MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

Katie Jarvis:

In this interview in Little White Lies Fish Tank actress Katie Jarvis talks about her crazy last 12 months and her hopes for the future.

When Katie Jarvis won the Best British Performance award at Edinburgh this year, she didn’t need to thank God, or her hairdresser or any of the acceptance speech regulars. She needed to thank her boyfriend for being a pain in the arse.

Because if Katie’s boyfriend wasn’t a pain in the arse, they wouldn’t argue so much. And if they didn’t argue so much, she wouldn’t have been mouthing off at him across the platform of Tilbury Town train station in 2008. And if she hadn’t been mouthing off at him across the platform of Tilbury Town train station in 2008, the casting assistant for Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank would never have noticed her. And if the casting assistant for Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank had never noticed her, the landscape of young British actors would look subtly but vitally different. Plucked off the streets of Essex with no acting experience, Katie has seen her face plastered across billboards, her name celebrated in exalted circles and her debut film nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or.

Fish Tank is the second feature from a writer/director whose hard-bitten debut, Red Road, catapulted her into the front line of young, socially conscious British filmmakers. Fish Tank is a worthy successor, shot entirely on location in Essex, where the urban sprawl of London gives way to the wide open spaces where the Thames meets the sea.

Read the full interview here.

'Fish Tank': It's Relevance to 1950's/1960's British Social Realist Films

In Andrea Arnold’s film, “Fish Tank,” an unsmiling 15-year-old named Mia (Katie Jarvis), who lives in a housing project in Essex, in England, becomes close to the boyfriend of her uncaring mother. The man, an Irish charmer named Connor, played by Michael Fassbender, gives her money and lends her his video camera so that she can tape herself dancing to hip-hop. It soon becomes apparent that the relationship between Mia and Connor is becoming dangerously intimate.

Ms. Arnold shot “Fish Tank” in a raw, nonjudgmental and observational style with plenty of hand-held camerawork. The film, which was in the United States on Friday, is recognizably the work of the same unflinching filmmaker who made “Red Road” (2006) and “Wasp,” which won the 2005 Oscar for best live-action short. The consistent look and the working-class milieu of Ms. Arnold’s films align them with the three British directors most associated with social realism: Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke, who died in 1990.

The difficulties in Britain of raising money to make films prohibits cohesive movements in the national cinema, and like other directors who have worked in a social realist style — including Gary Oldman (the actor, who directed “Nil by Mouth”), Carine Adler (“Under the Skin”), Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher”) and Duane Hopkins (“Better Things”) — Ms. Arnold is something of a lone voice. Her reputation as an auteur could come to rest on whether her films successfully harness her chosen style to express social themes, or whether they are merely anecdotes that look like Mr. Loach’s films.

Ms. Arnold admits to being a fan of Mr. Loach, but is hesitant about making claims for herself as a social realist. “I guess I am,” she allowed during a recent telephone interview. “When people have suggested it, I’ve said, ‘Oh, am I?’ I know it sounds kind of mad, but I just get on and make my films in my own way as best I can. I’m not aware that I’m joining any group. I know that all the people that have made similar films in the past paved the way for me to be able to do it, and I’m obviously influenced by what came before, but I’m not that conscious of it.”

Source: nytimes.com

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

Social Realism

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 shaping our ideas of what British cinema and British life can be.

Social realism in films is representative of real life, with all its difficulties. The stories and people portrayed are everyday characters, usually from working class backgrounds. Typically, films within the social realist genre are gritty, urban dramas about the struggle to survive the daily grind.

One of the strongest images of postwar British cinema is that of factory worker Arthur Seaton downing a pint in one at the end of another week in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Also in A Taste of Honey (1961) prejudices and social values were explored in British cinema for the first time.

These films dealt with prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, alienation and relationship problems; issues that were seen as controversial at the time. Here were factory workers, office underlings, dissatisfied wives, pregnant girlfriends, runaways, the marginalised, poor and depressed.

