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the BBC to try to emulate ITV’s success with bland, middle-of-the-road dramas such as Heartbeat (Yorkshire 1992–) by commissioning equally unadventurous soap-star vehicles such as Harbour Lights (BBC 1999–2000) and Sunburn (BBC 1998–2000). Clocking Off provided the BBC with an opportunity to return to its traditional strengths with a northern working-class drama intent on updating social realism for a new ‘postmodern’ television audience. In the ratings-driven climate of the late 1990s when Clocking Off was being developed (under its original title of
Del Principe argues that a compelling historical and political vision of post-unification Italy lies beneath the preternatural façade of Ugo Tarchettis Fantastic Tales, and that the authors transgressive approach to social realism is a reflection of the vast, cultural transformations of the period. Del Principe proposes correlations between sexual and political realms surfacing in Tarchettis narrative as indicators of mutating class structure and emerging capitalism. An examination of spatial allegories engages a discussion of psychic and physical modes of hysteria and xenophobic reactions that stem from the nationalistic fervor of post-unification Italy.
The British television director Alan Clarke is primarily associated with the visceral social realism of such works as his banned borstal play, Scum, and his study of football hooliganism, The Firm. This book uncovers the full range of his work from the mythic fantasy of Penda's Fen, to the radical short film on terrorism, Elephant. The author uses original research to examine the development of Clarke's career from the theatre and the ‘studio system’ of provocative television play strands of the 1960s and 1970s, to the increasingly personal work of the 1980s, which established him as one of Britain's greatest auteur directors. The book examines techniques of television direction and proposes new methodologies as it questions the critical neglect of directors in what is traditionally seen as a writer's medium. It raises issues in television studies, including aesthetics, authorship, censorship, the convergence of film and television, drama-documentary form, narrative and realism.
The book begins with a consideration of the origins and influences that have shaped Mathieu Kassovitz's development as a director, but also the cultural context within which he emerges as a filmmaker. It argues new realism, the banlieue. The book examines the American influences evident in all of Kassovitz's films to date as a director and explores the continuity and difference between his films as actor and director. The first phase of Mathieu Kassovitz's career comprises his short films and feature films up to and including
television schedule was underscored by a new candid form of social realism devoted to the stresses of working-class men’s experiences. A genre is born The unflinching mode of social realism implemented by Z Cars was, in part, a response to the arrival of commercial television. Following the UK Government’s 1954 Television Act an Independent Television Authority (ITA) awarded
about making the case that social realism, so central to British national cinematic identity, might be judged beyond its effectiveness (or otherwise) as a political medium. ‘British cinema’, and perhaps more specifically British realism, is, as the Polish film-maker Pawel Pawlikowski argued, ‘drowning in Sociology’, 12 to the extent where it is defined within the popular and critical imagination by its ‘grit’ 13 and not its grace. When we have spoken of art cinema in Britain, we have been drawn towards the 1980s, when, for Newland and Hoyle
70 2 Refining studio realism By the early 1960s, television was more established in both reach and form, yet despite significant technological shifts its production processes remained largely unchanged. Actor experience had increased, yet an analysis of studio realism during this period as the result solely of actors’ increased familiarity with the medium is complicated by external factors; primarily, the advent in British television and film of social realism. Though frequently linked with a particular ‘type’ or sub-genre of television drama, e.g. the work
des Variétés (Pagnol 1995 : I, 304–6), he publicly endorsed Pagnol’s lighter take on social realism in the pages of L’Information , casting it as potentially revolutionary for a venue long associated with light comedy. La pièce dégage une révolte indignée contre les mœurs présentes et risque de sonner étrangement sur les planches où
Film , David Thomson writes: There can be no doubt about the opportunities German cinema offered in the 1970s to politically committed but formally experimental films ... [Fassbinder] was an exponent of pure film, minus vibrato or expressiveness, so uncompromisingly plain that we rediscover social realism beneath all the petty guises of life’s performance ... His style was antistyle. 57 The following
-political concerns that the early 1990s were a period of moral decline. Lastly, an examination of The Cops (BBC, 1998–2001) determines how digital, handheld cameras combine docudrama’s emotional realism with the ‘horizontality’ of contemporary social realism to embody the precariousness of Anthony Giddens’s ‘new individualism’ whilst critiquing New Labour’s adoption of ‘left