Karel Reisz

<p>Czech-born refugee Karel Reisz (1926-2002) is widely regarded as one of the seminal figures in post-war British cinema. Along with Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson Reisz was a founder member of the independent Free Cinema 'movement' which attacked the parochial middle-class values of home-grown studio product with a vigorous commitment to everyday working-class subject matter and a poetically charged film style. This was immediately recognisable in the aesthetic of the international success of Reisz's first feature Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). <br><br>As the import of Free Cinema rapidly dissipated during the 'Swinging London' era Reisz confronted the changing cultural mores of the 1960s and 1970s with a series of ambivalent films that critique the anarchic free spirit of the times including Morgan (1966) Isadora (1968) The Gambler (1974) and Dog Soldiers (1978).<br><br>Drawing on Reisz's early film criticism for Sequence and Sight and Sound as well as interdisciplinary methodologies this first career-length study explores Reisz's personal brand of character-based realism offering the spectator a privileged insight into an artist's developing response to subjective and historical dislocation. The book should thus prove invaluable to film scholars cultural historians and the Reisz aficionado.</p>