The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History 2016025552, 9780415706193, 9781315392189

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO BRITISH CINEMA HISTORY

‘This monumental book represents a major step forward in the study of British cinema. Drawing on a wealth of newly available primary sources, its ambitious chronological sweep delivers many revisionist perspectives. British Film History can no longer be described as “New”: it is an established, dynamic and thriving scholarly enterprise.’ Sarah Street, Professor of Film, University of Bristol, UK ‘While the Introduction disclaims “comprehensiveness”, this monumental volume surely comes near to achieving this. It’s hard to think of any major matters not covered. It offers essential coverage of British film as an industry and as an art form, with matters such as stardom or the producer’s role in the British context, or the sheer capacity to survive over a hundred tumultuous years dealt with by a team of experts.’ Brian McFarlane, Adjunct Professor, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia Over thirty-nine chapters The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History offers a comprehensive and revisionist overview of British cinema as, on the one hand, a commercial entertainment industry and, on the other, a series of institutions centred on economics, funding and relations to government. Whereas most histories of British cinema focus on directors, stars, genres and themes, this Companion explores the forces enabling and constraining the films’ production, distribution, exhibition, and reception contexts from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The contributors provide a wealth of empirical and archive-based scholarship that draws on insider perspectives of key film institutions and illuminates aspects of British film culture that have been neglected or marginalized, such as the watch committee system, the Eady Levy, the rise of the multiplex and film festivals. It also places emphasis on areas where scholarship has either been especially productive and influential, such as in early and silent cinema, or promoted new approaches, such as audience and memory studies. I.Q. Hunter is Professor of Film Studies at De Montfort University, UK. Laraine Porter is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University, UK. Justin Smith is Professor of Media Industries at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Contributors: Sian Barber, Guy Barefoot, Neil Brand, Lucy Brett, James Cateridge, Steve Chibnall, Bertha Chin, Jo Comino, Bryony Dixon, Charles Drazin, Laurie N. Ede, Kate Egan, James Fenwick, Steve Foxon, Adrian Garvey, Jane Giles, Sheldon Hall, Stuart Hanson, Keith M. Johnston, Bethan Jones, Matthew Jones, Julia Knight, James Leggott, Richard MacDonald, Andrew Moor, Jack Newsinger, Richard Paterson, James Patterson, Laraine Porter, Iain Reid, Andrew Roberts, Kelly Robinson, Alex Rock, James Russell, Adrian Smith, Sarah Smyth, Andrew Spicer, Johnny Walker and Anne Woods.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO BRITISH CINEMA HISTORY

Edited by I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hunter, I.Q., 1964- editor. | Porter, Laraine editor. | Smith, Justin T. editor. Title: The Routledge companion to British cinema history / edited by I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016025552| ISBN 9780415706193 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315392189 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures—Great Britain—History and criticism. | Motion picture industry—Great Britain—History. Classification: LCC PN1993.5.G7 R75 2016 | DDC 791.430941—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025552 ISBN: 978-0-415-70619-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-39218-9 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

ix xii

List of illustrations List of contributors

Introduction: British cinema history I.Q. HUNTER, LARAINE PORTER AND JUSTIN SMITH

1

PART I

British silent cinema to the coming of sound: 1895–1930

21

  1 The origins of British cinema, 1895–1918 BRYONY DIXON

23

  2 “Temporary American citizens”: British cinema in the 1920s LARAINE PORTER

34

  3 “King of cameramen”: Jack Cox and British cinematography in the silent era KELLY ROBINSON

47

  4 Designing the silent British film LAURIE N. EDE

57

  5 Stardom in silent cinema ADRIAN GARVEY

67

  6 The view from the pit: British silent cinema and the coming of sound NEIL BRAND

76

  7 The talkies come to Britain: British silent cinema and the transition to sound, 1928–30 LARAINE PORTER

v

87

Contents

  8 The Tudor Cinema, Leicester: a local case study GUY BAREFOOT   9 The rise of the Film Society movement RICHARD MACDONALD

99

109

PART II

The classic period: 1930–80

119

10 Make-believe and realism in British film production: from the coming of sound to the abolition of the National Film Finance Corporation CHARLES DRAZIN

121

11 Local film censorship: the watch committee system ALEX ROCK

130

12 Producers and moguls in the British film industry, 1930–80 ANDREW SPICER

139

13 Émigrés in classic British cinema ANDREW MOOR

151

14 ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’: British documentary, 1945–52 STEVEN FOXON

161

15 “Above and beyond everyday life”: the rise and fall of Rank’s contract artists of the 1950s STEVE CHIBNALL

170

16 “A friend to every exhibitor”: National Screen Service and the British trailer industry KEITH M. JOHNSTON

181

17 The Eady Levy, “the envy of most other European nations”: runaway productions and the British Film Fund in the early 1960s JAMES FENWICK

191

18 The Children’s Film Foundation ANDREW ROBERTS

200

19 “As long as indifferent sexy films are box office they will abound!!”: the Jacey cinema chain and independent distribution and exhibition in 1960s Britain ADRIAN SMITH

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209

Contents

20 Cinema and the age of television, 1950–70 SIAN BARBER

220

21 The BBFC and the apparatus of censorship LUCY BRETT

231

22 The British Film Institute: between culture and industry RICHARD PATERSON

242

23 Trades unions and the British film industry, 1930s–80s IAIN REID

251

24 The public film archives and the evolving challenge of screen heritage preservation in the UK JAMES PATTERSON 25 Good of its kind? British film journalism SHELDON HALL

262

271

PART III

Contemporary British cinema: 1980 to the present

283

26 Cult films in British cinema and film culture KATE EGAN

285

27 The Scala Cinema: a case study JANE GILES

295

28 Underground film-making: British Super 8 in the 1980s JO COMINO

306

29 The rise of the multiplex STUART HANSON

317

30 Rewind, playback: re-viewing the “video boom” in Britain JOHNNY WALKER

328

31 The rise and fall of practically everyone? The independent British film production sector from the 1980s to the present JAMES LEGGOTT

338

32 From Film Four to the Film Council: film policy, subsidy and sponsorship, and the relationship between cinema and TV, 1980–2010 JAMES CATERIDGE

348

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Contents

33 The architects of BBC Films ANNE WOODS

358

34 The UKFC and the Regional Screen Agencies JACK NEWSINGER

367

35 Hollywood blockbusters and UK production today JAMES RUSSELL

377

36 Distributing British cinema JULIA KNIGHT

387

37 Memories of British cinema MATTHEW JONES

397

38 From Lerwick to Leicester Square: UK film festivals and why they matter SARAH SMYTH

406

39 Crowdfunding independence: British cinema and digital production/distribution platforms BERTHA CHIN AND BETHAN JONES

418

429

Index

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures  1.1 The Big Swallow (1901), James Williamson. Image courtesy of BFI National Archive 25  1.2 A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), George Albert Smith. Image courtesy of BFI National Archive 27   1.3 Mitchell and Kenyon: Manchester c.1900. Image courtesy of BFI National Archive 29   1.4 Alma Taylor in Hepworth’s Oliver Twist (1912), the first British feature film. Image courtesy of BFI National Archive 31   2.1 Battling the English weather in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Long Hole (1924). Image courtesy of BFI Stills 35   2.2 The hapless clerk played by George K. Arthur in Harold Shaw’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Wheels of Chance (1922). Image courtesy of BFI Stills 38   2.3 Moving house in Artistic Films’ acclaimed adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ Head of the Family (1922). Image courtesy of BFI Stills 40   6.1 Programme from w/c 11 January 1915 for the Acock’s Green Picture Playhouse – collection of Neil Brand (http://originals.neilbrand.com) 80   7.1 HMV’s mascot, Nipper, and a variable area soundtrack, 1930 91   8.1 The Tudor Cinema in its later years (courtesy of the Leicester Mercury)102 12.1 A startled Edward Everett Horton stares at himself in The Man in the Mirror (1936); the elaborate décor and sophisticated lighting proclaim this as one of Julius Hagen’s “quality” productions (courtesy BFI) 142 12.2 Joseph Janni (on left) and John Schlesinger share a joke on the set of Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). This partnership was the longest-lasting and most creative of Janni’s career (courtesy BFI) 145 12.3 Poster for Murder on the Orient Express, the first of four star-studded adaptations of Agatha Christie for which Nat Cohen acted as executive producer (courtesy BFI) 147 13.1 Hein Heckroth working on designs for The Red Shoes, with his wife Ada, and daughter Nandi looking on. The lush fur coat that Ada is wearing was a gift from Lotte Lenya. Thanks to Christian Routh for providing this image 158

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List of illustrations

14.1 London Can Take It! (1940). Produced by the GPO Film Unit for the Ministry of Information; it was co-directed by Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings (courtesy of BFI) 164 14.2 Journey Together (1945). Produced by the RAF Film Unit and starring Richard Attenborough. © BFI 165 15.1 The Rank contract artists at the time of the Cannes Film Festival 1957 173 19.1 Joseph Cohen, by permission of John Neville Cohen 210 19.2 A magazine advert for Jacey cinemas, Continental Film Review, October 1961, by permission of John Neville Cohen 213 21.1 Modern-day certificate used for a limited period in 2012 to celebrate the BBFC Centenary using the style of the earliest BBFC certificates which were white rather than the now iconic “black cards”. (Reproduced courtesy of the British Board of Film Classification. All © reserved) 233 21.2 Modern-day certificate used for a limited period in 2012 to celebrate the BBFC Centenary using the style of earlier BBFC “black cards”. (Reproduced courtesy of the British Board of Film Classification. All © reserved) 237 23.1 Highest academic qualification obtained (by year of entry to film industry) 259 24.1 MACE Archive Store © MACE 267 27.1 Alan Gregory, Jayne Pilling and Stephen Woolley reopening the Scala at the King’s Cross Primatarium, 1981 (courtesy of Stephen Woolley)300 27.2 Scala programme from April 1992 featuring the fateful screening of A Clockwork Orange (courtesy of 2D Design) 304 28.1 Still from John Maybury, The Technology of Souls, 1981, Super 8 (courtesy of John Maybury and LUX, London) 312 28.2 Still from Steven Chivers, Catherine De Medicis Part 2, 1984, Super 8 (courtesy of Steven Chivers and LUX, London) 313 28.3 Still from Cordelia Swann, Passion Triptych, 1982, Super 8 (courtesy of Cordelia Swann and LUX, London) 314 29.1 The Point in Milton Keynes, taken by author in 1997. When opened by AMC in 1985 it was the UK’s first multiplex. It subsequently closed in 2015 321 29.2 Telford multiplex, taken by author in 1992. Housing ten screens, it was opened by AMC in 1988. The glass canopy was removed when it was rebranded as an Odeon in 2004 324 30.1 Spectacular scenes? Some independent video distributors adopted novel ways of making home video appear attractive to new consumers, including Electric Video Ltd (L) and Derann Audio Visual (R), who briefly experimented with 3D technology (courtesy of the Popular Film and Television Archive, Northumbria University) 331 38.1 Invested film festival communities – Sheffield Doc/Fest, 2014. Photographer: David Chang 412

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List of illustrations

Tables 11.1 Proceeds of Sunday cinema income given to charity (distributed by Smethwick Cinema Visiting Committee) 29.1 Number of cinema sites and screens in Britain 1969–84 29.2 Growth in multiplex sites and number of screens in Britain 1985–2013

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134 319 323

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Sian Barber is Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has published on British cinema and cinema-going as well as on film regulation and the work of the British Board of Film Classification. She is the author of Censoring the 1970s: The BBFC and the Decade That Taste Forgot (2011), The British Film Industry in the 1970s: Capital, Culture and Creativity (2013) and Using Film as a Source (2015). She has been involved with the EUscreen project (www.euscreen.eu) since 2010 and is currently developing work on regional film censorship with Kate Egan from Aberystwyth University. Guy Barefoot is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Leicester. Author of Gaslight Melodrama: From Victorian London to 1940s Hollywood, he has contributed to publications including Directors in British and Irish Cinema: A Reference Companion and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Neil Brand is a writer, composer and broadcaster best known for his work with early film and film music. He has made two landmark series for BBC4 TV – Sound of Cinema: The Music That Made the Movies and Sound of Song – and has performed internationally as a silent film pianist for over thirty years. Lucy Brett is Head of Education at the British Board of Film Classification. She joined the BBFC as a Film and Video Examiner in 2004 after working in trade journalism, television research and media studies teaching. James Cateridge is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University. He has published widely (as James Caterer) on the history of British film policy. Current research interests include film tourism and the digitisation of the film industry. Steve Chibnall is Professor of British Cinema at De Montfort University and is one of the UK’s senior film historians. He is director of DMU’s Cinema and Television History Research Centre and curator of the Hammer Script Archive and other collections, including his own, which contains tens of thousands of pieces of British film and popular culture memorabilia. He has written or edited twelve books, published dozens of articles and book chapters, contributed sleeve notes and commentaries to DVD releases by Studio Canal, Odeon Entertainment and the BFI, and featured on television and radio over a long career. He is Visiting Professor at The Cinema Museum in London, where he organises frequent on-stage events, and a board member of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (EUP). His most recent book (written with Alan Burton) is The Historical Dictionary of British Cinema (Scarecrow Press, 2013). xii

List of contributors

Bertha Chin is Lecturer of Language and Communication at Swinburne University of Technology and board member on the Fan Studies Network. Her work has appeared in Social Semiotics, Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television, Participations and Transformative Works and Cultures. Jo Comino currently works for Borderlines Film Festival. She ran the London Film-Makers’ Co-Op Cinema in the early 1980s, has written on cinema for City Limits, The Guardian and Sight & Sound, taught Film Studies at further and higher education levels, directed a documentary on Super 8 filmmaking for Channel 4, and was researcher on Derek Jarman’s The Last of England. Bryony Dixon is Curator of Silent Film at the BFI with responsibility for the BFI National Archive’s extensive silent film collection. She has researched and written on many aspects of early and silent film, as well as programming for a variety of specialist film festivals and events worldwide including the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, Berlin FF, MoMA, San Francisco Silent Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival. Charles Drazin is a biographer and film historian who lectures at Queen Mary, University of London. His books to date are: The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s (1998), Blue Velvet: An A–Z Guide (1998), In Search of the Third Man (1999), Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul (2002), The Man Who Outshone the Sun King (2008), The Faber Book of French Cinema (2011) and A Bond for Bond: Film Finances and Dr No (2011). Together with Ernst Malmsten, the founder of the pioneering boo.com, and business journalist Erik Portanger, he wrote Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe, which was nominated for a W.H. Smith award in 2002. He is also the editor of two volumes of journals by the novelist John Fowles (2003 and 2006). Laurie N. Ede is Principal Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Portsmouth. He has published widely on issues of film aesthetics, with a particular focus on production design. In 2010, he produced a complete history of British film art direction. Kate Egan is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK. She is the author of Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (2007), Cultographies: The Evil Dead (2011) and (with Martin Barker, Tom Phillips and Sarah Ralph) Alien Audiences (2015). She is also co-editor (with Sarah Thomas) of Cult Film Stardom (2012). James Fenwick is a PhD candidate at De Montfort University researching Stanley Kubrick’s role as a film producer. Additionally, he has presented on the work of the film technician on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Steven Foxon is Curator of Non-Fiction at the British Film Institute with specialisms in British documentary, advertising and industrial films. He has produced a number of DVD releases on the work of the post-War documentary film units and has lectured internationally in this field. Adrian Garvey has taught widely on film, notably at Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck, and specialises in British cinema and studio-era Hollywood. He is developing a book on James Mason and film performance.

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List of contributors

Jane Giles has been a published film writer, programmer and distributor since 1988. She has worked at the Scala, ICA, Channel 4 and Tartan Pictures, and is currently Head of Content at the BFI. Sheldon Hall lectures in Stage and Screen Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. A former freelance journalist, he was film critic for the Northern Echo from 1986 to 1997. He is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It – The Making of the Epic Film (2005/2014), coauthor of Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters (2010), co-editor of Widescreen Worldwide (2010) and has contributed to numerous books and journals on various aspects of cinema. He is currently writing Armchair Cinema: Feature Films on British Television for publication by Tomahawk Press. Stuart Hanson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at De Montfort University. He is author of From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896 (2007) and a range of articles and chapters on the development of the multiplex cinema. Keith M. Johnston is Reader in Film and Television at the University of East Anglia. Author of Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (2009), his research looks at trailers across different media and industry contexts. Bethan Jones is a PhD candidate at the University of Huddersfield and board member on the Fan Studies Network. Her work focuses on fandom, gender and digital media, and has appeared in Transformative Works and Cultures, Participations and Sexualities. Matthew Jones is Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Television History at De Montfort University. He is a specialist on mid-century British cinema and television audiences, film and TV genres, Cold War culture, and memory. He is currently working on two monographs, one on the British reception contexts of science fiction cinema in the 1950s for Bloomsbury and one, co-authored with Professor Melvyn Stokes (UCL) and Dr Emma Pett (UEA), on memories of cinema-going in the 1960s. Julia Knight is Professor in Moving Image at the University of Sunderland. Her recent AHRC-funded research has addressed independent and artists’ moving image distribution in the UK, which resulted in Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (2011), co-authored with Peter Thomas, and the on-going Film and Video Distribution Database (http://fv-distribution-database.ac.uk). James Leggott lectures in film and television studies at Northumbria University. He has published on various aspects of British film and television culture and history, including contemporary cinema, comedy, science fiction and costume dramas. He is the editor of the Journal of Popular Television. Richard MacDonald is a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications. His book on civic cinephilia and the film society movement, The Appreciation of Film: The Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain is published by University of Exeter Press. He is currently researching outdoor film projection and animist ritual in Thailand. Andrew Moor is Reader of Cinema History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has written widely on British cinema and is currently working on a study of gay and lesbian film and genre since Stonewall.

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List of contributors

Jack Newsinger is Assistant Professor of Cultural Industries at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on the cultural and creative industries with a focus on policy, practice and labour. His research has been funded by the AHRC, the British Film Institute and the British Academy. Richard Paterson is Head of Research and Scholarship at the BFI and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow. James Patterson is Director of the Media Archive for Central England and a Senior Academic in the School of Film and Media at the University of Lincoln. He has worked in film archives for over thirty-five years, having previously been Keeper of Documentary Films at the National Film and TV Archive at the BFI. Laraine Porter is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University. She was Director of the Broadway Media Centre in Nottingham for ten years between 1998 and 2008 and is the co-founder and director of the British Silent Film Festival. She is currently the Principal Investigator on a major three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project researching the transition between silent and sound cinema in the UK. Iain Reid is a retired Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. After RMA Sandhurst and ten years in the British army, he worked in film production for twenty years before moving to LSE where his PhD research considered employment in the film industry during and after the closed shop. Andrew Roberts is a film writer who studied for an MA in Contemporary British History at London University and who recently completed his PhD in ‘The Decline of the Officer Class in Post-War British Cinema’ at Brunel University. He is rather too young to have seen most Foundation films in their cinematic heyday but has fond memories of watching Treasure in Malta and Runaway Railway on television. He is a contributor to Sight & Sound and The Independent and is currently engaged in writing a book on British film stardom from James Robertson Justice to Oliver Reed. Kelly Robinson completed her PhD ‘British International Pictures and the Influence of German Cinematographers (1927-1936)’ at the University of Southampton in 2008. She is a freelance programmer, contributing to seasons as the BFI Southbank and Birds Eye View Film Festival where the emphasis was on women filmmakers in the silent era. She has recently moved into production herself, writing and directing an awardwinning short, Across the Sea (2015). Alex Rock is Derby Cathedral’s Development Officer and an independent film historian. He completed his PhD, which takes as its focus the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau and its collaborations with the British film industry in the twentieth century, at De Montfort University’s Cinema and Television History Research Centre. He has published numerous articles, including a history of the Midlands-based Clifton cinema chain and an analysis of women patrols in cinemas during the ‘Khaki Fever’ moral panic. James Russell is Principal Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University. He has published on various aspects of American cinema, and his next book will be Hollywood and the Baby Boom: A Social History.

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List of contributors

Adrian Smith is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex. He is researching independent film distribution and exhibition in the UK in the 1960s, with a focus on international film. He also writes for Cinema Retro and has contributed material to several DVD releases. Sarah Smyth is a PhD candidate in the Film Studies Department at the University of St Andrews where her research investigates UK film festivals located in post-industrial cities. Before commencing her research Sarah worked as a film festival organiser for twelve years. Andrew Spicer is Professor of Cultural Production in the Department of Arts and Cultural Industries at the University of the West of England. His books include Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (2003), Sydney Box (2006) and, with A.T. McKenna, Get Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and British Cinema, 1960–1980 (2013). He co-edited Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies (2014) and is currently working on a study of Sean Connery for Manchester University Press. Johnny Walker is Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and founding co-editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series (Bloomsbury). He is currently writing a book on video rental culture in Britain. Anne Woods completed her PhD on the history and operation of BBC Films at the University of Portsmouth in 2015. Before joining academia she worked for the BBC, and as a freelance script consultant and screenwriting tutor in the UK and Europe. Her current research interests include British film history, film finance including PSB support for British filmmaking, and screenwriters and screenwriting practice.

xvi

INTRODUCTION British cinema history

I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith The study of British cinema has flourished since the 1990s. From being the “unknown cinema”, as Alan Lovell called it (1972), British cinema is now detailed encyclopaedically in such publications as Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (Higson 1996), British National Cinema (Street 1997), Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Richards 1997), British Cinema: Past and Present (Ashby and Higson 2000), British Cinema in Documents (Street 2001), British Cinema: A Critical History (Sargeant 2005), The British Cinema Book (Murphy 2009, now in its third edition) and The Journal of British Cinema and Television. Much of this new research has assiduously mapped what Julian Petley (1986) dubbed the “lost continent”, revised and updated the canon of British cinema, and overturned such received ideas as that the 1970s produced little of interest (Shail 2008; Harper and Smith 2012) and that popular British cinema does not repay analysis. Particular attention has been paid to genres, such as the costume film (Harper 1994; Cook 1996; Higson 2003), the historical film (Sargeant and Monk 2002; Chapman 2005), the horror film (Chibnall and Petley 2002; Rigby 2004; Walker 2015), the crime film (Chibnall and Murphy 1999) and comedies (Sutton 2000; Mather 2006; Hunter and Porter 2012). There has been notable work too on early cinema and the 1930s (Low 1979; Higson 2002), film during the Second World War (Gledhill 1996; Chapman 1998) and the 1950s (Geraghty 2000; Harper and Porter 2003). No less important than simply filling in gaps, however, has been a new emphasis on the national cinema’s industrial and institutional contexts. The New Film History (Chapman, Glancy and Harper 2007) did much to consolidate an “historical turn” and to conceptualise and sharpen methods of empirical analysis. It showed how to draw on primary and archival resources to explore the socio-economic determinants and effects of film culture, and shifted emphasis from textual analysis (with the inherent pitfalls of reflectionist readings of cinema’s relation to society) to evidencebased accounts of the political economy of entertainment and the material textures of popular pleasure. In the case of British cinema, long plagued as much by the rhetoric of imminent revival or precipitous collapse as by the statistical facts of its own financial precariousness, this has often meant foregrounding the vagaries of state funding, international finance and tax incentives. But just as culture itself is not entirely determined by profit and loss accounts, so economic histories are not the only worthwhile or definitive approaches. As James Leggott remarks in his chapter in this book, “scholarship on film

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I.Q. Hunter, Laraine Porter and Justin Smith

culture has a tendency to dichotomize art and commerce, sometimes overlooking how production processes involve a complex negotiation of these”. Judicious interpretation of “softer” archival sources – from scripts, storyboards and daily call sheets, to memoirs, correspondence and the idiosyncrasies of personal recollections – has recovered qualitative evidence of film-makers’ struggles to realise creative visions, turn a profit and sustain their careers. For example, recent articles published in a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (34(2) 2014) draw on the files of production guarantors Film Finances, demonstrating that far from being exhausted, archival film history is still yielding new secrets. The “New Film History” has now come of age, and its approaches underpin much of the work collected in this volume, which aims to reflect current research in the field by British scholars. However, British cinema research is still a somewhat rarefied specialism outside its home nation with some notable exceptions such as Pierre Sorlin and Marcia Landy. Consequently, unlike other overviews of the national cinema, The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History is not focused on directors, genres or studios, and it engages in little textual analysis of films themselves. Instead, the book’s contributors set out to explore the production, distribution, exhibition and reception contexts of the British film industry from the silent period to the present day. The guiding theme is British cinema as an institution, or rather series of institutions, enabled, constrained and shaped, on the one hand, by economic circumstances and, on the other, by changing relations to government; an institution invariably and awkwardly poised between art and commerce, the state and the free market, the national and the transnational, and in recent years between cinema itself and television. The Companion highlights revisionist scholarship which has been especially productive and influential (notably early and silent cinema), which investigates neglected aspects of film culture and industrial infrastructure, which adopts new conceptual approaches (such as Matthew Jones’s chapter on audience memories), or which is informed by insider perspectives to provide fresh histories of key British cinema institutions. The Companion is divided into three sections that broadly correspond to pre-sound British cinema, the classic period and contemporary British cinema. It cannot hope to be comprehensive but it does attempt to re-frame British film history differently, underlining how the tensions within British cinema have shaped and defined it across a number of binaries: culture/populism; state subsidy/tax incentives; cinema/television; regional/ national (and transnational).

Part I: British silent cinema to the coming of sound – 1895–1930 The first part of the Companion deals with the first three decades of British cinema from the first film screenings in 1895 to the coming of synchronised sound between 1929 and 1930. This period has until recently been largely overlooked by cinema historians, but the study of early and silent cinema is now one of the major areas of British film scholarship. Present-day work on British silent cinema owes a massive debt to a handful of historians and researchers in the 1970s and 1980s who, working largely as independent scholars and against the grain of popular critical attitudes at the time, meticulously catalogued the early British film industry and its output. Rachael Low, whose five-volume History of the British Cinema remains the outstanding text, was hardly a critical advocate of British

2

Introduction

silent cinema, but her work provides the empirical basis for much contemporary research (Low 1971, 1985), along with John and William Barnes’s five-volume opus The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901 (Barnes and Barnes 1998). Ironically perhaps, given Britain’s relative isolation from early cinema studies until recently, it was an international archive conference in Brighton in 1978 that sparked much of the contemporary interest and revisionist approaches to early cinema and launched the academic publishing careers of what have become known as “The Brighton Generation” of film historians around the world. Before this new wave of research, British silent cinema history had succumbed to the grand narratives and canonical films and directors associated with early Hollywood and European cinemas. Much of this history had side-lined British silent cinema as unworthy of study, as being too pictorial and static, too reliant on the theatre and essentially “un-cinematic”. Yet from the beginning, British film pioneers like Cecil Hepworth and George Albert Smith were competing with their American and European counterparts to “invent” cinema narrative in the early years. Lewin Fitzhamon’s Rescued by Rover (1905) which he made for the Hepworth Studio was world-leading in terms of its narrative structure and visual techniques. At the very least, these formative three decades laid the foundations for the British cinema industry that exists today. Bryony Dixon, Curator of Silent Film at the British Film Institute (BFI), opens the Companion with a concise introduction to the early pioneers of British cinema and argues that this remains a neglected area that has only recently been seriously researched. The role of the BFI in preserving and restoring Victorian and Edwardian cinema has been paramount in this respect with several major research-led restoration and dissemination projects including the films of Mitchell and Kenyon and the current project to digitise and make public all extant Victorian films in the National Archive. The role of the internet has been critical to the dissemination of this material through BFI Screenonline and latterly the BFIplayer and the websites of the UK’s regions and nations archives in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. But as more material becomes available through new digital dissemination channels, the need increases for curatorship and contextualisation to help us fully understand this material. And more research is needed to identify what are often referred to as “orphaned films”. There is also a relative dearth of British silent cinema available on DVD and Blu-Ray, because not only is the process of restoring and digitising feature films expensive and resource-heavy but only around one-third of pre-1930 British cinema has survived. Dixon covers the period until the end of the Great War in 1918, at which point British and continental European cinema industries had become decimated and Hollywood had achieved global dominance. Henceforth British cinema would remain in Hollywood’s shadow and found wanting by comparison in terms of production values, star systems, marketing and distribution strategies. Received wisdom tells us that British cinemagoers tolerated British films, but it was Hollywood films they really wanted to see and Hollywood stars they wanted to emulate. In the 1970s and 1980s British cinema critics and historians were often disdainful of British silent cinema, which perpetuated these attitudes and helped consign British silent cinema studies to a long gestation period from which it is only recently emerging. This premise is borne out in Chapter 2 where Laraine Porter continues the narrative of British cinema between 1918 and 1928, examining its post-War international and domestic decline from an initial boom in production to its nadir in 1925–6, to the inauguration

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of the Cinematograph Act in 1927 followed by the phoney war around synchronised sound between 1928 and 1930. This period saw many of the early pioneers go bust as the industry struggled to modernise and capitalise in the face of American competition for screens and box office. Porter argues that this period, like that of the pre-War, has been treated unfairly by critics and historians. She argues that there were three basic options open to British cinema during this period: capitulate to Hollywood; try to compete with Hollywood on its terms by emulating its genres, star system, production and marketing values; or play to its strengths and produce mid-budget films aimed at domestic and European markets. All of these options were explored to some extent, but it was the last that produced some of the most enduring films of the 1920s, many of which have been overlooked and remain relatively unknown. The decade also saw the developing talents of people like Anthony Asquith and Alfred Hitchcock at the start of their careers, while successful and prolific directors like Maurice Elvey and Herbert Wilcox maintained their prodigious output through thick and thin times. The British film industry of the 1920s developed considerable talent and expertise in depth, which is now often unrecognised or forgotten. Kelly Robinson makes a case for the art of the British cinematographer Jack Cox, who worked with Hitchcock and Asquith and was responsible for many of the virtuoso techniques credited to these directors. Robinson cites Hitchcock historian Charles Barr, who argues that Hitchcock was particularly silent about the debt he owed to Cox, and her chapter provides a significant revisionist understanding of the importance of an overlooked cinematographer who rivalled some of his better-known American and European counterparts. Citing Australian historian Barry Salt, Robinson also makes the important point that the delay in the arrival of synchronised sound to British and European film, relative to the US, allowed the silent art form to develop creatively beyond that of Hollywood. There are exceptions, of course – the American silent film Sunrise (1929) is generally considered to be the apogee of the silent cinema – but lesser-known British films also display virtuosity in mature silent film aesthetics and Robinson examines the cinematography in Hitchcock’s The Ring (1929) in depth. In terms of film design, British cinema is today widely acknowledged to be world-leading, but this reputation grew from inauspicious origins which Laurie Ede traces back to British film’s pioneering phase, where the director or most adept crew member would paint the backdrop; this was followed by the “transitional phase” when the arrival of purpose-built studios around 1907 merited the employment of a specialised set designer. The demand for longer, more scenically complex narratives, better lighting, verisimilitude and competition from superior German and Hollywood films meant that British films had to develop “art direction” and Ede cites director/producer George Pearson as being a major influence in the development of an “artist-led popular cinema”. Adrian Garvey’s chapter on the stars of British silent cinema explores the historic relationship between cinema and theatre and the origins of cinema’s inferiority complex in terms of its performers. Whereas Hollywood quickly developed its star-making factory, British cinema relied on actors who were prepared to move from theatre to cinema, often with some reluctance. British cinema was also slow to develop its own film stars, particularly as audience demand was satisfied by Hollywood. Betty Balfour and Ivor Novello were the great exceptions, and Garvey’s chapter opens with a quote from Pictures and Picturegoer magazine which pitches Novello against Hollywood idol Rudolph Valentino.

