“As Benedict Anderson has argued, nations are ‘imagined communities’ … constituted in part by … discourses of national identity … the stories that all nations tell themselves: stories about the nation’s origins, its struggles, its triumphs, its character, its values, its past, and even its future.” (Jackie Hogan). With specific and direct reference to one ‘movement’/national cinema studied this term, discuss “discourses of national identity,” paying attention to how they “imagine” the nation for both domestic and foreign audiences.

Realism is an important concept in the cinematic movement of the British New Wave and its spark of Social-Realist films that began to surface from the 1950’s. There are various incentives for this quest for depicting the world as it really is in film. In Theories of Cinema (1999) film theorist Francesco Casetti states that people want to see “the splendor of the world, the truth of things, in a word, reality” (Casetti, 1999, p.21), and this understanding may be regarded as the founding maxim of the British New Wave movement which attempted to present the previously unseen ‘real’ Britain. The British New Wave movement emerged from the short-lived but exceptionally influential British documentary movement of the 1950’s known as Free Cinema. This movement began with a series of documentaries directed by the likes of Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson being screened at the National Film Theatre in London in February 1956, and continued until March 1959. The films were ‘free’ in the sense that they were created outside the restrictive boundaries of the current film industry. The style in which these films were made foreshadowed much of the New Wave movement in terms of developing realism in film using “a minimum of equipment, real locations and a natural, unmade-up look” (Aldgate & Richards, 2002, p.194). Directors Anderson,