has established from the contemporary photographic record, alongside documents, and memoirs and other publications. As to the status of the conflict, one also thinks of Syria, and what Return to Homs (2013) wanted to propose, with the accord of Amnesty International (@amnesty), i.e. the assertion that what was happening in that country, if properly described, did not constitute 'civil war' (as claimed).

(That said, unlike with the calls on Yates' longer-lived (if maybe less-demanding) tenacity, we can see in The Salt of the Earth (2014) [which Torrent (@nycjordi), as well as Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm), highly approve], how Sebastião Salgado, a photographer who had been committed to covering events in conflict-zones, found that he could not go on with his photographic reportage after the experience of seeing yet more lives destroyed in the former Yugoslavia and, on a return trip, in Rwanda. (This was after the time that Salgado had spent shooting scenes of struggle in the not unrelated sphere of the effect of global economic pressures on jobs and work.))

In this country, significant energy per se may be devoted to marking anniversaries of VE Day, or the outbreak of World War I, but maybe ‘the establishment’ conveniently neglects recalling when the States and Great Britain stood by as a war was prosecuted, on Spanish soil, and very greatly helped by Hitler’s German forces, and those,
from Italy, of Mussolini. It ended on 1 April 1939, yet only for World War II to break out, and Britain to enter it on 3 September, a bare five months later. Catalan film directors (as well as authors, artists, etc.), have, of course, wanted to oppose such neglect of the memory of what happened (quite apart from any consideration of the gratuitous tactical gain that Axis powers had obtained, by being able to practise the tactics of Blitzkrieg ?).


Focusing on its topic, Héroes Invisibles steers clear of very much national accusation, and also of the complicating issue of factions that arose amongst the different republican / anti-fascist groupings⁵. That said, there are other films that have come to Festival Central in preceding years of Camera Catalonia [the link is to 'What is Catalan cinema ?'], such as Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008), which movingly centres on the Italian Air Force’s bombing of Barcelona [an era obliquely alluded to in [ ] Born (2014??)].

One thing that this film does, of course, desire is to challenge our impression of those who fought, if we derive it from the famous novel set during The Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The reason is that what Hemingway purported to tell us through the character of Robert Jordan, Héroes Invisibles states, in passing, is highly atypical with regard to the actual composition of the International Brigades. The consequence is that our having had regard to, and believed, a fictionalized account, rather than knowing the facts, has significantly marginalized knowledge of what James Yates
did (and others in his position).



Ernest Hemingway, working at his book For Whom the Bell Tolls, at Sun Valley, Idaho, in December 1939 [taken from the Wikipedia® web-page on him : is Hemingway working, or is this another pose (please see below) ?]


Yet, probably more significantly than whether ‘Papa’ Hemingway told truth, or betrayed the nature of the men whom he had met in Spain (as some say, in favour of a portrait of such a man as himself ?), this film informs us, through what happened to Yates, so much about the lives of people who substantially underpinned what is shown taking place in films such as Selma (2014) :

In Spain, welcomed, and treated as equals, but they soon had, as Yates did, unpleasant reminders of the past on their return. Yet they had the continuing courage, vision and fight to want to stake their claim on such better things in the States…


End-notes

¹ Likewise, the flickering of a silent film needs a good score, and it is best performed live. Not, though (although it is too often said), to bring it alive / to life, but to ease our way into its world, when, in its own terms, it was made for, and to have, accompaniment. Indeed, such films, after good image-quality and frame-rate had been secured, already do have movement (hence ‘moving / motion picture’, although often styled ‘movie’. (The giving of The Academy Awards ('Oscars®') is decided by The International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [emphasis added] (@TheAcademy)).

The best silent films have arguably and deservedly survived better, and are so much more alive, than many a Cinemascope release in Technicolor®. Yet perfectly posed early silver-nitrate ?? can be gorgeous, but does having a predilection for colour (e.g. even early colour footage of Hitler) cause us to keep our distance ?

² One substituted the word ‘fighter’ with ‘combatant’, because the film shows what a fighter Yates was, and continued to be, for what he believed in.

³ One can only speak as one alive at the time [which, then, benefited watching Generation Right (2015)], whereas other viewers are necessarily too young. However, we all respond with a variety of experiences to cinema (it is almost what cinema is for, to be a malleable medium of the mind and spirit ?), so, for some, 3D-ized photos, rendered almost spectral, would evoke a near-psychotic episode, because of their coupling with the disturbance of the audio [of background voices, making comment too quiet to be wholly audible, too audible to be wholly ignored]...

