'The Dead Don't Die' in Cannes

 Review:  Zero Hours Comedy

DIRECTOR Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty have come storming back to Cannes with another tactlessly passionate bulletin from the heart of modern Britain, the land of zero-hours vassalage and service-economy serfdom – a film in the tradition of Loach’s previous work and reaching back to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. It’s fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue whose implications you somehow don’t hear on the news.

Like their previous movie, I, Daniel Blake, it depicts the human cost of an economic development that we are encouraged to accept as a fact of life. Like I, Daniel Blake, it is substantially researched through many off-the-record interviews, and rich in detail. But I think this film is better: it is more dramatically varied and digested, with more light and shade in its narrative progress and more for the cast to do collectively. I was hit in the solar plexus by this movie, wiped out by the simple honesty and integrity of the performances. Yet my emotions were clouded by my feelings about a certain toxic political issue. Of this, more in a moment.

The drama concerns Ricky (played by Kris Hitchen) a former construction worker in Newcastle who lost both his building work and his chance of a mortgage after the economic crash of 2008. He is a hardworking, affectionate guy with a bit of a temper and a liking for drink. Now he is renting with his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), a contract nurse and in-home carer who has to visit dozens of disabled, elderly and vulnerable people every day for their meals, baths and “tuck-ins” – jargon for an eerie formalised version of maternal intimacy. It’s a workload that over the years has left no time for her to tuck in her two kids at the end of the day. They are Seb (Rhys Stone), a stroppy teen who has artistic talent but is in trouble with the authorities, and his smart kid sister, Liza Jane (Katie Proctor).
Ricky’s mate persuades him to get on what looks like a nice little earner: van driving for a big delivery company. But the firm’s hard-faced manager Maloney (Ross Brewster) – a bullet-headed guy with a number-one cut – brusquely tells Ricky that he will be employed on a quasi-freelance basis, with none of the benefits of conventional employment. He has to buy or lease his own van, or rent one from the firm at a ruinous daily rate, and meet strict targets for deliveries. These are set by the all-important scanner, worryingly called a “gun”. Particularly important are the “precisors”, customers who have paid extra for precise delivery slots. Maloney shouts things like “Let’s get the cardboard off the concrete!” when all the packages are being loaded: a telling real-world detail. But Ricky has no time to go to the lavatory and has to carry an empty plastic bottle with him, a necessity which is not just mortifying but makes him vulnerable. And Maloney has not told him everything about the insurance situation.

So Ricky persuades Abbie to sell the car she needs for her work so he can buy the van that is going to be their route out of financial misery. He is hired – or in the firm’s sinister terminology, he is “onboarded” – and Laverty creates a subtle resonance when a caring and careworn copper tells Seb he has a great family and that he should “Take that onboard”.

Read more:   http://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/may/16/sorry-we-missed-you-review-ken-loach

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Considering the Spanish Civil War

IN July 2011, I shared a platform with Lewis Mates and a local historian who was attached to the International Brigade Memorial Trust at an event to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in Newcastle.  Lewis has written a book about the volunteers from the North East who served in the International Brigade in Spain in the 1930s or fought in the Spanish Civil War in a militia, and has studied extensively that period of history.  Last week, in an e-mail responding to my review of  Professor Preston's book The Spanish Holocaust, he writes:  '... thanks for this Brian; interesting, but I'd have liked to see a closer examination of Preston's treatment of the anarchists; his account focuses heavily on the CNT-FAI killings in the republican zone and the Communists et.al. hardly get a mention...' 

The problem with what he is requesting here is that though Preston's treatment of the Spanish anarchists is probably skewed against both the CNT trade union and FAI political organisation, it is not Preston's central argument which is about the parallels between the Spanish right and the Great  dictators of Europe.  Another problem is that some Spaniish anarchists did behave badly in the Spanish Civil War, and that this has been acknowledged by Stuart Christie among others since Preston's book appeared.  

 

If one wanted to put the conduct of some Spanish anarchists into proportion we could do worse than turn to the sociologist Dr. Franz Borkenau's book The Spanish Cockpit to get a more balanced grasp of the nature of the Spanish war in  a Spanish context: often, it seems to me, that some writers demonstrate a degree of Hispanic-phobia when dealing with the Spanish Civil War.  Borkenau went to Spain with the intention of doing some 'field work' on a country in revolution; he made two trips, the first in August 1936, and the second in January 1937.  It may be of interest for Mr. Mates to consider the contrast between the two visits:  in August the Government was almost powerless, local collectives were functioning and factories had been taken over by their workers, and the Anarchists were the main revolutionary force; and as George Orwell writes in his review published in a French journal of Borkenau's book:

'as a result everything was in terrible chaos, the churches were still smouldering and suspected Fascists were being shot in large numbers, but there was everywhere a belief in the revolution, a feeling that the bondage of centuries had been broken'.   (The New Statesman had refused to publish this Orwell review as being against editorial policy).

