In a city on fire, firefighters try to put out the fire. The jet of water under pressure knocks out the man on the front line. The pipe becomes an uncontrollable reptile, the flames continue to devour the buildings, the men move in a ridiculous choreography. Later, once the first effects of the shock caused by the sight of aerial bombardment, A strange association comes to mind: Steve McQueen opened his evocation of Nazi Germany’s attempted destruction of London with a quote from the first fiction film in the history of cinema. This first sequence is a tragic and cruel new version of The sprinkler watered, by the Lumières brothers (1895).
Weaving together the reality of the world and the history of cinema, the visual and video artist turned director creates aerial bombardment a rare work: a fiction whose classic plot – a boy tries to find his mother in a country at war – is woven with images, situations, scenic ideas that force us to think – about the bombs and the people on whom they fall, yesterday and today, to the power of fiction and its limits, without hindering emotion and sensation.
It is September 1940, every night the Nazi Luftwaffe drops bombs on London. Docks, factories and densely populated neighborhoods make the East End a target. There, in Stepney, live Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan), in a small house they share with Rita’s father, Gerald (Paul Weller, the musician). A munitions factory worker, the young woman decides to send her son out of London.
Social divisions
George is mixed race (the idea for the film came to Steve McQueen when he discovered the photo of a black child evacuated from London during the Blitz), he cannot bear the prospect of being deprived of maternal protection, of being exposed to universal racism. which causes him to be insulted daily by his playmates and which, in the past, caused the expulsion of his father, originally from Granada. In the countryside, George jumps off the train to return home. At first unaware of her son’s escape, Rita briefly becomes the heroine of a chronicle of working-class life, filmed in the style of Soviet cinema, before launching into a desperate search to find the son. child.
Portrait of an old town on fire, aerial bombardment It portrays as few films have done the persistence of social divisions in times of war. Racism, first of all, which spreads its poison throughout the city, even in places where there are only white people. The judicious use of flashbacks gives insight into George’s origins, into the injustice committed against his father. Nor, contrary to what discourses of national unity would have us believe, did the war close the gap between the classes.
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