Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television

From Up the Junction onwards, the direction of Loach’s work with Tony Garnett during the 1960s was to move away from the studio play in the direction of film, making use of lightweight 16mm cameras previously employed in news and current affairs. In this respect, Loach’s work for the BBC not only involved a degree of disrespect for the traditional boundaries separating drama and documentary but also between cinema and television. Indeed, although Cathy Come Home was conceived as a television play, this did not prevent Tony Garnett from seeking to obtain a cinema release for the programme in the wake of its great success. The owners of the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, London, showed interest but ultimately decided not to proceed on the grounds that it was felt that the film did not make ‘the same impact on the screen as it did on television’ and that the play’s ‘mixture of drama and documentary, and the use of recorded voices, comes over much more naturally on television than in the cinema’.³¹⁶ This did not deter Garnett, however, who subsequently negotiated with Contemporary Films to screen Jack Gold’s The Lump and Loach’s In Two Minds (which it was suggested was ‘the kind of film that would be more attractive to the Paris Pullman potential audience than to a television audience’).³¹⁷Much to Garnett’s frustration, however, this was opposed by the BBC management who insisted that the Corporation’s policy was against ‘setting up in competition with the film industry on their own ground’.³¹⁸

Given this enthusiasm for shooting on film, and for showing television work in cinemas if possible, it is hardly surprising that Loach and Garnett should want to turn to feature-film-making in due course. According to Garnett, it was potentially ‘more satisfying to work in cinema’: ‘[y]ou have longer to do it, more money to spend on the film, and you’re working on a bigger canvas’.³¹⁹ However, it was also the case that this additional time and money came at a certain price. For all the problems that Loach and Garnett might have experienced at the hands of BBC management, they nonetheless recognised the organisation’s overall ‘liberalism’ and the relative freedom that this gave them to pursue controversial subject-matter. Given the economics of public-service television, this also included the freedom to undertake work that was not under an obligation to turn a profit. In the case of cinema, however, the economic pressures were very different. As Loach observes, for commercial cinema, film constitutes a ‘commodity’ and what matters is ‘whether the film is going to make money or not’.³²⁰ In moving towards feature production, therefore, Loach was forced to negotiate with a set of ‘commercial’ pressures of a kind that he had not previously encountered. As a result, he found the making of his first film feature, Poor Cow, a ‘fairly nightmarish experience’ and one which he came to regret, particularly as the project did not involve Garnett.³²¹

Poor Cow (1967) was based on the novel by Nell Dunn who was keen for it to be turned into a cinema film. Her agent was in negotiation with the independent producer Joseph Janni who had achieved recent success with the former television director John Schlesinger, with whom he had made A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar (1963). Janni was in a position to raise funding from the distribution company Anglo-Amalgamated (with additional finance from the government-backed National Film Finance Corporation) and the film went ahead on this basis. For Loach, this represented a significant change in scale. The direct costs of Cathy Come Home and In Two Minds had been just under £15,000 and £12,000 respectively.³²² Although these figures (in line with television practice) do not include indirect costs, it was still a huge leap to feature-film production given that the budget for Poor Cow was an estimated £210,000. This difference was also reflected in the shooting schedule. Loach had been used to around three weeks of shooting on his television productions. The schedule for Poor Cow, in comparison, ran to eight weeks and actual shooting went on longer (partly due to Loach’s inexperience and partly due to the difficulties he faced working with a crew drawn from a mix of both film and television backgrounds).³²³ Despite these differences, Poor Cow is, nevertheless, easily recognisable as the work of Loach, adopting and developing many of the devices that he had previously employed in his television plays.

In contrast to Up the Junction, however, the film is more clearly focused on a single character Joy (Carol White), a young East Ender who gives birth to her son Jonny at the film’s start. Her husband, Tom (John Bindon), is arrested after which Joy embarks upon a relationship with one of his criminal associates, Dave (Terence Stamp). When he too ends up in prison, Joy pursues a number of fleeting relationships before getting back together with Tom on his release. The plot of the film is, however, loose and episodic (to the extent that the order of events in the original script has been changed without any noticeable damage to the film’s narrative continuity) and involves shifts from apparently inconsequential occurrences (such as Jonny ruining a hairpiece) to events of major narrative significance (such as Dave’s trial and imprisonment). Thus, while the ending of the film involves a degree of narrative resolution (Joy’s temporary reconciliation to an unhappy marriage for the sake of her son), there is also a sense of life continuing to follow the relatively arbitrary course that it has taken up until this point. Hence, the film concludes with Joy talking directly to camera, answering questions from an unseen (and unidentified) interviewer about what the future might hold rather than with any straightforward tying-up of narrative loose ends. As Roger Bromley suggests, in relation to one of Loach’s later films, the film does not so much ‘end’ as ‘pause’, inviting the spectator to reflect upon what has happened and to consider what might occur next.³²⁴ The episodic structure of the film, combined with the use of titles and songs as a means of ironic commentary, indicates Loach’s continuing indebtedness to Brechtian ideas (as partly mediated through Godard). However, as in his earlier work, these formally self-conscious devices are combined with techniques borrowed from documentary and newsreel.

Loach directs Carol White and Terence Stamp in Poor Cow

This is particularly evident in the way in which the film seeks to punctuate the narrative with descriptive shots of people and places indicative of the social and physical environment that the characters occupy. This occurs throughout the film, beginning with cuts away from Joy to passersby on the street and other customers in the café following her discharge from the hospital. The same strategy is employed in the pub sequences in which, for example, the camera cuts away from a conversation between Joy and a male admirer (the bread-delivery man) to a series of close-ups of unidentified drinkers. It is also used extensively in the seaside sequence which is primarily descriptive in character (serving little narrative function other than to inform the audience, via a voiceover, of Tom’s impending release from prison) and consists of an extended montage of shots of holidaymakers intercut with those of Joy and Jonny. As in Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, these devices are employed to place the characters’ actions in a social and cultural context and to link their particular predicaments to a shared (working-class) condition. In so doing, the film also sets out, like Up the Junction and Cathy before it, to show how the ‘other’ England lives and to cast doubt on the actuality, and extensiveness, of the ‘affluent society’.

Robert Murphy, for example, includes the film in a list of ‘anti-Swinging London films’ and suggests how the film highlights ‘the poverty, the stunted lives, the lack of opportunity’ that continue to characterise working-class life despite ‘the rocketing fortunes of a handful of working-class photographers and footballers, actors and models’.³²⁵ Thus, while Joy dreams of a better life for herself, she is also realistic about her limited prospects. ‘Whoever heard of girls like me making it?’, she asks towards the film’s end. As in Up the Junction, this tension between desire and actuality is rendered concrete through the use of contemporary pop music (consisting of recent hits and new compositions by the pop singer Donovan). While these songs suggest some of the cultural vitality of the period (and, in some cases, appear to possess an emotional resonance for Joy), they are also used to comment upon the action and highlight some of the discrepancies between the idealised world celebrated in popular culture and the grim realities of Joy’s direct experience. In some cases, the song has been specially written in order to offer its own overt commentary upon the narrative action. This is the case with ‘Be Not Too Hard’, an original song written by Christopher Logue (who had previously employed songs to similar effect in The End of Arthur’s Marriage) and set to music by Donovan. Intercut with shots of Jonny’s birth, and Joy’s subsequent return home, at the beginning of the film, the song explicitly counsels against judgement of the film’s characters for whom ‘life is short’ and ‘nothing is given’. In other cases, the soundtrack consists of what are, in effect, ‘found’ pop songs snatched from the contemporary pop charts. This is the case in a sequence involving Joy, Jonny and Aunt Emm (Queenie Watts), with whom Joy stays following Tom’s arrest. Aunt Emm is preparing to go out for the evening (getting dressed, applying eyelashes, brushing her hair) while Joy remains stuck at home with Jonny (washing clothes on the stove, reading the paper and changing Jonny’s nappy). These apparently insignificant actions are observed through a complicated montage involving temporal ellipses and an elaborate use of sound that alternates between the women’s conversation, the comments of a radio DJ (‘not a bad outlook at all’) and snippets of contemporary pop songs (such as ‘Peek-A-Boo’ by The New Vaudeville Band and ‘Daydream’ by The Lovin’ Spoonful). In this way the lyrics of the songs (‘What a day for a daydream’, ‘you’re so fancy and free’, ‘something’s coming along’) not only embody the cheerful stoicism that characterises Joy’s responses to the events that befall her but also establish a contrast between the ‘fantasy’ world of idealised relationships celebrated in popular culture and the social and economic constrictions that she confronts in everyday life.³²⁶

