Land and Freedom

"A story from the Spanish Revolution" is the subtitle of Ken Loach's seemingly quixotic film Land and Freedom. The conflict officially known as the Spanish Civil War remains virtually forgotten or misunderstood today. In its quiet way, Loach's film is providing us with a history lesson.

Before the opening credits, two paramedics climb stairs to a flat (later we learn it's in Liverpool) where an old man, Dave Carr, has been found unresponsive by his granddaughter. Dave dies in the ambulance and his granddaughter cries out, "I've lost him!" We next see her going through some old newspapers, broadsheets, and handbills that tell us that Dave was a proud member of the Labour Party. Looking around, she notices an old leather suitcase atop a wardrobe. Inside she finds more old clippings, a photo of a young woman, and a red kerchief containing a few handfuls of earth. Puzzled, she takes some of it in her hand, then smells her fingers a little disgustedly. The credits begin with titles outlining the historical background of the war, how a military revolt in Spanish Morocco led by General Franco spread into Spain with the backing of landowners and industrialists, committed solely to the overthrow of a democratically elected leftist government. Also throwing their weight behind the Spanish fascists were both Mussolini and Hitler, while Stalin was - so one might think - on the side of the Republic.

Ken Loach has always been a kind of cinema pamphleteer, addressing subjects concerned with the living conditions of the working class, always critical of political actions that have, over the decades, deliberately worsened them. 

Loach's style is rather the opposite of epic. He depicts huge social issues involving multitudes of people from the perspective of a few, or even just one. Land and Freedom wasn't the first time that Loach sought to tackle historical subjects: Days of Hope (1975), dealt with events from World War I, and the later The Wind That Shakes the Barley was about the Irish Civil War. I fully understand Loach's wish to tell the story of the war, but I didn't find it necessary for him to tell the whole story. Kim, Dave Carr's granddaughter, reads the letters he wrote from Spain to his sweetheart, and they supply the framework for the film. Dave had been a member of the British Labour Party and his attendance of a speech given by a young Spaniard about the war is what inspires him to join an international brigade and fight for rhe Republican side.

But, possibly attempting to get the story straight, Land and Freedom gets bogged down in didacticism, with lengthy scenes in which the action stops so that characters can conduct political debates. At the center of the film, right after the capture of a village held by fascists by the militia is a scene in which the militia members, Spaniards, German and Scots volunteers, an American (who is far too pragmatic, and becomes something of a villain), and Dave engage in passionate debate over whether or not the village should be collectivized. It's the worst kind of sloganeering that communism was always notorious for, and that had, historically, turned so many away from it. (E.E. Cummings famously described the USSR as "the vicariously childlike kingdom of slogan.")

I found Land and Freedom disappointing because, unlike Loach's best films, he uses his protagonist as a cipher in order to provide us with an undogmatic account of the Spanish "Revolution" (a puzzling use of the term, since the government of the Republic arrived in power through an election, not a revolution). Dave Carr witnesses the victory of fascism and goes home to Liverpool. By the time of his death, he is estranged from his wife and lives alone in a tenement. How much more interesting it might have been if Loach had told us the story of Dave's life in England after witnessing what the working classes accomplished, albeit fleetingly, in Spain. What did he remember or regret from those days of amazement, when formerly abstract principles were put into practice and a society of free and equal human beings was realized? He must have grown disillusioned, especially after 1945. Yet he hung onto his mementos of Spain all those years. 

At the end of his time in Spain, after the death of Blanca, a woman with whom he had fallen in love, and after headlines of the fascist bombing of Guernica, Dave sees the futility of the struggle, with communists fighting anarchists fighting Trotskists, and he tears his Communist Party papers into tiny shreds and goes back over the border from Barcelona, the only city still held by the Republic. But not before Blanca is buried by her POUM campañeros. Dave takes her red kerchief and fills it with a handful of earth and goes home to bloody old Britain. But Loach cuts from Blanca's interment to Dave's in Liverpool, where his daughter opens the kerchief and adds the Spanish earth to his grave, reads a few lines from a William Morris poem, and raises her fist in the communist salute. I half expected her to sing the words from the "Internazionale" - the old revolutionary hymn. But where would she have learned it? 

There is one angle from which to view Land and Freedom that makes it acutely relevant and timely - because of the war in Ukraine. Currently, more than 20,000 fighters from 52 countries are fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers, helping them to repel Putin and his war of aggression on an independent democratic state. Along with these heroic volunteers, the democracies of the European Union and of North America are supporting the Ukrainian side with proclamations and arms. Although 40,000 foreigners fought on the Republican side in Spain, they fought with antiquated arms and with no air force. Franco, on the other hand, had the logistical support of the Third Reich. Now China is reportedly going to supply arms to Russia, while warning the West not to return the world to the Cold War. This time, the war is far from cold, and if China wants to engage in proxy warfare, they had better reconsider the fitness of their proxy warriors.

