What do we see, what do we hear in Ken Loach's Kes (1969)?

The conference on Kes is, to begin with, an opportunity to look at and listen to what is registered in this remarkable film by Ken Loach, made fifty years ago. To the question “What do we see, what do we hear in Kes?”, the answers should not be anachronistic. The intention is to take in, from a variety of angles and approaches, what is shown and made audible here: a community of women, men, children, their lives woven into, both propped up and confined by, the institutional nexus of component places, home, workplace, school, public house, and component times, early morning, Friday night. What animates Ken Loach’s picture of a mining community are the tensions evident in the sights and sounds through which the modest story of Billy Casper is conveyed, a story affording access to the lives of people as they play out, in occasional and sometimes irreversible conflict with other lives.