Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television

Written by the actor Neville Smith, Loach’s television film After a Lifetime (1971) begins with the death of a working-class activist, Billy Scully, in Liverpool. In the course of the film, his sons Billy (Neville Smith) and Aloysius (Jimmy Coleman) reflect on their father’s life and take stock of his political activities. The younger son, Aloysius, in particular, arrives at a new understanding of his father’s beliefs. This follows a visit to his father’s friend, ‘Uncle Joe’ (Peter Kerrigan) who presents him with an assortment of political memorabilia that reveals Billy’s lifelong commitment to socialism and involvement in the 1926 General Strike (which Joe himself describes ruefully as a ‘general defeat’). Although Aloysius himself is unemployed and the family continue to live in conditions of economic hardship, the film nonetheless counsels against despair, suggesting how, despite the failures of the past, the struggle must continue in the present. ‘We’ve got to fight for it,’ Billy tells Aloysius when his younger brother questions where their father’s principles have got them (albeit that there is relatively little evidence within the film of where this present-day fight is taking place).

Jim Allen’s Land and Freedom (1995) also begins with the death of a political activist, David Carr (Ian Hart), in a drab Liverpool towerblock where he is found by his granddaughter, Kim (Suzanne Maddock). Like Aloysius in After a Lifetime, Kim comes to learn about the political struggles of the past when she discovers David’s collection of letters, photographs and newspaper cuttings (which in a rare piece of in-joking include articles by Allen himself). Although After a Lifetime is set completely in the present, it nonetheless alludes to the past through the use of radio recordings on the soundtrack. These include a recording of the announcement of the end of the General Strike over footage of the funeral cortège and one concerning the denunciation of the strike as a ‘sin’ by Cardinal Bourne, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, in 1926, during the funeral service itself. In the case of Land and Freedom, however, the present-day scenes are intercut with a series of actual flashbacks prompted by Kim’s reading of her grandfather’s letters to his Liverpool sweetheart, Kitty (Angela Clarke). Although the film’s adoption of a voiceover and flashback structure was apparently the result of budgetary constraints (permitting the communication of information about historical events, such as the fighting in Barcelona, in a relatively economic fashion), it also provides a means of establishing connections between the past and the present. As in After a Lifetime, the loss of the idealism and militancy of the older generation may be mourned but the possibility of its revival is also suggested. Thus, while Kim, like Aloysius, has not arrived at any clear political perspective by the film’s end, her discovery of her grandfather’s political past encourages her to read from William Morris’s poem ‘The Day Is Coming’ at his graveside before pouring earth (which she has found wrapped in a red scarf among David’s possessions) onto the coffin and joining his former comrades in a raised-fist salute. According to Robert A. Rosenstone, it is common for mainstream historical film to present the past as ‘closed’ and ‘completed’.⁵⁶⁶ By intercutting between the past and present, and showing how past events can inspire actions in the present, Land and Freedom seeks to suggest how the past is not necessarily ‘over’ but may continue to have reverberations for the present.

Ken Loach and Jim Allen had nursed the idea of a film about the Spanish Civil War for some time. It was originally commissioned as a television series by Working Title in 1988 but was eventually taken over by Parallax, which initially struggled to raise the finance, particularly as the company was reluctant to go down the ‘American star’ route that had enabled the production of Hidden Agenda (featuring the actors Brad Dourif and Frances McDormand).⁵⁶⁷ As noted in Chapter 7, the funding was eventually raised from European sources even though this meant that the original budget for the film had to be reduced by almost half. The film itself is subtitled ‘a story from the Spanish revolution’ and does not attempt to cover the Spanish Civil War in a comprehensive manner. It focuses on a relatively short period – a few months during 1936–7 – and a particular place – the Aragon front – and deals primarily with the activities of a military unit under the command of the Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista (POUM), a quasi-Trotskyite group with roots in anarchism. The film, in this regard, is indebted to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (first published in 1938) in which Orwell describes his involvement with the POUM militia (which came about as a result of his links with the Independent Labour Party). At one point Allen and Loach contemplated a film version of Homage to Catalonia but decided against it on the grounds that they wanted to tell the story from the perspective of a working-class character rather than through the prism of a middle-class intellectual. In Land and Freedom, therefore, the central character is an unemployed Liverpudlian and member of the Communist Party, who is inspired to go to Spain when he attends a meeting in support of the Republican cause, addressed by a young Spanish militiaman. On his journey by rail through Spain, David meets up with a Frenchman, Bernard (Frédéric Pierrot), who persuades him to join the POUM. Thus, while the film retains the episodic structure, consisting of ‘emblematic’ moments, familiar from Loach’s earlier work, David’s story is also indebted to the Bildungsroman in the way in which the central character acquires a new maturity as a result of his experiences in Spain and the events that he witnesses. As in Days of Hope, in which Ben develops from youthful naivety to revolutionary consciousness, so David ends up undergoing his own political education which leads to him to question the social and political character of the conflict itself and the role that the Soviet-dominated Communist Party is playing.

However, while the film did not claim to provide a full portrait of the Civil War, and involves fictional characters rather than actual historical figures, the emphasis it placed upon the POUM was nevertheless queried by a number of critics and historians who suggested that the activities of the POUM on the Aragon front constituted a relatively small aspect of the Spanish Civil War. The famous Spanish Civil War correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, was particularly incensed, denouncing the POUM as ‘a fervid cult irrelevant to the great drama of the war’ and accusing Loach and Allen of blowing up ‘a minor sideshow of the war’.⁵⁶⁸ Although Loach and Allen were not naive enough to believe that the activities of the POUM were the only significant aspect of the Spanish Civil War, they did take the view that a focus upon this particular group served to highlight important issues and debates. As Loach has observed, there were a number of ‘possible stories’ that could have been told but it was a question of deciding which story to tell and why.⁵⁶⁹ For Loach and Allen, therefore, there were two main reasons why they wanted to concentrate on the events that they did. Made in the wake of the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Iron Curtain, there was a desire to recall a past that involved revolutionaries who were opposed to Stalin’s Russia and who did not identify with the Communist Party. As Jim Allen explained: ‘[w]hat we wanted to show was that socialism was not the same thing as Stalinism and that you couldn’t just bury socialism and say it was dead forever’.⁵⁷⁰ In order to do so, they also wanted to challenge the view of the Spanish Civil War as simply a battle of good versus evil, or democracy versus fascism. As Loach explained:

Part of the mythology of the war is that the left was united against fascism. Another part of this mythology is that all of the so-called democratic countries were against fascism. Both those things weren’t true as we now know.⁵⁷¹

This meant that, for Loach and Allen, it was important not simply to portray the fight against fascism as clearcut and unproblematically unified but also to recall the divisions on the Republican side over what kind of economic and political system the war was being fought to achieve.

