Tierra y Libertad - Film by Ken Loach

One of the many merits of Ken Loach's
latest film Tierra y Libertad is that it
prompts a re-reading of Homage lO Cata@onia.
Much of the film is, in fact, a recreation of
scenes in Orwell's book: the "parade-ground
drill of the most antiquated, stupid kind"
(chapter 1 ) at the Lenin Barracks in
Barcelona, the trenches on the Aragon front,
the rifle that backfires, the May fighting in
Barcelona.
 John Cornford, a communist, fought briefly
with the POUM (Partido Obrero de
Unificacion Marxista) before transferring to
the International Brigade. Orwell joined
because of his ILP connections. In Tierra y
Libertad David, an out-of-work communist
from Liverpool, joins the POUM because they
are the first people he meets. Stafford
Cottman, Orwell's friend in the POUM on
whom the character of David is based, was a
member of the Young Communist League.
When David finally realises, after the May
Days in Barcelona, that the Stalinists are
betraying the revolution, he tears up his party
card. Flnally, when the POUM is outlawed
(there is a glimpse of the infamous headline
that appeared in the Daily Worker on l9th
June 1937: Spanish Trotskyists with Franco)
David's militia is forcibly disbanded and its
commander arrested - surely to face, like Nin,
torture and death.
 Orwell (chapter 5) provides a timely
reminder of who the POUM were: @the
POUM militiamen were mostly CNT
members". He adds: "During the first two
months of the war it was the Anarchists, more
than anyone else, who saved the situation, and
much later than this the Anarchist militia ...
were notoriously the best fighters among the
purely Spanish forces. From about February
1937 onwards the Anarchists and the POUM
could to some extent be lumped together."
 One of the film's finest s@quences is the
taking of an insurgent-held village. The
hand-held carnera conveys all the emotion of
the street-fighting and the panic caused by a
priest firing from the church belfry. When
capture the priest denies it but his shoulder
bears the recoil bruises. He is hustled off to a
summary execution for this and for betraying
(breaking the secret of the confessional) the
hideout of four young anarchists, among
whose corpses he is shot. The terrible
revolutionary beauty of the sequence is as
stirring as anything in Potemkin or Malraux's
Espoir.
 The first thing the peasants do after seeing
off the fascists is to burn religious images and
paintings (when Durruti's men started doing
this in the village of Pina they were turned on).
Next, the villagers and the POUM militia hold
an asamblea to discuss collectivisation, the
heart of the Spanish Revolution. As Loach
himself puts it: "one of the few moments in
the history of mankind in which the people are
seen taking control of their own lives".
 Tierra y Libertad, a Spanlsn-British
co-production and one of Spain's entries at
Cannes, opened in Madrid on 7th April. It had
some unexpected pre-launch publicity @om
Santiago Carrillo, the erstwhile Communist
leader. He gave his @pinion of the film in an
article entitled 'El fascisimo, olvidado'
(Fascism, Forgotten) published in El Pais on
6th April. He criticised Loach for reducing the
heroism of the Republican fight against
Franco, in Carrillo's words "one of the
greatest epics of the fight for freedom this
century", to the differences between the
POUM and the Communists. The next day
Loach retorted that Carrillo had been one of
those who had regarded the POUM as
working for Franco.
 It should not be forgotten that after Franco's
death the Communist Party would again
betray the Spanish workers by agreeing to the
amnesiac transition that pretended the
dictatorship had never existed and which left
assassins in peace (notorious police torturers
would be promoted under the Socialists). One
current Popular Party Euro MP was a minister
in the Franco Cabinet that carried out five
judicial murders by firing squad in September
1975.
 It is no accident, of course, that Tie@ra y
Libertad opens and closes in contemporary
England. Like Hidden Agenda, RiJ@Ra@ and
Ladybird Ladybird, it is an attack on the
values of Conservative Britain. Elderly David
has a heart attack in his council flat in
Liverpool and dies in the amhulance. His
granddaughter, clearing up, finds his letters
from Spain to his girlfriend, later wife. Her
reading of these letters ushers in the
flashbacks. The film ends with David's burial,
at which the granddaughter reads some
moving lines by William Morris. They
emphasise the point that David was an English
worker who never gave up the fight to build
what Auden in his poem 'Spain' called "the
Just City". As David himself says after the
forcible disbandment of his militia, only
weeks before Lister's 11th Division was sent
to destroy the collectives in Aragon: "If we
had succeeded here, and we could have done
we would have changed the world".
 Orwell's account of the POUM militias is a
poignant record (chapter 8) of what it was like
to be in Aragon, in "the only community of
any size in Western Europe where political
consciousness and disbelief in capitalism
were more normal than their opposites ...
Many of the normal motives of civilised life -
snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the
boss, etc. - had simply ceased to exist. The
ordinary class-division of society h@d
disappeared ... a community where hope was
more normal than apathy or cynicism, where
the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship
and not, as in most countries, for humbug ...
to the vast majority of people Socialismmeans
a classless society, or it means nothing at all
... the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were
a sort of microcosm of a classless society."
 The greatness of Tierra y Libertad is that it
articulates this, keeping hope alive. The film
echoes the enthusiasm of Orwell
convalescing in Barcelona, in his letter to
Cyril Connolly (8th June 1937): "I have seen
wonderful things & at last really believe ir
Socialism, which I never did before".
 The day before Orwell enlisted in the POUM
militia he met an Italian at the Lenin Barracks.
He never saw him again but he became for
Orwell a symbol of "the flower of the
European working class, harried by the police
of all countries, the people who fill the mass
graves of the Spanish battlefields" (Looking
Back on the Spanish War). The poem Orwell
wrote about him near the end of the Civil War
ends:

"But the thing I saw in your face
No power can disinherit
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit."

The "crystal spirit" of Loach' s film shines out.

FREEDOM 10TH JUNE 1995


