Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue boasts a production history as turbulent as its plot. Beginning life as a coming-of-age drama entitled 'Cebe', the film’s producers were unhappy with the direction of the project, firing original director and screenwriter Leonard Yakir, with Hopper stepping in as replacement at the last minute. A countercultural icon who had been ostracised after the catastrophic reception of his 1971 film The Last Movie, Hopper transformed a somewhat rote family drama into a brutal evisceration of hippie ideals gone to rot. Taking its name from Neil Young’s song ‘My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)’, the movie would go on to inspire Primal Scream’s song ‘Kill All Hippies’, one of the lines repeated by protagonist Cebe over the radio as she attempts to connect with passing truck drivers.

Linda Manz gives a once-in-a-lifetime performance as Cebe, a young punk mourning the death of her idol Elvis and anticipating her father’s release from prison. Young and restless, under-served and preyed upon by the adults around her, she pushes her way through the world. Manz’s own childhood had some similarities to that of her character Cebe, having grown up with an absent father and often running away from home due to a difficult relationship with her mother. She plays Cebe with a ferocious, annihilating drive.

Cebe is the conduit for the contortions of the 1970s, when subcultures proliferated, fed primarily by disillusionment. Trapped in a crumbling town in rural Canada, the wild spirit of punk rock provides Cebe with something to believe in; as does her hatred (however authentic) of hippies and disco.. Both groups were known for their messages of love, hope and freedom, of which Cebe’s world is contemptuous. Idealism has disappeared along with any sense of personal responsibility, and Cebe’s anti-everything declarations articulate a profound sense of despair.

Out of the Blue revived Hopper’s career from the doldrums, yet it is Manz to whom the film belongs. After a series of on-screen successes Manz essentially retired from Hollywood in the late 1980s, and passed away in 2020 at the age of 58. Cebe might say, quoting Neil Young: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. 

Pickpocket

Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket is something of a manifesto for the French filmmaker. The film’s protagonist Michel moves through the banks, racecourses, and metro stations of Paris as a pickpocket, testing notions of morality and earnestly following events to their conclusion. Pursuing a life of crime without the expectation of any particular outcome, Michel’s story forms a canny mirror with Bresson’s cinematic style: in its mundanity and austerity, the madness and strangeness of the world are made all the more apparent. 

Bresson rejected the word “actor” in favour of the more unwieldly “human models”. In an attempt to distance film performance from the “overstudied sentiments” of theatre, Bresson had his largely non-professional actors repeat their lines over and over until he was satisfied that they had been stripped of any theatrical dramatism. The effect is delivery unmarked by dramatic intonation, a world away from the highly emotive Stanislavski Method popular in American cinema at the time.  Expectation and meaning are erased, allowing for the formation of a more personal, ‘pure’ cinematic experience.

With his placid expression and listless wandering, Michel possesses an almost phantasmic quality. His seemingly arbitrary theft of other people’s belongings makes him an agent of chaos in the lives of other characters in the film. Bresson never shows the moment where the victim realised they’ve been robbed. To them, their belongings have simply disappeared, the handbag they held under their arm transformed into a rolled up newspaper. This disruption of clear causality employed by Bresson reflects a post-WWII world in which events are unpredictable, nonsensical, and unexpected. Rules built on such an unstable foundation, argues Bresson, deserve interrogating. 

Together

As one of the first three films shown by the National Film Theatre as part of the Free Cinema programme in 1956, Lorenza Mazetti’s Together represents the genesis of a filmmaking style pursuing an honest and unglamorous depiction of reality. Spotlighting the lives of ordinary, working-class people, the movement’s name announced its rejection of the bourgeois British cinema industry and its servitude to box office appeal and propagandised intent. Often shot from low or body-level angles, the filming style of Together places the viewer alongside the characters, rather than treating them as subjects to be observed. With them we endure the harshness of life in the East End and take solace with them in their moments alone. A contrast of sound and silence, malice and tenderness, profundity and mundanity, Together presents a report of daily life that is as ordinary as it is exceptional. 

