Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

December 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 74

Total Comments: 65

Full Archive

Advertisements

The Wind That Shakes The Barley / U.K. / 2006

Ken Loach’s anti-Micheal Collins if you will, not only in staking out a position on the other side of the Irish Civil War but in localising its story, refusing to have walk-on parts for the national leaders of the day. For all the time spent on the action scenes of the story – the brutality of the British, the guerilla resistance – the core of Loach’s interest lies in two scenes: one is the conflict around a Republican court operating in a town wrested from the control of the British; the other is of the political debate around the Free State treaty. With both what is at issue here is the brief possibility that existed of a true socialist republic being set up in Ireland, a possibility that quickly passed. So, the final sense of Loach’s film is a rather sombre one, a mournful regret at the loss of that possibility among so many losses of life, all epitomised in the final shot: a woman falling to the ground, her partially burnt-out home behind her, cursing her lover’s executioner, just as her lover was himself cursed (a scene reported but not directly shown) earlier in the film.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
16 Dec 2006 11:54 AM | Submit Comment

Submit Comment

Please note that your email address will never be displayed on this page.

HTML is enabled; line breaks (<br />) and paragraphs (<p>) are automatically converted. Apostrophes, ellipses, em- and en-dashes, and quotes are also automatically formatted.

Recent Updates