Paper given on Ken Loach's film "Land and Freedom", KFLC, 1996

Almost sixty years since its end, the Spanish Civil War continues to exert a fascination over writers, literary scholars, historians and political scientists alike, for the way in which, as a watershed moment of the 20^th century, it ranged competing forces of European political thought against each other, and set up a dynamic of opposition that continued to preoccupy geo-politics in the Western hemisphere through to the post-Cold War present. Ken Loach's 1995 film "Land and Freedom" recuperates this history in its portrayal of the conflicts between Nationalism and Republicanism, the internecine strife on the left--among anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyists and party-line Stalinist Communists-- the place of Barcelona as a microcosm of the war, the role of foreign combatants, and the moral and political dilemmas facing the European Left. Sympathetic to the radical left's "revolution within the revolution," the film fleshes out the conflict between abstract theory and pragmatism, the problems of compromise and appeasement with the party-line, and the notion, made explicit in the film, that "ideology has to exist in a place, a real one, for real people".

What relevance the film should have now has a lot to say about contemporary European socialism, together with how we might read cultural production today in terms of that of the past. Loach's film is political nostalgia from an unreconstructed socialist, and in its forthright manner it raises the issue of the workings of political and cultural machinery across time. Loach brings to his audience a poignant reminiscence upon what the spirit of political commitment was like in 1930s Europe. It is, by extension, an affirmation of faith in the possibility for change in the present. As the protagonist says; "revolutions are contagious", and the film aims to recapture this spirit: a die-hard belief in socialist reform. I aim to look at the film in relation to the complex web of ideological commitments that memory of the Civil War still prompts today. Luis Lopez Guerra remarks how the war still represents for many sectors of Spanish society today "an essential element of identity and legitimacy" (244) and Peter Monteath has noted how the spirit of commitment to a cause in the war, and in the literature of the war, has yet much resonance in the present: "The peculiar confrontation of ideologies in Spain in the late 1930s will never be repeated; nevertheless the constellation of forces at that time in Spain bears a clear resemblance to countless contemporary struggles, for example in Central America. The literature of the Spanish Civil war deals with themes that are of great relevance today - the problem of violence, the relationship between politics and morality, the experience of idealism and disillusionment, of hostility and solidarity." (xxi).

These comments, I propose, also bear a strong and particular relevance to Loach's entire work, and the comparison to events in Central America is particulary a propos of his recent film-making ethic. Since beginning with screenplays written and directed for British television in the 1960s, he has been perhaps the most vehement and powerful defender in mainstream cinema of socialist politics in Britain. He is an outspoken critic of the conservative establishment, a powerful spokesman for workers' rights and for the need for a welfare state apparatus to protect the margins of society. He has been at the center of much controversy for directly confronting, in his films, the power structures of government and state bureaucracy, and for pointedly attacking the failings of public policy in contemporary Britain. His work is a lament for the demise of the post-war welfare state, in particular due to successive Conservative governments, and so one might well understand, bearing in mind his such overt political stance, why he should have such an attachment to the symbolic status of the Republican cause in "Land and Freedom". Films such as "Riff-Raff", "Ladybird, Ladybird", "Cathy Come Home", "Family Life", "Hidden Agenda" and myriad others in his abundant filmography, are powerful introductions, via the cinema, to the history of contemporary Britain seen through the eyes of the working class. Now, with a particular connection to Peter Monteath's comments on contemporary relevance quoted above, we are witnessing a very significant widening of his scope, with this film on Spain and the more recent "Carla's Song" (1996), a story which in many ways parallels "Land and Freedom". "Carla's Song" treats the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, seen through the eyes of a naive young Glaswegian bus-driver, another working-class character in many ways much like the David of "Land and Freedom".

