While firmly entrenched in the British realist tradition, Ken Loach's films transcend the limitations common to such methods by means of a rich combination of politics, poetry and pathos. Unfortunately, his rigorous naturalism and left-wing sympathies have effectively confined large sections of his work to television, although his imagery seems equally authentic on both large and small screens.
Jacob Leigh's detailed and perceptive new study in the "Directors' Cuts" series for Wallflower Press aims to describe the thematic and stylistic consistencies in Loach's work and trace the developments in his career. Overall the book interprets and evaluates aesthetic changes in Loach's canon that have formed the uncompromising social-realist idiom that he has refined over decades into a personal cinematic language. The narrative moves chronologically through Loach's career, each chapter studying closely two or three works from Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966) and concluding with the later films Raining Stones (1993), Ladybird Ladybird (1994) and Land and Freedom (1995).
Loach began his career directing for television, where the power and accuracy of his portraits of contemporary British working-class life in plays such as Up the Junction, Cathy Come Home and In Two Minds singled him out as an exciting new talent. In 1967 with long-term collaborator and producer Tony Garnett, he made his feature debut Poor Cow, in which a young wife's adultery with her criminal husband's closest friend gave rise to a somewhat schematic evocation of the poverty and banality of working- class experience. Kes (1969), however, was altogether more affecting. It is a naturalistic portrait of a young delinquent, whose feelings for a kestrel he finds and trains are symbolic of a doomed attempt to escape the stultifying, limited opportunities offered school-leavers in the industrial North. The dialogue - delivered in broad dialect - and profoundly truthful performances lend the film a sense of documentary "realism", but the use of the bird as a poetic metaphor for freedom and dignity, and the lucid analysis of the pressures to conform brought to bear on the boy by the adult world, transcend objective realism and elevate the film into the realm of moving, low-key political melodrama.
For most of the 1970's Loach worked mainly in television, the four-part Days of Hope - a family saga from the start of the Great War to the 1926 General Strike - being a highlight. In 1979 he returned to features with Black Jack, a children's film about pre-industrial Britain, while the television film The Gamekeeper was a superb, deeply ironic analysis of it's 'hero's' relationship to his family and his dog, the land itself, the poachers who are his friends, and his country-aristocrat employers. This was followed by the equally politically engaged Looks and Smiles (1981), a remarkably plausible account of a teenage romance blighted by the frustration and despair that accompanied unemployment in Thatcher's Britain. Loach's sympathies for his young working-class victims were as strong as ever, while unsentimental performances gave evidence of the integrity of his approach.
The consistent issues recurrent throughout Loach's work concern how to incorporate politics into mainstream fiction films without becoming purely polemical. The fundamental problematic is the search to find a form to express political beliefs. It is in the later films that Loach successfully blends mainstream Hollywood conventions to radical political ends. In furthering the depth of his argument Leigh proceeds to examine how Loach uses the aesthetics of cinema and performance to convince viewers not simply of a series of political ideas but a definite "authenticity". Reinforcing camera techniques, the long-take, the action-led camera and the unplanned shot Loach succeeds in inducing an extreme emotional intensity in the performance of his main protagonists. This authenticity however is dependent upon carefully orchestrated emotional crescendos, built through an interaction of different elements connecting with the narrative structures of melodrama.
And yet, what separates Loach's work from conventional melodrama is its inherent complexity and the way it discourages too strong an emotional identification with the characters while insisting on the economic and social motivations of their actions. Loach's characters rarely achieve "full tragic awareness"; frequently his characters remain at the mercy of the ideological forces that impel them. His films scrutinise the way that ideological forces, apparently existing at an abstract level, can determine people's lives, to the extent that his protagonists often have no powers to resolve their problems or to change their lives.
Extending the discussion of the role of ideology in melodrama allows us to introduce a category of "melodramas of protest" to include films such as Cathy Come Home, Rome Open City (1945), Battleship Potemkin (1925), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), that within their essential structure lies a death of innocence. The melodrama of protest attempts to evoke in the audience a sense of outrage at the injustice or atrocities of the authorities against an innocent protagonist. Leigh suggests that Loach has made melodramas of protest throughout his career from Cathy Come Home to Bread and Roses (2000), using a range of strategies to bring political and social protest into mainstream fiction films. Indeed his film-making excels when he works in the mainstream traditions of narrative cinema. And yet, as Leigh carefully states, the achievement of the film Land and Freedom indicates the limits on success that Loach's work can achieve - "[the film] presents both individual drama and social analysis without breaking the rhythm of the story; but with its divided world and its undivided hero who learns to see Stalinism, it remains a schematic melodrama of protest."
The most politically committed of British film-makers, Loach is to be valued for his imaginative exploration of the thin line separating fiction and documentary. Carefully wrought scripts and grainy location shooting - acknowledging the influence of the Italian neo-realists, the French "new wave" and the British Free Cinema - provide an astute, authentic analysis of society at large, while his excellent handling of actors lends the films an often deeply moving human dimension.
Throughout the text Leigh draws extensively from the "film-academics" V.F. Perkins and Stanley Cavell as a foundation to structure the theoretical narrative outline; however the book essentially succeeds when the author escapes these constraints and his explorations follow the emotional and performative impact displayed across the diegesis of Loach's filmic "screen". As Leigh concludes; "We cannot prove an interpretation, as no interpretation offers proof; it only appeals to a reader's memory of the film and a re-viewing of the film. I hope that my interpretations of Ken Loach's films will enrich readers' contact with his films, and help readers to see them in another way."
Reviewed by Adrian Gargett