This British New Wave was symptomatic of a worldwide emergence of art cinemas challenging mainstream aesthetics and attitudes. The New Wave protagonist was usually a working-class male without bearings in a society in which traditional industries and the cultures that went with them were in decline. Directors like Ken Loach and films such as those by Mike Leigh's High Hopes (1988) and The Full Monty (1997) have addressed the erosion of regional and class identities amid a landscape rendered increasingly uniform by consumerism and social structures.

Descendants of this style at the BBC in the 1960s, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh assessed the impact of the consumer society on family life, charting the erosion of the welfare state and the consensus that built it. Looking back, Loach's work seems to reflect the shift from the collectivist mood of the war years to the individualism of the postwar decades in its very form. Loach's films went from the improvised long-take naturalism of Poor Cow and Kes (both 1969) to the 'social melodrama' of Raining Stones (1993).

In the 1980s, publisher-broadcaster Channel 4 attempted to cultivate a cinema audience for realism. Responding to the moralistic entrepreneurialism of the Thatcher years, 'Films on Four' My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Brezhnev (both 1985) followed characters from the margins as they attempted to stake a claim in the new order. Meanwhile, more lethal and complex representations of men and women appeared in Shane Meadows' A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) and This Is England (2006) added more diverse representations of modern culture.

'Fish Tank' can be seen as a direct descendant of this type of cinema in its portrayal of a young girl disillusioned by her lifestyle, social insignificance and prospects who seeks escape in her passion to express herself in dance.

Genre & Narrative Theory

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

Read an interview with Andrea Arnold, the director of 'Fish Tank', here @ filmmakermagazine.com. Filmmaker spoke with Arnold about her faith in cinema, the simple act of observing everyday life, and why her New Year’s resolution is to dance every day. Watch an interview with Michael Fassbender below.

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

Andrea Arnold's acclaimed story of forbidden love in Essex is a powerful film in a bleak landscape, powered by fizzing performances from Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis. Read this review from The Guardian for a critical perspective of the film.

British social realism in film

British Social Realism from M Taylor

Uses & Gratifications in action

Here are a few forum/blog comments on our chosen texts. They indicate how fans respond to texts in different ways to different texts and highlight how researching such sites can provide valuable source material to include/quote in your exam responses.

Such research doesn't take long and blogging others comments allows for solid arguments and debates that can help you apply theory in more varied ways.  

Source: Lostpedia forum

Source: Guardian Mad Men Blog

Source: Independent blog

Social Realism in film

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

'Kes' is a 1969 British film from the social realist director Ken Loach (a former student at King Edward Grammar School, Nuneaton). The film has certain similarities to 'Fish Tank' as it focuses on 15-year-old Billy Casper, who has little hope in life and is bullied both at home, by his physically and verbally abusive half-brother, Judd, as well as at school. He is mischievous himself; he steals milk from milk floats, gets other students into trouble and generally fights and misbehaves. Billy comes over as an emotionally neglected boy with little self-respect. Billy's mother refers to him in the film as a "hopeless case".

'Kes' and social realism:

• Low budget filmmaking
• Hand-held camera (documentary feel)
• On location
• Deals with social issues/problems
• Socio-political messages and values
• Working class lifestyles
• Non-actors
• 'Kitchen Sink'

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

The British New Wave Cinema lasted only a few years, in effect from 1959 to 1963. And its output amounted to no more than, arguably, half a dozen films at most. But, albeit small in number, they were influential films and powerfully evocative, and enough to prompt leading critics of the day to talk of ‘a renaissance in British cinema’.

Coming at the end of a decade that was widely perceived as ‘a doldrums era’, replete with lightweight comedy fare, gothic horror films and endless war vehicles, or so it seemed, the New Wave films were greeted by audiences as a breath of fresh air – and paved the way, moreover, for the transatlantic success that awaited British cinema in the Swinging Sixties.

