Free Cinema

Image: Free Cinema discussion.

(l-r) David Robinson, Walter Lassally, Kevin MacDonald (Chair), Lorenza Mazzetti and Karel Reisz.

In February 1956, more than two years before the French New Wave and thirty-nine years before Dogme 95, a group of young film-makers launched their Manifesto at the NFT. They named the programme 'Free Cinema' and took their cameras out onto the streets, capturing a new naturalistic and unscripted look at England. It made such an impact that 400 filmgoers were turned away from the first screening. Forty-five years later, Karel Reisz, David Robinson, Lorenza Mazzetti and Walter Lasally returned to the NFT for a screening of the original Free Cinema Programme and a discussion afterwards. The discussion was chaired by Kevin MacDonald.

Introduction

Kevin MacDonald: Good evening everybody. Thanks for staying after the films. I expect that you all already know who these ladies and gentlemen are sitting next to me here, but I will do the formal introductions. On my far right is David Robinson, renowned film critic and I think at the time of the first Free Cinema programme which you've seen repeated tonight he was programmer at the NFT. Is that correct?

David Robinson: I think I was programmer during the first five, actually, four or five, yeah.

KM: Right. And, but you tell me you were bullied into putting them on by Lindsay Anderson.

DR: Everybody was bullied by Lindsay Anderson. I was no exception.

KM: Also on my right here, Walter Lassally, Oscar-winning cameraman, who was really the in-house lens for many of the Free Cinema films and went on to have a long and notable career shooting feature films, and who was just telling me at dinner that he's just made, just directed his latest short film which, if there's anyone here from the BBC, he's very keen to sell it.

And here to my left it's a very great pleasure to welcome Lorenza Mazzetti, who's the director of Together, the longest of the films that you saw tonight. Wonderful film. And this is Lorenza's first visit back to England since she left I think in 1957? So it's a real honour and privilege to have her here.

And to my extreme left, Karel Reisz, co-director, with Tony Richardson, of Momma Don't Allow, a film you've also seen, who went on to produce and direct other Free Cinema films, and then had a long and distinguished career as a feature film-maker and in fact has recently has just made his latest film, one of the long sequence of Beckett films that have been made in Ireland over the last couple of years. So I'm sure we'll be seeing that very soon. So what we're going to do is talk amongst ourselves for forty minutes or something and then we'll open it up to questions, but if anyone has any burning desire to ask anything while we're talking, please interrupt.

How it all started

Karel Reisz.

KM: What I wanted to start off by asking you is: if Free Cinema is all about personal expression, what was it that brought you all together, did you have any common intention, purpose as film-makers? Lorenza, maybe you can start off by answering that.

Lorenza Mazzetti: What a serious question! [Laughter] I told you "don't ask me serious questions". [to Karel] You do this question...

KM: OK, Karel, you can take the serious question. I'll ask the comedy question to Lorenza.

Karel Reisz: Well I mean it was really that there came a moment where Lindsay had made this 16mm film with off cuts from an industrial film that he'd made up North. Tony and I had made Momma Don't Allow and Lorenza had, with Lindsay's help in the finishing, made her film, and here we were, three amateur film-makers with movies and absolutely nowhere to show them. And we were friends and we did have certain things in common, certainly Lindsay and I had worked together on Sequence magazine, which had a certain position about the cinema. Lindsay's notion was, "let's show this thing, let's find a name, let's write, while we're about it, a manifesto to get a little bit of press, and... get on with it". And the thirst for change in English films was so extreme that the show made a huge splash. Now, as far as did we have anything in common is concerned, yes, we did. We believed that the films should be signed, that's to say they should have a point of view, not be objective documentaries or... studio films... formulaic studio films. And also that the British Cinema was extremely slow in picking up on the enormous social changes that had been happening since the war, since the Labour government. And the British Cinema had sort of more or less ignored all that. So two things. One: yes, we wanted to make films, to put it in short terms, in the streets, and secondly, we wanted them signed. And all three of them were that so we got together and did it.

KM: Lorenza, the others in the Free Cinema movement at least to begin with, were very much film buffs, they worked as film critics, you hadn't. You were an artist. Did you feel that you had a lot in common with them and their point of view about cinema?

LM: Certainly, yes. I wasn't a critic, no, I didn't even know that Lindsay was a critic when he came to see the film I did. I understand he was a critic because he said "if I like it I'll help you, if I don't like it I won't help you.' So, he certainly must have been a critic. Then little by little we started knowing each other and I really liked him so much and I even fall in love with him [laughter]. But he always used to call me and order me, he was like a general order me: "Please Lorenza come now we call your friend', because I had a friend who was a musician so we asked that musician I like it very much you can ask him to come from Rome, because he saw Metamorphosis the film...