As a result, the film deliberately focuses on the revolutionary activity prevalent throughout much of Spain in the months following the election of a ‘Popular Front’ government in February 1936 and the military uprising, in July 1936, led by General Franco. In his 1960s critique of the selectivity, and lack of ‘objectivity’, of historical accounts of the Spanish Civil War, Noam Chomsky indicates how ‘a social revolution of unprecedented scope took place’ in Spain during this period ‘involving masses of urban and rural laborers in a radical transformation of social and economic conditions that persisted, with remarkable success, until it was crushed by force’.⁵⁷² Like Chomsky, Land and Freedom is keen to draw attention to this outbreak of revolutionary activity in Spain and, in so doing, to provide what it sees as a corrective to accounts of the Civil War that downplay its significance. In this respect, what might be considered as ‘a minor sideshow’ takes on an emblematic importance in the battle for a new kind of society. In this, the film partly takes a lead from Orwell. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell had explained how, in the wake of the generals’ revolt, the militias were ‘hurriedly raised by the various trade unions and political parties’ and acted, in effect, as political organisations that owed allegiance to ‘party as much as to central Government’.⁵⁷³ These, he goes on, were also built upon principles of democracy and equality:

‘Socialism in action’: members of the militia in Land and Freedom

There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; no titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.⁵⁷⁴

It is this model of ‘classlessness’ that the film also seeks to demonstrate through its portrait of the fictionalised POUM joined by David. This is an international company, consisting mostly of international volunteers but also some Spaniards under the command of Major Vidal (Marc Martinez). To David’s surprise, it also includes women volunteers who live and fight alongside their male comrades. Echoing Orwell’s remarks, David describes how the militia represents a ‘people’s army’ in which there is ‘no saluting’, the officers are elected and ‘everything’s discussed and voted on’ in a way that exemplifies ‘socialism in action’. Thus, while the film may focus on David’s personal trajectory, it is through his participation in the activities of the collective that he acquires not only a fuller understanding of the meaning of socialism but a change of political outlook as well.

This sense of collectivism that the film seeks to communicate is reinforced by Loach’s approach to casting and filming. In line with the director’s previous practices, the actors involved were recruited on the basis of their affinities with the parts that they played and consisted of both professionals and non-professionals. The members of the militia were also brought together ahead of filming, not only to receive military training but to generate a sense of camaraderie among them. In this respect, Loach’s view that his films constitute a ‘documentary’ of the actors’ own relationships may also be seen to apply. The Spanish actor, Icíar Bollaín, who plays Maite in the film, has described Loach as ‘a magician’ who was responsible for creating an ‘incredible group of people’ in which the relationships among the cast were even ‘bigger than the relationships in the movie’. As a result, the group dynamics of the performers fed into, and overlapped with, the dynamics of the group on screen. This was reinforced by Loach’s method of shooting chronologically and providing actors with only parts of the script as the shooting occurred. The consequence of this was that the actors did not always know what was going to happen next with the result that they came to fear, as Bollaín indicates, that their characters would be killed off and they would be obliged to leave the group.⁵⁷⁵

Camaraderie among the cast in Land and Freedom

This sense of ‘socialism in action’, and fusing of the actor’s own attributes with the character they play, may be observed in one of the film’s most famous scenes: the debate concerning collectivisation. Due to the lack of suitable arms, the activities of the militia are largely confined to holding their position. However, in the main military action of the film, the company liberates a village that is under the control of the fascists. Following the burial of the dead, the villagers take possession of the landowner’s house where they meet to discuss whether they should now collectivise the land. As previously noted, it was a feature of Loach’s political work in the 1960s and 1970s – particularly The Big Flame and The Rank and File – to include extended scenes of political debate and discussion. As Loach has argued, the ‘clash of ideas’ should in itself be regarded as ‘a legitimate source of drama’.⁵⁷⁶ In this case, the scene lasts for around twelve minutes and consists of an impassioned debate about the importance of sustaining the revolution or holding back in the interests of the ‘bigger picture’. As in the case of the militia, the actors who played the villagers were a mixture of professionals and non-professionals who had been cast partly on the basis of their background and political beliefs. This meant, according to Loach, that ‘[a]ll of the positions taken by the actors’ corresponded to ‘their actual positions’ (with the exception of the American actor Tom Gilroy, playing Lawrence, who argued against complete collectivisation).⁵⁷⁷ Jim Allen has also explained that, although the scene was scripted, and the actors had learnt their lines, Loach told the actors to forget the script prior to filming in order to achieve a ‘kind of spontaneous creation’.⁵⁷⁸ This sense of apparent spontaneity is reinforced by the camera-work which, as in previous Loach films, suggests it is responding to events (which it partly was) rather than showing events that have been carefully pre-planned and staged for the camera. As a result, the camera maintains a degree of distance from the action, moving onto characters who have been heard off screen or showing the reactions of characters who have been listening. Compositions are rarely tidy and characters, who are speaking different languages, are allowed to talk across each other or interrupt what other characters are saying (but without undermining the basic ‘fairness’ of the debate). It is also significant that the film’s main character, David, barely participates in the discussion, only making a short contribution towards the end and, even then, arguing in favour of the view that loses out. Thus, while the sequence associates individuals with particular political positions, the emphasis is upon political argument and debate rather than a clash of personalities. As Loach has observed, it was important that even the most vocal opponent of full collectivisation, Lawrence, should not be a ‘caricature’ and that his position was accorded proper respect.⁵⁷⁹

The collectivisation sequence in Land and Freedom

While the debate over collectivisation within this particular village is central to the film’s presentation of the social revolution that occurred during the early stages of the war, it also signals the more general division within the anti-fascist forces then emerging.⁵⁸⁰ As the historian Raymond Carr explains, there was a growing belief among the Republican leadership, backed by the Soviet Union, that in order to mount ‘an efficient war effort’ and retain ‘a Popular Front embracing the bourgeois parties’, it was necessary to restore a ‘strong centralized government’ and reverse the social revolution that occurred at the start of the Civil War. However, for groups such as the anarcho-syndicalist trade-union organisation, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), and the POUM, ‘the sacrifice of the conquests of the revolution’, he explains, ‘meant the betrayal of the working class which had saved the Republic in the July days’.⁵⁸¹ It is this view – that social revolution should be moderated in the interests of maintaining cross-class unity and winning the war – that is presented by Lawrence in the collectivisation debate. However, while Lawrence is on the losing side of the debate in this particular village, what the film goes on to show is how it is his view, representative of the Communist Party, that ultimately prevails and results in the suppression of the kind of ‘socialism in action’ exemplified by the militia and villagers. In one of his early letters home, David suggests that, although he’s not in a Communist brigade, it ‘doesn’t matter’ because everyone’s ‘fighting the same enemy’. What, of course, the second part of Land and Freedom seeks to show is that this does matter and how, despite its hostility to fascism, the POUM comes to be regarded as the ‘enemy within’ by those with whom it had previously fought.

