"Youre what's wrong with me": Fish Tank, The Selfish Giant and the Language for Contemporary Social Realism
Dr Clive James  Nwonka lse.academia.edu
"Youre what's wrong with me": Fish Tank, The Selfish Giant and the Language for Contemporary Social Realism
This thesis examines recent trends in contemporary British cinema in relation to the ongoing dialogics of sociological theory, and alongside the ‘changing conceptualisation of the relation between the public and the private . . . the political and the personal’ (Higson in Barr 1986: 83) within social realist discourse. Social Realism has been a prominent mode of expression in British film culture since the 1930s, and it continues to enjoy considerable currency in today’s cinematic landscape. However, as Samantha Lay comments, ‘whilst certain well-established conventions have been maintained, some have been transformed and transmuted. In addition, the hybridity in form and style, and the shifts in terms of themes, issues and representations, pose new questions for British social realism’ (Lay 2002: 99). According to John Hill, it may be easy to 'run together differing forms of film-making practice' that have social realist tendencies and subsequently 'identify . . . a relatively unbroken tradition' (Hill 2000a: 249) between early and contemporary social realist cinema. However, it is not only their continuities, but also their discontinuities that need to be examined in order to understand what the term ‘social realism’ means today. At its core, and as its name signifies, social realism is concerned with the representation of society. As Robert Murphy notes, ‘the belief in social responsibility has been enormously influential on the British Cinema. It is most often articulated in terms of the cinema having a serious relationship with society’ (Lovell 2009: 6). Deriving 'from a variety of cultural and political assumptions about the workings of society and the role within society that cinema should play' (Hill 2000a: 250) and influenced by the Griersonian documentary movement of the 1930s, early forms of British social realism (namely the Free Cinema of the 1950s, and the subsequent British New Wave films of the late 1950s and 1960s) were born out of a 'fascination with traditional working class culture and the ambition to represent what is contemporary about contemporary Britain' (Lacey 1995:167). A ‘conscious movement towards social extension’ (Williams 1974), British social realism continues to be guided by some of these aims today. However, as Andrew Higson asserts, ‘the history of the realist tradition in British cinema’ also reveals a ‘changing conceptualisation of the relation between the public and the private, the political and the personal, the state and the citizen (Higson 1995: 193). In this thesis I propose to reapply and reinterpret Higson’s claim in relation to British social realist filmmaking in the twenty-first century. I have had a longstanding interest in Shane Meadows and I see him as a director whose films exemplify the shift that Higson outlines, that is, in the move from a public and political engagement towards a private and personal one. For this reason, I will address his work in my dissertation. I also intend to extend my focus to include the work of other British filmmakers whose films bear thematic and stylistic similarities to Meadows’ in their concerted efforts to provide audiences with ‘a view from within; portraying a heightened interest in the potential for common experience and a common humanity to be established between audience and subject’ (Brown 2007: 102). I consider this to be indicative of a move towards an emotional social realism, which lies in contrast to politically-motivated tendencies that are at the historical roots of these texts, and epitomises an increasingly pronounced interest in exploring the social at a microsociological, private and personal level, rather than at a solely macrosociological, public and political one. In addition, I contend that this direction of focus bears resemblance to (and, in fact, could be seen to be a creative manifestation of) recent arguments within the field of sociology by sociologists Les Back and Andrew Abbott that address the need for a new type of engagement with the world, one which is open and non-judgmental, ‘embraces the commitment to interpretation without legislation’ (Back 2007: 1), and has a ‘lyrical’ sensibility (Abbott 2007). In his work, Les Back refers to sociology as a ‘listener’s art’, and places importance on the practice of attentiveness, arguing that ‘we need to find more considered ways to engage with the ordinary yet remarkable things found in everyday life’ (Back 2007: 7). He suggests: That way of attending to the world that reduces what culture, history, social relations are to talk is profoundly limited. I want to argue for a more sensuous, multi-sensory, embodied attention to the social world, to the now, to life passed in living (Back in Ruiz 2012: 110) In my thesis, I will posit Shane Meadows, Clio Barnard and Guy Myhill, three contemporary British directors whose works are considered to be in the vein of social realism, as examples of filmmakers who arguably share the vocation of sociologists such as Les Back in their approach to their craft and their subjects. Whilst these filmmakers may 'seek to engender a sense of social injustice' in their work, their aim is not necessarily to carry 'explicit political messages' (Allen et al. 2001: 227). Instead, their focus on the realistic representation of individual protagonists and their emotional interactions with their environment, and their ‘willingness to embrace their complexity, regardless of what [their] own opinions are’ (Brown 2007: 84) renders them socially (emotionally) realist. Collectively, Meadows, Barnard and Myhill represent a new wave of British filmmakers whose works demand to be read in terms of their emotional resonance at a personal level, as well as in terms of what they say about class and national identity at a political level. My critical examination of them will consider the former, with my case studies consisting of an examination of the representation of space, place and male adolescence in Shane Meadows’ This is England (2006) and Somers Town (2008), Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013), and Myhill’s The Goob (2014). The ways in which coming-of-age stories are told across this collection of films and the treatment of male adolescence in them highlights an overall concerted effort by these filmmakers to overcome unbalanced stereotypical representations through providing emotionally realistic portrayals of their characters and their (habit-forming) environments. In this thesis, I seek to offer and develop a new approach to reading and understanding contemporary social realist films in terms of their emotional realism, drawing upon work from film studies, anthropology and sociology in order to do so. Through my focus on Meadows’, Barnard’s and Myhill’s films, I hope to illustrate how the employment of a ‘sociological lyricism’ (Abbott 2007) within realist filmmaking brings to life Back’s theory of the ‘Art of Listening’, and ultimately serves to resonate with audiences across boundaries of class and culture.