New British Cinema

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The term New British Cinema covers innovative trends in British cinema in the 1980s and 1990s. They are united in an effort to analyze and criticize the social developments in Great Britain since the Thatcher era . The spectrum ranges from realistic staged social dramas and comedies on historical films to experimental-influenced art-house cinema.

history

As a starting point of the New British Cinema is Hugh Hudson with Oscar award-winning film Chariots of Fire viewed from the year 1981st In 1982 Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi also drew attention to British cinema. After the 1970s in British cinema were marked by the dominance of the US film industry and the signature of British filmmakers was barely recognizable, a number of young personalities entered the film industry in the early 1980s. In addition to film school graduates such as Julien Temple , Bill Forsyth and Michael Radford , these were artists who came from the theater or television (such as Mike Leigh , Ken Loach , Stephen Frears or David Hare ) or other areas of art such as painting ( Derek Jarman , Peter Greenaway ) or literature ( Neil Jordan ). These filmmakers were given the opportunity to gain their first film experience primarily through television, especially the newly established channel Channel 4 .

It was not until the 1990s that New British Cinema finally broke its dependence on television after the National Lottery created new financing options for films under John Major's government . The bitterness of Thatcher's films was resolved in the late 1990s by the more open climate under Tony Blair . Furthermore, the films offered a precise and critical look at the social conditions, but often with a more optimistic perspective as in Brassed Off - With timpani and trumpets ( Mark Herman , 1997) or in whole or not at all ( Peter Cattaneo , 1997). Films like Trainspotting ( Danny Boyle , 1996) can be taken as evidence that the aftermath of Thatcherism, such as career thinking and consumerism, will continue into the new millennium and will be analyzed and reflected by British cinema in the tradition of New British Cinema.

features

The New British Cinema is not a self-contained film movement. The films counted among him have neither narrative nor stylistic similarities and only feed their affiliation from the fundamental rejection of the political, social and economic effects of neoliberal Thatcherism. On the one hand, the narrative traditions of British film were continued and renewed, such as social drama or British comedy; on the other hand, questions of British identity were projected into the past with the Heritage Films and new ways of aesthetic expression were sought with the Art House Movies .

Social dramas and comedies

Films like My Wonderful Laundromat ( Stephen Frears , 1985) are characteristic of the treatment of the political situation in New British Cinema. With irony and the means of comedy, typical conflict situations of Thatcher's time and their effects on private life are shown, in this case aspects of career aspiration, everyday racism and sexual orientation. The films often focus on protagonists from the working class, for example in Mike Leigh's Meantime (1983) or High Expectations (1988) or in Ken Loach's Riff-Raff (1991). Social minorities are addressed as well as the conflicts of the time, for example the Northern Ireland conflict in films such as Angel - Street Without End ( Neil Jordan , 1982), Cal ( Pat O'Connor , 1984) or Secret Protocol (Ken Loach, 1990).

Heritage films

The Heritage films deal with the English past, with the class structures and the value systems of past eras. Often staged in a painterly and decorative way, with landscape motifs in the foreground, these films embark on a search for national identity, examine the breaks in the often glorified past, shaped by puritanism , and try to build bridges to current problems. These films include Marek Kanievska's Another Country (1984), James Ivory's Heat and Dust (1982) and Room with a View (1986), and David Lean's Journey to India (1985). Many of these films are based on novels by Edward Morgan Forster .

Art house films

Filmmakers who came from experimental film are increasingly establishing themselves in the feature film sector. They rejected the prevailing mainstream aesthetic and created artificial film worlds, fed from non-film arts. The social criticism was encoded in subjectivity, dream-like images. Peter Greenaway paved the way for this direction of film with The Drawer's Contract (1982). Derek Jarman has dealt with films such as The Angelic Conversation (1985) with the British cultural heritage, namely the works of Shakespeare . Other directors in this direction are Terence Davies ( Distant Voices, Still Life , 1988) and Neil Jordan ( The Time of the Wolves , 1986).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kerstin Gutberlet : New British Cinema in: Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Reclams Sachlexikon des Films. 2nd edition, 2007. Philipp Reclam jun. GmbH & Co, Stuttgart. P. 473ff.