Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology

Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315304052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this edited collection, an international ensemble of scholars examine what contemporary cinema tells us about neoliberal capitalism and cinema, exploring whether filmmakers are able to imagine progressive alternatives under capitalist conditions. Individual contributions discuss filmmaking practices, film distribution, textual characteristics and the reception of films made in different parts of the world. They engage with topics such as class struggle, debt, multiculturalism and the effect of neoliberalism on love and sexual behaviour. Written in accessible, jargon-free language, Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology is an essential text for those interested in political filmmaking and the political meanings of films.

Part 1

Political economy of neoliberalism and its discontents

1

Team Loach and Sixteen Films

Authorship, collaboration, leadership (and football)¹

David Archibald

For over five decades, Ken Loach has directed film and television programmes that challenge the orthodoxies of contemporary capitalism and champion the struggles of oppressed groups. Working initially with the British Broadcasting Corporation, he negotiated the constraints of public sector broadcasting to direct ground-breaking television films such as Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966). Fifty years after the success of Cathy, Loach received the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival for I, Daniel Blake (2016), which was produced by Sixteen Films, the company Loach established with producer Rebecca O’Brien in 2002. Loach, then, has created work and achieved notable success (although not always consistently) both within the confines of a state broadcasting institution governed by a Keynesian model and with production companies working within the economic and ideological constraints of neoliberalism. This chapter sets out to explore the working practices of a socialist filmmaker who has, on the whole, successfully negotiated a pathway to produce films which contain an overt critique of capitalism whilst simultaneously operating within it.

Reflecting on receiving the Palme d’Or for I, Daniel Blake, Loach comments ‘The first thought is for all the people who helped you make it. If you were a football team winning the championship, everybody would get a medal but in films, the director has to go up. Obviously, it is for the whole team’ (quoted in Macnab 2016). In foregrounding filmmaking’s collaborative nature and comparing its production to that of a working-class sport, Loach’s observations contrast sharply with cinephilia’s rarified auteurist discourses.² I explore this contrast below through analysis of four imbricated areas: debates on authorship in Film and Television Studies, the functioning of leadership and teams in the production of films directed by Loach, how this production context is represented publicly by Sixteen Films, and how leadership and teams feature in Loach’s work throughout his career. My analysis is informed by research conducted into the making of The Angels’ Share (Loach, 2012), which involved extensive participant observation of the production process.

Figure 1.1:Loach and the lead actors in The Angels’ Share discuss the intricacies of a fight scene in a snooker hall.

Source: Author’s private collection.

I spent approximately twenty days on set during the shoot, visited the cutting room during the editing process, attended a private screening of a rough cut, attended the Cannes premiere and press conference, and received access to Sixteen Films’ documentation pertaining to the film. Observations from this research are supplemented by interviews with Loach and key production staff, subsequent analysis of material from the Loach archive at the British Film Institute (BFI) and textual analysis of Loach’s film and television œuvre.

