Work, Family, and Politics: Ken Loach’s Riff-Raff

Abstract

The working class has been a major subject of British art since the mid-1950s, when novelists such as John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, together with dramatists like John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, began treating anti-Establishment themes in a style that can be accurately characterized as “social realism.” Soon social realism crossed over into film, where it became known as “New Cinema,” a movement whose ethos or social commitment was borrowed from Italian neorealism, whose own techniques were modeled upon those of the French New Wave, and whose scripts were often adaptations of plays and novels by blue-collar writers.