In For A Downer? Notes on some British Film Institute feature film productions of the 1980s
This is a longer (!) version of an article published in Cinema Journal in 2008
The moment I saw ‘The British Film Institute in association with Channel 4 presents Distant Voices, Still Lives’ I feared we were in for a downer, and so it proved.[1]
For one living in the south London suburbs in the 1970s, connected by slow commuter trains to the metropolitan hub at Waterloo Station, the multi-sited British Film Institute principally meant the nearby National Film Theatre. The NFT (now Blairishly renamed BFI Southbank) was part of a cluster of cultural gatekeepers near Waterloo that included the Royal Festival and Queen Elizabeth Halls and Purcell Room for (mainly) classical music, the National (now Royal National) Theatre at the Old Vic and then its own purpose-built South Bank site and the Hayward Gallery (now rebranded The Hayward) for visual arts. This nexus of brutalist designs, windchilled piazzas, menacing underpasses, dark Victorian railway arches and lines and louche pubs and cafes seemed to stare morosely across the Thames, only barely connected to the “real” city opposite and hemmed in by the frantic traffic intersection to the south and west where Waterloo Road met York Road and by a sinister web of glowering warehouses, industrial terraces, grimy streets and pockmarked lanes of Southwark to the east. The Bankside Power Station was still a power station, not yet the anchor tenant of the cultural playground stretching to Tower Bridge that now includes the industrial chic of the Tate Modern and the Disneyland “authenticity” of “Shakespeare’s” “Globe”. Back then, we banlieusards arriving by train at Waterloo for cultural improvement were joined by pedestrians who poured south from their offices in Charing Cross and Covent Garden, crossing the Thames by the wide, painterly Waterloo Bridge or the anxious cage of the Hungerford footbridge, whose wire networks hindered attempts at suicide, whether across the train lines to the west or into the easterly river. The South Bank was a destination on the way to nowhere else, a home to the high arts that seemed like the last place on earth.
The South Bank as it was …
British Film’s lieu de mémoire
In those dark years between Swinging London and Cool Britannia (themselves also dark times in so many ways), there were plenty of repositories of film culture elsewhere in London, in Notting Hill and Islington, on Oxford Street and Knightsbridge, in Chelsea and South Kensington, and beyond. But the BFI, like its South Bank neighbors, was canonical: an “Institute”, “British”, its exhibition space “National” and a “Theatre” (a term which in the UK, unlike the U.S., is undemotic and grandiose), a home to the singular, pedestalled “Film,” and never plural, sublunary “Films.” The site itself was consecrated: it was the home of the Festival of Britain, a 1951 event designed both to mark the emergence of a new, quasi-socialist, Labour Party-led order from the ruins of the Second World War and, at the same time and apparently unironically, to celebrate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the international fair that marked the apogee of British imperialism. The Festival, and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II two years later, were statements of nationhood that simultaneously submerged and highlighted these paradoxes, although the former element was more apparent at the time: “celebrations of what contemporaries thought was a uniquely harmonious society.”[2] This attempted celebration of a totalizing and homogenizing ideology underpinned, so it was said, the solidarity of the nation during the Second World War, and was in many ways the high water mark of British Unionism, which promotes the attempted unitary state created progressively by the assimilation of Wales, Scotland and Ireland to the English throne by statutes (Acts of Union) of 1536, 1707 and 1800 respectively.
I emphasize these physical spaces because the existence of the South Bank cannot be explained simply by the need to have places to house art, theatre, films, and so on. Instead, their creation seems to me to embody a yearning that goes beyond mere utility. They comprise a lieu de mémoire in the sense posited by Pierre Nora, a monument to a past that is disconnected from our actual memories.[3] And in that sense, the cultural rupture between the imagined past and the imagined present that is inherent in the Festival is present at the birth of the BFI’s production activities.
