Ken Loach is my homeboy
Apr. 20th, 2007 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI just saw The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It's utterly awesome. I mean, it suffers a bit from Ken Loach's anviliciousness at the beginning, but it more than makes up for it in other ways.
"Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community - the men of no property." - James Connolly
Essentially, it's a story of how revolutionary struggle can go very wrong. Loach himself, I gather, sympathizes with the anti-Treaty Republicans as the heirs of Connolly et al., but he characterizes their fight as impossibly idealistic, and makes the National Army no less sympathetic. By the end, there are no heroes, no villains, and no right answers—just a tragic march to an inevitable conclusion. It's a beautiful mediation on the politics of compromise, and one can see its echoes in contemporary political debates (as Fred Clark mentions in his post on Rwanda).
One one level, it's a straight-up condemnation of ruling class interests betraying working class interests within a nationalist war, and the limits of class collaboration, etc. But on another level, it forces you to wonder about what the alternative would be. And it's rather bleak in the latter respect, but I have to hand it to Loach for asking hard questions. It's the sort of movie that I wish every black bloc, more-radical-than-thou type would watch before opining on various national liberation movements. Because sometimes it's just that imperfect and messy and ugly, and Loach does a lovely job of conveying that, and of keeping rather sophisticated political questions very grounded in humanism.
Anyone else seen it yet?
In unrelated news, click here for a photo of what appears to be a three-way brawl between neo-Nazi Paul Fromm, members of the fascist JDL, and a cop that happened yesterday morning. I wish I'd been there. With popcorn.
"Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community - the men of no property." - James Connolly
Essentially, it's a story of how revolutionary struggle can go very wrong. Loach himself, I gather, sympathizes with the anti-Treaty Republicans as the heirs of Connolly et al., but he characterizes their fight as impossibly idealistic, and makes the National Army no less sympathetic. By the end, there are no heroes, no villains, and no right answers—just a tragic march to an inevitable conclusion. It's a beautiful mediation on the politics of compromise, and one can see its echoes in contemporary political debates (as Fred Clark mentions in his post on Rwanda).
One one level, it's a straight-up condemnation of ruling class interests betraying working class interests within a nationalist war, and the limits of class collaboration, etc. But on another level, it forces you to wonder about what the alternative would be. And it's rather bleak in the latter respect, but I have to hand it to Loach for asking hard questions. It's the sort of movie that I wish every black bloc, more-radical-than-thou type would watch before opining on various national liberation movements. Because sometimes it's just that imperfect and messy and ugly, and Loach does a lovely job of conveying that, and of keeping rather sophisticated political questions very grounded in humanism.
Anyone else seen it yet?
In unrelated news, click here for a photo of what appears to be a three-way brawl between neo-Nazi Paul Fromm, members of the fascist JDL, and a cop that happened yesterday morning. I wish I'd been there. With popcorn.
