Abstract
Drawing upon theories of social and cultural memory, commemoration, and memory politics, this article explores how two British documentary dramas – Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday and McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday (both 2002) – re-enact the events of Bloody Sunday, Derry 1972, where British paratroopers shot and killed 13 unarmed demonstrators and wounded another 14. Moving from a textual analytical focus to a historical contextualization and recontextualization of the two films, I argue that Sunday and Bloody Sunday adopt different narrative and temporal frames and, as a consequence, expose competing perspectives on the question of preconditions and responsibilities for the atrocity. In connecting both films to the Saville inquiry’s final report published in 2010, I sketch out how they relate to an emerging historical mainstream discourse. I conclude that the differences exhibited bear witness to the impossibility of ultimately arresting constant discursive renegotiations of shared pasts – every (historical) vision seems to imply certain blind spots.
It is often asserted that, the establishment of a final and singular truth of what happened on that day [Bloody Sunday] will allow for a process of closure and resolution, and perhaps for those involved such an aspiration is understandable. But there is a danger that what is being pursued is something which will ultimately smooth over the actual and very real inconsistencies, partialities and blank spots of an event such as this. (Herron and Lynch, 2007: 71) To see something is constantly to oversee something else. There is no vision without a blind-spot. (Welsch, 1997: 25)
Introduction
There are different ways of relating to the past; personal, traumatic flashbacks, retelling tales, giving testimony, collecting traces or evidence, conducting historical research, visiting museums or monuments, or ritually enacting anniversaries or other memorial performances. In this list various forms of memory, various commemorative practices, and various kinds of actors blend and blur. Is memory a collective endeavor? Is it purely individual and biochemical? Is it a discursive operation? Is there one past or are there many? Is the past fixed or does it change? What role does popular culture play in memory-creating processes? Such questions and others are addressed in the emergent field of what Olick and Robbins (1998: 112) term social memory studies: the study of ‘distinct sets of mnemonic practices in various social sites’. I will here direct attention to the subfield of cultural memory – social memory practices that are carried out in, and through, cultural and aesthetic expressions.
I approach a difficult chapter of Northern Irish history – the events of 30 January 1972 in the town of Derry, where a peaceful civil rights march turned into bloody disaster when British elite forces opened fire and killed 13 unarmed civilians while wounding another 14. The events of that day – Bloody Sunday – have been termed a defining moment, a watershed, in British–Irish history and are widely seen as an important turning point in the Troubles that claimed the lives of over 3000 people. The public inquiry into the incident, conducted by Lord Widgery in 1972, branded all the victims as gunmen and snipers connected to the IRA. Only after the publication of the Saville inquiry’s final report in 2010 has the British state officially acknowledged the innocence of the victims and declared the soldiers responsible for the murders.
In the following, I will take a closer look at two British documentary dramas setting out to re-enact the events of that day – Sunday and Bloody Sunday both screened on British television in 2002. Can these two films be seen as memory-making movies? Do their versions of the events on Bloody Sunday agree, or are there differences? How do the films relate to historical discourses pertaining to the incidents in Derry in January 1972? Before engaging in these questions, however, a brief introduction of the field of cultural memory studies, and a short outlook onto how Bloody Sunday has been commemorated in Derry and beyond throughout the past decades seem appropriate.
Memory, media, memorymedia
Much has been written about the interconnection between cultural artifacts, social memory and memory politics. Starting with George Lipsitz (1990), as well as Jan Assmann (1992) and Aleida Assmann (1999), via Marita Sturken’s (1997) or Allison Landsberg’s (2004) thoughts and through to Astrid Erll’s (2008) contemporary work, also the importance of fiction – be it on film, as novel, poetry, or on stage – for processes of collective remembering has been acknowledged and critically assessed.
Regarding the issue of memory, fiction, and film Marita Sturken (1997: 23), for instance asserts that ‘feature films … retain a powerful cultural currency; they provide popular narratives … that supersede and overshadow documentary images and written texts’, while Astrid Erll (2008: 389) makes explicit that fictional media such as novels and feature films ‘possess the potential to generate and mold images of the past which will be retained by whole generations.’ Fiction (and fictionalized accounts), it seems, matter for processes of collective identity formation. They take part in forming what Allison Landsberg (2004) refers to as prosthetic memories, memories of past events one hasn’t experienced oneself, but developed a close relation to. The question remains as to how popular culture impacts social memory? How do fictionalized accounts influence historical discourse and memory politics?
In cultural memory studies an early focus on storage and archiving of historical material has been increasingly replaced by attention to the ways certain accounts are mediated and remediated, and their contents negotiated. This awareness of issues of mediation and reception led Astrid Erll (2008) to propose three analytical levels when dealing with narratives about the past. Drawing upon the well established distinction between text, intertext and context, she suggests an intra-medial, an inter-medial and a pluri-medial level of analysis. These levels imply the following:
At an intra-medial level attention is directed to the narrative’s textual features. What story is told, and which technical and narrative means are applied in the process?
At an inter-medial level focus is directed towards the ways through which earlier mediations of an event are remediated within a different work and to what purpose this is done. Is original footage included? Is documentary material mimicked? Are original locations used? To what avail?
Erll argues that the intra- and inter-medial dimensions merely allow for the assessment of potentials for memory-making inherent in the studied texts – be they fictitious or factual in kind. For instance not every feature film about a historical event employing real footage is read as conveying historical material by its varying audiences. As such, the technical and narrative means applied to suggest historical validity cannot guarantee the effectiveness of these strategies with all audiences and in all contexts of reception – not even in case of a fully-fledged documentary film. In other words, the intra- and inter-medial levels do not by themselves transform a certain narrative’s historical content into cultural memory. To achieve such memory-making effects a third, contextual level has to activate this content, ensure its continued availability in public discourse and assert its sociopolitical relevance.
