Abstract
While all documentary may be considered an alternative mode of film practice, in the sense that it asserts its difference — formally, institutionally, ideologically — from the fiction film, there also exists within documentary a ‘tradition of independence’ that runs alongside, and sometimes in opposition to, the mainstream of the movement.2 In Britain this alternative tradition has taken various forms, including the left-wing political film-makers of the 1930s for whom documentary was a means of promoting causes such as disarmament (People of Britain) and addressing topical subjects absent from the newsreels such as the Spanish Civil War (Behind the Spanish Lines, Spanish ABC), the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s with its polemical declaration of independence both from the British commercial cinema of the time and from the Griersonian orthodoxy of documentary, the work of the Cinema Action group in the 1970s with its agitprop ‘people’s films’ on behalf of marginalized groups such as council tenants (Not a Penny On the Rent), the homeless (Squatters), students (Hands Off Student Unions!) and strikers (Arise Ye Workers), and in the emergence of the film workshop and collective movement during the 1970s and 1980s exemplified by organizations such as Amber Films, the LondonWomen’s Film Group and the Black Audio Film Collective.
It is just over three years since we presented our first FREE CINEMA programme at the National Film Theatre — as a ‘Chal-lenge to Orthodoxy’. It made something of a stir. We were called ‘White Hopes’ … ‘Rebels’ … ‘A Serious venture of enormous promise’ … Audiences were large and enthusiastic. And, largely as a result of this favourable response, the thing became a movement. Now this is the sixth of these programmes. It is also the last. We have decided that this movement, under this name, has served its purpose. So this is the last FREE CINEMA…
FREE CINEMA is dead. Long live FREE CINEMA!
Free Cinema 6 manifesto1
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Notes
Lindsay Anderson, John Fletcher, Walter Lassally, Karel Reisz, ‘Free Cinema Six: The Last Free Cinema’, National Film Theatre programme notes, March 1959.
The term is borrowed from Don MacPherson (ed.), Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the Thirties (London, 1980).
See the excellent study by Stephen G. Jones, The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918–1939 (London, 1987).
Paul Rotha, ‘Films and the Labour Party’ (1936), in Ian Aitken (ed.), The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh, 1998), p.178.
For example Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1929–1939: Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s (London, 1979), p.166.
Quoted in Anthony Aldgate, Cinema and History: British Newsreels and the Spanish Civil War (London, 1979), p.24.
See Nicholas Pronay, ‘British Newsreels in the 1930s: 1. Audiences and Producers’, History, 56 (1971), pp.411–18; Pronay, ‘British Newsreels in the 1930s: 2. Their Policies and Impact’, History, 57 (1972), pp.63–72.
See Bert Hogenkamp, Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain 1929–39 (London, 1986).
Paul Rotha, Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939 (New York, 1973), p.164.
James Robertson, The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1975 (London, 1989), p.3.
Alan Burton, The British Consumer Co-operative Movement and Film 1860s-1960s (Manchester, 2005), p.156.
Thorold Dickinson, ‘Experiences in the Spanish Civil War’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 4: 2 (1984), p.190.
Andrew Spicer, Sydney Box (Manchester, 2006), p.28.
Quoted in Alexander Walker, Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London, 1974), p.27.
Lorenza Mazzetti, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, ‘Free Cinema’, National Theatre programme note February 1956.
Arthur Marwick, ‘Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and the “Cultural Revolution” in Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History, 19: 1 (1984), pp.127–52.
Quoted in Stuart Hall, ‘The “First” New Left: Life and Times’, in Robin Archer et al (ed.), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On (London, 1989), p.33.
Quoted in Colin Gardner, Karel Reisz (Manchester, 2006), p.85.
See M. Ali Issari and Doris A. Paul, What is Cinéma Vérité? (Metuchen, 1979), pp.52–7;
Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York, 2nd rev. edn 1993), pp.231–3;
and Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York, 1994), pp.559–73.
