Cinema – film “Blitz”: anti-fascist exclamation mark

When nine-year-old George (Elliott Heffernan) and other children are to be evacuated from the city and sent to the countryside during the German bombing of London in 1940, he runs away without further ado and makes his way home to his mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan).

Steve McQueen’s new film “Blitz”, titled after the Nazi bombing terror at the beginning of the 1940s, tells a story from the Second World War that is both sensitive and hard-hitting and is about the diversity of the London working class and their everyday life in the fight against German fascism and racism in our own country. The non-white George runs away because, on the one hand, he misses his mother and, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to endure the usual racist insults from other children on the train. He jumps out of the moving train, climbs onto a freight train, where he meets other boys who have also run away, and wanders for several days through London, which has been hit by German bombs, while his single mother desperately searches for him.

“Blitz” is a combative and political film about the London working class, which gets through these difficult days primarily through self-organization and solidarity.

In his visually stunning epic, Steve McQueen takes a look at the everyday lives of people in London at that time. It goes to bomb shelters where Londoners huddle together singing while bombs hit above and entire streets are set ablaze. The fire department is in constant use. In the opening scene of the film, a firefighter wants to point a huge hose at a flaming inferno – no water comes out until the hose suddenly gets pressure and the spray nozzle knocks the firefighter down like a hammer and it takes three men to kill him wildly to catch the spraying fire hose again.

The city’s infrastructure, which has fallen apart, is the consistent motif of this fast-paced film. »Blitz« shows a large European city that has an almost normal everyday life during the day – with busy streets, red buses whizzing through the city, but also workers who are busy cleaning up the destruction, while London is at night transformed into a nightmare of murderous hails of bombs and devastating fires.

The story of Rita and her husband, who comes from Grenada and is deported by the authorities, is also told in flashbacks, so that George grows up without a father. It’s about his parents’ romantic relationship, about the Caribbean dancehall culture of the 1930s in London, but also about the racist hostility that the black and white couple experienced.

In the present of war, Rita works in an armaments factory. She receives a visit from the BBC to the factory halls where bombs are assembled. In a live broadcast with musical performances, Rita sings live as a talented worker in front of an audience of millions. Until her colleagues storm the stage at the end of the heartbreaking song and demand political slogans for the subway stations to be opened for the bomb victims and are then pushed away by police officers.

“Blitz” is a combative and political film about the London working class, which gets through these difficult days primarily through self-organization and solidarity. Like in a bunker where Rita works as a helper at night, only to be back in the factory the next morning and, together with other women, produce weapons against the Nazis at the lathe and with the welding machine.

Meanwhile, George makes his way through London, meets gangsters who force him to commit burglaries for them and to go into half-dilapidated shops and loot there. But he also meets the air raid guard Ife (Benjamin Clementine), who comes from Nigeria, who picks him up, takes care of him and takes him to an air raid shelter when, like every night, the sirens scream and the German bombs fall. In a basement full of people where there is a confrontation between white supremacists, a Pakistani family and some Jews, Ife mediates and gives a fiery speech for the diversity of London and its people, who are fighting against the Nazis precisely because they do not differ from them Wanting to let hate divide. Although this seems a little pathetic, it is an incredibly powerful moment in this film and shows that this story is explosively topical despite the historical setting.

This moment lives above all from the great acting performance of Benjamin Clementine, who is known in Great Britain as a musician, but also recently appeared in “Dune” as an imperial herald. In the end, George manages to get back to his mother, but nothing is the same anymore.

The German bombing campaign against England, which was primarily directed against civil society, is a piece of history that has not yet been sufficiently brought to attention in this country. In times of right-wing global mobilization, Steve McQueen’s moving film is a combative, anti-fascist exclamation mark.

»Blitz«, Great Britain/USA 2023. Director: Steve McQueen. Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine. 120 min. Playing in the cinema.