SOCIAL REALISM

INDIAN PARALLEL CINEMA (1950s)

Western audiences largely associate Indian cinema with Bollywood musicals, but this is just one mode of this huge nation’s output.

Direct link to French poetic realism – Indian director Satyajit Ray visited the Indian set of Renoir’s The River. Based on a novel, Ray’s Pather Panchail (the first in the ’Apu’ trilogy) explores poverty through a family living in a Bengal village in the early 20th century. Utilising powerful symbolism of water and effective performances from non-professionals, the film contrasts poverty with the imminent industrialisation of India. Other key filmmakers and films of the parallel cinema movement were Ritwik Ghatak (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960) and Mrinal Sen.

The spirit of parallel cinema lives on in modern social-realist Indian films.

CZECH NEW WAVE


BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM (1960s)


Inspired by neorealism and the films of the Free Cinema documentary movement of the 1950s, social realism – sometimes called ‘kitchen sink’ dramas thrived in the 1960s. 

British films are often London-set romantic comedies or focus on the lives of the elite – these continue to have international appeal with Oscar-winning films like The King’s Speech, The Queen and TV series like Downton Abbey and The Crown. The 1960s saw films starting to tell stories of ‘angry young men’ struggling to cope in the post-war society. Director Tony Richardson’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and This Sporting Life (1963) are two key films from this period.

Ken Loach is a key British director who uses realism to add effectiveness to his stories of working class people. Cathy Come Home (1966), a television drama about a mother who becomes homeless due to circumstances beyond her control, was shot in stark black and white. It drew widespread attention and led to UK government debate over homelessness. Kes (1969) is set in Yorkshire and is about a bullied and neglected schoolboy who finds and trains a falcon. It remains one of British cinema’s crowning achievements. Loach continues to make highly-effective films about ordinary people. I, Daniel Blake won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2016. Its story of a man recovering from a heart-attack who battles strict government regulations that force him and others into poverty. Loach’s humanist work is highly-respected among film critics – to the point that ‘Loachian’ has entered the film vernacular. Recent British films like Ratcatcher, Fish Tank, The Selfish Giant – all from female filmmakers - and the work of Shane Meadows bear clear links to Loach’s influence.

IRANIAN NEW WAVE


Iran has become one of the key filmmaking countries in the past forty years, despite strong restrictions on film content. The Iranian new wave began 1964, soon followed by a second wave in 1987. Abbas Kiarostami was a key figure. His film Close-Up (1990) blurred lines between fact and fiction, and his slow, naturalistic Taste of Cherry (1997) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Mohsen Makhmalbaf and his daughter Samira are also key directors worthy of deeper exploration. Jafar Panahi circumvented a government ban on his filmmaking by filming on his iPhone, creating This is Not a Film in 2012. Asghar Farhadi has won the Best Foreign Film Oscar twice, with A Separation being a recent masterpiece of realism.

ROMANIA

Romania came out of its dictatorship with some fascinating films, sometimes mixing realism with black comedy. Some of the best films to come from Romania in recent years are The Death of Mr Lazarescu (2005), Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and Graduation (2016). These films are often very slow-paced but reveal the maddening bureaucracy of life during and after the dictatorship.

HOW TO WIN CANNES FILM FESTIVAL..

Take a look at the winners of Cannes Palme D’Or. 

We have seen that Shoplifters (Japan, 2018) and I, Daniel Blake (UK, 2016) are Social Realism films. It has also been noted by some critics that films about poverty in countries like Iran and China receive more international critical and audience attention than films on other themes. For example, the BBC’s 100 Greatest Foreign Language Films critics survey of 2018, a high proportion are about suffering or poverty.

BBC: 100 Greatest Foreign Language Films: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20181029-the-100-greatest-foreign-language-films

Discuss: Do international audiences focus on films with such difficult subject matter? If so, why?