Social Realism background research-History

As we've pretty much as a group decided that our opening sequence is going to be for a Social realist film I reckoned it would be a good idea to do some research (to help us in creating our opening sequence, and also just because of my own interest).

The idea of British Social Realism goes back as far as the very early 20th Century, with films such as Rescued by Rover (1905) and A Reservist Before the War, And After the War (1902) depicting British society as it was. And in 'A Reservist', a film about a Boer serviceman returning home to face unemployment, realising Social Realism's value as a form of social protest.
Social Realism as we know it was really born out of the post second world war atmosphere, and the tension between the camaraderie of the war years and the individualism of the post-war consumer lifestyle. It was influenced by the pre-war documentarian style of film making (namely that of Humphrey Jennings), who's work looking at ordinary British people created a new iconography and influenced the Free Cinema Documentary movement of the 50's and the British New Wave of the 60's.
A lot more was also able to be portrayed and discussed in films due to the relaxation of the censorship laws and the general atttidue of the 60's . This allowed British peoples lives sweat, blood, sex and tears to be portrayed more realistically than before.
Social realism is a form of cinema where the time period each film is set and shot in is effectively another character. And, as the main protagonists of the New Wave in the 60's were usally working class males without bearings in a society which, due to the decline of industry and that culture that goes with it, is dissapearing. (Although these issues have been discussed time and time again, most well known being in The Full Monty. So, in the 80's it was that British Social Realism followed characters from the margins of society who were trying to find their way in the new order. With the arrival of the 90's and as the funding environment grew more precarious a formulaic 'triumph-over-adversity' narrative became more commonplace in an attempt to reiterate a sense of national cinema. The Full Monty which combined british social realism with the feel-good vibe of Hollywood movies, became indicative of this new cross-breed which got the usually considered auteristic cinema of social realism to a much wider audience.
Meanwhile this same auteristic spirit lived on and was revived with such new films such Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth (1997) and Shane Meadow's A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), which explored a more lethal and complex representations of men and women. And so British Socialism will carry on changing with the times and it needs to, to become relevant and meaningful. Not that those which have been made in the past are now meaningless as the same problems still exist in society now as they did then, and will continue to exist in the future.