Fictionalising mining-town childhoods in postwar Britain: Hines, Loach, Douglas
Texte intégral
1The analysis presented here approaches Kes obliquely, so to speak, by comparing it with two works which are contemporary to Loach’s film. The first is the autobiographical trilogy by Scottish film-director Bill Douglas. Released between 1972 and 1979, it has been hailed by critics, then and now, as an underrated masterpiece of British social realist cinema. The second work is Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, published in 1968 but sent to Ken Loach and Tony Garnett while still in manuscript form to be turned into a screenplay for a film: the film which eventually became Kes.
2We are interested, however, not so much in the process of adaptation from Hines to Loach but rather in the markedly different—though contemporary—handling by Hines and Loach and Douglas of a common theme: unhappy childhoods in northern mining towns. This means that we will be dealing, perhaps unwisely, with rather heterogeneous material: prose and cinema, whose narratives, and conditions of production, only partially overlap. However, somewhat paradoxically, Hines’s novelistic telling and Douglas’s cinematographic telling of mining-town childhood bear greater similarities to each other than either does with Loach’s Kes, both in terms of the aesthetics through which they choose to represent mining Britain and the political implications of these aesthetics.
1. From A Kestrel to Kes
3The Penguin Classics biographical blurb which precedes A Kestrel for a Knave is keen to emphasise that Barry Hines is a working-class author “born in the mining village of Hoyland Common, near Barnsley, South Yorkshire.” Hines was an accomplished footballer, we are told, studied PE at Loughborough, and was eventually awarded an Honorary Fellowship at Sheffield Hallam University, in other words the post-1992 university, rather than the more established Sheffield University.1 In heritage, habitus and career, Barry Hines is thus a member of the working class. More importantly, his novel A Kestrel for a Knave represents a working-class community, centred around miners living on a newly built housing estate in South Yorkshire in the mid-1960s. Here, dialogue is rendered semi-phonetically, in keeping with Yorkshire “thy”s and “thou”s, and a re-writing of vowel-sounds and word-endings to be faithful to speech. The world that is represented here is not always a pretty one, as the very first words confirm:
There were no curtains up. The window was a hard edged block the colour of the night sky. Inside the bedroom the darkness was of a gritty texture. The wardrobe and bed were blurred shapes in the darkness. Silence (p. 9).
4With the austerity depicted in the opening lines and the faithful rendition of the South Yorkshire colloquialisms only a moment later, the novel is making a point from the very beginning: this is a work of gritty realism (the word “gritty” is in the opening paragraph. However austere and “gritty” this world is, Hines takes a non-moralising stance. The roughness of the world depicted is never here a springboard for judgement, and the narrative style remains detached and matter of fact, even at the harshest moments.
5So much for first impressions. These three points—Hines's working-class identity, his resolutely working-class subject matter, his no-frills but non-judgemental narrative style—are, in fact, confronted to their very antitheses on a second reading. Hines’s class position is, at the very least, ambivalent. Although he was from a working-class background, he did pass the 11+, went to grammar school, and continued his education all the way to university, and this at a time when 96% of the children of manual labourers—Hines’s peers—left school before 17.2 Hines, in other words, was for most of his life sheltered from the harsh world he describes in his work. Of course, his exceptional status left him with a melancholy attention to the social destiny of those who had not been exfiltrated through the “magic” of scholarships and academic success. Nevertheless, the kinds of manual labour that Hines would earn his living from after school were not typically proletarian: first as a PE teacher, and then as a full-time writer. In terms of his class determinations, Hines is highly atypical. His identity straddles, Janus-like, a proletarian origin, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a petty-bourgeois career as a writer, in a milieu where proletarians are acutely under-represented.
6The no-frills prose, meanwhile, is, in fact, highly stylized, a paradox reminiscent of precursors such as D.H. Lawrence, who, having benefitted from state education, wrote their way up the social ladder. In the passage quoted above—the first paragraph of A Kestrel—only the first sentence is plain English, in the sense that it is both grammatically correct and literally true. The second, third, and fourth sentences use metaphorical language to describe optical illusions, while the fifth and final sentence of the paragraph is a one-word sentence. In A Kestrel, very prosaic events invite a language which is subtly elaborate. Still on the first page, this is how Jud, the protagonist’s elder brother, turns off his alarm:
He stretched down and grabbed it with both hands. The glass lay curved in one palm, while the fingers of his other hand fumbled among the knobs and levers at the back. He found the lever and the noise stopped. Then he coiled back into bed and left the clock lying on its back (p. 9-10).