To this extent, the film may be seen not only to follow in the footsteps of The Big Flame, The Rank and File and Days of Hope (all, of course written by Jim Allen) in showing how ‘ordinary people’ may seize control of their lives and fashion new forms of social organisation but also how they are ultimately vulnerable to ‘betrayal’ at the hands of their leaders.⁵⁸² In this respect, the tales of individual downfall that have been a feature of Loach’s work since Three Clear Sundays and Cathy Come Home also possess an affinity with his more overtly political dramas that concentrate on the defeat of the collective. In the social dramas, individuals are, of course, failed by the dominant social and economic institutions; in the case of the political dramas, however, the group is ultimately let down by its ‘own side’. Thus, while the first part of Land and Freedom, culminating in the collectivisation scene, celebrates the new revolutionary impulses of the time, the second part charts how these are eventually extinguished at the hands of the Republican leadership.

Following an injury, David is sent to Barcelona where he decides to join his Communist Party comrades in the International Brigade. He is met there by a fellow member of the POUM militia, Blanca (Rosana Pastor), with whom he shares a night of lovemaking. However, in an unexpected reversal of normal romantic conventions, whereby the personal triumphs over the political, Blanca storms out when she discovers that David has reneged on his earlier commitment to resist the militia’s integration into the Popular Army. David remains in Barcelona where he becomes involved in the fighting in May 1937 between anarchists, including the POUM, and Communists. During a battle for control of the telephone exchange, a stronghold of the anarchist CNT, David discovers, to his bewilderment, that he and a volunteer from Manchester are on opposing sides. Subsequently, he confronts young soldiers in a café who have been denouncing the role of the militia on the Aragon front before returning to his room and ripping up his Communist Party membership card. He then returns to the front to rejoin his former comrades who participate in a renewed military offensive. However, when the promised reinforcements fail to arrive, the men are forced to retreat. While the survivors are still tending the wounded, a line of trucks approaches. However, these are not the expected reinforcements but members of the Popular Army, accompanied by Lawrence, sent to disarm the men and arrest their leaders (given that the POUM has now been made illegal for allegedly conspiring with the fascists).

The subsequent scene is one of the most moving in Loach’s work, revealing the shock and bewilderment of the militia members who cannot understand why they are being forced to lay down their arms. As in earlier scenes, the staging of the scene involved a degree of surprise for many of the actors who were unaware of what was going to happen. The distraught responses of the characters thus partly reflect the actors’ own disbelief regarding what was taking place and, as in the collectivisation scene, the camera pans across the scene in order to pick up their different reactions. In a final emotional twist, Blanca, who is seeking to prevent a comrade from firing his gun in the air, is herself shot by a nervy Republican soldier. As Richard Porton suggests, Blanca is ‘less a flesh-and-blood female militant than a symbol who almost seems designed as an anarchist equivalent of La Pasionara, the communists’ most famous female activist’.⁵⁸³ It is, of course, also Blanca who has opened David’s eyes to the treacheries of the Republican leadership and her death clearly signals the death of the revolutionary ideals that she represents. To this extent, the film may also be seen to move away from the more distanced debate of the collectivisation scene towards the direct emotional appeal of melodrama. Indeed, the scene bears more than a passing resemblance to the ending of Cathy Come Home in the way in which it involves a demonstration of the unjust persecution of ‘innocents’ and the generation of pathos through an enforced, and unexpected, break-up of the group (the family in Cathy, the militia in Land and Freedom).⁵⁸⁴

However, while the film successfully draws attention to the Communist campaign in 1937 against the anarchists and the POUM, there is also something a little unsettling in the way in which the film’s emotional energies are so completely directed against the Communist Party.⁵⁸⁵ As previously noted in relation to both The Rank and File and Days of Hope, there is a tendency in Loach and Allen’s work for the main enemies – the employers – to remain relatively invisible with the result that the political conflict is shown to be primarily between the rank and file and their leaders rather than between employees and their bosses. In Land and Freedom, Franco’s fascists also remain a largely invisible presence. Members of the militia are shown engaged in battle with the military rebels but, apart from a short encounter with a captured officer, the fascists do not appear in front of the camera. This is, of course, a part of the film’s strategy to show how the revolutionary potential of the Civil War was actively suppressed by the Republican government, supported by the Soviet Union. However, this demythologising impulse partly depends upon a pre-existing awareness of the Spanish Civil War as a popular war against fascism. But, by the 1990s, the memory of the Spanish Civil War outside of Spain had dimmed so considerably that, for young audiences in particular, the intensity of the film’s anti-Stalinist message ran the risk of obscuring the anti-fascist character of the war overall.

The betrayal of the Spanish revolution: the end of Land and Freedom

‘What kind of Ireland are we fighting for?’: The Wind That Shakes the Barley

In Land and Freedom, one of the members of the militia who is killed in the battle to free the village is an Irishman, Coogan (Eoin McCarthy) who had previously revealed to David that he had served time in a Manchester prison for ‘fighting the Brits’. The introduction of an Irishman who has fought both the British and the fascists in Spain not only throws an ironic light upon the failure of democracies such as Britain to come to the aid of an elected government in Spain but also suggests a parallel between the battle for freedom and democracy in Spain and the one that the Irish had undertaken previously.⁵⁸⁶ Indeed, in Loach’s later film The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), it is possible to detect a number of similarities between its treatment of the Irish War of Independence (1919–21) and subsequent Civil War (1921–2) with Land and Freedom’s earlier portrait of the conflicts in Spain. Although covering a longer period than Land and Freedom, The Wind That Shakes the Barley does not seek to provide a comprehensive picture of the war but focuses on specific events. It is set primarily in west Cork and focuses in particular on the activities of one (non-uniformed and civilian) flying column (played by a mix of professionals and non-professionals). As had been the case in Land and Freedom, a particular premium is placed on the ‘collective spirit’ of the group, which Loach encouraged by gathering the actors together for ‘basic training’ prior to the beginning of filming.⁵⁸⁷ Like Land and Freedom, however, the initial spirit of unity dissolves under the pressure of events and former comrades end up on conflicting sides. In this respect, the film presents the Irish War of Independence as not just a battle for formal political independence from Britain but as an internal conflict over different economic and social visions of an ‘independent’ Ireland (which ultimately lay the basis for civil war). As Loach himself put it:

Both in Spain and Ireland there were two questions. The first, in Spain, was how do we beat the Fascists? And in Ireland, how do we get the imperialists out? Then the question was, if we achieve that, what kind of society can we create? If you’re risking your life for something, you want to know what you’re risking it for. It’s a very political event … of real consequence.⁵⁸⁸

Although the narrative structure (and themes) of Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley are very similar, there are some differences in emphasis. Whereas Land and Freedom almost entirely ignores the fascists in its dramatisation of the splits within the left, the first part of The Wind That Shakes the Barley places considerable stress upon the brutality of the British forces in Ireland, particularly the Black and Tans, the former soldiers who became notorious for the extremity of their actions. The film begins with the arrival of Black and Tans at a farm where a group of local men who have been playing hurling are rounded up and one of them, Micheail (Laurence Barry), is killed when he refuses to give his name in English and assaults one of his tormentors. Subsequent scenes show British troops assaulting railway workers who refuse to permit soldiers to travel by train, attacking the homes of villagers and torturing an IRA man by pulling out his fingernails. The Black and Tans are also shown to return to the farmhouse where they assault the womenfolk while members of the flying column look on helplessly. It was undoubtedly this aspect of the film that was responsible for much of the hostility towards it in some sections of the British press. Ruth Dudley Edwards, for example, objected to the film’s portrayal of British soldiers as ‘sadists’ who required little encouragement ‘to enthusiastically shoot the innocent unarmed or pull out the fingernails of republicans with pliers’.⁵⁸⁹ Catherine Shoard, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, was better disposed towards the film but nonetheless insisted that there was ‘no getting round’ the fact that it was ‘anti-British’ insofar as it showed ‘the invading troops’ as ‘crass barbarians’ who ‘swear and sneer, torch cottages, humiliate grannies, butcher and humiliate’.⁵⁹⁰ Loach himself defended the scenes on the grounds that they were based on documentary sources and pointed out that no critic had actually ‘challenged a single fact in the film’.⁵⁹¹ He also indicated that the film had recruited a number of ex-soldiers to play the parts of the British in the film who had assured him that, in enacting such scenes, they were only drawing upon their own ‘training and technique’.⁵⁹²

British military brutality in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

However, while the activities of the Black and Tans in Ireland did seem to come as a surprise to some English critics, the emphasis upon the violence of British troops within the film may also be seen to have served particular political and dramatic functions. As in the case of Loach’s previous historical dramas, both the writer Paul Laverty and Loach himself were keen to emphasise the contemporary relevance of their portrayal of the past. Laverty, for example, indicated that one of the reasons for making the film was ‘to see how the long shadow of the past impacts on the present’ and suggested that ‘[i]f we knew what we had really done in Ireland it would be much harder to persuade the population that we are on a civilising mission in Iraq’.⁵⁹³ Loach also acquired considerable publicity at Cannes for drawing the same comparison, indicating how in Iraq – as in the film – the British were responsible for an illegal ‘army of occupation’ and ‘the damage and the casualties and the brutality’ that went with it.⁵⁹⁴ Although both Loach and Laverty did not seek to push the parallel too far, it is evident nonetheless that the emphasis upon the excessive violence of the British Army (including the use of torture) was partly motivated by an impulse to suggest analogies with the contemporary situation in Iraq and hammer home the human costs of a military occupation.

In this respect, the film may be seen to ratchet up the horrors of British occupation in comparison to Loach’s earlier treatment of the same subject. As previously noted, a sequence involving British troops in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence concluded the first episode of the four-part historical series Days of Hope. In this, Ben, who has volunteered to join the British Army in a spirit of patriotic fervour during World War I, subsequently finds himself serving in Ireland in 1920. Due to the focus upon Ben, and his politicisation within the series, there is greater emphasis upon the confusion of working-class soldiers who have been sent to a country which they do not understand and where they are not wanted. Thus, while the men are forcibly billeted upon a farmhouse where they bully a young girl into singing, the tables are turned when the girl reduces the men to silence by her emotional rendition of ‘The Bold Fenian Men’. This sense of the soldiers’ unease at the role they have been called upon to perform, combined with an incapacity to impose their authority over the local population, is summed up in an emblematic scene when a young boy, whom the soldiers have befriended, steals the cap of one of the soldiers. The soldier chases him into the woods but only to be blown up by a mine.⁵⁹⁵ In this way, the film suggests not only the futility of the army’s attempt to subdue the local people (when opposition to British rule runs so deep) but also the ‘foreignness’ of their relationship to the local terrain in comparison to the people who inhabit it.

This sense of an army ‘out of step’ with the landscape that they occupy is carried over into The Wind That Shakes the Barley in which the flying column, as in the attack on the Auxiliaries, almost seems to emerge out of the rocks and the hills. It is also significant that this scene ends with the flying column members visibly shaken by what they have done and their commander Finbar (Damien Kearney) calling his men into line. He tells them to look at the dead around them while exclaiming that they are sending ‘a message to the British cabinet’ that ‘if they bring their savagery over here we will meet it with a savagery of our own’. Thus, while hostile British critics dwelt upon the portrait of the violence of the British forces, there is also a sense in which the film itself seeks to show the tit-for-tat nature of the war and the IRA’s own capacity for retaliatory violence. Laverty argued, in this regard, how his experiences of war in Central America had not only made him conscious of the way in which violence ‘damages people’s psyches’ but also made him keen to avoid romanticising the violence of either side.⁵⁹⁶ However, while this might suggest that the film assumes some of the characteristics of an anti-war film, grimly charting the dehumanising effects of violence upon both sides, this is not really so. This is, in part, because the film maintains a sense of interiority with the IRA characters, investing their actions with a psychological and emotional complexity that their fairly one-dimensional British counterparts are denied.⁵⁹⁷ However, it also results from the way in which the film seeks to locate the meaning of the violence within a clear political context. Thus, in spite of the complaints in the British press concerning the film’s ‘anti-Britishness’, the film’s primary interest is neither the horrors of the British military campaign against the Irish nor the ‘heroism’ of the Irish resistance but rather the tensions within the Irish Republican movement itself regarding the ultimate objective of a ‘free Ireland’.

