poetry, literally. Take for instance the film Night Mail, not only did he film how the postal service worked but he noticed that something was missing and realised he needed to catch the peoples journey, not just the post, and on top of this he had W.H. Auden write verse for the film that described what was happening making it literally poetry.Social realism came into full swing during the 1960’s where a whole new style of British film was made, and has highly influenced film ever since. Back in the 60’s this style of film was known as ‘British New Wave’. This film style represents real life subjects and stories in true form, with all bared and no roseate cover pulled over the top to make the subject seem less harsh than it is. The stories tend to be about people and their struggle to endure everyday life in down and out areas and working class society. The typical settings are gritty, destitute areas. A lot of the films were adapted from books and plays as social realism was active in literature and theatre at this time.
From social realism came the “kitchen sink” dramas which some also referred to as “angry young men” films. Most of the directors of this style of filming had a background in theatre, television and documentaries such as Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson. Their films were dubbed as “angry young men” films as they tended to focus on the “economic and social problems of a frustrated male protagonist who attempted to make free from society and its expectations through the use of alcohol, sex, sports and money etc.”
Tony Richardson was very much a part of ‘free cinema’ which is what he described to be “independent of commercial cinema, free to make intensely personal statements and free to champion the director's right to control the picture”. These films were made without inhibitions, and led to the social realist aesthetic of putting ordinary people with problems onto the big screen. He is a key example of a director that adapted films from literature and theatre that was thriving with social realism. He adapted stage plays such as Look Back in Anger (1959) and A Taste of Honey (1961) and literary classics such as Tom Jones (1963), The Loved One (1965) and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968).
Ken Loach is a very political director, still alive today he stands by social realism and has not allowed himself to be influenced by Hollywood or anything else that threats corrupting his style of
direction. He started began doing docudramas such as Cathy Come Home (1966) which told the story of homelessness and its effect upon families, but he’s best known for his film Kes (1969) which focuses on the story of a young boy in a mining town whose life is altered by his relationship with an injured kestrel that he nurses back to health, but even with this there’s no escape from his fate of being trapped within drudgery of the industrial North. This film became a massive hit and a ‘school movie’ favourite. He is still making movies today and one of his more recent ones Sweet Sixteen (2002) is about a teenage boy who resorts to dealing drugs in an attempt to escape the poverty of the housing estate and create a new life with his drug addict mother.These type of films have influenced the British film industry greatly and films today are still based upon similar views about society and the working class such as Ratcatcher (1999), Billy Elliot (2000) and This is England (2006) which are all based around the bottom of the social hierarchy and the struggle to fit in and survive within the community and other peers.
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