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review
Tuesday July 11, 2006 19:04 by James R - WSM - 1st of May branch - personal capacity
Worthwhile Stereotypes, Templates and Routines? I'm just after returning from watching Ken Loach's Palm D'or reaping drama 'The Wind That Shakes The Barley' and like most feel slightly compelled to add one or two words to the flurry of type and hype that has accompanied the movies release on these shores. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a typical Loach movie portraying many of the core techniques of his previous outtings. Again he relies on plunging a shallowly crafted personal relationship, this time between two brothers, into a set of tragic circumstances. These circumstances provide an emotional cover for his overly didactic political approach to popularising alternative historical mythologies that challenge the authors of a victors' history. This time the contested historicity is the rabid nationalism of the Irish text book, that sweeps aside socialist and labour based movements in the process of consolidation of the free state. Loach as usual creates his alternative historical narratives brilliantly. As before in the Spanish Civil War epic' Land and Freedom', his pastiche of Orwell's experiences in 'Homage to Cataloni', which he gave a romantic flurry that nearly ends on two opposite ends of the barriacades outside the Barcelona telephone exchange. He also returns to his routine technique of using moments of extended tense political debate to foreground the various shades of arguments operating within the historical juncture he is focussing on. In Land and Freedom this was deployed around collectivisation of the village as well as militarisation and in Bread and Roses it was used during the discussions on joining a union. Here he pushes an anti-treaty agenda based on the social policy of the democratic programme of the first Dail to the front during arguments in a republican court that challenges the extortionate income charged by a local gombeen man and later prior to the Treaty vote itself. |
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