The British New Wave

A certain tendency?

B. F. Taylor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719069093
• eBook ISBN: 9781847796097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book offers an opportunity to reconsider the films of the British New Wave in the light of forty years of heated debate. By eschewing the usual tendency to view films like A Kind of Loving and The Entertainer collectively and include them in broader debates about class, gender, and ideology, this book presents a new and innovative look at this famous cycle of British films. For each film, a re-distribution of existing critical emphasis also allows the problematic relationship between these films and the question of realism to be reconsidered. Drawing upon existing sources and returning to long-standing and unchallenged assumptions about these films, this book offers the opportunity for the reader to return to the British New Wave and decide for themselves where they stand in relation to the films.

1 The British New Wave: a certain tendency?

The terrible thing about the cinema is the way it uses up everything. It exhausts ideas, stories, brands of stories, and suddenly finds itself faced with a kind of gulf, a ditch across which it must leap to capture some new and absolutely unforeseen territory. We’re not talking, obviously, about eternal masterpieces: clearly Shakespeare always had something to say, and he didn’t have to jump any ditch. But it’s a situation ordinary film production is likely to run into every five years or so. In France the New Wave has been lucky enough to jump the ditch. In England the same thing could happen. (Jean Renoir)¹

‘Queen’ magazine recently ran a ‘Space-age guide for Social Astronauts’ which replaced the expressions like ‘In’ and ‘Out’ with ‘Go,’ ‘Rogue’ and ‘Abort.’ ‘The cinema is generally “Go,” ’ twittered this glossy publication, ‘but films in foreign languages are “Rogue” (released on the right course, but now in the wrong orbit); English films are usually “Abort.” ’ (Mark Shivas)²

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one’s preferences into a monomaniac theory; in film criticism, the more … single-minded and dedicated … the theorist is, the more likely he is to be regarded as serious and important and ‘deep’ – in contrast to relaxed men of good sense whose pluralistic approaches can be disregarded as not fundamental enough. (Pauline Kael)³

The British New Wave: definitions and directions

The British New Wave is the name conventionally given to a series of films released between 1959 and 1963. Here is the series in full: Room at the Top (Jack Clayton, 1959); Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); A Kind of Loving (John Schlesinger, 1962); The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson, 1962); This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963); Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963).

Conventional approaches to these films place their greatest emphasis upon viewing them as a series, stressing their similarities, and use these similarities to include the films in broader debates about class, gender and/or ideology. The time is now right to take an alternative approach and consider each of the films individually. This is not to deny that the similarities between these films do exist. Nevertheless, for the sake of revivifying the study of British cinema, there is little methodological sense in merely reproducing existing critical discussions. Instead, I will define my own critical position in relation to the British New Wave and demonstrate that we can fruitfully consider the detail of these films individually without continually re-emphasising their similarities. The spirit of this approach has been shaped by Peter Hutchings’s recent discussion of the British New Wave. The innovation of this approach is also complemented by the position its subjects occupy within the history of British cinema. As their collective title suggests, the arrival of these films was marked by a similar sense of innovation. This is because, as Peter Hutchings observes:

Often shot on location in cities in the Midlands or the north of England and featuring relatively unknown actors and relatively untried directors, these films were generally seen by critics of the time as a step forward for British cinema, a move towards a mature, intelligent engagement with contemporary British social life and a welcome breath of fresh air after the conformist entertainment provided by studio-bound British film-makers in the first part of the 1950s.⁴

Hutchings continues by outlining three key points which will guide this book. He reminds us that these films, though constantly thought of and defined as a series, are, in certain respects, different from each other. Hutchings also argues that all of the New Wave films are ‘fictions that seek, often in very seductive ways, to involve us in their narratives in a manner that still has the potential to neutralise any critical distance, in effect to make us sympathetic participants in their world’. Finally, and crucially, whilst not denying the central position that the concept of cinematic realism holds in the British cinema, Hutchings suggests that the concern ‘to deconstruct realism and the aesthetic practices associated with it impacted especially severely’ on the British New Wave.⁵ Let’s begin by considering Hutchings’s final suggestion.

The innovation of a film like Room at the Top was its engagement with a contemporary British social life, and the emphasis in these new films was on the relationship between a character’s leisure time and their working life. This was accompanied by an increased willingness to deal openly with the representation of sexual behaviour, especially of the extra-marital kind. The result of this was that the films displayed ‘a deeper attention to the articulation of character and individuality’, achieved by their narratives being ‘resolutely organised around a single central protagonist, a single psychology and subjectivity’.⁶ Furthermore, it was this willingness to depict sexual relationships more explicitly, combined with a use of vernacular language and the breaking of conventional shooting techniques that led to an idea of social realism being attributed to the British New Wave. For Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment:

The roots of the social realist aesthetics of these ‘kitchen sink’ dramas are found in the British documentary movement of the 1930s (particularly the poetic realism of Humphrey Jennings), the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s and a new class consciousness in British theatre and literature centred on the experiences of aggressive and rebellious working-class males – the so-called ‘angry young men’ epitomised in successful plays such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and novels such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.⁷

The idea of social realism, however, has always been a contentious issue, especially as the term itself – like the phrase ‘kitchen sink’ – has become something of a convenient, and uncritical, way to describe the contents of these films as ‘gritty’, ‘raw’ and offering a ‘slice of life’. Worse still is the fact that the term itself is difficult to define owing to its being so politically and historically contingent. As Samantha Lay writes:

Specific stylistic concerns are utilised at different times, in different ways by film-makers. Their use of certain styles in camera work, iconography, editing and soundtrack stand in a relationship of contrast not just between the mainstream products of the day but also to the stylistic preferences of the social realist film-makers who preceded them.⁸

A further problem stems from the suggestion that ‘the new “realism” of these films was no more “realistic” than previous modes of representation had been. What was new was the drawing of a different boundary between the realms of “fiction” and “life.”’⁹ Finally, since the 1970s, realism in the cinema has been treated with suspicious and considered ideologically suspect.¹⁰

The relationship between social realism and the British New Wave is a troubled one and I am reluctant to engage with broader debates of realism and the cinema. My concern is that the question of realism in the cinema has always carried strong overtones in film aesthetics and has meant that successive critics have had to come to terms with some variation on the theme. The end result of this is usually the adding of another interpretation on to what Andrew Tudor has called ‘the already creaking cart’.¹¹

Lay usefully defines several pertinent features of the form of social realism associated with these films, and prominent among these is the way ‘character and place are linked in order to explore some aspect of contemporary life’. The term can generally imply an independent production, the use of real locations and the employment of non-professional or little-known actors. Lay outlines three overlapping aspects: practice and politics, style and form, and content. Practice has already been defined above. If politics is defined as intentions then we can see that the New Wave directors ‘were interested in extending the range of cinematic representation to include the working class beyond London to the industrial towns and cities of the north of England’. The style and form of these films reflected this new range of cinematic representation but quickly became labelled as drab and gritty, with depressing portrayals of settings and characters. As Lay concludes:

‘Style’ refers to the aesthetic devices employed by film-makers and the artistic choices they make. These aspects of social realism refer to the specific formal and stylistic techniques employed by social realist film-makers to capture, comment on, and critique the workings of society. Form and style refer to elements within the text, though it is important to note that they may be informed by practice, politics and content.¹²

With the emphasis on the idea of difference, I will begin by outlining an approach to film criticism that places the greatest value on considering a film in its own right. An approach of this kind allows the individual details of one film to be brought to our attention in such a way as to negate the need always to compare one film with another. This will be followed by considering the idea of a ‘critical distance’. The focus will be on the critical reception that these films received at the time and will consider some of the ways in which this reception has coloured subsequent examinations of the New Wave. I will conclude by continuing to investigate the relationship between British New Wave ‘style’ and social realism. Bearing in mind that the question of realism in the cinema is an enormous one, my discussion will be restricted to the impact that the desire to deconstruct these issues of realism has had upon the films. I will also propose a way in which the severity of this impact might be lessened.

Roman candles and rockets

Neil Sinyard hints at some of the reasons why the British New Wave films may have always suffered in terms of the critical response to them. The arrival of Room at the Top and the films that followed it coincided with a seismic shift in the British critical culture. For this period was the heyday of auteurism and ‘by the side of the big names of Europe and Hollywood, it was felt that British film had little to offer’. Though the arrival of Clayton’s film was greeted with considerable optimism, changes in the critical climate meant that some commentators were less sympathetic. This was particularly evident in the first edition of Movie, the British film journal which ‘set the intellectual tone of the debate about British film for the rest of the decade’. Published in 1962, just as the British New Wave was in its prime, Movie contained a broad survey of the then contemporary state of British cinema, Victor Perkins’s ‘The British Cinema’. British cinema has since undergone an extensive critical re-evaluation yet the shockwaves from Perkins’s damning indictment still ensure that the discussion of New Wave ‘style’ is still what Sinyard calls a tentative affair.¹³

Discussions of these films began in 1959 with Room at the Top and have continued ever since. In fact, as Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards write in their recent re-evaluation of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner:

Just as the notion of fifties cinema as necessarily a ‘doldrums era’ is now undergoing a well merited albeit tardy revision so, too, that aspect of late 1950s and early 1960s British cinema which has hitherto attracted most attention when discussing the advances evidently made during the period – in debates, principally, surrounding the ‘new wave’ films – is once more, and for its own part, receiving renewed and closer scrutiny.¹⁴

Yet, the critical attention that these films have received, and are now receiving once again, is less to do with discussing the details of individual films and more concerned with still viewing them as a series. This is because, as Richards argues elsewhere, the study of film can be divided into two approaches: film studies and cinema history. Whereas the former concerns itself with ‘minute visual and structural analysis of individual films’ the latter places ‘its highest priority on context, on the locating of films securely in the setting of their makers’ attitudes, constraints and preoccupations, on audience reaction and contemporary understandings’. Both are valuable yet, as Richards continues, there still remains a ‘hostility’ between some adherents of the two approaches.¹⁵ Nowhere is this hostility more apparent than in the case of the British New Wave. Admittedly, this division is a highly artificial one. Nevertheless, the implications of this division are directly relevant to the debates that surround the British New Wave. This is because films such as Room at the Top or Billy Liar lend themselves almost too easily to broader accounts of their context and construction. This is evident in famous discuss...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The British New Wave: a certain tendency?
• 2 From microscope to telescope: the films of Tony Richardson
• 3 A cinema of surfaces: Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top
• 4 Major themes and minor movements: composition and repetition in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar
• 5 The critical forest
• 6 Straight lines and rigid readings: Arthur Seaton and the arc of flight
• 7 Bodies, critics and This Sporting Life
• 8 Single vessels and twisting ropes
• Bibliography
• Index