However, while the strategy of exposing the ‘underbelly’ of ‘Swinging London’ in this way may be apparent, there are also certain tensions in the way in which it is achieved. As in Loach’s programmes with Jimmy O’Connor, there is a strong emphasis upon criminality as a defining aspect of working-class culture (and, indeed, society more generally in which, according to Tom, ‘everybody’s bent’). This emphasis upon crime not only diverts attention away from the ‘respectable’ working class, and the realities of wage-labour, but also links the misfortunes that befall Joy to the criminal proclivities of the men around her rather than the inequalities and social disadvantages generated by the class system. And although the film follows Up the Junction and Cathy in placing emphasis upon the physical environment in which the action occurs, the film’s visual portrayal of this environment is qualitatively different from the preceding television work. Loach was experienced in shooting in black and white, using lightweight, 16mm cameras. Although he had also wanted to film Poor Cow in black and white, commercial considerations dictated that he shoot on 35mm and in colour (which had by then become the norm for feature-film production). Loach had also hoped to employ Tony Imi, his cameraman on Up the Junction, Cathy and In Two Minds, but was teamed up with the cinematographer, Brian Probyn, who lacked familiarity with Loach’s methods. Thus, while the film replicates many of the aesthetic strategies employed in Up the Junction and Cathy, the use of a new cameraman, working with heavier equipment and shooting on colour stock, appears to have had the effect of eliminating some of the ‘rough-and-ready’ qualities that were a feature of the earlier TV work. The camerawork is generally steadier (with only limited recourse to hand-held material), shots are more obviously lit and composed and the photography in general looks cleaner and crisper. As a result, a number of reviewers complained that the photographic style did not entirely gel with the film’s ‘low-life’ subject-matter. One critic, for example, accused the Eastman Color photography of possessing ‘a saccharin quality’ while another claimed that it suffused the material in ‘a cheery glow of lyricism’ suggestive of ‘Zola in a pop wrapper’.³²⁷ Even Loach himself aired doubts about what he had achieved, admitting how difficult it had been to ‘stop colour being pretty’.³²⁸ The apparent tension between style and content that results may be seen, for example, in the sequence in which Joy goes back with Dave to his flat. The sequence is reminiscent of the tenement-block sequence in Cathy Come Home and consists of a short series of shots showing the common courtyard (strewn with washing lines) followed by Joy, Dave and Jonny climbing the stairwell (with the courtyard visible behind them). As in the earlier work, these shots prolong the basic narrative action as a means of associating characters with a social and physical environment and of documenting the cramped and unpleasant conditions in which they live. On the other hand, the artful compositions (the characters viewed through an arch on their arrival) and the stylised use of colour (the primary colours of the clothes set against a uniformly grey background) involved in portraying this environment also reveal a degree of aestheticism that is missing from the similar sequence in Cathy.³²⁹

To some extent, this element of stylisation may be understood in terms of another kind of tension operating within the film: not so much between visual style and content as between a broadly ‘documentary’ impulse to expose social conditions and a more ‘psychologising’ impulse (characteristic of the ‘art film’) to give outward expression to characters’ inner mental states. Like Cathy, the film employs a voiceover in which Joy describes her thoughts and feelings (rather than acting as a conventional narrator recounting events that have happened). As in Cathy, the precise status of these voiceovers is uncertain, particularly when they are not motivated by the letters that she is writing to Dave. While her comments could be recorded interview material (an impression reinforced by the appearance of Joy as an actual interviewee at the film’s end), they do not appear to be so at the time they are heard and are not linked, as in Cathy, to recordings of other unspecified voices. Given the pre-eminent role of Joy within the film, and the element of ‘subjectivisation’ of the narrative that her voiceovers (and the appearance of first-person titles) introduce, the space that she occupies comes to assume qualities that are ‘psychological’ as much as ‘sociological’. This does not result from the use of specifically ‘subjective’ camera techniques but rather the ‘expressiveness’ of the visual techniques. This is particularly evident at times of emotional crisis. Thus, when Joy returns to Dave’s flat, following his imprisonment, the film employs a striking overhead shot that shows Joy and Jonny walking through the courtyard to the accompaniment of Donovan’s song ‘Poor Love’. Similarly, when Joy leaves the house after Tom has hit her, and is forced to reflect upon her current situation, various shots are composed in a way that give outward expression to her inner turmoil (positioning her at the edge of the frame or behind rails and pillars).³³⁰ In this respect, the mise en scène of the film may be seen to oscillate between ‘objective’ observation and ‘subjective’ expressiveness in a way that combines a critique of ‘Swinging London’ cinema (exposing the grim underbelly of working-class conditions) with an element of complicity with it (by adopting a number of its stylistic tropes).

Certainly the perception of the film as ‘swinging’ was reinforced by its sexual content. As has been seen, the explicit sexual subject-matter of Up the Junction provoked considerable controversy at the time of its transmission and there can be little doubt that the commercial attractiveness of Poor Cow was partly the result of the film’s focus on a central character who so clearly derives pleasure from sex (with a variety of partners). Like Up the Junction, the film generally refuses to adopt a moral stance towards Joy’s sexual activities and, despite her temporary separation from Jonny near the film’s end, the character is not ‘punished’ for her sexual transgressions. Indeed, for some critics it was a perceived fault of the film that there was not, in fact, more condemnation of the character’s shortcomings.³³¹ The film, however, does not straightforwardly celebrate the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and also suggests the exploitative side of a sexualised culture (and, possibly, following Godard, the reliance of capitalism more generally upon prostitution, both literally and metaphorically). In one of the film’s most famous sequences, Joy accompanies Beryl (Kate Williams) to a seedy photographers’ club where she is encouraged to adopt a number of revealing poses for the group of assembled men (one of whom admits to not even having film in his camera). The views of the men leering at the women highlight the unappealing character of the male voyeur and partly disrupt (for the cinema spectator) the pleasures conventionally associated with looking at the female body. At the same time, however, the film itself partly depends on the eroticisation of the working-class woman whose story is presented primarily in terms of sexual adventure. It has, of course, been common for working-class realism to become associated with increasing sexual explicitness. In this respect, the social observation of the working class may be seen to be linked not simply to an impulse to expose social ills but also to a (middle-class) fascination with the (often imagined) ‘exotic’ sexualities of the ‘lower orders’. In the case of Poor Cow, it is evident that the central character is not so much a leader of the ‘sexual revolution’ (or proto-feminist as some have suggested) as an uneducated ‘primitive’ who is more governed by – than in command of – her own drives and impulses.³³² In this regard, the film may succeed in avoiding the middle-class moralising commonly associated with the observation of working-class subjects while nonetheless subjecting the central female character to an element of middle-class voyeurism (that no doubt contributed to the film’s popularity).

‘The eroticisation of the working-class woman’: Carol White in Poor Cow

Loach himself was not convinced that he had made a success of the film and subsequently condemned it for its ‘modishness’.³³³ So, while the film did well at the UK box office (and was sold to US distributors for more than its negative cost), the film did not represent a route that Loach wished to follow and he subsequently severed his relationship with Janni.³³⁴ This allowed him to reunite with Garnett with whom he went on to make more films for the BBC before embarking upon the feature that would set the template for much of what was to follow.

As previously noted, Garnett had departed the BBC in 1968 to establish his own production company, Kestrel Films, along with Clive Goodwin and Irving Teitelbaum. The company (and, subsequently, its sister company Kestrel Productions, which signed a TV production deal with London Weekend Television) took its name from its first production, Kes (1969), based on Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) (the title of which refers to the feudal ranking of hunting-birds whereby knaves (or male servants) were only permitted to hunt with kestrels). The origins of the project, however, may be traced back to the BBC when Garnett was a still a ‘Wednesday Play’ producer. Garnett had read Barry Hines’s first novel The Blinder (1966), about a young working-class footballer, and had sought to commission a screenplay from him. Hines, however, declined the commission on the basis that he was working on a new novel. This became A Kestrel for a Knave, which Hines duly sent to Garnett in manuscript form. Garnett and Loach were both keen to adapt it for the screen and Garnett set about raising finance. He initially secured the backing of National General Corporation, a US distributor branching into film production, but the company subsequently got cold feet and withdrew on the grounds that the project was likely to cost too much.³³⁵ The film was then rescued by the intervention of director Tony Richardson who succeeded in getting the Hollywood major, United Artists, to finance it by cross-collateralising it with his own production, Laughter in the Dark (1969).³³⁶ As a result of Richardson’s involvement, the film ended up being credited as a Woodfall Film. Woodfall was, of course, the company that Richardson and the playwright John Osborne had set up in the 1950s that had been responsible for many of the working-class films associated with the British ‘new wave’ of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). So, while the company’s actual involvement in the production of Kes may not have extended much beyond Richardson’s timely intervention, it does, nonetheless, link the film to an important tradition of British social realism.

A new production company: Tony Garnett produces Kes for Kestrel Films

Viewed from this perspective, Kes may be seen to demonstrate both a degree of continuity with these earlier films but also a number of differences. The British ‘new wave’ films constituted an important landmark in the cinematic representation of the working class, caught at a key moment of economic and social change. In particular, the films reveal an anxiety about the demise of the ‘traditional’ working class, associated with work, community and an attachment to place, in the face of the ‘affluence’ associated with consumerism, mass culture and suburbanisation. Insofar as these changes are also associated with a certain ‘feminisation’ of the working class, so these films also extend a degree of sympathy towards the virile, working-class male who endeavours to resist the pressures towards embourgeoisement and social conformity.³³⁷ In the case of Kes, however, there is little sense of the ‘affluence’ (or imminent ‘embourgeoisification’) to be found in the ‘new wave’ films and the film presents a much harsher view of the economic and cultural disadvantages associated with working-class life. The film is set in a northern mining town which possesses a relatively new housing estate and school. These do not appear, however, to have delivered much by way of social change. As the school headmaster, Mr Gryce (Bob Bowes) complains to the assembled boys in his office ‘things are no better now than they were’ when the school opened. The film itself focuses on the young boy Billy (David Bradley) who is set to leave school but for whom life carries few prospects. Although his brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher) is employed as a miner, Billy is determined not to follow in his footsteps. However, poorly educated, and branded a failure by the majority of his teachers, he is ill equipped to pursue alternatives so that, even should he succeed in avoiding the mines, his future is destined to remain one of dead-end manual labour. As Garnett has observed, the film’s purpose was to describe and indict the country’s ‘terrible education system’ that simply teaches the majority of kids ‘the bare necessities’ before throwing them ‘onto the labour market’.³³⁸

