Ken Loach Overview

If Britain had a blacklist during the Thatcher era, Ken Loach was on it. Pound the pavement though he might, he couldn't persuade anyone to fund his films. His made-for-TV documentaries met with steep resistance -- in fact, his depiction of... [more]

If Britain had a blacklist during the Thatcher era, Ken Loach was on it. Pound the pavement though he might, he couldn't persuade anyone to fund his films. His made-for-TV documentaries met with steep resistance -- in fact, his depiction of the 1984 coal miners' strike was banned outright. Why? Loach had a reputation for "social-conscience realism" that made the "regime" pretty uncomfortable. Loach, who often collaborated with Tony Garnett, made a series of films in the '60s that spoke to the real-life problems of Britain's underclass. For example, his "Cathy Come Home" galvanized support for new legislation on homelessness. When he crossed over from documentary to drama, the same issues continued to occupy him. His break-out fictional work is "Kes" (1969), a story of an abused, working-class boy whose only ally is a wild bird that he gradually tames. Some view it as the best-ever depiction of the social reality of industrialized Northern England. Then the drought struck -- in the '70s and '80s, a denial of funding almost silenced Loach. Only through dogged persistence did he manage to reemerge in the '90s with a series of new projects that would match the quality of his earlier works. Could it be sweeter that his 1990 comeback (though the word seems trite in his case) won the Jury Prize at Cannes? "Hidden Agenda" is a murder mystery set in Belfast: the dead man's girlfriend and a local detective uncover a conspiracy that underscores Thatcher's rise to power and its devastating effects on Northern Ireland. In the spate of films that followed in the '90s -- "Riff-Raff," "Raining Stones," "Ladybird Ladybird," "Land and Freedom," and "Carla's Song" -- Loach continued to hammer home his political message with subjects ranging from Thatcher-era construction workers to the Spanish Civil War. The high point of this outpouring is "My Name is Joe" (1998), a painful love story between a recovering alcoholic and a health worker set in the Glasgow slums. Its intensity can leave viewers breathless. As Loach takes social realism into the new millennium, it's worth recalling that his documentary approach was never without its detractors: he has sparked heated debate over the blurring of fact and fiction that progressive realism sometimes entails. If Loach treats real-life subjects, is he obliged to stick to the truth in every detail? On the other hand, if film is an artistic medium, does an auteur have a right to imaginative invention? Loach's method attempts to answer these doubts. He shoots all his films in sequence, providing the cast with one page of script a day so that their response is immediate and spontaneous. Minimal use of music and employment of natural light give his scenes an artless feel. Editing is also kept to a minimum. (Characters have been known to walk through the woods for minutes on end.) The effect is so intimate that the audience may feel as if it is crouched in a van watching the characters through binoculars. Mixing the roles of artist and social critic, director with documenter, Loach is a master at locking disparate elements into a coherent whole. Clearly he presents reality, but though his own lens: "Of course, everybody is against unemployment, against poverty, against brutality in relationships. The difficulty is to have some indication, within the infrastructure of the film, about why that happens. Otherwise anybody can claim the film as their own. And you can make any kind of political theory." After 20 years of silence, Loach isn't about to leave his work open to just anybody's interpretation. [show less]