Small Is Beautiful: The Story of the Free Cinema Films Told by Their Makers

Included on the third disk in the enjoyable Free Cinema collection released recently by the British Film Institute, this documentary does really require you to have already done the ground work of course and have watched the films on the other dvds before watching this. As I had just had my eyes opened to this piece of British film history I was looking forward to watching this documentary, mainly because of how I was curious about how the techniques and focus on reality shaped techniques that now we see as the norm.

Sadly the documentary is mostly not worthy of supporting the films themselves because it is far too basic an affair that offers little in the way of discussion around the subjects. I wanted to understand the period and time as well as appreciate the challenges and also the culture into which these films were screened. We do get a handful of the original films discussed but these talking heads tend to focus on the nuts and bolts rather than anything beyond that. This does still produce some nuggets of interest but sadly there are far too few to justify even a short running time of about ¾ of an hour and the final section looking back on the Film Cinema within a historical context is about 30 seconds and might as Michael Grigsby provides good personal memories from his couple of films, as do Mazzetti and Tanner. Sadly I found Lassally to be a tremendous bore with very little to say about the films, which I didn't understand at all how that could be and how more of interest wasn't drawn out of him. Sitting in a comfortable leather armchair in a home environment should have produced great chat but he doesn't produce the goods – a real shame considering how much of the running time is spent with him.

Vaguely interesting as a documentary but given it was part of the BFI's official release of this interesting collection of films from a period in British film history, it really should have been a lot better than it was.