KM: That was the previous film you'd made at the Slade...

LM: At the Slade, yes, and the music was done by Daniele Paris, so he said "Call him and we'll do the music to the film together." And yes he came and in the evening we usually went to the house of Lindsay to eat. He was a very clever cook and so, and after eating he was singing with the guitar, marvellous songs...

KM: Not an image I had of Lindsay Anderson...

LM: No he was singing in a marvellous romantic way. All his wickedness was disappearing and he was becoming a romantic man singing 'On the Foggy Foggy Dew' And I and Daniele just ask him to sing again that song marvellous and try to learn it in English and so Daniele thought we take one of these songs that Lindsay sang to put it in the film. And so in the film perhaps you have noticed, that it is always the same song, as a leitmotiv. Well it's because Lindsay was singing this song.

KM: So his influence hovers over it.

LM: Yes, what was the question you did ask me? [Laughter]

KM: That doesn't matter anymore.

KR: Well there was a famous moment in the relationship between Lindsay and Lorenza when they were as usual hugely in debt to the laboratory for reprints and things, and the laboratory said right no more, we really won't send you anything more, and Lindsay said 'In the cutting room', this was very early in the morning, he said, "You, Lorenza will get on the telephone, speak to the senior grader at Humphries Laboratories, and you will cry, and they will not be able to resist." And it worked.

LM: I usually obeyed him.

The Free Cinema technique

Walter Lasally.

KM: Walter, one of the things that is often written about Free Cinema is that it was only really made possible by advances in technology, with faster film stocks, particularly 16mm film stocks, lighter cameras, this sort of thing. Can you tell me a bit about the films, for instance, that we watched here tonight, you shot Momma Don't Allow, what did you shoot that on? What do you remember the actual process of filming that?

Walter Lassally: Yes. Well, the technical advances actually came mostly a little bit later on although they were already... the first invention of the first 400ASA film stock which was made by Ilford and called HPS came out somewhere around 1953-1954. That made certain things possible that were not possible before, such as in later Free Cinema films like Every Day Except Christmas. It's largely shot on that film, which enabled us to shoot in Covent Garden market without any lights or with virtually no lights. Momma Don't Allow is all shot on a Bolex. The main limitation of that was that it was a spring-operated camera and it had the maximum running time of twenty-one seconds or twenty-two seconds. So not only could you not shoot things sound because the camera made a noise, but you also had to limit yourself to the maximum length of twenty-two seconds. But I found generally that when I look at these films again in retrospect I found that the limitations which we were subject to, which were considerable, the technical limitations which were considerable, were a stimulant, a stimulant rather than a hindrance and it's very interesting. For instance, the BBC made a series of programmes ten, fifteen years later about The Lambeth Boys in which they... The Lambeth Boys is all about a Boys' Club in Lambeth... and the BBC went and they found the people who were part of the original film, and they filmed them in whatever they were doing at the present time and they also filmed that youth club which still exists, but which in the interval had gone from a 100% white to 90% black, and... but the most interesting thing to me when you see those three things together, there was the first programme showed The Lambeth Boys as a film, as it was, second programme was the one where they found all the people and interviewed them, and the third programme was about the youth club as it was today, but the interesting thing to me was that because we were so limited... we couldn't shoot things sound except with an improvised blimp which we shot a small sequence in, because we were so limited, the impact of the first, of The Lambeth Boys is visual, it's mainly visual, you could turn off the soundtrack and you'd still get the information coming across. But as is so often the case these days, it's the picture you can turn off, and you'd still get the information because so many of today's television films are illustrated radio programmes and you could turn the picture off and you'd still get the information. And having these limitations was actually as I said, it was a stimulus.

KR: Except I must just say this, as far as the system of sound is concerned, a department of these films that was entirely under the control of John Fletcher who was a sort of technical wizard, quite apart from being an extraordinary person. But he welcomed on The Lambeth Boys the opportunity to shoot synchronous sound on unrehearsed material, let's say there were these discussion sequences, and they were open-ended, there was no... we didn't know what was going to happen, and that was technically extremely advanced for the time, and Jean Rouch, the great French documentary maker said that these films of ours started him on all his ethnographic films, suddenly there was a possibility of shooting synchronous sound on unrehearsed documentary material, which at that time was unheard of.