In this respect, Billy himself possesses the status of a representative ‘victim’ familiar from Loach’s previous work, particularly young Scimpy in The Coming Out Party (one of a number of children in Loach’s work who are shown to suffer at the hands of the adult world). He is not, however, as Barry Hines indicates, an entirely ‘blameless character’ given his proclivity for petty thievery (shown stealing, at different times, from the newsagent, the milkman and a bookshop).³³⁹ Nevertheless, despite the use, in publicity, of a photograph of Billy delivering a ‘V’ sign (an image not actually to be found in the film itself), Billy is less an active rebel, cocking a snoop at authority, than a pragmatist, surviving the best he can in a hostile world. In particular, he has to learn to cope with a difficult family situation in which he is subject to the bullying of his brother, Jud, and the neglect of his mother (Lynne Perrie). Given the (unexplained) absence of Billy’s father, there are some echoes here of the ‘new wave’ films in which the perceived changes to the working class are associated with the decline in the status of the father.³⁴⁰However, in Kes, there is no nostalgia for the masculine culture of the traditional working class and no heroisation of ‘hard’ manual labour. Indeed, the culture of masculinity, and the bullying that accompanies it, might be said to be one of the least attractive features of the world that the film portrays (extending through virtually all of the male characters from teachers to schoolboys). As a result, the young working-class male, Jud, possesses none of the charismatic swagger that characterised Arthur (Albert Finney) in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and he is portrayed as mean, small-minded and violent, responsible not only for tormenting Billy but also for killing his kestrel in an act of spite at the film’s end. However, while both Loach and Hines felt they may have made Jud (and, indeed, Mrs Casper) too unsympathetic, Jud is not portrayed as a straightforward villain.³⁴¹ For while Jud may be Billy’s victimiser, he is himself the victim of economic and cultural disadvantage (rather than, as in a film such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the standard-bearer for the ‘affluent worker’). In a perceptive review at the time of the film’s first London screening, Paul Barker drew attention to how the film uses images of imprisonment to suggest how the two brothers are, in their different ways, ‘caged’ and, how on leaving school, Jud had merely ‘swapped one cage for another’ (a link visually suggested by the ‘cage’ in which Jud, and his fellow miners, disappear underground).³⁴² Thus, while it may be the case (as Billy remarks) that Jud is ‘cock o’ t’estate’, this does not disguise his lack of real economic and social power.

It is also a feature of many of the ‘new wave’ films that the central (male) character aspires to rise above – or ‘escape’ – from the constrictions of his economic and cultural environment. In Kes, Billy achieves a degree of ‘escape’ from his social situation through his passion for the kestrel which he teaches himself to train and whose flight becomes an emblem of Billy’s own desire for autonomy and transcendence. In this respect, Billy demonstrates that, despite the low expectations of those around him, he is not merely ‘fodder for the mass media’ (as his headmaster would have it) but possesses his own distinctive talents. It is his mother who muses at one stage whether Billy might have made more of himself had he been ‘brought up in a different environment’ and had benefited from ‘a better education’. This is, of course, the thesis of the film: that under a different set-up Billy (and others like him) would be more likely to flourish. Under the present system, however, the talents of the ‘mass’ remain undiscovered and Billy’s triumph over the cruel actualities of the world around him proves short-lived (when Jud kills the kestrel in revenge for Billy’s failure to place a winning bet). Garnett recalls how, in raising finance for the film, they encountered pressures to make the film’s ending more positive, such as having Billy – with the help of his teacher – obtain a job in a zoo. As Garnett observes, however, this would have been to betray the film’s point of view, which was concerned to raise questions about ‘the system’ rather than individuals.³⁴³ In this regard, the film explicitly departs from the convention of individual escape, found in earlier ‘new wave’ films, in order to emphasise the systemic aspects of economic and social disadvantage. Thus, while, for the film, Billy may be seen to possess special talents, this does not make him exceptional so much as typical of the many others who suffer from a similar lack of opportunity.

Caged: Billy (David Bradley) in Kes

As with themes, the stylistic features of the film also reveal a mix of continuity with, and difference from, Loach’s earlier works. As in the case of Poor Cow, Loach was reluctant to film in colour but was obliged to bow to economic necessity. However, as Garnett recalls, he and Loach were so concerned that the film should not look too picturesque that they ‘preflashed all the stock to desaturate and take some of those colours out’.³⁴⁴ This did not prevent critics, however, from detecting a new ‘lyricism’ and ‘poetic strain’ in Loach’s work. Given the overall bleakness of the film, this may appear odd but derives mainly from the film’s use of rural imagery as a contrast to the air of oppressiveness hanging over the industrial town. Although it is common in ‘new wave’ films for characters to escape (if only temporarily) to the country, the novelty of the film is the way in which the worlds of industry and nature exist in such close proximity. In a scene initially suggestive of rural tranquillity, for example, Jud is shown walking through the sun-bathed countryside. The shot that follows, however, reveals that Jud is actually on his way to work at the coalpit. In this context, the world of nature does not signify an alternative to, or ‘escape’ from, the world of work and industry but rather the very location in which such mundane, everyday activities are undertaken. Earlier in the film, Billy takes time off from his paper round to read a copy of ‘The Dandy’ (and keep up with the adventures of the cartoon character Desperate Dan). Although seated on a grassy hillside, a cut to behind Billy re-orients our perspective on the scene to reveal the factories and smoking chimneys below. It is, of course, common for characters in ‘new wave’ films to appear in locations in which they are shown, albeit temporarily, to ‘rise above’ the city (and the ‘alienation’ with which it is associated). While the shot, in Kes, is clearly indebted to such aerial views, and the intimations of transcendence that they offer, it also plays a role in undercutting the ‘romantic’ strain in the film’s treatment of the countryside and in reminding viewers of the industrial realities that continue to impose upon the characters’ lives (even on those occasions when they might appear to have ‘escaped’ them).

However, although the film retains the strong element of social critique to be found in Loach’s earlier work, there are also clear shifts in cinematic style. Loach has described his increasing dissatisfaction with ‘the go-in-and-grab-it type of filmmaking’ which he associated with productions such as Cathy Come Home and the element of ‘modishness’ that he felt marred Poor Cow. In Kes, therefore, he sought to move on from what he increasingly regarded as an overly ‘exploitative cinema style’ in the direction of a more ‘sympathetic way of looking at the subject’.³⁴⁵ In this regard, Kes may be seen to mark the point at which Loach begins to shed – or at least to employ more sparingly – many of the more self-conscious devices that had previously been a feature of his work. This is apparent, for example, in the film’s reduced use of voiceovers, pop songs and ‘descriptive’ montage compared to previous films. Voiceovers had, of course, been employed in a number of ways in Loach’s work since Diary of a Young Man: as a mode of narration, as a form of inner monologue and, through the inclusion of anonymous speech on the soundtrack, as a simulation of documentary. Although Loach had been influenced by Troy Kennedy Martin who had looked to voiceovers (particularly in the form of first-person narration) as an escape from the ‘theatricalism or ‘naturalism’ of television drama, it is evident that Loach was coming to the view that the voiceover itself constituted an ‘artificial’ device.³⁴⁶ This means that there is only one voiceover in Kes when Billy describes his method of training the kestrel. This begins in the first-person (‘Three good meals a day I’ll give him for a fortnight’) but then takes the form of Billy apparently reading from the book on falconry that he had previously stolen. In this way, the voiceover provides a degree of narrative exposition while simultaneously demonstrating Billy’s determination to read, and to learn, when he is inspired to do so. However, as in Poor Cow, the voiceover possesses an unclear ontological status and is short on ‘realistic’ motivation. It is also associated with a cinematic vocabulary of ‘subjectivity’ that Loach’s film-making style is increasingly seeking to avoid. Indeed, Hines’s original novel had ended with Billy breaking into a disused cinema where he had conceived a fantasy of himself as a larger-than-life cinematic character, ‘Billy the hero’, who uses his kestrel to attack Jud on the moors.³⁴⁷ This scene, however, is avoided in the film and subjective sequences more generally are set to become increasingly rare in Loach’s films. In Kes, there is only one apparently subjective sequence when Billy is caught daydreaming during school assembly, and we see him walking down the street with Kes on his arm and stopping to answer the questions of an elderly passerby. However, while the positioning of the sequence (during the course of the assembly) suggests that what we are seeing must be either a memory or a fantasy, it is not explicitly marked as ‘subjective’ and employs the documentary-like techniques evident in earlier work (showing apparent passersby walking in front of the camera and allowing them to obstruct our view of the main character).

Along with the voiceover, Kes also relies much less on montage, and generally avoids the descriptive sequences that had previously featured in Loach’s work. The film does include one sequence (missing from the novel), set in a club, that sets out to evoke a more general sense of working-class culture. However, although the cuts between conversational snippets suggest the documentarising impulse of earlier productions, the sequence is more firmly anchored to the conversations of two of the main characters – Jud and his mother – and, in contrast to Loach’s earlier work, does not incorporate ‘overheard’ conversations involving unidentified characters. The reduced role of montage (as both a means of description and sociological generalisation) may also be linked to a reduced incidence of pop songs on the soundtrack. Thus, while the group featured in the club sequence does perform covers of recent hits, the film dispenses with the extra-diegetic pop songs (and cutting of images to them) found in Up the Junction and Poor Cow. This also means that the film largely avoids using pre-existing music as a means of commentary on the action. The only occasion on which this occurs is when the sports master, Mr Sugden (Brian Glover), first appears, wearing a red tracksuit, at the start of the football match between schoolboy teams representing ‘Manchester United’ and ‘Spurs’. Partly harking back to the use of the music from Z Cars in The Golden Vision, the film employs the theme from the television sports programme, Grandstand (launched in 1958), in order to highlight the absurdity of the situation (and mock the teacher’s own schoolboy-like delusions). However, as with the voiceover, Loach appears to be coming to regard this kind of overt directorial device as lacking in ‘realism’ and is on the verge of eliminating it from his stylistic repertoire.