This is partly achieved by a return to the conventions of family melodrama previously employed in The Big Flame and Days of Hope in which members of the same family end up politically opposed. In The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the main dramatic focus is on two brothers – Damien (Cillian Murphy) and Teddy O’Donovan (Pádraic Delaney) – who initially fight alongside each other but end up on alternative sides of the Civil War. As some critics observed, this is a relatively well-worn device. However, by employing it, the film may also be seen to be inflecting it in a novel direction. It has been a feature of traditional representations of Irish paramilitarism to draw a distinction between two types of male protagonist: the fundamentally decent IRA man who cultivates doubts about the value of arms and the more fanatical hardliner who (often in the face of ‘reason’) remains wedded to the violent prosecution of ‘the cause’. This may be seen, for example, in the Irish War of Independence drama, Shake Hands with the Devil (1959) to which The Wind That Shakes the Barley bears a degree of similarity. In the earlier film, a young medical student, Kerry O’Shea (Don Murray), decides to join the IRA following the death of his friend and a beating at the hands of the Black and Tans. Likewise, in The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Damien is a young doctor who is set to head off for a job in England before deciding to stay and join a local IRA column as a result of the actions of the Black and Tans at Peggy’s (Mary Riordan) farm. In Shake Hands with the Devil, however, Kerry comes to reject the use of violent methods and turns against his hardline commandant whose opposition to the Anglo–Irish Treaty of 1921 he associates with ‘just killing’.⁵⁹⁸ In The Wind That Shakes the Barley, it initially looks as though Damien may follow in Kerry’s footsteps. Trained to save lives, he grows despairing of the violence in which he is involved. Required to execute a young lad, Chris (John Crean), whom he has known since he was a child, he exclaims to Dan (Liam Cunningham): ‘What kind of Ireland are we fighting for? I hope to Christ it’s worth it’. When the deed is done, he throws away his gun and runs down the hillside in an image eloquent of his inner turmoil. However, despite these doubts, Damien himself remains a ‘hardliner’ and, unlike Kerry in Shake Hands with the Devil, refuses to accept the Treaty. In this way, The Wind That Shakes the Barley partly overturns the conventions of earlier films, such as Shake Hands with the Devil, by structuring sympathy in favour of the supposed ‘fanatics’ rather than those who, under duress, have accepted the need to compromise.

It does so, however, by interpreting the split over the Treaty in a particular way. The film is very much fuelled by the spirit of James Connolly, one of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising, who had argued that the only true national revolution would be a socialist one. In the film, Connolly’s perspective is represented by the train driver, Dan, who was involved in the Dublin lock-out of 1913 and was a member of the Irish Citizen Army. Damien initially meets Dan at the railway station, where he has refused to carry British troops, but the men are reunited in prison where they jointly quote from Connolly’s famous 1897 essay ‘Socialism and Nationalism’:

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you organise a socialist Republic, your efforts will be in vain … . England will still rule you through her landlords, capitalists and commercial institutions.

Through Dan’s influence, Damien grows more politically radical and the two men are subsequently involved in a scene involving a local shopkeeper Sweeney (Kieran Ahern) who has been brought before a Republican Court (run mainly by women) for charging a local woman excessive interest.⁵⁹⁹ While Teddy intervenes on the grounds that the man is a financial backer of the IRA (which, he suggests, cannot afford to alienate ‘every merchant and businessman in the county’), Damien objects to the way in which the Court’s judgment is being undermined while Dan points out how the IRA leadership has been ‘backing the landlords’ through their opposition to land seizures. As in Land and Freedom, the film’s own sympathies clearly lie with the radicals who are pushing for a genuine social and economic revolution rather than an independent Ireland little different in social and economic character from the existing set-up (which, as Dan disparagingly puts it, involves ‘painting the Republic green while leaving the country ‘the same’ underneath).

However, as in previous Loach films, the revolutionary ideals of the main characters end up betrayed. In The Wind That Shakes the Barley, the betrayal is identified with the Treaty negotiated and signed by British and Irish leaders in 1921. Although opposition to this Treaty, involving the establishment of an Irish Free State, has been conventionally associated with hostility to partition and dominion status, the film’s emphasis upon Damien and Dan invests the case against the Treaty with a strong socialist dimension. The key scene here occurs at the printer’s workshop where Teddy leads a debate about the Treaty, laying stress on the threat of ‘immediate and terrible war’ that hangs over the men should they continue the campaign against the British. The pro-Treaty position, however, is met with a chorus of opposition from many of the group, including Damien who complains that the Treaty will favour ‘the powerful over the poor’. The scene then concludes with Dan reading from the Democratic Programme passed by Dáil Eireann in 1919 (calling for the subordination of ‘private property’ to ‘the public right and welfare’) and declaring that all the Treaty is doing is changing the ‘accents of the powerful and the colour of the flag’. The scene is, of course, reminiscent of the collectivisation scene in Land and Freedom. However, although the debate is clearly structured in favour of the anti-Treaty position exemplified by Damien and Dan, it is impossible for the argument to end in a vote (as it does in the earlier film). What is established, therefore, is a clear split within the Republican rank and file that, as in Land and Freedom, will lead to tragic consequences.

