yr12_scw_film

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Plot Summary
Spring 1936, a young unemployed communist, David, leaves his hometown Liverpool to join the fight against fascism in Spain. He joins an international   group of Militia-men and women, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). After being wounded he goes to Barcelona, where he decides to join another group of fighters. They remain in Barcelona and end up fighting other anti-fascist groups. David is disappointed and decides to go back to his old band. [|The Internet Movie Database]

**Personal Response:** Loach’s view is incredibly socialist. The audience see the popular people’s party (POUM) losing their notoriety, the audience start feeling sympathetic for this party as it is very one-sided. Owing to the fact that the audience don’t manage to see different view-points and perspectives, the film is rather limiting in giving a general and overall idea. It seems that this film was more of a propaganda piece rather than an informative historical video.

** First Review by //Richard Porton// **
It is a truism that history is written by the victors, not the vanquished, but the events in Spain from 1936-1939, known to the mainstream left as merely the = = Spanish Civil War and alternately referred to by anarchists and libertarian Marxists as the Spanish Revolution and counter-revolution, make convenient recourse to such platitudes even more problematic than usual. Many Americans earned of the Spanish crisis through novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and Man's Hope, as well as crusading documentaries such as The Spanish Earth. The struggle to preserve the endangered Republic and defeat Franco was depicted as a clear-cut struggle between liberal democracy and malevolent fascism. Even if fascism proved victorious, the war of words and images appears to have been won by the left. The novels by Hemingway and Malraux extolling the Republican side, and Ivens's similarly stirring film, are fondly remembered; only a few desultory remarks by Evelyn Waugh and Ezra Pound in support of Franco can be cited as memorable examples of profascist sentiment among distinguished members of the intelligentsia.

In recent years, however, a wealth of scholarship, unearthed by historians without an axe to grind as well as by committed anarchists and independent Marxists, has punctured the popular assumption, still shared by most well-intentioned liberals and leftists, that the defense of the Spanish Republic was merely a conflict between evil fascists and noble standardbearers of the Popular Front. Even many historians who do not share Murray Bookchin's anarchist convictions would, nonetheless, now agree with his assertion that "it is not a myth but a sheer lie - the cretinous perversion of history by its makers in the academy - to depict the 'Spanish Civil War' as a mere prelude to World War II, an alleged conflict between 'democracy and fascism.'" Anarchists such as Bookchin, the Marxist writers Pierre Broue and Emile Timine, and the non-aligned historian Burnett Bolloten, who devoted fifty years of his life to debunking received ideas concerning the Spanish Civil War, came to essentially the same conclusion: the upheaval of 1936-1939 was distinguished by both Western Europe's only noteworthy political and social revolution led by workers and peasants and a bloody period of repression in which the Communist Party, aided and abetted by the NKVD, sought to smear the left opposition as objective allies of the fascists and finally succeeded in crushing the dramatic urban and agrarian collectivization spearheaded by the CNT-FAI (Confederacion Nacional del political adjunct, Federacion Anarquista Iberica).