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The comparison is not without foundation as Novello was cast as a passionate romantic lead throughout the 1920s. Garvey emphasises British cinema’s initial diffidence towards the very idea of stardom as something alien and somehow contradictory to its values. Interestingly, women figure strongly in British cinema’s creation of “stars” during the 1910s with American director/actor/comedienne Florence Turner and the youthful “Tilly Girls” Chrissie White and Alma Taylor paving the way through their popular appeal. Ultimately, however, it was often the fluctuating fortunes of British production companies during the mid to late 1920s that determined the fate of British stardom; if the company or producer went bust, then the stars associated with them would be left to their fate, with many returning to the theatre. Musician, broadcaster and composer Neil Brand examines the largely undocumented history of live cinema music, through a recently discovered cache of annotated cinema music scores from the 1920s held at the Birmingham Library. Himself a silent cinema musician, Brand has long campaigned for more research and understanding into this largely forgotten art form and the thousands of musicians and composers who were once employed by cinemas and the cinema industry. The popular idea of a beleaguered and disinterested pianist hammering out a series of inappropriate melodies from an out-oftune “upright” should be consigned to history. The reality was very different, with an orchestra or ensemble of skilled musicians working to a musical director who composed new scores for each film. Discerning and musically literate audiences often came to hear the music as much as to see the film in the great city-centre picture palaces. Even smaller cinemas would employ an ensemble, allowing working-class audiences regular exposure to a wide repertoire of light classical music performed live. The art of silent musicianship was rapidly forgotten in the rush to develop the talkies, and thousands of people employed in the cinema music industries lost employment almost overnight, despite the efforts of the Musicians’ Union to campaign vociferously for their members. Porter’s second chapter, “The talkies come to Britain”, charts the seismic shift in the British film industry with the coming of sound, which among other things changed the industry’s relationships to Europe and America for good. British cinema was initially in denial and largely unprepared for the arrival of synchronised sound, with many insiders predicting that it was merely a fad that would bypass Britain. It was the massive box office success of the Al Jolson vehicle The Singing Fool (1928) in British cinemas that finally persuaded exhibitors and producers to convert, but this was not a smooth or unilateral process. The merits of the different systems were far from clear and were debated in the trade magazines; the quality of American talkies was contested by intellectuals; and the massive losses of musicians’ jobs were played out in the Musicians’ Union journals. Porter also points to unexpected consequences such as the need for hearing aid technology for audiences who had previously been able to read silent film intertitles; illiterate audiences, on the other hand, could now enjoy the sound track. The numerous patent wars and technological developments that characterised the industry between 1929 and 1931 were a pre-echo of the developments in digital technologies seventy years later, but while digital technologies did not fundamentally change cinema as an art form, the coming of sound did precisely that. While the majority of British film history has focused on the Metropolis, Guy Barefoot has mined local archives to uncover the detailed ledgers of the Tudor Cinema, which was located in a working-class Victorian suburb of Leicester. The ledgers, which record box

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office for individual films, income from sweets and cigarettes, and how weather and local events influenced attendance, offer an intimate snapshot of the fortunes of a local cinema from the mid-1920s through the transition to sound to the economic slump of the early 1930s. Although Barefoot stresses that these records show only part of the picture, they allow us to glimpse the financial imperatives and day-to-day business of a local cinema operation, which Barefoot cross-references with local newspapers, local histories, oral testimony of memories and the work of previous local cinema historians. Barefoot’s approach offers a humanised and textured film history which illuminates the lives of both cinemagoers and those who worked in exhibition. Such localised film studies are essential to understanding the role and function of cinema beyond London’s West End. The Cinema Theatre Association acts as a locus for disseminating this research, which is often based on painstaking trawls through local authority records and paper archives. David Williams’ studies of Durham and Leicester (1993, 2004), Gerry Turvey’s Phoenix Cinema: A Century of Film in East Finchley (2010) and Allen Eyles’s prodigious studies of the Odeon cinemas are exemplary here, and complement wider studies of cinemas and cinemagoing (Atwell 1980; Eyles 1991, 2002, 2005; Hanson 2007). Another key development coinciding with the arrival of sound was the birth of the Film Society Movement which attracted intellectuals, many of whom scorned the early talkies and lamented the passing of silent film as an art form. Richard MacDonald discusses the parallel manifestations of film societies between 1929 and 1931 in the so-called “better films” and the repertory (or “small kinema”) movements. These provided the bedrock for the ethos and practices of independent cinema exhibition in Britain, which continues to provide public access to international cinema. The Film Societies also circumvented the censorship of Soviet films by allowing “members’ only” screenings. While commercial exhibitors were reluctant to screen European films after the arrival of the Quota Act and the coming of sound, the Film Societies were not driven by the same commercial imperatives and films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Battleship Potemkin (1925) were revered and debated. British films by contrast were generally either ignored or denigrated, echoing the apathy towards British silent cinema of the highbrow magazine Close Up (1927–33) and intellectuals like Paul Rotha, the effects of which are still evident today.

Part II: The classic period – 1930–80 The period from the birth of talking pictures in 1929 to the demise of the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) in 1985 produced films which arguably represent the UK’s greatest contribution to cinema. These are also the decades upon which most published literature has focused. The emphasis of early scholarship was on the 1930s, when cinemagoing was, in A.J.P. Taylor’s famous phrase, “the essential social habit of the age” (1976: 392). The popularity of the movies in the 1930s, dominated then as now by Hollywood films, also fostered important foundational work on the idea of a national cinema (often international in its provenance if only occasionally international in its appeal) which the state recognised as worthy of protection. British cinema during the Second World War, from the role of the Ministry of Information to the documentary film movement and the rise of Ealing and Gainsborough Studios, has also been thoroughly researched and its most notable protagonists, from Noel Coward and David Lean to Laurence Olivier and Trevor Howard, from Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc to Deborah Kerr and

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Celia Johnson, from Cavalcanti and Asquith to Carol Reed and Powell and Pressburger, have all been examined. The third, well-documented period, in the first flush of film history, was the 1960s, with a particular emphasis on the British New Wave and so-called Swinging London films. Arguably each of these three decades – the thirties, the forties and the sixties – were periods when the film culture could be seen (in markedly different ways) to have had an important function as an index of social change. Even the 1980s, with native cinema in the doldrums, presented an opportunity to pit new kinds of film (variously avant-garde, neo-realist or period-costume, and frequently sponsored by television) against the forces of Thatcherism which, amongst other travesties, systematically dismantled the long-standing instruments of cinematic state aid (for what they were by then worth). For different reasons the 1950s and the 1970s were rather neglected initially; Ealing Comedies on the one hand, and a handful of provocative, maverick auteurs on the other, served to stand for decades which otherwise, cinematically, lacked coherence or resisted obvious purchase. Those omissions have since been more than adequately addressed, but in so doing film historians have challenged the assumptions at the heart of reflectionism, critiqued further the value of film as social evidence and pursued a revisionist stance which has called into question some previously held assumptions, thus rendering a fuller and more complex account of film culture by bringing empirical, archival and oral history methods to bear on the contextual fields of film finance, policy and regulation, and on the sites of production, distribution, exhibition and reception. It is following these modes of analysis and spheres of interest that the contributions to this section proceed. Charles Drazin’s chapter charts the surprising endurance in the British film industry of a spirit best characterised as the victory of optimism over experience. As his archival research reveals, successive generations of film producers failed to be deterred by the folly of international expansion in 1937 and, in the post-War period, too much was expected of the modest support provided by the NFFC in aiding British film producers to achieve overseas success. If the NFFC was conceived to provide a stimulus to film production, the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) was established in 1912 to regulate film exhibition (its history is the subject of a later chapter by Lucy Brett). From the outset the Board’s jurisdiction over licensing, to consider the suitability of the film content and to make recommendations on who should see a film was delegated from local authorities whose watch committees retained ultimate sanction. As Alex Rock’s archival research reveals, while many local authorities were content to abdicate these responsibilities except in the most contentious cases, others exercised their prerogative with habitual rigour and sometimes evangelical zeal. Smethwick local watch committee provides an exemplary case study, whilst the London County Council took umbrage with BBFC decisions regarding particular films on a number of occasions throughout its history. British studios have been the subject of many studies: Hammer (Pirie 1980; Hutchings 1993; Kinsey 2002, 2007), Ealing (Barr 1977; Perry 1981), Rank (Macnab 1993), Gainsborough (Murphy and Aspinall 1983; Cook 1997) and Elstree (Warren 1983). The vital role of the producer, however, has received comparatively little attention. While acknowledging the complexity of the producer’s multiple functions in film finance, production and marketing, Andrew Spicer offers a helpful typology: the mogul (Korda and Balcon), the first-feature independent (Sydney Box, Julian Wintle) and the artisan who frequently specialised in low-budget genres (Tony Tenser, Peter Rogers). Hagen is the

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chosen artisan in Spicer’s account; John Schlesinger’s frequent collaborator Joseph Janni is the independent; Nat Cohen, of Anglo-Amalgated and later EMI, provides an apt case study of the post-War British movie mogul. Andrew Moor explores another familiar component in established narratives about British film production: the importance of émigré workers. Moor debunks simplistic notions about the contributions of imported talent (Alexander Korda, Peter Lorre, Alfred Junge) reinforcing essentialist notions of national cinema. Film-making is, and always was, Moor insists, a cosmopolitan practice. His analysis transcends the discourses of imaginary communities and offers case studies of Emeric Pressburger and Hein Heckroth which demonstrate that the transnational characteristics of British cinema in the 1930s and 1940s were embedded in local, institutionalised creative practices. Steve Foxon sheds light on another neglected aspect of British film history. Although there have been important books on the documentary film, and the pioneering work of John Grierson and the GPO (later the Crown) Film Unit has been justly celebrated (Rotha 1973; Sussex 1976; Swann 1989; Aitken 1990; Logan 2011), little attention has been paid to British documentary after its “finest hour” during the Second World War. When the wartime Ministry of Information was re-branded the Central Office of Information (COI) in 1946, the COI’s purpose was refocused. Its activities were divided between production and distribution (commissioning independent documentaries from outside its own production base); its personnel established their own specialist trade association amidst much internal debate about the function of documentary; and its output (in the workplace, in schools and in community organisations) turned to matters of public health and education. In the uncertain years of Attlee’s post-War Labour administration when for many the hardships of the war years continued, and food and resources were in short supply, state regulation and information remained necessary forces for social cohesion. Turning from post-War privations to post-War glamour, Steve Chibnall’s chapter examines the demise of the “Rank Charm School”, the Rank Organization’s attempt to ape Hollywood studio practices in grooming its contract artists to project their star appeal internationally. Drawing on the often scathing personal testimony of the many actors caught up in John Davis’s relentless publicity machine, such as Dirk Bogarde, Michael Craig and Ian Carmichael, Chibnall documents the studio’s determination to mould its talent to American ideals to market its films overseas. In a throwback to the failed export drives of the 1930s, the demise of Rank’s charm initiative by the late 1950s coincided with the decline of its film output which would lead ultimately to its ceasing production altogether. Publicity is also the subject of Keith Johnston’s chapter, which relates the untold story of National Screen Services (NSS), the British subsidiary of an American company that from the mid-1920s to the 1980s produced trailers for films shown in UK cinemas. Johnston argues that while NSS is doubly ephemeral – its product was transient and its commercial status has left no corporate archives – its recovered history, its longevity and its market dominance offer a revisionist view of the cinema trade and a valuable index of the changing significance of screen entertainment in national film culture. James Fenwick examines the establishment of the Eady Levy on cinema admissions in the 1950s and the unforeseen stimulus it provided for film production by British subsidiaries of American studios during the 1960s. Existing accounts have frequently positioned the Levy as another failed example of state support for British production which, like the

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Quota Act, provided gaping loopholes to be exploited by canny American studios with a keen eye on their overseas earnings. However, Fenwick argues that the fund did much to encourage the relocation of some American directors, such as Stanley Kubrick, to Britain, and was instrumental in the international success of 1960s British films (notably the Bond franchise). Like Johnston’s account of National Screen Services, Andrew Roberts’s chapter on the Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) highlights a neglected aspect of British film history. The CFF was another beneficiary of the Eady Levy’s British Film Fund and was established in 1951 out of an earlier scheme (Children’s Entertainment Film) pioneered by J. Arthur Rank to promote film education in the mid-1940s. CFF-sponsored films, and the culture of Saturday morning cinema clubs they served, provided many youngsters’ first encounters with cinema from the 1950s to the 1970s, when the decline of matinee programming, cinema closures and the dominance of television shifted the CFF’s focus and purpose elsewhere. The world of “sexploitation” films could not be more different from the CFF, but, as Adrian Smith’s chapter reveals, the Jacey cinema chain, during its heyday in the early 1960s, was not only at the well-spring of the rise in salacious film entertainment, but was a surprisingly respectable family-run business. Joseph Cohen’s (hence JC) company owned cinemas in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton and its home city of Birmingham where its founder was a successful lawyer and businessman. Smith relates the exhibitor’s profitable relationships with four key distributors of exploitation film: Gala, Antony Balch, Compton and E.J. Fancey. In each case business collaborations were underpinned by strong personal friendships and family ties, and characterised by a shared understanding of entertainment and showmanship. Exploitation fare was one means, from the late 1950s onwards, by which cinema could continue to offer audiences a viable alternative from the domestic appeal of television (Chibnall and McFarlane 2009; Smith 2010; Hunter 2013). Although Jacey cinemas profited from showing a range of exploitation fare, it was the nudist film (that innocent precursor of soft-core pornography) that proved its most appealing staple. It was ironic, then, that the Cohens’s dissatisfaction and apparent embarrassment at the success of this formula prompted the company to launch a bizarre advertising campaign berating these films and their patrons, which marked the beginning of the company’s decline and the sale of its cinemas. Ultimately, as Smith shows, Jacey was too respectable for its own good. Sian Barber’s chapter looks at the fortunes of British cinema during the television age. Recent scholarship has scrutinised, in different ways, the received wisdom that the popularity of television was to blame for the further decline in cinemagoing after 1955. Barber chooses to highlight the ways in which the two media have been established, critically, in opposition to one another. She then goes on to examine parliamentary debates and legislative interventions which have shaped their interrelations, sometimes seemingly exacerbating their rivalry, and only latterly recognising their necessary mutual interdependence. Lucy Brett’s chapter, an insider’s view and historical overview of the operations of the BBFC, complements a number of recent studies of censorship in the UK (Robertson 1989; Egan 2007; Barber 2001; Petley 2011; Lamberti 2012). The British Board of Film Censors (renamed Classification in 1985) is a peculiarly British institution. Its jurisdiction is delegated from local authorities (with whom it has sometimes been at odds during its

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chequered history). The Home Office, and later the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, has oversight over the appointment of the BBFC’s senior figures yet its operations remain proudly independent of state interference (except at some crucial moments in its history). And it is funded by fees from the industry it regulates and advises (and whose work it has proscribed in some infamous cases throughout its history). Amid these contradictions and vagaries, as Brett shows, the Board has operated a certification system and an adjudication policy which has adapted to social change, shifting public tastes and technological innovations. The BBFC has seen its remit extended since the 1980s, first beyond cinema to video and then beyond film to the internet, though the Board’s modern image now stresses public information and guidance rather than censorial secrecy. Richard Paterson relates the history of another estimable bastion of British film culture, the British Film Institute (BFI). Like the BBFC, the BFI has occupied through much of its history a betwixt and between position, as Paterson frames it, between culture and industry. As with the BBFC, this is a balancing act which it has performed effectively, by and large, despite changes in its function, its funding and its status. The original purpose of the BFI was to promote film culture (as both entertainment and an art form) through similar educational means to the Film Society movement: a library, publications, events. It then took on the mantle of film preservation with the establishment of a national film archive in 1935. Subsequently the BFI has been a film exhibitor (via the National and Regional film theatres), a film distributor and a film producer, and its conservation activities now also embrace television. It has recently assumed the functions of the UK Film Council in apportioning National Lottery funds to the film industry. As Paterson shows, the BFI remains at the cusp of a British film culture that has always been torn between commercialism and subsidy, entertainment and art. Iain Reid’s chapter on trades unions and the British film industry offers another original perspective on the operation of the British film industry between the 1930s and the 1980s, an era dominated by the closed-shop power and practices of the ACTT (Association of Cine and Television Technicians). This history, drawn from archives, journalism and personal testimony, takes a refreshingly new approach that complements extant industry narratives centred on important directors and production companies, and provides compelling evidence that film production is a collaborative, highly specialised and technical industrial process. Moreover, Reid presents a persuasive case that unionisation provided continuity and stability to an economically and creatively precarious business. Union loyalty and power were strongest in the film laboratories. Reid shows how changing technology, the increase in freelance contracts under so-called “four-wall production” and the anti-union legislation of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments each played a part in bringing that era of union dominance to an end. James Patterson’s chapter focuses on film archives themselves, both national and regional. The establishment of a National Film Archive (NFA) was itself a political struggle, from the founding of the National Film Library in 1935 to its renaming as the NFA twenty years later. For many years the figure of Ernest Lindgren was its personification. Yet while his dedication to the national collection remained resolute and its survival owed much to his personal commitment, his long-term twin ambitions (a purpose-built facility capable of preserving the increasing variety and scale of film material the collection accrued, and a principle of statutory deposit) remained elusive in his lifetime, and only the former has since been realised with the opening of the BFI’s facility at Gaydon in Warwickshire in 2010.

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Another perspective on British film culture is provided by Sheldon Hall’s history of film journalism. As Hall makes clear, this is a field which has been riven historically by debates about the function of film criticism and hierarchical distinctions between journals and journalism. But film historians, in reaction to the factionalism of theorists and polemicists, have subsequently recognised the value of film journalism in the popular press in recovering something of the contemporary discourses of film reception. Hall’s account surveys the field of trade journals (principally Kine Weekly) and popular periodicals (such as Picturegoer), and examines the distinction drawn between the film critic and, a more pejorative term, the film reviewer. As Hall ultimately shows, many popular film reviewers (notably C.A. Lejeune and Margaret Hinxman) practised a good deal of self-scrutiny that revealed not only their sense of responsibility to their editors and their readership, but also the possibilities (within the constraints of their profession) to provide a good deal more enlightenment about film culture than the role of consumer guide entails. Importantly, film criticism is now well established as a valuable, if variable, body of evidence for reception studies.

Part III: Contemporary British cinema – 1980 to the present The uncertainties of the 1970s included the changing nature of audiences, which, as in the US after the decline of the studio system, proved increasingly elusive and went into sharp decline. Kate Egan looks at one new kind of audience that did exist, though it was hardly a stable one – the cult audience. British cult films like Performance (1970), Tommy (1975) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) were taken up by cultists who responded to the films’ intersection with the counterculture, pop music and gender confusions of the period. Although these films played at mainstream cinemas, cult cinema as a wider phenomenon was disseminated via rep cinemas and midnight movie screenings. The most notorious of the London rep cinemas and a key site for cult activity was the Scala cinema, whose most famous incarnation was at King’s Cross. Jane Giles, who programmed the Scala, explores how it became an influential byword for a certain kind of subversive programming. Other alternative cinemas existed, for example the experimental movies backed by the BFI, which enabled such radical ventures as Winstanley (1975) and Friendship’s Death (1987) and the Bill Douglas trilogy (Dickinson 1999; Curtis 2007; Knight and Thomas 2011; Gaal-Holmes 2015). In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, underground cinema took advantage of the new Super 8 format. As Jo Comino discusses, in the UK Super 8 was especially associated with the DIY aesthetic of punk, but also embraced a painterly abstract style that took advantage of the intense colour of some of the format’s stocks such as Kodachrome. Super 8 film culture saw the emergence of figures like Derek Jarman and John Maybury, both of whom became important directors in other formats, and was influential in that, unlike the more austere avant-garde film traditions such as structuralist film, it centred on the playful exploration of sexual and cultural identities. In the 1970s the withdrawal of money from the United States had led to a period of instability for the British film industry, which was reflected in the decline of outfits like Hammer. It was a decade when British film production seemed primarily to consist of either exploitation films, such as the ubiquitous sex comedies like Confession of a Window Cleaner (1974), or big-budget international co-productions, such as A Bridge Too Far (1977).

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The 1980s, however, brought signs of revitalisation with Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982) whose Oscar successes started rumours that the British were coming. While 1984 was a low point in terms of cinema attendance with only 58 million admissions, stirrings of a new optimism were symbolised by the launch of British Film Year in 1985 and the decade proved a time of rapid change and renewal. Exhibition changed in a radical way in 1985 with the opening of the first British multiplex, The Point, in Milton Keynes, which closed in 2015. Stuart Hanson’s chapter shows how the spread of the multiplex, which had been established in the US since the 1960s, was led by American companies such as Warners, MGM Cinemas and Showcase. Built within leisure complexes in out-of-town sites, multiplexes helped revive cinemas as destinations for lifestyle consumption, and by 1994 they had captured 46 per cent of admissions, which now topped 124 million. By the end of the 1990s nearly 200 multiplexes had been built. Multiplexes are now more often built in town and city centre locations than on peripheral greenfield sites and are intended as projects of urban renewal. Although they offer customers more screens, they are still owned by very few companies and, as Hanson argues, restrict the choice of films: the duopoly of ABC and Rank, which had carved up the exhibition circuit at the start of the 1980s, was by 2013 replaced by an oligopoly of three companies that accounted for 64 per cent of screens and took some 72 per cent of the annual total box office. Since the 1980s film consumption has also been transformed by the arrival of domestic video, of which the British were enthusiastic early adopters. Johnny Walker shows how this period enabled a cottage industry of independent distributors to release uncertificated films, which were often luridly advertised, beyond the reach of the BBFC. Some distributors welcomed the controversy these films caused, but it led ultimately to a moral panic around so-called “video nasties” and the 1984 Video Recordings Act, which gave the BBFC statutory powers to certificate all video releases. As both Walker and Kate Egan remark, the “nasties” and the “pre-cert” videos of the 1980s retain their fascination for cultists. James Leggott provides an overview of some of the key players in film production since the 1980s, such as HandMade; Palace Pictures, initially a video and film distribution business (it owned the Scala); Goldcrest; Merchant Ivory; and Working Title. The uneven success of these companies – Goldcrest collapsed and Palace Pictures was liquidated in 1992 – typified the precariousness of British film production, which persistently goes through cycles of boom, overexcitement and bust. As James Cateridge points out in his chapter, only from the 1930s to the 1950s has British cinema been a stable industry. British cinema has, consequently, always relied upon a degree of subsidy: the NFFC, for instance, supported over 750 productions over several decades since it was founded in 1949, while The Arts Council of Great Britain’s Artists’ Film and Video Panel helped support some of the Super 8 filmmakers. In 1985, however, the Conservative government withdrew state subsidy, abolishing the Eady Levy and dissolving the NFFC, whose functions were transferred to British Screen Finance Limited. Thus began the policy of encouraging production through tax incentives rather than direct subsidies that would continue to the present day. But new opportunities for funding had already emerged, of which the most important was the involvement of television companies in film production. Cateridge argues that it was Channel 4 which brought about the key revival of British cinema and film culture despite the withdrawal of direct subsidy. Channel 4

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collaborated with the BFI to produce films by Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and Terence Davies, and was responsible for key films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Trainspotting (1996). Other TV companies commissioned films too in the 1980s: Granada, for example, backed My Left Foot (1989). The 1980s did not secure a lasting revival of British cinema – only thirty films were in production in 1989 – but it did see a new branding of British cinema around “heritage films”, literary adaptations and romantic comedies as well as social realism. No less important was BBC Films, discussed by Anne Woods, where, again, cinema exhibition was a showcase for films whose home would be on TV and DVD. The BBC produced over 200 films in twenty-five years, rivalling Channel 4’s contribution. The films, in a sense, took over from the tradition of the oneoff play, and many of the key films were arguably middle brow and unadventurous. It was unclear whether the BBC should be making mid-range films or more ambitious international ones, and there was a tension between making “British” films for British audiences and nurturing the film industry. This is a perennial theme – if British cinema is to be subsidised, what kinds of films should be backed? Should they be for British audiences or for international consumption? And should they strive for art or popularity? Jack Newsinger approaches the vexed question of state finance of British cinema, focusing on the UK Film Council and Regional Screen Agencies (RSAs), and notes the contradictions between backing production to create or buoy up a film industry and to create a film culture. The UKFC was formed (as The Film Council) in 2000 – the year the BFI production board was abolished – along with the Regional Screen Agencies, using National Lottery funds. It reflected the Blairite enthusiasm for promoting the creative industries as intrinsic to British identity. The UKFC encountered the far from straightforward relation between culturally worthy and commercial films. It invested over £160 million in over 900 productions, generating over £700 million at box office. Successes included The King’s Speech (2010), but it also controversially backed films such as the lowbrow comedy Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004), which seemed precisely the kind of movie that should not be receiving public money. The UKFC and RSAs arguably did much to stabilise film production, but they were abolished in 2010 by the incoming Coalition government, and their roles taken over by the BFI, which would now allocate lottery money to production. The RSAs, meanwhile, were consolidated as Creative England. Contemporary British cinema is to an important extent defined not only by small-scale films backed by TV but by international co-productions, which package and sell versions of Britain to the world. Examples are the James Bond movies, the Harry Potter franchise and films such as Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), which is discussed here by James Russell. Britain has been recognised as a world-leading site of technical expertise since the 1970s, when films like Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) were filmed at Elstree and Pinewood Studios. Blockbusters such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) are filmed here because of world-class facilities and technicians. Pinewood, for example, is one of the largest studios in the world, with eighteen stages and three exterior lots, and Warner Bros.’s Leavesden Studio is owned by the studio outright. This has been encouraged and nurtured by favourable tax arrangements, which, though adding value to the British economy, arguably amount to subsidising Hollywood. Britain has also become a minor base for runaway Bollywood productions, since the negotiation of an Anglo-Indian film co-production treaty (2005–8) offering UK tax relief on runaway productions. The treaty was based on the buoyancy of the market from 2005 when there were 2.6 million visits

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to Hindi films in the UK, and Indian films accounted for over 16 per cent of all releases, taking 12.4 million at the box office. Hindi films are consistently the most successful foreign-language films in the UK. Building on this success, a London Indian Film Festival has been running since 2010. Blockbusters have little problem getting distributed. The same is not the case for lowerbudget British films, as Julia Knight shows, and many British films never make it to the cinema at all, ending up instead on DVD or television. Independent films are crowded out of the marketplace by the dominance of American studio-owned distributors, which have no investment in notions of national cinema. As a result, only around 10 per cent of the market share, according to Knight, is held by independent distributors, who have to be highly creative in developing tactics to survive. The multi-platform digital era now presents audiences with a much broader and technically versatile range of ways in which to consume films (including on mobile devices via streaming platforms). In response, nostalgia for the social practice of cinemagoing itself has been the focus of one of the newer trends in scholarship. Matthew Jones’s discussion of audience memories proves a fascinating avenue which has been little explored hitherto. Audiences are an elusive subject, often being ignored or taken for granted or theorised, and audience tastes and preferences in British culture have long been despaired at by elite commentators, whether for their partiality for Carry On films or for supposedly reactionary heritage films. Jones summarises recent work on memory, where individual films are often less important than memories of the cinemas themselves; the emphasis is on cinemagoing as ritual, identity and taste formation, and for the integration of films into everyday life. In fact, cinema culture means much more in Britain than just films. Cinema itself has embraced “liveness” anew, in celebration of its enduring qualities as a shared, public yet intimate social leisure experience. Cinemas now do live screenings of operas, plays and sporting events as part of their wider and changing role in consumer culture. Film festival culture is more vibrant and diverse than ever, and the popularity of event cinema, including Secret Cinema encounters, are revitalising the cinema experience once more. Film festivals, as Sarah Smyth argues in her chapter, have become essential not only for creating an exciting live environment for films but for sustaining any kind of independent national film culture at all. Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones discuss one potentially important change in the environment for production and distribution, which is crowdfunding. Though currently on a small scale, it offers the potential for new entries into the marketplace for films that can be distributed online. Research into British cinema has been transformed in recent years. To a large extent this is simply because the films have become available for the first time – whether via the BFI, or curated in DVD series that take British cinema’s outliers seriously, as with the Flipside series, or in releases by Renown (and Talking Pictures channel) and Network. This has relieved scholars to some extent from relying on discovering and studying British films on Steenbecks in the BFI library. But to return to where we began, the archives, as demonstrated by a number of the contributions which follow, are not exhausted yet. What lies beyond the archives is a theme that has been broached in scholarly debates among British film historians already. On the one hand, developments in the digital humanities and the fresh approaches to archival resources demonstrated by major institutions such as the BBC suggest that both scope and access remain on an upward trajectory. On the other hand, cuts in funding to digitisation projects, inadequate provision to host existing physical

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archives, and a digital future where paper records will no longer exist to tell the tales of our own present when it has passed offer pause for thought. It may be that production research will rely more heavily on engagement with the film industry on large-scale oral histories – a process that is already underway. Equally, there is much to be done in the rapidly changing fields of distribution, exhibition and reception studies, where patterns of film consumption are currently undergoing a slow but steady cultural transformation. An important example of a significant development in exhibition culture over the past thirty years, and a topic garnering further academic attention, has been the number of urban and suburban cinemas specialising in Bollywood films, and the cult consumption of Bollywood films by British Asian audiences. As Dudrah (2002) establishes, specialist Bollywood cinemas flourished in Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford and Derby during the 1970s, often taking advantage of the decline in mainstream cinemagoing and cinema closures during that decade. Yet from the late 1970s, with the arrival of home video, these venues in turn dwindled in number. However, from the mid-1990s, with the resurgence of the Mumbai industry, a new culture of late-night screenings frequented by a younger generation of British Asians witnessed both “straight” and “camp” responses from audiences who enjoyed the new Bollywood’s articulation of diasporic South Asian identities as well as its more conventional narratives with their familiar visual and aural signifiers (on black and Asian film in Britain see Mercer 1988; Fusco 1988; Bourne 1998; Korte 2004). This is one fruitful topic for ongoing research in the field, and of course there are many others which this volume has not the scope to include. Work on regional cinema cultures, contemporary pop-up and alternative film societies, and local censorship practices deserves further attention. Similarly, the role of awards bodies, trade associations and issues of inclusion and diversity within the industry are a subject of current concern. Public–private finance initiatives have provided a vital lifeline to independent British cinema for many years and the role of private patronage as well as public subsidy deserves further scrutiny. And British cinema’s interdependence on under-researched areas of film production (from music video to screen advertising) is attracting renewed interest. The changing experience of film consumption is notoriously difficult to evidence, and although new digital providers like Netflix are collecting more sophisticated data than ever before about their users, it remains in the corporate domain, which is another of those private archives beyond the purview of scholarship for now. These, and many others, must remain projects for another day.

Further reading British cinema history has been consolidated on the foundations established by a number of key texts which, for students new to the field, include: A Critical History of the British Cinema (Armes 1978), British Cinema History (Curran and Porter 1983), Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970 (Aldgate and Richards 1983), Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government 1927–84 (Dickinson and Street 1985), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (Barr 1986), British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (Landy 1991), Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992: Essays and Interviews (Dixon 1994), Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Higson 1995), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema (Higson 1996), British National Cinema (Street 1997), Films and

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British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army (Richards 1997), British Cinema: Past and Present (Ashby and Higson 2000), British Cinema in Documents (Street 2001), British Cinema: A Critical History (Sargeant 2005) and The British Cinema Book (Murphy 2009), now in its third edition. Additionally, there have been seminal studies of particular periods in British film history: The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain (Chanan 1980), Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930 (Higson 2002), The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–1939 (Richards 1984), The History of British Film: Film-Making in 1930s Britain, Vol. 7 – The History of the British Film, 1929–1939 (Low 1997), Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Aldgate and Richards 1986), Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality, and British Cinema in the Second World War (Gledhill 1996), The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (Chapman 1998), Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–1949 (Murphy 1989), British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (Geraghty 2000), British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference (Harper and Porter 2003), Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (Hill 1986), Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (Walker 1986), Sixties British Cinema (Murphy 1992), Seventies British Cinema (ed. Shail 2008), British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (Harper and Smith 2011), British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Hill 1999), British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (ed. Friedman 1993), British Cinema of the 90s (ed. Murphy 2000), Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s (Higson 2011) and The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema (Caterer 2011). A comprehensive bibliography can be found in the Historical Dictionary of British Cinema (Burton and Chibnall 2013).

References Aitken, I. (1990) Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement. London: Routledge. Aldgate, A. and Richards, J. (1983) Best of British: Cinema and Society 1930–1970. Oxford: Blackwell. Aldgate, A. and Richards, J. (1986) Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War. Oxford: Blackwell. Armes, R. (1978) A Critical History of the British Cinema. London: Secker and Warburg. Ashby, J. and Higson, A. (eds) (2000) British Cinema: Past and Present. London: Routledge. Aspinall, S. and Murphy, R. (eds) (1983) Gainsborough Melodrama. London: BFI. Atwell, D. (1980) Cathedrals of the Movies: A History of British Cinemas and Their Audiences. London: Architectural Press. Barber, S. (2011) Censoring the 1970s: The BBFC and the Decade That Taste Forgot. Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Barnes, J. (1997) The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Barr, C. (1977) Ealing Studios. London: Cameron and Tayleur. Barr, C. (ed) (1986) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema. London: BFI. Bourne, S. (1998) Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television, 1896–1996. London: Cassell.

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Burton, A. and Chibnall, S. (2013) Historical Dictionary of British Cinema. London: Scarecrow Press. Caterer, J. (2011) The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema. Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Chanan, M. (1980) The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chapman, J. (1998) The British At War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945. London: I.B. Tauris. Chapman, J. (2005) Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film. London: I.B. Tauris. Chapman, J., Glancy, M. and Harper, S. (2007) The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chibnall, S. and Murphy, R. (eds) (1999) British Crime Cinema. London: Routledge. Chibnall, S. and McFarlane, B. (2009) The British ‘B’ Film. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Chibnall, S. and Petley, J. (eds) (2002) British Horror Cinema. London: Routledge. Cook, P. (1996) Fashioning The Nation: Costume and Identity in British Cinema. London: BFI. Cook, P. (ed) (1997) Gainsborough Pictures. London: Cassell. Curran, J. and Porter, V. (eds) (1983) British Cinema History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Curtis, D. (2007) A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain. London: BFI. Dewe Mathews, T. (1994) Censored: What They Didn’t Allow You to See, and Why: The Story of Film Censorship in Britain. London: Chatto & Windus/Random House. Dickinson, M. (ed) (1999) Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90. London: BFI. Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927–84. London: BFI. Dixon, W.W. (ed) (1994) Re-viewing British Cinema, 1900–1992: Essays and Interviews. Albany: State University of New York Press. Duguid, M., Freeman, L., Johnston, K.M. and Williams, M. (eds) (2012) Ealing Revisited. London: BFI. Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eyles, A. (1996) Gaumont British Cinemas. Burgess Hill: Cinema Theatre Association. Eyles, A. (1998) The Granada Theatres. London: Cinema Theatre Association. Eyles, A. (2002) Odeon Cinemas: 1, Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation. London: Cinema Theatre Association. Eyles, A. (2005) Odeon Cinemas: 2, From J. Arthur Rank to the Multiplex. London: Cinema Theatre Association. Eyles, A., Adkinson, R. and Fry, N. (eds) (1973) The House of Horror: The Story of Hammer Films. London: Lorrimer. Friedman, L. (ed) (2006) British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started. 2nd Edition. London: Wallflower Press. Fusco, C. (1988) Young, British and Black: The Work of Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective. Buffalo, N.Y.: Hallwalls/Contempory Arts Center. Gaal-Holmes, P. (2015) A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Geraghty, C. (2000) British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look”. London: Routledge. Glancy, H.M. (1999) When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood “British” Film, 1939–45. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Glancy, H.M. (2014) Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris.

