Tracking Loach: Politics/Practices/Production (Web Exclusive)
by David Archibald. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 206 pp., illus. Hardcover: $120.00, Paperback: $24.95, E-book: $24.95.

Reviewed by John Hill

Following a screening at Cannes in May, film director Ken Loach suggested that his most recent film, The Old Oak, dealing with the tensions created by the arrival of Syrian refugees in a deprived former mining town in northeast England, might be his last. He is now eighty-eight and has been making work for television and film more or less continuously since 1963. He rose to prominence in the 1960s with the television drama Cathy Come Home (1966), an extraordinarily bold exposure of the calamity of homelessness, before acquiring an international reputation as a film director with Kes (1969), a melancholy tale of the frustrations of working-class childhood. Some fifty years later, in an impressive run of films from the 1990s onward, he has continued to make work—such as his blistering attack on the oppressiveness of the UK’s welfare “reforms,” I, Daniel Blake (2016)—that has challenged prevailing ideas, laid bare the injustices of an unequal society, and aroused the indignation of audiences.

Given the longevity of his career and the sociocultural and artistic importance of his work, there are already several studies of his films and television output, including a biography, two academic monographs, a book-length interview, a feature documentary, and innumerable essays and articles. Any new volume is therefore faced with the challenge of what it will add to this existing literature. In the case of David Archibald’s new book, Tracking Loach: Politics/Practices/Production, the key selling point is the access provided to the author during the making of Loach’s Scotland-set film, The Angels’ Share (2012). Although Loach has openly discussed his working methods in multiple interviews, he has been reluctant to allow outsiders to observe his practices on set (partly out of a fear it might have a negative effect on actors’ performances). Archibald was, however, permitted to observe several days of this film’s shooting as well as attend various planning meetings, including a casting session, and sit in on a day’s editing. He also joined Loach and others at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where he “tracked” the film’s promotion and reception. Archibald employs the somewhat ungainly term “ethnografilmic analysis” to describe this methodology, an approach which he argues not only adds to our understanding of the filmmaking process but also generates new insights into the films themselves.

There are, nonetheless, limitations to what the observation of the making of just one film can reveal. As Archibald acknowledges, while there may be strong continuities in Loach’s work, there have also been significant changes. The pared-down style of Kes, for example, signaled an end to the experimentalism and formal self-reflexivity of Loach’s earlier productions. More recently, the stylistic austerity of Kes and the four-part television series, Days of Hope (1975), has been supplanted by a more “classical” approach to narrative, shot length, and editing. The book’s case study, therefore, applies mostly to Loach’s later work rather than covering his entire career. It is also a little disappointing that the film that forms the subject of the case study, The Angels’ Share, could be argued to be one of Loach’s least compelling works. The film does possess its admirers and proved sufficiently engaging to win the Jury prize at Cannes. But its rather uneasy mix of social-realist melancholia—rooted in postindustrial hardship—and tartan-fueled comedy, involving the Ealing-like heist of a distillery, results in a degree of artistic unevenness and conventionality that compares unfavorably to other Loach films of the same period such as his playful comedy of collectivism, Looking for Eric (2009), or the hard-hitting social dramas I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You (2019). Although Archibald provides an interesting analysis of The Angels’ Share, defending it against criticism of its use of Scottish stereotypes, he nonetheless avoids claiming it as an especially significant career milestone. As such, his analysis of the making of the film primarily provides a guide to Loach’s more regular, or typical, working practices rather than an explanation of the director’s most exceptional accomplishments.

This is evident in the book’s identification of what are referred to, following Truffaut, as “certain tendencies in Loach’s cinema.” These are all fairly general and Archibald’s list includes, amongst other characteristics, on- and off-screen political engagement, use of popular narrative forms, realist mise en scène, natural lighting, unobtrusive soundtrack, continuity editing, realist casting, linear shooting, and the use of screenplay as a blueprint. These are, however, mostly features already identified in discussions of Loach’s work. The book’s methodology of ethnografilmic observation, therefore, does not so much reveal new—or previously unacknowledged—tendencies in Loach’s cinema as elaborate upon the ways in which these become manifest in a specific production. By this means, Loach’s investment in “discourses of truth and authenticity,” for example, is traced, in some detail, through every stage of the filmmaking process from casting to set design through to the etiquette expected on set and the performances of the actors.

One key argument that Archibald is keen to make is the collaborative nature of the production process, which he contrasts with more mainstream film productions and that he partly conceives of as a kind of “political” strategy in itself. In doing so, he also wants to challenge auteurist approaches to film study, which he sees as dominating film culture. Loach has, of course, consistently denied that he is an “auteur” and acknowledges the contribution of those with whom he works. He also prefers to work with a regular team and has cultivated ongoing relationships with not only producers and writers but also cinematographers, editors, composers, designers, and casting agents amongst others. Through his observations and interviews, Archibald’s study successfully demonstrates the collaborative ethos that characterizes “Team Loach” and the shared understanding of ways of working this generates. Archibald also recognizes, however, that Team Loach is not a collective and that Loach maintains “a hands-on leadership role across all aspects of the production.” Indeed, in his documenting of Loach’s fastidious involvement in all stages of the film from script, casting, and choice of locations through to set design, filming, performance, and postproduction, he reveals a level of directorial control that would appear to outstrip many of those directors who would most commonly be identified as contemporary cinematic auteurs.  

Underpinning the Loachian approach to production is, of course, what Archibald refers to as Loach’s enduring commitment to a “pragmatic, practical Marxism focused primarily on exposing capitalism’s limitations while haunted by the spectre of a postcapitalist, socialist world.” In examining this aspect of Loach’s work, Archibald not only considers the politics on the screen, evident in the representation of “the experiences and struggles of the working class and other oppressed groups,” but also calls for a “relational criticism” that considers the films as political interventions that enable Loach’s own off-screen political engagements. His discussion of how Loach has taken advantage of the film festival circuit—and Cannes in particular—not only to promote and achieve publicity for his films but also to advance his political ideas is particularly interesting and usefully extends arguments surrounding the political character of Loach’s films.  

Archibald himself expresses his admiration for Loach and his political ideas, identifying how the book has been written as “an act of solidarity.” This has its advantages insofar as he has gained the trust of Loach and his collaborators and writes intelligently and sympathetically about their work. It also has its dangers, however, insofar as the author clearly retains a loyalty to the filmmakers and, at times, shies away from too searching an assessment of Loach’s approach to filmmaking and the films that result. A fuller evaluation, for example, of not just the obvious strengths of Loach’s pursuit of “truth and authenticity” but also its artistic and political pitfalls would undoubtedly have added weight to the argument overall. And while the book successfully makes the case for the value of studying film production and demonstrates how what we see on the screen may be traced back to specific production choices, there is also a sense in which the methodology of production studies on its own emerges as insufficient for a full understanding of the films themselves. The book, in this regard, is inclined to take the value and reputation of Loach’s films for granted rather than tease out their complexities or convince the reader of their artistic and sociopolitical merits.

As a result, the book successfully adds to existing studies of Loach’s work by filling in some of the gaps in our understanding of Loach’s working methods and encouraging greater attention to processes of production. As a guide to and account of Loach’s work as a whole, however, it is also fair to say that this study offers a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, close critical analysis of the films’ inner workings. 

John Hill is author of Cinema and Northern Ireland and Ken Loach: the Politics of Film and Television.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4