This chapter charts the development of documentary styles that later, in attenuated form, impact on reality TV. Starting with the now critically acknowledged work of the Griersonian project, this chapter signals the modes we see as most influential on the later development of reality TV which includes Direct Cinema, cinéma vérité and Free Cinema. As with reality TV itself, we signal how these forms were in part a reaction to the purported objectivity of the Griersonian documentary makers. In all cases the attempt to faithfully record the real involves the negotiation of the camera’s subjects; the use of new technology and its assistance in mobility and engagement with location shooting and the creative use of sound – whether the authoritative voiceover and the symbolic use of ordinary working-class accents to signify and underline authenticity – or the synchronous use of sound on location. We see the development of an increasingly reflexive relation to the camera as crucial to the knowing style of the personalised documentary and indeed the docusoap which we discuss in later chapters. Furthermore, as documentarists abandon their pretence at objectivity, the role of Direct Cinema and cinéma vérité informs and/or is in dialogue with the later push towards a more equal relationship between filmmaker and subject adopted by the docusoap (discussed in the following chapter).
What these different documentary styles share is a political concern, differently informed by socio-cultural context, to depict the lives of ‘ordinary’ people. Whether social realism is depicted in the instructive expositional mode of Grierson and his cohort or in the claims to a scientific observational standpoint seemingly without intervention offered by practices developed in the 1960s, the shared aim is a capture of actuality rooted in the depiction of the everyday. Our discussion of television as the site of a renewed post-war documentary movement highlights once again, in Britain certainly, the importance of class as a signifier of the authentic everyday. Realism becomes measured through the subject matter being reconstructed and that realism depends on notions of suffering, raw experience and personal struggle as emblems of the real. In the discussion of Ken Loach’s work, for example, television is the new site for the popular broadcast of factual depictions of the previously
hidden condition of the working classes. A public service broadcasting ethos is, here, the implicit backdrop to the conditions and opportunities for the depiction, however flawed and manipulated, of the lives of ordinary people; albeit as an educative example for the imagined television viewer at home. Revelation in this context is allied with realism: for all the documentaries we discuss share a common, although differently inflected, belief that to have suffered, to have struggled, to have subjected your life to the camera, becomes the near-guarantee of the production of a new form of knowledge for the viewer.
Showing and telling: vérité styles
Far from being the faithful depiction of reality it is assumed to be, realism, through the various forms it has taken throughout its history, shows itself to be neither window nor mirror but a set of conventions.
– Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake (1988: 158)
The impact of the realist-documentary approach to filmmaking, initiated in the 1920s and 1930s, may still be seen in the factual and drama programming broadcast on British television. Despite the presence of other popular cinematic genres in the history of British film, the realist tradition, its conventions and the values commonly associated with it, remain dominant. This tradition privileges actuality and verisimilitude as a mode and working-class lives and social change as its subject matter. Key works of this tradition belong to John Grierson and his collaborators who, during the 1930s, rejected the more voyeuristic ‘social explorers’ approach which treated the landscape of the poor as an Anglicised ‘heart of darkness’ in favour of depictions that touched the ‘social conscience’ (Dodd & Dodd 1996: 42). The aim was to involve viewers in the general social process both at the micro level of the community and the macro level of the life of the nation. In Griersonian films the working class no longer appeared as an inchoate and enigmatic mass but instead was often figured as ‘victim’ or more frequently still, in films such as Drifters (1929) about fisherman and Coalface (1935) about mining, as a ‘heroic’ and usually masculine personification. This tradition contributed towards the project of unifying a nation during the inter-war period and beyond by explaining one class to another (but not affiliating one to the other) and also by helping to forge a masculine national identity on the eve of World War Two (Dodd & Dodd: 49–50).
Grierson, who coined the term ‘documentary’, happily acknowledged the role of aesthetics in the genre, describing the documentary process as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. The Documentary Movement which he spearheaded, consisted of state-funded films produced by the wonderfully named Empire Marketing Board Film Unit (1927–33) and the General Post Office Film Unit (1933–39), together with some commercially sponsored films, and was underpinned by both sociological and aesthetic agenda (Street 1997: 157). Grierson employed filmmakers with experimental film credentials including Humphrey Jennings whose poetic realism was informed by an interest in Surrealism, Alberto Calvacanti who had also been influenced by Surrealism and the French avantgarde, and Len Lye who had previously employed animation techniques (Street 1997: 157). A film such as Calvacanti’s
Coalface, already cited, is exemplary of the union of the sociological and aesthetic; featuring music by Benjamin Britten and words by the poetic W. H. Auden. Yet Grierson always maintained that this artistic sensibility could only be the ‘by-product of a job of work done’ and not an end in itself; the importance of the work should lie in its ability to represent the social world (in Kilborn & Izod 1997: 41–2). The influence of these films was such that during the 1940s critics maintained that an
essentially British national cinema was one that adhered to the poetic realism of documentaries and their kin (Ellis 1996: 71). In the longer term, British cinema and television drama have frequently identified themselves as working in the shadow of this movement.
Following World War Two, the services of the Documentary Movement were less relevant. The Labour government had taken on board many of the social changes advocated by the movement in the form of educational and social reforms and corporate sponsors sought more direct advertising than could be effected in the earlier documentary celebrations of manufacturing and services. Cinema exhibition also increasingly marginalised documentaries in favour of feature films. Instead, it was television that was to revive documentary and sustain it into the twenty-first century (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 64). Griersonian realism, its values and its conventions, had an enduring influence on television’s documentaries. Public service values are far more closely associated with the work of the Documentary Film Movement than with any of the other movements addressed below and its ethos was therefore easily assimilated into the declared role of national television to educate and inform its audience.
Griersonian conventions and their ideological import can be identified in contemporary television productions, with the BBC series The Trial (1994) cited as a notable example. John Izod and Richard Kilborn’s analysis shows how the series, which was the first to gain access to British courts of justice, adhered to the established documentary modes of exposition and example in order to produce a ‘responsible’ programme which strongly promoted an argument that audiences would find convincing. Their analysis suggests that the adoption of these didactic modes in this instance also helped to protect the series against accusations of voyeurism as they have become signifiers of ‘quality’ documentary practice (1997: 94–8). Thus even when no longer regarded as the only template for ideal documentary filmmaking its ‘standards’ and aspirations (to give insight into contemporary and historical realities) remain a benchmark of good practice. As such they have also become the measure against which the ‘lesser’ output of contemporary factual television, in the form of reality television and docusoaps, has usually been found wanting (see Kilborn 2000).
The French
cinéma vérité tradition and the filmmaking of the American Direct Cinema school have also been identified as influences in the development of British television documentary, particularly observational films (fly-on-the-wall and docusoaps) and other forms which are more properly designated ‘reality TV’.
1 In contrast with the Griersonian model, both approaches eschewed the social responsibility agenda that required a degree of propaganda and exposition, preferring a more consistently observational mode. The two approaches do have some elements in common: valuing intimacy, immediacy and the ‘real’ and embracing the ‘flaws’ and edginess of more spontaneous styles of filming. Their work exhibited a commitment to the depiction of ordinary people and their lives that was ground-breaking in its sense of accessibility and intimacy. Both movements were aided by changing technologies that allowed a refined sense of immediacy and a sense of ‘being there’ at the pro-filmic event. In some academic and practitioner accounts of documentary history these two modes have been conflated, as the American school (and later British television documentarists) also adopted the term
‘vérité’, but there are major differences between them (see Winston 1995: 148–69).
Direct Cinema, exemplified by the work of Frederick Wiseman, Don Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Robert Drew, favoured discrete observational filming with no attempt at analysis but instead ‘revelation through situation’ (Winston 1995: 150). It provided an evidential basis on which audiences would be expected to assess the facts of a situation for themselves. Rather than construct a ‘temporal framework’ in the form of organised storytelling or rhythmic patterning through a shooting script, observational films chose to rely on editing to generate a sense of lived experience and time passing. In its idealised form they would avoid entirely commentary, self-reflexivity, extra-diegetic music and so on, preferring synchronous sound, long takes, indirect speech and overheard dialogue; characteristics that chime with those of later docusoaps and some forms of reality TV (Nichols 1991: 38–9).