KM: But in these films that we saw tonight that was just a couple of years before that was possible.

KR: Yes.

WL: Well the big change came in 1963 or '64 with the invention of the Eclair NPR camera which was a handheld 16mm camera on which, which was self-blimped so that it didn't make a noise so you could shoot synch sound, and that made all sorts of things possible that weren't possible before.

Free Cinema, the British New Wave and the Angry Young Men

David Robinson.

KM: David, I came across a very interesting quote by Lindsay Anderson talking about Free Cinema and he said that the main importance of Free Cinema was that the film-makers had something to say, and didn't worry about the technique too much, he said 'As opposed to mainstream cinema of the day, which prided itself on making films about nothing, extremely well.' Do you think that's true, and could you say something about the impact that these films had on mainstream cinema at the time when they first came out, did they have any impact?

DR: Yes they did. I was struck by a beautiful article today in The Guardian by Andrew Pulver which is extremely appreciative of Free Cinema, but I was amazed when at the end he says: 'Free Cinema key failure was its inability to translate its precepts into feature films. No such loss ever afflicted the European contingent... Richardson, Reisz and Anderson filmed books and plays of stolid, less than inspiring toughness and the chance was lost.' Now I find that extraordinary because in fact the plays and the books that you were filming at that time were extraordinarily exciting at that moment and one of the really important things about Free Cinema was that it was not standing alone that it was part of a whole cultural current and a whole cultural upsurge in this country, and the fact that Tony's first feature was... Look Back in Anger and you did Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Lindsay did This Sporting Life, I mean, this was very important. And it's undoubtedly true that you had been preceded by Jack Clayton, who of course had done Room at the Top, but I think from that moment, the British feature cinema did change, not always for the best I mean it courted a passion for what was styled by the press as 'Kitchen Sink Cinema' and there were a lot of crude imitations of what the Free Cinema and the Free Cinema heirs were trying to do. But the cinema did change, and Free Cinema was a very important instrument in that change.

KR: And the connection with the Royal Court and with the writers and with the novelists is absolutely crucial. That was, first of all Tony of course, was 50% of the Royal Court with George Devine, Lindsay also worked a great deal there, but the writers Wesker and Osborne and so on, Arden and so on, were exactly doing similar things to ourselves. And the writers were part of the thing that was happening.

Humphrey Jennings' influence

KM: Lorenza, Karel was telling me earlier how much Humphrey Jennings, the great British film-maker of the wartime was an influence on Free Cinema. I presume that you probably didn't know Humphrey Jennings' films, what were the influences on your film, were there any influences? Where did you get the idea from?

LM: You know I knew Zavattini, in Italy and De Sica I saw, so I had this idea that the film could be made on the street with little money, and also improvisation. No, I didn't know Humphrey Jennings. But Lindsay showed it to me.

KM: What was it about Humphrey Jennings that was so inspiring, Karel?

KR: Well just the notion that you could make films out of observation rather than pre-thought reconstruction of ideas. That Listen to Britain was made out of, I don't know, a hundred pieces of policitous observation strung together with a poetic intent, not an informational intent. And that's really what we got from him. His particular spirit was rather different from most of the things we made, but the notion of how to use movies definitely came from him.

WL: You've made a film about Jennings...

KM: I've made a documentary about the documentary maker, yes. And it does seem to me there is the same poetic approach, and that it's an approach which goes against the predominant ethos in documentary today, which is a current affairs sort of approach, there's very little of that kind of visual, poetic documentary...

WL: And so was it in documentary, you know, in Grierson and Arthur Elton and...

KM: There were famous arguments over Free Cinema between Lindsay Anderson and Grierson weren't there?

WL: Oh yes.

KM: Could you tell me a bit about those?

WL: Well, I mean, our notion was that... to use faces to illustrate arguments promulgated in commentaries was a misuse of film. Well, that's rude enough.

KM: Didn't he call it baby stuff? Free Cinema was baby stuff. And that seems to me typical of the reaction of the quote unquote professional cinema, that they thought it was kind of shoddy.

WL: Well what you have to remember is that documentary was very big business then. It was, the documentary companies were run by The Post Office, by the Shell Film Unit, by Ford, whom we later used through Free Cinema... there was reason why documentaries, the traditional documentaries, were made in such a way that there was an argument, and a presentation of a point of view that could be defended in a boardroom.

Filming Together

Lorenza Mazzetti.

