Ceasefire | BBC1, Mon
Close to Evil | RTE1
MonIn the age of on-demand services and catch-up sites, television scheduling is supposed to be an increasingly irrelevant art. In reality, however, the broadcasting industry remains besotted with dates and times, and not only in terms of its transmission practices. As the struggle to find subjects of unifying popular interest gets harder, TV is fast developing a curious sideline in overenthusiastic historical commemoration, the florid celebration of red-letter days.
Last Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of the ceasefire declaration by the Provisional IRA. Six weeks after republicans silenced their guns, loyalist paramilitaries did likewise. The war was by no means over but the Northern Irish conflict had moved into a new phase, one in which dialogue would replace violence as the default mode of inter-tribal communication.
Most news and current affairs programmes used last week’s anniversary as the hook for a safe and sanitised summary of the peace process narrative so far. We were treated to innumerable “overviews” of the Troubles, a sprawling 25-year saga of murder, treachery and gangsterism which is now almost invariably presented as a tragic tale with a — comparatively — happy ending. But the design flaw built into this version of events should be self-evident.
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Recalling the Troubles by celebrating the ceasefire is like commemorating the Famine with a cookery demonstration. It is a textbook example of the distortions that occur when you look through the wrong end of a telescope. The people of these islands have lacked many things during the past two decades but we have not been deprived of slack-witted TV programmes in which the big guns of Sinn Fein have been repeatedly allowed to fire off loud and ostentatious salutes to the splendour of their own moral righteousness.
That’s why the best of last week’s commemorative productions was Ceasefire, a simple but effective documentary which deftly interlaced the story of the backroom political manoeuvrings with vivid accounts of some of the terrorist atrocities that were being perpetrated — mostly by the IRA — at the same time. Crucially, the latter testimony was provided by relatives of the individuals who were killed.
The alternating concentration between intrigue and raw emotion was no mere stylistic indulgence but rather an agile journalistic device deployed to convey the grotesque duality of what was happening at the time. 1994 may be remembered as a year of peace but 1993 and the first eight months of 1994 comprised an exceptionally bloody period, as a cycle of tit-for-tat murders by republicans and loyalists threatened to destroy the province. The ratcheting up of sectarian carnage during these years was, the documentary argued, central to the IRA’s negotiating strategy with the Irish and British governments — a tactical detail that is, not surprisingly, never mentioned by the would-be peaceniks of contemporary Sinn Fein.
Co-directed by Dermot Lavery and Jonathan Golden, Ceasefire was a quiet but significant triumph. Sinn Fein has been highly adept at using TV to promote an aggressively partisan account of the peace process, a relentlessly self-serving yarn in which those killed during the dying days of the Troubles are often depicted as little more than plot points. But then, selective forgetfulness has always been a trademark feature of Northern Irish politics.
Memory loss — and how to tackle it — was also the guiding preoccupation of Close to Evil, a compelling film about another important front in the never-ending battle between history and historical amnesia. Tomi Reichental is a Holocaust survivor. Born in Slovakia in 1935, into a tight-knit Jewish family, he lost 35 relatives to the Nazi concentration camps. He was nine when he was himself dispatched, via cattle truck, to Bergen-Belsen.
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Reichental has lived in Dublin since 1959, and gives regular talks about his childhood experiences to secondary school students. Following an RTE radio interview in 2012, he was contacted with news that one of his former SS Guards — Hilde Lisiewicz — is hale and hearty and living in Hamburg. He set out to organise a face-to-face meeting with the now ninetysomething grandmother, and the documentary chronicled his quest.
Co-directed by Reichental and Gerry Gregg, Close to Evil skilfully blended an impassioned personal odyssey with a keen-eyed exploration of how modern Germany has coped with the Nazi legacy. Reichental never got to have his sit-down with Lisiewicz but viewers were afforded an intimate encounter with her courtesy of clips from an interview she gave, in 2004. The unshakable strength of her refusal to acknowledge any culpability for the horrors that unfolded in the camp was remarkable to behold, haunting testimony to the eternal human capacity for denial.
Above all else, Close to Evil reminded us that history TV is at its most powerful when commemorating events that some people would rather we forget.