The film aspect of the Festival, organized by the BFI at the request of the British government, was “integral to the Festival of Britain,” bridging the “three main areas of concern, the arts, industry and science.”[4] Financial exigencies threatened the BFI’s brief, but ultimately its role included stimulating Festival-themed feature production from mainstream producers as well as acting as an underfunded impresario for original documentary and “technically experimental” films.[5] The temporary headquarters for film and television at the festival, the Telecinema, was created by the Corbusier-modernist architect and designer Wells Coates, and precursor to the NFT which opened nearby in 1957. The most prominent result of this celebration of film, The Magic Box (John Boulting, 1951), sought, via a fanciful account of the camera inventor William Friese-Greene, to claim the creation of the cinema as the product of the British genius, rather than the messy outcome of the work of myriad researchers from Germany, France, the UK and the USA, among other places.[6] The other key films of the Festival were similarly conflicted,[7] most notably Humphrey Jennings’ contribution, Family Portrait, in which the “family” is the British people, and which in an exceptionalist culmination, positions postwar Britain as a bridge between Europe and the rest of the world:
And now we also belong to a communion across the Atlantic and the South Seas. We are too small, too crowded to stand alone. We have to come both inside the family of Europe and the pattern overseas. We are the link between them. For all we have received, from them and from our native land, what can we return? Perhaps, the very things that make the family, the pattern, possible. Tolerance. Courage. Faith. The will to be disciplined. And free. Together. [8]
It was this Unionist, Atlanticist, romanticized Britain that gave birth to the film production activities of the BFI, a national, state-supported institution, and its South Bank exhibition buildings, the Telecinema and the NFT, essential to the constitution of official (or at least hegemonic) versions of film culture in Britain. However, even to its British contemporaries, the sentimental special pleading of The Magic Box seemed overdone, while in Family Portrait, while Jennings’ “fantasy of the Empire” was repellent even to his champions, such as Lindsay Anderson who, echoing Nora, perceived Jennings’ reliance on “[t]he [p]ast as a refuge.”[9] The triumphalism of the Festival bred concurrently its own discontents and oppositions.
Of course, this account of film “Britishness” is highly partial. Humphrey Jennings and John Boulting are no more or less “British” than the many staples of the British cinema: regional comedy (Will Hay, Gracie Fields, George Formby), Anna Neagle costume dramas, Gainsborough Pictures melodramas and comedies, Ealing’s green worlds, Hammer horror pictures, prisoner-of-war dramas, James Bond films, and so on. But it is the dominant account of the Festival, a fantasy tellingly privileged over the many alternatives.
In its South Bank lieu de mémoire, the NFT was where the results of the BFI’s efforts to incubate new films would generally be seen. Indeed, as Christophe Dupin has shown, the decision to set up a film fund at the BFI was entwined with efforts to preserve the Telecinema as a national cinémathèque: both were projects derived from the BFI’s Festival of Britain activities, aimed at institutionalizing and perpetuating the original ad hoc project. Thus, the new NFT was home to the first screenings of the so-called “Free Cinema” programs, organized by Anderson and including both BFI and non-BFI-funded work: Together (Lorenza Mazzetti, 1956), Momma Don’t Allow (Karel Reisz & Tony Richardson, 1955) and O Dreamland (Lindsay Anderson, 1953). Although different in style and outlook, these films all suggested a Britain different from the Festival version: where class, income, environment and race, among other things, were dividing, distancing features of national life. The pleasures taken by the jazz fans in their North London pub in Momma Don’t Allow or the funfair participants of O Dreamland are not those of Jennings’ “family” but of a more disconnected people, grounded in the local but part of nothing bigger. But if these films, whether documentary or documentary-style fiction, avoided institutional “Britishness”, they generally remained aligned with their subjects: even the dyspepsia of Anderson’s nightmarish views and soundscapes in O Dreamland is “truer” than such Free Cinema follow-ups as Nice Time (Claude Goretta & Alain Tanner, 1957), whose mashed-up accounts of night-time visitors to Piccadilly Circus seem like mere exercises de style in comparison.
