gilhyle
22nd October 2006, 21:28
Over the last two weekends, I watched two recent, similar, radical Palme d’Or prizewinners _ The Child by the Daardenne Brothers and The Wind that Shakes the Barley by Ken Loach.
Both films illustrate key challenge for naturalist, radical filmmaking -, namely how to portray real, believable characters without falling into the Hollywood trap of suggesting that character determines fate.
For these film makers that is an important issue because both the Dardenne Brothers and Loach want to show how people bear, suffer and must find ways to live in social relations they cant influence.
I had high hopes of the Dardenne Brothers, but they disappointed. Their capacity to show real characters had slipped away from them (hopefully temporarily). The Palme d’Or was clearly being awarded, belatedly for much better – truly powerful, left-wing films like Rosetta and The Son.
Ken Loach was another story. .Ken Loach is a filmmaker worthy of immense respect. For forty years, from the devastating Kathy Come Home on to insightful films like Family Life and Looks & Smiles he expressed the demands and the millitancy of the 1960s and 1970s and then n the late eighties, films like Ladybird, Ladybird and Raining Stones marked a revival in his popularity that peaked with Land and Freedom. He has gone on producing films which insist on the importance of daily working class life and the cultural significance of political militancy.
But he has paid a high artistic price for this succouring of revolutionary politics and art through periods of reaction and defeat. Increasingly Loach's naturalist observations of working class life have become one dimensional and sentimental (the Dardenne brothers are never sentimental !).
One side of this is the artificial search for ideals - Raining Stones' affected assurance that working class people have a special spiritual quality. The other side is portraying political struggles in Central America, Spain and Ireland where he interprets working class or peasant life as a mere illustrations for an affirmation of the existence of a radical democratic agenda.
This was displayed at its worst in Hidden Agenda - a film which avoided the reality of working class life in Northern Ireland in favour of marginal observations on the effect of the Northern Irish 'troubles' on British politics - his worst film, by far. The best film of this type is Land and Freedom an historically inaccurate celebration of the POUM.
We are back to the ‘Land and Freedom’ type of film with The Wind that Shakes the Barley’. I had hoped for much, but I had not expected much. What we get is a shallow narrative. The characters are cyphers for the narrative. The events faithfully mirror real events, but concentrate them all into the lives of a few people. The result is a reasonably well-filmed, badly scripted, passably acted pastiche of the most eventful years of Irish history – with some key distortions at its core.
At the end, the hero waits to be executed in the civil war that followed independence. He tells us that now he knows what he is fighting for. Its the key lie in the movie. To this day, no one knows what the ‘irregulars’ were fighting FOR in the civil war. We can easily read what they were fighting against – but not what they were fighting for.
How can Loach tell this lie ? He tells it by the device of bringing a radical supporter of James Connolly out from the capital city to the rural south of Ireland, forced by events to stay and join the local IRA. From this device, Loach and his scriptwriter Laverty build the idea that the irregulars had a radical social programme and were fighting against the conservative pro-business supporters of the treaty that ended the war of independence.
Nice story , but its just not true. The social base of the anti-treaty forces were the small farmers of Cork and Kerry who more than anyone else in the country wanted complete independence from the Empire so that their recenty purchased landholdings and new established coopératives could be protected from free trade in agricultural goods – they had not taste for social democratic politics and proved vitriolicallly anti-working class and anti-communist in the decades to come.
The division between them and the large cattle farmers who wanted to export to UK markets might have been that social basis for the civil war, but that wasn’t the heart of the civil war issue. The harshly slight reality of the civil war is that the war of independence had pushed unbending, idealistic men of violence into leadership positions. They were repelled by the idea that they personally, as parliamentarians, would have to swear an oath to the crown and they used the personal loyalty of their soldiers to them to bring the bulk of the Irish Republican Army in the south into rebellion against the newly (democratically) elected government over little or nothing. Loach skips this historical reality by having the leader of the local IRA unit support the treaty and have his men break with him to oppose it. It was rarely so in practice.
