By Talulla Torthe
Playfully fierce, Carry Greenham Home (1983) opens with an image of balloons and teddy bears on a barbed wire fence over Holly Near’s “Singing for Our Lives.” March to Aldermaston (1959), filmed over two decades prior, opens with a shot of a man walking on a snow-adorned landscape, wearing a “No ‘H’ Bombs” sign. Separated by time and united by peace, the two landmark documentaries of British anti-nuclear campaigning are testaments to the power of peaceful protest on film, as relevant today as they were when Contemporary Films picked them up for UK distribution.
On 4 April 1958, thousands of people gathered in Trafalgar Square to march to Aldermaston in protest against the Bomb. March to Aldermaston, made by filmmakers associated with the Free Cinema movement, is a document of that march: an observation of everyday people participating in political action. The film looks beyond the crowd, showing people coming out of their homes to watch the march pass and giving protesters a platform to explain why they have joined it. The march becomes not just a mass political action, but one made up of individuals. A voluntary work by film technicians including Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz (and partly funded by Contemporary Films), the film mirrors in its own collective production the collective action it documents, capturing the unity of ordinary British people in peaceful and collaborative protest.
More than two decades later, the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp began in 1981, when an activist group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived at Greenham to protest against the government’s decision to authorise the storage of American cruise missiles there. The camp became the centre of the British peace movement. From 36 women chaining themselves to the base fence in protest of nuclear weapons, the protest grew to tens of thousands of women taking part in demonstrations around the base. In 1983, around 70,000 protesters formed a 23km human chain from Greenham to Aldermaston.
The human chain of Greenham provides a striking connection between the two films and the protests they document. Twenty-five years after protesters marched from London to Aldermaston, the women of Greenham physically linked their protest back to the site that had become synonymous with British anti-nuclear protest. The concerns of the earlier march had not disappeared, but the form of protest had changed: the mass march documented in March to Aldermaston had become, at Greenham, a sustained long-term feminist occupation in which protest was everyday life and living.
Filmed over seven months in 1982 and 1983 by film students Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson, Carry Greenham Home shows that change, providing an intimate insider look at the early days of the camp, punctuated by the creativity, humour, and bravery of the women there. Like March to Aldermaston, the film is a human account of the people who make up the movement.
“It’s really important for people to know this political, social history,” says film programmer Dr Selina Robertson of Club des Femmes, the queer feminist film curation collective screening the films at The Rio in association with Contemporary 75. “The relevance today [is] about solidarity, how people can come together.” While Carry Greenham Home documents a specifically feminist movement, March to Aldermaston reaches further back into Britain’s anti-nuclear history. Seen together, the films recover a history of British peaceful resistance and collective action, but also show how that type of resistance can be passed down and transformed across generations.
Carry Greenham Home and March to Aldermaston play on Sunday at The Rio, as part of Contemporary 75, a festival celebrating the anniversary of the film distributor Contemporary Films.