In both of these recent movies, cultural displacements have served to universalize Loach's ideological position. In both "Carla's Song" and "Land and Freedom", he moves beyond the confines of Britain and places idealistic British characters in politically volatile foreign circumstances, where he allows their emotional and intellectual conflicts to play themselves out. This pattern is not only relocated across geographic limits, but also in time. The two films connect the experiences of the nineteen thirties with the eighties, those of Europe with those of the Americas, and it is in this sense that I speak of the ideological underpinning of Loach's world-view as a universalist and transhistoric mode, hence a shifting site. He transplants his politicized world view from place to place and time to time. As an overarching comment on his film-making, Loach has said quite simply: "I don't think I've really had cause to revise the basic analysis that we all made 30-odd years ago, because events by and large have supported it . . . . There are still basically two classes in society, and the project of one is to exploit the other." (Allen) This stated compromise between politics and art betrays the doctrinal component of the director's work, but, more importantly, it voices the opinion that art can restore political identity obscured by time and lost in the past. People are constituted by their personal and collective history, and the memory of this fact should not be erased, especially for those generations of Spaniards, and latterly Nicaraguans, who were defeated in their respective wars. As a verse from one of the militia hymns says, "el género humano es internacional". Thus Loach will say again how "Politics lives in people, through people. Everybody is the product of their circumstances, their income and the job they do. It determines everything about them" (Allen). Film as an art-form can live out politics in the human drama that lies behind the bigger historical events.

"Land and Freedom" was, appropriately, a cooperative, international effort, among Britain, Canal Plus and TVE in Spain, and Italian and German production companies. The cast, also, is multinational, involving amateur as well as professional actors. It is a powerful and nostalgic film, expressing immense solidarity with the Leftist cause. This is apparent in the title, also that of the Anarchist newspaper "Tierra y Libertad", which was "the mouthpiece of the FAI" (Bolloten, 63). The film is, as much of Loach's work, guilty of didacticism, for the overtly manipulative way in which Loach so unquestioningly embraces the Left's cause. But I start from the premise that aesthetic judgement is, at root, always covertly ideological. And so if, at worst, Loach's work seems preachy--and this film is no different in its use of a very moral imagination--it nevertheless deliberately conjures up a spirit and a passion which thread together, across the decades, the history of the European left. The favorable reception of the film in Spain is indicative of its relevance today. Michael Eaude, in Britain's New Statesman, reports how the headline of an adulating review in El Mundo read, quite without irony, "Gracias por todo, Mr. Loach", and how the El País review gushed effusively about "this tender, yet furious picture ... incomparable ... It is the most beautiful tribute that the cinema has given to the memory of a free Spain". Eaude's review also writes of the apparent hold the movie took over many young movie-goers in Spain, who admitted to be enthusiastically discovering these complex aspects of the Civil War for the first time.

Showing the involvement of working class Europe in the Civil War serves as a parallel of the way in which the Civil War prompted European intellectuals, even the most aesthetically "pure" writers, to dirty their hands and take sides. This necessary Manichaean polarization of pro- and antifascist has been succinctly studied in the work of European writers and poets by, among others, Valentine Cunningham, Peter Monteath, Stanley Weintraub, Frederick Benson and Stephen Hart. "Land and Freedom" illustrates their unavoidable emotional and intellectual need for commitment. Amidst majestic cinematography that recreates in detail Aragon in the 1930s, the film blends different narrative codes, ranging from the lyrical and the sentimental, through the dramatic and the romantic, to the propagandistic and the political. In talking of the locus of ideology, I hope to illustrate the shifting terrain of ideological and aesthetic commitments that play themselves out in the film.

The story of "Land and Freedom" is framed around an event in the present. In a run-down, tenement block in the Liverpool of the 1990s, an elderly English veteran of the POUM militia dies. In the days following the death, his grand daughter rummages through an old suitcase which contains letters, political broadsheets, a scrapbook of photos, press-clippings, and even a symbolic handful of Spanish soil wrapped up in a neckerchief. These are all souvenirs that the old man had saved as memorabilia of distant months spent on the Aragonese front. The grand daughter's discovery frames the narrative for the remainder of the movie, for from this point on the film slides into a lengthy flashback, recreating his experiences through the grand-daughter's reading of the letters home. The film ends back in the present, at the funeral, where old comrades have gathered to pay their respects, and where the grand-daughter reads a short poem from the war that serves as an epitaph. The circularity of the film's structure clearly is meant to dramatize the notion of collective memory that can be so ubiquitous in the arts, and here it is enacted in an almost ritual manner in the funeral service. This homage to the past, connecting it to the present, works not only as a dramatic device, but moreover underscores the overt political message of the film, which is, fundamentally, a recovery of lost memory.

