 Ken Loach was born on 17 June 1936 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. The son of an electrician, he attended grammar school in Nuneaton and after two years of National Service studied Law at Oxford University, where he was President of the Dramatic Society. After university he briefly pursued an acting career before turning to directing, joiningNorthampton Repertory Theatre as an assistant director in 1961 and then moving to theBBC as a trainee television director in 1963. Loach's first directorial assignment was a thirty-minute drama written byRoger Smith (who worked as story editor onLoach's earlyWednesday Plays and was still collaborating with him over thirty years later). In 1964 he also directed episodes ofZ Cars (BBC, 1962-78), which taughtLoach the difficulties of directing live television drama, andDiary Of A Young Man (BBC), which enabled him to see the possibilities film afforded to get out of the studio and onto the streets.Diary also used non-naturalistic elements, such as stills sequences cut to music and a narrational voiceover, in its attempt to achieve a new kind of narrative drama andLoach was to incorporate some of these innovations into his earlyWednesday Plays. Of the sixWednesday PlaysLoach directed in 1965,Up The Junction (BBC, tx. 3/11/1965) was the most groundbreaking for its elliptical style and its inclusion of a controversial abortion sequence. That he was still experimenting at this time was evident fromThe End Of Arthur's Marriage (BBC, tx. 17/11/1965), an uncharacteristic musical drama from a script byChristopher Logue, but the following year sawCathy Come Home (BBC, tx. 16/11/1966), written byJeremy Sandford, consolidate thedocumentary drama approach ofUp The Junction and establishLoach's reputation for social-issue drama.Cathy Come Home's exposure of homelessness as a social problem, at a time when the media was preoccupied with the hedonistic fantasy of the 'swinging sixties', aroused national concern and gave a boost to homelessness charityShelter which, coincidentally, launched a few days later.. Loach's nextWednesday Play,In Two Minds (BBC, tx. 1/3/1967), written byDavid Mercer, explored the issue of schizophrenia and the ideas of the radical psychiatristR. D. Laing, but for his first feature film,Poor Cow (1967), he returned to the world ofUp The Junction andCathy Come Home. With a script byNell Dunn (who had writtenUp The Junction), and starringCarol White as a rather more feckless variant on her Cathy character, it was a transitional film, retaining some of the stylistic innovations andnon-diegetic music ofUp The Junction andCathy Come Home while striving towards the naturalistic style that was to becomeLoach's trademark. Several people were instrumental inLoach finding his style and his subject matter in the late sixties. One of these wasTony Garnett, with whomLoach worked onUp The Junction,Cathy Come Home,In Two Minds and his final twoWednesday Plays:The Golden Vision (BBC, tx. 17/4/1968) andThe Big Flame (BBC, tx. 19/2/1969). It was on these television dramas thatLoach developed a naturalistic style which reached its fullest expression in his second feature film,Kes (1969), whichGarnett produced. Adapted byBarry Hines from his own novel,Kes told the story of Billy Casper, a working-class lad from Barnsley, alienated from school and the prospect of working in the coal mine, who finds a sense of personal achievement in learning to train and fly a kestrel. The cinematographerChris Menges collaborated withLoach on developing a more observational style which allowed improvisation and the use of untrained actors such asDavid Bradley who played Billy. Kes was a commercial and critical success butLoach's next film,Family Life (1971) a re-working ofIn Two Minds, held little appeal for mainstream cinema audiences and, in the face of a declining British film industry, he spent most of the '70s working in television, making a series of extraordinarily radical political dramas.The Big Flame, scripted by the Trotskyite writerJim Allen, dramatises a fictional strike at the Liverpool docks which almost escalates into a working-class revolution.Allen also wroteThe Rank and File (BBC, tx. 20/5/1971), a less daring but more realistic play built around the strike of thePilkington glass workers. These gritty contemporary dramas were succeeded byDays of Hope (BBC, 1975), four feature-length period dramas shot in colour, showing the politicisation of a working-class family in the period from the First World War to the General Strike of 1926, which recount historical events from an explicitly Trotskyite point of view. After a return to contemporary politics with the two-part dramaThe Price Of Coal (BBC, 1977),Loach was able to make his fourth feature filmBlack Jack (1979), a children's adventure film set in the 18th century, made byLoach andGarnett'sKestrel Films with money