Grim tales of war

If there was any moment this week to make you do a double take, it was when, in Townlands: If These Walls Could Talk, a young loyalist mural painter pointed at a quote on a wall he was especially proud of. "It's from some famous American, I don't know who." He read it out. "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." You wanted to reach into the telly, tap him on the shoulder and say, "Listen, son, you might want to check your historical references on that one." He wouldn't have been quick enough with the big bottle of Tippex.

The walls do talk, of course; it was just that Townlands didn't listen hard enough. This was a whistle-stop tour of the 300-odd murals of Belfast and it didn't leave time to quiz the guide.

"It's politics with a small 'p'," insisted Sean Colligan, the hand behind much of the nationalist artwork. If that's true, it's only because they needed to donate the stem from that "p" to make an even bigger "T" for Territory.

Whatever notions of culture and tradition are written in the flecks of paint, those of intimidation and demarcation loom just as large. In Belfast, there's hardly a street, paving stone or electricity pole that hasn't been branded. It is a colour-coded city. The murals, complex and impressive as they are, are only the most overt signposts in a place in which it helps to know exactly where you are.

They also say much about the sometimes bizarre patchwork iconography of loyalism, the kind of thing that allows Simply The Best to become an anthem, a kind of The Sash Tina Turner Wore. In Townlands, however, we were left only to guess at how the skeletal mascot of mulleted heavy metal outfit Iron Maiden has become such a popular icon on loyalist murals. And there was the woman crediting Johnny Adair with inspiring the murals in the area: "He has aided with the finance to promote culture, identity, history". He's a proper Lady Gregory and no mistake.

In Belfast My Love, earlier in the week, there was the briefest glimpse of a marcher leading the way with a Young Defenders banner featuring, at the centre of the crest, Yosemite Sam, the moustachio-ed Western nemesis of Bugs Bunny. You can bet they're the rootenist, tootenist sons of Ulster around, and hopefully less likely to be fooled if a smart rabbit puts on a dress.

This was another unsatisfying film about the North, this time from Protestant Belfast native and television journalist Lawrence Pitkethly, who reported on the outbreak of the Troubles in 1969 and was returning 30 years later, to see how the old town had fared.

Made in 1999, its optimism already looked embarrassingly out of step, but that wasn't its only problem. Rather, it hit upon promising stories - the evangelical fervour of some Protestant sects, the subsequent life of a baby he filmed sleeping in a refugee centre in 1969 - but didn't do enough to tease them out. With its simplified history and pithy sermonising, Belfast My Love came across as a film made for foreign television. Pitkethly's warped accent betrayed the fact that he's been in the US for many of the intervening years - which may have explained his obsession with song. He asked for one from several of its subjects and even offered one up himself. It was a documentary that propped itself on a New York barstool and wailed for the old country.

Briefly returning to Townlands, the same young man who had unknowingly pushed the sayings of JFK through the medium of bigotry admired one mural covering the side of a house. "The person in the house isn't happy. I don't think he could do much about it," he shrugged. Maybe he was asked, maybe he wasn't, but it would have been instructive to hear what the owner of the house had to say. Although - even given the unlikely possibility he would have spoken on camera - it is less conceivable he would have said what he really thought.

There's a refuge in anonymity in Northern Ireland that does not make for honest television. It's a regular thing to see a news report in which an eye-witness to a crime is filmed from behind, or close up on the mouth rather than allow themselves be identified.

Documenting Northern Ireland lends itself more easily to the anonymity of print than to the glare of the sharp light above a television camera. When people stop hiding, such as with Peter Taylor's revealing triangular history of the Troubles (Provos, Loyalists and Brits), it can make for extraordinary journalism.

That lack of candour comes to mind as much because of two other documentaries this week. In True Stories: Soldat, a film on the dignity-stripping two years that is every young Russian male's spell in the army, there was footage so intimate and violent that you began to question how it could have been obtained.

There is an unsanctioned but common practice in the Russian army, the Rule of Grandfathers, in which hardened conscripts use fresh ones for punchbags, and this leads to hundreds of deaths each year. It is so rigid that those at the top of the four-tier system see it as beneath them to thump or kick the new guys themselves. So they get their juniors to do it for them instead. The film repeatedly cut in with footage of conscripts being punched, elbowed, kneed and abused.

So involved was the camera that several times a hand reached out from it and landed a blow on a shaven head. It was uncomfortably conspiratorial, and you could only wonder how such film was obtained, whether it encouraged the beatings or simply recorded them. With each wince-inducing thud of knuckles on skull it was difficult not to feel guilt mixing with the sympathy.

Russia is not a television natural. It always looks ruddy, weather-beaten, a cigarette drooping from its lips, vodka breath cutting the air as it stands and beats its body against the cold. Soldat was not cosmetic surgery. It opened with a general publicly ridiculing the army camp colonel for the state of the frozen, flaking parade ground and showed the humiliation flowing downwards through the ranks, gathering force until it came clobbering down on the new conscripts in a flurry of punches.

When not engaged in kicking juniors, the soldiers were sticking their fingers up behind the backs of officers, standing around like indolent builders, blaming somebody else for tasks they hadn't completed.

Conscripts are told they're going to a resort town to train, where there will be sea and wine. "Who wouldn't want to go?" asked one sarcastically. Three hundred thousand men are conscripted every year. Sixty thousand try to avoid it. Police go from house to house to find the draft dodgers. As the conscripts were driven away, the bus doors were sealed so that the young men couldn't escape. "Don't you want to serve in the army?" asked a medic of one grumbling teenager. There is only one answer.

Lifters was a sort of real-life This Life on heroin. Again, it was bracing in its honesty. Saul Dibb's camera knocked on the doors, was invited in and offered cups of tea before the subjects shoot up. It wandered in unchecked on street deals, followed the addicts on shoplifting expeditions, remained impassive as they slid deeper into a hit.

It even got a call from the police, after one addict, Martin, got caught for theft and told the cops that he was in this documentary and that he and his mate Pete were only stealing for the cameras. Pete, who hadn't even been an addict at the start, had been sectioned for 28 days for refusing to go on a methadone programme. Another addict, Dave, was enjoying his longest spell out of prison during his adult life - four months.

The strength of Lifters lay in its banality, the grim simplicity of four addicts' lives, the endless talk of what they would do when they were finally clean. The irony being that they usually made the plans while utterly stoned.

It was not without its gallows humour. Martin and Pete live in a bedsit that doubles as a superdump. "Sorry about the mess," slurred Martin, his eyes sinking, his body limp to the drug. "The cleaner's on holidays."

tvreview@irish-times.ie