Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 6
Reconfiguring Time and Place
A number of years before the resurgence of Belfast’s live music scene in the early 2000s and the more widespread simultaneous nostalgia for punk, vintage and vinyl that has emerged and grown since, Duncan Campbell’s video installation Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) captures the intensity of the working class youth culture in the 1970s and 1980s that gathered around energetic live music and was fuelled by an ethos of dissent against distension. The video’s title derives from a phrase commonly seen in graffiti in Belfast during the conflict, and is indicative of class tensions between different areas of the city. This same class tension, or more specifically, anger against privilege, emerges in much of the punk lyrics of the time.1
The images in Campbell’s work consist of photographs from the time held in the Belfast Exposed photographic gallery’s archives. It gives movement to still photographs of underprivileged teenagers and punks escaping the stifling concrete fortification of their housing estates and finding moments of freedom and a sense of community in alternative venues and company, all accompanied by a barely legible and fast-paced monologue delivered by Scottish actor Ewen Bremner.
Campbell’s interest in the image archive and in reviving/re-presenting forgotten marginalized pasts pre-empts the timely publication of Hooley’s memoirs in 2010 and the release of Good Vibrations in 2012 when the nostalgia had taken hold. These works are all indicative of wider and more varied cultural products produced in and about Northern Ireland that attempt to acknowledge plural pasts across a range of approaches and from slightly more varied (but still predominantly male) points of view. Considering such cultural impulses to engage with the artefacts a previous generation archived away in light of the ways films like Good Vibrations and No re-map place as well as time is the concern of this section.
I hope you will be forgiving that I know less about Santiago de Chile than my home city of Belfast and may never get to visit to see for myself, but I understand from my reading around informed views of life since the dictatorship there that there are sanitized sites of memorial which serve as signs indicating that the job of confronting the past is done while the capital and country grow and develop around them, signifying – in many cases, deceptively – that society is moving on. For someone whose 30 years living in Belfast spanned times of transition away from conflict and towards commercial development, this ‘band-aiding’ is all too disappointingly familiar, as is the knowledge that getting a society to ‘move on’ from its collective trauma really doesn’t work like that. Authorities can place as many memorial sites as they wish, but they ultimately only serve to drive tourism while collective and individual wounds run deep. When it comes to confronting some of these wounds in fictionalized feature films, what shape is an effective approach in treating the narratives?
Co-director Glenn Leyburn describes Good Vibrations as being far removed from the ‘Kitchen Sink’ dramas associated with the British New Wave in the 1950s and 1960s. The film’s tagline hails it as ‘a feel-great comedy about the Troubles’, and the poster foregrounding a triumphant fist-pumping Hooley is more in line with rock comedies and teenpics in stark contrast to other films featuring Northern Ireland and the conflict that follow individual males. In discussing Alan Clarke’s television productions dealing specifically with Northern Ireland – Contact (1985) and Elephant (1989) – Brian McIlroy notes that alongside Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, Clarke is an inheritor of the tradition of social realism in British Film and television dramas. More commercial films with traditional narratives tend to either derive from that tradition, or take influence from Hollywood genres in films such as Resurrection Man (dir. Marc Evans, 1998) which often amalgamate the action thriller and ‘angry young man’ dramas.2
That is not to say that Good Vibrations is devoid of such drama. We are shown that Terri’s carefree living-in-the-moment ambling through the streets at night and his persistence in maintaining the record shop on the frequently bombed Great Victoria Street in the city centre are met with very real risk. There is even a graphic torture scene included involving Terri’s friend Eric (David Wilmot) that would not be out of place in Resurrection Man. These inclusions amid the riotous joy of punk gigs and Terri’s unending optimism in the face of failure, defeat and poor finances indicate the normalcy of getting on with life regardless of the persistent threat of harm. This is further evoked in the selected archival footage of real events depicting the ubiquity and realness of constant violence. Viewed side by side in the post-Agreement period, the film evaluates that precarious, uncertain and immediate way of life from a later time in which collective traumatic recall retains those impulses even during relative peace and conflict transformation (now compounded with anxieties and disagreements pertaining to Brexit).
While the narrative in Good Vibrations is individualized and presented from the viewpoint of a single male character, it does also capture the sense of a marginalized collective, albeit a predominantly male one in this representation. It is said by those who lived in it that Belfast was a dark place in the 1970s and 1980s, and Good Vibrations is at its core a drama with wry comedy inflections, showcasing Northern Irish humour (with mainly local actors) in the face of adversity in posing a counterpoint to a long list of serious dramas (with notoriously poor accents) which are often based on a reductive understanding of the nature of the conflict.
