WIth a BBC Radio documentary on the movement set to debut this weekend, the Guardian's Simon Hoggart spends some time remembering the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s. Now largely forgotten, the movement was nonetheless hugely influential at the time, popular with the working class whose lives it reflected on screen an instrumental in creating a new narrative focus in both British film and television. (For Hoggart, there's a personal touch as well: his father, Richard Hoggart, wrote a book in 1957 called The Uses of Literacy that reflected many of the same values and ideals as that of the Free Cinema movement.)
Looking at the movement from the perspective of 50 years later, it seems to represent a revolution so basic it's staggering that it ever seemed necessary: Free Cinema (so named by its founder, the pioneering director Lindsay Anderson, because it was free of both the patriotic demands of wartime production and the commercial demands of mainstream cinema) wanted to do no more and no less than tell the stories of working-class Britons from all over the country, rather than simply focus on the stories of southern England's middle class and the aristocracy. And yet the movies were so radical in their production methods (they were made with the cheapest available Bolex cameras, on budgets little more than a few hundred dollars) and so unique in their means (a number of them were funded as part of a community arts grant from a then-socially conscious Ford Motor Company, something that's almost unthinkable now) that the whole movement seems like something from a fantasy world.
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