The Unknown Brilliance – A conversation about Locarno's British postwar cinema retrospective

Mandy

Transcription of a radio interview on the Locarno Film Festival's British postwar cinema retrospective (which I curated), conducted by Julia Baschiera of Austrian broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk and Patrick Wellinski of German station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. This was done over Zoom in late July 2025. Transcription and mild editing is mine. – EK

ORF/Deutschlandfunk Kultur: Maybe you start by explaining to me the retrospective—why you chose the topic this year, how it began, and perhaps the most important aspects?

Ehsan Khoshbakht: Sure. This year's retrospective is on British post-war cinema, films made between September 1945 and the end of 1960. For me, the key reasons for going in that direction were, first of all, that British cinema in general is—surprisingly—one of the least known European cinemas. These films, especially from this period, have rarely had the chance to be screened outside Britain.

There are historical reasons for that. We can blame the Cahiers du Cinéma circle—particularly Truffaut, but also, to some extent, the Franco-Swiss Godard who thought, “Oh, British cinema is terrible.” That’s unfair and totally untrue when you look at the films. So, I thought it was a good starting point.

It’s also the country I live in. In that sense, it’s a tribute to some of the cultural elements that shaped me and encouraged me to come this way. And Locarno itself has a long history of showing British films, going back to the very first editions of the festival. In fact, one of the films in my programme, Hunted by Charles Crichton, actually won the Golden Leopard in 1953. So, this retrospective also continues that tradition.

ORF/DK: You wrote, “Compared to British music, literature and theatre, British cinema remained unexplored.” What was happening in that moment? Can we just contextualise that?

Ehsan: British cinema partly remained obscure because of the language, the way that French-speaking Belgian cinema remained obscure and was overshadowed by French cinema. So, British cinema was always put next to Hollywood, which is a completely meaningless comparison because there are two very different modes of filmmaking. And this issue was further complicated by the fact that many British directors and technicians also worked in Hollywood. Some of them made some of the most famous films in collaboration with Hollywood studios, like David. So, this creates confusion and many Hollywood films are shot in British film studios to this day. So, I think it’s a problem of language in this case too.

But back to your question, what was happening then in that period? So many different things.

First of all, you have the great documentary movement of the ’30s and early ’40s slowing down because the propaganda function of it is more or less over. The war is over, so that sense of urgency in some of the masterpieces of British cinema, which were essentially propaganda films, was no longer relevant. Then documentary cinema handed over this torch of taking reality seriously to British fiction films.

And people like John Grierson, one of the leading figures of documentary cinema, became the head of a company producing fiction films with the idea that the realities of British society can still be addressed in fiction films.

The other thing was the studio system in Britain. Britain is one of the countries that had a very rigorous studio system, a miniature of Hollywood. This is very rare in Europe. You don’t have that in many other countries. So, they flourished during and after the war. Therefore, this retrospective focuses on the brilliance of the studio system and the directors who worked for these studios.

And of course, we are all familiar with some of the traditions like Ealing comedies, Hammer crime films, and later Hammer horror films, the latter not part of the programme that I will explain later why.

So, in terms of style, so many things were happening, but at the same time, the films were dealing with two or three major historical facts. One was the idea of reconstructing British society after the war. Some of the cities, London in particular, were in shambles—bomb sites, ruins. On the other hand, there was a Labour government in Downing Street, with the promise of a new life for the Brits. You also have the end of the British Empire.

So, all these major historical factors were contributing to add an edge, a very strong sense of self-criticism, and a quest for some questions to British films. And that’s what makes these periods particularly outstanding. But again, back to your very first question, it’s also somehow this significant period is overshadowed by what came later, what they call kitchen sink cinema and the British New Wave. One of my arguments is that if you compare some of the themes that are explored in both types of cinemas, the cinema of this period that the retrospective covers and the New Wave, I personally find the first group stronger in many ways.

