Nice Time
Free Cinema (eleven films) • 17m
Directed by Claude Goretta & Alain Tanner • Documentary • 1957 • 16 minutes
The swirling neon frenzy of Piccadilly Circus has never been better captured than in this innovative short, which presents the London landmark as a bewildering collage of image and sound.
Swiss film enthusiasts and BFI employees Claude Goretta and Alain Tanner (later to become established art-house filmmakers back home) were inspired by their colleagues’ success with the Free Cinema programme to try their own attempt at low-budget documentary filmmaking. After shooting 6,000 feet of footage of 25 nights, they turned the limitation of an absence of synced sound to their advantage by crafting a sophisticated soundtrack. Utilising snatches ambient street noise, pop music and scraps of dialogue from the kinds of Hollywood films shown in West End cinemas, their collage of sound was used to both imaginative and ironic effect (such as the National Anthem played over a shot of a large Coca-Cola sign).
Up Next in Free Cinema (eleven films)
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Enginemen
Directed by Michael Grigsby • Documentary • 1959 • 21 minutes
Produced just in time to be screened under the banner of the late–1950s ‘Free Cinema’ documentary movement, Enginemen records the life and work of engine workers in a locomotive shed just outside Manchester. At the time of British Rai...
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Food for a Blush
Directed by Elizabeth Russell • Documentary • 1959 • 29 minutes
Food for a Blush is a documentary of worry, satirising some aspects of London life.
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Tomorrow's Saturday
Directed by Michael Grigsby • Documentary • 1962 • 18 minutes
Impressions of a typical Saturday at Blackburn, a milling town in the North of England.
