The story of "The Child and the Eagle" takes place in an ordinary small town. Like many other British towns, the small town was developed on the basis of coal mining factories here. The vast majority of people in cities and towns rely on this to make a living, and then the next generation will take over from the previous generation and continue to dig coal. This is the gathering place for the working class. Ken Lodge, who started filming political documentaries on television in his early years, will be his second place. It is not surprising that the movie is set here. The setting of this "industrial town" abounds in subsequent British movies. For example, the famous "Six Heroes of the Pig" focused on a declining industrial town, where six unemployed men had to rely on striptease to make ends meet. Of course, the humor and irony that belong exclusively to the British dilute the heavy propositions of dignity and value, and the "industrial loneliness" of modern people struggling in the torrent of changes in the era is implicit in the laughter and curse. Ken Lodge will not discuss the issue of "industrial loneliness". He focuses on "big themes" such as politics and class differences. The great thing about "The Child and the Eagle" is that he used an extremely simple story to present these "big themes", and used an ordinary little boy to tell the pain and hesitation of a generation. The great changes in British society in the 1960s were put into this simple story by the director. Isn’t the pain and sorrow of the little boy Billy the pain and sorrow of this country at this moment?
The family is a present but absent existence in Billy's life. The father's departure, the mother's disregard, and the brother's beating and scolding reflect the family's "lack of meaning" for Billy. There is a metaphor of "decay" between the absence of father and the declining factory. The elder brother who works in the factory is undoubtedly a representative of the "lost generation". He is dissatisfied with the work in the factory (complaining when he wakes up in the morning), but he has no plans to change another job. While rebelling against this increasingly declining "empire", it is still relying on its existence to survive. The former "empire that never sets in the sun" is rapidly declining, and it is a "loss of meaning" for everyone living in it. I can’t help thinking of John Ford’s masterpiece "Green Hills and Green Valley". The background of the movie is also in an industrial town, but the director has been changed to an American. The main theme of the family is sung in "Green Hills and Green Valley", love for hometown and relatives, even if life is unfair to me (brother and father died in mine disasters one after another), love can overcome all of this. The mines in "Green Hills and Green Valleys" give people the feeling that they are endless, vigorous and full of American "idealism" like those green mountains and green waters. But to the British, the decline of mines and the disintegration of families have long lost that kind of "pastoral" kind of warmth. Not only the family, but studying and living is also a "nightmare" for Billy. There is a very long scene in the film. Billy participates in a football match and has no money to buy a jersey, which makes the physical education teacher very dissatisfied. In the following games, this once failed football player wanted to find glory in the students. If the child fouled, he said it was a penalty, not a penalty, and also said that the goalkeeper moved ahead of time and he wanted to kick again. His malicious foul was considered a reasonable collision. Billy didn't hold a shot from the opponent, so that the "Manchester United" represented by the teacher lost the ball. With a grudge, he forced the thin Billy to shower in the locker room and deliberately used a lot of water. This passage makes people shudder in the documentary and silent scenes of Ken Rocky. Watching Billy who has nowhere to hide in the washing of cold water, the audience can't help but feel the same. Coincidentally, the male protagonist in another British movie "Out of My World" is also called Billy, who also lives in a declining industrial town, but Billy Elliott's luck is much better. Since childhood, I was obsessed with the ballet of "girls dancing". Although everyone could not accept it at first, when his father saw Billy's persistence, he decided to support him at all costs. In this movie, his father, brother, and teacher are all boosters for Billy to drive towards success, helping him step by step to success, jumping out of the closed mining town, and opening up his own world. "Children and Billy in "Eagle" is also looking for his own blue sky. Billy, who had no sustenance in this empty town, caught a small eagle and stole a book about taming the eagle from the bookstore, and began to tame the young eagle. The taming of the eagle became the top priority in Billy’s life. . Ken Lodge constantly hints at the closed environment and depressive living atmosphere of the small town in the film. The fences Billy constantly climbed over, the big chimneys of the factory, the narrow streets, the dense houses... Billy could only sit on the grass and look at the factory, or sit in the classroom and stare at the small world outside the window. . In the closed world, Billy can only look up and see the blue sky while taming the eagle. In addition to the hints of fences and other objects, there was another time when Billy was going to catch an eagle when he was told by the farmer that he had crossed the boundary and could not go any further. This clearly expressed the meaning of Billy's inability to escape this closed world.
