Original subtitles

# But they never stood in the dark with you, love #

# When you take me in your arms and drive me slowly out of my mind #

# Oh, kiss me, kiss me #

# And when you do, I know that you will miss me, miss me #

# If we ever say "Adieu" #

# So kiss me, kiss me #

# Make me tell you I'm in love with you #

# Hold me, thrill me, kiss me #

# Never let me go #

When you've got a Bolex with 40 seconds

and you've got one lens, a 25mm lens, and no sync sound, that's it.

So you have to actually make it work for you,

otherwise you may as well give up and go home.

And, actually, sometimes, the less you have, small is beautiful.

The less you have, it actually makes you think more clearly,

and it makes you think, "How do I express this idea as simply as possible,

but as cogently as possible with what I have?"

O Dreamland was a little film that, when we were in Margate in 1952,

filming a film called Thursday's Children, of which Lindsay was the co-director,

but he did the bulk of the directing.

Anyway, during that period, because it's shot in Margate,

Lindsay became interested in the funfair there called Dreamland,

which was one of the best-known ones on the south coast, certainly.

And he got together with John Fletcher, more or less simultaneously,

in the intervals, the various gaps, in the shooting.

And again they did that over various weekends more or less at the same time.

And that was a totally Lindsay Anderson production.

Later there was a lot of trouble.

They wanted to sue the BFI and anybody in sight

because they realised they weren't being portrayed in a very attractive light.

But there again, it's a little gem of a film that stands up very well.

It's so atmospheric and so representative of its time

that it stands up to scrutiny 50 years later.

# I believe for every drop of rain that falls #

# A flower grows #

# I believe that somewhere in the darkest night #

# A candle glows #

# I believe for everyone who goes astray #

# Someone will come to show the way #

# I believe #

# Oh, I believe #

Well, Momma Don't Allow was one of the first films

to be financed by the British Film Institute Experimental Fund, as it was then called.

And Karel arranged that...

I think Karel arranged... The initial pre-production was done by Karel.

But it was always intended to be a joint effort with Tony Richardson.

We decided that it could be made very easily with a Bolex and the sound would be added,

because most of the sound would be the music of the Chris Barber Jazz Band.

And then the framing stories,

they were designed in such a way as not to have any significant dialogue,

so there again one could work with a Bolex.

At that time, sound recording was a bit of a problem.

You couldn't just take your tape recorder because there weren't any.

The films had to be designed in such a way that they could be post-synced.

Subsequently, I often described that film as a film made with a Bolex and a ladder.

They were our basic tools.

Quite a few of the scenes among the dancers were taken from a ladder,

so you could be really close

but also on top of them, so you could film them from a top angle,

which is used, if you watch the film, it's used a lot.

And it's intercut with the lower angles.

And all divided in such a way that no shot could last longer than 22 seconds

because that was the limit of the spring-wound Bolex.

It couldn't run for longer than that.

But it was an enjoyable experience, and I would say it was very efficiently made

in four or five sessions of the jazz club.

And then either before or afterwards, we filmed the framing stories:

the dentist and the railway cleaner and the butcher boy.

All of which were designed to do without dialogue, basically.

And it's one of the most successful films ever made.

For years afterwards, I used to get cheques for 13s 8d from the distribution of that movie,

one of the very few movies I ever got any money from.

That wasn't in the calculation.

Yes, the story of Together is quite complicated and a bit chaotic, that it was er...

Lorenza Mazzetti, the director, had managed to get finance from the BFI,

again from the Experimental Film Fund,

to make a film on 35mm, which is highly unusual.

At that period, it's the only one to be made at that point on 35mm.

And she had a co-director and scriptwriter called Denis Horn.

And there was a lot of trouble because they were neither of them qualified

to put that script onto film.

I met him in the street because he had a nice little car called an Austin 7.

Small like that.

I asked him if I could be taken around with this car for a moment,

and he says yes, and, anyway, we get friends and I fall in love with him.

