Introduction

'If we had succeeded here - and we could have done - we would have changed the world.'

David Carr in Land and Freedom

When Ken Loach was persuaded to become involved in this project in 1996, he said, 'It's a bit egotistical, isn't it? I can't imagine anyone wants to hear me waffling on.' In its self-effacement, it was a characteristically Loachian comment, and the one, above all others, that I most vehemently disagreed with during the several meetings that enabled Loach on Loach to come into being. For there were pressing reasons why a personal account by Loach of his career should become a matter of record. First of all, there is no biography of Loach and only one book of commentary on his work as a film-maker in the English language.* Second, the social imperatives of Loach's work mean it is in danger of becoming the intellectual property of a particular branch of film studies, which has a tendency to obfuscate the spirit in which his TV plays and films were made; Loach's accessible conversation in the following pages reminds us that his prime concern is people, not rhetoric or ideology, no matter that his work is rooted in political struggle. Third, Loach has been scandalously neglected in terms of his craft as a director, on which, of course, the ideas in his films depend for their lucidity. How Loach and his collaborators made their early television plays and how, thirty years later, they make their feature films are central to this book.

Loach is a naturally modest man. Indeed, he is a walking oxymoron: a film director apparently without ego. Cinematographer Chris Menges may have had Loach's unusual combination of gentleness, steel and purpose in mind when he said, 'Ken is the man I admire most.'┼ Of the legions of directors who have addressed my tape-recorder over the years, Loach has been the least directorly in manner, the one least interested in attaching cosmic significance to the profession. The point would not be worth making except that it's germane both to Loach's approach to making his films and their dogged insistence on a democratic, egalitarian way of life. Says Loach, 'We are all equally important, and drama is not the preserve of the middle class.' His TV dramas and documentaries and his feature films cling to that thread through thick and thin, seeking to draw attention to situations where people routinely undercut or actually destroy the equality, liberty and livelihoods of others - in the workplace, in the home and in society at large.

It may, then, be heretical to suggest it, but Loach is the single most important - by which I mean urgent - voice in British film and TV of the last third of the century. That's not to slight his crucial collaborators, who include writers Nell Dunn, Jeremy Sandford, Neville Smith, Jim Allen, Barry Hines, Bill Jesse, Rona Munro and Paul Laverty; producers Tony Garnett, Rebecca O'Brien and Sally Hibbin; script editor Roger Smith; cinematographers Tony Imi, Chris Menges and Barry Ackroyd; and such diverse and inspired actors as Carol White, Bill Dean, Peter Kerrigan, Ken Jones, David Bradley, Sandy Ratcliff, Grace Cave, Robert Carlyle, Ricky Tomlinson and Crissy Rock. But Loach, of course, is the common denominator in the works he has signed and his is the unifying vision we are concerned with here.

Loach's work is exemplary on several fronts: as a thorn in the side of those opposed to political and social change, as a repository of humanism, as the spirit of independent cinema in a country that doesn't really have one, and simply in terms of evolving, innovatory technique. He is really the only contemporary world-class film-maker spanning cinema and television, fiction and documentary, who prioritizes polemics over commercial needs every time out. And of the angry young men of the Left who emerged from the BBC in the 1960s, Loach is the one who has most consistently stuck to the task of using film as a means of dissent in a world in which it's axiomatic that people in power will exploit and betray those who aren't. Perhaps the most alarming revelation to have emerged from his films over the years, though, is the recognition that the betrayal and disenfranchisement of working-class people come, invariably, at the hands of those who are supposed to protect and support their interests: the social services who take Cathy's children away from her in Cathy Come Home and Maggie's from her in Ladybird, Ladybird; the mothers who batter away at their daughters' self-esteem in In Two Minds and Family Life; the mother who neglects Billy and the brother who kills his kestrel in Kes; the trade union officials who sell out their members in The Big Flame, The Rank and File and the banned documentary series Questions of Leadership; the steelworker turned gamekeeper who breeds birds for the idle rich to kill in The Gamekeeper; the British forces of law and order who harass the Irish or Northern Irish population or shoot to kill in Days of Hope, the documentary short Time to Go and Hidden Agenda; the communists who doom the efforts of the POUM militia group in the Spanish Civil War in Land and Freedom; and so on. Screenwriting theory holds that the greatest opponent is the most intimate opponent: time and again, Loach's dramas, whether true or fictional, bear out that notion in its full, tragic complexity.

Loach's career falls into four distinct phases, each of which roughly corresponds to the four decades in which he has been active: the fruitful Wednesday Play era (the 1960s); the foray into feature films and longer television dramas (the 1970s); the documentary period when Loach's attempts to tackle Thatcherism were throttled by censorship (the 1980s); and the mature feature film era (the 1990s). After some experiments in Brechtian non-naturalism in the mid-1960s, Loach gravitated towards a naturalistic, observational style that seeks to replicate life as it actually is. The cinéma vérité quality of his films is crucial to their explication of political and social dynamics. It is as if he recognized that, stylistically as well as morally, 'the truth will set you free'. In a filmic tradition that enfolds the British kitchen sink school and the Czech New Wave, the French youth cinema of the late 1990s and Zhang Yimou's The Story of Qiu Ju, Loach is the master of what Deborah Knight describes as 'critical realism'╬ - experimental naturalism in the service of social criticism, as derived from Emile Zola's manifesto of literary naturalism. In Loach's work, this is illustrated by a downbeat mise-en-scène with images of social decay and malaise, and unsentimental stories about ordinary, unheroic working-class people doing what little they can to make ends meet and make life tolerable in the face of faceless institutional and capitalistic oppression: the uncaring society of Thatcher and post-Thatcher Britain in Looks and Smiles, Riff-Raff, Raining Stones and Ladybird, Ladybird, which extends back to First World War England and Ireland in Days of Hope, forward to the inner-city Glasgow of Tony Blair's Britain of the late 1990s in My Name Is Joe, and beyond to the Popular Army shooting a Spanish militiawoman in the back in Land and Freedom and Contra atrocities in Nicaragua in Carla's Song.

Given Loach's ethical decision to paint life as it is and to refuse the seductions of stylization or the placebos and panaceas of happy endings, the world his films describe is not a pretty one or one that offers much hope of resolution; this has cost them wider commercial acceptance. It is a world in which the struggle goes on. Yet the idea that Loach's films are depressive or ultimately forlorn is a fundamental misconception. Although hope is also betrayed in them with familiar regularity, hope has a habit of resurfacing, for Loach is, quietly, a psychological realist, too. Poor Cow's Joy will drift along having affairs, watching her son grow until he's old enough to go on the dole. Bob finally gets his daughter a communion dress in Raining Stones. Ladybird, Ladybird's Maggie and Jorge will keep trying to put a family together. David's granddaughter carries the torch lit in pre-Franco Spain in modern Liverpool in Land and Freedom; the dockers of the same city in The Big Flame continue to fight casualization in The Flickering Flame. (One only despairs for the offspring of the Everton supporters of The Golden Vision.)

Sometimes, if hope evaporates for Loach's protagonists - Billy in Kes, Janice in Family Life - the point is made during the course of the film that society must begin to take responsibility for its ills and inequalities. And if the struggles in Loach's films seem endless, there is, as in life, alleviation in the shape of communal rituals and moments of self-actualization: the flirty, energized pub life and camaraderie of women factory workers in Up the Junction; Joy and her lover Dave escaping the slums for a few days in the country; Janice and her boyfriend going for a spin around town; Billy...