“The first question is the light, always the light. It’s often said that filmmaking is physically about light hitting celluloid, but it’s also about enlightening and clarifying. There’s this metaphorical connection to light as well as the physical connection to the mechanism of creating an image.” — Ken Loach
87-year-old British director Ken Loach has just released what he claims will be his final film, The Old Oak. In celebration, New York’s Film Forum is holding a major retrospective of a filmmaker who’s been instrumental to the development of cinema over the last half-century — yet rarely receives the credit. Critics and cinephiles often regard his films as the filmic equivalent of eating your vegetables or voting. We know they are vital and urgent, but they might feel more like a distribution mechanism for civic virtue than an exercise in aesthetics.
That attitude is not without cause. Especially in recent years, Loach’s work has brimmed over with righteous anger at how Western governments have turned their back on the working class. But Loach’s talent lies in his ability to hold both the long arc of proletariat history alongside its contemporary expressions, such as the gig economy of 2020’s Sorry We Missed You or the European migration crisis in The Old Oak.
I had the chance to interview Ken Loach last month for Slant Magazine, and I appreciate that he gave me a long explanation of how he connects the content of his work to the artistic form it takes. (The quote at the top of the newsletter is from that discussion.) His response is worth digesting even if you don’t have access to see The Old Oak because it highlights the great amount of calculation and intention that have to go into any shot seeming “natural.”
This long-overdue tribute to Ken Loach made me reflect on his instrumental place in cementing one of my favorite subgenres: poetic social realism. Here’s how I define that, using each of the words to illustrate.
Poetic: suggesting something inscrutable and unknowable, perhaps divine or supernatural, beyond the mere world of the text itself
Social: seeing a person as more than just their actions but as part of a larger societal ecosystem that guides, but does not dictate, individual behavior
Realism: depicting the honest conditions of an environment, refusing both glossy ignorance and sensational exaggeration
Poetic social realist films, to me, feel like a culmination (as far as a present-day mind can comprehend) of two grand movements in the history of art. On the one hand, the subject of art has moved from depicting sacred scenes of religious ecstasy to capturing profane moments of everyday life. On the other, the creators and audiences of art have expanded and democratized from a moneyed elite to the people at large.
Poetic social realism is an art of the people and for the people, giving them dignity by capturing life as they experience it while also acknowledging that something ineffable undergirds their travails on this mortal coil. It’s a way of seeing the world plainly for what it is while knowing it is — and can be — so much more. To guide you through some of the hallmarks of this subgenre, as well as Ken Loach’s place within it, I’ve crafted a rough syllabus below should you want to self-guide your study.
FORERUNNERS
At the dawn of the talkies, cinema was technologically limited from participating in much verité storytelling. Equipment for recording sound was limited, not to mention bulky and immobile. To capture usable audio, most films shot on sound stages so dialogue would be discernible for audiences. This setting lent itself to more theatrical styles of filmmaking that favored depictions of society’s upper crust. Keep in mind the times, too: moviegoers favored cheap escape during the Great Depression.
A shifting political climate, coupled with some advances in cameras, helped usher in an era of Italian neorealism following WWII and the fall of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Filmmakers like Robert Rossellini began introducing documentary-like techniques into narrative cinema, liberating themselves from the studio and taking to the streets to capture the desecration of their country by the war. Their unvarnished look at physical conditions among the country’s destitute matched the emotional vulnerability in their characters as they navigate precarious situations.
Robert Rossellini’s Rome Open City is widely considered the textbook example here, but Vittorio De Sica made much more interesting and engaging work. He also began to push it beyond just stark depictions of poverty and access a deeper emotional register. While De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves is the more canonical classic, I’d recommend Umberto D. (available on Max and Criterion Channel) for a better sense of De Sica’s stylistic contributions. This tale of an elderly retiree facing repeated setbacks in his quest to secure permanent shelter for himself and his dog is a wrenching watch because it places the titular character’s humanity at such odds with his country’s disregard. (Spoiler alert: the dog lives!)
Neorealism petered out a bit as post-war economic prosperity enlivened Italy, giving way to more garish filmmakers like Fellini. But there’s always somewhere in the world that is suffering, and movements liberating cinema tend to transcend borders. The Czech New Wave translated their frustrations with an oppressive communist government into black, irreverent humor that often took some crazy risks with the form.
For Ken Loach, these filmmakers — some of whom he could count as contemporaries — helped inspire his own filmmaking style. Looking at something like Black Peter (available on Criterion Channel) from Miloš Forman, who would later go on to win Oscars for directing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, provides an additional blueprint for poetic social realist cinema.
