Renegotiating difficult pasts: Two documentary dramas on Bloody Sunday, Derry 1972

Abstract

Drawing upon theories of social and cultural memory, commemoration, and memory politics, this article explores how two British documentary dramas -Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and McDougall and McGovern's Sunday (both 2002) -re-enact the events of Bloody Sunday, Derry 1972, where British paratroopers shot and killed 13 unarmed demonstrators and wounded another 14. Moving from a textual analytical focus to a historical contextualization and recontextualization of the two films, I argue that Sunday and Bloody Sunday adopt different narrative and temporal frames and, as a consequence, expose competing perspectives on the question of preconditions and responsibilities for the atrocity. In connecting both films to the Saville inquiry's final report published in 2010, I sketch out how they relate to an emerging historical mainstream discourse. I conclude that the differences exhibited bear witness to the impossibility of ultimately arresting constant discursive renegotiations of shared pasts -every (historical) vision seems to imply certain blind spots.It is often asserted that, the establishment of a final and singular truth of what happened on that day [Bloody Sunday] will allow for a process of closure and resolution, and perhaps for those involved such an aspiration is understandable. But there is a danger that what is being pursued is something which will ultimately smooth over the actual and very real inconsistencies, partialities and blank spots of an event such as this. (Herron and Lynch, 2007: 71) To see something is constantly to oversee something else. There is no vision without a blind-spot. (Welsch, 1997: 25)

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