KM: Lorenza, when you came to shoot your film, there, there are certain shots in that film that I think are absolutely marvellous, and one of them comes near the beginning where the two deaf mutes are walking down the street talking to each other in sign language, and the camera instead of framing on their faces, is framed half here, so the top of their faces is cut off and the frame is actually on the hands, and it's the kind of frame that you would never see up to that point, I've never seen something like that in cinema. Were you consciously breaking rules like that or...?

LM: I consciously liked it.

KM: You consciously liked it? [Laughter] What was it like working for Lorenza, Walter.

LM: But you see it wasn't a documentary.

KM: No, but it has a great deal of documentary content in it.

LM: Yes, but that was me. You can use reality to have, to say something. The important is actually what, the same viewpoint we had. That was, that isn't a reproduction of reality, Together is not the reproduction of these things. Is nothing to do with these things. The deaf mute are not deaf mute, the people who hear don't hear anything, and the deaf mutes hear well, so the meaning is not what is said, but is what is not said, so, we are not talking about documentary.

KM: But still, I think, there is, I would say, a lot of observation, there's a lot of obviously real characters doing the real things, they're not being paid, the dancers in the pub, the children playing...

LM: You use reality, but you use it, you are not...

KM: British cinema and most cinema of that time wouldn't have used those things, they would have staged them, whereas you were using what you found.

LM: I found because I looked for it.

KM: Yeah. What was it like working with Lorenza, Walter? You don't have to be honest.

WL: Why not? The strange thing is you see I never actually worked with Lorenza because I on the bits that I did for her film I worked with Lindsay, because perhaps this should be explained, it's probably in the programme notes somewhere, but, Lorenza's film started out as something quite different, Lorenza's film started out as a plot-orientated story called The Glass Marble in which the couple of deaf mutes are constantly pursued by a group of children who persecute them and pursue them, and accidentally cause the death of one of them, but this story had never been completely covered in such a way that it couldn't be edited in the way it was intended in the script so Lindsay came in at that stage, and saw that because the material was so wonderful you could turn it into another type of film. And he then asked me and John Fletcher and Geoffrey Simpson to shoot extra material, so I never actually worked with Lorenza on the shooting of any of it. We just came in at the end.

LM: You had some scenes, we need some editing for, we need some scenes lacking, and I remember when...

WL: Did we actually ever work together?

LM: Yes, we went to look for the scene for the end I needed the river and the boat going.

KR: Speak up I'm a bit deaf!

LM: Some scene for ending the film were missing like the boat going under the river, so... more of them, so we asked Walter to have this... No I was saying again I repeat that it is not a documentary film.

KM: I agree.

LM: It's always, also Kafka, because I did before the Metamorphosis, at the Slade School, also Kafka used reality. What he tells is not what he means. So it's more complex.

KM: Do you think that it's a coincidence...

LM: And also Lindsay Anderson. It's not a documentary... O Dreamland, it's not a documentary...

WL: Not at all.

LM: He doesn't say what he means, he means what he doesn't say. He apparently tells how happy people are and actually he is reproaching them and criticising humanity. So...

KM: But all documentary does that.

LM: No! But documentary...

KM: All documentary has a point of view.

LM: No! No!

WL: Not always.

KM: It would be a mess.

LM: Yes, but our point of view were the same. Because all of that was a critique of the society. But the vision and the critique of society at that moment, we felt together.

A movement of foreigners?

KM: Do you think that it's a coincidence that all three of you, not David, are in some sense, or were in some sense, exiles, émigrés here. Walter, I think you came from Germany in 1939, I'm not sure when you came from Czechoslovakia, Karel, and you had also had an experience of Fascism.

DR: On the other hand Tony Richardson comes from Wakefield and...

WL: And Lindsay came from Scotland...

KM: The émigrés are longer lived!

WL: Lindsay was an émigré from Scotland, yes.

LM: And John Fletcher and everybody...

WL: John Fletcher was very quintessential English.

KM: It is just a coincidence is it, or do you think there's something about the outsider's eye?

KR: Who knows, no I don't think so.

LM: Coincidence are, as Jung say, extraordinary things. Coincidence are...

WL: The difference between coincidence and synchronicity.

LM: They are synchronism, significant synchronism Jung says.

KM: Do you feel that your background had impact on that particular film?

LM: But certainly had an impact in my rage.

KM: Your rage. It's not a furious film though, quite a despairing film in some ways.

LM: Yes, but I just felt that I couldn't possibly be like the others I felt an outsider.

KM: Did you feel you were like the deaf mute, you could you could try as hard as you could but nobody would hear, nobody would listen.