One, possibly ironic, consequence of this is that Kes comes to rely much more heavily on an original score than had previously been the case in Loach’s work. Thus, while John Cameron’s score is relatively short by feature standards, the music employed (most notably Harold McNair’s lilting flute-playing) plays an important structural role in the film, differentiating the country scenes from those in the town and school and investing them with a distinctive ‘emotional’ resonance. As Simon Frith indicates, the employment of a musical score in film is generally regarded as a ‘“non-realist”’ element.³⁴⁸ It is hardly surprising therefore that the use of extra-diegetic music (or music with no ‘realistic’ source within the film’s own world) within works that aspire to ‘realism’ has historically divided critical opinion. The employment of music, for example, by one of the founding texts of Italian neo-realism, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945), has often been considered problematic by critics.³⁴⁹ Loach himself has indicated how his defiance of the accepted conventions of ‘mainstream’ cinema has also helped him to avoid ‘a certain kind of music and a kind of manipulation of the emotions that would change the nature of the film’ that he wanted to make.³⁵⁰ In this respect, the employment of music is not only identified with a departure from the norms of social realism (and ‘realist’ motivation) but also with a particular kind of mobilisation of audience responses. As Frith suggests, film music not only refers to ‘emotional reality’ (rather than external physical reality) but also possesses the capacity to ‘offer us emotional experience directly’.³⁵¹ However, in spite of the move in Loach’s work towards increased stylistic austerity (and growing avoidance of ‘unrealistic’ devices), it is rare for his films to eliminate music altogether. This is particularly so of his work for cinema where, Loach’s comments notwithstanding, a combination of commercial pressures and aesthetic expectations appear to have encouraged a greater reliance upon music than in television productions such as The Rank and File and Days of Hope (both of which followed Kes).³⁵²However, the role of music, and the possibilities for direct emotional address that it provides, may also be related to the ‘melodramatic’ (and subsequently comic) strains in Loach’s work that seek to solicit strong emotional reactions to the social and psychological predicaments of the films’ characters.³⁵³

The move away from voiceover and montage in Kes may also be linked to an abandonment of the more attention-grabbing forms of ‘vérité’-influenced documentary (such as hand-held camera) in favour of a less overt observational style. Loach’s cameraman on the film was Chris Menges who previously worked in documentary and had acted as the camera operator on Poor Cow. He also worked with the Polish cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček on If … . (1968) before joining Loach to make Kes. Ondříček had been the cameraman on Milos Forman’s film, A Blonde in Love (1965) (one of Loach’s favourites), and Menges was evidently struck by his approach to filming. The Czech ‘new wave’ more generally might also be said to have provided a model of film-making based on social observation that did not depend upon stylistic obtrusiveness or overt narrational commentary. The teaming-up of Loach and Menges, therefore, occurred at an important point of Loach’s artistic development, leading to a degree of rethinking of the filming process that involved a less ‘interventionist’ attitude towards the recording of action (and its editing). In particular, the two men set out to light scenes in such a way that it was ‘the space’ being filmed that ‘would be lit rather than the shot itself’.³⁵⁴ This also entailed placing the camera ‘back a little way’ (and employing ‘a slightly longer lens’) in order to avoid inhibiting the actors and to permit them to do things that may have been unplanned.³⁵⁵Menges himself has indicated his liking for shots that give ‘the actor the most freedom’ but that also succeed in invoking ‘a sense of time and a sense of place’.³⁵⁶ This could also be a description of Kes which maintains Loach’s interest in accurately ‘documenting’ ‘time’ and ‘place’ but in a way that relies less on montage, and more on framing and composition, than had formerly been the case. In this respect, there is also a partial turn towards longer takes and the use of camera movement as a way not only of maintaining spatial coherence but of intimating the kind of connections (among people and of people to places) that might previously have been achieved through cutting (to shots of the people and places representing the surrounding environment and social context).³⁵⁷ This may be seen, for example, in the scene of Billy inside the betting shop. The camera follows him to the counter before he turns to consult one of the customers about the likelihood of Jud’s horses winning. Following their conversation he decides not to place the bet and heads for the door. As he exits the frame, the camera briefly holds on the face of an unidentified customer. This is all shown in one continuous shot and the link between Billy and his ‘environment’ is established without the use of cuts. This is also the case in the subsequent scene in which Billy walks out of the chip shop, talks to the butcher, who gives him some scraps, and then heads off down a gloomy-looking street of terraced houses.

Evolving a new style of filming: Chris Menges at work on Kes

The film’s concern to allow actors increased freedom within the shot may also be related to the relative absence of professionals in the film. Colin Welland, who had worked with Loach on Z Cars, was the only experienced actor among the cast. The rest were either entertainers drawn from the club circuit (such as Lynne Perrie, Bernard Atha, Duggie Brown, Bill Dean and Joey Kaye) or non-professionals. The most famous of these was Billy himself, played by an unknown schoolboy, David Bradley, but also included Brian Glover (a teacher friend of Barry Hines), Freddie Fletcher (then working as a painter and decorator), Bob Bowes (a real-life headmaster) and, of course, all of the pupils in the film.³⁵⁸ Partly due to union agreements, Loach had mainly worked with professional actors although he had sought to avoid those who might be too well known or too strongly identified with a previous role. Thus, he had not been entirely happy at having to cast Terence Stamp in Poor Cow due to the ‘memories of other parts’ that would inevitably accompany his appearance in the film.³⁵⁹However, Loach was not simply resistant to the ‘star personae’ that well-established actors would bring to a film but also the indebtedness of British film and television acting to the theatrical tradition (and the patterns of speech and gesture with which it is associated). Accordingly, he has not only sought out ‘unknowns’ but also performers capable of departing from theatrical modes of acting. In the case of The Golden Vision, this led to the casting of performers from the northern club circuit such as the comics Bill Dean, Johnny Gee and Joey Kaye whom Loach believed could bring a ‘sharpness and spontaneity’ to the production that ‘straight actors’ would not.³⁶⁰ The same desire to avoid theatrical acting also encouraged Loach to recruit non-professionals whom Loach believed to be capable of bringing an ‘authenticity’ to a part that was more important than acting experience.³⁶¹ For this reason, he cast John Bindon, a former prisoner who had served a sentence for assault, as Joy’s criminal husband in Poor Cow and a former docker and activist, Peter Kerrigan, as one of the strike leaders in The Big Flame. The belief that actors should possess experiences in common with the characters they play had become increasingly important for Loach and even Colin Welland, the leading professional in Kes, claims that he would not have been cast in the film had he not also been a teacher (in the north of England) before becoming an actor.³⁶² However, although the ‘balance’ between professionals and non-professionals has varied considerably across productions, Loach has rarely avoided the use of professional actors altogether. This may partly be explained by André Bazin’s observation that the hallmark of social realism consists of ‘the casual mixing of professionals and of those who just act occasionally’ rather than ‘the absence of professional actors’ per se. As he suggests, this mixing of professionals and non-professionals creates the possibility for ‘a kind of osmosis’ whereby the ‘technical inexperience of the amateur is helped out by the experience of the professionals while the professionals themselves benefit from the general atmosphere of authenticity’.³⁶³

However, while Loach aimed to achieve ‘authenticity’ through casting, he was also refining a method of working with actors that sought to blur the boundaries between ‘reality’ and ‘performance’ even further. As he explained in a television interview, his ambition has been to take actors through the story in a way that means that they are not interpreting a role in the conventional manner but ‘really experiencing’ the story and responding to it in the same way that the character would.³⁶⁴ This has led him to shooting a film in sequence in order that actors experience the story in the correct chronological order and undergo a similar emotional journey to the characters that they play. It has also led him, in many cases, to withhold the whole script from actors so that they do not know what is going to happen next and, therefore, arrive at a scene with the same amount of ‘knowledge’ as their characters.³⁶⁵ Loach also avoids extensive rehearsals and encourages actors to improvise as a way of achieving spontaneity in their performances. As he has commented, ‘exact words are not terribly important – the important thing is what’s happening’.³⁶⁶However, improvisation is not as extensive as is sometimes imagined and Loach has estimated that some 90 per cent of the script is ‘filmed unchanged’.³⁶⁷However, he has also developed a strategy of surprising actors as a means of cultivating apparently ‘genuine’ and unrehearsed reactions. This is what seems to have happened in the famous ending of Cathy Come Home when the children (including Carol White’s own son) were not warned that they would be separated from their ‘mother’ at the railway station. It also occurs in Kes when the boys receive a caning at the hands of the headmaster that they had not expected.³⁶⁸ In this way, Loach seeks to close the gap between ‘reality’ and ‘performance’ by aligning actor and character as closely as possible. Indeed, on a number of occasions, he has suggested his films achieve a degree of ‘documentariness’ not just through their adoption of particular film-making techniques but in the way in which they ‘document’ the process that the actors themselves undergo. As he puts it, the actors may be ‘going through the experience of the character’ but the film is in part ‘a sort of documentary about them as well’.³⁶⁹ This might be said of the young David Bradley in Kes, an unknown schoolboy previously unfamiliar with kestrels whose own experience of acquiring the skills learnt by his character is, to some extent, documented in the film. In a scene that has been much commented upon, Billy is shown to galvanise the class with his impassioned account of how he has trained his hawk. The subject of the class is, in fact, the distinction between ‘fact and fiction’ (words seen written on the blackboard); however, it has also been the project of the film to break down this distinction and minimise the gap between character and ‘performer’ with the result that the actor appears to be describing what he himself, and not just the character, has learnt.

