Free Cinema

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Free Cinema was a documentary film movement that emerged in England in the 1950s. Co-founded by Lindsay Anderson with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti, the movement began with a programme of their short films at the National Film Theatre in London on 5 February 1956. The programme was such a success that five further programmes appeared under the Free Cinema banner before the founders decided to call it a day in 1959. Anderson and Reisz had previously founded, with Gavin Lambert, the shortlived but influential journal Sequence, of which Anderson later wrote '"No Film Can Be Too Personal". So ran the initial pronouncement in the first Free Cinema manifesto. It could equally well have been the motto of SEQUENCE'.^[1]

The manifesto was drawn up by Lindsay Anderson and Lorenza Mazzetti at a Charing Cross cafe called The Soup Kitchen, where Mazzetti worked. It read: ^[2]

These films were not made together; nor with the
idea of showing them together. But when they came
together, we felt they had an attitude in common.
Implicit in this attitude is a belief in freedom,
in the importance of people and the significance of
the everyday.

As filmmakers we believe that

No film can be too personal.
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.

At an interview in 2001, Mazzetti explained that the reference to size was prompted by the then-new experiments in CinemaScope and other large screen formats, "The image speaks" was an assertion of the primacy of the image over the sound. Reisz said that "An attitude means a style" meant that "a style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion."^[3]

The first Free Cinema programme featured just three films: Anderson's O Dreamland, about an amusement park in Margate in Kent, Reisz and Richardson's Momma Don't Allow, about a North London jazz club, and Mazzetti's Together, a documentary-style fiction about a pair of deaf-mutes in London's bomb-torn East End. The films were accompanied by the above provocative film manifesto, written chiefly by Anderson, which helped bring the film-makers valuable publicity. Later programmes brought in other likeminded filmmakers, among them Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta (with Nice Time), Michael Grigsby and Robert Vas. The two film technicians closely associated with the movement were Walter Lassally and John Fletcher. Three of the six programmes were devoted to foreign work, including the emerging French New Wave and new Polish cinema.

The films were 'free' in the sense that they were made outside the confines of the film industry and were distinguished by their style and attitude and by their conditions of production. All of the films were made cheaply, for no more than a few hundred pounds, mostly with grants from the British Film Institute's Experimental Film Fund, although some of the later films were sponsored by the Ford Motor Company or funded independently. They were typically shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, handheld cameras, usually with a non-synchronised soundtrack added separately. Most of the films deliberately omitted narration. The film-makers shared a determination to focus on ordinary, largely working-class British subjects, which they felt had been overlooked by the middle-class-dominated British film industry of the time, displaying a rare sympathy and respect, and a self-consciously poetic style.

The founders were dismissive of mainstream documentary film-making in Britain, particularly of the British Documentary Movement of the 1930s and 1940s associated with John Grierson, although they admired Humphrey Jennings. Another acknowledged influence was French director Jean Vigo. Free Cinema bears some similarities to, but as many differences from, the cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema movements.

Free Cinema was a major influence on the British New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and all of the founders except Mazzetti would make films associated with the movement, Reisz with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Richardson with A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Anderson with This Sporting Life (1963).