Ah, isn’t it lovely? Snowdrops, daffodils, and crocuses. Brighter mornings, longer evenings, and the promise of better days ahead. Recently returned to the UK after years abroad, I am in rapture with all of that, and all of this: the beauty, brilliance, and bounty of Britain.
Potable water and peace! Walkable streets and orderly traffic! A rich diversity of colours, sounds and flavours, and harmony among our many Churches, Gurdwaras, Mosques, Temples, Synagogues, and more. The gentleness of queuing, giving way, and a sense – remarkably widely shared, it seems to me—that life calls on us to “live and let live.” Human rights evolving from the Magna Carta and abolition of the Corn Laws to global movements to end slavery, empower women, and promote LGBT rights, funded at all levels from the Treasury to village fete. Invention of the toothbrush, tyre, turbo-jet and telephone; design of the computer, internet and iPhone; creation of Hey Jude, Harry Potter, and the Notting Hill Carnival. The NHS, Tunnocks Tea Cake and BBC. Free primary education, libraries, museums, galleries, parks and street cleaning.
— I could go on.
It’s not perfect, of course. How could it be? Like every other country, ours is flawed. Like every other history, ours is blemished. Like other people, we suffer. But not as the Baha’i’s in Iran, Masalit in Sudan, journalists in Venezuela, gay people in Burundi, Uighurs in China, critics in Philippines, or those sold as slaves in Libya.
And do you ever wonder, why? How did our small storm-battered islands, successively plundered and wrecked by Romans, Normans, Vikings, Nazis, and political mistakes from Cromwell to Eden, became a haven of safety and success, across every sector?
Here’s my guess: freedom of expression. A political philosophy fine-tuned here over hundreds of years, clarifying the rights we all need to live well—food, shelter, safety, and such—and the essential foundation of all of them: freedom of expression.
Because for all that we humans are flawed and frustrating and a load of other f-words, we are also fantastic. We can each make a massive contribution to commerce, culture, science, and social good. You and I possess a shimmering genius which makes it possible for us to create a world-changing invention, artwork, or organization. A great idea glimmering within, like the tree to the acorn. To bring this beautiful Big Idea into being though, you must be able to speak–write, paint, perform, or organize an event—about it. You’re unlikely to do any of this if you risk death, detention, torture when you try—or a hate mob mobilized against you, brandishing sticks or smart phones claiming that they are offense and outrage. Which is what happens when freedom of expression is not protected.
Victorian writer and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill referred to this as the ‘despotism of custom‘ and ‘tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling.’ He worked to develop laws, policies and a public consciousness to encourage us to be bold in living our own lives, and restrained in imposing our will on others. He thought that if we live courageously, and allow others to so the same—however objectionable and offensive they may be in their Sex Pistols-y, Emmeline Pankhurst-ish, Stormzy-esque, bizarreness—we would fire up a dynamo of creativity to unleash the greatest force and most lucrative resource in history: human genius. And that this might enable a tiny, storm-battered, battle-bruised nation to become the greatest on earth.
And here we are.
Not perfect people in a perfect place, on a perfect planet. But blessed to be in Britain, protected by a philosophy of freedom that gives us so much to love.
Us here in Britain, and in the rest of the world. H.G. Wells built on Mill’s work in his book ‘The Rights of Man;’ highlighting freedom of expression as a dynamic force to realize rights, peace and progress. U.S President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it to persuade the American people to fight fascism, and Eleanor Roosevelt used it to help draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Love in legal form, this most important document in modern history highlights the primacy of free speech to enable everyone, everywhere, to enjoy better standards of life in larger freedom.
And that’s it! The beauty of Britain, in a nutshell. A story of peace and prosperity, fuelled by the most powerful resource on earth: human brilliance, unleashed. A tale of freedom of expression that stretches from the abolitionist movement to the Make Poverty History campaign, alongside the creation of the steam train and Sympathy for the Devil, Damien Hirst’s Unicorns, Tracy Emin’s Unmade Bed, and Pauline Amos’ ‘My Flesh My Canvas.’
Britain is brilliant. Human rights are good. Freedom of expression is great. The Magna Carta. Something about unicorns. The End?
Winston Churchill seemed to think so. He stood in the Palace of Westminster, listing reasons to believe in perpetual peace – the maturity of civilizations, interdependence of nations, sense of public law and charity, humanitarian conventions, rise of liberal principles, the Labour movement, global finance, common sense. Only then he paused. He looked up from his notes. He raised an eyebrow. And he said: “Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong.”
