We spoke about British cinema. I wanted to tell you about some films that you must watch, not  just because of their artistic value, but because by watching them you’d come to some type of  understanding about Britain; you’d be able to perceive something truthful about British life, about  the country as an organism full of its own idiosyncratic stories and experiences.  

American interest in British cinema and TV has always erred towards a fascination with the fact  that unlike them we have a ‘proper’ history — one that goes back to the time of the Romans. The  Americans have a tendency to love and obsess over onscreen portrayals of Great Britain in period  dramas and historical epics (think Downton Abbey, The Queen, Braveheart) with lavish costumes  and settings that evoke both the grandeur and the squalor of life in the distant past — and ideally  for the Americans these onscreen depictions include the constant consumption of cups of tea to  reassure them that their narrow preconceptions of our genteel ways are accurate and true! 

For some reason American audiences have always found it harder (if not impossible) to engage  with the particular brand of gritty social realism that marks out a lot of the great works of British  cinema. That focus on social realism can be seen to have begun in the late 1950s and early 1960s  with a British cultural movement that emerged in theater and cinema known as “Kitchen Sink  Drama”; some of its key characteristics being the portrayal of contemporary existence rooted in  the subjective, tales from the lives of ordinary people that center antiheroes, working class  experiences, explorations of class division, an overall concern with social dissatisfaction,  alienation, and a general exposition of the ugliness of reality. This particular brand of realism often  depicts its characters as being confined not just to the geographic isolation of the island on which  they reside, but more specifically to their social circumstances where the escapist possibilities of  fantasy and fabulism cease to exist — or are killed off by the harsh immediacy of modern life. Of  course we should be clear that this unique form of British social realism isn’t by definition solely  bleak and hopeless. There is plenty of brilliant comedy and satire that has arisen from within the  form.   Naked (1993)

With this brand of realism in mind, we should start our exploration of British cinema with Mike  Leigh’s Naked (1993), a doomsday portrayal of a man called Johnny as he wanders the nocturnal  streets of London in the guise of a tireless ranting intellectual who’s greatest conflict isn’t with the  world he scorns but with his own anguish at the purposelessness of modern life. At the start of  the film, Johnny arrives in London from Manchester, and in the singular identity of being a  northerner (marked out by his distinct Mancunian accent) he automatically represents the North South divide of England, a culturally significant conceptual division that relates to economic and  social disparities where the south has traditionally been seen as always having a generally higher  standard of living, healthcare, more expensive housing, more political influence and so on — all  of this exacerbated by the decline of industry in the north that took place in the latter half of the  20th Century. 

Johnny represents the working class northerner; despondent, disenfranchised and disillusioned,  escaping his roots to seek his fortune in the big city — or perhaps to find answers, to find  meaning, to find some purpose to which he might anchor himself. As he wanders the nocturnal  streets of London, drowned in shadow, edged in the cold yellow membrane of sodium street  lights, he encounters a number of lonely souls adrift in a capital city that doesn’t swallow them up  as much as it overshadows them, ignores them, renders their existences irrelevant and 

meaningless — as insignificant as a grain of light when viewed within the swirl of the vast galaxy  that contains our solar system.  

All of the characters in Naked seem to be dishevelled or haggard, or just generally ruined and  exhausted by life; the pale bluish Mercury-like tones of daylight drown the characters in an almost  poisonous aura of dull misery and listlessness, the boredom of existence eating away at everyone  until Johnny explodes into a memorable rant when he proclaims, “That’s the trouble with  everybody, you’re all so bored. You’ve had nature explained to you and you’re bored with it,  you’ve had the living body explained to you and you’re bored with it, you’ve had the universe  explained to you and you’re bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like, plenty of  them, and it doesn’t matter how tawdry or vacuous they are, as long as it’s new, as long as it’s  new, as long as it flashes and fucking bleeps in forty fucking different colours!”

The city at night seems almost abandoned in the face of some coming apocalypse and Johnny  remains as the despairing preacher searching for his flock, for disciples to harken to his message  of doom, almost masochistically unable to leave the metropolis or even go to sleep. His  intellectual ranting, while not lacking in substance, merely provokes people into annoyance,  scorn, distaste, or even violence. Here he represents the pointlessness of the intellectual in the  crowd that is uninterested in philosophical ideas about life. But as his rants go further and further  into the realms of conspiracy theory we start to see a man entirely overtaken by his sense of  intellectual superiority and persecution, perhaps because it’s the only way in which he can  distinguish himself from the other lonely souls in the great metropolis at the end of the world; if  they can’t recognise him as the prophet he is, at least he knows it of himself.  

