From the New Wave to ‘Brit-Grit'

In an article devoted to recent trends in British film-making, the journalist Vanessa Thorpe announced the revival of what she described as ‘Brit-grit’: a return ‘to the hard-bitten tradition of social realism … launched on the back of pictures such as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning [sic; Karel Reisz, 1960], A Kind of Loving [John Schlesinger, 1962] and This Sporting Life [Lindsay Anderson, 1963]’. ¹ The central focus of Thorpe's article is recent British films such as Shane Meadows’ TwentyFourSeven (1997), Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth (1997) and Tim Roth's The War Zone (1999). But she also suggests that such film-makers as Ken Loach, Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh have maintained a tradition of ‘gritty realism’ since the 1960s by influencing or directly encouraging this new breed of British directors. While Thorpe is clearly right to suggest lines of continuity between the realism of the 1960s and subsequent British film-making, she is also too eager to identify this as a relatively unbroken tradition and to run together differing forms of film-making practice. In the discussion that follows, I will consider the broad continuities but also the changes that have occurred within this tradition. Taking the work of Loach, Clarke and Leigh as my main examples, I will also assess some of the consequences of these developments.