Change Society First

The Big Flame tells the story of a famous strike by a group of dockers in Liverpool in 1967. Interestingly, the UK government was in the hands of the Labour Party at the time; Harold Wilson's election in 1964 followed a violent political campaign in which Labour Party strategists drew inspiration from John F. Kennedy's American campaign (1960), partly based on the lives of New Wave actors and writers. The Prime Minister, elected thanks to the image of a good rebel with popular taste, had the support of the traditional trade unions, especially after the conclusions of the "Devlin Report". This report was commissioned by the government and addressed working conditions in the docks. It recommended an offensive against unofficial workers' organisations as a method of preventing strikes.

The way in which Ken Loach presents what he called "an authentic portrait of English working-class life" is carefully built on a professional relationship of political and artistic complicity with Jim Allen, the screenwriter of The Big Flame, on Marxist principles, on a cast that knows the reality represented in the film (a practice inherited from Soviet cinema and Italian neorealism) and, of course, on a whole way of filming and editing, here with frequent use of face and chest shots and an alternation of narrative that allows a clear reading of simultaneous events in time but in different places (social groups).

In fact, Ken Loach's style, often described as "simple", "direct" and "realistic", is very constructed; an experimental and investigative naturalism, born of an elaboration between historical facts and artistic imagination, between the role of the writer of the filmed script and the contribution of the actors, who add their experiential testimonies to the replicas.

The film begins with the events that led to the strike. The failed negotiation attempts between workers, union leaders and government representatives are choreographed in what Raymond Williams would call the "indicative mode", until, at a second moment in the film, one of the workers introduces the "subjunctive mode" by lighting the " big flame" to which the title refers: what if, instead of continuing to strike for purely economic reasons (pay rises), which are quickly absorbed by inflation, putting everything back to square one, the workers occupied the docks, appropriating and controlling the means of production?

Still according to Raymond Williams, this "imaginative hypothesis" is not represented in a "utopian way", but rather in a "naturalistic way", fusing the usual techniques of creating recognition in cinema with creative experiences, in order to elaborate an alternative hypothesis within this recognition. Thus we follow the story of 10,000 men who occupied the port of Liverpool for five days and, without masters or ties, managed to produce more and better.

I would like to draw your attention to three devices used by Ken Loach that add to the story being told and at the same time expand its universe. The first is the use of voiceover at a certain moment to comment on the action in an epic tone (amplification); the second is the introduction of a musical intermezzo performed by an American sailor who sings a song about a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World union, internationalising the action and emphasising the role of militant art in political struggle (self-referential); finally, in the last part of the film, a sequence using the agitprop techniques of courtroom theatre — the character of the judge praises Marxism as an intellectual tool at the university and condemns its political use by workers, leading to a highly politicised response from the defendant. In addition to all this, the film is constantly critical of the role of the media, which is seen as an arm of power, along with the police and the army. Allies of power are also traitors to the class.

In an interview in 2007, Ken Loach confessed that perhaps cinema has never done much for workers, and that if we really want to make a difference, it has to be in politics or in the trade union movement. Watching The Big Flame in 2024, I can't help but feel — perhaps a little overdramatically, I admit — that a war has been lost. It was lost without glory, despite the fury used in the battles fought. A faint heart never won a fair maiden. The workers have almost all been replaced by collaborators, and the unions that have any power are those of the professional groups of the so-called middle class. The film brings to the present day the moment when the class struggle in Europe was unwittingly entering its final throes — although the struggle continued, as the final scene shows. The ruling class won that war, and today the struggle is for the survival of the planet. We'll never know whether the planet would be better off if the outcome of the war between workers and employers had been different. However, a whole "new wave" of dangers "threatens the system" and justifies the maintenance of repressive institutions such as the police and the army — I use the quotation marks here in their original sense of irony. The "new" "dangers" are, among others, exiled people, immigrants, children of immigrants, people perceived as foreigners, people belonging to ethnic minorities, religious minorities, undocumented people, the sick, gender dissidents, in short, all those people who, for whatever reason, do not fit into the current neoliberal order. Ten years after the premiere of The Big Flame, the Conservative government of Margaret Tatcher has been particularly violent in its attacks on trade unions, and less so on individual freedoms: as a result, the "old" workers who make up a large part of the phalanx of "new dangers" have no strong organisations to defend them.