7“The glass lay curved in one palm”: this evokes, in succinct language, how the slightly convex lens of the alarm-clock fits into the slightly concave palm of Jud’s hand. Later, the indication “he coiled back into bed” metaphorically suggests that Jud assumed a foetal position under the covers, while also hinting that this moment of repose has a latent force, like a coiled spring. Hines’s prose is not in fact sparse, but bristling with metaphorically rich moments like this one, which evoke the micro-experiences of everyday life in a style which—though not florid—is highly suggestive.3 The author displays his mastery of language, powers of observation, ability to convey in concise and imaginative language the seemingly ineffable experiences of everyday life, and these descriptive moments serve no other purpose beyond that display. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is in contradiction with the no-frills, gritty realism version of itself that the novel projects, with its own advertising campaign, as it were. The blurb hails it as a “story of survival in a tough, joyless world”: but A Kestrel for a Knave is also a fastidiously manicured exercise in evocative prose, which repeatedly subordinates content to verbal display. The subject of the novel and its reception history have disguised to us its anti-realist, aestheticized parti pris.
8Meanwhile, the representation of the proletarian modus vivendi, if non-judgemental, is also brutalized and pessimistic. Indeed, it is non-judgemental because it is brutalized: working-class society, the novel seems to be saying, is a jungle, a dog-eat-dog world, to which an individualism both merciless and self-defensive is the only rational response. Right at the beginning of the novel, Billy eats some stolen chocolate in counterpoint to a very detailed and violent description of a thrush pulling a worm out of the ground (p. 16-17). The intertwining of these two meals, both acquired by force and cunning, both necessary for survival, seems to say: in the working-class jungle, it’s eat or be eaten. When Jud leaves his snap on the table unattended for a few seconds, Billy eats it (p. 28); if Billy can rip off his elder brother he does so, as with the gambling incident, which, we are told, has antecedents. The fact that many of these peccadilloes involve food and that Billy’s relation to Kes is structured around feeding her is not insignificant: in a world of competing self-interests, the bottom line is getting food and defending it from others. It is relevant that when Billy writes in class a story entirely from his imagination (entitled “A Tall Story”), in the mode of unbridled wish-fulfilment, self-consciously beyond the bounds of possibility (p. 89-90) Kes is absent from Billy’s imagined utopia. Jud is replaced by Billy’s father. They have plenty to eat, they go to the cinema. The dream version of his life is one without raptors (predation, wildness, etc.), and so without Kes. Kes is an escape from his world, and sets him against his world, but she is nevertheless very much part of that world.4 The question which is left unanswered is whether this world of raptors is the result of prevailing socio-economic relations or a fatality doomed to outlast any social structure. Either way, the wild—incarnated by Kes—is a reflection of the social, bringing out its depredations, individualism, and violence. Industrial working-class society, Hines seems to be saying, is a special kind of society, to the extent that the dissimulating veneer of civilized human and humane behaviour does not obtain.5 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.
9Loach’s Kes is a very faithful adaptation of A Kestrel for a Knave, and one which involved Hines, so the comparison can’t be reduced to a Loach/Hines binary. Nevertheless, the strong continuities shouldn’t efface the minor but significant departures. In terms of class identity, Loach’s position is even more ambivalent than Hines’s: although from a northern, working-class Tory family, he went to a prestigious grammar school, read Law at Oxford, and worked as a stage actor before getting a job at the BBC. Loach combines a strong commitment to left-wing causes, working-class Tory roots, and numerous hallmarks of bourgeois assimilation: the RP accent, the Oxford degree, the interest in theatre and high culture, the job at the BBC. The point is not that Loach is a class-traitor or social climber: nothing could be further from the truth. But he unquestionably produces work from a different (that is, less marginal) class position: we’ll see why this is important below.
10To go back to the film itself, we should note that, in Kes unlike in A Kestrel for a Knave, Billy does not eat Jud’s snap, we are not shown his two wish-fulfilment fantasies, and there is no scene of a thrush devouring a worm. These may seem like details, but they are part of a more general point: Kes is much less determined to represent the working-class social environment as a Hobbesian jungle than is A Kestrel for a Knave.
