Impact of the first british new wave Source b from Andrew Crisell, Intro history of British broadcasting, published

in 1997 Like the French New Wave, where many of the filmmakers began as film critics and journalists, in Britain critical writing about the state of British cinema began in the 1950s and foreshadowed some of what was to come. Among this group of critic/documentary film makers was Lindsay Anderson who was a prominent critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine (194752), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz (later a prominent director); writing for the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. In one of his early and most wellknown polemical pieces, Stand Up, Stand Up, he outlined his theories of what British cinema should become. Following a series of screenings which he organised at the National Film Theatre of independently produced short films including his own Every Day Except Christmas (about the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market), Karel Reisz's Momma Don't Allow and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema which found expression in what became known as the Free Cinema Movement in Britain by the late 1950s. This was the belief that the cinema must break away from its class-bound attitudes and that the working classes ought to be seen on Britain's screens. Along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others he secured funding from a variety of sources (including Ford of Britain) and they each made a series of socially challenging short documentaries on a variety of subjects. These films, made in the tradition of British documentaries in the 1930s by such men as John Grierson, foreshadowed much of the social realism of British cinema which emerged in the 1960s with Anderson's own film This Sporting Life, Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. By 1964, the cycle was essentially over. Tony Richardson's Tom Jones, Richard Lester's A Hard Day's Night and the early James Bond films ushered in a new era for British cinema, focusing less on realism and social issues, and more on light comedy and escapism. And yet Lindsay Anderson continued his theme of anti-establishment anti-heroes in 1968 with "If...." (1968), which starred Malcolm McDowell in the role that made Stanley Kubrick cast him for A Clockwork Orange. In February 1989, Rupert Murdochs Sky Television began to broadcast to the UK from Luxembourg-owned (the satellite itself was 36,000km above the Congo).