Social Realism Research

Social Realism is an artistic movement expressed in the visual arts that can be shown in many different forms, but mainly art and films. The movement tries to express topics such as social and racial injustice, economic hardship and often depicts the working class as being ‘heroic’.

In the arts, artists try to render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects, in a true-to-life manner. Social realism in films tries to tackle with real life situations and dilemmas and all the difficulties that surround it. The storylines and characters in social realism films are often ‘everyday’ and ‘normal’.

Social realism has played an important role in both British cinema and TV and is considered Britain's main form of cinematic style. One of the first British films to express realism's value was the 1902 film from U.K. director James Williamson, A Reservist Before the War, and After the War which memorialized the Boer War serviceman coming back home to unemployment. Another early realism film was ‘Rescued by Rover’ by Lewin Fitzhamon and Cecil M. Hepworth which was about a woman kidnapping a child and it was made in 1905. This, however, was just the start of a huge line of social realism films in British cinema.

Social realism is a genre that is still around today, Pawel Pawlikowski’s “The Last Resort” (2000) is a great example of a strong and powerful social realism film. A very well known film that tackles with social realism is ‘The Full Monty’ (1997) which is about six unemployed men, four of them former steel workers, who decide to form a male striptease act. Although the film is slightly humorous, it deals head on with the subject of unemployment. It is unusual for a film such as The Full Monty to be so popular as social realism films are not extremely popular around the world.

Social realism was also shown by Hindi films in the 1940s and 1950s, including Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946) and Bimal Roy's Two Acres of Land (1953). It is shown in films around the world; however, no other country has a greater support for social realism films than Britain. The United States was one of the last countries to adopt this form of style in cinema, mainly because the American audience does not like this style of film.