Kes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Billy Casper stands in a field with a lure on a string, and a kestrel falls out of the grey Yorkshire sky toward his fist. Watch what his body does. It stops. The boy who flinches through every other scene — ducked at home, cuffed at school, braced for the next humiliation — goes completely still, and his face, which the film has kept shut like a fist, opens. Almost nothing in Kes is more important than this stillness, and it is the clue to why a plain, unspectacular film about a doomed working-class boy belongs in any serious account of what cinema learned to do with time.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze divided film history at roughly the place where Loach is working. Before the break, he said, cinema ran on the movement-image: a character sees a situation, and acts to change it, and the editing carries us along that chain of cause and effect toward resolution. After the war — and he located the turn in Italian neorealism, in films like Bicycle Thieves, which is the direct ancestor Kes most openly inherits — something jammed. Characters began to find themselves in situations they could perceive perfectly well but could not act upon. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, and Kes is one of its purest English instances. Billy's predicament is precisely that there is no action available to him. The pit waits; the future is, as the dossier puts it, a foregone conclusion. He cannot fight his half-brother, cannot reach his mother, cannot pass an exam that was never going to be his. The film's whole structure — a loose run of ordinary days, the paper round, the playground, the betting shop — is what Deleuze named the voyage-balade, the stroll that transforms nothing, episodes weakly linked because no single act could redirect this life.

What fills the space where action used to be? Looking. Deleuze's term is the opsign — a pure optical situation, a moment where a character (and we) can only see, with no motor response to discharge the seeing into. The falconry scenes are sustained opsigns. Billy does not do anything to the bird; one of the lessons the film quietly teaches is that a kestrel cannot be commanded, only attended to. He waits, watches, holds his arm out, and reads the sky. This makes him what Deleuze called a voyant, a seer rather than an agent — and the deep irony Loach exposes is that the only domain where Billy is permitted to be competent is the domain of pure watching. The boy with no power to change his world becomes an expert in beholding one small piece of it.

There is an even finer concept here, and it is what makes the lure scene unforgettable. Deleuze noticed that in modern cinema the relation between figure and world sometimes inverts: instead of the character moving through a fixed setting, the character holds still and the world moves around them — the dance that absorbs the dancer. That is exactly the kestrel in flight. Billy is rooted; the bird wheels and stoops and the open Yorkshire air becomes mobile around his stillness. For two or three minutes the whole oppressive milieu — the colliery, the school, the house — drops away, and movement returns to the film, but it is the bird's movement, not the boy's. Chris Menges shoots it with longer lenses and natural northern light, the same patient distance he keeps everywhere, so the lyricism never curdles into the picturesque. The plainness is the point.

That plainness is itself a Deleuzian instrument. Loach's camera stands back and lets a scene run to its natural length — Roy Watts's editing trusts duration over propulsion — so that what we get is dead time, the everyday simply held rather than compressed into plot. And his images are made of any-instant-whatever: not the posed dramatic peak but the unremarkable interval, behaviour caught rather than staged, which is why the performances read as witness rather than acting. This is the line that runs back through The 400 Blows (the institution as cage, the boy observed without pity), Los Olvidados (the child's-eye poverty that refuses redemption), and the kitchen-sink films Kes strips of their last lyrical flourishes. It is the Bazinian faith that the camera should reveal the world as found, not rearrange it — extended here to sound, where the refusal to soften the Yorkshire dialect (a refusal that cost the film with its own distributor) is the same fidelity carried into the ear.

Two more things the film does precisely. When Brian Glover's PE teacher commandeers a schoolboy football match and narrates himself as a star centre-forward, Loach gives us a perfect gest — Deleuze's word for a posture that lays bare a whole social relation. The man's swaggering body is the petty tyranny of the institution, performed. And across the film, Billy's guarded, sudden body — the way it carries his entire history without a word — is what Deleuze called a cinema of the body, attitude and duration doing the work that dialogue and plot decline to do.

Why does any of this matter for film as an art? Because Kes proves that the time-image is not a property of difficult European art cinema alone. Loach took the most legible subject imaginable — a boy and his bird — and built it entirely out of seeing rather than doing, and in the process founded the durable observational style that became his life's signature. The ending offers no consolation, and it cannot, because the film has spent its whole length teaching us that Billy can only watch. The bird could fly. He never could. Loach's achievement is to make us feel the difference, and to hand us, for a few minutes in a field, the eyes to see it.