41. Sunday Bloody Sunday &...

Lyrics

I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away!

How long?
How long must we sing this song?
How long?
How long?

'Cause tonight...we can be as one
Tonight...

Broken bottles under children's feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end streets
But I won't heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts back up against the wall!

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
All right lets go!

And the battles just begun
Theres many lost but tell me who has won
The trenches dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart!

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday

How long...how long must we sing this song?
How long?
How long?

'Cause tonight...we can be as one
Tonight
Tonight (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
Tonight
Tonight (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
Tonight
Come get some!

Wipe the tears from your eyes
Wipe your tears away
Wipe your tears away
I wipe your tears away (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
I wipe your blood shot eyes (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)

Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
Here I come!

And it's true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die!

The real battle yet began (Sunday, Bloody Sunday)
To claim the victory Jesus won (Sunday, Bloody Sunday
on...

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday...


Well, of course U2 would make a song about Bloody Sunday. How could they not? Despite this obviousness though, I was pleasantly surprised by it. I hadn't heard this song in a very long time, because I remembered not liking it. But now I've heard it again I like it a lot. It seems to be one of their more adventurous songs. And for once they've realized that a song about a serious or sad subject doesn't need to dabble in heavy-handed sentimentality. It can be joyous and still deliver its message. Anyway it wasn't hard to choose a movie. I simply choose the most famous one made about Bloody Sunday.

The Movie: Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002)

Well, in my previous post I criticized movies that desperately want to pretend that they are historically authentic and that they are presenting a specific event/period as it really was. I kind of forgot that the next movie I'd review would be Greengrass' Bloody Sunday. I hadn't seen the movie before, but I was familiar with Greengrass' style and the premise of the movie. Greengrass is a filmmaker who above all seems to strive for authenticity and realism, even in movies where that's completely unnecessary. He directed The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum in which he wanted to tell a realistic, authentic story about a super smart spy that outsmarts the whole CIA. And with Bloody Sunday he wanted to make a movie in documentary-style about the events of Bloody Sunday. While I enjoyed the movie to a certain extent, I think it is reasonable to ask why Greengrass didn't just string together two hours of news reports on Bloody Sunday and be done with it. That might have even provided more valuable insights than this movie. And this is going to be a rather weird piece. I've watched the film, but most of what I'll write here, I could have written without seeing it.  

Bloody Sunday isn't so much documentary-style film making as it is fly on the wall film making. Greengrass has filmed this movie like a series of live news reports. He wants to make is feel as if we are watching a (live) report of the events of Bloody Sunday. As if there is (or was) a camera present during the events of Bloody Sunday and we are now watching the (objective) footage of that camera. I think that this approach is ,at best, just silly. If only for the obvious reason that no matter how hard you try to make it look live, it's not. And everybody knows it's not. It's not so much that lying is immoral as it is that lying when everybody knows you're lying is just stupid. I may not have had such problems though if using this aesthetic didn't mean that you are making a deliberately ugly and seemingly bad made movie. There are for example constantly people out of the frame for no other reason than the fact that Greengrass wants to pretend he is making a news report. For the same reason he pretends as if the camera has trouble following the action. Thus he often cuts/pans away from the action disrupting the flow of the movie and showing stuff we are not really interested in seeing. I actually wonder how real news reporters see this movie. They often use the aesthetic of Bloody Sunday in their reports, but that's out of necessity, not because it works really good. If most news reporters had the possibility to stage, shoot and think their shots out like real filmmakers they'd make their news report more in the style of a classical movie. See most non-live news reports for evidence of this. Besides all this, when Greengrass restrains his style a bit, he makes it clear that he is a very skilled director. There are for example some wonderful long takes here and even a couple of really good scenes. He is just deliberately undermining his own movie.

Next to these aesthetic arguments against Greengrass' style, I think there are also some political/moral objections to be raised. By presenting the events of Bloody Sunday as an objective news report he implies that this is how it really happened. He presents it as if it is an objective account. This is not true. It is clear he stands on the side of the Northern Irish protestants and presents the British 'occupants' as evil. I don't have a problem with this in and of itself. There are (way too) many movies in which the Brits (and Americans for that matter) are presented as the clear and absolute good guys. Of course both the Brits and the Americans have done some really bad stuff through history, even in events in which we see them as the good guys. And I wouldn't have a problem with a movie that presented the Brits involvement in Bloody Sunday in a bad light, if it didn't pretend to be objective about it. In fact I do believe that the Brits acted very badly on Bloody Sunday. But it doesn't matter much what I believe. If you claim objectivity, than only the facts matter After watching this movie I've read some stuff on it. And it turns out that in 2002 when this movie came out, the official investigation about what happened on Bloody Sunday and the role of the Brits in this event was still going on. The movie cannot present what happened in such a clear-cut way and pretend it is the absolute, objective truth. Lastly I had another minor problem with these claims of authenticity. We are shown a lot of people mourning and being sorrowful about the events of Bloody Sunday and the loved ones they've lost. But all these people are actors. If you present your movie as an authentic depiction of Bloody Sunday, and then have actors portraying real people, you kind of imply that the emotions of the actors and the real people are interchangeable. And that it is just as harrowing to see an actor crying over a loved one as it is to see real people crying over their real loved ones. This is pretty problematic.