Postwar Italian films put workers at the centre and helped Ken Loach do the same in his many award-winning working-class dramas, the 89-year-old Poor Cow, Cathy Come Home, Kes, Raining Stones, Riff-Raff, The Navigators, The Wind That Shakes The Barley and I, Daniel Blake retired director told a Bologna University audience in a videolink from London while receiving an honorary degree in philosophy from the world's oldest university Tuesday.
"The films that struck me most were precisely the postwar Italian ones: it was a great achievement for me that those films made it clear to me that the working class was a fully-fledged subject," said Warwickshire born Loach, in a speech at the University of Bologna, broadcast from London, where Rector Giovanni Molari joined him to confer on him an honorary degree in Philosophical Sciences.
Before discovering Italian films, the director added, "we were accustomed to seeing middle-class people, aristocrats, people with servants in films, and Italian films made me understand that the working class could be at the centre.
And this was a great lesson." After that moment, he continued, "I must admit that one thing has stayed with me for the rest of my life: the realization that there is a conflict, a rift that runs through our entire society, between those who sell their labor and those who profit from it: this is as true today as it was in the 1960s." Finding stories for me, he concluded, "meant, through a relationship, a family, to tell and clarify the contradiction in society that clarifies the world." Loach's film Kes (1969) was voted the seventh greatest British film of the 20th century in a poll by the British Film Institute.