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Gledhill, C. and Swanson, G. (eds) (1996) Nationalising Femininity: Culture, Sexuality, and British Cinema in the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hanson S. (2007) From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harper, S. (1994) Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film. London: BFI. Harper, S. (2000) Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. London: Continuum. Harper, S. and Porter, V. (2003) British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harper, S. and Smith, J. (2012) British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Higson, A. (1995) Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Higson, A. (1996) Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema. London: Cassell. Higson, A. (2002) Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Higson, A. (2003) English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higson, A. (2011) Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. Hill, J. (1986) Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963. London: BFI. Hill, J. (1999) British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes. Oxford: Clarendon. Hochscherf, T. (2011) The Continental Connection: German-speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1927–45. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hunter, I.Q. (2013) British Trash Cinema. London: BFI. Hunter, I.Q. and Porter, L. (eds) (2012) British Comedy Cinema. London: Routledge. Hutchings, P. (1983) Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kinsey, W. (2002) Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years. London: Reynolds & Hearn. Kinsey, W. (2007) Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years. Sheffield: Tomahawk. Knight, J. and Thomas, P. (2011) Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image. Bristol: Intellect Books. Korte, B. and Sternberg, C. (2004) Bidding for the Mainstream? Black and Asian British Film since the 1990s. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Lamberti, E. (ed) (2012) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Landy, M. (1991) British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Lovell, A. (1972) ‘The Unknown Cinema of Britain’, Cinema Journal, 11.2 (Spring), pp. 1–8. Low, R. (1971) The History of British Film 1918–1929. London: George Allen & Unwin. Low, R. (1985) The History of British Film 1929–1939: Film-Making in 1930s Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin. Macnab, G. (1993) J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge. Mather, N. (2006) Tears of Laughter: Comedy-Drama in 1990s British Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mercer, K. (ed) (1988) Black Film, British Cinema. London: ICA. Murphy, R. (1989) Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939–1949. London: Routledge. Murphy, R. (1992) Sixties British Cinema. London: BFI. Murphy, R. (ed) (2000) British Cinema of the 90s. London: BFI. Murphy, R. (ed) (2009) The British Cinema Book. 3rd Edition. London: BFI. Perry, G. (1981) George Perry Presents Forever Ealing: A Celebration of the Great British Film Studio. London: Pavilion.

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Petley, J. (1986) ‘The Lost Continent’, in C. Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 98–119. Petley, J. (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pirie, D. (1980) Hammer: A Cinema Case Study. London: BFI. Richards, J. (1984) The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Richards, J. (1997) Films and British National Identity: From Dickens to Dad’s Army. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rigby, J. (2004) English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema. Richmond: Reynolds & Hearn. Robertson, J.C. (1989) The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1972. London: Routledge. Rotha, P. (1973) Documentary Diary: An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928–1939. London: Secker and Warburg. Sargeant, A. (2005) British Cinema: A Critical History. London: BFI. Sargeant, A. and Monk, C. (eds) (2002) British Historical Cinema: The History, Heritage and Costume Film. London: Routledge. Shail, R. (ed) (2008) Seventies British Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, J. (2010) Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Street, S. (1997) British National Cinema. London: Routledge. Street, S. (2000) British Cinema in Documents. London: Routledge. Street, S. (2002) Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the United States. London: Continuum. Sussex, E. (1976). The Rise and Fall of British Documentary: The Story of the Film Movement Founded by John Grierson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton, D. (2000) A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy, 1929–1939. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Swann, P. (1989) The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926–1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, A.J.P. (1976) English History, 1914–1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Turvey, G. (2010) The Phoenix Cinema: A Century of Film in East Finchley. London: Phoenix Cinema Trust. Walker, J. (2015) Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Warren, P. (1988) Elstree: The British Hollywood. London: Columbus Books. Williams, D.R. (1993) Cinema in Leicester 1896–1931. Leicester: Heart of Albion Press. Williams, D.R. (2004) Cinema in a Cathedral City: Cinema Exhibition in Durham City and Its Environs 1896–2003. Wakefield: Mercia Cinema Society. Williams, M. and Bell, M. (eds) (2010) British Women’s Cinema. London: Routledge.

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Part I

BRITISH SILENT CINEMA TO THE COMING OF SOUND 1895–1930

1

THE ORIGINS OF BRITISH CINEMA, 1895–1918 Bryony Dixon Introduction It is time to look at British silent film with new eyes. No article on it can apparently be written without alluding to its poor reputation on the international scene, but as we have arrived at a moment of change in the accessibility of historical sources, it’s time to look again. This era of film history will be studied differently from now on, with an unprecedented mass of digitized films being made available on online platforms. Having these primary sources increasingly accessible, as well as an equivalent mass of contemporary contextual material to follow, should broaden out the study of our film heritage in many ways. We will almost certainly pay more attention to non-fiction and short films, which are easier to publish online, and find it easier to make connections between films of different producing companies and countries, which will increasingly internationalize film history. From being an area of film history that has been disregarded by the mainstream, British film may finally be seen in its proper context as something worthy of notice, enjoyment and study. Despite excellent written resources such as the major history of British cinema between 1895 and 1929 which was written by Rachael Low between 1948 and 1971 and the thorough work on the British filmography by Denis Gifford and the BFI, British silent films, with the exception of a selection of pioneer films and one or two Hitchcock titles, failed to penetrate the histories of international cinema or the programming of silent films in cinematheques and festivals. A concerted effort to remedy this situation began with the founding of the British Silent Film Festival in 1998, which aimed to screen all the available extant films and to promote research. Academic projects and publications have flourished as source materials have become gradually easier to access and major discoveries like the Mitchell and Kenyon films have gained worldwide press attention and removed some of the prejudices that had sprung up around silent film in preceding decades. Restoration, cinema and festival programming, and the expansion in broadcasting and publication on DVD, Blu-ray and online in recent years has exposed a great number of people to Britain’s silent film heritage.

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Recent digital developments are set to massively increase the availability of film and contextualizing records to the public. What this opening up of the archives means is that from now on early silent film can increasingly be used, in conjunction with other historical records, to inform our view of this period of history for a broad audience. The BFI National Archive has always had a twin remit to preserve film as an art – unbelievably we are still struggling with film being properly recognized as such – and as a record as the life and customs of the British people. For many decades film as art and popular fiction entertainment has had more critical attention. As things stand, with way the Internet has developed, it is now short form and non-fiction films that are being privileged. A huge amount of this material is now coming through from all of the UK’s film archives. Early film even more so, due to the public’s natural interest in things that are older, easier-to-clear copyrights and the media’s fixation on anniversaries. Longer fiction film will follow in greater number once rights issues are resolved. There has also been a boom in live cinema (i.e. silent film with live accompaniment) and education and creative music projects using early film. It is now more surprising if a child has not seen a silent film by the time they are 16 than if they have. So, as we are at the dawn of a new era in how our cinema can be seen and understood, let’s cast off the shackles of film historiography and our national insecurity about British cinema and look back 120 years to the dawn of another era, the birth of film.

1895 to 1901: Victorian Britain has more than its fair share of the many ‘firsts’ in the birth of film and these are well documented. In fact the early years of filmmaking in this country have been written about extensively and very well. It is an international story of discovery, invention, development and improvement (as well as a lot of copying and imitation). A fascinating assortment of inventors, engineers, entertainers, entrepreneurs and scientists all contributed to the early film trade in a number of countries. Amongst these, here are a few of our homegrown pioneers: the Frenchman Louis Le Prince working in Leeds, Robert Paul, Birt Acres, W. K. L. Dickson, Charles Goodwin Norton, Walter Gibbons, Edward Turner and Frederick Lee, John Alfred Prestwich, A. C. Bromhead, Cecil Hepworth and Charles Urban, all based in London, William Friese-Greene, George Albert Smith and James Williamson on the south coast, James Bamforth, Frank Mottershaw and the Riley Brothers in Yorkshire, Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn, William Walker and George Greene in Scotland, Arthur Cheetham working in Wales, and touring exhibitors like Randall Williams and A. D. Thomas. There were many others too, involved in all aspects of getting the film business started. As with the birth of other major media like radio or the internet there was a flurry of chaotic super-invention. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that everything you could think of to do with film was tried in the first 10 years by these and their counterparts in other countries – all the genres: actuality, drama, comedy, news, westerns, war and crime films, romance and social problem films, adaptations of classics from Shakespeare and Dickens. All types of attractions were tried, from the aesthetic, such as Rough Sea at Dover (1896), a simple shot of waves crashing against a pier, to the cerebral and self-reflexive films like The Big Swallow (1901) taken

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Figure 1.1  The Big Swallow (1901), James Williamson

from the point of view of a pesky cameraman who, refusing to respect the privacy of an irate tourist, is swallowed, camera, tripod and us (as it were) with him. In the technical field too, everything was tried – sound film, a whole range of colour technologies, editing, camera movement, large formats, cine-microscopy, even 3-D. It was an exciting time full of creative energy. Of the various ‘firsts’ of Victorian cinema in Britain, quite a number survive and many are easily available. We should be wary of seeing all these films as primitive proto-types of later film genres as we may miss both the greater cultural context and some of the interesting directions taken by early filmmakers. Many films or sub-genres were particular to their age. So what are some of the unique features of the earliest films? They are characterized first and foremost by their short running time. Films from 1895 tend not to extend beyond about 40 feet, so less than a minute. Our first extant films, with the exception of Le Prince’s films Leeds Bridge and Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), which were not commercially exhibited, are Birt Acres’ The Derby (1895) and Arrest of a Pickpocket (1895) and these were not exhibited by R. W. Paul, who was in business with Acres until 1896, after the much-publicized screening in December 1895 by the Lumière Brothers in Paris. In a remarkably short space of time thereafter, film was being shown everywhere. The Lumière Brothers rapidly capitalized on the boom and sent out cameramen to produce

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films in all the major cities to be shown at Cinématographe shows in major theatres. The Lumières’ experience of photography meant that their films were beautifully composed and photographed but their cameramen also seem to have instinctively grasped the best ways to introduce movement into the picture by mounting the camera on a moving object – boat, train, tram or bus. Panoramas and phantom rides are another unique genre of the early film. The views taken by Alexander Promio in London in 1896 may be short but they are highly produced – set ups included a panorama of the Houses of Parliament, taken from a boat on the river (so is both a panorama and a ‘phantom ride’) and the best, Entrée du Cinématographe (1896), is taken outside the theatre in which these very films were shown, the Empire Leicester Square. Far from being a random view taken from across the street, it is arranged with ‘extras’ walking at different angles across the traffic, to create a sense of bustling movement and on the theatre front we can see the hoarding advertising the ‘Lumière Cinématographe’ show. The film of the outside of the auditorium then started the programme of films inside it. Single-shot films dominated for a while and British filmmakers were inventive with them. Of course they had several years of Kinetoscope and Mutoscope ‘films’ to copy and improve upon as well as adopting the Lumières’ business model. The Warwick Trading Company, for example, made, commissioned and distributed other producers’ films from 1898, sending cameramen as far as India, Canada and the Alps. Their lavishly illustrated catalogues show the series of views from all over the world that could be purchased by exhibitors, together with comic scenes, sports, lifeboat launches and fire drills, military parades and state occasions. Mitchell and Kenyon were beginning to produce factory gate pictures and other locally commissioned films for showmen in the north of England. Audiences would turn out in great numbers to see themselves on screen. Despite an initial period when early exhibitors had screened film shows for royalty and high society and in spite of the high-end shows such as those at the Palace Theatre of Varieties, the Empire and the Alhambra, it seemed that film shows would be enjoyed mostly for low prices by the working class. Examples: Leeds Bridge (1888), Derby and Arrest of a Pickpocket (1895), The Big Swallow (1901), Fire! (1901) How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900).

1902 to 1910: Edwardian Edwardian Britain was a vibrant time for film, full of invention, experiment and change. We know much more about this period from work done in recent years, in particular due to regular centenary programming at festivals and cinematheques, film restoration programmes and video publication in a range of formats (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, now VoD and online) that have transformed our knowledge of how films were made, why they were made, how they were programmed and how they were received. We know more about the exhibition environment in which the films were shown from fairground booths to the seasonal town hall show which was a precursor of the type of programme that developed in the new purpose-built cinema space. We know more about the other elements that made up the show, the music that accompanied the films, lecturers and film explainers, marketing and merchandising. Reconstructions of the mixed programme in fairground tents, town and village halls and early cinema buildings have given us a

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flavour of what it was like to go to a picture show at that time. It was the way that the show was put together that determined its success as much as the quality of the films themselves. A typical mixed programme could be constructed and ordered thus: A musical item (roughly synchronised songs were popular at this time); an actuality, say a royal occasion or a report of a far-off military campaign or local film; a comedy, probably of the chase variety; a drama, perhaps an adaptation of a famous literary work; a natural history or science item, a travelogue or interest film; and the big attraction as the finale, which might have been a drama of higher production value or a colour fairy film. Often the programme was rounded off with a comedy to send people home cheerful. These films could come from a variety of countries and producers who were effectively ‘brands’ and began to develop as genres along these lines. A brisk international trade grew up with considerable movement between the principal producing nations in Western Europe and the United States. The quest for constant novelty drove development. Multipart scenic films grew into the seven to ten-minute travelogue. The single-scene comedy derived from strip cartoons began to develop into short sketches such as Mary Jane’s Mishap (1903) or the very popular chase format such as in Our New Errand Boy (1905). Multi-shot films had begun almost accidentally when a single-shot narrative was inserted into a phantom ride in the popular Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) in which a couple, played by the filmmakers G. A. Smith and his wife Laura Bayley, are seen kissing in a railway carriage as it goes into a dark tunnel. The catalogue of the distributor, the Warwick Trade Company, suggested that this scene could be sandwiched between a pre-existing phantom ride of a train going into,

Figure 1.2  A Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), George Albert Smith

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then emerging from, a tunnel. The initial impetus was to extend the usable life of the phantom ride films but it very soon occurred to filmmakers to make multi-shot films. James Williamson’s film Fire! (1901) is a good example in which scenes are linked in a kind of tableaux arrangement. The scenes are linked of course by chronology – the discovery of a burning house, alerting the fire station, firemen turning out (already a popular genre), the rescue of the inhabitants taken both from the interior and exterior of the bedroom where people are trapped, but there is also recognizable continuity – a policeman who has discovered a house to be on fire runs out of one scene and into another. William Haggar’s Desperate Poaching Affray (1903) and Frank Mottershaw’s Daring Daylight Robbery (1903) move this idea on with more fluid linking of scenes, and editing began to be a tool filmmakers could use to smooth out a narrative conceived in episodes or based on illustrations; they could also use it to build tension. Mottershaw’s film famously inspired Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery made later that year. Cecil Hepworth’s Rescued by Rover (1905) took narrative continuity to a new level by establishing the classic ‘beginning, middle and end’ of most cinema narratives. He starts by setting up the story – the kidnap of a baby, and then shows the story’s action in clear chronological scenes – the tracking of the missing child by the family dog, his return to bring the father to retrieve the baby – followed by denouement, the return of the kidnapper to her room and the reunited family. Not all filmmakers went down this route; sometimes subject matter suited the tableaux structure, which was specific to this period and lasted until at least 1905 with films such as William Haggar’s The Life of Charles Peace. Hepworth’s Alice in Wonderland (1903) based on Sir John Tenniel’s famous illustrations made no effort to impose continuity on the various scenes, perhaps in keeping with the dreamlike quality of the original work. In any event the different scenes were offered for sale individually, so you could buy the Cheshire Cat scene or the ‘Parade of the Cards’ as standalone films or as a set, and for an extra few shillings you could have them coloured. Non-fiction films followed much of the same trajectory as fiction with a tendency to get longer and develop into specific genres. News was always the premier product of the film business and major state occasions or international incidents were highly prized. After the death of Victoria, the Boer War and its aftermath occupied filmmakers until 1902. Filmmakers soon realized that the so-called ‘fake’ documentary of the early years – usually just a fictional recreation around current events and not intended to deceive people into thinking they were witnessing actuality – wouldn’t wash with audiences. The expense and difficulty of sending cameramen halfway across the world and the unlikelihood of cameramen happening to be present when momentous events were taking place meant that actualities tended to focus on more predictable events. Audiences today are surprised by the number of parades and processions that take place in early films – it feels like people did little else – but we have to remember that films had to be shot in full daylight due to the relative insensitivity of film stock at that time. Parades and processions were a good method of getting as much movement and as many people in the picture as possible which was always a good strategy for getting people to come along to see themselves, friends and family or their town in the moving pictures. Another genre that we now know as the ‘local film’, based largely on the discovery of a cache of negatives made by the Mitchell and Kenyon company in Blackburn, adopted a similar strategy for their productions that were mainly commissioned by local

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showmen. The cameramen would find any place or event where large numbers of people were gathered and film them. Handbills might encourage people to attend – to see themselves ‘as others saw them’. The filmmakers or the showmen would partially stage these films by directing people past the camera or making them react in some way. A favourite device was to film people coming out of factory gates where a great number of workers would be filtering through a small space. Others followed parades, or captured people on holiday or at sporting events. But aside from this staging, the Mitchell and Kenyon films show us the most unstudied scenes of Edwardian life in Britain. Their recent rediscovery (they were restored by the BFI and released to the public in 2005 in conjunction with a research project at the National Fairground Archive at University of Sheffield) has added very substantially to our knowledge of film at this period. The films were shown in grand fairground shows, often with elaborate decorated frontages. Other venues that held film shows were local music halls, various institutes and church and school halls. Touring lectures using film as a component would appear at this type of venue too. The Edwardian era was the golden age of the ‘interest film’. These films, which tended to last from seven to ten minutes, covered a range of topics. Travel films were very popular, showing audiences people, places, industries and customs from all over the globe. They were distributed very widely, sometimes by touring exhibitors like Jean Desmet in Holland or the Corrick family in Australia, and so large numbers of these films have survived in film collections, often with their original colours produced by tinting and toning or stencil colouring. These films had a long shelf life so the investment in making colour prints was worthwhile. Subjects covered could be diverse – a few examples from

Figure 1.3  Mitchell and Kenyon: Manchester c.1900

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the BFI’s collections are Dynamiting Fish in the Solomon Islands, Pineapple Cultivation in Singapore, Rope Making in Northern France and How the Post Reaches Paris from Central Africa. These films usually followed a pattern showing a process or product from raw material to manufactured product, ending with the product in use or being consumed. Expedition films could be a subset of the interest film or by the early 1910s they could be much longer, incorporated into a multimedia lecture package in the case of something like Herbert Ponting’s film of Captain Scott’s expedition to Antarctica. Natural history was also a very popular genre with several British pioneers making a significant impact in this field. F. Martin Duncan, Percy Smith, Oliver Pike and J. C. Bee-Mason all started making films in the 1900s showing the lives of animals in their natural habitat, using ground-breaking techniques such as time lapse to photography plants, or different types of cameras and lenses to show birds in the air or tiny creatures under the microscope. Charles Urban, an ex-encyclopaedia salesman, specialized in this kind of interest film and his motto, ‘We Put the World Before You’, perfectly encapsulated his ambition. As specialization in the film business progressed, the first purpose-built venues gradually began to appear in major cities. One of the earliest was opened in 1906 by Alfred Bromhead of the Gaumont Company in London’s busy Bishopsgate, and then in 1909 many cinemas opened in former skating rinks when the craze suddenly faded. Overall more investment was channelled into the sector, and the significant reorganizing of the industry around renting as opposed to the open market of direct sales from producer to exhibitor underpinned the commercialization of film. Many early producers in Britain such as R. W. Paul, Smith and Williamson got out of the business as the French company Pathé Frères and Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company colluded to undercut their competitors. Film companies in Britain such as Hepworth Manufacturing Co., British & Colonial and Urban Trading Co. adapted to new conditions. Gaumont split from its French parent and middle-sized companies such as Clarendon and Will Barker were able to continue producing quality films for the domestic and even the international market, but the free circulation of films around Europe would never be quite the same as it was in these years. As a result of difficult international market conditions, the industry professionalized. It began to organize into lobbying groups and a new trade press began to thrive with regular weekly publications such as Bioscope, The Kinematograph and Lantern. This was the birth of the British cinema as an industry.

1911 to 1918: pre-war If the dynamic film culture of the Edwardian era is analogous to youth then the 1910s saw it growing up fast. Film settled into a home of its own. The first great boom in cinema building, across the country from roughly 1909 to 1912, coincided with consolidation of new exhibition practice. Regulation resulting from the Cinematograph Act 1909 recognized the new state of affairs and brought in public safety controls to reduce the risk to patrons of fire, which could be caused by poor handling of the combustible films. With local authorities in charge of cinemas, censorship crept in by the back door, ironing out idiosyncrasy and imposing middle-class norms although cinema was by no means the pre-packaged phenomenon it was to become. A major feature of the settling-in period of cinema was the establishment of regular newsreels, first from the two big international

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companies Pathé and Gaumont, swiftly followed by homegrown companies like Topical Budget and Warwick Bioscope Chronicle. This was the decade in which censorship was systematized and dramas became longer to fit more sophisticated narratives. The super-production, a longer fiction film relying on spectacle or a well-known literary source, was the precursor of the blockbuster. Expensively produced films like L’Inferno (1911) and Quo Vadis? (1912) from Italy opened the door to the longer feature film which rapidly caught the audiences’ taste and has remained an astonishingly successful format that thrives to this day. In Britain the first feature was Oliver Twist, appropriately a Dickens adaptation, directed by Thomas Bentley and released by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company in January 1912. Producers who had invested heavily in these new films, and who had created a demand for this latest novelty, were in a position to auction them to the highest bidder rather than sell them outright. This new business model, together with the guaranteed regular supply of films to the new cinemas from newsreel companies, ended the open market for film sold by the producer for a fixed price per foot. Renters, or what we now call distributors, began to handle packages of titles to an exhibition market hungry for product, using the increasing demand for well-marketed features to offload more ordinary films from the same producers.

Figure 1.4  Alma Taylor in Hepworth’s Oliver Twist (1912), the first British feature film

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Product specialization in the film market developed new genres. Just as it had for fiction, a long non-fiction film genre developed, with titles such as The Battle of the Somme (1916), various other long war-related films and South, the film of Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’ expedition, which was filmed in 1916 and edited and released by Frank Hurley in 1919. These are generally not included in histories of documentary film (the term was coined later by John Grierson) but by any definition this is what they were. Definitions are unevenly applied to films of this era. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is often called a documentary despite containing considerably more dramatic creation than the above-mentioned British films. The other result of product specialization was the early signs of a developing star system. Named characters in comedy and adventure series – such as the Tilly and Pimple comedies – began to make stars of their comedians. Actors were never credited at this time, only those performers who made films that recorded their ‘acts’, for example Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree performing in King John (1896) or Dan Leno in An Obstinate Cork (1902). The producer, whether Pathé, Hepworth or Biograph, was the important identifier, not the leading players or director. Even a very popular player such as the American actress Florence Turner was known only as ‘the Vitagraph Girl’ until 1910. When she came to England she made sure her name was known by setting up her own company, Turner Films. But as a fan press developed around the cinema, the public began to demand more information about their favourite performers, and the star system, resisted by producers, always keen to keep wages down, began to develop and was unstoppable. The 1910s were something of an all-too-brief flowering of female filmmaking talent – with Alice Guy, Lois Weber and others in America and Ethyle Batley in Britain directing films, principally dramas. It was also the time, due to the war, that the government began to wake up to the possibilities film presented for messaging and propaganda. Campaigns to encourage women to work on the land and in the munitions factories used film extensively and favourite actors such as Ivy Close and Chrissie White made many recruiting films aimed at women. The latter worked with her husband Henry Edwards on a series of short dramatized films to encourage people to save paper or recycle food scraps for the war effort. The development of animation was given a boost by propaganda cartoons and lightning sketches in the regular newsreels. Cinema proprietors threw themselves into the war effort in 1914 with very effective fundraising campaigns for ambulances and unique community memorializing events for the men at the front through the compilation of rolls of honour on film. The local cinema became as much a part of the social fabric during wartime as the parish church. War had other effects. With conscription, the drain of staff away from the cinemas was covered by women, boys and older men. The government imposed an entertainment tax, which ate into profits for the owners, and film stock was in short supply. No new cinemas were built, production slowed and the proportion of foreign, mainly American film increased. As more goods were carried in American rather than British ships due to wartime demands, London lost ground as the great entrepôt and this ultimately had a knock-on effect on Britain’s position in film distribution. Another film import from across the pond was the phenomenally popular film comedies of the first great Hollywood star, one of Britain’s own, Charlie Chaplin. The mass movement and concentrating of people during the war was a significant factor in the spreading fame of Chaplin as his films were used to entertain the troops and provide a welcome distraction in the cinemas

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back home. The popularity of ever more highly produced and sophisticated comedy from Hollywood in British cinemas was cemented by the end of the war and continues to this day. Mass movement of people during and just after the war had a more serious consequence for cinema; the flu epidemic of 1918 led to temporary closures in spaces, such as cinemas, in which transmission of infection was heightened. Despite the hardships of war, by the end of it cinema as a business was solidly entrenched in the fabric of society. There were 4,000 or so cinemas in Britain and Ireland with audiences estimated to be 20 million visits a week. Cinema had overtaken the music hall as the dominant form of entertainment for the masses. It had infrastructure and a range of vibrant businesses supplying it. British production, though depressed, was producing some good-quality films for the domestic market; East is East (1919) directed by Henry Edwards is a good example of this type. Newsreels continued to thrive although Britain failed to make much of the popularity of the adventure or detective serial in the teens, and these were a big part of the popularity of American and European films. British producers began to see the efficacy of importing talent from abroad to give professional gloss to their output, with directors such as Harold Shaw coming from America. Directors as well as actors began to be credited and noticed in these years, again reflecting developments in the larger-scale American industry where directors D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille and others were achieving stardom of their own. The period from the 1890s to the end of the First World War saw a complete change in the way films were shown. Initially films, of all genres, and generally short in duration, were screened to the public as a novelty in a range of locations: music halls, fairground shows and local halls of all kinds. By the end of the war we can talk about the ‘Cinema’ – now settled into its own purpose-built exhibition space, a highly capitalized business, a significant medium of communication and the new dominant form of mass entertainment. And although the mixed programme was still alive and well, genres were becoming standardized with comedy, serials, newsreel interest films and the new long fiction feature all finding their place in a ‘Cinema’ that would last for decades to come.

Further reading Abel, R. (ed) (2013) Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. London: Routledge. Barnes, J. (1976–98) The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894–1901 (5 vols). Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (1994) Film History: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill.

References Chanan, M. (1996) The Dream That Kicks: The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. Cherchi Usai, P. (2000) Silent Cinema: An Introduction. London: BFI. Harding, C. and Popple, S. (1996) In the Kingdom of Shadows: A Companion to Early Cinema. London: Cygnus Arts. Low, R. (1973) History of the British Film, 1896 to 1929 (4 vols). London: George Allen & Unwin. Salt, B. (2003) Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. London: Starword.

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2

“TEMPORARY AMERICAN CITIZENS” British cinema in the 1920s

Laraine Porter Introduction and overview The British film industry, like its other once world-leading European counterparts, emerged from the Great War into a very different set of economic and cultural conditions. Hollywood had risen to dominance, Chaplin was the most famous person in the world and the emerging American Studio System had created an indomitable global industry producing popular entertainment and stars. The depleted European industries simply could not compete. Audiences had developed a taste for American production values, genres and stars and were now loyal to Hollywood. Once world-leading and pioneering British director-producers like Cecil Hepworth and George Pearson, so significant in creating the early British film industry, found it hard to survive in this new era, with their low-key, domestic production outfits. This chapter will discuss the British industry from the immediate post-War period up until the late 1920s, through its near collapse in 1925–6, to the Cinematograph Act of 1927 and the period just before the transition to sound. It will look at key production companies and their outputs and the directors and stars navigating the industry’s fluctuating fortunes in a period that saw an increase in cinema-going and cinema-building. Producers, distributors and exhibitors had to carve their niche in the face of Hollywood dominance and many looked to European co-productions and to the adaptation of popular British authors and stage plays, as well as the use of well-known British performers, which this chapter will also investigate. After an immediate post-War boom in British production, a general decline set in, with 163 features made in 1920, 72 in 1923 and a nadir in 1925 with only 32 when the industry virtually went bankrupt. Things started to pick up thereafter with 44 features (i.e. films of sixty minutes or more in length) produced in 1927 and 79 in 1928 when the Quota Act started to take effect (Gifford 1973). During the slump of the early to mid-1920s, many small companies and lone producers went bankrupt and the industry was sustained by shorter films and film series such as Stoll’s Fu Manchu, The Old Man in the Corner, Sherlock Holmes and Samuelson’s Twisted Tales. By 1926, the “talkies” were pre-empted with the first short sound films including British Acoustic’s

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A Wet Night filmed in Berlin in January. By December 1926 De Forest Phonofilms had produced 18 short sound films featuring musical numbers and “turns” by popular Variety performers, indicating a general interest in sound cinema. A significant effort was made to exploit sound-on-disc technology being pioneered by Warner Brothers with their Vitaphone system, though it was not until the middle of 1929 before Britain produced its first sound feature, spearheaded by Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) and almost two years after Hollywood. Britain’s transition to sound will be dealt with in Chapter 5. The conditions forged by the First World War presented three stark options for postWar British cinema: attempt to compete with Hollywood by producing lower-budget versions of Hollywood films that would inevitably lack the same popular appeal; capitulate entirely and accept Hollywood’s dominance; or produce low to mid-budget films pitched at domestic audiences. All of these options were explored to some extent, but it was the “third way” that arguably produced some of the best films of this period. British producers were quick to exploit links between the readership of classic and popular British fiction and audiences for cinema by adapting authors such as Dickens and Hardy, but more often popular contemporary writers such as Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Sax Rohmer, Ethel M. Dell, Sinclair Hill, Edgar Wallace, W.W. Jacobs and P.G. Wodehouse. These authors also offered a wealth of stories for easy adaptation into screenplays. A major barrier to assessing output from this period is the lack of extant film. The majority of silent films have not survived due to a lack of resources for their safekeeping

Figure 2.1  Battling the English weather in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Long Hole (1924)

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and a general acceptance of cinema’s ephemerality. Many were recycled. When Cecil Hepworth’s company went bankrupt in 1921, his films were seized and melted down to extract their silver nitrate content. By the time the British Film Institute was formed with a remit to preserve film in 1932, two thirds of British silent cinema was already lost. The process of rebuilding the British film industry in the post-War period initially involved older producers and companies like Hepworth, Welsh-Pearson, Stoll, Gaumont and Ideal, attempting to conduct business as usual, but contributing their experience and reputations to emerging new talent. This post-War generation included actor-directors Henry Edwards, Guy Newall and Walter Forde, the ambitious Herbert Wilcox, and from 1926 the young Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Asquith, all producing modestly budgeted films with varying degrees of critical and popular success. British film during this period could be characterised by romantic melodramas such as Hepworth’s Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1923), Edwards’ A Girl of London (1925) and Newall’s Fox Farm (1922) and The Lure of Crooning Water (1920), and character-driven light comedies including adaptations of P.G. Wodehouse’s golfing tales and the seafaring stories of W.W. Jacobs. Historic and imperialist adventure dramas including Herbert Wilcox’s Nell Gwynn (1926), The Man Without Desire (1922) and The Wandering Jew (1923) were also abundant, as were domestic melodramas set among the upper classes in large country houses such as Lady Audley’s Secret (1920), whilst films based in exotic locations such as At the Villa Rose (1920) and Roses of Picardy (1927) gave audiences a taste of the French Riviera. The First World War emerged as a subject in film largely towards the end of the decade and at a respectable distance from the War itself, with notable and superb exceptions A Couple of Down and Outs (1923) and The Flag Lieutenant (1926). New stars such as Alma Taylor, Betty Balfour and matinee idol Ivor Novello began their ascent to fame whilst others, identified with Edwardian cinema, went into decline. Actor and producer Florence Turner had returned to America, popular home-grown preWar stars such as the youthful Tilly Girls matured into what Kenton Bamford describes as “drawing room types” (Bamford 1999: 42), broad slapstick comedians such as Pimple were out-flanked by their Hollywood counterparts and British cinema settled into a fraught period of forging a new identity commensurate with its size, structures, box-office potential, global market value and investment levels. In the immediate aftermath of the War, British producers were optimistic about returning to pre-War levels of production and international status, but according to Rachael Low (1971: 107), there was a consistent decline from 1920 to 1924 during which time the old guard went out of business and new, more modern producers and directors assumed dominance. The later 1920s also saw the emergence and proliferation of British film criticism with intellectuals, theatre critics and authors with James Agate, C.A. Lejeune, Iris Barry, Ivor Montague, Ernest Betts, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf developing a new critical language. Later, dedicated critical journals like Close-Up (from 1927) were not always favourable to British films, preferring French, German and Danish cinema which was viewed as superior in almost every aspect. Despite a general lack of faith in the British industry, in 1923 The Bioscope, with misplaced confidence, had stated, “the world domination of the British Super Film may well prove the outstanding feature of 1923” (1 February 1923: 39). In November 1923, the Prince of Wales gave his support for the industry when he declared,

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It is well worth the British Nation’s while to take the film industry seriously and to develop it to its utmost as a national industry … it is up to us to see that British film pictures take their place in the theatres of the world and particularly on British screens. (Commission of Educational and Cultural Films 1932: 41) Three years later and the British film industry was virtually bankrupt with domestic films occupying only a 5 per cent share of screen time. British cinema could not even dominate its own screens, let alone the world’s theatres.

