The Spirit of '45

Some people have complained that the film is not objective, I think they're missing the point.

The point of this documentary is to capture the essence of that time. What our parents and grandparents had endured and how they faced up to the future with hope for a better world than that passed away with war.

That working together in commonality could build a better world for future generations and they did just that. The achievements of the Atlee government still reverberate down the decades and are with us still.

They did what they did in far harder times than now, are we so useless that we cannot do it?

"The Spirit of '45" reminds us of the air of progress occurring in British politics immediately after World War II. It takes back to the founding of welfare state and the nationalization of the health service, transport, energy and other areas of public life. The faces we see at the beginning of the film of young Britons celebrating in the fountains at Trafalgar Square symbolize the hope of a nation. But Loach is also worried about the spirit of modern Britain. The second part ponders a different mood than the one of the 1940s: Thatcherism and the more recent failures of organized labor to live up to its founding principles. On the whole this is a tender and humane film, a compelling mix of interviews, with archive footage. The film works all at once as a lament, a celebration and a wake- up call to modern politicians, it's only a bit boring.

Why did Churchill lose the elections of 1945. Were people simply ungrateful? According to Ken Loach, there were two main reasons. People remembered the misery after WW1 and they had realized that if the state was able to organize the war victory, it should also be able to win victory in peace.

So it came during Clement Attlee; nationalization of health care, of electricity, of the railways, of the coal mines. And at the same time Britain changed into a welfare state.

It's a very effective documentary, but two questions remain unanswered. How was it all financed and why did Churchill come back in 1951? Anyway, it's refreshing to watch how politics once was in charge.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

Ken Loach has quite a backlog of work as a performance film maker, but his latest work, laying his unashamed socialist leanings firmly on the line, is presented in a documentary format. Loach thrusts us back in time to the immediate post war years, where with a country in ruins and millions sick and injured, there was no shortage of work and so the people had the power, coming together to re-build the country and form one huge powerful united front that let them decide their own fate, all under the thrust of a powerful Labour movement. The real main objective of the movement was not to go back to the appalling poverty of before the war, which nobody noticed and was just accepted by those who lived in it. Flash forward twenty five years or so, to the arrival of Thatcher.

The main trouble, when politics is presented as art, is that you are naturally going to spur on and impress those who agree with you and form the most spiteful critics out of those who think you don't know what you're talking about. Like the most high horsed (but probably best) Michael Moore offering, Ken Loach here bombards us with a presentation of faces, talking heads, if you will, of a mostly much older generation who vividly bring the original socialist movement back to life, and try to paint a portrait of the sort of things that originally spurned it on.

Reminding me of Moore's work a little, as it does, it's all naturally quite one sided and could even be seen as somewhat self indulgent/important, but where Loach gets it right is by managing to make the film's argument so persuasive anyway, genuinely managing to craft a scene where the poor/lower classes generally had no voice and by realizing their combined power, improved things for themselves and their families, only to have it all snatched back from them many years later.

It never feels pretentious in any way. It's just the work of a proud and accomplished director, maybe wearing his heart on his sleeve a little, maybe not being as subtle as he could be, but presenting something made with such insight and, well, spirit you can't help but be impressed anyway. *****

THE SPIRIT OF 45 goes back to the end of the Second World War to recreate the unique spirit of that era, when it really did seem as if a new order had been set up in Great Britain, one dedicated to everyone working for each other rather than out to make individual profits. Industries were nationalized with the aim of securing viable investment, the National Health Service offered medical care at point of contact for everyone, while the government of the time dedicated itself for everyone rather than simply appealing to rich interests. With the help of archive film plus testimonies from those who were around the period, Ken Loach evokes a unique spirit, one which has not existed either before or after that period.

Within those terms, the film is a nostalgic piece which makes some important points about people's capacity to change things, if they really want to. But unfortunately Loach veers off his theme when he introduces Margaret Thatcher into the proceedings. It is true that she ushered in a new area of capitalism and selling off state industries to the highest bidder, but we have to remember the size of her victories, which suggest that a substantial slice of the working classes actually voted for her, in spite of the fact that she was working against their interests. What the film illustrates above anything else is the limitation of communal activity, especially when voters are swayed by the prospect of increased wealth through private enterprise - for example, by being given the chance to buy their council houses. It might not be ethically fair, especially for those too poor to accomplish this, but people basically think for themselves first and their fellow-citizens later. In a sense we were responsible for creating a capitalist world; Mrs. Thatcher only offered the conditions.

With this in mind, a lot of the second half of THE SPIRIT OF '45 is largely rubbish, the product of a mind that consciously misreads British history and simply blames the government for all of our problems, rather than ourselves. On the other hand I applaud Loach for advocating this view, for it is only by appreciating its limitations that we can understand that we are responsible for our own demise.