As Bill Nichols notes, these observational techniques are especially suited to the representation of uneventfulness and of time passing, which it should be noted, is a staple of 24/7 reality TV:
‘Dead’ or ‘empty’ time unfolds where nothing of narrative significance occurs but where the rhythms of everyday life settle in and establish themselves. In this mode of representation, each cut or edit serves mainly to sustain the spatial and temporal continuity of observation rather than the logical continuity of an argument or case … the sense of an underlying temporal or spatial continuity prevails, one which is consonant with the moment of filming, making observational cinema a particularly vivid form of ‘present tense’ representation. (1991: 40)
These films foster a sense of unmediated connectedness between the space and duration of the pro-filmic event and the film shoot which was to anticipate the sense of immediacy and unrolling of time over the longer time-span of reality TV programming. They shun the structural logic of argument in favour of a temporal logic of continuity and flow. For these documentarists the story and its dramatisation must be inherent within the film and any narration weakens its impact. In the making of these ‘cutting edge’ documentaries, ‘narration is what you do when you fail’ (Drew 1983: 273). Writing in the 1980s, Robert Drew argued that the best potential route for the popularisation of documentary lay in the operation of what he refers to as ‘filmic-dramatic principles’. Like the movies, the most accessible documentaries should refrain from controlling narration: ‘Films that tell stories directly, through characters who develop through actions in dramatic lines – these have the possibility at least of allowing the power of film to build’ (1983: 271). This analogy with film suggests a rather simplistic understanding of the filmic principles of mainstream movies. The success of film realism, to which Drew refers, lies partly in the
ideological realism that masks its naturalising and mythical function by avoiding drawing any attention to its technological construction through features such as camera-work, sound and editing. It sutures the viewer into the text through a realist film grammar of narration, field/reverse field and eyeline match that Direct Cinema is unlikely to achieve with its unscripted filming even if it wanted to. Fiction film’s conventions have become so established as to become naturalised and accepted by audiences as a ‘realistic’ mode of representation. And they are accepted, not only because of these embedded conventions, but also because the films broadly conform to audience’s assumptions about ‘what life is like’ (Ellis 1982: 63); assumptions which a socially-informed radical documentary practice would presumably wish to challenge.
2It might well be the case that Drew’s analogy with fiction filmic principles is an attempt to bridge the ideological gap between what John Caughie refers to as the ‘documentary gaze’ and the ‘dramatic look’. The ‘documentary gaze’ refers to the non-fiction modes which ‘observe the social space and the figures within it … exploiting the “objectivity” of the camera to constitute its object as “document”.’ This stands in contrast to the dramatic imperative which ‘orders narrative space and gives the spectator a place within it in a process of quite literal identification’ (Caughie 2000: 111; see also Caughie 1980). The ‘classic paradox’ here is that the two, while both achieving a kind of ‘realism’, do so in radically different ways: one through the establishment of conventions that become invisible and the other by virtue of the very visibility of the medium: rough and ready filming, and imperfections of all kinds (ibid.). Drew is seeking to formulate the conditions of possibility for a dramatic observational documentary practice that refuses to intervene in any explicit way in the pro-filmic event – if achievable it would be the epitome of the dramatisation of everyday life.
It cannot be said, however, that Direct Cinema operated outside of mediation in its presentation of reality. Simply picking up a camera and selecting something to film is an intervention in the flow of real-life events and Drew’s filmic-dramatic principles, even if they were achievable in documentary form must, by definition, result in seeking order within the often chaotic flux of the everyday and consequently a modification of the everyday. The promotion of Direct Cinema as ‘on the hoof’ filmmaking also belies the strategies used to shape programmes in the absence of orienting exposition. Pre-production work can include extensive research and planning of the programming, the choice of subjects such as celebrities or authority figures can in itself generate dramatic tension, opinion can be voiced through proxy figures within the diegesis such as journalists and authorities and post-production work can be used to enhance the ‘natural’ temporal flow as Nichols, cited above, has observed (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 68–9). All of these subtle strategies assemble an organising grammar of observational documentary that in themselves artificially create a sense of immediacy and ‘easy’ realism.
These cinematographers certainly achieved works of enduring influence and impact. The main problematic of the observational form arises not because of what was achieved but because the filmmakers’ stated intentions to replicate reality have come to be seen as increasingly naïve and untenable. The exponents of this brand of observational documentary were actually very proscriptive, banning, for example, rehearsals, dissolves, film lights and interviews: curiously, ‘the filmmaking movement which seemed to stand for iconoclasm and freedom became one of the most codified and puritanical’ (Macdonald & Cousins 1996: 250). And while its exponents acknowledged that the filmmaker’s perception is itself selective they heavily downplayed the modification of reality activated by the presence of cameras and crew on film subjects.
3 Richard Leacock, for example, contended in interview:
You can make your presence known, or you can act in such a way as not to effect them. Also, of course, it depends on the intensity of what’s happening to them. But we don’t think that it effects people very much, at least I don’t. (1963: 256)
Leacock is not only downplaying the presence of film crew as actors (i.e. active subjects) in the pro-filmic space, he is also, by implication, diminishing the ideological impact of their presence in the unfolding of Direct Cinema’s particular brand of realism. Direct Cinema depended for its credibility on an absolute trust in the filmmaker’s vision of the truth of any given scenario but, paradoxically, it denied that the filmmaker, as an auteur, would influence events. David Maysles, who together with his brother Albert, worked on some of the early classics of Direct Cinema, asserted that, ‘objectivity is just a personal integrity: being essentially true to the subject and capturing it essentially’ (in Blue 1964: 262). Here objectivity is contrived as a natural attribute of the skilled filmmaker. For these films to be accepted as truthful there is a prerequisite that the audience have an absolute confidence in this personal integrity and in the presentation of footage as ‘evidence’. It is, perhaps, for this reason that French vérité filmmaker Jean Rouch commented wryly that American-style vérité should be more properly named ‘cinema-sincerity’ (Leven 1969: 265).
In Direct Cinema the consensual relationship or contract between filmmaker and viewer is underscored by technology. From the end of the 1950s the scaling down of the production crew and the miniaturisation of equipment enhanced the viewer’s sense of unmediated access (Kilborn & Izod 1997: 67). The vision of the viewer is allied with the filmmaker’s vision via the camera and synchronous sound. Albert Maysles stated: ‘We shoot everything with one camera. You, as a viewer, become one camera. You are not two or three cameras that are impossibly in two situations at one time’ (in Blue 1964: 260). Rather than demand that the viewer judge the film on an evidential basis alone, this ideological linkage between viewer, filmmaker and camera demands, in fact, that they also have faith in the perception and judgement of the filmmaker and in the camera’s capacity to directly capture reality in an unobtrusive and non-directional manner.
Cinéma vérité, on the other hand, was overtly interventionist; interrupting film subjects, interacting with them and even filming their responses to rough-cuts of film footage. This movement, most often associated with the work of French anthropologist Jean Rouch, worked within a tradition that was more auteur-based and essayistic (Winston 1995: 184). In contrast with the American school, Rouch was more than happy to acknowledge that the presence of cameras affected film subjects but he also argued that their presence prompted them to be
more truthful and more authentically themselves (an idea that continues to fuel popular fascination with current reality TV). For Rouch,
vérité does not simply ‘show’ – it is also a mode that composes an argument, overtly presenting a point of view and even becoming a catalyst for action. Rouch explains this well:
I go in the subway, I look at it and I note that the subway is dirty and that the people are bored – that’s not a film. I go on the subway and I say to myself, ‘These people are bored, why? What’s happening, what are they doing here? Why do they accept it? Why don’t they smash the subway? Why do they sit here going over the same route everyday?’At that moment you can make a film. (In Roy-Leven 1969: 266)
Erik Barnouw (1974: 245) asserted that the difference between the Direct Cinema and the
cinéma vérité filmmaker was that the former took a camera into a difficult context in anticipation of a crisis and the latter tried to precipitate one. There was certainly a revolutionary aspect to the
vérité approach and one of Rouch’s central criticisms of his American colleagues was that their observational style instigated a mixture of voyeurism and passivity in audiences. In interview, Rouch cites Frederick Wiseman’s controversial film
Titicut Follies (1967) as an example. Wiseman made the film to show his law students the kinds of conditions that their future clients might encounter. In fact,
Titicut Follies’ disturbing depiction of the negligence and brutalities of the criminal justice system’s treatment of the criminally insane attracted the wrath of the authorities of the day.
