After researching on the dirfferent Genre's we were given to choose, we have decided to do a A British social realist drama. We had some trouble on deciding what exactly a British Social realist Drama was and what we would need to portray in our opening . After searching we found this definition for it;
'Social realism in films is representative of real life, with all its difficulties. The stories and people portrayed are everyday characters, usually from working class backgrounds. Typically, films within the social realist canon are gritty, urban dramas about the struggle to survive the daily grind.'
This then helped us to view other films that involved this definition, these films were such as Billy Elliot, This Is England, Kidulthood, once apon a time in the midlands, control and eat is east.
These films here, are based on the conventions of a social realist film, these are as so....
drugs
working class
unemployed
alchol
reality
violence
outside of society
crime
troubled/ misunderstood
personal relationships
real life situations
sex
urban locations
sometimes shocking narrative
slight humour/ black comedy
The general theme of the 'Social realist genre, has also become known as a Kitchen Sink Drama, we found more on why this is on Wikepidia.com -
"Kitchen sink realism was an
English cultural movement which developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in
theatre,
art,
novels,
film and
television plays. It used a style of
social realism which often depicted the domestic situations of
working class Britons living in council flats and spending their off-hours in grimy pubs to explore social issues and political controversies."
"The British New Wave is the name given to a trend in filmmaking among
directors in
Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The label is a tranposition of
Nouvelle Vague, the French term first applied to the films of
François Truffaut,
Jean-Luc Godard and others. There is considerable overlap with the so-called "Angry Young Men", such as Osborne and director
Tony Richardson, who challenged the social status quo with their dramas about
working class life."
Labels: Lisette Cooke, Lydia Scott, Vicky Pearce