And so I say, "I'm doing a film. Would you like to help me?"

And he said, "Yes."

"Well, write some dialogue," I'd say.

He wrote a lot of dialogues.

But I didn't want so many dialogues, so we start quarrelling on the set.

It was a little embarrassing.

And Denis was furious, he left me. I was alone editing the film.

And I had to cut. I had a lot of material.

And it was at that point, when Lorenza was sitting in the basement of the BFI,

which was then in Great Russell Street,

and in the basement there were some extremely primitive cutting rooms,

which didn't even have bins in them.

There was some sort of primitive Moviola,

probably an Editola or something like that, a very difficult thing to use.

Lorenza was stuck down there, sticking bits of film on the wall with Sellotape,

and there she was discovered by Lindsay.

LORENZA: I didn't know him. Apparently, he was a famous critic.

He came. He was so unkind.

He said, "OK, I'm going to see that, but if I don't like it, I won't help you."

OK, well, have a look.

Well, he said, "I like it. I help you."

And we started great friendship.

But he was treating me like a general and a very simple soldier.

And he could see that the material was extremely interesting.

There was some wonderful material.

But, on the other hand, it was not conducive to being made into the story,

which was called The Glass Marble at the time,

which was the script.

Which was these two deaf mutes living in the East End of London,

working in the docks, being pursued by this gang of children,

whose marbles game they'd disturbed at some point.

I had to do that story.

I had to do the idea of two deaf mutes.

You know, like, the sound was cutting and the silence.

They were in the world of silence.

The others were in the world of sound.

The difference, the outsider.

I was the outsider, so it's quite simple.

I was projecting my feelings.

And Lindsay decided that by shooting certain additional material,

it could be made into a film which retained the bones of the story,

but which was no longer plot-orientated,

but became a rather poetic, atmospheric evocation

of the atmosphere of the East End of London and the docklands at that time,

which, of course, it is.

LORENZA: Well, the atmosphere, it was absolutely...

I never saw, in my life, such architecture.

There were streets and streets.

It seems to me the representation of hell, but also it was marvelous.

Lorenza was one of those people...

There are several instances of foreigners coming along

and finding material in the streets of London

that no British director had ever found or bothered with.

Again, I have to use the word "extraordinary".

It was just a cinematic set already done.

But it's one of my favourite films.

I think it's a really beautiful film, quite unique in its way. It's a very poetic film.

And the two actors, Eduardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews,

who was a sculptor and a painter respectively, performed marvellously.

They weren't actors, but they performed absolutely brilliantly.

So, that, I think, in the end was a very successful enterprise,

which, of course, lives on even 40 or 50 years later.

It's a film you can see any time and appreciate.

Well, there came a point where Momma Don't Allow was finished,

Together was finished,

and Dreamland was around, in the background.

It was never... Lindsay had never thought about a professional exhibition for that film.

It hadn't really occurred to him what would happen to the film.

He wasn't particularly interested in that.

Here we were, three amateur filmmakers, with movies,

and absolutely nowhere to show them.

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.

Lindsay coined the phrase "Free Cinema", as a grouping for these three films,

which were completely separately produced.

They were made by different people,

and the one thing they had in common was that they were free,

in the sense that the people who made those films were free to do exactly what they liked,

without front office interference or interference by some producer or some front office person.

VOICE OF KAREL REISZ: We believed that the films should be signed,

that's to say they should have a point of view, not be objective documentaries

or 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.

The title "Free Cinema" was a marketing device

to present these three films together at the National Film Theatre,

and er...

To make it something of an event, the manifesto was written,

which Lindsay and Lorenza and Karel Reisz signed,

and it was an extremely successful event.

The cinema was full for God knows how many evenings.

Every newspaper wrote about it.

They were saying wild, ridiculous things about the renaissance of British cinema,

Richard Dimbleby interviewed us on Panorama.

I mean, this, for three amateur shorts.

It was very successful, extremely successful.

Then it led to the subsequent Free Cinema programmes over a period of four years or so.

