Screen
Modernism for the masses
Channel 4’s film coverage held a mirror up to a diverse 1980s Britain—and offered a map to a new self
by SUKHDEV SANDHU
The post-punk generation: Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke in “My Beautiful Laundrette” (1985)
© PHOTO 12 / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Clearing out boxes from my childhood bedroom this summer, I chanced on a decades-old pamphlet that sent me into an unexpected reverie. It was an annotated filmography—A5 format, its pages mostly stills and synopses—devoted to New Wave director François Truffaut. Produced in April 1986 by Channel 4 to accompany its mini-retrospective of the filmmaker, who had died 18 months earlier, the brochure cost the price of a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
I had sent off for it smitten and reeling after watching the still-peerless The 400 Blows (1959), Truffaut’s autobiographical portrait of a Parisian teenager finding a refuge from his troubled family in cinema. I’d never been to a cinema myself or even seen a subtitled film. No one I knew had been to Paris. And yet, there in my parents’ living room in Gloucester, on a free television channel, on a humdrum homework night, Channel 4 was showing me things I didn’t know I wanted to see. It was offering me a passport out of provinciality—a roadmap from my old to a new self.