Debating the Treaty in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

With echoes of Lawrence in Land and Freedom, Teddy opts to join the new Free State Army while his brother Damien, along with Dan and other members of the flying column, refuse to stand down. Following news of the attack by government troops on the Four Courts building in Dublin, then occupied by the anti-Treaty IRA, Damien and his colleagues return to action. During a raid on army barracks in search of weapons, however, Dan is brutally killed and Damien arrested. Refusing to inform, Damien is sentenced to death and, in an emotional climax similar to the end of Land and Freedom, it is his brother who gives the firing squad the order to shoot. Teddy then returns to Peggy’s burnt-out farm where he passes on Damien’s letter to Sinéad (Orla Fitzgerald), who falls to the ground weeping. In this way, the film completes a circular pattern, beginning and ending in the same location. The grim irony of the film, however, is that whereas it was previously the British who were responsible for the attacks on the farm’s inhabitants, it is, as an earlier scene makes evident, the newly established Free State troops who have since taken on the same role. Although the film is making a political point (about how the old political and military arrangements have remained the same), the combination of a circular dramatic structure and melodramatic excess may also be seen to link the film to a pre-existing tradition of representing Irish history in terms of historical repetition, female suffering and fatalism that partly undercuts the political perspective adopted by the film.⁶⁰⁰

Although it was the film’s portrait of the British forces in Ireland that provoked most controversy in Britain, it was the film’s interpretation of the Civil War that attracted the greatest attention in Ireland. The film followed in the wake of Neil Jordan’s historical epic Michael Collins (1996) and was widely interpreted as providing a riposte to the earlier film’s pro-Collins perspective.⁶⁰¹ At the same time, many critics felt that Loach and Laverty had interpreted the Civil War in a particularly skewed manner by over-emphasising the socialist aspects of the anti-Treaty cause. Some critics in the popular press complained, for example, that Loach had made a ‘Marxist fantasy movie’ that might encourage an outsider to believe that ‘the anti-Treaty forces were inspired not by de Valera but by Lenin’.⁶⁰² In a similar vein, the Irish historian Roy Foster argues that the film is ‘misleading’ in the way in which it associates opposition to the Treaty with ‘socialism, “democracy” and anti-partitionism’ and that ‘Loach’s representation of 1920–1 as an aborted socialist-nationalist revolution craving completion’ is more ‘an exercise in wish-fulfilment … than history’.⁶⁰³

Brother against brother: Damien (Cillian Murphy) is executed by his brother Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) in The Wind That Shakes the Barley

There certainly appears to be some justice to the view that the film rather too neatly aligns the divisions between the pro- and anti-Treaty forces with pro- and anti-capitalist sentiments. In actuality, the split between pro- and anti-Treaty forces was much less clearcut and primarily focused on the failure to deliver a Republic (itself sometimes conceived in almost mystical terms) rather than socialism. Thus, according to Adrian Pimley, the ‘anti-Treaty leadership of the IRA’ was ‘politically conservative when it came to social or economic questions’ and the ‘anti-Treaty Sinn Fein forces’ made ‘no effort to translate their principles into some tangible economic or social goals for the Irish working class or the small farmer’, preferring to fight the Civil War on the basis of ‘the abstract principle of loyalty to the “Republic”’. It was only when the war was essentially lost, he suggests, that some IRA leaders ‘grasped at the possibility of an alliance with the Irish working class to smash the Treaty’.⁶⁰⁴ However, as others have argued, social radicalism, in the form of land seizures and working-class militancy, was undoubtedly evident in Ireland during the period 1917–21. As the historian Fergus Campbell suggests, the ‘Irish revolution’ may properly be regarded as ‘a period of flux, during which a number of different outcomes were possible’ (including the possibility that the radicals within the Republican movement might have exerted a greater influence over the leadership than they eventually did).⁶⁰⁵ Viewed in this light, Campbell goes on to argue that ‘Ken Loach’s polemic The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) is not as far-fetched as some historians have suggested.’⁶⁰⁶

This, as would be expected, is also the view of the film’s historical adviser Donal Ó Drisceoil who argues that the novelty of the film resides in its attempts to provide ‘an account not of what happened but of what happened in the light of what might have happened’. As he explains, the film focuses on ‘the “what-might-have-beens” of the Irish revolution, not in a romantic, counterfactual manner, but by highlighting or foregrounding spurned radical political and historical possibilities’.⁶⁰⁷ Indeed, this could be said to be so of all Loach’s historical dramas, ranging from Days of Hope to Land and Freedom, which also involve the excavation of revolutionary possibilities that might, in different circumstances, have generated alternative outcomes. To some extent, the reading of the film then turns on how ‘representative’ or ‘typical’ the story it tells is taken to be. Critics of both Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley complained that the films’ portrayal of events were ‘atypical’ while their defenders argued that it was not the aim of the films to tell the ‘whole story’ (or, more precisely, all of the stories) of the periods portrayed but to draw attention to political currents and events that had been marginalised or ‘hidden from view’. This was, in fact, a point also made by Ó Drisceoil who suggested that just as Land and Freedom was subtitled ‘ a story from the Spanish revolution’ so The Wind That Shakes the Barley would be better understood as ‘a story from the Irish revolution’ rather than ‘the story of the Irish revolution’ that some critics interpreted it as being.⁶⁰⁸

However, as the discussion of Family Life (in Chapter 5) indicates, the relationship of the particular to the general (and the ‘balance’ between them) in Loach’s films has been a source of continuing debate. This becomes an even more complicated issue when the films are dealing with actual events. As already noted, Loach’s historical dramas may deal with specific historical events but they do so mainly through the use of fictional characters. The concluding episode of Days of Hope did, of course, involve named political figures but the writer, Jim Allen, felt that the resulting requirement for historical precision led to a straitjacketing of the drama. In the case of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Loach was clear about his preference for fictionalisation. ‘We wanted fictional characters’, he explained, ‘because then they can embody the conflict and follow the rules of dramatic conflict rather than follow what the factual characters would have done in real life.’⁶⁰⁹ Similarly, while he was happy to allude to actual historical events, he did not wish to get bogged down in historical detail. Thus, while the ambush in the film bears a number of similarities to the actual ambush on British Auxiliaries by the West Cork Flying Column (under the command of Tom Barry) at Kilmichael in 1920, Loach was adamant that, while he wanted the representation of the ambush to be ‘accurate’, this was not a reconstruction of any particular event but was a ‘representative’ one that demonstrated ‘the way that they operated’.⁶¹⁰ It has, of course, been a recurring characteristic of Loach’s work that it involves the telling of stories about the lived experience of particular individuals and their families that, nonetheless, aspire to a degree of ‘typicality’ or social representativeness. In the case of the historical dramas, therefore, one of the key means of achieving ‘representativeness’ is the creation of ‘composite’ fictional characters and events within a recognisable, but not precisely delineated, historical situation. However, insofar as this also involves a ‘centring’ of the ‘particular’ experiences of the historically forgotten or marginalised, it is an aesthetic approach that necessarily entails a degree of ambiguity about the precise status of the ‘representativeness’ which is being claimed (and which therefore opens up the films to readings that oscillate between the particular and the general).