Come January 1937, power had passed to a greater extent from the Anarchists to the Communists - though not so much as later in the war, and it seemed that the Communists were bringing back the pre-revolutionary police forces, and political espionage on the republican side was developing.  Borkenau himself was soon imprisoned, but luckily for him, unlike Orwell and others, he managed to to save his documents.   

 

Borkenau describes the position as Spain fell under Communist control in January/ February 1937 as follows:

'It is at present impossible … to discuss openly even the basic facts of the political situation.  The fight between the revolutionary and non-revolutionary principle, as embodied in Anarchists and Communists respectively, is inevitable, because fire and water cannot mix …  But as the Press is not even allowed to mention it, nobody is fully aware of the position, and the political antagonism breaks through, not in open fight to win over public opinion, but in backstairs intrigues, assassinations by Anarchist bravos, legal assassinations by Communist police, subdued allusions, rumours ….  The concealment of the main political facts from the public and the maintenance of this deception by means of censorship and terrorism carries with it far-reaching detrimental effects, which will be felt in the future even more than at present.' 

 

Mr. Borkenau is not a revolutionary and he may even welcome a more orderly regime, but what he objects to is the arrival of the police spies as the Communists begin to gain influence over the Spamish and Catalan Governments, the lack of transparency, the censorship and the concealment of what was going on on the republican side.  We can all recognise this even in the tin-pot politics of the British left, nay especially there in those hole-in-the-corner parties and what Orwell, in another context, called 'the smelly little orthodoxies'.

'The Spirit of 45': Critical review of the new Ken Loach Film

Ken Loachs new film The Spirit of  45 has been showing this week at the Moston Small Cinema at the Miners Arts and Music Centre.    The latter is an impressive small cinema entirely furbished by volunteers.   The film however is a great disappointment compared to some of his earlier works such as "Land and Freedom " and "Bread and Roses".    It  is a curious mishmash of newsreel material, reminiscences of elderly activists and a whole gamut of Trotskyists including John Rees, Alan Thornet, Karen Reisman and Tony Mulhearn as well as a few fellow travellers of the orthodox Communist left.

It is an exercise in nostalgia for the supposedly golden age of socialism under Clement Attlee and wallows in sentimentality and eulogises this era without any genuine analysis of the nature and structures of fabian socialism with its top down bureaucratic ethos and lack of genuine participatory democracy from the bottom up.   State socialists and their supporters on the authoritarian left will undoubtedly wax lyrically about this film but libertarians and anarchists will pose the question why scarcely any reference in the film to grass roots movements such as Occupy and the anti-capitalist movements based on consensual decision making.

In conclusion, this film and its director  represent a partial and tendentious effort to rehabilate state socialism with its welfarist component and keynesian economics at a time of economic austerity.   Unfortunately this model of socialism so enthusiastically endorsed by Loach has been tried and failed in post war Britain .   Bureaucratic and hierachical theories of socialism should be relegated to "the dustbin of history".   Ken Loach presumably a student of the Spanish Civil War has manifestly learnt nothing from the substantial achievements of the Confederacion de Nacional Trabajo (CNT) which is living proof that workers and peasants can develop and organise forms of collective action from the base upwards which offer a vision of how society could managed in a post capitalist world.

Restaurant Review: The Price of 'Herby Fishcakes'

MACK-THE-KNIFE GOES TO 'delifonseca' on Stanley Street, Liverpool:

THEY SAY, or rather some folk from Manchester say: 'You can never trust a Scouser!' I never really understood that saying and yet, in the last year, I have felt diddled by two establishments in Liverpool: both times it was an issue of a false description on a menu. The first was last Summer when I was in John Lewis cafe across from the Liverpool Tate and I ordered tea and a scone priced lower on the menu that at the till. When I queried it the staff were rude and ungrateful that I'd made them aware of what is after all an offence under the Trades Descriptions Act. But as I had my camera with me I snapped the menu before they changed it. Returning to sip my tea I was approached by a manager who after an explanation offered me another drink for free.

