The term referred to an absence of propagandised intent or deliberate box office appeal.
[3] At an interview in 2001, Mazzetti explained that the reference to size was prompted by the then-new experiments in CinemaScope and other large screen formats.
Later programmes brought in like minded filmmakers, among them Alain Tanner and Claude Goretta (with Nice Time), Michael Grigsby and Robert Vas.
[6] That event also included Norman McLaren's Neighbours and Georges Franju's Le Sang des bêtes.
They were typically shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, hand-held cameras, usually with a non-synchronised soundtrack added separately.
The film-makers shared a determination to focus on ordinary, largely working-class British subjects.
Free Cinema was a major influence on the British New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and all of the founders except Mazzetti would make films associated with the movement.
Many of these films have also been categorized as part of the kitchen sink realism genre, and many of them are adaptations of novels or plays written by members of Britain's so-called "angry young men".