Eleonore Chomant, Winds and Wounds, A Travel Diary in Ireland

Foreword,
by Ken Loach

History lives in many ways. Academics write books, invariably, with their own political agenda. Novelists write fiction, again reflecting their specific interests. People remember. The moments pass through the generations, enhanced, caricatured, romanticized and sometimes rejec-ted. So it is in Ireland. The war of independence is contested ground. Every shade of opinion from the apolo-gists for imperialism in Britain, die-hard loyalists in the north, defenders of the status quo who hide behind a pro-claimed pragmatism to nationalists, in all their diversity, all will put forward a different view of these events. For example, those who are anti-socialist tend to deny a socia-list strand in the republican movement against all the evidence, as though those who followed Connolly ceased to exist from the moment of his execution. In making a film, Paul Laverty and I started with two objectives : to see how the war fitted into the long history of Britain’s presence in Ireland and to be as accurate in our research as possible. Then Paul wrote a story that, we hoped, would allow the different elements that were present to be resol-ved through the conflicts of real flesh and blood charac-ters. And, in talking of the British presence, we were aware that it was the landowners and their class who did the occupying. When we were auditioning people for the film I was asked how I, as an Englishman, felt about tel-ling a story which showed the brutality of the British occupation. I replied that many of my father’s family were coal miners. Their employers, the mine owners, who had a long history of oppressing their workers, were the same class who ruled Ireland as a British colony. It is not surpri-sing that now, some ninety years after the war, there are many varied responses. What seemed urgent to us, as students of history, is less so to those with more pressing concerns in their daily lives. Yet those lives are determi-ned by the settlements of the past. The removal of the British government from twenty six countries had a lasting impact. So, too, did its replacement by a political tendency that wanted to see business as usual. The Irish, like all of us, are formed by their past. Eléonore’s journey reveals this. It also, incidentally, reveals that the French take cinema rather more seriously than we do. It is sadly pre-dictable that, in Britain and Ireland, we generally do not expect to engage with the reality of either our past or our present when we watch a film. But the delightful account of a few days in Ireland in the company of a curious and thoughtful companion, as Eléonore Chomant is, should be greatly enjoyed.
Ken Loach,
Director of The Wind that shakes the Barley