[Peace-discuss] Peterloo: A film by Mike Leigh

[David Green]

Friday, 02 November 2018 21:25Peterloo
Written by Mike Wayne
<https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/films/itemlist/user/818-mikewayne>
in Films <https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/films>

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[image: Peterloo]
<https://www.culturematters.org.uk/media/k2/items/cache/83d805430a76a62d95bd944b328ed4da_XL.jpg>

*Mike Wayne reviews Mike Leigh's new film, a complex, powerful
reconstruction of a key historical moment in the ongoing class struggle of
the British working class.*

Mike Leigh’s only previous foray into historical drama was the 1999 Topsy
Turvey and his films have mostly been small scale, intimate and personal
stories rather than the explicitly political territory Ken Loach is well
known for. And yet with Peterloo, Leigh has made what is arguably his most
accomplished and important work and possibly one of the most significant
works of historical film drama on British history.

Admittedly the subject matter instantly lends the work the potential for
significance, just because this is an example of a story from history which
has not received the attention it deserves, in the popular culture or in
our education system. Here was an episode when the British state responded
with violence towards the working class, who were struggling to establish
something like the substantive and meaningful democracy which the elites
today pretend was there all along. It was not of course and neither was it
graciously handed down by benevolent elites. They were forced to concede
it, under pressure, but they did so having already demonstrated they if
they were pushed too far and too fast, they would not hesitate to respond
with violence.

[image: Peterloo]

In the early years of the nineteenth century the British ruling class were
concerned to produce their own ‘hostile environment’ towards the demands
for democratic representation that were coming from the labouring classes,
especially inspired by the French revolution of 1789. The film begins on
the battlefield of Waterloo (1815) where we meet Joseph, a bugler,
stumbling around half-dazed, surrounded by cannon fire. Joseph will still
be wearing his distinctive red soldier’s coat on a very different
battlefield in St Peter’s Field, Manchester (1819) at the film’s climactic
scene. This visual linking via Joseph of the two battlefields, is the
film’s temporal sleight of hand, as it feels that only a matter of months
had passed rather than four years. It is a brilliant compression and one
example of the way Leigh eschews naturalism for a more pointed construction
of historical and social truth. And here is the true measure of Peterloo’s
significance and achievement. Because while at the level of historical
content any film that recovers a repressed history is welcome, this film,
so richly underpinned by historical research, has marshalled its material
into a formal architecture that does justice to the subject matter.

One of the basic dilemmas that confronted Leigh in telling this story was
that it is unintelligible unless it is understood as a collective story and
a story of different collectives, or classes converging with tragic
consequences at a point in time and space. Yet our storytelling conventions
and habits are largely built around individual heroes whose goals and
actions push things along. As a result our stories do not usually ring true
as historical events. Leigh’s solution is to strike a balance between a
focus on one family who take us into the film initially and who reappear
consistently throughout, and a much wider ensemble of individuals and
groups, many based on the real historical figures involved in the period,
who collectively develop the political action. The family is Joseph’s, and
he returns to it, traumatised by what he has seen. His mother Nellie
(Maxine Peake) is politically aware while his father Joshua works in the
local mills. The family’s difficulties in surviving exemplify how hard life
is and provide the personal evidence of what is at stake. But it is the
confidence the film has to spread its dramaturgy much wider than this
family unit, which is key in developing the social and historical
understanding of what is happening and why.

[image: Peterloo Unit 28491R resized]

An early sequence convinced me that I was already watching a breakthrough
film, when we are introduced to a number of the local magistrates in a
series of vignettes. Here we see them meet out their brutal penalties
(flogging, transportation and hanging) for a series of petty crimes
committed by the impoverished. The fear and loathing of the local
bourgeoisie of the working class is moderated slightly by the national
government and the aristocracy there, and in the army. They are that much
more secure in their rule and confident in their position to urge caution,
although when a potato is hurled at the Prince Regent as he waves to the
crowd, they are quick enough to suspend habeas corpus. So the one essential
ingredient for the compelling realism of this film, that all the key
classes are present and correct, is fulfilled. But there are fine
individual portraits within these ruling class social types, even when the
range of opinions they express falls within the narrow compass of their
prejudices and fears. It is the working-class characters, and to a lesser
extent their liberal middle-class reform allies, who represent a range of
opinion and perspectives on the issues of the day.

