Film culture pits the spirit of ’45 against the spirit of ’76.
In the 1976 Classic Rock song “Hotel California,” the Eagles mocked bygone Sixties radicalism when Don Henley sang,
So I called up the Captain,
“Please bring me my wine.”
He said, “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”
The Eagles sneered at what they perceived as Disco-era political apathy, but British filmmaker Ken Loach gets drunk on Old Time radicalism in the new documentary The Spirit of ’45, recalling how Great Britain’s electorate turned to socialism after World War II.
Loach, a longtime socialist, more doctrinaire than his English fellow travelers Mike Leigh and Terence Davies, usually makes unabashedly pedantic dramas about working-class issues (Riff-Raff; My Name Is Joe; The Wind That Shakes the Barley; I, Daniel Blake; and Singing the Blues in Red). His social-critique narratives recall the mission of Hollywood social-consciousness filmmaker Stanley Kramer, but Loach maintains a vivid semi-doc style. His earliest films (shot by the great cinematographer Chris Menges) inspired the current generation of British directors.
Loach continues to exert his influence in The Spirit of ’45 by combining archival news footage and contemporary interviews with senior Britons looking back on the cultural sea change that swept the Labour Party into power:
Underlying our joy and thankfulness there was one uneasy question: What about the future? What will happen now? Will we, the people who have won the war, drive home our victory against fascism by defeating our prewar enemies of poverty and unemployment?
That question, the film’s opening gambit, is a shrewd piece of propagandizing. It places 86-year-old Loach at the forefront of media progressives who emphasize social disparities to push the sentimental drift toward socialism in the Millennial West. (Progressives also love to play with the word “fascism,” applying it only to others.) No wonder The Spirit of ’45 is playing at Film Forum; it’s part of the cultural shift that certainly dominates New York and film culture in general.
It’s fair to say that Loach is a master of maudlin manipulation. In Hollywood’s romantic epic Reds, Warren Beatty’s interviews with aged celebrities who were contemporaries of John Reed was an arch conceit. But Loach simply lets gray-haired non-celebrity veterans regale us with memories of their enlightenment before and after WWII. He introduces the 1942 report of parliamentarian William Beveridge, which helped design the United Kingdom’s welfare state; then he evokes the long history of British social reform by mentioning The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, a 1914 novel favored by the codgers. “I couldn’t sleep after reading it,” one oldster marvels. This leads to a montage of post-war social ills, each labeled with screen-filling graphics: “Idleness.” “Ignorance.” “Disease.” “Squalor.” It’s the damnedest Brechtian jest since Marco Bellocchio analyzed the rise of Mussolini in Vincere.
These devices are central to Loach’s method of persuasion, especially when the rhetoric he captures and commemorates from the moment of England’s turning point so closely resembles Millennial pomposity: “too much economic power in the hands of too few men.” Or: “What we’re looking for is an integrated world system where everybody gets what they need.” This ageless sentimentality might come across as profound to naïve viewers who have grown accustomed to its repetition.
Loach avoids Marx and goes back to John Ball — a priest involved in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 — to validate the idea of “common ownership.” Ball vowed that “nothing will go well in England until everything is held in common.” This thought, constantly reiterated, follows Loach’s disenchantment with Winston Churchill, and it becomes the basis of his ire when he eventually jumps forward to critique Margaret Thatcher.
This foreshortened history of a long struggle seems truncated as he includes the complaints of anti-police protestors, arguments among economists (Keynesians versus the Milton Friedman macroeconomists), and the contradictory stances on the miners’ strike and the Green New Deal reductions. When Loach’s documentary methods branch outside his customary dramatic persuasion, the details of political history confound the spirit of reform that animates his filmmaking.
By the time Loach gets to the modern reality of “state bureaucrats replacing corporate bureaucrats” (what he calls “the worm in the apple of 1945”), his persuasive powers are exhausted. Switching to full-color footage of V-E Day celebrations with jolly soldiers and buxom English girls (underscored by horns playing William Blake’s “Jerusalem”), Loach reduces his protest cinema to cheap nostalgia. He presumes that political sentiment — the spirit of ’45 — can be revived. However this plays in England, Americans experienced post-war fervor differently; socialist zealotry competed with skepticism such as the Eagles’, whining about metaphorical wine. Loach’s film makes us wonder: How long will the American “Spirit of ’76” prevail?
