Cinema politico: Irish fight for their rights in political films

It would be difficult to find films more disparate in style than The Wind That Shakes the Barley and The Crying Game. But the two films are, at their core, about the same thing—the Irish fight for independence from Great Britain.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which won the 2006 Palme D’Or at Cannes before falling off the map, follows two Irish brothers and their tragic involvement in the run-up to the Irish Civil War. The film is technically strong—a beautiful mix of breathtaking pastoral panoramas juxtaposed with visceral handheld sequences of martial brutality—but Barley’s construction is not what makes it worthwhile. What powers the film is the jarring nature of the story and the unflinching way in which it is told.

When considering fascism or terrorism, both strong presences in Barley, neither the early ’20s nor the Irish countryside is what first comes to mind for most audience members, who are more inclined to think of Nazism and Islamic terrorism. Both these historical entities have suffered through hackneyed and vapid cinematic portrayals. The proliferation of films about the Nazis and endless serious and satiric cultural referencing have riddled the subject with cliches.

Similarly, in Western attempts to confront Islamic terrorism in cinema, characterizations are generally trite, exemplified by films like Body of Lies, or even racist, as in the hijack flick Executive Decision. Non-Western cinema, like the Palestinian Paradise Now, has given the subject a more fruitful examination, but Islamic terrorism has proven a difficult motion picture nut for Western artists to crack.

Barley, by confronting fascism and terrorism in a unique historical and social context, reinvigorates cinema’s ability to wrestle with these issues. After film upon film about the upstanding British against the evil Nazis, Barley complicates the matter by showing British soldiers bayoneting a man who refuses to reveal his name and wrenching the fingernails off of an Irish dissident with rusty pliers, forcing the audience to reevaluate Western cinema’s stale moral stereotypes. Director Ken Loach never shortchanges the complexity of the subject matter—there are no true heroes in this film, only deeply flawed martyrs.

Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, released fourteen years before Barley, also upends typical ways of depicting political conflict but in a way that could not be more different. Here, the conflict is treated both directly and as sexual allegory. To say anything about the plot, aside from the fact that one scene will make your eyes pop out of your head, would be criminal, but the important point is that The Crying Game, set in the late 20th century, takes the other temporal end of Barley’s conflict and depicts it in an entirely different light. Barley is a rueful film, but Jordan somehow captures the same excruciating trauma of Irish political strife with wry wit rather than gloomy realism.

These two films, and the unique ways in which they liven political discourse about the same subject matter, illustrate the relevance of political cinema. When discussing art, it is tempting to deny that an artistic object can have value outside its aesthetic. The impulse is understandable, given how didactic or—as with the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will—dangerous, overly political cinema can be. But apolitical art is not immune to manipulation, for destructive historical forces can easily commandeer purely aesthetic art by virtue of its political apathy. Innovative and intelligent political cinema sidesteps moralizing and propagandizing to provoke discussions on political issues in ways that current events, endlessly diluted in the heat of the moment, never can.

Political cinema is a canary in the coal mine of free and open culture. When people compel political films to stop being made, something is wrong with society at large. As Times critic A.O. Scott mused when reviewing the lackluster and overtly political film Rendition, “It’s disappointing when such efforts don’t succeed, but I wouldn’t want to live in a country where filmmakers never tried.”

David Berke is a Columbia College first-year. Cinema Politico runs alternate Tuesdays.

Tags: Arts & Entertainment, David Berke