⁴ For example, in the documentary Virunga (2014) [which came to Festival Central (@CamPicturehouse) for a Q&A (before its impressive nominations for BAFTAs (@BAFTA) and The Academy Awards (@)], the ‘tick-over’ of a teleprinter was used to help present the pressure of events unfolding because director Orlando von Einsiedel had employed a drama editor (Masahiro Hirakubo).

⁵ For which, though, we can look to Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), or Catalan director Óscar Aibar’s El bosc (The Forest) (2012), the latter of which screened at Cambridge Film Festival 2013 (#CamFF), during Camera Catalonia [the link is to 'What is Catalan cinema ?'].




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Tuesday 3 June 2014

A safe space […] where we can dance ?

This is a review of Jimmy’s Hall (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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2 June (updated 3 June, following Ken Loach's masterly Q&A, as hosted by The Arts Picturehouse's (@CamPicturehouse's) own Jack Toye (@jackabuss))

This is a review of Jimmy’s Hall (2014)

Director Ken Loach first began working with screenwriter Paul Laverty on Carla’s Song (1996), then My Name is Joe (1998), since when (including this one) they have made ten further films together*. Their previous film was The Angels’ Share (2012), but, certainly once we are out of Glasgow, it occupies significantly different territory in terms of historicity and emotional depth from that of Jimmy’s Hall (2014) (even if it is rooted in the world of rare malt whisky, and lost or ‘mothballed’ distilleries) :

The Angels' Share romps with its central conceit, whereas Jimmy’s Hall broods over its. In between, Loach made The Spirit of ‘45 (2013), though…



The opening sequence proper – with just a rill of bright water as variation from the slow process of Jimmy Gralton (Barry Ward) and his effects, being hauled along the winding road – complements other moments of transit in the film, just as 1922 (located by the ‘ten years earlier’ of a caption to come around ten minutes later), is an adjunct to understanding where we have begun : parallels, paths, not mapped out, but taken (not lightly), and then What are the sequelae… ?

The story-telling montage has told us much already, with news-reel footage** from New York City of the early-to-late 1920s, showing the boom and bust of The Great Depression : when, after a pivotal moment a good while later on (to which we return anon), Jimmy refers to what happened with The Wall Street Crash, we both have those images, and they have already helped us understand his own history. Personal experience as motivation for campaigning for change, but pitted against the masters and pastors (as we heard them succinctly referred to) and what they wish to protect.


Without a doubt, in Jimmy’s impassioned plea to reject greed in favour of motives such as love, Loach and Laverty are appealing to our times of austerity and downturn. They are pointing the lesson that – though, of course, the film never uses any such word – sustainability, and people being able to have something that they can rely on to ground a worthwhile life, are what being alive should be about, not facing eviction for missing a payment of rent…

In Jim Norton, as Father Sheridan (on ‘the pastor’ side of things), Loach has gone with an inspired choice, casting Father Ted’s Bishop Brennan as the man from the church who is pushing, with landowners / high-ups such as O’Keefe (Brían F. O'Byrne), for the status quo, even embracing (in words, at any rate) the cause of Irish country dancing so that he can denigrate American jazz for (supposedly) seeking to supplant it. Norton has more fire, of a zealous kind, just in his eyes than many another actor would have in the whole of enacting a towering tirade, and he makes a perfect complement for Jimmy (and has his foil in Father Seamus).

Yes, the exact detail may be fable, with exaggeration, conflation or invention, but no one is claiming that this is a bio-pic (whatever defines one), any more than with Saving Mr. Banks (2013). It is a telling of the origins of The Pearse–Connolly Hall 1922, Co. Leitrim, filmed on location there, and in Co. Sligo (which, Ken Loach seemed to be saying in the Q&A, was where the replica was built). It is the telling of Jimmy Gralton (who died on 29 December 1945), even if, in part, fictionalized.

At the start of the film, when the cart has had to interrupt the dancing that Father Sheridan later affects to approve, Jimmy apologizes for having missed ‘Charlie’s funeral’ (his brother) – it is just a fleeting moment, as his mother acknowledges the words, but it hints at exile, exile where his mother may have been under the care of pastoral visits from Sheridan. Loach, who is sceptical of authority and what it does to people’s motives (as in the powerful film Hidden Agenda (1990), set in Northern Ireland at the time of the troubles - and, interestingly, with Jim Norton again and centrally, as Brodie to Brian Cox's well-intentioned Kerrigan), makes Sheridan much more than a one-dimensional figure of self-interest in utilizing police, the landed classes and even the visit of The Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri, and the 31st Eucharistic Congress to further his aims : whatever arm-waving his fellow priest Father Seamus (Andrew Scott) may make, it is he, though not wavering from his opposition, who comes to a grudging respect for Jimmy’s courage.


— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014


Laverty’s story-telling also makes us work, needing to listen to what else is said in passing, and giving us, without compromise, the politics of the 1920s and 1930s, following the end (of which captions told us) of The Civil War : the world that he shows has a vivid disconnection between the rule of law (represented by the court and its judgements) and what happens when power is exercised on the ground, but concertedly coming together in the closing scenes. Just as with the earlier films referenced (in particular Land and Freedom (1995)), we may not exactly follow the ins and outs of the political machinations, but we see again the broad thrust of unholy alliances, betrayals, and seeking self-determination.

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014

At the centre of this world, for part of the time and offering hope (as does the enthusiasm of Marie (Aisling Franciosi)), is Oonagh (Simone Kirby), and our piecing together her story, in the context of the reasons for Jimmy’s absence and return. In particular, the heightened reality of the moonlight scene - if one surrenders to it - is electrifying, and part of the sure use of light in this film***, as also when Jimmy sets foot in the building, and starts opening the shutters. At one point soon after, not necessarily through our inattention, but seemingly in a wish to show how little separates the two initial time-periods, we hesitate, because the subdued colours are suddenly gone (though their brilliance was always suggested by Oonagh’s hat, as she cycles away in the gloaming from Jimmy's homecoming), to say when in time we are.

The credentials of Jimmy’s Hall to be a well-made feature are compounded by little technical things such as sparing use of soft focus, but varying the depth of field from a tight one (within which faces are brought in and out of sharpness), or a more generous one to encompass the wider sweep of a scene – and the full-throated whirl of the dance (inside the hall, as against outside on the road), whilst letting us imagine that we see Jimmy show us some dance-steps, but doing much of it by suggestion from the waist (or thereabouts) up.

Other hallmarks to notice are the quality of the writing and editing, the extent to which – in the two scenes where there is discussion in the hall – the debate is on multiple levels (as in Land and Freedom), for and against, and how violence (or the threat of it) tinges the hope that Jimmy’s supporters give him, and he finds in Oonagh. The performances from Ward, Kirby, Norton are strong, and committed to the truth of this film as one feels that McDonagh and his crew, led by Brendan Gleeson, are to that of Calvary (2014).

Ultimately, how we respond to this piece of work here should depend less on what Jimmy’s politics (we see him take stock when leafing through a book by James Connolly) may have been than on his principled care for others : though Loach and Laverty present scant favourable view of the likes of Sheridan and O’Keefe, they give enough idea of the complexity of the political situation in The Republic, and, as with The Spanish Civil War (in Land and Freedom), how alignments and changing coalitions not only affect the course of history, but individual human beings.



End-notes

* Sources : IMDb’s page for Laverty, and Loach on Loach (Faber & Faber (ed. Fuller, Graham), London, 1998, p. 78) in the excellent Faber series where directors talk about their films, broadly chronologically.

About Laverty, Loach says Then Carla’s Song came out of the blue. Paul Laverty, who had been working as a civil rights lawyer in Nicaragua, got in touch with us about doing a script after he had been there [p. 105].


** As deftly assembled as in Spirit of ’45 – or, for that matter, interspersed in the two time-periods of Land and Freedom (1995) (Loach working with Jim Allen, just before starting with Laverty).

*** Several people in the Q&A commented on how well light had been used, and Loach had nothing but praise for cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who is not even given a credit on IMDb's web-page for the film !), who, we were told, had largely used available light (shooting on Kodak stock).



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 9 March 2014

Don’t play hide and seek with reality !*

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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9 March

This is a review of a special screening (from 35mm) at The Arts Picturehouse (@CamPicturehouse), Cambridge, of Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990), as presented as part of the series ‘Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories Season’ (http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org) by the University of Cambridge’s CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities)

The invited guests of CRASSH’s own Hugo Drochon, historian Tony Craig and film producer David Hickman, introduced the film and usefully put it in its political and cinematic context. That said, the film was made a quarter of a century ago, and what we might know now (assuming that Sinclair is right that there is a consensus) about the truth of claims that there was a Tory smear campaign against Harold Wilson may not have been available at the time of this film (and in 1998 – please see the title cited, below) – or not easily to director Ken Loach (or Jim Allen – please see below). (Hickman stated, both before and following the screening, that he thinks that Loach did believe the story about a smear.)  

Besides which, although Loach has close relationships with his writers, Jim Allen is solely credited with producing the script (i.e. not as a co-writer with Loach) : if, therefore, it were germane that talk in the film of a Wilson plot does not accord with the evidence that we have (for it may not be germane, if this is a fiction - please see below), Allen as well as Loach must presumably have ‘bought into’ that notion at the time, even if only enough to make it a part of the skeleton on which the piece is built.