Yet if George Orwell's lucid account of his experience as a soldier on the Aragon front, //Homage to Catalonia//, had not attained the status of a minor classic, the vantage point of the anti-Stalinist left might have been doomed to even greater obscurity. Although Franz Borkenau's roughly contemporaneous, and more comprehensive, The Spanish Cockpit offered a strikingly similar perspective, the allure of Homage to Catalonia was its ability to encapsulate the fervor of a non-Communist, but unassailably radical, left within the form of a compelling narrative. Although Orwell's book is a fine example of autobiographical journalism, it is also a deceptively straightforward work of literature which resembles an eighteenth-century Bildungsroman - a narrative of self-education and moral edification. In fact, Homage to Catalonia's literary achievement is ultifaceted enough that its paradoxical resemblance to both a picaresque novel and a secular conversion narrative takes nothing away from its moral and political astuteness. In almost classically comic picaresque fashion, Orwell finds himself fighting for the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion, the anti-Stalinist Marxist party, allied in a marriage of convenience, but not of ideology, with the CNT), despite the fact that he came to Spain convinced of the soundness of the Communist Party line. In addition, Orwell, who, despite his veneer of self-deprecation, is undeniably the 'hero' of this work of nonfiction, emerged from his crise de conscience to become the twentieth century's archetypal version of an intellectual liberated from the chains of cant - the man who, according to Lionel Trilling, defined "our sense of the man who tells the truth." Ken Loach's new film, //Land and Freedom//, shares much of //Homage to Catalonia//'s moral earnestness, even if screenwriter Jim Allen's (Loach's longtime collaborator) frequently creaky narrative structure has little in common with the lucid compression of Orwell's reportage. Loach and Allen attempt to find a fictional equivalent for Orwell's saga of Stalinist betrayal, but their story is tethered to a thesis that much too often holds an admirable political stance hostage to wooden dramaturgy. This is not to say that Land and Freedom will not prove revelatory for many viewers unfamiliar with the convoluted internecine warfare of the Thirties or that Loach and Allen's film is not often extremely moving in spite of itself. This eminently well-intentioned film merely demonstrates that it is extremely difficult to transform an event as intricate and riven with contradictions as the Spanish Revolution into a populist epic. Throughout the film, a tenuous attempt to contrast the current climate of political despair with the Thirties' arduous, if more optimistic, ideological battles can be discerned. An opening shot of a Liverpool council estate's bleak stairwell, in which circled anarchist 'As' are clearly visible, sets the tone for the film, while a brief militant poem by the nineteenth-century British socialist William Morris, read by the hero's granddaughter at the end of the film, cements Loach and Allen's insistence that the radicalism of the past cannot be reduced to mere nostalgia. This implicit rejection of contemporary cynicism is nothing if not admirable, but the filmmakers devise an exceptionally unwieldy narrative ruse to convey, and to a certain extent simplify, the complexities of the past. After the death of POUM veteran David Carne (Ian Hart), his young granddaughter, Kim, discovers a cache of letters (stored with a mound of Spanish earth and a healthy supply of Communist and Trotyskyist newspaper clippings) written by Carne to his fiancee Kitty, which will soon coalesce into the film's voice-over narration. Carne's sojourn in Spain is also inseparable from this intellectual journey - a circuitous trek from the platitudes of Communism to the equally intransigent militancy of the anti-Stalinist left.

The interwoven flashbacks that follow form a kind of pilgrim's progress that stolidly mirror Orwell's intellectual trajectory in Homage to Catalonia, although Land and Freedom's substitution of a working-class hero for a middle-class intellectual is certainly not coincidental. Before long, David, whose grasp of internal Spanish politics is less than rudimentary, signs on with a POUM militia after failing to locate the indigenous Communists. Loach provides an excellent sense of the camaraderie and egalitarianism that flourished among the international recruits, and his decision to include a considerable amount of subtitled Spanish dialog, while casting French, German, Spanish, Italian, and American actors, serves as a useful reprimand to the ironing out of linguistic and national differences usually encountered in the commercial cinema.

The film rightly recognizes that the democratic structure of the POUM and the CNT militias differed radically from the Communist controlled "Popular Army." As an anarcho-syndicalist newspaper observed in 1936, //"a CNT member will never be a disciplined militiaman togged up in a braided uniform, strutting with martial gait through the streets of Madrid...rhythmically swinging his arms and legs,"// and the international assortment of militants encountered by David in the militia - a defiantly upbeat young Spanish woman named Maite (Iciar Bollain), Bernard (Frederic Pierrot), an ardent French defender of the radical faith, and the passionate anarchist Blanca (Rosana Pastor) - remind us that antiauthoritarianism can sometimes be reconciled with the travails of war.