Wakefield Express was made in '52, I believe.

Again, it was an extremely simple production.

Just Lindsay and me, and later on John, John came.

We made two or three trips up to Wakefield.

The newspaper, called the Wakefield Express,

which was actually a series of newspapers, regional newspapers,

asked him to make the film and said,

"Look, we're always being asked to show people round the works

and it's a terrible nuisance.

If you could make a film

that we can show them first,

and then, having seen the film, we can have a quick tour,

not as extensive as it would be without the film."

So the idea of the film was a tour of the press,

a tour of the works to show how the newspaper was produced.

And Lindsay developed that into a very affectionate and efficient study of the area.

Some of those sequences are very effective.

The war memorial sequence is particularly effective.

I managed to crouch low under a sort of wall,

and filmed possibly a widow or any woman with wild hair, blowing in the wind,

who was very tearful and distraught at this war memorial ceremony.

It's a very nice movie.

Again one of those movies that you can see 50 years later.

It has the property of a document of the period, a lot of which doesn't exist.

Hot metal doesn't exist any more, the typography...

The way the newspaper is produced, of course, has changed totally.

It doesn't exist any more, so some of it looks very quaint now.

But they were very professional

and it gives a very good account of what the area was like,

what newspaper production was like, all in the space of 30 minutes or whatever it is.

We found out that the BFI had this Experimental Fund,

which had some money in it,

and which provided the opportunity for young film-makers

to make their first short film

from an idea they first submitted.

And then I saw the initial Free Cinema programme.

I met Lindsay and the others at that stage.

How our friendships developed from there, I don't really know.

When the opportunity arose to do that with Goretta...

they were interested.

They didn't say to us, "You are members of Free Cinema."

No, but then again, why not?

If your film is successful,

if it's in the spirit of the movement,

we could perhaps include it in a programme.

# Cute little baby, my baby #

# My baby don't want no gambling #

# My baby #

# My baby don't want no gambling, my baby #

# My baby #

# My baby don't want no gambling #

# She wants none of this moonlight rambling #

# My baby, cute little baby #

# My baby #

One thing that struck us...

because we came from Geneva, which was a small town.

We arrived in this great metropolis.

What struck us was what an architect friend called "the rotten heart of cities".

It's remarkable. There is an absolutely incredible concentration in the West End

of every possible entertainment imaginable.

And seeing these huge crowds on a Saturday night

who descended on the area to go to the restaurants and pubs,

the cinemas and theatres and shows, etc.

We were amazed. We watched. We went there on a Saturday evening.

And suddenly we had the idea to make a short film about it.

The English themselves didn't give it a second thought

because, I don't know, it was part of the fabric of their daily lives.

It didn't occur to them, how striking it was,

at a sociological level, political even,

this extraordinary concentration of people in one place at the same time,

always the same ritual.

We saw, and we saw it in the course of various Saturdays...

We only filmed on Saturday evenings,

20 consecutive Saturday evenings.

We didn't film every week but we turned up with a camera to see.

And we realised that it was the same scenario to the minute,

exactly the same every Saturday night.

With the same characters in the same place at the same time, etc.

So we submitted our idea for this film

and it was accepted and we set to work on it.

Neither of us had any experience of the cinema.

We had seen lots of films but we had no practical or technical experience.

And it's thanks to our friend

who was associated with the Free Cinema movement, John Fletcher,

who was himself a technician - a cameraman, sound engineer, etc.

An ambivalent technician. A real handyman, too.

He could turn his hand to anything technical, repair the equipment and so on.

And, moreover, he was sensitive and intelligent.

So, the three of us made the film together.

We were inspired by Jean Vigo.

His approach in his film A propos de Nice

was a source of inspiration for us

in conveying the reality that was Piccadilly Circus

on a Saturday night.

So we were inspired by that.

And the other thing that was a bit experimental was...

I can't really remember but I think it was the first film to be made in full

with a new type of film that had just come onto the market

which was Ilford HPS,

400 ASA, extremely sensitive,

that made it possible to film at night,

as long as there was some natural light, of course.

