‘Everything is talked through’: Loach and writer Paul Laverty
‘Ken Loach is a national treasure’, observed the Irish Times on the occasion of the release of The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). ‘It just seems that the nation that produced him is not always keen to treasure him’.1 In many respects, this sums up the peculiar position that Loach occupies within English culture. On the one hand, he is probably the most distinguished English film-maker at work today, responsible for some of the most memorable British film and television productions of the last forty years ranging from Up the Junction (1965), Cathy Come Home (1966) and Kes (1969) through to Days of Hope (1975), Land and Freedom (1995) and Sweet Sixteen (2002). On the other hand, he has never become a member of the – political or film – establishment and has retained a certain ‘outsider’ status by virtue of his continuing capacity for making work that provokes controversy and arouses debate. This was particularly evident following the release of his film about the Irish War of Independence and the resulting Civil War, The Wind That Shakes the Barley which, partly due to its portrait of British troops in Ireland, prompted outrage in certain sections of the British press (and gave rise to a number of highly offensive personal attacks). This was despite the fact that – or maybe because of in some cases – the film had won the Palme d’Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and was in the process of gathering a substantial following across Europe (where the film not only did well in Ireland but also in France, Italy and Spain). Indeed as Chapter 7 reveals, the audiences for Loach’s films in mainland Europe are now substantially larger than they are in the UK.
It is not too difficult to explain why Loach is regarded with such mixed emotions in his own country. For since the mid-1960s, Loach has not only been one of England’s most active film-makers but also one of its most consistently political. Radicalised, like many of his generation, during the 1960s, he has remained committed to socialist politics throughout the ensuing decades, continuing to draw attention in his films to the shortcomings of contemporary economic and social arrangements while maintaining the possibility that there might be political alternatives. As a result, his film and television work has consistently sought to challenge prevailing political orthodoxies by giving vent to views and attitudes that are often discounted, or marginalised, within the mainstream media. This has not only made him unpopular with commentators of different political persuasions but has also led to objections that he is primarily a polemicist who places politics ahead of both ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’.
As a result, it has become a feature of certain kinds of writing on Loach to discount his politics and claim that, despite the ‘noise’ his politics creates, Loach should nonetheless be regarded as a great ‘humanist’ or ‘realist’ film-maker. While this may be a legitimate critical manoeuvre, it also seems to involve a degree of disregard for – and possibly a sense of superiority to – the ideas that have animated Loach’s work for so long. Certainly Loach himself has expressed continuing exasperation with critics who dwell on the ‘style and technique’ of his films while paying relatively little attention to their ‘subject-matter’.2 This does not mean, of course, that ‘style and technique’ lack importance but that, for Loach, they are integral to, not separate from, the view of the world that his films project. One of the aims of this book, therefore, is to attend to both the politics and aesthetics of Loach’s work and in so doing, to take stock of the ways in which Loach has sought, for over forty years, to employ film and television as a social and political tool. This means that the discussion that follows does not set out to provide either a straightforward biographical account of Loach’s life and career or a conventional directorial study of the recurring themes and stylistic traits to be detected in his work (even though elements of both these approaches will make an appearance).3 Rather, the book aims to offer a form of social history that locates Loach’s film and television productions in a range of political, institutional and artistic contexts and attempts to assess the political significance of his work in relation to these.
This also means that, while the focus of the study may be Loach’s work, it is not Loach alone. As Loach himself has readily acknowledged, film and television production is not a solitary activity but involves acts of collaboration. As his former producer, Tony Garnett, commented, when discussing their work together, ‘[f]ilm making is not like writing a novel, it is a social activity and if you look at the films we have been involved in it’s very difficult to ascribe the credit or blame that easily, in terms of one individual’.4 Indeed, partly for political reasons (a belief in collective working) and partly for creative reasons (the maintenance of continuity over a number of productions), Loach has consistently sought to develop regular working relationships with trusted partners. At the beginning of his career, his most important partnership was undoubtedly with Garnett who produced nearly all of his television and film work between 1965 and 1980. As Chapter 7 indicates, the break-up of the men’s partnership coincided with a degree of downturn in Loach’s fortunes and it was not until Loach established relationships with new producers – first Sally Hibbin and then Rebecca O’Brien – that his career properly revived.