Johnny is at once an everyman in terms of his loneliness, and at the same time he is the lone  individual, the poor intellectual, isolated, flawed and problematic, his sexual urges being entirely  self-serving to the point that he might just rape a woman if she doesn’t consent to sex when he  wants it. He is unable to make friends, unable to find a home, unable to settle, eternally restless; a  piece of human driftwood floating without a compass on the sea of life. Ultimately, he is a man  with no sense of future. He waits listlessly for the end of the world that is (annoyingly) taking its  time to happen, and while he waits for the apocalypse to arrive, he searches for people who will  listen to him, who will give his voice meaning and purpose, who by being his audience will draw  his voice out of the void into which he casts his words.  

Continuing in the vein of harsh realism I recall a young Ray Winstone delivering a masterful  performance in a film called Scum (1979) about boys in a British young offender’s institution. It’s a  harrowing film that sweats, seethes, and trembles; a film that bares its teeth and clenches its fists,  ready to punch you in the face. I remember the first time I watched it on TV when I was fifteen,  late at night when my parents had gone out to see friends, and I thought I’d stumbled across some sort of hellishly brutal documentary — such was the impact of its ferocious realism. The  film’s premise is straightforward: it’s about the survival of a criminal post-crime, telling the story of  Carlin, played by Ray Winstone, who survives the inhumanity of the prison regime by using  violence to rise through the ranks of the prisoners to become “the Daddy” (the inmate who  controls the prison wing). But what is particularly powerful about Scum is that the brutality of the  film and the performances of its actors lack any overtly performative quality. The vile and  dehumanising racism of prison guards and white inmates towards black prisoners, the cruelty of  the adults in charge of what are essentially a bunch of young teenage boys, the incessant  violence of words and deeds, the overall lack of human compassion, all scream at the viewer who  is unable to do anything to stop the relentless unfolding of events on screen. What makes it truly  great is that the film’s astounding realism is never undermined by moral pontification, by overt  signalling, or by the conveying of some moral lesson or message to take away with us. Scum is  simply an accusation. It’s a confrontation with the world image of British respectability, a revealing  of some of the secrets that the nation tries to lock away in its dungeons and prisons, away from  prying eyes who, should they see such a great revealing of truth as there is in Scum, will point a  finger at British society and its universally acclaimed justice system and say, “J’accuse!”

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Veering away from the bleakness of modern life, we go to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, a  1943 romantic war film shot in Technicolor. An undoubtable masterpiece, the film is about the  ailment of being an Englishman, with dazzling cinematography, powerful performances from the  entire cast, and a constant oscillation between profound gravity and lighthearted warmth, where 

the humanity of the characters always shines through. Apart from its technical mastery with all its  vivid colours and a great variety of settings, as well as the bravery of its intent when it was made  right in the middle of the Second World War, it provides us with the ultimate combination of love  and war in a story that explores the death of the gentleman as personified by the central character  of Major-General Clive Wynne-Candy — and perhaps not just the death of the English gentleman  but the European one too. As it shifts from the Boer War to WW1 and then into WW2, we see how  The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp considers the end of a supposed ‘old world’, eroded rapidly  by the noisy and explosive arrival of the new world that expresses itself most explicitly through  the chaos and catastrophe of the Second World War. Gone is the world of men governed by  manners and decorum. Those men have no chance of surviving in the face of Nazi barbarity and cruelty.

On one hand this film truly conveys a sense of Englishness in its purest form — and yet that  Englishness has all but vanished now, even though for most people who watch The Life and  Death of Colonel Blimp it will undoubtedly evoke a sense of some familiar ideas about the English  and their ways. Because this film doesn’t just speak to a British audience. It faces the world and  contemplates the passage of history where mankind crosses the border from one era into another,  a border that closes forever behind those billions of souls who cross it alive, and in a sense all  we’re left with to remember that past era are the paintings, the literature, the architecture and  artefacts that belonged exclusively to that faded past. We still have to exercise our imaginations  when we encounter literature, art and architecture from the past, yet with The Life and Death of  Colonel Blimp we see the possibility of cinema that allows us to rest our imaginations as we  witness onscreen the encapsulation and preservation of those lost modes of existence that the passage of time inevitably blurs.  

There is an amazing scene that involves a fencing duel between Colonel Clive and a German  officer; we never see the actual duel, rather it is beautifully removed from our sight as if the film  itself wishes to preserve the honour of those two men engaging in mutual combat to settle their  differences respectfully over a perceived insult. This cinematic moment is in itself a statement  about the old world, where in the new one heralded by Hollywood with all its glitz and glamour,  producers and directors would require that we see the duel with plenty of blood and noise and  special effects. Colonel Clive’s encounter with American soldiers in the latter part of the film  reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s witty line: “We have really everything in common with America  nowadays except, of course, language.” 

