Looking Back at the British New Wave

Abstract

The evolution of what has come to be called the British New Wave offers an intriguing case of the critics’ mediating and constitutive role in the forming of a movement, school or trend (Zarhy-Levo 2001). This particular instance, however, illustrates a case of ‘second-order mediation’, namely that of the film critics voicing their perception that a new phase had begun in the cinematic domain by relying on and exploiting the ‘ready-made’ critical discourse already constructed around the literary and theatrical developments that had taken place a few years earlier, most notably the designation of the Angry YoungMan (AYM) phenomenon and the prevailing judgements surrounding the Royal Court Theatre’s productions, particularly that of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Zarhy-Levo 2008). To this extent, I suggest, the discourse constructed by literary and theatre critics not only provided the film critics with a ready-made means to promote a new wave, but also seemed to have inspired them to advocate their perception of progress in the cinematic domain. Moreover, the film critics’ reliance on this discourse can also account for the somewhat puzzling elements in their definition of the British New Wave, namely the date of its beginning and the films which it encompasses. The British New Wave is commonly perceived as comprising nine particular films released between 1959 and 1963: Room at the Top (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), This Sporting Life (1963) and Billy Liar (1963).1 Over the last three decades historians and critics of British cinema, reassessing the New Wave, have been engaged in an ongoing debate not only about whether these films should be seen as a distinct group (Hill 1986; Higson 1996) or as in fact very different from each