The Philosophy of Documentary Film by David LaRocca

Author:David LaRocca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Chapter 16

Whose Strife Is It Anyway?

The Erosion of Agency in the Cinematic Production of Kitchen Sink Realism

Elan Gamaker

In 1966, the BBC commissioned local filmmaker Ken Loach to adapt the Jeremy Sandford-penned play Cathy Come Home for national broadcast in England. Cathy Come Home tells the story of Cathy and Reg Ward (Carol White and Ray Brooks), a young working-class couple who, after a brief courting, marry and begin a life together. They have high hopes, but these are quickly dashed when Reg loses his job, and they must move into council housing. But there is a paucity of decent accommodation, so when the couple—with three kids in tow—are evicted, they move to a caravan. The caravan burns down, forcing the couple to split as Cathy moves to a women-only dormitory. The enforced separation ruins their marriage, and Cathy is left alone. Penniless, her children are taken into state care and she becomes homeless.

The work was an episode of The Wednesday Play, a regular slot featuring television adaptations of current theatrical pieces. A quarter of the country’s viewing public tuned in, and the show had an immediate and far-reaching effect on programming, the effects of viewership, and especially social action. City councils were spurred into action and new housing charities such as Shelter were formed, as “the issues of homelessness and of various measures adopted by local authorities to deal with it became more prominent in public and political discussion.”1 The film was even credited with being the most prominent to highlight the growing postwar housing crisis and “had its effects on the Labour Government of 1966.”2

But, interestingly, Cathy Come Home has since become praised more for its visual style than for its social, economic, or political influence. Using a combination of dramatized narrative based on the source material, along with location footage of London’s decrepit housing precincts, the film merges raw document with actor-driven dramaturgy to create a depiction of working life that is part record, part restaging. So, even though Cathy Come Home was commissioned to show the housing shortage in 1960s Britain, it was this creative, hybrid approach—as opposed to the film’s real-world impact—that has made the work come to be regarded as a groundbreaking documentary. Moreover, and more proximately, its use of dramatization provided the springboard for Ken Loach’s career as a narrative filmmaker and was “an inspiration for his future work and his development into making feature length films.”3

By his own admission Loach did not set out merely to create a document of record. He decided to shoot the film in what I call here documentary style “to increase its believability.”4 By documentary style I refer to a generic stylization of a visual document: planned and restaged, rehearsed, written and acted scenes shot in a verité manner to imitate the straightforward recording of real events. For Loach, film—and by inference filmmakers themselves—had the “social responsibility to effect change.”5

But while we might argue that this ethos evokes a key problematic proposed by Allan Sekula, namely that artistic

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