Part1 |
What does
Loach like to show? People in trouble, or people who are trying to get out
of these troubles, but who cannot, whatever the reason is?
All his movies feature individuals who desperately
want and try to get out of situations that make them unhappy, and even if
they do not succeed in doing it, the films focus as much on the causes of
their failure as on the human efforts to retrieve a kind of dignity. In My
Name Is Joe, Joe fails to save Liam from the dealer McGowan as he fails
to preserve his relationship with Sarah. But Loach shows how hard Joe tries
to do his best in both situations: he is often shot running, his body is in
constant motion. The physical efforts he makes stand for the amount of comprehension
and care he is able to show for others. In this respect, the football team
is a device used by Loach to represent a kind of microcosm in which friendship
and solidarity are possible. It is seen as a process of socialization: the
game has its rules, and players have to respect them if they want to win.
They can ask someone for help and advice if they need some (the captain).
The team keeps admittedly loosing; but the act of learning is more important
than a sportive performance. The viewer is constantly made aware of what it
costs to Joe to remain out of drinking, and to prevent Liam from having his
legs broken.
It seems that happiness begins when dignity is intact,
for Loach. In his movies, happiness is not a matter of great feelings and
emotions (or not only that), because the characters are in need of things
even more basic than that: their needs stick to a day-to-day reality: shelter,
money, work. This is the case in Cathy Come Home, Raining Stones,
or Riff-Raff. But when those basic needs are provided for, Loachian
characters are in search of belonging to a community. The uncomprehension
faced by characters like Maggie in Ladybird or Janice in Family
Life surrounds them to such a point that it conditions their relations
to others. This is clearly what makes most characters unhappy in the end.
On top of financial and material difficulties, they do not find any comfort
from social services. Loach shows that societies similar to the British society
don't play the supporting role they claim to be able to play.
Two films staged the classical learning time, childhood:
Kes(1969), and Black Jack(1979). In Kes, a young boy
called Billy lives in a poor northern city, and he finds it hard to be integrated
among his schoolmates, because of his extreme shyness, and also because he
is not good at playing football. He finds a kestrel and starts to train him.
The training becomes a passion, which Billy finds very satisfying and rewarding.
He is able to speak about his new experience in front of his classmates. He
feels different, almost new to himself. He has become someone from whom others
can learn something. In his own way, he has found his place in the world that
surrounds him. His close relation with the kestrel could have cut him from
the rest of the world, but on the contrary it has enabled him to share something
with others. The fact that the kestrel is a symbol of wilderness, of the natural
world, is interesting because it means that what has enabled Billy to be more
integrated in his class and to get a certain respect from others, is not the
help of a man or a woman, whereas it should have been so, if one considers
the socializing role school is supposed to have. In this film, school doesn't
play the role of socialization it is traditionally supposed to play. The world
around Billy is cruel, and stays as such even if he can forget and escape
it for a moment. When his brother kills the kestrel, Billy arranges a kind
of funerals. This ritualization puts him in the world of adults for good.
Yet, he is shot in a close-up frame, with leaves and branches around him.
He chooses to bury the animal in the forest where it belongs; he seems to
have understood the respect that was due to living beings.
Black Jack is a film
that is considered as minor in Loach's filmography. It is quite a shame, because
this 18th century social tale is very interesting in many respects.
It is full of metaphors: the journey that Tolly and Belle make with the stallholders
represents Tolly's growing up and becoming a man. Moreover, the time this
journey takes enables all of the group to understand Belle, and to understand
her language. Language is meaningful to Loach; the way people talk is important
to him, and he works a lot on regional accents, that define social backgrounds,
according to him. It defines a whole culture; that may be why he likes to
melt several languages in a movie: German and English in Fatherland,
Spanish and English in Land and Freedom(1995), Bread and Roses,
or Carla's Song. As viewers may find it hard to understand all of them,
they are made aware of the complexity of relationships between people who
don't talk the same language, literally or metaphorically…Indeed, some films
give the impression that people from the same country do not mean the same
things while speaking the same idioms. Going back to Black Jack, Belle's
problem is not her accent, but the way she thinks and how she signifies her
needs. It takes time and understanding from others to be aware that she is
not insane nor dangerous. Coming from a bourgeois family, she is very constrained,
partly because her family is ashamed of her, and the
film is also about the way she frees herself from her background, and how
she frees others from their prejudices about different people.
