Week 6: Research into British Social Realism

This week's assignment's quite tricky, especially for international students. The trick's not to confuse Social Realism with Socialist Realism, the dominant (= the only allowed) style of art behind the Iron Curtain. Both of them occurred in roughly the same time (starting in 1930s, Social Realism was as an artistic response to Great Depression. Socialist Realism was a feature of the USSR under Stalin from 1934 on), both of them concerned working class, however in different way. The former has to do with a worker facing the capitalist system, especially its inequalities streaming from class division of society and other flaws of capitalism. The latter was involved in glorification of labour and working class. 

Socialist Realism had its own set of rules which artists had to obey and a special Committee had to accept a work of art as worth showing, in other words it decided if something is art or not. Thus, in order to have their work accepted for public display, anti-communist artists had to use the guidelines of Socialist Realism in such a way, so that only after deep analysis the true and intended meaning could be decoded.

Having said this, what strikes me in British Social Realism is straightforwardness of the films. In contrast to Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble (1977), Promised Land (1975), Ash and Diamond (1958) or Kanal (1957), the films I have watched to prepare for this week's assignment [Tony Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (1959) or Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty (1997)] weren't that intellectually demanding so far as decoding of their meaning is concerned. Hence, it'll be difficult not to simply copy one of the scenes appearing in at least one of the films. It's highly probable, though, that the films I happened to find in the library (unfortunately I couldn't find any of Mike Leigh's films) aren't ones of the finest pieces of British Social Realism and so the film that we as a group will make on Monday won't be that tightly connected to the ideas of the era.