Disconnected from Humphrey Jennings’ “family”
“Innovative” and “accessible”
By the mid 1970s, after twenty or so years of film funding – until 1965 through the Experimental Film Fund and then through its Production Board – the BFI’s production activities had reached a kind of entropy. No BFI-funded films were screened at the NFT in the five-and-a-half years after March 1971, although a bare handful, including Bill Douglas’ My Childhood (1972) and My Ain Folk (1973), were shown at the London Film Festival.[10] Internal cultural divisions within the BFI – notably around issues of film theory – created an institutional environment that pitted the BFI’s intellectual leadership against the more conventional, patronage-minded membership of the Production Board. And outside the BFI, the opposition of such centers of avant-garde film practice as the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op and the Independent Film Makers’ Association to the entrenched practices of auteurism and art cinema embraced by the Production Board (although the Co-Op also received BFI funding). These stresses, combined with financial, management and distribution problems, kept the BFI’s production activities in a persistent condition of near-crisis. In response to these crippling difficulties, the BFI’s new head of production, Peter Sainsbury, called in 1976 for “a renunciation of the ethic of patronage and the institution of processional production procedures with compatible budgetary strategies.”[11] This meant a number of things, but its most visible effect was to change the BFI into a producer — led by a head of production whose discretionary powers (i.e., independence from the BFI Production Board) had been greatly enhanced — of “commercial-grade” feature films with potential for theatrical, television and video release. Sainsbury was seen at the time as an instrument of change:
Peter Sainsbury, head of the British Film Institute Production Board, has encouraged film-makers working with BFI finance to cast their scripts within a narrative structure, use well-known names in the case, and employ skilled technicians to secure the highest production values possible with a low budget. Sainsbury’s aim to maximize the audience for films which are innovative in their use of the film medium has brought strong criticism from experimental film-makers who interpreted such measures as attempts to compromise a director’s creative integrity. Such criticisms spring from a deep disdain for the audience and a refusal to take any steps towards accessibility.[12]
There are quite a few contestable terms used in this short passage: notably, “production values”, “innovative” and “accessible”. But it seems fair to say, first, that James Park’s description here (as opposed to his evaluation) of Sainsbury’s policy is accurate, and, second, that it endorses a conservative, incremental approach: the features supported by the BFI are essentially on the same page as those produced by more mainstream cinemas, albeit often at the margins. The idea that they might be written on a different page altogether has been roundly rejected. One context for this was structural. “Highest production values” was often coded language for not video, not 16mm or Super 8mm, less academy ratio and more color.
By favoring 35mm, widescreen formats and color photography, the BFI’s policy pushed up costs, even of purportedly “low budget” films. Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) cost around £450,000 to make.[13] His previous feature, The Falls (1980), was an hour and half longer and received just £30,000 in production funding from the BFI.[14] Sainsbury’s new production dispensation required funds from other sources: on a small scale, there was the National Film Finance Corporation (now British Screen), headed by a predecessor of Sainsbury’s at the BFI, Mamoun Hassan. More substantially, there was a new UK television network, Channel Four (run by a former Production Board chairman, Jeremy Isaacs), whose film financing remit was heavily influenced by the success of West German television networks during the 1970s in nurturing such emerging talents as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. According to James Park, Channel Four put £150-200,000 into The Draughtsman’s Contract, which nonetheless left an enormous balance for the BFI to cover: in 1979, the Production Board’s combined contribution to eight new films was around £370,000, while in 1978 the total, for seven films, was just over £150,000.[15]
Whatever else Sainsbury’s policies may have achieved, the sums of money involved, together with the routine need for co-production partners, imposed a marketplace logic on the BFI’s production enterprise. Without commercial returns – something scarcely ever before achieved by any BFI film, ever – the new approach would be unsustainable. And in light of the “national” role of the BFI, discussed previously, it is worth noting what “marketplace logic” meant in Britain at the turn of the 1980s.
