The famous French film critic, Andre Bazin, argues in his essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" that there are two types of film makers – those who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality." Ken Loach is, perhaps, the most noteworthy example of a Bazinian film maker, a director who consistently puts his "faith in reality." Kes, his 1970 breakthrough film, is often cited as one of the ten best British movies ever made. It is a thorough-going demonstration of the ethics and aesthetics of realism.
Bazin cited the Italian "neo-realists," filmmakers like Visconti, de Sica, and Rossellini, as developing a new form of "humanism." He conceived of film as a mechanism for mirroring the world – that is, reflecting the world in a concrete, explicable form. His theory required that he see sound films as a great advance on the poetic imagery and expressionistic acting of the silent era – after all, the world is present to us in sound. (Bazin was one of the few critics who regarded sound pictures as an artistic advance more perfect than the silent film.) As Kes shows, the world is also present to us in color – hence, the 35 milimeter technicolor in which his film is rendered. Bazin regarded montage, that is editing, as necessary to the development of "film as an art." But he thought that showy or overly demonstrative montage abstracted the audience from the film, that is, distracted viewers from the emotional or narrative content of what they were seeing – as a consequence, Bazin favored long-takes, even sequence shots, in deep-focus. The deep-focus effects visible in a movie like Orson Welles Citizen Kane, Bazin hailed as an important advance in film making – although he was deeply suspicious of Welles’ melodramatic devices and German expressionist lighting. (I think the paradigm for Bazinian cinema are some of the sequences showing family squabbles in Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons – particularly, the long sequence with Agnes Moorhead and .... arguing in the kitchen.) Ultimately, Bazin felt that the film maker should present reality as he or she found it, refrain from commentary on the action depicted, and let the audience determine the meanings implicit in the material. Bazin’s notion was that the director should be invisible and anonymous. To some degree, Kes sustains this ideology – Loach has always maintained that he is merely a member of a team of people working together to create the film and not its auteur in any significant way. This is disingenuous because, in fact, Loach’ movies have a specific quality that is unique to them and remarkably consistent throughout his work.
Bazin famously wrote that "if the plastic arts were subjected to psychoanalysis," it would be revealed that the practice of embalming the dead would be "the fundamental factor in their creation" – this statement commences his essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image". Bazin’s notion that photography is inevitably mortuary – that is, concerned with preserving the dead – has been decisive with respect to both Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag’s analysis of photography. The idea is implicit as well in Godard’s dictum that every film is a documentary on the subject of its actor – it preserves a certain phase in their lives as well as their image at that time. Bazin seems to have felt that film effected as sort of resurrection of their flesh – it restores life to what has been dead. In that context, it is well to recall that Bazin was a devout Catholic – in the realistic image, he saw God depicted. Excessive manipulation of an image, aggressive montage, and stylized or symbolic narrative was a form of blasphemy, heresy against God’s creation. Bazin died of leukemia in 1958one day before his admirer, Francois Truffaut, began shooting The 400 Blows, a picture dedicated to the critic.
Although Loach’s Kes seems consistent with Bazin’s theories, the director approached the picture from a perspective that would have horrified the Frenchman. Loach is affiliated with the far Left in British politics – a member of the Socialist Labor League. In this context, he is a socialist with an ideology arising from the milieu of British radical trade unionism. Loach was raised in the north of England, in the coal-mining country, showing in Kes. Both his grandfather and father were lower middle class tradesmen and labor organizers. Loach escaped this background through the medium of television – he worked on documentaries made by the BBC during the period when Labor was ascendent, that is, during the sixties before the rule of Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher. The State media and the arts were heavily influenced by Marxist thought during that period – indeed, Screen the Oxford-published journal of film and television studies (edited at the University of Glasgow) is, in effect, a Marxist (and radical feminist) party organ.
Loach is a lawyer, taking a degree in that subject in the late fifties (he was born in 1936). After two years in the RAF, Loach went to work at the BBC and rapidly rose to the status of producer of the so-called Wednesday Plays, a series of docu-dramas on issues of social concern. Loach wrote these programs and directed them as well, achieving significant acclaim. Initially, his master was Bertolt Brecht and his TV programs show various degrees of Brechtian influence – including direct address to the camera, documentary interpolations, and the other types of Verfremdundeffekts ("Alienation effects"). Communist cinema is nominally materialist and, therefore, intersects with the canons of Bazinian practice arising in the context of similarly Left-leaning neo-realism – in Britain, the so-called "Kitchen Sink" directors. Gradually, Loach’s Brechtian approach to cinema matured into the densely realistic practice visible in Kes. (As has been pointed out, the only vestige of Brecht remaining in Kes is the score at the bottom of the image comically superimposed in the football sequence.)
