Tag: Film

Meet Me in St. Louis

December 19, 2022 ·

Don’t Tell Me The Light Are Shining Any Place But There

To me, there is no warmer, more cosy genre than the musical, especially ones from the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood. The technical perfection cleaning off all the rough edges and open artifice of the performances, both in the style of acting and the fact they start singing, create a sense of familiarity and distance; a kind of nostalgia. That’s why Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Wizard of Oz (1938) feel like Christmas films even though they really have nothing to do with the season. Because they are films from a time gone by: in the early post-war period musicals made up about a sixth of all Hollywood productions, but now they seldom produce more than two a year. Their escapism is no longer about absorbing you in, sincerity must always be diffused with self-aware humour, pointing to its artifice before the audience can. So it’s not surprising that people’s feelings bursting out into songs is seen as silly. It’s an idea that has clearly taken far too much of a hold when a film like La La Land (2016) thinks that “what if there was a Hollywood musical where the performers couldn’t sing or dance?” is an interesting question to ask. As if some added realism would offset–or at best allow–the genre’s supposed excesses, rather than neuter them with irony. At least Mamma Mia! (2008) and its sequel are straightforward in their boozy sing-along intentions. But both show that the Golden Age of musicals is awfully far away.

Perhaps that’s what makes them more appealing, more nostalgic, but I think there is much that their warmth could bring to a time in Hollywood when textures have become so icy and cold, and fantasy has moved away from emotions and enclosed itself into unrelated universes. I think movies, in general, would be better if they were more like Meet Me in St Louis (1944), perhaps the warmest and greatest musical of its time. Before he became interested in the illusions and the irony of escapist filmmaking, Vincente Minnelli adapted Sally Benson’s sentimental short stories which look back nostalgically at the life of the Missouri-based Smith family over a year at the very beginning of the 20th century. It’s a simple and incidental film, and so the musical numbers expand the emotions of daily life, without ever feeling the urge to explode them out into melodrama. When Esther (Judy Garland) sings longingly about the boy next door (in the fittingly titled “The Boy Next Door”) she takes a moment to look in the mirror and dance with herself, it’s those little moments, those private joys, that the film thinks are most worth capturing. The scene is shot simply, as all the musical numbers are, mostly through the window Esther is looking out of, because Minnelli sees the lives of the women who make up the majority of the family as interesting and valuable in and of themselves.

In another scene, Garland is comically resisting as she’s squeezed into a corset by her sister Rose (Lucille Bremer), and the things off-screen that we have to ignore become all too obvious. Garland is sparkling and brilliant in the film, but she had a terrible time making it, or at least while making it. According to the daily production reports, she was chronically late and occasionally didn’t show up at all, when on set she would delay shooting for any number of reasons. As insecure as she was about her juvenile screen persona, she struggled to see herself as a leading lady next to all the women she had been told were much more beautiful than her, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer called her his “little hunchback”. Maybe some of that insecurity bleeds into the performance, into the way that Esther is desperate to grow up, imitating the kind of way an adult talks, even though underneath she’s already so tender and so strong. But that feels distasteful to say. It doesn’t matter if it’s true at all because it comes far too close to justifying her cruel treatment. At first MGM forced her onto a strict diet and then gave her amphetamines to control her weight. By 1944 she was completely addicted, she had been for years. These addictions would follow her for the rest of her short life. She might have found a brief love on this set, she and Minnelli were married for six years, but ultimately, Hollywood killed her. She died of an accidental overdose at 47.

Old Hollywood movies are designed to make you forget. They were supposed to be escapist after all. Part of what makes Minnelli so interesting is that he made his films in harmony with the system, rather than in opposition to it: in his films art and escapism seem harmonious, even though the studio’s factory line production methods should stand between them. His style is elegant and decorative, but fundamentally simple: he moves the camera as little as possible so that the meaning, the emotion it’s trying to create, is felt but not quite seen. It makes those feelings seem bigger and like they are a totally natural response, rather than something you’re being told, I think that’s the essence of Old Hollywood style and Minnelli was the very best at it. Even the highly specific production design of St Louis–the sets cost $497,000 of the 1.5 million budget–work in a similar way. Every detail of the Smith family’s second empire Victorian house is integrated into the movie, like when Rose is trying to have a private call with her family sitting a few feet away at the dinner table, but she has to shout down the old phone to be heard. Or, when Esther asks the boy next door, John Truett (Tom Drake), if he could help her turn down the lamps, so she can hold close to him in the fading light, the lamps become an inextricable part of the aching romance. It makes the nostalgic memories of this time and place seem like your own, you remember the little things in a way that only someone who lived with them would.

