The purpose of the national film industry needs to be defined
The purposes served by a national film industry are a happy perennial of public debate. On Wednesday, the prime minister indicated – to no one's surprise – that his government thought the pre-eminent one should be making money. Speaking at Pinewood studios, Mr Cameron predicted approvingly that Lord Chris Smith's investigation of Britain's £4bn film industry, out next week, will call for government and lottery support to be directed more at entrepreneurial film-makers and box-office hits than at technically innovative or culturally important projects. It probably will, since that is what the then plain Chris Smith MP said 12 years ago when as culture secretary he set up the UK Film Council, the body his Conservative successor axed within weeks of taking office in May 2010.
There is a strong case here for defining terms. Precisely what is meant by the British film industry is as familiar an argument as deciding what it is for. There are films that are culturally British – War Horse, which its maker Steven Spielberg described this week as his "first British film", or Harry Potter – films featuring British actors and British landscape, based on British books, but made with Yankee dollars. There are films that are culturally British and made with British money, like the Film Council's greatest success, The King's Speech. But then is Shame, made by the British director Steve McQueen and starring two British actors but set in New York, also British? And of course the industry itself is so much more than the fare at the local multiplex. It is the studios, the post-production facilities, the technical knowhow and the locations, film rights and distribution and cinemas.
The second term that needs defining is sustainable – the word most often applied to the objective for government and lottery funding. It would be possible to have a sustainable film industry that made money from Britain's unquestioned expertise in production, without actually originating any films at all. In 2010, UK film production generated a record £1.1bn for the wider economy. But that denies the cultural significance of an industry that is an irreplaceable way of telling the world something about life in Britain (although it is not always obvious quite what: Bend it like Beckham was the first British film to be screened in North Korea). Chris Smith's Film Council set out to concentrate on the commercial. Its determination to recoup on its investments left it short of friends, and according to its closing down audit, a poor record of success. It also paid its top executives considerably more than cabinet ministers. Labour had already begun to question its worth before cuts-hungry Conservative ministers delivered the death blow. So it is a nice political irony that its last year was the most successful ever in terms of international recognition (King's Speech, The Deep Blue Sea, We Need to Talk about Kevin) and investment in British films – while the transfer of its functions to the BFI appears unlikely to save any money.
David Cameron wants a system of funding that rewards success. In headline terms, that could mean two things, one bad and one good: the bad is a likely reluctance to take risks in what is an inherently risky, high-cost industry where fewer than one in 10 films recovers their production costs. Even if it worked, it might prompt the Treasury to wonder why the government needed to invest in an industry that made money anyway. But it could mean less clawing back of public investment. That would remove a gripe against the old Film Council. However the funding criteria are drawn up, the BFI will still have to wrestle with the Springtime for Hitler factor. Film finance is almost as creative as the industry it serves. Keeping up with the sharp accountancy that sometimes amounts to straightforward grant farming is a matter of constant vigilance, and not a bad justification for regularly reinventing the wheel. The Film Council made some enemies – but it helped make some good films too. The trick for the BFI will be to tell the good from the bad and the plain ugly.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/11/britain-film-industry-closing-credits
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