Ken Loach

"The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People examines the linking of art and politics that distinguishes the work of this leading British film director. Loach's films manifest recurrent themes over a long period of working with various collaborators, yet his handling of those themes has changed throughout his career. This book examines those changes as a way of reaching an understanding of Loach's style and meaning. It evaluates how Loach incorporates his political beliefs and those of his writers into his work and augments this thematic interpretation with contextual information gleaned from original archive research and new interviews."--BOOK JACKET.

John Hill's definitive study looks at the career and work of British director Ken Loach. From his early television work (Cathy Come Home) through to landmark films (Kes) and examinations of British society (Looking For Eric) this landmark study reveals Loach as one of the great European directors.

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, Free University of Berlin, language: English, abstract: The life of the "Ae Fond Kiss" protagonists, Casim and Roisin, is made difficult when they start a romantic relationship that brings Casim’s Pakistani background into conflict with Roisin’s Irish Catholic background They are condemned to experience how long standing prejudice and narrow-mindedness get in the way of what looks like a promising, almost harmonious love story –just like it tragically happens to Romeo and Juliet.

The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn is charting a new direction. Here, Nathan Yeowell has brought together a remarkable array of contributors to provide expert insight into twentieth-century British history and Labour politics – and how they might shape thinking about Labour's future. Reframing the span of Labour history and its effects on contemporary British politics, the book provides fresh thinking and analysis of various traditions, themes and individuals. These include the shifting significance of 1945, the need for more grounded interpretations of Tony Blair's legacy, and the enduring importance of place, identity and aspiration to the evolution of the party. Contributions from leading historians such as Patrick Diamond, Steven Fielding, Ben Jackson, Glen O' Hara and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite are supplemented by those with experience of Labour electoral politics, such as Rachel Reeves and Nick Thomas-Symonds. The result is an intellectually rich and politically relevant roadmap for Labour's future.

This collection of essays examines the ways in which writing and cinema can be studied in relation to each other. A wide range of material is presented, from essays which look at particular films, including The Piano and The English Patient, to discussions of the latest developments in film studies including psychoanalytic film theory and the cultural study of film audiences. Specific topics that the essays address also include: the kinds of writing produced for the cinema industry, advertising, film adaptations of written texts and theatre plays from nineteenth century 'classic' novels to recent cyberpunk science fiction such as Blade Runner and Starship Troopers. The essays deal with existing areas of debate, like questions of authorship and audience, and also break new ground, for example in proposing approaches to the study of writing on the cinema screen. The book includes a select bibliography, and a documents section gives details of a range of films for further study.

While the general agreement in education remains that the more senses involved in learning, the better we learn; the question still remains as to the distinction between the education of children and the education of adults. Handbook of Research on Teaching and Learning in K-20 Education provides well-rounded research in providing teaching and learning theories that can be applied to both adults and children while acknowledging the difference between both. This book serves as a comprehensive collection of expertise, research, skill, and experiences which will be useful to educators, scholars, and practitioners in the K-12 education, higher education, and adult education field.

This book is the first ever full-length study of the reception of British cinema in post-war France, challenging François Truffaut's infamous dismissal of British cinema as 'a contradiction in terms', a comment which has been, and still is, widely reproduced, yet has until now remained critically unexplored. A historical account, the book gathers together well-known episodes (such as Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s) and critics (André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard), along with original new material, and thus throws new light on a topic which, given the influential nature of French film criticism and cinephilia, continues to be at the core of film culture.

This critical study of Mike Leigh's cinema is a comprehensive assessment of his thirty plus years in film, including his television features, from the first feature-length Bleak Moments to All or Nothing. Through his own species of tragicomedy and favored thematic content concentrating on relationships, Leigh enlarges the emotional boundaries of cinema for performers and audience alike. His deep and fully realized characters often subvert both decorum and irony traditionally associated with British film and television. Leigh's sense of the reciprocity and interpenetration of the material mundane, the ridiculous, and the humanistic sublime brings respect for the complexity of the ordinary and merits celebration within the democratic and demotic art of film.

The Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film is a fully international reference work on the history of the documentary film from the Lumière brothers' Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1885) to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 (2004). This Encyclopedia provides a resource that critically analyzes that history in all its aspects. Not only does this Encyclopedia examine individual films and the careers of individual film makers, it also provides overview articles of national and regional documentary film history. It explains concepts and themes in the study of documentary film, the techniques used in making films, and the institutions that support their production, appreciation, and preservation.

British Social Realism details and explores the rich tradition of social realism in British cinema from its beginnings in the documentary movement of the 1930s to its more stylistically eclectic and generically hybrid contemporary forms. Samantha Lay examines the movements, moments and cycles of British social realist texts through a detailed consideration of practice, politics, form, style and content, using case studies of key texts including Listen to Britain, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Letter to Brezhnev, and Nil by Mouth. In discussing the work of many prominent realist filmmakers, the book considers the challenges for social realist film practice and production in Britain, now and in the future.