Loach has also cultivated strong relationships with writers. He has described writing as ‘the most important act in the whole process of filmmaking’ and, although he rarely writes his own scripts, has consistently sought to ‘work side-by-side with the writer’.5 This process of working closely with writers began with his work with Nell Dunn (Up the Junction) and Jeremy Sandford (Cathy Come Home) but, as Chapter 4 reveals, it was his relationship with Jim Allen that proved to be one of the most enduring, beginning with The Big Flame (1969) and continuing until Land and Freedom. It was also Allen who invested Loach’s work with the strong political dimension that has remained a constant feature of his work ever since. During the 1960s, Loach also struck up a relationship with Barry Hines, who wrote Kes, The Price of Coal (1977), The Gamekeeper (1980) and Looks and Smiles (1981) and, during the 1990s, with Paul Laverty who has collaborated on nearly all of Loach’s films since Carla’s Song (1996). Pointing to the closeness of the working relationship between director and writer, Laverty has commented that ‘[t]he collaboration is total and everything is talked through’.6
‘Everything is talked through’: Loach and writer Paul Laverty
However, it is not only the producer and writer with whom Loach has developed strong relationships. He has also worked regularly with the same cameramen (Tony Imi, Chris Menges, Barry Ackroyd), the same editors (Roy Watts, Jonathan Morris), the same designers (Martin Johnson, Fergus Clegg) and the same composer (George Fenton). During the 1960s, he also employed a number of acting regulars (such as Bill Dean, Peter Kerrigan, Joey Kaye and Johnny Gee) though this has grown less common due to Loach’s concern to cast unknown or non-professional actors who can avoid bringing a pre-existing reputation or persona to their parts. In this respect Ricky Tomlinson (Riff-Raff [1991], Raining Stones [1993]) and Robert Carlyle (Riff-Raff, Carla’s Song) have been relatively unusual in being allowed to appear in more than one Loach film and, in these cases, it seems to be accounted for by the way in which their backgrounds and beliefs have successfully gelled with the social universe that Loach portrays. Given this emphasis upon building a team and working collaboratively, it is therefore appropriate that the ensuing discussion should avoid attributing sole responsibility to Loach for the production and ‘meaning’ of his films and aim to identify some of the ways in which others have contributed to the shaping of the work that has emerged.
Despite this, it would be fair to suggest that ‘the balance of power’ within Loach’s working relationships has changed over the course of his career. In the early days, it was Garnett who was responsible for initiating many of their projects and, in certain cases such as The Big Flame and In Two Minds (1967), Loach only became involved once the project was already underway.7 As Chapter 3 indicates, Garnett’s productions during this period were regarded as distinct from other BBC dramas with his name functioning as a guarantee of a certain kind and quality of television programming. In this respect, many of the Loach–Garnett productions became as much identified with Garnett as with Loach. However, as Loach’s own reputation became more firmly established, and he worked increasingly in the cinema, it has been his name that has come to assume the most prominence. Thus, while producers such as Sally Hibbin and Rebecca O’Brien have been crucial in enabling Loach’s career to continue successfully, they do not possess the ‘star’ status of Tony Garnett and have generally worked on behalf of Loach rather than setting up their ‘own’ productions. Loach’s changing status could also be said to have altered his relationship with writers. Whereas a writer such as Jim Allen would have been identified as the main ‘author’ of works such as The Big Flame and The Rank and File (1971), this has become less true of later films for which Loach has generally been regarded as the ‘auteur’ even though he has not written the script. As Rona Munro, the writer of Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), has observed, the film-making process may operate as ‘a collective because everyone’s given equal status’ but everyone, including the writer, is also ‘working as a collective to make a Ken Loach film’.8
The idea of ‘a Ken Loach film’ has, however, emerged over time and partly reflects Loach’s transition from television to cinema.9 Historically, television was generally perceived to be a writer’s, rather than a director’s, medium. According to Charles Barr, this was partly to do with the limited scope for directorial creativity permitted by electronic recording and it took an increase in the use of film in the production of television for the emergence of the ‘artist-director’ to occur.10 This is, of course, a point with particular significance for Loach. As this book suggests, both Loach and Garnett fought for the use of film in television drama and consistently rejected the idea that there was any ‘essential’ difference between producing work for television and cinema. This commitment to the use of film also meant that Loach became one of the first television directors to be perceived as possessing a distinctive directorial signature. As the television critic, Peter Black, commented, in his review of After a Lifetime (1971), Loach is ‘the only director using TV to have developed a recognisable visual style … perhaps because he doesn’t use TV, except as a means of distribution. He makes films.’11 As Chapter 4 points out, the perception of Loach as an ‘artist-director’ grew as a result of his making films for the cinema, such as Poor Cow (1967), Kes and Family Life (1971), which also provided him with sufficient kudos to carry on making work for television even though his work was recognised as likely to provoke controversy. Since the late 1980s, Loach has worked almost exclusively in cinema and, as Chapter 7 indicates, this has reinforced his status as an ‘auteur’ partly due to the way in which his films have increasingly circulated internationally as a form of ‘art cinema’ that depends upon the foregrounding of the role of the director. Thus while Loach himself has consistently claimed that he does not ‘subscribe to the auteur theory of film-making’ and that, when directing a film, he doesn’t ‘try to be the author’, the circumstances in which his films are made and shown have increasingly encouraged a reading of his work in precisely these terms.12
