Social Realism

Social Realism

A social realist film is a film that shows a realistic perspective of society at a specific time and place.

An example of a social realist film is  Hue and Cry (1947), which was a film shot promptly after the aftermath of the Blitz, shot on real bombed out sites across Britain.

Most early post world war 2 social realist films received funding from the government in order to show people what British Society is like at the time. 

Early British cinema picked up on the revelation of everyday social interaction to be found in Dickens and Thomas Hardy.

In the years following World War I, it was widely felt that the key to a national cinema lay in 'realism and restraint'.

Britain's contribution to cinema in the 1930s lay in a state-sponsored documentary tradition that would feed into the 1940s mainstream.

The British industry has had a longstanding rivalry with Hollywood in terms of 'realism and tinsel'.

The 'quality film' mirrored a transforming wartime society. Women now worked in munitions factories and the services, mixing with men and challenging pre-assigned gender roles.

In the postwar period, tensions grew between the camaraderie of the war years and the individualism of a burgeoning consumer society.

These film strongly represent mundane everyday life.

British Socially realistic cinema was influenced by the features of French New Wave and Italian neorealist film making. 

Related to, though independent of, the commercial mainstream, 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.

The New Wave was symptomatic of a worldwide emergence of art cinemas challenging mainstream aesthetics and attitudes. Identified with their directors rather than with the industry, the New Wave films tended to address issues around masculinity that would become common in British social realism, thus making the role of the director more unique and significant than the whole industry.

The New Wave protagonist was usually a working-class male without bearings in a society in which traditional industries and the cultures that went with them were in decline. Directors from Ken Loach to Patrick Keiller, and films from Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988) to The Full Monty (1997) have addressed the erosion/destruction of regional and class identities amid a landscape rendered increasingly uniform by consumerism.

Descendants of the realist flowering at the BBC in the 1960s, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh assessed the impact of the consumer society on family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state and the consensus that built it. Looking back, Loach's work seems to reflect the shift from the collectivist mood of the war years to the individualism of the postwar decades in its very form. Loach's films went from the improvised long-take naturalism of Poor Cow and Kes (both 1969) to the 'social melodrama' of Raining Stones (1993) and Ladybird Ladybird (1994), wider social issues now explored via emotional and dramatic individual stories.

The breakdown of the collective consensus in postwar Britain seems to be captured in the tragicomic exchanges of Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993) and Secrets and Lies (1996). In these films, Leigh examined the fractures in domestic and social life wrought by divisive Thatcherite policies in an increasingly fragmented and multicultural Britain. If the New Wave short-sightedly blamed women for the blighting of British manhood, women in Loach and Leigh are often complex and powerful individuals.

In the 1980s, publisher-broadcaster Channel 4 attempted to cultivate a cinema audience for realism. Responding to the moralistic entrepreneurialism of the Thatcher years, 'Films on Four' My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Brezhnev (both 1985) followed characters from the margins as they attempted to stake a claim in the new order. 

As the funding environment grew more precarious, by the 1990s a formulaic 'triumph-over-adversity' narrative combining the streets and cityscapes of traditional British realism with the feel-good vibe of Hollywood individualism answered the challenge of reiterating a national cinema amid spreading multiplexes. 

Championed by the incoming post-welfare New Labour, The Full Monty (1997) came to epitomise a new and entertaining conception of British social realism. Meanwhile, more lethal and complex representations of men and women appeared in Gary Oldman's autobiographical Nil by Mouth, Antonia Bird's Face (both 1997), Shane Meadows' A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and Carine Adler's Under the Skin (1997), adding shade to our best hope for a truly national cinema. 

Touted in the British press as yet another banner year for British filmmaking, 2002 saw important new films from Loach - Sweet Sixteen - Leigh - All or Nothing - and Lynne Ramsay - Morvern Callar, suggesting a national cinema with a genuine and vital commitment to the way we live.

Prominent aspects

- Idea of the outside = Lost Boy theme (Kes)

- Casual Violence/ Abuse (Wasp)

- Escapism (Fishtank)

- Poverty (I, Daniel Blake)

- Strict authoritarian Bullies (Kes)

- Alchohol Addiction (Tyrannosaur)

- Abstract camera-work (Transporting)

The lost Boy is a certain archetype which repeatedly shows up in British social realist films, which observes a character that is lost looking for himself.

Technical Elements

• Very realistic Looking Elements.
• very conversational dialogue - colloquial.   
• Deliberate excentric choice to film scenes like a documentary to increase realism

Mike Leigh - Secrets and Lies

This is characterising British social realism values that preview normal everyday British lives, forming a relatable and believable scene.