Nonetheless, in his eagerness to replace the mainstream left's saga of heroic unity with an equally heroic narrative of ultraleft unity, Loach, perhaps understandably, overlooks many of the ideological quarrels that separated the Marxist POUM from the anarchist CNT. Relations between the CNT and the POUM were often chilly, even if, due to subsequent tragic events, the destinies of anti-Stalinist Marxists and anarchists eventually became intertwined. Although it is certainly true that CNT members occasionally joined POUM militias, the naive viewer would have no way of knowing that, in December 1936, the CNT, to the dismay of its more radical members, reluctantly supported the Communist move to expel the POUM from the Catalan government. Of course, the anarchist movement itself was split by the rank and file's outraged response to its leaders' decision to accept ministerial positions within the central Popular Front government. It may seem pedantic to chide Land and Freedom for sins of omission, not commission; after all, a fiction film of less than two hours which strives to fuse historical exegesis with adventure and romance will inevitably lack the leisurely scope of a lengthy documentary. But the film is flawed not by lack of detail or outright historical distortion, but by a yearning to render a messy past seamless and comforting.

The perils of sentimentality are especially evident in the cinematic treatment of Blanca, a character who must carry the cumbersome double burden of representing both the anarchists in a film which devotes far more screen time to the POUM (a rather lopsided strategy, since the CNT/FAI membership was far larger than that enjoyed by the relatively tiny Marxist party) and the contributions of Spanish women to the war effort. After her lover, a POUM member and ex-IRA partisan named Coogan is killed in battle, Blanca functions as both David's transient love interest and an ideological guide who must introduce the fairly dense Liverpudlian to the culture of the antiauthoritarian left.

The Spanish Revolution certainly mobilized the energies of scores of impassioned anarchist women; in addition to fighting with men during the early phase of the war, their advocacy of abortion rights and denunciation of the economic exploitation of prostitutes was truly ground-breaking in the light of Spain's rigid Catholic tradition. Blanca, however, is less a flesh and blood female militant than a symbol who almost seems designed as an anarchist equivalent of La Pasionaria, the Communists' most famous female activist. Her prominent red and black scarf provides visual evidence of her anarchist affinities, but the audience is never made aware of the nuances that might differentiate her from her Marxist comrades. Blanca is also the catalyst who sets David on his irrevocable path to anti-Stalinism. After their romantic interlude in Barcelona, she chides him for his decision to abandon the militia for the Communist line and the Popular Army.

Soon after, David witnesses the Communist siege of the city's telephone exchange, a stronghold of the CNT. This pivotal incident in May 1937 became one of the war's most mulled-over events, part of an explicit 'counterrevolution within the revolution' (commonly known as the Barcelona May Days) marked by street fighting between Communists and anarchists. The May Days are only sketchily alluded to in Land and Freedom but, in any case, David acquires a fuzzy knowledge of Stalinism in action. His eventual decision, moreover, to tear up his CP membership card appears, perhaps inevitably, more a result of his love for a beautiful anarchist than the end-product of genuine political sophistication. There is nothing especially wrong with this admixture of love and war, but it is painful to admit that Loach's punctuation of lovemaking with anti-Stalinist polemicizing infuses fire film with an inadvertent tenor of high-flown kitsch.

Yet it is possible to temporarily suspend any doubts concerning Loach's compromised synthesis of radicalism and Hollywood-style bathos during an extensive recreation of a Spanish village's decision to publicly debate the merits of agrarian collectivization. Andres Nin, the murdered (reportedly on orders from Moscow) leader of the POUM, maintained that the Spanish experiment in self-management was a "proletarian revolution more profound than the Russian Revolution itself," and the grassroots, participatory ethos of the Spanish collectives stands in stark contrast to the bureaucratic morass created by the Soviet Union's disastrous effort to impose collectivization on an unwilling peasantry. Land and Freedom's fictional village eventually votes in favor of collectivization, but the film is noteworthy for giving equal weight to opponents of the CNT line, particularly a seemingly reasonable American named Gene Lawrence (Tom Gilroy). Although Lawrence is nominally a member of the POUM militia, he is essentially an articulate exponent of the standard Communist argument that the war must be won before revolutionary goals can even be pondered.