With this film Loach wanted to show that authentic
contact and relationships between people could help to change them: Tolly
helps Belle but he also helps Jacques (the eponymous villain), who redeems
himself at the end of the film. This movie came directly after Family Life,
interestingly enough. Both of them condemn familial constraint, showing in
different ways how far it can go. They also criticise a medical system which
whatever the century is more interested in money than in the patient's health
(this is very clear in Black Jack, in which doctors keep acting according
to the money they will be given from Belle's father). In both Black Jack
and Family Life, the relation between doctors and those who are sick
and need them is metaphorical of the relation between those who govern and
those who are governed. The question of balance of power is very important,
because more generally, it raises the question of legitimacy of power in societies:
What is the status of those who are governed in the society depicted by Loach?
What should it be?
The amount
of social criticism is huge in Loach’s films. Greediness , lack of humanity,
financial and political interests… all this is responsible for the degradation
of the social welfare. According to Loach’s mise en scene, working- class
people are often put apart or forgotten. What is questioned is their authentic
citizenship and the right they have to claim for justice and social help,
the right to things that would enable them to be heard. Citizenship is central
in Loach’s movies because they always try to define what is, or what it should
be, and how it is important in order to make a social cohesion: Having a sense
of belonging to a community does not only mean having to pay taxes: the community
has to give back as much as it receives, in terms of support to those who
mostly need it.
Citizenship is thus linked to happiness: a trustful
society is able make those who compose it happy. This is very close to Aristotle’s
concept of men’s place in every city/“polis”. He states that a city is an
association, and that “[…] all associations come into being for the sake of
some good-for all men do all their acts with a view to achieving something
which is, in their view, a good.”[15]
Aristotle wrote the Politics after he made
a series of observations on different forms of existing governments; from
oligarchies to democracies. What he sought to find was the best political
system in which, according to him, individuals would be able to be happy,
according to their individual needs and status. The Politics are a
set of advice meant to describe what an ideal society could be. A parallel
can be drawn between the Politics and Loach’s work: the films describe
what a society should not be, how the citizens’ expectations can be turned
down because of social gaps. This is particularly the case in Ladybird,
Ladybird and Cathy Come Home. Viewers have the feeling that the
British society and its institutions, and the individuals who compose it come
from two different worlds; they do not share the same interests: Loach makes
it clear that the interest of those who run the institutions lies in spending
the least possible on those who would mostly need it; as a consequence, they
have to make those people silent, and everything that’s useful in order to
make it possible is done: intimidation, threats, getting into others’ private
lives… In Ladybird, the scenes of opposition between Maggie and police
forces are shot so as to signify the gap between a human being and opposing
forces: Chrissy Rock, who performs the character of Maggie, is shot in close-ups,
whereas the policemen who want to take her baby away are shot from a certain
distance, as if the viewer could not get close to them. Moreover, they do
not act in natural way: their gestures are mechanical, and so is their way
of talking. The film is about people who are not considered valuable enough
to be helped the way they should be (this is true for Maggie as well as for
Jorge), to whom higher classes will not care to be fair; but the way it is
shot features those who are responsible as those who do not deserve the status
of citizen. Still according to Aristotle, the city is defined by the freedom
its members benefit from: "Those constitutions which consider only the
personal interests of the rulers are all wrong constitutions, or perversion
of the right forms. Such perverted forms are despotic; whereas the city is
an association of free men".[16]
In Loach's films, despotic figures often seek to deprive central characters
from their original status of citizen, as being a free human being. In this
respect, Cathy Come Home is very interesting because it portrays the
state servants who evict Cathy and her family in a curious way: they walk
up and down the corridor, heads down, all wearing the same kind of clothes,
same colors, as if they were coming to spread conformism and uniformisation.
In the scene where Cathy’s children are taken away from her, at the station,
the people from the social services and the policemen look like a mass swooping
down on Cathy. The scene is shot in low angle so that viewers can see Cathy
disappear under this mass. Even her lively blonde hair is covered by the dark
blue coats.