11So what does Loach introduce? In A Kestrel for a Knave, we see Mrs Casper and Jud arguing before going out (p. 48); the next scene shows Jud coming home rowdy and drunk (p. 49). Kes introduces a scene at the local pub or social club between those two moments. The dialogue is mostly unscripted and improvised; the camera is hand-held: the way the scene is shot is not unlike a documentary. This scene makes Jud and Mrs Casper more than merely Billy’s antagonists. We hear them discoursing freely on subjects such as happiness and family life, on aspirations and hopes for the future. The scene is certainly not free from antagonism or rose-tinted, but it gives the two characters an interiority and depth which is not entirely and directly determined by their status as exploited proletarians. Jean Renoir’s comment, made in the context of filming socialist militants for his documentary on the Front populaire, L’Avenir est à nous (1936), is perhaps relevant, here: “Of course, first and foremost they were revolutionaries, but that didn’t stop them eating, drinking, feeling too hot or too cold.”6 Of course, Jud and Mrs Casper are members of a mining community in Yorkshire, but that doesn’t stop them from being happy or unhappy, in love or out, stingy or generous, witty or po-faced.
12It is not coincidental that the scene which demystifies the working-class jungle is also one of the most formally humble: here, the documentary style aims, precisely, to document these exchanges, with as little emphasis on the medium as possible. (Admittedly, the question of whether documentary-style, hand-held filming really is self-effacing is a complex one for Loach: as his career developed, he would move increasingly away from such techniques—prominent in Cathy Come Home and his work in the 60s—in favour of a fixed camera which, paradoxically, can produce more natural footage.) As formal virtuosity takes a back seat, so the working class is allowed out of the sphere of its mythology. This interdependence of a self-effacing medium and the militant project of giving the working class a dramatically credible interiority is a conscious part of Loach’s approach to cinema. Trevor Griffiths has remarked (with pejorative intent, seemingly): “If Loach could make a film without a camera he would.”7 Emilie Bickerton has summarised Loach’s style: “Loach does everything to avoid visual stylistic flourishes, as though these were inappropriate.”8
13That is not to say that Loach’s camera is always neutral. One way of understanding a “style without flourishes” is that stylization must always be invested with dramatic meaning. Two particularly beautiful shots from the beginning of Kes illustrate this. First, Billy in Porter’s newsagents (fig. 1).
Fig. 1

Billy’s sleight of hand.
14Porter is haranguing him off-camera, while Billy is filmed perched on a step-ladder. The camera is static and the shot is a fairly long one, given that there is almost no movement or action. It is almost as if Billy is posing for an oil painting. But, on careful viewing, this balanced stasis contains an under-hand drama: Billy is subtly stealing a bar of chocolate from behind his back. A second long shot with a static camera and no action, again in the first part of the movie, shows Billy reading the Dandy (fig. 2).
Fig. 2

Absorption/Industry figured in a landscape?
15He is sitting on a hillock and below him, in the background of the shot, we can see the smoking industrial complex. This meditative and painterly shot (reminiscent of, for instance, Jules Adler, Les Hauts-Fourneaux de la Providence, 1904) is also a pointed juxtaposition of a child who is skiving off duty (he is reading the magazine he should be delivering) with an altogether more imposing and brutal image of industrial labour.
16One way, then, of describing the difference between A Kestrel for a Knave and Kes is to suggest that the film commits to a maximal formal transparency, or, at other times, to a maximal dramatic justification of formal tours de force. This anti-formalist approach is the foundation for the film’s much greater reflexivity about how the working class is presented, and the condition of possibility for its militant objectives.
2. Loach/Douglas
17Kes had a belated opening in March 1970, two years after its filming, in Doncaster, South Yorkshire: the film’s distributor (Rank) was sceptical about the possibility of its achieving commercial success.9 Two years later, the first film in Bill Douglas’s Trilogy, My Childhood, opened at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
18Douglas developed the basic idea for the films as he was studying at the London Film School, where he was accepted in 1968 after working odd jobs (including mining) and, post-National Service, trying his hand at playwriting, theatre and TV acting in London. The film was made thanks to funding from the British Film Institute, whose then head, Mamoun Hassan, was keen to encourage the development of a distinctly Scottish cinema: he had seen and praised one of Douglas’s student films while at the LFS, and read with enthusiasm the script for My Childhood (the first of the Trilogy).10
19The Trilogy, which is based on Douglas’s own childhood in Newcraighall, a mining village on the outskirts of Edinburgh, follows a young boy, Jamie, from his bleak, parentless and penniless childhood in Newcraighall, to his literal and symbolic escape from Scotland, as he is sent to Egypt on National Service duty in the RAF, where, in the final film of the Trilogy, My Way Home, a fellow-recruit introduces him to art: in other words, the “home” to which Jamie finds his way in the end is not Scotland but art. The journey of the Trilogy is less from Scotland and back again than the making of Bill Douglas as an artist.
