FILM 2154 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Free Cinema, Hammer Film Productions, French New Wave
Exam 3 Lecture 12: British Cinema
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• Post WWII
o Eagle-Lion/Rank cooperation
o Bitish Fils fo expot: uiue Bitish aspets
o Ealing comedies
o Period Films
o Eady Levy: Government tax on cinema tickets, rebate to producers of British Films
• U.K films with U.S performers:
o Tax break for Hollywood actors
o Uses frozen funds (Disney)
o Standard genre of films (mystery) appeal to US audiences
• Export success: Hammer horror films of late 1950s onward
o Familiar genre (horror movie) & characters (Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, etc.)
o Plus Bitish feel ad podutio gloss
• Free Cinema Documentary Group- 1956 manifesto signed by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony
Richardson, Lorenza Mazzeti
o as a filake e eliee that:
▪ No film can be too personal
▪ The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comment
▪ Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim
▪ An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude
o Attributes
▪ Films made outside of the regular industry
▪ Shot in black and white, 16mm, hand-held cameras, non-sync sound
▪ Omit narration
▪ Focus on everyday life and people
▪ Opposed to documentary film movement of 1930s-40s
• Early 1950s-60s – both Angry Young Men and Kitchen Sink were terms in cultural movements not
limited to cinema
o Angry young men- working and middle-class playwrights & novelists who became
prominent in the late 1950s
o Followed the Free Cinema Movement, but for fictional feature films
▪ Lindsay Anderson – film critic turned director
▪ Tony Richardson- theatre director turned film director
o Attributes
▪ Working-class protagonist
▪ Films deal with social issues, daily life
▪ Many set in northern England (industrial area)
▪ Unlike French New Wave, many based on works of literature (plays and novels) &
feature well-known actors
o Room at the Top (novel), A Taste of Honey (play), Look Back in Anger (play), Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (novel), This Sporting Life (novel)
• 1960s change in style Tom Jones (1963): Based on a novel but not recent one; not a
contemporary film and not about the working class. Breaks the 4th wall by using attention-grabbing
effects. Received Oscars for the Best Film and Best Director
o Mod & Swinging London
▪ director Richard Lester A hard Day’s Night, Help!, The Knack and How to Get It
more attention grabbing style
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