In their commitment to create raw depictions of ordinary life, the films of the Free Cinema movement tended to omit narration. In Together, Lorenza Mazetti goes a step further, almost entirely omitting dialogue. Traversing the bombed-out landscape of post-war London, Mazetti follows the routines of two mute-deaf dock workers as they go about their daily life, neither molested nor welcomed by the cacophony of urban noise that surrounds them. Danger and excitement lurk around every corner, be it in the form of a car behind them that they remain oblivious to, or the enchanting appearance of a woman, her wild dancing communicating rhythm and suggestion in lieu of spoken words. The bond shared by the two is deeply tender and distinctly vulnerable as together they face the harshness of the industrial world.

A witness to the cruelties of the war era, Mazetti escaped the massacre of her aunt’s family, with whom she and her sister were living, by officers of the Wehrmacht on the belief that they were Jewish. The incident became known as the Strage di Rignano. Followed by the trauma of this event, much of her work tackles themes of alienation, and the contrast between the beauty of human moments and the horrific cruelty of life. When confronted by these tensions in Together, the characters face the audience directly, searching desperately for meaning and understanding, both from the world and from us. Amongst the screeching of machinery, the drone of drunk workers, and the taunting of the local children, their silent existence is both one of solace and of social banishment. 

Dread Beat an' Blood

After reading to a group of pupils at Tulse Hill School, poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson is asked why violence features so heavily in his work. “I suppose that’s because it is that which sparks off my imagination,” he says. After a short pause, he breaks into a grin: “I write about love as well”. This captures the mood of the documentary Dread Beat an’ Blood, which covers the life of the dub poet in a moment of political foment and unrest among the Black British community. 

Cutting between footage of South London streets, public readings, studio recordings and interviews, the film describes how community is built and sustained, from impromptu encounters with neighbours to a roundtable discussion of shared experiences of racial discrimination by police. “I don't believe that poetry changes anything, I don't believe that art changes anything,” says Johnson in a typically reflective musing. “Art reflects changes within the wider society; changes come out of people’s material struggles in life”. The mood of the film is of warmth underpinned by pervasive anger.

“The spoken word has more immediacy: it reaches more people than written poetry could ever do”. The final words of the documentary understate the fact that Johnson’s poetry is part of that very material struggle. Language, music, protest: all are revealed to operate as part of a wider political process. The Brixton uprising took place just two years after the original release of the film, and the film is a snapshot of that culminating unrest. Over five days in 1981, 943 people had been stopped by police in Brixton under the “Sus law” allowing the Metropolitan Police to stop-and-search based on suspicion of crime; that is to say, without evidence. It was a key tipping point for the riots, and prompted Johnson to write his well-regarded poem Di Great Insohreckshan:

“When we run riot all over Brixton
When we mash up plenty police van
When we mash up the wicked one plan
When we mash up the Swamp 81, fi what?
Fi make deh rule of dem understand
Dat we nah take no more of dem oppression.”

HERE FOR LIFE

The vision of England as quaint and cheerful, a place of lords and ladies and national stories promising prosperity in return for hard work, is a mythology that has been told for centuries. Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Here for Life (2019) proposes a different tale: a country growing ever more hostile towards those on the margins. “I’ve never felt like I owned something. I’ve always felt like I’ve been looking for somewhere to belong,” says Jono, one of the ten Londoners the film follows. Each having faced homelessness, Here for Life’s protagonists meditate on the moral landscape of this fair green land. 

The film’s central location – Shoreditch’s Nomadic Community Gardens – provides fertile ground for exploring the battle between sanitised urban development and the degradation of local communities. This is where the Cardboard Citizens theatre group, the organisation the ten characters are a part of, works to create performances for and by the homeless. Nestled between the vintage shops and influencer hot spots of Brick Lane and the ominous shadow of the ever-growing skyline of the city, the Nomadic Gardens attest to the group’s fundamental precarity. It’s appropriate, then, that mere months after the film’s release, the Gardens were shut down due to redevelopment plans. It’s this vision of London that Here for Life speaks to, the language of hostile architecture, sleeping deterrents and forced relocations. 

Produced by Artangel, the organisation behind works such as Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and Richard Billingham’s Fishtank, Here For Life is in keeping with the organisation's interest in producing uncategorisable, British-focused work. Neither documentary nor fiction, Here for Life may be described as a tapestry of experience, and an opportunity to question our assumptions about homelessness, precarity and crime. In this sense, it offers a pathway to an increasingly rare commodity in our troubled times: hope.