In the mise en scene of the historical portion of the film, we are taken back to Liverpool in the nineteen-thirties, to a working mens' club, and to the speeches of anti-fascist campaigners who traveled around Europe to recruit volunteers.. Unemployed and idealistic, the hopeful young protagonist, David Carr, is emotionally stirred by the rhetoric of "No pasarán" and suitably enraged by the dramatic newsreel footage of atrocities committed against trade-unionists. He is seduced into helping them in their struggle against barbarism and, clinging tight to his CP card, symbol of his idealism and the spirit of "proletarian internationalism" that characterized the working class response to Spain, soon we find him on the train into Barcelona⁽¹⁾. Over the next few months he will fight with the POUM militia on the Aragonese front, which he initially--and naively, it turns out--believes to be "socialism in action". The film proceeds to portray David's private response to the way in which foreign volunteers were drawn into the war and at once seduced and perplexed by the cause, almost in spite of themselves. It is a narrative at times very reminiscent of George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia: we witness the tragicomic endeavors of a poorly-trained, disorganized and extremely ill-armed militia as it prepares for what will be a listless war-effort in the hills and villages of Aragón. Much as in Orwell's book, the emphasis is not on the only occasional action in the early months of the rural war, but rather on the behind the scenes events, characters and discussions which shaped and defined the human nature of the Republican effort. The comparison with Orwell is significant, since the film was originally conceived as an adaptation of Orwell's book. But significantly, Loach moved away from this initial idea, for his emphasis demanded a shift from an intellectual, writerly point of view, to that of a working class perspective, so characteristic of his work in general. "Orwell wrote the book, but a lot of people had the experience," says Loach. "I was anxious that he [David] not be a middle-class person. He's a working-class man who goes to Spain because it's a working-class struggle."⁽²⁾ This anti-intellectual popularization of the war is central to Loach"s film-making ethic, for he elects to create a different experience, one where history is re-interpreted through the concrete experiences of working-class people. He emphasizes in an interview how "International working-class solidarity was the best friend of the Spanish people" ("The Revolution Betrayed"). In a sense, Loach fulfills a project originally to embarked upon by Orwell, but never carried through to its full "proletarian" conclusion. Orwell, according to Stanley Weintraub, "found the Socialism he saw preached in England inherently distasteful. It was intellectual and theoretical, while Orwell's politics and economics - particularly before Spain - were sentimental." (90) Orwell may have attempted to bridge the gap between his writerly, intellectual identity and his gut-feeling, class politics, but only partially managed to communicate this sentimental affinity in his Homage to Catalonia. Loach's positing of a working class protagonist with apparently little formal education goes successfully further in this regard.

David's gradual awareness that their many dislocations of thought and effort cannot hold the Republican movement together is the central theme of the film. The Republican cause is fractured along ideological lines, and he comes to see in this the breakdown of what he calls his own "daft, romantic vision". Such a theme is noticeably scarce in the eulogizing vision found in much writing by foreign combatants in the war.⁽³⁾ It takes the more level-headed understanding of Loach's working class protagonist to cut through the Communist mystique and intellectualization of the struggle. These dislocations on the Left are in contrast to traditional images of the Nationalist apparatus as an intact and homogenous body of organization, uniformity and concerted propaganda. The screenplay alludes to this play of Nationalist order versus Republican dissension, in the depiction of the rag-tag militia-in-training compared to the professional army of the Right, and, for example, in the scene where a captured Nationalist captain refuses to take orders from Republican militia he considers "gentuza". Loach reflects constantly upon the proletarian nature of the Left, and the process of how the struggle entailed their consciousness-raising. For much of the time, David is frustrated to see that his companions do so little and talk so much. What fighting there is primitive, they have such archaic equipment. Much of the time they hide behind slogans, "El mañana es nuestro, compañeros. No pasarán. Pasaremos", and they march to battle hymns as if off to a pep-rally. The film explores this complex and fragmented Republican identity, getting inside the character of David as the focal point where all these conflicts converge.

The film operates on different levels: as an historical document, as a war-movie, as an entertainment, a love story, but also as a statement on how cinema can be an instrument to reconfigure ethical and political concerns across time, and thus reaffirm class ideology as a transhistoric mode. In linking the nineteen thirties with the nineteen nineties through David's life and its impact on the grand daughter, Loach recovers the Socialist past. He resituates the meaning of the Civil War for a present audience by reviving the ideologies and personalities involved. And in so doing, he brings out the important role of cinema, of how a film can help define Spanish culture at an important historical juncture. The film articulates the workings of a proletarian culture enabled by the social and political environment of the 30s. It shows how, implicitly, culture itself was the battleground. Through the film, we sense the cultural iconography of the Spanish Civil War unfold.