According to Erll, it is precisely at this point that the third level of analysis becomes relevant – the pluri-medial constellations surrounding a work – ‘tight network[s] of other medial representations … [that] prepare the ground … lead reception … open up and channel discussion, and thus endow [for instance] films with their memorial meaning’ (Erll, 2008: 396). Pluri-medial networks serve to premediate a text, predispose its reception, ensure its continued availability, and provide reading instructions, hints or cues to audiences as to how to understand and discursively articulate it. It is at this pluri-medial level that memory-making potentials are transformed into discursive effects impacting memory politics as well as the formation and negotiation of individual and collective identities.
Commemorating Bloody Sunday
Before I engage in a closer analysis of, and comparison between, the two films some remarks regarding the medial formation and negotiation of cultural forms of memory pertaining to Bloody Sunday become necessary.
The events of Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 are a good example for what Brian Conway (2009: 398) refers to as difficult pasts. Difficult pasts are traumatic events that carry widely different connotations for different – and often opposed – communities. Drawing attention to the contradictory relation between official, vernacular and personal forms of memory, Conway interconnects social and cultural memory with issues of power, authority and the constitution of individual and group identities. In his meticulous historical analysis of local commemorative practices performed around Derry’s Bloody Sunday memorial at Rossville Street, Conway (2010) argues that there is never only one past to be discovered and unearthed, but always several versions of it, the perceived authority of which constantly changes. The past is constituted in the present on the basis of disparate traces. It is accordingly in constant flux and remains dependent on perpetuated re-enactments organized by memory choreographers; the past resembles ‘a container for multiple and colliding interpretations’ (2010: 3).
Arguing in a similar direction, Graham Dawson states that Bloody Sunday is a present past (2007: 10) – a past that has not been put to rest in form of a reconciliatory historical master narrative, but that still haunts communities and threatens to deteriorate intercommunal relations. According to him, representations of the past have profound impacts on politics and everyday practices. He states that cultural memory is ‘an element in the ideological repertoire of a society, its narratives forming an indispensable part of the cultural maps of meaning that enable people to live in a particular environment and make sense of their personal and social experience’ (2007: 12). Dawson approaches the politics of commemoration of Bloody Sunday as a discursive struggle between local survivor memory ‘shaped … from below’ and ‘a state sanctioned official memory’ (2007: 90) articulated from above that establishes hegemonic discursive frames and marginalizes competing accounts.
In Derry and Northern Ireland Bloody Sunday was commemorated, represented, re-enacted and constantly re-negotiated by and between various stakeholders and memory choreographers on the nationalist side (Conway, 2010; Dawson, 2007). Angela Hegarty (2004: 223) points out that a strong local memory formed in the affected community in Derry as a counterweight to official memorial discourse enshrined in the Widgery inquiry’s flawed report (Widgery, 1972). Counter-memories were often based on witness accounts and communal story-telling. Stories pertaining to Bloody Sunday were disseminated locally as documentary material, but also in the form of cultural products such as songs, stage plays, poetry, novels, visual art, or film. Herron and Lynch (2007: 3) assert that, ‘it is hardly surprising that, in the face of a blatant perversion of the truth-finding function of the law, culture and art have filled the gap with versions of a popular, demotic history of Bloody Sunday’. Or, as Moi (2010: 64) asserts in his study of poetic treatments of Bloody Sunday, ‘the tragedy [and] the official report … instigated counterhegemonic documentation and commemoration by the local community, as well as alternative aesthetic apprehensions by a variety of artists’.
Hackett and Rolston (2009) argue that giving unofficial testimony of traumatic experience can serve as means to counter injustice, and to generate opportunities for collective solidarity. However, they continue, that ‘victims and survivors have often told their stories … only in confined spaces, given the power of the state and other dominant societal institutions to determine what can and cannot be said’ (2009: 357). As a consequence, their stories ‘often go unacknowledged by the wider society’ (2009: 355). This was also largely the case with the unofficial memories pertaining to Bloody Sunday, which were reproduced in, and through, local commemorative practices and mainly disseminated in the form of sub- and counter-cultural expressions.
Until the early 1990s, British mainstream media took little notice of local bottom-up commemorative practices connected to the atrocities committed in Derry. According to Dawson (2007) first the 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 1992 brought national and international news media back to Derry and ‘prompted a brief flurry of … interest’ (2007: 169). Nevertheless, according to Dawson, this anniversary had the important function of ‘placing survivor testimony on the public record’ (2007: 169). Newspapers such as The Guardian featured eyewitnesses stories on prominent locations and contributed to an ‘atmosphere of interest … with a potentially more enduring impact’ (2007: 169).
While the notion of Bloody Sunday as a criminal violation of basic rights can be seen to have gained some acceptance in British media discourse over time, medial exposure of the issue remained negligible. First, the peace process developing throughout the 1990s enabled an increasing mainstream focus on the event. Conway (2008) for instance asserts that during the late 1990s, Bloody Sunday acquired a ‘globally ‘chic’ quality … that seems to liquidate its earlier localized meaning’ (2008: 187). According to him, in this period ‘the event [Bloody Sunday] was re-imagined and re-constituted in increasingly global and universal terms’ (2008: 193). This way, the event attracted wider audiences and to a growing extent enabled commemorative manifestations in, and as, mainstream popular culture on a national and international scale. According to Hegarty (2004: 225), this alternative, culturally inflected process of commemorating Bloody Sunday ‘was important … it led people back into the legal process and culminated in a re-opening of the case and the institution of a second inquiry’. 1
The opening of the second inquiry by Tony Blair in 1998 to reassess evidence and ‘establish the truth about what happened on that day [Bloody Sunday]’ (Tony Blair) 2 is seen as a crucial step in efforts to end the conflict and reconcile the parties. Saville’s inquiry significantly impacted the memory-politics unfolding around the event and has led to an extended media interest and exposure. Aileen Blaney (2007: 117) states, that ‘in the leading up to the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 2002 an unprecedented number of artists produced commemorative works aimed at both eliciting and constructing memory of the atrocity’, before she explicitly refers to both Greengrass’s and McDougall and McGovern’s films as means through which ‘the historical event was spectacularized for mainstream audiences’ (2007: 117). Also Conway (2008: 192) refers to both Sunday and Bloody Sunday as examples for popular cultural manifestations impacting public perceptions of the historical incident.