LM: Except they were too outsiders, and I felt an outsider, but because people anybody who feels an outsider is furious because actually can't get in the others. Like Kafka can't get in 'The Castle', so he's furious actually.

KM: You wanted to belong, there was a yearning to belong.

LM: We would like to belong to the mass but we can't because the others, we don't like them.

KM: Or they don't like you?

LM: They don't like me and I don't like them!

KM: Is that why you haven't been back to England for forty-five years? For those of you who don't know I'm sure it says in the programme notes, I haven't seen them, but, that Lorenza wrote a autobiographical novel 'The Sky Falls In', something like that, which has recently been turned into a very successful film in Italy based on all her childhood experiences. Sorry Walter.

WL: I just wanted to come back briefly to Humphrey Jennings because I have a tape of Humphrey Jennings short films at home, I live in Greece now. And I look at it regularly, it's an inspiration because it's it is... the only word is poetic, he was one of the very few if not the only film-maker who was, could genuinely be called a poet of the cinema. And some of the Free Cinema things, I think, films, have that in common with him that they are very poetic, particularly Together is very poetic, very poetic film, although that's an extremely hard word to define, but I think, I understood in that way, it is very poetic.

Reception of the first programme by the public and the critics

KM: David, were these films, in their free style, shocking at the time. I mean, when you saw them projected, I'm sure the NFT wasn't here I don't know where the NFT was in those days, 1956. They're handheld, there's under exposure, you know, there's all sorts of this which wouldn't have been seen as OK in the professional cinema. Was that shocking to audiences or was it liberating?

DR: I think liberating but in an unconscious way. I don't think people, I think people were so taken by the content that they really were not... were not discussing the form and the technique very much. Lindsay, you always come back to Lindsay because he was such a sort of metteur-en-scene, this was something he put together and put, here were about twenty films, which really if they'd been left to themselves would have drifted out to sea and excellent as they were would have been forgotten. But Lindsay had this idea of packaging them, but having packaged them so that he was selling the films in this very effective way, he then did make, did produce from them a manifesto which was very coherent, I mean it was not Lindsay, it was something which had started with Sequence and if you go back to Sequence you'll find the very words and the very sentiments of the Free Cinema programme notes. So this was a very... And also the marketing of them, the thing that stands out... everybody wrote about these because they didn't dare not write about them. And, for instance, there was a... the most famous film critic of her day was Caroline Lejeune, C.A. Lejeune, who'd been a great great figure in the thirties, but by the fifties was a bit passe but still quite influential, she was writing for The Observer. And she used to... no I won't tell you... she used to shuffle along...

KM: Tell us, do your imitation.

DR: No no because it's too cruel a story. She used to shuffle along to the film shows, she used to shuffle along her way and she only went to the main film shows and she wouldn't have dreamed of coming down to the National Film Theatre. But Lindsay, I'm sure not entirely by accident, was there when she was coming out of the previous press show, and forcibly put her into a taxi and brought her down here and she wrote about the films. And I think that was the most violent piece of press... but I mean he was a great, great press agent, terrific press man.

WL: Great publicist, yes.

KM: One does get the sense in some ways this was, that Free Cinema was a kind of publicity stunt. It was a bit like the Dogme Manifesto of its day.

KR: There was something true about it, undoubtedly, but it was also a piece of manipulation. I mean, you know, the cinema was full for God knows how many evenings, every newspaper wrote about it, there were sort of wild ridiculous things about the renaissance of British cinema, Richard Dimbleby interviewed us on Panorama, I mean this for three amateur shorts, you know. And part of it was that the British cinema had been very dull and conformist and something partly because I think because there was news. I mean I was a secondary schoolmaster while we were doing this and I saw those kids every day of my life, and nobody paid any attention to what was going on. The Teddy Boys were treated by the news media as danger and morally reprehensible and the clothes were made fun of. And the feeling was - look there's all this stuff that nobody's showing. So I think that was a very much bigger reason...

KM: You were showing the underbelly of Britain... or the...not the underbelly...

KR: It was the reality...just what was actually happening...

KM: What the mainstream media weren't showing...

KR: Instead of, you know, cosy Ealing stuff.

The Manifesto

Lorenza Mazzetti and Karel Reisz.

KM: Lorenza, can you tell me a little bit about the writing of this manifesto, which is projected behind us here. This slightly cryptic, slightly angry, manifesto. Do you remember writing this?

LM: I remember that Lindsay came to the Soup Kitchen where I was a waiter and he said...

KM: Where was the Soup Kitchen?

LM: At the Charing Cross.