There’s a dispassionately removed compassion for the titular teen in his picaresque wanderings through Czech society. His aimless wandering through the world is not ascribed as a personal fault but rather an understandable reaction to a confusing ethical ecosystem. Forman brings a gentle humanism without slathering on the sentimentality or using cinematic shortcuts to elicit empathy.
LOACH AND OTHER LANDMARKS
Though he’s since won two Palme D’Or prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, Ken Loach’s calling card remains 1969’s Kes (available to rent on various digital platforms). Short for kestrel, a kind of falcon, the story tracks the travails of a teenager growing up in a poor British coal mining town. Shunned by his peers and misunderstood by his family, young Billy finds friendship in a bird he learns to train. It’s this kinship with the kestrel that begins to set a troubled lad aright and points him toward some kind of future within a business and education system that seems resigned to letting him slip through the cracks otherwise.
Loach’s filmmaking grew out of a tradition of “kitchen sink realism” in Great Britain, a reconnection with the country’s Dickensian tradition that centered the cynicism of angry young men raging against the machine. While these works rebelled against the prevailing naturalistic disposition in the arts, Loach found a way to marry the two. Kes still provides a damning indictment of their future prospects while acknowledging the saving grace of things beyond societal constructions.
In emphasizing the liberating potential of a connection to the natural world, Loach finds a counter to reactionary conservatism that would soon envelop the Western world via the Reagan Revolution and Thatcherism. It’s not that working people need to return to a previous time to find contentment. Rather, it’s that they need to live in harmony with an animal kingdom that suffers not from the arbitrary commitments to social constructions.
Loach and his cinematographer Chris Menges could shoot this story more loosely by leaning on new lightweight cameras with better synchronized sound developed for documentary work. Kes feels like it’s floating on the wind like a creature of the sky. Literally and metaphorically speaking.
Another great English practitioner of this form is the late Terrence Davies, who I had the pleasure of speaking with before his passing last year. I would say he leans more in the poetic direction than the realism, but he’s nonetheless a keen observer of everyday detail. “Poetry is like music, it’s felt,” he told me. “You’ve got to find subtextual meaning at every single shot. Every bit of music, every bit of poetry has got to earn its keep, or it gets cut.”
His masterwork, 1992’s The Long Day Closes (available on Criterion Channel) is somewhat the inverse of Kes. Rather than finding a utopian ideal in the natural world, the young protagonist looks for it within the cinema. But Davies makes it clear why 12-year-old Bud, a stand-in for the filmmaker himself, needs to escape. His stifling upbringing in Liverpool, combined with the secret of his sexuality, has Bud looking for transcendence. Like the character, Davies refuses to let circumstances dictate our experience of the world. This fragmentary work shows that it’s possible to depict working-class conditions honestly without being entirely direct.
INTERNATIONAL APPLICATIONS
Poetic social realism is a broad enough stylistic toolkit that it’s possible to find elements of it across cinema. You could make a case that anything that shows working-class or poor characters without stooping to outright “poverty porn” fits the bill. But I do think some evolutions to the style began to take place in the indie boom of the 1990s that are worth noting.
In Hong Kong, Wong Kar Wai developed a personal style of deep, submerged longing expressed through languorous movements. (You’ve seen its lesser applications as the house style for perfume ads these days.) There’s something corporeal about his work, locating the wonder of nature within the self as a source of grounding wonder. If the characters in his works were just to connect their inner thoughts to their outer movements, the films suggest they might free themselves from their repression.
Many of Wong’s films, like the now-canonical In the Mood for Love, have an air of elegance about them (even if the two star-crossed lovers are but bureaucratic cogs). For a film that feels more squarely in this tradition, the more squalid Happy Together (available on Max and Criterion Channel) provides a better demonstration for why Wong belongs in the conversation. The film follows two male lovers trapped in a turbulent romance who escape their home in Hong Kong for Argentina. Despite the beauty of Iguazu Falls, they find the problem in their relationship is not in their surroundings but in themselves.
Elsewhere, French director Claire Denis explored the power of gesture in her widely-recognized masterpiece Beau Travail (available on Max and Criterion Channel). Leave it to a female director to so stunningly capture the prison of masculinity as physical exercises begin to reveal the psychic connection between a commandant and legionnaire serving in Djibouti. Like Davies, Denis takes an elliptical storytelling approach while anchoring her images in concrete yet evocative observations. Without making any overt nods toward their sexual chemistry, the film nods tragically to a love that cannot be and is sublimated through their military service.