Through the political struggle of Left and Right there was an exploitation of the cultural make-up of the country. This involved erasures and re-formations of identity, and arrogations of power. Famous writers were, as I have said, forced to take sides; literature and education were appropriated as political tools. Culture-producers were co-opted by the competing factions. One need only think of Saura's tragicomic treatment of the war in "¡Ay Carmela!" to see a similar example of victimization, and how the war over culture caused suffering to even the most pragmatic and ostensibly apolitical players in Civil War society. Carmela's resolute refusal to capitulate to the overt political manipulation of their traveling vaudeville show is a prime example of how culture was deemed by the authorities to have such an importance, symbolically and politically. Her dilemma symbolized how culture was a tool to enact ideological conflicts behind the scenes. Loach's movie, in a more doctrinal way, works in the same terrain. (On the most basic level, the enactment of politics is seen in the café culture, in posters, graffiti, colloquialisms of the day and popular songs and slogans.) ⁽⁴⁾

These connections between culture and politics are powerful and dynamic, for in the end "the cultural sphere . . is the decisive area where social conflicts are experienced and evaluated." (Rowe and Schelling, 11) In the case of Civil War Spain and its aftermath, one critical tendency today has been to envision the constant and disjointed reconfigurations of the cultural apparatus in the hands of the Republicans, in contrast to how the Nationalists are portrayed as seeking and achieving stability and a sense of historical permanence. This was to feed into the subsequent creation of heroic myths of nacionalcatolicismo, the crusade, and imperialism that have been studied, in literature, by the likes of Randolph Pope, David Herzberger, and others.

"Land and Freedom" plays itself out in the one half of this cultural arena where there was a dynamic confrontation between competing leftist political creeds. For the duration of the war the failure of any faction to assert its dominance was evidenced in the struggle going on over culture. On their side of the equation, Republican identities were in constant flux and subject to an unresolved dialectic. The strong, and at times heavy-handed, use of dialogue in the movie, especially in the central scene of the debate at the casa del pueblo over land collectivization, underscores this idea. Conflictive discourse was a process central to constituting the identity of the Republican combatants. As if to highlight the curious disparity between the respective abilities of Republicans and Nationalists to decide and allocate power, the critic Alicia Alsted has pointed to the stark contrast between the two models of cultural development as were evidenced on either side. She remarks as to how "The differences in the institutional organization of culture by the two sides are glaring. In the Nationalist zone the military were in charge; consequently they stamped their hierarchical, homogenizing imprint on all forms of cultural expression. In the Republican zone, however, there was conflict between military and political interests, as well as disagreement between the various political and trade union groups, and between the central government and the governments of the autonomous regions, especially Catalonia. All of them wanted to take advantage of the war to carry out their own revolution, but the problem was there had to be agreement on what kind of a revolution this should be, and to put it into effect they had to defeat the enemy. The ideological differences and lack of political unity in the Republican zone were reflected in a consequent cultural diversity, with a proliferation of forms of expression sponsored by organizations of many different kinds" (154).

This idea is imaged in the central scene of the film in the casa del pueblo. The casa del pueblo is set up in the usurped manor house of the landowner don Julián, and it becomes a cultural microcosm of Republican society. There, culture and politics are indivisible. One woman notes how she had never been in the house before except to clean, and now she is suddenly thrust into political decision making. An argument ensues amongst the farmers and village-folk as to the collectivization of don Julián's lands that have just been expropriated. Some desire a cooperative effort to work it, others are more selfish in wanting to keep their own share of the profits, following the--evidently capitalist--logic of being harder workers. Their different cultural or educational backgrounds see them arguing from different perspectives. Then the foreign militia, to that point only passively observing guests, are invited to participate in the discussion. When they do, the vehemence of the debate quickly picks up pace. The animated political discussion lasts a good twelve minutes of the film. Loach amazingly manages to sustain political theory as the centerpiece of his film, and somehow is able to keep the argument flowing despite its heated, intellectual, and rather theoretical nature. The Scots militiaman fights to keep the debate intelligible for the village-folk and to include them, just when it runs the danger of losing them in its obtuse jargon and the foreign languages of the participants.⁽⁵⁾ Amidst such a heteroglot symbol of confusion, the exasperated David can only interject his plaintive objection "but the revolution has to exist in a place, a real one, for real people". The implication, of course, is that a people's revolution should not just be the abstractions of debates and books, but also in a sentimental attachment to the cause.

