CHAPTER THREE: Question of religion.

 It has been made clear in Chapter Two that Loach and Sartre had quite a few things in common, concerning their vision of the world and the role man has to play in it. They have another thing in common which is their belief in marxism, even if Loach was often reluctant to admit it fully, for fear of being easily labelled, whereas Sartre used to claim that he was a marxist, and he studied extensively Marx's works, his criticism of religion and his approach to materialistic history.
Jean-Paul Sartre is the main representative of atheist existentialism, which he thought to be "more coherent" than other branches of existentialism.[11]He thought that there was no point in believing in God, because nothing would be changed as men could not be saved but by their own acts. Besides, if God does not exist, then there is no such thing as human nature, since there is no one to build one…Therefore, men are fully responsible for the meaning they give to their lives, and to themselves: 

In many respects, this can be applied to Loach's films. We do not get any sense of spiritual quest or religious belongings, because basically that is not the point. What we have instead is a description of people struggling to live decently, or people failing to cope with hostile or narrow-minded institutions, as in Cathy Come Home(1966) or Ladybird, Ladybird(1994), for instance. The films are deeply settled in a material reality: people don't need spiritual guidance, they need shelter, food, and understanding from their fellow citizens. From a pictorial point of view, Loach hardly ever shots any churches, whereas he provides plenty of outside views of factories, demolished buildings, stations, building sites, and pubs…in other words, symbols of the industrial heritage, of the working class. It is as if he denied religion a part in the industrial landscape. Even when there are some religious metaphors, the metaphor turns out to have a different meaning. In My Name Is Joe(1998), Joe appears to be a Christ figure because he acts as a redeemer when he pays for Liam's debts. He is a sacrificial figure, because his act endangers his relationship with Sarah. But his sacrifice turns out to be vain: Liam commits suicide, his relationship with Sarah is broken, and he goes back to drinking. The question Loach seems to raise is one of wondering what a sacrifice is if people who are concerned by it do not value it the way they should.
However, there is one film that is problematic if one assumes that Loach never describes religion as potentially being helpful in the lives of those he depicts, and it is Raining Stones. It is about a father, Bob, who is on the dole and gets into trouble because he cannot pay back the money he has borrowed from a loan-shark to buy his daughter a communion dress. If the film does show some sympathy for him, Bob is also pictured as stubborn and irresponsible, because he has been offered a second-hand dress and he still wants to buy a new one. Many critics have assumed that religion was his last "luxury". What Loach was aiming at with this movie was showing that on the one hand, religion is all about social conventions, and habits and pride (Bob's wife recognises she had a brand new dress for her communion, so Bob says her daughter must have it the same way): there is the communion dress, but there is also the shoes, the cake, the drinks, the party…It is about appearances (Bob keeps saying: "I will know" when his wife objects that nobody will know if the dress is second-hand), and certainly not about spiritual guidance: Bob's daughter Colleen does not understand a single word of the passage of the Bible she  is reading in the church, and Bob is absolutely unable to explain to her the passage about Jesus sharing his last meal with the apostles, because he does not feel concerned. Religion is not helpful for him ("That does not put any bread on the table, does it?") and Loach does not picture it as an entity existing beyond men.
On the other hand, he pictures religion as being made of men, and as belonging to a certain cultural tradition. It is not a priest who "saves" Bob, it is Father Barry, a man who belongs to the Labor priests tradition, a man who knows about working-class people, who knows how tough is life for them. Thus Father Barry does not act as a priest; he is not narrowed by religious considerations about telling the truth. There are other realities that he has to consider as well: loan-sharks should not exist. On top of that, Loach gives his own version of reality: a father should be able to buy a communion dress for his daughter, but capitalist societies do not enable working-class fathers to do so.
Religion is presented as something having to do with men, and not with God. There's no miracle, and there will not be any. Priests are men who stand for a compassionate, understanding figure, trying to support desperate people like Bob.
In this respect, Loach is really away from the traditional narrative pattern of "fatum". "Fatum" is the Greek word for "fate", and it has shaped western literature and ways of setting up stories for centuries. Greek mythology is undoubtedly the most famous reference. In Sophocle's Phedre, the heroine Phedre is famous for saying that she cannot do anything about the troubles she has caused, because her family has always been cursed, and Gods had decided a long time ago that she had to die anyway. Generally speaking, Greek tragedies are based on the concept of fatum: people struggle against their destiny because they are unhappy, but they cannot escape it.
There is nothing like that in Loach's movies: no pre-established destiny to curse or to hold responsible for one's lot, but people's acts and the possibility to change things. In any of his films, people are unhappy, but the reason why they are unhappy has a face. It is represented by a man or a woman who usually get the main protagonists into deeper troubles. In Cathy Come Home for instance, the family becomes homeless, but there is no curse: the people responsible for their homelessness are those who come to throw them out of the house, who wear  grey suits, who seldom have any human facial expression, who eventually stand for lifeless figures. In Ladybird, Ladybird, Maggie loses her children one after the other, and they are taken away by the authorities. But the spectator gets a sense of Maggie's responsibility: if she had been more cooperative with those authorities, the way Jorge behaved, she may have not lost all of them. What is more, her constant anger is a reason why she loses control of her life, and the spectator knows it even if he understands her anger, because it is legitimated by the situation. One could say of course that this approach is very similar to, if not taken from, Marx's dismissal of religion. Obviously, it would not be the only similarity between Loach's political ideas and Marx's, even if Loach may not deserve to be considered as marxist in every way.