BRITISH REVIVAL
A new generational vanguard emerged in Britain around the turn of the century. While no passing of the torch took place, it’s evident that Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold are continuing Loach’s legacy. To put it mildly, these are two of my absolute favorite filmmakers and part of the reason I dove into the wide-ranging past, present, and future of poetic social realism. (Have not done the necessary therapizing to understand what it is about British women that I connect with so deeply.)
Lynne Ramsay’s sensational debut Ratcatcher (available on Max and Criterion Channel) would make for a great double feature with Kes. While she casts her eye backward at Glasgow in 1973, the film feels entirely immediate in its evocation of place as the adolescent James and his family await rehousing. Ramsay’s contribution to the craft is to plunge deeply into James’ subjective experience, making literal for the viewer how he’s processing and internalizing the demoralizing conditions around him.
Longtime Marshall and the Movies readers will know I am in the tank, pun fully intended, for Andrea Arnold. Fish Tank (available on Criterion Channel) is really my gateway drug into this style of cinema. Arnold is unflinching in her depiction of the dead-end doomerism that teenage Mia feels living in British social housing.
She takes Loach’s fascination with the natural world even further, turning the omnipresence of the animal kingdom into a motif that runs throughout her work. Arnold’s films constantly cut away to bugs, birds, and any number of other creatures. They offer a counterpoint to the human drama: we will never escape our roots in the animal kingdom, so why wouldn’t we try to exist in harmony with their patterns of living?
Fish Tank features the most literal tethering of the two worlds as Mia finds a metaphor for her condition through a white horse chained to the fence of a trailer park. Here’s innocence and freedom tied down, just like she feels. The wide-open frontier of the future is out there, just out of reach without drastic action.
THE A24 VARIANT
The movie that most likely made you familiar with poetic social realism is Barry Jenkins’ improbable Best Picture winner Moonlight (available on Max). His triptych following the coming-of-age of a gay Black man in Miami imbues tragedy with a spiritual sense of importance and artistry. Jenkins’ great genius is merging the traditional format with Wong and Denis’ elliptical, bodily emphasis. His embodied, empathic synthesis truly sings.
This has become something a house style for A24 now with too many titles to name, but Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (available on Netflix through 4/30) following the next year really solidified that reputation of the studio as a premier destination for aesthetics and ideas. Baker’s chronicle of post-recession Florida is as notable for what it doesn’t show, at least not matter-of-factly. The tale of Moonee’s adventures living at a motel in the shadow of Disney World is a modern-day Little Rascals, a tribute to the resilience of children to turn any setting into a playground. When the reality of her situation living with a single mom on the fritz comes crashing in and the fantasy crumbles, it’s nothing short of devastating.
NEW FRONTIERS
So where else does poetic social realism have to go? Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart (available on Criterion Channel), which was championed relentlessly by the late Roger Ebert, injects mythology into the daily grind of a food cart operator in New York. The film’s storytelling rhythms and visual framing liken the beleaguered protagonist to something of a contemporary Sisyphus.
While I’ve focused most of my attention on the visual language of these films, there are plenty of poetic social realist films who use their aural landscape to provide something other than naturalistic noise. Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind (available for rent on various digital platforms) turns the streets of New York into a layered collage as experienced through the senses of a homeless man played by Richard Gere as he ambles around the city. The film assiduously refuses to let us into his psychology, instead emphasizing the visceral experience of being unhoused.
There are still marginalized communities whose stories we have yet to fully explore and understand, as Jim McKay demonstrated in 2017’s En el Séptimo Día (available for rent on various digital platforms). The film wrings immaculate tension from a Brooklyn bicycle delivery man trying to meet his economic obligations while still fulfilling his lifestyle aspirations as part of a recreational soccer team. McKay humanizes protagonist José, making him more than just his occupation and giving his struggles value by elevating them to art.
And across the pond, we may be witnessing yet another generational changeover within poetic social realism. The last year saw two first features, Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper (available on Paramount+) and Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex (available on MUBI), that give ecstatic expression to the growing pains of contemporary teenagers. These works feel confident toggling between outer and inner worlds, macro and micro, observational and declarative, intimate and opulent. In other words, it’s an exciting time to be tuned into movies in the world and movies about the world.
Sasquatch Sunset is now in theaters nationwide, and I spoke to its directors David and Nathan Zellner for Slant Magazine on how they made an anthropologically accurate movie about a family of Bigfoot-esque sasquatches. One of those “must be seen to be believed” types of movies, truly.
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