20Both Kes and the Trilogy, then, are British films about tough working-class childhoods in Northern mining towns, made within a few years of each other. Whether Douglas actually saw Kes cannot be proved, but Loach’s and Douglas’s common involvement in London’s cinema world makes it highly likely. There are, of course, a few superficial differences between Kes and the Trilogy: fiction v. autobiographical fiction; Northern England v. Scotland; the date of the setting is different too, since while Kes takes place in the late 1960s, My Childhood, going back to the time of Douglas’s own childhood in the 1940s, is set (discreetly) during World War II. But there are also more radical differences, especially in terms of cinematic style and the treatment of the mining-town background of the two childhoods, that make the films, despite the closeness of their subject material, diametrically opposed.
21The first obvious, visually striking, difference between the two works is that Douglas’s Trilogy, unlike Kes, is shot in black and white. For a work which broadly falls into the category of “social realism,” this was a logical choice: the tradition of British social realist films which developed in the 1950s and 1960s (Room at the Top, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of The Long-Distance Runner) was black and white. And the films made by Loach and Garnett for the BBC’s Wednesday Play in the 1960s, notably Cathy Come Home, were also in black and white. But Kes, under pressure from the film’s producer and distributor, and despite Loach’s initial reluctance about colour, which he deemed too picturesque, was shot in colour.11 At a time when social realism was being reinvented in colour, Douglas’s black-and-white Trilogy—reminiscent of the austere visual style of Dreyer’s work—was something of an anachronism, and criticised for its formal conservatism by the more radical wing of the BFI Production Board.12
22Yet, Douglas’s version of black and white social realism is no mere hanging on to what by the early 1970s was a slightly dated tradition, and is quite different both from the British “Kitchen sink” films of the 1950s and 1960s and from Loach’s Wednesday Plays. Admittedly, it shares with Loach’s Cathy an episodic structure of loosely connected scenes, which breaks with the tighter narratives of kitchen sink cinema: description rather than plot is the organising principle in both cases. However, Douglas’s descriptiveness is markedly different from the hand-held, documentary and newsreel-inspired descriptive shots of people and places in Loach’s early films, which, as John Hill puts it, “serve to place the characters’ actions in a social and cultural context and to link them to a shared working-class condition.”13 Douglas’s descriptive shots, conversely, are motionless close-ups on the objects and bodies of people in the scene—so much so that they have repeatedly been compared to still lifes.
23These static, painterly qualities are for example illustrated by a sequence towards the beginning of My Childhood [00:13:48 to 00:15:15], which consists of (1) a close-up on dried flowers in a mug (fig. 3), in the flat where Jamie and Tommy live with their grandmother; (2) a medium shot of Jamie entering the room with a kettle and laying it on the table next to the mug which he empties of its content; (3) a close-up of water pouring from the kettle into the reclaimed mug and over-flowing onto the wooden table, then of Jamie’s hand emptying the mug on the table; (4) a medium shot of Jamie kneeling in front of his grandmother asleep in a rocking chair and placing the mug in her hands; (5) a close-up on Jamie’s hands patting his grandmother’s as the screen fades to black.
Fig. 3

24These close-ups are not so much a cut away from the action as the very stuff of the action itself: they are the jolty, atmospheric way in which the story is dimly told. Arguably, this elliptical, descriptive narration can be said to contribute to the film’s realism, to the extent that it delivers the flow and stuff of life uncommented to viewers, leaving it up to them to fill the gaps and make what sense they can of the shreds they are offered. The resulting confusion could also be read as a form of psychological realism, since it is consistent with the subjective viewpoint of the protagonist (young Jamie) and his narrow and chaotic understanding of the world around him.
