Children, Cinema and Social Realism. by Christopher Wells

This book seeks to explore the extent to which the work of Terrence Davies, Lynne Ramsay and Shane Meadows produced throughout the 1990s and 2000s should be considered as a reaction against Charles Murray’s ‘crisis of the underclass’ in 1989, and its subsequent ramifications in cultural theory (Lister in Murray, 1996, p.1). For these filmmakers that work in a social realist mode, location and identity’ are not inextricably linked as a means of defining characters. Instead these filmmakers show that what determines subjectivity, attitudes and values are the unique childhood perceptions of space and place and are therefore different for each individual, even those sharing the same post code (Lay, 2002, p.9). These filmmakers offer representations of working, or ‘under’, class childhoods that resist socio-economic reading strategies, and demonstrate a return to romance in social realism. The book will investigate how and why the aesthetics of these films constantly shift between inner, imaginal and private space of the child’s point of view with the political and social events that exist in an outer, social world of public places, or as Paul Dave (2006, p.83) puts it, between ‘fantasy and realism’.