This season examines bold, often strange, and deeply personal filmmaking from 1970 onwards, set against a backdrop of a collapsing British film industry.

These stylistically innovative, and sometimes challenging and transgressive films reflect broader social and political erosion that would lead to the first Margaret Thatcher government in 1979. During a time when the US rode the New Hollywood wave, British studios such as The Rank Organisation and British Lion Films suffered significantly reduced state funding, the withdrawal of Hollywood money, and increasing competition from TV. In a reactionary bid to retain audiences, cheaply made horror films, sex comedies, and TV spin-offs flooded into cinemas. Despite, and partly because of, these dismal circumstances, several now-renowned filmmakers absorbed the decay and transformed it into dark and inventive cinematic refractions that have endured as some of the most celebrated works created on these shores. These films were perhaps the natural eruption from a time of rolling blackouts, strikes and protests, including The Winter of Discontent.

The season leads us through crumbling and filthy urban environments, and rural landscapes that are simultaneously pastoral and troubling, whilst exploring the films’ continually ambivalent relationship with recent and ancient pasts, and revealing their explicit (and sometimes bleak) erotic currents.