Social Realism BFI- ScreenOnline by Richard Armstrong

"In the years following World War 1, it was widely felt that the key to a national cinema lay in 'realism and restraint'."

"This view reflected the tastes of mainly south-eastern middle-class audience."

"Meanwhile, working class audiences, it was said favoured Hollywood genre movies."

"Realism carried patrician connotations of education and high seriousness."

Michael Balcon- "British industry's longstanding rivalry with Hollywood in terms of 'realism and tinsel'."

"smoothed away the tensions of the class-bound society in the depiction of factory life."

"Thanks to relaxation to censorship, characters had sex lives, money worries, social problems."

"The New Wav 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."

"Addressed the erosion of regional and class identities amid a landscape, rendered increasingly uniform by consumerism."

1960s- "Ken Loach and Mike Leigh assessed the impact of the consumer society on family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state ad the consensus that built it."

"A national cinema with a genuine and vital commitment to the way we live."