There has always been a dispute on the left in Ireland about whether the anti-treaty side should have been supported. Roddy Connolly, James’ son and then leader of the young CPI took the view Loach takes that it was a civil war for a social democratic programme. Peader O’Donnell, a well known novelist and communist in the 1920s and 1930s long articulated the same hope that those anti-treaty forces, even after defeat, would form the social base for a radical political movement. The anti-treaty forces proved them all wrong by taking power in the 1930s and – confusingly – implementing much of the political programme of Michael Collins, whom they had fought and killed in the civil war.
The didactic preaching of this dubious view of the civil war is the ultimate political failing of this film – and is strikingly similar to the incorrect portrayal of the POUM in Land and Freedom. But the more fundamental artistic failing is the empty, slight characters that inhabit this film – charicactures all. Characters dont have to be fully drawn in movies, but in the kind of naturalist cinema Loach and the Dardenne Brothers make, the deft drawing of character without recourse to the past, is the key to success….and it just doesnt happen in this film.
It is hard to criticise Loach wholeheartedly for these limitations. Almost alone he has defied fashions and fads to continue making films which express his deep sympathy for the working class and his commitment to revolutionary political ideas.
You can like this film just for the rare experience of watching a left wing film. You can like it because its Ken Loach and you want him to be good. You can like it, like an elderly Irish acquaintance of mine, because the costumes and decor faithfully recreate the 1920s. But you cant like it because its a good film…..simply because it isnt.
The solution, the way forward for Loach's art lies mainly outside him in the sphere of politics. A filmmaker like Loach is crying out for commitment. But ultimately, artists, unlike political activists, do not significantly contribute to the creation of their environment. Rather, they cleave to existing political movements, and where those movements do not exist or have been defeated, the authenticity of the artistic voices of committed revolutionary artists tends to be undermined by their continuing search for an audience.
In judging Loach it is necessary to rest with the conclusion that it is to his credit that only a political radicalisation of the class to which he relates - the English working class - will resolve the problems of his art and allow him to make better films, the kind of films he is so patently capable of in the right environment. I was left wanting those films and the environment which would facilitate them, rather than wanting to persuade myself that this was good cinema.
Both films illustrate key challenge for naturalist, radical filmmaking -, namely how to portray real, believable characters without falling into the Hollywood trap of suggesting that character determines fate.
For these film makers that is an important issue because both the Dardenne Brothers and Loach want to show how people bear, suffer and must find ways to live in social relations they cant influence.
I had high hopes of the Dardenne Brothers, but they disappointed. Their capacity to show real characters had slipped away from them (hopefully temporarily). The Palme d’Or was clearly being awarded, belatedly for much better – truly powerful, left-wing films like Rosetta and The Son.
Ken Loach was another story. .Ken Loach is a filmmaker worthy of immense respect. For forty years, from the devastating Kathy Come Home on to insightful films like Family Life and Looks & Smiles he expressed the demands and the millitancy of the 1960s and 1970s and then n the late eighties, films like Ladybird, Ladybird and Raining Stones marked a revival in his popularity that peaked with Land and Freedom. He has gone on producing films which insist on the importance of daily working class life and the cultural significance of political militancy.
But he has paid a high artistic price for this succouring of revolutionary politics and art through periods of reaction and defeat. Increasingly Loach's naturalist observations of working class life have become one dimensional and sentimental (the Dardenne brothers are never sentimental !).
One side of this is the artificial search for ideals - Raining Stones' affected assurance that working class people have a special spiritual quality. The other side is portraying political struggles in Central America, Spain and Ireland where he interprets working class or peasant life as a mere illustrations for an affirmation of the existence of a radical democratic agenda.
This was displayed at its worst in Hidden Agenda - a film which avoided the reality of working class life in Northern Ireland in favour of marginal observations on the effect of the Northern Irish 'troubles' on British politics - his worst film, by far. The best film of this type is Land and Freedom an historically inaccurate celebration of the POUM.