4 But Rouch condemns it: ‘There’s no hope. Finally it’s a film of despair … There’s a fascination with horror here … it’s a certified report, which could perhaps be interpreted as a cynical and sadomasochistic report’ (in Roy-Leven 1969: 268). When his interviewer suggests that
Titicut Follies is merely presenting the truth of the situation, Rouch replies: ‘Then you have to speak, you have to say it. I would like him [the filmmaker] to say something, say what the thesis is. Does it mean that we have to suppress this police system … It’s not obvious’ (ibid). Brian Winston makes a similar criticism of a key film of the Direct Cinema movement called
Primary (1960). He asserts that the novelty of the filmic techniques employed masked its refusal to engage with ‘social meaning’. The film features a continuous 75-second take of Senator John Kennedy greeting members of the crowd as he makes his way to the dais. The camera, held high and using a wide-angle lens, captures the scene. Winston comments, ‘The politics of the situation … remain hidden. We learn nothing of the issues … except tangentially because the people being filmed happen, as it were, to be concerned with little else’ (1995: 152).
The influences of
cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema in terms of how they organised the field of vision are perceptible in subsequent television programming, although it was the latter that was destined to motivate, most profoundly, the development of television documentary practice. Direct Cinema, in particular, influenced Britain’s National Film School, which fostered in its students a commitment to minimising manipulation and authorial intervention with the objective of replicating reality as closely as possible. Television documentary, benefiting from technological developments which facilitated increased mobility and synchronous sound recording, embraced the impulse to minimise mediation and allowed itself, ‘to lay a stronger claim to the real than was possible previously’ (Winston 2000: 22). However, the legacy of
cinéma vérité is also apparent in variants of the interactive documentary in which features of the
vérité style have become thoroughly normalised. The use of journalistic interview, editing to reveal contradictions in testimony and argument, the conspicuous presence of the filmmaker and/or crew and the use of commentary that reflects on the filmmaking process are among the distinguishing features of the work of documentarists such as Errol Morris, Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield. The economic and cultural requirements of television have reshaped both Direct Cinema and
cinéma vérité approaches to fit the medium. Exceptionally, some documentarists may make single films for cinema exhibition (such as Moore and Broomfield), others, such as Roger Graef, Molly Dineen and Paul Watson, make series on a single subject and a few make a variety of films for a scheduled slot (such as Morris). But many single documentaries appear in series that organise productions according to subject (institutions, the domestic, individuals) or ways of seeing (observational, interactive or hybrids of the two) and fit in with marketing and scheduling requirements (Kilborn & Izod: 73–4).
The attitude of Free Cinema
When [these films] 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 in the significance of the everyday.
– Free Cinema Programme 1956
The early British Documentary Film Movement, Direct Cinema and
cinéma vérité all impacted on the documentary practices of television documentary. Less debated in the history of television documentary has been the place of a British, rather short-lived, movement of documentary film practice known as ‘Free Cinema’. Originating in the mid-1950s, Free Cinema favoured hand-held cameras, real locations and a sometimes raw style that echoed many of the techniques of
cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema. From 1956, the Free Cinema project (which was not as coherent as this label might suggest) sought to make films outside of the established system. It attempted to step outside of the ideological and aesthetic conventions sustained by earlier pioneers of documentary and which were imposed by the commercially-driven film industry of the period. The movement consisted of documentaries, polemical articles and six programmes of organised film screenings between 1956 and 1959.
5 Screenings were organised at London’s National Film Theatre by young critics and filmmakers such as Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, John Fletcher, Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti and Walter Lassally and included not only films made by the group but also foreign films by filmmakers including Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut and Roman Polanski that were considered to be working in a similar vein.
The first programme of shorts included
O Dreamland (Anderson), which cast a critical and satirical eye on the popular pleasures of the seaside amusement park,
Momma Don’t Allow (Richardson and Reisz) focusing on a jazz club and
Together (Mazzetti) which focused on the lives of two deaf mute East End dockers. These films, although distinctive from one another, constituted a new style of documentary whose influence was also being seen in television productions (especially on commercial television) by the early 1960s. Their subject matter was popular culture, youth culture and the working classes more generally. Images were allowed to stand without comment and their subjects were closely scrutinised through close-up and sound. All four filmmakers signed the manifesto included in the programme notes cited above and which was drafted by Lindsay Anderson to launch the programme. These screenings attracted media attention, including a spot on television on the current affairs programme
Panorama. Anderson has described how there was no intention to continue the series; instead the programme had really been put together to showcase the three films. However, as other foreign and British films appeared that were sympathetic to the Free Cinema ideal a one-off event became transformed into a ‘movement’ (see Anderson 1977).
Free Cinema sounded a call to arms against the conformist social conservatism of a previous generation. The term ‘free’ condensed several concepts: a rejection of the film industry’s commercially-driven constraints (especially associated with Rank) and a consequent liberty to adopt a personal vision in both style and subject matter. In this context it also differentiated these practitioners from ‘experimental’ filmmakers whose emphasis on technique or on technical innovation could be alienating to audiences and cloud the film’s meaning. However, this approach should not imply a disinterestedness in aesthetics and technical innovation but rather an agenda ‘driven by aesthetics and attitude’ together (Dixon & Dupin 2001: 29) which married a new style with a radical social conscience to produce a new variant of ‘poetic realism’. The term connoted a new artistic and technical mobility and flexibility in practice; moving filmmaking out of the studio onto the streets, using lower budgets to make more films and using 16mm rather than the more ‘professional’ 35mm film (see Ellis 1977).
‘Free Cinema’ then was actually an umbrella term for a variety of outputs including public-relations films such as Lindsay Anderson and Guy Brenton’s 1954 Thursday’s Children (made for a school for deaf children) and Anderson’s 1957 Ford Motor Company-sponsored film Everyday Except Christmas (see Barnouw 1993: 231). The latter was one of three films made for Ford’s ‘Look at Britain’ series, which also included Karel Reisz’s We Are the Lambeth Boys (1959) featuring members of a South London Youth Club and John Fletcher’s The Saturday Men (1962) which looked at West Bromwich Albion Football Club. The subject matter of these films seems commonplace today but was clearly unorthodox at the time, taking ordinary culture seriously and contravening the assumption that documentary should present a selective and ideal picture of national life. Anderson (1977) recalls, for example, how the British Selection Committee refused to submit Everyday Except Christmas for the Tours Documentary film festival ‘on the grounds that it didn’t show an aspect of Britain which merited official publicity’ (it went on to win the Grand Prix). The message was clear that the divisions between high culture and popular culture were continuing to be patrolled by the old guard of cultural criticism.
The Free Cinema filmmakers were arguably influenced much more strongly by the European
nouvelle vague than by the earlier British documentary tradition of the 1930s and the work of John Grierson, of whom they were explicitly critical. Their work was, however, marked by the Griersonian emphasis on social democratic values and the valorisation of the lives of ordinary people. They also infused documentary with their own brand of poetic realism – albeit one not imposed from the ‘outside’ in the form of extra-diegetic spoken poetry and music (as in
Coalface, above) but one seeming to originate organically from the editing process. As Brian Winston (1995: 63) convincingly argues, Grierson and his followers failed as mass communicators – despite (or perhaps partly because) of their educational agenda – but they did, arguably, succeed in moving cinema towards a more socially conscious position. The practitioners of Free Cinema attempted to move beyond the overtly pedagogical imperative of their British predecessors and were keen to make socially inclusive and accessible films. In 1956 in an article entitled ‘Stand up! Stand up!’, which featured in the influential film magazine
Sight and Sound, Anderson called for a socially inclusive cinema as well as for the pursuit of the filmmaker’s personal creative vision.
6 A year later in 1957 Anderson declared, ‘The cinema is an industry … But it is something else as well: it is a means of making connections … I want a Britain in which the cinema can be respected and understood by everyone’ (in Hill 1986: 128). Having said this, while the later feature films of Anderson and his collaborators (New Wave or ‘kitchen sink’ drama) did reach out to wide audiences, the intellectualism and sometimes idiosyncratic vision of their documentaries would not achieve the same success.