George Orwell, despite the remote suggestion of him being a middle class "stooge", also complained of this failure to connect with the realities of the situation. Orwell's criticism is precisely against the type of intellectualizing such as went on in pseudo-official forums such as the casa del pueblo, and elsewhere. This criticism extends to poetry written by his countrymen. For many other British poets did not evince the same skepticism as Orwell about Stalinism, as their poetry waxed lyrical as to the hope of the future. John Cornford (the Cambridge poet and also a POUM militiaman, like David in the film) wrote the eulogistic "Midnight at Teruel", a towering example of such doctrinaire verse, as was, to a lesser extent, Auden's "Spain", with its incantations to a great, idealized vision of tomorrow. In each case one can see a problem of not connecting with the people. (Weintraub called Auden's poem "a paper committment, a metaphorical acceptance" 68.) Intellectuals, Orwell deemed, could, in the worst cases, be guilty of condescension. Their view of Spain and Spaniards, refracted through such differing nationalistic, cultural and intellectual optics, could be considered a form of slumming. Loach's shift to the proletarian perspective is a possible corrective to this problem. David's gradual realization that the militias' "true revolution" was betrayed by the Stalinist need for compromise and respectability represents the converse of the fawning attitude of Europe's intelligentsia. The European left was guilty of using Spain as a puppet, as David remarks in another letter home: "Stalin is using the working classes like pieces on a chess board."

With such conflict in power structures, Loach's response is to bring politics back down to the personal level. The emotional content of his movies is always high, but there is little room for excess sentiment in his social realist aesthetic. There are no teary close-ups nor soft-focus sequences. Everything is told in bold, stark realism, with a coarse, honest humor and an often documentary style approach. The battle scenes are raw and primitive, devoid of special effects, minimally acted. This attempt at naturalism is achieved, for example, in sequential shooting, feeding the actors scripts one day at a time, using amateur actors with real leftist political credentials to play the militia ("You can't act class" Loach has said), and, finally, in the scene where David's militia girlfriend, Blanca, is killed by the Popular Army. The scene was devised in such a way that the cast all suspected that some minor character was going to be shot on film, but nobody knew who. The resultant reaction at a protagonist dying transmits well the movie's attempt toward emotional and psychological verisimilitude.

The generally indolent pace of the film is punctuated by occasional and sudden scenes of violence such as this, or as a raid on a village when the militia executes a village priest who aided the rebels, or when David's faulty antique rifle blows up in his face and causes him to be sent back to Barcelona for medical treatment. At the same time, whilst not wishing to diminish the seriousness of war, the film does have its comic moments, as when, in the streets of Barcelona, David discovers that a fellow working class Mancunian has found himself on the opposite side of the barricades. Their laddish repartee points out the comic incongruity of young working class men so far from home, in a strange situation they so little can affect. These elements play up the discrepancies between comedy, pathos and horror, and the confusion of a situation in which, as has been long noted by historians and writers, the Republic could never quite gets its act together to put up a united front against the alzamiento.

Amidst the switches between suffering and farce, Loach explores the inherent duplicity in revolutionary politics, the constant power struggles which impeded the formation of a unified Left, and the ultimate betrayal by the official Party line. The Communists held that the workers and peasants should halt their revolution for fear of alarming capitalist countries that might provide arms to the Spanish government's campaign against Franco. "The war first and the revolution afterwards," was the official Communist line. Loach and Orwell both argue, however, that, in Orwell's words, "the thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure that it never happened." (This attitude of compromise is epitomized in the character of the American intellectual who abandons David's militia to join the official Popular Army, to return later and arrest his former comrades.)

If this is a conventional view, it is underwritten by Loach's unashamed embrace of the POUM cause and his manipulative play on the emotional impact of the war on the characters and on us, his audience. He wants to promote the idea that real people, and not just "characters", live through films, and that their experiences change their lives. Loach has said how "Politics lives in people, through people. Everybody is the product of their circumstances, their income and the job they do. It determines everything about them" (Allen). Film as an art-form can enact class politics in the microcosm of individual lives by showing the human drama that lies behind bigger historical events. "Land and Freedom" brings the war back to the human level. Tired of the infighting, the militia's refusal to integrate into the official Popular Army, the new rules which prohibit women from fighting, David vows to forget war. "I want to feel human for a change," he despairingly writes in a letter. The depersonalization caused by the rhetoric and rules of war and party politics takes its toll. Comrades are set against comrades, the war effort is in disarray, the POUM is outlawed, its leaders arrested. The ideological struggle has depersonalized the players amidst the abstractions of dogma. The militia might have all the will in the world to defend their cause but suffer from a drastic lack of cohesion, leadership and direction. The film is tinged with trenchant irony, since at root lies a serious comment on how the place of ideological commitment to a cause can be so dispersed as to lose its strength, and how well-meaning individuals are physically and emotionally victimized in the process. Lost in this is the effect on human beings, which Loach restores through the film.