This has, however, rarely led to a reading of Loach’s work as a ‘personal cinema’ in the sense of being autobiographical or reflecting personal experiences and obsessions.13 Rather, the emphasis within critical writing has been Loach’s association with forms of film-making indebted to realism, naturalism and documentary. Thus, as early as 1969, the television critic Stewart Lane suggested, in a review of The Big Flame, that Loach’s ‘down-tempo, “voices-over” style of location film’ could already be seen to constitute ‘a uniquely personal approach’.14 There can, of course, be little doubt that the guiding impulse throughout much of Loach’s work has been a pursuit of ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘authenticity’ in the telling of stories about ‘ordinary people’. As a result, it is the terms ‘realist’, ‘naturalist’ or ‘documentary drama’ that have most commonly been used to describe his work. However, these are all terms that are notoriously difficult to pin down and it is not my intention to begin by proposing firm definitions of them. Rather, what the book sets out to do is to examine how the stylistic features of Loach’s work have changed over time and investigate the ways in which particular kinds of label have come to be applied to them. From this perspective, it can be seen how terms such as ‘naturalism’ and ‘documentary drama’ do not possess a fixed or unchanging meaning but have been employed in different ways and at different times by different writers. In the same way, although Loach’s ‘realism’ has tended to be discussed as a relatively homogeneous set of practices, the book also indicates the ways in which Loach’s work has altered over time and how some of it, especially in the early years, could hardly be said to be ‘realist’ at all.
As the book also makes clear, Loach’s pursuit of particular forms of film and television ‘realism’ has not only generated considerable debate regarding its aesthetic merits but its political effects as well. Thus, while Loach may sometimes give the impression that he regards all talk of ‘style and technique’ as a cinephiliac indulgence, his film-making approach has also generated considerable debate concerning the kind of politics that his work may be seen to be delivering. This debate gained particular currency in the 1970s when the value of realism as a method of political film-making became the subject of an especially intense critique. As this book indicates, however, this debate tended to remain at the level of form and largely ignored the specific historical, political and institutional contexts in which ‘realist texts’ operated. In revisiting some of this terrain, therefore, the book is concerned to show how Loach’s work should not be assessed simply in terms of its formal features alone but also in relation to the circumstances in which it was both made and shown.
This is, of course, another reason why the book is not solely about Loach. For in order to assess some of the political resonance of his work, it has been necessary to offer accounts of how his work has responded to the social situation of the time and operated within particular political and institutional contexts. From this perspective, work for television – such as The Big Flame and Days of Hope – that may have been dismissed by some writers for its formal timidity may also be seen to have been operating at the limits of what was then politically and institutionally acceptable. In this respect, the book also suggests that, while Loach may have broken down some of the distinctions between film and television in his film-making approach, the institutional arrangements governing the funding and distribution of film and television have also made a difference to the kind of political reverberation that his work has been able to achieve.
Accordingly, the book may be seen to provide a loosely chronological account of Loach’s career, bringing together a discussion of social contexts, institutional settings, formal strategies and political ideas. Given the huge range of Loach’s work, it has not been possible to consider all of his films and television productions in the same detail. This means that there has been a degree of concentration on some of Loach’s most important work (either aesthetically or politically) along with other work that has received less attention than might have been appropriate (some of the early television work, for example). In this respect, the book does not make any assumption that Loach’s work for the cinema is superior, or more worthy of attention, than his work for television. This is partly because it would be an impossible case to sustain (who could possibly dispute, for example, the importance and continuing resonance of either Up the Junction or Cathy Come Home) and partly because Loach’s move from television to cinema has involved both gains and losses which the book itself considers. Although I have tried to avoid an overtly evaluative approach to Loach’s work, preferring to discuss how it may be understood in relation to the social, political and artistic currents of the time, the book does, nonetheless, devote considerable space to Loach’s television work precisely because of the potent mix of artistic experiment, political radicalism and public controversy with which it was associated (and which, arguably, has not been reproduced in quite the same way in Loach’s later cinema career).
In terms of actual structure, the book is laid out as follows. Chapter 1 deals with Loach’s entry into television and his association with the growing tide of ‘anti-naturalism’ within television drama. By looking at Diary of Young Man (1964) and The End of Arthur’s Marriage (1965), the chapter discusses the way in which Loach’s early work seeks to go beyond the theatricalism of conventional television drama and to discover new ways of telling a story and exploring the contemporary world. Chapter 2 focuses on Loach’s association with a new culture of ‘permissiveness’ that seeks to extend the social discourses of television by addressing contemporary topics such as capital punishment and abortion. This chapter looks at the launch of ‘The Wednesday Play’, Loach’s collaborations with the writer James O’Connor and the controversy surrounding his early cause célèbre, Up the Junction. Chapter 3 builds on the preceding chapter by considering Loach’s increasing use of film and the adoption of techniques associated with documentary. This involves a discussion of one of Loach’s most famous works, Cathy Come Home, but also includes an assessment of the ‘documentary drama’ debate in the light of Loach’s later work, In Two Minds and The Golden Vision (1968). Chapter 4 considers Loach’s growing politicisation, his early work with Jim Allen and the political controversies that this work generated. In so doing, it indicates how the arguments concerning the legitimacy of mixing drama and documentary began to shift ground and became much more concerned with the propriety of using drama for political purposes and the challenge that this posed to the BBC’s supposed commitment to ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’.
