1. It's a great pleasure for me that The Criterion Channel keeps the collection titled The British New Wave available, maybe permanently?
For starters, film critic Alicia Malone gives a superb introduction to the collection, focusing on the vision, directors, and actors of this short-lived movement in cinema.
These movies, made between about 1959 and 1963, for the most part, take as their subject matter the lives of working class men and women in industrial town and cities in the north of England.
Most of these movies were shot in black and white and often feel as much like documentaries as fictional movies.
I have to brace myself before I watch these movies. They often feature angry, disillusioned, and sometimes violent men in volatile relationships with women. The movies I've watched in this collection have been tense, sometimes brutal, often bleak.
Some time ago, I had watched Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts in the British New Wave movie, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and after seeing Rachel Roberts in Murder on the Orient Express, I wanted to watch her in another movie.
Therefore, today I clicked on This Sporting Life (1963) to watch Rachel Roberts perform with Richard Harris.
I admired the honesty and naked emotional content of this movie as well as the imaginative ways the movie told its story and how it was filmed.
I also had a lot of trouble enduring its tension and outbursts of violence.
Both Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts portrayed the grief, despair, and disillusionment of their characters brilliantly.
The movie focused primarily on Richard Harris's character, Frank Machin, a rugby player and a man divided between his hunger for love and companionship and his aggressive drive for control and power, whether on the rugby pitch or in his relationship with the widow Margaret Hammond, played by Rachel Roberts.
Watching this movie to its end was taxing, but I'm glad I stuck with it, not because I enjoyed its subject matter or felt good about the story, but because as a work of art, as a showcase of great writing, acting, and filmmaking, and as a searing look at the lives of working class people in relation to moneyed people, this was an unforgettably superb movie.
2. I thought a lot today about how when I was younger, I almost thrived on watching movies like This Sporting Life. I don't know when the change occurred, when it became more and more taxing for me to watch frank portrayals of brokenness, violence, and despair.
I concluded today that when I was younger, I found these movies exciting because I found art itself exciting.
Discovering that storytellers, poets, filmmakers, painters, and other artists could strike so deeply into the core of human experience thrilled me. I think I'd been led to avoid or deny darkness, to seek out stories and movies that make us feel good. But, there was plenty in life, even as a guy in my late teens and early 20s, that I didn't feel good about and through plays, poems, novels, movies, and other art forms, I discovered I wasn't alone. The experience of feeling connected to Shakespeare, Flannery O'Connor, Rembrandt, and many others exhilarated me so much that I couldn't get enough of this art, whether the content was uplifting or bleak.
I would hear others say that dark stories were so depressing and within myself I'd think, "No, it wasn't. It was a brilliant portrayal of what is dark in life, but executed so brilliantly that it's not depressing."
Now that I'm older and possibly more aware of the weight of the darker elements of life, I still appreciate the artistic brilliance of a movie like This Sporting Life, but my appreciation of the art no longer exceeds the difficulty of confronting the difficult realities of human life.
As a result, I can't binge watch Broadchurch and I can't come to the end of This Sporting Life and do what I did when I was young and load up another similarly bleak movie.
I need time now that I didn't need when I was younger to recover.
3. After fixing myself yet another vegetable stir fry for dinner, I did what turned out to be smart.
I watched the first episode of Telford's Change.
The setting, tone, language, and concerns of Telford's Change are very different from the movies of the British New Wave.
But, like those movies, as this first episode developed, Telford's Change has at its core conflict between a man and a woman -- in this case, between Mark Telford and his wife Sylvia, played by the formidable Hannah Gordon.
The Telfords live in a world that contrasts sharply from the working class lives portrayed in the British New Wave movies.
But wealth and comfort do not insulate Mark and Sylvia Telford from conflict and resentments in their marriage and as Mark Telford makes his change, as he leaves the world of international banking to become the manager of a small branch bank in Dover, the Telford's conflicts grow and the next nine episodes will examine what direction each of their lives moves in and whether they can find a way to resolve the difficulties that simmer and sometimes boil over between them.