Producers and product In the early 1920s studio working conditions were primitive. The raw stock was much less sensitive than it is today so the lighting had to be very strong indeed. The players (both sexes) wore heavy pancake makeup and everybody had to take care not to look into the arc lights … the camera was hand-operated, and the lights were noisy. (Balcon 1969: 16) Michael Balcon and others realised that the British film industry needed modernisation to keep pace with its competitors, with better-equipped studios producing bigger-budget films with coordinated distribution and exhibition strategies. But the size of the domestic market meant that the industry was barely viable and older producers were still trying to work on “meagre backyard productions” (Low 1971: 107). Many of the key producers and production companies such as Hepworth, Pearson and Gaumont had started in the early 1900s and expected to work with pre-War budgets and still compete with American films costing many times more. Personnel and stars were imported from America and Europe to give the British industry a creative boost during the early 1920s, bringing new ideas, techniques and the appeal of international stardom with stars like Betty Compson, Lionel Barrymore, Mae Marsh, Betty Blythe and Werner Krauss, and international directors like Herbert Brenon, Michael Kurtiz, Donald Crisp and George Fitzmaurice. American director Harold Shaw directed some of the most appealing and enduring British films during this period: Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1921) and The Wheels of Chance (1922) based on novels by H.G. Wells (who also adapted them for the screen) and starring British actor George K. Arthur and Shaw’s wife Edna Flugrath. Shaw demonstrated the quality that could be achieved with good scripts, appealing locations, naturalistic acting and reasonable, though not Hollywood-style, budgets. He had come to Britain in 1913 to work for London Film Productions, making almost 50 short films and features in the UK before returning to the US in 1922 and tragically dying in a car accident in 1926. During this period he had also made films in South Africa and the Soviet Union, typifying the transnational potential of the silent film director as language was no barrier to international distribution. Another emerging talent during the early 1920s was actor/director/producer Henry Edwards. Edwards had co-starred with actress and producer Florence Turner in her 1917 film East is East and worked with Hepworth producing and directing his own films and becoming director of the Hepworth company from 1922. In 1919 Edwards directed The

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Figure 2.2 The hapless clerk played by George K. Arthur in Harold Shaw’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Wheels of Chance (1922)

City of Beautiful Nonsense, based on a very popular 1909 E. Temple Thurston novel of the same name which was “rapturously received by the … admirers of the book” (Hepworth 1951: 169). Edwards, who married actress Chrissie White in 1922, survived the transition to sound and maintained a prolific film career until his death in 1952. The Hepworth Studio offered a timeless identity for the British industry with its trademark bucolic romantic melodramas, set in the English countryside and often starring their leading actress Alma Taylor. Their titles attest to their subject and settings: The Forest on the Hill (1919), Helen of Four Gates (1920), Tansy (1921), and Mist in the Valley, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, and The Pipes of Pan (all 1923) were among many other popular and successful films of the early 1920s including Alf’s Button (1920) adapted from William Aubrey Darlington’s comic novel of the same name and year. But despite, and possibly because of, their prodigious output and a modernising programme that saw the installation of electric arc lighting, Hepworth’s company went into liquidation in 1921 (Hepworth 1951: 187). His films celebrated the English landscape, traditions and people and attempted to capture what he described as an “English idiom”, rightly avoiding Hollywood imitation: I would never work indoors if I could possibly get into the open air. It was always in the back of my mind from the very beginning that I was to make English

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pictures with all the English countryside for background and with English atmosphere and English idiom throughout. When the transatlantic films began to get a stranglehold upon the trade over here it came to be generally assumed that the American method and style of production was the reason for their success and the great majority of our producers set about trying to imitate them … it cannot be successfully copied. (Hepworth 1951: 144) The most prolific director of the period, Maurice Elvey, had already directed 42 films by the end of the War, having entered the industry in 1913 at the age of 26. He would go on to direct a further 85 during the remainder of the 1920s and countless more in the sound period during an unbroken 44-year career that extended until 1957, 10 years before his death. Elvey was unabashed about the commercialism of his varied output, working for pretty much all of the big production companies during the 1920s including directing The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for Stoll. Elvey had little formal education and started his career in the theatre in the early 1910s, and although his films were often subsequently overlooked as theatre-bound adaptations of popular novels and plays, his sustained career attests to his popularity, producing an average of four feature films each year (Betts 1973: 59). Director/producer George Pearson, a former schoolmaster who entered the industry in 1913 aged 38, introduced his vivacious new star Betty Balfour in Nothing Else Matters (1920). But it was the success of Squibs (1921) in which she plays a Cockney flower-seller, in love with the local “bobby”, that cemented their future partnership, with Balfour becoming Britain’s most popular film star in the 1920s. Distributor William Jury spotted Squibs’ potential and insisted on a series. That Pearson heeded his advice and went on to direct four Squibs films and a series of other Betty Balfour vehicles indicates the influence of the distributor over the director during this period. The winning formula was based on Balfour’s cheerful working-class Cockney character whose indomitable spirit meant she invariably bounced back from misfortune. Another creatively successful production outfit was Artistic Films, run by actor/director/ producer Manning Haynes and the talented writer Lydia Hayward, using a stock company of now-forgotten British character actors such as Bobby Rudd, Moore Marriott, Johnny Butt, Tom Coventry and Cynthia Murtagh. Artistic Films produced short features based on the novels of W.W. Jacobs and Jerome K. Jerome, from Three Men in a Boat (1920) to The Boatswain’s Mate (1924). The films, like the stories, depicted vanishing ways of life like the Thames bargemen working around the Kentish coast, soon to be surpassed by the large steamships. They captured the eccentricity and wit of the motley characters inhabiting Jacobs’s and Jerome’s gently mocking tales, using authentic locations of seaside towns, harbours and local pubs, whilst avoiding descending into postcard quaintness. When they were reviewed, the films garnered praise: The sincerity and simplicity of these pictures makes me hope that the clever producer will one day be accorded greater resources in something rather different. Meanwhile, these comedies eclipse all other British efforts along similar lines. They are incidentally, well edited, and the sub titles are not only crisp and clever, but actually punctuated correctly! (The Motion Picture Studio, 26 January 1924)

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Figure 2.3 Moving house in Artistic Films’ acclaimed adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ Head of the Family (1922)

The issue of resources is critical here. Artistic Films, like other British producers, often worked with knife-edge finances, particularly when it came to marketing and distribution, a factor that contributed to the company’s downfall. The Monkey’s Paw (1923) stands out among Artistic’s output as an early horror film, based on W.W. Jacobs’ Gothic tale of the same name. It stars Marie Ault and Moore Marriott as the parents who wish on a monkey’s paw for the return of their dead son, only to be landed with his undead corpse. Sadly, only part of the film is known to survive, but it is genuinely chilling and atmospheric. Despite good critical response and the talent of its writer/director team, Artistic Films was wound up in 1925 after ten years of production with Kinematograph Weekly reporting “Artistic Failure” and detailing the company’s declining fortunes. Having made a profit of £990 in 1917, the company became loss-making from 1918 with an £11,235 deficit and £4–6k losses each year thereafter (Kinematograph Weekly, 21 January 1926: 58). Their fortune is not untypical of British film producers during this period, with a disastrous combination of insufficient working capital and resources to produce, market and distribute films in a competitive market. The final straw was the failure of an unnamed American contract that would have seen Artistic make a survival profit of £2–3k, indicating the company’s vulnerability. Haynes died in 1957 and merited a very short obituary in Today’s Cinema, poignant in its brevity and symptomatic of the later neglect of British directors from the silent period: “British studio old-timers will learn with regret of the death … of one of the

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most thoughtful directors of the silent days and later. He it was who brought W.W. Jacobs to the screen in a series of outstanding short comedies …” (7 March 1957: 4). Another example of the emerging Gothic in early 1920s British cinema was British Entertainment Films’ 1921 Grand Guignol series by actor-director Fred Paul. These were taut short films with strong storylines and ironic, fatalistic twists such as The Last Appeal, The Flat and The Gentle Doctor. Paul described his lugubrious philosophy thus: I attempt to show life as it really is, its sordidness and cruelty; the diabolical humour of the destiny we call fate, which plays with us as it will, raises us to high places or drags us to the gutter; allows one man to rob the widows and orphans of their all and makes a criminal of the starving wretch who in his misery has stolen a mouthful of bread. (Kinematograph Weekly, 24 March 1921: 53) Paul also starred as Nayland Smith, adversary to actor Harry Agar Lyons’s “Dr Fu Manchu”, in Stoll’s The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu series (1923). Based on Sax Rohmer’s stories, these films tapped into myths of the so-called “Yellow Peril”; an exaggerated belief that Chinese opium dens were overtaking London’s Limehouse and making addicts of vulnerable English women. These fears were fuelled with curiosity and desire for a fictional Eastern exoticism and a fashion for Chinoiserie evident in the films’ mise en scène. The Yellow Claw (1920), directed by Rene Plaissetty for Stoll from another Sax Rohmer story, was one of the first. Here, the “yellow claw” invades the home of a rich female socialite who, having succumbed to the “pipe”, was murdered by opium smugglers. The small geographical area of Limehouse and its tiny population of Chinese migrants gave rise to a disproportionate amount of racial scaremongering in film and literature of the 1910s and early 1920s. A fictional Hollywood Limehouse had been the setting for D.W. Griffith’s 1919 Broken Blossoms based on British author Thomas Burke’s “The Chink and the Child” from his 1916 anthology Limehouse Nights. The film humanised its Chinese character, but only as a childlike victim. In summary, the early 1920s were characterised by a post-War boom in production which gave way to rapid decline as the industry tried, and largely failed, to modernise and settle into a new order dominated by Hollywood and globalised business models. The period produced some outstanding films from talented and polymath actor/director/ producers, but the industry suffered from a lack of cooperation and sometimes outright animosity between producers and the most powerful of all during this period: the distribution companies. This fragmented, under-capitalised industry was no match for the maturing, vertically integrated Hollywood studio system.

The distribution business In the early 1920s, a number of small British distributors were keen to promote British films including Butchers, Ideal, Gaumont, General Film Renters and Granger’s, each working with specific producers, but often struggling to find enough indigenous product and with poor facilities and a lack of infrastructure (Low 1971: 72). The six largest distributors in Britain handled American films and unsurprisingly prospered as many were linked to their parent companies in Hollywood. Famous Players-Lasky, Vitagraph, Fox, Goldwyn, Film Booking Offices and Western Import handled around 40 per cent of all

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films screened, with the seventeen or so British distribution companies handling the remaining 60 per cent between them. The inexorable march towards the Americanisation of the industry caused consternation that American companies would open their own vertically integrated studios in Britain. Before the War, London had been a world clearing house for cinema with film negatives imported, printed up and sold to international buyers, giving British producers an advantage in being able to easily insert their own films into the system. By the end of the War, this international market shifted to Hollywood and despite British producers and distributors trying to make inroads into American markets, often by personally taking their films across the Atlantic, many failed dramatically in the US. This was largely due to a misjudgement of the kind of films that would export and a failure to understand that American audiences and critics regarded the majority of British films as technically and artistically retrograde. The following quote from Variety magazine offers a withering critique of an industry perceived by the US as insular and self-aggrandising: Badly produced from bad stories, badly played by actors who carry little weight beyond the family circle, Wardour Street, these great pictures are trade shown, cut up by the trade and lay press or praised from a mistaken sense of loyalty … and eventually forgotten or put out in the very small kinemas. (Variety, 14 April 1922: 43) There were some transatlantic successes, however, including Stoll’s 1921 series “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” and Hepworth’s Alf’s Button, but the kind of pre-War gentlemen’s agreements between producers on either side of the Atlantic were no longer appropriate and America did not need British films. Low also cites the misguided practice of using faded American stars to create a transatlantic appeal that “ignored the fact that great films make stars, not the reverse” (Low 1971: 78). The evidence points to Britain’s failure to grasp the changing nature of the global film industry and its diminishing role within it, alongside a failure to understand the kinds of British films and subjects that might appeal to international markets.

Cinemas and cinema-going By 1920 there were 157 circuits with 787 cinemas out of a total of 4,000 cinemas in the UK, though many of these were small with around four cinemas each and based in the Regions (Low 1971: 41). Some consolidation took place during the 1920s with ABC and Gaumont circuits emerging supreme. The once-weekly screenings in multi-purpose public halls were declining in favour of continuous film programmes and a proliferation of cinemas serving local communities, particularly in the Victorian suburbs of the big cities where many people worked in factories close to their homes. Cinemas in Leicester grew up along the tram network, for example. Ticket prices were kept as low as 2d (in 1920) in the Regions, encouraging working-class people to attend more than once a week and allowing exhibitors to avoid paying entertainments’ tax on their box office, whilst the big London cinemas could charge as much as 21 shillings (Low 1971: 48). These prices reflected the disparity between the big West End super cinemas with full orchestras, cafés

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and concierges and the small local “fleapits”, with solo pianist and poorer standards of comfort, cleanliness and presentation. The Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) was the professional body representing cinema managers through its regional and London branches. Its main battles were with distributors over the cost of film hires, the Government over Sunday openings and the Entertainments’ Tax. The Musicians’ Union (MU) were consistently battling with the CEA over the pay and conditions of musicians in cinemas, aiming to increase their membership along the way. Cinema represented a booming employment market for musicians, with many cinemas employing ensembles or full orchestras, but profit margins were tight and cinema organs introduced into cinemas from around 1926 sought to replace orchestras. As the number of cinemas expanded, one of the factors improving their appeal and competitiveness, particularly for the higher-spending middle-class patron, was the quality of the musical accompaniment. Medium to large cinemas had their own musical director, fitting library music to the latest releases and rehearsing the orchestra daily with rapidly changing repertoires of new music. But relatively well-paid resident musicians increased the cost of film exhibition, and when the MU’s Glasgow Branch Secretary asked George Bernard Shaw, a former music critic and well-known socialist, for his support for cinemas maintaining large orchestras, his reply summarised the dilemma faced by cinemas operating within narrow profit margins: I should like to have a Band of at least twenty at every Cinema, instead of the solitary Pianist, or Pianist-cum-Organist, many of them do with; but to make this compulsory would shut up many Cinemas and throw the Pianists on the streets. (Monthly Report of the Musicians’ Union, 14 August 1924) However, during the early to late 1920s at least, cinemas had a rapacious appetite for skilled musicians. This was the golden age for live cinema music, for by 1926, the cinema organ was starting to replace the orchestra, followed by the advent of the talkies from 1929.

Critique A considerable amount of the received wisdom around British cinema of the 1920s has come not from modern reviews of the films themselves, which are rarely (if ever) seen, but from the opinions of contemporary critics and intellectuals such as Ernest Betts, Ivor Montagu, Paul Rotha, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and H.G. Wells. Such was the overall intellectual disdain for cinema that, writing in 1926, British film critic Iris Barry felt compelled to reassure her reader that “Going to the pictures is nothing to be ashamed of ”, stating her ambition to encourage an intellectual approach that drove up standards of film production rather than dismissing it out of hand: “Chiefly, I should like to irritate one or two intelligences into beguiling this new monster as critically as it deserves” (Barry 1926: viii). Barry argued against translating plays verbatim into films, a common practice in British cinema, insisting that the two art forms should be treated separately. Whilst reserving most of her praise for German, Russian and Hollywood films, she did include positive reviews of British films in her writing.

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But rarely was British cinema the cause for critical celebration. Writing in 1930, Paul Rotha was withering in his critique, saying: “It has no other aim than that of the imitation of the cinema of other countries”, and: The British Film is established upon a hollow foundation. Perhaps it would be more significant to write that it rests upon a structure of false prestige, supported by the flatulent flapdoodle of newspaper writers and by the indifferent goodwill of the English people. (Rotha 1930: 226) Many early film critics drew upon the work of Vachel Lindsay’s influential The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) first published in Britain in 1922, which sought to establish cinema as an art form rather than mere popular entertainment and started to permeate British intellectual film criticism. Whilst film criticism was a nascent discipline, trade publications such as Kinematograph Weekly and The Bioscope described films for exhibitors, suggesting how audiences might be wooed with tips on promotion. Newspapers like The Times reported information on industry developments and economic trends, featured films in its “London Entertainment” listings and from 1920 ran a column called “The Film World”. From 1921, The Picturegoer was Britain’s leading popular cine-magazine covering the lives of stars, their films and industry gossip. However, its first editorial, entitled “The Empty Chair”, felt obliged to defend British cinema against its perceived lack of artistic merit: “Where is the SHAKESPEARE of the screen, or to be going on with, its Dickens? Even its Hall Caine? … CAN the Motion Picture supersede Literature or the Drama? … it is the art of humanity, but where is the artist?” (The Picturegoer, January 1921: 9).

Legislation and the Cinematograph Act By 1926, the fragility of the British film industry prompted Government intervention in the form of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act (Quota Act) that aimed to increase the domestic market for British films by setting quotas for exhibitors and thereby stimulating producers to make more British films in the face of American competition. The Act gave rise to so-called “Quota Quickies” and films of variable quality. American producers also took advantage of the Act by producing cheap films under license in the UK. According to critic Ernest Betts, this brought British films into further disrepute: The American companies made cheap quickies to fulfil the letter of the law, and in many cases didn’t even trouble to show them. British film producers also made quickies, but unfortunately showed them, thus throwing the industry into disrepute, for they were quite worthless. (Betts 1973: 6–7) Block and blind booking practices were already established by Hollywood, forcing British exhibitors to book a slate of films “blind”, even before production was complete, to secure a popular title; a practice that further marginalised the space for British films in British cinemas. Producer Michael Balcon at Gainsborough echoed misgivings on the exploitation of

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the Act, though as Betts points out above, Quota films were often produced by American companies to allow them to maintain a foothold in UK cinemas: As they were British-made, and were shown in programmes of far more expensive and well-made American films, they brought the name of British films into disrepute. For many people “a British film” became the rubbishy second feature you had to sit through, or avoid, if you went to see a Hollywood picture. (Balcon 1969: 28) The “indoctrination” of British audiences by the onslaught of American cinema was a cause for considerable consternation later accelerated by the arrival of the “talkies”, which would inject American speech and idiom into the minds of “vulnerable” young people and threaten Britain’s markets in the Dominions by flooding those too. The perceived Americanisation of British culture was not limited to cinema and was partly a reflection of Britain’s own declining power at the head of its Empire. Influential and outspoken critics like G.A. Atkinson of the Daily Express wrote: The plain truth about the British film situation is that the bulk of our picturegoers are Americanized to an extent that it makes them regard the British film as a foreign film, and an interesting but more frequently irritating interlude in their favourite entertainment. They go to see American stars. They have been brought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens. (1927 in Glancy 2013: 14)

Conclusion The early to mid-1920s were a difficult, transitional period for British cinema as they were for other European cinemas interrupted by the Great War. Successive generations of historians have also adopted Variety’s line and unfairly dismissed much of the British industry’s output. Scholarship has only relatively recently begun to re-evaluate this with the added problem that the majority of films are tantalisingly out of reach – missing and believed lost. This was the period in which British cinema was forced to define its identity in relation to both Hollywood and Europe, paving the way for many of the directors and producers who would thrive in the sound period, but weeding out those who would not. It is also the period when British audiences became Americanised with the associated fears for British cultural and national identity being eroded by cinema. This chapter has offered a brief overview of key trends, personnel and product, but there is much more work to be done in bringing this fascinating period into the spotlight.

Further reading Bamford, K. (1999) Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s, London: I.B. Tauris.

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Betts, E. (1973) The Film Business: A History of British Cinema 1896–1972, London: George Allen & Unwin. Low, R. (1971) The History of the British Film 1918–1929, London: George Allen & Unwin.

References Balcon, M. (1969) Michael Balcon Presents … A Lifetime of Films, London: Hutchinson. Barry, I. (1926) Let’s Go to the Pictures, London: Chatto and Windus. Commission of Educational and Cultural Films (1932) The Film in National Life, London: George Allen & Unwin. Gifford, D. (1973) The British Film Catalogue, Oxford: Facts on File Publications. Glancy, M. (2014) Hollywood and the Americanisation of Britain from the 1920s to the Present, London: I.B. Tauris. Hepworth, C. (1951) Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer, London: Phoenix House Ltd. Rotha, P. (1930) The Film Till Now: A Survey of Cinema, London: Jonathon Cape.

Journals The Bioscope Film Weekly Kinematograph Weekly The Motion Picture Studio The Musicians’ Union Journal Variety

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“KING OF CAMERAMEN” Jack Cox and British cinematography in the silent era

Kelly Robinson Duncan Petrie highlights the British cameraman’s contribution to the art of cinematography by listing the extraordinary number of Academy Awards they received between 1940 and 1990 (Petrie 1996: 1–2). Cameramen like Jack Cardiff and Freddie Young worked on a variety of outstanding national and international productions with careers that spanned several decades. These cameramen also worked in the silent era, a time rich with invention and discovery. Yet examinations of cinematography in this dynamic period are rare and the contributions of British pioneers like Basil Emmott, Percy Strong, William Shenton and Jack Cox, whose careers straddled both silent and sound filmmaking, are frequently overlooked. This chapter will explore the factors that contributed to the skill and artistry of the British cinematographer, comparing the somewhat constrictive environment of the industry in the early 1920s with the more ambitious and industrious period from the mid-1920s. Analysis of silent film cinematography indicates that there is much to be explored, notably the mobility of the camera, angled shots, lenses, depth of field and shot transitions. Henry Jenkins’ interpretation of historical poetics offers a framework for the approach taken here: What is perhaps most important about “historical poetics” as an approach to aesthetic history is its movements away from great works and great authors towards a more broadly based survey of the aesthetic norms in place at a particular historical juncture. Stylistic choices are understood not simply as a means of individual expression by exceptional artists but rather as grounded in institutional practices and larger aesthetic movements. (Jenkins 1995: 102) Many award-winning British cameramen worked at British International Pictures (BIP), an ambitious studio founded in 1927. It did not have a strong identity, or definable “spirit” like later British studios, and although its finance was principally British, its staff was international, with many including technicians, directors, set designers and cinematographers from German-speaking nations. Cinematography was prioritised by the studio in an effort to appeal to international markets. Alfred Hitchcock and Jack Cox collaborated on several films at BIP that are indicative of this endeavour, from the flamboyant 47

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cinematography and editing in The Ring (1927) to the languid, sophisticated style of The Farmer’s Wife (1928). As the example of Cox demonstrates, although cameramen from abroad had a significant impact on the way cinematography developed in Britain, British cameramen also made a vital contribution. Cameraman Leonard Harris recalled working with Robert Stevenson on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). “‘Oh my goodness,’ he [Stevenson] said, ‘We’ve had all cameramen, American, German and all sorts, but there’s nothing like Jack Cox’” (Harris 1981). In the early 1920s the British film industry had a variety of problems to contend with, including a shrinking export market for British films and competition for the home market from more sophisticated American productions. In his autobiography, producer and director Herbert Wilcox recalled how hard it was to compete with “Supers” like those by D.W. Griffith, when investment in the British industry was minimal. Style and subject matter were often limited by budgetary constraints. Wilcox’s The Wonderful Story (Graham Cutts, 1922) is emblematic of this with its country cottage setting and three actors: “The production unit consisted of the director and cameraman, a boy to carry the camera (Emile Littler, straight from school), a continuity girl, one property man, and myself. Six all told” (Wilcox 1967: 51). This “cottage-style” approach to the industry impacted on the way cinematography developed. The fact that production was on a film-to-film basis meant that few British cameramen became specialised in the way that German and American cameramen were during the same period. The lack of capital investment in production meant that facilities at many British studios did not meet standards abroad. In a technical survey of 1920, Colin N. Bennett reported that new cameras were finally being imported such as the Bell & Howell; yet this camera had been used in US studios for many years. They cost around £350; a price that, Bennett remarked, few British companies could afford (Bennett 1921: 83). Enterprising cameramen purchased their own cameras and kits. Basil Emmott, for instance, bought himself a Pathe Willard so if Gaumont needed a second camera they would use him (Young 1999: 14). Cameraman Freddie Young recalled the “most modern” studio at Gaumont’s Lime Grove as still having walls and a roof made of glass in the late 1910s. This restricted the cameraman’s control over lighting effects in the scene and was impractical given the changeable British weather, with “enemy fog” and clouds often ruining a shot (Young 1999: 2 and Wilcox 1967: 66). By the early 1920s most studios were “dark”. Lighting tended to be restricted to arc lamps, similar to those used for street lighting. They were incredibly hot and prone to flickering so needed constant adjustment. The most commonly used arc lamps could not be directed, thus cameramen were limited with the effects they could create (Young 1999: 19). Some studios also had CooperHewitt mercury vapour tubes which gave off a less intense, more diffuse light (Low 1970: 250). Developments in artificial lighting during this time were disappointing. Features that often drew criticism were un-diffused and distracting shadows and a lack of creative use of light and shade for pictorial effect. Young described the approach of British cameramen as “pretty crude” (Young 1999: 16): The way the older cameramen worked was first they’d get a long shot of the set, showing a character entering and walking over to a desk, say. Then they’d move

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in to a closer shot. To avoid the lighting being too symmetrical they might use a couple of arcs on one side, and three on the other. That was all. Otherwise the image was completely flat, just a flood of light. There was no attempt at artistry. … You couldn’t really call it lighting, it was just illumination. (Young 1999: 19) Indeed, in an account of the film industry written in 1921 it was the electrician that worked on the “lighting-plot” for the studio, leaving the cinematographer instead to view the rehearsal and decide on the best camera position to film the scene, “bearing in mind the time of day and consequent position of the sun for outdoor locations” (Boughey 1921: 63). According to this account, the role of the cinematographer was more that of a technician concerned with obtaining “the perfect negative” than a creative artist concerned with lighting imaginatively (Boughey 1921: 64). Cameraman Desmond Dickinson recalled that they were often regarded “as engineers to mend the machinery which wasn’t very good”. Their opinion was seldom respected and the director would frequently interfere with the lighting (Dickinson 1963). Lighting eventually came to be seen as not just the responsibility of the cameraman but also a craft potentially enhancing the quality of the production. Indeed, a craft often considered absent from British films by the contemporary press, and more discerning moviegoers. Hitchcock recalled as a young man making the comparison between British and American approaches to lighting and finding British films inferior. “At eighteen I was studying photography, just as a hobby. I had noticed, for instance, that the Americans always tried to separate the image from the background with backlights, whereas in the British films the image melted into the background. There was no separation, no relief” (Truffaut 1978: 35). Rachael Low observed how many films from this period sought to avoid drawing attention to the camera. Consequently action is frequently filmed with a static camera, straight on, at a distance, and “Little deliberate thought seems to have been given to the use of lighting to set the mood or heighten the drama of a sequence” (Low 1950: 225). Low points to comments by cameraman S. Palmer as being typical of this approach: “the more realistic and natural the lighting is, the more convincing the scene will be, and if the producer and photographer can each work together to make the lighting and atmosphere as natural as possible, the best results will be attained” (Low 1950: 225). However, even if realism was the only aspiration, the results were not always dull and ineffective and some cameramen became incredibly skilled at shooting on location as a result of the budgetary constraints and lack of studio space. For instance, Joe Rosenthal Jr. used natural sunlight and framed scenic exteriors to dramatic effect in The Lure of Crooning Water (Arthur Rooke, 1920). He used sunlight pouring through trees to express a sensual quality as the lovers (played by Guy Newall and Ivy Duke) walk through the woods. The film was produced by Ducal Studios, a production company comprising regular collaborators (Low 1950: 146–7). Other ambitious filmmakers who were interested in the aesthetic qualities of the medium included early film pioneer Cecil Hepworth and cameraman Geoffrey Faithfull, although their approach at times stood apart from international trends. Hepworth, notoriously, was less interested in trick work and more with pictorial beauty of a specifically British kind (see Christine Gledhill 2003). It is true, however, that studio work rarely

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received the same attention as it would in Germany and America, particularly from the late 1910s where increasing attention was given to set design and artificial lighting. Despite limitations, several British cameramen established a reputation for themselves during this period. Arguably, some constraints contributed to their versatility and resourcefulness. The specialisation of roles came late for many British production companies. Young recounted working as an assistant cameraman at Lime Grove in the late 1910s where he did an array of jobs, including cutting the film (Young 1999: 7). Young, like several other award-winning cameramen, would also move into direction; his ambition and confidence was acquired through his extensive knowledge of all aspects of production. Percy Strong achieved attention photographing in a low-key style on George Pearson’s films at the small Harlesden Studio. Cameramen Desmond Dickinson and Gil Taylor were influenced by this “great innovator” (Girdlestone 1978: 24). In the early 1920s, there was a tendency to use high-powered arc lamps due to the slow-speed emulsion of the film: “Percy had developed a new type of small lamp to give local as against general lighting and became quite a master at this new technique” (Girdlestone 1975: 19). The most accomplished cameramen were those employed at studios that could sustain production, such as Welsh-Pearson and Stoll. Continuity of employment encouraged proficiency and cameramen like Strong and Cox benefited from working consistently with closely knit teams. Foreign technicians, who started arriving in Britain very early on in the industry, also helped to raise the standards of British cinematography. The London Film Company, for instance, hired the Italian Alfonso Frenguelli, the American Ernest Palmer and the Dane Gustav Pauli. George Pearson’s regular cameraman from 1915 to 1923 was the Frenchman Emile Lauste (Petrie 1996: 10). But it took the arrival of American cameramen at the British Famous Players-Lasky studios in Islington in the early 1920s to spur the importation of new lighting equipment. Apparently they had insisted that they “could not do good work over here with our hitherto almost universal enclosed long arc” (Bennett 1921: 84). Wohl “broadsides”, Klieg side lamps, Cooper-Hewitt mercury vapour banks and Sun-Light arcs were introduced to the studio and the proud management invited members of the industry to come and examine the premises (Bennett 1921: 84). Dickinson recalled how excellently equipped the studios were. But British cameramen needed to acquire the skills to use the new equipment, and when the first Kleig lights arrived at the Clarendon Film Company, nobody knew how to use them (Dickinson 1963). In the mid-1920s, improvements in cinematography became noticeable, particularly in the co-productions or films shot overseas. During this time, new producers, with a more internationalist and ambitious attitude, were emerging in Britain including Michael Balcon and Wilcox. Faced with a meagre market and lack of resources in Britain, they started to seek foreign talent, backing and distribution links for their films. Expert cameramen including the cosmopolitan René Guissart who photographed Chu Chin Chow (1925) and Theodor Sparkuhl who photographed Decameron Nights (1924) were employed. Also in the mid-1920s, Balcon was a frequent visitor to Neubabelsberg (Balcon 1969: 53) where a series of Ufa and Gainsborough co-productions were made including Die Prinzessin und der Geiger (The Blackguard, 1925) with cinematography by Sparkuhl. Hitchcock was art director on this film and directed The Pleasure Garden (1925) and The Mountain Eagle (1926) – co-productions between Emelka and Gainsborough – at

