Red Pepper » Clive James Nwonka

The Condition of the Working Class: what’s changed?

admin — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:14:17 +0000

In 2012, a group of working class people from Manchester and Salford come together to create a theatrical show from scratch based on their own experiences and Engels’ book The Condition of the Working Class in England. They have eight weeks before their first performance. This film, The Condition of the Working Class, follows them from the first rehearsal to the first night performance – and situates their struggle to get the show on stage in the context of the daily struggles of ordinary people facing economic crisis and austerity politics.
The people who came together to do the show turned from a group of strangers, many of whom had never acted before, into the ‘Ragged Collective’ in little more than two months. The film, full of political passion and anger, is a wonderful testament to the creativity, determination and camaraderie of working people that blows the media stereotypes of the working class out of the water.

What was the motivation for this documentary?
The idea for the film originated a few years ago. We were working for a year in Venezuela. We read Engels’ book The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844, while we were there. We were struck by how relevant it remained at a time when the UK was dismantling its welfare state and returning to an unbridled 19th century capitalism where politics serves the rich. What’s changed? Some things have. When Engels wrote his book, working class political consciousness was very high and there was a thriving and independent working class culture. Today working people and their organisations in the UK, and especially England, have been broken up by years of attacks by neoliberal policies. We wanted to bring back a little flavour of that revolutionary spirit that was in Engels’ book and which we also found in Venezuela.

What was the production process like?
We issued an open call in the Manchester and Salford region asking for volunteers to take part in the project. The aim was to get people to devise and perform a play based on their own experiences and Engels’ text – so two things would follow. One, they would make the connections between Engels’ work and their own lives and two, they would tell their own stories. The idea was for the film to follow this process of bonding, of collaboration, of creativity, of storytelling and bring issues of class to the fore. At the same time we contextualised what was going on within the rehearsals with a wider look at austerity politics today as well as a historical look at the condition of the working class in the past, using archive footage and Engels’ words.

Documentaries, particularly ones with a fly on the wall aesthetic, often have an observational style that leads towards impartiality; you have a definite perspective on the issue. Was it always the intention to allow the actors to articulate their own experiences and interpretations of the book?
The whole idea for this film required setting up the situation – so we were never impartial observers who had stumbled onto something that would have been happening if we were not there. In that sense the film is in the tradition of cinéma vérité, which is often confused with observational cinema but is actually very different in that it allows for the filmmaker to take an interventionist position. This tradition has also resurfaced in a corrupt form in those TV documentaries where protagonists are set competitive tasks or goals by the filmmakers. The difference with our film is that we wanted people to work together (not against each other) on a political project.

Do you think that the times require a film or documentary culture that actually asks the big questions about British society?
There is a massive transformation in British society going on and the mainstream media are simply not covering it. The welfare state, which was established to provide some protective barriers between people and the market, is being dismantled. We are returning to the sort of laissez faire capitalism of the 19th century – which is another reason why we should also return to Engels today. There’s a corporate coup going on in this country but virtual silence from the mainstream media. The times themselves are producing a documentary culture that is asking the big questions.

The aim of the film was to draw parallels between the present situation and 1844. What are those parallels?
There are striking parallels between what Engels found in his examination of England at the start of the industrial revolution and today’s unleashed capitalism. The poor still work for subsistence wages, they still live in substandard housing, they are more unhealthy, they die younger, there is little social mobility, education is designed to prepare them for a life of servile jobs while the law, as Engels put it, ‘is a rod which the bourgeois has prepared for them’. Take for example what Engels says about the link between inequality and crime, and then think about what the representatives of the bourgeoisie said about ‘the sacredness of property’ after the riots that shook English cities in 2011. David Cameron described the riots as ‘criminality, pure and simple’.

How relevant do you feel Engels’ book is in the present day?
What is so powerful about Engels is that he cuts through to the fundamental power relations of society by writing about class. This is the category which politicians will not talk about, or have substituted with the prejudices of a out of touch elite, with talk of ‘scroungers’. The media meanwhile recycles one-dimensional stereotypes of class and much of academia has declared class to be an archaic concept. And yet the reality is without the category of class we literally cannot grasp the fundamental drivers of social change and endemic social problems. Engels’ book is thus not a historical curiosity but a reminder of what we have forgotten: that class is still relevant to understanding today’s society.

