| 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.
|
