Cinema: The New Wave

Peter Wollen

Introduction

In our previous issue, Tom Nairn’s essay ‘The Bourgeois Nemesis’, foundational for nlr, appeared for the first time in English. In this number, four other articles, which came out alongside it in 1963, in the same double issue on Britain of the Italian journal Il Contemporaneo, are translated back into English, as the original texts no longer exist. These comprise Peter Wollen on the cinema, Raymond Williams on fiction and drama, Eric Hobsbawm on the social order of that time and Ralph Miliband on the prospects for Labour. The quintet of pieces published in nlr six decades later, striking enough as a set, made up less than half the length of the symposium in Italian. That included articles on the visual arts, music and economy; a short story by Alan Sillitoe; a script for television by Arnold Wesker; a conversation with Joan Littlewood; poems by Michael Hamburger, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and others. Heading the issue was an introductory sketch of the cultural and socio-political landscape of the country, ‘From the Suez expedition to the Profumo affair’, by Giorgio Fanti, who put the double number together. A text on Fanti follows the articles we have had retranslated. Nothing like the collection he assembled existed in Britain itself. It was a remarkable feat. Is there anything comparable to it, published in any European language (including English) in the subsequent sixty years—a symposium of such length, with such a galaxy of talent from the target country, in any journal of a host country? The sad answer is simply, no. The lands of the European Union, which boasts of its cosmopolitan breadth, remain provincially preoccupied with themselves, their elites too ideologically at one to trouble themselves with the cultural or intellectual differences between the countries they rule. Lack of curiosity, born of confidence in political identity, is the hallmark of the caste.

The conjuncture in Britain that generated the coverage of Il Contemporaneo bears, in at least one respect, a close resemblance to that of today. Then, as now, Ukania is at the fag-end of thirteen years of Tory rule: the regime in place no less discredited, its economy flagging still more visibly, the Labour Party all but universally expected to return to office at the next election, looming less than a year ahead. Mark Twain’s adage that history doesn’t repeat itself, though it often rhymes, naturally holds good. Sunak, a more proficient leader, is not Home. But his party is much less popular today than the Conservatives remained even in 1963. It is highly unlikely it will come as close to clinging onto power as Home did in 1964. On the other side of the aisle, Starmer cannot hold a parliamentary candle to Wilson’s performance as leader of the opposition, acknowledged even by opponents as a bravura display of eloquence, trenchancy and wit (evaporating in office). But Starmer’s lead in the opinion polls is to date much larger, and control of his party absolute, which Wilson’s was not. Like Blair, on whom he would like to model himself, and unlike Wilson, he enjoys the benevolence, not just of such reliable stand-bys as the Guardian and the Mirror, but also of the megaphones of the business press, the Financial Times and the Economist. That a clear-cut parliamentary majority for Labour might still prove out of reach is a function, not of any improbable Conservative comeback, but of the fragmentation of the political scene to which Ukanian decline has led, with the snp still in power in Scotland, and the Liberal party leading the challenge to many a southern Tory seat. Yet the first-past-the-post system still favours the post-war dichotomy of the two big parties, whose logic is Starmer in comfortable command at Westminster. With Labour nearing power again in 2024, Miliband’s prognosis of the outcome in 1964 has lost little of its critical edge today.

Socially and culturally, it is another story, as the texts of Hobsbawm, Williams and Wollen bring home. The class divisions of the country are not the same; the composition of its rulers has altered; its trade unions are weaker; sexes and races are less unequal. Britain’s economic plight is graver, with a fall in the growth of productivity and per capita income steeper and more sudden than any drop in the past, whose causes remain to be explored. Culturally, perhaps above all, nothing comparable to the iconoclastic vitality and mordancy of the arts and satires of the early sixties has been visible since. Could the spectacle of a Public Prosecutor in Downing Street do something to alter that?

Peter Wollen

Cinema: The New Wave

The rise of a ‘new wave’ in British cinema should be welcomed, but it is still too soon to venture any more than a provisional estimate of its achievement. The two most gifted exponents of the movement—the directors Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson—have so far made just one film each, and it may be that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz) and This Sporting Life (Anderson) have had more praise than they deserve. The lacklustre history of British cinema has understandably made critics indulgent of any director who challenges the narrow outlook of the film industry.