And, historically verifiable accounts apart, the basic message remains : rubbishing others and their reputations can and has been used throughout history by those seeking power (or seeking it for others, e.g. from the US operations with various regimes in Central America to Julius Caesar and Ralph Fiennes' film Coriolanus (2011) (as based on Shakespeare)), irrespective of what are asserted as laudable reasons for so doing.

In other words, the film need not just revolve in its own world, but can be a paradigm for how power is sought, gained and held. This is probably what Loach means in his description of the film (quoted interviewed by Graham Fuller as part of the favoured Faber & Faber series on this blog, Loach on Loach**) :

I guess it’s best described as a fiction inspired by fact

Earlier, Loach talks to Fuller, the book’s editor, about the film’s critical reception, saying that :

You hope some of these notions [sc. about what British forces or public servants have done] linger with people in the audience, but in terms of public debate it’s very difficult to get anything started. One of the ongoing frustrations of film-making is that you try to put out a set of ideas or a piece of evidence in front of an audience, while being as gripping and as entertaining as you can, but critics never deal with the substance or follow up on the questions you’re asking in a film.

Is this why you regard most film criticism as decadent ?

I think so, yes. The critics will examine the brush strokes, but they won’t stand back and see the content of the painting. I don’t know why that is.
[Ibid., pp. 82–83]


Paradigm or not as the film may be intended to be, it is, as Hickman pointed out, beautifully lit, using available light – not strictly so, as he explained afterwards, but as near to it as could be, and a model that, he observed, has been taken over by Hollywood in the interim. (Regarding watching the print, Hickman observed how different the scene looks when Harris is partly in darkness, and then comes into the light, with which the DVD version does not compare.) In the introduction to the chapter in which he deals with, amongst other films, Hidden Agenda, Fuller explains where the film and Loach’s collaborations fit in with his career to date :

Following the critically acclaimed and appropriately controversial Hidden Agenda (1990), their [sc. Loach and Allen’s] initial film collaboration, they went on to make Raining Stones (1993) and Land and Freedom
(1995).

[…] The third factor [in ‘this not unextraordinary renaissance’]*** was the teaming of Loach and Barry Ackroyd, who has photographed all of Loach’s features since Riff-Raff and has brought to them the kind of uncompromising visual rawness that had been lacking from Loach’s films in the Looks and Smiles era. Ackroyd’s cinematography restored to Loach’s and his writers’ world its aesthetic integrity. […]
[Ibid., pp. 78–79]

To contemporary viewers, Brian Cox and Maurice Roëves may be very familiar faces****, from which we can take some comfort in this sinister scenario, and both seem just right for their roles (supported, in the former case, by John Benfield (as Maxwell)) – even physically, Cox has the solidity to be a high-ranking policeman (which we believe will translate into moral and intellectual weightedness), Roëves the wiriness that fits a man on the run. The triangle of principals is completed by Frances McDormand, who shows singular self-determination and sheer spunk as Ingrid Jessner, the woman whose partner, with Harris, is at the (apparent) centre of matters. Unknown to her, and to Kerridge and Maxwell, everything about them has been researched, and they are less the investigators (she with a civil liberties group to which her partner and she belong, he to the police force) than the investigated.

We have high hopes, almost alongside Loach, that Kerridge will do the job with which he has been entrusted, and not worry about putting a few noses out of joint, as we see him happily doing for much of the film. The nub of the film is to lead us to understand how limited his room for manoeuvre is, hence the relevance to a season about conspiracy and the theories that postulate its existence : it is a moot point whether all who infer 'hands at work behind the scenes', and hence a hidden agenda, embrace the terms ‘conspiracy [theorists / theory]’ to describe themselves and what they believe happened or is happening, or whether it is a term of abuse***** from those who dismiss both theories and theorists. Not always from a position of power, such as that from which the film’s Sir Robert Neil (Bernard Archard) and Alec Nevin (Patrick Kavanagh) address Kerridge, but usually with derision.

As the film’s tension builds from that point, one wonders whether it is going to end, for Ingrid, as for a young-seeming Meryl Streep in Silkwood (1983) – or for Harris… In the event, one is reminded of those shocking moments in other depictions when the ground has, stealthily and step by step, been taken out from someone... until the teetering denouement is, because of the physics of gravity, an inevitability – for want of a better analogy, a demise of the kind that David Carradine (as Bill), in Kill Bill Volume 2 (2004), is unaware of facing.

