It Happened Here

This film was shown recently as part of the Channel 4 War Weekend. I found it to be well made, and contained some very powerful images, of the German forces in occupation.

My only reservation is that I found it difficult to track the passage of time within the film.

The film deals with a woman, who is relocated to London, following Partisan activity at her home village. She becomes a Collaborator, not particularly from choice, but from circumstance. She is faced with a simple choice: work for the state, or don't eat. The film presents the Partisans as terrorists, whose methods differ little from the Nazis, although their objectives are purer. The film certainly made me think more about the life of the civilian in occupied territory. You could become a partisan, and act as a terrorist, or work for the forces of occupation, either directly, or indirectly. Or you could starve.

Well, what would you do?

The film sticks tenaciously in the memory, in a way that slick studio productions often fail to do.

Visually, a fair bit of the film is a pastiche of German propaganda newsreels, or borrows from that library of pictures. This augments the feeling of realism and makes it an even bigger shock to see German troops marching through London, or relaxing off-duty, taking in the sights and admiring the women. No studio film would dare to take such an approach. And where did they find so much genuine-looking equipment? No studio film-researcher would ever be that scrupulous about accuracy.

The sound-recording is dreadful and it would benefit from one of those clever clean-up jobs that are available these days. But what is said, and how it's said, are unforgettable. The wrong-headed justifications of Fascism that pepper this film sound like real people's words and they're spoken by what clearly are real people, who are taking a little time off from their real jobs to appear in the film. For instance, the fat, middle-aged, bureaucratic bully who voices many of the arguments has to have been in real life a school teacher or a bank manager: he looks and sounds the part in a way that studio actors working from a polished script could never manage.

The ending is forced, but only because you feel that the film would be endless without a forced ending. Although a lot of things take place that are genuinely shocking (I won't list them as I'd have to announce spoilers), the point of the film isn't to relate a narrative that has a defined beginning, middle and end. The point is to make you feel that this is all real and make you wonder what your response would have been if the Nazis had started running your country.

"It Happened Here" is remarkable.

Somewhere along the line back around 1970 this was on TV in the UK and I watched it as a 12-year-old. I remember being stunned by it then. I have just watched it again after a gap of 52 years. It's still remarkable.

When this was made in 1964, the war was a "recent" memory. Plenty of people alive then had direct actual experience of war as adults. The "British" cultural memory was being formed in those years, and it reverberates today. I grew up in that environment.

I'm not sure that a film like "It Happened Here" could be made in Britain today. We have forgotten the actual experience of war and the impact it had here in reality. Very few people now have direct experience. Instead, we have stereotypes and myths. We have literally thousands of people engaged in "re-enactment" days or weekends. They dress up in facsimile German uniforms and flounce around as if it's clever. It's not clever.

The Nazi cult was vile and repressive. This was understood in a different way in 1964 to how it is understood today. Back then, Nazism was understood as insidious - it worked from the inside exercising it's power through propaganda, denounciations and control. "It Happened Here" shows us this world - the world we would have had.

The film itself is limited. Obviously made by amateurs on a limited budget in a different world. But it's ambitious in scope and daring. It was deliberately provocative - designed to challenge the world of 1964 and point out how dangerous right-wing thinking is.

Still a very remarkable piece.

Must have been 1967 when I was based at High Wycombe and often went to London for the day. The film was released during this year and wandered into the cinema. The title and posters intrigued me and I was just killing time.

I was amazed at how realistic this film portrayal was and how quiet the cinema was, not a sound from start to finish. The way ID cards/papers were used, the attitude of some people that collaborated, and the resistance starting to fight back, it was just brilliant.

I'd love to see it again,let's hope it is screened on TV but I don't remember seeing it on TV to date, unless it was during the 80's when I was working abroad.

What's most amazing about this film is that it was made by teenagers and looks good even for being shot in 16mm. Seeing Nazis goose-stepping in front of various UK landmarks and is pretty upsetting and totally convincing. The narrative loses a lot of steam after an hour (I think this film was expanded from a short) but the faked newsreel shown in a cinema halfway through the movie is totally flawless in its imitation of German propaganda films.