Directors and Writers

The leading directors of New Wave cinema were Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger and Lindsay Anderson. Most came from the theatre, principally the Royal Court Theatre, where Richardson had directed the plays of John Osborne, notably Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer to great critical acclaim. In fact, the major production company behind British New Wave cinema, Woodfall films, was set up by Richardson and Osborne precisely to put these stage plays on to the big screen, which they did with the likes of Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier in the leading roles.

Woodfall’s fortunes fared even better when Richardson and Reisz spread their net wider to draw on northern realist novelists or playwrights such as Alan Sillitoe and Shelagh Delaney, and, what’s more, took the unusual step for the film industry of those times of engaging these authors to do the screenplays for the films of their own works. Taking the cameras out of the studio confines and engaging in larger amounts of location shooting was another first for the industry, and not at all welcomed in mainstream circles. But social realism was the watchword of these new film-makers, scriptwriters, and a younger generation of actors, including Albert Finney, Rita Tushingham, Shirley Anne Field, Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates, Rachel Roberts, Richard Harris and the like.

Karel Reisz had the first big commercial success with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), while Tony Richardson made A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Lindsay Anderson engaged David Storey to script his own book of This Sporting Life (1963), which effectively brought New Wave Cinema to an end.

Realism and After

The social realism fostered by New Wave Cinema, in particular, made an indelible and lasting impression on British film-makers for many years, and can even be discerned in such recent films as Pater Cattaneo’s international hit, The Full Monty (1997), as well as Lynne Ramsay’s art-house success, Ratcatcher (1999) and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (2009). The spirit of the New Wave, in short, extended way beyond its own period and, indeed, still flourishes in British cinema today.

'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'

Adapted from Alan Sillitoe’s rebellious first popular novel, which is about the new young working class, directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Tony Richardson, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning stars Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field. The film was a revelation when it was initially released, not just for its realistic style, but also for its graphic portrayal of sex, extra-marital affairs, strong language, and, most contentious of all, abortion.

The British Board of Film Censors, for instance, urged a general toning down of all the language and sex scenes. In particular, it required that the successful abortion scene promised in the screenplay and evident from the first in Sillitoe’s original novel, be rendered ultimately ineffective and that the film-makers follow a policy of ‘social responsibility’ as far as possible.

Extract edited from: The Open University

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

What is Social Realism?

Cinematically the British New Wave is part of a tradition of social realism within British film which has seen many shifts since the growth of the British documentary movement in the 1930s. Realism is a difficult concept because encapsulated within it there are a range of changing aesthetic conventions all of which have as a central concern the intention of representing ‘the world as it really is’ or ‘life as it is really lived’. Lay (2002) points out:

There is no universal, all-encompassing definition of realism, nor is there agreement amongst academics and film-makers as to its purpose and use. But what we can say is that there are many ‘realisms’ and these realisms all share an interest in presenting some aspect of life as it is lived’. Carroll (1996) suggests that the term should only be used with a prefix attached. This is because another important feature of all realisms is how they are produced at specific historical points. The addition of a prefix, such as social-, neo-, documentary-, specifies the’ what’ and crucially, ‘when’ of that movement or moment. What is regarded as ‘real’, by whom, and how it is represented is unstable dynamic, and ever-changing, precisely because realism is irrevocably tied to the specifics of time and place. ‘Moment’” (Lay, Samantha, 2002: p 8)

As Andre Bazin also noted, each era looks to the technique and aesthetic which can best capture aspects of reality, thus realism is in itself an aesthetic construct dependent upon a set of artistic conventions and forms. It has been noted that for a film to be realist rather than just realistic there are 2 necessary fundamentals. There must have been the intention to capture the experience of the event depicted and secondly the film-maker must have a specific argument or message to make about the social world employing realist conventions to express this.

Raymond Williams has argued that the four main criteria of social realism incorporate the following features:

• Firstly that the texts are secular, released from mysticism and religion
• Secondly that they are grounded in the contemporary scene in terms of setting, characters and social issues
• Thirdly that they contain an element of social extension by which previously under-represented groupings in society become represented
• Fourthly there is the intent of the artist which is mostly a political one although some artists have used the genre as route into a mainstream film-making career.