When the Attlee government fell in October 1951, just as the Festival of Britain was drawing to its close, the Labour Party found itself in opposition to the dominant Conservative Party for some 16 of the next 22 years. Labour returned to power in 1974 in the aftermath of the oil crisis that had begun the previous year. In common with most other Western countries, Britain suffered prolonged double-figure inflation and then-record unemployment levels. In 1979, in reaction to this severe decline, the Conservatives, led by Margaret Thatcher, won the general election by a landslide on a pledge to sweep away the postwar Keynesian mixed economy model and replace it with policies promoted by free market theorists such as Milton Friedman. As with the contemporaneous Reagan-Bush administrations in the United States, the Thatcher government proclaimed the beneficial supremacy of markets and the failure of state intervention in regulating most human affairs. For the BFI, the embrace of marketplace logic in 1979-80 was a very British thing to do. In this light, the promotion of “accessibility” as a film value can look in this context less of an appeal to popular (or populist) democracy and more as a submission to the new ideological current of allowing the marketplace to decide what should or should not survive. One would guess that many if not most of the BFI leadership voted against Thatcher in 1979 and continued to disdain her throughout her long term of office – that was the commonplace opinion of metropolitan culture at the time. Objectively, though, this was opposition waged through submission, more reactionary surrender than necessary improvement.
But just as the Free Cinema films somewhat cut through the prevailing Festival ideologies of the BFI in the 1950s, it is still at least theoretically possible that the actual results of the Sainsbury policy shifts may have diverged from the spirit of the Thatcher age. The films that I have chosen to discuss in this context are those that in some way or other have been deemed, then and/or since, to have been “successes”, whether critically, financially, or both. In that sense, their place in the world into which they were born has been somewhat overlooked, as if they have become museum pieces rather than cultural products.
Christopher Petit, Radio On (1980)
Radio On: a promising debut?
Radio On was in many ways the BFI’s first “hit”, a co-production with Wenders’ Road Movies Filmproduktion company that cost about £80-100,000 to make,[16] and shot in widescreen 35mm black and white. It has been anointed as “[o]ne of the landmark English films of the past 30 years” by the conservative London newspaper The Daily Telegraph.[17] (“English”, not “British”. So much for Unionism.) Robert, a London disk jockey, drives across the country to learn more about his brother’s suicide. On the way he encounters various characters – an erratic, unemployed Scottish ex-serviceman, a feckless gas station attendant who plays Eddie Cochran songs, a German woman seeking custody of her young son, and so on, all to the backdrop of a fairly impeccable musical score from the period, including songs by David Bowie, Kraftwerk, Ian Dury, Lene Lovich and Wreckless Eric. There are gestures towards the political moment – graffiti on a wall call for the release of the jailed Baader-Meinhof guerrilla Astrid Proll, the Scot talks about two Army tours patrolling in Belfast – but the film’s dominant posture is the gaze from a distance of the disconnected, passive spectator to which things happen, a non-actor. Although Radio On’s most obvious debt is to David Lynch’s own low-budget black-and-white feature, Eraserhead (1977), a work that was greatly admired by the magazine Time Out, for which Petit worked as a film critic, it lacks the almost frantic engagement of that film with its stricken hero. It is determined to be cross-culturally Germanic – the Wenders collaboration, the Proll graffiti, the German characters, the Kraftwerk music, the German language version of Bowie’s Heroes – but as it progresses, the film becomes less and less cosmopolitan. Robert penetrates the dull heart of England: pubs, trailer parks, provincial towns, the seaside. With its grainy monochrome and seedy backdrops, Radio On begins to look more in the tradition of another British staple – kitchen sink drama – and less a product of the narrative vanguard. After a couple of unsuccessful features – An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982) and Flight To Berlin (1984), Petit’s career essentially stalled. This is only surprising if Radio On is seen as a promising debut.
