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
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