In 2010, after 12 years of work and on more than 5000 pages, Saville finally delivered his verdict and declared the innocence of all the victims involved. However, his report – this ‘test-case of the British State’s willingness to undertake a fundamental reassessment of its own role in the conflict’ (Dawson, 2007: 205) – can hardly be seen as providing access to an ultimate truth. Rather, the report functions as a powerful articulation that establishes a renegotiated, reconciliatory and officially endorsed authoritative version of the incidents in Derry. As such, this ‘definitive account of Bloody Sunday’ (Herron and Lynch, 2007: 3), constitutes the core of an emerging mainstream discourse backed by the enunciatory capacities of the British state. It will, however not, and indeed cannot ever, stand uncontested. In other words, memory politics pertaining to the events continue unabatedly; in court as well as in parliament, in tabloids as well as in academia, in poetry, on stage, and as documentary dramas on television. It is this last medium I will now turn my attention to.
Two documentary dramas on Bloody Sunday
The first film under consideration in this article is Sunday (2002), directed by Charles McDougall and written by Jimmy McGovern. It was produced for Channel 4 and aired on 25 January 2002 – close to the 30th anniversary of the 1972 events. McDougall and McGovern’s film is loosely based on historical studies conducted by McCann et al. (1992) and Mullan and Scally (1997), who gathered eyewitness accounts from Derry residents to establish a counter-archive to the officially endorsed version of the events. However, Sunday also draws on a vast array of official documents and on extended interviews screenwriter Jimmy McGovern conducted throughout pre-production research with local eyewitnesses and soldiers of the First Parachute (1 Para) regiment deployed on that day in Derry. The filming was largely done on original locations in Derry casting mainly non-professional actors (among them eyewitnesses and relatives of civilians involved in the 1972 events and army veterans who had served in Northern Ireland). Some parts were shot in Manchester because of significant architectural changes in Derry’s Rossville flats area where many of the 1972 killings had taken place.
Sunday was met with some criticism by the British mainstream press for alleged bias, partisanship and for succumbing to conspiracy theories, but received considerable acclaim in for instance The Guardian or on the BBC. 3 It won several TV awards amongst them the Irish Film and Television Award and the Prix Italia both for best TV drama. During a panel debate on Channel 4 that immediately followed the screening, 4 senior British military staff, local Derry eyewitnesses, civil rights activists, politicians, historians, as well as screenwriter Jimmy McGovern were asked to comment on the film. Many contributions pointed to the meticulous research conducted by the production team as the basis for the historical relevance of the film, and to the close proximity between re-enactment and original footage taken on that day. Regardless whether Sunday attracted acclaim or condemnation by participants, the relevance of the film for historical discourse was unanimously assumed.
The second movie, Bloody Sunday, was directed by Paul Greengrass and produced by Mark Redhead. It aired on ITV a week before Sunday and had a limited theatrical release a week later. Starring James Nesbitt, it earned several awards at international film festivals around the world including the Golden Berlin Bear and the British Independent Film Award for best director and best actor (James Nesbitt). Greengrass’s film is loosely based on a study conducted by Mullan and Scally (1997) that is widely seen as preparing the grounds for the institution of a second inquiry into the events on Bloody Sunday by the newly elected Blair government in 1998. Greengrass mainly filmed in Dublin even though some sequences were shot in Derry casting non-professional actors such as army veterans and Derry locals.
Even though also Greengrass’s film was heavily criticized in some reviews, 5 it earned significant acclaim at international film festivals and was by and large received well by the mainstream press, which particularly commended the film’s reconciliatory and inclusive stance and acknowledged its precise re-enactment and sensitive treatment of a difficult incident in newer Irish and British history. 6
Sunday and Bloody Sunday as memory-making movies
I will now turn to a brief sketch of the intra- and inter-medial rhetorical strategies employed in Sunday and Bloody Sunday to establish memory-making potential, before I move on to outline some of the pluri-medial constellations forming around these films to frame reception and channel their discursive impacts.
Both Sunday and Bloody Sunday employ authentification strategies throughout their opening sequences to connect the presented narrative to a preceding real event. In McDougall and McGovern’s film, lines of written text assert the factual basis of the presented account before a voiceover commenting on documentary footage briefly relates the historical background (Derry in the late 1960s and early 1970s) of the ensuing story. Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday cross-cuts between precise re-enactments of press-conferences given by the British military and the Derry Civil Rights Association to present the positions of key players involved in the events of the day, before a line of written text indicates exact time and place of the diegetic universe – ‘30th January 1972, Derry, Northern Ireland’.
Having made initial claims to historical truthfulness throughout their opening sequences to ‘cue a documentary mode of engagement’ (Blaney, 2007: 131), both movies then employ what I term a mimetic realism 7 as a predominant rhetorical strategy. Operating mainly at an inter-medial level, mimetic realism is a set of stylistic devices that aims at achieving a semblance of the depicted images with original footage of the past familiar to audiences. Mimetic realism mimics the indexicality of original photographic footage to give authority to its version of events, and bases its claims to authenticity on the documentary value implicitly assigned to photographic images.
Sunday and Bloody Sunday employ a mimetic form of realism. Through such means as the use of desaturated, bleached colors and grainy images, both movies invoke a semblance to TV footage produced in Northern Ireland throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Through an inclusion of real footage made on Bloody Sunday, the repeated use of original locations, the casting of Derry eyewitnesses as well as army veterans as actors, and the meticulous re-enactment of iconic scenes, both movies play on familiar visual discourses pertaining to the event. These ‘Bloody Sunday stylistics’ (Herron and Lynch, 2007: 9) suggest a close proximity between the audio-visual representations and the historical event.