Although both of these are a part of what makes the movie so rich and affecting, the sense of naturalness allows it to carry in other ideas quietly. Think of the scene when the family patriarch (Leon Ames) decides that the whole family is moving to New York. At first, everyone is upset and goes off to their rooms, but when he starts to sing a sentimental song with his wife (Mary Astor) at the piano, they all slowly return. It’s a moving scene perfectly executed, the slow build from the bare sound of just voice and piano to the warm hum of everyone together again, silently forgiving and returning to normal. But nothing has actually changed, the Father’s unfair and arbitrary use of his patriarchal authority still stands. Nostalgia smudges memories, and it softens them. Escapism makes us look away entirely. So perhaps this genre which embodies these things the most, even in a period so defined by them, only serves to convince us to go back downstairs and listen to our father’s voice.

But in many ways Meet Me in St Louis is an exception, even with the exceptional time that it was made. Though the studio system continued into the sixties, as Thomas Schatz argues in The Genius of the System (1988), the decline started as early as 1947, with the introduction of television and the Paramount Agreement amongst other things. Even within this brief boom, no musical was as incidental. Neither a back-stage story nor melodrama, it stands mostly alone. The system can only take so much credit for its exceptions and miracles, as much as it would like to. Even though its surfaces seem so perfect, it’s a complicated and contradictory film, an individual one. Its view of the future isn’t simply sadness that the beautiful past is being left behind, in fact, that sense is mostly brought on by the Father’s active decision. It’s not inevitable at all, it can be undone and is by the end of the film. The future can als be joyous, as in the opening song (“Meet Me in St Louis”) where characters young and old pine for the upcoming St Louis World’s Fair, which even in 1903 was a symbol of the future; “Don’t tell me the rights are shining any place but there” they sing. Minnelli doesn’t feel the need to bridge these contradictions, the future can simply be both.

The modern Hollywood musical can only look back, and to these movies they don’t even take seriously; there is no world’s fair on the horizon, it sees no future for the genre. Meet Me in St Louis is as nostalgic as any of them, but it’s also looking forward, and to find a future for musicals we must follow its gaze. Now that the studio system has fallen, with its control of both production and distribution, there is much more freedom to look outside of it. Now film history doesn’t have to be so linear, we can build on films from far-reaching places and time. Western cinephiles have started to explore the huge amount of musicals coming from India, and there are no doubt other places with as deep of a well, maybe the future is already there. But to find exceptions like St Louis requires a deeper understanding of these cultures, both in terms of filmmaking and politics, which seems awfully far away. Eventually we will get there and find a new place for the musical, hopefully at a faster pace than we’ve looked so far, but until then, we’ll have to muddle through somehow.

The Genius of the System by Thomas Schatz.
Get Happy by Gerald Clarke (pg 82).

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

December 19, 2022December 19, 2022 ·

Don’t Forget Your Old Shipmate

Kirsty Asher

Since my day job now consists of post-production work, my idealised cosiness of the industry has become more informed by the comradeship I find there. In the time of cookie-cutter blockbusters and Taika Waititi framing the failures of his own direction as gainful publicity, the days of actors and crew reminiscing about the sheer joy and creativity of a major project seems doomed to become a fleeting thing of the past. Just recently I was lucky enough to hear Ian McShane regale the audience about his times getting pissed with Ava Gardner on the Scottish borders for the filming of The Ballad of Tam-Lin (1971) at its Hallowe’en screening and Q&A. It proved a soothing antidote to clips of celebrities peeling back velcro on Google predictive searches and asking each other inane ‘would-you-rathers’ (Negroni Sbagliato obviously gets a free pass here). But the one film which I return to for that comfort of camaraderie; for what felt like the 21st century’s last grasping attempt at a major blockbuster action film made with all the finesse and dedication of a Bach cello suite is Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003).