More disturbing was our experience last Friday at the highly recommended (in the Telegraph) 'delifonseca', where we had two main courses from the chalked-up Blackboard and a bottle of Tynant sparking water from the drink list. The water was £3.35 for a 750ml blue bottle and served with ice and lemon. I had Sausage & Mash at £8.25, not cheap but nice - the cafe is in the Moorfield area and has certain pretensions. The three pork sausages were delightful and I couldn't fault the quality of the dish or the gravy. More or a problem was my nearest & dearest's 'Herby Fishcakes': there were two of them with potato wedges and some pickle. The waiter Angus had said: 'The fishcakes are Haddock today!' The verdict was that the fishcakes were more like potato cakes and that it was hard to detect any fish in them.

The bill came and I duly paid it on my credit card, minutes later my partner spotted that the price of the fishcakes had transformed to £10.45 on the bill while the same thing was clearly £9.75 on the big Blackboard before us. Wearily, I approached the waiter by the bar and asked for an explanation of the discrepancy? Quick as a flash he said: 'It's wrongly described up there - the Chalkboard refers to Fishcakes containing Coley, not Haddock - I ought to have told you that!'

My partner who prides herself on knowing the Trades Descriptions Act said: 'That's very naughty you!' To which Angus replied 'I'm sorry I just haven't had time to change the price on the Blackboard.' By the it was 3.30pm in the afternoon. Alas I had no camera this time.

BRITISH ROYALTY & BARCELONA'S GANGMASTERS

LAST MONDAY, The Sun in an editorial entitled 'War on anarchy' warned: 'Anarchists, prostitutes and assorted nutters hope to wreck the Royal Wedding on April 29th'. Shortly the Oscars will be awarded and Colin Firth is widely tipped to win one for Best Actor for his role in 'The King's Speech' as the soon to be George VI. Also nominated for Best Actor is Javier Bardem, who played the part of a gangmaster on the streets of Barcelona in the film 'Biutiful'. The blurb in the Manchester Cornerhouse's program describes his 'stunning central performance' that 'tells the compelling story of one man's struggle to find spiritual redemption in morally bankrupt Barcelona.'

It is curious that both The Sun of Murdoch and anarchist critics, like Professor Chris Knight, should have such an obsession about Royalty, which I suppose is itself very British. The Spanish film is focused on serious social issues like bent coppers, Senegalese street people selling drugs on the Ramblas, and Chinese illegal immigrants being used as cheap labour on Catalan building sites. In 'The King's Speech' Colin Firth grapples with his own stammering and his fear of public speaking as the abdication of his more articulate brother Edward VIII looms in 1937, just at the time the Spanish Civil War is at its height. Coincidentally, Colin Firth's next role is reported to be that of George Orwell in 'Homage to Catalonia' and Javier Bardem in 'Biutiful' is the son of an anti-Francoist who just 'couldn't keep his trap shut' and fled into exile in Mexico. Perhaps typically 'The King's Speech' is psychological and cultural, while 'Biutiful' is very Spanish in dealing with social issues.

Last Saturday, the critics on Radio Four's 'Saturday Review' declared that 'Biutiful' shows the Barcelona that the tourists don't see in a very gritty light. My partner thought that on this showing Javier Bardem should get the Oscar for Best Actor - he got the Cannes Best Actor award; but Nigel Andrews in the FT called it 'two hours of bloated messianic attitudinising'. In 1963 I wrote a piece on the shanty towns in Barcelona for World Labour News - journal of the Syndicalist Workers' Federation - that later appeared in the newspaper of the Spanish Youth Federation (FIJL) as 'Donde las touristas nunca fui': 'Where the tourists never go'.

Review: 'Shed Your Tears & Walk Away' by Jez Lewis

Noticing the Natives in Hebden Bridge

A FEW YEARS AGO my grand-daughter, who lives in the working-class town Todmorden, said she was not going to secondary school in nearby Hebden Bridge because there 'Mi Mum says all the "druggies" come out in the afternoon'. At the time I thought that that was a false view or excuse to keep her out of Hebden based on 'inverted snobbery', imposed upon her by her mother who didn't really care for the middle-class incomers from the South and elsewhere who swarm round the streets of this former small mill town. I didn't at that time believe there was a drug problem in Hebden; in a way I idealised it having first gone there as a kid of ten or eleven around 1950-1, when I was shocked by the broadness of their Yorkshire dialect: living in Lancashire, I'd never heard nowt like it.

It only goes to show that not only are some things 'seen but unnoticed' but that we also hear what people say but don't digest it: 'Shed Your Your Tears & Walk Away' is a film about the genuine natives of Hebden Bridge, the folk I was once dazzled by when I went there to buy tropical fish from old Marnie with my Dad. The children and grandchildren of the people I saw and heard and so admired for their rough talk in 1951, have now been deposed by upper-class incomers.