Inevitably, while the film is about the passing of an era, it is also about the life and death of a man  for whom the world refuses to wait; his small moments of triumph, his moments of anguish, love,  friendship, and above all the confusion that swirls around him as society changes without taking  him and his wants into consideration.

Nil by Mouth (1997)

Returning to bleak social realism, I couldn’t mention British cinema without referring to Gary  Oldman’s directorial debut Nil by Mouth (1997). An unparalleled masterpiece in the landscape of  British film, replete with breathtaking performances from Ray Winstone and Kathy Burke as well  as a soundtrack by Eric Clapton, Nil by Mouth is a working class tragedy about the brutality of  poverty, set in south London’s iconic area of Peckham; a film imbued with the smell of cigarettes  and beer-soaked carpets in dimly lit pubs that echo with the word “cunt”.

If you could only watch one film from this entire list, I would tell you to watch this one. Nil by  Mouth is real life; it isn’t about imagination or the conjuring up of a world. This is the world; the  world that lurks just behind the pub door, or inside the piss-stained concrete tower block, or in the  late night laundrette with its windows steamed up. In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger  considers Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes as he proposes that art is the becoming of truth.  Heidegger’s consideration of Van Gogh’s painting should be the way in which we consider Nil by  Mouth. Heidegger posits that it is only by viewing the picture that we notice the life of a peasant  woman in the details of her shoes; “The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them.”  For the viewer, the “equipmental quality” of the equipment (as Heidegger puts it) was discovered  not through written description or verbal explanation but by looking at Van Gogh’s painting close  up and considering all its details: “The painting spoke. In the nearness of the work we were  suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.” This sudden transportation that Heidegger 

speaks of isn’t a journey of escapism — it isn’t an experience that removes us from reality. Rather  it transports us into the very heart of reality as the work of art discloses the truth of its subject.  When considering Nil by Mouth as a brutally honest depiction of working class life in south  London, we see what Heidegger argued; that a true work of art is not merely pale imitation  through reproduction, rather it is “the reproduction of things’ general essence”.  

The central figures of the film are Ray and Val, a dysfunctional couple with a dysfunctional family  unit plagued by alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence. At times the dysfunction seems to  emerge as a form of coping with the bleak circumstances in which they exist. One can’t be certain  if they were dysfunctional first, or if their world pushed them into a cycle of eternal dysfunction.  What is certain however, is that their world is limited and they are crushed into its boundaries —  the concrete landscape, the universe shrunken into dingy litter-strewn streets, the human  interactions confined to tower blocks, pubs and greasy spoon cafés where every sentence seems  to include the word “cunt"… But even if they might try and break free from the cyclical nature of  their existence, ultimately they are bonded by their dysfunctionality. It’s what they’re used to after  all, since the world offers them nothing else and in the end, it is only in that narrow, constricted  little world that they have any significance. Thus the violent and abusive figure of Ray embodies  the impotent rage of the working man who is all too aware of his insignificance and lack of real  power. He beats up his wife and other people because he cannot beat up the world for treading  upon him.

At the same time, when viewing Nil by Mouth now, there is a strong feeling of a vanished past; an  older version of London, pre-smoking ban, when there were still pubs on every other street corner,  bustling with life. In a sense this essay is also about something that has been lost in the  landscape of British culture, not just in cinema but in the arts as a whole: the appetite for realism,  for “the brutality of fact”, as the late great painter Francis Bacon called it. Looking at British  culture in the present, it seems to me as though the appetite for serious realism without the bright  morning light of redemption at its end has been erased or suppressed in the face of a sickly desire  to reinvent the world; to turn horror into comedy. I saw this myself when I went to see the  Ukrainian film La Palisiada (2023) and at the moment that the young girl shot her lover during an  argument, the audience laughed. Similarly, after the release of the brilliant Ukrainian film Pamfir (2022) about a smuggler and the violence and rural corruption of the society in which he exists,  the editor of what is arguably Britain’s most prominent independent film magazine, Little White  Lies, published a review of Pamfir in which he called it a “gangster comedy”. To me these are all  the symptoms of a society where its artistic output is no longer about truth, but about reimagining  truth to suit some form of artificial utopian idealism; an inclination to reimagine reality as a form of  avoiding the harshness of the world — an inclination that inevitably curtails the possibilities of art,  until it chokes to death in the grip of a hand that wears the glove of quixotic hope.