Identifying the distinction between ‘social realism’ and ‘poetic realism’

British Cinema has been described as and conventionally understood to be a cinema that is either ‘literary’ or ‘realist’. These are two longstanding traditions of British Cinema, the origins of what is referred to as literary being films such as The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933, Alexander Korda) and Wuthering Heights (1920, A. V. Bramble). These films tended to be literary adaptations of Britain’s classic authors such as Dickens and the Bronte’s, or they were historical adaptations and biopics, drawing on elements of British history such as the Tudors and historical war’s. However, even when these films were not adaptions, they were still considered to be literary films due to them being more dialogue driven and seemingly having more association with literary conventions than with the emerging style from Hollywood.

What has been identified as the other dominant aspect of British Cinema is realism. This is a tradition which emerged around the same time as literary cinema, post war documentaries such as Coal Face (1935, Alberto Cavalcanti) and Night Mail (1936, Harry Watt and Basil Wright) began to capture a different side to British life, focusing on British industry and the everyday people who made up the workforce of Britain. These films shone a light on aspects of society that weren’t otherwise being shown, and this approach to showing the British working class experience was something that soon spread over to narrative cinema. Films such as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1960, Karel Reisz), Look Back in Anger (1959, Tony Richardson), and Room at the Top (1959, Jack Clayton) emerged, films with a “commitment to addressing contemporary social realities” which also featured a “politically serious representation of the working class experience” (Hill, John. 1986. Page 1). These early British realist films introduced many techniques and themes which would continue to feature heavily in realist cinema, they paved the way for contemporary British directors in their decision to feature “location shooting and the employment of unknown regional actors, occasionally in improvised performances” (Hill, John. 1986. Page 127).

From these early realist films emerged Ken Loach. Loach began to attract attention through a series of dramas made for the BBC. In these early television dramas, such as Cathy Come Home (1969), Loach employed the faux-documentary style of the early British realist films, and throughout Loaches long career he has continued to be “an unwavering chronicler of the dispossessed and an advocate for an unfussy, quasi-documentary approach that strives for naturalism in performance and situation” (Leggott, James. 2008. Page 72). The combination of this now distinctively-Loach visual style paired with a dedication to telling stories focused on the struggles of the working classes has made Loach a director who has continued to be at the forefront of social realist cinema.

However, in more recent years, a new approach to realism has appeared; filmmakers such as Lynne Ramsey and Shane Meadows, who continue to keep the tradition of realism alive in British Cinema, have began to adapt the faux-documentary style of Loach and the other social realist directors into something more poetic and personal. This new wave of realist filmmaking is not only different visually from the traditional social realist cinema, but it also differs thematically. Poetic realist films tend to be less class conscious than social realism, films such as My Summer of Love (2004, Pawel Pawlikowski) ‘(are) not concerned directly with authentic representations and explication of class difference. Rather, (they) operate on a broader thematic platform’ (David Forrest. 2013. Page 36). These films have moved away from the ‘angry young men’ of traditional social realism and instead tell stories about youth, ethnic minorities and women. This move away from the typically male dominated films of directors such as Loach and Leigh has been seen as a move in a new direction for realist cinema, ‘the masculine bias of much British social realist cinema has been challenged by a proliferation of films centering upon female characters, very often from the perspective of a female writer or director’ (James Leggott. 2008. Page 72). This shift from the more narrative driven, class conscious, and natural looking films of social realism towards the more visually led, broad, stylized films of poetic realism is something which has led to much debate and speculation. What is considered realism is seen to be shifting from the politically driven, honest depiction of the working class towards films with more of a focus on personal realities.

In 2016 Loach released I, Daniel Blake, a film which was considered by many a return to form for the director. The film revolves around the story of the titular character, Daniel Blake, an everyman from Newcastle who has suffered from a severe heart attack leaving him unfit to work, and his following struggles with the benefits system and the state. The film starts Dave Johns, best known as a stand up comedian, alongside Hayley Squires, best known for her television work. This cast of relatively unknown and regional actors is a tradition for British realism, having actors who aren’t well established allows the performances to become fully absorbing and believable, not tainted by recognizable faces. This balance of professional and non-professional actors is something which Loach has actively pursued throughout his career, and the casting of a comedian is typical of Loach’s films, ‘he has not only sought out ‘unknowns’ but also performers capable of departing from theatrical modes of acting’, typically these actors capable of moving away from what Loach feels to be a dependence on a theatrical style of acting were comedians and performers from the northern club circuit, ‘comics (such as) Bill Dean, Johnny Gee and Joey Kaye, whom Loach believed could bring a ‘sharpness and spontaneity’ to the production that ‘straight actors’ would not.’ (John Hill. 2011. Page 120). These moments of comedy in the otherwise bleak situation the characters find themselves in is a common aspect of social realism, characters often walk the fine line between comedy and tragedy.

