British Social Realism
Recall that during and after World War II, Laurence Olivier launched the ‘masterpiece tradition’ of literary adaptations, Henry V (1944) & Hamlet (1948). Some narrative films of Hitchcock and Korda’s historical bios (Private Life of Henry the VIII) were often geared to be 2nd feature to follow American film on double bill.
Ealing Comedies: Michael Balcon’s family run studio made intelligent and witty comedies w. Alec Guinness.
By mid-50’s critics Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz attacked the controlling assumption of British cinema:
“The British cinema has been a bourgeois rather than a revolutionary growth; and it is not a middle-class trait to examine oneself w. the strictest objectivity, or to be able to represent higher or lower levels of society with sympathy and respect.”
Postwar British Cinema and its Context
Like New Wave filmmakers, these were young men (Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karl Reisz, etc.) disgusted with the static, class-conscious but ‘quality’ (i.e. “masterpiece tradition”) films Britain was making which seemed to have no connection to reality (Olivier’s HAMLET, Lean’s GREAT EXPECTATIONS).
1954/5 FREE CINEMA – they began to make short, low-budget documentaries which emphasized democratic values and the everyday in depicting British working class. Ex. Anderson’s O Dreamland (1954) a satirical assault on the spiritual emptiness of working-class life set in an amusement park.
Then moved into features.
Phase I: Social Realism (Angry Young Man movement (or “Kitchen-Sink” realism) Lasted roughly from 1958 to 1963.
Watch: Look Back in Anger clip
Initiated by similar movement in theater beginning w. John Osbourne’s “Look Back in Anger” in 1956 (filmed in 1958 by Tony Richardson and starring Richard Burton) which rocked the traditional culture by calling into question the whole class structure of British society and assailing the moral bankruptcy of the welfare state, which is portrayed as drab, bureaucratic, and joyless.
Reflect attitude of hostility toward the ruling-class Establishment and its institutions (Britain’s exclusive, inter-locking power structure, including the ‘established’ Church of England, such institutions as the elite ‘public school’ system (actually private, expensive, and decided upper-crust), the top echelons of the media, the major banks and corporations, and the royal family (which Osborne referred to as “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay.”)
Alan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (both of which are also part of the “angry young men” movement), wrote that Osborne “didn’t contribute to British theatre, he set off a landmine and blew most of it up”.
Generally stark and socially committed, they often dealt with the gritty realities of working-class life.
Thus low budget, photographed in black and white on actual locations (bars, factories, shabby project houses).
Featured “angry young man” working-class heroes who are rebellious, angry, or frustrated at their lack of opportunity. Portrayed vices as well as the virtues of the characters, including such traits as cynicism, narrow-mindedness, and moral expediency. Thus characters (played by unknown actors) were often crude and arrogant but emotionally alive. The films often contained violent scenes, such as drunken brawls, sporting events, and ritual beatings (sometimes well deserved) of the hero.
Depicted the sexual lives of the characters frankly (prior to this pd. most English movies could have been given the title of a long-playing stage hit, No Sex Please, We’re British.)
Avoided the ‘King’s English’ (of the Masterpiece Tradition) in favor of earthy, unliterary dialogue, including regional dialects, swearing, and slang.
Introduced a new realistic style of acting–indebted to the American METHOD– emphasizing emotions and naturalistic gestures which emerge sexier, more psychological, and physical, with less emphasis on crisp diction and the beauty of the spoken word.
Chronology
1959: Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top — realistic treatment of cluttered dreariness and frank sensuality made it a major hit in the art houses. Later Clayton turned away from Brit social realism for The Innocents (1961), The Pumpkin Eater (1964)
1960: Karel Reisz’ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) featured newcomer Albert Finney as a snarling, boozing factory worker, Arthur Seaton. Here was an angry young man w. a vengeance–violent, cynical, and nobody’s fool, yet capable of surprising tenderness.
WATCH – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning trailer
Saturday night Sunday morning trailer – CC
1962 Tony Richardson’s Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962): lower-class youth (Tom Courtenay) who is sent to reform school for a bungled larceny. The only time he feels free is when he is running. The warden allows the boy to practice running in the hopes that he will win the race against a posh public-school team. During the actual race, the protag realizes that he’s being exploited just like his father, that the reform school is just another institution of a repressive Establishment. Though he is far ahead of his competitor, the hero deliberately refuses to win the race, halting in front of the finishing line. His act of defiance against the warden and the system he represents is an exhilarating moment of triumph in defeat.