And the area is so well lit by neon lights

and all the street lighting,

that there was more than enough light to be able to use this film.

These were no-budget films.

The Experimental Fund paid for the roll of film, the processing, and so on.

But not for the editing, nor for the equipment needed for shooting.

Fortunately, John Fletcher had access to some equipment.

We filmed with these 16mm spring-wound cameras

and these tiny 30-metre magazines.

It was a very basic way of working.

Very basic.

What's more, it was a technique for amateurs.

It was just that, instead of filming baby on the beach,

we had other ideas.

VENDOR: Only for a short while now. Five shillings or six and six.

Pay box is on your left. Six and six.

Or five shillings.

At the time, Lindsay Anderson shared a flat with Gavin Lambert,

who was editor of Sight & Sound

and who went off to Hollywood.

And there was a large room going free.

So he said, if you're staying, you must live here. And I stayed two years.

From then on, as I was living with him and I saw him every morning at breakfast,

we naturally became close friends

and as we cut Nice Time in my bedroom,

he came to have a look from time to time.

He made comments, told us what he thought.

He shouted at us, as only he knew how.

He supported us, too, of course. He encouraged us.

So that's what was happening.

Then the film was deemed good enough to be included in the third programme,

in the third programme along with this masterpiece,

at least I think so, Everyday Except Christmas.

In 1955 or 1956,

Karel Reisz moved from the BFI, where he was programming the NFT,

to the Ford Motor Company.

He became the Films Officer of the Ford Motor Company,

to look after their publicity films, and that kind of thing.

And because it was on the cards it was possible within that job,

he suggested to them that they finance

Every Day Except Christmas,

in a... It was meant to be one of a series of programmes called Look At Britain.

And the Ford Motor Company was agreeable,

so that film was planned as a 20-minute documentary

about Covent Garden Market.

We had four weeks of shooting.

Two weeks of night shooting,

for the bulk of the material,

and two weeks which er...

started just pre-dawn, and then went...

It started just pre-dawn and then it went on to about midday.

So we worked something like six till two.

Anyway, under the... under the auspices of Leon Clore,

who was a very astute, a very professional and a very generous man,

it was possible for that film to spend six months in the cutting room.

Which, of course, normally... it would not be on the cards.

So I always think of Every Day Except Christmas

for all the...

...beauty of the material, there's very good material there,

but I think of that film as having been made in the cutting room.

And a tremendous contribution was made by the music of Daniel Paris,

whom Lindsay, again, contacted and engaged.

I don't know where he first got to know about Daniel Paris, but...

But when you look at that film in its final form,

and particularly at the daylight sequence,

it's like a fugue.

It just augments and augments and builds and builds and builds

into a sort of fugue, where the music, of course, is crucial.

It was in late '53

that Ilford came out with the material

which, initially, had a name like Experimental Material No.5. Something like that!

And eventually, it took on the name of HPS.

But on...

Every Day Except Christmas could not have been made without that film, that film stock.

Impossible. Absolutely impossible.

Because it's made in very, very low-level light conditions,

with a minimum of additional light.

You just had these very dim hanging lights...

...you could just see by with the naked eye, let alone photograph by! Not in those days.

So HPS, the material HPS,

which was the first 400 ASA black-and-white material worldwide,

made that film, essential for the making of that. It couldn't have been made without it.

# And on her back was a Union Jack #

# So I paid five francs more #

# And up and down her spine #

# Was the BHB in line #

But there's a lot of hand-holding.

There's some hand-held tracking shots and er...

and there is some sync sound, proper sync sound, improvised sync sound.

All of it appropriate to the situation.

Some of the time, I was sitting up on the top shelf of the four-tiered shelves in the Garden,

...studying the movements of the people, and it had a certain rhythm to it.

And I studied that rhythm, so I was...

When I was ready to shoot, I was able to follow that rhythm, and to anticipate.

