“… From a nostalgic and romantic viewpoint, the 1960s can be seen as a time of freedom, experimentation and creativity, and relative affluence… the decade cannot be characterized so simply and to fully understand it, it must be located within its historical perspective… the experience of World War Two and all the hardships that brought with it, created a strong desire for change. Interestingly, a major part of this desire was for greater social fairness and recognition that all levels of society had rights to welfare and education. Britain changed socially and culturally to such an extent that the 1960s can be seen as a watershed in Britain’s social history. It was during that 1960s that the idea of a youth culture fully developed and this, together with increasingly affluence, in fact led to greater …show more content…
It does not preach. It never makes any kind of explicit case. It gives you a situation and shows what happens in this particular instance when certain forces on one side are set against certain forces on the other, without any mutual understanding. The aim of the picture is not to incite but to help people to understand the resulting conflict….
It is about responsibility against irresponsibility, and consequently well within a strong puritan tradition. Its hero, Mick, is a hero in the good honourable, old-fashioned sense of the word. He is someone who arrives at his own beliefs and stands up for those beliefs, if necessarily against the world. The film is, I think, deeply anarchistic. People persistently misunderstand the term anarchistic, and think it just means wildly chucking bombs about, but anarchy is a social and political philosophy which puts the highest possible value on responsibility. The notion of someone who wants to change the world is not the notion of an irresponsible