Sheltering in the London underground during the Blitz (Photo: flickr/oooOOC)
Steve McQueen’s superb new film Blitz is a powerful corrective to standard accounts of London during Hitler’s bombing raids in 1940.
It’s a gripping and brilliantly realised story about race and class that feels utterly relevant today. Blitz takes place over three nights in September 1940 as Luftwaffe raids intensify. But there is no Churchill or “stiff upper lip” in this story.
Instead we focus on George, a mixed heritage nine-year-old boy and Rita, his working class mother. Their home district, near the docks in the East End, suffers the worst of the bombing.
The film opens with terrified crowds fighting to get into a locked underground station to escape raging fires.
Rita takes the agonising decision to evacuate George to the countryside. Over 800,000 children were evacuated in this way. But George jumps from the train and hides on another travelling back to London.
The story now splits in two. We see Rita’s life, working in a munitions factory with flashbacks to her romance with her missing black husband.
George takes a perilous journey through the city as he desperately attempts to get back home.
George’s father has disappeared—most likely deported after his arrest for standing up to racists. When the exclusive Cafe Royal takes a direct hit, George is forced to join a gang of looters. They mock and rob the corpses of the rich who, with their lungs burst by the blast, remain ghoulishly seated at their tables.
Rita is volunteered to perform a morale-boosting song in a live broadcast for the BBC from the factory floor. As the applause dies down, a workmate grabs the microphone. She leads the women workers in chanting angry demands for the Tube stations to be opened up as raid shelters.
With husbands and children away and with money to spend, these women embrace their new-found independence. It plays out on the factory floor as well as in the pub and on the dance floor. Rita herself goes on to volunteer at a shelter run by a Jewish socialist.
The performances of the cast, especially Elliott Heffernan as George and Saoirse Ronan as his determined mother, are utterly convincing.
The period detail is excellent but this is no dry or costume drama. The immersive soundtrack is by Hans Zimmer who grew up in a Jewish family in post war Germany. He agreed to work on the film after seeing parallels with his own childhood experience of racism.
The daily fight to survive, the terror of not knowing where the next bomb will fall, the deep divisions behind appeals to national unity—these themes give Blitz an added power and relevance for audiences today.
McQueen told the audience at a preview screening that “war is always about race”. As he rightly concluded, “It feels like the right time for this film.”
- Blitz is on general release at cinemas nationwide. It will play on Apple TV+ later this month
The great art that the Hindu right hopes you don’t see
What is it about Indian art that the Hindu right finds so threatening?
The answer can be found in Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Speechless City. The work is a testament to the fear and hatred of the communal riots in the state of Gujarat.
Packs of black dogs search the empty houses that people left in a hurry. Doors and windows swing open in the wind. Speechless City takes aim at those who did nothing when, in the late 1960s—and many times since—zealots targeted Muslims with burnings, rape and murder.
Prime minister Narendra Modi—the far right, former chief minister of Gujarat—would hate the work. So no wonder there is an alarm around it. But its not just the hard right we have to worry about.
Part of this exhibition is a reaction to the 1977 “state of emergency” brought in by prime minister Indira Gandhi. The pieces in this section are by artists who were Marxists, or were influenced by Marxism.
The exhibition also depicts the lives of India’s most downtrodden. Photojournalist Pablo Bartholomew documents the impact of the 1984 Union Carbide poison gas disaster in Bhopal. More recent works include Nalini Malani’s response to the 1998 Indian underground nuclear tests.
No wonder the Indian right wants artists censored and galleries shut down.
Yuri Prasad
- The Imaginary institute of India, Barbican Art Gallery, London Until 5 January