Mostly it takes place in an exotic setting, near the park, against a dramatic backdrop of a lush green landscape both in the centre of Hebden and in the surrounding hills around Heptonstall, where a former poet laureate used to live, and another poet is buried. Indeed, a lot of the action is played out in front of a newish apartment block where till recently two anarchist incomers, one a member of the Northern Voices editorial panel, used to live. With the mills gone these lads and lassies in the film have become society's rejects - almost foreigners in their own land inhabiting a kind of nether world; a world within a world that most of us walk past without noticing. The town is full of tourists during the day, like nearby Howarth, and where there where once antique shops there are now cafes, bookshops and a sun dial in St. Georges Square.

The film is both directed & narrated by a former native of Hebden, Jez Lewis, who went to London, but came back because he was concerned about his friends from school who where dying at a frighteningly young age. People in the film attack the cultural colonisation of Hebden by incomers, it seems the jobs are just not there for people who make things anymore. Instead, there is a vegan bakers on Market Street, where now an anarcho-syndicalist member of the Solidarity Federation who works at Leeds University and comments on gender politics, goes to buy his vegan croissants in the morning.
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Chris Draper commenting yesterday on the above film says that he doesn't expect to include it in his forthcoming feature on Six o' the Best Northern Films in Northern Voicies 12 because it is not a commercial film and is a documentary. There will be a more refective review in the Bit on the Side section of NV12.

Film Review - 'Vincere' by Marco Bellocchio

The film Vincere is about the relationship between Ida Dalser and the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. In his book on Mussolini, Christopher Hibbert provides some fascinating background information in this respect. The Italian media portrayed Mussolini as a perfect role model for the Italian family- dedicated to his children - Uomo Casalingo. In reality Mussolini was a donnaiolo - Don Juan. According to Hibbert, one of his earliest mistresses was a bizarre, neurotic woman. Her name was Ida Dalser. She had a mentally retarted and physically deformed child by Mussolini. Il Duce ultimately ended the relationship and had Ida incarcerated in a mental institution.

Since 1913 Ida, who is portrayed in a sympathetic manner in the film, had claimed that Mussolini had promised to marry her, or in fact had done so, and that she could not be bribed with a maintenance allowance. Ida often came to the offices of Il Popolo d'Italia in Milan and created a scene. On one occasion Mussolini threatened her with a pistol. On another occasion she was arrested for causing a breach of the peace in Trento where she set fire to furniture in the Hotel Bristol claiming that she was Mussolini's wife. She died in a mental hospital in Venice in 1937.

Ida's son Benito died in another mental hospital in Milan in 1942. Vincere is a powerful and moving film which was recently shown in the Cornerhouse in Manchester. It was directed by the accomplished Italian director Marco Bellochio and starred Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi.

The film combines historical material with a very human and personal story. Ida gave up everything to support Mussolini's political ambitions and in return was treated in a brutal manner culminating with 11 years imprisonment in a lunatic asylum. Bellochio has directed a patently anti-fascist film and I would recommend it to all libertarians and anarchists.

As further background reading to this period there is an excellent pamphlet published by the Anarchist Federation entitled the Italian Factory Council Movement 1920. I reviewed this pamphlet for Northern Voices but it was not published due to reasons of space. This review is available on request.

Review: La Buena Nueva (The Good News)

YESTERDAY, the Cornerhouse in Manchester showed the Spanish film 'La Buena Nueva' (The Good News), the true story of the trials of a young sincere priest who is sent to a poor village in Navarra, bordering the Basque region, but in 1936 the centre of traditional right-wing Carlist politics and religion. On his arrival the socialist mayor and his party are about to be overthrown by a group of Falange fighters and incomers, who are sent to unite with the local Carlists to take over the village. Several socialists who take to the hills to escape are shot by the Falange. Others are thrown in a pit.

The priest trys to maintain some sort of neutrality for the Church and adopt a prudent postion helping some of the widows of the victims. But tensions develop, not just between the priest and the Falangist incomers, but also between the Carlists and the Falange. Conflicts between differing approaches to the Church and religion of the conquerering parties are lightly touch upon. More interesting is the priest threat to the boss of the Falange that one day he would have to pay for the killings. The implication throughout the film is the underlying suggestion that some day the bodies will be discovered, making the film a harbinger of what is now happening in so far as there is a recuperation of historical memory and a recovery of the bodies of Spanish Civil War victims all over Spain. Writers in Spain are already turning out novels about the civil war and no doubt there will be many more films on similar subjects.