HAND IN

• Micro analysis first draft FINAL deadline today

• Feedback on yesterday’s research -

• What have you learnt about the themes and issues in the two films?

Which sub genre of crime are our two films?

• True Crime – based on real past events• Crime horror – extreme violence, bloody based crime• Crime thriller – problem to solve/race against time• Police procedural – depicts the acts of the police force in

solving a crime• Hood films – African American gang culture• Heist – elaborate theft/robbery• Detective – A private detective is hired to solve a crime• Legal Dramas – show the aftermath – court cases• Mob films – dealing with the mafia

Social Realism as a genre

What is social realism?

Read the article and bullet point key facts

SOCIAL REALISM

• A realistic portrayal of British society

Screen Gash

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p004pyyx

• Social Realism  • The most 'typically British' of all film genres • Better than any other genre, social realism has

shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and shaping our ideas of what British cinema can be. While our cinema has experienced all the fluctuations in fortune of Hollywood's first export territory, realism has been Britain's richest gift to the world.

• Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic.

• What are working class activities?

• Hard Luck, Humour and Working Class Heroes – • The Story of Social Realism• Showing:• BBC TWO, Saturday August 11, 9pm• • http://www.bbc.co.uk/britishfilm/summer/documentary/social_realism.shtml -

play short film

• Synopsis:• Programme Three in BBC TWO's landmark series on the history of British

Film takes a look at the most British of genres - Social Realism.• There was a revolution in British film at the end of the 1950s: working

people and the realities of their everyday lives started to appear on the big screen. Hardship, Humour and Heroes traces the evolution from Billy Liar to Billy Elliot via Saturday Night Sunday Morning, Kes and Trainspotting.

• Featuring original interviews with Ewan McGregor, Jamie Bell, Rita Tushingham, Malcom McDowell, Phil Daniels, Danny Boyle and Johnny Vegas - as well as the directors who have shaped the genre: Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

Social Realism conventions

• Realistic settings• Realistic events and situations• Believable filming technique• Hard luck• Working class heroes• Economic hardship• Life’s struggles• Experiences of REAL Britons• Gritty style• Urban locations

Billy Elliot clip – how is this social realism?

• Featured Social Realism Films• British Film Forever • A Way Of Life • All Or Nothing • Billy Elliot • Billy Liar • Flame In The Streets • Ratcatcher • Sweet Sixteen • The Boys • The Plague • The Stars Look Down • The Whisperers • This Sporting Life • Twenty Four Seven

London to Brighton vs Bullet Boy

• Which do you think depicts social realism more, based on what you know so far?

• In Film• Social Realism in cinema is a style that finds its roots in the Italian neorealism

movement known for naturalistic, substance-over-style works of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and, to some extent, Federico Fellini, but is considered Britain's main form of cinematic style.[7] For Britons, their early cinema used common social interaction found in Dickens and Thomas Hardy.[8] One of the first British films to emphasize realism's value as social protest was the 1902 film from U.K. director and Scottish born film pioneer James Williamson[9], A Reservist Before the War, and After the War[10] which memorialized the Boer War serviceman coming back home to unemployment.[11] Repressive censorship during 1945-1954 prevented British films from more radical social positions. [12]

• Social realism was also adopted by Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s, including Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946) which won the Palme d'Or at the first Cannes Film Festival, and Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land (1953) which won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. This in turn gave rise to the Indian New Wave, with early Bengali art films such as Ritwik Ghatak's Nagarik (1952) and Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959). Realism in Indian cinema dates back even earlier to the 1920s and 1930s, with early examples including V. Shantaram's films Indian Shylock (1925) and The Unexpected (1937).[13]

• The United States was one of the last countries to adopt this form of style in cinema. Kine Weekly, marketed as an invaluable record of British film and television industries development, [14] in 1947 wrote, "Americans have shown [sic] they want pictures reflecting the simple emotions. We are trying to crash into their market by offering them gloom-sadism-and-soft-focus. We must aim at the box office and not the art gallery. It is no good aiming over their heads. It will not help us earn dollars.”[15] British Social Realism cinema has an objective distancing from what the characters think and feel, or a naturalism in its character spines.[16]

• This introduces a very important second dimension to the realism debate. What we judge to be realistic is not just an assessment of how a film or scene relates to what we know of in the real world. Realism always involves an aesthetic judgement about how this vision of the real has been produced and how it relates to, or is in dialogue with, other representations. Realism is always in some sense an innovation, a break or some modification in the “audio-visual” toolkit of representation. It always stands in some relationship (which also includes borrowing and adapting) with other traditions and specific films, inviting acts of comparison.

• This opening to the film is shocking and, we might say, accords with an initial but hopefully uncontroversial definition of realism. Realism in film requires a plausible range of character action and interaction within the specific circumstances depicted.

• Crime fiction is the genre of fiction that deals with crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred. It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction (including the whodunnit), legal thriller, courtroom drama and hard-boiled fiction.

Crime genres

• A Crime film, in the most general sense, is a film that involves various aspects crime and the criminal justice system. Stylistically, it can fall under many different genres, most commonly drama film, thriller film, mystery film, action film and film noir. Films focused on the Mafia are a typical example of crime films.

Lesson 2 – Social Realism

• Start with hand in and feedback from research• What is social realism – read article and bullet point• Discuss, introduce definition – working class activites?,

watch Gash and watch short film on Social realism – make notes on key points

• To feedback – in pairs come up with the conventions of social realism, FB and show my list

• Screen BBC clip of Billy Elliot – how is this social realism? Could show director’s clip if time

• Are our films crime films? Discuss• Write about LTB & BB – how socially realistic?

• Use social realism in a Sentence• See images of social realism• Search social realism on the Web

• –noun a style of painting, esp. of the 1930s in the U.S., in which the scenes depicted typically convey a message of social or political protest edged with satire.