25Yet, the freezing of the film’s progress that is effected by these close-ups, and their conspicuous pictorial beauty, also make them stand out as self-conscious artifice, drawing viewers’ attention to Douglas’s artful filming—so that their overall effect is less realistic than aestheticising. This could be construed as Douglas’s own take on an aesthetics of distanciation, which in his case is less indebted to Brecht than to Russian formalism and Soviet silent cinema.14 But it also turns objects of use into symbols and visual artefacts by abstracting them (literally, through close-ups) from the wider social environment to which they belong.
26Writing on Lord Jim in The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson links Conrad’s aestheticising prose to the reification inherent in capitalism, which seeks to abstract commodities from the actual productive conditions in which they were made—so that the description of the ship’s boiler room, in terms of the noises it emits rather than as the source of the ship’s energy, “absorbs infrastructure into the realm of perception” and becomes “an art-commodity which one consumes by way of its own dynamic.”15 This is enlightening when applied to Douglas, where the same process of absorbing the infrastructure of mining, the site of Newcraighall, into the realm of visual (rather than auditory) perception, seems to be at work. It can be seen both in the aesthetic, rather than functional, treatment of the town’s mine—a mere background to a story which is primarily one of childhood—and in the striking absence of the actual labour of mining, for an artwork whose subject material and its filming in black and white links it to the tradition of British social realism, focused on the working class as class.
27Though the chief economic activity of the village and the livelihood of several of the Trilogy’s characters (Jamie’s father, later Jamie himself, in My Way Home), mining remains a marginal and essentially visual presence in the films. We see a mining shaft and smokestacks in the opening and closing scenes of My Childhood, and coal heaps through which Jamie and Tommy go scavenging. More subtle clues include a helmet and front light on Jamie’s father’s head as he comes home, and adolescent Jamie’s blackened face in My Way Home, as his stepmother derides his ambition to become a painter, shouting at him “if you were meant to have been different, you’d have been born different”—with the bleak finality of Calvinist predestination, which perhaps goes some way to explaining the echoes between Douglas and Dreyer.
28In the rare scenes showing miners at work, Douglas’s handling of the theme is markedly different from that of Loach in Kes. Jud’s arrival at the pit, where he comes across fellow miners who rejoice at being out in the open, is both evocative of the pattern of mining work (with day shifts and night shifts, rotating teams) and of a shared working condition, and is critical of a socio-economic organisation which condemns men like Jud to spend half their life beneath the ground. The direct cut from a school scene, where Billy is bullied by the PE teacher, to Jud going to the mine, seems to suggest that this is Billy’s socially-organised future, and to indict a selective school system whose purpose is to keep turning working-class boys into manual labourers, thus answering the country’s economic need for mining work. By contrast, in My Childhood, a scene of miners coming out of the pit and escorted home by their children, watched from a distance by fatherless Jamie, has the opposite effect: it isolates the character from the rest of the villagers and emphasises his sense of affective deprivation, so that the significance of the scene is less social and political than psychological and individual.
29The visual treatment of the mine-shaft elevator by the two directors is also telling. In Kes, the elevator looks like a cage. It likens the plight of Jud and of miners to that of Kes (the bird) and of Billy (whose face, as he goes to feed Kes, is shown framed by the bars in the door of the shed where he keeps her), and seems to be making a claim against working-class exploitation in general. At the beginning of My Ain Folk, on the other hand, the black rectangular aperture in which miners wait motionless for the elevator to come up, then the rectangular aperture in the elevator through which the outside world is seen gradually disappearing (fig. 4), as the elevator goes down, are likened to the cinema screen and rapt motionless audience in the previous scene. A little later [00:12:35], a scene briefly showing miners advancing underground with their front-lights on (actually shot with students on a boating pond in Edinburgh)16 becomes a mesmerising dance of glow-worms in the dark and is again suggestive of a cinema screen—especially since it is introduced by the same shot of disappearing daylight framed through the elevator’s rectangular opening, as in the opening credits. Thus the mine, in Douglas’s films, becomes the privileged site for cinematic superposition and mise en abyme.