His warning that the anarchists "must moderate their slogans" sums up the cautiousness, occasionally sincerely pragmatic and often the product of unadorned cynicism, promoted by the Popular Front. This sequence, mixing the contributions of professional and local, nonprofessional actors, is the film's best example of Loach's earnest debt to the social realist tradition. Lisa Berger, a filmmaker and researcher who helped plan the sequence, observed that she was responsible for finding: People who could argue for collectivization, without looking like city intellectuals, others who could be opposed, and others who could see the point, but weren't really convinced, based on real lived experience working in the countryside. The first group was comprised of young people who are currently active in the CNT in Castellon, Valencia, and Sagunto, some of whom are studying the issues of war vs. revolution in the university and are well-versed in the arguments used in 1936. The men who were opposed to collectivization were the real mayor of the village where these scenes were shot...and a local farmer who Ken and I had lots of conversations with to know what he would say.

Barry Ackroyd's fluid cinematography accurately captures the debate's vigorous fluctuations, and it is regrettable that this extremely engaging meld of fiction and documentary could not have been sustained for the entire film. To Loach's credit, the final sequences of his film give audiences an accurate idea of the Stalinists' accelerated repression of their left-wing rivals which led by 1937 to the imprisonment of thousands of CNT and POUM partisans. Nonetheless, Land and Freedom's tragic denouement - which features Lawrence's flamboyant reemergence as a Communist apparatchik as well as the pointblank shooting of its anarchist heroine and her subsequent martyr's burial - must be deemed more a string of dubious contrivances than a satisfying thematic resolution. It is difficult not to be at least somewhat moved by these final sequences, but it is equally difficult not to feel that they are crassly manipulative.

While at times it seems like aging leftists do little else but re-fight the Spanish Civil War from their armchairs, it is instructive to learn that Land and Freedom has struck a responsive chord with Spain's young people, many of whom know little of their own turbulent history. Unfortunately, even the freewheeling post-Franco Spanish cinema has been extremely reluctant to tackle some of the thornier issues of the Civil War period. **Whatever the weaknesses of Loach's film, he has done a great service in disinterring an episode from Spanish - and left-wing - history that has suffered from malign cinematic neglect for far too many years. **

Second Review by //Rony Quickenden//
"The civil war was never a romantic story. The idea that war has something romantic about it also serves a political function and obscures or covers up that which has occurred in reality" - Ken Loach

During the 15 years or so that my interest in the Spanish Revolution has been developing, I often dreamt of seeing a full cinematic treatment of the hopes and achievements of the revolution and the tragedy of its defeat : a film which would tell with a human voice the unknown stories of people who were not afraid to fight and carry through that which we could only theorise about to make their new society. Land and Freedom may not quite be that film .but it comes close indeed. Ken Loach is known for his harshly realistic works of social criticism, having established his reputation with the acclaimed and controversial "Kathy Come Home","Kes", and "Raining Stones". He has the kind of political and technical perspectives demanded by a subject with themes as complex yet universal as the Spanish Civil War. In this film he succeeds in bringing to bear a previously underplayed element in his work; human warmth and joy. For this is not a bleak exposition of political theory, nor a war film of Hollywood heroics but an exploration of some of the achievements and failings of the revolution through the experiences of a mixed group of men and women in a militia section.

