1. Kes then and now, Ken Loach now9

9Thierry Labica links two moments in the arc of Ken Loach’s career as a film-director. He thus foregrounds two distinct questions: that of the resonance and aura of the name “Ken Loach” and that of the resonance and aura of a film, Kes. His article, which opens the present volume, focuses first on the symbolic aura of the director’s name, a flag around which a community of those committed to a politics of radical critique in the name of radical social justice can from time to time rally, coming together in spite of their differences. In a shared acknowledgement of the social trajectory which, taken together as an ongoing day-to-day epic of the working classes, Loach’s films map out. “Ken Loach” is thus, in a symbolic or ritual sense, a banner enabling a community of the left to reenact a commitment to social justice and common dignity. But as to the relation between the symbolic aura of Loach and the question of what is to be seen in Kes, then (1969) and now (2019-2022), there remains the question of how a sustaining symbolic investment in the iconic virtue of the name “Ken Loach” will inform any renewed reception of the film Kes. On this question, Thierry Labica adopts a procedure of longitudinal reading, arguing a stark differentiation between conditions then (Kes, 1968-1969) and now (Sorry We Missed You, 2019). The vestigial presence within the social world of Kes of certain pastoral places, outside the order of extraction and production, which have their correlative in certain moments of lived time—childhood before the time of work, certain fragile and short-lived moments of leisure-time, their status always tenuous and ambiguous, encroached upon—is for Thierry Labica a pointer to a still preserved time that is not one of enclosure (“enfermement” or “saturation” in French). From there, he draws on the tropes of an “absolute capitalism” (Étienne Balibar) or an “ultimodernity,” by which is to be understood the extension of “the modern structure of class […] organized to the ultimate scale, that of the planet” (Jacques Bidet). This is not the case, or is not yet the case in Kes. Thierry Labica, in presenting the lived world of Kes as not yet the saturated world of our “ultimodernity,” is sketching an ironic inversion of the temporality of eschatological accomplishment, mapping out the transition from that which was already there: an ambivalent virtuality registered in the sense that there is in Kes both the suggestion of something still preserved and the pointer to that which is not yet, but is en chemin to the now of our present, to the full accomplishment of our “ultimodernity,” with its final inversion of the temporality of expectation and hope. In this reading, Kes points antithetically to what is now there, to a time when the fleeting moments and marginal sites of aspiration, still present in the world of Billy Casper, are beyond reach. This is perhaps the most implacably pessimistic of the readings that are proposed here.

10Thierry Labica’s longitudinal reading of Kes in relation to Loach’s recent films is followed by a reading of Kes which points to how the film is “of its time,” by way of its claim to be a window opening on the ordinary lives in a mining village in the actually lived time of the late 1960s. Lara Cox reads Kes in relation to a tradition of documentary cinema and with reference to a significant body of television documentary where miners are shown as they go about their work, shown also in the activities of their leisure time, or talking about their work. She points to the evidence from the period of a will on the part of the makers of documentaries to see beyond the hero figure of the miner or miners, though not as part of an ironic or condescending caricature of the social world of Britain’s mining communities: “films about coalmining contain some common tropes: the coalminer is, generally, the beleaguered hero who battles against larger and more powerful forces, his struggle only serving to enhance his moral qualities.” On the contrary, in presentations of the miners in the late sixties and the early seventies, their positioning in the everyday conditions of their work, coupled with the registration of their aspirations to improve their living conditions, to ensure entitlement to the fruits of the post-war consumer-driven economy, is predicated on the capacity of the maker of a documentary to strip away the heroic aura of “the miner.” Focusing on the character of Jud, Lara Cox points out that

[he] breaks with the British cinematic tradition of romanticising the coalminer. Yet Ken Loach’s and Barry Hines’ apprehension that the elder brother (played by Freddie Fletcher) might have turned out to be more “unsympathetic” than planned must be taken as an expression of authorial (un)intention; in the fabric of the film, Jud seems less the monolithic “villain” than a product of his habitus.

11Lara Cox goes on to remark that though the first signs of a renewal of strike action in the Yorkshire coalmines were from 1969

Kes occludes all hint of industrial action, reflecting rather the everyday culture of a mining town in 1969. Forms of leisure that would also go on to feature prominently in documentaries such as Miner’s Last Stand, specifically the drinking and festivities located in the local community club, can be identified in Kes.