How much do you think that documentary practices can work as social practice, in terms of influencing society?
All cultural practices are social practices. Our cultural practice was different because of the way we worked. It was central to the project that working class people told their stories in their own way. The stories of the working class are not usually authored by the working class and that is the big difference. The domination of the media by a middle class increasingly remote from the lives and experiences of the working class means that those stories are filtered through an alien class prism. In order to influence society in a progressive direction, it is important to take account of the process of production and not just the final product. Within the traditional media the process of production is a hierarchical one, in which, when working class people are approached by the media, their images and words are expropriated, manipulated and distorted to fit a pre-existing narrative.

The interview with the young woman in the shoe store in Moss Side is a very emotional point in the documentary. But it also displays a multi-racial, collectivised working class experience.
One of the problems with the group of self-selecting people who came together to do the theatrical project is that they were all white. Initially around 30 people showed an interest in the project but that number halved once people realised the scale of the commitment that was required. There were some black and Asian people who were part of that initial group but they were among those who we subsequently lost. What we did not appreciate, as Londoners, is how much more segregated Manchester is in terms of the different communities that live there. So that is a problem insofar as the film is about this group of people doing the show, the film reproduces a problematically homogenous view of the modern working class. So we knew we had to try and correct that in the film. We went down to Moss Side and initially got little joy from potential interviewees, who when we asked them which class they belonged to, declared that they belonged to the ‘hustling class’ and would not speak on camera to us. Then we came across Angie and she gave us this incredibly powerful interview which we knew we wanted to use and ends up being a centre-piece moment in the film. We did find that a lot of people were angry; there’s this frustration and pain bubbling away underneath the surface, and you can see that in the course of the interview with Angie. This emotional and psychological dimensional to class oppression is very important. It is not just about ‘economics’ or ‘society’ as an abstraction, it is about the real costs on the lives of people.

The Condition of the Working Class will be screened in these venues in 2013. All screenings will be followed by a Q&A with the film’s directors.
May
Saturday May 25th: LA CASA, 2pm. 29 Hope Street, Liverpool L1 9BQ.
June
Thursday June 6th: The CLF ART CAFE, 7.30pm. 133 Rye Lane, London, SE15 4ST.
Friday June 7th: THE WORKING MEN’S COLLEGE, 7pm. 44 Crowndale Rd, London, NW1 1TR.
Tuesday June 11th: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS (GRAND COMMITTEE ROOM), 7.30pm (This is a public screening, but please allow 20 mins to get through security).
Wednesday June 12th: METAL AT EDGE HILL STATION, 6.30pm. Tunnel Road, Liverpool www.metalculture.com/
Sunday June 16th: UNOFFICIAL HISTORIES CONFERENCE. Details to be confirmed.
Saturday June 22nd: THE NEW THEATRE CONNOLLY BOOKS, 2pm. 43 Essex Street, Dublin.

Blockbusters only please, we’re British!

Michael — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:10:56 +0000

Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared that the UK film industry should support “more commercially successful pictures”. His words outline the mandate, as he sees it, suggested in the UK Film Policy Review . Cameron’s comments, which came prior to the 16 January publication of the Review, have sparked outrage among sections of the film industry.

Led by Lord Chris Smith, and backed by Downtown Abbey creator and Tory Peer Julian Fellows, the Review has been framed around the transatlantic success of the King’s Speech. It argues that public money, via National Lottery funding, should be directed to film projects that will rival the commercial success of the “best international productions”.

Cameron stated that, “our role, and that of the BFI, should be to support the sector in becoming even more dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK producers to make commercially successful pictures.” Social realist film director Ken Loach publicly criticized Cameron’s conclusions on BBC Breakfast, also prior to the publication of the review. Loach said: “We do not have, as in other countries in Europe, a wide spread of independent cinemas. Now, unless you can really see a wide variety of films you don’t have a vibrant film industry and we get a very narrow menu.”

In effect, Cameron wants the film industry to serve as the government’s international relations agency, selling the rest of the world an ideal version of Britishness as seen in A King’s Speech, An Education (2009) and the lamentably apolitical The Iron Lady (2011). His words have little to do with cultural entrepreneurialism, and everything to do with the politics of his own survival.

A narrow menu

The suggestion that the industry is afflicted with a poverty of commercial ambition is a narrow analysis of British cinema. The films of Loach, Mike Leigh and more recently Shane Meadows and Andrea Arnold, represent a triumph of critical success over commerciality. It’s this very diversity of British film that makes it successful. To declare that potential film projects in the UK should now be funded on the subtle premise of revenue forecasting goes against the very raison d’être of cinema.

