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Come Home (Ken Loach, 1966) signalled that this was where the social
problem film could make maximum impact; it was also indicative that the
distinction between the documentary and the feature film was as blurred as
ever.
Historians of the British cinema have to confront the its attachment of
realism, notable contributors to the debate being Andrew Higson and Robert
Murphy.
21
Key issues are what constituted realism, how the term was used to
define the quality film, how successfully a sense for real life being lived was
conveyed to audiences and whether they wanted it. If less attention is devoted
to how realism lost its pre-eminence, this is due in part to the tendency to
periodise history, with the 1950s being treated as a discrete entity. The British
film industry of the time suffered retrenchment in the face of declining audience
numbers and the eclipse of realism becomes subsumed within this general
malaise. The renaissance associated with the New Wave at the end of the
decade was eclipsed by a music-based pop culture predicated on
entertainment and ironically by the French Nouvelle Vague, which took a more
playful and self-conscious approach to cinema. Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s
Night (1964) manages to accommodate these new influences, while still owing
a debt to realism and the documentary. Two decades later, the works of E. M.
Forster became a mainstay of heritage cinema. An earlier generation of
documentary film-makers might have managed two cheers for this celebration
of Englishness, even if it was a chocolate box England far removed from
reality.
In an earlier work I concluded from a survey of other sources that realism
was in the eye of the beholder and was one of a range of competing
perspectives available to film-makers.
22
The sources cited above do nothing to
invalidate this conclusion, though I might have added that realism was an
aspiration more often honoured in the breach. For that, audiences in the years
of austerity were probably grateful.
1. Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford
University Press, 1995), 13-15 and 187.
2. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (4th edn., London:
Little Brown, 2002), 770.
3. Philip Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), 201.
4. Alberto Cavalcanti, ‘The cinema as an art form’, Contemporary Cinema, 1: 3
(1947), 39-41.
5. Anthony Asquith, ‘Realer than the real thing’, Contemporary Cinema, 2: 1
(1948), 10.
6. Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary, 359-60.
7. Michael Balcon, ‘The feature carries the documentary tradition’, Quarterly of
Film and Television, 6: 4 (1952), 352-3.
8. British Film Institute, letter from Del Guidice to H. Greenwood dated 20
December 1948, item 15, Del Guidice papers.
9. Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film, 53-5.
10. Paul Strand, ‘Realism: a personal view’, Sight and Sound, 18, January
1950, 23.
11. Roger Manvell, ‘Clearing the air’, Hollywood Quarterly, 2: 2 (1947), 176-7.
12. Roger Manvell, ‘Britain’s self-portraiture in feature film’, Geographical
Magazine, August 1953, 226.
13. Milton Schulman, Evening Standard, 4 June 1948 (1948 cuttings file, British
Film Institute library).
14. Gerald Young, ‘The voice of the people’, Film Quarterly, 1: 2 (1946), 47.
15. Lesley Blanch ‘Now look homeward’, Leader, 14 April 1945 (1945 cuttings
file, British Film Institute library); J. B. Priestley, ‘Britain is missing a
great opportunity’, Daily Herald, 6 November 1946 (1946 cuttings file,
British Film Institute library).
16. Daily Mirror, 19 December 1945 (1945 cuttings file, British Film Institute
library).
17. Daily Film Renter, 1 January 1948, 17.
18. Philip Gillett, ‘The British working class in postwar film 1945-1950', Ph.D
thesis (London Metropolitan University, 2000) table 6.2, appendix 1, p.
a42.
19. E. M. Forster, ‘What I believe’ in Two Cheers for Democracy (London:
Penguin, 1965); essay reproduced on
http://www.geocities.com/dspichtinger/otexts/believe.html accessed 29
December 2005.
20. E. M. Forster, ‘Two cheers for democracy’, in Two Cheers for Democracy.
21. Andrew Higson, ‘”Britain’s outstanding contribution to the film”: the
documentary-realist tradition’, in Charles Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays:
90 Years of British Film (London: BFI, 1986), 72-97; Robert Murphy,
Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939-49 (London:
Routledge, 1992).
22. Gillett, The British Working Class in Postwar Film, 182-3.
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