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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Bloody Sunday
Wednesday 13 November @ 10:22:27 |
 by David Anderson
The bland admission that we live in an era of daily docudrama takes nothing away from director Paul Greengrass's award-winning film “Bloody Sunday,” a tight, sobering re-creation of the 1972 massacre by British paratroopers of unarmed civil rights marchers in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Greengrass has advanced the form and given it a whole new meaning with this truer-than-life narrative made to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the event, the darkest day in the long and bitter sectarian struggle that natives call The Troubles.
The “doc” that marks this film's gritty style was honed in part by Greengrass’s 10-year career producing documentaries for British television; the result lends an all-too-real immediacy to the drama. Using a handheld camera much of the time, and with abrupt edits that directly evoke the style of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 landmark “The Battle of Algiers,” the filmmaker fuses the rough-cut look of an early ’70s news sequence onto his balanced version of the events of Jan. 30, 1972.
The intervening years of violence that have come to shape the Loyalist versus Nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland have blunted our threshold for emotion: we are by now beyond being shocked. The end to hostilities, if fragile at best, has allowed our attention to move on to the world’s other hot zones. Greengrass has brought it all back for us lest we forget. Using cast members and extras plucked from among residents of the Bogside, the Derry neighborhood where the tragedy occurred, “Bloody Sunday” adds realism to an already angry authenticity.
Greengrass has always made the most of the talents of the actors he’s employed, notably David Thewlis in “Resurrected” and Kenneth Branagh in “The Theory of Flight.” The same can be said here of James Nesbitt (“Waking Ned Devine”) as Ivan Cooper, the Protestant member of parliament who represents Catholic Bogside. Hoping to replicate the successes of the rights movement in America, Cooper volunteers to lead the marchers. “If we don’t march, civil rights is dead in this city,” he tells them.
From the film’s opening shot, Greengrass maintains the distance necessary to tell the story from both sides. His even-handed approach artfully traces the growing tension that rises from the British barracks to the backrooms of the High Street pubs and shop windows. This contrasted view pulls no punches, as the film clearly favors the Catholic side, who fielded 15,000 demonstrators that day protesting perceived discrimination from the province’s Protestant majority. “The British government has promised us reform, and all we’ve had is excuses and curfews,” Cooper declares.
“Bloody Sunday” takes some liberties with official history, but only in order to weave conflicting accounts into a credible narrative. The paratroop squad, untrained for their mission in Ulster, has its fateful orders. “In view of the adverse security situation in the province, all parades, processions and marches will be banned until further notice,” says their commander, Major General Robert Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith). “There’ll be none today.”
With the strains of “We Shall Overcome” on their lips, the unsuspecting marchers advance. As the troops deploy their weapons, the action boldly begins a machinery of slaughter. The clearing smoke reveals the pools of blood of the 13 killed as well as an atrocity that provoked a deadly Nationalist reaction. “From this, you will reap a whirlwind,” Cooper cautions the powers that be in London.
Bloody Sunday fueled decades of sectarian violence and gave the IRA its greatest victory. The army was exonerated, later it was blamed. Investigations were closed, then ultimately re-opened in 1998; the final government report is still pending. Far from reconciled, the echoes of that awful day can still be heard, while Greengrass has faithfully delivered film testimony that time cannot revise or court records easily contradict.
“Bloody Sunday” opens Friday that The Lagoon
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