We are back to the ‘Land and Freedom’ type of film with The Wind that Shakes the Barley’. I had hoped for much, but I had not expected much. What we get is a shallow narrative. The characters are cyphers for the narrative. The events faithfully mirror real events, but concentrate them all into the lives of a few people. The result is a reasonably well-filmed, badly scripted, passably acted pastiche of the most eventful years of Irish history – with some key distortions at its core.
At the end, the hero waits to be executed in the civil war that followed independence. He tells us that now he knows what he is fighting for. Its the key lie in the movie. To this day, no one knows what the ‘irregulars’ were fighting FOR in the civil war. We can easily read what they were fighting against – but not what they were fighting for.
How can Loach tell this lie ? He tells it by the device of bringing a radical supporter of James Connolly out from the capital city to the rural south of Ireland, forced by events to stay and join the local IRA. From this device, Loach and his scriptwriter Laverty build the idea that the irregulars had a radical social programme and were fighting against the conservative pro-business supporters of the treaty that ended the war of independence.
Nice story , but its just not true. The social base of the anti-treaty forces were the small farmers of Cork and Kerry who more than anyone else in the country wanted complete independence from the Empire so that their recenty purchased landholdings and new established coopératives could be protected from free trade in agricultural goods – they had not taste for social democratic politics and proved vitriolicallly anti-working class and anti-communist in the decades to come.
The division between them and the large cattle farmers who wanted to export to UK markets might have been that social basis for the civil war, but that wasn’t the heart of the civil war issue. The harshly slight reality of the civil war is that the war of independence had pushed unbending, idealistic men of violence into leadership positions. They were repelled by the idea that they personally, as parliamentarians, would have to swear an oath to the crown and they used the personal loyalty of their soldiers to them to bring the bulk of the Irish Republican Army in the south into rebellion against the newly (democratically) elected government over little or nothing. Loach skips this historical reality by having the leader of the local IRA unit support the treaty and have his men break with him to oppose it. It was rarely so in practice.
There has always been a dispute on the left in Ireland about whether the anti-treaty side should have been supported. Roddy Connolly, James’ son and then leader of the young CPI took the view Loach takes that it was a civil war for a social democratic programme. Peader O’Donnell, a well known novelist and communist in the 1920s and 1930s long articulated the same hope that those anti-treaty forces, even after defeat, would form the social base for a radical political movement. The anti-treaty forces proved them all wrong by taking power in the 1930s and – confusingly – implementing much of the political programme of Michael Collins, whom they had fought and killed in the civil war.
The didactic preaching of this dubious view of the civil war is the ultimate political failing of this film – and is strikingly similar to the incorrect portrayal of the POUM in Land and Freedom. But the more fundamental artistic failing is the empty, slight characters that inhabit this film – charicactures all. Characters dont have to be fully drawn in movies, but in the kind of naturalist cinema Loach and the Dardenne Brothers make, the deft drawing of character without recourse to the past, is the key to success….and it just doesnt happen in this film.
It is hard to criticise Loach wholeheartedly for these limitations. Almost alone he has defied fashions and fads to continue making films which express his deep sympathy for the working class and his commitment to revolutionary political ideas.
You can like this film just for the rare experience of watching a left wing film. You can like it because its Ken Loach and you want him to be good. You can like it, like an elderly Irish acquaintance of mine, because the costumes and decor faithfully recreate the 1920s. But you cant like it because its a good film…..simply because it isnt.
The solution, the way forward for Loach's art lies mainly outside him in the sphere of politics. A filmmaker like Loach is crying out for commitment. But ultimately, artists, unlike political activists, do not significantly contribute to the creation of their environment. Rather, they cleave to existing political movements, and where those movements do not exist or have been defeated, the authenticity of the artistic voices of committed revolutionary artists tends to be undermined by their continuing search for an audience.
In judging Loach it is necessary to rest with the conclusion that it is to his credit that only a political radicalisation of the class to which he relates - the English working class - will resolve the problems of his art and allow him to make better films, the kind of films he is so patently capable of in the right environment. I was left wanting those films and the environment which would facilitate them, rather than wanting to persuade myself that this was good cinema.