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FILM COMMENT
September/October 2002
OVER THE EDGE, INTO THE ABYSS
PAUL GREENGRASS, HEIR APPARENT TO GRITTY BRITISH REALISM, RELIVES BLOODY SUNDAY AND OTHER BLEAK MOMENTS FROM HIS NATION'S RECENT PAST
by Graham Fuller
above: Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday unflinchingly depicts the events of January 30, 1972, when soldiers of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment of the British Army, deployed to arrest ćhooligansä attending a Catholic civil rights demonstration in Bogside, a republican stronghold in Londonderry, killed 13 people and wounded 13 others, one of whom subsequently died. Says Greengrass on his approach to delineating the tragedy, which rapidly intensified the conflict in Northern Ireland by spurring IRA recruitment: ćI wanted to create this kind of ballet of rational intent undone, as violence ratcheted through the day, until finally youād danced your way across the floor and over the edge, into the abyss. This is essentially the story of the Troubles.ä
Used in the cinematic sense, the word ćballetä can conveniently be applied to the kinetic violence of Sam Peckinpahās Westerns or the macho lyricism of Oliver Stoneās films, but it sits strangely with Bloody Sundayās grueling verisimilitude. Thatās not to say itās inapposite ÷ ćballetä will suffice if the tune is ćDanse Macabreä and the choreography is by St. Vitus. Directed in war-zone news footage style by Greengrass and shot in 16mm with juddering handheld camerawork by Strasburg, Bloody Sunday is a propulsively rhythmic replication of an inexorable collision between a civilian march and an occupying army; for all its vérité harshness, it is shot through with fatalism.
Its analogues are not handsomely calibrated, patriotic combat movies like Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, or even the Troubles films of Loach (Hidden Agenda) and Leigh (Four Days in July), but scrupulously unglamorous and anti-rhetorical historical re-creations like Gillo Pontecorvoās Battle of Algiers and Costa-Gavrasās Z. But the crucial influence, both artistically and spiritually, is Clarke, a hero of Greengrassās and director of two BBC-TV films about the Troubles: Contact (85), a relentlessly bleak study of British soldiers searching for ira arms dumps on the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and Elephant (89), a wordless catalogue of sectarian assassinations ÷ and itself a kind of surreal ballet.
Of course, when Greengrass speaks of ballet, he is referring more to the dialectical dances between Bloody Sundayās various factions (and between people with different motives within those groups) than to the movieās cadences or mise-en-scène. Shot in Dublinās Ballymun Estate for about $5 million, the movie is stoked by rapid intercutting between a number of characters: pacifist Protestant MP Ivan Cooper (James Nesbitt), who is leading the illegal march in protest of the British governmentās mass internment without trial of suspected IRA men; impressionable 17-year-old Gerry Donaghy (Declan Duddy), who has previously been arrested for rioting; Major General Ford (Tim Pigott-Smith), gung-ho, media-friendly commander of the British Land Forces in Northern Ireland; flustered Brigadier MacLellan (Nicholas Farrell), who must do Fordās bidding from an operations room; and, in the field, the Parasā business-like Colonel Wilford (Simon Mann) and Private 027 (Mike Edwards), who is shocked by his matesā willingness to shoot unarmed civilians.
Terse fades-to-black instill the narrative with a mood of foreboding as the Bogside youths at the rear of the march stone the British troops, who respond with water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas. Provisional IRA gunmen let off a few rounds as the Paras roar into the area in armored cars and open fire with live ammo on the men, women, and children scattering in front of them. The film briefly depicts actual moments from the real slaughter ÷ the hunched Father Edward Daly (Raymond Cullen) waving a bloodstained white handkerchief as he leads three men carrying the body of a dying youth; the middle-aged Barney McGuigan (Kevin McCallion) being arbitrarily gunned down as he goes to rescue a wounded man in front of a block of flats. ćThe idea is that Ivan and I would imagine our way back to where we began when we decided to make documentaries together in places like Northern Ireland,ä says Greengrass. ćWe said, What if weād been there on Bloody Sunday and in some mystical, magical way had been allowed to go where we wanted ÷ into the command room, with the soldiers, with the Provos, out in the streets ÷ and weād just shot the fuck out of it, and then had forgotten that footage for 30 years and then found it again. Thatās the film we set out to make and why we used crappy old 16mm stock.
ćThe reason we used the fades-to-black is because life is disjunctive,ä Greengrass adds. ćA well-constructed film is about creating a surface of fictional reality. I wanted to disrupt that, to distress it in the editing room, so that we got fragments of experience, which then built up into a film that was more like a collage than a smoothly running river, though only by standing back from it could you see it as a received image, and meaning would emerge out of that. The fades also give the film a kind of visual jazz rhythm, which, with the layers of sound, create a pulse, which is important because thereās no music score.ä The filmās source was Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, a series of oral testimonies, including that of the bookās compiler, Irish civil rights activist Don Mullan, who participated in the march as a 15-year-old. It reports that the shootings took place in under half an hour, but Greengrass compresses the massacre into six stomach-churning minutes that ignore all the compositional rules of screen warfare. As the Paras cut loose, the fleeing Bogsiders crouch behind low walls, dart toward safety ÷ and some of them fall dying. We see a Para execute one prostrate man, shot in the back of the head, but the flurry of action defies spatial and moral reason.
ćI wasnāt there on Bloody Sunday ,ä says Greengrass. ćBut Iāve certainly witnessed riots in Northern Ireland and I remember filming during the Aquino revolution in the Philippines when Marcosās policemen started firing and a couple of people were killed. That kind of violence is all over in seconds, and then you see bodies lying around. You donāt see bullets hit people, because nobody knows where the firingās coming from, let alone where itās going to. Itās not like the movies. Before we made Bloody Sunday, I screened the rushes that I shot in the Philippines because it vividly shows what happens to a camera and what happens to a crowd when bullets get fired.ä
After it aired on British television on the 30th anniversary of the tragedy in January, Bloody Sunday was slated as crude anti-British propaganda by right-wing elements of the British press. It was only natural that a former World in Action director would empathize with brutalized civilians. Greengrass unambiguously asserts that soldiers planted weapons on the dead as part of a cover-up. Major General Ford is portrayed as a supercilious, self-absolving government toady who, before the march, snubs a local police chief desperate to prevent any bloodshed, and who eggs his men on against the ćhooligansä and ćyobbos.ä In contrast, however, Brigadier MacLellan and Private 027 are portrayed sympathetically, so that the film offers no blanket appraisal of the British forces as unregenerate authoritarian bullyboys.
The price paid when young men coax one another into acts of violence is central to both The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and Bloody Sunday. A bravura sequence in the first film is shown from the ground-level, wide-angle perspective of a police surveillance video camera recording the murder suspects joking about their likely acquittal ÷ one of them mimes slamming a knife into an imaginary back. In Bloody Sunday, Gerry Donaghyās mates invade the ladās bedroom on the morning of the march and lure him into hurling rocks at British soldiers. The Paras, meanwhile, stand behind a barricade, champing at the bit to get among the ćhooligansä and warning the hesitant Private 027 to stand with them. Soon, Gerry is dead. In a poignant shot at the end of the film, his girlfriend stands forlornly at their appointed meeting place, like one of John Fordās waiting women. The correlative of Greengrassās abrasive, testosterone-driven realism is female loss ÷ that of the philandering soccer starās long-suffering wife in The Fix, of the grieving mother in The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, of an innocent colleen in Bloody Sunday. Should Greengrass go Hollywood, womenās stories could be his destiny.
Graham Fullerās forthcoming book on Mike Leigh will be published in the fall.
© 2002 by Graham Fuller