They are because they are more wrapped in the tradition of genre films. They might not be as visible as the artiness of British New Wave films, but they deliver what they have to deliver with the same force and with power of conviction. I totally disagree with people who tend to see different phases of cinema as separate entities. There is always a sense of continuity. And after all, the British New Wave was not exactly like the French New Wave, a rebellion against Cinéma du Papa. And it was just trying to find a new approach to the question of class, regional cultures, and the form in filmmaking. The earlier films were equally aware of and open to what was happening in other parts of the world, especially in Western European modernist cinemas, in particular neorealism and French Poetic Realism. I see a great deal of influence from French Poetic Realist cinema, in particular Marcel Carné, in the British films of this period.

And of course, the link with Hollywood is something very specific to these films, because they are genre films, and in some cases, they were made with the aim of getting distribution in the US as well, mostly as the second feature of a double bill.

ORF/DK: How did you select the 50 films?

Ehsan: 45 to be more precise. I set some rules for it. Films had to be set in Britain. Of course, there are many British films set in other places. One of the most famous British films is set in Vienna, The Third Man. Then, the films had to be contemporary stories—films made between 1945 and 1960 that are set in the period 1945 and 1960.

In some cases, I have cheated a bit but hopefully not many will notice! Brighton Rock is set in, I think, 1936, it’s before the war, but you won’t notice it because it never mentions the time period.

There are also no fantastical elements. So there’s no Red Shoes. And for that reason, there’s no Hammer Horror. I basically wanted to make a program about British people and the idea of Britishness through British films. That’s the concept of a program. And that’s why I have decided to cut out the period films, films set elsewhere and films that are fantastical.

It doesn’t mean that a fantastical film made in Britain doesn’t reveal something about the character of the British. On the contrary, many of them do. But I thought it would be good to start with the reality and see in which direction it would go.

I want to also add that this program is not very much about the documentary movement. However, I have some documentaries included in it to set the tone for the program. In fact, the very first film in the program is a documentary. It’s a film called A Diary for Timothy by Humphrey Jennings. And this is the film that sets us on this journey.

ORF/DK: And what is the journey in the film?

Ehsan: A child is born, Timothy. The war is almost over. Not exactly over, but almost over. You never see the war, which actually reminds me of the joke in Fawlty Towers: “Don’t mention the war.”

By the way, in the selection, you never see scenes of the war, because, as I said, there are contemporary films. However, the mention of the war and the way that the war has shaped the British experience way into the ’60s is in every single film. You see bombsites in many films. You see the psychological damage of the war in almost every single film, the rationing, and the black market.

Now, in A Diary for Timothy, Jennings asks what is going to happen to this child, to this small boy who’s just born in 1944? What is the future for him? The film is tender and very poignant. And then the rest of the program follows the story hypothetically. What happened to Timothy, which experiences that tiny baby had in ’46, in ’47 way into the ’60s?

So, back to the beginning of A Diary for Timothy, the second film in the program is I Know Where I’m Going! by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. That film also starts with the image of a baby girl on the floor, crawling on the floor, and she knows where she’s going. So, we follow the same journey of the same baby. And this baby is now a grown up woman. And it deals with the materialistic values of the post-war culture among a certain class in Britain. And it’s also about a journey from North of England all the way to Scotland.

And each film borrows a theme from the previous film and adds something to that. And then with the next film, Hunted by Charles Crichton we see the same journey again, undertaken by an orphan boy who moves from the slums and the ruins of London on a journey, again, to Scotland, taken by this criminal on the run, played by Dirk Bogarde. So, this idea of movement in search of a place that they can find happiness, that they can find a home.

I always think that it’s good to show people something they are not very familiar with. So, it would have been very easy to show Brief Encounter. Brief Encounter is one of the greatest British films. But I thought it would be good to show another film by David Lean instead of that one. And most of the time, I have only one, in some cases only two titles by each director.

So, from David Lean, the film in the program is The Passionate Friends, which again is similar in terms of the questions it poses to I Know Where I’m Going!. This is a story of a woman examining her relationship with a man that she loves. But I thought it would be an interesting film because it’s also partly set in Switzerland. I like doing that, establishing contacts with the place in which I’m showing the films.

