A Camera for a Knave

Khaleel Etwebi A camera for a Knave Documenting a fictional life Bachelor’s project in FILM2000 Supervisor: Ilona Hongisto May 2020 Bachelor’s project NTNU Faculty of Humanities Department of Art and Media Studies Norwegian University of Science and Technology Khaleel Etwebi A camera for a Knave Documenting a fictional life Bachelor’s project in FILM2000 Supervisor: Ilona Hongisto May 2020 Norwegian University of Science and Technology Faculty of Humanities Department of Art and Media Studies Table of content: 1. Introduction (p. 2-4) 1.1 Short summary and the film’s theme (p. 3-4) 2. Main content (p. 4-17) 2.1 The British new wave and social realism (p. 4-5) 2.2 Casting and collaborating with the actors (p. 6-7) 2.3 The visual style of Kes (p. 7-14) 2.3.1The Camera as a sympathetic observant (p. 8-10) 2.3.2 The less the merrier (p. 10-11) 2.3.3 Cathy Come Home and the subsequent “documentary look” of Kes (p. 11-14) 2.4 Untraditional social realist elements (p. 14-15) 2.5 Endless cycle (p. 16-17) 3. Conclusion (p. 17-18) 4. Reference list (p. 19) 1 A camera for a knave: Documenting a fictional life. 1. Introduction A dimly lit room, color washed walls, two brothers, a young man and a child, sharing a small bed, and then an alarm clock breaks the silence. Every time I watch the opening sequence of Kes (1969) by the British film-maker Ken Loach I find myself left in awe and wonder, fully engaged in the seemingly eventless scene and its realism. Throughout the film, I felt like I was watching a documentary about the real life of real people and that this fictional film seems to be documenting real life events. The degree of realism the film managed to convey about the characters’ struggles, social class and daily life has mesmerized me and left me wondering where did that feeling come from? What was it in the film visually that made its story believable, so real and the performances to be so natural? In my thesis, I will be raising several questions as for what makes Kes a social realist film and what are the cinematic elements that the film shares with documentary films. Furthermore, I ask how social realism is achieved and affected by the cinematic devices that Loach uses or abandons in this film, for example, the way the main characters are portrayed, the usage of real locations and nonprofessional actors, the way the scenes and locations are framed and filmed, the distance of the camera and the viewer to the subject, and other cinematic devices that make this film a social realist one. I will be looking into the cinematic language that Ken Loach has developed and consistently uses to tell such a political and a social realistic story as well as the documentary devices he employs under the umbrella of a fiction film. To achieve that I will be referring to some of his earlier works and searching for the cinematic devices that Ken Loach brought from his early documentary/TV work he made for the BBC and how he managed to alter them and use them in his fictional work for cinema, blurring at times the boundary between investigating documentary/TV reportage and cinema, fact and fiction. In order for me to understand his work and social realism as a cinematic movement, I’ll be referring to a selection of academic work on the subject of social realism of several film scholars who wrote about, interviewed, and studied Ken Loach, his work and social realism in general. Specifically, John Hill, Jacob Leigh, Graham Fuller, Samantha Lay and others. 2 1.1. A short summary and the film’s theme Kes tells the story of a young boy named Billy Casper (David Bradley) who lives in a town in northern England called Barnsley. The town is one of several towns in Yorkshire famous for its coal-mining industry, where the lower working class makes up the majority of its residents. The film shows us different episodes from Billy’s life that spans couple of months. Billy is neglected by his own family, his mother (Lynne Perrie) and older brother Jud (Freddie Fletcher), and he is neglected as well by his teachers at school who see him as a hopeless troublemaker with no academic future whatsoever. Billy begins to drift away from his family and schoolmates to avoid trouble, and he finds temporarily solace in life when he finds a young Kestrel (a small falcon) and begins to learn how to train it. Proving, by doing so, to everyone around him, but mostly to himself, that he is capable of achieving success in life. Nevertheless, the harsh reality closes in around him and eventually kills his hope. Kes is the second feature film for Ken Loach. His first feature was Poor Cow (1967) and previously to that he worked for BBC and made several dramas for TV, like the documentary drama Cathy Come Home (1966) which was part of Wednesday Play (a TV series dedicated to social issues that aired from 1964 to 1970) a drama that discussed the problems of homelessness and public housing in Britain at the time. Throughout his career Ken Loach has made several films that tend to be viewed and classified as social realist films, but it is in Kes that I believe his depiction of social issues matured both visually and thematically. To me, a social realist film aspires to express the lives of its characters in a way that is truthful to their social status, location, and their time. It is a film that turns national statistics into dramatic stories with ordinary people at its center as its heroes, and by doing so it brings neglected social problems back to the limelight. One can see Kes as a protest against the country’s educational system. It describes and shows how a great number of children in schools all around Britain are abandoned and thrown into labor work by the country’s terrible educational system. A system that functions with unsympathetic and rigid rules and that retains mostly teachers who lack faith and hope in their pupils, which in return weaken the students’ faith in themselves. (See Leigh, J. 2002. p.64.) The film is based on a novel by Barry Hines called A Kestrel for A Knave. Hines, who is a schoolteacher and the son of a former coalminer, adapted his own novel to a manuscript for the 3 film. Hines wrote all the dialogue in the local dialect and worked closely with Loach to help bring the authenticity of his words to the screen. The title of the novel comes from an old roman law that states what kind of a bird a member of each social class is allowed to keep and it is the epigraph that the novel starts with: “An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady; a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, a Musket for a Holy water Clerck, a Kestrel for a Knave.” (Selected from the Boke of St Albans, 1486, and a Harleian manuscript). (Hines, B. 1968. p.7.) Billy is the knave in the film, which refers to a male servant or a man of humble birth or position. Billy’s world is his home, his town and his school with the coalmines looming in the distance covering with its smoke the light of hope for a better future. It is as if Billy moves from one prison to another. He goes from his house to his school, surrounded by walls and people who try to corner and pin him down. It is as if he cannot escape his destiny which is going down the pit like his older brother. One can see Billy as a blameless character where he is a victim to the harsh and indifferent adult world. Unlike characters from Loach’s earlier works like Cathy in Cathy Come Home Where she and her husband try to put up a fight against the authorities and protest against the injustices of the country’s housing system, Billy is not portrayed as a rebel who is fighting against the unjust system but rather as a vulnerable little kid who is trying in the best way he can to cope with the hostile and bullying circumstances and environment he finds himself in, both at home from his brother Jud or outside in the world. Billy manages to get by in this world by stealing, lying, and eventually avoiding and drifting away from every single human being in the city and finding his comfort and solace with his bird. 2. Main content 2.1. The British new wave and social realism Ken Loach was a part of the new wave of British film directors who came after the Second World War and who were concerned with telling stories about and inspired from the daily lives of the British society’s different social classes. Loach was one of the film directors who was also inspired by Italian neorealism, the French avantgarde and films coming from Eastern European 4 countries. He was inspired by social realist films and theories, where politics, social class, and the struggle for basic human rights, be it individual or national struggle, are affecting and shaping the director’s cinematic expression. (Fuller, G. 1998. p.38.) Ever since he started making TV plays and working as a director in early 1960s, Loach’s work was shaped and influenced by his political stance as a socialist.

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