One of the most consistent makers of excellent motion pictures during the 1980s and 1990s has been Ken Loach. With a resume highlighted by such unforgettable titles as Hidden Agenda, Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, and Ladybird, Ladybird, Loach is recognized as the kind of director who will face challenges without backing down. His provocative, idea-rich movies are always populated by believable characters, and his latest offering, Land and Freedom, is no exception. With this movie, however, Loach has moved out of his familiar territory of modern-day England, turning the clock back to 1936 Spain to tell the story of one group who stood against General Franco and his fascist supporters.
The Spanish Civil War was like no other uprising in history. It was a messy, disorganized affair with pro-communist and pro-democracy forces fighting each other instead of uniting against their common enemy. This lack of organization among the country's landless workers led to victory by Franco, who was backed by both Mussolini and Hitler. Some, including Loach, believe that the pernicious influence of the Stalin-backed Communist party fostered the divisiveness among the revolutionaries that resulted in the fascist victory.
Land And Freedom
Land and Freedom opens in present-day England, with a young woman (Mandy Walsh) reading the diaries and letters of her late grandfather, who was part of the multi-national Republican Militia fighting against Franco. David (Ian Hart), a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, was unemployed in Liverpool when the call went out from Spain for support in the war against fascism. Driven by idealism, David left his wife behind to join a ragtag division of one of many local militias struggling to defeat Franco.
The story unfolds as seen through David's eyes. This is his tale, and, like all epic journeys of the heart and spirit, it involves triumph, tragedy, love, passion, and pain. Torn between supporting the organized resistance and continuing to be a part of an isolated but autonomous militia, David makes the "safe" decision, then, to his dismay, learns the reason why Franco is winning the war -- the Stalinists are more interested in suppressing the real freedom fighters than opposing the fascists.
Most men, even in the comparatively free country of America, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so preoccupied with the factitious cares and superfluously course labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. The laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity (812). Because man is so chained to his work that he cannot enjoy its benefits, the ownership of land takes freedom away. Thoreau compares labor of the land to laboring under a mistaken (812) freedom where the soul of a man is soon ploughed into the soil as compost (812).
MST and EZLN differ in social, cultural and ethnic context, geographical settings, and economic and historical background, but they are nonetheless united by the aims of building peasant fronts against neoliberalism and reclaiming the right to the land. For unfamiliar readers, MST officially became a national movement in 1984 in Cascavel, Paraná towards the end of the military junta which had overthrown the democratically elected president João Goulart in 1964. It was founded to coordinate grassroots movements working on land occupations. EZLN made their first appearance in January 1994 in the state of Chiapas, when they issued their first declaration. The trigger of their insurgence was the NAFTA agreement which the Mexican state signed with USA and Canada, de facto introducing neoliberal restructuring which penalised peasant and indigenous greatly.
Similarly the author interviews a member of the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indigéna-Comandancia General (Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command), part of the military structure of the EZLN, who explains how the committee if formed and the involvement of wider community in its structure:
The clandestine committee is chosen by the compas of all the communities. They are in contact with the bases de apoyo and they go around to collect the views of the compass [recogiendo la palabra]. (p. 118).
The second and better-known Land and Freedom group emerged after the failure of the "Going to the People" experiments in the early 1870s. Forced to review their strategy and activities, Russian populists realized that the peasants were hostile to intellectuals and that the state would not change of its own accord. In 1876, in St. Petersburg, they organized a new Land and Freedom group as a secret political organization. The leaders of the group, whose members included Mark Natanson, Alexander Mikhailov, and Lev Tikomirov, reasoned that revolutionaries would have to go among and work through the Russian people (narod ). They were well aware, however, that many Russian activists had idealized the peasants and overestimated their willingness to revolt. Thus, if Land and Freedom was to achieve its goals of giving peasants collective ownership of the land through the obshchina, promoting freedom of the individual so that the peasants would be able to regulate their own affairs, and bringing about the abolition of private property, it would have to be better organized (through a more centralized structure) and, above all, would have to use agitprop (agitation and propaganda) in both word and deed to win the people over.