Commercial viability can never be the axis around which an entire film industry can operate. Unless the industry can provide funding for low budget, or “risky” projects, which the burden of purely profit-making goals will stymie, young British filmmakers and screenwriters will be unable to develop their talents. It will also push the very best of our established filmmakers to look to Europe for funding, or be reduced to subverting their own work in order to survive under the new regime.

Film is a commodity that cannot exist in isolation from its paymasters. And there must be present a correlation between a film and an audience’s willingness to pay for it. But what is at issue goes beyond the commercial viability of projects to be funded by the British Film Institute, and the example of the King’s Speech speaks volumes about a possible wider agenda at play: it telegraphs a tranquil version of the British experience to America via a cultural discourse, at a time when British social life is anything but serene.

In this new era of film funding in Britain, heritage filmmaking will bloom, tended to by a government hanging on to its authority. The viewing public will be presented with an ideal, particular vision of national identity. Making Britain proud of its heritage will become a survival stratagem. Heritage films can and should have their place. But there must be equilibrium.

We need a holistic approach to cultivating a British film culture that fully represents and serves the society it draws its funding from. It must be a cinema that is commercially successful, but also one that expresses society and actively participates in it.

Silencing dissent

With the government actively encouraging a specific brand of film, it will became harder for emerging filmmakers, who cannot appeal for funding abroad, to go against the grain. Cameron’s words will become the perfect mitigation for a film industry already weary of funding film projects with concrete social engagement. The few films of this period that may allude to social reality will be heavily depoliticised, lest they bring the nation into disrepute. Loach has every reason to be concerned. The potential sacrificial lambs of the review’s policy recommendations are obvious.

The aspect of social criticism in films by Loach, Leigh, Meadows and Arnold certainly needs to be taken into consideration in an analysis of Cameron’s comments. Loaches’ characters are victims of their social circumstances, and his depiction of working class life provides an indication of what is transpiring politically, implicating the government through their policies as wilful allies of the status quo. But commercial success is rarely achieved by filmmakers wishing to adhere to political reality rather than popularism.

The 1980’s was a decade marred by political disquiet and anxiety under the Tories, and this was articulated by a group of distinctively anti-Thatcherite films. And while the turmoil of this decade will spur filmmakers to indulge in politics, under the proposals in the review, the industry may no longer allow such transgressions.

sions.