WL: At this place.

LM: It was a bar, a cafe, is it still there?

KM: No, I don't think so.

WL: They're called the Soup Kitchen and not the Kitchen Soup as it says...

KM: Soup's gone out of fashion.

LM: And he told me well, let's write something together, so we sit there while people was calling me to bring coffee and writing and start writing, he was very good in writing insolent sentences. He would say 'Do you like that?' 'It's all right'.

KM: I particularly like the last few short bullet points: size is irrelevant, perfection is not an aim, and attitude means a style, a style means an attitude. What does that mean Karel? [Laughter]

KR: Well it means that a style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion. I would have thought that that was perfectly clear. [Laughter]

WL: Of course the reference to size of course, it had to be remembered that this is very shortly after the invention of CinemaScope, which came in 1953 and 1954, because a lot was made of the wide screen so that's why that bit is in there 'size is irrelevant', and the other thing I've often, the phrase that says, the line that says, 'the image speaks, sound amplifies and comments' was resented by sound recordists for at least twenty years after.

Free Cinema, French Nouvelle Vague and British Cinema

KM: Do you think we could do with a Free Cinema today? Do we need something like this? Would something like this work, or is it a complete irrelevance?

KR: I don't think the norm of the cinema or television is particularly dull or conformist at the moment. I think there are lots and lots of things happening. People are only too willing to give people with the slightest experimental whims money. I don't think, you know, this is a time exactly when in France, Truffaut said that the French Cinema is now so dull, the 'cinema de papa', is so boring, that it has to be rescued by amateurs. And of course they were brilliant, I think and they went on, they built on their Nouvelle Vague very much more substantially than we ever did. But it was exactly the same thing. Everybody was fed up with not being shown what their experience of the world was.

KM: Don't you think that the British Nouvelle Vague did go on, from what David was saying earlier, just sort of mutated into the world of television. So you had directors like Ken Loach, Stephen Frears, Michael Apted etc. making, in the late sixties early seventies, and that's perhaps why the British new wave that you were a part of didn't...

KR: No, I think you have to remember there was a whole other side of British films, wasn't there? There was Michael Powell, and there was Lean, there was Reed, this isn't the whole of the... there's a great danger in making this seem more important than it is, this whole Free Cinema thing is an important footnote...

KM: I think it's more than that, because I think it did have a lasting influence as I said I think the feature films that you all worked on then themselves influenced many many feature film directors to come including those people who then made their films not for the big screen but for the small screen.

WL: But there's a big lag time, first of all there's a big lag time. The French Nouvelle Vague, the main start of the French Nouvelle Vague, actually happened in the interval between the Free Cinema and the making of say, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning so on, in that lag time the Nouvelle Vague started because it was in the air, we didn't copy each other but there was a lot of sort of common ground a lot of common influence.

KM: Did you feel there was a time when the influence of Free Cinema waned and when you yourself weren't interested in that kind of film-making? When was that Karel? After you made Morgan for instance, that could be seen as having a strong influence of Free Cinema. But your later films, not necessarily. Is that fair?

KR: I became a sort of jobbing director really, and I think that that particular energy that was coming at us from the air disappeared. There was no longer a need for intransigent revolt.

KM: Was that because there was representation elsewhere that other directors were taking it up or that television was taking it up?

KR: You know the next generation was, as you say, Stephen Frears and Loach and Mike Leigh.

WL: But the main industry at the time of Free Cinema was extremely monolithic, and it was extremely difficult to break into it, to break thorough that wall, and when you compare it to today, I mean I was head of camera at the National Film and Television School for four years fairly recently, and the thing that strikes one is what marvellous opportunities are open to young people, they can choose between any number of opportunities. In those days, the physical necessities were so hard to get hold of, that round about that time in fact before that time I made a film with Derek York who is also deceased, for which everything was borrowed. We didn't have any money, and everything was borrowed. The exposure meter was borrowed, the camera was borrowed, the film stock was scrounged from various kindly producers, I mean it was extremely difficult.

KM: Yes, well, don't romanticise it too much, Walter, don't romanticise it too much.

DR: In their different ways, Loach, Frears, Mike Leigh were heirs and to some extent beneficiaries sometimes direct beneficiaries of Free Cinema. And yet each of them experienced ten, fifteen years when they could not make feature films. They were lodged there...

KM: Not much was happening in Britain at that time during the late Sixties/Seventies.

DR: It would have done if they'd been making films.

KM: I think...

Denis Forman's role

Denis Forman.

