THE WIND THAT SHOOK THE BARLEY didn’t shake me but the Imperial rage in the British national press about it did. Suddenly they came out of the woodwork as regards Ireland. So, Ireland, look out, they don’t seem to have finished with you yet. The film is now showing at the Renoir Cinema in the Bruinswick Centre, Holborn, the Tricycle Cinema, Kilburn, and at the Curzon Cinema, Soho, all in London. I went along, with my wife, to the Renoir Cinema on Sunday the 25th of June for the first performance at 2.45 pm. That is the date and near the time on which England was about to play Ecuador in the World Cup series, so, there wasn’t a big audience. Most people there were elderly English women plus two Muslim women. Not football fans I would think. I’m not much of a football fan myself but I always watch England during the World Cup, even if I have to record it, which I did this time around.
The Renoir, the Tricycle and Curzon cinemas are art houses. This film is not on the main film circuit in England. I read somewhere that only 200 copies of the film have been made whereas a film made to the usual Hollywood formula of simulated sex scenes, car chases, cloned painfully-thin women, and so-called Italian-American gangsterism can have thousands of copies made to put out around the UK.
THE WIND is as wordy as a stage play and at times agit-prop, also best kept in the theatre. Film is a visual medium and if you examine the film scripts of Eisenstein, after the silent film period, you won’t find a lot of dialogue. Even Battleship Potemkin of the silent period of film, with its brief subtitles, comes across just the same as a powerful film about an historical earthquake. The Irish War of Independence was such a time.
THE WIND is no The Battle of Algiers, that filmnmade, in 1965/1966, and directed by Gillo Pontecorvo about the Algerian struggle against the French occupation.
These comparisons are probably unfair. The film makers mentioned seems to have had a lot more money to play around with than Ken Loach had. But in that case you cut your coat to suit your cloth.
I am always suspicious when actors start shouting. Shouting in a dramatic situation is obviously necessary at times but it must be something that rises organically out of a particular scene. Too much shouting can also mean that the script is failing, that the director and actors may think the film is not be making its point,
or that the director has lost control of his actors. In this film everyone is shouting – the Black and Tans, the IRA members and the people running the Republican courts are shouting. Too much is crammed into the script and rattled out at break-neck speed. And too much pointing of guns at people who have been already been subdued by their captors the Black and Tans. If you’re going to fire a .303 rifle in a cell then the ricochete may possibly kill you as well. Too much emphasis is no emphasis - American SWAT team stuff seen in television drama.
The results of the Downing Street agreement over the Treaty is shouted out in anger, the shelling of the anti-Treatyite-held Four Courts in Dublin£is angrily shouted out. A silent scene of it being shelled with British-borrowed artillery by the
pro-Treatyites would have spoken volumes. Any affinity I saw with Iraq was the installing of a puppet government.
James Connolly’s argument for a Socialist Republic was not so much shouted out as rhymed out between two actors followed by a self-conscious smile by one of the them as if to say: “Sure don’t all of you out there know that anyway.”
My wife, a Filipina, was still able to understand that the signing of the Treaty meant that a lot of people saw it as a sell-out and that it would end in a tragedy by cutting across families and isolate the Northern Catholics. I have never discussed the Treaty with her and if I ever did try she wouldn’t have been listening for she has a zero interest in politics. So I would think that bodes well for people living in England understanding it.
Her strong point is fashion and in her opinion the Irish actors were wearing clothes made from the best material, that the men’s shirts were expensive, that the women’s dresses looked styled. Bespoke in other words. I myself thought everything looked too clean. We see turf being handled with clean hands, farmyards with hens scratching around and general rural poverty. Anyone who has ever lived under a thatched roof knows how filthy life can be with rats, mice and insects burrowing into it. So where are the flea-bitten necks and the bed-bug tracks, the lice-in-the-hair that plagued a great many of us up into the late 1940s despite our best efforts. The women did not fine comb their hair once. This cleanliness is what we have come to associate with television costume drama. Gael Linn has an excellent photographic library from this period so there can be no excuses for not researching properly.
My wife was shocked by the film. It made an impression on her. She says she will probably have nightmares tonight. I’ll just daydream about what it could have been?
The odd love scene seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought – he removes his coat and then removes the head-scarf from the girl’s hair. They kiss, their bodies lower as the camera pans above floor level and out of sight of them. How many times have you seen this in films and on television. After that I expected a tearful pregnancy scene.
A young British soldier unlocks the cell doors in one scene and releases the IRA men awaiting questioning through torture and possible execution. The soldier says he doesn’t want their deaths on his conscience. We see no more of the soldier after that. What happened to him?
