Despatching Thatcher - who always had cost in her arsenal to justify cuts

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 April

This is a review of Ken Loach's documentary The Spirit of '45 (2013)

In reassuring me that there was no expectation of a delay in my journey using The Tube, Transport for London's notices called 'Baroness' one whom some recently have been referring to as 'Lady' - who knows what the protocol is, but it seems more than a little odd that no one knows what to call Thatcher.

Certainly not, to my mind and the title of a recent waste of the medium of film, The Iron Lady. More like, if a noisy band hadn't got there first, an iron maiden, choking and skewering to death those whom she despised : just look at the footage from the time of the miners' strike in Ken Loach's excellent The Spirit of '45 (2013).

In London, this seems a day like any other, apart from those notices - just imagine a horrible world where everyone around you wore a black arm-band !

Which takes me, by an inevitable association, to the tomb of The Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral - about him, as about the snuffed-out promise of Prince Henry (i.e. the elder son of James I (of England)), there was no doubt what was felt. Yes, even in the seventeenth century, people were not as free as we now think ourselves, but there was a lively press, and a spirit that would lead to a monarch on trial for crimes against his own country...

Not that the chummy trio of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne need face any more than tha ballot-box, but they are fools if they think that their self-minded and motivated support of their cronies builds this country, rather than their wealth and interests, and that it will all go unforgiven, let alone unnoticed !


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The Unthanks and a film

This is a Festival review of A Very English Winter : The Unthanks (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 June

This is a Festival review of A Very English Winter : The Unthanks (2012)

This was a cinema premiere of A Very English Winter : The Unthanks, a film made for t.v. (for BBC Four), introduced by the film-maker, who had perhaps prepared a little too much to say for such an occasion. Although Rachel Unthank and her sister Becky (Rebecca) were mentioned as clog-dancers as well as folk-singers, they had no opportunity to demonstrate the former skills, although they did take place in what was called a molly dance (which would originally have been to seek to raise funds for the ploughboys at the start of the traditional agricultural year) and one in which six dancers with swords came together to form a star.

Rachel and Becky ventured south to Lincolnshire, to Ramsey in Cambridgeshire, and Lewes in Sussex, but were not in the south-west at all, and otherwise in Yorkshire or nearby counties. The film ran chronologically and comprised six or seven events, starting with Hallowe’en and a mummer’s play, in which The Black Prince tried to attack King George. The prince was killed, but revived by a doctor with various potions, before Beelzebub put in an appearance and stole someone’s pint, which he impressively downed in one.

Whether quite, as the commentary by The Unthanks claimed, these various traditions such as lighting tar-barrels (carried on the head), parading through Lewes in costume and with huge numbers of fireworks on 5 November, and singing carols to lively melodies that had been written in the seventeeth and eighteenth century and banned by the church as too riotous showed adherence to beliefs other than wanting to do what previous generations had done (as was attested by cine footage) is perhaps doubtful: the anti-popery banners in Lewes turned out to be said to relate to an unnamed holder of papal power who, if he had been as bad, would have been one of the anti-popes anyway, and, although driving away evil figured in the mummer’s play, it was not obvious whether people did believe in ‘the embodiment of evil’.

As it is, I think that our traditions of writing and portraying evil on the screen do often show it as other, as the blacked-up Black Prince* was: we have a Lord Voldemort or a Hannibal to relate to and to wish for his undoing, even if life is maybe a little more complicated than that.


End-notes

* In truth, The Black Prince was an honourable knight, much loved and his death bewailed, as the glory of his tomb in Canterbury Cathedral shows, with all his ‘achievements’, i.e. his gauntlets, plumes, helm, etc., above him (these are copies, with the originals on view nearby), making clear that he was valued as the height of chivalry.


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