Ken Loach Films | Ken Loach Filmography | Ken Loach Biography | Ken Loach Career | Ken Loach Awards

Ken Loach is not only Britain's most political filmmaker, he is also its most censored-and the two are not entirely unconnected. Loach's career illustrates all too clearly the immense difficulties facing the radical filmmaker in Britain today: the broadcasting organisations' position within the state makes them extraordinarily sensitive sites from which to tackle certain fundamental political questions (about labour relations, ?national security,? or Northern Ireland, for example), while the film industry, though less subject to political interference and selfcensorship, simply finds Loach's projects too ?uncommercial,? thanks to its habitually povertystricken state. And what other filmmaker, British or otherwise, has found one of his films the subject of vitriolic attacks by sections of his own country's press at a major international film festival-as happened at Cannes in 1990 with Hidden Agenda?

For all the obvious political differences with Grierson, Loach is the chief standard bearer of the British cinematic tradition that started with the documentary movement in the 1930s. His quintessentially naturalistic approach was apparent even in his earliest works (in his contributions to the seminal BBC police series ZCars, for instance) but really came to the fore with Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home. In the days when television drama was still finding its way beyond the proscenium arch and out from under the blanket of middle-brow, middle-class, literary-based classics, Cathy's portrayal of a homeless family hounded by the forces of a pitiless bureaucracy caused a sensation and led directly to the founding of the housing charity Shelter. Indeed, one critic described it as ?effecting massive, visceral change in millions of viewers in a single evening.? Typically, however, Loach himself has been far more circumspect, arguing that the film was socially as opposed to politically conscious, that it made people aware of a problem without giving them any indication of what they might do about it. He concludes that "ideally I should have liked Cathy to lead to the nationalisation of the building industry and home ownership. Only political action can do anything in the end"-a point of view to which he has remained faithful throughout his career.

Accordingly, in The Big Flame, The Rank and File, and the four-part series Days of Hope, Loach turned to more directly political subjects. It is in these dramas that Loach begins his project of giving voice to the politically silenced and marginalised. As he put it, "I think it's a very important function to let people speak who are usually disqualified from speaking or who've become non-persons-activists, militants, or people who really have any developed political ideas. One after the other in different industries, there have been people who've developed very coherent political analyses, who are really just excluded. They're vilified-called extremists and then put beyond the pale."

Such views made enemies across the spectrum of political ideologies but, typically, Loach's critics cloaked what were basically political objections in apparently aesthetic rhetoric. In particular, Loach was dragged into the much-rehearsed argument that the ?documentarydrama? form dishonestly and misleadingly blurs the line between fact and fiction and, in particular, presents the latter as the former. Loach himself dismisses such criticisms as ?ludicrous? and a ?smokescreen,? citing the numerous uncontroversial disinterrings of Churchill, Edward VII, and others and concluding that "It's an argument that's always dragged out selectively when there's a view of history, a view of events, that the Establishment doesn't agree with-it's not really the form which worries them at all. It's such an intellectual fraud that it doesn't bear serious consideration."

Loach's work, especially Days of Hope, was also drawn into a more serious debate which raged at one time in the pages of Screen about whether films with ?progressive? political content can be truly ?progressive? if they utilise the allegedly outworn and ideologically dubious conventions of realism. Loach's response was to accuse such critics of "not seeing the woods for the trees. The big issue which we tried to make plain to ordinary folks who aren't film critics was that the Labour leadership had betrayed them fifty years ago and were about to do so again. That's the important thing to tell people. It surprised me that critics didn't take the political point, but a rather abstruse cinematic point.... Even the more serious critics always avoid confronting the content of the film and deciding if they think it is truthful. They'll skirt around it by talking about realism and the Function of Film or they'll do a little paragraph while devoting all their space to some commercial film they pretend to dislike."

With the coming of the 1980s Loach began to shift increasingly into documentary proper, abandoning dramatic devices altogether. This was partly a result of the increasing difficulty, both economic and political, that he had in making the kind of films in which he was most interested, but was also related to the advent of Thatcherism in 1979. As he himself explained, "There were things we wanted to say head on and not wrapped up in fiction, things that should be said as directly as one can say them. Thatcherism just felt so urgent that I thought that doing a fictional piece for TV, which would take a year just to get commissioned and at least another year to make, was just too slow. Documentaries can tackle things head on, and you can make them faster than dramas too-though with hindsight it's just as hard, if not harder, to get them transmitted."

Indeed, Loach had major problems with his analysis of the relationship between trade union leaders and the rank and file in A Question of Leadership and the series Questions of Leadership, the first of which was cut in order to include a final ?balancing? discussion and broadcast in only one ITV region, while the second was never broadcast at all after numerous legal wrangles over alleged defamation. Similarly, Loach's coal dispute film, Which Side Are You On?, was banned by the company (London Weekend Television) which commissioned it. It was finally televised, but only after it could be ?balanced? by a programme less sympathetic to the striking miners than Loach's. It says a great deal about the system of film and television programme making in Britain that one of the country's most experienced and politically conscious directors was, and remains, unable to produce a full-scale work about one of the most momentous political events in the country's recent history.

Exactly the same could be said about Loach and Northern Ireland. Revealingly, the initial idea for what was to become Hidden Agenda came from David Puttnam when he was studio boss at Columbia, after two of Loach's long-cherished Irish projects, one with the BBC and the other with Channel 4, had foundered. However, Loach has borne his treatment at the hands of the British establishment with remarkable fortitude. With his particular political outlook he would presumably be surprised if things were otherwise. Nor does he have an inflated view of the role of film and the filmmaker. As his remarks about Cathy clearly testify, Loach is a great believer in the primacy of the political. And, as he himself concludes, "filmmakers have a very soft life really, in comparison to people who have to work for a living. And so it's easy to be a radical filmmaker. The people who really are on the front line aren't filmmakers. We're in a very privileged position, very free and good wages-if you can keep working."

As Ken Loach ages, his films remain consistently provocative and politically savvy, with a deep respect for and understanding of his struggling, working class characters. Riff Raff 'features a prototypical Loach hero: an unemployed blue collar worker who comes to London and lands a job on a construction site. However, the film is no dry, pedantic political tract. While it is never less than pointed in its depiction of the never-ending conflict between the classes, it also is piercingly funny. Comic asides also highlight Raining Stones, an otherwise intense drama depicting the efforts of an out-of-work laborer to scrape together funds to feed his family. He is a proud man, who will not accept charity; however, trouble comes when he unwittingly borrows money from a loan shark to pay for his daughter's communion dress. With vivid irony, Loach graphically depicts the sense of hopelessness of honorable laborers who desire nothing more than the right to a suitable job, for suitable pay.

Loach's concerns are not solely with the male working class. Ladybird Ladybird is a trenchant, based-on-fact drama about a profoundly distressed single mother with a sad history of being exploited by men. He also is interested in the impact of history on the individual; in Land and Freedom, he abandons his usual British working class setting to tell the story of a jobless but passionate Liverpudlian Communist who treks to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War to do battle for ?land and freedom.? The film works best as a potent look at political idealism in the face of the reality of a heartless, brutal enemy.-JULIAN PETLEY and ROB EDELMAN