Peter Greenaway, The Falls (1980), The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), A Zed & Two Noughts (1985)
Some would claim that the charge that the BFI abandoned the avant-garde in the Sainsbury era is answered by the success of Peter Greenaway. For the sake of simplicity, let us adopt Pam Cook’s avowedly “limited and debatable” description of the term “avant-garde” film:
… use[d] … to refer to that body or work which engages with questions of film language and the relationship of the film-maker and spectator to film, but which is also produced in opposition to the dominant system of production, distribution and exhibition and is therefore part of independent cinema.[18]
Let us even give Greenaway the arguable benefit of the doubt, that his later benefactors such as Channel Four (and even the BFI) were not themselves part of the “dominant system of production, distribution and exhibition.” In terms of his film practice – the engagement with language and the spectator identified as the second strand of Pam Cook’s definition – it can be claimed that Greenaway’s work is related to the painterly tradition identified by Peter Wollen as one of the two strands of avant-gardisme in the cinema.[19] But he is also connected to other, more specifically British cultural strands, notably the short-lived “absurdist” theatre of the 1950s and 1960s, in particular the work of N.F. Simpson (A Resounding Tinkle, 1957, One Way Pendulum, 1959), and the zany tradition that runs from radio’s The Goon Show, the theatrical review Beyond the Fringe and through to the television and film work of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Seen against this backdrop, a work such as The Falls (1980), a three-hour series of 92 vignettes concerning people whose names begin with the letters FALL that have been afflicted by an occurrence called the Violent Unknown Event, seems to have more loopy geniality than any truly sinister or disturbing impact. But this good-natured fusion of Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam darkens and dissipates as Greenaway’s ambitions to make bigger films are realized. The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), hugely praised in its time, combines, in its account of a painter working at an eighteenth-century English country house, a cold formalism with glib analogizing – in a series of tableaux vivants, a commonplace is repeated and repeated: that the artist is the director is the artist. (Pasolini pulls this off in Il Decameron [1975], but even he skirts the obvious.) By the time of A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), Greenaway’s color palette has gone dayglo – reminiscent of Ken Russell’s Crimes of Passion (1984), but without Russell’s justifying purpose. Instead, Greenaway embraces a sort of enervated voyeurism: a dull project of looking without feeling. David Thomson has well stated the problem:
Greenaway is a test case in the question as to whether cinema can really be as solitary as art or literature. Or is there not an inevitable, maudlin, melodramatic sense of the crowd as soon as one throws light on a wall?[20]
The reason that Greenaway is not avant-garde is that he pushes and questions nothing. He is all surface, preferring “classical landscapes – studied, organized and considered” to any attempt to “capture the moment” of the type that he reads into impressionism.[21] In that sense, he became in the 1980s a perfect reflection of a very British moment: substituting a parody of difference for the practice of opposition.
Terence Davies, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), Death and Transfiguration (1983)
The three films that became known as the Terence Davies Trilogy were in some ways the product of the old pre-Sainsbury dispensation at the BFI, although they did not achieve their greatest success until the series was finished in 1983 and packaged for the international festival and art house circuit. Children was financed (£7,775) by the Production Board, Madonna and Child by the National Film School – it was Davies’ graduation film – and Death and Transfiguration by a combination of the BFI and a municipal arts association, Greater London Arts. The concept – a trilogy of personal films about a central character associated with the biography of the writer-director, taking him from a working-class childhood to the consciousness transformations of the adult world – had already been achieved, recently, by Bill Douglas. The compositional, narrative and attitudinal influences, notably of Robert Bresson and François Truffaut, were so familiar as to be commonplace. But execution is all, and Davies’ apparent allegiance to the conventions of the art house could be deceptive: in a tour de force in Madonna and Child, Davies juxtaposes Catholic church imagery with an off-camera telephone call to a tattooist who is to decorate the protagonist’s genitals. Davies has no interest in the shock value of this moment, but in the commonplace dynamics of the transaction and the sad yearnings it embraces. The thought that the Trilogy belongs to an earlier age is superficial: as Davies showed again later, with The House of Mirth (2000), an unallusive film of sensibility can capture its own time better than efforts that may be more coy or more sly.