From its beginnings, world cinema has been dominated, culturally and economically, by the United States. The first sound film was American. The first colour film was American. Almost every talented European director has spent some time working in the us, many remaining there permanently. Even Eisenstein went there to shoot ¡Que viva Mexico! Few European films have penetrated the American market, while the rest of the world has long been awash with us output. Initially, German film appeared a potential rival. But heavy American investment in the German industry, combined, of course, with the ascent of Nazism, dealt with that challenge. Almost all its major directors—Murnau, Lang, Ophüls—emigrated across the Atlantic. German cinema never recovered.

British cinema has remained more subordinate to America than any other. In France, Italy and Japan, the linguistic difference and—in general—the lesser extent of American cultural and economic penetration allowed the development of a more autonomous cinema. Moreover, some masters—Renoir, Rossellini and Mizoguchi—remained at home despite the rupture of the War. Britain, by contrast, gave Hitchcock to Hollywood. But if the uk’s cinema emerged as an appendix of America’s, it simultaneously developed an attitude of naïve provincialism. This was a completely commercial cinema, in the American manner, unquestioning in its respect for the ‘star’ system, valuation by audience size and formulaic subject matter. Yet it sought to free itself from this by reasserting a distinctively British character. While the American cinema was genuinely American, catering for a public whose cultural identity was still coalescing—developing in a reciprocal relationship between spectator and director—British cinema sought to graft a caricature of Britishness onto its imitation of American cinema, one which pandered to the dilapidated sentimentality of its public.

During the 1950s, American cinema confronted a deepening crisis, accompanied by the rise of television. Production was drastically reduced. The industry placed its hopes in grandiose, wasteful super-productions, culminating in Cleopatra. As a result, the possibility of a relatively low-budget, quality cinema emerged in Europe. Ingmar Bergman was first on the scene. Then in 1958, French cinema took the lead. Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, Hiroshima, mon amour by Resnais and Godard’s À bout de souffle showcased a whole range of new possibilities. In Italy, Antonioni achieved worldwide fame, and neo-realism was brought up to date. The growing shortage of new American films gave impetus to these ‘new waves’. In France, experimental films began to circulate in mainstream venues, helped by the country’s quasi-anarchic distribution system. In Britain, however, two monolithic distributors, Rank and abc, persisted in their conservatism. It seemed that British cinema would be left behind.

Finally, in 1960, new horizons opened up. This was due not to any change of heart on the part of producers and distributors, but to the success of a new group of playwrights and novelists. With one bestseller or box-office hit after another, film adaptations of the group’s work became an attractive proposition. Warner Brothers supported the recently-formed film company Woodfall, enabling Tony Richardson to make Look Back in Anger, based on John Osborne’s play. (Richardson had been its stage director.) John Braine’s novel Room at the Top was directed by Jack Clayton, with Simone Signoret bringing great emotional force to her role, winning an Oscar for her performance. Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s novel, was an unexpected box-office success for Rank. Richardson followed this with A Taste of Honey, adapted from Shelagh Delaney’s successful stage play, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, another adaptation from Sillitoe. The British ‘new wave’ had arrived.

The literary and theatrical antecedents of the new British cinema set it apart from its French and Italian equivalents. While the new French directors wrote their own scripts, or at least worked from material written specifically for the cinema, the British relied on adaptations—from a narrow and fairly homogeneous set of writers. It is therefore not easy to separate the distinguishing qualities of the new cinema from those of the new theatre or new novel. British cinema has not produced directors with a deep cinematic culture like Godard or Truffaut, Rivette or Rohmer, developed through their work at Cahiers du cinéma. Before they had any chance of making films, these French directors had conceptualized an understanding of film’s history and an aesthetics of cinematography that accorded great importance to mise-en-scène and acknowledged in particular the formal and stylistic achievements of the major American directors. Samuel Fuller’s influence on À bout de souffle or George Cukor’s on Une femme est une femme is altogether evident.

The new British directors, it should be said, also began as critics and theorists. Reisz, Richardson and Anderson all took part in the Free Cinema movement of the 1940s, and Anderson was a co-founder of the journal Sequence. The emphasis, however, was always on the need to develop cinema’s social conscience. This sensibility was already present in the watchword they adopted (‘the poetry of the everyday’). They found it hard to conceive of its transformation in audio-visual terms without the ornament of an essentially literary idea and plot. The directors had not developed original ideas or found a style for transforming literary material into something cinematographically valid. Reisz himself came to admit that ‘our films lack style and imagination, with the result that so far they have been works of small account—with no sense of the urgency of an exceptional personality’. The British ‘new wave’ is therefore vulnerable to the charge that its primary interest is sociological, that it presents not a new idea of cinema but a new range of subjects and milieux.

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Cinema: The New Wave

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