It was a perpetual struggle to emerge from Grierson’s shadow. Even as semi-independent producers they had to contend with external pressures to conform to established practices of documentary filmmaking. For example, the Ford Company insisted on a voiceover for We Are the Lambeth Boys which rendered it more conventional and more judgemental, substantiating Winston’s argument that the official funding and production of films, together with their romanticism, worked against their potential for radical social meaning. Until this point documentaries had been associated with either national or commercial prestige or with the general ‘social betterment’ of the nation. In 1957 critic John Berger noted with approval how the ‘Free Cinema Three’ programme had ‘triumphantly broken through this propriety barrier’. Importantly, Berger recognised the movement as a timely intervention and identified a new cultural turn to ‘reality’. He observed approvingly:
It reveals a new kind of vision. Every time an art needs to revitalise itself after a period of formalism … artists will turn back to reality: but their attitude to reality, and the way they interpret it, will depend upon the particular needs of their time. That is why realism can never be defined as a style, and can never mean an acquiescent return to a previous tradition. (Berger 1957: 12)
A year earlier, Gavin Lambert asked, in Sight and Sound, how it had happened that these images of ordinary people, of the pleasures and alienation of ordinary lives, had been previously so under-represented. There was a clear sense that these films marked a cultural turn in the non-fiction representation of popular culture and everyday life. But there was also a recognition that ‘real’ does not mean un-constructed or naturalistic or unmediated. The real is all about artifice: ‘Here, at any rate, are “real” people in dramatised situations, conveying their own truth and illustrating human behaviour in a way that, it is no exaggeration to say, has never (Jennings excepted) appeared before on the British screen’ (Lambert 1956: 17, emphasis in original).
The notable British antecedent to this movement, cited by Lambert, was documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings whose films such as
Heart of Britain (1941),
Listen to Britain (1942) (which has no commentary at all) and
Fires Were Started (1943) married documentary with allegory and a distinctive, sometimes poetic, personal vision.
7 Jennings was a member of Grierson’s GPO Unit and his best-known films were made as wartime propaganda. Yet in 1954 Lindsay Anderson was to describe him as ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’ (1954: 53). In these early films Anderson spies the fashioning of a distinctive style:
A style based on a peculiar intimacy of observation, a fascination with the commonplace thing or person that is significant precisely because it is commonplace, and with the whole pattern that can emerge when such commonplace, significant things and people are fitted together in the right order. (1954: 54)
Bearing this description in mind, the debt to Jennings may be seen, for example, in the opening sequence of Everyday Except Christmas. Two men are filmed loading their truck, in the middle of the night, with produce from a Sussex market garden. As they drive through the empty, but brightly-lit roads and streets into London the soundtrack moves from the final moments of the BBC radio light entertainment service with its national anthem to a continuity announcer wishing everyone a safe night. The sequence forms associations between an ‘imagined community’ and its sovereign, between the reassuring voice of the BBC announcer and the quiet suburban streets where those who will buy the groceries that are passing by their doors in the delivery truck are already sleeping.
The sequence stresses the continuities and routines of everyday life. The narrator, speaking in a lilting Welsh male voice, describes the journey to London as one of many that will be made that night and every night. The journey and the subsequent Covent Garden market scenes give primacy to the visual over the spoken word. Visual patterning and repetition is achieved by lingering shots on boxes of flowers and produce as they are unloaded and stacked for elaborate visual displays. The rhythm and the busy-ness of the marketplace flows through the film, with porters, buyers and sellers all working with apparently unthinking regularity like worker ants. Towards the end of the film market porters are slumped tiredly after twelve-hour shifts and at the end of the day elderly women who sell flowers on the streets and raggedly dressed old men arrive to sift the discarded leftovers for anything salvageable. But these and other voices are smothered beneath the soundtrack that segues from music to authorial voice. Where voices are heard commenting on prices, food quality and so on; these voices are usually disembodied, patched into a montage soundtrack.
8 The film focuses on everyday life and ordinary people but its aesthetic dominates any social commentary. The poorest people who live on the fringes of the marketplace, making-do on what others have left behind are given no voice; neither are the porters who seem to stride so stoically throughout the day with heavy boxes on their heads. In this sense
Everyday Except Christmas is not about individual lives but about the life of commerce, trade and the marketplace, and its servicing by individuals. Through its use of music, visual patterns and recurring motifs it presents an abstract and emblematic picture of the nation’s commercial life.
The observational documentary and its aesthetic philosophy promoted by Free Cinema continued in the films of the television production company Unit 5/7, whose mainly Manchester-based members were allied to the Free Cinema movement. Their work is exemplified by
Tomorrow’s Saturday (1962) which was sponsored by the British Film Institute. Directed by Mike Grigsby, the film was strongly reminiscent of
Everyday Except Christmas, presenting a montage of sound and images, impressions really, of a typical Saturday at Blackburn, a milling town in the North of England. The only commentary, if so it could be described, is a patchwork of voices and some street songs that explicitly critiqued those in power. Regarding it now, it seems shocking that such obvious poverty existed side by side with the growing affluence of the period. But no comparisons or juxtapositions are presented in the film between rich and poor and it seems to be devoid of social comment in spite of its visual revelations. The heritage of the lyric poeticism of Humphrey Jennings is prominent, together with a Griersonian attention to the social conditions of ordinary people. If the function of documentary is political then its politicisation is apparent mainly in this centrality of ordinary people. Grigsby has commented, ‘I think it is incumbent on us … to be looking at our society and trying to find those resonances, trying to hear those voices, to give people space’ (in Kilborn & Izod 1997: 7). The film is intrinsically observational and it does afford a representational ‘space’ for its subjects but it is hard to imagine, even in 1962, how it could generate political debate without some form of commentary. Also, like most documentary practice, it precluded the possibility of its subjects having some autonomy over the filming process and offered no chance for them to express a point of view. Instead subjects are treated as always already there in the manner encapsulated by John Caughie: ‘the rhetoric of the documentary … constitutes its object – the community, the social environment, the working class – as simply there, unproblematic, always already complete, “extras” waiting to be filmed’ (2000: 122).
These ordered scenes of everyday life and the ‘silence’ of some film subjects, trigger the question of how the treatment of the subjects of this documentary movement should be understood. Free Cinema documentary and the New Wave feature films that followed certainly placed ordinary people centre stage. The feature films were distinguished by both filmmaking techniques and subject matter; preferring location shooting, unknown regional actors, some improvisation and a new emphasis on the experiences of the industrial working class in the context of a socially-committed cinema (see Hill 1996: 127–8). Anderson himself asserted, ‘I want to make people – ordinary people, not just top people – feel their dignity and importance’ (in Hill 1986: 128). And indeed, films such as Everyday Except Christmas afforded its subjects a significant role in the life of the community. Film critics such as John Berger (1957) acknowledged this, regarding Anderson as achieving a more easy relationship between filmmaker and subjects who are neither overly scrutinised nor patronised but treated ‘humanely’. But the phrase centre stage is used advisedly, because Free Cinema produced a dramaturgical depiction of ordinary life, as ordered and visually pleasing and as distant as any theatre choreography.
Other, more cautious, contemporaries noted a certain distanciation between filmmaker and subject in these films. In 1969 Ray Durgnat wrote of
O Dreamland and
Momma Don’t Allow: ’Anderson’s vehement ambivalence to the common people and Reisz’s cool calculated tact dampen one’s enthusiasm a little. We’re too obviously in the presence of outsiders to the society they claim to be revealing to us’ (in Dixon & Dupin 2001: 29).