12Which means that the truth of the film Kes to the actual lives of the characters implies it is not to be read by way of the misgivings subsequently voiced by Loach or by Hines regarding the film’s treatment of the elder brother, Jud. The various perspectives offered in the present volume on the relation between Billy Casper and his brother Jud are consistent in their suggestion that Kes is true to the aspirations of Jud, as it is true to the aspirations of Billy. The hope of making good an accumulator bet on two horses in two races is, for Jud, an ardent aspiration and an investment of hope, which Billy Casper brings to naught when he fails to place the bet. In respect to the truthfulness of Kes to the lives of its characters, we can quote the dictum of D.H. Lawrence, whose social destiny, as the son of a miner born in a Nottinghamshire mining village, and whose fate of rupture and social mobility is by way of his becoming a writer, echoing that of Hines, or that of David Story or David Mercer.10 Lawrence famously wrote: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”11 That Hines and Loach had misgivings about the treatment of Jud need not deflect from the task of scrupulous unblinkered vision to be taken up. What Lara Cox points to is the inscription of Kes in its time, just as Family Life is of its time. In the former film, the headmaster wields the cane while voicing his bewilderment at the lack of deference now evident in the manners of the young.12 In the latter film, the father no longer feels he can comprehend what it is his daughter aspires to.

2. Family

13Behind the film Kes, hinted at in the unfolding of the drama, by way of the mother’s recurrent voicing of her fears as to what her son Billy will become, by way also of the career officer’s perplexity as to what can be done with Billy Casper, who has come to the end of his destiny of compulsory schooling, there is the suggestion of other destinies, that will cast a shadow over the lives of those who “got away”: Hines, David Mercer, Tony Garnett, David Storey (though not perhaps, Ken Loach: Marion Leclair and Edward Lee-Six point to crucial differences between Loach and Hines regarding their social positioning and specific engagement with the social destiny of miners or with the community of a mining village). This enabling condition, which Jud has not been given, plays out as an ambiguous grace or windfall of exfiltration. Susannah O’Carroll quotes Tony Garnett, who writes in his autobiography: “[…] I had been arbitrarily chosen for privileged advancement as early as eleven, leaving behind most of the people I knew—so much hope and potential / lives crushed by an indifferent system.”13 To which we can add the following voicing of the dilemma of honesty and fidelity, as lived out by the writer exfiltrated. I quote from David Storey’s autobiography, his account of the moment when he tells mother and father that he will not take up a place in university:

I had decided to become—in fact, I already ‘was’—an artist. […] Our father’s response was predictably more volatile. ‘Do you think I’ve been working all these years for you to end up in a garret?’ In those words, art and morality become inextricably confused. How could I paint or write a poem while our father was hacking at a coalface?14

14The enabling condition—that neither Hines nor Loach is “hacking at a coalface”—is to remain hors champ or avant champ. Jud is a miner, his daily routine to be called out of bed by his brother and to go down pit. And since Billy will not be a miner and Kes is not a story of the young boy who becomes an artist (this very different destiny is focused upon by Marion Leclair and Edward Six-Lee in their presentation of Bill Douglas’s Trilogy, a story of bleak confinement in family and of artistic becoming), the artist’s capacity (the prerogative of Hines, Garnett, Loach, of Storey or Mercer) to capture the condition of Jud or of Billy Casper involves the imperative of truthfulness to the confinement of the character, possible by way of their having achieved a distance from which to establish a “take” on that which they know insofar as they have established a distance. Such artistic enablement will also (perhaps) imply an ongoing sense of the cost exacted in exchange for the establishment of the necessary distance. Storey’s autobiography is written as a work of impossible fidelity to the spectres that for him have been a livelong haunting.

15None of this makes Kes in any sense an agit-prop denunciation of the social conditions determining the actual life of Mrs Casper, or of Billy and Jud. None of this makes Kes a fully-fledged critique of the social reproduction and the streaming of destinies, by way of a differential institution of schooling. Or makes Kes receivable as a denunciation of what was then the coal industry as managed by the National Coal Board. What rings true in the exchanges between Jud and his mother, before they leave home and in the social club where they go for a night out (their exchanges, of words and looks, played out as a sub-text to their performance of self in the company of others), is the sense of promise blighted, arbitrarily but irreversibly cut off. This is the stuff with which the artist, that is Hines, or Garnett, or Mercer, or Storey, is to engage, an interminable work of attempted placation of the ghosts who did not get the chance to be able to capture those moments in which the sense of promise blighted is intensely suggested, but never by way of any keynote declaration. This is how Jacob Leigh, as quoted by Susannah O’Carroll, puts it: “She [Mrs Casper] states the themes of Kes—the problems of environment and education; yet her statements do not constitute a keynote speech.”

