British New Wave: 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' 1960. Representation of the working class.

'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' Trailer:



A mind map displaying the representation of the working-class as a collective identity in the New Wave film 'Saturday Night, Sunday Morning' 1960. Click on image to enlarge.

Social Realism and the British New Wave

Social Realism - the most 'typically British' of all film genres.

Social Realism has shown us to ourselves and put the experiences of real Britons on screen.

Early British cinema picked up on the revelation of everyday social interaction. In the years following World War I, the key to national cinema lay in 'realism and restraint', reflecting the tastes of mainly the south-eastern middle-class audience as 'realism' carried connotations of education and high seriousness. Working-class audiences preferred Hollywood genre movies.

Britain's contribution to cinema in the 1930s was of a documentary tradition that would feed into the 1940s. Combining the objective temper and aesthetics of the documentary movement with the starts and resources of studio film making, 1940s British cinema made a stirring appeal to a mass audience. The 'quality film' mirrored a transforming wartime society: women were challenging men for pre-assigned gender roles.

Documentarist Humphery Jennings was responsible for influencing the 1950s Free Cinema documentary movement and the 1960s British New Wave. The New Wave was fed by the 'Angry Young Men' of 1950s theatre, the verisimilitude of Italian Neo-realism and the youth appeal of the French New Wave.

Relaxation of censorship meant characters of factory workers, office underlings, dissatisfied wives, pregnant girlfriends and runaways had sex lives, money worries and social problems. They experienced abortion, prostitution, homosexuality, alienation and relationship problems.

The New Wave was symptomatic of a worldwide emergence of art cinemas challenging mainstream aesthetics and attitudes.

Richard Armstrong

Section B: Contemporary Media Issues

The two issues I will be studying and exploring are:

• Media and Collective Identity
• Post Modern Media

For both of these topics I will demonstrate understanding through case studies, texts, debates and research. This understanding must combine knowledge of at least two media platforms. In order to do this I will look at:

• Different types of media: TV drama, films, posters, teaser trailers, internet advertising, magazines etc.
• Relevant articles from the Media Magazine and related online sites.
• The current role of industry in marketing and producing media.
• The work of some media theorists i.e. David Gauntlett and David Buckingham who wrote about the media and its impact on cultural identity.

An introduction to A2 media studies...Critical Perspectives: Themes

For A2 Media, cover the following questions and tasks...

• How important is the media in society?
• What different roles do the media play in peoples lives?
• Engage with a range of theoretical perspectives on how people use media.
• Know about a variety of research that discovered specific audiences practices and habits.
• Demonstrate a personal position on the issues.
• Take an interest in how people use the media at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
• Understand how people make sense of and use media products as part of their lives.
• What difference increasingly global dissemination of ideas makes to culture and identity?
• Are our identities becoming increasingly shaped by media in the online age?
• What kinds of regulation are adequate in this web 2.0 world?

Themes of Critical Perspective:

• Regulation
• Democracy
• Identity
• Online Media
• Post Modern Media
• Global Media

For each theme, focus on three areas:

• Historical...understand how relevant aspect of contemporary can be compared to the past.
• Contemporary...demonstrate an up to date, accurate, theoretical and academic analysis of today's media.
• Future...have some ideas of where media is going.

POPULAR CULTURE - the media that ordinary people access in large numbers.

CULTURAL STUDIES - not just looking at texts and what they 'mean' or how they are 'consumed', look at people and what they do with media.

Example of Cultural Studies:

• The impact of broadband Internet on how people use media
• Is there such a thing as 'audience' in this post-modern 'we media' age?
• Dan Gilmor argues web 2.0 allows ordinary people to participate in politics and news via 'citizen journalism' in the form of blogs - their own accounts of real events and comments produced immediately on 'official journalism'.
• 'Long Tail' media production - the proliferation of small chunks of media content at the opposite end of the body to the head.
• Implications of 'long tail' media distribution according to John Hartley, web 2.0 has introduced 'mass literacy' and the idea of mass public schooling.
• Most of us are using the web 2.0 sites to read, watch, play and listen (not to create or upload), which is how we were using 'old media'.

Definitions of culture:

• Made by humans.
• Describes all the various forms of belief, communication, ritual, representation and ideas that the human race uses to make sense of it's existence.
• Is the things humans produce that animals do not.
• The outcome of collective thought.
• Jenks' (2005) four definitions of culture...a state of mind; a collective pursuit of civilisation; artistic and intellectual activity; a social category.
• Everything we might study in the media and produce for the media is culture.

Social Groups:

• To give people a label based on collective characteristics or traits, as opposed to their individual or biological make-up.