THE NEW WAVE FILMS AND 
THE LONLINESS OF A LONG DISTANCE RUNNER
By Howard Slater 
 
The following is an edit from a longer piece of writing that forms part of a project 
examining the working class and film. The project endeavours to eschew the notion 
that watching a film is a passive activity and that the only possible portrayal of the 
working class is as a 'collectivity' outside the bounds of the 'entertainment' film. These 
notions, by relying on overtly idealist concepts and expectations can set up false 
goals that not only blind us to positive aspects of film but lead to a disillusionment that 
traditional leftism knows only too well how to create. 

Toward the end of the 50s and into the early 60s a series of films emerged in Britain 
that went some way towards dealing with working class life. The majority of these 
films had a common impetus in that they used, as their basis, the novels of a number 
of working class writers (Silletoe, Delaney, Barstow, Storey). In line with the regional 
settings of the original novels, the New Wave films heralded a departure from the 
prevalence for using studios and the occasional London location and marked an 
exodous of film crews into the towns of Nottingham, Lancashire and Yorkshire. 
Coming as they did at  the end of the 50s the films were noted for their frank 
treatment of sexual matters including adultery, sex out of marriage and abortion 
(albeit from a male point of view). For our purposes, though, the most interesting 
innovation comes as a response to the criticism of British cinema issued by Lindsay 
Anderson (This Sporting Life, If ) "What sort of cinema have we got in Britain? First of 
all it is necessary to point out that it is an English cinema (and southern English at 
that) metropolitan in attitude and entirely middle class". The New Wave films changed 
this and marked a departure from the rash of delinquency films (i.e. The Blue Lamp) of 
the 50s that always had establishment morals policing the narrative - the New Wave 
films avoided this high-handed moral approach and objective distance more fitting to a 
public information film and allowed the rebelliousness and anger of the characters, 
created by working class writers, to be given expression  by these characters 
providing  the main narrative drive of the film. 
 
Whilst the scripts are accepted as part of working class culture the middle-class 
background of the directors of these films set up a tension seen specifically in the 
directors' treatment of realism. The directors were essentially outsiders coming into 
towns and choosing photogenic locations of interest to them - these location shots 
then become the defining image of northern working class towns (This is something 
akin to Oliver Stone and Francis Ford Coppola creating a beauty of the terrain in their 
Vietnam films). This point is borne out by New Wave cameraman Walter Lassally who 
remarked that a predominant factor of the films was not so much that they dealt with 
"working class problems" but had a "very poetic view of them". For critic John Hill 
these location shots can be positive as they interrupt the individuising logic of the 
narrative but they also mark the "foregrounding of artistry" which gives rise to creating 
of citiescapes and factories "visual abstractions emptied of socio-historic meaning". 
When we marry these comments to the popular representation of these films as 
"kitchen sink dramas" and the connotation this gives as looking in on working class 
squalor (a word itself replete with hidden class meaning) then the danger becomes 
one of the working class being sensationalised, of being the objects rather then the 
subjects of the films. 
 
A further tension arises when we take the combination of middle-class directors and 
the "private, personal drama" momentum of narrative seen in the way that many of 
the New Wave films centre on individual characters who want to stand out from their 
working class community and "better themselves". This is most  playfully seen in Billy 
Liar and most aggressively in Room At The Top . How dominant a factor this is within 
the films is up for debate. For instance the Richard Harris character in This Sporting 
Life achieves "fame and fortune" but is aware of being treated like a piece of property 
by the businessman/owner of the rugby league club he plays for. Likewise Arthur 
Seaton's aggressive individualism is apparently being curbed by his impending 
marriage and move to a new suburban estate but his forceful throwing of a 
stone(author of The Working Class and Film) the ambiguities are not visible for he has 
remarked that "we are not interested  in Arthur Seaton because he is a worker but 
because he is an exceptional worker, who will obviously go places". This "going 
places" is taken as a given and it is a symptom of the control of middle-class directors 
that omits discussion of , or insight into, this "given" within the films and by doing so 
there is an implied condemnation on the working class community which the 
characters are differentiated from: we learn that the Richard Harris character was a 
miner but there is no depiction of this part of his life. This is a tendancy that is 
repeated throughout all New Wave films where there is no lasting focus upon the 
world of work. 
 
What makes the Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner, for me, the most powerful of 
these films is that, for once, this element of "going places", of bettering yourself, whilst 
encouraged in the central character, is refused outright by him. There is a movement 
and energy, but it is one of rebellion, recalcitrance, circular entrapment and a squaring 
up against authority. Personal advancement is parodied by means of the running 
motif - running where? for what? for whom? The film centres on Colin, a young scally, 
arrested for his part in the robbery of a bakery who is sent to borstal and trained up 
there as a cross country runner to represent the institution in a challenge with the 
local public school.  Though released in 1962, the same year as the clever dick secret 
agent James Bond  made his first appearance, Loneliness does not paint  a picture of 
authority as uncomplicated and decent - instead the authority Colin comes up against 
is at turns liberal, vindictive, brutish and full of its own self importance. Likewise the 
film does not shy away from the realities of class but puts them to the foreground: the 
premature death of his father through overwork; the harshness of prison life, 
scrimping and scraping, lack of choices, feelings of entrapment, being objectified. But 
it is to the films advantage that it resists a straight forward social-realist style in favour 
of a variety of film techniques popularised by the French New Wave (hence the label): 
flashbacks and non-chronological narrative, unusual camera angles and framing, 
quick cutting etc. 
 
Furthermore, Loneliness chooses to balance the negative with the more positive 
depiction of the micro-resistance of the working class: giving lip to the coppers, 
joyriding, turning the sound down on the TV during a political speech and mimicking 
the gibberish, refusing to co-operate and remaining reticent in the face of authority. On 
a more explicit level, there are occasions when during the film when Colin comes out 
with class-war invective that makes the "Don't let the bastards grind you down" 
soundbite from Saturday Night, Sunday Morning seem urbane: "I know what I'd do if I 
had the whip hand. I'd get all the governors, all the posh whores, officers and MPs, 
stick 'em up against this wall and let 'em have it. 'Cos that's what they'd like to do to 
blokes like us". Similarly the film contains perhaps one of the more powerful images of 
symbolic resistance captured on film during the 60s when Colin withdraws from his 
family gathered around the TV, enters his dead fathers room and sets light to a pound 
note. The lack of a voice-over as he contemplates the flame means that the image 
escapes being assigned a specific function in the narrative and allows viewers a 
space to attach their own meaning to the scene. 
 
The ending of the film centres upon the race and it is here that resistance to authority 
takes centre stage: Colin, the clear winner of the cross-country race, stops and 
refuses to cross the finishing line - knowing what his victory would mean to the 
governor he uses the race as a means of  rebellion, he refuses to carry out what is 
expected of him, he refuses to compete and strikes at the desire of the governor, a 
desire he is not willing to share and perpetuate. Bearing in mind that Colin could have 
been freed if he'd co-operated his refusal is evocative of his autonomy from an 
agenda pre-set for him by the institution. In terms of the resolution of the narrative, a 
device all too often used to release an audience from the problems posed by a film,  
this ending frustrates the expectation of a neat resolution and provokes the audience 
into deciding what factors have informed it. 
 
Howard Slater


WORking Press
This is the text only version of  an unpublished essay by Howard Slater
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