Empty tank

admin — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 04:17:26 +0000

For an aficionado of British social realism, Fish Tank (2009) is a bittersweet achievement. Andrea Arnold’s celebrated coming-of-age drama, set on an Essex housing estate, is a raw, pleading film. Focusing on working-class Britain, it offers an urgent portrayal of complex family relations. Its success is pleasing. A few years ago, this kind of film was extinct and filmmakers like Arnold were in danger of dying out. Yet the singular praise it received highlights how far social realism has become a marginal cinematic practice where it was once a dominant form.
It has not been abandoned entirely, but the imperative has changed. British social realism no longer implies a filmmaking style and narrative based on socialist principles and critiques of pervasive class divides. Instead, the genre has come to prioritise entertainment and voyeurism – and the British working class still lacks cinematic representation.
Kitchen sink to commercial interest
The popularity of the genre is tied to political context. It is rooted in John Grierson’s 1930s documentary movement, which aimed to use film as an ideological weapon to combat political apathy and encourage democratic cohesion post-Depression. Early social realist film was defined by Marxist perspectives. Genre-defining films such as Tony Richardson’s Look Back in Anger (1958) and Lindsey Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963) aimed to expose the effects of capitalism on troubled, working-class characters and assert socialism as the only solution for its narrative themes – unemployment, poverty, racism and exclusion. For all its prolific urgency, however, ‘kitchen sink’ realism was short lived and cinema audiences’ interest in British working-class existence waned during the 1960s.
The 1980s saw a renaissance, as Channel 4 sought to extend the representation and range of typical television characters and topics to include marginal groups and issues in society. The channel’s head of fiction, David Rose, was highly influential. As BBC head of drama, Rose had produced Play for Today throughout the 1970s and worked with Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. His Film on Four productions both reflected and opposed the political hegemony of the decade. Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Chris Bernard’s Letter to Brezhnev (1985) are typically anti-Thatcherite, critically illuminating the social impacts of government policy.
Channel 4 had been able to establish itself with socially provocative films via funding from levies paid by ITV companies. Under the 1990 Broadcasting Act, however, the channel effectively became a commodity. Desire to innovate and the need for advertising sales were at cross-purposes and as the commercial imperative became the paramount concern, content was compromised.
The New Labour effect
More profound changes occurred during the New Labour years, during which the three main independent film funders – FilmFour, the BBC and, in particular, the UK Film Council – increasingly operated to support substantially profitable transatlantic films. Privileged scripts sold America a sanitised, white, upper-middle-class version of England, which had been a hit in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). In Notting Hill (1999), the true ethno-social composition of a particular part of London is knowingly misrepresented in order to fit the mould.
Thus encouraged, filmmakers produced work from a liberal, middle-class perspective for liberal, middle-class audiences that was occasionally about, but not for, the working-class. Reflective of Blair’s mandate for a classless society – which, paradoxically, meant assimilation into a middle-class one – and supported by ministers riding a populist, sanitised wave of ‘cool Britannia’, films such as Billy Elliot (2000) became well-publicised, roaring successes.
The allegation that liberals view social realist films like intellectual issues in abstract thought raises questions about whose interest a narrative serves. Billy, a young Tynesider aspiring to be a ballet dancer against the backdrop of the 1984-85 miners strike, must ultimately relocate to the middle-class south to live happily. His embourgeoisement implies that working-class culture is incapable of nurturing a desirable mode of existence.
Black filmmaking was also co-opted into New Labour ideology, where a hegemonic version of what it is to be black British was fixed by accordingly compartmentalised arts funding. In Saul Dibb’s Bullet Boy (2005), for example, interesting, oppressed characters are presented without exploration or moral critique of the institutional system that produces their economic and social hardship.
While the work was celebrated as diverse, urban and worthy, black people arguably became the mere subjects of white middle‑class imaginations. Ethnic minorities featured, but did not strategise, reinforcing beliefs that issues raised in the film are cultural as opposed to political. This has a marginalising effect that seems to reinforce, rather than ameliorate, the otherness of the subjects, often conforming to media stereotypes and their obsession with gun crime. In the 1970s and 1980s, black filmmakers had used documentary realism to attack hegemonic media portrayals of black British behaviour in films such as Pressure (1975), Babylon (1980) and Territories (1984). These contrast significantly with Bullet Boy, which was suddenly aggrandised as culturally valid.
The derogatory representations of the 1980s have only become more sophisticatedly expressed. Black film is once again in need of an effective political alignment, and consideration must be given to whether social realism offers a more appropriate cinematic and sociological strategy than current race relations discourses.
The new imperative
British social realism is not just about portraying the working class in motion, taking hand-held cameras to the nearest council estate, or even a certain vernacular. It is the collective idea, and the lived experiences that proceed from this. It is about refocusing attention on the oppressive political and social frameworks that embolden coalition Britain and how these affect the troubled working-class characters we view. In our current context, it is not impossible to imagine a return to a cinema that has such a vital social role.
Already, there is a rising awareness about the lack of realistic working-class and ethnic minority representation in film. Directors such as Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows (This Is England) are presenting characters conventional British cinema usually chooses to ignore, deny or patronise. Along with Ken Loach’s continued work, they represent the more credible, contemporary cinematic efforts to address social issues.
Yet Loach, who has demonstrated remarkable fidelity to socialist beliefs in his treatment of the working class, while enduring censorship and funding battles, remains the only practitioner at his level to take this approach in his films. Other filmmakers of a social realist persuasion need to make clear where their commitments lie, accompanying stated commitments to working-class representation and social reform with appropriate cinematic choices. They must defend their visions against commercial interest.
Art flourishes in times of austerity, and filmmakers now have fertile ground to make narrative-based comment. It is appropriate to contend that working-class films and stories must emerge most strongly at times of socio-economic distress.
Any renaissance in socio-political imperative focused social realism will be tempered, however, by financial pressure on the UK film industry. As the industry waits to see the film funding mandate handed to the British Film Institute by the coalition, the recent international success of films such as The King’s Speech (2010) and An Education (2009) may herald the return of British heritage film.
In terms of reviving the commercial viability and success of British cinema, these films have their place. Whether this will be paralleled with a body of films reflective of the re-emergence of working-class politics and visibility remains to be seen. The BFI, the BBC, FilmFour and Creative England can contribute by empowering those who are willing and able to meaningfully confront social inequality on screen. That they find the conviction to do so is in the interest of British cinema and society.

Read this alongside Siobhan McGuirk’s potted history of British social realism.