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Emelka’s studios in Munich (Thomas 1973). German filmmakers were considered pioneers in special effects, lighting, camera angles and camera movement. Kinematograph Weekly reported on the German filmmakers’ efficiency: “They start early every morning; their scenarios have time-schedules for each day’s work; and their cameramen with £1,000 outfits are not treated as handle-turners.” They asked “has the British producer nothing to learn in these directions?” (25 August 1927: 38). In German studios the cameraman was afforded a great deal of respect, and included in the creative decision-making process. There was an explicit sense of “film craftsmanship” among the personnel, a factor which Paul Rotha argued contributed to “the perfection to which German cameramen have taken the technical qualities of their photography” (Rotha 1949: 255). “Exhaustive experimentation” (Herlth 1973: 62) was encouraged among production crews; hence technological advances were often striking and recurrent in German studios in the 1920s. Cameramen such as Karl Freund and Carl Hoffmann had articles published on them in the British film journal Close-Up – only British cameraman Emmott was granted such prestige (Blakeston 1929: 468–71). British cameraman Ronald Neame explained: We were all influenced very much by German films possibly more than we were influenced by American films. That’s why the Germans became the most soughtafter cameramen for that particular period in England. We weren’t very interested in Hollywood in those days. (Neame 2007) Small-scale British production companies offering sporadic employment could not retain ambitious filmmakers; many left for America for better wages and career prospects. In 1926, Kinematograph Weekly observed that if British production picked up it would be quite probable that the industry would be faced with a lack of cameramen (“The Observation Window” 1926: 85). However, the same journal’s columnist P.L. Mannock was outraged by his friend Graham Cutts’ claim that there were not more than three capable cameramen in Britain and listed several examples of accomplished cameramen working in Britain. “Give them equipment, and don’t rush them – in other words, give them the same chance as imported Americans, and this complaint about British photography will evaporate” (Mannock 1926). These observations were made repeatedly in the journal, in 1927 by Shenton in an article headed “Why British Cameramen Fail” and in 1928 by an unidentified author (possibly Shenton again), this time headed “The Cameraman’s Notebook: Why some Photography is Poor”. Both articles mount a defence of British cinematography in response to criticisms in the press. The author blames inexperience, low budgets and poorly equipped studios and concluded that before people criticise British filmmaking, they should have some understanding of the conditions the cameramen are working under (“X Ray” 1928: 99). With the introduction of the Cinematograph Act in 1927, larger investments were made in the British film industry. BIP benefited greatly from these developments. Its ambition to rival and imitate Hollywood and Germany, along with the fervour with which it employed film personnel from both countries, led to its being dubbed by the British press as the “European Paramount” (Kinematograph Weekly 21 March 1929: 41). Technical research departments were set up at BIP’s Elstree Studios, such as one led

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by Helmuth Marx. According to one source, Marx had been “the acknowledged master of film lighting” at Ufa and had worked on major German productions including Varieté (E.A. Dupont, 1925) (Kinematograph Weekly 13 January 1927: 105). An article in Kinematograph Weekly entitled “Britain’s Hollywood” reported that: One of the most interesting and advanced sections of the Elstree scheme will be the electric lighting installation, which will surpass all previous efforts in studio illumination, and even in its incomplete present state is capable of producing the most brilliant effects in artistic camera craft. (13 January 1927: 105) The Studio’s cameras included Bell & Howell and there was even a Mitchell – believed to be the only one of its type in the country (Bioscope 18 June 1927: 70). Cox used the Mitchell to shoot The Ring, explaining its qualities: “It cost £1,200, but I can believe that it is an economy in the long run, with its time-saving additions of masks, irises and localised focusing – all integral parts of the box” (Kinematograph Weekly 10 October 1927: 42). John Maxwell, director at BIP, learnt about efficient production organisation from tours of studios in the US and Germany (Kinematograph Weekly 13 January 1927: 56). He employed a regular staff of international cinematographers including Cox, Claude Friese-Greene, Guissart and Sparkuhl, and set designers J. Elder Wills, Hugh Gee and C. Wilfred Arnold. E.A. Dupont’s first two films for BIP, Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929), had Werner Brandes as cameraman and Alfred Junge as set designer. The director-unit system, as in Germany, encouraged technical and stylistic experimentation as regular teams were assembled around a major director. For instance, Hitchcock had regular collaborators including Arnold as set designer and Cox as cinematographer. Reporting on the shooting of The Farmer’s Wife, Kinematograph Weekly remarked that “there is a pleasant intimacy in this young director’s entourage which makes for good work” (10 October 1927: 42). In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, The Ring was one of the few films Hitchcock appeared to enjoy talking about when pressed about his silent filmmaking career. He recounted an anecdote about cameraman Claude McDonnell failing to turn up to set, and being told Cox would be his replacement. Hitchcock claimed Cox wasn’t a principal cameraman and that he “taught him photography” (Bogdanovich 1998: 493). Contrary to Hitchcock’s account, Cox was very experienced, having worked in the industry long before Hitchcock (Sainsbury 1943). He had been under contract for some time at Stoll, probably the largest and most successful studio during the 1920s, and shot some of their most elaborate productions across a range of genres and alongside important directors including Maurice Elvey, arguably the most accomplished British director of this period. At Stoll, Cox would have crossed paths with Hitchcock’s future wife Alma Reville. Indeed Charlotte Chandler quotes Hitchcock as saying that he met Cox in 1923 there. Reville had asked him to shoot some inserts for a film she was editing. When the crew broke for lunch, Hitchcock walked on stage and looked through the camera viewfinder: “A voice behind me said, ‘that’s my job. You stick to what’s in front of it’” (Chandler 2006: 14). Cox’s cinematography drew critical praise throughout the 1920s and he was frequently mentioned by name in reviews. Kinematograph Weekly praised the “good tinting and lighting effects” in The Yellow Claw (13 January 1921). Indeed, Cox used light

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very effectively to create suspense: looming shadows appear on a door and bookcase as a woman is followed back to an apartment where she is then murdered. The Bioscope observed that it was the first film to emerge from the new Stoll studio at Cricklewood: “the big floor space, fine lighting equipment, and other technical resources of which are clearly evident from the result on the screen” (13 January 1921). Contemporary reviews reveal Cox to be equally adept at shooting exteriors including the rugged landscape of Cornwall in Petticoat Loose (1922) and interiors: the luxuriously furnished sets of The Gold Cure (1925) (Stoll’s Editorial News 1922: 21 and The Bioscope 1925: 39). Cox left Stoll after hearing his wages were to be reduced and went freelance, demonstrating his versatility with two extraordinary films: Blighty (1927) for Gainsborough Pictures and Hindle Wakes (1927) for Gaumont-British Picture Corporation (Sainsbury 1943: 33). The reviews of Hindle Wakes all drew attention to the photography by Shenton and Cox as effective in conveying atmosphere and the impressions and thrills of Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The sequence at the fair is imaginatively shot, simulating the feeling of being on the rides by mounting the camera on them. Cox would recollect this as his most unpleasant shooting experience, but he was proud of its authenticity, unrestricted by sound filmmaking and the studio (The Cine-Technician 1943: 34). A reviewer for Kinematograph Weekly exalted, “the camera angles and dissolving impressions [are] equal to the best Germany has given us” (10 February 1927). Both Hitchcock and Walter Mycroft (then scenario editor and literary adviser at BIP and whose idea The Ring was based on) were heavily influenced by German cinema, and if they wanted to emulate the style and content of Varieté with its extravagant subjective camera shots, Cox’s experience would have made him an appealing collaborator. The Ring is a virtuoso production, foregrounding both the talent of the crew and the extensive equipment BIP had amassed; it positively pulsated with light and shade. For instance, in a night sequence at the fairground campsite, Hitchcock built suspense by cutting cleverly between three evocatively lit spaces. Fairground boxer Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) is being persuaded by a promoter to join him and professional boxer Bob Corby (Ian Hunter). Meanwhile Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis), Jack’s girlfriend, is being seduced by Bob. All this action is observed by a fortune teller spying from her caravan. Light streams in from her window and glows from the fireplace. A close-up of Jack clasping the promoter’s hand is delicately cross-dissolved with Bob’s hands moving a snake bracelet up Mabel’s arm, both points of action “sealing the deal”; one professional, the other sexual. Lighting was no longer simply “illumination” but integrated wholly into the drama. Point-of-view shots, imitating a character’s vision, are used frequently along with trick shots and superimpositions, often to reveal inner turmoil. At a raucous house party, Jack can see reflected in a mirror Mabel (now his wife) and Bob flirting in another room. Despite turning his head to listen to a friend talking – an impression the camera imitates by panning to one side – the couple “follow” his line of vision, eventually superimposed over his friend. As they lean in to kiss, their image enlarges, obtruding his friend talking. There is a dissolve to girls frenetically dancing, which is then distorted to stretch the image. Cox then dissolves to piano keys being played and applies a similar elongated effect. The image becomes further multi-layered with a person playing guitar and a record player spinning wildly and then, finally, the lovers kissing. Hitchcock and Cox sought a visual equivalent for the “noise” inside Jack’s head, a build-up of emotional despair that finally cross-dissolves with a close-up of Jack’s anguished face. The climatic fight between

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Bob and Jack is a virtuoso piece of point-of-view filmmaking. It incorporates a moving camera, dynamic framings, close-ups, long shots and superimpositions to dizzying effect. When Jack is knocked out by Bob, the screen suddenly flashes with light and the camera becomes mobile, creating a subjective impression of Jack being disoriented by the punch. The white rope from the boxing ring is superimposed and multiplied over the image, creating a dizzying array of horizontal lines. White circles of light appear gradually, moving into focus to reveal themselves as lights in the stadium and the umpire’s arm enters the frame to count down. This sequence is incredibly impressionistic, almost avant-garde. It bares comparison to the films of Hans Richter which were shown at The Film Society in London, a popular destination for filmmakers. Hitchcock proudly recalled that one of the elaborate sequences in the film received a round of applause at its première (Truffaut 1978: 59). Barry Salt observes that because sound films were delayed in coming to Europe, its late silent films developed stylistic features to an extreme that was not possible in the US (Salt 1992: 179). The energy devoted to reaching a wider market accelerated this trend in Britain. Cinematography and editing were often given particular attention beyond those productions at BIP. Anthony Asquith’s late silent masterpieces like Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) include similar virtuoso camera techniques, lighting effects and editing and were equally inspired by wider aesthetic movements such as Soviet Montage and German Expressionism. Many contemporary critics delighted in cinematic spectacles based upon the creative use of the camera’s potential. However, some bemoaned the loss of dramatic values. Close-Up wrote of The Ring that: “If the director had been a little less busy demonstrating that the British studios are the best in the world, he might have given us a little characterisation” (Herring 1928: 36). Yet this is exactly what BIP wanted – a product that would promote the studio; establish its reputation abroad. A striking technique, similarly to stars, could increase exportability (Rowson 1929: 34). Whilst the strategies implemented at BIP might not have resulted in a unified aesthetic standard or “BIP style”, their films contributed to impressive stylistic improvement and quality in British films. The Ring is not an isolated silent masterpiece by a singular visionary director but one of many striking productions that emerged from the studio. In this sense The Ring is as much a BIP film as a Hitchcock one. The opportunities afforded Hitchcock at the studio in the late 1920s (when silent film reached its creative zenith) demonstrate that BIP played as significant a role in his career as his previous work under Michael Balcon at Gainsborough Studios. As Charles Barr has observed, Hitchcock was often silent about the debt he owed his British collaborators (Barr 2011: 64). This serves Cox a particular injustice. They were kindred spirits. They both delighted in exploring the camera’s capabilities: they were often overheard having discussions about trick effects. Cox would go on to shoot all of Hitchcock’s BIP films and would recall Hitchcock as his favourite director, second to Asquith (Sainsbury 1943: 33). The auteur focus of many Hitchcock studies has also devalued the role of the cinematographer in the creation of his films. Hitchcock was indisputably a visionary director, yet he can hardly be credited with responsibility for all the stylistic developments in his films. Of course, it is near impossible to establish what crew member was responsible for what device; filmmaking is a collaborative enterprise, subject to cultural and economic forces. At BIP, Cox was the highest-paid cameraman, receiving £100 a week, which was apparently more than most directors (E.M. Smedley-Aston 1997). He would continue to

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have an illustrious career in the industry, influencing many British cameramen including Ronald Neame, Jack Cardiff and Bryan Langley. The latter recalled that despite having numerous continental “star cameramen” at BIP, “Cox was the king of cameramen” (Langley 2005). Nationality was not a precondition for talent and British cameramen demonstrated that given the same opportunities as their continental counterparts, they could be their equals.

Further reading Gledhill, C. (2003) Reframing British Cinema, 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion, London: BFI Publishing. Low, R. (1950) The History of the British Film 1914–1918, London: George Allen & Unwin. Low, R. (1970) The History of the British Film 1918–1929, London: George Allen & Unwin. Salt, B. (1992) Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (2nd Expanded Edition), London: Starword.

References Anon. (1921a) “The Yellow Claw,” The Bioscope, 13 January, p. 60. Anon. (1921b) “The Yellow Claw,” Kinematograph Weekly, 13 January, p. 60. Anon. (1922) “Petticoat Loose”, Stoll’s Editorial News, 28 December, p. 21. Anon. (1925) “The Gold Cure,” Bioscope, 22 October, p. 39. Anon. (1926) “The Observation Window,” Supplement to Kinematograph Weekly, 21 January, p. 85. Anon. (1927a) “British National Strengthened,” Kinematograph Weekly, 13 January, p. 56. Anon. (1927b) “Britain’s Hollywood,” Kinematograph Weekly, 13 January, p. 105. Anon. (1927c) “Hindle Wakes,” Kinematograph Weekly, 10 February, p. 50. Anon. (1927d) “Elstree: Britain’s First Big Scale Enterprise,” Bioscope, British Film Number, 18 June, p. 70. Anon. (1927e) “The Way Germany Works,” Kinematograph Weekly, 25 August, p. 38. Anon. (1927f) “The Faculty of Herts,” Kinematograph Weekly, 10 October, p. 42. Anon. (1929) “Arthur Dent’s Tour. B.I.P. in Latin Countries. Southern Europe’s Welcome,” Kinematograph Weekly, 21 March, p. 41. Balcon, M. (1969) Michael Balcon Presents … A Lifetime of Films, London: Hutchinson. Barr, C. (2011) “Hitchcock and Early Filmmakers,” in T. Leitch and L. Poague (eds.) A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing. Barrett, E. E. (1927) “Hollywood in Herts,” Picturegoer, March, p. 46. Bennett, C. N. (1921) “Technical Survey of 1920,” Kinematograph Year Book, p. 84. Bennett, C. N. (1924) “Technical Survey of 1923,” Kinematograph Year Book, p. 217. Blakeston, O. (1929a) “Interview with Carl Freund [sic],” Close-Up, January, pp. 58–61. Blakeston, O. (1929b) “A Talk on Technique. A.B.C. of the New Cinema: Basil Emmott,” Close-Up, December, pp. 468–471. Bogdanovich, P. (1998) Who the Devil Made It? Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Boughey, D. (1921) The Film Industry, London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons. Chandler, C. (2006) It’s Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, A Personal Biography, London, New York Sydney: Applause Theatre Book Publishers. Girdlestone, B. (1975) “I Remember It Well,” Guild of British Film Editors Journal, December, No. 46. Girdlestone, B. (1978) “I Remember It Well,” Guild of British Film Editors Journal, March, No. 50.

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Herlth, R. (1973) “With Murnau on the Set,” in Eisner, L.H., Murnau, London: Secker & Warburg. Herring, R. (1928) “The Latest British Masterpiece,” Close-Up, January. Hoffman, C. (1929) “Camera Problems,” Close-Up, July, pp. 29–31. Jenkins, H. (1995) “Historical Poetics,” in Hollows, J. and Janovich, M., Approaches to Popular Film, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Mannock, P.L. (1926) “Our Good Cameramen,’ Kinematograph Weekly, 15 April. Petrie, D. (1996) The British Cinematographer, London: BFI. Rotha, P. (1949) The Film Till Now: A Survey of World Cinema, London: Vision. Rowson, S. (1929) “The Future of British Talkies: The Insularity of Our Outlook,” Kinematograph Weekly, 27 June, p. 34. Sainsbury, F. (ed.) (1943) “Close-Ups No. 20 Jack Cox,” The Cine-Technician, March–April. Shenton, W. (1927) “Why British Cameramen Fail,” Kinematograph Weekly, 24 March, p. 71. Thomas, B. (1973) “Alfred Hitchcock: The German Years,” Action, January–February. Truffaut, F. (1978) Hitchcock, London: Granada Publishing Limited. Vincendeau, V. (1998) “Issues in European Cinema,” in Hill, J. and Church-Gibson, P. (eds.), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Wilcox, H. (1967) Twenty-Five Thousand Sunsets, London: Bodley Head. “X Ray” (1928) “The Cameraman’s Notebook: Why some Photography Is Poor,” Kinematograph Weekly, 8 March, p. 99. Young, F. (1999) Seventy Light Years: A Life in the Movies, London: Faber & Faber.

BECTU interviews (Interviews copyright of the BECTU History Project: https://www.bctu.org.uk/advice-resources/ history-project.) Desmond Dickinson (5 July 1963) interviewed by Ralph Bond. Leonard Harris (18 March 1981) interviewed by Alan Lawson and Manny Yospa. E.M. Smedley-Aston (30 April 1997) interviewed by Roy Rowler. Freddie Young (24 March 2003) interviewed by Alan Lawson.

Interviews with author Jack Cardiff (28 September 2005). Bryan Langley (30 June 2005). Ronald Neame (2 February 2007).

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4

DESIGNING THE SILENT BRITISH FILM Laurie N. Ede In 1928, towards the end of British cinema’s silent era, the film critic Eric Elliott hinted at the gains made by British set designers: Surely no one can suppose that the interior scenes of a photoplay spring from the ground, all ready for “shooting”. They must be constructed; and where constructed, they may be designed … an art director is free to “compose” the whole picture in such a manner that it will enhance the dramatic interpretations. (Elliott 1928: 25–26) But in the earliest days, British film sets had appeared to emanate from nowhere; or, at least, to be arranged in an arbitrary manner, typically by the director. The set designer (or “art director”) took a while to emerge and, as Elliott suggested, his or her arrival greatly extended the narrative range of British cinema. Of course, this is to write in broad terms. Notably, when we talk of “silent cinema” we conflate over 30 years of British film activity. In design terms, it is better to think of the wordless/soundless era of British cinema as having three phases: the primitive or pioneer phase (1895–1907), the early experimental period of cinema; the transitional phase (1907–18), wherein films became longer and studio practices developed; and the early studio phase (1918–27). As we know, the literal end of silent cinema in Britain did not come until 1929 and the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, but 1927 was the more significant year for British film design because of the impact made by the Cinematograph Films Act. Amongst other considerations, that legislation drew a heavy line under the first developmental phase of the British film industry. The pioneer phase of cinema was the time when filmmakers, in Britain and elsewhere, began to explore the distinctive possibilities of moving pictures. Initially, the appeal of films lay in the basic sensation of movement. John B. Rathbun recalled in 1914 that: “The moving picture of the period attracted crowds, not because of the interest of the subject, but simply for the reason that it moved” (Rathbun 1914: 43). But the lure of the actuality film was short lived. According to the British film pioneer Robert W. Paul, audiences started to tire of everyday scenes by 1897 and producers had to deliver new sensations (Paul in Bromhead 1933: 5–6). This led to the development of two new kinds

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of subject; the “topicals” (films recording newsworthy events such as the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901) and “made-up” films. It was the latter products that brought the film designer tentatively into the picture. It is generally argued that narrative films of this era were set against painted backcloths. Actually, this was never the case – few of the early film producers were satisfied with backcloths alone. A rough sense of three-dimensional verisimilitude prevailed in films such as George Albert Smith’s The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) with its improvised train seats and few items of luggage or Paul’s Come Along Do (1898), whose poorly painted gallery exterior was dressed with a couple of pot plants. The evidence of these films, and others by early British directors such as James Williamson, suggests that, from the start, British filmmakers tried to impart depth to their sets. The early British “made-up” films also show that, contrary to the claims of the Italian scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini and others, cinema did not make an early decision to abandon realism (Liehm 1986: 104). In Britain, as elsewhere, pioneer filmmakers decided that, aesthetically, films should move away from theatre and attempt to depict reality. The fact that some of these early films did not much resemble reality was a matter of poor draughtsmanship. It also reflected the limitations of the early “dab hand” school of film design, wherein settings and props were entrusted to the crew member who seemed most adept at art. As a matter of expediency, that person was often the director himself, as the British designer Norman Arnold recalled in 1927: In the early days of film production, the director himself was the Jack of all trades. He did practically everything; wrote the story, designed settings, supervised the building, gave a hand with the painting. (Arnold 1927: 171) Characteristically, Cecil Hepworth recalled that his initial self-painted scenery (from 1901) was intended merely “to give the appearance of a room, kitchen or drawing [room] or what not” (Hepworth 1951: 52). The sets of primitive British films often looked “cheapjack”; the designer and critic Edward Carrick contended that in the first British films, nobody “bothered about detail, atmosphere and similar things” (Carrick 1948: 12). Paul’s films were notably poor in scenic terms. The trick effects of The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901) were excellent but the theatre was badly painted. Paul’s A Chess Dispute (1903) was cruder still. The film hinged on a comic argument between two chess players, but the setting was mysterious; the few columns, vases and shrubs suggested a weird cross between a bourgeois garden and a conservatory. Clearly, the design of films was taken for granted during the pioneer period. But the very act of “making up” stories meant that some notion of design was bound to emerge: if we imagine stories then we must also imagine their settings. By 1907, this point was acknowledged in America, as a report in The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly made clear: Besides author, stage manager and actors, there is an artist who plays an important part in the production. He must paint scenes that cannot be caught with the camera, and must make them look like the real thing. (Anon. 1907: 85)

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In Britain too by this time, filmmakers realised that it might be helpful to employ someone to contrive the physical environments for films. Revealingly, The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly also reported on the work of a film crew in Acton consisting of a stage manager, scene shifters, a “property man” and a “bioscope operator” (Anon. 1907: 98). It was that property man who would develop into the first manifestation of the art director, their arrival encouraged by the development of the first studios in Britain. The transitional phase of British silent cinema was the period when Britain had studios but no studio system. The latter would finally come in the aftermath of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927. Between 1907 and 1914 (or thereabouts), British films underwent a period of increased capitalisation, albeit fragmentary, as producers attempted to meet the demands of specialised audiences. Two major things happened, both of significant consequence for British film design: films grew longer; and film factories were devised. Hepworth reported that the first long silent films came about because of director ambition. But developments in exhibition venues – from the early travelling fairs to converted shops to purpose-built cinemas – meant that, from 1909, every producer was obliged to think beyond short subjects. Audiences began to expect a full evening’s entertainment in the manner of the theatre. Will Barker’s production of Henry VIII in 1911 was an important innovation, at 25 minutes long, and it was followed shortly by British and Colonial’s 3,000-ft (90-min) The Battle of Waterloo (1913) and the even longer Ivanhoe (1913) from the Independent Film Company. (The latter was filmed ambitiously on location at Chepstow Castle.) Longer subjects brought distinct challenges and possibilities for emerging British designers; John Rathbun noted that the “demand for [long] plays led to the complete transformation of the motion picture business” (Rathbun 1914: 50). New staging equipment had to be installed in studios to cope with the scenic variety which was necessitated by longer films. Importantly, longer stories were also trickier to communicate and harder for audiences to understand – cross-cutting between locations and temporal shifts became common. Title cards could help smooth the transitions, but designers were increasingly required to provide clear settings for the various locations, both real and studio-based. The designer’s task was also affected during the 1910s by developments in studio design. The earliest primitive studios – such as those built by Paul (Muswell Hill), Hepworth (Walton), Bromhead (Brixton) and Smith (Brighton) – were al alfresco affairs. These early stages turned out to be of limited worth, because of the capricious English weather: Bromhead lamented, “Sometimes the whole thing was blown down, wet weather was entirely hopeless, while even on fine days clouds had a habit of obscuring the sun at crucial moments” (Bromhead 1933: 13). These factors led to British filmmakers shifting indoors. The technical visionary Paul built a sophisticated raised stage which was partly enclosed and thereafter film companies began to build substantial glass studios. By 1914, these had developed into reasonably sophisticated operations, sometimes with large areas of floor space and well-resourced workshops. British and Colonial’s studios at Hoe Street (London) were converted (not unusually) from a skating rink and had a huge 18,900-square-feet stage which could hold 20 sets at a time. Such facilities helped B&C pull off such design feats as a reproduction of Florence Nightingale’s ward for Florence Nightingale (1915), the replica of a ship’s deck for The Loss of the Birkenhead (1914) and multi-set spectaculars such as The Battle of Waterloo (1913). The London Film Company

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also offered good facilities judged by the standards of the day. Like B&C and Hepworth, LFC claimed that it did not use canvas or painted sets and it boasted that its stock rooms allowed it to produce total screen realism (Anon. 1919: 11). Clearly, British design in the mid-1910s had progressed through a major period of transition – in places, it was even starting to develop standardised production methods. But two things were lacking. To begin with, the efforts of designers continued to be unrecognised in the pre-war period, both by the film press and the industry itself. In America, Wilfred Buckland was designated an “Art Director” as early as 1914, but no such title existed in Britain. More importantly, the British film industry lacked a coherent idea of the function of the film designer; except, perhaps, in the case of the director George Pearson. Pearson felt that British films could learn much from American and German approaches to design. He also took a holistic approach to film craft, insisting that all recorded scenes, whether studio or location, must be purposeful and integrated into the fabric of the film. More than anything – and more than anyone during the midsilent era – Pearson insisted that design actually mattered. Pearson’s attitude towards design could be usefully compared to that of another leading director of the transitional period, Cecil Hepworth. Hepworth was a believer in naturalism, who declared “I would never work indoors if I could possibly get into the open air” (Hepworth 1953: 144); unsurprisingly, he was unmoved by German studio showpieces The Golem and Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (both 1920). In contrast, Pearson felt that cinema should aim to do more than simply record the world: The art of the screen must lie in its ability to transmit thought. … She (the screen) has not to concentrate on providing excellent snapshots of things the eyes of all may see. … To aim at reproducing every tiny detail is not art, it is cataloguing. (Pearson 1923) To Pearson, the camera’s ability to record was far less important than its ability to facilitate the drama. He expected all of his collaborators to play their part in both developing the story (there being no words to help explain the action on screen) and heightening the emotional tension. Characteristically, Pearson asked his two designers – Ernest Jones and Harry Jonas – to consider the narrative and emotional value of every prop: Take, for example, a narrow ugly slum alley. In it there is a closed door, a chink in the wall through which people will pass. Behind it there is a story yet to be told … that door is the key to a thrilling mystery … do all you can to give that door character, its own individuality. (Pearson 1923) Ultimately, Jonas would become a key interlocutor to Pearson, helping him develop a symbolist approach to design based on spare detail. Pearson’s latter film company WelshPearson would often use a few key props to “allow the sets [to] suggest more than they determine” (Pearson 1923). This technique was deployed in Love, Life and Laughter (1923) where Jonas and Pearson used a clock mechanism to figure an entire factory; bright light was shone through the workings to create a machine-like shadow on a whitewashed wall. The symbolist house design style was pushed further in Reveille (1924)

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where Jonas evoked the spirit of Trafalgar Square on Armistice Night by using location footage combined with one studio-built replica of Landseer’s lion sculpture. Not surprisingly, Pearson’s vision of an artist-led popular cinema found favour with young British designers. Edward Carrick, who first encountered the director during his spell as a tenant director at the Stoll studios in Cricklewood, believed that Pearson “knew too much for the British industry” (Ede 1993); Lawrence P. Williams felt that WelshPearson was the only company that had the technical wherewithal to emulate the great Russian and German films of the silent era (Ede 1993). But Pearson’s idealism was built on his distance from mainstream British cinema. The consistent patronage of producer T.A. Welsh gave Pearson the space to maintain his authorial vision. Circumstances were different for the mainstream British producers who had large studios to maintain. As the silent period progressed, British companies faced increasing problems trying to preserve their market share in the face of European and American competition; by 1925, only 5 per cent of screen time in British cinemas was occupied by British-made films and many of the companies who had formed in the pre-war period had gone bankrupt. The financial stresses of the British film industry inevitably impacted upon its technical progress. By and large, throughout the greater part of the 1920s British design suffered from a bad case of arrested development. Overall, British design suffered from two primary deficiencies; a shortage of money and a lack of vision. It is difficult to locate a firm starting point for British films’ economic problems. Pearson felt that the “rot” started as early as 1906, when Britain lost ground to the spectacular films coming out of Italy, America and (in particular) France; Hepworth conceded that British films were poorly received by domestic audiences by 1910. But the British film industry was seriously undermined by the First World War. The war caused personnel shortages in British studios and engendered the collapse of the major export markets. Moreover, the four-year period of enforced quiescence enabled both Germany and America to steal the march on the British film industry. The allied blockade had useful consequences for German film producers, who found new markets to fill in the film-starved countries of central Europe; 33 per cent finance from the German Government also permitted the development of the powerful Ufa vertically integrated combine. The circumstances behind Hollywood’s climatic rise to power were identified, in sardonic manner, in July 1920 by the British producer Martin Sabine: Brought to a full stop, as we were by the war … we have a lot of lost time and lost ground to recover. … Other nations, whose time until towards the end of the war was more their own, went ahead of us in all the necessary attributes of successful production. (Sabine 1920: ix) Sabine explained that America’s war savings had allowed it to create purpose-built studios, large enough to allow for big sets and the full range of camera shots. Clearly, American films benefited from other natural advantages. The Californian weather was a huge plus. Critics Robert E. Welsh and Ernest Dench observed that the sun enabled Hollywood producers to maximise the use of their studios – schedules could be planned around the equable weather – and, at the same time, provide the irradiant scenes which swiftly became part of the inspiring Hollywood brand (Welsh 1916: 52; Dench 1919: 14).

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These broad economic factors impacted daily on the work of the British designer. In Hollywood and Germany (up until its own film slump of 1927) art technicians felt secure within environments which were geared towards making films in a considered and wellresourced manner. British designers felt no such encouragement. L.P. Williams claimed that there were still British studios in 1926 who boasted that they didn’t need an art director (Williams 1936: 121). Similarly, Norman Arnold noted that art direction had “always been considered a luxury” by the British film industry (Arnold 1927: 171). Most compellingly, Charles Dalmon, who worked in the 1920s as art director to George Clark Productions, found that the British art director was a despised creature: As a matter of fact, he scarcely exists at all; and until he does exist in a more concrete form, many shortcomings now so evident in British productions will remain exactly as they are. (Dalmon 1920: xv) British art directors envied Hollywood designers their power and facilities (Dalmon described Hollywood design chiefs as “tin gods”) and the German designers their creative freedom. Doubtless, Arnold expressed the sentiments of many when he remarked that German designers had the opportunity to “exploit the dramatic value of the set”. In contrast, he found that British films were too often satisfied with sets which resembled “a cross between a seaside café, a cheap photographer’s studio and a second hand store” (Arnold 1927: 171). Arnold had a right to his opinion. He had studied German design methods first hand in 1924. Moreover, he was one of the few British designers of the 1920s to establish a coherent body of work and he did much to formalise the British art department. Arnold entered films in 1920, following architectural training and war service in the Royal Flying Corps. (Some of Arnold’s paintings of his flying experiences were acquired by the Imperial War Museum.) He was employed initially by Famous Players-Lasky at its new studios in Islington. The studios at Poole Street would in future decades be thought of as a dismal backwater, but in 1920 they were considered state of the art. Converted from a former power station, Poole Street had two stages, a scene dock, a tank and an anti-fog heating system (the latter a major boon in an era where shooting, indoor or out, was frequently ruined by London smog). Over time, and after an initial stint as Leslie Dawson’s design assistant, Arnold established a coherent art department at Islington. By 1921, all the departments had blueprints for sets, based upon the director’s requirements. The diligent Arnold also put other disciplines in place at Islington, such as routines for the striking and storing of sets. But Arnold was more than just a bureaucrat. He had a strong feeling for the dramatic impact of contrasting décor and he was a versatile artist. Arnold’s earliest designs, typically in crayon and Conte, were precise, resembling architectural elevations. With experience, and influenced by his experiences in Germany (he designed Herbert Wilcox’s Chu Chin Chow and Decameron Nights in Germany in 1923 and 1924), Arnold developed other styles. Watching the German artists, he realised that more dramatic subjects sometimes required a more expressive technique. Consequently, from the mid-1920s (he worked in films right up to his death in 1964) Arnold endeavoured to use different mediums and styles to fit the mood of the film.