It is appropriate to close with the ever-hopeful Loach's comments from an interview in the Progressive magazine. On the subject of why he should be so insistent on marrying films and politics, and as to why the film should have relevance today, he answers: "Sooner or later something has to happen. We can't imagine this whole set-up going on for generation after generation, so something has to give. What will give, or where it will happen, I don't know. But when the possibility of transformative change happens, and people start to look around and say, 'Hang on, we actually need to take power here,' then people have to be organized. . . That's one of the reasons to do films, isn't it? Because the implication is that life doesn't have to be like this."

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Works Consulted.

Allen, Carol. "Another Land, Same Freedoms." Rev. of "Carla's Song." The Times, Internet Edition 29^th January, 1997.

Benson, Frederick, R. Writers in Arms; the Literary impact of the Spanish Civil War. New York: New York University Press, 1967.

Bolloten, Burnett. The Spanish Civil War. Revolution and Counter-Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Brown, Frieda S., Malcolm Alan Compitello, Victor M. Howard, Robert A. Martin, eds. Rewriting the Good Fight. Critical Essays on the Spanish Literature of the Spanish Civil War. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989.

Cunningham, Valentine, ed. Penguin Book of Civil War Verse. Middlesex: Penguin, 1980.

Eaude, Michael. Rev. of Land and Freedom. New Statesman & Society, Sept 29, 1995 v8 n372 p48(2)

Graham, Helen and Jo Labanyi, eds. Spanish Cultural Studies: an Introduction New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Hart, Stephen M., ed ."¡No pasarán!" Art, Literature and the Spanish Civil War. London: Tamesis Books, 1988.

Kaufmann, Stanley. Rev. of Land and Freedom. New Republic, April 1, 1996 v214 n14 p26(1)

Klawans, Stuart. Rev. of Land and Freedom. The Nation, April 1, 1996 v262 n13 p36(1).

Lane, Anthony. Rev. of Land and Freedom. The New Yorker, March 25, 1996 v72 n5 p97(3)

Lee, Laurie. A Moment of War. New York: The New Press, 1991.

Loach, Ken, dir. Land and Freedom. Gramercy Pictures, 1995.

dir. Carla's Song. Colombia Pictures, 1996.

____ "The Revolution Betrayed - Land and Freedom - An Interview with Ken Loach" by R. Porton CINEASTE, 1996 v22 i1 p30-31 (2)

____ "Revolution is a pregnant cow - a conversation with film maker Ken Loach" by Jane Slaughter The Progressive, July 1996 v60 n7 p30(2)

Lopez Guerra, Luis. "The Legacy of the Spanish Civil War Today" in Brown et al. eds, pp.243-259.

Monteath, Peter. Writing the Good Fight Political Commitment in the International Literature of the Civil war. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Orwell, George. Homage to Catalonia. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1952.

Rowe, William and Vivian Schelling. Memory and Modernity. Popular Culture in Latin America. London, Verso, 1991.

Seguin, Denis. Rev. of Land and Freedom. Eye Weekly, Toronto. 3.28.96

Weintraub, Stanley. The Last Great Cause. The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War. London: W.H. Allen, 1968.

1. The political background of "proletarian internationalism" and its popularity amongst the British working classes is well described and documented in Hywel Francis, Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984, esp. Chapter One.

2. ² Interview, p.

3. See Monteath, op cit.

4. ⁴ And I could go on to mention also, obliquely, "Belle epoque", as an example of how culture--the painter, Manolo, and his opera star wife--represent freedom in face of the War's impending doom, and refuse to be engaged by the political machinations around them.

5. This character, interestingly enough, is played by Paul Laverty, the Glasgow lawyer whose story is recounted in "Carla's Song" (and who wrote the screenplay of the latter movie). This is a prime example of Loach's aesthetic creed that amateur actors can often better convey authentic political convictions.