| British New Wave | |
|---|---|
 Leslie Caron received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her performance in The L-Shaped Room (1962). | |
| Years active | Late 1950s to Mid-1960s |
| Location | United Kingdom |
| Influences | |
| Influenced | |
The British New Wave is a style of films released in the United Kingdom between 1959 and 1963. [1] [2] The label is a translation of Nouvelle Vague , the French term first applied to the films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, among others. [3]
The British New Wave was characterised by many of the same stylistic and thematic conventions as the French New Wave. Usually in black and white, these films had a spontaneous quality, often shot in a pseudo-documentary (or cinéma vérité ) style on real locations and with real people rather than extras, apparently capturing life as it happens.
There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the angry young men , those artists in British theatre and film such as playwright John Osborne and director Tony Richardson, who challenged the social status quo. Their work drew attention to the reality of life for the working classes, especially in the North of England, often characterised as "It's grim up north". This particular type of drama, centred on class and the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life, was also known as kitchen sink realism. [4]
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(December 2025) |
Like the French New Wave, where many of the filmmakers began as film critics and journalists, in Britain critical writing about the state of British cinema began in the 1950s and foreshadowed some of what was to come. Among this group of critic/documentary film makers was Lindsay Anderson who was a prominent critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine (1947–52), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz (later a prominent director); writing for the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman . In one of his early and most well-known polemical pieces, Stand Up, Stand Up, he outlined his theories of what British cinema should become.
Following a series of screenings which he organised at the National Film Theatre of independently produced short films including his own Every Day Except Christmas (about the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market), Reisz's & Richardson's Momma Don't Allow (1956) and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema which found expression in what became known as the Free Cinema Movement in Britain by the late 1950s. This was the belief that the cinema must break away from its class-bound attitudes and that the working classes ought to be seen on Britain's screens.
Along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others he secured funding from a variety of sources (including Ford of Britain) and they each made a series of socially challenging short documentaries on a variety of subjects. Another acclaimed title was Reisz's featurette, We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959).
These films, made in the tradition of British documentaries in the 1930s by such men as John Grierson, foreshadowed much of the social realism of British cinema which emerged in the 1960s with Anderson's own film This Sporting Life , Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning , and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner . According to Filmink "the common element for the ones that made money were, to be frank, sex – if a new wave film had hot people having sex, there was a market for it." [5]
By 1964, the cycle was essentially over. Tony Richardson's Tom Jones , Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and the early James Bond films ushered in a new era for British cinema, now suddenly popular in the United States.
…Features raw violence even for 1960 after Film Noir had ended... yet this kind of stylistic crime thriller was just reigniting it with the British New Wave.
Room at the Top (1959) and The Pumpkin Eater (1964) are realist, kitchen sink dramas in the manner of the British New Wave, but Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), a version of a short story by Ray Bradbury, is dream-like and fantastical. In The Innocents, he manages to combine both elements.
More ardent cinephiles might jump straight to his 1960s British New Wave exemplars: Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) and – perhaps his most celebrated artistic venture, placing as it did the Hollywood actress and dancer Leslie Caron in a 'kitchen-sink' drama – The L-Shaped Room (1962).
Director Clive Donner's 1962 film Some People presents a fantastic and little-known early example of British 'New Wave' cinema, filmed in Eastmancolor and shot entirely on location in Bristol.
…A true Soho and British new wave film!
Well, first, there's the film itself—divorced from its position as a major turning point in the British New Wave, it's simply a ceaselessly creative, untiringly cheeky, delightful romp.
As a landmark of the British New Wave, Tom Jones naturally carries the influence of its parallel French movement,
So, as well as positioning A Hard Day's Night at the top of the music-movie pyramid, we should also view it as the pinnacle of the 1960s British New Wave—
Sidney J. Furie directed 1964's The Leather Boys, a film that capitalized on the kitchen-sink realism of the British New Wave.
What remains unusual about the 1965 90º in the Shade [Třicet jedna ve stínu] is that it brings together elements of Czech and British New Wave cinema in a single film.
Girl with Green Eyes and I Was Happy Here were produced in the context of the British new wave, which Davis was a part of, and contemporaneous with O'Brien's novels.
| By style |
|
|---|---|
| By theme |
|
| By movement or period |
|
| By demographic | |
| By format, technique, approach, or production |
|