Master and Commander was made with the intention of kickstarting a franchise (the original Aubrey-Maturin book series by Patrick O’Brian spans twenty novels), but Weir had always been cautious to create a cinematic adaptation, despite being a fan of and reliable authority on the books. When the production eventually took place, he decided on adapting the tenth book, The Far Side of the World (1984). The premise as adapted for screen concerns Captain “Lucky” Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) being charged with intercepting a French heavy frigate far bigger and faster than his own HMS Surprise (a real frigate which was broken up in 1802). An inter-oceanic chase begins, peppered with shanties, superstition, and stories told amongst friends and officers. The ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany) offers a cerebral view of warfare which, when combined with his keen naturalist knowledge, leads to innovative tactics for capturing the bigger vessel.

As detailed in the making-of film Behind the Seas: A Filmmaker’s Journey (2004) the deftness of Master and Commander’s production design, the rigorous immersion of the cast in the period setting, and the lengths this production went to to achieve historical accuracy was nothing short of extraordinary. Not only did they buy a replica frigate the HMS Rose at auction in Canada and make suitable adjustments, but when they realised they needed a second ship for static shots, they constructed their own HMS Surprise using the original plans kept at the Admiralty House in Whitehall since the 18th century. Weir, at this point a charismatic figurehead of filmmaking and, described in the Behind the Seas as “film’s pied piper”, constructed a boot camp for the cast, or “crew” as they were to become. With colour-coded t-shirts connoting their rank (this was actually Russell Crowe’s idea) the midshipmen and able seamen were taught the ways of cannon fire, in lessons that also acted as rehearsals for blocking the scenes. Weir also created a break room to boost morale for a cast a long way from home and family, which reflected a gentleman’s club of the early 19th century “designed for the express purpose of developing friendships and camaraderie”. While directors have often been compared to a ship’s captain, there’s no denying Weir took the notion to heart with these additions. Devoid of television, the cast were encouraged to chat and play chess or snooker, or read books. What was being crafted in Baja California under the meditative watch of Peter Weir wasn’t just a film, but a once-in-a-lifetime experience of historical immersion. The cast, from the extras playing ordinary sailors to the officer class, consented to taking part in a unique cinematic experiment. The dedication to historical accuracy, to production design brim with artisanal skill, to costumes which sealed the actors into their characters, all contributed towards a film that totally immerses the viewer into the Napoleonic era.

Sadly, 2003 turned out to be the worst year for an Antipodean-led blockbuster to attempt both award and box office supremacy with Peter Jackson’s Return of the King looming large. Master and Commander was a stately maritime venture that came out the same year as a rollicking, deeply silly maritime adventure in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. While Return of the King won for all its nominations, Master and Commander limped home with just two wins. On a $150 million budget, it barely scraped a profit with $211 million internationally. Operating within the framework of cinema as big business and the art crafted therein as capital, it seemed at the time as if the painstaking craftwork, attention to detail and historical accuracy was little deserved. Why continue with this dated filmmaking style when the new reality of blockbuster filmmaking was on the horizon: bloated projects with misaligned budget priorities, consistent abuse of VFX workers’ rights, films and shows further destined to streaming debuts in lieu of theatre premiers, social media calcifying in the arteries of daily life leading to films and shows more frequently framed and written with a subtitled screenshot in mind.

Yet a small but dedicated core of fans have remained loyal to the film. Like ‘Brazil mentioned’, it only takes one person posting something related to Master and Commander’s opening text “OCEANS ARE NOW BATTLEFIELDS” on Twitter for a legion of devoted fans to respond with their undying adoration for the film. The great efforts that went into crafting this dedication to the Age of Sail and its camaraderie has itself inspired a camaraderie amongst those who hold this film dear.

