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