from theNational Film Finance Corporation. Loach began the 1980s with two films scripted byBarry Hines,The Gamekeeper (1980), made forATV andLooks and Smiles (1981), made forCentral TV (and limited cinema release).Garnett had left (temporarily) for America, andLoach admits to finding things difficult at this time, struggling to raise money for films and failing to adapt to the political changes that were taking place as Britain swung to the Right: I think I'd lost my way a bit - and lost touch with the kind of raw energy of the things we'd done in the mid-sixties and withKes. The films I was making weren't incisive enough. I wasn't getting the right projects and I wasn't getting the right ideas. And so that's why I tried documentaries not long after the big political change occurred in Britain. But even with documentaries Loach ran into problems of political censorship. The four-part series about the trade unions,Questions Of Leadership, commissioned byChannel Four, was never shown; a film about the miners' strike forThe South Bank Show was withheld byLWT, to be shown eventually onChannel Four; andJim Allen's stage play about Zionism,Perdition, which Loach was going to direct, was withdrawn at the last minute by theRoyal Court Theatre. One of the few filmsLoach did manage to get made in the '80s wasFatherland (1986), written byTrevor Griffiths and funded byFilm Four International with French and German co-production money. The resulting film was more European in subject matter and less social realist in style than many ofLoach's previous films and, despiteLoach andGriffiths sharing the same political sympathies, wasn't entirely successful, partly becauseGriffiths' script was more literary and less suited toLoach's naturalistic style. It wasn't until 1990, with the release ofHidden Agenda, a political thriller set in Northern Ireland about the British army's 'shoot-to-kill' policy, thatLoach was able to make a film that regained the polemical edge of the best of his earlier work. It was written byJim Allen, who was to script two more films forLoach in the '90s, and followed by the equally successfulRiff-Raff (1991), the first of a series of films produced bySally Hibbin'sParallax Pictures and photographed byBarry Ackroyd. In addition toJim Allen, who wroteRaining Stones (1993) andLand and Freedom (1995), Loach was able to draw on a new generation of left-wing writers such asBill Jesse (Riff-Raff),Rona Munro (Ladybird, Ladybird, 1994),Paul Laverty (Carla's Song, 1996,My Name Is Joe, 1998,Bread and Roses, 2000, andSweet Sixteen, 2002) andRob Dawber (The Navigators, 2001), to regain his sense of purpose and achieve a remarkable renaissance in his career. A new element which came intoLoach's work in the '90s was an increased use of humour. This was partly a result of working with new collaborators such asBill Jesse andPaul Laverty who brought a new sensibility, tempering the earnest didacticism of some ofLoach's earlier films. Additionally, while some of the '90s films veered towards social realism (Riff-Raff,Raining Stones,The Navigators), others mixed social realism with melodrama (Ladybird, Ladybird,Carla's Song,My Name Is Joe), adding an extra enriching dimension to the films. Some critics, however, noting the presence of a downward spiral towards pessimism and defeat inLoach's films, have identified this as a persistent and fundamental problem in his work which is exacerbated by the adoption of a naturalistic style. When so many of his films end on a bleak, despairing note, no matter how 'realistic' this may be, the audience is left with little prospect of positive change, no manifesto for how things might be different. On the other hand, one can but admireLoach for relentlessly sticking to his task, repeatedly championing the underdog by revealing the hardships and struggles of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is no accident that his best work has been produced at times of supposed affluence, in the mid '60s and the '90s, when he has often been a lone voice, bravely and resolutely standing up for the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. Few directors have been as consistent in their themes and their filmic style, or as principled in their politics, asLoach has in a career spanning five decades. Without doubt he is Britain's foremost political filmmaker. Bibliography
Fuller, Graham (ed),Loach On Loach (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)
Hill, John, 'Every Fuckin' Choice Stinks',Sight and Sound, Nov. 1998, pp. 18-21
Kerr, Paul, 'The Complete Ken Loach',Stills, May/June 1986, pp. 144-8
Leigh, Jacob,The Cinema Of Ken Loach (London: Wallflower, 2002)
McKnight, George (ed),Agent Of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997) Lez Cooke, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors  |
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