Loach’s work has received considerable academic attention: most notably, the four-part television series Days of Hope (BBC, 1975) provoked a discipline-defining debate on the politics of form in Screen and subsequent years have witnessed book-length studies on Loach’s wider output; George McKnight’s edited collection Agent of Challenge and Defiance: Films of Ken Loach (McKnight 1997), Jacob Leigh’s The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People (Leigh 2002) and John Hill’s Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (Hill 2011). In keeping with Film and Television Studies’ text-based origins, these critical appraisals concentrate on formal qualities and thematic concerns, with detailed discussion of production notably absent. While popular commentaries on film production more widely do exist, for instance journalist Lillian Ross’ Picture, an account of the making of The Red Badge of Courage (Ford, 1952), and Wim Wenders’ My Time with Antonioni (1983), production studies of single films by Film Studies scholars are rare. Moreover, although there has been the development of Production Studies as a sub-field of Film and Television Studies, research on the nature of creative teams in film production remains extremely limited. In research conducted by Steve Presence and Andrew Spicer on RED Production Company and Warp Films, the authors note that ‘Production companies are not only invisible to the general public, they are also, it appears, invisible to media scholars who continue to be preoccupied with individual writers and directors such as Paul Abbott or Shane Meadows without an understanding of the importance of these companies’ production cultures to their creativity’ (Presence and Spicer 2016: 26). Dorota Ostrowska speculates on the reasons for the lack of research into production cultures more generally, positing that different methodologies are required to conduct this type of research, and noting that it requires a conceptual shift away from traditional screen analysis (Ostrowska 2010: 1). If we factor in the challenges of participant observation-based studies, not least that access is difficult to secure, it is considerably time-consuming, and writing about actually existing people requires more delicacy than writing about completed films, then it is not difficult to identify some of the reasons why research of this nature is scarce. I contend, nevertheless, that Film Studies would benefit from a broader and deeper engagement with Production Studies, which, as John Thornton Caldwell argues, ‘can provide rich insights that speculative theorizing misses’ (Thornton Caldwell 2013: 162). I seek here, then, to partially fill the lacuna in the critical literature surrounding Loach: that he has worked in both film and television in multifarious production contexts over a lengthy career makes his work a particularly rich case study. In so doing, I seek to illustrate how this type of research can benefit our understanding of the film production processes, but also feed into textual analysis, thereby impacting Film and Television Studies more broadly. My aim is not to elevate the study of practice above the practice of theory, but to illustrate how the latter might benefit from insights gleaned from the former. Of course, Loach is not the only socialist filmmaker making explicitly anti-capitalist or anti-neoliberal films; he is, however, perhaps the most successful, which makes the study of his production process of particular interest.

Theories of authorship

Film Studies’ critical orthodoxy tended initially to conceptualise cinema as a vehicle for the personal expression of the director in a framework inherited from Enlightenment thought, a perspective outlined by Alexander Astruc in 1948:

the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the new contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo.

(quoted in Caughie 1981: 9)

The inclusion of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ in John Caughie’s influential edited collection Theories of Authorship (Caughie 1981) was indicative of Film Studies’ structuralist/post-structuralist impulse to consign the auteur to the grave. Returning to these debates in 2007, however, Caughie notes that, although auteurism was no longer a hotly contested topic in the discipline, the grave to which the auteur had been consigned was largely empty (Caughie 2007: 408). For Caughie, a recognition of the way in which specific groups championed seemingly representative auteurs was evident, alongside the emergence of a more tempered and nuanced director-centred criticism, which had replaced those on offer in the pioneering days of auteurism. Other work has highlighted auteurism’s ongoing appeal; for instance, Steve Neale (1981), Tim Corrigan (1990) and Catherine Grant (2000, 2008) have illustrated how auteurist discourses feature heavily in the marketing and consumption of cinema. One could add to the list the manner in which film scholars continue to conduct and publish auteurist-based research, exemplified by the titles of a range of monographs on specific filmmakers, from Elizabeth Ezra’s Georges Méliès: The Birth of the Auteur (Ezra 2000) to work on more contemporary filmmakers in Brian Michael Goss’ Global Auteurs: Politics in the Films of Almodóvar, von Trier, and Winterbottom (Goss 2009). It is not all one-way traffic, however. In Authoring Hal Ashby: The Myth of the New Hollywood Auteur, Aaron Hunter points to Ashby’s collaborative working practices, arguing that this was more widespread in the New Hollywood Cinema than is generally understood and highlighting ongoing conflicting trends in Film Studies’ debates over authorship.

