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The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People

By Richard Armstrong

Richard Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated to the British Film Institute. His book, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist, appeared from McFarland in 2000. He is currently writing Understanding Realism for the Bfi's Understanding the Moving Image series and Chocolate Biscuits and Italian Neo-Realism, a blend of reception aesthetics and personal memoir. He is a regular contributor to the websites Audience, Bright Lights Film Journal, Senses of Cinema and Talking Pictures, and contributes book reviews to the Times Higher Educational Supplement.

A comparison between Kes (Loach, 1969) and Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000) reveals much about how British cinema and society have changed. It also gets to the heart of Jacob Leigh's rich new study of Ken Loach. Loach is arguably not only the political conscience of modern British cinema but its aesthetic conscience too. Whilst contemporaries Scott, Parker, Leigh's archetypal tales of individual fulfillment or forebearance have become identified with mainstream aesthetics, for Loach the politics of the individual slip in and out of the community fabric.

He began in 1964, the year Britain's Labour party returned to office, working in TV drama for the new arts-oriented BBC2 under Sydney Newman, a Grierson acolyte whose credo "art in the service of the people" seminally influenced Loach. This book is strong on that ferment of Brecht, Godard, the lightweight camera, and what television theorist John Caughie calls "the rhetoric of the unplanned shot", then bubbling away along the corridors of the BBC. Sixties Loach is central to a flowering of state-sponsored realism - Cathy Come Home (1966), Poor Cow (1967), Family Life (1971) - which, arguably, made British TV more relevant to Britons than it has ever been since. Particularly closely argued is Leigh's examination of the interface between fiction and sociology in Cathy Come Home. The last time that that specifically British consensus formed in the unemployment lines and Spanish trenches of the 1930s, and forged in the fires of the "Blitz", had any real cultural clout was in the 1960s. In the fall of 1975 Days of Hope, a TV dramatization of events in a mining community between 1916 and the General Strike of 1926, drew upon a range of documentation and perspective, addressing history as though it were unfolding then and there. Resonating with early-70s industrial unrest and the growing schism between the "hard" left and "soft" left in British politics, the programme generated one of the last meaningful debates over the relationship between television aesthetics and content in the British press.

Loach's camera responds to rather than anticipates the actions of the protagonists, re-affirming the ontology of the image during an era when the revelatory power of the lens came under attack in both theory and practice. Watching Loach restores your faith in the immediacy of people and their interactions shorn of the trappings of aesthetics and performance. You have to remind yourself that Cathy is actress Carol White. Those voices you hear are real slum dwellers. Such is the interaction between record and reconstruction in a film that led to the establishment of Shelter, a charity to remedy the postwar decline in housing provision. In Land and Freedom (1995) the credits appear over original newsreel of the actual Spanish Civil War, fusing this film with this history. Dealing with mental illness in Family Life, class in The Gamekeeper (1980), unemployment in Raining Stones (1993), Loach's work induces anger, a feeling which mainstream cinemas seldom encourage. Leigh is scrupulously attentive to those moments when Loach and his collaborators achieve that seamless reconciliation of personal and social, and as sensitive when it doesn't come off. In Carla's Song (1996), Loach tries to prepare George and us for the Nicaraguan revolution by having George's little sister explain it to him. Watching this with Leigh, the scene strains the credulity of actors and spectator, seeming too schematic an attempt to impart background information. Compare this with the scene in which Carla and George listen to revolutionary tales on a crowded bus, Oyanka Cabezas and Robert Carlyle visibly moved by eyewitness accounts. Yet for years Loach's work has been difficult for Britons to watch. Leigh decided to bracket off issues around reception. But such a readable and thorough book as this begs research into the factor so ironically missing from a book with this subtitle; the people who saw the art and were made so miserable that Loach does better in Europe.

The radical Thatcherism of the 1980s marginalized socially conscious British cinema, pushing Loach towards documentary and, for Loach, the twin evils of censorship and TV commercials. But the swing to Labour in the 1990s coincided with accommodations with mainstream genre and fruitful collaborations with screenwriters Jim Allen (Raining Stones, Land and Freedom), Rona Munro (Ladybird Ladybird, 1994), and Paul Laverty (My Name is Joe, 1998, Sweet Sixteen, 2002). Loach's "melodramas of protest" patiently record social oppression, individual misery and occasional victory. Far from reducing characters to social victims, as critics say, their humour and vernacular sensibility make them more exceptional because we hadn't heard from these people in years. As Loach told Richard Porton, "Films should be about us; they shouldn't just be a commodity, which comes in and exploits us." Yet whilst mass audience discomfort betrayed its intoxication with the dream of rampant self-sufficiency sold to the British public from 1979, the academy embalmed another 1960s auteur, Loach's "return" playing assiduously to the "carrot cake" crowd.

If his films make British audiences recall their lost solidarity, then resentful because there are feelgood alternatives at the multiplex, it is because another casualty of the 1980s was a "difficult" British cinema. (Unlike in France where, with its tradition of regional realisms, Loach is seen as a leading European filmmaker. Sweet Sixteen is a British, German and Spanish co-production, for example). Embraced as the official art of Blairite "New Labour", the "triumph-against-adversity" narratives of The Full Monty (1997), Billy Elliot and their ilk respond to what Loach sees as a conciliatory socialism of collective welfare and quirky stamina. This excellent book has appeared at an apposite moment in the evolution of British cinema and society. Whilst My Name is Joe found Sight and Sound asking whether Loach was making the same film over and over again, "like the best auteurs", at a time of organizational crisis in the UK transport sector last December, Channel 4, (BBC2 with commercials), ran Loach's The Navigators (2001). More recently, Leigh's vivid rehearsal of Billy traipsing across a wet playground in Kes made me see myself at that age.

Jacob Leigh. London: Wallflower Press, distributed in the US by Columbia UP, 2002. 192 pp., Illus., Cloth/Paper: $55.00/$20.00.