The Working Class in Ken Loach Cinema
It's a story that many people know but no one talks about… The film was shot based on many true narratives, and much of what we heard was actually much more tragic than what you've seen.”
“If you're going to tell a story, you should tell it not because it's beautiful, but because it needs to be told.”
Ken Loach
Ken Loach: Why Did I Make the Movie?
“They had a job but still could not support their families. The working poor. It felt like a story that needed to be told. It's a story that many people know but no one talks about… The film was shot based on many true narratives, and much of what we heard was actually much more tragic than what you've seen.”
Ken Loach, the director of the movie Sorry We Missed You (Sorry We Couldn't Reach You-2019), explains why he shot this movie with the words above.
The film tells how a nuclear family living in England is crushed under the capitalist economy. Abby and her husband Ricky lost both their homes and their jobs in the 2007 crisis. Abby is a contract nurse who goes to the homes of elderly or disabled individuals and provides home care services and is paid only for the hours she serves. The time he should devote to each “customer” is fifteen minutes. Travel times to reach the homes he went to for care are not included in his contract. Working hours exceed thirteen hours with transportation.
Ricky, on the other hand, starts working for a cargo delivery company that he will distribute with his own van, where he will get paid per piece and will become his own boss. However, when and how many hours it will work, how many cargoes it will deliver per day, the delivery times of cargoes, even every movement of each package is controlled by the company. Ricky sets out to deliver at 7am; He doesn't have time to eat or go to the toilet. There are no days off, the right to be sick and absent from work only if he finds a replacement or pays a fine of up to two hundred pounds. Lost or stolen packages are your sole responsibility. There is no health insurance against illness or injury.
Because of their jobs, Abby and Ricky parent their children remotely. On the bus from one house to the next, Abby sends voicemails to the kids' phones about bedtimes, what food to heat, how much computer permissions they have. In this movie, Ken Loach shows what happens to the families of people who don't have time to support their families. Loach also explains how the new gig economy (employees work on short-term or project-based contracts without being tied to the companies they do business with) based on uncertainty and instability, which are the main features of the new capitalism, disrupts people's work and life balance.
Political Cinema:
One of the first directors that comes to mind when it comes to political cinema is undoubtedly Ken Loach. He is an Irish-British director. Considering cinema as a mirror of society and attaching great importance to the transfer of reality to the screen, it is seen that his political identity is always at the forefront in his films. By taking the ordinary person into consideration, Loach transfers his daily life, social, material and political difficulties with all its nakedness to cinema works with a plain and plain expression. Its heroes; ordinary people, mostly poor working-class individuals, marginalized and ignored, immigrants and disregarded.
I, Daniel Blake Movie:
I, Daniel Blake (I, Daniel Blake-2016) is one of the drama films directed by Ken Loach. This film won 3 awards, including the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016.
Daniel Blake is a 60-year-old carpenter living in New Castle who has lost his wife and has no children. He has a heart attack and his doctor reports that he cannot work for a long time. Blake, who has no other income, applies to the unemployment fund for unemployment benefits from the state. However, the wheel of bureaucracy, which he wants to prove that he is really sick, is making him sick. Blake meets an orphaned young mother named Katie, who is struggling to survive with her two children and dealing with bureaucratic obstacles while trying to get unemployment funds. The old man, the young mother and the two children desperately start to fight hand in hand against the state. Loach once again revealed the helplessness of mankind while criticizing the dysfunctional corrupt system of the British state. In addition, in this film, Loach criticizes those who submit to the obstacles placed without questioning as well as those who put obstacles in the system.
It's a Free World:
It's a free world (2007) Angie in London is mostly uninsured to immigrants from Eastern Europe; She works at a recruitment agency that finds jobs on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. However, she is fired from the job for no reason because she reacted harshly to her boss' harassment. She decides to start her own recruitment agency and partners with her friend. They start finding jobs for migrant workers. The more she earns, the more she wants, leaving the "legal" aside and starting to make money off of informal migrant workers. Angie's business is purely exploitative enrichment using immigrants. When unpaid workers kidnap his son, one of the workers' lines is as follows: "Do you think your child is valuable, I don't care, my children are hungry". Angie, who does not care about anyone but her family in the world with her ambition to get rich and rise to the upper class, has forgotten that she is an immigrant and how she was oppressed, and has become the oppressing boss in the capitalist system. In the film, Angie's difficulties as an oppressed migrant worker of Polish origin, the process of becoming a boss, how she used the predicament of migrant workers to earn money, and how she forgot herself. Ken Loach describes the difficulties of being a woman, being a mother and being an 'entrepreneur' in a capitalist system with the character of Angie in the movie Here is the Free World, emphasizing the exploited classes of the capitalist system.