Social Realism and Representation

Social realist texts usually focus on the type of characters not generally found in mainstream films. Social realist texts draw in characters who inhabit the social margins of society in terms of status and power. This ‘social extension’ has usually involved the representation of the working class at moments of social and economic change.

For example there was a shift in modes of representation of the working class from the Grierson documentaries of the 1930s to British Free Cinema documentaries and the British New Wave features which followed on from the Free Cinema Movement. Free Cinema and New Wave chose to represent the working class neither in victim mode, nor in heroic worker mode as had been done previously. The working class were to be seen as more energetic and vibrant.

Critics generally accept that women have faired badly in the representations of the British New Wave, although Loach’s Poor Cow (1967) and TV docudramas Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home helped redress the balance. By the 1980s social realist films such as Letter to Brehznev (1985), Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) reflected the changing nature of society and the growing importance of women in the workforce, not only women but humour too was more apparent. This approach continued into the 1990s with films such as Mike Leigh’s Career Girls (1997). Some have argued that the portrayal of women took a retrograde step in the mid to late 1990s as they became adept consumers unsupportive of husbands as in Brassed Off (1996) and The Full Monty (1997). Alternatively women became victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse such as Stella Does Tricks (1996) or Nil By Mouth (1997).

It has been argued that in general the representation of the working class has shifted from being producers to consumers reflected in a move which has seen members of the working class in more privatised domestic environments and leisure-time settings instead of as members of geographical communities or in workplace environments where collective bargaining procedures are in place.

Whilst social realist representation has tended to focus upon white working class males there has been some breakthrough in terms of race in films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Bahji on the Beach (1994). The changing sense of Britishness has been represented through cultural hybridity and multiculturalism from the mid 1980s through until Chada’s Bend it Like Beckham moving from social real to a more fantasy mode in the process. Recently social extension has begun to be granted to the position of asylum seekers and refugees and those effected by the diasporic forces relating to globalisation and the collapse of the post-capitalist states such as Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things (2002) which concerns issues of globalised inequality from a social realist perspective.

Source: blogs.warwick.ac.uk

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

Fish Tank: Review

Director Andrea Arnold works wonders in Fish Tank, an Essex-based kitchen sink drama which shows British film at its best.

It was clear from Red Road, Andrea Arnold’s darkly compulsive tale of surveillance and revenge in Glasgow, that a distinctive new British filmmaker had arrived on the scene.

We need all of these we can get, so praise be that Arnold’s follow-up, Fish Tank, has the same confident signature. The sinuous camerawork of Robbie Ryan prowls around a housing estate, this time in Essex, and the story is a collision course whose precise moment of impact we can’t guess. If this is social realism, it’s a kind with prickly cinematic voltage and no redundant lesson to teach. It’s tremendous.

Fifteen-year-old Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis) is the film’s heroine, and rarely has a more scowling, stroppy, wilful teenager had the whole forcefield of a movie at her disposal. She lives on insult. “Call me back, you bitch!” may not be the best-chosen words to patch up a blighted friendship; there’s even less love lost between Mia and her single mum (Kierston Wareing), who wants to pack her off into juvenile care.

If Arnold has one great skill, it’s charging up the spaces between her characters – she can put two people in a room and make it seethe. When Irish charmer Connor (Michael Fassbender) walks half-naked into their kitchen for the first time, sex is added to Fish Tank’s miasma of tensions.

Mia falls back on her natural defence mechanism – lippiness – but there’s clearly something between them. She peeks into her mother’s bedroom at night, and pays Connor coy visits at work. His own status in the household is hard to read. Is he protector, predator, or what?

Even by Fassbender’s high standards, this is a spellbinding turn, and the film shifts gears unmistakably whenever it’s around him. Arnold coaxes totally convincing performances from Jarvis, who ably suggests awkwardness and shyness beneath Mia’s keep-off exterior, and Rebecca Griffiths as her younger sister Tyler, a swearing tyke with an amazingly filthy laugh.