This is a film that is very much about the communication of ideas, whether
in the written form (letters, the press) or above all through oral speech.
There are a lot of speeches in this film, the content of which has mostly
been culled from what the real people these characters are based on did
say, according to the historical records. But this does not make the film
dull or like a series of lectures. This is because the speeches are
themselves intrinsically interesting and powerful and in the case of the
working-class characters especially, a treat to hear the eloquence, passion
and politics with which they cognise their situation. But the film is
careful to always have some little drama playing around the speeches to
give them a wider layer of narrative interest. It may be that police spies
are watching, or that there are disagreements between speakers or that
there is some lively interaction between audience and speakers. But there
is also the ever-present potential and actual consequences of communication
and speech as well.

[image: Peterloo Unit 21881R4 resized]

This is a film about the dangers of rhetorical overload. The industrial
bourgeoisie ramp up pressure for a violent reaction to the working class
demands for political reform by their hysterical reports of what the
workers are up to. The young working-class radicals are tempted by
agent-provocateurs to talk of arming the workers, thereby overstepping the
mark and allowing the government to arrest them. Or there are the
rhetorical flourishes of the middle-class leaders of a women’s reform group
whose words go over the heads of the working-class members of the audience.
And when they speak up and talk of their experience during a recent strike,
the middle-class leaders quickly move on.

This last scene points to the internal class tensions between the working
class and the liberal reformers. This is central to the film’s portrayal of
the relationship between Samuel Bamford (a great enthusiastic performance
by Neil Bell) a working class radical and the middle class Wiltshire
landowner Henry Hunt (played by Rory Kinnear, a superb piece of classed
casting). It is Bamford who is instrumental in the film in getting Henry
Hunt invited to address the crowd in St Peter’s Field after he impresses
him with a speech in London. But they fall out when Bamford suggests that
it would be wise to have some small number of men armed with cudgels and
swords on the day in case the forces of ‘law and order’ are unleashed on
them. Hunt, who does not know the situation in the North as well as he does
in London, rejects the idea and subsequently has Bamford banished from the
platform on the day as the vast crowd assemble. How resonant that is now,
when metaphorically the middle class dominate the public media platforms
and the working-class representatives and organic intellectuals are nowhere
to be seen.

[image: PETERLOO credit Entertainment One UK]

It is a touch of genius that in a film full of speeches, we barely hear any
of Henry Hunt’s on the crucial day. This is because it is no longer that
relevant. Of far more importance is the way the local bourgeoisie prepare
to set the Yeomanry and cavalry on the crowd. Bamford’s prescience as to
the possibility of violence and the need for self-defence raises a question
which is all too rare in British political discourse, namely, how to
respond to the violence of the British state. There are no easy answers to
this question as the history of the North of Ireland shows. Yet it is a
question rarely even broached, such is the invisibility of the violence of
the British state within mainstream discourse.

Leigh incidentally has said that he regrets not having Irish Mancunians
play a bigger role in the film, and while it is a shame both for the
historical record and the added layer of contemporary resonance it would
have lent the film, we must also recognise the difficult choices inevitably
involved in bringing this story to the big screen. The final climactic
scene is incredibly shocking even in the absence of the kind of bloody gore
we expect from contemporary films. It is shocking because of the evident
and appalling injustice meted out to the crowd by a ruling class for whom
the workers are deeply inferior. The descendants of that ruling class are
all around us and in their basic attitudes towards the working class, they
have barely made any progress since the nineteenth century. Leigh’s
complex, powerful reconstruction of a moment in the ongoing class war,
needs to be seen and debated widely.


Read 37 timesLast modified on Friday, 02 November 2018 22:06
[image: Mike Wayne]
Mike Wayne
<https://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/films/itemlist/user/818-mikewayne>

Mike Wayne is a Professor in Screen Media at Brunel University.
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