The meaning of the eagle for Billy I believe every audience can interpret a lot. I think the eagle is a combination of freedom, life and hope. The eagle is Billy's sustenance of love in this cruel and closed world. The eagle is free, even if it is kept in a cage. As Billy said, "the eagle cannot be completely tame". There is only the vastness in the eagle's heart. The blue sky is where it belongs. The eagle is the only life-colored existence in Billy's hopeless life. The eagle's soaring and diving again and again are all signs of vitality. I believe that every child contains the vigorous vitality like an eagle, but after being deprived of freedom, this vitality will inevitably wither. There is a story in which the enemy questioned Che Guevara "The lifeless freedom you have chosen is not true freedom". Guevara retorted, "The life without freedom you have chosen is not real life." Life is built on freedom. What about life without freedom? Man is just a "walking dead". It's no wonder Petofi would write a poem that "both can be thrown away" for freedom, life and love. The British free film movement not only refers to the "freedom" in the way of film creation, but also implies the resistance of films to traditional dogma and behavior patterns that imprison people's thoughts. The exchange of identities of master and servant in Joseph Rossi's "The Servant" is undoubtedly a naked declaration of war on the traditional view of class. Similarly, the conflict between students and teachers in Lindsay Anderson's "If" finally evolved into an armed revolutionary enhanced version of Jean Vigo's "Zero Conduct". The new generation finally chose force to resist the old system. The growth of Britain's "post-war generation" in the 1960s directly gave birth to a sub-cultural revolution, which subverted mainstream middle-class values. In "The Kid and the Eagle" Ken Rocky’s suggestion is quite clever. Billy and some of his classmates were found smoking by the teacher. Ken Rocky changed his previous documentary style. Here he gave the teacher a close-up of the cigarette on the desk. . While the teacher kept reiterating the rigid rules, a few students kept laughing in the back. The confrontation between the new and the old values is cleverly presented here. In this remote town, although there is no bloody conflict like the one in "If", this kind of conflict does grow secretly. Although Ken Rocky chose to intervene "accidentally" in this scene, the scene still reflects the director's documentary style very well. When the teacher teaches the students, the students and the teacher are in the foreground, the window of the teacher's office is in the middle view, and the grass outside the window is in the far view. In this scene, suddenly there is a person walking in the distant view. Although the person is extremely small, because the teacher and students are relatively still, the sudden appearance of a moving thing on the screen will surely distract the audience. Attention, but this character has absolutely no meaning for the movie. If it were in other movies, such "punch shots" would generally not appear, but Ken Rocky chose to be true to the end. If you think about it carefully, this kind of "pusher shot" is similar to Godard's "Exhausted" drama in which the extras star in it is true".
The meaning of "hope" carried by the eagle is very obvious in the middle of the film. Billy's English teacher saw Billy's eagle tamer talent. The lecture on eagle training in front of the class made Billy find his confidence in the curious eyes of his classmates. Billy's life seemed to be heading for the better. But Ken Lodge is not Stephen Dadley, and the role in Ken Lodge movies rarely escapes his destiny. In "The Kid and the Eagle" Billy took his brother's money for betting on horses to buy eagle feed. Unexpectedly, the horse won the race, but his brother didn't get the money, so he brutally killed the eagle. In 2002's "Sweet Sixteen", Lyme hoped that his mother, who had been in jail for his father, could start a normal life with himself after being released from prison, but the result was that his mother returned to the villain father's side. Happiness is right here, but it is untouchable. Ken Lodge's film is not so much "fate" as it is "real". For the marginalized people living at the bottom, this is life. In the last scene of "The Kid and the Eagle", Billy silently buried Kitty, and also buried his hopes and dreams. In this "climax" paragraph, Ken Roach did not go to sensationalism at all, but was so calm as to be almost harsh, which reminds people of the scene where his brother shot his younger brother in "The Wind Blowing Wheat Wave" when he reached the top of Cannes in 2006. play. This is what a wise director should do, replacing sensationalism with truth, and empty emotional renderings with direct sorrow.
"The Kid and the Eagle" is such an unpretentious film, but it is recognized as the most important British film since the 1960s. Ken Lodge used his candid lens language to surpass the pain that accompanies despair, but etched the sadness of that entire generation.
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