Like much of Loach’s work, I, Daniel Blake was made to highlight and address issues in Britain such as a growing use in food banks, poverty, and the faceless monster that is the current benefits system, reducing people to simply numbers in a database. Loach firmly places the blame for these issues on those in power. However, despite this clear political statement the film makes, the leading characters of the film are not overtly political; Blake simply wants to go back to work and Katie, Hayley Squires character, wants to have enough money to look after her children and go back to her studies. Keeping the characters somewhat distanced from politics means that the audience witness the current state of affairs alongside the characters as opposed to being force fed the information in something more resembling a propaganda film than a piece of social realist cinema. This technique also allows the film to be about more than just the characters, Loach is ‘concerned (with raising) questions about ‘the system’ rather than individuals’ (John Hill. 2011. Page 113). Making films with a clear political and social message is something that Loach has become known for throughout his career; Cathy Come Home, one of his earliest films, focused on a young couple and their fall into homelessness, this film and the public’s reaction to it led to the formation of the homeless charity Crisis. This commitment to making films which not only explore and show audiences aspects of society but also attempt to reform the systems in place is something which has become associated with Loach and his branch of realist cinema.

Aside from the political message and the cast of regional and relatively unknown actors, the film follows in the traditions of social realism in its visual style; Loach remains a firm adopter of the documentary aesthetic in his films. Neutral and natural lighting set ups allow the camera to flow freely around the locations and actors, following characters as they talk to each other, seemingly trying to keep up with the events as they unfold. This is a technique which Loach has employed from as early as Kes in 1969, while working with cameraman Chris Menges on Kes ‘the two men set out to light scenes in a way that it was ‘the space’ being filmed that ‘would be lit rather than the shot itself’’ (John Hill. 2011. Page 119). This partnership between Menges and Loach inspired much of the visual style that Loach is still using in I, Daniel Blake, techniques such as ‘placing the camera ‘back a little way’ in order to avoid inhibiting the actors and to permit them to do things that may have been unplanned’ (John Hill. 2011. Page 119). This technique of keeping the camera away from the action can be seen clearly as Blake goes around the construction sites and industrial estates of Newcastle handing out his CV, in this sequence several of the extra’s he interacts with seem as if they could be unaware of the filming taking place. The camera keeps its distance from the scene and the audio can barely be heard over the sounds of machinery. This mix of scripted and what appears to be real seems to be present as Blake spray paints his demands for his appeal date to be moved forward onto the side of the Jobcentre, the crowds which gather around him and the onlookers from busses and passing traffic appear to be real people witnessing the filming taking place. Allowing some reality to pass between the actors and the camera is something which has been identified as part of Loach’s well established visual style, this blending of real and fiction adds to the documentary style of his films and keeps some elements of the scene unscripted and unprepared for. The inclusion of unnamed and possibly unintentional characters in the film is ‘employed to place the characters’ actions in a social and cultural context and to link their particular predicaments to a shared (working-class) condition’ (John Hill. 2011. Page 107), the crowds which gather around Blake show that he is not alone in his situation.

The Unloved, Samantha Morton’s directorial debut, is a film which tells the story of a young girl in care; abused and neglected by both her father and her mother, Lucy is taken into a care system which proves to be just as volatile and unstable as her home life. The film is loosely based around Morton’s own upbringing, and, like Blake, the character of Lucy is meant to be representative of many children going through similar situations. Unlike the natural and neutral style of I, Daniel Blake, The Unloved is a film with a very clear visual style, making it visually-driven as opposed to the often dialogue heavy films of social realism. The visual style of the film is very slow and static; the free-flowing, documentary style of Loach is replaced by an unmoving, fixed position. This slow and static camera is the dominant visual style throughout the film, there are very few moments where the camera moves around the action, instead the film features frequent ‘long takes and long shots of towns and cities often involving isolated protagonists’ (David Forrest. 2013. Page 46). This aesthetic approach, frequent in many poetic realist films, has received some criticism, ‘Andrew Higson described the New Wave’s approach to the formal representation of the Northern city as taking ‘a place of poverty and squalor’ and making it ‘photogenic and dramatic’ (David Forrest. 2013.Page 46), many feel that this slow and static style is exploiting and fetishizing the subjects and their situation. However, The Unloved also uses this visual style to add to the impact of many of the emotional scenes, for example, in the opening sequence where Lucy is verbally abused and then beaten by her father, played by Robert Carlyle, the camera stays in a fixed location at the end of the living room, moving only when her father begins to beat her, cutting to a shot from outside the room, where the audience are left only able to hear the following events. This use of the static camera and long take keeps the audience away from the scene, leaving them feeling helpless and unable to intervene in the horrific events.

