This session will explore Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (2010) and The Selfish Giant (2013) through the lens of the British social realist tradition. Both films engage self-consciously with the history of working-class representation in British cinema, while also - along with works by the likes of Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows - marking new terrain for realist cinema in the 21st century. We will draw on Ken Loach’s Kes (1969) as both a foundational text for realist cinema, and as a rich intertext for Barnard, as she seeks to reimagine its class politics and poetic register for an age of social atomisation and precarity. We will explore the working-class child as a recurring figure in realist cinema, and will examine the importance of landscape and the non-human as mechanisms for meaning-making within the mode; these elements are central to an impulse within British realist cinema that marries political commitment with lyricism, stretching from Kes to the Selfish Giant and beyond. 

The first half of the session will work as an illustrated talk, while the second half will see us explore in collaboration the three films, reflecting on their place within traditions of working-class culture in Britain and revealing and analysing the relationships between form and meaning in the films. 
 

Biography

David Forrest is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Sheffield, where he is also Deputy Vice-President for Education (Student Experience). His research explores questions of realism, class, region, and sport in British film, television, and literature. His most recent book is a volume of the BFI Film Classics series on Kes (2024), and he is the author of New Realisms: Contemporary British Cinema (2020), Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics (2013); co-author of Film Audiences: Personal journeys with film (2023), and Barry Hines: Kes, Threads and Beyond (2018); and co-editor of Social Class and Television Drama in Contemporary Britain (2016), and Filmurbia: Screening the Suburbs (2017). He sits on the editorial board for Studies in European Cinema and The Journal of British Cinema and Television, and with Melanie Willams he co-edits the ‘British Cinema Series’ for Bloomsbury/BFI.