Both movies attempt to draw the spectator into the events by rendering the medial frames invisible. Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday almost entirely relies on a quivering hand-held camera that seems to be part of the diegetic world. Camera movement and cuts often seem dictated by diegetic events, and not the considerations of an extra-diegetic director, as in scenes where the firing of shots leads to a sudden interruption in the filming or makes the camera crouch behind a barricade providing only marginal visual access to what happens. This immersed, bottom-up perspective is further supported by Greengrass’s almost entire abstinence from the use of extra-diegetic sound or music. Chaotic noises repeatedly interrupt actors’ speech and render large chunks of conversation incomprehensible to audiences. It is maybe with an eye on such reality-effects that some reviewers commented on the subtitle track as often necessary, but ‘intrusive’. 8 What makes the frames most visible in Bloody Sunday is the casting of actor James Nesbitt as main protagonist Ivan Cooper. The presence of a renowned star somewhat disturbs the illusionary transparency of the medium created through the means outlined above. In addition, Greengrass’s montage technique, with which he repeatedly juxtaposes key players and emphasizes a cause and effect structure of the events, makes the viewer aware of the filmic frames.
McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday only employs immersive strategies such as the use of hand-held camera, sudden cuts seemingly caused by events on screen, and a soundtrack composed of diegetic noise and speech during some rioting scenes. In such sequences the casting of unknown local laymen as protagonists further diminishes the perceived distance between medium and event. Beyond some rioting scenes, however, Sunday appears more consciously composed. The camera is often static and follows various different characters. Cuts largely appear dictated by dramatic effect – for instance the cross-cutting between the statements given by eyewitnesses in court with re-enactments of the recounted events, or a brief cut testifying to the planting of nail bombs on the dead Gerald Donaghey. In addition, McDougall consistently uses extra-diegetic musical tunes to provide reading instructions and emotionally charge depicted events.
Regardless of such differences, through their choice of theme and style both movies assert their relevance for historical discourse and memory politics. In Erll’s terminology this means that in both Sunday and Bloody Sunday potentials for memory-making effects are laid at an intra- and inter-medial level. The spectator is consistently invited to accept the presented narratives as authentic representations of what happened. Such memory-making potential has, however, to be activated in and through particular discursive environments – pluri-medial constellations in Erll’s terminology – to transfer such potential into actual memory-effects.
A closer look at the pluri-medial constellations in which both Bloody Sunday and Sunday are embedded suggests that both movies were treated as realistic representations of a historical event in public discourse. Regardless of whether the films attracted acclaim or criticism, their relevance for an emerging memory-politics regarding the incidents on Bloody Sunday was nearly solemnly acknowledged.
The availability of Sunday and Bloody Sunday varies over time. The initial release of the two films in 2002 attracted wide national attention in the UK and Ireland. Herron and Lynch (2007: 65) point out that the ‘transmission on British television … of Bloody Sunday and Sunday coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Bloody Sunday was of enormous importance in raising awareness of the event outside of Derry and … offered the families and community some kind of validation for their long and largely lonely insistence on a counter-history to that of the Widgery Report’.
Eight years after their release, Sunday and Bloody Sunday experienced a limited resurge in attention due to the publication of the Saville inquiry’s final report fuelling again public interest in the history of the Troubles in general and that of Bloody Sunday in particular. Looking at both movies in the light of the pluri-medial constellation forming around Saville’s report reveals some interesting traits regarding the potential memory-making impact of the two films. In the two films, two distinct and partly contradictory historical narratives seem to come to the surface. While Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday closely aligns to the final conclusions drawn by Saville and at times almost seems to resemble a popular and dramatized pre-mediation of the actual report, McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday plays on a discursive background critical of some crucial assertions made in both Greengrass’s film and Saville’s conclusions.
Discursive interplays: Greengrass, Saville and McGovern
Even though both movies concur in the overall sequencing of events and in their presentation of all the victims as innocent, they provide competing perspectives regarding the preconditions for the massacre and concerning the question of responsibility for it. These disagreements are the result of intentional choices made by the directors and screenwriters – an inclusion of different voices and the adoption of different narrative frames. These differences, again, make the two movies resonate with competing historical discourses pertaining to Bloody Sunday.
Comparing Sunday and Bloody Sunday
Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday mainly focalizes the events through main protagonist Ivan Cooper – a Protestant MP of the Northern Irish Assembly, leader of the cross-congregational SDLP and one of the organizers of the civil rights march in Derry that day, and puts his character up against the one of General Ford. 9 In Blaney’s (2007) words, both Cooper and Ford ‘act as indexes of historical and political issues’ (2007: 120). As such, she continues, ‘Cooper’s heroization and Ford’s vilification far exceeded their dramatic functions and crystallize extra-diegetic political and historical issues’ (2007: 121).
In Greengrass’s film, Cooper emerges as what I have termed a liminal character (Pötzsch, 2010: 72–3). Liminal characters are protagonists who cross dividing lines, defuse antagonisms, and enable a reconceptualization of the enemy as a potential partner for non-violent conflict resolution. In doing so – in crossing discursive as well as topographic barriers separating friend from foe – liminal characters challenge and potentially subvert mutually exclusive discursive identities. In making a constitutive and inaccessible outside accessible, they open up alternative trajectories enabling a politics beyond polarity and exclusion. Casting James Nesbitt – himself a Protestant from Northern Ireland – as Ivan Cooper – a Protestant working for a mainly Catholic cause – seems an ideal choice for a movie that according to its director sets out ‘to create a shared narrative in a spirit of reconciliation’. 10
The liminal status of James Nesbitt’s Cooper is repeatedly emphasized throughout the movie. Cooper is depicted as swiftly moving through the streets of Derry shaking hands with Protestant businessmen and Catholic Derry Young Hooligans alike, and as talking to RUC-officers and army personnel as well as to IRA representatives to defuse potentially eruptive situations. Cooper agrees to the difficult compromise of redirecting the march to avoid confrontation with British elite military forces and succeeds in making the other organizers follow him. He constantly delivers the message that the march is a peaceful, cross-congregational activity aiming at civil rights and not in support of violent endeavors from any side.