In Good Vibrations, Belfast is reconfigured in time and place in the collapse of the old city with the new, regenerated, re-industrializing city. It plays itself in the film while also being used as a stand-in for London – a typical practice that has emerged with the increasing popularity of Belfast as a shooting location in the service of national and international film and television production. Its mixed architectures lend themselves well to looking like that of other cities while the streets in central and south Belfast are familiar to those who frequent the Cathedral and Queen’s Quarters.
The Cathedral Quarter is home to the Harp Bar where many of the gigs in Good Vibrations take place, and the bar itself has experienced a resurgence since the film’s release in 2012. Hill Street where it is located has been regenerated since the old days, but apart from re-erecting the cages around the bar, no attempt was made in the film to ‘re-dress’ and ‘age’ the street and building fronts. This area is now the city’s cultural centre and is distinctive far and wide, although in 2020 the quarter has come under the threat of being bulldozed to make way for a homogenized office and retail hub. The film-makers recorded the area as it was at the time of filming in 2011 to keep it recognizable, little knowing that the film itself would be a further archival record of another ‘old’, or at least, transitional, Belfast. Before these further changes were a notion, the aesthetic decision by the production team (which may well have been led by budgetary constraints) means that the film’s mise en scène conveys the coexistence of past and present. Parts of the city look new, but collective memories and archives keep its past traumas and difficulties and its formidable energy and vibrancy very much alive, particularly at a time of resurgence in its music scene.
While the archive interjects and commands attention like a short but hard-hitting punk track in Good Vibrations, it is woven into the very fabric of No. We could say that it presents a total collapse of past and present as we witness the re-enactment of the events shown in much of the archival footage that plays in the film, often side by side, but that would be inaccurate. Active, observant viewers will notice that the original players, including some high-profile political and media figures in Chile such as broadcast journalist Patricio Bañados, appear in the film’s diegesis as themselves and often next to monitors showing the ‘live’ feed which is actually archival. They will also notice the visible nearly 25-year age difference between the 1988 and 2011/12 versions of these people re-performing their past appearances in the No television segments that convinced Chile its joy was finally coming.
In shaping the campaign, the ways that René traverses space in No are notable. In terms of transport, he crosses Santiago and the surrounding areas either on skateboard or motorcycle, both of which are individual vehicles connoting a sense of freedom. René skateboards in the morning sunlight without a care for political turmoil. He seems to consistently sail through and slip away, always peripheral and not quite of Santiago. The skateboarding codes René as carefree and socially, culturally and politically mobile. Even when the same streets become crowded with demonstrators, René possesses an ability to slip through and remain passive. The motorcycle cannot help but nod towards García Bernal’s previous performance as the young Ernesto ‘Ché’ Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries (dir. Walter Salles, 2004) with knowing parallels between two characters who unwittingly become central to a revolution of some kind.
Elsewhere, in marketing meetings René is front and centre, or in control behind the camera when directing ads. However, in spaces of transition and authority, including the police station and his workplace after he and his boss Lucho Guzmán become political adversaries, he creeps around, hovers in threshold spaces, becomes passive and leaves quietly at the soonest opportunity. His passivity when he witnesses his one-time partner Verónica get beaten by police signifies him as a bystander unwilling to relinquish his privilege, while his ambiguous relationship with Verónica and allusions to his father (who is absent but referred to in present tense, indicating he is alive) suggest that by association he has socialist leanings while clearly enjoying the spoils of neo-liberal capitalism shaped by Pinochet’s junta.
As an exile returned from Mexico and a self-made capitalist from a socialist lineage, René Saavedra is other in 1988 Santiago de Chile. As a non-compliant political vagrant and fun-loving aficionado of imported reggae music, Terri Hooley is other in 1980s Belfast. They are uneasy presences in their home cities and revolutionary in simply wanting to do whatever they want to do. As such, the films remain unclear as to what extent they are critical of individuals’ or groups’ actions, but do create scope for viewers to ask questions.
In both films, the insertion of archival material far transcends stylistic or narrative motivations, and their depictions of their protagonists blur the lines between anti-hero and hero tropes. Chile and Northern Ireland are for all intents and purposes places of peace and prosperity at the times the films were made and since. However, for those old enough to remember the violence, for families of the murdered, the interned and the disappeared, and even for the ‘postmemory’ generations who carry traumatic pasts whether they realize it or not, the past always remains the present playing on loop. This is what the media artefacts reframed on television sets in the films visualize: the continual replay of mediatized pasts that make visible the unhealed wounds band-aided by veneers of reconciliation and the empty, commercial language of moving on that only causes further festering.
1 For example, Rudi’s ‘Big Time’ and ‘My Perfect Cousin’ by The Undertones express working-class youth feeling resentment towards their middle-class peers.
2 Brian McIlroy, Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland (Steveston Press), p. 126.
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