ABSTRACT
For over five decades, Ken Loach has directed film and television programmes that challenge the orthodoxies of contemporary capitalism and champion the struggles of oppressed groups. Loach's work has received considerable academic attention: most notably, the four-part television series Days of Hope provoked a discipline-defining debate on the politics of form in Screen and subsequent years have witnessed book-length studies on Loach's wider output. John Thornton Caldwell notes that academics 'fortunate enough to be embedded in a media company' should carefully negotiate 'managed top-down explanations of production'. Powdermaker suggests that Hollywood is marked by, on the whole, 'a striking and complete lack of mutual respect as well as trust. Reflecting on Film Studies' engagement with auteurism in 2007, John Caughie writes that 'The work of theory is still contestatory, moving forward dialectically, rather like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, continually looking backwards to pick up any fragments which may have been lost in the rubble of earlier encounters.
