“That constant humiliation to survive. If you’re not angry about it, what kind of person are you?”
- Ken Loach
The life and work of Ken Loach keeps alive the hopes and dreams, anger and frustrations of a seemingly bygone era when ideas like freedom, democracy, liberation, and revolution were in vogue and fired the imagination of millions of youth across the world. It was a time when communist ideals and socialist goals were very much part of ongoing struggles and really existing regimes.
Then came Glasnost and Perestroika, the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the splintering of the USSR, and a new gigantic wave of globalisation and privatisation that swept across the world. All these changes resonated in cinema all over the world. Cinemas in the erstwhile Eastern Bloc gradually lost their support base and sheen, and even the revolutionary spirit and energy of the Latin American cinemas seemed to ebb and wither. The great tradition of the revolutionary Left in cinema seemed suddenly to turn into ‘history’, while smart, ‘non-linear’ narratives of a linear market ideology began to take over the stage.
Amidst all this ups and downs, local victories and global setbacks, stood Ken Loach, a filmmaker who, for more than six decades, consistently and stubbornly went on to make film after film that dealt with the life and struggles of the working class, their relentless resistance to capitalist exploitation. Working from within the capitalist system, he has been a steadfast chronicler of the underclass for the last five decades, documenting their hopes and valiant uprisings, their resilience and simmering anger.
Born in 1936 in Warwickshire, United Kingdom, Kenneth Loach studied Law and was interested in acting and directing plays. After a stint at a Repertory Theatre as assistant director, he moved to BBC in 1963 as trainee director. During his early formative years at the BBC, he directed the much celebrated and often controversial series like ‘Wednesday Plays’ - ‘Up The Junction’ (1965), ‘Cathy Come Home’ (1966), ‘In Two Minds’ (1967) and ‘The Big Flame’ (1969) – that dealt with various aspects of life and livelihood at the margins.
After his first film Poor Cow (1967), he made Kes (1969), which received wide critical acclaim; it was about the coming of age of a school boy and its narrative was set in a working class background, where survival was an everyday gamble.
A still from ‘Kes’
His next film Family Life (1971) did not do well commercially, and in the coming years, he remained active making films for television like The Big Flame , The Price of Coal, Rank and File , and Days of Hope , a four-part epic on the working class experience from 1916 through to the defeat of the General Strike in 1926. They brought into public view and discourses various crucial and sensational political issues such as dock workers’ resistance and the political awakenings of working class families. These films looked at the world from the other side, and interrogated contemporary political trends, always talking about unsavoury truths that touched raw nerves, and ruffled many a mighty feather. Naturally, they also constantly ran into controversies and faced censorship problems.
The film that followed such as Black Jack (1979), Looks and Smiles (1981), Fatherland (1986) and Hidden Agenda (1990, which won the Cannes Special Jury Prize) were all trenchant reactions to the political and economic developments of the Margaret Thatcher era. After Hidden Agenda, which was a political thriller about British state terrorism against Irish nationalists and how human rights were systematically snuffed out, Loach made three films that explored the working class experience in a period of defeat. Riff-Raff (1991) and Raining Stones (1993) were films about class struggle, of individual and collective resistance within the capitalist system. Riff-Raff was about the troubled times of the working class in Britain under Thatcher.
Raining Stones , which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, was a poignant human drama about a man’s struggle to buy his daughter a First Communion dress. They were followed by equally poignant narratives: Ladybird, (1994) about the crumbling social security system in Britain and how the working class is rendered helpless and desperate, and Land and Freedom (1995) about the international brigade joining local forces in Spain to fight the fascists. Carla's Song (1996), centred on a Nicaraguan woman, living in exile returning to her insurgency-torn homeland, dealt with the issue of immigration.
My Name Is Joe (1998) was about insecurity and unemployment, in the form of the story of an unemployed alcoholic struggling to recover from his addiction. It was followed by Sweet Sixteen (2002), and Ae Fond Kiss (2004), which form what is considered the ‘Glasgow trilogy.’
The films in the first decade of the new millennium like Bread and Roses (2000), The Navigators (2001) and Looking for Eric (2009) further explored the underside of European life in the context of the increasing hegemony of the global market and capital in society, economy and polity.
A still from ‘Looking for Eric’
While one set of his films clinically analyse the condition of the working class in Britain under the Thatcher and Tony Blair regimes, another set of films such as Land and Freedom, Jimmy’s Hall and The Wind That Shakes The Barley dwell upon the glorious traditions of resistance. In the latter two, Loach went back to the long history of Irish nationalist resistance and their undying spirit of resilience.
A still from ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ Photo: AFP
Graham Fuller, in his book Loach on Loach , divides Loach's career into four phases: first, the 'Wednesday Plays' period of the 1960s; second, the period of the more overtly political plays and the first feature films in the 1970s; third, the documentary period in the 1980s when Loach was often strangled by censorship; and lastly, the succession of powerful feature films that he has made and is still making in the 1990s.
The abiding themes and concerns of Ken Loach films have been basic issues that threaten livelihood and survival in the present day world, like homelessness, unemployment, indebtedness, poverty, migration, displacement, and disenfranchisement. They are also about the desperate but continuing struggles to assert humanity, justice and freedom against the hegemonic forces of the State and global capital. The most crucial aspect of Loach’s films is that they are not only point fingers at the powers-that-be and talk back to it on burning issues, but also dare to question and interrogate the other side. Many films, even while celebrating working class resistance, also reveal layers of betrayal and defeat on the part of ministers and leaders, and also of leadership of unions and resistance movements. No wonder one encounters lengthy sequences of heated debates, arguments and discussion at the centre of his film narratives, where different points of view fight each other, revealing, as it were, the churning process behind history.
His latest film I, Daniel Blake , which won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, is about the aging eponymous protagonist’s desperate and frustrating attempts to seek welfare benefits. He realises that he has been made redundant not only by the new technologies and economic system, he is also redundant as a citizen and human being too.
Despite dealing with stories of despair for so long, Ken Loach remains an optimist: “ I think people are getting the sense that the world cannot be sustained like this..the impulse is that another world is possible. There is a sense that we really have to change things now.”
