BFI research

"In the years following World War I, it was widely felt that the key to a national cinema lay in 'realism and restraint'."

"Britain's contribution to cinema in the 1930s lay in a state-sponsored documentary tradition that would feed into the 1940s mainstream."

"Balcon, in his position as head of Ealing Studios, would become a key figure in the emergence of a national cinema characterised by stoicism and verisimilitude. Combining the objective temper and aesthetics of the documentary movement with the stars and resources of studio filmmaking, 1940s British cinema made a stirring appeal to a mass audience."

"Films like Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1952) reiterated gentler patrician values in the face of growing corporatisation and 'Americanisation'. To see Ealing's The Blue Lamp (1949) alongside a contemporary Hollywood film noir is to witness the growing cracks in the postwar consensus."

"Documentarist Humphrey Jennings had been responsible for consensus-building works like Listen to Britain (1942) and Spare Time (1939), which, looking at the British at play, forged a 'new iconography', influencing the 1950s Free Cinema documentary movement and the 1960s British New Wave."

"Related to, though independent of, the commercial mainstream, the New Wave was fed by the 'Angry Young Men' of 1950s theatre, the verisimilitude of Italian Neo-realism and the youth appeal of the French New Wave."

"British 'auteurs' like Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and John Schlesinger dealt with prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, alienation and relationship problems. Here were factory workers, office underlings, dissatisfied wives, pregnant girlfriends, runaways, the marginalised, poor and depressed."

"Identified with their directors rather than with the industry, the New Wave films tended to address issues around masculinity that would become common in British social realism."

"The New Wave protagonist was usually a working-class male without bearings in a society in which traditional industries and the cultures that went with them were in decline"

"Ken Loach and Mike Leigh assessed the impact of the consumer society on family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state and the consensus that built it."

"The breakdown of the collective consensus in postwar Britain seems to be captured in the tragicomic exchanges of Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet (1990), Naked (1993) and Secrets and Lies (1996). In these films, Leigh examined the fractures in domestic and social life wrought by divisive Thatcherite policies in an increasingly fragmented and multicultural Britain."

"If the New Wave short-sightedly blamed women for the blighting of British manhood, women in Loach and Leigh are often complex and powerful individuals"

"Responding to the moralistic entrepreneurialism of the Thatcher years, 'Films on Four' My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Brezhnev (both 1985) followed characters from the margins as they attempted to stake a claim in the new order."

"As the funding environment grew more precarious, by the 1990s a formulaic 'triumph-over-adversity' narrative combining the streets and cityscapes of traditional British realism with the feel-good vibe of Hollywood individualism answered the challenge of reiterating a national cinema amid spreading multiplexes."