Free Cinema was a documentary film movement that emerged in England in the mid-1950s.

The term referred to an absence of propagandising intent or deliberate box office appeal. Co-
founded by Lindsay Anderson, though he later disdained the 'movement' tag, with Karel
Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti, the movement began with a programme of
three short films at the National Film Theatre, London on 5 February 1956. The programme
was such a success that five further programmes appeared under the Free Cinema banner
before the founders decided to end the series; the last event was held in March 1959. Three of
the screenings consisted of work from overseas film makers.

Anderson and Reisz had previously founded, with Gavin Lambert, the shortlived, but
influential journal Sequence, of which Anderson later wrote '"No Film Can Be Too Personal".
So ran the initial pronouncement in the first Free Cinema manifesto. It could equally well
have been the motto of SEQUENCE'.[1]

The manifesto was drawn up by Lindsay Anderson and Lorenza Mazzetti at a Charing Cross
cafe called The Soup Kitchen, where Mazzetti worked. It reads:

These films were not made together; nor with the

idea of showing them together. But when they came
together, we felt they had an attitude in common.
Implicit in this attitude is a belief in freedom,
in the importance of people and the significance of
the everyday.
As filmmakers we believe that
No film can be too personal.
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude. [2][3]

At an interview in 2001, Mazzetti explained that the reference to size was prompted by the
then-new experiments in CinemaScope and other large screen formats, "The image speaks"
was an assertion of the primacy of the image over the sound. Reisz said that "An attitude
means a style" meant that "a style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an
expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion."[4]

The first Free Cinema programme featured just three films: Anderson's O Dreamland (1953),
previously unshown, about an amusement park in Margate in Kent, Reisz and Richardson's
Momma Don't Allow (1956), about a Wood Green (North London) jazz club, and Mazzetti's
Together (also 1956), a documentary-style fiction about a pair of deaf-mutes in London's
bomb-torn East End. The films were accompanied by the above provocative film manifesto,
written chiefly by Anderson, which helped bring the film-makers valuable publicity. Later
programmes brought in other likeminded filmmakers, among them Alain Tanner and Claude
Goretta (with Nice Time), Michael Grigsby and Robert Vas. The two film technicians closely
associated with the movement were Walter Lassally and John Fletcher. The three of the six
programmes devoted to foreign work, included the new Polish cinema (fourth programme),
emerging French New Wave (fifth programme) and American independent filmmaker Lionel
Rogosin was invited to screen his ground breaking film On the Bowery at the second Free
cinema program in September 1956. That event also included the work of Norman McLaren
and Georges Franju.
The films were 'free' in the sense that they were made outside the confines of the film industry
and were distinguished by their style and attitude and by their conditions of production. All of
the films were made cheaply, for no more than a few hundred pounds, mostly with grants
from the British Film Institute's Experimental Film Fund, although some of the later films
were sponsored by the Ford Motor Company or funded independently. They were typically
shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, handheld cameras, usually with a
non-synchronised soundtrack added separately. Most of the films deliberately omitted
narration. The film-makers shared a determination to focus on ordinary, largely working-class
British subjects, which they felt had been overlooked by the middle-class-dominated British
film industry of the time, displaying a rare sympathy and respect, and a self-consciously
poetic style.

The founders were dismissive of mainstream documentary film-making in Britain,

particularly of the British Documentary Movement of the 1930s and 1940s associated with
John Grierson, although they made an exception for Humphrey Jennings. Another
acknowledged influence was French director Jean Vigo (1905-34). Free Cinema bears some
similarities to, but as many differences from, the cinéma vérité and Direct Cinema
movements.

Free Cinema was a major influence on the British New Wave of the late 1950s and early
1960s, and all of the founders except Mazzetti would make films associated with the
movement, Reisz with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Richardson with A Taste
of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Anderson with
This Sporting Life (1963).