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← Media Studies

← Chris Benisek

Z Movies

Z movies came about in the mid -1960s as a description of ‘certain

unequivocally non-A films. It was adopted to separate low-budget

pictures with standards below most B movies and so called C movies.

Most films placed into the category of Z are made for little money and

tend to be on the outsides of the film industry. From this scripts tend to

be bad, errors continuously occur during shooting and non-professional

actors are used. Also the lighting and editing tends to be on a whole poor.

Ken Loaches Hidden Agenda fits into the category of a Z movie.

Highlighted in an article written by Guy Hennebelle in Cineaste, Z Movies

"only use 'politics' as a convenient reference to create the illusion that

they are seriously dealing with a problem"

One main issue surrounding Hidden Agenda is that Ken Loach does not

look into the ‘socio-political’ reasons for why Britain dominated Northern

Ireland.

Instead of this he strafes off in a different direction, creating a narrative

centred on a detective, accompanied with easily identifiable good and bad

guys. ‘Politics serve as a means to that end, but not as an end in and of 

itself.’ 

Hennebelle also stated that Z Movies "revive most of the Hollywood

gimmicks in their glossing over of reality — the recourse to out-of-the-

ordinary heroes who are all put into extraordinary situations, contrivancesof editing, pounding musical scores, and deliberate ideological

fuzziness..."

This is highly apparent in Hidden Agenda. The main hero/detective, finds

himself in a situation which is by definition extraordinary since the films

depend on shocking viewers to maintain their tension. The ideology of the

film is not very clear.

 ‘Are viewers of Hidden Agenda supposed to sympathize with the members

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of the IRA? Neither film has a coherent ideological perspective. Rather,

both dispense with ideology whenever they can in order to concentrate on

the heroic quest of their middle class, white male protagonist To do

otherwise would alert viewers to the contradictions that rooting for thesefellows entails.’ 

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Sourced and altered from…http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC38folder/HiddenAgenda-JFK.html

In terms of the Wiki definition though, I personally don’t think that the

film fits entirely into the definition as in certain aspects its quite highquality, take the narrative as an example. This is an extremely complex

tale of events compressed into a short period of time.

Positive outlook

http://www.allmovie.com/work/hidden-agenda-22318/review

This article provided by allmovie.com has nothing but glowing praise for

the film, but like any review it has to pick out slight faults yet overall it

gives large amount of support towards the production, the scripting, the

actors and castings and the situation used for the film.

In between

http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/71997/Hidden_Agenda.ht

ml

This article gives a balanced view on loaches productions as it reiterates

two sides to the argument but doesn’t settle to one side. This quote

 ‘deserves to be seen simply because it takes the debate on Ireland further

than most such docudramas’, outlines this as they are basically getting

across that the film is artistically well done and should be watched to give

the viewer their own opinion.

Negative outlook

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-388256/Why-does-Ken-Loach-

loathe-country-much.html

From the title of the article alone you’re aware that clearly the Daily Mail

are not big fans of Hidden Agenda. ‘Why does Ken Loach loathe his

country so much?’. From this you are clearly made aware that this

newspaper is against the political message the film portrays.