Bread and Roses Movie:
The movie Bread and roses (2000) tells how Mexican and Central American immigrants who work as cleaners in Los Angeles, USA, organize to improve their living conditions. In the film, Loach advises the working class to have a collective consciousness so that they can prevent their rights from being abused. It also emphasizes the importance of being a member of a union. With the line “uniforms make them invisible” in the movie, Loach states that the power that will make the workers visible; He points out that unionization means having a collective consciousness and fighting spirit. Adopting the principle that no one can beat organized people, "Bread and Roses" is considered one of the few Marxist films in the world.
Ken Loach is one of the most important directors for world cinema, who has devoted his life to workers' rights, freedoms, social injustices and the problems of workers. Political themes form the background of his films, but the main element in his films is the story he tells. The main heroes in his films; are poor people. Most of them are from the working class, construction workers, illegal immigrants, foreigners who could not adapt to society, young people pushed into crime, fathers who are upset because they cannot provide the welfare level they want to their children.
Other Movies:
The navigators (Demiryolcular-2001), on the other hand, tells the changes in the lives of the workers working in the railways after the privatization of the British State Railways in 1995. At the same time, the family life of two of the workers is included in the film, emphasizing that human relations have become ordinary because they are based only on material basis and power, and the concept of family solidarity cannot be mentioned anymore.
In the movie Land and Freedom (1995), the British David and the leftist and anarchist youth who came to Spain from many parts of Europe, struggle for freedom with the Republicans against the fascist Franco regime in Spain of the 1930s. In this film, Loach gives today's youth "hope of struggle" through the red scarf, dirt and newspaper clippings that David's young grandson pulled out of the ballot box. Loach, showing the red scarf as the metaphor of the passion for freedom and the land as the metaphor of a new beginning, proposes a class struggle to the young people who are unemployed or jobless and helpless against the system due to the neo-liberal policies of the 90s world. The film is the recipient of the FIPRESCI International Critics Award and the Cannes Ecumenical Jury Awards.
Raining Stones (1993) Bob, a man torn between his family and his beliefs, works in temp jobs. He wants to buy an affordable but expensive dress for his seven-year-old daughter to wear for communion, but she has no money to buy it. His stubbornness and determination get him in trouble as he takes more and more dubious paths to get the necessary money. In this movie, Loach showed us the conflicts of values, money, poverty and religion in the helpless father character Bob.
Conclusion:
Ken Loach withdrew the movie 'Looking for Eric', which competed at the film festival held in Melbourne, Australia in July 2009, citing Israel. When he learned that the sponsor of the festival was Israel, he said, “Art is not made in the shadow of the state that produces violence. Art serves peace and humanity, not war and destruction. Israel should review its policies in the Middle East,” he said.
Ken Loach was deemed worthy of the Lifetime Honor Award at the Turin Film Festival in 2012. However, he refused the award, explaining that he could not ignore the outsourcing of workers at the National Cinema Museum, which organizes the Loach festival, and the dismissal of workers who resisted precarious, low-wage work.
Ken Loach won the Palme d'Or twice for The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006 and I, Daniel Blake in 2016. The 85-year-old director Ken Loach has made 20 television movies and 31 feature films, each more beautiful than the other and worth watching.
The book titled Which Side are You on?, written by Antony Hayward on the director, is published with Özden Arıkan's translation from the Turkish Agora Library.
References:
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/944085
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/233305
https://ucnoktaaforizma.wordpress.com/sanat/iste-ozgur-dunyafilmi-politik-filmlerin-ustadi-ken-loach-son-calismasi/
https://docplayer.biz.tr/51635605-Theodor-papadopoulos-ken-loach-filmlerinde-yuzeyin-altindaki-puruzlu-tabakayla-ilgileniyor.html