Fig. 4
![From the elevator cage, a daily sky, spotting clouds, a distant natural landscape framed by large black borders, at right, left and at the bottom. “The outside world […] seen gradually disappearing, as the elevator goes down”, changing the environment suggests suddenly a sort of emptiness. Does the “disappearing” achieved in the representation tells about the evasion of the machinery and social reality of going down pit? Of the realities of a Scottish mining town? A way out, through the symbolically charged field of art?](/pupo/file/40897/tei/image-4.png/download)
30Correlated to the depiction of the mine as a spectacle and of miners as cut off from the main character, is the absence of a sense of the working class as a class, in a film which turns the post-war town into a timeless village. First, there is seemingly no class solidarity among the inhabitants of Newcraighall—a fact which the actual inhabitants of the town resented when they saw the film at the Edinburgh festival, deploring that the community was inaccurately portrayed as uncaring.17 But the working class, except in the few stylised shots of miners we have mentioned, is also, literally and conceptually, obscured from the film. Literally, because only the film’s characters are shown on screen, and they seem to inhabit a deserted village. Conceptually, because the action takes place within the (albeit dysfunctional) family unit, with the exception of a few school scenes and war scenes, along with a passing scene of bagpipes marching down an Edinburgh street, and because of the way in which the characters speak, which give a fleeting sense of Jamie’s identity as a child, a Scot and a Briton. So that while the nation, the region, the family and age all seem to be relevant and constitutive components of the protagonist’s character, class seems altogether irrelevant and unnecessary—except in a few scenes in My Way Home where the character’s class is shown repeatedly to be a hindrance to his artistic and social aspirations, when his grandmother derides his wish to become a painter and orders him to “stick to [his] place,” or when a public-school boy in tartan mocks him for mispronouncing “Gascoygne.”
31Class antagonism is also forcibly shown in the Egyptian scenes of the film, through visual contrast between Jamie’s buttoned-up uniform, crouching posture and general awkwardness, and his upper-class friend Robert’s open shirt and shorts, English accent and easy-flowing, albeit rather shallow, conversation (“Anyway, people are alright”), and the effortless grace with which Robert seems to do everything, from reading in the sun to picking out fish-bones and polishing buttons. But in all these cases, class, precisely, is experienced and shown as a hindrance, rather than as a framework for action and consciousness. At the end of the Trilogy Jamie is mercifully rescued from his social origin, in rather Dickensian fashion, by Robert, as he finds his way to his elective home—that of Robert’s family-house, Southern-English orchards, and art.
32A novel, written by a writer of working-class origin, but who has partially left his class behind, and which foregrounds expressive qualities as much as it does content, becomes a film, produced by an Oxford-educated artist with socialist convictions, and which effaces form in favour of unmediated documentation. Only a few years later, another working-class artist produces a film of self-conscious formal beauty, and apprehends the story of its protagonist as an individual’s bildungsjahren. This, then, is the situation we have been considering, a situation whose paradoxical reversals belie the superficial reception of all three works of art as similarly engaged in gritty realist depictions of the working class. But how can this conjuncture be explained?
33There is, first of all, the matter of political commitment. The fact is simply that Loach rallied to Left-wing causes from a fairly young age, learnt the fundamentals of Marxist theory from the organised working class, and volunteered as a political activist. 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.
34But 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. Douglas has to show that, although his parcours has been anything but gilded, he is quite able to produce a work of art of bleak beauty and high-brow technique, which he is. One can posit, in other words, not merely that the class starting-point of the different artists affects their legitimacy as artists, but also that there is a causal relationship between artistic legitimacy and formalism, to the extent that artists who have to earn their legitimacy often resort to displays of formal dexterity, as the entry fee to Parnassus.
35Finally, each artist’s medium carries with it structural predispositions. In other words, of the three, Loach is the only artist who, through his work for television in the 1960s, can aspire to reaching a mass—a working-class—audience. Hines the novelist writes for the minority of the population who read innovative contemporary fiction. Douglas’s Trilogy was funded by the BFI for the audience of film festivals and high culture. Loach, on the other hand, had been lucky enough to work for the BBC in the brief window of the only period in the institution’s history during which it produced high-quality, socially committed material, which reached a mass audience: Cathy Come Home was watched by literally millions of people when it was first broadcast in 1966. Kes was made in that tradition of art for the masses, and it had the backing to make good that aspiration: financed by Hollywood capital (United Artists) and distributed by the UK’s largest film company (Rank), the film was not made for the refined sensibilities of a cultural elite and opened, tellingly, not at the London Academy Cinema, but at a cinema in Doncaster. The material pressures of the production of mass cinema, in other words, have a determining effect on the content of Kes, accounting for its differences in emphasis compared to Hines’s novel or Douglas’s trilogy. Loach’s Kes may be one of cinema’s rare cases where the effect of those material pressures on the film itself are not to be regretted.
