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 Muslim women who are being escorted around the premises. The look of shocked amazement on Tomlinson’s face was genuine, as the actor was simply instructed to “have a bath”, and had no idea of the director’s cruel intentions.

These disingenuous methods are Loach’s means to a naturalistic end. His quest for authenticity extends to employing nonprofessional actors in supporting or occasionally starring roles, most notably Martin Compston (who was an apprentice footballer) in Sweet Sixteen, comedienne Crissy Rock in Ladybird, Ladybird and, most famously, David Bradley in Kes, whose emotionally devastating performance is singed into the retina of anyone who’s ever seen the film. In 2006, Loach received the top prize at Cannes for The Wind That Shakes The Barley (2006). Most critics agreed that this potent drama about the aftermath of the Irish uprising was by no means the director’s finest work, and that the prize was, in all but name, a lifetime achievement award. And few would disagree that his career has deserved such an honour.

Kes 1969, 113 min cast David Bradley, Lynne Perrie, Freddie Fletcher, Colin Welland, Brian Glover, Bob Bowes, Robert Naylor cin Chris Menges m John Cameron

Newcomer David Bradley plays a weedy schoolboy who finds meaning in his deprived life by caring for a young kestrel. Bradley is almost overshadowed by Brian Glover’s barnstorming performance as an ultra-competitive games teacher. Almost but not quite, because Bradley, like the film, evinces an aching poignancy. This is Loach’s most affecting and effective attempt at uniting the universal and the particular.

Land And Freedom 1995, 110 min cast Ian Hart, Rosana Pastor, Iciar Bollain, Tom Gilroy, Eoin McCarthy, Frédéric Pierrot cin Barry Ackroyd m George Fenton

Idealistic young Scouser David Carr (Ian Hart) joins the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, only to watch the opposition to Generalissimo Franco fracture. Amidst the impressive battle scenes, Loach bravely, or foolhardily, stops the action to stage a lengthy discussion about the ideological pros and cons of land collectivization. Intellectual cinema at its most rousing.

British social realism: keeping it real

Critics have often bemoaned the dominance of social realism in the British national cinema; not enough Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger-style fantasy, too many gritty realist dramas. However, as with most sweeping generalizations, there is more than a grain of truth amid this critique of British filmmaking. Karel Reisz was one of a number of directors involved in the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, which was launched in 1956 by Reisz, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti.

These key directors, and their associates, produced imaginative, short documentary films, shot in a grainy cinéma vérité style with inexpensive 16mm technology, which typically featured working-class people at work and play. They looked back to the strong wartime documentary tradition epitomized by Humphrey Jennings, who had built on the foundations laid by the great John Grierson who established Britain as a centre of excellence for documentary-making in the 1930s. Reisz moved from documentaries to fiction features in 1960, with Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, as part of a burgeoning New Wave of British filmmaking, one of several such movements worldwide. The British New Wave lacked the intellectual ambition and free editing style of the nouvelle vague and the pathos of Italian neo-realism, but it shared with both a move towards greater location shooting and a suspicion of gloss and artifice. It also had a distinctly British focus on the lower end of the traditional English class system.

Other significant early films of this social realist movement were Richardson’s A Taste Of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (1962), John Schlesinger’s A Kind Of Loving (1962) and Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963). All but A Taste Of Honey (from a play by Shelagh Delaney) were based on novels, but the most important literary adaptation of the British New Wave was Richardson’s 1959 film of John Osborne’s landmark play Look Back In Anger. Staged at the Royal Court in 1956, it set the tone for films reflecting the “Angry Young Men” vogue of the period, which was evidenced in the New Wave’s emphasis on the lives and frustrations of northern working-class men, and its often less-than-sympathetic handling of female characters.

The radical political mood of the moment was felt across all areas of the media. British television, with its public service obligations, played a key role in the cultural movements of the period, providing employment for a new generation of directors and opportunities for developing alternative models of low-key realism. Ken Loach, a torchbearer for realistic and social-cause filmmaking, was one of several directors to benefit from working for the BBC, finding himself in the national spotlight after making the ground-breaking TV drama Cathy Come Home (1966). By the end of the 1960s, films like Loach’s Kes (1969) vied for attention with those of the extravagant “romantic” director Ken Russell, while Reisz and Richardson were moving towards literary adaptations and lighter fare. And although Anderson’s If…. (1968) retained the political anger of the early 1960s, its hypothetical public school revolution moved well away from social realism’s tales of ordinary people living ordinary lives.

The 1970s were not significant years for realism in British cinema, with the impetus shifting to television, but in the 1980s Loach was joined by Mike Leigh, who hit his stride in 1988 with High Hopes. Leigh remains an important force in British social realism to the present day, making down-to-earth films from 1995’s Secrets And Lies to 2002’s All Or Nothing. Filmmakers of the 1980s and early 90s were inspired by the social concerns raised by the politics of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative regime, and were aided by an injection of cash into the industry courtesy of the newly created Channel 4, with its edict to provide distinct, provocative and socially diverse programming. The undoubted chef d’oeuvre of this financing was Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).

As British film production rose in the 1990s, Loach returned to prominence with a series of films about the struggles of those at the wrong end of the social ladder: Riff-Raff (1990), Raining Stones (1993) and, best of all, My Name Is Joe (1998). Gary Oldman’s fierce Nil By Mouth (1997) and Lynne Ramsay’s more lyrical Ratcatcher (1999) were bleak, but brilliant, highlights of the decade. At the other end of the spectrum, Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996) and Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (1997) mixed comedy with themes of working-class conflict, unemployment and alienation, and Damien O’Donnell’s East Is East (1999) added multicultural clashes to the mix. Of the new generation of realists, the most convincing is the streetwise Shane Meadows, whose DIY aesthetic has made use of the economies of digital video. A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) was one of several films to announce his talents, and his mature, semi-autobiographical This Is England (2007) has kept Britain’s tradition of social realism fresh and pertinent.

Quotes are taken with permission from the Rough Guide To Film (September 2007). All rights reserved with Rough Guides.