ESSAYS

Ken Loach or Film for Different World

Without hiding his affinity, the author of the text analyzes several films by Ken Loach, a strongly left-oriented author in a political and social sense. One of Loach’s early television films Cathy Come Home already became and remained the trademark for the engaged film. Loach experienced his first big cinema success with a moderate realistic family drama about the childhood of Kes which is probably his most emotional film.

However, the documentary genre was more suitable for Loach’s artistic and social intentions. Therefore, the text analyzes Loach’s films about workers’ strikes such as A Question of Leadership and Which Side Are You On?, as well as The Flickering Flame. In these films the director carefully arranges his documentary material with the purpose of making the spectator take the side of the left position. He develops the procedure of the targeted empathy.

This procedure will appear in a radical form in his feature films such as Hidden Agenda, a film on Northern Ireland, Ladybird, Ladybird, a film that connects an intimate story and a criticizing social background, and Land and Freedom, about conflicts within the left during the Spanish civil war in which he achieves the director’s tour de force.

Marijan Krivak