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Arnold was one of the very few British designers to enjoy continuous employment through the latter silent period. But the most prolific designer of all was Walter Murton. Rachael Low rightly adjudged that Murton “was responsible more than any other person for the characteristic look of the British films of the period” (Low 1997: 244). Like Arnold, Murton originally set out to work in interior design. Following initial training at the Norwich School of Art (he was born in Norwich in 1892), Murton worked for interior design companies in Birmingham and London. His entry into films came directly following his 1914–18 war service, when he was taken on as resident art director at the new Stoll studios in Cricklewood. For the better part of the 1920s, Murton enjoyed the enviable privilege of continuous employment and he was proud to report to the Kinematograph Year Book of 1925 that he had “‘set’ every production by this firm” (Rayment 1925: 148). Stoll Picture Productions Ltd was owned by the Australian-born theatrical impresario Sir Oswald Stoll. The company’s first films were produced at the Regent House Estate overlooking Surbiton Park, shot both in the 17-acre grounds and in the house itself. In a manner which presaged the later “house style” of Hammer films, Murton was obliged to incorporate the architectural features of Regent House into his designs; in the case of Maurice Elvey’s The Swindler (1919), many scenes were shot in the one drawing room. Facilities improved greatly in 1920 when Stoll acquired a former aeroplane factory. This was expensively equipped to form the largest studios in England; capable, as Stoll assured his shareholders, of yielding “a very large output of pictures of the most ambitious type” (Stoll 1922: 19). Stoll created his company as a commercial venture, dedicated to the filming of popular plays and novels such as Comradeship (1919) and The Chinese Bungalow (1926). Murton set about his task in a conscientious manner. Uniquely, he made his designs in small format, typically several to the page in 6” x 4” frames. These he coloured in tones of grey, punctuated by dashes of white chalk to signify the doors and windows. Many of the actual Murton Stoll films have been lost over time, but it is possible to make a few observations based on the few that remain and the evidence of contemporary studio stills. Notably, it seems clear that Murton paid closer attention to textures and dressings as time progressed. The 1923 production of Don Quixote (1923) benefited from a few imaginative and well-finished studio town exteriors. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1922) was better still. The mobile camera helped to reveal the quiet humour of Murton’s fusty sets representing 221B Baker Street. The cramped drawing room, with its stuffed bureau, implied something about the preoccupied and eccentric detective. Murton’s assignments at Stoll during the 1920s included a number of other highlights. In 1922, he had the distinction of designing Britain’s first colour film, The Glorious Adventure, an American-financed costume drama, filmed using the two-strip Prizma system. Later, Murton designed the ambitious star vehicle for Harry Lauder, Huntingtower (1927). Picturegoer magazine claimed that this Pearson-directed comedy featured “the largest set ever seen inside a British studio”, being Murton’s 8000-square-foot Baronial Castle. It also featured some expansive location sequences shot in and around Glasgow (Mannock 1927: 12). Murton continued working in British films up to 1943 (his last work was on Gainsborough’s The Man in Grey) but he shared the fate of a number of British technicians in being over-associated with the silent era. To a new generation of British

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designers Murton was strictly of “The Old School”. It all came down to that key date of 1927. By this time, everyone who worked in films was aware of the imminent arrival, inevitably paradigm-shifting, of sound. At the same time, British film culture was shaken up by the Cinematograph Films Act. Added to this were a new generation of British film technicians, who were inspired by the superior technique they saw in continental films of the period. The Act drew a decisive line under the silent period. Old studios were replaced and hundreds of new technicians were employed. But, at the same time, it seemed obvious that Britain lacked a coherent filmmaking tradition. For the rising generation of British designers, this point was underscored by the examples of foreign art direction which they were able to see in the films shown by the Film Society. From 1925, the society (founded by the producer Ivor Montagu, director Adrian Brunel, exhibitor Sidney Bernstein and others) used downtime in West End cinemas, usually Sunday afternoons, to screen “films of intrinsic merit” for the edification of British film technicians and enthusiasts. The programmes included important titles such as Pandora’s Box (1929), The Threepenny Opera (1931), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Battleship Potemkin (1925), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) and Tartuffe (1926), and drew large crowds. Significantly, the audiences included many of the filmmakers who would shape British films during the 1930s and beyond, including producers Michael Balcon and Herbert Wilcox; directors David Lean, Thorold Dickinson and Alfred Hitchcock; and photographers Freddy Young and Desmond Dickinson. They also included a significant number of young art directors such as Edward Carrick, L.P. Williams, Michael Relph, Maurice Carter, David Rawnsley and John Bryan. The German films in particular had a marked effect on the design tyros because of their overt display of the designer’s craft. The expressionist subjects, such as Caligari and Mabuse, showed how lines and planes could create a psychological tone. The venerated films of the New Objectivity, as associated with the director G.W. Pabst, illustrated what could be achieved via the considered manipulation of props and textures. More than anything, Lang’s prodigious magnum opus Metropolis demonstrated the power that could be wrought by progressive combinations of plastic sets, models and other trick effects. Irving enthused: They [German designers] were beginning to think of the camera as a servant rather than as a capricious master – as a machine, like a lithographic press, to reproduce the conceptions of the artist rather than as a snapper of accidental trifles. They united architecture, light and actors in controlled compositions. (Irving 1950: 12) Such ideals had a strong appeal to a new generation of designers who saw the fresh economic circumstances of British films as the opportunity to assert more progressive standards of design. One film of 1926 showed what could be done. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger was designed by Norman Arnold’s brother Wilfred. He had accompanied his elder brother on his trip to Germany in 1923 (as usual, employed as his draughtsman) and had been similarly impressed by what he had seen. The Lodger emerged as the first example of British expressionism. It was made at Islington but it could easily have been mistaken for a Ufa

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production, cloaked as it was in doom-laden, Teutonic shadow. Arnold made full use of the facilities at Islington to produce a thoroughly convincing rendering of the threestorey London home which lay at the heart of the murder mystery. Effective use was made of Arnold’s stairways and the designer also achieved strong textural effects, notably in the composite set which represented the rooms of “the visitor” (Ivor Novello). But The Lodger was remarkable mainly for the unity of direction, photography and design. Arnold’s department provided a glass platform which, when shot from below, revealed the nervous pacing of The Visitor in his upstairs rooms. Moreover, Arnold reacted strongly to Hitchcock’s demands for sparse mise-en-scène in the German manner. The opening murder scene was shot in a dark studio with just a few key dressings: the phone booth, the tea stall, the spare details of the newspaper office combined to telling psychological effect. The Lodger was subtitled “a tale of the London fog”: Arnold’s restraint meant that the viewer was undistracted by detail and at the same time compelled to think about the threat that lay at the heart of the “pea-soup” fog. Charles Barr wrote that, “Our [Britain’s] film culture has no roots in, and no memory of, the silent film period” (Barr 2009: 5). The same might be said of film design of the era. Generally, historians have dwelt on those moments where British art direction came to the forefront (for example, in the films of Michael Powell and David Lean) or, conversely, seemed to absent itself (the British New Wave). But some significant design moments occurred during the wordless and soundless times. Studio techniques were developed and roles consolidated. More than anything, British art designers – and some directors – grew to appreciate the dramatic value of set design.

Further reading Cherchi Usai, P. (2000) Silent Cinema: An Introduction, London: British Film Institute. Ede, L. (2010) British Film Design: A History, London: I.B. Tauris. Low, R. (1997) The History of the British Film – Volume 4: 1918–1929, London: Routledge.

References Anon. (1907a) “The Inner Side of Film Making”, The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 13 June, p. 85. Anon. (1907b) “Biographing a Serial Story”, The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 20 June, p. 98. Anon. (1922) “Stoll Picture Productions: Conditions of the Film Industry”, The Times, 26 September. Bromhead, C. (1933) Reminiscences of the British Film Trade, London: British Kinematograph Society. Dalmon, C. (1920) “Art Direction in British Film Studios”, The Bioscope British Films Supplement, 1 July, p. xv. Dench, E.A. (1919) “Realism in Motion Picture Work: Window Scenes and Water Effects”, Conquest, December, p. 14. Ede, L. (1993) Conversation with Edward Carrick. Ede, L. (1993) Conversation with L.P. Williams. Elliott, E. (1928) Anatomy of Motion Picture Art, Territet: Riant Chateau. Hepworth, C. (1951) Came the Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer. London: Phoenix House Ltd. Irving, L. (1930) “Architecture and the Films”, The Builder, 28 February, p. 428. Irving, L. (1950) “The Designer”, Sequence, Autumn, p. 12.

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Liehm, M. (1986) Passion and Defiance: Italian Film from 1942 to the Present, Berkeley: University of California Press. Low, R. (1997) The History of the British Film – Volume 4: 1918–1929, London: Routledge. Mannock, P.L. (1927) “Screening Sir Harry”, The Picturegoer, August, p. 12. Pearson, G. (1923) “The Art of the Screen”, unpublished speech delivered to the Nottingham Playgoers Club, 19 March. Rathbun, J. (1914) Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting, London: T. Werner Laurie. Rayment, S. (ed.) (1925) Kinematograph Year Book, London: Kinematograph Weekly. Sabine, M. (1920) “The Growth of British Studio Equipment”, The Bioscope British Films Supplement, 1 July, p. ix. Welsh, R.E. (1916) ABC of Motion Pictures, London: Harper and Bros.

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5

STARDOM IN SILENT CINEMA Adrian Garvey I think that Rudy didn’t oughter be termed a star of the first water for how can he eclipse (poor fellow) that human masterpiece Novello though for most men I feel contempt there’s one at least who is exempt for Ivor, king of all the males except perhaps the Prince of Wales, is just the cutest, nicest ever, so handsome virile strong and clever … (“C.N.” 1925: 65)

This verse, part of a tribute from a reader of Pictures and the Picturegoer in 1925, suggests both Ivor Novello’s appeal and his status as the pre-eminent British film star of the 1920s. Its tone of teasing rivalry with Hollywood, with a domestic star favoured over Rudolph Valentino, is also characteristic of much fan magazine correspondence of the time, which often saw admirers of British performers arguing for their greater attractiveness, authenticity and general superiority over those from America. However, beyond these pages, which were hardly a reliable record of audience tastes and preferences, there was much concern in the wider industry around questions of stardom in this period. While the mature studio system now in place in Hollywood was producing such exalted idols as Valentino and Gloria Swanson, British cinema seemed to have no comparable figures. Novello, whose intensely romantic persona was demonstrated in such films as The Man Without Desire (1923) and The Rat (1925), and Betty Balfour, who achieved fame in the “Squibs” comedies as a Cockney flower girl, were generally cited as the only British stars approaching such status. The industry was divided over whether the creation of British film stars was viable, or even necessary. Christine Gledhill identifies “a contradictory mix of opinion” on the subject in the trade press, with “outright resistance to stars for economic and high cultural reasons, equally vocal laments at the lack of investment in stars and reliance on the draw of West End stage names, combined with advice on how to produce and nurture stars” (2003: 77). In addition, the dominant concept of stardom was already codified in

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national terms, as, in Richard Dyer’s words, “a version of the American Dream, organised around the themes of consumption, success and ordinariness” (1979: 39). Inevitably, few British stars corresponded to this inapposite model. The industry’s diffidence and uncertainty were not new, and similar questions of film stardom in Britain arguably remain unresolved. Two decades earlier, the performers of Early Cinema had been largely anonymous. In Britain, as in Hollywood, initial moves to identify these unidentified players, which began around 1910, came about in response to requests from the public. However, as Rachael Low notes, it took several years of such interest, and of letters from members of the audience demanding to know who the pretty girl was in such and such a film, where she could be written to, and if it were possible to obtain a photograph of her … before its commercial properties were fully realized. (1950: 125) “Picture player” or “film player” was the favoured term for performers until the late 1910s, with some occasional, tentative use of the word “star”, often placed in quotation marks, earlier in the decade, as when “Miss Florence Turner” is described by The Bioscope trade journal in 1913 as “the bright and particular ‘star’ of the Turner Film Company” (1913a). Until the mid-1910s film posters rarely mentioned individual performers. It has been suggested that producers feared that named stars would become too powerful and expensive, but it seems rather that their significance for audiences was initially underestimated. The Bioscope, seeking some exhibitors’ thoughts on audience tastes in 1914, considered the elements which “count most in the eyes of the public”. Suggestions included “good acting”, along with “ingenious and original plot, lavish staging, elaborate spectacles”, but there was no mention of the actors themselves (1914b). Stardom gradually became more central to both the economic and aesthetic practice of most national cinemas during the industry’s second decade, with named performers increasingly recognised as exploitable commercial assets. Their identities were used to sell individual films, and also to advertise production companies, who liked to promote their stable of stars, and especially high-profile acquisitions. The intense competition between national cinemas in the early 1910s also encouraged the emphasis on stars as nationally inflected archetypes or ideals. Interest in actors was also stimulated by changes in film form, as the longer narrative films which emerged in the 1910s increasingly focused on character as much as action. In terms of staging and mise-en-scène, the development of continuity editing, and the move away from the frontal tableau style favoured by early cinema, also drew the audience closer to the onscreen space and to the performers, most obviously in the development of the close-up. In addition, the introduction of characters by intertitles which also included the name of the performer, and so linked the relationship between star and role, became a standard convention during the decade. Mapping the development of stardom in Hollywood during the 1910s, Richard de Cordova has argued that during this period audience interest shifted from actors’ work to their private selves: “The picture personality was defined … by a discourse that restricted knowledge to the professional existence of the actor. With the emergence of the star, the question of the player’s existence outside his or her work became the primary focus of discourse” (2001: 98). A similar process took place in Britain during this decade, with

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some national stars emerging, and the development of an ancillary fan culture which disseminated images, interviews and commentary about them. But there were significant differences: Britain’s nascent film industry was much smaller and less coherently organised than Hollywood, and its screens became increasingly dominated by American films – and stars – during this time. In addition, there were the earliest concerns about adapting the model of stardom offered by Hollywood into a British context. The growing desire to identify and promote national stars is evident in the “Greatest British Film Players Contest” which was run by the leading fan magazine Pictures and the Picturegoer in 1915, with voting instructions advising readers that “the players are to be judged by their artistic merits only – not from their popularity or good looks” (1915b). The eventual winner was the Hepworth Company actor Alma Taylor, with Charlie Chaplin in second place, a considerable achievement for Taylor at the time of Chaplin’s first flush of success. The poll results produced a list of 60 admired actors, indicating the rapid emergence of the field since the beginning of the decade (Taylor 1915: 246). Some new stars were created by the medium, but considerable publicity was accrued by attracting performers from other entertainment forms, and other public figures. At a time when the lay press gave limited attention to British stars, the Daily Express gave an enthusiastic front-page review for The Great Game (1916), the second film vehicle for the boxing champion “Bombardier” Billy Wells, noting that “the film is certain to score a great success, not only on account of the story, but because of the personality of the principal player, Billy Wells” (Daily Express 1918: 1). The industry also recruited many established performers from the music hall and the legitimate theatre, where star systems were already in place. British-born Charlie Chaplin made the transition from music hall to film while on tour in America in 1913, where he stayed to become the biggest international star of the decade. A fellow music hall artist, and former childhood friend of Chaplin, Fred Evans became the most popular British-based comic of the period, and was best known for his “Pimple” character. Evans, who came fifth in the 1915 poll, was a stage veteran, born to a family of performers, who began his career as a child, and started making knockabout one-reelers in 1910. He came to the cinema as an established performer, but not a widely known star. Evans initially played the smartly dressed Charley Smiler, a variation of the “dude” character, or comic dandy, who was a music hall archetype, for the producers Cricks and Martin. After moving first to Precision Films, then establishing his own production company in collaboration with his brother Joe and producer Will Kellino, Evans was forced to adopt a new screen persona after legal threats from Cricks and Martin, who claimed ownership of the Smiler character. This new figure, “Pimple”, who appeared first in 1912, was a more dishevelled, proletarian figure than Smiler, distinguished by centre-parted lank hair and, most notably, his striking facial appearance. In the tradition of the “muzzle” associated with the “Auguste” clown figure, Pimple had a circle of white make-up covering the area around his mouth, reaching to the tip of the nose, with dark lines emphasising the nostrils and corners of the mouth. Like the Auguste, as described by Louise Peacock, Pimple was generally “clumsy, incompetent, but eager to do well” (2009: 21), as demonstrated in Fat Man on a Bicycle (1914) in which his attempts to support the overweight cyclist through a suburban street lead to collisions, a violent remonstration from an outraged nanny whose pram is upended and eventual failure.

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Evans and his production team, working from their own West London studio, were extremely prolific, producing over 200 Pimple films between 1912 and 1918. As comic short films declined in popularity, The Bioscope was impressed by the performer’s longevity, noting in 1914 that “there seems to be no end to Mr Evans’s fertility of invention, no shadow on the brightness of his humour” (1914a). Evans sustained his career with a transition to longer comedies, which parodied other popular films and contemporary issues of the day. He played Napoleon in Pimple’s Battle of Waterloo (1913), which satirised a spectacular version of the story in The Battle of Waterloo, produced by British and Colonial in the same year. The tone of the Evans film is immediately established by the opening scene of Napoleon crossing the Alps, which are rendered by rudimentary theatrical flats, with the location identified by a crude wooden marker, a gag repeated throughout the film. Napoleon then enters uncertainly on a one-man pantomime horse, before falling off and destroying part of the mountain scenery. Much of the film’s humour is built on absurd comic incongruities, with Napoleon harangued by a suffragette and Wellington’s army led by boy scouts. The low comedy tone and debunking of heroics is equally evident in Lt. Pimple’s Dash for the Pole (1914), the first of many Lieutenant Pimple adventures, with the explorer and his bo’sun, played by Joe Evans, encountering a policeman, a post office and a pub – The North Pole Arms – alongside the Arctic wildlife, which is reimagined with playful naivety. More recently the subject of some favourable and sympathetic attention, Evans’ reputation suffered for many years in comparison with that of Chaplin. Chaplin’s precision, as both performer and filmmaker – and the relative production standards of Hollywood and Eel Pie Island – make the Pimple films seem crude. But this crudity is also expressive of an enduring low comedy tradition in Britain. Evans deserves recognition as one of the first British film stars, and one who was, in collaboration with his brother Joe, responsible for almost every aspect of production. He also represents an important connection between British cinema and its music hall and circus traditions, a link he actively sustained by maintaining a stage presence alongside his film career, and also sometimes combining both through live appearances at screenings. Jon Burrows has examined the significant and productive relationship between theatre and cinema during the 1910s, when an array of distinguished theatrical actors, including Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Sir Charles Hawtrey, brought adaptations of some of their great stage successes to the screen. Burrows argues that these prestigious and highly publicised star vehicles helped to legitimise the medium, encouraged new audiences and were also harnessed to support developments in the industry, demonstrating that [m]ovies like Barker’s Henry VIII starring Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree became particularly emblematic titles for exhibitors and distributors who, respectively, scheduled the building and opening of new unprecedentedly luxurious exhibition venues around the release of these films and used them to pioneer new methods of film renting. (2003: 126) If for some stage stars, the cinema offered an opportunity to record and preserve some signature roles, others, such as Matheson Lang, developed important film careers. Most, however, were simply supplementing their theatrical income, and the proximity of studios in and around London facilitated occasional film work.

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According to Low’s disparaging account, “many members of the large, undisciplined casts in British films in the early twenties continued to regard themselves as stage actors first and foremost, reduced from time to time to a little slumming on film” (1971: 301). This point reflects a widespread view that the development of British cinema was hampered by its reliance on the stage, which produced over-emphatic acting and a theatrical tableau-style staging. Gledhill has offered a far more nuanced understanding of the relationship between film and theatre in this period, and the importance of “theatricality” as a national cultural mode which “informs British cinema aesthetics through its production of sites of action as metaphorical stages for social performances” (2003: 20). A progenitor of what would come to be known as heritage cinema, The Hepworth Company produced many theatrical and literary adaptations during the 1910s. Arguably the most prestigious and prominent studio of the period, it was also one of the oldest, having been founded in 1899 by the cinema pioneer Cecil Hepworth. The studio also established an impressive stock company of players, whose respectable personae reinforced the genteel and cultured image of the company. The acclaim and popularity achieved by Chrissie White, Alma Taylor, Violet Hopson, Stewart Rome and other Hepworth artists demonstrate both the possibilities and the limits of British film stardom in the period. The Bioscope published its first profile of a female British film performer in 1911, briefly introducing readers to Chrissie White as “A Clever English Actress”. A decade later, with White, and also the whole apparatus of film stardom becoming more established in Britain, the Daily Mirror’s leading front-page story for 22 April 1922, under the headline “Film Stars’ Romance”, announced “the engagement of the famous screen lovers Mr Henry Edwards, the well-known film actor and producer, and Miss Chrissie White, one of the most famous of British film stars” (Daily Mirror 1922: 1). White’s career, nearing its end by the time of her engagement, encompassed over 180 films between 1908 and 1934. It spanned a period of enormous changes within the industry beginning as the “cinema of attractions” declined, and ending in the early sound era, and brought her from anonymous performer to “picture player” and, finally, film star. White was enduringly popular with both critics and audiences, coming fifth in the 1915 poll. Describing her as “a delightful heroine” in The Breaking Point (1914), The Bioscope argued that “this charming young actress seems to showcase in her art all that is pleasantest and best in English acting” (1914c: 93). Her onscreen image as the ingénue of the Hepworth stock company was compounded by her eventual marriage to Edwards, a frequent co-star and sometimes also director and writer of her later romantic dramas (which have largely not survived). The couple were, according to Low, “the most important romantic partnership in British films” (1949: 82). Alma Taylor emerged during the 1910s as the leading lady of Hepworth Company, securing the dramatic roles in films such as Annie Laurie (1916) and Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1916 and 1923), which seemed too emotionally intense for White’s more reserved, innocent persona. However, both actors had achieved fame playing very different characters, the anarchic schoolgirls in the Tilly films, a hugely popular series of comic shorts, which ran from 1910 to 1916. Actress Unity More had first appeared as the eponymous character in Tilly the Tomboy Plays Truant (1910), but was not available to appear in the sequel. According to Hepworth:

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We had two other little girls, just as clever and already on the fringe of our stock company, Chrissie White and Alma Taylor. Which should be chosen to carry on the good work? They were both thoroughly mischievous by nature and equally suitable. Choosing became too invidious. The Gordian knot was cut by taking them both and they kept the series going (and “going” is a very mild way of putting it) for several years. (1953: 76–77) Taylor nominally played Tilly, and White her friend Sally, but, as suggested by the casting decision, they seem almost indivisible, a duplication of disruptive femininity. Usually dressed in matching costumes of pleat-fronted smock dresses, they quickly subvert this image of idealised Edwardian girlhood with conspiratorial glee. The films follow the pattern of much one-reel comedy material, with the friends bringing chaos to various aspects of English life, often climaxing in chase sequences, but the disorder is especially potent with young girls as the unrepentant agents of chaos. Tilly’s Party (1911) shows the girls ordered away to their piano lesson as a family party begins. Instead, they create havoc, covering the servants with food in the kitchen and inviting two young naval cadets upstairs, where they lock a maid inside a wardrobe. As the household collapses in chaos, they escape with the young men on bicycles, pursued by the outraged family, who find them innocently practising the piano at their tutor’s house. The films emphasise the characters’ unbridled delight in violence and destruction: they gleefully hose down a pursuing crowd in Tilly and the Fire Engines (1911); after calling on the bedridden “poor old Mrs Smith” in Tilly the Tomboy Visits the Poor (1910), they drag her bed around the room and take turns bouncing on it, before abandoning her to steal a laundry van. In their animated, attuned performances, Taylor and White convey a joy in their characters’ physical freedom. Most of White’s other roles allowed her far less agency and energy; she is often a handwringing adjunct to the central, male-dominated action of the narrative. In many of her dramatic films she is called on to represent a modest, dutiful femininity, one associated with the values of home and family: fought over by her fiancé and his jealous rival in The Lie (1914); as the supportive sister of the accused man in At the Foot of the Scaffold (1913); and as the daughter who keeps faith in a disgraced man in A Bunch of Violets (1916). In the latter film, her character, also named Violet, pins the titular flowers on her father as an act of devotion; a publicity item noted that “the name she bore suited her to perfection; she reminded one of the flower itself – sweet, retiring” (The Hepworth Picture-Play Paper 1916d). In Wife the Weaker Vessel (1915), one of many films of the period to show suffragettes as gorgons, another comic role for White offers some perspective on this demure persona. In this example, Mr Ponder is mocked by his friends over his subservience to his domineering wife. He takes revenge by introducing the formidable “Physical Culture Phyllis”, played by White, to his friend Mr Filson in the guise of a demure young lady. They marry; then her true character is revealed when Filson arrives home late from his club and she attacks him. The film ends with Phyllis and Mrs Ponder heading for a golf match, while their husbands are left tending to babies. Though White’s role is based on crude stereotyping, it is conceived and acted with a playful understanding of her image. The assertive physicality of Phyllis has echoes of

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the Tilly and Sally characters, but is represented as more threatening in an adult woman character. The more submissive persona she assumes for the deception, as when Phyllis ingenuously suggests to Filson that she hasn’t the strength to handle the oars on their honeymoon rowing boat, is heavily signalled as a performance of “appropriate” femininity, as the comic context permits some satirising of White’s “sweet, retiring” persona. The decorum of the company’s stars was frequently praised, with a review of Paying the Penalty (1913) noting that “the Hepworth players really do know how to behave like ladies and gentlemen before the cameras” (The Bioscope 1913b). As Hollywood’s international consolidation of the industry continued, White, and other Hepworth Company stars, were also proudly identified with distinctly national ideals, with a review of One Good Turn (1915) describing her as “a delightful embodiment of all the best qualities of the typical English girl”, with a performance “full of freshness and youthful charm and natural sweetness” (1915a: iii). Publicity material, profiles and interviews tended to stress White’s simple dedication to her career and modesty about her achievements. Writing herself for Pictures and the Picturegoer in 1919, she vowed that “I will work as hard and as long as they’ll let me – I love my work and I am very happy in it” (White 1919: 688). The company’s already intense promotion of its Englishness was inevitably heightened during the war, and became considerably more jingoistic. An elaborate and verbose 16-page trade paper supplement from 1915, “The Sane Spot”, constructed a crucial wartime role for the company, with its actors, as “Entertainers-in-chief to a Nation at War”, declaring that: We, “oldest, largest, and greatest all-British producers,” now stand as chief servers of the nation in its need for recreation. With our continual production of great plays and with our six stars, we are continually doing what we believe to be our greatest duty to the nation. (The Bioscope 1915b: 399) Despite its cultured, artisanal air, the Hepworth Company promoted its films and actors assiduously. It pioneered film advertising on the London Underground, and distributed postcard images of its players. The appearance of a dedicated company magazine in 1915, The Hepworth Picture-Play Paper, also demonstrated the studio’s ability to foster and control the images of its stars. Like a standard fan magazine, the publication featured profiles, interviews, portraits, production news and readers’ enquiries, though here focused entirely on Hepworth’s output. Naturally, Chrissie White was featured extensively, including accounts of her “discovery”, an important element of many star narratives: “One day when Chrissie White was nine years old, she wrote a note to the chief producer of a picture play company to say that her sister couldn’t work in a film that week as requested, and would she do as well?” (1916b). The fable stresses the air of industry and seriousness which would be emphasised in so much of White’s publicity and press coverage. The magazines include some references to the stars’ off-screen lives, including information on some male stars’ wartime service; on how the romantic leading man Stewart Rome’s time spent working in Australia lent “sincerity, strength and real manliness” to his screen acting (1916c); and on Alma Taylor’s convalescence, after suffering exhaustion from overwork. But there is also a defensive and testy tone in some responses to readers’ enquiries in the “Asked about” columns:

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Is Stewart Rome now in the Army? We had not thought it necessary to explain that Stewart Rome is ineligible on medical grounds. Which of your stars are married? We have written hundreds of paragraphs about our famous stars, and intend to write many more. But we shall never intrude on the personal romances of any of them – so please don’t ask. (1916a) This caution, which denies the access to performers’ “real” lives that de Cordova sees as central to the nature of film stardom, perhaps reflects British cultural norms regarding privacy and discretion. At the same time, another kind of intimacy between audience and star was also lost, or at least reduced, by Cecil Hepworth’s resistance to the close-up. Reviewing The Inevitable (1913), The Bioscope complained that: One would have liked further opportunity given to the players by a little closeup photography. Miss Crissie [sic] White, alone, is quite capable of giving a most delightful performance near to the camera, and, when one has artists who are competent to pass the exacting test, it seems a pity that they should not be permitted to display their talent. (1913c) The studio favoured the medium long shot, and long takes, with very little internal editing during scenes, a style which began to seem increasingly anachronistic as the decade continued. This aesthetic similarly kept the studio’s stars at a distance from their audience that was clearly unwelcome to some. The Hepworth Company continued, successfully at first into the next decade, but collapsed spectacularly in 1924 after a decline in popularity and an ill-advised attempt at expansion. The fortunes of its major stars, Chrissie White, Alma Taylor, Stewart Rome, et al., and those of Ivor Novello, Betty Balfour and others in the 1920s, demonstrate the vitality and significance of British stardom in the period, as well as some of the problems of competing with the already pervasive Hollywood model. Renewed interest in this period, demonstrated by the revisionist work of Burrows, Gledhill and others, continues to reveal it as a rich and complex field of British film culture.

Further reading deCordova R. (2001) Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Dyer, R. (1979) Stars, London: BFI. Gledhill, C. (2003) Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion, London: BFI. Macnab, G. (2000) Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Cassell.

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References Allen, G.F. (1919) “Little Chats with British Film Favourites: Chrissie White”, Pictures and the Picturegoer, 15–22 Feb., p. 181. The Bioscope (1911) “A Clever English Actress”, 28 Dec., p. 941. —— (1913a) “The New Turner Films: A Talk with Mr Larry Trimble”, 15 May, p. 515. —— (1913b) “Paying the Penalty”, 15 May, p. 519. —— (1913c) “The Inevitable”, 3 July, p. 67. —— (1914a) “The Productions of ‘Pimple’”, 22 Jan., p. 337. —— (1914b) “What the Public Wants: An Interesting Symposium”, 19 Feb., p. 815. —— (1914c) “The Breaking Point”, 2 July, p. 93. —— (1915a) “One Good Turn”, supplement, 4 March, p. iii. —— (1915b) “The Sane Spot”, 28 Oct., pp. 393–408. Burrows, J. (2001) “‘Our English Mary Pickford’; Alma Taylor and Ambivalent British Stardom in the 1910s”, in Bruce Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 29–41. —— (2003) Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films 1908–1918, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. “C.N”, (1925) ‘What Do You Think? Your Views and Ours’, Pictures and the Picturegoer, June, p. 66. Daily Express (1918) “Famous Boxer in a Film Play: Drama of the Ring and Racecourse”, 30 Nov., p. 1. Daily Mirror (1922) “Film Stars’ Romance”, 14 Nov., p. 1. deCordova R. (2001) Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Dyer, R. (1979) Stars, London: BFI. Gledhill, C. (2003) Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion, London: BFI. —— (2007) “Reframing Women in 1920s British Cinema: The Case of Violet Hopson and Dinah Shurey”, in Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 4.1, pp. 1–17. Hammond, M. (2000) “‘Cultivating Pimple’: Performance Traditions and the Film Comedy of Fred and Joe Evans”, in Burton, A. and Porter, L. (eds.), Pimple, Pranks and Pratfalls: British Film Comedy Before 1930, pp. 58–68. Trowbridge: Flicks Books. Hepworth, C.M. (1951) Came The Dawn: Memories of a Film Pioneer, London: Phoenix House. The Hepworth Picture-Play Paper (1916a) “Asked About”, Jan., p. 6. —— (1916b) “Greatest British Picture Players No. 3: Chrissie White”, Feb. p. 1. —— (1916c) “Greatest Picture Players This Month: Stewart Rome”, Aug., p. 6. —— (1916d) “A Bunch of Violets”, Nov., p. 4. Low, R. (1949) The History of the British Film: 1906–1914, London: George Allen & Unwin. —— (1950) The History of the British Film: 1914–1918, London: George Allen & Unwin. —— (1971) The History of the British Film: 1918–1929, London: George Allen & Unwin. Macnab, G. (2000) Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Cassell. Peacock, L. (2009) Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pictures and the Picturegoer (1915a) “  ‘Pimple’ Past and Present”, 3 April, pp. 9–10. Pictures and the Picturegoer (1915b) “  ‘The Pictures’ Greatest British Film Players Contest”, 3 April, p. 15. Taylor, V.F. (1915) Pictures and the Picturegoer “Result of Our Greatest British Film Players Contest”, 3 July, pp. 246–249. White, C. (1919) “Chrissie White: On Work and Play”, Pictures and Picturegoer, 13 Dec., pp. 688–690. —— (1924) “The Truth About Film Fame”, Pictures and Picturegoer, July, pp. 20–21, 60. Williams, M. (2003) Ivor Novello: Screen Idol, London: BFI.

