Film Reader: Free Cinema

When the first Free Cinema films appeared at the National Film Theatre in London in February 1956, the audience was astounded. In a series of six programmes of short and medium length documentaries, Free Cinema introduced the first films of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, or Tony Richardson, the filmmakers who were soon to become one of the most revolutionary directors in the UK. They brought up new topics and formal and stylistic features and laid the foundations of the British New Wave. But that’s another story.