Essential Political Films: Gesha-Marie Bland on BLOODY SUNDAY
Before he earned the reputation as the go-to action director with THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, Paul Greengrass focused on made-for-television films about the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland. Conceived as companion to OMAGH, a film about the aftermath of an IRA bombing for Channel 4, Greengrass wrote and directed a devastating real-time portrait of political violence in BLOODY SUNDAY, the namesake of a peaceful civil rights march in North Ireland which ended in carnage. Winner of the Sundance Audience Award and the Berlin International Film Festival the year it premiered, instead of grand speeches and lofty idealism, the film offers a striking portrait of leadership under stress and a simple plea for basic political rights, as well as one of the best uses of handheld camerawork I’ve ever seen (of course, other than THE BOURNE SUPREMACY.)
On the surface, BLOODY SUNDAY is a simple story. A peaceful group is besieged by a larger, militarized one. Acrimony and confusion boil over, smaller escalations lead to larger, irreversible ones, rocks lead to water hoses and tear gas, rubber bullets lead to real bullets. And real bullets always lead to real casualties. It’s a simplicity elevated by the handheld camerawork to convey the urgency, claustrophobia and fear of being besieged. On the scene-level, BLOODY SUNDAY is a taut, rousing exercise in foreboding, tension, and total panic. As writer-director, Greengrass relies on a staccato rhythm of intercutting, between the protagonist Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt) a member of the Northern Ireland Parliament, his fractured coalition of IRA operatives, hooligans, and jaded citizens, and the enemy, the British command in some distant headquarters, and Royal paratroopers, dressed for battle in camo and face paint.
Though it feels terribly ill-fated, the film, like the march, forges ahead with an inevitability, driven by some measure of hope that no one should live under foreign/military occupation. The tragedy and outrage that any viewer will certainly feel surging through their veins during ACT 3 of BLOODY SUNDAY is only further compounded when the top-brass immediately start the all-too-familiar game of spin control before they know the facts, or more importantly, the body count (27 wounded, 14 dead). It’s a denouement so devastating, it’ll leave any viewer with fist-raised, ready to join the revolution.
Like HUNGER (2008) by Steve McQueen, starring Michael Fassbender, my second choice for this Essential Political Films post, and also an historical drama about the Northern Ireland Civil Rights movement, BLOODY SUNDAY challenges the current notion of a political film. Admittedly, political films are a tricky sell. It’s as if advice about appropriate dinner party topics– avoid sex, religion, and politics — has permeated our film culture. It’s understandable, one of those inevitable consequences of history that cinema’s growth coincided with the rise of early 20th century dictatorships, and that for many years ‘political film’ was synonymous with ‘propaganda film.’ The masters of editing, Sergei Eisenstein et al embarked on ground-breaking formal experiments in 1920s Soviet Union, with the BATTLESHIP POTEMKIM as the main surviving artifact, but were ultimate reined in by Lenin’s vast state apparatus.
The thriving 1930’s German film studio, UFA, after being cleansed of racial and other undesirables, and consequently of all talent, by the Third Reich, provided a ready infrastructure for Goebbels and Hitler to disseminate propaganda about Aryan yada-yada yada. Ironically, despite their vast resources, Nazi Germany produced no great achievements in the cinematic arts. It wasn’t until the growth of liberation and revolutionary movements throughout Europe and its colonial strongholds, that we see the re-emergence of political films, the genre modernized by mixing with others genres. Gillo Pontecorvo’s BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966) about the Algerian Resistance to French Colonial rule, unfolds as a fictionalized documentary, some, mainly just the French, consider it propaganda. Though Z by Costa Gavras is essentially a thriller, its bonafides as a political film are rarely questioned. Bloody Sunday owes much to the BATTLE OF ALGIERS and Z, with its cinema verité style and reliance on handheld camerawork to highlight the tension, urgency and danger of political struggle, not for the state, but for individual.
During the early part of the march, when unbeknownst to the participants, the guns are readying themselves, Ivan Cooper invokes the legacy of MLK as their inspiration for non-violent protest. I suspect it was a wink to a feature Greengrass was already planning. In 2011 rumors of a film about the last days before MLK’s assassination were the talk of the town. A few months later the project seems to have stalled, with rumors of difficulties with King’s estate, competing projects and complaints that he wasn’t the ‘right kind of’ director to tell a story about MLK. In 2012, the project made it back into the trades, only to die off completely afterwards. Politics aside — the estate ones and the identity ones at least — I’m waiting for Paul Greengrass’ version of the American Civil Rights movement, the rousing political film that MLK deserves.