Far too much sentimentality in the film as well. Oscar Wilde observed that: “Sentimentality is the emotion of the hard-hearted.”
Why make the film in colour. The people who expect colour are not going to come and see it anyway. The Battle of Algiers was made in black and white and was all the more effective for it. The Cuban film industry, during its best period in the 1960s, made a historical film about one of their heroes Jose Marti. He was born in 1853 and struggled against the Spanish occupation of Cuba. The film was made in sepia as if it had turned reddish-brown from age, like photographs from the Nineteenth Century did. Cuba didn’t have a lot of money to put into film then. Why I mention this is because during THE WIND we see a brief silent newsreel, from 1921, with subtitles, in black and white, showing the British Army lining the streets of Dublin with fixed bayonets. One Dubliner, pushing a handcart stops to stare at them and at the camera and is threateningly ushered on by a soldier who steps out of the line. This scene of about ten seconds sent a chill through me. THE WIND could have been made as a docudrama, as was The Battle of Algiers.
The ambush scene in the Cork countryside was inept. Well, inept when you consider Tom Barry’s tactical ability in mounting the Kilmichael one in West Cork. There is a blueprint of it all in Tom Barry’s book Guerrilla Days in Ireland.–Why didn’t Ken Loach use it? That would have been the most powerful scene in the film.
That cliche: a most-terrible-war-if-the-Treaty-isn’t-signed- threat by Downing Street is aired again. Also aired again is the claim that there were not enough weapons to continue the struggle. Well, the British Army had plenty, for the taking.
Yes, the farmer labourer and the urban worker was goaded into the struggle by British oppression but another factor was that the new rising Irish middle-class needed room to expand. The signing of the Treaty showed that their goals had been met.
Some of the dialogue was from today: “Shut the fuck up.” is an Americanism and was used a few times by the Black and Tans. “The Brits.” that term, used by the IRA in the film, didn’t come about until the Provos started using it in the 1970s. “Go Go Go!” as shouted by the 1920s IRA comes from“today’s American SWAT teams. This hysterical cry was taken up by the UK police recently when raiding drug dens or persecuting Muslims in their own homes.
A priest in his sermon during Mass is belabouring the congregation for not fully accepting the Treaty. A couple of anti-Treatyites answer him back. Not possible back in the 1920s and scarcely possible even now, not out of fear but out of respect for the Holy Articles in the church. People don’t go to Mass for the priest but for their belief in God. Some priests are eccentric, some are not very bright, but a few are lovable.
It appears, in the film, that most of the congregation walked out. Very doubtful. Fifty years later a few did walk out of Catholic churches on the Falls Road when a priest condemned Republican violence but didn’t mention British Army violence. Catholics usually hate the sermons in most countries I have visited. They twitch uncomfortably, young children cry with the boredom of it all, most close their ears. In today’s England people can’t stand the rhetoric of it at all. They are merely listening to one person’s views. The Catholic Church still pays tribute to a monarchy those forebears almost destroyed the church. Give us back Westminster Abbey might be the slogan of a more militant Church. Well, give it back to them. I’m a non-believer in London and only accompany my wife to Church for she can’t bear being alone with all the thieving of handbags and donation pouches going on these days. But I am a Catholic in Belfast for political reasons. I didn’t decide that. That was decided for me by the situation in Northern Ireland.
Overall, I am glad the film was made mainly because we saw the media bare its teeth and thus we had a glimpse of what they mean by free speech.
A local paper in London, the Hampstead & Highgate Express, which is supposed to cover the most intellectual area in London, has its film critic saying:
“A good film but a bit one-sided.”
A bit one-sided? Like the ruling circles’ never-ending prejudicial attitude towards the Germans, sixty years after the war. This attitude has filtered down and now we have mobs of English football fans trying to recreate that war as a theme park in Germany during this World Cup series? Come on the SS never got to England, thanks firstly to Hitler’s armies halting on the outskirts of Dunkirk because of his respect for the British Empire and his desire for a peace pact with what was now a defeated nation. After that a joint effort against the Soviet Union? Hitler marvelled at how Britain held such vast colonial territories without a great number of troops. Brendan Clifford recently wrote that thanks to Churchill having the Enigma Machine given to him by the Poles, near the beginning of the war, Britain was able to break German codes and be aware of German plans for England. Then there was the Soviet Union and their mighty sacrifice that made sure the Nazis were going nowhere. But Britain’s counterpart of the SS, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries, did get to Ireland
Ken Loach said in a recent interview: “If you lie about the past you won’t tell the truth about the present.” I wish I had of thought of that.
I believe this film has done me some good after all. Go see it for yourself.
GO GO GO!