Derek Jarman, The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986)
Jarman: Reclaiming vital cultural property from the custodians
Derek Jarman’s career was cut short by AIDS and death at the age of 52, but he still managed a film career of nearly a quarter of a century. Although he struggled for much of that time in the demi monde of the poor artist, he was well connected and had different ways of getting films made: before The Angelic Conversation, he had made three features, Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1977) and The Tempest (1979) and some three dozen shorts without any BFI money, an oversight that must have begun to seem embarrassing. In The Angelic Conversation, he sets Shakespeare’s sonnets to montages of a young man in love, using a panoply of effects – stop-motion, color desaturation, granular imaging, all in Super-8mm – that evoke Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). In Caravaggio, Jarman takes his favorite subjects, art and gay love, and makes an urgent case for both, whether together or separately. By the time these films were made, AIDS, which had only been identified in 1981, was claiming huge numbers of gay men in Europe and North America (Jarman was diagnosed HIV-positive in December 1986, after the release of Caravaggio): these uncompromising expressions of love, art and desire, made in the shadow of the epidemic, could only be oppositional demands to the moral and cultural order. In that sense, the “high art” inflections of both films are relevant only as reclamations of vital cultural properties from their habitual custodians. Jarman’s project – projects, really – insists on a patterns of life and experience that reject all efforts to contain them. It hardly seems accidental that within two years of Caravaggio, the Thatcher government passed the notorious Section 28, a statutory amendment directing that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”[22] Although the BFI was not a “local authority” within the meaning of Section 28, official Britain had nonetheless spoken to the challenge of Jarman’s work. Whether because of this or not, Jarman’s remaining films were not supported by the BFI, although he continued to receive funds from Channel Four and the BBC.
In For a Downer?
Ken Russell’s grumpy comments quoted at the beginning may not be fair to Terence Davies, but they do reflect valid frustration at the type of cinema the BFI often stood for in the 1980s. After all, there were other sources of visual arts and entertainment that often seemed more challenging and more daring than the institutionalized “alternative” cinema offered under the Sainsbury regime. Television continued to be a vital source of drama, with Alan Bleasdale, Alan Clark, Trevor Griffith, David Leland, Dennis Potter, Philip Savile and many others producing a flow of work that took issue with the institutional vision of Britain posited elsewhere. And the techniques of music videos, which burgeoned in the 1980s, drawn both from avant-garde experimentation and the maverick cinemas of among others, Russell, Dick Lester and Bob Rafelson, arguably had more influence on the language of cinema than anything done by Peter Greenaway. A later UK director such as Paul Greengrass seems more to owe allegiance equally to the British documentary tradition (as seen in his Bloody Sunday [2002] and United 93 [2006]) and to the fast and furious conventions of music videos (The Bourne Ultimatum [2007]). The “downer” of so much of the work of the 1980s is the poverty of ambition clothed in the attitudinizing of the “alternative” and “independent”.
The BFI Production Board was merged into the UK’s Film Council – “the Government-backed strategic agency for film”[23] – in 2000, so the South Bank complex has been disconnected, at least directly, from the exhibition of films supported by the British state. But the custodians of state power continue to articulate their fantasies of cultural conformity. In September 2007, the new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, a Scot and a British Unionist to the hilt, addressed the Labour Party’s annual conference as if virtually nothing had changed since the Festival of Britain and Humphrey Jennings was still rallying the people:
Britain has been tested [by terrorist attacks] and not found wanting. This is who we are. And there is no weakness in Britain today that cannot be overcome by the strengths of the British people.… I am proud to be British. I believe in British values.… I stand for a Britain where it is a mark of citizenship that you should learn our language and traditions. I stand for a Britain where we expect responsibility at every level of society. I stand for a Britain that defends its citizens and both punishes crime and prevents it by dealing with the root causes. … So I stand for a Britain where we all have obligations to each other and by fulfilling them, everyone has the chance to make the most of themselves.[24]
[1] Ken Russell, The Lion Roars (Boston: Faber & Faber 1994), 168.