Blaney (2007) observes that Greengrass’s narrative ‘exaggerates [Cooper’s] importance in order to satisfy a contemporary imperative to appeal to the two main communities … in Northern Ireland … [and] to promote intercommunal cooperation both in the spirit of reconciliation and in the interest of political pragmatism’ (2007: 125). As such, it seems Bloody Sunday in crucial issues diverts from available historical documentation to increase its range of address and appeal to both opposed communities in the conflict.
In contrast to Greengrass who follows ‘a politician trying to keep two warring factions apart’, 11 McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday mainly focalizes through the characters of local Bogside residents and soldiers of the First Parachute Regiment. This choice of narrative point of view is the result of a three-year period of intensive research and a large number of interviews conducted by McGovern with Derry residents and former Paras which colored the developing narrative. In McGovern’s words, ‘the process of writing a drama-doc is as important as the drama-doc itself. It must empower the powerless.’ 12 As such, in adopting a bottom-up perspective, the film provides a voice to members of the affected community, as well as to the deployed ground troops, and this way discursively articulates formerly marginalized perspectives on the events.
In Sunday border-crossing liminal characters are largely absent. RUC Chief Supt Lagan constitutes an exception as he argues for a strategy of de-escalation. However, rather than really bridging the divide between military and peace activists, in McDougall’s movie his character serves to expose the fateful killings of Bloody Sunday as the result of a deliberately devised military strategy endorsed by the government. For instance, at one point at the military HQ Lagan is told that the decision to stop the march regardless its peaceful agenda, and deploy 1 Para ‘has been made at the highest possible level’. This makes the RUC officer enquire twice whether this means the government. He only receives a telling silence as reply.
I will now proceed to highlight some of the disagreements between Sunday and Bloody Sunday concerning the historical event and connect these to the emerging pluri-medial constellation regarding Bloody Sunday with the Saville report at its core. Throughout his film, Greengrass makes a series of distinct claims regarding the killings in Derry:
The killings were entirely unjustified, yet did not happen with either overt or silent endorsement by British authorities.
The killings were carried out by an elite army unit out of control that bears sole responsibility for the fateful events.
The soldiers lied about their conduct, yet without endorsement by military command or state authorities.
None of the dead and wounded were armed.
Even though the IRA did fire some shots that day, these shots did not influence the course of events in any way; the soldiers fired without being fired upon.
The killings exacerbated the conflict and fuelled support for the IRA precisely by diminishing the common, liminal grounds on which peaceful alternatives might have thrived.
These assertions are in remarkable accordance with the findings published by the Saville inquiry eight years later. It seems safe to say that Greengrass with his film constructs an inclusive and reconciliatory historical master narrative regarding the event. As such, Bloody Sunday articulates, popularizes and widely disseminates an emerging mainstream position in public and historical discourse. McDougall and McGovern are in agreement with Greengrass concerning the innocence of the victims and the role of the IRA. On other issues, however, Sunday contests and challenges an emerging mainstream position in, for instance, widening the frame of enquiry to include some of the blind-spots left unattended by Greengrass and (to a lesser extend) by Saville.
McDougall and McGovern disagree with Greengrass and Saville in relation to the reasons and responsibilities for the events. For instance, the decision to deploy 1 Para and stop the march is presented as the result of a consciously devised military strategy of controlled escalation. In addition, considerable emphasis is put on the war culture prevalent in the military unit and on the soldiers’ conviction to fulfill implied government and military objectives when entering the Bogside as a fighting force. Also, the planting of evidence on Gerald Donaghey is focused on in some detail, while an extension of the narrative frame allows for an inclusion of the high-level political involvement in the Widgery whitewash.
In disagreeing with an emerging mainstream position on such crucial subjects, McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday points to where it hurts the British authorities most – it directs attention to possible government involvement in the massacre and its ensuing cover-up. Accordingly, their film was regularly dismissed by critics as propagandistic, partisan, and as adhering to conspiracy theories, while it was solemnly slaughtered in British tabloids. However, the film ‘was warmly welcomed’ (Herron and Lynch (2007: 66) by the population of Derry, who were closely engaged in pre-production research and in the production itself.
Even though Sunday attracted some scholarly criticism because of its insistence on telling ‘the truth’ about the event and for evading the activity of Martin McGuiness and the IRA, most serious critics endorsed Sunday for its comprehensive perspective on the events, and for the fact that the mere process of making the film in Derry in itself constituted a reconciliatory act bringing together victims, witnesses and former army personnel (McCann, 2002; McLoone, 2002; and the interviews with Professor Keith Jeffery and Professor Paul Arthur on the Channel 4 Sunday website). 13
Sunday, Bloody Sunday, and the Saville report
I will now compare the historical representations of Bloody Sunday in Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday and McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday in some detail and connect their differences to a historical mainstream discourse with Saville’s report at its core.