The following chapter then considers Loach’s move into feature-film-making. It also indicates how, in the case of Kes, this involved a degree of rethinking of Loach’s approach to film-making and a paring down of the artistic devices that he had previously employed. It also suggests how the climate of the British film industry was relatively inhospitable to the kind of work that he was seeking to make and the difficulties in securing distribution that resulted. Chapter 6 considers Loach’s return to television and the circumstances surrounding his four-part series, Days of Hope. It looks at the responses of both the press and academic critics and examines the controversy that the series generated inside the BBC where it was felt that the organisation’s ‘liberalism’ was being severely tested. Chapter 7 deals with Loach’s lean years during the 1980s and his subsequent return to feature-film-making. It describes the new economic landscape surrounding British film-making and indicates how Loach became increasingly dependent upon international funding and distribution for the maintenance of his career and critical standing. Chapters 8 and 9 then look at the films that emerged out of this new situation. Chapter 8 focuses on the changing representations of the working class to be found in Loach’s films since the 1990s while Chapter 9 examines two of his historical films (Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes the Barley) that set out to suggest how the politics of the present might have turned out differently. As such the book is not intended to be the ‘last word’ on Loach but rather a contribution to the understanding of a body of work that has been remarkable not only for its consistency but also for its continuing capacity to divide opinion and provoke strong – critical and political – reactions.
1.‘Direct Action’, Irish Times (‘The Ticket’), 9 June 2006, p. 2.
2.Daily Telegraph, 17 September 2004, p. 19.
3.For a solid factual account of Loach’s life, see Anthony Hayward, Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). For a critical assessment of ‘the thematic and stylistic consistencies’ in Loach’s work, see Jacob Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People (London: Wallflower Press, 2002).
4.‘Tony Garnett’, Afterimage no. 1, 1970, n.p.
5.John Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, Sources of Inspiration Lecture, 30 March 2000, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Sources of Inspiration Lectures Documentation (Berlin: Sources 2, 2001), p. 4; John Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, in George McKnight (ed.), Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), p. 164. It might be said, however, that Loach has tended to work best with writers who are prepared to let him collaborate from the start and do not mind if particular words are lost in the realisation of the script. More literary collaborators – such as David Mercer (In Two Minds) and Trevor Griffiths (Fatherland) – have found working with Loach less easy.
6.Sunday Times, 14 June 2009, p. 11.
7.Indeed, Garnett himself explained his enthusiasm for the role of producer in television in terms of the power which it provided: ‘[t]he way television is run, rightly or wrongly … the important decisions are the producer decisions … . A director has no more power than an actor because if you are a producer in television, perhaps because you have freelance directors to choose from, for any piece of work you can cast directors … . With a choice of directors, you can more or less decide the “how” question in advance, because you know that one director will do it one way and someone else will do it another’ (‘Tony Garnett’, Afterimage no. 1, 1970, n.p.).
8.Rona Munro in ‘“Whose Stories You Tell”: Writing “Ken Loach”’ (John Tulloch in conversation with Rona Munro), in Jonathan Bignell (ed.), Writing and Cinema (Harlow: Longman, 1999), p. 16. Laverty has also argued that although ‘you’ll never see “A Ken Loach Film” on a poster … [d]irectors and actors are all people are really interested in’ (Sunday Times, 14 June 2009, p. 11).
9.In fact, the name ‘Ken Loach’ is not used on credits until the late 1980s when it is adopted by The View from the Woodpile (1989) and Hidden Agenda (1990). Prior to this, Loach’s name appears as ‘Kenneth Loach’.
10.‘Approaching Television’, Movie no. 20, 1975, p. 27. Barr is partly responding to Kenneth Tynan’s query in the Observer in 1968 concerning the relative absence of ‘artist-directors’ in television compared with cinema.
11.Peter Black, Daily Mail, 19 July 1971.
12.Graham Fuller (ed.), Loach on Loach (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 18.
13.Born into a working-class family, Loach was, however, one of a number of ‘scholarship boys’ who entered television in the 1960s and helped to challenge its prevailing ethos. See John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 61–2.
14.Morning Star, 20 February 1969.