Photo: James Nesbitt as Ivan Cooper in Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday
That director Paul Greengrass's gripping Bloody Sunday could easily pass for a documentary on the subject is a testament to the immediacy of this vérité exercise. Greengrass offers little historical context for the events of Bloody Sunday beyond a series of intertitles that close the film. Understandably, the film has courted controversy in merry England, and while Greengrass clearly sides with the Irish peacemakers, his humanism affords compassion for confused Parachute troops that may or may not have been incited to violence because of the ineffectual chain of command between the field and the British Army's headquarters. A promising formalist, Greengrass cuts between scenes with hyperbolic fadeouts that have a way of displacing the events depicted in the film into memory. The film's details are rich yet subtle (a local theater in Derry plays two films: The Magnificent Seven and Sunday Bloody Sunday) and the sense of dread is overwhelming.
That director Paul Greengrass's gripping Bloody Sunday could easily pass for a documentary on the subject is a testament to the immediacy of this vérité exercise. Greengrass offers little historical context for the events of Bloody Sunday beyond a series of intertitles that close the film. Understandably, the film has courted controversy in merry England, and while Greengrass clearly sides with the Irish peacemakers, his humanism affords compassion for confused Parachute troops that may or may not have been incited to violence because of the ineffectual chain of command between the field and the British Army's headquarters. A promising formalist, Greengrass cuts between scenes with hyperbolic fadeouts that have a way of displacing the events depicted in the film into memory. The film's details are rich yet subtle (a local theater in Derry plays two films: The Magnificent Seven and Sunday Bloody Sunday) and the sense of dread is overwhelming.