O Dreamland was especially scathing in its depiction of ordinary people and their apparently enthusiastic embrace of cheap and transient entertainment. Like Richard Hoggart’s
The Uses of Literacy (1957) (which extended literary criticism to the criticism of working-class popular culture and questioned the ‘shiny barbarism’ of modern popular pastimes) but without the affection and respect that tempered it, Anderson’s film was fiercely judgemental. John Hill’s description of the arcade scene in which visitors are shown viewing re-enactments of executions and so on, sums up the film’s attitude and the manner in which it created ‘the overall pattern of degrading spectacle and lethargic spectators’:
This disdain is further marked by composition, fragmenting the spectators’ bodies and imprisoning them behind bars, as well as editing, whereby model dummies and spectators are intercut in the suggestion of a parallel … the raucous laughter of a model policeman is heard … it quickly becomes something of a motif, punctuating the film at a variety of stages and accumulating thematic significance, mocking the spectators. (Hill 1986: 152)
It seems that as one of the interpretative approaches to the working-class culture of the period, observational documentary fell short of its social democratic aims, even as it made a space for the representation of ordinary people. In the case of Free Cinema, and the New Wave feature films that followed, their representation of ordinary life was firmly placed within the context of a cultural critique that was already being articulated in the intellectual debates of the day. As Carolyn Steedman’s (1986: 10) eloquent exposition of a gendered working-class life demonstrates, the cultural criticisms of working-class life written in the late 1950s (and indeed much later in the 1980s), while ground-breaking, were flawed. Accounts such as Hoggart’s, cited above, may have put working-class culture on the intellectual map but they also served to consolidate the absence of psychological complexity which had always been a problematic feature of working-class representation from ‘the outside’. Within this framework it was perhaps inevitable that filmmaking would sometimes slip into perpetuating the picture, which Caughie draws above, of the great mass of people and their lives as unchanging and homogenous and always already there – only waiting to be filmed.
Television and the ‘unconsidered corners’
Free Cinema nonetheless exhibited a respect for working-class culture; albeit bound together with scepticism about the mass entertainment they consumed and a politicised critique of the social and economic conditions of the period. The catch-phrase for the era was the assertion by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to his electorate that they ‘had never had it so good’. For a few years at least, it seemed that Britain was becoming more confident, more stable and more affluent. It was suggested that the unemployment and class struggles of a previous generation had been overcome (Davies & Saunders 1983: 20–1). The standard of living was rising and within a few years it became an expectation among ordinary people that they would own washing machines, refrigerators and television sets. By the mid-1960s, however, the growing realisation that social problems continued to reproduce inequalities instigated a ‘revolt against complacency’ among academics, writers and those in the entertainment industries whose productions, such as Ken Loach’s television docudrama
Cathy Come Home, informed a national audience about social disparities (Davies & Saunders 1983: 39).
Cinema’s main rival, television, also came in for criticism by the new radicals, along with the older forms of mass entertainment pilloried in O Dreamland, as an emblem of complacency and enforced passivity. Television featured as a signifier of claustrophobic domestication, consumerism and enervating mass culture in a number of the New Wave films which followed in the wake of Free Cinema (see Hill 1986: 153–4). The ‘angry young man’ railed against the capitulation of his father’s generation to cosy domesticity. Television was thereby figured as a feminised form, part of a broader smothering of masculine working-class radicalism, that conflated class struggle with the battle of the sexes and which led to the fashioning of working-class heroism as intrinsically masculine and naturally central to the narrative of class struggle. Steedman notes that the working-class stories of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as John Braine’s 1957 novel Room at the Top (reworked as Jack Clayton’s 1959 film of the same film), failed, in this sense, to provide a framework with which women could identify: ‘That framework was itself ignorant of the material stepping-stones of our escape: clothes, shoes, makeup … [Women] could not be the heroines of the conventional narratives of escape’ (1986: 15) because they were somehow rendered classless (and thereby invisible) by the assumption of their social mobility that was underpinned by consumerism.
Ironically perhaps, it was television that was to become the most commonly used and most accessible arena for both the screening of documentary and as a space for the representation of ordinary people – men and women. There were practical reasons for this transition from big screen to television set. In interview, Karel Reisz has commented that there never really was an effective distribution system for the movement’s documentary films and that television, especially in the form of the commercial company Granada, provided a far better forum for innovative filmmakers (BFI, 2001). Producer Tony Garnett has commented on the timeliness of television and its appropriateness as a medium of socially-orientated communication in the days just prior to the launch of commercial television in 1955:
Television was the most exciting place to be …There was just two channels, but the whole nation, it seemed, was watching and talking about it the next day. Our families did not go to the theatre … and British cinema was dead in the water. Several of us entered television … because we were politically motivated. We wanted to occupy that screen to show the Britain we knew, to incite, to express our anger. (Garnett 2000: 12)
Garnett’s recollections support Penelope Houston’s (1963) view, expressed in her book on the contemporary film industry, that there was a perception in the early 1960s that cinema was no longer
the mass medium. She notes, for example, that the influential Griersonian cinema documentary
Housing Problems (1935), which revealed some appalling living conditions, would easily be matched in impact and audience reached by a single episode of the television documentary series
Panorama. The moment of Free Cinema was actually timely in the sense that it was able to contribute to the style and tone of both television documentary and social-issue drama. Its attention to the representation of ordinary lives intersected not only with radical theatre (which also went on to influence television drama and documentary) and critiques of ordinary culture such as
The Uses of Literacy but also with the changing cultural scene of television. The advent of programmes such as
That Was The Week That Was (1962), which broke the unspoken codes of respect by satirising the establishment, and
Coronation Street (1960), which borrowed the conventions of British New Wave feature films to present a recognisable ‘social realist’ picture of working-class life, suggested that the public was ready for more challenging and more ‘realistic’ explorations of social and cultural relations (see Houston 1963: 115–16).
9 Coronation Street, in particular, was conceived of as a realistic portrayal of working-class northern life. Although sometimes humorous and often nostalgic, it seemed to convey a less mediated reality by, among other things, harnessing the rhythms of everyday life, with multiple characters and storylines, to the continuous serial format. Television was becoming increasingly important as the medium of representation of ordinary people
to ordinary people. In Houston’s view, filmmakers were battling against the British film industry’s ‘natural conservatism’ and outmoded industrial working practices that meant films could not be made on the very low budgets employed by the French
nouvelle vague filmmakers. Consequently, television could come into its own in challenging accepted ideas and ways of working. She suggests that television documentary series such as
Monitor allowed more scope for creativity than the ‘sponsor-dominated world’ of documentary cinema and that this autonomy was crucial. Houston comments: ‘simply by getting about, moving easily up and down Britain, and poking its cameras into some unconsidered corners, television loosened things up all round’ (1963: 116).
The late 1950s and early 1960s was also the time when television became firmly established in working-class households as both a sign of respectability and as a pastime leading to ever-increasing audience numbers. The proportion of the adult population who owned a television set increased from 4 per cent in 1950 to 80 per cent by 1960 (Gorman & McLean 2003: 132). Michael Young and Peter Wilmott’s 1957 study of working-class families in East London noted that for women especially, the television mast was a status symbol and the outward appearance of respectability (1957: 156).
10 Television also compensated for a lack of amenities in poorer areas so that, in this study, researchers discovered that the possession of television sets was far higher on a relatively culturally isolated council estate than in nearby Bethnal Green, which had a greater variety of facilities and entertainment. The authors note:
Instead of going out to the cinema or the pub, the family sits night by night around the magic screen … In one household the parents and five children of all ages were paraded around it in a half circle at 9pm … the two-month-old baby was stationed in its pram in front of the set. The scene had the air of a strange ritual. (Young & Wilmott 1957: 143)
11
At this time, viewers such as these could access a growing number of documentary and current affairs programmes and ‘live’ events as well as the mainstream light entertainment that had characterised BBC radio and television broadcasting for some time. And recollections of the period suggest that it was not the apparatus of television but its transmission of these events and programmes, as well as the shared experience of watching, that remains with viewers over time. Audiences interviewed years later about their experience of television tended to dwell on the programme rather than the medium, bearing witness ‘to the power of the medium in presenting itself as transparent’ (O’Sullivan 1991: 163).
The influence of Free Cinema’s scepticism about the place of television was also in evidence on television itself. It is ironic perhaps that one of the most fascinating debates (which does however roundly prosecute popular television) about the importance of television in national life took place in a documentary called The Dream Machine (1964), directed by Denis Mitchell. Mitchell was one of the Free Cinema exponents (writing the script for Fletcher’s film The Saturday Men) who went on to work in television. The Dream Machine debated, in a style owing as much to Grierson as to Free Cinema, the impact of television on culture and its chronic critical neglect by academics and critics alike. The impact of television was only slowly being addressed within the scholarship taking place in universities and was not yet an area of consistent and serious attention on the arts review pages of national newspapers. At that time television had 40 million viewers but no one wanted to write about it, preferring to write about the established arts which were consumed by a far lesser number (40,000) of people from more ‘cultured’ backgrounds. The film’s long opening sequence is overlaid with a montage of voices signalling the debate to come: ‘television is and will be a main factor in shaping our society’; ‘The living reality of a twelve million audience [for a programme] is compelling’, and so on. The programme emerges as a juxtaposed debate about the value and role of television between lecturer Roy Knight and a light entertainment producer for commercial television Francis Essex.
