The camera peers out from a car slowly touring what looks like an ordinary council housing estate. The place the Creggan, on fringes of Derry, that mean and monstrous piece of architectural by the Loyalist-run council to keep the city's Catholic majority asserting their political power.
The day is sunny and quiet.
A dog barks somewhere. young child stands motioniess by a phone box. A bird chirps.
The car turns a corner, camera scans walls and slogans 'Stuff the Jubilee' 'Up the Provos'. Meanwhile woman's voice, hurried then hesitant by turns, intones a deadly litany of names:
...there was the McCulp family... Joe Coyle... Eamonn Lafferty, he was shot dead. there was Kitty Thompson, she whin McGillin, Keenan, Newton Sheimaus • Bradly... Barney McGuigan, hé was killed on Bloody Şunday...
McPhael, he was killed with a plastic bullet... Daniel Hagertv se was so over te cor field on the morning of Motorman...
At sixteen falters, 'I'm sure there's a lot more than that but I just can't remember off-hand' This remarkable called 'Creggan' made director Michael Whyte, 'And I think the Catholic ole began to realise that Peo the army came here it wasn't really to protect them, it was to protect the interests of the British ruling class.' Thames Television and Mary Holland, recently sacked from Tonor Cruise o Brien For her The Observer: ęx-liberal though the monthly Welc caballc ui ШaKШZ activists, from evaluating the it, without ano mre cary uculally featured the built the Colin Tom question.
However, remarkable KLOSL sucaes anone ting, this radically-conceived and moving account of politics she the ground in Ireland is scheduled to appear national television Tuesday night!
The film's style is simple, tilm stark and uncluttered. A list of by it doesn't contain Wholl give a strong idea of how different it feels compared with all that has gone before it: no archive footage of meningless violence; no dramatic music; no moral condemnations; no arnest, middle-class presente irom London talking glibly of 'tragedy', 'violence' rorism'; no army spokesmen; no one from the liberals, academic "expert'; no one from Goverment, North or Jeft-of-centre views on the trish, «South; - no Loyalist spokesper
son; no 'moderate' Catholic what is perhaps priests; no hostile interviewer;
that, and very little TV voice-over at IBA permitcontain? Apart from the brief Northern 'To me the Provisional IRA next was a crowd of young fellows that just tried to pay back some of the brutality that they had got. will historical voice-over, there are Just two clements interviews with families and individuals on the Creggan talking to camera.
This is superbly cut 'ter- fascinating almost static RUC; .no the Brits, venic e side the SWF the Vietnamese contributors non oerween aralysis But tried to La stream of cemetery;
What then does the film frame.
sound:
The core of film is extended SCOT the portrait of smiling, faces coming off duty. low-key, shots of the inside and outside is immediately plus street-scenes in Cpn patrol; a check-point search; a
sloganned wall; shoppers; the people entering the Cathedral doorway for mass -shot symmetrically echoed enemy. later by the doorway of the Law Courts with armed RUC men. walking in and out of audience And all shot with 'natural' car-engines, barkings, shouting, all the usual noises of a warm, sunny afternoon.
The brilliant political control underlying the film can be sequence at the British army base, where for a moment the camera seems to side with the army - a familiar strained But this easy identification undercut as Mary Holland äsks Do" you ground: regard the soldiers as your enemy?" and an unseen woman
ning, The replies 'Not the soldiers but the uniform that they wear... when he dons that uniform, he's my The film is designed to address an uncommitted no heady Republican retoric, no explicit appeals for "Troops Out' and The argument is embedded in the film's style and text verbal over-kill is not required.
Instead the audience is drawn 'He said that talking had never solved Derry's pro blem, that the politicians hac done absolutely nothing and that the only way to get the British to leave the country cast was by the gun.
in and approached on familiar everyday -sounds and events; clip from d US crime series on the box, in someone's
front room; early discussion of housing problems, family planunemployment and the need for the husband to seek work elsewhere er te emes ovi on to more overtly political events: the early Civil Rights movement ('the very fact that the police didn't allow them to march drew me and thousands of others out'); the Bloody Sunday massacre; the political attitudes of the estate's young.
Suddenly you realise that both these 'ordinary' couples are in fact the parents of young men imprisoned for IRA activity. But retreat has been cut The origins of Republican support and militancy have already been sketched almost imperceptibly. Hod Britsh revul sion, good old moralism becomes impossible audience is forced to think, to engage, to puzzle out this conundrum.
There will be many critics who will say that all this is just variation media 'Do the English working class mothers really unders. tand what their sons are doing over there? You know i think there's a lot of things happening here which have been deliberately kept from the English public.
'manipulation', but that woulc be to miss the point. All films TV ,programmes • invoive 'manipulation', they all consist of an artificial, constructed The difference is that films like this 'manipulate' to force the au dience to question that world the bulk of television manipulates to make people accept it.
CREGGAN will be broadOn ITV at 11pm on Tuesday, 17 June. All those with access to video-recorders should make efforts to tape it - it will, be an, invaluable visual aid in raising the issue of reland in Britan Paso 15
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IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR DEAR SON AGED 17 YRS MURDERED BY BRITISH PARATROOPERS 30 - JAN. 1972