Agent of Callenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach.

Edited by George McKnight. Trowbridge, U.K.: Ricks Books, 1997. 234 pp., illus. Hardcover: $59.95, Paperback: $24.95.

One of the most welcomed trends in the British cinema of the Nineties has been the return of Ken Loach to regular work, and his renewed recognition, particularly in continental Europe, as one of the masters of the increasingly rare art of political filmmaking. George McKnight's new collection, which forms part of an enterprising series from U.K. publisher Flicks Books on neglected and oppositional filmmakers, fills an obvious gap in the literature. As well as contributions on censorship and naturalism, the book contains an interview with Loach and an extensive filmography and bibliography. Anyone interested in placing Loach's work in the context of, in particular, social and political developments in Britain since the Sixties will find the book invaluable.

Whether the book adds greatly to critical debates about Loach is less clear, although there are interesting essays defending the director's work from both left- and right-wing critiques. Julian Petley usefully documents attacks on Loach's early work as confusing the distinction between fact and fiction, and in doing so reveals the tensions in the BBC of the time between the paternalistic liberalism of Director General Hugh Carlton Greene and the growing vulnerability of public-service broadcasting to attack by politicians and the tabloids. In another chapter, Petley surveys the censorship of Loach's efforts to use the television documentary form in the early Eighties to defend the labor rank and file from both Thatcherism and union leaders.

The other defense concerns the influential Seventies notion, much debated in Screen, that Loach's early work, and in particular his television epic Days of Hope (1975), constituted a "classic realist" text which discouraged political understanding and encouraged spectators just to "look and see." Deborah Knight contests this line by identifying the work with a tradition of naturalism in the British New Wave that can be differentiated from Hollywood realism, and that is as politically acute as the once-fashionable "cine-Brechtianism." For her, there are few easy resolutions in Loach films, and McKnight comes to a similar conclusion in his study of the "problematic identification" with his characters that Loach invites in "domestic morality tales" from Cathy Come Home and Family Life to Raining Stones and Ladybird, Ladybird. He finds a number of Loach's protagonists clinging to self-delusion, acting in a way that is "symptomatic of a certain kind of nostalgia."

A number of factors help explain the revival in Loach's career, after dark days in the Eighties, when he returned briefly to making television commercials. Apart from the waning of Thatcherism, the director has belatedly benefited from Channel Four's key role in recent British filmmaking, and in the exploitation by his production company, Parallax Pictures, of new European sources of cinema and television co-production finance. Nervous British distributors eventually responded to Loach's success at European festivals. In the most incisive and critical chapter, John Hill discusses the uncertain development of Loach's political and esthetic strategies in this later period, with particular reference to Fatherland, Hidden Agenda, and Riff Raff. To Hill the ending of the last named film illustrates a lack of confidence - which arguably subsequently returned - with drama documentary style.

Elsewhere in the book a piece by Patrick MacFadden explores the historical and political resonances of the director's best recent film, Land and Freedom. While Loach remains an icon of political filmmaking, particularly to French critics, there is the sense that his passionate belief in the working class as the life and blood of the progressive struggle sometimes comes at the expense of his treatment of sex and ethnicity. But in an era of Blairite rebranding and a so far unimpressive investment of lottery money in British film, few to the left of the now dominant mainstream are prepared to quibble at a director who, while making concessions to the new political and cinematic realities, has remained true to consistent personal ideals.

Brian Nave

Brian Nave teaches Political Science at the University of Bath and is the author of Film and Politics in America