Free Cinema is now acknowledged as a highly influential moment in British cinema history, which
not only re-invigorated British documentary in the 1950s but also served as a
precursor to the British New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But what
exactly was Free Cinema? Lindsay Anderson, its undisputed founder and spokesman,
later admitted, "Free Cinema, whether as a specific historical movement, or as a
genre, or as an inspiration, has been defined, written about or attacked in
terms so various that it isn't surprising there is now a great deal of confusion
as to what exactly the term implies." An explanation is therefore needed.
Essentially, Free Cinema was the general title given to a series of six
programmes of (mainly) short documentaries shown at the National Film Theatre
(NFT) in London between February 1956 and March 1959. The programmes were put
together by a group of young filmmakers and critics whose films were shown in
the series' three British programmes ('Free Cinema', 'Free Cinema 3: Look at
Britain' and 'Free Cinema 6: 'The Last Free Cinema'). The three other
programmes introduced the work of foreign filmmakers, including Roman Polanski,
Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut.
Free Cinema was created primarily for pragmatic reasons. In early 1956, as
Anderson and his friends Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti were
struggling to get their films shown, they decided to join forces and screen them
together in a single programme at the National Film Theatre, which Reisz had
conveniently been programming for three years. They soon realised that although
the films had been made independently, they had a definite 'attitude in common'.
Anderson coined the term 'Free Cinema' (a reference to the films having been
made free from the pressures of the box-office or the demands of propaganda),
and together produced a 'manifesto' in which they stated the ideas behind the
presentation of the programme. Although the name was intended only for that
one-off event, the 'publicity stunt' proved so effective - with the event
attracting wide press attention and all screenings sold out - that five more
programmes were shown under the same banner in the next three years, each
accompanied by a programme note in the form of a manifesto.
But Free Cinema was much more than just a clever piece of cultural packaging.
It represented a new attitude to filmmaking, rejecting the orthodoxy and
conservatism of both the mainstream British cinema and the dominant documentary
tradition initiated by John Grierson in the 1930s. The Free Cinema group
dismissed mainstream 1950s British films as completely detached from the reality
of everyday contemporary life in Britain, and condemned their stereotypical and
patronising representation of the working class. As the programme note for the
third Free Cinema programme stated: "British cinema [is] still obstinately
class-bound; still rejecting the stimulus of contemporary life, as well as the
responsibility to criticise; still reflecting a metropolitan, Southern English
culture which excludes the rich diversity of tradition and personality which is
the whole of Britain." In contrast, the Free Cinema filmmakers affirmed their
"belief in freedom, the importance of people and in the significance of the
everyday" (Free Cinema manifesto). Their films attempted to rehabilitate an
objective, critical, yet respectful and often affectionate portrayal of ordinary
people at work or at play.
At the same time, they were strong advocates of the filmmaker's freedom to
express his/her personal views through film - "no film can be too
personal", insisted the first manifesto - of the commitment of the filmmaker as
an artist, and of his/her role as a vocal social commentator. The one British
documentarist the Free Cinema members admired was Humphrey Jennings, whose
style, in such films as London Can Take It! (1940) and Fires Were Started
(1943), was distinguished by a quest for authenticity and poetic form. Free
Cinema's critical and theoretical background was set out in the journal Sequence
(until 1952) and then in Sight and Sound, for which Anderson, Reisz and their
colleagues wrote.
One obvious common denominator of the Free Cinema films (and a prerequisite
to their makers' creative freedom) was the fact that they were all made outside
the framework of the film industry. They were produced in semi-amateur
conditions (all but three on 16mm film), and used the same enthusiastic and
skilful (but mainly unpaid) technicians, particularly cameraman Walter Lassally
and sound-recordist/editor John Fletcher. The active and generous contribution
of these two pioneering technicians was a direct link between most of the Free
Cinema films; this alone made Free Cinema much more than a label of convenience.
The films were funded either by their makers or by small grants from two main
sponsors, who gave them almost complete creative freedom. The BFI Experimental
Film Fund, a tiny fund for innovative films set up and administrated by the
British Film Institute since 1952, provided financial assistance for six of the
films. The Ford Motor Company sponsored the two most ambitious productions,
Anderson's Every Day Except Christmas and Reisz's We Are the Lambeth Boys.
The films also shared a number of formal and stylistic features. Typically,
they were short (the longest was We Are the Lambeth Boys, at 50 minutes), used
black and white film and hand-held, portable cameras, avoided or limited the use
of didactic voice-over commentary, shunned narrative continuity and used sound
and editing impressionistically. Their distinctive aesthetic was a consequence
of three main factors: a conscious decision to take their cameras out of the
studios and into the streets in order to engage with the reality of contemporary
Britain; the extremely limited funds at the filmmakers' disposal; and the
technology available.
Two particular technological limitations determined the Free Cinema
aesthetic: the limited shooting time of the spring-wound Bolex 16mm camera
(which meant no shot could last longer than 22 seconds), the impossibility of
recording synchronised sound outside the studio until the turn of the 1960s (We
Are the Lambeth Boys was one of the early experiments in that field). On the
positive side, the emergence of hyper-sensitive film stock allowed filming on
location without the use of artificial light, even by night.
The filmmakers made a virtue of these financial and technological
limitations: as the Free Cinema 3 programme note stated, "with a 16mm camera,
and minimal resources, and no payment for your technicians, you cannot achieve
very much - in commercial terms.... But you can use your eyes and your ears. You
can give indications. You can make poetry." In that respect, Free Cinema
advocated and developed a genuine 'aesthetic of economy'. The films may have
lacked polish - some were even shot on spare (read 'scratched') government film
stock - but their inner quality came from the creative way in which the
filmmakers arranged sounds (often a combination of natural sounds and added
music) and images, often creating symbolic contrasts between them.
Although Anderson later denied Free Cinema the status of a genuine 'film
movement', the films' concern with some aspect of contemporary life in Britain,
their similar independent mode of production and their common aesthetic seem
sufficient to earn it the name, however limited the movement might have been in
comparison to, say, Italian neo-realism or the French New Wave.
But Free Cinema must also to be understood as an early manifestation of a
wider cultural movement, which also included a new breed of writers who began to
challenge the existing social and cultural order. The 'angry young men', as they
became known, focused on lower-middle-class and working-class life and were
savagely critical of the institutions of English society. They included
novelists Alan Sillitoe, John Braine and David Storey and playwrights Arnold
Wesker and John Osborne, whose 'Look Back in Anger' (produced in 1956, shortly
after the first Free Cinema programme) was the archetypal 'angry young man'
work. The 'angry young men' had a direct link to Free Cinema in Tony Richardson
who, with George Devine, had founded the English Stage Company at London's Royal
Court Theatre, and directed both stage and film versions of Osborne's 'Look Back
in Anger' (and later partnered Osborne to set up the film production company
Woodfall).
The emergence of the 'British New Wave' partly explains why Anderson and
Reisz decided to end the Free Cinema series in March 1959. To some extent, this
decision showed the limitations of the project as an end in itself. However, as
Richardson, Reisz and Anderson were about to move on to feature filmmaking, one can, at the very least, recognise Free Cinema's significant role in the
apprenticeship of filmmakers who made a major contribution to the flowering of 'social realist' cinema in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Meanwhile a handful of younger filmmakers kept the movement alive for a few more years, producing short, low-budget documentaries in the Free Cinema style.
Christophe Dupin
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