LM: Listen. I would like to thank Denis Forman who allowed me to do the film.

KM: Yes, I'm sure that comes from all of you, Denis Forman, Sir Denis Forman who is sitting in the front row there, and who was the man responsible for setting up the Experimental Film Fund at the BFI. I don't think you were at the BFI when Free Cinema programme occurred, or were you still? You were still there.

LM: Yes. He was still. No, because, I must tell you I was at the Slade School and I did do a little film from the Metamorphosis from Franz Kafka, but I did sign all, a big bill came to the director of the university who was Coldstream, and he discovered that it was me who would always sign university college. And so he called me and said, what's that all this money to be paid, well I've done this little film you have the film society took the camera and the stock and I developed everything there, he said yes, but who is going to pay? And I say, well I don't know, I don't know. And he said you have to pay, if not you will go to prison. And I said well, I have no money but send me prison. [Laughter] And he said, well, no, I won't send you to prison, before I want to see this film. Let's say like that he said. If the film is good and student will clap hands, well, they know that they will pay and if they won't clap hands, well, then you will go to prison, it's all right? [Laughter] I said it's all right, well, then we'll show the film to the students in the hall tomorrow and see what happens. Well I was really terrified and anyway the film was shown, they clap hands and I was very happy and I saw William Coldstream the director of the Slade coming towards me with a very handsome man and he said, well Lorenza, I present you Mr Denis Forman, who is the director of the BFI, and he would like to talk to you. And he said hello, Lorenza, would you like to make a film without going to prison? And I said yes, of course, and he said, OK, come tomorrow to the BFI and have a cup of tea with me, and bring in one page, an idea, a subject. OK. So I went to see him, we really had a cup of tea. And actually I dropped the tea on the table and hot tea went on his knees. And I was so worried to have burned him with the hot tea and he said, don't worry, because I have a wooden leg. [Laughter]. Because my leg I left it in Italy at Cassino. It was absolutely... So I was happy to haven't burned him. He said I read the idea of two deaf mutes. Like that, he said, OK come tomorrow you can start a new film, and that's that. That's why I would like to thank him, for that and many other things.

[Applause]

Audience questions

Audience Question: How did you get Ford to finance some of the Free Cinema films?

KR: Well I did a sort of deal with them, I said I would do all the films about the commercials, and the films about ball-bearings and Ford tractors and so on, if once a year they gave me money for a free film, and there was some, it was a bit of a con trick but there was some truth in that, because you see sales films of that, in those days, were distributed on 16mm, beautiful films were made, the first film I ever made was called The Three Graces and it was about the Ford Zephyr, Zodiac and Consul, and the problem about doing those films was that there was nowhere to show them. Nobody, so I said if we make these films, get some publicity for them, there will be non-commercial screenings in which we can show our sales films. And they bought it. It worked for about three years, for three films, enough to see three movies through. And I have to say they were very generous sponsors. There was a tradition of sponsorship from industrial companies, I mean, the Gas, and Shell...

WL: If I can just add a footnote to that very briefly. I had cause to look for something, a film that used to be in the Ford Film Library, probably Lambeth Boys or Every Day Except Christmas, this is quite recently, a couple of years ago. I rang up the Ford motor company and I said to the person on the other end of the telephone, Ford used to have a film library, you know sort of thirty years ago, twenty years ago and I kind of wondered what happened to the films that were in that film library, and the girl said 'Film, is that something like video?'

Audience Question: Did any of the Free Cinema films have a traditional voiceover at all, and do you think that today we get away with doing what you did then?

KR: Well, you see we didn't get away with it really, we didn't get away with it commercially. These were, let us be honest, festival films, National Film Theatre and festival and film society films. And yes, actually, the Ford people did insist on the second of the, on We Are the Lambeth Boys that there should be a commentary and I put on a very, very sparse one, which, is a little bit embarrassing now.

Audience Question: To what extend did Italian neo-realism and films such as Bicycle Thieves influence the movement?

KR: Surely the Italians beat us to it, neo-realism... that's Rossellini, it immediately after the war, they came immediately after the war, it came out immediately post-war. So they preceded us.

KM: Although I think Humphrey Jennings beat them to it, with Fires Were Started, which is probably the first of those sorts of films, isn't it?

KR: Ah, yes.

KM: Lorenza, I think that was a question aimed at you, wasn't it? About Bicycle Thieves, you'd seen Bicycle Thieves presumably.

LM: Yes, of course.

KM: And that was exactly the kind of film that influenced you?