To loach, being a citizen means caring for others,
and he describes exactly what it is: Bob and Tommy may be penniless, but they
still give a little money when the bar tenant of the pub where they are trying
to sell their meat asks them to give for a boy to go to Lourdes. Loach also
shoots people -usually from upper classes-who think they are good citizens
and who are not in reality: in Bread and Roses, lawyers and directors
who work in the building where Maya and all the janitors work keep ignoring
them, thus implicitly guarantying their unhappy lot.
What is striking in all Loch’s movies is the lack
of cohesion in the society he depicts: a society that keeps perpetrating injustices
against working-class people. Once again, this finds an echo in Aristotle’s
Politics: “Man is a political animal”, because he naturally tends to
associate himself with others. But one of the fundamental characteristic of
the city he founds with others is justice:"The virtue of justice belongs
to the city; for justice is an ordering of the political association, and
the virtue of justice consists in determination of what is just".[17]
According to Aristotle, men have
a finality only in the city. It is as such, because he states that it is in
men’s very nature to be part of a city and men cannot be fully satisfied nor
happy in another system. Moreover, the city produces benefits that can be
shared by all its members, thus directly concurring to their happiness. If
we try to link this to Loach’s description of British society, we see that
the Aristotelian “polis” is criticized because it has lost its beneficent
powers, and also because some of its members have been more or less dismissed.
As a consequence, it is very important, even vital as it is part of human
nature, to fight for civil rights. The message is clear in every movie.
The stories filmed by Ken Loach are most
often situated in urban areas. This is partly due to most of the script writers
he worked with. Jim Allen, for instance, comes from the northern city of Manchester,
and he acknowledges that he writes according to what he knows best: the city.[18]
The city and the people who live
in are central in Loach's movies; the way the city is organized, how it is
ruled, how people live in…It really stands for the political and social side
of the films. Thanks to its description, viewers can see how it affects, directly
or not, the protagonists' lives.
There is a very striking sequence at the very beginning
of Family Life: [19]
a close up on Janice's parents' house gets larger to show the other houses
of the street, which are all exactly alike. The sequence ends with an overall
view of the neighborhood; it shows parallel rows of houses that are the very
copies of Janice's parents', and the rows seem never to end in the fog. This
sequence can be taken for something that sums up the whole mood of the film.
The streets where Janice has grown up do not let any space for change: everything
is astonishingly alike. At the same time, this kind of environment is very
confining. It reflects the state of mind of its inhabitants, of Janice's parents
in particular: narrow-minded and prejudiced. Thus, the streets of the city
can be taken for a metaphor for the mind of those who establish the norms.
But as the images get blurred by the fog, so is this way of thinking: blurred
by normative behaviors. The sense of uniformisation that gets hold of Janice
is unbearable to her, and the only way she finds to escape it is by cutting
herself from others. Her incapacity to live in a society embodied by her parents
leads her to develop schizophrenia.
In Raining Stones, Bob decides to go from houses
to houses to propose his services to clean the drains, to get a little extra
money. The priest of his parish, Father Barry, thinks Bob asks him for free,
and Bob has no choice but doing it for free. When he goes down the drains,
Father Barry flushes the toilets and Bob receives a "shower" of
excrements. This sequence is interesting first because it shows Bob going
"underground": he goes in a hidden part of the city that no one
wants to see even if it is known to be there. He is able to unblock the drains,
even if it means being spattered with excrements. Those excrements are products
of human bodies, and men are disgusted by them and want to get rid of them;
but they can be problematic (block the drains) and remind men that the problem
has to be solved. Symbolically, it reminds viewers that what society considers
as easily forgivable still exists, even if no one wants to see it: the social
criticism Loach does concerns abusive politics, upper classes and enterprises,
that want to get rid of lower classes. The sequence is also meaningful in
the story itself: what Bob wants to hide from his wife comes back to the surface,
with traumatic consequences: the loan shark Tansey comes to see his wife to
ask his money back. Even if the story ends rather well, Bob is seen as very
anxious at the end of the film. He always looks back to check if the police
do not come to arrest him; he feels guilty, afraid and cannot be at ease during
his daughter's communion.