This technique for allowing key scenes in the narrative to take place off camera is carried across to the dialogue of the film. Much of the exposition given early in the film is delivered by characters we don’t fully see, instead of showing these characters the film stays on Lucy who is receiving the information alongside the audience. As Lucy is driven from school to the care home, for example, we are told via Lucy’s social worker that both Lucy’s mother and her previous foster parents are unable to currently provide care for her; this is a key moment of exposition, beginning to explain that Lucy’s mother is unwilling to look after her and informing the audience that the events of the film have happened before. However, instead of this information being presented to us in a clear and unmissable way, it is simply told to us by an off camera voice as we are given a close up of Lucy looking out of the car window, the sky and passing buildings reflected in the glass. This distancing from the adult characters in the film and more of a focus being put on Lucy helps to bring the audience into her world; the small details of her world are given particular attention, minor details like her routine before going to bed are played out in real time, her first breakfast at the care home gets a full screen close up, and there are several moments through the film which appear to be dream sequences or visualizations of her thoughts and memories. These insights we are given into the personal moments of Lucy’s life show how her inner and emotional reality is what the film is centering around, more so than the realities of the situations unfolding around her, this move away from the social and political aspects of the story and the shift towards more of the emotional reality is the characteristic most associated with the new wave of poetic realism, as identified by David Forrest,

_{“The authentic location, rejection of star actors, eschewal of cause and effect and goal driven structures, and focus on the marginalized still mark the new realist films as heirs to a long tradition in British visual culture, the move towards an image-led narration in which the specificities of social and political detail are sidelined in favour of a more liberated textual approach suggest a genuine change in the heritage of British cinematic realism.” (David Forrest. 2013.Page 37).}

Lucy, the lead character of the film, is played by Molly Windsor, this role is Windsor’s first appearance in a feature film; this debut performance has a similar effect as Loach’s casting of Johns, keeping the film grounded in reality by not having a well known actor at the lead. Windsor, like Johns, is from the same place as the character of Lucy, having actors who have some connection with the characters they are playing is something that is commonly found in both traditional social realism and the more contemporary poetic realism. This link can be something as simple as being from the same city, in the case of Windsor, to something more emotional and personal such as a shared trauma; for example, Thomas Turgoose who played the lead role of Shaun in Meadows’ semi-autobiographical This Is England -both Turgoose and the character of Shaun had recently lost a parent. This relationship between actors and their respective characters is something frequently present in Loach’s work, in Kes the cast was made up almost exclusively of non-professional actors, only Colin Welland, who played Billy’s school teacher, was a professional actor, and even Welland himself ‘claims that he would not have been cast in the film had he not also been a teacher before becoming an actor’ (John Hill. 2011. Page 121).

Windsor’s performance is also in keeping with the tradition of poetic realist cinema telling stories about childhood. Films depicting youth and following the stories of children is something which is present in both social realism and poetic realism, however, poetic realism tends to more frequently tell stories that are semi-autobiographical, This Is England is loosely based on the childhood of Meadows, just as The Unloved tells a story similar to that of Morton’s. This tendency for directors to tell stories inspired by their own experiences could be seen as a byproduct of poetic realisms focus on featuring more of a personal truth and trying to express this through cinematic means, rather than attempting to capture reality in it’s most honest form. Directors have a medium and an audience which allows them to represent their own experiences in a poetic and stylistic way, following the ‘realist impulse that continues to manifest itself through subject matter or form, or a combination of the two’ (James Leggott. 2008. Page 71-72). This desire to capture a more inner truth instead of a focus on representing the reality of a situation has been observed as a merging of European Art Cinema and British realist cinema, these filmmakers ‘make distinctive use of editing, framing and sound design to suggest the inter-relationship of character and landscape’, one method that is frequently used to convey this relationship between a character and their environment is via ‘the psychological states of the protagonists (being) conveyed through time-lapse photography and freeze-frames’ (Leggott, James. 2008. Page 75).

