What makes Ken Loach's films social realist?

Question

What kind of themes, please.

Answer 1

Perhaps you should define social realism - it is the most 'typically British' of all film genres.

Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British cinema can be. While our cinema has experienced all the fluctuations in fortune of Hollywood's first export territory, realism has been Britain's richest gift to world cinema.

As in France, where the 'actualités' of cinema pioneers the Lumière Brothers seemed to descend from the provincial realism of Gustave Flaubert, early British cinema picked up on the revelation of everyday social interaction to be found in Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

In the years following World War I, it was widely felt that the key to a national cinema lay in 'realism and restraint'. Such a view reflected the tastes of a mainly south-eastern middle-class audience. Meanwhile, working-class audiences, it was said, favoured Hollywood genre movies. So realism carried patrician connotations of education and high seriousness. These social and aesthetic distinctions have become running themes in a cinema for which social realism is now associated with the arthouse auteur, while 'entertainment' plays at the multiplex.

The New Wave was symptomatic of a worldwide emergence of art cinemas challenging mainstream aesthetics and attitudes. Identified with their directors rather than with the industry, the New Wave films tended to address issues around masculinity that would become common in British social realism. The New Wave protagonist was usually a working-class male without bearings in a society in which traditional industries and the cultures that went with them were in decline. Directors from Ken Loach to Patrick Keiller, and films from Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988) to The Full Monty (1997) have addressed the erosion of regional and class identities amid a landscape rendered increasingly uniform by consumerism.

Descendants of the realist flowering at the BBC in the 1960s, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh assessed the impact of the consumer society on family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state and the consensus that built it. Looking back, Loach's work seems to reflect the shift from the collectivist mood of the war years to the individualism of the postwar decades in its very form. Loach's films went from the improvised long-take naturalism of Poor Cow and Kes (both 1969) to the 'social melodrama' of Raining Stones (1993) and Ladybird Ladybird (1994), wider social issues now explored via emotional and dramatic individual stories.

If the New Wave can be accused of short-sightedly blameing women for the blighting of British manhood, you would have to conceed that the women in Loach and Leigh are often complex and powerful individuals. On the other hand, one can but admire Loach for relentlessly sticking to his task, repeatedly championing the underdog by revealing the hardships and struggles of those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. It is no accident that his best work has been produced at times of supposed affluence, in the mid '60s and the '90s, when he has often been a lone voice, bravely and resolutely standing up for the disadvantaged and the downtrodden. Few directors have been as consistent in their themes and their filmic style, or as principled in their politics, as Loach has in a career spanning five decades. Without doubt he is Britain's foremost political filmmaker.

Answer 2

I think maybe you answered this question yourself, social realism! Maybe I'm being too simplistic but Ken Loach shows realistic people in realistic situations!

Answer 3

Social Realism. they were about things that got swept under the carpet, but problems that were all to real and common. Abortion, Homelessness and promiscuity. They were, and still are hard hitting drama at its best, in my humble opinion

Answer 4

He tells it like it is without the Hollywood gloss and happy endings. Watch Kes. Working-class north of England real story.

Not rags-to riches, but rags-to-rags.....hard life , some laughs to be had but not many etc.

You must see Kes.......

Answer 5

His northern gritty approach to life.

Answer 6

true northern grit