Filmy Ramblings

The views expressed in the Free Cinema manifesto (Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson) contained the ideas I most believe in, in approach to film making. We looked at this manifesto within a Film Tech tutorial; it states:

No film can be too personal
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant, perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style, a style means an attitude.

I agreed with this completely. Possibly spurred by my respect for Lindsay Anderson (if.... being one of favourite films of all time) but more to the point that it was, nay, is relevant. There were other manifestos by auteur's such as Werner Herzog, but I believed that the free cinema manifesto applied to the world of film making today more than ever before. The original article written in the mid-50s as cinema began to take on a change of it's own, many 60's films (like independent cinema today) focusing on creativity, youth, challenging the establishment & discrimination, be social class, race or sexuality, personal freedom...

Today anyone can pick up a camera and technically, anyone could make an independent, if not artistic film. As a film student, I lean more towards "Free Cinema", anyway. Most films created by the students here also tend to be of a "free" nature, 'free' in the sense that they are made outside the confines of the film industry and are not set by the traditional confines of professional/mainstream filmmaking. The same way we make films here, is the same way that Anderson, Mazzetti, Richardson and Reisz made their "Sequence" films.

Their films were made  for no more than a few hundred pounds, mostly with grants from the British Film Institute's experimental film fund. Our films, mirroring this somewhat, are made for sweet bugger all on grants from the Student Loan Company, often produced in limited, small time frames. The only problem stopping our work being a perfect example of Free Cinema being deadlines, which oppose the core principles of Free Cinema, however me whining about the education system is far from likely to win me any marks... but I digress.

Anderson et al's films were all typically shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, hand-held cameras, usually with a non-synchronised soundtrack added separately. Again, many parallels to the way we film students have been working at university and in some cases, college beforehand. Having gone through Film Studies at Sixth Form, I had emerged respecting independent cinema. The artistic. The freelance. Mostly a love of British Cinema from the 1960s onwards.