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6

THE VIEW FROM THE PIT British silent cinema and the coming of sound

Neil Brand As a co-director and performer at the British Silent Film Festival (BSFF) since its inception in 1998, I have been privileged to witness not only the rediscovery of great movies from the silent period but also the huge strides in scholarly research that have thrown a muchneeded light onto the films, cinema practices and audiences of that time. The BSFF was set up after a particularly bruising reaction to the British season at Il Giornate del Cinema Muto festival of silent film in Pordenone, Italy. The accusation that British cinema was “no good” could not be countered when so much British output from the silent period had simply never been seen. It did not help that there had long been an assumption (somewhat fostered by British film historian Rachael Low) that British cinema led the world in enterprise and experimentation until 1906, after which its silent output consisted chiefly of dreary theatrical adaptations, only briefly illuminated by a wunderkind such as Hitchcock or Asquith. In the years since 1998, thanks to my co-directors Bryony Dixon and Laraine Porter, the festival has thrived, with so much newly discovered British material finding its way once more onto the world stage and redressing the critical balance. Meanwhile, scholarly writing on the specifically British experience of silent cinema now paints a detailed picture of how films were made and distributed in this country throughout the first decades of the twentieth century and how and where their audiences saw them. Aside from being, to my mind, vital social history, this writing has also shown me my cinema-going ancestors and predecessors in the world of silent movie music with a vividness I did not expect to see in my lifetime. Much of the recent scholarship concerning the music of the period was collected in the excellent 2013 anthology The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (eds. Brown and Davison) which, through meticulous research in such unexpected sources as licensing registers and local newspaper reviews, achieved a brilliantly detailed snapshot of British cinema’s many and varied sound accompaniments to silent film. As those of us fascinated by music-making in the period know all too well, there is very little first-hand evidence of what most cinemagoers actually experienced at the time, and given that we are dealing with a pioneering thirty-year period and a huge range of venue sizes and standards, a consensus on that subject is impossible. We have many case-studies, to which I am delighted to add further, and we have the imaginative leaps a modern musician can make into the

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shoes of his predecessors, given what can be gleaned from what we know of the period. Those are the twin purposes of this chapter. There is an unavoidable relationship between a cinema’s music in the silent period and its immediate, local audience. In the early development of the exhibition industry, as more robust exhibition spaces than Bioscope tents came to the fore, local proprietors were in the same quandary as the modern restaurant owner – how to persuade paying punters through their doors rather than either a rival nickelodeon’s or those of a theatre, pub or music hall? The uniqueness of the entertainment was the moving picture’s principal selling-point, yet even in the first decades of the century the outlay of cash investment by venue proprietors was pretty huge. Assuming a cinema of 1912 was running well (and regularly), the weekly costs were likely to be around £20 for staff alone (even in small pre-war houses, a staff of eight was expected), of which the highest paid were the manager, the projectionist and the pianist, who all earned £3 or more a week.1 Then the costs of the films, licences, publicity and upkeep had to be taken into consideration. Of course, manager and projectionist were vital, but the pianist’s qualities become more apparent when gone into in detail: The skilled accompanist will manage, with well-timed improvisations, to smooth over any awkward pauses and abrupt transitions. … Finally, the pianist should commit to memory, or have to hand, a selection of pieces which are likely to suit the various idiosyncrasies of the films. … The pianist should have the films at every change of program projected for his special delectation in order that he may arrange his musical program to suit the pictures and may know what is coming next. Too often films are changed and the man at the piano has no inkling of the subjects excepting what he has gained from a perusal of the synopsis. (How to Run a Picture Theatre: A Handbook for Proprietors, Managers and Exhibitors, published by The Kinematograph Weekly c.1912) So, money well spent on the pianist, then? Well, not necessarily since income was dependent on ticket prices (usually threepence, sixpence and a shilling) and the size of the hall, and here we see the reason why music was often the first hostage to fortune. The World’s Fair periodical calculated that, with a good location and a well-chosen programme, and working fourteen hours a day with “a mountain of anxiety”, a good proprietor might hope for a £10 or £20-a-week profit. Assuming an average entrance fee of threepence that would mean 4,800 tickets sold a week for a return of £60. For a theatre seating 800 (the average figure in 1910) with a continuous show policy of, say, eight programmes per day, this might seem easily achieved, but it was a feature of the continuous shows that the cinemas were seldom full.2 If that is indicative of how tight the profit margin could be on a picture house that was subject to the whims of clientele, weather, popular taste and economic fluctuations, then the other two gentlemen at the top of the payroll were arguably much less dispensable. The music, in hard, economic terms, merely had to be there, not be disruptive and satisfy a none-too-discerning clientele whose main aim was visual delight. This is not to suggest that a good pianist couldn’t make an excellent living; one imagines, primarily, by becoming as much of an attraction as the film. In Eric Leadbitter’s 1920 novel Rain Before Seven, a novice pianist auditions for the manager of a small London cinema.

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“Now what can you play?” asked Mr Potter when they reached the piano. “Anything you like – it depends what sort of stuff you want.” “Well cut along – bright and tuney is the word here; something with a tang in it.” Michael rattled off a ragtime melody just then in vogue and followed it by a few bars of a waltz. “That’s just so – now can you do much of it?” “I can play anything I hear – whistle something and I will show you.” Mr Potter responded with a windy version of a music-hall refrain … the melody was not very clear but Michael managed to catch it and rattled it off with a good deal of dash. He was amused to find how well he was able to imitate the cheap bravura effects that he had heard in such places. Mr Potter, considerably impressed, was struck by an inspiration … Michael was engaged, the arrangement being that he was to play any tune whistled by a member of the audience. His salary was to be 35 shillings a week. (Leadbitter 1920: 186) It is one of the many ironies of doing a job such as silent film pianist that the better one performs, the less obtrusive the music will be – a fine musical performance serving to strengthen the impact of the visuals, not itself. Any number of excellent musicians in the silent period must have faded into the background where their less gifted comrades already laboured at considerably less expense to the management. Anthony Burgess’s anti-heroine Ellen Henshaw in his novel The Pianoplayers is taught by her wayward father the mysteries of cinema accompaniment: “Here’s a chord you can’t do without,” he said, “if you’re a Picture Palace Piano player. You use it for fights, burst dams, thunderstorms, the voice of the Lord God, a wife telling her old man to bugger off out of the house and never come back no more.” And he showed me. C E flat G flat A. Or F G sharp B D. Or E G B flat C sharp. Always the same like dangerous sound, like something terrible’s going to happen or is happening (soft for going to happen, loud for happening) and you can play a whole string of these chords on a different white or black note at the bottom. And you can arpeggiate them to make them more mysterious. (Burgess 1986: 28)3 Grandstanding from the piano would not have been welcomed if it detracted from the film except where an audience expected it. The loyal clientele of a small suburban picture house would have learnt very quickly the tastes and foibles of its musician(s), and vice versa. Certain types of film would play to a musician’s strengths, and even the ones that didn’t would be prepared for by the musician or musical director cunningly choosing music which s/he knew his audience liked, or just sounded decent when played by that particular band. The musician’s most crucial ability would have been that of changing mood, and indeed musical piece, on a sixpence, as soon as the visuals demanded it, an ability that would not have come easily to a trained musician. Quick reactions and a flexible

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awareness of key and tempo were crucial, and these become more acute as soon as there was more than one musician in the pit. Henry Shirley, a New Zealander who played for silent films in London, remembers: It was quite a trick to read music at sight, follow the picture and conduct when needed with the right hand. If there was a quick scene change from, say children playing, to a “baddie” lurking round the corner, I had to grab a number from the “suspense” pile, throw left and right a violin and trumpet part and try to keep some sort of sound coming from the piano until we were ready to start together again. For the next two nights the program would then be in order and we could concentrate on getting the right notes. Then a change of program and a repetition of the process. By Saturday night everything would be running smoothly, from the first pompous notes of the overture to the last tremolo chord of the evening, 3 young musicians could give everything they had and think themselves the best band in town. (Shirley 1971: 56) Repeated use of the same music week in, week out must have been rife throughout the exhibition industry, just as an improvising pianist today has certain motifs or rhythms that can be relied on in certain circumstances. Yet even that could be considered a boon for an audience that had certain expectations of its band and felt the security of a piece they were familiar with played alongside a film they were not. So to expand the musical forces beyond a single pianist was an act of faith that could only be considered if the likely income made it worthwhile. The gradual change from picture houses playing continuous shows to larger cinemas playing only one or two shows a night on a more theatrical model certainly increased the likelihood of generating sufficient profits to justify the expense, and the mushrooming of cinema circuits in the immediate pre-First World War period almost guaranteed them. Now our anxious proprietor with £20-a-week profit to play with has evolved into a behemoth like the Biograph or Electric circuit (often established by theatre entrepreneurs), limited companies that were well subscribed and paying good dividends to their investors. In these permanent venues the band was on a par with the decor, the quality programming of three- and fourreel features and the seat prices. Here, musicians were intended to entertain with and without the film, accompanying live performers, leading singalongs, providing concertquality music throughout the evening and helping the cinema to outgrow the music hall and the legitimate theatre in popularity. But what of the small-business cinema which had no guarantee of long-term survival in 1912, but maybe a couple of years later has established itself as central to the community it serves, has a predictable income, loyal audiences and a distinctive sense of self? One such place would have been the Acock’s Green Picture Playhouse in Birmingham. This is one of several Birmingham cinemas purpose-built around 1913, and by chance a set of the Picturehouse’s programmes from the weeks between 16 November 1914 and 8 May 1915 are available to research.4 What makes them remarkable, and a ripe case-study for students of silent film accompaniment, is that they seem to place equal weight on both the film and music elements of the programme. The audience is told not only what film they will see (with a spoiler-laden plot description for the most important films) but what

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Figure 6.1 Programme from w/c 11 January 1915 for the Acock’s Green Picture Playhouse – collection of Neil Brand (http://originals.neilbrand.com)

The View from the Pit

music they will hear with the films, all performed by the orchestra under the direction of Mr John Wood, who also wrote some of the music they played (see Figure 6.1). Much of the advertising space on the earliest programme is “To Let” but by the time we reach 11 January 1915 all this space is taken; the quality of the films has risen with Beerbohm Tree’s Trilby (1915) playing the first half of the week and Elliott Stannard and Maurice Elvey’s It’s a Long Way to Tipperary (only released two months previously) playing the lucrative second half alongside a Fatty Arbuckle Keystone comedy. The music Wood’s orchestra played for Tipperary is the “Overture” from Oberon, by Weber, a nine-minute piece which would yield up interesting and tuneful selections for a drama such as Elvey’s as well as sounding good with a small ensemble of (possibly) three or four musicians. Quite whether the band also gave us the eponymous song along with Weber (let alone how the two were incorporated) is something we can only guess at, but it would be very likely given the song’s popularity at the time and the opportunity it gave for communal singing. It is noticeable that the programme now also carries a large banner proclaiming “Special Musical Item Each Evening” – so Wood’s band is also promising music unconnected to the film to surprise and delight, and that is considered a big selling point for the programme. We have to assume that these programmes (“No charge is made for this Programme”) must have been prepared well in advance, to act as advertising flyers as much as evening information sheets. As such, the potential audience was being wooed by the twin delights of image and music. That the musical director has not seen the films in advance can be guessed at from the selections and that the descriptions read like trade show patois, suggesting that the film footage was bought by title and sales-package with potentially only a scanty connection between what the audience will see and what they will hear. But the very placing of the musical entertainment at the heart of the screening and the centre of the programme is evidence of the Picture Playhouse’s self-identification as a cinema different to others by dint of its musical planning and advertising. When a comparatively large, high-culture five-reeler feature in the form of Marie Corelli’s adapted novel Vendetta (1915) plays the Acock’s Green Picture Playhouse for three nights in March 1915, nothing less than Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Paderewski, Mendelssohn and Elgar are considered heavyweight enough to accompany a picture which, because of its length, will only get three showings in a day. Admittedly most of the fare on offer at Acock’s Green arrived many months after its release date, which is indicative of the lack of status that cinema may have had on a national scale. However, its appeal to its local audience, the variety in the programming, and the enthusiastic advertisers and ubiquity of John Wood’s band and music on the programme suggest the efforts every cinema at the time was making to fill its seats in an increasingly competitive market. Birmingham, by chance, is also the home of a much more detailed, though equally rare, survivor from the lost world of silent movie music. Held in the Birmingham Library’s Music Department is the largest collection yet discovered of silent movie mood music, comprising over 500 scores and parts, most of which belonged to movie theatre Musical Directors Louis Benson and H.T. Saunders and left as bequests to the library. Although the collection is, at present, unavailable for research purposes, strenuous efforts are being made to eventually analyse and copy these precious documents, and the insights they have already revealed are extraordinary.

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All the pieces, British, French and American (roughly a third of each), are written uniquely for cinema use between 1913 and 1929, published by commercially operating music publishers, and nearly all in sets of parts for a band of 7–11 players, or a “salon orchestra” as it was known. They all have generic titles such as “Bizarre March”, “The Onslaught”, “Emotional Waltz”, “Desert Monotony”(!), or numbers, and often suggestions for their use: “for Eastern pictures”, “For Pathetic or Tragic scenes”, “Fire or Torture scenes” etc. Harry T. Ramsden of 12 Monteith Rd., Glasgow, the biggest donor of material, had hundreds of pieces from ABC Dramatic and Carl Fischer Publications which would allow him to instantly provide a compiled score for any film. Some of the music pages have been turned so many times they have been taped up all round, edges and spines, until they are virtually cardboard – those are the pieces he used all the time – obviously he either really liked them or they fitted the bill in a huge number of contexts. And Purcell Le Roi, listed as the solo violinist, could provide his own music sets as well as his expertise, thus begging the question did these music sets contain either easy or virtuosic violin parts? Louis Benson, who owned at least a quarter of the material in the collection, was obviously a jobbing musical director and as his music sets contain visual synchronisation cues written in pencil, not on the piano part as one would expect, but on the cello part. Only one cue was given each time, which leads us to surmise that Louis hired himself out as musical director to different orchestras for a specific film (it is not possible to ascertain which film from the sketchy pencil notes), which he then conducted and synchronised from the cello. Typically, the piano always led a band but cello also makes sense – it is easier to remove the hands from the instrument to conduct when the instrument stopped playing and the bow doubled as a big, obvious baton for beating time or conducting. Two pieces in the collection could be linked directly to an actual film. The first was “Marche Grotesque” of 1916, simply entitled “Charlie Chaplin”, written by Cyril Thorne, a littleknown composer of light music whose publishers, Reeder and Walsh, obviously saw the virtue of selling a piece aimed at accompanying Chaplin’s ubiquitous presence across the world. Then, a generic piece called The Onslaught written for the cinema by Richard Howgill, later a music director and producer for the BBC, published by Lafleur Motion Picture Edition in 1928. On the violin part for this piece is scribbled “25th September 1915”. That is the date of the start of the Battle of Loos, and the 1928 film The Guns of Loos was a huge success throughout Britain – the intertitle showing that date precedes the film’s spectacular battle sequence. The information stored in this massive collection at the Birmingham Library is hugely varied, opening up the industry as well as the music of silent cinema. First, of course, is the music itself which, if traced by country and year, will give an indication of how musical tastes flourished among the silent film musicians and publishers, which moods or composers were in demand, whether there was a definable attempt to delineate more complex emotional situations as the films themselves addressed more complex issues, or even a traceable development away from the broadly “classical” sound of movie accompaniments towards more jazz-oriented pieces in the 1920s. Next there is the insight into the more esoteric corners of the profession of silent film music. As well as the publishers of these pieces, there were inevitably salesmen and exhibitor/publishers, whose sole prerogative was to service the music being played in every cinema and push their products in the face of stiff competition. There would have

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been many composers of cinema mood music (we know that Catelby was one of these, as can be surmised from the style of his pieces such as In a Persian Market or In a Monastery Garden working either to specific briefs or, like today’s composers of library music, trying to fill a gap which had not yet arisen by second-guessing the musical needs of newly released films. There was an obvious commercial chain of command to these various institutions which can be discerned in the Birmingham hoard – some film companies owned music publishers so that they could make money in more than just one area of cinema distribution. Cue sheets supplied for specific films may have been generated by a designated studio “musical director” or may have been left to more lowly hands from one country to the next but would have favoured music that was either owned by the film’s producers or had been chosen with some commercial imperative in mind. Certain pieces would have been hugely popular for a short time, perhaps lauded in Gilbert R. Stevens’ column “Picture Music”, which appeared regularly in Kinematograph Weekly in the 1910s and 1920s or “talked up” by more local salesmen to create competition from one cinema orchestra to the next. This was similar territory to the dance bands that inhabited the halls so beautifully brought to life in Maurice Elvey’s 1928 film Palais de Dance. Expected to both move on and stand still, they had to please their customers with a mix of old favourites and the latest crazes. Yet beyond these pleasing insights perhaps the rubber stamps and pencil notes on the Birmingham cache throw up another intriguing possibility – that of the existence of the itinerant musical director. Thanks to, among other works, Gerry Turvey’s scholarly The Phoenix Cinema – A Century of Film in East Finchley, we know that cinemas regularly increased their band size for a big-selling feature. In the case of the Phoenix, this was prompted by the arrival of the 1925 behemoth Ben-Hur which was thought worthy of an extra five musicians and a consequent hike in seat prices. In the Musicians’ Union Journal there is a cri de coeur from a member (one John Seer) giving advice on precisely such enhancements and how they could best serve the music: In the smallest of orchestras there should be two woodwind instruments (flute and clarinet) and in an orchestra of ten performers the balance should be maintained by Musical Director (playing), two first violins, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, piano, organ, drums. For an orchestra of twelve add viola and oboe. For an orchestra of fourteen add cornet and trombone. For an orchestra of sixteen add bassoon and another violin allowing MD to revert to baton only. (Musicians’ Union Journal October 1930) By the mid-1920s bands of twenty were not uncommon in larger cinemas, a huge responsibility for a musical director who could become the star of their particular venue. Paul Moulder, at the Rivoli, Whitechapel, Emanuel Starkey and Quentin Maclean of the Regal, Fred Kitchen at the Astoria, Brixton, Charles Williams of the “Davis”, and Croydon and Wilson Dibble of the Carlton, Upton Park are all credited with putting their venues on the map through the size and quality of the bands – indeed, all these gentlemen seem to be working almost uninterrupted as late as 1930. Ella Mallett, a musician in the orchestra of the New Gallery Kinema under the direction of the legendary Louis Levy, remembers this period in this interview with BECTU’s Roy Fowler.

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Roy Fowler: How many people in the orchestra? Ella Mallett: Oh, if I remember and count them rightly I think there were nine … without the organ … and, well, I enjoyed every moment because it was something about we were all together, we sort of lived that. It was very exacting on all of us. Some very strange … anyhow, you know. But there was an art in … the music. We players were all kinds of people with no idea at all of setting the music to the films. But it must have been a very quiet and exacting study for both Jerry Siskin[?] and Emile, which was his brother in law … and he must have worked everything out and everything to time. And so of course you followed all his pencilling on the score, and cutting. I’ve always thought, wouldn’t the public like to see a silent picture. I think we had just as many thrills as they have now! Somehow we were all in harmony. We lived the picture, although it was just a glance. We’d run through, but I mean to say you took your cue from him in every way, although you had the score. (BECTU History Project – Interview No. 40 1988) However, the Birmingham cache suggests that venues may have augmented their bands not just with musicians but “specialist” musical directors. It has been commonly assumed that musical directors clung to specific cinemas, like Acock’s Green’s John Wood, from where their careers may only take them to other venues. Yet the much-travelled, wellthumbed parts belonging to Messrs Benjamin and Saunders, in particular the well-worn pencil markings linking pieces to Sinclair Hill’s Guns of Loos, suggest the possibility of an enterprising musical director/musician who acquires, times and collates the music necessary for a major release (and Guns of Loos was a hugely popular title) then offers himself and his “score” to cinemas intending to play the film. In hiring the musical director to direct and perform with their orchestras, those cinemas would be using music that had proven to work, may have had to pay less than the cost of acquiring and preparing the music themselves, and could help build the reputation of “his” music selection. In this way our travelling hero MD could make the same music and parts generate income over months rather than weeks of engagements. This goes some way to explain the sheer size of these personal music collections, since they represent, to the individuals who owned them, a considerable outlay of expense in buying them in the first place (there would have been a very healthy industry of cinema music hire running alongside the normal suppliers), with only limited chances of making a good return on the investment unless it was the music itself which generated the income. Possibly they merely represent the sheer volume of music a director of a salon orchestra in a medium-sized house had to have access to, but even in the commercially successful 1920s no MD who bought that amount of music could expect to make the money back just from their income from cinema work. Hiring it on to other orchestras or going on the road with it themselves would seem to be the best ways to monetise such huge collections of mood music. Here, then, we have a window onto a vast industry which collapsed into redundancy alongside the cinema musicians when sound swept the industry in 1929–30. Yet even that cataclysm was initially perceived as reversible, at least among the hopeful members of the Musicians’ Union. As W.H. Lowkes wrote in the Musicians’ Union Journal in October 1930:

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One theatre manager said, “Filthy, beastly, horrible, grating, grunting noise which is called a talking film. This cuts no ice. What does he suggest doing to supplant it? We wish to know because we desire to live and we wish to see the entertainment industry prosper or our occupations are gone.” (Lowkes 1930: 25) The answer seemed to come some weeks later as the Musicians’ Union spotted light at the end of the tunnel: Good News!! At the moment of going to press we are able to announce that MORE BANDS ARE BEING REINSTATED IN KINEMAS. The Gaumont British Corporation has completed negotiations with the Musicians Union for several bands to start almost immediately, which are to comprise 16 to 20 performers. According to the success of these bands some TWENTY-FOUR BANDS of first-rate standing will be featured by the Gaumont British. (Musicians’ Union Journal October 1930: 25) Gwen Berry, who played cello in the Grand Cinema, Alum Rock Rd, Saltley, Birmingham, watched her livelihood dwindle away through 1929, writing in her diary on 6 January 1930: We have been about seven miles to do seven minutes playing today. Only a selection and march to play at the Picturehouse. Soon I suppose they won’t want us at all. At least I hope we won’t go on like this, it’s too unsettling. But then just ten days later: A (postcard) from Mr Cozens to turn up for the matinee as the Talkie was a failure and he had returned to silent films! Hurrah! A poster outside the show saying Silent Film WITH ORCHESTRA! We nearly fainted away. (Gwen Berry, diary 1929: author’s own) Despite these pyrrhic victories and wild exhortations from the Musicians’ Union to cinema proprietors not to be bankrupted by the stranglehold that sound-happy US film companies had on the British industry, the silent era was doomed as the first excellent films of the sound era began to attract the crowds. It was not only the Musicians’ Union that was ultimately to admit defeat – some cinemas did not survive the transition into sound, including, ironically, the Picture Playhouse at Acock’s Green. It closed in 1929 with another victim of sound, the Hollywood star John Gilbert, in Man, Woman and Sin (1927), and was never equipped to show sound films. Whether John Wood was still plying his trade when his venue closed its doors is, like so much connected with the cinema music trade, not known.

Notes 1 I am indebted to Luke McKernan for his website The Bioscope and specifically “How to Run a Picture Theatre”, taken from the 1912 Kinematograph Weekly publication How to Run a Theatre: A Handbook for Proprietors, Managers and Exhibitors.

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2 “Cinematograph Trouble is Looming Darkly Ahead”, The World’s Fair, 17 December 1910, quoted in Unequal Pleasures ©Luke McKernan 2006. Paper given at the Emergence of the Film Industry in Britain conference, University of Reading Business School, 29/30 June 2006. https://www. google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chromeinstant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF8#q=Cinematograph+ Trouble+is+Looming+darkly+ahead. 3 Anthony Burgess’s own father had been a cinema pianist. 4 I am indebted to Dr Nicholas Hiley for the information about these programmes on eBay!

Further reading Brown, J. and Davison, A. (eds) (2013) The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References Brown, J. and Davison, A. (eds) (2013) The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burgess, A. (1986) The Pianoplayers. London: Hutchinson. Leadbitter. E. (1920) Rain Before Seven. London: Jacobs. Shirley, H. (1971) Just a Bloody Piano Player. Auckland: Price Publications. Turvey, G. (2010) The Phoenix Cinema: A Century of Film in East Finchley. London: Phoenix Cinema Trust.

Trade magazines Kinematograph Weekly Musicians’ Union Journal

Interview Ella Mallet (1988) interviewed by Roy Fowler for the BECTU History Project interview no. 40.

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7

THE TALKIES COME TO BRITAIN British silent cinema and the transition to sound, 1928–30

Laraine Porter The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema; the only thing they lacked was the sound of people talking … but this slight imperfection did not warrant the major changes that sound brought in. (Alfred Hitchcock in Truffaut 1984: 66) [O]ne might say that mediocrity came back into its own with the advent of sound. (François Truffaut in Truffaut 1984: 67)

As cultural revolutions go, the transition between silent and sound cinema was swift, expensive and brutal. It cared little for the legacy of silent film as an art form, obliterating much of its own history and the work of the great silent directors and stars in the process. The art and practice of silent cinema and the industry that produced it were rapidly supplanted in the rush to develop the “talkies”. 1n 1928 and 1929, many intellectuals and critics echoed the sentiments of Hitchcock and Truffaut above, for by the time synchronised sound arrived, silent film had reached its apogee as an international art form with films like Murnau’s minimally intertitled Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), critically acclaimed around the world. Whilst much has been written about the transition in Hollywood, British cinema during this period has been largely overlooked, a lack this chapter will start to redress. In America, the sound revolution has been widely recognised as starting with the part “talkie” The Jazz Singer (1927), with Al Jolson’s immortal words, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet”, as a poignant farewell to the art of silent film. But it was the success in British cinemas of Jolson’s follow-up The Singing Fool (1928) that convinced producers and exhibitors to invest in synchronised sound technology. What followed was a complex and expensive process that had significant implications for the entire British film industry and was by no means smooth or universally embraced. Sound cinema was not viewed unilaterally as “progress”, despite the fact that during the

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1920s, radio broadcast technology was rolled out across Britain and audiences were also “listeners”. This chapter will chart the introduction of synchronised sound and its impact across the British film industry from production to exhibition and reception. It will look at competing sound systems and the resulting turmoil from their incompatibility and hasty introduction, arguing that many decisions were taken in the rush to capitalise on the transient commercial success of The Singing Fool. It will look at both winners and losers; from the voice coaches and new breed of sound technicians that suddenly became invaluable to the industry to the thousands of musicians who lost their employment overnight. Using a combination of personal testimony, trade and professional association reports and production data, it will focus on the critical years 1928–30 as the transition gathered momentum at variable speeds across the UK under the shadow of the impending economic downturn associated with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. That the British film industry itself faced near collapse in 1926 with only 37 films produced and a mere 5 per cent share of British screen time suggests that it entered the crucial sound phase in a relatively fragile state. By 1929, British production had increased to 65 films, largely as a result of the 1927 Cinematographic Act which could not have come quickly enough. But first, a prescient scene from Anthony Asquith’s late silent film A Cottage on Dartmoor (trade-screened, October 1929) that perfectly encapsulated a cinema in transition. The film has a short dialogue sequence set in a small provincial cinema where the audience watch a film on the cusp of the talkies, at a time when silent films occasionally included sound sequences. One minute the audience share laughter at the silent film accompanied by the cinema orchestra. The next, they fall into concentrated silence and strain to listen to the unfamiliar technology crackling into life as the dialogue scene starts. An elderly deaf woman leans forward in frustration, hoping to catch the words emanating from somewhere behind the screen, whilst the young woman next to her attempts to recount them directly into her ear-trumpet. Asquith’s fictional audience do not know how to behave; the communal laughter at a moment of silent comedy has been transformed into the need for silence, with people attempting to help the hardof-hearing. Laughter inhibits the ability to hear the screen speak, so this “talkie” scene needs concentrated attention and the elderly and deaf have been disenfranchised. The musicians “down tools” and eat their sandwiches for the synchronised sound interlude, knowing that it is only a matter of time before they are no longer needed at all. In this scene, Asquith encapsulated an audience’s experience of the transition between silent and sound cinema as not simply a shift from a visual to an aural or voco-centric experience, but as requiring a different spectator response. Audiences needed to listen hard and restrain laughter or verbal interaction. This scene, representing the teething problems of the new technology and the fate of cinema musicians, also offered a riposte to the technological revolution that henceforward drove cinema technology, aesthetics and style. Whilst Asquith released his film as a silent with a sound interlude in October 1929, Hitchcock produced Blackmail in both fully silent and sound versions, dubbing the voice of his photogenic leading actress Anny Ondra to disguise her Czech accent in the talkie version. British International Productions (BIP), who produced Blackmail at Elstree Studios, worked full-tilt to get their first talkies produced. But whilst the British industry

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hedged its bets in 1929, producing both silent and sound films, Hollywood produced over 300 talkies using Vitaphone, Movietone and Photophone sound recording and reproduction systems. British cinema exhibitors, hungry for talkie product to capitalise on their investment in new sound equipment (around £4000 for the favoured American Western Electric system), were happy to have the market flooded with the kind of popular Hollywood product that increased box office sales, despite fears of an American cultural and linguistic invasion. However, during 1929 and 1930, the flow of sound films became intermittent with allegations that the big American producers were withholding product from those UK cinemas who had not installed Vitaphone sound-on-disc (Warner Brothers) or Movietone sound-on-film (Fox) equipment. The transitional period saw a frenzy of patent wars between UK, European and American manufacturers all competing to have their systems installed and gain market dominance, with localised companies producing small-scale solutions to convert silent projectors to sound along with amplification equipment for cinemas. Ultimately, American equipment was sold alongside American films, forcing British and European companies out of this lucrative new market, and the British Government were accused of capitulating to the big American conglomerates and obliterating British companies. In response to such allegations, The Board of Trade issued the following convoluted statement in August 1929: The selection of apparatus in either the theatre or the studio is a question in either case for the judgement of the prospective owners, who may be presumed to be disposed to carry on their own business efficiently, and who have no motive whatever for installing apparatus of any kind that will not give satisfaction to the public. The committee are of the opinion that any attempts on the part of either manufacturers of apparatus or distributors of films to impose preferential conditions in restraint are directly opposed to the intentions of British production. (Quoted in Wood 1986: 13) In an effort to reassure the British industry of their neutrality in these matters, Famous Players-Lasky, Fox, Jury-Metro-Goldwyn, United Artists, Universal and Warner Bros. issued the following statement: We have no desire to dictate to any exhibitor the form of reproducing equipment or device he should use but we wish to take every precaution that our sound pictures are only projected over equipments (sic) which give suitable results. (Bioscope, 31 July 1929, quoted in Wood 1986: 13) Despite this statement, American interests dominated the markets in Britain and Europe. Western Electric were better capitalised and organised with substantial training and support programmes for exhibitors and the capacity to respond to rapid demands for installations in a way that no British company could manage. So, despite some early entrepreneurial attempts to compete, British companies were forced out of business. During this crucial transitional period, the professional body representing cinema exhibitors, the Cinema Exhibitors Association (CEA), appeared complacent regarding the talkies. Their 1927 annual report discusses the lack of a decent summer, which gave

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a boost to cinema attendance; the consolidation of the big cinema circuits; and the overall improvement in the quality of British and European films, with no mention of the new sound technology or the invasion of American brands. Instead, it sought to raise industry morale by stating: “At this juncture the British film with its British note, story and wholesome sense of our ideas, found its opportunity … the Cinematograph Films Bill [sic] … assured the certainty of the market” (CEA Annual Report, 31 December 1927: 5). This was a tumultuous time for exhibitors, but the CEA was diverted into disputes over film rental agreements as distributors demanded a percentage of box office income instead of the traditional flat fee. This move was hotly contested by exhibitors who saw its potential to decrease their profit margins, but is the system still in use today. Arguments also raged over increasing prices for electricity and problems with the newly formed National Grid whose switch from direct to alternating current would later cause problematic ‘wow and flutter’ in early sound films, whilst a bizarre spate of stink-bombs in cinemas added to their woes. The CEA General Council and Regional Committees advised caution regarding adopting the talkies. As late as December 1928, exhibitors were still doggedly forecasting that silent films would continue indefinitely: Exhibitors … were interested in the possibilities of the “Talkies” and what effect these could have on the silent films, and the general opinion was not to be too hasty in committing themselves to a heavy outlay and the possible difficulty of obtaining the necessary films at a reasonable price. (CEA Annual Report, 31 December 1928: 27) Controversy over Sunday opening, the entertainment tax and discussion of the CEA summer ball and annual day trip took more space in reports than the imminent arrival of the talkies. The Notts and Derby Branch reported smugly, “So far there has been no installation of apparatus in any theatre in this district for the purpose of showing Talking and Sound Films” (ibid.: 60). A year later, however, things were progressing apace: For most members 1929 has been occupied with the exhibition of silent films. … By September first-run cinemas definitely indicated a settled policy to install [sound equipment] and by the end of the year about 800 installations had been effected in all types of cinemas. Nevertheless there still remained 3400 cinemas … showing silent films. (CEA Annual Report 1929: 1) The CEA General Council encouraged negative attitudes towards sound, being unimpressed with the performance of The Singing Fool – stating that the “alleged Eldorado profits attached to Talking films” were due to the relatively few wired cinemas benefitting from novelty value (ibid.: 8). In November 1928 all 19 British films in production were silent, but a year later, all films in production were sound with producers having to simultaneously install and master new sound technology whilst speeding up production and working with lower budgets to satisfy the Quota Act (Chibnall 2007: 3).

