Free Cinema was a documentary film movement that emerged in the United Kingdom in the mid-1950s. The term referred to an absence of propagandised intent or deliberate box office appeal. Co-founded by Lindsay Anderson (but he later disdained the 'movement' tag) with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti, the movement began with a programme of three short films at the National Film Theatre, London on 5 February 1956. The programme was such a success that five more programmes appeared under the ‘Free Cinema’ banner before the founders decided to end the series. The last event was held in March 1959. Three of the screenings consisted of work from overseas filmmakers.[1]
Background
Together with Gavin Lambert, Anderson and Reisz had previously founded the short-lived but influential journal Sequence, of which Anderson later wrote 'No Film Can Be Too Personal'. So ran the initial pronouncement in the first Free Cinema manifesto. It could equally well have been the motto of SEQUENCE'.[2]
The manifesto was drawn up by Anderson and Mazzetti at a Charing Cross cafe named The Soup Kitchen, where Mazzetti worked. It read:
These films were not made together; nor with the
idea of showing them together. But when they came together, we felt they had an attitude in common.
Implicit in this attitude is a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and the significance of
the everyday.
As filmmakers we believe that No film can be too personal. The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments. Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim. An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.[3]
At an interview in 2001, Mazzetti explained that the reference to size was prompted by the then-new experiments in CinemaScope and other large screen formats. "The image speaks" was an assertion of the primacy of the image over the sound. Reisz said that ‘An attitude means a style’ meant that ‘a style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion’.[4]
The first ‘Free Cinema’ programme featured just three films:
Anderson's O Dreamland (1953), previously unshown, about an amusement park in Margate, Kent
Reisz and Richardson's Momma Don't Allow (1956), about a Wood Green (North London) jazz club
Mazzetti's Together (1956), a fiction based on a short story by Denis Horne about a pair of deaf-mute dockworkers in London's East End.[5]
The films were free in the sense that they were made outside the confines of the film industry and were distinguished by their style and attitude and the conditions of production. All of the films were made cheaply, for no more than a few hundred pounds, mostly with grants from the British Film Institute's Experimental Film Fund. Some of the later films were sponsored by the Ford Motor Company or funded independently. They were typically shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, hand-held cameras, usually with a non-synchronised soundtrack added separately. Most of the films deliberately omitted narration. The film-makers shared a determination to focus on ordinary, largely working-class British subjects. They felt these people had been overlooked by the middle-class-dominated British film industry of the time.
The founders of the movement were dismissive of mainstream documentary film-making in Britain, particularly of the Documentary Film Movement of the 1930s and 1940s associated with John Grierson, although they made an exception for Humphrey Jennings. Another acknowledged influence was French director Jean Vigo (1905–34). Free Cinema bears some similarities to the cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema movements.
Many of these films have also been categorized as part of the kitchen sink realism genre, and many of them are adaptations of novels or plays written by members of Britain's so-called "angry young men".