Ideationally Puzzling

Flag of the Lincoln Battalion

I had a chance last week to watch Ken Loach's 1995 film Land and Freedom. My review of the film is forthcoming, but I went back to read what Stanley Kauffmann thought of the film. Writing in his column at The New Republic on April 1, 1996, Kauffmann wrote favorably of Land and Freedom, but with curious reservations. He was moved by its portrayal of a crucial moment in history that was overshadowed by the greater catastrophe of World War Two, the Spanish Civil War, to make a confession that is significant:

In Jim Allen's screenplay, Dave's granddaughter goes through his letters and clippings and photos, and the film flashes back to his experiences in Spain: his combat life, his encounters with the communist factionalism that accompanies the fight against fascism, his involvement in the ponderous discussion groups, his love affair with a young woman in the ranks alongside him and the dreadful inevitable results of the war - inevitable not only because Italy and Germany were supporting Franco, not only because the democracies were reluctant to support communists, but because of the strife among anti-Franco forces and the subversions of Stalin.

For those of us who lived through those days, Loach recreates engulfingly the atmosphere in which we lived and feared. Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 had been naked brutality. Still, it seemed somewhat distant. Franco's rebellion in Spain seemed to presage the tidal roll of fascism toward us. Loach made me remember nightmares (and my two heroic days when I got an application form for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and studied it, then never filled it out).

World War II and subsequent events erased that simplicity but apparently not for Loach. As Dave Hart's body is lowered into his Liverpool grave, his relatives and friends, young and old, raise their fists in the communist salute. It's not kneejerk anticommunism, I think, to wonder after that salute about the purpose of the film. Is Loach sympathizing or satirizing? Is he telling us that Dave and perhaps he himself learned nothing from the slitherings of communist policy in the Spanish Civil War, let alone the cascade of subsequent history? In recent years, even deeply held radical beliefs have come in for darker tempering; we get no sense of that from Loach's excellently made but ideationally puzzling film.

What's puzzling for me about Kauffmann's last remark is that it wasn't just Dave who came away from his participation in a moment of history, a participation joined by the likes of George Orwell, feeling vindicated, but Stanley who decided against participating, who ultimately failed to see the point of participating. 

With allowances made for the lapse of sixty years, Kauffmann didn't seem to know what the Spanish Civil War was really about. Quite simply, it was the overwhelming defeat of a people's choice of how they wanted to be governed by the forces of fascism, that the Western powers - the democracies - had an opportunity to stop, which may have sent a message to Hitler and Mussolini that we considered democracy worth fighting for and fascism worth resisting. But we failed, like Kauffmann, to fill out the application form and stayed home to watch fascism win, only to find ourselves fighting it anyway across Europe and the Pacific a few years later.

Dave dies of old age in Liverpool and his granddaughter discovers a small suitcase filled with his mementos, his souvenirs of an adventure he never told her about. And of those mementos Ken Loach gives us his "excellently made" film, ending with a group of Dave's fellow Socialists (Kauffmann continually calls them Communists) giving him the raised fist salute, which was the anti-fascist salute in Spain, made by communists, socialists, and anarchists. I found the moment to be neither naïve nor ironic, but beautiful.

In December 1936, when George Orwell arrived in Barcelona, the de facto capital of the Spanish Republic, he was a journalist sent to find out what was really going on - since the British press had been reporting quite conflicting accounts. He was so overwhelmed by what he saw, with the working class, as he put it, "in the driver seat," that he joined a militia that was unaffiliated with the hardline communist forces called Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista, or POUM - which is incidentally the very same militia that Dave joins in Land and Freedom. He saw action on the Aragon front until he was wounded in the throat by a falangist sniper and invalided out of Spain. He wrote the book Homage to Catalonia to try and set the historical record of the war straight. In 1943 he published an essay called "Looking Back on the Spanish War" in which he wrote:

One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.

The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan't they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.

So Stanley Kauffmann, who was otherwise a heroic figure among American film critics, was right to refrain from filling out the form and joining the Lincoln Battalion. The cause was lost, and Kauffmann had reason to think he did right. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference (just 2,500 Americans served in the Battalion), but perhaps the cause wouldn't have been such a lost one if he - and numerous other liberals like him - had filled it out and girded his loins in defense of democracy.