Media Essay
Investigating Social Realism: with reference to Sweet Sixteen (2002) and This Is England (2006)
Within the last few years British Cinema and Realism have been linked. “Realism began in the 1930’s with documentary films, and a prime example of this is with the ‘father of documentary’ John Grierson, who founded the British documentary movement and created classic films such as Drifters (1929), Industrial Britain (1933), Song of Ceylon (1934) and Night Mail (1936).”In which British Cinema depicting the daily lifestyles of working class citizens. Social Realism presents a tenacious raw and grim image of lifestyles explored by the working class. It is conventional for social realism to be filmed with natural lighting, as it help encode realism, with also de saturated colours as Social realism tends to deal with real life issues, as the mood of the media text typically tends to be negative. Over the years the genre has been seen to have a gloomy reputation, which has seen an increase in box office revenue. For example Kidulthood which depicted gang culture with the streets of London, The film was of a low budget (which is normally conventional for a social realist films) and was funded by the UK film council. Social realist films tend to consist of the socio-economic group of an ABC1 audience and a psychographic group of aspirers from the age range of 30-60 with a secondary audience of students. Social realism can be seen to educate and inform users about grim issues faced upon society. The upper band of the socio economic group, the ABC1 group would tend to use the film for a sense of personal identity or surveillance (Blumer and Katz, 1974) whereas the lower end of socio economic group, C2, D and E audience would use social realism for diversion to gain a sense of escapism from the outside world. “Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and
Within the last few years British Cinema and Realism have been linked. “Realism began in the 1930’s with documentary films, and a prime example of this is with the ‘father of documentary’ John Grierson, who founded the British documentary movement and created classic films such as Drifters (1929), Industrial Britain (1933), Song of Ceylon (1934) and Night Mail (1936).”In which British Cinema depicting the daily lifestyles of working class citizens. Social Realism presents a tenacious raw and grim image of lifestyles explored by the working class. It is conventional for social realism to be filmed with natural lighting, as it help encode realism, with also de saturated colours as Social realism tends to deal with real life issues, as the mood of the media text typically tends to be negative. Over the years the genre has been seen to have a gloomy reputation, which has seen an increase in box office revenue. For example Kidulthood which depicted gang culture with the streets of London, The film was of a low budget (which is normally conventional for a social realist films) and was funded by the UK film council. Social realist films tend to consist of the socio-economic group of an ABC1 audience and a psychographic group of aspirers from the age range of 30-60 with a secondary audience of students. Social realism can be seen to educate and inform users about grim issues faced upon society. The upper band of the socio economic group, the ABC1 group would tend to use the film for a sense of personal identity or surveillance (Blumer and Katz, 1974) whereas the lower end of socio economic group, C2, D and E audience would use social realism for diversion to gain a sense of escapism from the outside world. “Better than any other genre, social realism has shown us to ourselves, pushing the boundaries in the effort to put the experiences of real Britons on the screen, and