To this end, members of Land and Freedom went out in the Russian countryside, concentrating on the Volga region, where there had been peasant uprisings in the past. They also agitated among rebellious students in the winter of 1877 to 1878. In the late 1870s, Land and Freedom decided to disrupt the Russian state by carrying out terrorist acts targeting landowners, the police, and government officials. When the state responded by restricting its activities and arresting many of its members, Land and Freedom split into two other groups, Narodnaia Volya (People's Will) and Chernyi Peredel (Black Petition), both of which left a mark on Russian history when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.
This petition, which invoked post-Revolutionary freedom rhetoric, was successful. Tony Vassall was granted 12 annually.25 The same year, the family was evicted.Despite the success of their petition, Tony and Cuba Vassall carved out freedom in an environment of ongoing racial discrimination and evolving legal uncertainty. Between 1780-1783, a new state constitution and a series of court cases signaled the legal end of slavery in Massachusetts. Whiting notes that the constitution and courts did not initiate this move toward abolition, but rather took cues from the groundswell of Black legal challenges and flight from slavery leading up to and during the American Revolution.26In 1787, Tony and Cuba Vassall purchased a home at what is now the corner of Shepard Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, and later purchased five additional acres. The national tax valuation from 1798 records Anthony Vassall as owner of five acres of land valued at $290. Tony worked as a paid laborer, yeoman farmer, and farrier. He died at the reported age of 98 on September 2, 1811. That year, Cuba Vassall filed her own successful petition to become the beneficiary of the annual pension.27 Cuba Vassall died the following year on September 16, 1812. Their burial locations are unknown.
In a sequence of black farce, Dave finds himself defending the Communist Party HQ against his supposed allies. Shooting at him from across the street is a bloke from Manchester, England; neither of them knows what the other is doing there.
filmic communism? Ken Loachs early war drama Land & Freedom has a certain stasis to live off from, determining statics making it unwieldy and aloof. characters are treated stepmotherly, possibilities to establish love interests or a crime-and-punishment story arc are abandoned. individual storylines are disregarded in order to let all elements of the group of freedom fighters having the same amount of spotlight.
The soldiers and the locals are arguing about collectivisation. Many of the fighters want to see the immediate end of private property and the beginning of collectivised industry. However there are others in the room who do not wish to give up their land, or who are concerned that too left-wing an agenda will lose them any chance of gaining support from capitalist democracies, which they think is necessary for victory.
He soon finds that the POUM militia is run on an amateurish basis, and is kept short of decent guns by the government, but he is attracted by the spirit of equality and freedom that the movement offers. This is reflected in his growing interest in Blanca (Rosana Pastor), a young Spanish woman. After the death of her boyfriend, Blanca and Carr become close.
The story of Land and Freedom follows a similar path to that of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a later more polished Ken Loach movie about the war for independence in Ireland. In both cases, the guerrilla army fights against a common enemy, but finally the hopes for a new and more representative society are quashed by the statists on their own side.
In 1780, the Massachusetts General Court prepared to sell the Vassall estate. Tony and Cuba, now using the surname Vassall, faced eviction. They petitioned the court to continue living on and cultivating an acre of land. That petition was denied.
Today, the legacy of these families who endured slavery and fought for freedom in Cambridge persists. Learn more about the history of slavery at 105 Brattle St., including an in-depth version of this article, here. Visit the Cambridge Black History Project and History Cambridge for more local history and community.
This past summer, while attending WBC in Pennsylvania, we met and played a game with Alex Knight (in case you were wondering the game was Nicaea from Hollandspiele). He is an aspiring new designer, with a quick mind and rapier wit and he is currently finishing up the design for a game that covers the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. The game is called Land and Freedom: The Spanish Revolution and Civil War and will be published by Blue Panther LLC. The game is set to release in early February so I am getting this interview ready so you can get a bit of background about the game as you consider purchasing it. 2ff7e9595c
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