Knight is filmed holding a seminar for a small group of all-male undergraduates to launch his new course about television. He is emphatic, speaking with a belligerent confidence and conviction to his audience and punctuating his reasoning with a cigarette clenched in his fist. He presents the kinds of arguments with which media studies students are now familiar but which were then fresh and unexplored. He suggests that television was taken for granted, not sufficiently critiqued and therefore of dubious quality. Audiences only had the illusion of choice, had no say in television provision and they were erroneously regarded as a ‘mass’ by those who worked in television, when they should be understood as families and individuals.
The film crew trails Francis Essex behind the scenes as he develops a one-off variety show called
Six Wonderful Girls. Essex, far more suave than Knight, is depicted spieling the ‘girls’ and their agents and selling his concept to his colleagues. Interviews with Essex partly substantiate the notion that the television industry viewed audiences as undiscriminating; with him suggesting that as a mass they required little more than ‘distraction and diversions’. Essex adds complacently, ‘I don’t require audiences to think or contribute.’ The programme aimed to showcase singers such as Shirley Bassey and Milly Martin with spectacular sets and costumes. Mitchell’s selection of the variety show, with its frothy rehearsals and mini-dramas over artists’ schedules, is heavily loaded. He juxtaposes its ‘showbiz’ busy-ness with the unforgiving earnestness of Knight’s serious engagement with the ‘problem’ of television. With commercial television typified as feminine spectacle and diversion the debate about the quality and consumption of television once again becomes a gendered one and although Mitchell presents two opposing arguments it is not difficult to ascertain whose side the filmmaker favours.
Mitchell had worked extensively in radio prior to his television work; he had an ear for voices and allowed popular speech patterns a new centrality in television documentary. During the 1950s and 1960s he became one of the most influential documentarists in television. Mitchell was an important innovator who experimented with full-scale outside-broadcast television units in order to make small-scale domestic documentaries (Winston 1995: 207) and introduced the tape recorder as a mode of recording a more spontaneous popular speech. He imported into radio and then television the sound of real people talking rather than real people reading a scripted version of what they had already said. In recalling his early radio work he states, ‘I got launched with a series called People Talking. It was an astonishing success mainly because for the first time ever they were listening to real people saying whatever came into their minds.’ This immediacy thus facilitated a subjective mode of actuality which privileged the ‘consciousness’ of his subjects through speech recording initially called the ‘think-tape’ method (in Corner 1991b: 49–50).
Mitchell’s entry into television occurred when he worked on a report entitled ‘Teenagers’ (1955) for the current affairs series Special Enquiry (BBC 1952–57), repeated two years later in 1957 with the title On the Threshold (see Corner 1991b). His experiments in sound recording were used to produce a tape-recorded soundtrack as the lynchpin of the programme. Tape recording enabled the film crew to use the more portable silent camera and his collaborator Norman Swallow, who was initially sceptical about the process, commented that the programme managed to get close to the ‘hearts and minds of those teenagers’ (in Corner 1991b: 48). Mitchell’s intimate style of observational documentary was acutely apparent in his attention to the voices of ordinary people; oddballs and outsiders, radicals and hobos. Films such as In Prison (BBC 1957) and A Soho Story (1958) delighted in the sometimes rambling but always revealing monologues of their subjects. In Prison, like some of the British Free Cinema documentaries, organised its narrative around the cycle of prison life, including entry and release. An observational style is married with an impressionistic soundtrack that begins with a prisoner’s voice and a snatch of the well-known Ewan McColl song ‘Time On My Hands’. The soundtrack frames the topic, building ‘an “inner” structure of feeling, closing the imaginative distance between prisoners and viewers right from the start’ (Corner 1991b: 50).
In Mitchell’s most intimate portraits, he avoided lecturing his audience but instead chose to refract social commentary via his subjects. Reisz said of Mitchell, ‘he uses “untypical” characters … because he tries to find those who are most vulnerable to the social pressures he is describing’ (in Barnouw 1993: 234). In this sense, Mitchell’s portraits of those with most to fear from the majority community say as much about that community as they say about the ostensible subject of the film. This is crystal clear in the remarkable film
A Soho Story. The film begins with a reflective voiceover in which Mitchell recalls how he had wanted to make a film about buskers and had been seeking a character called Mack who could show him around. He discovers that Mack has left the streets to try to make a new life as an artist. When Mitchell does find him he decides, instead, to make him the subject of the film. Appositely, Mack who was also an artist and a bohemian, had made his living for twenty years orating Shakespearean soliloquies for theatre queues in London’s West End and he proves to be a hypnotically attractive speaker to camera. In an extraordinary piece of early confessional television, Mack sits on a bar stool nursing a pint and a chaser or stands by his easel with paint palette and bottle of beer, while he chronicles his life as ‘one of society’s outsiders, an intellectual bum’, as one of his Soho companions puts it. It is an intimate scene and we, the audience, feel as though we are seated with him by the bar. Mack’s story turns out to be a poignant one. Told straight to camera and quite frankly, with very little in the way of self-indulgence or self-pity, viewers hear about his youthful rebellion against middle-class values, his alcohol abuse, his failed marriage and his recent attempt to live a more mainstream life. His account is intercut with colourful scenes of Soho life; mainly bars where artists, poets and other outsiders amplify or illuminate Mack’s diatribe against society. Mack’s eloquent critique of mainstream society is extended by cuts to speech-makers at Hyde Park’s ‘Speakers’ Corner’ and the defiant voices of other Bohos who refuse to conform. Their critiques are explicitly ideological. The film suggests that Mack has made a ‘cult of being an outsider’ and he asserts that even though he has been beaten by the middle classes, ‘I’ll never believe in the idea of them.’
Mack’s autobiography is also a chronicle of Soho and its inhabitants since he arrived there in the late 1930s. And with an elegant reciprocity other characters are brought in to comment on Mack’s life. The most touching of these is when Mack’s former wife Marie tells, in voiceover, of her affection for him, how they met and why they could not continue together. There is very little in the way of authorial comment or intervention here and it is never explained whether Marie refused to be filmed, whether she speaks her words or whether they are read out by another on her behalf. It is as if she is simply sitting off-stage, close by. More direct and more awkwardly placed, is the scene in which a policeman is filmed confidently declaring that Mack will never make it and will soon be back on the streets. Seated formally behind his desk, and speaking rather stiffly straight to camera, his attitude recalls an earlier era of the public information films and makes a nice counterpoint to the laxity of the bizarre-looking Soho inhabitants whom it is difficult not to regard sympathetically.
Cathy Come Home and the dramatisation of everyday life
From the late 1950s a number of factors contributed to a socially-committed observational style on British television. The political inflection of Free Cinema, the style of Direct Cinema, the influence of individual directors such as Ken Loach and a growing televisual commitment to the depiction of social issues and the representation of ordinary people was increasingly evident on the BBC and on the new ITV services. Even drama, partly inspired by the success of the ‘angry young man’ stage dramas of the Royal Court produced between 1956 and 1958 and exemplified by the work of writers such as John Osborne, embraced the issues and the filmic techniques that had formerly been the purview of documentarists.
