Learning on ScreenBritish Social Realism at the Movies
A parallel realist tradition subsequently also developed in British television, extending from the work of such figures as the documentarist Denis Mitchell to the socially conscious plays produced by the BBC for slots like The Wednesday Play – where Ken Loach first developed his skills and reputation – and Play for Today, drama series such as Coronation Street and Z Cars, and more recently many of the films commissioned by Channel Four, some of which, like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), enjoyed a successful theatrical run before their first network broadcast. Big-screen realism has also been kept alive in films as varied as Brassed Off (1996) and Nil by Mouth (1997), though it is often a struggle for them and their ilk to secure multiplex playing time in the face of competition from Hollywood blockbusters unimpeded by the quota regulations which, until 1985, once reserved space in UK cinemas for home-grown movies of all kinds. Even so, the social-realist comedy The Full Monty (1997) went on to become the most financially successful British-made (albeit American-financed) film of all time.
Social realist films also form a staple element of university and college courses on the history of British cinema …
Social realist films also form a staple element of university and college courses on the history of British cinema, and new generations of students regularly encounter the work of Jennings, Anderson, Loach, et al., in an educational rather than – or perhaps as well as – an entertainment context. There has also been a steady stream of critical writing on the realist tradition emanating from the academic community, including such now-standard works as John Hill’s Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963 (BFI, 1986), Robert Murphy’s Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-49 (Routledge, 1989) and Sixties British Cinema (BFI, 1992), Ian Aitken’s Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (Routledge, 1990), Andrew Higson’s Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (OUP, 1995), and Charles Barr’s Ealing Studios (third edition, Cameron and Hollis, 1998).
While Samantha Lay’s monograph British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (Wallflower, 2002) cannot be reccommended, many of the films themselves are thankfully available now on DVD and on High Definition Blu-ray. Particularly notably is the trio of early 60s New Wave films released by the British Film Institute: Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (since re-relased by Optimum without any accompanyong extras) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). The discs all boast crisp new black-and-white transfers in the correct 1.66:1 aspect ratio – in a direct comparison with the broadcast television version the DVD transfer of A Taste of Honey seems to mask off a sliver of picture information at the right-hand side, though the difference is negligible – as well as a number of supplementary features including audio commentaries, photo galleries, video essays, and still-frame pages of biographical notes and other information. A minor shortcoming is the absence of original theatrical trailers, which must surely have been easy to get hold of, and which can usually be found even on otherwise bare-bones DVD packages (including those of British films available in Region 1).
The audio commentary on the BFI’s A Taste of Honey features co-stars Dora Bryan, Rita Tushingham and Murray Melvin (the latter recorded separately and occasionally interrupting Bryan and Tushingham’s gossipy conversation). It is, as might be expected, engagingly chatty and anecdotal rather than informative or reflective, but also included on the DVD is a superb video essay by the film’s director of photography Walter Lassally, which is quite the most insightful ‘extra’ on any of these discs (there is a similar item on Long Distance Runner). Lassally lucidly explains some of the lighting problems he faced in various difficult conditions using largely natural sources (including the light of a single candle for one scene in an underground cave) and his comments have a far wider application than to the discussion of realism: the twenty-minute essay is highly recommended as an invaluable resource for the study of cinematography generally, and it is usefully complemented by a printable DVD-Rom essay by camera operator Desmond Davis.