16The doubts voiced by Hines and Loach as to whether the film has been fair to Jud echo the awareness that the work of the artist will never be attuned to the attritional materiality of working time, shift after shift, never be in phase with the worker “hacking at a coalface.” The only fidelity is by way of the nagging sense that the artist is to do time, for life, taking up the task of “hacking at” the succession of ethical and artistic (formal) challenges that will occupy the working time of any artist held to accounts for the honesty of the effort to be fair to Jud, or to the others “hacking away at the coalface.”

17Note also that since it can only record the moving images of people’s lives by way of the exposure of the camera to the play of light, whether in a confined interior or when figures are foregrounded against city streets or the expanse of landscape, the very idea of a filmmaker capturing on film the worker “hacking at a coalface,” in the absence of any natural light, is a practical and a moral aporia. The extremity of the “coalface” can perhaps be suggested by way of an ellipsis, the focus on what comes before and on what comes after. Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet’s account of “sibling rivalry,” with its complication of any suggestion that Jud is merely the bully of his brother, foregrounds the moment immediately before the descent into the darkness, where in the company of his mates Jud will “hack at a coalface”:

The sternness that takes hold of him just as he reaches the lift at the colliery pit head can be put down to his concentration, but also to a pang of anxiety, something that is often mentioned by young miners evoking the moment when they prepare to go down the pit. He too is a victim of entrapment, as shown by the claustrophobic scene of the mine, that seems to eat its miners alive to belch them out after a day’s work, once they are worn out. The cage effect of the pit lift is obvious, with the gates and the chains surrounding the miners’ faces. To an ominous sound of rumbles, cracks and clangs, they are sent down, in a jarring contrast to the flute theme heard earlier during Jud’s pastoral walk to the pit.

18The spectator’s response to the transition is here that of Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet. A response to the image-mouvement from a pastoral green world to the “cage” of the colliery pithead, from light to darkness. Going back to the words of Thierry Labica, the pastoral interlude can be read as evidence that the social world of the Casper brothers is not “saturated,” that it does harbour moments and sites of opening. Or it might also be read as the ultimate irony of a descent into the pit by way of the pastoral interlude. The latter, bleaker reading is not what I care to see in Kes, insofar as my response to the film is illuminated by the foregrounding of Jud on his way to work by Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet. It is of course an open question for all of us, in our responses to Kes. I would argue that the honesty of the spectator’s response to the worker “hacking at a coalface”—an imperative following from that which the artist, here the filmmaker, cannot renege upon—can never involve any string-pulling montage-effect by way of which the spectator is to infer that a cruel irony is being played out on Jud as he goes down pit, under the focus of the film-director and before the gaze of the spectator who knows, and what he or she knows is the the story of alienation as work in progress, which the viewer as critical subject is in a position to see through. Here the camera focus of a morning scene is on and for Jud. And thus does Kes continue to move and to unsettle the viewer.

19If Kes is not received as a nagging reminder of possibilities thwarted—for Billy and Jud, for his mother—and if it is not also an opening upon a world that is more than social and which is not one of confinement, if it does not trace lines of flight by way of the movement of the camera as it charts the flight of the kestrel, then we have not been looking. No film by Loach can ever be strictly or exclusively social, precisely insofar as it involves an ethical and aesthetic fidelity to lives lived “hacking at a coalface,” or consumed in other versions of the appropriation of time, labour, imagination. Nor can any domestic drama be filed under the label of kitchen-sink.15 Nor is the film in any sense a railing against the ordinary fabric of the interactions of family. From the first opening scene where the elder brother is repeatedly told by the younger brother to get up, to the climactic killing of the bird at the end, by way of the dual focus on Jud and on Mrs Casper on their night out at the club, if Kes shows “tout un monde”, as Susannah O’Carroll points out, it is not by way of an “angry young man” exposure of a matrix of domestic domination. Billy Casper’s moment of glory as he faces the classroom and takes over is there to remind us that possibilities thwarted linger on as the ghosts of possibilities intact, forever there in the liminal space of cinema, salle obscure, calling viewers to account, haunting our response to any work of art that shows and sounds out its ethical and aesthetic honesty, its deference to the conditions under which lives are lived out “hacking at the coalface,” by those dreaming of the moment when they will come up for air.

