Social Realism - in Film

In Film

Social Realism in cinema is a style that finds its roots in the Italian neorealism movement known for naturalistic, substance-over-style works of filmmakers such as Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica and, to some extent, Federico Fellini, but is considered Britain's main form of cinematic style. For Britons, their early cinema used common social interaction found in Dickens and Thomas Hardy. One of the first British films to emphasize realism's value as social protest was the 1902 film from U.K. director and Scottish born film pioneer James Williamson, A Reservist Before the War, and After the War which memorialized the Boer War serviceman coming back home to unemployment. Repressive censorship during 1945-54 prevented British films from more radical social positions.

Social realism was also adopted by Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s, including Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946) which won the Palme d'Or at the first Cannes Film Festival, and Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land (1953) which won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. This in turn gave rise to the Indian New Wave, with early Bengali art films such as Ritwik Ghatak's Nagarik (1952) and Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955–59). Realism in Indian cinema dates back even earlier to the 1920s and 1930s, with early examples including V. Shantaram's films Indian Shylock (1925) and The Unexpected (1937).

The United States was one of the last countries to adopt this form of style in cinema. Kine Weekly, marketed as an invaluable record of British film and television industries development, in 1947 wrote, "Americans have shown they want pictures reflecting the simple emotions. We are trying to crash into their market by offering them gloom-sadism-and-soft-focus. We must aim at the box office and not the art gallery. It is no good aiming over their heads. It will not help us earn dollars.” British Social Realism cinema has an objective distancing from what the characters think and feel, or a naturalism in its character spines.