INSIDE SOCIAL REALISM at the BFI

I was recently invited by Dee of Inside Film to talk to young learners and their parents/guardians about British social realist films at the BFI.

My brief was to give a history of social realism films, whilst considering who the films were made by and for, and offering an analysis of the extracts that I screened. The main thread of the talk was to consider the representations of the working class.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960)

After a lovely lunch in the Riverside cafe, Noel and a colleague at the BFI helped Dee and I set up.

The screening and three-hour talk went well. A very receptive audience put me at ease. After an introduction to some of the key concepts regarding social realism, the first clip I showed was an extract from O Dreamland (1953). Some members of the audience were shocked that Lindsay Anderson's film was meant to be a sympathetic portrayal of working class trippers at Margate. They rightly pointed out that the people in the film looked like 'zombies' and were filmed little differently to the caged zoo animals at Dreamland Amusement Park.

Other films we looked at included Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960), A Taste Of Honey (1961), Kes (1970), Raining Stones (1993), Brassed Off (1996) and A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) - a particular favourite of the afternoon.

A Room For Romeo Brass (1999)

We finished by watching Andrea Arnold's Oscar-winning short Wasp (2003). This sparked some heated comments about whose point of view the film is constructed from, and what audience the film is made for. Someone commented quite rightly that it showed working class single mothers in a bad light, whilst I pointed out that the characters in the film came across as 'grotesques' with no light and shade.

We concluded that not a lot has changed in the years since O Dreamland was made.

Wasp (2003)