More generally, it seems that the description of the
urban environment where the main protagonists live is a means to picture their
problems and inhibitions. This environment is not just a sphere in which people
evolve; it is a living mirror that reflects characters their true fears, but
also their needs. This is seen through Loach's way of framing his shots: people
are rarely shot in close ups, whereas frames are enlarged to show the surrounding
location. Thus, characters are always seen in the middle urban locations,
or in their houses. Which means that they are very often seen between walls.
Walls are often bare, accentuating their whiteness, and their constraining
effects. Depths of field are usually high(except in Cathy Come Home),
to signify the relation between characters and their space. The stress put
on the body as a manifestation of moods is important as well, because it goes
against a general British puritan tradition, inherited from Protestantism,
that used to deny the body's behavior to focus on the mind only. According
to the puritan thought, bodies were only evidence of people's materialization
in the world, but faith and minds only could guide believers.[20]
Consciously or not, Loach stands
against this tradition and insists on the importance of bodies: they reveal
who people are and where they come from. Space and bodies are thus closely
linked. Loach used the zoom figure in his early works such as Cathy Come
Home or Up the Junction, as a means to signify the belonging of
characters (especially female characters) to a place. The zoom crushes and
erases perspectives, and viewers have the impression that there is no space
behind characters, that they literally stick to their background, without
any perspective of change. This reminds viewers that they are watching a movie,
and that they are enabled to get closer to central characters, but from a
far place, because they know that it is the camera that enabled them to do
it. As such, viewers are made aware that the way they are made to look at
things is also responsible for the characters' incapacity to get back to a
safer place, as the zooms always take place in outside sequences.[21]
Every Loach's movie features social relations.
Whether this relation is harmful or beneficent, it is at the center of the
story. As men are driven to live together, their happiness depends on their
capacity to benefit as much as possible from their relation to others. Riff-Raff
and My Name Is Joe are certainly the two films that mostly stage and
deal with relations between individuals. Both of them show how people cannot
make it without help, that is to say, without socializing or meaning something
important to others. To convey this, Loach uses two social patterns: the working
team on a building site in Riff-Raff, and the football team in My
Name Is Joe.
On the building site, workers have to get on well
together, otherwise they will not be able to get help if they need some. The
microcosm they form has its rules, one of which is being fair. When one of
them, Joe, accepts to cash others' cheques because they do not have a bank
account in exchange of a commission, he finally does not get the commission
that was agreed to be given to him, because the others thought it was too
high. Joe can do nothing but say: "You gave me your word", implying
they were not honest. Within the group, people give each others lessons and
take revenge they cannot take on their boss who exploits them. Still, people
stay behind each other. The little space they are given to take their meals
is so tiny that one would expect them to burst out. Instead, they take advantage
of this to know each other better and create social links. Everything is a
pretext to laugh: even the presence of a rat in the kitchen, which is a sad
piece of evidence of the insalubrity of the place, becomes something of a
comedy. Thus the place where they are endangered becomes a place where they
can also find comfort. Little by little, they dare talking of their dreams
(one of them wants to go to Africa; Stevie wants to run a little market…).
In Riff-Raff, beyond the love story between Stevie and Susan, the true
stake is the workers, or how men who are constantly beaten up by abusive bosses
can still experience a sense of comradeship and hope to better their lot.
In My Name Is Joe, the pattern is slightly
different since people are only gathered in a football team, for leisure.
Nonetheless, the activity and the fact of gathering help to forget individual
troubles: Liam is seen smiling only when he meets his fellow players. Here,
the team is used to back up unemployed young men. Each member is supportive
of one another, and viewers have the feeling that Joe's work with Liam is
more efficient than Sarah's, the social worker. In this respect, socialization
is shown as something that cannot really interact between social classes.