[2]Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 535.
[3] Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: the construction of the French past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1-2.
[4] Sarah Easen, “Film and the Festival of Britain,” in British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration, ed. Ian MacKillop and Neil Sinyard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 50-51. Film seems less “integral” to general historians of the Festival, who barely mention it. See, e.g., Mary Banham and Bevis Hillier, eds., A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976) and Paul Rennie, Festival of Britain Design 1951 (Woodbridge, England, 2007).
[5] Christophe Dupin, “The British Film Institute as a sponsor and producer of noncommercial film: a contextualised analysis of the origins, administration, policy and achievements of the BFI, Experimental Film Fund (1952-1965) and Production Board (1966-1979)” (Ph.D diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2005), 29-31. I am very grateful to Dr. Dupin for providing me with a copy of his unpublished dissertation.
[6] See, e.g., David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 9-10.
[7] An incomplete list of official, semi-official and unofficial films connected to the Festival other than The Magic Box, many with varying degrees of BFI support, would include Air Parade (Bill Mason, 1951); Around is Around (Norman McLaren, 1951); Brief City (Maurice Harvey & Jacques Brunius, 1952); Family Portrait (Humphrey Jennings, 1951); Festival in London (Philip Leacock, 1951); David (Paul Dickson, 1951); Distant Thames: Royal River (Brian Smith 1951); Forward A Century (JB Napier-Bell, 1951); Now is the Time (Norman McLaren & Raymond Spottiswoode, 1951); Painter and Poet 1-4 (John Halas, 1951); A Solid Explanation (Peter Bradford, 1951); and Waters of Time (Basil Wright & Bill Launder, 1951).
[8] Transcribed from the film commentary. I have attempted to match the punctuation to the vocal cadences of the narrator (Michael Goodliffe).
[9] Quoted in Easen, 58.
[10] Dupin, 212.
[11] Dupin, 251.
[12] James Park, Learning to Dream: the New British Cinema (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 51. Park’s enthusiasm for the new wave of British film-makers of the early and mid-1980s was short-lived: his next book on the subject was called British Cinema: the Lights that Failed (London: BT Batsford, 1990).
[13] Park, Learning to Dream, 73.
[14] Dupin, 311. Some contributions were spread over two years.
[15] Dupin, 311. Some contributions were spread over two years.
[16] £80,000 according to Park, Learning to Dream, 44; £100,000 according to Dupin, 280. The BFI contribution was £40,000.
[17] Sukhdev Sandhu, “Road movie through post-punk Britain.” Daily Telegraph (London), October 8, 2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/10/08/bfpetit08.xml (accessed November 30, 2007).
[18] Pam Cook, “Teaching Avant-garde Film; Notes Towards Practice” (1979), in The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture, ed. Manuel Alvarado, Edward Buscombe and Richard Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 61.
[19] Peter Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes” (1975), in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso Editions, 1982), 92-104.
[20] David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2002), 353.
[21] Park, Learning to Dream, 89
[22] Local Government Act 1988 (c. 9) [UK]
[23] UK Film Council web site, http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/, accessed November 30, 2007.
[24] “Gordon Brown speaks to Conference,” speech given to the Labour Party Conference, September 24, 2007, at the Labour Party’s official website, http://www.labour.org.uk/conference/brown_speech. Accessed November 29, 2007. The selected portions are considerably compressed from the complete speech as given; the ellipses cover substantial cuts.
I always thought Peter Greenaway was overrated.