Not surprisingly, Loach’s favorite films are de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, and Milos Foreman’s Loves of a Blonde. Characteristic of film artists of his generation, Loach asserts that Bicycle Thieves changed his life.
Loach has remained active in British cinema although his films have never been successful at the box-office. His work has twice won the Cannes Palme d’Or, the highest award at that festival – the prize was awarded for The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), a film about the Irish rebellion against the British and, then, for I, Daniel Blake (2016), a movie about a pensioner seeking health and other benefits from British government agencies. (Loach’s thesis is that the government makes application for benefits so onerous that deserving recipients don’t apply or become exhausted in their attempts – Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn attended the premiere of I, Daniel Blake and has promoted the movie.) Although he is 82, Loach continues to make movies. In 2019, his picture We’re sorry we missed you, about so-called Zero Hour contracts competed at Cannes. ("Zero Hour" contracts are employment contracts that out-source labor and don’t require the employer to provide any minimum number of hours work.)
Due to his political engagement, Ken Loach has been controversial: he has called for a boycott of Israel and Israeli films on the basis of his perception that the Jewish State discriminates against Palestinians. When he noted that Israel was founded on the basis of "ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians", he was rather predictably accused of both anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. The Wind that Shakes the Barley was interpreted as pro-IRA propaganda and denounced in the conservative press. Furthermore, I, Daniel Blake was received with indignation by the agencies whose work it depicted – they claimed that the film was untruthful and damaging to their enterprise. A number of Loach films have served as incentives to governmental or employment law reforms in the United Kingdom. He was among the first directors to use "swearing" and curse words in his films – this is part of his commitment to realism, although initially many critics purported to be offended. (Probably, their objections were primarily politically.) Loach has also been attacked from his Left – he has been accused of not featuring strong women in his films and depicting female characters as primarily victims; it has been said that "he seems not to know that gay people exist."
The Soundtrack
Most American film distributors passed on Kes on the basis of their concern that the film’s dialogue would be largely unintelligible to audiences in the United States. One American distributor said that the film’s dialogue would be easier to understand if "it were in Hungarian." The characters in Kes speak in a Yorkshire dialect that many people in London would have difficulty understanding. In recognition of this problem, Loach recorded a post-synchronized soundtrack intended to provide more definition and audio clarity to speech in the film – not all of the film was post-synchronized just some parts that were deemed particularly hard to understand. Loach’s commitment to realism, however, required that he re-record the film in the same Yorkshire dialect – and, as a consequence, to my ear, at least, the post-synchronized sound-track is, more or less, an unintelligible as the originial sound. I was able to decipher only about one-third of what the characters say in the movie – and, when they are excited and talking quickly the speeches devolve into a mere salad of vowels and consonants. There is no cure for this – you simply have to listen as hard as you can.
The rather plaintive pastoral-sounding melodies that accompany the scenes in which Billy Caspar encounters the kestrel date the movie. Nothing cries out the vintage of a movie more stridently than a film’s musical cues.
Film Production notes
Kes was made on location, using natural light and semi-professional actors. By "semi-professional", I mean that the lead characters are generally played by comedians who performed on TV and in local nightclubs. (Comedians are always a good resource for film makers.)
Surprisingly, the picture has a literary source – a novel called A Kestrel for a Knave, published in 1968 by Barry Hines. (The phrase a "a kestrel for a knave" – "knave" taking its medieval meaning of "a lad" – comes from a 15th century manuscript, The Boke of St. Albans). Sound was recorded live and some of it was deemed murky even by the neo-realist standards to which Loach subscribed.
David Bradley (now known as "Dai Bradley" – he is a follower of Krishnamurti) was 14 when the movie was made. He has happy recollections of the shoot – "we were all one big family," he has said. He particularly enjoyed working with the three kestrels trained for the film and recalls the football scenes as being particularly fun to shoot. The movie was made in Barnsley (south Yorkshire) and the football scenes were shot in August. Thousands of gallons of water had been sprayed on the field to create mud. It was the coldest August for many years and Bradley says that everyone was "freezing."
Bradley became emotionally attached to the kestrels in the film. He was horrified when Loach told him that one of the birds had to be killed for the film’s ending. Accordingly, the emotions that we see in the movie are authentic rage and sorrow. (In fact, Bradley later learned that Loach hadn’t killed the kestrel – a dead bird had been retrieved from a place that raised these kinds of raptors, a story that, itself, seems a little dubious to me.) Like many child stars, Bradley had difficulty making the transition to adult roles. He played the lead in Peter Schaffer’s Equus, but, later, when rejected for a role for which he thought he was well-suited, Bradley retired from acting and spent twenty years as a carpenter doing remodel projects in London. When Kes was revived on its thirtieth anniversary, by this time accounted the seventh greatest film in British history, Bradley enjoyed some brief renown and returned to the stage. He has never achieved any significant success, although he seems to perform frequently in secondary roles in Shakespeare plays. He is now an odd-looking, wizened geezer.