 

CHAPTER FOUR: Marxism and Existentialism: question of politics.

 Ken Loach has always been recognized as a marxist film-maker by the media (even if he's reluctant to acknowledge it). Yet, within marxism, he makes a great distinction between stalinism and trotskism. This is made clear in Fatherland(1986), in which the issue of politics obviously prevails on the film's aesthetics. At some point, the main character, Klaus Drittermann, walks past a wall on which is written: "Stalinism is not Socialism-Capitalism is not Freedom". Even if the marxist criticism of capitalist countries is present in this movie, Loach explicitly recognizes and even denounces the excesses of stalinist governments, when Klaus is forced to leave Eastern Germany because the lyrics of his songs are too critical of its government. Here is what Ken Loach said in 1994 when he was asked whether it was true he was a trotskist:

But his way of picturing the Marxist concept of class is quite original, in that he makes fictions where individual stories prevail on collective didactic actions, except maybe for his last movie Bread and Roses(2000), in which collective action is seen as the only way to undermine employers' abuses as well as to make lower- social classes exist in the eyes of those who usually ignore them. The upper classes are best embodied by the skyscraper in which Maya and Rosa work. It is always pictured in low-angle shots, which accentuates its size and makes Maya and her peers look even tinier in front of the massive capitalist American institution it stands for. This is Loach's most marxist film, if one considers that the setting up of the strike takes over the individual stories of both Maya and Rosa.
All in all, it seems that Loach is parting away from marxist theses by focalising on individuals, on "small random acts".[14] What is very interesting is that he does so whether shooting a fiction or a documentary. For instance, The Flickering Flame(1996) –about the Liverpool dockers' strike in 1995- is very telling of his concern for individualities: he would be expected, as a marxist film-maker, to film large shots of people waiting on the picket line, with a sound-track explaining why they were doing so. But these expectations are turned down as there are hardly any "mass" shots. Instead, spectators get images of different people, each of them telling their different account of the strike, each of them identified with his name on the left side of the screen. They are talking about the way the strike went on, what they expected from it, what support they expected from the TGWU (the dockers' main union) and how it failed to support them. On top of that, there are shots of the dockers' wives, explaining what consequences the lack of money had on families. What is shown is not only workers, but also human beings who speak about all the consequences on their personal and familial lives. The documentary is not a simple report of facts; it's a reaction to facts.
This multi-dimensional account of the Liverpool dockers' strike is also telling of how Loach links the universal to the particular: he takes time to let people express themselves in front of the camera, and their stories build up what is, for Loach, working-class History. In this respect, it seems that Loach is close to the "historical materialism" approach of Marx: a society is shaped by its economic structure and the evolution of this structure. Thus, history is not a matter of men fighting for ideals or ideas, but a set of social rules determined by economic  forces that shape individuals. Indeed, Loach's characters are caught in systems in which they are driven to act because of financial or social troubles. Their problem is that they do not fit in the norms. But Loach goes far beyond the Marxist approach. Sticking to stories of individuals, he gives the spectators a sense of how politics affect privacy, and what appears to be an individual tale stands in fact for the story of working-class people. This is his idea of how the universal affects the individual. Loach usually describes people without any specificity, everyday people who are not expected to do anything wonderful, but try to escape a certain kind of Darwinian determinism, as seen by liberal capitalists: Loach shows that what a capitalist society thinks is a weak element can sometimes find a way through, and eventually have its own private victory. What he thinks must be shown is the possibilities of action: Loach undoubtedly admits that men are a product of their own history, but that must not prevent them from playing an active part in it. There is a certain fatalism that he wants to point out as something paralysing and narrow-minded: the feeling that things cannot be changed, that nothing can be done, seems unbearable to Loach, who likes to tell the story of people who struggle in spite of a lot of adversity: in Ladybird, Ladybird, Maggie and Jorge fight in order to keep the guard of their newly-born daughter Zoe. In Riff-Raff, Stevie keeps dreaming of his market business in spite of the lack of money, he keeps working with dignity even if he had to sleep outside for a while. There is much hope in Loach's movies; they invite the spectators to trust themselves through the characters, because they can identify easily with all of them. Again, this is very similar to existentialism; the possibility to act in order to be responsible of one's lot is related, in Loach's films, to the feeling of belonging to a society where action, collective or individual, is possible. As a consequence, preserving one's civic rights is fundamental, and Loach makes it his role to denounce when those rights are baffled. His movies are like pamphlets, with the help of images and "mise en scène".

 

 

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

Part 2