1963 Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life a powerful account of the world of professional rugby (British football) and the people who profit off the sport. The protag (Richard Harris) is an ex-miner who elbows his way into the big time, then becomes disillusioned when he’s treated like an ape on a playing field.
Watch: This Sporting Life trailer
(Later, 1968 Anderson’s If… attacks the breeding grounds of the Establishment, the exclusive public school system. Its hero, Mick (Malcolm McDowell), and his pals revolt against the oppressive rules of an all-male boarding school, which is run by sadistic masters and their minions. Intercut with the realistic scenes are fantasy episodes in which the boys give vent to their anger and frustration)
John Schlesinger: Darling (1965) examined in modish terms, upper class decadence filmed a la nouvelle vague, which brought Julie Christie to stardom; later stylish and cinematically intelligent films like Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)
Jack Clayton: after Room at the Top (1959) The films realistic treatment of cluttered dreariness and frank sensuality made it a major hit in the art houses), turned away from Brit social realism for The Innocents (1961), The Pumpkin Eater (1964)
Joseph Losey (w. Harold Pinter) The Servant (1963) a psychological study of how an insidious “gentleman’s gentleman” (Dirk Bogarde) manages to corrupt and dominate his effete master (James Fox). Their power struggle is not conveyed in words–which are evasive, oblique–but through the mise en scene. Pinter’s dialogue is seldom where the real action is. The subtext, or what is implied beneath the words, is what’s important. Characters often talk about perfectly neutral subjects, but the way they speak, their hesitations and pauses, is how we come to understand the sub currents of emotions. We infer the subtle shifts in psychology through the way that the characters are placed within the frame: the angle from which a shot is photographed, how close or far the characters stand from each other, who is higher (more dominant) in the frame, the body language of the actors, the symbolic implications of foreground obstructions, the significance of decor and lighting in revealing character. Many of Losey’s pictures explore the sexual and social tensions between classes. Subtle stylist whose major themes are the destructiveness of the erotic impulse and the corrupting nature of technocracy.
1963 Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones was virtually an encyclopedia of cinematic self-consciousness, including iris shots, fast-motion, wipes, freeze frames, lyrical helicopter shots, frenzied editing, and characters who speak directly to the camera. Bawdy, vibrant and romantic, Tom Jones signaled a change in the British cinema, away from the downbeat, realistic films of the earlier period toward the livelier and more subjective movies of Swinging England.
WATCH: Tom Jones ‘fine dining’ clip
Phase II: Swinging London –1963 to the end decade. Upbeat, reflecting the prosperity and trendy stylishness of the era. Color and free-wheeling techniques from Fr. New Wave: Georgy Girl, Help!
WATCH: Georgy Girl opening
1964 Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help (1965): American expatriate who directed award-winning shorts, then achieved fame w. the Beatles and New Wave techs (telephoto zooms and swoops, flashbacks, jump cuts, and devices of narrative displacement) –to create a dazzling new kind of audiovisual comedy.
WATCH: A Hard Day’s Night trailer
WATCH: Austin Powers- Man of Mystery trailer
1965 John Schlesinger’s Darling (1965) examined in modish terms, upper class decadence filmed a la nouvelle vague, which brought Julie Christie to stardom; later stylish and cinematically intelligent films like Far from the Madding Crowd (1967).
The End of Social Realism
Britain has rarely been a major force in world cinematically due to the American domination of English language film market, AND partially by the innate conservatism of Brit visual and aural culture.
Like New Wave, the Brit social realist cinema disappeared along w. the social context that had motivated it. But it bequeathed the then radical stylistic conventions of the New Wave to a cinema stagnant w. armchair narrative traditions carried over from the prewar era. And in its new concern for the aesthetics of everyday life and outspokenness about the dynamics of sex, class, and power in the postindustrial world, it gave the class-ridden, hidebound Brit film a vastly wider range of themes than it had ever known before.