12 Influential television producer Tony Garnett has also indicated how the cinematography of Jean-Luc Godard and the radicalism of the East End Theatre under the aegis of Joan Littlewood influenced the style of filmmaking that eventually imposed itself onto the BBC:
I wanted us to go out with a 16mm camera on the shoulder and just grab these films. The BBC film department at Ealing … thought it was ‘lowering standards’. Those 16mm cameras were for news, not drama … Anyway I fought the battle and we won. Indeed within two or three years no one wanted to work in a studio anymore. (Garnett 2001: 74)
The arrival of Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1964, after thirteen years of a Conservative administration, also corresponded with a growing radicalism among writers and directors within the BBC. Canadian Sydney Newman, already responsible for ITV’s successful Armchair Theatre, move to the BBC in 1963 with an agenda of refreshing television drama and directing it away from filmed theatre towards a more uniquely televisual form. 1964 therefore saw the inauguration of a series of plays in a new slot known as the Wednesday Play which ran for six years until 1970 and which, during that period, reconfigured both the televisual and ideological grammar of drama. Inroads were made into a television culture that had drawn most heavily from stage theatre, which was well-suited to programming that was studio-bound, used tape (as opposed to celluloid) and deployed live rather than recorded and edited drama. The Wednesday Play aired for about forty weeks each year at 9pm following on from the evening news. Director Ken Loach recalls how its placing in the schedules was crucial to the image of the plays that he and others wished to project:
We were very anxious at the time for our plays not to be considered dramas but as continuations of the news. The big investigatory documentary of the time was World in Action … and we tried to copy its techniques and cut with a rough, raw, edgy quality, which enabled us to deal with issues head on. (In Fuller 1998: 15).
Television producers, directors and writers increasingly aimed to depict a ‘history from below’ that could give a voice to working-class experience and touch the social conscience of their audience. Documentary drama (or ‘docudrama’), in particular, enabled filmmakers to unite a political agenda and social comment with an engaging, watchable drama.
13 The fresh new perspective afforded by these programmes, on those often categorised as outside of respectable mainstream society, was contextualised within a social responsibility agenda (Caughie 2000: 103). By the time that the
Wednesday Play, the
Play for Today series (also BBC) and
Armchair Theatre had come to an end, the arena of documentary drama especially had been colonised by the left. Moreover, it was championed by television professionals such as Leslie Woodhead, from Granada TV, as ‘one of the few art forms pioneered by television’ (Woodhead 1981: 105). The documentary drama was also borne of necessity. Filming was mainly studio-bound and limited by the use of 35mm cameras, which meant that heavily researched and scripted material was a natural way to express information; when these plays also managed to include outside and location shooting as well they represented the best of both worlds. The term ‘documentary drama’ itself also points to the perceived importance of dramatic realism at this time, which, together with an emphasis on truth-telling as the foundation of productions, led to the cultivation of a uniquely televisual lexicon of conventions. Even soaps like
Coronation Street and
Emergency Ward 10 and crime dramas such as the BBC’s Z Cars
14 were referred to as drama documentary.
15 It is certainly arguable that it was British television, more than cinema, that gave mass audiences a taste for realism as the primary organising structure of contemporary storytelling.
Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966), directed by Ken Loach and produced by Tony Garnett as part of the Wednesday Play series, is widely recognised as a landmark docudrama that successfully married the chronicling of events and social realism that characterises British documentary form with fictional devices, filmic and radio techniques. Loach, like the exponents of Free Cinema and together with the subsequent Granada producers of docudramas from the 1970s onwards, was committed to an intensely observational style of realism. This is not to say that Cathy Come Home, albeit in observational fashion, did not formulate an argument; indeed it is frequently cited as an exemplary campaigning film and more broadly as evidence of good television practice. Shot in monochrome, with shaky camera work and plenty of exterior and location filming, the film has become a touchstone of British documentary drama filmmaking. It also acted as a rejoinder to the commercial cinema of the British New Wave which had come to the fore with films such as Room at the Top (Clayton, 1959) and Look Back in Anger (Richardson, 1959); putting on the small screen working-class voices and attitudes. But unlike films such as these, Cathy Come Home, with its central female protagonist, also gave a real and sympathetic credibility to the social aspirations for consumer goods and the comfortable life that was so frequently coded as problematically ‘feminine’.
Cathy Come Home contributed towards the development and re-fashioning of television drama as a form in its own right rather than a form heavily indebted to theatre and theatrical conventions. There was a growing sense in the industry that television drama in particular needed to change and formulate its own identity as a mass medium. It needed to ‘forge a unique representational and discursive model … which was capable of validating the upstart medium as a form in its own right’ (MacMurraugh-Kavanagh & Lacey 1999: 60). Alongside this there was an acceptance that television drama needed to be more accessible and relevant to viewers’ lives. When the BBC invited Canadian Sidney Newman to run the Drama Department it called in a man whose background in documentary and commercial television signalled a sea-change in attitude towards what was representable on television. He advocated topical dramas that ‘dramatise the lives of ordinary people in matters that are relevant to their times‘ (MacMurraugh-Kavanagh & Lacey 1999: 61).
This commitment to move from classical dramaturgy to a more topical realism demanded corresponding changes in form and technique. It prompted the development of a filmic methodology that increased the narrative pace, the use of an extra-diegetic soundtrack, multiple cameras, and so on. It also adopted the 16mm film which was regarded as uniquely televisual, already associated with the realist genres of documentary and news and which enabled the removal of filming from the studio to the world outside. Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh and Stephen Lacey describe the radical outcome of these initiatives in the broadcasting of Ken Loach’s 1965 drama
Up the Junction. The drama, a contemporary story of working-class experience, gained currency by following on from the evening news and by articulating a realist aesthetic supported by natural lighting, street-sound, location filming and the busy backdrop of everyday life. It also replicated working-class voices, well captured in Nell Dunn’s script which exhibited an ‘ethnographic ear for fragments of the everyday’ (Caughie 2000: 120). The dialogue was so naturalistic that some accused Loach of allowing his actors to ad lib (Fuller 1998: 18). The ‘play’, so different from its predecessors, re-figured viewers’ expectation of television drama and established what were eventually to become the new conventions of television realism.
But even so, Up the Junction was partly studio-based and the few productions that were all-film during this period tended to be documentary dramas, with Cathy Come Home being the most notable example. The story, written by investigative journalist Jeremy Sandford, privileges Cathy’s point of view as it follows her throughout her social and personal downfall. The opening shots find Cathy hitching a lift on the motorway, escaping her ‘respectable’ home in the country to seek a new life in London. The story cuts to shaky footage of street scenes with her new boyfriend Reg Ward. Popular music, including the song ‘Stand by Me’ sets the tone as the couple court, playfight, chat and begin to talk about a future together. A tramp, sleeping rough on a nearby bench, is barely noted by the couple courting in the park but his presence is used to undercut these scenes and anticipate the disaster that will follow.
Cathy and Reg, both earning reasonable money, plan their wedding and choose the flat they will live in together. They have aspirations with which contemporary audiences can identify – they admire the central heating, parquet flooring and the tin opener fixed to the kitchen wall. The couple’s detailed discussions about money at this moment and throughout the film provide an accessible and detailed insight into the practicalities and pitfalls of contemporary life. Gradually, Cathy and Reg are overwhelmed by a series of events both externally imposed and of their own making. Reg is injured at work and receives no compensation and Cathy falls pregnant. The rest of the film charts their downwards moves: staying with Reg’s mother in a crowded tenement block in Islington, moving after a dispute to a house in a run-down area, evicted and turned onto the streets, turned away from the council, living in a caravan and squatting. Finally, Cathy and her children are separated from Reg and lodged in temporary half-way houses until, in a final traumatic scene, her children are forcibly removed from her as they shelter in a railway station.
16The backdrop to this story is an urban landscape that encompasses the leafy park of the couple’s opening courtship, the grim tenements, crumbling blitz-damaged houses and the dank sticky marshes of later scenes. It capitalises on the freedom to move from television studio to location to give the play a filmic quality and to establish a fresh verisimilitude in the form of landmarks and buildings. As Andrew Higson argues in his discussion of landscape in British New Wave films, scenes such as these construct not only a ‘narrative space’ for action but they also ‘authenticate the fiction’ (1996: 134) and underpin its claims to realism. Moreover, the townscape can offer viewing pleasures in this context quite different from the grim gratification of recognition. In one scene Reg drags and cajoles Cathy up some high steps to see the view across a building site; we, the television audience, are dragged up with her to gaze across a landscape in which new houses are rising from the rubble. Cathy follows reluctantly, before collapsing with laughter in his arms. The scene is emblematic and loaded with symbolism, depicting Reg’s youthful optimism and confidence in the modern world which turns out to be fatally misplaced, as well as their own jointly-held aspirations to create a life together.
