2 - Form

Summary

When you’re young you pick ideas from all over the place, that’s inevitable; but the biggest influences on us were things like World in Action, the hard-hitting current affairs documentary, but also Joan Littlewood was a big influence with things like Oh, What a Lovely War! where you’d have a concert party scene on stage but then the numbers of the dead running across it in figures across the stage so that you had the juxtaposition of drama and hard documentary side by side. And in things like Cathy and Up the Junction we nicked that idea. Brecht was also an influence in terms of the very pared down way in which he would stage things. The French New Wave up to a point.

Ken Loach

On one evening in 2012, I am sitting in a small, quiet hostelry in London. A long day editing The Angels’ Share has just concluded and I am interviewing the film’s director, Ken Loach. Towards the end of the interview, I seek his opinion on scholarly debates on his work’s formal qualities. He replies that the audience he hopes to reach is the wider public and appears somewhat exasperated by academic responses which prioritise formal over thematic concerns. This chapter does focus on Loach’s film form; however, although I explore some aspects of formal classification, I am not primarily concerned with engaging with exhausted formalist debates on the progressive potential of varying film forms. The chapter covers Certain Tendencies in Loach’s Cinema numbers (2) the use of popular narrative forms, (3) realist mise en scène, focusing on setting, production design, costume and make-up, (4) camera positioned as sympathetic observer, (5) maximising natural lighting, (6) unobtrusive soundtrack and (7) continuity editing. The Oxford English Dictionary offers one definition of ‘real’ as ‘actually existing physically as a thing’, and I explore how real life ‘things’ – locations, people, clothes and so on – are utilised and transformed through the production process. My focus remains on The Angels’ Share, contextualising analysis of this film within Loach’s wider body of fictional cinema, offering insights into how the aesthetics with which his films are associated are assembled, and exploring how Loach and his collaborators utilise discourses of the real when discussing their work.