Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television by John Hill

Author:John Hill [Hill, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, General
ISBN: 9781838716592
Google: h1jyDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-07-25T00:00:16.469523+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.