Telling the story as a sequence of long flashbacks a young girl discovers her deceased grandfathers past while going through his belongings, bringing the issues into the here and now, reminding us of how many people of the 'older' generation have their own extraordinary stories left untold. Loach brings to the subject several original and effective film making techniques. Above all he uses players who are largely unknown, some of whom are indeed not professional actors at all. He brings extra freshness by encouraging them to improvise as much as possible with a minimum of formal direction, and furthermore insisted on shooting the scenes chronologically, enhancing the actors commitment to their character, unaware of the next turn in **the story**. He has also used players whose regional and national backgrounds match those of their characters, so that the dialogue of English American English, Castillian, Catalan, French, and German is delivered as naturally as possible. All of this works superbly well for me, and reaches a peak of realism in the debate scene where peasants and militia discuss collectivising the newly acquired land they have just liberated. This could easily have been shot as a dry conflict of theories or as a traditional Hollywood clash of egos, but instead we feel that these people really mean what they are saying, in all = = their awkwardness and embarrassment. In this context the two leads Ian Hart and Rosana Pastor add greatly by being suitably low key and creditably 'ordinary', but also being capable of showing great strength and determination.

To say all this is not to give the impression that the film is free of faults or compromises. It seems that in the making a major consideration was how much knowledge could be assumed on the part of the audience. Plainly very little, but it seems reasonable to suppose that most viewers would either have read or heard of Orwells 'Homage to Catalonia '. It is perhaps this line of thought which led to the central reliance on the POUM as the way of exploring the non-Stalinist revolution in the film (Loach himself is a Trotskyist and although the POUM had formally split from Trotsky,this may also serve to explain the POUM's attraction for Loach).Furthermore, the POUM can be described as a 'workers party against Stalin' as the script says, whereas focusing on the much larger and more relevant CNT-FAI would necessitate much usage of the dread term 'Anarchist'.

Both Orwell and Loach give sympathetic mentions to the Anarchists but neither give them the space which their numbers, power, achievements, and opposition to Stalinism would require. Technically, Loach blurs the line, giving the POUM red and black bandanas and using CNT songs in the soundtrack, but no attempt is really made to show what Anarchism or the POUM brand of Marxism really involves. However, to the films credit, the day to day realities of local decision making, egalitarian organisation, the position of Women and to some extent collectivisation are touched on, and their examples give the casual viewer a much more important lesson in what was achieved than dry analysis of the theoretical agendas of each group.

Some other compromises in the film have been picked upon as absurdities by some reviewers.The compression of time, the very limited geographical scope, and the difficulties experienced while crossing into Spain when the border was still open, have all received unfavourable mentions in the press. But there are small details which it has been necessary to compromise on in order to show a variety of experiences and keep within a very low budget. Similarly troops of so many nations would not all have appeared in the same section, especially in a POUM militia unit. But the point here is to try and show the international dimension of the struggle (though its overridingly Spanish character is thankfully, recognised) and to convey the message of solidarity. Having heard that the film contained very innovatory and realistic combat sequences, I must say I found these a little disappointing. It is true that the improvised low tech and rather chaotic nature of the fighting was captured, along with some convincing loud explosions. However, the fear, confusion and tunnel vision experienced in combat was not realised, and the storming of a nationalist held village was filmed in a very traditional way. Using a hand held camera would have helped to convey something of the confusion and limited view open to the combatants as can be seen in recent news footage (Bosnia/Checnaya). Loach used the hand held camera to give a more intimate feel to Blancas grief scene, so it would not have been out of place in the preceding combat sequences.

Politically, ** the central theme of the film is the betrayal of the revolution by the communist party and the crisis of belief which this induce's **. In 1936 the Communist party was a very small, even insignificant party which came to prominence due to the increasing importance of Soviet material, by recruiting disaffected bourgeois elements and by virtue of its reputation for discipline and efficiency. In fact, their agenda was fundamentally reactionary, as they fought to secure the privileges of private property and reverse the process of spreading collectivisation which the CNT-FAI, the most significant working class organisation in 1936 was promoting. It was important for the USSR to show that their form of Marxism was the only true revolutionary path, and so genuine libertarian successes could not be tolerated.

