Free Cinema

Free Cinema
Facets Video
Suggested retail $70
3 DVD set
North American release of a more robust PAL BFI DVD set.

Facet's newish 3-disc release of the British Free Cinema movement's work is a nice reminder that history of postwar documentary goes beyond American cinema verite. It's a reminder that other national cinemas are just as worthy for consideration; Canadian documentary at the very least deserves wider video availability, and perhaps other national documentary cinemas deserve unearthing for an American academic and cinephile audience.

Ultimately, the Free Cinema will interest most viewers on two counts: the stylistic verve the filmmakers bring to nonfiction film (mobile camera, deft framing, jazz soundtracks) and the obvious training ground for the British New Wave, which boasted many of the Free Cinema makers: Anderson, Reisz, and Richardson. These filmmakers' films in fact are the strongest, at least in the first disc of the set.

O Dreamland has all the ideological problems the Screen folks saw in Anderson: by subjecting the working class social actors to an objectifying gaze rather than a view depicting their subjective experience of an amusement park, the film's invocation of the "dreamland" is ironic, a sly questioning of Britain's postwar consumer culture.


That said, the documentary is laudable for its updating of Griersonianism for new smaller-gauge technology and new historical circumstances. Like many of the others on the disc, it manages to straddle both realist and formalist-expressionist aesthetics of documentary making. For instance, the eye for framing juxtaposition in Dreamland show a narrational presence beyond the "objective" or objectivist stance of the verite counterparts.

In general, British cinema tends to get overlooked in the American pedagogical context. This Free Cinema compilation might give more reason for its inclusion in our sightlines.

DVD Talk review
Wikipedia on Free Cinema movement
Senses of Cinema article on Tony Richardson