Concerned as we are at CYZ with being perched on the edge of history, we are nevertheless always looking forward to ask how on earth anything can progress from here. We who indulge in cinema, and by extension Film Twitter, are always concerned that juggernaut profit-machines and social media’s relentless dynamism will metastasise into a dreaded ouroboros, gorging on nostalgia and profit in a never-ending cycle. But I see reason for hope. Eschewing the Coca-Cola Christmas fantasy, I look instead to a pagan vision of winter hope for cinema’s future – that from the moment the darkest night has fallen, we have not long to await the green shoots of spring. After years of languishing in the bilge water of development, it looks as though a sequel to Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is finally in the works for those of us who have stood unfalteringly by Weir’s maligned masterpiece. Perhaps, after the unbearable glut of Marvel supremacy this will herald the return of the action-drama film, and with it the return of legendary productions that both cast and crew can take genuine pride in.

Blonde

December 19, 2022 ·

Credit: Netflix

Digby Houghton

If The Buggles had written “Video Killed The Radio Star” today, it may have read more like, “high concept television killed the mid-budget film”. However, mid-budget cinema comprises a large portion of what makes Christmas the cosiest time of the year, because these films are predominantly released during this period. My own seasonal nostalgia for the time of year is evoked when I recollect the slick polish of Carol and I, Tonya. This festival season may be no different. It’s already proving to be bountiful for mid-budget movies with Cate Blanchett hopefully winning another Oscar for her performance as the eponymous Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s Tár and the fateful bromance of Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin. Although the meme potential of both films has been potent, box office numbers have not as contemporary audiences find themselves inundated with the glut known as the prestige age of television. The fate of the mid-budget film rests less in the hands of film-goers than media moguls who are gleefully pivoting to streaming.

Mid-budget cinema loosely encompasses films whose budgets fall within the range of $15 to $60 million and is indebted to genres like drama, biopic, and courtroom films, all of which have plummetted in demand since the 1990s. Films of this calibre tend to gravitate around a tight cast of three or four main characters and an even tighter screenplay. This formulaic approach reached its zenith through the ripple effects of the rise of indie darlings in the late 1980s like Gus Van Sant, Steven Soderbergh and the Coen Brothers, who would go on to make mainstream films in the 1990s including Good Will Hunting, The Limey, and Barton Fink respectively. These films exemplified the benefits of an economical screenplay and a handful of acting talent could favour box office success. But in the decades hence, this kind of American cinema has become diluted and lost in the mainstream vanguard.

American author Ben Fritz reverses the traditional maxim in his 2019 book The Big Picture, “it used to be that television, the home of endlessly recycled sitcoms and cop shows, was the medium of the familiar and cinema the medium of originality,” in order to prove that television has replaced cinema as the beacon of artistic showmanship. He charts the decline of the mid-budget film concurrent with the rise of fêted television productions like The Sopranos and The Wire. However, the new era of streaming has encouraged a binge-watching model which sustains itself on a never-ending consumption of televisual content. And it is endorsed through the platforms, which provide a ten-second countdown before the next episode begins to play, shown in Netflix series like House of Cards. Television may offer an effective (potentially endless) product, but the importance of mid-tier cinema is that it keeps film culture, and cinema-going, alive.

Blockbusters may provide limitless escapism for audiences during the festive season, but thanks to the media circus of awards ceremonies, it’s also a period for cinema that nominally attempts to deal with adult themes to receive attention outside of the main metropolises. These kinds of films have slowly been corroded since the dominance of streaming television. If Christmas isn’t a time to unfurl in the cinemas and watch the latest new releases of Black Adam and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, then you also have the opportunity to see some auteur-driven autofictional recreations. Old Hollywood legends like Steven Spielberg push this agenda in his latest outfit The Fabelmans, as well as a slew of other 20–50-million-dollar films like Glass Onion and Bones and All (all of which will hit streaming before they end up in a cinema near you). This is a slate of films which have attempted to resonate with the blockbuster market, but there have been few signs of encouragement from the results thus far.