Greengrass in Bloody Sunday seems to assert that first the unjustified, yet ultimately unintended, shootings on Bloody Sunday consistently undermined any real prospect of peaceful reconciliation in the province and fuelled considerably the support for the IRA. For instance, in a stammering press statement at the end of the movie, Nesbitt’s Cooper tells the assembled journalists that, after the events of the day, he no longer feels articulate to say anything to young men queuing up to join the IRA in Derry. With this statement, the reconciliatory, liminal position represented by Greengrass’s main character appears as thoroughly undermined by the massacre. As a consequence of the atrocity an ‘epistemological barrier’ (Pötzsch, 2010: 69–72) is drawn between Derry residents and state authorities that allows for a simplifying demonization of the respective other, and abets the construction of monolithic, mutually exclusive identities facilitating a politics of polarity and violence. 14
In contrast, McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday adopts the position that Bloody Sunday, even though in itself a extraordinarily traumatic event, was inherently not a new or unprecedented form of colonial oppression. In widening the discursive frame they direct attention to the historical trajectory leading up to the establishment of the No-Go area of Free Derry – namely indiscriminate RUC violence and killings, as well as the introduction of unlimited internment without trial. 15 In alerting the viewer to this historical background, McDougall and McGovern effectively draw a chain of equivalence interconnecting the causes of Bogside militants and civil rights activists. While Greengrass’s film at times seems to presuppose an antagonism between the civil rights movement and Nationalist militants, Sunday shows that the establishment, and violent defence, of Free Derry was perceived as a necessity not only by the militants of the Derry Citizens Defence Association, but that it also garnered the support of a large majority of Bogside residents to counter inherently colonial practices adopted by the British state in the region. Here, epistemological barriers dividing the opposed entities appear as determinate of the situation from the outset. McDougall and McGovern very much imply that an end to internment and to unrestrained RUC activities in the Bogside would have meant an end to the barricades protecting Free Derry as well, as the project then would have been bereft of its legitimacy. 16 According to Herron and Lynch (2007: 67), ‘this attempt to contextualize and identify the political and military pressures that are seen [in Sunday] is key to being able to explain what happened … and why’.
Greengrass’s detailed re-enactment exclusively focuses on the 24 hours of 30 January 1972. This temporal confinement to the day of the killings makes it difficult to sufficiently address the political situation leading up to the event, and entails a reduction of the scandalous Widgery inquiry to a mere footnote in the end credits. The conditions for, and consequences of, the massacre are thus de-emphasized, and a detailed presentation of possible high-level involvement in the atrocity and the subsequent legal whitewash is circumvented.
Greengrass does depict military authorities as consciously risking violent escalation when deploying the 1 Para regiment in the Bogside area. The military and political leadership is, however, exempted from any suspicion of following a long-term strategy that would allow for an example to be made. In Bloody Sunday the British military command appears unable to control the deployed elite forces that had been geared up for war. The 1 Para regiment under Colonel Wilford is presented as virtually deploying itself against explicit orders, and as venturing further into the Bogside area than intended by military planners. Responsibility for the killings is thus assigned to the ground troops and their commanding officer, who acted recklessly and on their own initiative. Accordingly, Herron and Lynch (2007: 68) assert that Bloody Sunday fails to ‘identify the political maneuvering that led to the atrocity [Bloody Sunday]’, while McLoone (2002: 42) states that the film ‘seems to let the British authorities and the army off the hook’. In the words of McCann (2002), Greengrass succumbed to a ‘cock-up theory’ regarding the massacre on Bloody Sunday.
Regarding these points Greengrass again appears in thorough agreement with the Saville inquiry that also refused to directly engage the circumstances behind Widgery’s flawed inquiry 17 and in its final report assigned ultimate responsibility for the unjustified killings to the deployed ground forces alone. 18
Adopting a wider historical frame, McDougall and McGovern can fully lay out the sociopolitical conditions for, and consequences of, the fact that British military forces and the highest judge in the land became instruments of colonial suppression of their own citizens. In rendering verbatim documented statements made by, for instance, General Ford – regarding the military strategy ‘to shoot and kill selected ring leaders of the Derry Young Hooligans after clear warnings have been given’ 19 – or by UK Prime Minister Edward Heath, who reminded Widgery that ‘in Northern Ireland we do not only fight a military, but also a propaganda war’, 20 McDougall and McGovern connect the highest level of military command and political leadership to the atrocity and the ensuing cover up, thus challenging Saville’s conclusions in crucial areas.
In contextualizing Bloody Sunday in this manner and in enabling a perspective beyond merely a detailed re-enactment of the events, McDougall and McGovern’s movie asserts that not the massacre in itself, but first and foremost the endorsement by the country’s highest authorities of the lies published about it – ‘this double injury’ (Herron and Lynch, 2007: 6) – led the young men of Derry to join the military campaign of the IRA. It was the denial of justice to the victims by the British state and not the killings themselves that ultimately fuelled the conflict and led to a path of escalation resulting in almost three decades of bloodshed.
In addition, in spite of presenting the soldiers of 1 Para as a reckless band preparing for war through an evocation of extreme anti-Irish sentiments, as engaged in brutal murder, and as exulting at the number of deaths conveyed in the evening news, McDougall and McGovern exempt them from overarching responsibility for the atrocity. The question addressed in Sunday is not only ‘what did the soldiers do?’, but also ‘what brought young men and soldiers to suddenly become vicious, remorseless killers?’. Sunday not only addresses the acts of killing, but also the preparations that make these killings possible, the processes of de-humanizing the enemy, of reminding oneself of the righteousness of one’s own conduct with reference to one’s own victimhood, and the conscious instrumentalization by senior officers and military strategists of a war culture prevalent in the unit 21 – a war culture Saville was unable to confirm or discharge as being partly responsible for the massacre. 22 The very issue of military training, of remolding young men for the purpose of enabling them to kill, is presented as part of the issue and, indeed, part of the problem, while the question of individual failure – or cock-ups – gains a systemic dimension. As one of the soldiers puts it: ‘They sent 1 Para into the Bogside – the backyard of the IRA. What did they expect?’