Pity indeed. For soon after, Britain was fighting for her life. A gathering storm of hate and murder unleashed fire and fury on our cities and civilians – seeing our Magna Carta, and raising it a massive aerial campaign.
And today, Pauline Amos isn’t quite sure. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Amos used freedom of expression to create sculpture, painting, music and performance art in Britain and abroad. Her passionate and prolific avant-garde work symbolises the exuberance of being fully alive as a free human being in a tolerant country. She expressed whatever she had in her head and heart – sometimes political, sometimes sensual, sometimes anguished, sometimes celebratory—and planned to continue putting all of herself, sometimes quite literally, onto paint and pen, canvas and clay.
Then something changed. Where once there had been open doors and minds, there was now something. . . different. Something that felt like discouragement, limitation, timidity, even . . . censorship? With the rest of us, Amos was horrified by the arrest and detention of Chinese artist Ai WeiWei, and Russian performers Pussy Riot. But this was different. This was. . . here.
“I realised that so much of my work over decades, I just couldn’t produce now,” she says “or, if I did, I would have to think carefully about how and where I presented the work”. Unsettled, Amos put what she was seeing and sensing – constriction, coldness, a darkness gathering – into her newest work: Branded.
A 75-minute film about a female artist imprisoned by a repressive regime, Branded is a beautifully-shot story, depicting the grim reality that artists have faced at numerous times through history, perhaps most notably in Nazi Germany, where leaders organized the confiscation of so-called ‘degenerate’ modern art, which they linked with democracy and moral decay.
The protagonist’s character is performed by Amos, and voiced by Ukrainian artist-turned-soldier Kateryna Polishchuk, whose experience in the siege of Mariupol, and four months of detention as a prisoner of war, produces a sound resonant with desperation, despair, and defiance of a woman who refuses to yield to her circumstances – not to deprivation, not to humiliation, not even to a certain death.
Unbroken despite her confinement in a dark and dirty cell, the sound of torture and conflict encroaching, and sense of her final day approaching, the protagonist—her eyes wild but still long-trained on beauty and truth—shines with her fierce belief in Art, and memory of a creative life. Interspersed with bright, sunny scenes of happy days past, and the intense hope of a second character, voiced by Ukrainian soldier, Nazar Grabar, the film is both uplifting and unnerving.
It is said that the power of art lies not only in its power to inspire through beauty, or to inform through truth, but to support emotional release. Was making the film cathartic for Amos?
“Not for long,” she says. She describes a short conversation with an agent who said: “I’m sorry – did you say it’s a film about a woman? Can you explain what that means?” And the unsettling response from a prominent film house: “so it’s about imprisonment? Right, it’ll have to go to our Board for review, to see if it fits our policies.”
And all the while, Amos’ colleagues face similar responses as they try to produce, publish, and display their work. And all the while Russian jets make daily incursions of UK airspace. And all the while military spending to annex Ukraine rises to $160bn. And all the while the Ukrainian people – including the soldiers who appear in this film—are fighting for their lives, warning of a West-ward sweep of aggression across Europe if their resistance does not hold.
As the film ends, its images turn in mind, stirring feelings between awe and uneasy curiosity. Is Branded an homage to the suffering of artists in repressive regimes? A forewarning about dictatorship encroaching on Europe? An artistic comment on cancel culture? A siren to the corrosive effect of division fomented by digital algorithms? An alert to AI tools suppressing free speech? An urge to scrutinise terror legislation inverted and turned against pluralism? An exhortation to define ‘diversity and inclusion’ to include diverse forms of expression? An alarm to wake us from sleep, because we too believed that the battle for decency and democracy was won long ago, safeguarded by interests and institutions, laws and liberal sensibilities?
Or is it a call to love: who we are, what we have, and the freedom that made it all possible? To bring forth the courage to defend this freedom, both by speaking to what we believe, and preserving the space for others to do the same? To fight, you and I? Not with weapons perhaps, but with words that call out ‘the tyranny of prevailing opinion’ where we see it, so that the ‘despotism of custom’ does not become the abuse of a repressive regime?
Work of art, not political treatise, Branded asks no questions, provides no answers, gives no clues. Except these few words from the heroine, hollow-eyed and freezing in her cell: “we believe it could happen here, did we?”
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This article was published in the Edinburgh Evening News.
FILM Tour dates: To find out when Branded is coming to a cinema near you, visit: https://borncriminal.com/tour-dates/
FILM Trailer: https://youtu.be/J68XM60Kw0Q?si=KUS14xBkJbm4KE0E
FILM Website: https://borncriminal.com/branded-criminal/