It's like you're a fly on the wall, but you're an intelligent fly,

and you're very well trained, you've observed the process.

And you're ready to film it in the most effective manner,

without drawing attention to yourself.

There again, like with Together,

the result was a film which you can look at 50 years later and be perfectly happy with.

The only thing that seems slightly dated nowadays

is parts of the commentary, which seem slightly patronising.

Robert Vas was a refugee from Hungary after the events of '56.

He left Hungary at that time...

...and he was already...

I think he was a filmmaker in Hungary, in a small way.

He was quite young.

And he may have come out of film school.

Anyway, he had some experience as a filmmaker.

And we got together. Again, through the BFI.

And he had this plan to make this little film called...

which was finally called Refuge England.

HUNGARIAN MAN: I want to tell you about my first day in London.

Many years have passed since...

...but I can still remember clearly what I saw and felt on that day,

when I arrived from the camp.

And I remember how nice he was.

He was a very polite, very gentle-spoken, polite person.

He never raised his voice.

And it was a good script, and it was well written.

There were some very simple things in it.

Like a table laid with silver, and sort of laid out.

And to a refugee, this was civilisation again, you know,

to come into an atmosphere where you weren't hiding or running away.

And he had a Hungarian actor with him, or he had contact with a Hungarian actor,

who again may have been a refugee alongside at that period.

As a production, it was made in exactly the same way,

and for the sort of money, I suppose, minimal amount of money

that the other films were made.

And, unfortunately, the sad thing is that he committed suicide some years later.

Very sad.

By the time I was 18, and doing my A-levels, or whatever,

and about to leave, and being urged to go on to university,

I made the decision I wouldn't go to university, but I wanted to try and make films immediately.

And everybody thought this was crazy.

So...

I immediately went home after I left school,

and I wrote lots and lots and lots and lots of letters.

Overseen by my mother.

And fired them off around to all the companies.

And actually got two very positive replies.

And one was from the BBC.

And another was from Granada, who were just starting off.

So, by the time I was 19, I was there in Granada.

And then I thought, "Hey, I'm earning enough money. I can buy a camera."

And this was the first time I'd ever been, really, in any depth,

to the industrial north of Britain.

And that was... That shocked me.

It shocked me to see how another half of Britain was living.

And I had really not seen or felt it before.

And I thought I should really try and make a film about this experience. Um...

...and what I was discovering around me.

So, having got the salary, I bought a Bolex.

A wind-up Bolex.

With a, I think, a 40 spring wound-up 40 or 50-second maximum running time

on each take.

One 25mm lens.

And a tripod.

And that was it.

And then, again, repeating my experience I'd had whilst I was at school,

I went and saw the boss at Granada and urged him to give us some money,

to actually get me some equipment, a bit more equipment, to set up this film unit.

Which we did. Unit Five Seven.

And again, I gathered around me,

or people came to me, the dissidents, the mavericks, the bored,

and we made our first film.

Which was Enginemen, which we made over a period of around 18 months, I think.

Getting up most Saturday mornings around 4am.

Driving out to the engine sheds -

the film was about enginemen in Newton Heath, near Manchester.

And shooting on black-and-white

in the hours... the grey, misty hours between 5.30am and about 8am.

And then the light was too bright, and we stopped shooting and went home.

We were shooting much of the time on ex-government film stock.

Ex-government film stock being stuff that the government had thrown away

and was in danger of being fogged.

And it was cheap. So we used that a lot of the time.

And, therefore, my shooting ratios were often...

I think my shooting ratios were incredibly low.

Roundabout two or three to one.

I was really interested in the detail, the minutiae...

...the silence between the words.

I was interested in letting people be themselves,

giving people space to be themselves.

If not in terms of dialogue, just in the way they move and are.

Letting people express themselves and their lives through atmosphere,

through their movements, through their faces.

MAN: That's how l do feel about it.

The racial disputes in America...

The land of the free, and the Statue of Liberty,

but er... there's a great number of their population are not getting all the freedom.