The absence of stars (or even a significant proportion of professional actors), however, was also one of the features of the film (along with a low-key plot and lack of a happy ending) that was destined to make Kes a difficult sell. The film, as previously noted, was funded by United Artists which possessed ties with the Odeon circuit, owned by Rank. Rank, however, was not convinced of the film’s box-office potential and took the view that the strong regional accents of the actors would put off potential audiences. Indeed, the strong accents led United Artists to undertake some ‘revoicing’ without the knowledge of either Garnett or Loach. Given the lack of any announcement regarding the film’s distribution, Garnett resorted to the tactic, previously employed in the case of The Big Flame, of organising a special screening for critics as a way of applying pressure to get the film shown. A successful London Film Festival screening followed in November 1969 but Rank could still not be persuaded to offer the film a circuit release. The Rank Organisation did, however agree to permit the rival ABC chain to take on the film. ABC was also unsure about the film’s commercial prospects and took the unusual step of opening the film in cinemas in the north of England, following a premiere in Doncaster (in March 1970). It was therefore not until May 1970, two years after filming and a year after the film had been delivered to the distributors, that the film eventually opened in London, albeit at the Academy Cinema, a traditional art-house venue, rather than a flagship ABC cinema. Nevertheless, partly due to the extensive press coverage it had received, the film aroused considerable interest and ABC went on to open the film in its suburban London cinemas in August.³⁷⁰

The relative success of Kes made it easier for Garnett to raise the finance for Loach’s next feature film, Family Life (1971), which was co-funded by Anglo-EMI and the National Film Finance Corporation (and cost £175,000). This was a remake of David Mercer’s In Two Minds and it effectively demonstrates the changes that were occurring in Loach’s film-making approach. As previously noted, In Two Minds had been one of Loach’s most experimental works, taking advantage of the play’s theme of madness to explore the subjectivity of perception through an audacious mix of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ techniques. In the cinema version, however, the extreme close-ups, zooms, stylised compositions, disorienting point-of-view shots, interior monologues and jump-cuts that had been such a striking feature of the earlier film are abandoned. Although still dependent upon flashbacks, the cinema version also tells the story in a much more straightforward manner, making it simpler to follow and more clearly establishing the causal connections between events. A key change here involves the ‘Laingian’ psychiatrist who remained invisible in the original version but now appears in front of the camera in a significantly enlarged role. In the earlier production, the psychiatrist had merely been undertaking interviews for research purposes. In the remake, he is actually responsible for the treatment of Janice Baildon (Sandy Ratcliff) (Kate Winter in the original) and undertakes the interviews with Janice and her parents as part of his medical duties. The appearance of the psychiatrist in front of the camera has also encouraged a degree of rethinking of the film’s style. This partly involves a return to a more conventional ‘classical’ style, involving reverse-field cutting, but also builds on the aesthetic, evolved in Kes, of maintaining the camera at a respectful distance from the actors and letting conversations play out without excessive cutting. In this respected, the film’s photographic style involves a muted ‘classicism’, partly indebted to documentary observation, in which shots are held for longer, and cuts and point-of-view shots are fewer, than would normally be the case in a mainstream feature film. This then encourages techniques in which the camera holds on a speaker, rather than cutting from one speaker to another, or, as in the scene at the police station at the film’s beginning, the camera moving to reveal a character who has initially been heard off screen. In other cases, a character who has been heard off screen can unexpectedly come into view as when Janice’s father unexpectedly appears in the frame prior to hitting her. Although, like Kes, the film dispenses with most of the ‘obtrusive’ devices that had featured in earlier productions, it does make a limited use of montage to locate the individual drama in a social context. The film begins, for example, with a short montage of black-and-white stills of the suburban estate in which the Baildon family live that situates the drama within a particular milieu. When Janice first talks with the ‘progressive’ psychiatrist, there is also a cut to a short sequence of shots showing Janice, and a series of bored-looking shopworkers, in a department store while the doctor and Janice’s comments continue on the soundtrack. In this way, the film not only sets out to link Janice’s story to others in a similar social situation but also to locate the position of the family within a more ‘objectively’ observed context than was the case in In Two Minds. However, in comparison, to earlier productions such as Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, the use of montage is relatively subdued and Loach suggests that it is ‘the juxtaposition of different naturalistic sequences’, rather than shots, that is central to the film’s overall aesthetic design.³⁷¹

This strategy of juxtaposition is particularly evident in the way in which the film sets out to establish a contrast between the methods of treatment that Janice undergoes. By enhancing the role of the previously unseen doctor, the film is able to include scenes involving mental patients under his care and provide evidence of his non-physical approach to therapy. These scenes take place in an experimental ward in which the traditional regime of the hospital has been dispensed with and patients are encouraged to live together as a community. In line with Loach’s desire for ‘authenticity’ and accuracy, the psychiatrist, Dr Donaldson, is played by an actual doctor, Michael Riddall, while many of those taking part in the group-therapy scenes are former schizophrenics who were then living in one of the alternative therapeutic communities run by the Philadelphia Association (a charitable organisation founded by Laing in 1965). These scenes are then contrasted with the treatment that Janice receives in a regular ward following the refusal of an unsympathetic hospital board to extend Donaldson’s contract of employment. Here she comes under the care of the more orthodox consultant, Mr Carswell (Alan MacNaughton), who advocates the use of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). This initially appears to help but subsequently leads to a state of complete passivity. On her readmission to hospital, Janice is shown being given an injection against her will and then subjected to electric shocks. When the treatment is completed, the camera then follows her as she is wheeled in the direction of a row of comatose patients. As in the original version, Janice then ends up as an exhibit in a lecture hall where the consultant tells his students that she is ‘in many ways a typical case history’ but denies that there is any ‘detectable relationship between her various symptoms and her environment’.

This is, of course, precisely the opposite of what the film itself sets out to suggest, identifying both relations within the family and the relations of the family to society more generally as the root of Janice’s predicaments. As in the case of In Two Minds, the pressures to adjust to the demands of the ‘schizogenic’ family are portrayed in studied detail. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson placed particular emphasis upon the way that mothers stood in the way of their daughters’ independence and the film also suggests how Janice’s mother resists her desire for greater freedom and self-expression (with the result that Janice tells her boyfriend that ‘my mother’s trying to kill me’). As her father Mr Baildon (Bill Dean), a working-class northerner, tells the psychiatrist, his wife, Vera, was economically better off than him and their marriage had been opposed by her parents. To this extent, the film may be seen to follow in the footsteps of the earlier British ‘new wave’ in which, as in A Kind of Loving, the pressures to conform are associated with suburban respectability and the maintenance of social and moral ‘standards’. Vera is played by Grace Cave, a non-professional with limited acting experience who, according to the publicity of the time, was recruited through a local Women’s Association which Anthony Hayward identifies as the Walthamstow Conservative Association’s ladies committee.³⁷² In line with Loach’s policy of casting actors possessing similarities to the characters they play, Cave was encouraged, in part, to be ‘herself’, and, in the film, her character becomes a convincing spokesperson not just for respect and order within the family but within society more generally.³⁷³ As she tells the psychiatrist:

The ‘schizogenic’ family: Mr Baildon (Bill Dean), Janice Baildon (Sandy Ratcliff), Mrs Baildon (Grace Cave) in Family Life

There seems to be some connection between the whole society today … the permissiveness and the drug-taking … . Just thinking that they can march and demonstrate for the least thing. And it all seems to be tied up somehow … . There must be more control over our younger generation.

The reproduction of conformity: Janice and Tim (Malcolm Tierney) survey the ‘normal’ world in Family Life

As this would suggest, the film, even more explicitly than In Two Minds, seeks to show how the tensions within the family (and the desire for ‘control’) constitute larger social conflicts in microcosm.

This is partly achieved by an expansion of the role of Janice’s boyfriend, Tim (Malcolm Tierney). In the remake, he plays a much more active role than in the earlier play, encouraging Janice to leave her parents and removing her from the ward where she has been receiving ECT (before she is dragged back by the hospital authorities). In addition, he takes on the role of mouthpiece for the more explicit critique of contemporary society that the film is mounting. In the film, Tim is an art student (rather than an actor) with clear links to the ‘counterculture’ of the period (shown as part of a circle of friends, including Janice, listening to an impromptu performance of Neil Young’s ‘Down by the River’).³⁷⁴ Unlike the actor in In Two Minds, he has also rejected the values of ‘normal’ society and encourages Janice to do the same. This is made explicit when he takes Janice to the studio where he paints and offers her one of his paintings (which appears to consist of a loose reworking of a famous figure study by Leonardo da Vinci). Concerned that her parents ‘could never accept it’, she is, however, hesitant to take it. This prompts Tim to turn and look out of an upstairs window onto the rows of similar-looking houses (backed by industrial chimneys and cooling towers) that they can see down below. ‘That’s your Mum and Dad,’ he comments, ‘Do as they’re told. That’s what they’re going to do to you. That’s normal … but is it sane?’ He then goes on to articulate what is, in effect, the main ‘thesis’ of the film: that families are ‘training camps’ for the reproduction of labour power, responsible for instilling the conformity and passivity necessary for people to ‘go out there into one of those factories and do a day’s work’.³⁷⁵ Thus, despite the apparent differences in social landscape, Family Life is nonetheless similar to Kes in the way in which it identifies how social institutions – such as the school and family – serve the economic system by preparing individuals to accept unfulfilling jobs. From early on in the film, it is established that Janice’s father is a ‘good worker’ who has stuck to the same job for over twenty-five years. Janice, on the other hand, seems unable to hold down a steady job and this becomes an early sign of her supposed ‘illness’ (just as her subsequent smashing of a clock presented to her father for years of ‘loyal service’ ensures that she is readmitted to hospital). Conversely, her temporary ‘cure’, following the employment of ECT, is signalled by a re-entry into the workforce. Thus, her departure from hospital is followed immediately by a short montage of shots showing her working in a chocolate factory, mindlessly filling empty boxes. The women in Up the Junction, it may be remembered, were also employed in a chocolate factory. However, whereas in the earlier production, factory work offered the opportunity for constant female chatter and camaraderie (and popular music provided the pretext for high jinks and dancing), in Family Life, labour is merely repetitive and alienating (and popular music, in the form of the Tony Blackburn Show on Radio 1, merely reinforces a deadening of the senses). In this way, the ‘pacification’ that Janice undergoes in the course of the film is firmly linked not just to the conformity and repression demanded within the family but to the docility and discipline required by the capitalist system. As in Kes, therefore, even small acts of rebellion become doomed to failure. Tim may encourage Janice to cock a snook at her parents’ suburban pretensions by spraying the garden, and its gnomes, blue, but this is purely a symbolic gesture unlikely to achieve anything more than temporary release. As Loach commented when questioned about the gloominess of the film’s ending:

The idea that there can be any optimism gleaned from within the way we treat mentally ill people now, would be false. To say ‘The whole system is terrible, but hang on folks, there is a chink here.’ It would be as false as saying, ‘Couldn’t Billy Casper be got a job in a zoo’.³⁷⁶

However, given the film’s elimination of the stylistic self-consciousness that had been a feature of In Two Minds, it is perhaps unsurprising that the issue of the film’s ‘accuracy’ in portraying schizophrenia and its treatment was, once again, raised on television and in the press.³⁷⁷ Ironically, the paring down of the cinematic style, and simplification of the plot, also rendered the melodramatic elements of the plot more visible and there were complaints from critics about the way in which members of the medical establishment were treated simply as ‘villains’, apparently guilty of hounding an innocent ‘victim’.³⁷⁸ In this respect, the film contains a scene, missing from the TV version, in which representatives of the hospital authorities forcibly remove Janice from Tim’s flat. This is, of course, a scene that carries echoes of the seizure of Cathy’s children in Cathy Come Home and one of the actors involved – Edwin Brown – plays an unsympathetic official in both productions. The use of professional actors to portray officialdom also gave rise to objections that the film was employing double standards in casting. Thus, unlike the real-life doctor who played the Laingian therapist, the establishment doctor, Mr Carswell, was played by a relatively well-known television actor, Alan MacNaughton, who had previously won acclaim for his portrait of a Nazi in The White Rabbit (1967).³⁷⁹ Thus, while Bazin, as previously noted, felt that professional actors could achieve added ‘authenticity’ by working with non-professionals, it was also the case that conventional acting skills could serve to signify its opposite. As John Caughie argues with reference to ‘drama documentary’ more generally, it is not uncommon for ‘classical acting skills … to be reserved for officialdom or authority’ with the result that ‘the traditional skills of impersonation’ come to mean ‘insincerity’ whereas ‘not quite knowing your lines’ indicates ‘speaking the truth’.³⁸⁰

However, while many of the reviewers of Family Life were respectful of its seriousness of purpose but sceptical of its ‘fairness’, the film also prompted a different kind of debate which was to reverberate for years to come. Following the film’s release, in early 1972, the left-wing paper 7 Days published an interview with Loach and Garnett involving Anthony Barnett, John McGrath, John Mathews and Peter Wollen. This was a particularly interesting line-up. John McGrath had, of course, worked with Loach on Diary of a Young Man. However, whereas Loach was moving away from the ‘anti-naturalism’ of his earlier work, McGrath remained committed to forms that would challenge the conventional language of film, television and theatre (and had recently established the 7:84 Theatre Company that would continue to put such ideas into practice). Similarly, Peter Wollen was a film theorist and critic with commitments to the political avant-garde who was set to publish his famous essay on Godard’s ‘counter cinema’ later that year.³⁸¹ Both McGrath and Wollen, therefore, occupied positions that were sceptical of the political value of ‘realism’ and their questions to Loach and Garnett reflected some of their concerns.

From Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home onwards, Loach had been interested in telling stories that connected the circumstances of particular individuals with a more general sociopolitical context. As he explained in relation to the mixing of drama and documentary conventions:

We were trying to get the best of both worlds – to get the insights into personal relationships and experiences that you can get through fiction, and yet to set them in a firm context. The shock you get by cutting back and forth between the private world and the public world was just what we wanted.³⁸²

However, maintaining the ‘balance’ between the ‘private’ and the ‘public’ was not necessarily a straightforward task and his work has constantly risked emphasising one at the expense of the other. Thus, while it is evident that Family Life seeks to encourage its audience to draw more general conclusions from its telling of a particular story, it is also the case that the film’s pursuit of greater stylistic ‘simplicity’ means that the focus of the film is more firmly on individuals than was the case in some of the earlier television work. This is a point made by Peter Wollen who suggests that by ‘making it these particular people, and by making it so perfectly realistic, in the end it … becomes just those particular people, and you lose sight of the general, theoretical points which were what you started with’.³⁸³ Indeed, this was a way of ‘reading’ the film that was partly encouraged by the publicity surrounding the film which was clearly fearful that audiences might be deterred from going to see a film that was perceived as too ‘political’ or ‘propagandist’. Thus, when it was shown at the Academy Cinema, the programme notes clearly stated that the film represented ‘a particular story about particular people, not a generalising attempt to present a “typical” case history’.³⁸⁴While the film’s portrayal of schizophrenia is certainly more complicated than this (and does, as previously indicated, seek to connect it to social factors), the extent to which Loach’s films succeed in making ‘general’ political points through the telling of ‘particular’ stories is destined to remain a source of debate, provoking criticisms from different sides of the political spectrum, that the characters that appear in his films are either too ‘individualised’ or that they are not ‘individualised’ enough.

McGrath and Wollen make other points that have also continued to be associated with the discussion of Loach’s work. In an explicit attack on the limits of ‘naturalism’, John McGrath argued that ‘[i]t is impossible to show, in a naturalistic form, the way out of an apparently closed situation’. In order to do so, he suggested, it was necessary ‘to have a dialectical relationship to the subject’ that would avoid the ‘pessimism’ associated with naturalist form.³⁸⁵ Peter Wollen adopted a similar view, arguing that ‘there should be gaps and rifts between the content and the form which set up gaps and rifts in people’s minds’. ‘Far from the film being closed and continuous’, he continued, the work should contain ‘discontinuities, disclosures which go on operating in people’s minds afterwards’.³⁸⁶ In this respect, McGrath and Wollen were both invoking a Brechtian position that argued for a break with surface realism (and the fetish of observational ‘accuracy’) in favour of a more self-conscious, open-ended use of aesthetic devices that they believed would stimulate a more ‘active’ relationship with the spectator. As with the argument about ‘individualisation’, this was a view that would feature strongly in subsequent discussion of Loach’s work, particularly Days of Hope, the four-part series on labour history that Loach and Garnett were to undertake soon afterwards.

A ‘typical’ case study? Janice (Sandy Ratcliff) in Family Life

It is worth noting, however, how the argument about ‘naturalism’ has now slightly shifted ground. In his original anti-naturalist polemic, ‘Nats Go Home’, Troy Kennedy Martin had clearly identified ‘naturalism’ with the theatricalism and temporal simplicities of television studio drama. However, Loach’s work, now shot on film on location and then carefully edited, no longer constituted the kind of straightforward televisual ‘naturalism’ that Kennedy Martin had in mind. To this extent, Loach’s ‘naturalism’ could now be said to be of a different order: one that is identified much more with the observation of surface, empirical realities (and avoidance of self-reflective techniques). Indeed, one of the peculiarities of the responses to Kennedy Martin’s original manifesto had been Garnett’s invocation of the leading exponent of literary naturalism, Émile Zola, in support of the supposedly anti-naturalist cause in television.³⁸⁷ In this respect, Kennedy Martin’s somewhat confusing call for ‘new kinds of objectiveness’ may be seen to have sown the seeds of two divergent approaches: the cultivation of the detached, intellectual ‘objectivity’ afforded by Brechtian and other modernist devices and the observational ‘objectivity’ (or ‘naturalism’) that the use of film (and particularly shooting on location) could provide. While, in Diary of a Young Man, the ‘observational’ aspects of the drama remain subordinate to the programme’s dominant modes of self-conscious narration and montage, this, as has been seen, soon changes in Loach’s subsequent work as formally obtrusive devices are gradually invested with a ‘documentary’ motivation or eliminated altogether.

While this move in the direction of greater ‘naturalism’ partly grew out of a concern simply to show the actualities of people’s lives, it was also motivated by a specific sense of a text’s relationship with the audience. Responding to McGrath and Wollen’s criticisms of his work, Loach commented that one of the things that had been central to the films he’d made was

to try to make films for the class which we think is the only politically important class – the working class – and therefore not to make elitist films, or cineaste films, but to make films which can be understood by ordinary people.³⁸⁸

For Loach, this also meant that he had to work with ‘the expectations’ that people brought to films and avoid erecting ‘a barrier between you and them by adopting a form they will react against’.³⁸⁹ In this respect, he believed that it was essential for his films to tell stories that were not difficult to follow and which would be recognised by working-class audiences as ‘accurate’ and ‘true’. As he explained:

[I]f people can see a situation and say: Yes, I recognise that, I recognise those people, that’s true of me, or that’s true of someone I know, then you’ve made a basic contact. If it’s a film about an industrial situation, it’s very important that everybody in the film is accurate so the people seeing it recognise their own fellow factory workers. It’s also very important that you can follow what’s going on – the story line. Given that, it’s hard to avoid going towards a film that looks naturalistic.³⁹⁰

However, the issue of ‘accessibility’ also raised a question about the relative merits of working in film and television. Loach’s work on television had won audiences of a number and type that were not as readily available in the cinema. This was, in fact, an issue that Tony Garnett had recognised when he argued that

[b]y and large the working class watch television and less and less go to the cinema … . Therefore television is where we have to be as well if we want to address ourselves to the only class that is politically interesting to us.³⁹¹

However, for Garnett and Loach there was also a desire to make films for the cinema even if the size (and class composition) of the audience was likely to be different. For Garnett, the weakness of television was its relative ubiquity which meant that films risked getting lost amid the constant flow of material being broadcast. He therefore took the view that ‘a cinema film, partly because of its means of distribution, and partly for very snobbish reasons, tends to reverberate for longer than a television film which goes out on one occasion and that’s it!’ For this reason, he concluded that it had been worthwhile to remake In Two Minds for the cinema and that Family Life would ‘reverberate longer … and more deeply’ than the earlier television film’.³⁹²

However, the semi-monopolistic control of the ‘means of distribution’ within the film industry also meant, as the case of Kes had illustrated, that Loach’s films found it difficult to obtain a proper release on one of the country’s two main cinema circuits. Thus, despite Loach’s commitment to a form that he believed would be ‘accessible’ to ordinary working-class people, the films’ lack of many of the qualities associated with ‘popular’ cinema (such as stars and high ‘production values’) made them relatively unattractive to distributors and exhibitors.³⁹³ It also meant that Loach’s films were unlikely to turn a significant profit. As has been seen, Kes did turn out to be a surprise ‘hit’ in the UK but was still, according to Garnett, only ‘a modest success’ because it failed to sell internationally.³⁹⁴ Family Life did achieve a degree of success in the US (where it was released as Wednesday’s Child) but performed less well than Kes in the UK.