In this respect, both Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley may be seen to have revived many of the debates about historical drama that first surfaced in relation to Days of Hope. Like Days of Hope, the films challenge the dominant conventions of mainstream historical film in the way in which they focus on ‘ordinary’, rather than elite, figures and account for events in terms of the actions of groups of people rather than (‘great’ or ‘exceptional’) individuals. On the other hand, the films’ adoption of linear narratives and the conventions of observational (or ‘surface’) realism have led to criticisms that, whatever their actual political content, the films cultivate, what Stephen Crofts refers to as, ‘closed modes of historical explanation’.⁶¹¹ It is this perception that may be detected not only in the accusations of ‘political bias’ and ‘propaganda’ to be found in the press but also the claims, in academic studies, that Loach’s work solicits the viewer’s ‘passive acquiescence’.⁶¹² From this perspective, Loach’s film may be regarded as encouraging, what Raymond Williams calls, ‘counter-seeing’ (involving a challenge to prevailing views) rather than ‘complex seeing’ (involving the presentation of more than a single viewpoint).⁶¹³ Ó Drisceoil maintains that this is not, in fact, the case, suggesting how an emphasis upon the ‘what-might-have-been’ results in films in which the ‘contradictions and conflicts of this period of history are presented in an open-ended way’.⁶¹⁴However, showing how the past might have turned out differently is not quite the same as the film itself offering an account of the past that is ‘open-ended’.

Nevertheless, as the discussion of the ‘Days of Hope debate’ (in Chapter 6) showed, the ‘meaning’ of a film is rarely a purely textual matter. So, just as Days of Hope succeeded in provoking a wide-ranging debate about its portrait of the past, so one of the most striking features about The Wind That Shakes the Barley was the intensity of the argument it generated nor just in Britain but particularly in Ireland where it was responsible for a surge of commentary by academics, journalists and letter-writers competing to define how the film (and Irish history) should be analysed and understood. Although this was also the case with Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, it could still be said that it is in the character of Loach’s work to encourage this kind of reaction. Thus, the elements that are commonly disliked by critics – the partisanship, the mixing of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, the stark dramatic oppositions and melodramatic turns – are often the very elements that arouse such strong responses. It is partly this tension that Jonathan Romney identifies in his review of The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Commenting on ‘the dramatic problem posed by the extremity of the British violence in the film’, he suggests how the viewer is obliged to ‘step back from the drama’ and demand ‘evidence’. At this point, he observes, consideration of the film ‘extends beyond’ the film itself and ‘into newspaper articles and TV current affairs slots’.⁶¹⁵ As he acknowledges, this is hardly an issue for Loach who has always been keen that critics should discuss the content of his films rather than simply their aesthetics. Indeed, it could be said that it is this urge to provoke audiences to ‘step back’ from the drama, and reflect on the film’s relationship to the social world it addresses, that has been a recurring feature of Loach’s work since the beginning of his career. In this respect, the measure of its success – from Cathy Come Home to The Wind That Shakes the Barley – has never been just an aesthetic matter but also a broadly ‘political’ one. This does not, of course, refer simply to the political orientation of the films but also to their capacity to ‘provoke’ audiences and critics and, in so doing, to intervene politically within the public sphere.

566.Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 57.

568.‘This Is Not the War I Knew’, Evening Standard, 5 October 1995, p. 27.

569.Lecture at ‘Radical and Popular Pasts: Public History Conference’, Ruskin College, Oxford, 17 March 2007.

570.Quoted in Julian Petley, ‘Land and Freedom’, International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 1, 3rd edn (London: St James Press, 1997), p. 554.

571.Richard Porton, ‘The Revolution Betrayed: An Interview with Ken Loach’, Cineaste vol. 22 no. 1, 1996, p. 30.

572.Noam Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’, in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: New Press, 2002, orig. 1969), p. 76.

573.George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977, orig. 1938), p. 28.

575.Loach on Location: Making Land and Freedom (tx. BBC2, 15 May 1995). Bollaín herself subsequently married Paul Laverty, who played the role of a Scottish militia man in the film. She also wrote a book (in Spanish) about Loach as well as embarking upon her own directorial career.

578.‘An Interview Conducted with Jim Allen in 1995’, World Socialist Web Site, <www.wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/alle-a11.shtml>. According to the cameraman Barry Ackroyd, Loach did not regard the outcome of the debate as a ‘foregone conclusion’ even though ‘the characters were stacked heavily in favour of the film’s view’. See Hayward, Which Side Are You On?, p. 229.

579.Porton, ‘The Revolution Betrayed’, p. 30. Although the character of Lawrence is presented as largely sympathetic in this scene, his reappearance at the end of the film as a fully uniformed officer with the Popular Army, set upon the suppression of the POUM militia, has been criticised as a rather crude narrative device.

580.The film’s historical advisor, Andy Durgan, did, however, concede that the collectivisation scene had involved an element of altered chronology. In the film, this happens in early 1937 but the seizing of villages by the POUM had actually occurred the previous year, between late July and September. Durgan regards this as a legitimate dramatic device that ‘does not seriously undermine the film’s credibility at an historical level’ (‘The Hidden Story of the Revolution’, New Politics vol. 6 no. 1, 1996, <ww3.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue21/durgan21.htm>).

581.Raymond Carr, Modern Spain 1875–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 139.

582.Given the political orientation of the POUM, the film’s critique of the Communist Party’s betrayal of the POUM may clearly be linked with Trotsky’s own critique of the betrayal of the revolution in the Soviet Union. See Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (London: Faber and Faber, 1937).

583.Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London: Verso, 1999), p. 88.

584.The two scenes also depended upon a degree of surprise in the way in which they were set up and Loach describes how the militia man responsible for shooting his gun in the air didn’t know that his action would lead to Blanca’s death and, therefore, ‘completely broke down’ as he would have done ‘in real life’ (Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, Sources of Inspiration Lecture, p. 4).

585.The film did, of course, lead to complaints that it downplayed the role of the Soviet Union in sustaining the Republican government against its enemies (at a time when democratic countries such as Britain and France were engaged in a blockade) as well as the important part played by members of the Communist Party in the International Brigades. From a more sympathetic perspective, there were also complaints that the film, by focusing on the POUM, also downplayed the role of the anarchists, particularly the CNT.

586.Irish support for the Spanish Republic was, however, complicated by the position of the Catholic church which meant that more Irishmen fought in support of Franco than against. See Robert Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, 1936–9 (Manchester: Mandolin, 1999).

587.Ken Loach, ‘Director’s Note’, The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ardfield: Galley Head Press, 2006), pp. 8–9.

