Re-Presenting Society

Q. What factors affect how a director re-presents the world back to the audience in their texts?

Social Realism

Social Realism is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic.

Film
The term British New Wave, or "Kitchen Sink Realism", is used to describe a group of commercial feature films made between 1955 and 1963 which portrayed a more gritty form of social realism than had been seen in British cinema previously. The British New Wave feature films are often associated with a new openness about working class life (e.g. A Taste of Honey, 1961), and previously taboo issues such as abortion and homosexuality (e.g. The Leather Boys, 1964).

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

The film is considered to be the first of the social-realist or "kitchen sink dramas" of the 1960s. Others include A Taste of Honey; and John Schlesinger's A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar. It was at the forefront of the British New Wave, films dealing with working class issues in a serious manner for the first time, and portraying the more realistic side of issues such as sex and abortion.

The films were personal, poetic, imaginative in their use of sound and narration, and featured ordinary workingclass people with sympathy and respect

Contemporary Case Studies

Ken Loach - My Name is Joe

My Name Is Joe is a 1998 Scottish film directed by Ken Loach. The film stars Peter Mullan as Joe Kavanagh, an unemployed recovering alcoholic in Glasgow who meets and falls in love with a health visitor. The film's title is a reference to the ritualized greeting performed in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, as portrayed in the film's opening scene. The movie was mainly filmed in the actual slums of Glasgow and filling small roles with local residents, many of whom had drug and criminal pasts. The natural Scottish accents of some of the actors are unfamiliar to most American television viewers and as such the film is often shown subtitled.

Ken Loach possesses a rare ability to depict a community as if it were cut straight out of real life, a reality Loach observes from a distance but with empathy and repose, devoid of sentimentality or easy answers such as those provided by feel-good films like The Full Monty and Brassed Off.
http://www.filmreference.com/Films-My-No/My-Name-is-Joe.html

Shane Meadows This is England 86 and 88

When I finished This Is England, I had a wealth of material and unused ideas that I felt very keen to take further audiences seemed to really respond to the characters we created and out of my longstanding relationship with Film4 and Channel 4 the idea for a television serial developed. Not only did I want to take the story of the gang broader and deeper, I also saw in the experiences of the young in 1986 many resonances to now recession, lack of jobs, sense of the world at a turning point. Whereas the film told part of the story, the TV series will tell the rest. (Shane Meadows)

Social Realism in Television

Coronation Street (1960)

The series began on 9 December 1960 and was not initially a critical success. Granada Television commissioned only 13 episodes and some inside the company doubted the show would last its planned production run. Despite the negativity, viewers were immediately drawn to the serial, won over by Coronation Street's 'ordinary' characters. The programme also made use of Northern English language and dialect; affectionate local terms like "eh, chuck?", "nowt", and "by heck!" became widely heard on British television for the first time on British serialised television.

Early episodes told the story of student Kenneth Barlow, who had won a place at university and thus found his background something of an embarrassment. The character is one of the few to have experienced life 'outside' of Coronation Street, and in some ways predicts the growth of globalisation and the decline of similar communities. In a 1961 episode, Barlow declares: "You can't go on just thinking about your own street these days. We're living with people on the other side of the world. There's more to worry about than Elsie Tanner and her boyfriends.