Beyond the New Wave : realism in British cinema, 1959-1963.

This chapter challenged the commonly held idea that British film realism of the late 1950s and early 1960s was centred in the films of the British New Wave both through reassessing the extent to which the New Wave might be seen as an aesthetically coherent group of films and through exploring the deployment of realist practices in other types of film from the period, including crime, horror and science-fiction. The chapter was specially commissioned for the 2nd edition of The British Cinema Book. It developed Hutchings’ research on British film genres, in particular his work on horror and on science fiction – notably ‘‘“We’re the Martians now”: British SF Invasion Fantasies of the 1950s and 1960s’ in Ian Hunter, ed., British Science Fiction Cinema (Routledge, 1999). An expanded version of the chapter will appear in the 3rd edition of The British Cinema Book (British Film Institute, 2008). PGR student Paul O’Reilly’s University-funded PhD (begun in 2007) connects with this research in its focus on realist strategies in North-East independent film production.