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Save our film heritage from the political vandals

Colin MacCabe
Sunday July 8, 2007

Observer

The British Film Institute has been part of my life almost as long as I can remember. In Sixties London it was the only place to learn the history of the cinema, to see retrospectives of Howard Hawks or Roberto Rossellini. In the Eighties I was incredibly lucky to work with Derek Jarman, Terence Davies and Sally Potter as head of the BFI Production Board. It has thus been extremely painful to see the BFI being destroyed over the last 10 years by government policy. Ever since New Labour was elected in 1997 it has shown no sign of valuing this very British organisation.
When I left the BFI in 1998, it was regarded worldwide as the outstanding example of an educational and cultural film institution. It had experimental film and television production arms, a postgraduate programme and a cutting edge publications division. It hired the greatest clustering of film expertise in the world ranging from its curators to its academics. These had at their disposal the best film library and film archive in the world. They also had the National Film Theatre.

Today there is a renamed cinema complex but every other activity has been abolished or is under threat while talent has haemorrhaged away. In international circles the BFI is now mentioned not as an enviable model but as an awful example of political vandalism. Variety magazine talks of the 'tipping point' at which the institute will cease to exist. In recent weeks the institute has announced that it can no longer support its publication division; its great library, the recipient of hundreds of valuable donations, from Derek Jarman to Richard Attenborough, is being offered to any university that will house it; and most recently the film archive itself has been declared in grave danger through lack of resources. This is the archive which houses not only the films of Hitchcock and Lean but also the biggest collection of silent film in the world and documentaries which record British life in every decade of the 20th century.

On the morning of Brown's reshuffle and in his last interview as films minister Shaun Woodward recognised that the crisis in the archive was so acute that extra money must be found, but he refused to accept that these problems were the result of the decisions made by Culture Secretary Chris Smith in 1998 and 1999 when he stripped the institute of its innovative production and postgraduate activities and subordinated it to a new body, the United Kingdom Film Council. Smith wanted a 'sustainable film industry', but this is a fantasy that has failed in every decade, from Alexander Korda in the Thirties to David Puttnam and Goldcrest in the Eighties. Britain cannot sustain an autonomous film industry. On the one hand it confronts Hollywood, which uses both our language and our stars and, on the other, it inhabits a culture in which television and theatre hold pride of place. Any British film policy has to link our film and television industries together. If we look at the great successes of the past decade or so - both the old guard of Frears, Loach and Leigh, and the new talent of Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), Paul Greengrass (United 93) and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) - what is noticeable is their hybrid formation in film and television, a mixed economy crucial to Britain.

Shaun Woodward defended New Labour policies, citing the quadrupling of production in 20 years from 30 to 120 films annually. But this is a typically misleading Film Council statistic, for it fails to distinguish between films that have found real audiences and ones that are tax-avoidance schemes. According to Screen Finance, investment in the film industry collapsed by 57 per cent in the first three months of this year. The day the Treasury brought a halt to the iniquitous tax breaks which allowed City boys to trouser more of their bonuses by investing in films, the British film industry vanished in a puff of dodgy accounting and unseen films. Films only exist when they are distributed properly. As art they need context and educational support; publications; proper cataloguing and archiving - all roles for which the BFI was invented in the 1930s. The main problem is that Blair's Labour policy for the arts knew only two arguments - an economic one for inward investment and a social one of inclusion.

Everybody I have talked to in the past week has warmly welcomed the appointment of James Purnell as the new Culture Secretary. Many have looked forward to him appointing a new chairman of the BFI when Anthony Minghella steps down at the end of the year. But the BFI is now the only Royal Charter institution not directly responsible to a minister. The new chairman of the BFI will be nominated by the Film Council. But it is the Film Council who have reduced the BFI's budget to less than it was a decade ago, and have held the institute on a standstill budget for the last four years and provoked the present crisis.

By my calculations, if you add the lottery, tax breaks and direct government spending together, Blair's government outspent any previous government on film by a factor of at least 10. I know nobody within the film industry who thinks it got value for money and nobody outside who has noticed. The present crisis in the BFI is merely a symptom of a much wider failure. Purnell's first task for film is to commission an external report and then revisit the Film Council's monopoly position. Make no mistake; this is not another cash-strapped organisation crying wolf. The events of the last weeks have made clear that two of our most valuable national collections, the library and the archive, are on the verge of ceasing to be national resources. If Purnell cannot save the BFI then it will rapidly become clear that the only safe home for these invaluable sources of popular memory is the British Library.

ellipsis7 wrote:Regrettably the very being of the BFI as publisher, exhibitor, distributor, library, film archive, document collection and research resource is under serious threat...

Blast from the past

The problems facing the BFI today aren't new, as this excerpt from a 1974 BFI publications policy paper shows:

'In the field of publishing the BFI will require a carefully thought-out policy to enable it to cope with this conjunction of restricted funds and an ever-increasing gap between what the public needs and what [commercial] publishers will provide.