Loach and Allen tell their story with care, and are, for example, content to show us Harris amongst the vividness and noise of the Orange Order parades, but without telling us till later who he is, because they trust that we will recall him and his behaviour. Kerridge and Ingrid are both intended to invoke our sympathies as seeking the truth, although they take different paths and end up diverging (which, of course, only adds to the drama).

This is a film that looks very good cinematically, and still has much to say, Sinclair’s objections as to its historicity apart (it is a document, of a sort, of its own time, however we judge Loach’s politics and where they have him lean) – both emotionally and as to how the world works. As to what Allen and he sought to weave together, perhaps the final word should be left to Loach (continuing the short quotation above) :

It’s very close in the depiction of the murders that were carried out by the RUC and in the corrupting effect of the British presence in Northern Ireland, but the whole issue of fact or fiction gets quite tricky at this point, and I’m not sure we solved it altogether satisfactorily – or the attempt to weave together the Stalker elements with the conspiracy against Wilson.
[Ibid., p. 84]


End-notes

* As Kerridge (Brian Cox) is told, before he is ultimately manipulated into accepting the reality propounded by the film’s conspirators (rather than exposing the reality behind it) : for, as they candidly tell him, they did what they did, it cannot be undone, and they did it – and still think it – ‘for the best’. (The old Machiavellian-style ends over means argument…)

** London, 1998, p. 84.

*** The second being sympathetic producers Rebecca O’Brien and Sally Hibbin.

**** Cox, for example, from Menenius in Fiennes’ Coriolanus (2011) (as well as the voice of disembodied and recreated Alan Watts in Her (2013)), and Roëves from the Chief Inspector in Brighton Rock (2010) (or even Colonel Munro in The Last of the Mohicans (1992)).

***** Radio 3 (@BBCRadio3) has renamed its late-night arts programme Free Thinking, but there were times when to be called a freethinker was meant in a wholly derogatory way.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Thursday 21 November 2013

The ferocity and frailty of war

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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21 November


97 = S : 17 / A : 16 / C : 17 / M : 15 / P : 16 / F : 16


A rating and review of Land and Freedom (1995)



S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



* Contains spoilers *

This film, set relatively early in the Spanish Civil War, not only has some gorgeous music by George Fenton, which only momentarily attracts one’s attention when it should not, but some very good acting and scripting. Director Ken Loach, working with cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, fills the screen with the immediacy of faces, and, at the times when David Carr (Ian Hurt) is part of the militia (POUM), immerses one in the vibrancy of that life and comradeship.

Loach also puts a distance on it, by the medium of (what turns out to be) David’s granddaughter Kim reading the letters that he sent back from the front, with a deliberate alienation that he is somehow able to send back photographs of those alongside whom he is fighting – despite never seeing a camera, one might come up with an explanation where he gets films developed on leave, but it seems wiser to infer that Loach intends it symbolically.

The effect of those photos being looked through puts the events that are being so vividly shown, and with such a colour palette, back into history as ‘old photos’, along with the folded press clippings : unless we can stop and think, clearly the latter had not been sent with the former, but have ended up together as a subjective account along with (in the newspaper) a supposedly objective one.

Hurt is never better than when his voice is heard reading his letters aloud as Kim looks at them, and the images from abroad. On screen, probably deliberately, he seems a shadow of what we hear, which makes him perfect to be afloat in a world of politics and coalitions that are convenient only for a time – there may be a film that does not leave one confused about the rights and wrongs of the situation, of which Eyes on the Sky and The Forest are but two, and in need of a reliable history*, but Loach captures the incomprehension of people who find themselves on opposite sides.

The scene around the table in the town in Aragon that has been liberated is telling : Loach has the local people at the centre of the scene, but, at the margins, three pondering shots of members of the militia in civvies and casting glances, or speaking quietly, to each other. Before they are invited into the discussion, this makes it look like a mistake that they have been given nothing to add, but, afterwards, they make quite clear that they have views, the differences in which feed into the succeeding action.

Add to this guilt, the horrors of war and of retribution, a love story (Blanca, full of conviction, well played by Rosana Pastor), and needless death, and there is a powerful film, which maintains its pace, and does not deliver short on how divided those united against the fascists were. Loach, although he is known for left-wing inclinations, pulls no punches on that account.



End-notes

* Before the screening at Cambridge Film Festival, curator of the Catalan series, Ramon Lamarca, helped alleviate some difficulty regarding the anti-fascists and the International Brigade, whereas the husband whose family is at the centre of things is, although a conservative, not for that a fascist. The town shown being captured, which may be Mirambel or Morella (whose people are thanked in the credits), appeared to be the local town in the Catalan film.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)