The presentation of the character Para 027 – a radio operator who strongly opposed the conduct of his comrades and made severe allegations against his fellow soldiers in the aftermath of the shooting – reveals similar disagreements between Bloody Sunday and Sunday. In Greengrass’s film, Para 027 is shown as finally succumbing to peer pressure exerted by his fellow soldiers and as reluctantly telling the agreed upon cover story to his interrogators. Bloody Sunday as such allocates the ultimate responsibility for the lies to be enshrined in the Widgery report at the lowest possible level – at the level of the individual soldiers. As a result the ground forces are assigned the entire blame. Not only did their unauthorized conduct lead to the massacre, but also the ensuing cover up is framed as initiated and implemented by Colonel Wilford and his men. Widgery appears as simply tricked by their lies. Also in this version of the events Greengrass appears in agreement with the Saville report. 23
In contrast to this, and in agreement with available documentation, McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday shows Para 027 waiting in court to give testimony at the Widgery inquiry when a senior legal officer approaches him, telling him his written statement ‘implies we shot innocent people’. When Para 027 replies that that was what he had seen, the officer rises and tells him that his testimony ‘will not be required in court’. 24 Here McDougall and McGovern place responsibility for the lies becoming official discourse through the Widgery report at the political level that interferes with the allegedly independent inquiry conducted by Lord Widgery.
It seems that, in questioning key assumptions of an emerging mainstream historical discourse, McGovern’s script ‘empowers the powerless’ as he directs attention not only to the victimized Bogside residents, but also to the lower rank military officers and foot soldiers assigned with the blame. Regarding these assertions McDougall and McGovern seem in factual agreement with a series of studies published by critical scholars during the past 30 years that mainly employ eyewitness testimonies – by both local residents and soldiers – as historical sources (McCann, 1980, 2006; McCann et al., 1992; Mullan and Scally, 1997). As such, Sunday feeds into a local historical discourse opposed to some of Saville’s conclusions, yet largely disregarded in the British mainstream media. 25
Blaney (2007) concludes her analysis of Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday with the assertion that the film functions as ‘prosthetic memory’ pertaining to the events in the Bogside in 1972 before continuing that ‘from a negative perspective, it [prosthetic memory] erases historical memory and sanitizes history, while more positively, it remembers a past that might have been suppressed by official history’ (2007: 132). She then connects Greengrass’s film with the more positive function of bringing the events to the attention of a wider public.
It appears beyond any doubt that Greengrass’s film raises awareness about an important and undercommunicated event. Nonetheless, it does not seem inappropriate to claim that Greengrass – in agreement with the mainstream discourse emergent in Saville’s report – at crucial points deviates from available documentation for the sake of a reconciliatory appeal to both communities. Arguing in a similar direction, Martin McLoone (2002: 43) points out that Bloody Sunday ‘perhaps disguises the truth as much as it reveals reality’. The film can be read as a discursive articulation serving a particular political objective, rather than constituting an attempt to realistically re-enact a historical event on the basis of a widest possible array of available sources.
As a consequence of this, I conclude that Greengrass’s film not only raises awareness for an important past event, but also sanitizes history in the name of reconciliation and intercommunal understanding. While this attempt to achieve ‘mnemonic consensus’ (Olick and Robbins, 1998: 126) might prove noble and, indeed, politically wise given decades of violence, it nonetheless requires public contestation, critique and further debate. Through its inclusion of marginalized voices and its adoption of alternative historical frames, McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday enables a popularization of precisely such a critical engagement with officially endorsed and widely disseminated truths. This makes it an important memory-creating counter narrative.
Renegotiating difficult pasts: A conclusion
As I attempted to show in the course of this article, Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday interacts with a pluri-medial network of other representations and commemorative performances that aims at promoting a process of reconciliatory discursive closure culminating in the publication of Saville’s long expected report in the summer of 2010. On the other hand, in drawing on a wider array of available historical documentation and eyewitness accounts McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday alerts the viewer to various blind-spots left unattended in a developing mainstream discourse pertaining to the tragic 1972 events in Derry. This way both films illustrate the important nexus interconnecting historical research, politics and popular culture.
According to Dawson ‘the past … is shaped by present day needs and interests’ (2007: 307). It is not fixed but continuously emerges as ‘a constantly evolving movement’ (2007: 307) that is constitutively incomplete. The discursive interplay of the two documentary dramas and their competing assertions points to this ultimate instability of historical truths, and supports an understanding of social memory as inherently aesthetic and contingent. Collective forms of memory emerge as fluid and changing – as intersubjectively accepted versions of past events that are constantly negotiated and never entirely fixed in one objective and timeless historical truth. Such constant negotiations of shared pasts through various commemorative and representational practices constitute an important element of a democratic politics. Discursive closure can always only be temporary and partial, and must invite critical inquiry into possible blind-spots or marginalized voices and memories. Does such a negotiability, such a fluidity of social memory imply arbitrariness? Does everything go?
As Herron and Lynch point out, ‘the emphasis on indeterminacy and ongoing struggle over meaning rather than the reassuring comforts of closure is not the same thing as a denial of meaning or a disabling relativism’ (2007: 76; emphasis in original). Even though social memory is inherently contingent and constantly open to change and subversion, this does not imply that all articulations are alike in impact. To achieve discursive relevance, a historical articulation, such as, for instance, a documentary drama, has to connect back to a preceding real event and signal this connection through certain intra- and inter-medial representational strategies. Through processes of rearticulation in pluri-medial constellations, the asserted claims are weighted, criticized, promoted or suppressed. The resulting memory effects are the result of a combination of documentable historical accuracy and the discursive enunciatory power of the disseminating agent or memory choreographer.
In the case of the events on Bloody Sunday, the enunciatory powers of the British state and its institutions for a long time suppressed the discursive articulation of vital evidence, thereby hampering the political renegotiation of the social and cultural memory concerning the event. This led to the formation of counter-memorial practices and the emergence of local, autonomous memory cultures. First the initiation of the peace process allowed for a cautious inclusion of these counter-narratives in the dominant historical discourse. As a result, alternative perspectives were increasingly articulated in the mass media and prepared the ground for an official renegotiation of the events that culminated in the publication of Saville’s report in 2010, powerfully articulating a renewed and reconciliatory historical master narrative. Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday and McDougall and McGovern’s Sunday popularized and ‘spectacularized’ (Herron and Lynch, 2007: 117) this emerging dominant discourse, as well as its inherent blank-spots and unavoidably exclusory frames. As such, the discursive interplay of both movies points to the fact that, in the words of Welsch (1997: 25) ‘there is no vision without a blind-spot’ – be this vision juridical, historical, political or otherwise.
