Screentest

One of our sponsors this year is Rough Guides, who have recently released their Rough Guide To Film. The book, published in September 2007 is a hefty 650-page volume of film reviews, ordered by director, in addition to a number of articles on aspects of film. As well as donating prizes to the festival, Rough Guide has kindly allowed us to reproduce a few excerpts from the book which we hope will interest you. Included is an article on Ken Loach, who attended Screentest in 2005 as well as an article on realism in British Cinema. The Rough Guide To Film is available in all good book shops now at the price of £18.99.

Introduction:

When embarking on The Rough Guide To Film we had one central aim: to present the world of cinema through the lens of its leading directors. Of course, a set of nearly 840 director portraits hardly tells the whole story of the movies, which is as much an industry as an art form. In its day-to-day business of self-promotion, cinema always has more to say about its acting talent than its directorial stars, and when it comes to green-lighting and the final cut the decisions are mostly made by producers and financiers, not the man with the megaphone. But with the moneymen mostly shying away from the limelight and the big-name stars never out of it, we thought it high time that a popular guide shine a light on the directors. From professionals wielding a budget of millions to improvisers with only a DV camera and a shoestring crew, they are the people whose artistic vision is often what ultimately determines a film’s value.

There is no shortage of film reviews out there - whether on the Internet or in large printed directories - but this wealth of information can actually be unhelpful to the viewer wanting to pick a film to see at the cinema or add to their DVD rental list. In The Rough Guide To Film we have prioritized quality over quantity, so that every film reviewed is one that is worthy of your time. That said, there are still over 2000 reviews in the book, so you will never be short of ideas for what to watch.

Ken Loach (UK, 1936 -)

There is a persistent myth about Ken Loach. It’s that his TV play Cathy Come Home (1966) changed the law on homelessness and was responsible for the creation of the charity Shelter. As Loach is the first to admit, Shelter was already in existence and the television drama only brought the issues into the public arena. Although this may seem like a small point, it’s crucial to an understanding of Loach’s work because the socialist director doesn’t believe that one film can make an iota of difference. This may seem surprising, almost self-defeating, as the director appears to be on a one-man mission to raise political consciousness.

Loach began his career as a trainee director at the BBC, where he formed one of the most important partnerships in his career. Working with producer Tony Garnett, Loach made, among others, Up The Junction (1965), which controversially tackled the subject of abortion, and Cathy Come Home. The star of that TV play, Carol White, also elicited her 1960s brand of charisma in Loach’s first feature film, the austere, miserabilist Poor Cow (1967) about the travails of a young, married woman whose bad boy hubby is residing at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Two years later, Loach made the feature for which he is still best known in the UK, his locus classicus, Kes (1969), based on a novel by Barry Hines and produced and co-written by Garnett. Returning to television, Loach only made a handful of features in the 1970s and 80s, including Family Life (1971), the earnestly indulgent and semi-improvised drama Looks And Smiles (1981) and the genuine curio Fatherland (1986), about a folk singer who leaves East Germany for the West.

However, he enjoyed an unlikely renaissance in the 1990s. Loach hates the expression “political filmmaker” as he believes all films are political, or at least ideological, and regards the term as a sly way of marginalizing left-wing directors. However, it’s undeniable that some of his films tackle political issues head-on: the shoot-to-kill policy in Northern Ireland in Hidden Agenda (1990); the dissolution of the Left during the Spanish Civil War in Land And Freedom (1995); the Nicaraguan conflict in Carla’s Song (1996); and the human rights of poorly paid Latin American cleaners in Bread And Roses (2000), his only North American film to date.

During a career lasting over four decades, the working classes have unerringly been Loach’s subject, and this hasn’t changed in recent years. Without succumbing entirely to salt-of-the-earth stereotypes, his workers are flawed, headstrong and often hopeless: the scheming construction workers on a London building site in the boisterous Riff-Raff (1990); the unemployed father trying to find the money for his daughter’s communion dress in the grimly humorous Raining Stones (1993); the single mum who is the courge of social services in the unsubtly polemical Ladybird, Ladybird (1994); the alcoholic who moonlights while on the dole in My Name Is Joe (1998); and the teenage drug dealer in Sweet Sixteen (2002). When discussing Loach’s aesthetic, critics can’t avoid using words like gritty and realistic. Loach exhibits a personal modesty which is translated into his directorial style, a self-effacing cinéma vérité approach. However, there are some distinctive characteristics in his work, such as his concerns with the family unit and his ability to capture the flavour and timbre of previously undocumented lives and communities (including authentic accents and dialects that need to be subtitled for the American market).

If the director eschews a distinct personal style, it’s because he puts himself at the service of his writers, from his long association with firebrand playwright Jim Allen (writer of his early TV plays and Hidden Agenda, Raining Stones and Land And Freedom) to his fruitful partnership with Paul Laverty (writer of Carla’s Song and the Scottish films My Name Is Joe, Sweet Sixteen and 2004’s Ae Fond Kiss). Loach’s scripts are often the result of months of research, but they are not usually shown in their entirety to the actors, who never quite know what will happen next. In a standout moment in Riff-Raff, a builder played by Ricky Tomlinson is having a sneaky bath in a show home when he’s surprised by three