Michael Bracewell presents Food for a Blush

Michael Bracewell (*1958) gilt als herausragender Kenner der britischen Popkultur. Er präsentierte ein bemerkenswertes Beispiel des englischen Kunsthochschulfilms der 1950er Jahre.

„Food for a Blush” wurde zwischen 1956 und 1958 von den Kunsthochschulstudenten Elizabeth Russell und Nicholas Ferguson gedreht. Er bricht mit dem sozial-realistischen Ethos der britischen Free-Cinema-Bewegung, wie es ansonsten in jenen Jahren dominant war. Der kurze, 30-minütige Film wurde von den zwei Studenten der Chelsea School of Art in London als Dokumentarfilm gedreht: ""filmed between bedsits and bombsites"". In traumartigen Bildern beschreibt er die gelangweilte und desorientierte Jugend in den Jahren vor der Explosion des Pop.

Ausgehend von von einer Begegnung mit Elisabeth Russell im Jahr 2009 stellte Michael Bracewell den Film, seine Geschichte und seinen Kontext vor.

Strange film example of British Art School Cinema of the 1950s.

Anomalous to the otherwise social-realist ethos of the British Free Cinema” movement of the 1950s, Food for a Blush is a short, 30-minute film made between 1956 and 1959 by two students at the Chelsea School of Art in London.

It was described by one of its makers as a documentary of worry filmed between bedsits and bombsites.

While the emergence of teen sub-culture in Britain during the late 1950s has become well-trodden ground for cultural historians, the drab and desolate pre-pop years o the Austerity, as experienced by restless and enquiring youth, are perhaps less documented.

""Food for a Blush"", an amateur film made by art students Elizabeth Russell and Nicholas Ferguson, depicts a twilight world in the final years before the youth explosion enabled by Pop. Here are bored young adults searching for cultural language to call their own and coming up with a comic-surreal hybrid that anticipates by a decade the arch, retro-Edwardian Pop Dada of the 1960s.

Ambiguous, dream-like, existentially disoriented, Food for a Blush owes as much to Cocteau as t does to Charlie Chaplin. As Russell observed, it was inspired by the anxiety that underlay the post-Teddy Boy aimless coffee-bar feel of the Kings Road of 1955. Drawing on a meeting in the summer of 2009 with its star, Michael Bracewell introduces the film, its history and context.