20Saturation or not saturation? That is the question which Thierry Labica establishes as the perspective under which, in the period 2020-2022, we respond to Ken Loach’s Kes. To which I will venture a sense that Kes does practise an opening, a perforation. As in the title of the opera I was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.16 An opening which is there in Loach’s film from the beginning, from the semi-darkness of the opening scene when Billy is calling on his brother to get up—a protracted living out of the ordeal of waking, eventually made bearable for the viewer when the camera frames an opening beyond the confinement of the bedroom, to the sky. Attention should be paid to the aerial movement of the camera in the film: whether the scenes when Billy Casper is schooling the bird, schooling himself in a responsiveness that is not a mastery, or in the football match—grey sky, heavy ball, goalposts framed against the Yorkshire dales.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

21Cécile Bazin follows the Deleuzean line of flight traced over the land, upwards into the sky, in two films, Kes (1969) and Into the West (1992). If Kes does offer openings, beyond saturation and confinement, the perforation is already there in the opening scene:

Billy Casper is sitting on his bed, looking out to the sky, visible through the window that is wide open. This starting-point reveals metaphorically Billy’s desire to break away from his immediate environment: his home, his cramped bedroom, the bed he shares with his elder brother Jud, a coalminer who is brutal and aggressive towards him. This opening scene, anchored in the contrast between the hero’s confinement within a hostile domestic sphere and the opening on the glimpsed, metonymically suggested, vastness of the sky, is thus concretely and rigidly compartmentalized, showing Billy’s desire to escape from the limitation of his environment and destiny. Likewise, the metaphor of the window wide open, visible on screen, transports Billy’s imagination off-screen.

22For Billy, the way-out of a conflictual domestic confinement is through his coevolution with the bird. Kes can thus be responded to as a cinematographic bildungsroman, though not in the sense that it is a portrait of the artist en devenir, which is the case, as pointed out by Marion Leclair and Edward Lee-Six, for Bill Douglas in his Trilogy. Escape, escapism, evasion, evasive are habitually used as negative terms, explicitly judgmental on the part of a viewer or critic. Do we see in Kes the escapist aspiration of a boy, Billy Casper, his fantasy of a way-out? A film thus receivable as a violation of the (anti-escapist) imperative of unflinching honesty? But we must remember that evasion and aspiration are perhaps the ultimate touchstones of dignity, affirmed over the centuries in an English gothic literature (against carceral confinement) and an English literature of childhood. And the line of flight is often, as suggested here by Cécile Bazin, to be performed under the tutelary watch of an animal. In no sense can the bird Kes be a transitional object for the boy. The bird is rather a restoring and liberating presence. What is now to be heard and seen in Kes (in our present that is resonant with the acute sense of our planetary conditions) is the co-implication between the destinies of humans and all the rest that is there: a transspecies community of destiny, between the air above and what is down below, in the pit to which Jud goes down. The sense of a community of destiny extending far beyond the confines of any exclusively national community, fantasied in the late 19^th century as the stuff of history, only to be realized as nightmare.

23Mike Newell’s Into the West is the story of a coming home, for the father and for the children, through the agency of the white horse. In Kes, the reparation will not be for any of the characters. “Sibling rivalry” (Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet) reaches its climax in the killing of the bird. But as a work of catharsis, a potential healing and opening that are there, in wait for the spectator, Kes is a prophetic warning that any condition individually endured or enjoyed connects to all that is social; that whatever is social connects to the enabling conditions within which it is accommodated, provisionally harboured and thus to be lived. The upward flight of the bird now stands out in all its fragile, contingent, perhaps sustainable, perhaps not, achievement.

3. Hacking away

24That the responses presented in the volume offer no conclusive answer as to what it is we see in Kes is what we are left with. With which we go back to the film. Indeed, the questions remain, starker than ever, when we read the final essay, by Marion Leclair and Edward Six-Lee, “Filming mining-town childhoods in British postwar cinema: a comparative study of Ken Loach’s Kes and Bill Douglas’s Trilogy.” They point to differences between Loach’s film and Douglas’s Trilogy of childhood confinement and exfiltration, made a few years later.17 They also point to differences between a poetic quality on display in the prose of Barry Hines and the conspicuous flatness of Loach’s filming of the episodes of Kes, the story of Billy Casper and of those whose destines cross his: family, school peers and teachers, the newsagent who employs him for his morning distribution of the daily paper. And the bird Kes.

Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, whatever else it might be, and against the grain of its “brand image,” is a novel written by an author with an ambivalent class position, in a richly stylised prose, and which represents the working-class as debased and animalistic. This is not an attempt to unmask Hines as a crypto-reactionary. There is no evidence that he has secret high-Conservative sympathies: on the contrary. Rather, it is making a case for recognising the contradictions and complexity of his novel. The next question is how Ken Loach—in collaboration with Hines himself—inherits and appropriates these contradictions in the transformation of A Kestrel for a Knave into Kes.