The BFI should involve itself more fully in publishing. Of course there isn't enough money; but there never is enough money for all the things the Institute wants to do. But in determining the development of film culture publishing is just as important as the exhibition of films; and in the education sector arguably more so.'

Ed Buscombe, Editor of Publications, BFI Education Advisory Services, BFI Publications Policy, 25 October 1974.

colinr0380 wrote:DVD Times on Science Is Fiction.

The second disc is accompanied by the music of Yo La Tengo. Not being an afficianado of their work, I would describe it as atmospheric prog rock

The second disc is accompanied by the music of Yo La Tengo. Not being an afficianado of their work, I would describe it as atmospheric prog rock

meanwhile wrote:Silent film news from the bfi. Franz Osten's A Throw of Dice (1929) is scheduled for release October 29th

domino harvey wrote:the BFI Bigger Than Life DVD is fantastic, great extras, one of the year's best releases!

Gigi M. wrote:

domino harvey wrote:the BFI Bigger Than Life DVD is fantastic, great extras, one of the year's best releases!

I've been meaning to pick this up, but something tells either Fox or Criterion is putting it out soon at a lower price. How much did you paid for it, Domino?

In the summer of 1924 Claude Friese-Greene set out from Cornwall with the aim of recording life on the road, in colour, between Land's End and John O'Groats. The result is The Open Road.

The BFI National Archive has restored a special compilation of highlights from the journey. The result is a fascinating portrait of inter-war Britain, in which town and country, people and landscapes are captured as never before, in a truly unique and rich colour palette.

BFIVD739/£19.99/UK/1925/colour/silent with music/64 mins

DVD extras include:

New score by pianist Neil Brand and violinist Günther Buchwald

Across England In An Aeroplane (UK, 1919-20)

Peter Whitehead and the Sixties

Wholly Communion (1965)
Benefit of the Doubt (1967)

"With famously good looks, an intellectual demeanour, and an uncanny knack for finding the eye of the storm, English documentary filmmaker Peter Whitehead cast a wide net over the late '60s...[His] films offer a dizzying catalogue of a decade on fire"
San Francisco Bay Guardian

In June 1965, the Royal Albert Hall played host to a slew of American and European beat poets for an extraordinary event that marked the birth of London's gestating 1960s counterculture. Whitehead constructed Wholly Communion from the unfolding circus, creating an extraordinary, anarchic film that is as much a landmark as the event itself.

Whitehead was then invited to film a controversial new play by Peter Brook - building on the provocative question of Britain's relationship to America during the Vietnam War. Benefit of the Doubt has troubling relevance to the current political climate.

BFIVD750/£19.99/UK/1965-67/colour/89 mins + 91 mins extra material

DVD extras include:

Exclusive interview with Peter Whitehead

Jeanetta Cochrane (1967), Whitehead's rarely seen experimental short

Footage from George Devine memorial plays featuring Laurence Olivier, Alec Guiness and Albert Finney, and footage of Vanessa Redgrave at the Royal Albert Hall (Whitehead, 1966)

Throw Of Dice, A
(U), 77 mins, 1929, United Kingdom/India/Germany, Colour

From Time Out London

A treat for Indian movie buffs and lovers of silent melodrama alike, this lovely BFI digital restoration of Franz Osten's moving and picaresque tale of fighting princes, thwarted love and the perils of gambling is going on countrywide tour as part of the ‘India Now' celebrations. The German-born Osten, along with his Indian producer Himansu Rai, is often cited as ‘a father of modern Bollywood' and you feel in his accessible, animal-filled, extras-laden, Rajasthan-set movie quite a modern Mumbai-style musical ebb-and-flow, augmented by now-familiar but then startling location work (of forts, forests and lakes) and very engaging, if still recognisably silent-era, performances, especially from Charu Roy as the smiling royal gambler and sweet Seeta Devi as his coy bride. Let's hope it's dry on Thursday, when you can catch a free preview in Trafalgar Square, with the LSO and Nitin Sawhney's band performing the eclectic compositeur-du-jour's entirely appropriate new East-meets-West score.

jonah.77 wrote:

video and written essays by Barnard Eisenschitz

Eisenschitz is one of the best film historians out there. He's the editor of the lovely French review simply called CINÉMA, which has published a number of interesting pieces on Naruse over the past few years.

His video-essays (notably the one on the French DVD of MOONFLEET) often make extraordinary use of archival materials. This is a great addition to the set.

Tommaso wrote:I also received Friese-Greene's "The Open Road" recently, and would highly recommend it. A beautiful disc, I really love these glimpses at a time long past. Probably some sort of 'temporal' exoticism... Very much reminding of "Electric Edwardians", just made 20 years later and in COLOUR (well, sort of...it looks like very faded technicolor in a way, but has a pretty unique quality to it). Great music as well. Also on it is a charming little 10 minute extra film of footage taken from an aeroplane flight over England in 1920. Only the menu design is somewhat below the usual beautiful BFI standard of recent years.