See John Gibbs, ‘Sequence and the Archaeology of British Film Criticism’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 4 (2001), pp.14–29;
and Erik Hedling, ‘Lindsay Anderson: Sequence and the Rise of Auteurism in 1950s Britain’, in Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (eds), British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration (Manchester, 2003), pp.23–31.
Lindsay Anderson, ‘Only Connect: Some Aspects of the Work of Humphrey Jennings’, Sight and Sound, 23: 4 (1954), p.182.
Quoted in Erik Hedling, Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker (London, 1998), p.34.
Gavin Lambert, ‘Free Cinema’, Sight and Sound, 25: 4 (1956), p.177.
Penelope Houston, The Contemporary Cinema (Harmondsworth, 1963), pp.114–5.
Alan Lovell and Jim Hillier, Studies in Documentary (London, 1972), pp.139–40.
Raymond Durgnat, A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (London, 1970), pp.127–8.
Roy Armes, A Critical History of British Cinema (London, 1978), pp.264–5.
Nicholas J. Cull, ‘Peter Watkins’ Culloden and the Alternative Form in Historical Filmmaking’, Film International, 1 (2003), p.49.
Robert A. Rosenstone, ‘Introduction’, in Rosenstone (ed.), Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, 1995), p.8.
See Michael Tracey, ‘Censored: The War Game Story’, in Crispin Aubrey et al (eds), Nukespeak: The Media and the Bomb (London, 1982), pp.38–54;
Patrick Murphy, ‘The War Game — The Controversy’, Film International, 3 (2003), pp.25–8;
James Chapman, ‘The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game (1965)’, Journal of Contemporary British History, 41: 1 (2006), pp.75–94.
John R. Cook and Patrick Murphy, ‘After the Bomb Dropped: The Cinema Half-Life of The War Game’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 3 (2000), pp.129–32.
See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c.1958–c.1974 (Oxford, 1998), passim.
On Third Cinema, see Jonathan Buchsbaum, ‘A Closer Look at Third Cinema’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 21: 2 (2001), pp.153–66;
and Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (eds), Questions of Third Cinema (London, 1989).
Jim Pines, ‘Notes on Political Cinema’, Cinema Rising, 1 (1972), p.17.
Quoted in Margaret Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90 (London, 1999), p.1.
Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, ‘Brecht in Britain: The Independent Political Film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen, 16: 4 (1975–6), p.103.
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London, 1995), p.199.
Marc Karlin, Claire Johnston, Mark Nash and Paul Willemen, ‘Problems of Independent Cinema’, Screen, 21: 4 (1980–1), p.22.
Julian Petley, ‘Doing Without the Broadcast Media’, Broadcast, 28 June 1985, p.7.
Elizabeth Sussex, ‘Grierson on Documentary: The Last Interview’, Film Quarterly, 26: 1 (1972), p.30.
Darren Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-class Culture: An Interview with Murray Martin’, Visual Studies, 17: 2 (2002), p.119.
Quoted in Huw Beynon, ‘Documentary Poet: Murray Martin’, in Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon Beynon (eds), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain (London, 2001), p.162.
Jack Newsinger, ‘The Interface of Documentary and Fiction: The Amber Film Workshop and Regional Documentary Practice’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6: 3 (2009), p.921.
James Leggott and Tobias Hochscherf, ‘From Marks and Spencer to Marx and Engels: A Transnational DEFA and Amber Film Documentary Project across the Iron Curtain’, Studies in Documentary Film, 2: 2 (2008), pp.123–35.
Neil Young, ‘Forever Amber: An Interview with Ellin Hare and Murray Martin of the Amber Film Collective’, Critical Quarterly, 43: 4 (2001), p.69.
Jim Pines, ‘British Cinema and Black Representation’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London, 1997), p.213.
Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Black Film/British Cinema (London, 1988), p.28.
Paul Gilroy and Jim Pines, ‘Handsworth Songs: Interview with the Black Audio Film Collective’, Framework, 35 (1988), p.7.
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© 2015 James Chapman
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Chapman, J. (2015). Alternative and Oppositional Documentary. In: A New History of British Documentary. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392878_7
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