Global streaming giants like Netflix, who distribute, produce, and exhibit their own films, continue to relegate the position of art cinema to televisions and other streaming devices. This is evident in the recent Netflix releases: Andrew Dominik’s Blonde was made for $22 million and provides a ghastly intrusion into Marilyn Monroe’s turbulent life. The saddest part of this film’s production predominantly lies in the puppet distribution approach, which meant it barely played in theatres, even in my hometown of Melbourne, where Dominik graduated university. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which was acquired during the Venice Film Festival, tells the surrealist life of a documentary filmmaker whose life uncannily resembles Iñárritu’s own. Bardo’s short-lived release in Melbourne meant that it was gone from theatres in a fortnight. Netflix’s production model relies on mid-scale movies but the distribution and exhibition creates an issue for audiences because they’re in cinemas for a mere moment. Therefore, Fritz’s earlier remarks couldn’t be any closer to the truth as Netflix usurps the market for mid-budget cinema by producing and distributing its own products for our television screens, leaving the cinema relatively desolate.

Fritz also paraphrases Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer of Netflix, who has argued that “movies are simply stories made of moving images that you consume in one night, whereas TV shows are ones that take several nights.” Netflix’s chief priority towards providing a limitless experience of entertainment that only a medium like television can provide is daunting for the future of mid-budget entertainment films which don’t necessarily breed off the likelihood of sequels and the construction of cinema franchises. Hollywood competes on an ever-expanding global market, from China to Brazil, and therefore its stories and narratives need to appeal to as many demographics as possible, which has led to the proliferation of the franchise movie.

However, mid-budget films are affected by ever-increasing costs, because a studio can quite reliably return their money on investment by producing fewer films if one of them is a hit. They are also seen to be a bigger gamble than in previous years. Fritz reiterates, “today, anything that’s not a big-budget franchise film or a low-cost, ultra-low-risk comedy or horror movie is an endangered species at Hollywood’s six major studios.” Thus, as time passes perhaps the cosiest time of the year will no longer be fixated on the latest art house concept, masterminded by some kind of European auteur, but rather mindless consumption around a television alongside family and friends. Bardo and Blonde may justify our cravings for art cinema, but given its self-mutilative model which prioritises clicks, hits, and quantity over quality, this shouldn’t be considered a long-term goal for sustaining independent production.

If audiences desire the trend of mindless consumption in which mid-tier budget films are relegated to streaming platforms, losing credibility and popularity as an art form, then there is not much more which can be done. There needs to be a drive from producers, directors and distributors to bring audiences back to the cinema. Mid-budget films are an important part of the ecology of film and they rely on components of film production like a tight screenplay, whereas big-budget films prioritise special effects and ensemble casts of A-list actors. The recent reception to Banshees of Inishiren and Tár prove that there is still an audience for these films. However, the dominance of streaming models is hard to overcome. Hopefully, in the new year there will be greater demand for the mid-budget movie, and we will be rescued from the plight of ‘mid-budget streaming’.

The L-Shaped Room

December 19, 2022 ·

Orla Smith

In a recent talk at the BFI Southbank, Danny Boyle made the bold claim: “I am not sure that we [the British] are great filmmakers.” This quote set off two warring factions in my brain. One is the side that’s been writing about film for over five years — and watching it voraciously for even longer. It’s the side that grimly sighs and remembers the dozens of recent fanatically hyped up British debut features that turned out to elicit a series of homogenous shrugs.

Then there’s the side of me that’s a fledgling filmmaker, one short film deep and terrified at the prospect of building a career in the increasingly hostile British film industry. There’s so much to say about Britain right now, and so few means by which to say it (at least in the medium of film). Yes, our homegrown box office hits are Fisherman’s Friends (2019) and Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022), and you might watch one of our government-funded independent films and find you’ve forgotten about it by breakfast the next morning. But it hasn’t always been like this, and my Christmas wish (for the sake of my future filmmaking as well as my own viewing pleasure) is that it won’t be like this for much longer. Consider this a Christmas card to Danny Boyle (with the British government cc’d), asking him to consider whether British filmmakers are the problem, or if Britain itself is shielding artists from their own potential.