LM: I think I had been influenced by neo-realism a lot, when I came here. It was normal for me to go round the streets and do the film of course. See the reality, yes. I was also friend of Zavattini because I went to see him because I liked very much his books and he was very nice and opened the door to me and said, oh, you want to meet me, OK, let's talk. He was a very charming man. When I met I think I went there as a student to see him, then I met him again in Cannes with Lindsay Anderson, when Together was presented at Cannes in '56, and won a prize, and I met him and he said, you know that you are going to win the Palme of avant-garde I like very much your film, OK I say, let's meet in Rome, so when I went to Rome again Zavattini appeared in my life, as a very important person. Because I wrote this book, after in '62, I wrote this book a biography of my life, I was in a villa in Tuscany, adopted by an uncle who was the cousin of Albert Einstein, and I was there with this villa with my sister, and very happy, and then came the Nazis and kill everybody except me and my sister because we were not Jews, and that was a tragedy for me, and my angst finished only when I wrote the book. But nobody wanted to publish the book because the book was about a girl, a little girl, who was in love with Mussolini, and it was too original in that moment to publish this book. Everybody was against Mussolini, and I was writing that. Only Zavattini said, but this is a marvellous book, and he sent it to a publisher. All the other publishers sent me back the book, and Zavattini said it's a marvellous book, it has to be published, and he gave it to the father of Bernardo Bertolucci who was the director of Garzanti, and he said yes, it's a marvellous book, and it was sent to arrange a price and got the price. To say that Zavattini was important... my master. Yes.

DR: Zavattini, for those of you who don't know, I'm sure all of you do, was the writer of most of the... Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine...

LM: Miracle in Milan...

KM: Lorenza, can you tell us just briefly what led you to leave film? You went back to Italy, you did work on two or three films, I think... And then you didn't have anything more to do with the film industry, why was that?

LM: Well, because when, when I went to London because I didn't want to stay anymore in Florence. Because I had terrible memories about these terrible things happening in my life when I was little and when I came back from London after Cannes I went back to Florence I... I start being very ill with terrible symptom, I couldn't sleep because I saw again the country, the house that burned, and so I was far too ill to make films. I had to go to a psychiatrist, and try to save myself, and only writing the book I was... cured, yes, that's why I have more problems than to make films, the first problem was to be well myself.

Audience Question: Do you think you had a better to chance to get your films funded then than a young film-maker would have now? And do young people still want to make this kind of film today?

KM: Why are less people wanting to make them? I mean today it seems you can't walk along a street anywhere in Britain without bumping into twenty aspiring film-makers. Was it the same then?

KR: Well there was a concrete possibility for very many fewer. I mean for one thing the union was a closed shop, you know, we were none of us members of the union, these were amateur movies.

KM: So Denis, did you always commission in that way?

Denis Forman: Yes.

KM: Good.

DF: And continued more or less in the same way at Granada.

KM: You trusted in the talent.

DF: I think that's the way to do it...

WL: I think the great tragedy to my mind is that the talent exists to make the movies not only in England but worldwide, the audiences that would love to see well-made movies exist also worldwide, but the means of putting them together, the whole distribution system, has collapsed many many years ago and nobody seems to have noticed so the means of putting these two groups together no longer exists.

KR: Well there never was a distribution system for this kind of film, in fact television provided a brief period where, you know, Robert Vas, Denis Mitchell...

KM: Mike Grigsby

KR: Mike Grigsby. There was a way of making films of this kind with an audience guaranteed by television. So it didn't all disappear, not everybody went into...

KM: But that was thanks to Sir Denis largely at Granada.

KR: Correct. Yes, and BBC.

KM: Maybe you need to come out of retirement... Any other questions?

Audience Question: You were talking about observation, was there any influence... [inaudible]

KR: I think the purpose of mass observation was almost the opposite to these, mass observation was a way of finding what opinion smelt like, about certain... and to try and get some contact with the majority feeling. I mean the thing about the films was that one was interested in the single person, you know the child in O Dreamland, that responds to the torture scene, the kids dancing and the deaf mutes, it was quite the opposite. The idea was to show truthfully observed feeling, and then infer from that, rather than extrapolate general information.

Audience Question: Did Free Cinema have a political agenda?

KR: Not in the sense of programmatic... no. But I think it was aimed to give the kind of information on which intelligent political decisions could be made. But it was in no way polemical.

KM: OK, I'm going to wrap it up there. Lorenza's getting tired I think, and so, it just leaves me to thank all of you for coming along tonight, it's been very, very interesting and educational.

[Applause]