British cinema audiences were, of course, in long-term decline and, following the withdrawal of the US funding that had fuelled so much British film production of the 1960s, British film-making faced a degree of ‘crisis’ in the 1970s. Given the economic difficulties confronting the British film-production sector during this period, it therefore became common to claim that ‘British cinema was alive and well on television.’³⁹⁵ Through the ‘Play for Today’ slot that replaced ‘The Wednesday Play’, for example, directors such as Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh were able to pursue careers that were impossible within the conventional film industry of the time.³⁹⁶ This was also true of Loach who was, in a sense, forced back to television by the lack of opportunities to make features of the kind he wished. The second episode of Days of Hope was, in fact, originally planned as a feature film but Garnett proved unable to raise the necessary funding. The film, therefore, evolved into a television series partly as a way of getting it made. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Garnett was asked, at the time of Days of Hope’s transmission, why there were no political films being made for the British cinema, he answered that the BBC was the only place where ‘regular and consistent film-making is done’.³⁹⁷

316.Letter from Ivo Jarosy to Tony Garnett, 8 December 1966, BBCWAC T5/965/1. The programme did go on, however, to be distributed on 16mm by Concord.

317.Letter from Garnett to Charles Cooper, Contemporary Films, 24 February 1967, BBCWAC T5/1623/2.

318.Memo from G. del Strother, Television Enterprises, to Garnett, 20 February 1967, BBCWAC T5/1623/2.

322.Costs provided in memo from Tony Garnett to HPDTel, 23 August 1966, BBCWAC T5/629/2.

324.Roger Bromley, ‘The Theme That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Class and Recent British Film’, in Sally R. Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change (London: Cassell, 2000), p. 57.

326.This contrast may also be seen to operate in the trip made by Joy and Dave to Wales. This initially appears to perform a deflationary function, suggesting how the reality of camping in the country differs from its idealised image (a title declaring ‘Oh God I’ll never forget Wales it was terrific’ is followed by a scene in which Joy throws tinned stew over Dave). However, the sequence concludes with Joy and Dave embracing under a waterfall to the accompaniment of a jazzy soundtrack. Although many critics objected to the clichéd imagery, Raymond Durgnat suggested that the scene’s similarity to ‘an advert for menthol cigarettes’ could well have been ‘deliberate’ since Joy is ‘seeing the country through commercial-conditioned eyes’ (‘TV’s Young Turks (Part Two)’, Films and Filming, April 1969, p. 28). This imagery also carries some echoes of Cathy Come Home in which Cathy and Reg’s kiss by the canal is shot in a manner reminiscent of an advert.

327.Michael Armstrong, Films and Filming, April 1968, p. 26; J. A. D., Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1968, p. 23.

328.David Robinson, ‘Case Studies of the Next Renascence’, Sight and Sound, Winter 1968–9, p. 39.

329.This short contextualising montage also includes a shot of an Italian woman leaning out of her ground-floor window and talking to her son. While this involves a degree of generalising out from the specifics of the mother–son relationship between Joy and Jonny, it also appears to function as something of an ‘in-joke’ about Italian neo-realism, which stands at odds with the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ to which the sequence is otherwise laying claim.

330.Jacob Leigh draws attention to the similarity between a shot of Battersea Power Station at the beginning of Up the Junction and the one at the start of this sequence in Poor Cow (The Cinema of Ken Loach, p. 47). Leigh does not, however, draw attention to the stylistic differences between the two shots (and the much firmer anchoring of the second shot to the consciousness of the relevant character).

331.Penelope Houston complains, for example, that although Joy may be characterised as ‘indolent, acquisitive, shrewish and congenitally disloyal’, the film-makers appear to think that ‘her unlovely qualities are somewhat redeemed by resilience and a simple, South London peasant devotion to her small boy’ in the Spectator, 15 December 1967, p. 756.

332.In their account of the representation of working-class women in Pat Barker’s novel Union Street, Kathryn Dodd and Philip Dodd suggest how the women are viewed primarily in terms of ‘their biological, physical functions – sex, pregnancy, abortion, motherhood, ageing and death’, which they associate with ‘the detached stance of the zoologist-observer’. See ‘From the East End to EastEnders: Representations of the Working Class, 1890–1990’, in Dominic Strinati and Stephen Wagg (eds), Come on Down? Popular Media Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 124. It could be said that both Up the Junction and Poor Cow inherit a similar emphasis upon the ‘biological, physical functions’ from the original Nell Dunn novels.

334.The National Film Finance Corporation, which had backed the film, indicated that, for them, it was the ‘outstanding success of the year’ in its Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended 31st March 1968, Cmnd. 3716 (London: HMSO, 1968), p. 2.

335.John Russell Taylor, ‘The Kes Dossier’, Sight and Sound vol. 39 no. 3, Summer 1970, p. 130. According to Taylor, the company mistakenly believed that the film would cost considerably more than Garnett’s budget. The eventual cost of the film appears to have been £157,000.

336.Tony Richardson, The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 216. United Artists had played a major role in backing British film in the 1960s following its investment in Dr No (1962), A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). Robert Murphy notes that, between 1968 and 1970, the studio backed no less than thirty-one British films (Sixties British Cinema, p. 260).

338.‘Tony Garnett’, Afterimage no. 1, 1970, np. At the time of the film’s production the majority of schools in England were still either grammar schools or secondary moderns. The intake for these was based on the eleven-plus examination and tended to reproduce a split between the predominantly middle-class minority who went to grammar schools and the predominantly working-class majority who attended secondary moderns. In July 1965 the Labour government had called upon local authorities to move towards the establishment of comprehensive schools but progress towards comprehensivisation had proved relatively slow.

339.Barry Hines, ‘Afterword’, A Kestrel for a Knave (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 203.

340.The film, in this respect, omits the suggestion, to be found in the novel, that Billy’s father left due to the infidelity of Billy’s mother with ‘Uncle Mick’. This omission (and the suggestion that his father was a ‘wrong ’un’) makes Billy’s mother rather more sympathetic in the film, absolving her of the blame for the father’s absence and showing her neglect of Billy to be partly related to dissatisfaction with her own lot and her desire to find a new husband.

341.Hines, ‘Afterword’, p. 206. Loach himself argues that it was important that ‘Jud didn’t come off as just a villain’ but suggests ‘we didn’t quite pull that off’ in Fuller, Loach on Loach, p. 44.

342.Paul Barker, ‘Boy in a Cage’, New Society, 20 November 1969, p. 823. Although Barker does not make this point, it might be suggested that a sense of ‘imprisonment’ hangs over the majority of the characters, most of whom, including the teachers, appear to be ‘trapped’ in unfulfilling roles. In this respect, the gym teacher, Mr Sugden (Brian Glover), who nurtures fantasies of footballing success while bullying the boys in his charge, possesses a degree of similarity to Jud.

344.Geoffrey Macnab, ‘The Wrong Kind of Bird’, Independent, 1 October 1999, p. 14. According to Ira Konigsberg, preflashing involves ‘[e]xposing film not yet used for shooting to a constant, dim light in order to reduce contrast and to mute colors in the images which will later be produced’ (The Complete Film Dictionary [London: Bloomsbury, 1987], p. 268.).

345.John Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, in McKnight, Agent of Challenge and Defiance, p. 162.

346.Sarah Kozloff discusses how voiceover narration has commonly been viewed as too ‘literary’ or ‘uncinematic’ in Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). The growth of observational styles of documentary had also involved an increasing rejection of the expository voiceover as too directive and ‘authoritarian’. Although Cathy had used voiceover in this way, Loach’s main debt to documentary voiceovers was in his use of recorded speech as a means of expressing experiences and ideas that went beyond what could be straightforwardly observed.

348.Simon Frith, ‘Hearing Secret Harmonies’, in Colin MacCabe (ed.), High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Television and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 65.

349.Stephen L. Hanson, for example, suggests that the use of music undermines the film’s ‘objectivity’ in Christopher Lyon (ed.), The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: Volume 1: Films (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 399.

350.Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, in McKnight, Agent of Challenge and Defiance, p. 168.

352.According to John Ellis, television depends on sound more than cinema due to a less concentrated ‘regime of vision’ in television (Visible Fictions [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982], Ch. 8). However, this seems to refer to the spoken word rather than to music which, historically, has played a more important role in cinema than television in focusing the spectator’s concentration (and underscoring the emotional significance of what is shown).

353.It is, of course, common to point out that, in origins, melodrama was a form of play that combined songs (melos) with action (drama). However, there has also been a critical tendency to identify the ‘melos’ in film melodrama with the mise en scène and, thus, pay relatively little attention to the actual role of the music itself.

