REVOLUTION IS A PREGNANT COW'
SLAUGHTER, JANE
'Revolution is a Pregnant Cow' A conversation with filmmaker Ken Loach BY JANE SLAUGHTER There's something odd about seeing your own politics on film, if you're a radical or a socialist. You...
...They're realistic films that don't pull any punches...
...About the politics of his films...
...If I couldn't make the kind of films and do the kind of work I feel drawn to, I wouldn't want to stay...
...Loach is unhappy with the suggestion that his films might be didactic...
...At the center of the movie is a remarkable sequence in which peasants and militia meet in a landowner's captured house to decide whether to collectivize his land...
...There, David learns to live in the trenches...
...we actuallv need to take power here,' then people have to be organized...
...But a story of kids, of young people going to war—movies have fed on that kind of story forever...
...They're very anti-Hollywood—against the exploitative way the film industry uses the medium, the way they exploit the performances, exploit them emotionally, the way the music is used to give the audience an effect...
...Cinema kind of uses war but robs war of the reasons why people are there...
...a poor single mother whose children are taken away by welfare agencies (Ladybird, Ladybird...
...Karen Cooper is director of the Film Forum, a New York City theater specializing in independent and art films...
...That's real—why shouldn't the cinema deal with people who are passionate about politics and trying to do something about it...
...When you consider what the film industry is like and how hard it is to get a film made, most people by the time they've been working thirty years are really cynical...
...It was in a prime spot right after the news," Loach remembers...
...In Riff-Raff, construction workers help their new mate Stevie move into a "squat...
...To his credit, he's 'They're not escapist films to go to and forget your troubles...
...But they are always recognizable human beings grappling with a world we know...
...This meeting, full of overlapping arguments and interruptions, goes on for twelve minutes, but Loach has the guts to trust an audience to sit still for politics...
...The Detroit Film Institute has shown Loach's films, and assistant curator Larry Baranski considers Loach's recent work "a model of what the art form could be...
...He just records what you see...
...If you say, 'Here's a heavy political film, do you want to watch it?' they'll walk out right away, won't they...
...And then the Harold Wilson [Labour Party] government had come to power with a lot of hopes and illusions...
...That's why he's an important artist...
...I don't know...
...Ladybird, Ladybird concerns working-class people who speak with a Cockney accent...
...You couldn't be around in 1967 without picking up radical ideas...
...All won prizes in Europe...
...they're not traditional entertainment...
...It depicts David Carr, an unemployed worker from Liverpool and a Communist Party member, who takes off for 1936 Spain to fight against fascism...
...Orwell and David both come away bitter towards the Communists...
...That's the difference...
...But when the possibility of transformative change happens, and people start to look around and say...
...A 1984 piece called Questions of Leadership, made for Britain's Channel 4, was censored...
...For political activists, meetings are the stuff of our existence—but how often does a movie meeting last longer than a few pithy speeches...
...she asks...
...Like Orwell, David is wounded, recuperates in Barcelona, and is caught up in the street-fighting between the two factions...
...Land and Freedom: A Story from the Spanish Revolution is his latest release in the United States...
...Or what caused Hitler, or who backed him...
...It criticized the leaders of British unions for, in Loach's words, "fearing their own members more than they fear the bosses...
...Because the implication is that life doesn't have to be like this...
...Hang on...
...Sooner or later something has to happen...
...I'm not in love with the business at all, really...
...That was a great good fortune, to be in on that...
...His career goes back to the 1960s...
...They never actually discuss fascism and why they're fighting against it...
...Richard Gere falling in love with a prostitute—you can't get more heavy-handed than that...
...they're not traditional entertainment...
...Orwell wrote the book, but a lot of people had the experience," says Loach...
...That's boring...
...It was like a national event...
...Later, he gets fired for speaking to the boss about safety shortly before another worker crashes through an unsecured railing to his death...
...But political people do talk like that," says Loach...
...Loach says, "People always have to come to it through the stories of the people in the film...
...And yet, they often do a certain amount of spelling out...
...some people found it difficult to understand...
...Loach takes the novel approach of shooting all his films in sequence, and can't understand why other directors don't do so: "It's a lot easier for everyone...
...Loach feels this approach creaW,) more immediacy: "The point is for thtffttg tors—you take them through the experience...
...A lot of filmmakers make a great film and that's it...
...Loach and Orwell both argue, however, that, in Orwell's words, "the thing for which the Communists were working was not to postpone the Spanish revolution till a more suitable time, but to make sure that it never happened...
...That was supposedly a war against fascism, but when do you ever hear that discussed...
...I guess so...