If one aspect of the program is the idea of movement, you see the movement in the migration of talents to Britain too, mostly refugees. First, you have the wave of refugees from Central and Eastern Europe, mostly Jews. And then you have a second wave of refugees, the American blacklisted directors who during the McCarthy era moved to Britain. So, you have films like Obsession by Edward Dmytryk and films by Joseph Losey, Cy Endfield and Jules Dassin.

And I have not overlooked a great tradition of British comedy. So, there are films like Passport to Pimlico. To me, this is the film that explains Brexit better than any other film in history of British cinema. And also some wonderful comedies like The Happiest Days of Your Life by Frank Launder.

Now that I mentioned Frank Launder, one other aspect that this program highlights is the duos, the teams, production teams, the collaborations in British cinema. It was very common and very rewarding for British cinema, including the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Muriel Box and Sydney Box, the Boulting Brothers. So we also have the idea of collaborative filmmaking highlighted in the program.

Another important topic is the role of women. We are going to have two really wonderful films by Muriel Box in the program. One is The Happy Family, which is a significant film because it deals with the question of housing after the war. And the film asks, "How we can find a balance between the reconstruction, and the renovation of urban spaces damaged by the war with people's true needs and their sense of belonging. So there is change and there's the tradition.

The film is about a family who resists their house being demolished for the Festival of Britain. It has touches of light-hearted anarchy and Muriel Box was a master of these comedies.

Her other film in the program, Simon and Laura—a beautiful colour film—deals with the television culture. It's a very early take on reality television.

There are other female directors in the program as well. People like Jill Craigie, the director of a film called To Be a Woman from 1951. And also very talented, especially in short films, Wendy Toye of whom we show The Stranger Left No Card from 1952. And we have more films written by women, edited by women or produced by women. So this is again British cinema was in a very unique position compared to many other national cinemas. In a period ’40s and ’50s that it saw an increasing presence of women in front and behind the camera.

ORF/DK: Why does the retrospective end with Peeping Tom?

Ehsan: It's the end of one those famous duos. So it’s Michael Powell solo work—no longer with Pressburger. It’s a film that the British critics destroyed. So a tradition in studio filmmaking is totally dismissed as trashy, perverted and sick. It’s a misunderstood masterpiece and it’s a film that is about cinema.

ORF/DK: Is the program more about reality?

Ehsan: The interesting thing is that the films are about the reality of British people, but by no means "realist". Like studio films, they’re very stylized. There’s plenty of expressionist lighting, film noir touches, very expressive use of music, sometimes jazz score. These films are not realist at all. But the starting point is the reality of the people through a fully flourished studio style that British cinema had developed by that point.

ORF/DK: And what does this period mean to you?

Ehsan: I grew up watching these films since I was a kid. Some of these films I had not revisited since I was a kid. One of them, a film called Mandy by Alexander Mackendrick, about a deaf girl, I rewatched some months ago and was shaken because I could still remember every scene. There was a scene that this small girl puts her hand on her forehead out of fear. And I exactly remember how fearful I was as a kid when I saw that film, feeling for this girl. And that was a film that when I was nine or ten, made me realize that there are people who suffer from certain things that I didn’t suffer from.

ORF/DK: And also maybe we can mention that not many people know how Powell was important for a filmmaker like Scorsese?

Ehsan: Very true.  One of the first rediscoveries of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger after the total obscurity was in 1982. Locarno holds a retrospective on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. And in Piazza Grande, Michael Powell goes on a stage and he’s moved to see so many people there. It was a turning point in the life of Michael Powell.

But not only Michael Powell, there are many other filmmakers in this selection who have been important for someone or some other filmmakers outside Britain. But unfortunately, the histories of these people and the influences they had elsewhere were, how should I say, they were never weaved together to create one tapestry that we could look at and say, yes, the influence goes in every direction.

Some great Italian directors were not brought up on necessarily the French New Wave tradition or even the Italian tradition. Marco Bellocchio studied in London and he was a student of Thorold Dickinson.

The Australian film critic Adrian Martin writes that when Raúl Ruiz, the Chilean director, was in Melbourne for a film festival, they asked him who his favourite director in the world was. He responded by saying Alexander Mackendrick!