From a near standing start in the 1970s, the emergence and expansion of an aesthetically and culturally distinctive Scottish cinema proved to be one of the most significant developments within late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century British film culture. Individual Scottish films and filmmakers have attracted notable amounts of critical attention as a result. The New Scottish Cinema, however, is the first book to trace Scottish film culture's industrial, creative and critical evolution in comprehensive detail across a forty-year period. On the one hand, it invites readers to reconsider the known - films such as Shallow Grave, Ratcatcher, The Magdalene Sisters, Young Adam, Red Road and The Last King of Scotland. On the other, it uncovers the overlooked, from the 1980s comedic film makers who followed in the footsteps of Bill Forsyth to the variety of present-day Scottish film making - a body of work that encompasses explorations of multiculturalism, exploitation of the macabre and much else in between.In addition to analysing an eclectic range of films and filmmakers, The New Scottish Cinema also examines the diverse industrial, institutional and cultural contexts which have allowed Scottish film to evolve and grow since the 1970s, and relates these to the images of Scotland which artists have put on screen. In so doing, the book narrates a story of interest to any student of contemporary British film.

Children have been a part of the cinematic landscape since the silent film era, yet children are rarely a part of the theoretical landscape of film analysis. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Debbie C. Olson and Andrew Scahill, seeks to remedy that oversight. Throughout the over one-hundred year history of cinema, the image of the child has been inextricably bound to filmic storytelling and has been equally bound to notions of romantic innocence and purity. This collection reveals, however, that there is a body of work that provides a counter note of darkness to the traditional portraits of sweetness and light. Particularly since the mid-twentieth century, there are a growing number of cinematic works that depict childhood has as a site of knowingness, despair, sexuality, death, and madness. Lost and Othered Children in Contemporary Cinema challenges notions of the innocent child through an exploration of the dark side of childhood in contemporary cinema. The contributors to this multidisciplinary study offer a global perspective that explores the multiple conditions of marginalized childhood as cinematically imagined within political, geographical, sociological, and cultural contexts.

In this edited collection, an international ensemble of scholars examine what contemporary cinema tells us about neoliberal capitalism and cinema, exploring whether filmmakers are able to imagine progressive alternatives under capitalist conditions. Individual contributions discuss filmmaking practices, film distribution, textual characteristics and the reception of films made in different parts of the world. They engage with topics such as class struggle, debt, multiculturalism and the effect of neoliberalism on love and sexual behaviour. Written in accessible, jargon-free language, Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology is an essential text for those interested in political filmmaking and the political meanings of films.

Barry Hines’s novel A Kestrel for a Knave, adapted for the screen as Kes, is one of the best-known and well-loved novels of the post-war period, while his screenplay for the television drama Threads is central to a Cold War-era vision of nuclear attack. But Hines published a further eight novels and nine screenplays between the 1960s and 1990s, as well as writing eleven other works which remain unpublished and unperformed. This study examines the entirety of Hines’s work. It argues that he used a great variety of aesthetic forms to represent the lives of working-class people in Britain during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and into the post-industrial conclusion of the twentieth century. It also makes the case that, as well as his literary flair for poetic realism, Hines’s authorial contributions to the films of his novels show the profoundly collaborative nature of these works.

This collection presents a number of films and television programmes set in the North of England in an investigation of how northern identity imbricates with class, race, gender, rural and urban identities. Heading North considers famous screen images of the North, such as Coronation Street and Kes (1969), but the main purpose is to examine its lesser known facets. From Mitchell and Kenyon’s ‘Factory Gate’ films to recent horror series In the Flesh, the authors analyse how the dominant narrative of the North of England as an ‘oppressed region’ subordinated to the economically and politically powerful South of England is challenged. The book discusses the relationship between the North of England and the rest of the world and should be of interest to students of British cinema and television, as well as to those broadly interested in its history and culture.

The spirit that founded the volume and guided its development is radically inter- and transdisciplinary. Dispatches have arrived from anthropology, communications, English, film studies (including theory, history, criticism), literary studies (including theory, history, criticism), media and screen studies, cognitive cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, poetics, politics, and political theory; and as a special aspect of the volume, theorist-filmmakers make their thoughts known as well. Consequently, the critical reflections gathered here are decidedly pluralistic and heterogeneous, inviting—not bracketing or partitioning—the dynamism and diversity of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences (in so far as we are biological beings who are trying to track our cognitive and perceptual understanding of a nonbiological thing—namely, film, whether celluloid-based or in digital form); these disciplines, so habitually cordoned off from one another, are brought together into a shared conversation about a common object and domain of investigation. This book will be of interest to theorists and practitioners of nonfiction film; to emerging and established scholars contributing to the secondary literature; and to those who are intrigued by the kinds of questions and claims that seem native to nonfiction film, and who may wish to explore some critical responses to them written in engaging language.