355.Ibid., p. 41. As Loach later explained, ‘the point is to withdraw the technology as far as you can so that nothing interrupts the sense of belief that the actors try to create … you don’t direct actors, you direct for them’ (John Hill, ‘Interview with Ken Loach’, Sources of Inspiration Lecture, p. 8).

356.David Chell, Moviemakers at Work: Interviews (Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1987), p. 41.

357.For Bazin, of course, the long take was a crucial ingredient of the ‘realist’ tradition in cinema, by virtue of the manner in which it maintained spatial and temporal unities and preserved the ‘ambiguity’ of reality. See ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’, in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, pp. 23–40. While there is a clear move away from montage towards the long take in Kes, this does not amount to an overarching aesthetic and is probably less ‘ambiguous’ than Bazin would have wished (making limited use, for example, of composition in depth).

358.Simon W. Golding provides details on the backgrounds of virtually all the cast in Life after Kes (Bridgnorth: GET Publishing, 2005). It has been a significant feature of Loach’s approach to film-making since Kes that he devotes considerable time to the casting process, auditioning large numbers of unknowns. As he has subsequently observed, ‘If you can find the right people, then it will go. That’s the biggest hurdle’ (Tony Garnett and Ken Loach, ‘Family Life in the Making’, 7 Days, 12 January 1972, p. 21).

359.Quoted in Hayward, Which Side Are You On?, p. 81. Hayward also notes that there were some reservations about the casting of Ray Brooks in Cathy Come Home due to his previous experience working in films.

361.This was also associated with a belief that social class was embedded in the look and demeanour of actors and could not be faked. As Loach explained: ‘You carry your class with you in how you talk, how you behave, how you pick up a fork. You can’t really act it, and you can’t act a dialect.’ See Simon Hattenstone, ‘Rock Steady’, Guardian, 29 September 1994.

362.Quoted in Akin Ojumu, ‘“A typical reaction was a snigger … I was making a film about the wrong kind of bird”’, Observer, 29 August 1999, Review Section, p. 6.

363.André Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: NeoRealism’, What Is Cinema?, Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 23–4.

365.Loach has explained this as follows: ‘I don’t think the actor should see the totality. An actor should see the world through the eyes of the character. That’s why I don’t like actors to see the entire script of the film they’re working on. I don’t want them to take a bird’s-eye view. I just want them to go through the events at the level of their character’ (Fuller, Loach on Loach, p. 46).

366.Paul Madden, ‘Extracts from an Interview with Ken Loach’, Complete Programme Notes for a Season of British Television Drama 1959–73 Held at NFT, 11–24 October 1976 (London: BFI, 1976), n.p.

367.Quart, ‘A Fidelity to the Real’, p. 28. Neville Smith, who both wrote and acted for Loach, commented that although Loach ‘does improvise’ it is ‘in a very tight fashion close to the script’. See Paul Madden, ‘Extracts from an Interview with Neville Smith’, Complete Programme Notes, n.p.

368.While this technique of surprise can be entirely benign – the actor Ricky Tomlinson, for example, speaks affectionately of how he was surprised by the appearance of three Arab women in a scene in Riff-Raff – it may, as in Kes, prove problematic. The boys involved in the caning scene felt that their trust had been betrayed and, as subsequent interviews reveal, remain upset about how they were treated. (See, for example, Golding, Life after Kes, pp. 198–205). There is, of course, a larger ethical issue involved in the use of (young) non-professionals whose success in a film necessarily depends upon an aura of ‘novelty’ and ‘authenticity’ that it is impossible to replicate. This may make it difficult for actors to ‘escape’ the role and make a career out of acting, as is partly borne out by the experience of David (‘Dai’) Bradley whose subsequent acting career was to falter. It is, of course, a feature of Loach’s work that he avoids working with the same actors on a regular basis in order to maintain the sense of authenticity associated with the ‘unknown’ performer.

370.William Stephenson charts how the film became a cause célèbre for the press which, in agitating for its release, succeeded in arousing interest in the film. See ‘Kes and the Press’, Cinema Journal vol. 12 no. 2, 1973, pp. 48–55.

373.For the part of the father, Loach cast the club comedian Bill Dean with whom he had worked before on The Golden Vision, The Big Flame and After a Lifetime. As Loach acknowledged, there was much less ‘fit’ between the actor and character in this case as Dean was ‘a much more open and generous bloke than he appears in the film’. ‘The problem’, therefore, ‘was to stop him showing too much of that, while at the same time not letting him pretend to be someone he wasn’t’ (Garnett and Loach, ‘Family Life in the Making’, p. 21).

374.Although this brief scene is clearly designed to suggest a contrast to the coldness, and lack of conviviality, of Janice’s own home, Young’s angst-ridden song also carries connotations of the traumas associated with Janice’s family life, preceding a scene in which Janice’s parents pressure her to have an abortion and ending just before we hear the crucial lines ‘I shot my baby … down by the river’. In the film, the abortion is, of course, linked with Janice’s own symbolic ‘death’.

375.According to Laing, the ‘function’ of the family was ‘to create … one-dimensional man: to promote respect, conformity, obedience … to promote a respect for work’. See The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 55. In referring to the idea of ‘one-dimensional man’, Laing is, of course, drawing on the work of Herbert Marcuse.

377.The BBC’s Review programme held a discussion that included a psychiatrist who claimed the central character did not possess the symptoms of schizophrenia while a number of newspaper reviews expressed concern about the truth of the film’s portrait of psychiatric treatment in hospitals. The psychiatrist involved in the discussion with Loach and Garnett subsequently wrote to New Society (3 February 1972) to accuse the film of ‘propaganda’ against ‘conventional psychiatry’.

378.Christopher Williams suggested the film resembled ‘a Hammer horror from which the colour has almost been washed away and in which the diabolism has been channelled into institutional appearances’ in New Society, 6 April 1972, p. 21.

379.It was possibly this association that led Jan Dawson to comment on the ‘Gestapo-glint’ in the actor’s eye in describing his personification of ‘the Evil of Psychiatry’ (Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1972, p. 31).

380.John Caughie, ‘What Do Actors Do When They Act?’, in Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey and Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 165–6. This strategy may, however, prove problematic. As Paul McDonald suggests, the ‘believability’ or ‘truthfulness’ of a performance characteristically depends upon the ‘invisibility’ of the acting involved (‘Film Acting’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 31). In the case of Loach, however, non-professional actors acquire much of their ‘authenticity’ by making these codes partly ‘visible’ through a failure to deliver lines with a normal fluency or confidence. However, it is also possible that this kind of faltering delivery, or misplaced emphasis in speaking lines, may simply be interpreted as awkward and ‘unnatural’ (and, therefore, as the product of poor or inadequate acting skills).

381.‘Counter Cinema: Vent D’Est’, Afterimage no. 4, 1972, pp. 6–16. In this Wollen sets up a schematic opposition between ‘Hollywood-Mosfilm’ and ‘counter cinema’ which he identifies in terms of narrative intransitivity, estrangement, foregrounding, multiple diegesis, unpleasure and reality.

382.Quoted in Paul Kerr, ‘The Complete Ken Loach’, Stills no. 27, 1986, p. 146.

383.Garnett and Loach, ‘Family Life in the Making’, p. 21. Wollen also recognises the alternative danger: that ‘these particular people’ may become no more than ‘representatives’ with the result that the ‘theory’ becomes ‘too simplified’. In response to Wollen, Loach agreed that he began by ‘observing individuals reacting on one another’ but that this did not prevent the making of ‘some generalised statement’.

384.Ian Connell also notes how the publicity for the film promoted the idea that ‘there are no villains in “Family Life” only victims’, thus muting an important dimension of the film’s social critique. See Ian Connell, Film Production and Presentation: The Institutional Passage of Films, MA thesis, University of Birmingham, 1973, pp. 183–4.

386.Ibid., p. 21. In his discussion of the film in New Society (6 April 1972), Christopher Williams argued that Family Life was, in fact, a step backwards from In Two Minds in which he argued the interviews had achieved the ‘effect of breaking up the narrative continuity, questioning it, and encouraging the spectator to question himself’ (p. 21).

390.Ibid. The substance of his difference with McGrath, in this respect, was that McGrath did not accept that working-class audiences would only accept ‘naturalistic’ forms, particularly given the ‘non-naturalistic’ traditions of popular entertainment.

391.Paul Bream, ‘Spreading Wings at Kestrel’, Films and Filming vol. 18 no. 6, 1972, p. 38.

393.Tony Garnett recalls that he and Loach had to fight to cast Sandy Ratcliff in the main part as she was initially opposed by Nat Cohen of Anglo-EMI who wanted someone better known. Conversation with Tony Garnett, London, 23 October 2009.

395.Indeed, in 1977, the producer Kenith Trodd drew up a list of television dramas shot on film (mainly at the BBC) in order to highlight the quality of British television films when compared with British feature films seen at the cinemas. See Vision vol. 2 no.1, March 1977, pp. 14–19.

396.For a discussion of the attraction to Frears of working in television in the 1970s, see John Hill, ‘“Enmeshed in British Society but with a Yen for American Movies”: Film, Television and Stephen Frears’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television (John Libbey Media/University of Luton Press: Luton, 1986), pp. 224–31.

397.Bart Mills, ‘“Days of Hope” – Going to Extremes’, Listener, 11 September 1975, p. 338. Stephen Frears, who chose to work in television during the 1970s, also argued how ‘ridiculous’ it was to make ‘poor films’ for the cinema when you could make ‘good films on television’, suggesting that there wasn’t ‘one film made for cinema distribution which compares in importance with Days of Hope’ (Screen International, 1 November 1975, p. 18).