John Hill highlights that films directed by Loach are exhibited and distributed in an auteurist context (Hill 2011: 5). On the international film festival circuit, which is governed predominantly on auteurist lines, Loach has had significant success, with, for instance, more films screened in competition at Cannes than any other filmmaker.³ ‘Ken Loach’ is also deployed as a brand in the distribution of his work, exemplified by the DVD box sets’ titles The Ken Loach Collection (Sixteen Films, 2007) and Ken Loach at the BBC (Sixteen Films/BFI/BBC, 2011). Loach rejects the auteur label, repeatedly highlighting cinema’s collaborative nature; but also stressing the centrality of the writer in both film and television.⁴ Although Loach has garnered significant success in cinema, it was his early television work with which he first achieved both critical acclaim and public recognition. Andy Willis notes that many of the major figures identified with British television drama’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ were writers (Willis 2009, 300). Consequently, in contrast to auteurism’s focus on the director in cinema, the discourse around authorship in British television often centred on the writer. The subject of Willis’ article is Jim Allen, who met Loach in the late sixties. Prior to their encounter, Loach’s output was broadly leftist in content; however, Allen’s Trotskyist politics influenced Loach significantly. This emerges clearly in their first collaborative project, The Big Flame (BBC, 1969), in which a Liverpool dockers’ strike culminates in the declaration of a Soviet. An engagement with Trotskyism is more explicit in their second television play, The Rank and File (BBC, 1971), a dramatised account of the 1970 Pilkington glass factory strike. Towards the film’s conclusion, Eddie, a local union leader, reflects on the dispute: ‘Surely to God we’ve seen the futility of rank and fileism; that blind militancy will get us nowhere. The only question is one of political leadership and a foundation or the forming of a party that will lead the workers to power.’ Over a montage of monochrome photographs of young children, Eddie continues, ‘I go along with Trotsky. Life is beautiful. Let the future generation cleanse it of all the oppression, violence and evil and enjoy it to the full.’ I quote from Eddie’s speech at length here as it contains two connected threads which mark Loach’s future work, and the manner in which he discusses it: the influence of Trotskyism, and the importance of leadership.⁵ These threads are evident, albeit to varying degrees, in subsequent projects between Allen and Loach: Save the Children Fund Film, aka In Black and White (1971), Days of Hope, Hidden Agenda (1990), Raining Stones (1993), Tierra y libertad/Land and Freedom (1995) and the controversial Holocaust play, Perdition (1987).⁶ Of this work, Days of Hope and Land and Freedom deal explicitly with what we could define as a ‘Lessons of Defeat’ trope; Days of Hope is fiercely critical of the Trades Union Congress leadership’s role in the defeated 1926 General Strike, and Land and Freedom critiques Stalinism’s contribution to the crushing of the Spanish revolution. This preoccupation with leadership in the workers’ movement continues in Loach’s output, even when he is not working directly with Allen, as evidenced in the television documentaries A Question of Leadership (ATV, 1981), which deals with a UK steelworkers’ strike, and Questions of Leadership (Channel 4, 1983), a four-part series on contemporary British trades unions.

Factoring the long-term impact of Allen’s contribution into Loach’s work significantly disrupts Film Studies’ auteurist discourses. John Caughie notes that, in traditional French film criticism, the term auteur was utilised to refer to the script writer or to the ‘artist who created the film’ (Caughie 1981: 9). Writing more recently, Richard Corliss contends that the writer should be credited with auteur status because, as he puts it, ‘Auteur criticism is essentially theme criticism; and themes – as expressed through plot, characterization, and dialogue – belong primarily to the writer’ (Corliss 2008: 143). It is possible to discern a noticeable difference in thematic concerns and formal qualities when analysing Loach’s work with different writers. For instance, although Fatherland (1986), scripted by Trevor Griffiths, is politically and thematically consistent with Loach’s output, its modernist, monochrome dreamscapes are strikingly dissimilar to the predominantly social-realist aesthetic of the other work. In more recent films with Paul Laverty, who has scripted every full fictional feature bar Navigators (2001) since Carla’s Song (1996), an overt, didactic commitment to revolutionary socialist politics is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Political economy of neoliberalism and its discontents
• Part 2 Neoliberal winners and losers
• Part 3 Love and sexual identities under neoliberalism
• Index