Biography ken loach kes di
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Ken Loach is the 46th most popular film director (down from 37th in 2024), the 367th most popular biography from United Kingdom (down from 192nd in 2019) and the 3rd most popular British Film Director.
Ken Loach is most famous for his films about the British working class, such as Kes, Poor Cow, and I, Daniel Blake.
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Among FILM DIRECTORS
Among film directors, Ken Loach ranks 46 out of 2,041.
The films I was making weren't incisive enough. Significantly, this was during the progressive director-generalship of Sir Hugh Greene and coincided with Sydney Newman's influential appointment as head of BBC drama. After him are Tony Scott (1944), Alan Parker (1944), Peter Brook (1925), Christopher Nolan (1970), Richard Attenborough (1923), David Lean (1908), Peter Greenaway (1942), Michael Powell (1905), and Danny Boyle (1956).
British born Film Directors
Go to all RankingsKen Loach
Ken Loach.
Photo courtesy of Ken Loach
British Director
Ken Loach.
Garnett had left (temporarily) for America, and Loach admits to finding things difficult at this time, struggling to raise money for films and failing to adapt to the political changes that were taking place as Britain swung to the Right:
I think I'd lost my way a bit - and lost touch with the kind of raw energy of the things we'd done in the mid-sixties and with Kes.
And so that's why I tried documentaries not long after the big political change occurred in Britain.
But even with documentaries Loach ran into problems of political censorship. His socially critical directing style and socialist views are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty (Poor Cow, 1967), homelessness (Cathy Come Home, 1966), and labour rights (Riff-Raff, 1991, and The Navigators, 2001).
By far the most powerful work from this period of Loach's career, however, is Cathy Come Home(1966), a study of the effects of homelessness and bureaucracy on family life. Attended King Edward School, Nuneaton; St. Peter's College, Oxford. 20/5/1971), a less daring but more realistic play built around the strike of the Pilkington glass workers.
These gritty contemporary dramas were succeeded by Days of Hope (BBC, 1975), four feature-length period dramas shot in colour, showing the politicisation of a working-class family in the period from the First World War to the General Strike of 1926, which recount historical events from an explicitly Trotskyite point of view.
Additionally, while some of the '90s films veered towards social realism (Riff-Raff, Raining Stones, The Navigators), others mixed social realism with melodrama (Ladybird, Ladybird, Carla's Song, My Name Is Joe), adding an extra enriching dimension to the films.
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Leigh, Jacob, The Cinema Of Ken Loach (London: Wallflower, 2002)
McKnight, George (ed), Agent Of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997)
Lez Cooke, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors
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Lightweight, handheld camera; grainy 16mm film stock; a blackĀ and-white aesthetic; location shooting; natural lighting; direct, asynchronous sound; blending of experienced and nonprofessional performers; authentic regional accents and dialects; overlapping dialogue; improvised acting; expressive editing; incorporation of statistical information: all these strategies combined in varying degrees to create a compelling and original documentary effect markedly at odds with the look of traditional "acted" television drama.In 1975 the distinctive Loach-Garnett style was employed in a notable exploration, nearly 400 minutes in length, of British labor history, which functioned as a poignant commentary on the parlous state of contemporary industrial relations.
The resulting film was more European in subject matter and less social realist in style than many of Loach's previous films and, despite Loach and Griffiths sharing the same political sympathies, wasn't entirely successful, partly because Griffiths' script was more literary and less suited to Loach's naturalistic style.
It wasn't until 1990, with the release of Hidden Agenda, a political thriller set in Northern Ireland about the British army's 'shoot-to-kill' policy, that Loach was able to make a film that regained the polemical edge of the best of his earlier work.
Above all, he was concerned to capture a sense of the real, extending a range of practiced cinema-verite techniques to produce a sense of immediacy and plausibility that would in tum produce recognition in the spectator and inspire collective action. Adapted by Barry Hines from his own novel, Kes told the story of Billy Casper, a working-class lad from Barnsley, alienated from school and the prospect of working in the coal mine, who finds a sense of personal achievement in learning to train and fly a kestrel.
Beginning with his political thriller about a military cover-up in Ulster, Hidden Agenda, which was reviled and praised in roughly equal measure on its first screening at Cannes, Loach has gone on to make roughly one feature film each year, usually with an early television showing in mind. Read more on Wikipedia
His biography is available in 48 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 47 in 2024).
If anything, however, this route led Loach into even greater problems with censorship, culminating in the controversial withdrawals of the four-part series Questions of Leadership (1983) and Which Side Are You On? (1984), a polemical documentary about the socially disruptive minersĀ· strike. Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, June 17, 1937.