Footnotes
1.
Then Prime Minister Tony Blair instituted the Saville Inquiry in 1998.
3.
See for instance the leader in The Guardian (Guardian, 2002) and the interview carried out with screenwriter McGovern in the same newspaper (McGovern, 2004). For the BBC see, for instance, 
.
4.
The panel debate is included as extra material in the DVD edition of Sunday.
5.
The treatment of both films in, for instance, The Telegraph, which stated that ‘the Bloody Sunday wound will never heal while films like these [Sunday and Bloody Sunday] are made’ (Wade, 2002), or in the Daily Mail, which termed them ‘pro-IRA movies’ (Hitchens, 2002) can stand in as somewhat representative for a strain of critical reviews.
6.
See for instance Flachra Gibbons in The Guardian (2002) or Peter Bradshaw (2002) in the same newspaper, and for a positive mention by the BBC see .
9.
While focusing on the activities of the Civil Rights Association, Greengrass’s film has been criticized for downplaying the role of other key actors on that side, such as Bernadette Devlin, John Hume, or Eamonn McCann (Blaney, 2007; McCann, 2002).
10.
Paul Greengrass in a question and answer session after a screening of Bloody Sunday at Curzon Soho, January 2002. Accessible as extra material of the DVD edition.
11.
Jimmy McGovern in an interview with The Guardian (McGovern, 2004).
12.
Jimmy McGovern in an interview with The Guardian (McGovern, 2004).
15.
According to an audio-commentary by McGovern on the DVD edition, unlimited internment without trial was used throughout the colonial period in, among other places, Kenya and is today again implemented in Iraq and Afghanistan.
16.
This view is supported by the events in Free Derry prior to Bloody Sunday. Free Derry was established in 1968 to protect the Bogside and Craggan areas from incursions by the RUC and its notorious voluntary auxiliary force, the B Specials. The Derry Citizen Defence Association organized the defense, but terminated their activities almost immediately after the Hunt Report had acknowledged the need for a reform of the RUC and recommended the dismantling of the B Specials. First killings committed by the army (which had replaced the feared RUC in the Bogside) and the introduction of unlimited internment without trial again fuelled the conflict leading to the re-establishing of Free Derry prior to the events of Bloody Sunday. See for instance , or The Battle of the Bogside, TV documentary by Vinny Cunningham that aired on the BBC in 2004, for detailed accounts of this pre-history of Bloody Sunday.
17.
In Lord Saville’s opening statement of the tribunal (3 April 1998), he makes explicit that ‘[t]he present Inquiry is not an investigation into how Lord Widgery conducted his Inquiry. We are not sitting as a court of appeal from the Widgery Inquiry. It is very important for all concerned to bear this in mind’. The statement can be found online as an appendix to Saville’s final report (2010: ).
18.
For that matter see the main conclusions in Volume I of Saville’s final report. In particular Sections 4.1, 4.4, 4.5, 4.9 and 5.2 lay the whole responsibility for the massacre on the deployed 1 Para regiment and in particular Colonel Wilford and his unit. General Ford, Brigadier MacLellan, and political authorities are thoroughly exempted of any responsibility or suspicion of misconduct (Saville, 2010; volume 1 of Saville’s report can be accessed at the following url: ).
19.
According to an audio commentary by screenwriter McGovern available on the DVD edition this scene is ‘rendered verbatim’ on the basis of a memorandum pertaining to the strategic situation in Northern Ireland written by General Ford. Saville, even though acknowledging the existence of the memo, dismisses any connection to the soldiers’ behavior on Bloody Sunday with the somewhat surprising conclusion that ‘[w]e found no evidence to suggest that the use of lethal force against unarmed rioters … was contemplated by General Ford or those senior to him as possible means of dealing with any rioting that might accompany the then forthcoming civil rights march’; see Saville (2010: Chapter 4.10 in Volume I: report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.orcg/volume01/chapter004/). See also Mullin (2000) and .
21.
In their voice over commentaries both McGovern and McDougall connect this issue to the present-day debate on western soldiers’ conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan.
22.
See section 4.7 in Volume I of the final report (Saville, 2010: .
23.
The Saville report made explicit that ‘we have found no evidence that anyone involved in military information falsified any Army or government document relating to Bloody Sunday, nor any evidence that anyone involved in military information disseminated to the public anything about Bloody Sunday, knowing or believing that information to be untrue’ (Saville, 2010: Volume IX, section 178.74: report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/volume09/chapter178/). This assertion causes problems not only in relation to the statements made by Para 027, but also when brought into connection with Saville’s assessments of the victims as innocent. As such, Saville maintains that nail bombs were probably found in the pockets of one of the victims (Gerald Donaghey), but that these possessions did in no way justify his death. Saville maintained this version even though the evidence presented by the army was solemnly dismissed by a series of eyewitnesses also mentioned in his report (see Saville, 2010: Volume VII, Chapter 145 and in particular sections 145.4 and 145.25–26: .
24.
According to the voice over commentary by screenwriter McGovern available on the DVD edition, this scene is ‘heavily documented’ and ‘rendered verbatim’ based on testimony given by Para 027. McGovern does however not specify where or when this testimony was given. Blaney (2007: 123) refers to statements made by Para 027 during the Saville inquiry, however, also without providing an exact source. In section 179.3 Saville refers to Para 027’s claim that crown lawyers had composed the statement he allegedly gave to the Widgery inquiry. Saville decides to dismiss these allegations (section 179.26). The conclusions of Saville regarding Para 027 can be found in Saville (2010: Volume IX, Chapter 179: .
25.
The scholars mentioned welcomed the Saville report and its conclusion that all the victims were innocent and that the killings were entirely unjustified. Often implicit differences arise merely in relation to the question of responsibility that is arguably difficult to address.