This year, our press cohort has fallen over itself to praise directorial debuts Aftersun (Charlotte Wells) and Blue Jean (Georgia Oakley), with both of them triumphing at the British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) over titles directed by more established filmmakers. (I’d like to throw in some support for the less-discussed and BIFA-ignored Pretty Red Dress by Dionne Edwards, which I slightly prefer to both, for its energetic filmmaking and its lived-in portrait of a Black South London family messily grappling with gender nonconformity.) Last year it was After Love (Aleem Khan), Boiling Point (Philip Barantini), and Censor (Prano Bailey-Bond). Stretch a little further back and you’ll remember the beloved His House (Remi Weekes, 2020), Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019), Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham, 2018), Apostasy (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2017), I Am Not a Witch (Rungano Nyoni, 2017), Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2016)… the list could go on further than you care to read. All have their merits, some I like more than others, but each of these are films that scream “POTENTIAL” without fully delivering on it. Because of course they don’t. What is a first feature if not a place from which to grow?

But what else ties all those films together, besides their debut feature status? All of their directors are yet to make a second film.

We are setting our emerging filmmakers up to fail; the UK film industry is currently little more than a constant stream of empty promises. Plenty of programmes exist to support first features, such as iFeatures, which has aided the development of films like Blue Jean, Perfect 10 (Eva Riley, 2020), Make Up (Claire Oakley, 2020), Pin Cushion (Deborah Haywood, 2017), God’s Own Country (Francis Lee, 2017), Apostasy, Lady Macbeth, The Levelling (Hope Dickson-Leach, 2016), and more. And yet, of that list, Francis Lee is the only filmmaker to have made a second film — and only with the support of American company Neon.

When we’re not hanging them out to dry completely, we are driving promising talent out of the country to seek funding elsewhere. In rare cases, this means Americans funding British-set projects, like Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir/Eternal Daughter trilogy (2019-2022), or Lee’s Ammonite. More commonly, this means artists leaving the country to tell American stories. Around half of Andrew Haigh’s creative output has been US-centric, and he’s now based in LA, which is a loss of one of Britain’s most thoughtful writers of character, and one of few contemporary filmmakers who really know how to block a scene. Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold are two of the most stylistically distinct filmmakers to emerge in the 21st-century, certainly in Britain, both of them bringing poetry to marginal lives in ways that are very much their own. Still their careers seems to have shifted toward stateside storytelling with Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017), and Arnold’s American Honey (2016). (Perhaps we’ll win Arnold back after her catastrophic experience on Big Little Lies Season 2, but it’s too early to tell if her documentary Cow is a homecoming or a brief digression.) And it took Steve McQueen three American features (one a Best Picture winner) to be able to come back to Britain and make his opus Small Axe (2020). Even still, that watershed work that chronicles the stories of London’s West Indian community could only exist on TV, and never got its day in movie theatres.

In one of the most politically fraught times in recent British history — it certainly feels like we’re teetering on the brink of collapse — we need British cinema about Britain that is political, sharp, urgent, and compelling. The current moment should inspire a new wave of politically-charged films, and yet the waters are shallow and tepid. Sure, it’s encouraging that projects from diverse voices are increasingly being greenlit: more women are making films in Britain, and more people of colour, although certainly not enough. More queer stories are being told (although trans directors are conspicously absent from the list of filmmakers above, perhaps because the transphobia of British institutions outweighs their desire to appear progressive).

But what use is providing one-off funding to the next generation when you have no interest in cultivating artists, and allowing them to have a career? It takes skill and practice to make a film that speaks meaningfully to the current moment, discussing political systems and personal plights in a way that’s poetic rather than trite. There’s a multitude of reasons that we aren’t seeing that in our national cinema, but it’s certainly partly because we aren’t allowing filmmakers to grow into the kinds of artists that can achieve something that profound. We aren’t providing them the freedom to work in an unconventional way, if that’s what they need to achieve results. Hell, even an old hand like Mike Leigh is struggling to get a project off the ground, even though it’s hard to think of a film more resonant to contemporary London than his nearly thirty-year-old film Naked (perhaps double billed with his 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky, to compare and contrast a nihilist’s and optimist’s views of the city). It amounts to nothing more than good PR for the arts sector, rather than actually equalising the cinematic voice of the nation.

***

In my state of depression about the country’s myriad legislative clusterfucks, the lack of political conviction and poetry in our filmmaking, and my own depressing career prospects, I found myself drawn back over half a century to the British New Wave. These films, which were predominantly produced in the early 1960s, massively shaped how British cinema is thought of and talked about, particularly since it originated the term ‘kitchen sink drama’, still hurled around today, and sometimes in a derogatory context. Watching Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1962) was a shock to the system. Somehow, cultural memory has marked these films as oppressive and traumatic, when some of them are filled with life, youthful energy, and visual beauty — if also accompanied by harsh truths.