And then I was in a rooming house, living in a rooming house in Manchester,

called The Barkham Hotel.

And in that rooming house, were also Manchester Guardian cub trainees.

And one of them, one of these trainees, one day went across to Liverpool

to report... to cover a story by Lindsay Anderson.

And he mentioned, the reporter actually mentioned,

that I was working away on my own in Manchester with this group,

making a little film about life there.

And Anderson said, "Well, look. Ask him to send me his rushes."

And I did so.

And, in fact, I saw Anderson on television many years later,

saying that he received this brown-paper parcel,

and when he opened it, all the film fell out,

because I didn't even know how to spool the film up!

So the film went across his breakfast table.

Anyway, he and Karel Reisz put the thing together.

And they projected it.

And then sent me an incredible telegram, just saying, "Congratulations.

How can we help you finish this?

Can't believe you're doing this on your own." Something like that.

And they gave us, the unit,

money to do post-production properly.

To do a better soundtrack.

And to edit it in a slightly more polished way.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Because it then went into the last Free Cinema programme...

...had some amazing reviews.

Yeah, I haven't really looked back, actually, since then.

And I loved that experience, because it was a film of just images and sound.

Very poetic in its feeling. Very rough. Quite raw.

Because we had very little money. We made the whole film for, I think, under �200.

But it just showed what could be done with vision, some dedication,

a group of very willing people...

...and some visionaries, like Anderson and Reisz,

who actually said they believed in us and could make it happen.

And we made it happen.

Yes, We Are the Lambeth Boys, er...

was the last of the Free Cinema films with which I was involved.

It was shot in '58, I think.

Directed by Karel Reisz.

We used many of the same techniques

that we'd used in previous Free Cinema films

and other documentaries of the period.

With one addition - that we actually made a...

we improvised a blimp out of a sleeping bag...

...and some bits and pieces,

in order to be able to shoot some improvised scenes, hand-held scenes.

The blimp had to be light enough.

You could buy a blimp in those days, but you couldn't hand-hold it.

It would take... Even an extremely strong man couldn't hand-hold it.

So we had to improvise something where the sound was sufficiently dampened

to be useable.

And, at the same time, the camera remained a flexible, hand-holdable camera.

And that was used mainly in a sequence where

the girls are sort of chatting, the boys are playing cricket in the nets.

So, in those situations, it's essential to find a way of covering it,

with possibly less than perfect sound, but it's better than nothing.

Shut up, you!

I'll get Phyllis on you!

He's as stupid as Vince.

BOY: Oi, Peggy! He's hopeless, in't he, though? - Oh, shut up!

You think I'm a nut, don't you? I know I am.

- Here, you've got a funny haircut. - You hit my head.

That looks like your mum!

Oh! That was just to look older.

Oh, see that?

That boy paid 1/6d for that, and I come down on the slope and it flew away.

I weren't half choked! Believe you me I was!

Oi! Oi, Oi, darlin'!

The original movie is largely visual.

All right, it has sound, but the sound amplifies and comments.

The information is often in the visuals.

And particularly in the scene

where they go and play cricket with a public school in Harrow, or somewhere...

...there's almost no dialogue.

The information is entirely in the visuals,

and it's entirely adequate like that.

You don't wish for either commentary -

there's a tiny bit of commentary at the beginning, a bit at the end -

but, basically, the story is there in the pictures.

Skinny Minnie!

- Hello, darling'! - How about a big of bingo?

We'll come up here tonight, sup here.

I like your lovely legs!

# All bus inspectors need a rope around their neck #

# All bus inspectors need a rope around their neck #

# All bus inspectors... #

Well, it was... Free Cinema was, I think,

a very, very small and tentative beginning of a change,

which eventually changed British film entirely.

But before it could do that, there had to be this input from... particularly from the theatre,

from the Royal Court Theatre.

That, I think, was a much bigger element than the input from Free Cinema.

But it was a beginning. It was a first, small step.

It was the first, small step.