Recommended reading: John Patterson on 1970s (and early 1980s) British cinema in The Guardian.
"British cinema of the 1970s [...] is almost impossible to remember. While Hollywood enjoyed its 70s renaissance, while new German cinema flourished and the Italian and French cinemas continued to produce groundbreaking work, British cinema, so vibrant throughout the 1960s, seemed to keel over and die. It didn't — not quite — but it takes some dedicated cinematic archeology to disinter several gleaming threads of endeavour that suggest British cinema didn't die after all, but went into a form of internal exile.
"There were other kinds of exile, too. When the American studio money that had largely underwritten the 'British' new wave throughout the 1960s dried up in 1970, British cinema experienced a body-blow from which it took almost a decade to recover. Those intervening years seem like a wasteland of Confessions and Steptoe and Son movies, the last gasp of Hammer horror and the Carry On series. A few isolated landmarks stand out, often of debatable Britishness: Get Carter, The Wicker Man, A Clockwork Orange, O Lucky Man, Barry Lyndon, Scum, Quadrophenia, Rude Boy, two marvellous, unsettling films from the Polish exile Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End, The Shout), the excesses of Ken Russell and the innovations of Nicolas Roeg."
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The photo above is from the Terence Davies Trilogy (1984), comprised of the shorts Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration. "It makes Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis," wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times.
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