Nighthawks

Referencing Edward Hopper’s painting of the same name, Ron Peck’s Nighthawks is a sensitive portrayal of a man who is constantly learning about his own identity with a quiet sense of caution and hesitation. The characters in Hopper’s painting take shelter from a dark and desolate cityscape. Emotionally distant despite their physical proximity, they share only this moment in the café and will later move on, perhaps never to meet again. Much like these figures, Peck’s protagonist Jim finds solace in the space of underground discotheques which offer fleeting moments of tenderness and connection for the gay community. Wanting more, Jim determinedly pursues a hope of enduring connection in the bleak outside world of 1970s London.

Peck’s use of colour emphasises the duality of queer life at the time. Shuffling together in the hum of electronic music, the figures in the club create a static charge of joy, desperation, and desire radiating from the dancefloor. The scenes are tinged with the pinkish hue of bodies, strobe lights and glowing faces. Come morning the sumptuous reds and the sexy glittering whites of the club scenes are exchanged for the dull greys and muted browns of daily life. London is perpetually shrouded in fog, the streets charmless and the buildings crumbling.

In his early thirties, Jim has only recently seen the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England in 1967: it will not be decriminalised throughout the UK until 1982. In the year of Nighthawks' release, Margaret Thatcher would become Prime Minister of the UK, eventually introducing the famous Section 28 which banned the “promotion of homosexuality”. Unbeknown to anyone watching at the time, the AIDS crisis and its devastating impact on the queer community looms. In this context, Jim’s ability to embrace his identity is highly precarious. His rights are newly won, easily eroded and afford him little social capital. He must constantly check himself, not overstepping, over-amplifying, or over-living his identity. Spaces in the film mirror this sense of claustrophobia, the dingy underground discotheque and Jim's tiny, bare bedsit being the only spaces where he can openly be himself.

Love is not straightforward for Jim, and Peck chides us for expecting it to be so. He lies to his coworker that he is in a steady relationship with a man he is seeing, perhaps sincerely wishing that he was, or perhaps out of suspicion that his heterosexual peers will not comprehend the significance of his short but emotional romantic encounters. Later in the film, when we think Jim has met a true companion, who asks him to stay and offers him a lift home, Jim shuns him. Though we know he seeks love, Jim rejects the perhaps prejudiced expectation that he should settle, assuming a heteronormative framework. A statement on the beauty of gay intimacy, Nighthawks is a groundbreaking foray into the queer cinematic canon, as well as one of the great films on the loneliness of urban living.

Speak Like a Child

Sometimes, the past is best left untouched. John Akomfrah’s 1998 film Speak Like a Child is a study of the intensity of adolescent relationships and the destruction that can lie in their wake. The film tells the story of Billy, who returns returns with his pregnant girlfriend Ruby to meet their old friend Sammyat the site of an abandoned children’s home in Northumbria where the trio once lived. This step back into the past will turn over old unbroken ground. 

It’s the mid-1980s when Billy, Sammy and Ruby are marooned in the children’s home, which was loosely based on the childhood experiences of screenwriter Danny Padmore. The timid and sensitive Sammy is taken under the wing of the manipulative Billy, who encourages an interest in girls and steers Sammy’s gaze towards their classmate Ruby, the alluring redhead. Eventually, the three of them are locked in an uneasy menage-a-trois. As the saying goes, two’s a company and three’s a crowd. 

As with Akomfrah’s gallery works, the film investigates the instability of memory and its intertwining with history. Margaret Thatcher’s mass closure of the coal mines in the Northwest of England – the time and place in which the film is set – caused child poverty to more than double across the decade, and the film responds to the social devastation wrought by Thatcher’s neoliberal programme. Questions regarding personal responsibility recur: does the fact that Billy was sent to the children’s home after his “da killed his ma” explain his brutal tendencies? Or is it the desolate terrain of Northumbria, beautifully rendered by Akomfrah, causing the moral rot in Billy’s character? 

