3 - Team Loach

Summary

… the cinema is quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the arts have been before it, and in particular painting and the novel. After having been successfully a fairground attraction, an amusement analogous to boulevard theatre, or a means of preserving the images of an era, it is gradually becoming a language. By language, I mean a form in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in the new contemporary essay or novel. That is why I would like to call this new age of cinema the age of caméra-stylo.

Alexander Astruc

In the art film world, we all know the film by the director, in Hollywood by the producer or the star, and it’s all horseshit.

Tony Garnett

When The Angels’ Share was being shot in Tain, in the county of Ross-shire in the Highlands, I spent one week on location and on a few occasions joined the younger-in-spirit and more agile cast and crew members who spent downtime playing football on a grassy park near to their digs. I recalled the experience when listening to Loach’s speech on receiving the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or for I, Daniel Blake: ‘The first thought is for all the people who helped you make it. If you were a football team winning the championship, everybody would get a medal but in films, the director has to go up. Obviously, it is for the whole team.’ In foregrounding filmmaking’s collaborative nature and comparing its production to a working-class team sport, Loach’s observations contrast sharply with the Alexander Astruc1 Tony Garnett auteurist discourses which dominate popular film culture, and which continue to haunt film scholarship. In this chapter, I explore this contrast and seek to illuminate understanding of tendencies (8) the importance of teams and leaders on- and off-screen, and (9) control of production, of the Certain Tendencies in Loach’s Cinema laid out in the Introduction. I do this through analysis of four imbricated areas: debates on authorship in film and television scholarship; the functioning of leadership and teams in the production of The Angels’ Share and Loach’s wider body of work; how Sixteen Films present this production context publicly; and how leadership and teams are represented in the films themselves.