Mike Leigh:a Distinctive Social Relist Auteur

Mike Leigh is a highly prolific and award-honoured British independent director who dedicates himself to realistically representing the harsh existences of the underrepresented British ordinary people for almost half a century from his earliest Bleak Moments (1971) to the latest Another Year (2010). This dissertation employs the auteur theory to analyze the special status and significance of Mike Leigh as a social realist filmmaker. It argues that Leigh’s distinctive personal style and constant thematic concerns not only win him the laurel of film auteur, but convincingly demonstrate his uniqueness from other social realist directors. Stylistically, Leigh is distinctive in both his original filming method of highly creative improvisations and lengthy but meticulous rehearsals, and his cinematic style distinguished by the subject matter, the sensory representations of characters, the settings and non-political endings. Thematically, Leigh unwaveringly focuses on commonplace issues:family, work, birth, marriage and so forth. To better illustrate Leigh’s thematic preoccupations, seven films are chosen out of his over twenty films and interpreted through textual analysis:Nuts in May (1976), High Hopes (1988), All or Nothing (2002) and Life Is Sweet (1990) are approached from the perspective of class, Hard Labour (1973) and All or Nothing are discussed from the angle of marriage, Bleak Moments (1971) and Naked (1993) are illustrated from the point of human connection.