At the Chalk Face
What happened during the twenty year reign of selective education? Did the Eleven Plus fail? At the Chalk Face examines movies shot in schools to investigate.
Related programme
Fred Davies explores the interfaces between cinema, culture and history.
Their work would lead to the British New Wave giving a voice to the working class, to the regions and to youth in films like Saturday Night Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz 1960).The "permissive society" is depicted, a challenge to long held taboos about sex, bad language and nudity.
Even so, these films still generally provided the viewpoint of the male. One film of the time that was not of the New Wave but dealt with the nature of film was Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), the story of an amateur film maker obsessed with using his camera to capture the faces of women as he kills them. Interestingly Powell used his own amateur home movie footage of himself with his son to explain the psychology of this sadistic scopophilia.
The New Wave, however, was short lived as Hollywood studios actually were established in Britain (following the lead of MGM British in the 30s), starting with the James Bond franchise (put together by Cubby Broccoli. an American, for the Hollywood studio United Artists), to the extent that by the end of the decade nearly all British films were actually Hollywood products. Continuing from MGM’s Mr Chips, Columbia’s To Sir, with Love (1967, with American star Sidney Poitier) looked at an East London school as a social problem but with a Hollywood feel-good happy ending. Almost as a riposte there was Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic, surreal If… (1968) about an armed revolt in a public school, mirroring the student events of 1968, but also about the state of the nation from a New Left stance.
British cinema, whether mainstream or amateur, has always reflected contemporary society but always engaged with its cultural and social values. It's usually reinforced them, occasionally contested them but always provided an insight into the social history of the period, from the official voice of the 30s (generally middle class, middle aged, male and English) to the multicultural mix of today. Cinema might be the "dream factory" or a culture industry of mere entertainment. It might be our rational, conscious, objective stories we tell ourselves, or our dreams and nightmares - but we always need these representations to help construct our identities, past and present, and to understand them.
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Content last updated: 07/01/2005
