Free Cinema and the British New Wave

Documentary shorts, then dramas, took British film out of the studio and into northern working-class streets, factories and kitchens.

When: 1956–1963
Where: United Kingdom
Films: 5 · 1 guided
Named by: 11 guides

Where it sits

British documentary movement · Italian NeorealismFree Cinema and the British New WaveNew Hollywood

Context

What was happening

Britain in the mid-fifties: rationing is over, television is arriving in living rooms, and the cinema audience is beginning to shrink. British films are still made in studios, often as polite comedies and war stories, and they rarely show how most people live. The North, the factory and the terraced street are almost absent from the screen.

A younger generation wants that changed. Playwrights and novelists are writing about working-class anger, and a few critics and filmmakers have the example of wartime documentary and Italian neorealism. In 1956 they show their own short films in London as Free Cinema. Within four years they are making features.

The signature

What you see on screen

1Northern streetsTerraced rows, canals, factory gates and fairgrounds, filmed where they really are.
2Black and whiteGrey light and plain images, closer to a documentary than to a studio picture.
3The angry young manA working-class hero who drinks, argues and refuses to know his place.
4Plain speechRegional accents and frank talk about sex, money, work and pregnancy.

The people

Who made it

LALindsay AndersonCritic, voice of Free Cinema, then director. Every Day Except Christmas, This Sporting Life.
KRKarel ReiszFree Cinema filmmaker who opened the feature cycle. We Are the Lambeth Boys, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
TRTony RichardsonDirector and Woodfall co-founder. A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tom Jones.
JSJohn SchlesingerBrought the same candour to the screen. A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, later Midnight Cowboy.

The films

Defining films, in order

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
1STARTSaturday Night and Sunday Morning1960 · not on Cinespective yet
A Taste of Honey
2STARTA Taste of Honey1961 · not on Cinespective yet
3The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner1962
4STARTThis Sporting Life1963
5Tom Jones

Its constellation

Where it came from, what it led to

Came from

British documentary movementItalian Neorealism

Led to

New Hollywood

Parallel

French New Wave Direct cinema and cinéma vérité

Open the galaxy of movements

Legacy

Where you still see it

Still seen whenever a British film goes to an ordinary street, with ordinary people, and takes them seriously: in television drama and in the social realism of the following decades. It also crossed the Atlantic. Tom Jones and Midnight Cowboy show the British wave arriving in American studios, just as the old taboos of New Hollywood were collapsing.

Ask the Cine Guide about Free Cinema and the British New Wave