Notes de bas de page
1Barry Hines, A Kestrel for a Knave, London, Penguin, 2000. All future references will be to this edition and the page number given in parentheses in the main body of the text.
2Robin Blackburn, “Inequality and Exploitation,” in NLR, Vol. 1, No. 42, March-April 1967, p. 12. Blackburn’s statistics come from Alan Little and John Westergaard, “The Trend of Class Differentials in Educational Opportunity in England and Wales,” in British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 4, December 1964, p. 301-316. See also Hines:
[…] unlike Billy, I was no academic failure. I had passed the eleven-plus and gone on to grammar school. Most of my friends however had failed and gone to the local secondary modern—the model for the school in the novel. A school so tough that some of the boys went dressed in boiler suits and boots because they spent so much time rolling around the floor fighting. Their mothers said they may as well dress for the job, rather than ruin good clothes. “Author’s Afterword,” in A Kestrel for a Knave, op. cit., p. 200.
3Crumpled newspaper is “like a bouquet of hydrangea flowers” (p. 12). “The stones were wet, and shone different shades of brown and green, like polished leather” (p. 18). “The zip slipped as soon as she moved, and the slit expanded to the shape of a rugby ball” (p. 23). “The soil smattered the panes, then fell to the sill, which threw it back to the concrete in a wide arc, like a projection half-way down a waterfall” (p. 29). These are just a handful of examples from only the first 20 pages of the novel.
4On this score, the wish-fulfilment of “A Tall Story” can be compared to the final episode of the novel which is also a wish-fulfilment episode. After Kes has been murdered by Jud, Billy breaks into an abandoned cinema and on the vacant screen he imagines Kes tormenting Jud. “Jud breaks from cover, running hard through the heather. Kes sees him and stoops, breathtaking stoop, audience gasps” (p. 196). We can conclude from this that Kes is included in Billy’s wish-fulfilment imagination a) only after her death, and b) to exact vengeance.
5The logic of the concentration camp—as per Primo Levi—is germane to this imbrication of the social and the wild. Se Questo è un uomo makes the point that the concentration camp imposes a kind of social organisation where the supreme value is individualism, and the primary logic is injustice. This is precisely how one would describe Billy’s world, and the comparison is invited, fleetingly, by Hines: “he [Billy] resembled an old print of a child hurrying toward the final solution” (p. 130). This sentence initially seems jarring and isolated, but it spells out the point that is reiterated from the beginning to the end of the novel: that the world of the industrial working-class is one of extreme internecine social brutality.
6Quoted in Lee Russell, “Jean Renoir,” in NLR, Vol. 1, No. 25, May-June 1964, p. 60.
7Quoted in Ryan Gilbey, “Putting the Manifesto before the Movie,” in LRB, Vol. 24, No. 21, 31 October 2002.
8Emilie Bickerton, “A New Proletkino,” in NLR, No. 109, January-February 2018, p. 111.
9This was partly on account of the strong regional accents of the actors—so that the producer organised some re-voicing unbeknownst to either Loach or Garnett. See John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 122.
10Andrew Noble, “Bill Douglas, 1934-1991: A Memoir,” in Bill Douglas, A Lanternist’s Account, Eddie Dick, Andrew Noble, Duncan Petrie (eds.), London, BFI Publishing, 1993, p. 20-21.
11John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, op. cit., p. 116.
12Andrew Noble, “Bill Douglas, 1934-1991: A Memoir,” op. cit., p. 153.
13John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, op. cit., p. 107.
14John Caughie, “Don’t Mourn—Analyse: Reviewing the Trilogy,” in Bill Douglas, A Lanternist’s Account, op. cit., p. 201.
15Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [1981], London, Routledge, 1996, p. 210-219.
16Andrew Noble, “Bill Douglas, 1934-1991: A Memoir,” op. cit., p. 133.
17Andrew O’Hagan, “Homing,” in Bill Douglas, A Lanternist’s Account, op. cit., p. 207.
Auteurs
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Marion Leclair
Université d’Artois, Laboratoire Textes et Cultures
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Edward Lee-Six
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Sur les traces de la violence
Un essai anthropologique après les attentats de Paris
Robert Desjarlais Céline Curiol (trad.)
2020