The Unloved doesn’t use time-lapse photography or freeze-frames, however there are several moments where visual relationships between Lucy’s emotions and the city are created using wide shots of the city landscape and frequent sequences where Lucy wanders the city alone. These wide shots of the city which are scattered throughout the film present the ‘high-rise accommodation (as) majestic and lyrical rather than depressing, and this setting offers Lucy escape yet presents her to the spectator as a liminal figure and an outsider’ (Stella Hockenhull. 2017. Page 133). These moments where Lucy’s feelings are conveyed to the audience by creating a visual link between her and the city can be clearly seen in the sequence of the film where Lucy visits Nottingham castle, the vast, empty space that Lucy occupies mirrors her being alone. This sequence and the other sequences throughout the film where Lucy wanders alone through the city ‘(open) up the subject matter to broader interpretations’ (David Forrest. 2013.Page 44), this move away from the clear and defined interpretation of a film such as I, Daniel Blake to something more open and broad is ‘achieved through a recourse to a narrative strategy that is reliant on imagery and therefore negates the potential for prescriptive interpretations that may be derived from a primary focus on defined social issues and subject matter’ (David Forrest. 2013. Page 44). Another moment where the visual style expands upon the emotional state of the films protagonist and opens the film up to further interpretation is the films ending where Lucy makes direct eye-contact with the camera, this extended sequence at the end of the film is seemingly an homage to the freeze-frame ending of French New Wave film The 400 Blows (1959, François Truffaut), both films child protagonists have found themselves with nowhere left to turn, facing a life of institutionalism. Having the film end with the character making eye contact with the audience brings the events of the film into reality and could be seen as a cry for help from the audience, a reminder from Morton that these events do take place and that the audience can help to prevent this.

The Unloved and I, Daniel Blake both provide clear examples of the numerous differences between social realism and poetic realism, from the visual and stylistic differences to the thematic and political contrast. However, despite these differences there are some similarities between both films and between social and poetic realism at large. Both films fit in with the loose, episodic narrative structure often associated with British cinema; they also have more of a focus on character over action and environment over spectacle. One key similarity between the two films is their dependence on television networks, The Unloved was made as part of Channel 4’s Forgotten Children series, a week long series of programming aimed at highlighting issues facing children living in care. The film received an initial viewing of 2 million on its Channel 4 release and went on to have a limited cinematic release the following year. While I, Daniel Blake was released in cinemas and was something of a success, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, adding to the conversation about privatization, disability allowance, and the flaws of the benefits system at large, and also being Loach’s biggest UK box office, it also was reliant upon television networks for its production. Loach initially pitched the film to Film4, Channel 4’s film production department who have been responsible for many of the biggest successes in British cinema since its formation in 1998, however, Film4 turned down the offer and Loach instead went to BBC Films. This dependence upon television studios for financing and distribution highlights a shared difficulty that both social realism and poetic realism face.

Despite some similarities and the various differences between the two schools of filmmaking, I would argue that the biggest difference between two schools of realist filmmaking would be the visual style, most notably the move away from a documentary style and a move towards a more expressive and artistic approach. This new visual approach to realism can be seen to be a melding of traditions of art cinema and realist cinema, and this genre-hybridity is something which has always been essential to British realism. Realism, and what has been accepted as realism, is constantly in flux, ‘films which were once accepted as ‘realistic’ by one generation often appear ‘false’ or ‘dated’ to the next. Thus, the working-class films of the British ‘new wave’, which initially appeared so striking in their ‘realism’, now appear ‘melodramatic’ and ‘even hysterical’’ (John Hill. 1986. Page 57-58), and these more visually-driven and personal films of the more contemporary poetic realism seem to mirror modern society at large, in what some are describing as an age of individualism it is fitting that directors such as Meadows and Morton are also looking inwards, making films inspired by their own experiences. This move away from creating a film intended to resolve and reform issues and instead a focus being put on something intended to be artistic and ‘poetic’ can be summarized by a comment from Morton on The Unloved, ‘‘I didn’t make the film for that. If I’d wanted to do that, I would have made a documentary. I hope I’ve made a poetic statement if anything’’ (Stella Hockenhull. 2017. Page 134).

_Bibliography

_{I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016)}

_{Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)}

_{Life is Sweet (Mike Leigh, 1990)}

_{The Unloved (Samantha Morton, 2009)}

_{This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2006)}

^{The Selfish Giant (Clio Barnard, 2013)}

_{D. Forrest (2013) ‘Twenty-first-Century Social Realism: Shane Meadows and New British Realism’ pg. 35-50 in M. Fradley, S. Godfrey, M. Williams ‘Shane Meadows: Critical Essays’, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh}

_{J. Hill (2011) ‘From Television into Film: Poor Cow, Kes and Family Life’ pg. 104-134 in J. Hill ‘Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television’, British Film Institute, London}

_{J. Hill (1986) ‘Sex, Class and Realism – British Cinema 1956-1963’, British Film Institute, London}

_{J. Leggott (2008) ‘Contemporary British Cinema – From Heritage to Horror’, Wallflower Press, London}

_{S. Hockenhull (2017) ‘Women Directors and Poetic Realism’ pg. 109-148 in S. Hockenhull ‘British Women Film Directors in the New Millennium’, Palgrave Macmillan UK, London}