British Social Realist genre conventions

After having watched Cathy Come Home and High Hopes, as well as the beginning of Bullet Boy in one of our media lessons I compiled a list of genre conventions and techniques that are often used to create a sense of British social realism.

• It attempts as best as it can to make the viewer think what he is watching is real. So:
- Often uses long takes, which can allow the actors to semi-improvise in the roles of their characters creating more natural dialogue.
- Not a great deal of camera movement, use of lots of long held shots-perhaps with slow pans, tracks or other movements, fast camera movement would draw attention to the fact that their is a camera and subsequently what you are watching is not real.
- No flashy editing is an important part, again flashy editing would draw attention to the fact this is a film you are watching.
- Some social realist films have a lot less non-diagetic music than films of other genres (although this is not always the case e.g High Hopes), this is again to make the film seem more real.
- In it's most extreme forms social realism can become almost documentarian in it's style, this being where it originally grew from, a good example of this is Cathy Come Home which during my viewing of it I wasn't sure which characters were actors and which were real people they'd interviewed, or sound clips from things real people had said. This made the film much more effecting and effective, because the message hits home much harder if you're not entirely sure whether it's real or not. This is the highest achievement a social realist film do.

Stylism/stylistic editing and camera techniques are the enemy of social realism by default.

• As a general rule British Social Realist films are concerned with British people which means the huge majority of the characters are British, be this Caucasian or any other racial group or ethnic minority.
- As a result of this the characters can often have quite strong regional accents, the best example of this being Riff-Raff by Ken Loach where for American audiences they had to screen it with subtitles due to huge array of dialects.

• Social realist films often try and address and discuss social issues, these are often social issues very specific to the time periods they are made/set in.