In this sense publicising the reality of the role of the Communist party in Spain was an important weapon for libertarians, as the party did everything possible to distract attention from these events. Similarly, the Western democracies did not want their workers to be infected by the example of a successful revolution in Spain, with the result not only of the non intervention committee, but also that the revolutionary dimension of the civil war and the Communist reaction to it being very much downplayed. The establishment has preferred a view of history in which the extremists of Fascism and Communism fought each other in a far off foreign land. It is in this context that Loachs film should be seen, helping in some way to tell stories which have for too long been obscured or distorted by established interests.

In Land and freedom the conflict between the libertarians and authoritarians is mainly illustrated by the militarisation of the militias and the fighting known as the May days. These were struggles of great significance for the direction of the revolution in Spain and the workers movement in general. Similar issues had been fought out in Russia, the Ukraine, Germany and elsewhere in the period after WW1, but the more general divergence between these two strands of political thought, organisation and action are timeless themes. In Spain, the struggle did not end with the 'Maydays', Anarchist collectives continued to resist being brought under state or private control for years to come: many individuals were persecuted or killed for their libertarian work, for example the famous Italian Anarchist Camille Berneri. The conflict had other less clear aspects, such as the participation in the government of prominent Anarchists, compromising in order to avoid being completely sidelined by the increasingly powerful state apparatus. ** These themes are either not mentioned or merely hinted at in the film. ** Overall, it is clear that ordinary people, only moderately organised and poorly armed made enormous social and military strides in the initial period following the Generals' rising. But the revolutionary spirit which drove the resistance was difficult to maintain in the face of the escalating conflict and mismanagement behind the lines as the war at the front became a slogging match between conscripted armies. Above all the nature of the revolution was being altered as the earliest gains were eroded at first insidiously and then quite openly, by a range of conservative elements in the republican camp. The successes promised if the CNT- FAI submitted to militarisation and central control were as illusory in the military and economic field: Communist efficiency was not particularly efficient after all. In these cases //the film is sympathetic with a vaguely antiauthoritarian position, but stops short of explaining the CNTFAI role, which would have been a real innovation, a real contribution. Loach himself has said that in the making of the film Trotsky's influence was indispensable, but that of the anarchists and libertarian communists merely amount to 'other influence'.//

"Land and Freedom" has attracted a good deal of attention in Spain itself, some ex POUM members even considering a relaunch of their party. Speaking with Spanish people it is noticeable that the Franco years and the subsequent move towards consumerism, have succeeded in leaving young people with only a limited interest in, or knowledge of the period. Indeed the actors/actresses in the film frankly admitted that the events portrayed in the film were new to them.

The Spanish Revolution and Civil War can be seen as a political laboratory, in which one can glimpse the kind of world that each of the political groupings were working towards. "Land and Freedom" spotlights events which form some of the crucial lessons of the period, and **in an accessible way raises some issues which are of deep significance to the question of how human beings organise themselves and their world, and for that alone it is extremely welcome.**

How do Historians Challenge Loach's View?
//"While at times it seems like aging leftists do little else but re-fight the Spanish Civil War from their armchairs, it is instructive to learn that Land and Freedom has struck a responsive chord with Spain's young people, many of whom know little of their own turbulent history. Unfortunately, even the freewheeling post-Franco Spanish cinema has been extremely reluctant to tackle some of the thornier issues of the Civil War period. Whatever the weaknesses of Loach's film, he has done a great service in disinterring an episode from Spanish - and left-wing - history that has suffered from malign cinematic neglect for far too many years." -// Richard Porton

//"The film is sympathetic with a vaguely antiauthoritarian position, but stops short of explaining the CNTFAI role, which would have been a real innovation, a real contribution. Loach himself has said that in the making of the film Trotsky's influence was indispensable, but that of the anarchists and libertarian communists merely amount to 'other influence'.// //" -// Rony Quickenden