There are false notes here and there: a subplot about a local gipsy (Harry Treadaway) and his ailing white horse feels like standard urban fairy tale. But Arnold works wonders almost everywhere in this film: the drip-drop drabness of kitchen-sink drama is stilled, alive, and newly dangerous.

By Tim Robey3 (Telegraph) : 10 Sep 2009

MS4 - Text, Industry & Audience: Fish Tank (Genre/Representation)

For a history of Social Realism in British Cinema visit the Screenonline site here. it will be useful for understanding the genre and representational issues at work in 'Fish Tank'. Watch the trailer below.

British New Wave Cinema 1959-1969 (including Social Realism)

What is Social Realism?

Cinematically the British New Wave is part of a tradition of social realism within British film which has seen many shifts since the growth of the British documentary movement in the 1930s. Realism is a difficult concept because encapsulated within it there are a range of changing aesthetic conventions all of which have as a central concern the intention of representing ‘the world as it really is’ or ‘life as it is really lived’.

Britain today is still a society in many ways defined by class, but in the 1950s divisions were far more rigid. The 'new wave' films and the sources that inspired them gave a voice to a working-class that was for the first time gaining some economic power.

Previously, working-class characters in British cinema had largely been used for comic effect or as 'salt of the earth' cannon fodder. Here we see their lives at the centre of the action. That action, such as it is, details everyday dramas - hence 'the kitchen sink' tag. We see events through the emotional journeys of the characters.

Interestingly, only Room at the Top (d. Jack Clayton, 1958) and Look Back in Anger (d. Tony Richardson, 1959) look directly at conflict between working-class and middle-class characters.

The later films concentrate on conflicts within the working-class contrasting 'rough' (the very poor, unskilled, criminal and hedonistic - represented by characters like Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Karel Reisz, 1960) and Colin Smith and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, d. Richardson, 1962) with 'respectable' (skilled, aspirational, educated and 'moral' - such as the heroes of John Schlesinger's films: Vic Brown in A Kind of Loving (1962) and the life that Billy Fisher in Billy Liar (1963) appears to lead).

The debates around class are complex. There is recognition that social change and affluence will make society 'freer' but there is also an understanding that the basis of power will not change.

Social Realism: British New Wave Cinema

The British New Wave is the name given to a trend in filmmaking among directors in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The label is a translation of Nouvelle Vague, the French term first applied to the films of François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard among others.

There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the so-called "Angry Young Men", those artistes in British theatre and film such as playwright John Osborne and director Tony Richardson, who challenged the social status quo. Their work drew attention to the reality of life for the working classes, especially in the North of England, often characterized as "It's grim up north". This particular type of drama, centred around class and the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life, was also known as the kitchen sink drama.

The British New Wave was characterised by many of the same stylistic and thematic conventions as the French New Wave. Usually in black-and-white, these films had a spontaneous quality, often shot in a pseudo-documentary (or cinéma vérité) style on real locations and with real people rather than extras, apparently capturing life as it happens.

Social Realism Conventions

Ken Loach to visit King Edward VI College on 16/11/12

A once in lifetime opportunity to engage with Ken Loach, the high profile and socially aware filmmaker, has arisen and should be regarded as unique. I would, therefore, expect and urge you to research his filmmaking career in preparation for his arrival on 16th November and make sure he receives the respect that he undoubtedly deserves.

Ken Loach is a former student of King Edward VI Grammar School, a world renowned social realist filmmaker and he will be coming to Nuneaton on 16th November 2012 to revisit the college he attended in the 1950's. This is one of the first times he has returned to his hometown in recent years and it will be an excellent opportunity for current Film and Media students to gain inspiration from one of the most influential filmmakers that the UK has ever produced.

Loach's filmmaking career initially began in theatre and television, but he gained international fame in 1969 when he made Kes, the story of a troubled boy and his kestrel, based on the novel A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines. 

His most recent film The Angel's Share centres around a young Scottish troublemaker who is given one final opportunity to stay out of jail. The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival where Loach won the Jury Prize.