...That's why he's an important artist/ getting better...
...The woman who comes and says, 'I've never been in here before except to clean.' And suddenly it's hers...
...Loach became radicalized after college, when he fell in with a group that was working on plays for the BBC...
...People lose their jobs, they're in big trouble...
...Usually these moments work because they ring true...
...Ttf actors are given the scripts only one day*t a time...
...After a brief stint as an actor, Loach began directing...
...That meeting in a way is the heart of the film," says Loach...
...We did that for fourteen years, maybe forty shows a year...
...You were really central to the cultural life of the people...
...That was my stroke of luck, really," says the soft-spoken Loach...
...Like Orwell, David comes to Spain sympathetic to the Communist point of view, as opJane Slaughter is a frequent contributor to The Progressive...
...The war first and the revolution afterwards," was the official Communist line...
...She says exhibitors consider Loach a difficult director because he deals with social issues...
...I find Sylvester Stallone heavy-handed...
...At one point in Riff-Raff, Stevie's apartment is broken into by fellow squatters...
...Cooper deflects the notion that Loach is didactic or heavy-handed...
...But in many ways it's not dissimilar to a documentary...
...In Land and Freedom, David writes home, "Stalin is just using the working class like pieces on a chessboard...
...Why get up at six o'clock in the morning and stand in the rain for twelve hours'1 Just to massage other people's egos, or talk money, or whatever...
...Is reality didactic...
...Sometimes the characters are conscious activists themselves...
...As they turn on the gas, bespectacled Larry remarks, "We used to own the gas before she [Margaret Thatcher] pinched it off us [that is, privatized the gas company...
...That's one of the reasons to do films, isn't it...
...David's story owes a great deal to George Orwell, whose Homage to Catalonia tells of his own experiences as an English volunteer in 1936 and 1937...
...and life under Thatcher (Riff-Raff and Raining Stones...
...You'd do something and it would be talked about next day...
...More often not...
...He chases them off, shouting, "I've got fuck-all, same as you...
...We can't imagine this whole set-up going on for generation after generation, so something has to give...
...you keep expecting a Hollywood "the-truth-is-somewhere-in-between" viewpoint to win the day...
...I met Loach at his base in London, as he was editing a new movie set in Scotland and Nicaragua...
...Well, there were only two channels...
...There's the guy who says, 'I work harder than you—why should I share with you?' The old guy who says the revolution is like a pregnant cow—you have to help it when it needs it, not when you think it's the right time...
...We're only getting our own back...
...we were getting audiences of ten million...
...David tears up his party card...
...In all his movies, he displays a confident socialist and pro-working-class point of view...
...Unlike some filmmakers, Loach does not romanticize the movie world...
...What will give, or where it will happen...
...For Loach, the politics is the thing...
...His group did a seventy-minute TV play or film every week...
...Loach says he's "telling stories that try to shed some light on the human cost of the way the system makes people live...
...Loach's films are not well known in the United States because, he says, they are "really quite European in their concerns and approach...
...Something can happen in one scene that's obviously right, and it's then incorporated into the film...
...They were a very good group that tried to be quite socially aware...
...Loach, who is fifty-nine years old, grew up in England's industrial Midlands, where his father was a non-political factory electrician...
...Loach films have dealt with the IRA (Hidden Agenda...
...He's a working-class man who goes to Spain because it's a working-class struggle...
...It seems as though Loach is really coming of age as a filmmaker," says Baranski...
...Look at all the films on the Second World War...
...He and his fellow militia men and women argue politics as if politics were questions of life and death— as, for soldiers during the Spanish Revolution, they were...
...But Ken Loach gets it right...
...You can't believe the filmmaker is actually getting it right...
...I guess I had some of those illusions—and then to see how that social-democratic government in fact performed...
...posed to the anarchist or Trotskyism The Communists held that the workers and peasants should halt their revolution for fear of alarming capitalist countries that might provide arms to the Spanish government's campaign against Franco...
...Because the bits of making a film for its own sake—it's just hard work...
...Obviously you work to a script...
...Loach is operating on an entirely different playing field, dealing with the real facts of people's lives...
...During a lunch break, Larry tells the lads that the only thing that's gotten working people anywhere at all is the unions...
...Loach's director of photography says Loach is "not after spectacle or cinematic effect...
...They're not escapist films to go to and forget your troubles...
...The challenge is to find the right situations to let it reveal itself...
...I was anxious that he not be a middle-class person...
...if you look at Poor Cow [Loach's first feature film in 1968], Ladybird, Ladybird is really the same film but done with so much more subtlety and artistry...
Vol. 60 • July 1996 • No. 7
