Pressure.

Pressure was released in the midst of black exploitation cinema in the mid 1970s. Pressure portrays the situation of Britain's demographic change. It was shown in a 'back-seat' kind of way so we, as an audience could see the kinds of things that were going on in the 1970s-1980s. Pressure can be seen as a coming-of-age film showing the social revelations of young black men and women. Equally it focuses upon how the social, political and cultural climate change throughout the 70s and 80s.


I believe Pressure was made to highlight that at the time Black Britain was seen to be a completely separate indication to the white British culture. Pressure covers many different ways of the cultural boundaries and how they are different from personal views, some more obvious and consequential than others. Pressure shows many different perspectives on culture and the types of responses to Black people and Black Britain especially at the time that the film was made.


Also, Pressure emphasizes the fact that people used to tar black people with the same brush. As Tony, the main character had been brought up in England since he was born so he hangs around and acts in a similar way to his friends who are all white. Yet his brother is totally different as he originally was brought up in Trinidad so he has different characteristics. This is how the directors chose to put across the differences of everyone of the black culture. It highlighted many differences between the two brothers no matter how close they were they would be different because of how they have been brought up. 


There are many forms of racism brought up in the film but in different ways. Pressure has put across and shown well how people acted and treated each other back in the era that it focuses on. For example, when Tony went back to his friends flat, the landlord decided she didn't want tony to be in her household. Yet his friend was defending him saying that he had as much right as anybody else to be there. This particular situation highlighted two different perspectives of black people and made a realistic argument. Some people had a strong hatred against black people and clearly wouldnt like to change their mind, this would usually be the older generation whereas the younger generation, teenagers, would have a mutual respect for black people as much as anybody else because they had grown up with them and didnt see any problem.


Another situation that arose was that when the Black people decided to have a meeting about certain problems that arose and just to have a general party, the police turned up and began to arrest people without any particular reasoning. This proved that people especially policemen wanted any excuse to get black people into trouble. This portrayed the brutality of the situation within the era.


I believe that Pressure can be seen as different from mainstream representations of Black Britons because it portrays so many perspectives of black britain and captures a realistic view of how  the lifestyles of britons in the 1970s-80s was.