Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) director Ken Loach has repeatedly admitted that The Battle of Algiers (1966) has had a large influence on his own filmmaking career. In Martin Evan’s interview with Ken Loach about the Gillo Pontecorvo film, Evans says “[Loach’s] film-making is committed to a realist style; one that strives to give a voice to ordinary people and their daily lives.” The Pontecorvo film as an early example of postcolonial film is a good place to start when looking at The Wind that Shakes the Barley. What makes these films similarly peculiar is their obvious stance as outsider directors telling a story that is not their own. Both films introduce a nation on the verge of postcoloniality. Pontecorvo, an Italian director, shot …show more content…
The former colonist is promoting the formerly colonized. Ken Loach’s film The Wind that Shakes the Barley is not easily labeled as an Irish or British film. It was nominated simultaneously for “Best British Film” in the United Kingdom and in Ireland for “Best Irish Film.” The film explores a nation being born, a colonized country coming into the postcolonial moment. The spaces of the film are mundane, counter to a more typical Hollywood story of the major leaders and big battles of a war. The history of the IRA and the Irish Wars against the British are a history of the people. With few cities and a capital on the eastern end of the island, quite far from other areas, Ken Loach does the work of decentralizing the Irish narrative from Dublin or Northern Ireland’s Belfast (as opposed to Hunger, Some Mother’s Son with their lead characters of Bobby Sands in Belfast, another city). Instead, Ken Loach navigates the telling of an Irish story through a more socialist lens instead of a straight nationalist narrative. Even so, the film ends up heavily sympathizing with characters who do commit murder, even of members of their own army. In the end, The Wind that Shakes the Barley is something between an Irish and a British film. It cannot really be placed into either box. There is a constant question of who represents who, yet here presented with a non-Irish director and very strongly Republican film. The movie fails to provide any nuance as to the opposing side, the British Empire and their representative in Ireland. There are but fleeting glimpses of their humanity, and ninety-nine percent of the time they are inhuman brutes. Perhaps a film like Hunger (2008) in which director Steve McQueen takes a more ahistorical approach to his film is a good contrast when dealing with films about the long history of Irish-British conflict. Without knowing any