Joe and Sarah do not come from the same social background: the set of photographs
on Sarah's kitchen's wall clearly sets up her background. She went to University,
whereas Joe is the kind of people whose family do not have the money to send
children to university. This difference, among others, leads them to react
to events in a different way. Joe tends to survive, whereas Sarah earns a
rather comfortable living. Thus, they do not have the same point of view when
it comes to Liam. Sarah rejects Joe when she learns he worked for McGowan,
whereas it seems that it was the only way he could save Liam, and even the
only way Liam could be saved. People may have inflexible moral values, but
when it comes to someone's life, those values are questioned. The picture
Loach does of the kingdom in which money and terror reign is partly pessimistic:
one can have values when one has money to live. The bad thing is not what
Joe did to save Liam, but why he could not do anything else, and why in the
first place Liam had to give money back. Socialization is essential, because
characters badly need each other, but the insecurity of the suburbs gets in
the relations between people, thus endangering their safety. It certainly
has a cost.
The society depicted by Loach is an entity able to
work by itself, without the working class: instead of helping people to find
a job, it has a system of checking on them so as to make sure they don't work
"illegally". Isolated, men find it hard to fight back; some of them
say they suffer from feeling useless: Maya confesses her despair to Sam, and
tells him that she does not know what her future consists in; Tommy feels
terribly ashamed when her daughter gives him money. But the films suggest
that collective thinking and action can lead somewhere: the sign in the Bob's
father-in-law's office says: "Is there really a Labor alternative?",
inviting protagonists, but also viewers, to think it over. In this respect,
Loach likes to make movies which have a sense outside of characters' lives.
The sign with the political connotation in Raining Stones is very telling
of that because it reminds viewers that they are not watching a complete fiction,
but a piece of their own world. The documentary side of Loach's fictions-and
thanks to which he was first made known- helps to create the interaction effect
between what viewers see in the movie and what they know to be their day to
day reality. Whereas Hollywood movies do their best to make them forget this
reality and confront them with extra-ordinary stories, Ken Loach offers another
conception of cinema. His fictions are made to settle viewers in a reality
that is theirs: what they watch is meant to enable them to see what surrounds
them in a new perspective, more critical. Fictions are meant to create reactions
about social realities.
Loach conveys his vision of socialization as a mean
to be happy through the relations he films. He seems to be very interested
in familial relationships. With Family Life, he shows that, within
the family itself, societies have consequences because their norms prevent
people from having healthy and unprejudiced relationships. This is obvious
with the character of Janice's mother, who is obsessed with what is to be
done, or not. Here characters are not confronted with financial troubles;
they suffer from a narrow-minded and conservative way of thinking. On the
contrary, lack of money is at the center of Raining Stones' plot: it
clearly rules and divides Bob and Anne. Their conversations are monopolized
by money matters, and there is nothing else. According to Jenny Turner,[22]
this kind of nothingness between them is due to Julie Brown(Anne)'s amateurism,
and "Loach should have known how to put this right". This is not
really relevant, since the whole story is based on the consequences of unemployment
on a basic working class family: it affects everyone in the familial cell,
and everyone becomes obsessed by the lack of money: the film is about how
Bob is going to make it with the communion's dress. In this respect, the case
of Bob's friend Tommy (Ricky Tomlinson) is very interesting as well: he doesn't
have to buy a communion dress, but this doesn't prevent him from despair because
he feels he has lost his dignity, as he cannot afford to refuse the money
his daughter gives him-and it becomes even more meaningful when viewers know
where this money comes from. Not only do capitalist societies endanger workers,
but they also endanger their familial relationships. They make couples more
unstable. In this respect, Loach has done many films in which the relationships
between men and women are one of the element of the narrative. Thus, his movies
offer a wide range of masculine and feminine portraits, that help to convey
the vision of a changing society.
[15] Aristotle, Politics, New York : Oxford University Press,
1995:7
[16] Aristotle, Politics, (III, 6).
[17] Aristotle, Politics, p.12
[18] see in Karim Dridi, Citizen Ken Loach, prod Arte, 1995.
[19] Mike Leigh used the same pattern in his 1996 movie Secrets and
Lies.
[20] This is why icones are not found in Protestant churches, because prayers
do not worship images.
[21] For a complete study of perspectives in Cathy Come Home, see
Laurent Roth, Le zoom ou l'entrave des corps, in Images Documentaire,
1997, n.27.
[22] in Sight and Sound, October 1994, p.51
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