Jimmy’s Hall: a blueprint for community resilience in these times?
It’s a cold night and we walk across the dark Bushwood flats to a building that’s a bright coffee shop and co-working space by day, mottled light spilling in from a community garden outside – and a somehow cosy two-screen cinema by night. I see a familiar form – is that Gareth Evans? – I wonder. It is – the screening is the brainchild of the Whitechapel Gallery’s film curator, who I last saw around Eelyn Lee‘s Barbican residency for her Monster film. It’s not just a screening of Ken Loach’s 2014 film (which I’d neither seen nor knew anything of), but a post-screening interview with star Barry Ward and legendary Sixteen Films producer Rebecca O’Brien, followed with a small ceilidh band, which baby-sitter demands we don’t get much of.
For host Gareth Evans the reason for this screening in this place, at this time seems obvious: Jimmy’s Hall is as much about the Hall – gathering space for a rural community struggling 10 years after the Irish Civil War against the church, state and boredom – as about Jimmy Gralton, the only Irishman to be exiled from the country (Irish President Michael Higgins apologised in 2016). It’s uncommon for a film to focus on a building – which is why it contrasts well for me with The Brutalist. By bringing this film to a community cinema in a community building, Evans as curator deftly remind us of cinema’s original power, like theatre and stories around campfire: the gathering of a group of strangers to share in a tale. It was such a welcome and needed reminder.
The news has been grim, my phone a firehose of multiple reminders of a global escalation in suffering, conflict and uncertainty, coupled with a jock-ish frat-boy influencer response that delights in ‘woke tears’. Our phones host the tech barons in our pocket, feeding our metadata and audio into their AI training engines in a way beyond the wildest dreams of the GDR, alongside a stream of micro-targeted, often false content, designed to keep us scrolling. Yet still we carry them, stroking them in our empty moments to feel some connection, some sense of being less alone with this all. And even the smaller, less commercial spaces we turn to online for this – such as the less centralised and more idealist Mastodon or BlueSky – are still a constant reminder of what’s going wrong. There’s many rightly angry voices.
Against this, cinema – by which I mean a screen in front of some strangers in the darkness – has always offered both escape and sanctuary, a temporary refugee from our realities, be they smart-phone influenced or everyday. But when paired with discussion, music, the sale of middle Eastern food as we arrived, a glass of wine, the small talk with strangers, the salted chocolate brownie, being provoked by the Q&A – cinema grows into some kind of bigger communion; less escape from, and more coming towards.
As Jimmy’s story unfolds over 1933, we see a man determined to stand by his principles as he’s attacked by church and state. But his hall – which is built on screen (much like The Brutalist) – isn’t a place for him to lecture politics, but, inspired by his experience in America’s jazz clubs, is somewhere bored locals can learn Gaelic, recite poetry, dance – and most importantly, hang out. For so much of what we yearn for, we don’t need technology more sophisticated than this – physical space to gather and support each other. Paul Laverty’s plot and dialogue saunters along like most of the films in his long-running collaboration with Loach and O’Brien, that began with Carla’s Song.
The film walks us through the ways the Irish establishment fought this community gathering, and in seeing the resilience of Jimmy in the face of it, perfectly personified by Jim Norton as fanatical Father Sheridan, there’s something oddly reassuring. However bleak and pervasive phone doom-scrolling has become, a digital-panopticon device, slipped in everyone’s pocket, that can both spy and propagandise; we still have the freedom to not have one, to leave the house and gather together. No-one forces us to carry them or open them, let alone stop us (in much of the world) from meeting; indeed the British and Irish government film boards part-financed this biopic of Ireland’s most famous communist – while both countries were governed by austerity-leaning right-wing parties.
Of course I wish I wasn’t dependent on devices run by people who don’t have our best interests, or the planet, at heart – but the phone also played a small part in helping me find and remember this event where I could meet, in person, and chat – with no algorithm in the middle deciding which bit of the conversation is monetisable or where to insert a promotion for something else. And once there I forget about the device, no need to check it. So here’s cinema’s final revolutionary act – two or more waking hours with a phone turned off, many more if it’s part of a social.
I’m sorry reader that this review risks being polemic, or at least a rambling paean to the redeeming power of public gathering. But in this community cinema offers a wonderful hybrid of a prepared narrative and fellow humans, each in our own way, trying to get through. Best evening out in a long time, more please.
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