There are no simple answers in Speak Like a Child: each of the protagonists are, in their own way, victims of institutional negligence, while remaining autonomous subjects in their own tragi-drama. Yet tragedy is always the story of the nation compressed into the individual, and as the film reaches its climax, the violence of class warfare is made brutally explicit. 

My Ain Folk

Historically, cinematic depictions of poverty tend to fetishise hardship. The Bill Douglas Trilogy – My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978) – refuses to bow to the seduction of sensationalism, and instead presents a semi-autobiographical account of post-WWII Scotland through the figure of Jamie, a young man navigating penury and abuse as he searches for a way out of poverty. 

Debuting at the 1972 Venice Film Festival, My Childhood was the unexpected winner of the Silver Lion. With a budget of £3,500, the film finds a balance between British kitchen-sink realism and the transcendentalism European stylishness. Across the trilogy, visual landscapes are austere, camera movements sparse, and dialogue so rare that the films border on silent. Gaps in language are occupied by an intense visual symbolism that creates a stark aesthetic poetry.  

Although not an outwardly ideological filmmaker, Douglas works in an Eisensteinian mode, with political points made through his canny use of film language. In My Ain Folk, the film Lassie Come Home plays in vibrant Technicolor in the background, as the screen jumps to an image of Tommy (Jamie’s brother), his face wet with tears and black with coal. My Way Home begins with a shot of a framed portrait of the Royal Family, cutting to a child holding a baby on stage in a nativity play. These scenes and their contrasting symbolism – American idealism undercut by British cynicism, exorbitant wealth and dire poverty – describe a reality of almost psychotic inequality and difference. 

Jamie’s opportunity to escape his economic context comes in My Way Home, when he joins the army and strikes up a friendship with upper-middle-class Robert. Robert introduces him to books and invites him into his home. Jamie tells him that he wants to be an “artist, or maybe even a filmmaker” and our satisfaction comes from the knowledge that for Jamie – or really, for Bill – the existence of the film itself is evidence of its triumph. Yet this isn’t a simple rags-to-riches story, or a straightforward parable about the improving power of cinema, but a more complex depiction of how people and place can be beautiful even in dire circumstances; and how art might recapture without seeking to transcend where it was born. 

THE EXILES

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles opens with a series of photos by Edward S. Curtis, an American photographer and ethnologist, who throughout his life photographed various scenes of Native North American life. Today, Curtis’ work has been criticised for presenting  an impression of a prelapsarian Indigenous life, given that by 1895, when Curtis first photographed a Native American, North America had been colonised for over 300 years. Following roughly 24 hours in the lives of young Native Americans living in Los Angeles, The Exiles provokes similar questions to Curtis’ work. In just 72 minutes, Mackenzie navigates a difficult route between representation and stereotype, and reality and fantasy. 

The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 encouraged or coerced Indigenous people to move from reservations to cities, a step in their assimilation into a new American identity. Brought to Los Angeles by this initiative, the film’s Indigenous protagonists grapple with the reolcation’s impact on their collective and individual identity. The effect is one of flux: the film’s characters flip between languages, cultural practices, behaviours, and attitudes, in response to a society that demands assimilation as it rejects and derides them. The strain of these contortions can be seen in the often-volatile interpersonal relationships within the group, and the discomfort and uncertainty expressed by the characters throughout.

This is not a work of reportage, though the film claims to be a documentary. Though it is set in the timeframe of a night and a day, the project was in fact filmed across three years. In the film, the character of Yvonne (not the actor's real name) is married to Homer. In reality, her husband at the time was unavailable for filming due to his working hours and Mackenzie placed Homer into the role instead. Additionally, though Mackenzie intended to use the rock music that his subjects really listened to in his film, he could not afford the rights and therefore hired a band, The Revels, to record music and radio ads for the soundtrack. 

In one scene, we see Rico, already drunk, take rent money from his wife to go gambling. His son watches him disappear into the night. From within the house, a character on the unseen TV declares, “I recon that’ll teach the moon-faced Injun to respect his betters”. Some have criticised Mackenzie of fuelling stereotypes of Native Americans as drunks and gamblers, directionless and morally corrupt. But in including this audio, he provides a canny vision of how even within their own homes, Native Americans cannot be free of harassment and demonisation. In the face of this indignity, Mackenzie asks, really, how should one behave?