The Oscar-winning British film director, Sir Steve McQueen, who is most famous for bringing the horror of the slave trade to cinema screens, has turned his lens on the forgotten, and even officially censored, terrors that London underwent during the second world war.
His starry new film, Blitz, which opens the London film festival (LFF) next month, is a powerful evocation of the perils of life during the German Blitzkrieg – a bombing campaign that aimed to batter Britain into submission in the early 1940s.And he's chosen to include the Bethnal Green Tube disaster, when a crush killed 173 Londoners.
The film is told through the eyes of what I assume is considered to be a typical mother & child from the East End of London in 1943. Let's take a look at a still:
Ahead of the premiere, McQueen said: “Blitz is a movie about Londoners. It honours the spirit of what and how Londoners endured during the blitz, but also explores the true representation of people in London.”
Are you sure about that?
We, as a family, lived on the edge of London during the war. My Dad was a Tube Train driver and we often travelled on the tube to visit the two Grandmas.
ReplyDeleteI never, ever, saw anyone who looked like the 'true people of London' that you show in the photograph
Don't forget that everything was black and white in those days.
ReplyDeleteShe must have blown the whole family's clothes ration on that outfit. Show us the Utility Mark.
ReplyDeleteBut it clearly shows the rashism of that era. All the Caucasian, South Asian and East Asian children got evacuated out to farms to be used as slave labour by the cruel farmers.
What was she using for make-up? The weekly lard ration and beetroot?
ReplyDeleteGood point - reminds me that, when my mother’s family had an evacuated mother and son briefly billeted on them, the mother caused a massive row the night of a local dance by putting the entire household’s butter ration on her skin and boiling up all their remaining sugar to set her hair and starch her petticoats.
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