25The “transformation of A Kestrel for a Knave into Kes” thus involves the deletion of certain verbal flourishes which, according to Marion Leclair and Edward Six-Lee, were designed to validate Hines’s conspicuous production of a literary style. Art is a very specific “field” or champ, in the Bourdieusian sense. And if the agent is to gain admission, she or he will have to produce credentials, to be flashed at the border before the eyes of those who grant admission, thus submitting to an arduous and uncertain work of justification which others, heirs to a more secure position within the field of culture and symbolic capital, do not have to pay, as a toll on a bridge. The suggestion is that Hines had to “prove” his credentials, as did D.H. Lawrence or indeed James Joyce, or any artist who had to work at the production of an effect substantiating the claim to a positioning where she or he was not, by birth, destined to be. And as was the case for Douglas, who would go about the task of filming his bildungsjaren, focusing on the time when the hero had to break with family and with my ain folk, in accordance with the law of extraction that left no choice but to pay the price exacted, if he was to make himself an artist in film.

26In foregrounding the rupture involved, Marion Leclair and Edward Six-Lee echo the passage quoted from the autobiography of David Storey. But does this mean that Douglas’s Trilogy, focusing as it does on the ordeal of the artist’s self-making, reneges on the politics of art or on an imperative, both ethical and aesthetic, of fidelity to My ain folk? For that is the title of the second of the three films of Douglas’ Trilogy.

27Marion Leclair and Edward Lee-Six point to the specific conditions of production and audience reception within which Ken Loach began his career—television drama, The Wednesday Play slot on BBC, a collaborative approach to the devising of a workable screenplay—which he then brought to his practice as a maker of films remarkable for their ability to frame a story through which to address a social issue faced by ordinary people in ordinary everyday life. From this there follow two important points as to what we can see in Kes. First, that Billy Casper is not foregrounded as an artist in embryo. Involvement with birds could be part of the ordinary transitional rituals of becoming an ordinary man,18 rather than a threshold encounter in which an artist’s exceptionality is disclosed. Billy Casper, despite his scrawny marginality compared to his peers, despite or because of the sibling rivalry with Jud, is in the film the bearer of an ordinary destiny. Ken Loach could not have made Kes on conditions other than those of his own specific agenda. And these were never conditions echoing those to which Ken Russell, another director who made the transition from television to cinema in the same era, responded in an œuvre focused on the exceptionality of the artist’s genius.19

Loach was more politicised than Hines and Douglas and set out to create art in the service of a political cause. His objectives, in other words, were simply different from those of Hines or Douglas.

28Whereas Storey had nailed the impossible obligation of the artist to the miner “hacking at the coalface,” the strange implication of the argument so powerfully formulated by Leclair and Six-Lee regarding the political and artistic positioning of Ken Loach is that in contrast both to Hines, who had to prove his literary credentials, and to Storey, burdened with an impossible dilemma of fidelity, the adoption of an adequately adjusted and workable positioning was possible for Loach; the achievement of a perspective from which he could film in such a way as to produce films designed to be instructive as to the actually lived conditions of political and social domination, precisely insofar as he had less to prove, in terms of his admission to the specific field of artistic performance, justification of his right to be there, or indeed fidelity to his own folk. The consequence, if we follow the argument of Marion Leclair and Edward Six-Lee, is that he was thus in a position to produce a political art of injustices exposed. And that one of the correlatives of this is Loach’s production of a cinema focused on ordinary lives and not, as for Storey or for Bill Douglas and Terence Davies, a focusing on the second birth, accouchement dans la douleur, in which the artist not born to a securely established position in the field must juggle with the conflicting imperatives of legitimacy in symbolic production and a legitimacy and effectiveness of political voice, and the claims of one’s own folk. Leclair and Six-Lee go on:

But this is merely to pose a further question: why were they different? It may be that an answer lies in the class positions of the different artists. Loach is not a director in search of cultural legitimacy: whatever his family background, Loach’s class determinations as an adult (an Oxford degree and a job at the BBC, inter alia) give him every socially required entitlement to participate in cultural production. It is not that Loach’s Nuneaton origins or Socialist commitment are unimportant—quite the reverse—but simply that those determinations are combined with factors that place him quite legitimately at the centre of cultural production. Put crudely, Loach has less to prove. Hines or Douglas, by contrast, have to show themselves to be skilled artisans of media to which members of their class are not normally granted access. Hines has to prove that—despite being a working-class PE teacher—his penmanship is as deft and elaborate as anyone else’s, which it is.

29Leclair and Six-Lee therefore open up "further" questions. The readings presented here draw the viewer back to the reception of and response to what there is to be seen and heard in the film: a “classic” to be taken up in our changed times. The intention is that the reader of this volume will return to Kes with "further questions," an enhanced seeing and hearing of what is there.