588.Harlan Jacobson, ‘On the Job’, Film Comment, January–February 2007, p. 22

589.Ruth Dudley Edwards, ‘Why Does Ken Loach Loathe His Country So Much?’, Daily Mail, 30 May 2006.

591.David Archibald, ‘Correcting Historical Lies: An Interview with Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’, Cineaste vol. 32 no. 2, 2007, p. 30. More sophisticated historical critics acknowledged the basis of the film in historical fact but queried the film’s concentration on violent events. Stephen Howe, for example, agreed that ‘[a]lmost every incident of British military brutality depicted in the film has parallels in events which took place – or at least were alleged – in Ireland, mostly in rural west Cork, in 1919–21’ but questions whether the events shown were as ‘commonplace, routine, or typical of British behaviour as the film implies’ (‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley: Ken Loach and Irish History’, 15 June 2006, <www.opendemocracy.net/arts-Film/loach_3650.jsp>).

592.Tara Brady, ‘The Socialist Graces’, Hot Press, 28 June 2006, p. 60. There were, however, complaints that Loach’s casting reinforced an equation between ‘goodness’ and physical attractiveness. This is particularly so in the case of Cillian Murphy whose striking good looks not only differentiate him from the Black and Tans but also from the pro-Treaty IRA. The casting also involves a degree of reversal of Loach’s earlier association of professional actors with ‘authority’, rather than ‘authenticity’, insofar as it is the professional actors, Murphy and Liam Cunningham, who are set against the non-professionals playing both their military and IRA opponents.

595.One of the ironies of this death is that the soldier concerned, though born in England, is from an Irish family. This sense of class and ethnic loyalties that cut across political divisions is also to be found in The Wind … in which a young Scottish soldier (played by William Ruane from Sweet Sixteen and Tickets) helps the IRA men escape from prison on the grounds that his family is from Donegal.

597.As in his work for television, Loach questioned the relevance of the idea of ‘balance’ when it came to portraying ‘a battle for political independence’. ‘The idea of “balance” is wholly skewed’, he suggested, ‘because the British stood for opposition to democracy, for oppression of the people, for the brutal destruction of their homes in many cases and their lives.’ As a result, he felt there was no ‘need to be balanced between the oppressor and the oppressed’ (‘Correcting Historical Lies’, p. 28).

598.For a discussion of Shake Hands with the Devil, and cinematic images of violent Republicanism more generally, see John Hill, ‘Images of Violence’, in Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and Ireland (London: Routledge, 1988).

599.As Luke Gibbons indicates, one of the ways in which the film breaks new ground is by ‘highlighting the active role of women in the struggle – as Republican Court judges, as protestors in church, as members of Cumann na mBan’ and, in so doing, by subverting the conventional association of the male sphere with politics and militarism and the female sphere with home and domesticity (‘Introduction’, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, p. 4). The film’s reliance on the imagery of three generations of female suffering as an emblem of the suffering of the nation is, however, much less ground-breaking.

600.Jonathan Romney, for example, suggests how ‘the film’s view of history entails a sort of tragic karma’, which would hardly seem to constitute the kind of political reading that Loach and Laverty would have aimed to encourage (Independent on Sunday, 25 June 2006, p. 9).

601.Apart from the question of which ‘side’ the films were on, the comparison with Michael Collins also raised issues about the relevance of The Wind That Shakes the Barley to the contemporary situation in (Northern) Ireland (as opposed to Iraq). Made in the wake of the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994, Michael Collins was widely regarded as a ‘peace-process’ film that set out to redeem the politics of compromise and pragmatism. Given its support for anti-Treaty ‘hardliners’, critics were much less sure about how to interpret The Wind That Shakes the Barley in the light of the new political dispensation in the North.

602.Eamonn Sweeney, ‘Ken Loach’, Sunday Independent, 6 August 2006, p. 21.

603.‘The Red and the Green’, Dublin Review no. 24, 2006, pp. 46 and 51. While the film identifies the democratic basis of armed opposition to British rule with the first Dáil (or Irish parliament) of 1919 (subsequently proscribed by the British), the film’s subsequent association of the anti-Treaty position with democracy was criticised by many writers on the grounds that both the Dáil and the Irish electorate voted for acceptance of the Treaty. Although the film suggests these later votes were the product of ‘fear’, the film may also be seen to reflect a degree of ideological tension within Irish Republicanism between appeals to the ‘will of the people’, expressed through elections, and to ‘the rights of the nation’, expressed in acts of insurgence such as the 1916 Rising.

604.Adrian Pimley, ‘The Working-class Movement and the Irish Revolution, 1896–1923’ in D. G. Boyce (ed.), The Revolution in Ireland, 1879–1923 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988), pp. 213–14. Henry Patterson also suggests that it was only ‘after the Treaty split and the onset of civil war’ that some Republicans began ‘to fashion a version of the War of Independence that depicted the source of the ultimate “betrayal” as the IRA’s predominating hostility to popular economic struggles’. See The Politics of Illusion: Republicanism and Socialism in Modern Ireland (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), p. 16.

605.Fergus Campbell, ‘Reviews in History’, <www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/734/response>. Campbell is responding to a review of his book Land and Revolution: Nationalist Politics in the West of Ireland 1891–1921 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a discussion of what kind of ‘revolution’ occurred in Ireland during this period, see Joost Augusteijn (ed.), The Irish Revolution, 1913–1923 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).

606.Campbell, ‘Reviews in History’. There is, however, a supplementary issue as to whether a film committed to showing the radical potential of this period might be said partly to undermine its own objective in the way in which it privileges military conflict over social and economic struggles. Thus, even in the scene involving trade-union action at the railway station, the contribution of organised labour to the struggle is subordinated to the role it plays in prompting Damien to take up arms. Thus, while the film challenges popular representations of Irish violence by investing it with a rational, political context, it remains, to some extent, caught in the ‘militaristic’ paradigm that it might otherwise be seen to be subverting.

607.Donal Ó Drisceoil, ‘Framing the Irish Revolution: Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley’, Radical History Review no. 104, 2009, p. 10.

610.Ibid., p. 28. Laverty also suggested that historical detail could become a ‘burden’ and that what mattered was to be ‘true to the spirit of the times’.

611.‘Not a Window on the Past: How Films and Television Construct History’, Film and History vol. 17 no. 4, 1987, p. 93.

612.This is Michael Patrick Gillespie’s verdict on The Wind That Shakes the Barley in The Myth of an Irish Cinema: Approaching Irish-themed Films (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 253

613.This distinction is discussed – in relation to Brecht – in Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1973), p. 322.