These were films primarily concerned with working class lives, particularly in the North of England, responding to a lack of those stories in the British cinema landscape. They treated their characters as complex, thorny people; at turns bitter, humorous, sexy, and mad as hell (another label attached to the movement is ‘angry young men’). These were progressive films for their time, discussing class, misogyny, and various taboo subjects with more frankness than you’d find in most other contemporaneous films. And most importantly of all, they were largely compelling and exquisitely crafted.

The L-Shaped Room (1962) is a personal favourite of mine, and despite being an outlier as one of the few films in the movement to centre on a female protagonist, I think it represents a lot of the strengths of the New Wave. Directed by Bryan Forbes (Whistle Down the Wind, Seance on a Wet Afternoon, The Stepford Wives), the film follows a French woman named Jane (Leslie Caron) who moves into a rundown Notting Hill boarding house and grows to know and love its residents. Here we have an expertly directed ensemble drama with a strong sense of place (it is named after its setting, after all), that is matter-of-fact about the difficulties faced by working class people, but still holds so much compassion and warmth for its characters. The way The L-Shaped Room depicts outsiders on the fringes of society feels surprisingly modern: it’s primarily about the stigma surrounding single motherhood, and the film discusses abortion; it also features multiple queer characters, including a Black immigrant who Jane befriends when she moves next door to him. It’s much less of a difficult watch than something like the blisteringly rageful Look Back in Anger (1959), because the angry young man here (Tom Bell’s Toby) isn’t the lead character, but supporting to Jane (and he’s not nearly as awful as Richard Burton’s Jimmy Porter in Anger, because who is). But The L-Shaped Room still ends on an achingly melancholy note that provokes anger at the system that has left its characters with no good or easy choices.

Crucially, this New Wave, which had ripple effects that are still felt in British cinema today, was not achieved by waiting patiently for the establishment to act. In fact, you can trace a lot of its films back to one production company: Woodfall Film Productions, founded by Tony Richardson, John Osborne, and Harry Saltzman, who wanted to create a film adaptation of Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger. They were artists frustrated by the lack of opportunities to tell the kinds of stories they wanted to tell, and get them screened, so they created those opportunities independently. In the ‘60s alone, Woodfall produced eight of Tony Richardson’s own films. Other significant filmmakers of the British New Wave, several of which were supported by Woodfall at some point, worked frequently throughout the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: Karel Reisz, Richard Lester, Desmond Davis, Lindsay Anderson, Ken Loach, Jack Clayton, Bryan Forbes, etc. Today’s cohort is significantly less white and male — but it’s hard to pat the BFI on the back for that progress when they’ll never offer contemporary filmmakers the chance to practise and hone their craft (and thus shape and enrich our film culture) as frequently as the New Wave directors got to.

I don’t think the BFI, Film4, or the British government’s (lack of) arts money generosity is going to save British film any time soon. There are models for government arts funding that support rich and varied works — there’s plenty wrong with the French film industry, but you can’t deny that they hungrily cultivate auteurs and greenlight risk-taking films. It’s hard to imagine the BFI ever funding a debut fiction film as challenging as Alice Diop’s patience-demanding, morally murky Saint Omer (2022). Or even any film, debut or not, as challenging as Saint Omer or Julia Ducournau’s car-fucking spectacular Titane (2021) or Justine Triet’s exquisitely strange Sibyl (2020). It’s a goal to strive for, but we’re a long way from having a government-funded infrastructure that supports the regular creation of daring works.

My wish for the new year is that filmmakers in this country find canny ways to make and exhibit work within Britain — about life in Britain — without having to wait to be sanctioned by our arts funding overlords, and that we (as viewers) shift our attention to what artists on the fringes are creating. That might mean independent production companies, or it might mean experimenting with modes of filmmaking that don’t require tons of money, or any money at all (they do exist!). Whatever it is, it will require collaboration, ingenuity, and a little bit more hope for our cinematic potential than that possessed by Danny Boyle.