Thoughts as to the film’s interpretation
British critics regard Kes as an indictment of both education and the class system in the United Kingdom. The school system in the Yorkshire mining town operates as a cog in an industrial system intended to create miners for consumption in "the pits." The ideal miner is compliant, unimaginative, scarcely literate, uninterested in anything but drinking and sport, and, therefore, readily manipulated. Pressure from educators, accordingly, produces a working class of the particular sort required by the local industry. (The film’s ostensibly vicious attack on the British state-sponsored school system, with a couple of exceptions, is invisible to American audiences – by our standards, the school seems to be teaching rigorous, well-organized, and difficult curricula. Our schools are so immeasurably worse than the British that the classrooms shown in Kes seem calm havens of industrious academic endeavor.) The endeavor in these schools is to force all students into a specific mold – the resourceful and highly intelligent hero in Kes is at risk of being crushed into a pacific, ignorant working man, narcotized by alcohol and football. The film’s first shot is symbolic – Billy occupies the same bed as his brother. Society’s impulse is to turn him into his ne-er-do-well brother who spends the time that he not working in the pits gambling, drinking, and ineffectually chasing women.
The film also exhibits a heuristic common in education both in Britain and this country. The teachers judge students by forebears in their family. The headmaster who canes the boys for smoking shrieks that he’s been caning generations of students – he views this as evidence of the inherent depravity of the children he is supposed to be educating. But, in fact, his brutality may be a reason that the educational system doesn’t educate anyone. (The film is clear-eyed on this subject: the system is not supposed to educate anyone – indeed, educating anyone would be counter to the system’s objective: producing readily manipulable soldiers in the industrial army.) In any event, the students who have just been caned for cigarette possession are seen in the next couple shots blithely smoking at recess – of course, the system allows for minor instances of rebellion: as long as kids think they are rebels by smoking forbidden cigarettes all will be well with the class system. Billy Caspar is viewed by his teachers in the light of his older brother. No doubt, the older brother, Jud, was similarly construed as sharing the same flaws that his father exhibited. In this world, people are viewed as types, not individuals.
No doubt, Loach would eschew any non-materialist theory interpretative of the film – he would argue, I suppose, that there are no symbols in the film, no metaphors, merely sober reflections of everyday life in a south Yorkshire mining town. But symbolism and metaphor are unavoidable in narrative art – images and figures have meanings behind their merely instrumental appearance in the narrative. The fact that the kestrel is extracted from the high wall of a ruined medieval monastery is certainly symbolic – kestrels and medieval ruins bring to mind the England of the Arthurian legends. Falconry is a noble art, the pastime of knights and aristocrats and, therefore, Billy trespasses across class lines when he takes up the sport of kings. Similarly, the ruins of the monastery suggest that the working class world shown in the movie is rooted in something like feudalism – the miners are serfs. The tamed kestrel is a highly complex and paradoxical figure, an image of a free, wild thing domesticated into becoming a servant. Thus, the pinioned bird both represents freedom and its opposite. The domesticated kestrel is an extraordinarily complex symbol representing both the probable fate of Billy Caspar and one means to escape that fate.
Loach is also clear about one indisputable phenomenon: the most fearsome predators on the poor are the poor themselves. Even Billy Caspar is a bully. In the scene involving the smokers, he conspires with the bigger boys to bully the smallest kid in the group into accepting responsibility for the cigarettes and, thereby, earning a caning himself. The school teachers don’t commit soul-murder by killing Billy’s kestrel – this is accomplished by his own brother.
Throughout the film, Billy pretends that he can’t read or write. Yet, we see him reading and, acting out, a comic strip in an early scene in the movie and, of course, he has mastered a complex manual on raising and training kestrels, a book stolen from the second-hand shop that he uses as his guide to falconry. Loach poses this question: what kind of socio-economic system creates young people who take refuge in the untrue claim that they can’t read.
Questions for discussion:
2. Similarly, Kes contains a long sequence showing Jud and Billy’s mother at the pub. Billy isn’t even in this scene? What does it mean? Why did the filmmaker include this scene?
3. A British critic noted that many people in the audience said that Billy could be employed as a person who trains animals for performances in a circus? Or could work at a zoo? What do you think?
4. What are the differences between the milieu depicted in Kes and the socio-economic factors prevailing in coal country in West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and other places that were bastions of Trump voters in 2016?
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