With a 16mm camera, and minimal resources, and no payment for your technicians, you cannot achieve very much in commercial terms. You cannot make a feature film and your possibilities of experiment are severely limited. But you can use your eyes and your ears. You can give indications. You can make poetry.
So said Lindsay Anderson, one of the founders of the Free Cinema movement, which existed to give a platform to young filmmakers who wanted to work outside the industrialised mainstream. Although the six Free Cinema programmes shown at London's National Film Theatre from 1956-9 made a big critical splash, and many of their creators went on to high-profile careers in either fiction (Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, Claude Goretta, Alain Tanner, cameraman Walter Lassally) or documentary (Mike Grigsby, Robert Vas), the original films have been far more discussed than actually watched.
This is for the same reason that they had difficulty getting shown in the first place: they were almost entirely short documentaries, typically 20-50 minutes long. Britain already had a venerable documentary tradition, but the Free Cinema films stood apart from this, not least because they were unashamedly auteurist - to cite a phrase that had only just joined the critical lexicon.
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