Kes
The classic Ken Loach 1969 film comes to the Junior Cycle, and it is a very welcome arrival.
Billy Casper (David Bradley) doesn’t lead a very happy life. Treated abysmally by his older brother, and not much better by his mother, the fifteen-year-old working class teenager finds solace and meaning in his Kestrel.
There are many films on this list that touch on the lives of young adults and those entering their teenage years, but few do it as starkly, and as warmly, as Kes.
At times brutally realistic, at times beautifully realistic, the film trusts its actors to live out their characters, to allow themselves to just inhabit the skin of the people they are creating.
Shot in Yorkshire the film doesn’t make any concession to those of us a little rusty with the accent, this, allied to the time distance, results in a film with a distinctly foreign feel. Yet, again, the truth beneath the accents universalises the themes. We all know a Billy. I’ve taught a few, male and female.
Loach lets the film unfold at its own pace but pay attention to how interiors and exteriors are shot, Kes, like ET, is all about the outside, the freedom of nature.
Night of the Hunter
Stone cold classic. A masterpiece of cinema. Another film I have used in class, and not just with the junior cycle students.
Charles Laughton directed Robert Mitchum in this noir-fairy-tale. And it has Lillian Gish.
Imagine a fairy tale about an evil step-father hunting down two children for the family treasure. Now imagine that being turned into a film by a director that seems to have swallowed every German Expressionist film made, before watching all the noirs available up to 1955 (some would say the end point of the true film noir ‘movement’).
Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a man that shared a cell with the father of the two children in question, John (John Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). Before their father, Ben, is executed he tells Harry about the $10,000 he has left in his family home. Harry, upon release, goes straight to Ben’s widow (Shelley Winters), woos her, marries her, kills her. John realises what’s going on and goes on the run with Pearl.
Laughton’s film wasn’t well received when it was first released but time has exposed those critics as being blind to the true art before them.
The gothic elements are accompanied by a firm understanding of how a film utilises perspective, both of the audience but also of the characters.
This is a film worthy of any classroom.
The films on the new list are a diverse bunch, in terms of director, protagonist, setting and language, but they all seem to contain a similar understanding of the centrality of agency in the human experience. Without the feeling that we are in control, that we can affect change, whether personal or communal, then we are forever lost in the space between shots, in the transition between the scenes of the hero and the villain.
18 CinÉireann / June 2018