Production
The play was written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach, who went on to become a major figure in British film. Loach employed a realistic documentary style, using predominantly 16mm film on location, which contrasted with the vast amount of BBC drama of the time, which was commonly made in the electronic television studio. Union regulations of the time though forced about ten minutes of Cathy Come Home to be shot in this way, with the material shot on electronic cameras being telerecorded, and spliced into the film as required.
The Cinematographer was Tony Imi. Imi's innovative use of a hand-held camera to take moving action shots and close ups gave "Cathy" almost a current affairs feel and a reality which was rare in British TV drama at the time. This produced shots some traditionalists thought "not technically acceptable". Imi commented: "I was stuck in a rut after working on Dr Finlay's Casebook and Maigret – standard BBC productions. All of a sudden, with The Wednesday Play and Ken, there was a newness that fitted into the way I was thinking at the time." Tony Imi died on March 8, 2010.
Loach's realistic style helped to heighten the play's impact. Many scenes were improvised, and some include unknowing members of the public, such as the final scene in which Cathy's children are taken from her in a railway station (none of the passers-by intervened).
Read more about this topic: Cathy Come Home
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)