Cathy’s centrality to the story is underscored by her strength of character; she retains her dignity and her respectability (which is important) throughout the narrative, only succumbing to tears towards the end of her ordeal. She refuses to be ‘pushed around like so much litter’. Reg is an easygoing, family-centred man who tries to make the best of a catastrophe so incremental that he refuses to recognise its full implications. When they move into the caravan site situated on a rubbish dump in marshland he maintains, ‘we may have dropped a peg Cath but we’ll be a lot contenter [sic]’. He registers their increasing exclusion from mainstream society with bemusement and, bewildered, he wonders how they ‘sunk somehow out of the race’. Their story is also a gendered story, with Reg increasingly mortified at his inability to keep his family together and Cathy, forced to occupy the bitter role of the maternal protector in desperate circumstances, made to fight for her children.
This narrative, although linear in its account of the decline and fall of a family, is imbued with a cyclical, repetitive quality that enables Loach to build up a sustained argument about social welfare within the context of one fictionalised and actually highly artistically constructed story. What is distinctive here, is the primacy of voice and its relationship to images (Caughie 2000: 118). For example, an educated male voiceover punctuates each stage of the narrative as Cathy moves from place to place. When Cathy tries to find lodgings following her husband’s accident the voiceover adds not only a commentary on homeless statistics but advocates political action, stating, ‘we need a government that realises that this is a crisis and treats it as such’. When Cathy is installed in temporary accommodation the audience is informed that the situation produces ‘problem families by the time they leave’ who have suffered from the ‘punitive attitude’ of local authorities.
This commentary also has an interventionist function. When a white resident in an argument with a black woman accuses immigrants of taking too much housing allocation the voiceover contradicts this assumption, referring to the Holland Report and explaining that more people leave the country than enter it. In this way it prevents or tries to prevent viewers from consenting to the white woman’s perspective and her understanding of the pre-conditions of her own situation.
Finally, the voices of ordinary people at each of the locations – tenement block, run-down street, caravan site, dormitory – provide a chorus; speaking about their own experiences of living in difficult circumstances. A collage of voices add their own observations: ‘there’s disease here’, ‘we all get on together’, ‘it’s as low as you can go’, even ‘our own’ are prejudiced against us, ‘I feel like a refugee’ and so on. This allows people to speak from within their own setting. In interview Ken Loach has identified a key problem in the representation of working-class people on television. Whether studio-based or even on a location such as a picket line the setting ‘works against people being articulate’ thereby countering the essence of good drama which should be precisely about fostering expressiveness (Rowbotham 1997: 84). This bricolage of voices may be somewhat disembodied but at the same time it amplifies the setting and enriches viewers’ understanding of the experience of inhabitation in these conditions. The final text, superimposed as Cathy hitches a ride (having lost her husband, her children and her home) back to her original family home states: ‘All the events in this film took place in Britain within the last eighteen months.’ The film ends by asserting the essential truthfulness of its revelations. For its director, Loach, it was this collision of drama and statistics that gave
Cathy its vitality and, surprisingly perhaps, their inclusion prompted a greater attention still to the dramatic realism of the piece: ‘The complementing of a fictional story with a factual context places a responsibility on the fiction … the fictional elements you put in the film have to be as authentic as any bit of actuality’ (Fuller 1998: 23).
The trauma and de-humanisation of social inequality are underscored through this tri-partite structure of dramatised narrative, commentator as advocate and information-provider and multi-voiced chorus. The rhetorical power of the film resides in the interweaving of voices; a strategy which allows the commentary a gravitas which is fundamentally important in a film that advocates change without diminishing the importance of Cathy’s story and the stories of the ordinary people that she encounters. The dramatic impact of the piece is rooted in traumatic scenes such as the one in which Reg’s grandfather is coerced into an old people’s home to ameliorate overcrowding in the tenement flat or where Cathy clings to her children as they are dragged away from her; but also in comic scenes of comradeship and mutual support through hard times. The dramatisation of real life allows the viewer a usually forbidden glimpse into the painful negotiations between social worker and client over the terrain of respectability but a script populated by defiant and resilient voices arguably precludes a more voyeuristic engagement with events. It also reveals the ways in which the ideal of the self-supporting nuclear family was being placed under intolerable strain, undermined not by decreasing personal commitment to its ideals, but by social and political factors beyond one’s control. The tensions between Cathy and her mother-in-law, the ejection of the grandfather from the family home and the splitting up of Cathy’s children are engendered by poverty, poor social planning and unsympathetic officials. The breakdown of the family unit is rooted here in structural inequalities. Author Jeremy Sandford is quoted as saying, ‘Cathy is Everywoman, Everymother … coming up against state machinery, which results in the decimation of her family. Her natural instincts and desires are destroyed by the institutionalised violence of a state’ (in Paget 1999a: 76).
The montage of image and voice can produce some non-naturalistic effects, sometimes blurring the lines of authority within the narrative. In one crucial scene towards the end of the film the camera follows Cathy as Reg speaks at length about their difficulties. He sounds distanced, more closely allied with the voice of the documentarist than with his own character. This moment signals perhaps the couple’s growing estrangement as they consider the benefits of him seeking work in Liverpool where the housing is said to be cheaper. But it also foregrounds the limitations of seeking to understand the film solely in terms of its commitment to realism and to a socialist realist aesthetic. At this moment Reg’s voiceover and ensuing dialogue with his wife foreground the constructedness of film, pointing to the non-naturalistic and paradoxical moment when a private conversation about the couple’s relationship must also be a public conversation about social welfare.
The oddity of this moment is embedded in the tensions of a form that pulls in two directions; between dramatic engagement and investigative journalism. Some of the criticism levelled at
Cathy Come Home suggests that the problem inherent in the ‘social problem’ film lies in the centrality of an ‘exaggerated human interest’ (Paget 1990: 87) that may weaken the overall argument about policy, governmentality and social change. Also, the continuing ‘marketability’ of films about social class and poverty in modern times, while politically admirable, may be rooted in what Derek Paget condemns as ‘cultural tourism’. He argues that the claim to immediacy that is built into factual-based drama may actually mask the distancing mechanisms that construct audiences as entertained spectators within documentary drama. These spectators are also actually consumers and the act of filming to a lesser or greater degree objectifies its subjects. This is not to say that the politically motivated film is founded on questionable intentions but rather that in its name ‘an
attitude of concern’ is also being marketed and consumed and that the individual consumer is, in any case, fairly ineffective should they wish to make a political response to the film (Paget 1999b: 49).
This caveat not withstanding, Cathy Come Home was arguably ‘the first dramatic political statement on television in terms of form and content, congruent with its channel of communication and with the power to change thought, institutions and situations by the time it had finished transmission’ (Hanson 2002: 59). A grand claim perhaps, but the form is especially significant in televisual terms – its hybrid aesthetic points forward to the increasing blurring of boundaries between performance, dramatisation and documentary form. As John Corner demonstrates, the play’s formal distinctiveness is characterised especially by its interplay between ‘story’ and ‘report’ – between the viewer’s sense of an involving dramatised narrative and their understanding of the play as an ‘account’ or document which provides a ‘bigger picture’ than Cathy’s story can provide alone (Corner 1996b: 99–100). As a document too, plays such as this, come in for criticism. Playwright David Edgar argues that Cathy Come Home is characteristic of docudrama in that it has a thesis and that as such it attracts concern because of an anxiety that viewers will fail to recognise that they are being presented with an argument rather than a statement of fact. Indeed, on the occasion of the second broadcast of Cathy Come Home, the statistics were removed, following queries about their accuracy and their interpretation. But for Edgar, the advantages of the form, its unique capacity to present arguments in an authoritative and credible manner is paramount. He adds, ‘the form also needs to be defended because the presence of docudrama in the schedules is an active encouragement to audiences to think critically and seriously about the programmes they watch’ (Edgar 1988: 187).
The success of
Cathy Come Home, however, was rooted not only in its presentation of an eloquent and accessible argument but also in the convincing depiction of ordinary people and everyday life.
Cathy Come Home broke new ground in this regard and demonstrated that the working classes could be far more than simply a
sign of authenticity and of the real; they could be complex characters negotiating a complex world.
Chapter 3 moves on from
Cathy Come Home to track a number of subsequent routes in the documentary portrayal of ordinary lives, including the campaigning films that worked in the shadow of Loach’s film and those that broke away from this highly politicised arena through either poetic realism or observational documentary.