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If exhibitors resisted the change to sound, cinema technology manufacturing companies had more foresight. In early June 1928 one of the key British players advancing sound-on-disc technology, British Photophone, was formed to emulate the success of American talkies using Warner’s Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. Despite a less than successful domestic demonstration, and before the first screening of an American sound picture in the UK, the company’s share issue was massively over-subscribed, indicating investor faith in the future of sound technology. In America, Photophone was owned by RCA who experimented with “variable area” sound-on-film as opposed to the “variable density” of other American companies, Fox Movietone and Lee DeForest’s Phonofilm, the system that would prevail until the arrival of digital technology at the end of the twentieth century. On 27 September 1928, The Jazz Singer had its British premiere at the Piccadilly Cinema in London, though it was several months before it toured the British regions. Meanwhile, the first British-produced sound cartoon,’Orace the ’Armonious ’Ound, had begun production a fortnight before. A month later in October 1928, Gaumont British demonstrated its rival British Acoustic system invented by Danes Arnold Poulsen and Axel Peterson using an optical soundtrack on separate synchronised film stock, rather than married to the image track, allowing for better sound quality. But like sound-ondisc systems, it proved difficult to maintain synchronisation to the picture. Also in October 1928, British Photophone merged with the German companies Siemens Halske and Tobis to market a cheaper electrical sound reproducer. These European mergers were intended to stave off the creeping American dominance of the lucrative European

Figure 7.1  HMV’s mascot, Nipper, and a variable area soundtrack, 1930

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market. However, the British Acoustic Poulsen and Petersen system, involving two 35-mm projector mechanisms running synchronously from the same motor – one playing the sound, the other projecting the film – had teething problems. Its excellent sound reproduction and the fact that many of the bigger cinemas had installed it in 1928 did not protect it from American competition as exhibitors could not afford to annoy audiences with equipment failure. Many ripped it out and reinvested in the better-serviced Western Electric system. Sound engineer and projectionist Mickey Hickey was employed at the newly opened Astoria Cinema in London’s Charing Cross Road as a 14-year-old when the elderly projectionists were struggling with the British Acoustic system and screening The Singing Fool in early 1929. Hickey attests to the unreliability of the British system which the Astoria trialled before removing it. His reference to the installation of Western Electric as “going big” also suggests that the American system was considered the apogee; despite being more expensive, it had superior back-up. His interview hints at the confusion in the rush to install new sound technology: Well we had this “G-B Acoustic” thing, but at the same time we had … Western Electric engineers installing the Vitaphone system. … And we also had this double header stuff … at the side of the projector we had the sound unit. But whether it was us and not knowing what we were doing and not having proper tuition, to this day I don’t know, but it never seemed to work! We might get it to work one show. The Astoria decided, “Let’s get rid of this, let’s go in big. Go for Western [Electric]”. (BECTU interview no. 371, Mickey Hickey interviewed by Bob Allen, 11 August 1995) The new sound technology’s lack of reliability meant that cinemas were often obliged to return to silent films as they stuttered towards talkies: We’d no sooner started than something would go wrong – we’d be out of sync … and so we’d say, “Oh, shutdown!” So we’d go back over to the silent film, because in those days you ran one silent and one sound. Well by that time [February 1929] we were all silent, we were just playing around with [sound] shorts. (ibid.) British Photophone fared little better than British Acoustic and went bankrupt in May 1930, apparently due to their unsupported but pioneering status in the UK, the failure of a potential German merger and their inability to compete with the American systems that were also, unfairly, tied into film distribution deals (The Times, 10 May 1930: 4). These failings were reflected in the fates of other British sound companies – noble failures caught out by a lack of investment and the aggressive marketing tactics of the Americans. Equipment breakdown, lack of available sound films, conflicting audience demands and a feeling that talkies were a passing fad meant that the transition was anything but seamless in cinemas. But for thousands of cinema musicians, the writing was on the wall. They were made redundant by degrees, losing their contracts with the bigger cinemas only to be called back when the sound equipment failed. This uncertainty created enormous tension between exhibitors and the Musicians’ Union which was vociferous in

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defence of its members whose jobs were jeopardised by “mechanical music”. The plight of cinema musicians is discussed in more detail below. Despite some heroic failures, British companies continued to invent and market various systems often mistakenly wedded to sound-on-disc. In December 1928, Filmophone Ltd was launched with the aim of combining gramophone and projection equipment linked to Inter-Cine film distributors. Despite the obvious problems with sound-on-disc technology, it confidently advertised the sale of over a million shares in The Times (18 December 1929: 9). Filmophone, already involved in the manufacture of gramophone records, advertised itself as a cheap and reliable alternative, suitable for every cinema in the country, compatible with all existing projection and gramophone systems and with immediate delivery guaranteed. In January 1929, Filmophone was reported as having purchased the rights to a number of films, only one of which, Lord Richard in the Pantry, was ever produced as a bilingual talkie directed by Walter Forde in July 1930 for Twickenham Films (The Times, 2 January 1929: 10). As a manufacturer of talkie equipment, the company predictably faltered against the might of Western Electric, but such was the optimism among British manufacturers that many entrepreneurial systems were developed to gain a foothold in the market. Entrepreneurialism also flourished in localised manufacturing. The Leicester company, Partridge and Mee, for example, designed and manufactured the Parmeko Valve Amplifier which was designed to work with existing silent projectors such as the ubiquitous and popular Kalee manufactured by Kershaw of Leeds. Imperial Sound Systems, also in Leicester, produced equipment to convert silent film projectors into sound at the beginning of the 1930s. These local electrical engineering companies saw a gap in the market for providing sound solutions to smaller, independent exhibitors and educational organisations. Although a full survey of the extent to which local suppliers sought to compete with Western Electric has yet to be conducted, it does appear that the talkies stimulated local manufacturing to some extent. In spring 1929, The Jazz Singer started to tour in silent and sound versions as the technology was rolled out across the UK. In Leicester, typical of many medium-sized industrial cities, the silent version was screened at the City Cinema in mid-February, with the Leicester Mercury reviewer lamenting: This picture was obviously filmed as a “talkie” – the whole story hinges on the “voice with a tear in it”, and there are long close-ups of Jolson’s facial contortions as he gets his “stuff” over. … It was a “talkie” in London, but we in the provinces will have to wait for the mechanical addition. ... We should have liked to have heard Mr Jolson’s voice. (Leicester Mercury, 12 February 1929: 7) In the same month, Mr Allen Wells, manager of the Cinema de Luxe in Hastings, gave an illustrated talk comparing the Phonophone (sound on separate film) and Vitaphone (sound on disc) systems, to what was undoubtedly a rapt audience (Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 16 February 1929: 3). For the time being at least, audiences on the south coast and in the Midlands had to make do with reading about the talkies in newspapers or learning about the comparative sound systems from lectures. The rollout of sound equipment was spasmodic. Big cities in Yorkshire were ahead of the field with the Tower and Majestic cinemas in Leeds advertising the sound version

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of The Jazz Singer in February 1929, headlining the popular songs “KOL NIDRE AND MAMMY” (Yorkshire Evening Post, 25 February 1929) which were clearly the film’s selling points. Meanwhile cinemagoers in Bedford were still watching the silent version at the end of June alongside Rex Ingram’s 1922 Prisoner of Zenda, suggesting that new silent product was drying up and smaller cinemas, yet to convert, were having to screen backcatalogue silent films. Popular films were now driving recorded music sales, and advertisements for the gramophone records of songs-from-the-film often accompanied their newspaper advertisements. Music and cinema tie-ins became possible and cinemas were keen to stress the quality of their sound equipment to the discerning patron previously accustomed to live orchestral accompaniment in acoustically bespoke auditoria. Early film sound recording, reproduced in the less than optimal surroundings of cinemas designed for live musical performance, often evoked criticism. The Redhill Pavilion in Reigate specifically advertised its installation of “Western Electric Super Sound Reproducing Apparatus” as a mark of quality allowing audiences to “see and hear the ONLY talking, singing version ever presented in this District” (The Surrey Mirror, 16 September 1929: 16). The Picture House in Selkirk was able to screen the sound version of The Singing Fool for “two nights only” with “The special vocal numbers sung by Al Jolson … rendered on His Master’s Voice latest model gramophone” (Southern Reporter, 2 May 1929: 1). These advertisements also indicate the length of time that audiences beyond London had to wait for talkies to arrive. Many exhibitors could only secure prints of popular sound films for two or three days, advising patrons to book tickets well in advance with demand greatly outstripping supply. They also indicate how sound cinema spread across the UK, unsurprisingly with bigger northern industrial cities installing before the Midlands, followed by the Home Counties and smaller market towns. The major circuit cinemas were the best placed with ABC commencing installation of the Western Electric system in February 1929, capitalising on the success of The Singing Fool in London and Glasgow. If exhibition drove the transition to sound in the UK, then British production had to keep pace and satisfy the demands of the Quota Act. Ernest Lindgren thought the industry complacent: “The stampede towards sound gave a rude jolt to British producers preparing to settle down under the protective shade of the Quota Act” (Lindgren 1947: 15). The Quota Act began to take full effect in spring 1928, six months before the UK’s first screening of The Jazz Singer. American producers and renters, like Paramount British, seized the opportunity to flood the British market with cheap productions made on British soil by their satellite production companies, thus satisfying the Quota, whilst enabling them to get American-made films into British cinemas with minimum disruption (Chibnall 2007: 4). British studios rapidly needed equipping and in March 1929 BIP converted space at Elstree for the production of White Cargo and Blackmail. White Cargo was completed first and trade-screened silent in May 1929, waiting until October 1929 for its “talkie” première. Blackmail was issued in silent and sound versions in June 1929, complicating the question as to what was Britain’s first “talkie” but suggesting that BIP favoured Hitchcock. Other studios followed suit in June 1929, with Gainsborough, Shepherd’s Bush, Isleworth and Twickenham all installing RCA recording equipment. In May 1929 Basil Dean’s Associated Talking Pictures (ATP) was formed along with several other production companies including Allied Talking Pictures, British

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Filmograph, British Talkie Films Ads, International Talking Screen Productions, Sound Industries, Powers Cinephone Equipment and Talking Films. With the exception of ATP, none of these survived beyond the mid-1930s, as competition increased and the effects of the Depression took hold. The introduction of sound into film studios dramatically changed the production status quo as the microphone became king. Fred Tomlin, a microphone operator, recalled arguments between the new breed of sound engineers and the lighting and camera operators who were used to having their own way in the silent period. Now, lighting had to be altered to prevent shadows from the microphone falling on faces whilst the camera had to ensure that the microphone stayed out of shot. On the set of Kitty (1929), Tomlin recalls how director Victor Saville had to intervene and light the set himself when the lighting operator refused to comply with the demands of the sound technician and walked off set (Peet 1993). Sound recordist Dallas Bower (BECTU 1987), one of the new breed of sound technicians, described the difficulties in finding the best place for the microphone, which before the invention of the boom was in a large box hauled onto an overhead gantry, creating difficulties in setting up the shot. Concealed microphones quickly replaced this overhead system, but their narrow polar curve created further problems as the actor had to remain static whilst delivering dialogue. Gone was the musical ensemble playing on the silent film set to create the right mood. Prior to the invention of post-production sound-mixing, sound effects were produced on set and recorded simultaneously. In terms of the effects of sound recording on performers, British star, Chili Bouchier, described the situation at Gainsborough and the changing relationship between actor and camera: Either wisely (or unwisely) it was decided to add dialogue to The City of Play. I say unwisely because nobody had considered the rather odd assortment of sounds which would issue from the mouths of their leading players. There was the stagetrained, dark brown bass of Lawson Butt, the regional accent of the leading man and my Minnie Mouse squeak. On the first day of sound I arrived on the set to find my lover, my beloved camera, confined to a padded cell – swathed in layers of thick blankets which muffled the gentle and comforting whirr of his motor. I was moved to kiss him on his cold little nose and to tell him that I still loved him. (Bouchier 1995: 63–64) Accents, voice pitch and timbre had never been an issue, but now they were key. Bouchier’s description of the different accents on set would have been typical during the transitional phase before voice coaches could get to work. Another major issue was the demise of co-productions with non-Anglophone countries such as France and Germany. From the mid-1920s the Film Europe initiative had pooled talent, finance and resources, primarily to counteract Hollywood dominance by creating a united European industry that also benefited from economies of scale and allowed more lavish productions. It was a relatively simple process to add foreign-language intertitles to a silent film when British stars, directors and technicians worked across Europe: Betty Balfour with Louis Mercanton in France, Anthony Asquith and Alfred Hitchcock at Ufa in Germany, and directors such as Paul Czinner, Geza von Bolvary and A.E. Dupont

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producing films in British studios. Sound changed matters dramatically and despite BIP’s attempts to produce multi-lingual versions of films such as Atlantic (1929) and Cape Forlorn (1931), both by A.E. Dupont, Richard Eichberg and Walter Summers’ The Flame of Love (1930), and Hitchcock’s Murder (1930), where the same script, studio and set would be re-used to shoot different language versions of the same film, this proved a complex and costly process. It was considerably more difficult to translate dialogue into different languages with different idiomatic expressions and literal translations were often inappropriate. Meanwhile, in July 1929 Picture Show magazine took a positive view on Britain’s position in the talkie race: While it is a fact that America got a start on this country in the production of talking, singing and sound pictures, there is no need for pessimism in regard to the future. … We have at least two systems which are as good as the two best in America, and one of these systems is far cheaper. (Edward Wood, Picture Show, 6 July 1929: 14–15) The author chirped that Noel Coward could single-handedly stave off the American invasion. All Britain had to do was to capitalise upon its cultural assets: We have many famous authors and playwrights. … Of the younger school there is Noel Coward, who could write any sort of Talkie from a light comedy to a tragedy, and between these two he could write a musical comedy kind of Talkie and supply the music. … I feel confident that if American producers were British they would be concentrating on English history for their talking plays – if only for the reason that the other fellow couldn’t do it. (ibid.) The newsreel, a longstanding feature of the cinema programme, was given a major boost with the advent of sound. British Movietone, a subsidiary of the American Newsreel Company, was launched on 4 July 1929. The entrepreneurial Ostrer Brothers, who had acquired Gaumont British in 1927, became majority shareholders ostensibly to ward off American control of British Movietone. However, this deal coincided with an announcement that their 300 Gaumont Cinemas were to be equipped with still untested Western Electric sound apparatus, suggesting that the deal was not as patriotic as it first appeared.

Conclusion: winners and losers The biggest winners from this period were undoubtedly the new breed of sound technicians, many drafted from the BBC where radio had been broadcast since 1923 and which would later provide opportunities for unemployed cinema musicians. Of British actors, it was stage-trained character actors like Ellaline Terriss, Donald Calthrop, Humberston Wright and Aldwych Farce and stage stars such as Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, who made unproblematic transitions to sound. Others, who fared less well, blamed the microphone. Mabel Poulton attributed her dwindling career to her broad cockney accent being completely at odds with her silent image. In some cases, the lack of a “talkie voice” was used

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as an excuse by producers to get rid of expensive “dead wood”: actors past their prime or losing popularity with fans. Voice coaches advertised in The Times whilst women were extolled to develop a “happy voice” now that the talkies had created a vogue for “attractive” voices (Leicester Mercury, 9 February 1929: 13). The hard-of-hearing or deaf, like the elderly woman in A Cottage on Dartmoor, were disenfranchised whilst the reverse was true for the illiterate who could not read written intertitles. The arrival of the “talkies” promoted a new need for hearing aids and a flurry of new inventions were marketed such as the Ossi Vibro which exhorted: “Deaf! The rest of your life is before you. Are you to be denied the pleasures of the talkies …” (The Times, 24 February 1932: 7). The “talkies” were the new “big thing” and everyone wanted to experience them. Cinema musicians were the biggest losers of all with over 4,000 Musicians Union members alone losing employment by 1930. Many more non-unionised musicians and those working in associated industries like cinema music publishing and composing slid under the radar. The Musicians Union had been battling the “menace of the talkies” since early 1928 when synchronised short Phonofilms were widely produced in Britain and “mechanical music” was gaining momentum through the twin evils of domestic gramophone records and radio broadcasting. The battles were fought in the pages of its monthly journal which riled against Americans and “alien musicians”, the CEA, Board of Trade and the hapless Minister for Labour, Miss Bondfield, who was harshly described as “stupid”. In July 1930 matters reached a new level of hyperbole in an article titled “Talkies Threaten the Jews” which claimed that Palestinian Jews had been in touch with the Musicians Union for advice on “combatting the evil”. The Union explained that despite appeals to the Government, they had been treated as “David dealt with Uriah, an illustration which the Jews will probably appreciate better than others” (The Musicians Journal, July 1930: 20). Anti-Americanism was rife among Musicians Union members and its executive board from 1928 until sound cinema became established, when the focus of attention shifted to broadcasting and the BBC. Paranoia is evident in their statement: “The invasion of this American apparatus in British Cinemas seems almost like a pre-arranged plot to combat the Film Quota Act – a legislative measure of doubtful success” (The Musicians Journal, July 1930: 5). An elegant summary of this complex period is impossible as it was characterised by several conflicting factors: uncertainty, lack of preparedness and complacency from within the industry, disdain from critics and public intellectuals for American talkies and an associated fear of cultural invasion, contrasted with a demand from British audiences for those same American talkies. Suffice to say, this was a tumultuous period which changed British cinema on every level from production to critique and forged the kind of Anglophone relationships that the industry relies on to this day.

Further reading Bouchier, C. (1995) Shooting Star: The Last of the Silent Film Stars. London: Atlantis. Chibnall, S. (2007) “Quota Quickies”: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: British Film Institute. Lindgren, E. (1947) “The Early Feature Film” in Twenty Years of British Film 1925–1945. London: The Falcon Press.

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References Bouchier, C. (1995) Shooting Star: The Last of the Silent Film Stars. London: Atlantis. Chibnall, S. (2007) “Quota Quickies”: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film. London: British Film Institute. Lindgren, E. (1947) “The Early Feature Film” in Twenty Years of British Film 1925–1945. London: The Falcon Press. Truffaut, F. (1984 English translation). Hitchcock Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wood, L. (1986) British Films 1927–1939. London: BFI Library Services (available online at: http:// www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-british-films-1927-1939.pdf).

Newspapers and trade magazines The Bioscope The Leicester Mercury The Musicians Journal The Times The Surrey Mirror The Yorkshire Post

Documents and recordings Bower, D. (1987) Magnetic tape interview for the BECTU History Project. Cinema Exhibitor’s Association Annual Reports 1927, 1928, 1929. Hickey, M. (1995). Magnetic tape BECTU interview no. 371 with Bob Allen 11 Aug. 1995. Peet, S. (1993) The Talkies Come to Britain. Magnetic tape recording first presented at BAFTA, London, 14 October 1993.

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8

THE TUDOR CINEMA, LEICESTER A local case study

Guy Barefoot The history of British cinema is more than a history of British filmmaking, both in the sense that cinema is more than film production and in that what British audiences saw at the cinema included British films but also films made in Hollywood and (to a degree) elsewhere. Where they survive and are available, we can get a clearer sense of what audiences watched, and in what numbers, by looking at the records kept by individual cinemas. Fortunately, a number of cinema business ledgers have been preserved, and while these differ in their scope and level of detail, they all add to our knowledge of cinema history, often providing a useful corrective to assumptions about which were the important films at a particular time. Significant work done in this field includes studies of the records of cinemas in Macclesfield, Portsmouth and Edinburgh (see Poole 1987; Harper 2004, 2006; Jeacle 2009). There are limits to what the records of one particular cinema can tell us about audience taste. Cinemas catered to different markets depending on where they were located within the country but also within their particular city, town or region, and whether they operated on a first or subsequent-run basis. A film could draw a larger audience for a range of reasons, including the nature of the competition and the time of year it played. It is possible to take this into account by combining different records (see Sedgwick 2006). However, beyond box-office figures, cinema records can provide information on both the commercial operation of a cinema and the nature of the cinema-going experience. The ledgers of the Tudor Cinema, Leicester, held at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, represent a particularly fascinating source, in part because they cover the second half of the 1920s as well as the early 1930s. They thus provide a record for a period earlier than cinemas such as the Regent in Portsmouth and the first systematic overview of British cinema attendance (Rowson 1936). They cover a time that saw the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, the introduction of synchronised sound and the beginnings of a new phase of cinema-building. The ledgers are also particularly useful because their information is not restricted to the main or even the second feature film. Some work has already been published on the Tudor and its records. There are a considerable number of local cinema histories, including work on Leicester cinemas (see Williams 1993; Johnson 2007). In addition, the Tudor has been used to illustrate

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the importance of the “quota quickie” at the beginning of the 1930s (Chibnall 2007). However, the Tudor records also provide an opportunity to examine the changing nature of the cinema programme as a whole, and how the independent operator responded to changes in the film industry during the interwar years. The Tudor dates from the very end of the initial phase of cinema-building in Britain in the years leading up to the First World War. As Nicholas Hiley has noted, while few people in 1907 saw the permanent, purpose-built cinema as a viable form of moving picture exhibition, 1,000 had been built in Britain by 1910 and 3,800 by 1913 (Hiley 2002: 120). This growth was accompanied by a growth in registered cinema companies, from 12 in 1908, 231 in 1910, to 544 in 1913 (2002: 123). These figures do not indicate a simple rise in demand for the cinema. During the same period there was a decline in the number of other venues used for film screenings, partly as a result of the tighter safety inspections and licensing arrangements introduced after the 1909 Cinematograph Act. The growth in cinema-building was investment, rather than audience driven, and investors could be more interested in a quick return than the long-term survival of the cinema as a form of mass entertainment. The expansion in the number of cinemas and cinema companies was closely followed by an increasing number of businesses that went into liquidation. Those that survived benefitted from an increase in attendance during the First World War, but the immediate post-war period saw audience figures decline again. They only picked up again when the Entertainment Duty was waived on tickets costing less than 6d in 1924. There was a further spate of cinema-building to capitalise on the popularity of this form of entertainment but this in turn threatened the viability of the older, smaller house, a process that was accentuated with the arrival of sound, which meant that cinemas dating from an earlier period had to compete with those already wired for sound. The interwar years thus saw “a complex transition from one pattern and style of cinemagoing to another,” as there was a move from an industry dominated by a non-deferential working-class audience going to small, local auditoria to see a mixed show of short and long films and often elements of live performance, towards the discipline of the picture palace (Hiley 1999: 45). The local perspective illustrates how this operated in practice but also specific complications and the persistence of earlier practices. The city of Leicester did not have a purpose-built cinema until 1910, but 17 cinemas for a population of 227,222 by 1913 (Kinematograph Year Book 1914: 339). By 1931 the figure had risen slightly to 22 cinemas for a population of 234,190 (Kinematograph Year Book 1931: 418–19). Yet in Leicester as elsewhere, some of the companies established to run cinemas proved to be shortlived. For instance, on 9 November 1912 the Alhambra Ltd was registered as a private company, with £3,500 capital “to carry on the business of cinematograph and theatre proprietors and managers,” with a registered office in Brown Street, Manchester (Cinema News and Property Gazette 1912: 89). Plans for a new “cinematograph theatre” at the corner of Vaughan Street and Hoby Street about three quarters of a mile from the centre of Leicester, to be called the Alhambra, were approved by the Leicester watch committee on 18 December 1912, but before the cinema had opened Alhambra Ltd had gone into liquidation (Williams 1993: 92). What was to have been the Alhambra opened as the Tudor on Easter Monday, 13 April 1914, under the new management of a consortium of local businesspeople trading as Leicester Pictures Ltd, 4 Horsefair Street. On 23 April 1914 it was announced that:

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An important addition to Leicester’s already lengthy list of picture houses, to say nothing of nightly bioscope features at the variety houses, was made on Easter Monday, when the Tudor cinema had its inaugural opening, with Mr White as manager. The brick building though not overly elaborate is very solidly built, while inside, the arrangements are everything to be desired, the “rake” of the floor ensuring an uninterrupted view from every one of its 1,250 seats. These are upholstered in red plush, the greater part being tie-ups of a generous width. A plentiful supply of exits, up-to-date lighting, etc., figure in an excellent scheme. The screen used is the largest in town, being 24 ft. by 20 ft. and the projector, a motor-driven Vulcan with a 144 ft. throw is manipulated by Mr R.F. Thompson with excellent results. At the inaugural performance in the afternoon, a crowded house waxed enthusiastic over a capital programme, which included “To Headquarters” and “The Stolen Plans.” So far, nightly audiences have been entirely satisfactory. … Situated in the centre of a densely populated district, the newcomer should speedily render a good account of itself. (Bioscope 1914: 361) The then newcomer continued as a cinema, and retained the “Tudor” name, up to its final show on 12 July 1958. The building then served as a warehouse before it was demolished in 1996 to make way for housing (see Johnson 2007: 83–4). In its final years it had become anything but up-to-date, despite the installation of a CinemaScope screen in 1955. A Leicester Mercury correspondent recalled it as “the fleapit” and remembered screaming during The Tommy Steele Story, not in excitement at the sight of Tommy Steele but because she thought she heard one of the mice that supposedly lived in the seats (Gilbey 2001: 14). The name, “Tudor,” had been taken from the nearby Tudor Road. It was a neighbourhood cinema, situated in “a network of terraced houses in a relatively prosperous working-class district” (Chibnall 2007: 199). The building was sizeable for a cinema not located in the city centre, made more distinctive by the three box-office kiosks (needed for the busiest times) and the exterior canopy to protect queuing customers from the rain. It was also distinctive in issuing metal tokens rather than paper tickets, with different shaped tokens for different prices to guide the usherette in the dark (Johnson 2007: 83). It aimed to attract a local audience who couldn’t afford city centre prices, though advertisements in the Leicester Mercury suggested it hoped to attract some patrons from beyond the immediate locality. For the period just after that covered by the business ledgers, Rowson calculated the average British cinema ticket price as 10.25d but noted that “43 percent of the entire cinema admissions are in respect of seats for which the charge last year did not exceed 7d, inclusive of Entertainment Duty, and this year did not exceed 6d” (Rowson 1936: 70–1). 7d was the highest price charged by the Tudor in 1924, that had increased to 7 ½d in 1932, but the vast majority of the cinema’s customers paid the lower charges of 6d, 5d or 4d, significantly below the one to two-shilling price range at the centrally located City Cinema. Children paid 2d to attend matinees, which one local resident later recalled as a penny less than the neighbouring Westleigh (Barker 1995). The Tudor was an independent cinema throughout its history, but it did not operate in isolation. At the end of the 1920s the then managing director, Walter H.B. Emson,

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Figure 8.1  The Tudor Cinema in its later years

was also managing Leicester’s Belgrave (opened in 1913) and City Cinema (opened in 1924), in addition to serving as vice-chairman of the Leicestershire branch of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) (Kinematograph Year Book 1929: 272). There is evidence that Emson also had an interest in another Leicester cinema, the Aylestone (built in 1926) (Johnson 2007: 95). For at least some of their existence, the Belgrave and the Tudor seem to have shared programming, and this slightly stronger bargaining position may have enabled an agreement with renters to show films on a “second-run” rather than “last-run” basis (Williams 1999: 93). From the 1930s the Tudor came to be operated by Arthur and Edith Black, again along with other Leicester cinemas: Edith Black had managed the Belgrave, while Arthur Black was later identified as “managing director of Princes, Regal, Tudor and Belgrave cinemas, delegate to [the CEA] general council” (Kinematograph Year Book 1948: 58). From the 1940s the address given for the local CEA was the same Horsefair Street address at which Leicester Pictures was registered. Thus the independence of the Tudor needs to be seen as part of a network of local owners and managers linked to the exhibitor’s trade association, using these connections to survive in the face of competition from the cinema chains and the power of the film renters. The Tudor ledgers cover the period from 8 December 1924 to 31 December 1932. They are particularly useful for giving details of the second as well as the first feature film, and of other items on the programme, including newsreels, shorts and serials. As well as giving admission figures and box-office takings, they detail sales for chocolates and “sundries” (identified as cigarettes in the second of the two volumes). Rental costs are given for screenings: a percentage of the takings for feature films, with a single figure charged for double bills, and a flat rate for shorts. Occasional out-of-the-ordinary expenses are listed, such as the cost of employing two vocalists to accompany The Blue Danube (1926), though regular outgoings for items such as staff wages and running costs are not listed. Other events likely to have affected attendance, such as the Leicester Fair, are noted. Details of the weather are given for each day except Sunday, when the cinema was closed. The weather was clearly a key influence on the box office, perhaps even to

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the extent that “cinema attendances in any area are the resultant of two principal conditions: first, the weather, and second, the attractiveness of the principal picture” (Rowson 1936: 115). On occasions the cinema would screen a main feature Monday to Saturday. The Gold Rush (1925) played for a week in November 1926, Ben Hur (1925) in December 1927, The Circus (1928) in November 1928, and there were some week-long screenings in the 1930s. The standard practice, however, was a change of programme Mondays and Thursdays. Matinees on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays were usually the same as the evenings shows, although in the 1930s there are examples of feature films screened as Saturday matinees only: for example Lupino Lane in Never Trouble Trouble (1931) on 27 August 1932, or Bill Cody in Montana Kid (1931) on 1 October 1932. The mid-week programme change continued into the 1950s, by which time Sunday screenings (from 5 pm) had been introduced and ticket prices raised from 9d to 1s 6d (Kinematograph Year Book 1950: 345). Thus the cinema’s final week consisted of a double bill of the Dick Powelldirected The Enemy Below (1957) and the “Regalscope” western, Blood Arrow (1958), showing Sunday to Wednesday, while the Robert Ryan western, The Proud Ones (1956), supported by the Errol Flynn swashbuckler, The Dark Avenger (1955), played Thursday, Friday and Saturday, before the cinema went dark for good. In the week beginning 8 December 1924 audiences could have seen the Broadway-set The Great White Way (1924) on the Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, and Hilda Bayley and Stewart Rome in the British The Woman Who Obeyed (1923) on Thursday, Friday or Saturday. An instalment of the British newsreel, Topical Budget, was included on the programme, while other short items were episodes of the Stoll series, Old Man in the Corner (1924) and Universal’s The Leather Pushers (1922), as well as an item identified simply as “comedy.” The total attendance for the week was 8,582. Christmas Day fell in the final week detailed in the ledgers, meaning that the cinema was only open five days that week and that the previous week provides a better comparison. In the week beginning 19 December 1932, Careless Lady (1932), starring Joan Bennett and John Boles, played with the contemporary western, The Gay Caballero (1932), Monday to Wednesday. Gustav Pabst’s Kameradschaft (1931) played Thursday, Friday and Saturday, supported by The Slippery Pearls (1931), a fundraising film for the National Variety Artists’ tuberculosis sanatorium featuring a range of Hollywood stars and personalities. Chapter Ten (‘Secret of the Cave’) of the Mascot serial, The Lightning Warrior (1931), was also on the programme and Movietone News had replaced Topical Budget. Total admissions for the week fell to 5,164. The programme at the Tudor was not always so distinctive, but its eclectic nature is well illustrated by the combination of Kameradschaft, Slippery Pearls and The Lightning Warrior: a German film about Franco-German solidarity in the face of a mining disaster alongside Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy and others searching for Norma Shearer’s pearls in Hollywood, and the final performance of one-time major star, Rin-Tin-Tin. “Always a Good Programme Here” announced the Tudor in one of its Leicester Mercury advertisements (25 May 1933), and while we do not know whether audiences watched the full programme or only part, it is clear that a programme is precisely what the cinema provided. The inclusion of the serial on the regular bill is particularly interesting as confirmed in the Leicester Mercury advertisements. Thus Thursday, Friday and Saturday editions of the Leicester Mercury, 27–9 October 1932, advertised Second Chances

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(also known as Probation, 1932) but also the first episode of The Lightning Warrior, which was also included in the Tudor’s advertisements in the following two weeks but not for the rest of its run. The advertisement published in the Mercury on Thursday 4 August 1932 identified Local Boy Makes Good (a 1931 Joe E. Brown comedy from First National) and Lloyd No.2, a reference to the second chapter of the serial Lloyd of the C.I.D., while in the period immediately after that covered by the ledgers the third, fourth and sixth chapters of the Universal serial, Jungle Mystery, were mentioned alongside the feature in the advertisements placed in the Mercury on Thursday 2, 9 and 23 February 1933. In the period covered by the ledgers the Tudor changed films, but also the nature of the film programme. The standard pattern was a main feature supported by other short material including a newsreel. The newsreel, or “topical,” was the most consistent item. The cinema used Topical Budget up to July 1925, but from March 1925 it had also been screening Fox Review, then from June of that year Pathé Gazette. Eve’s Film Review, a “lifestyle” topical aimed at female audiences, was shown for two weeks in January 1925. By November 1931 British Movietone News had become the regular newsreel. There were other short films that came as part of a series and were thus regular items on the programme for particular periods of time. As well as The Old Man in the Corner and the boxing-themed The Leather Pushers, dramatic series included Twisted Tales (Reciprocity Films, 1925–6). The cartoon shorts, Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Film Fables (1920 onwards) and Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, were regular items, as was Hodge Podge, the Lyman H. Howe shorts released between 1922 and 1933 that combined live action and animation. The one-reel film magazine, Fox Varieties, was included on different programmes, while between April and October 1926 the Tudor included episodes from the Claude FrieseGreene colour travelogue, The Open Road (1926), among its short subjects. Items listed as “Beethoven,” “Liszt,” “Wagner” and “Mozart,” and elsewhere as “Music Master” or “Music Masters,” presumably refer to James A. Fitzpatrick’s Famous Music Master series (1925–9). The Stoll Company’s Racing Outlook series (1924) was screened on different occasions. Other sport-based shorts include items listed as “Rowing,” “Great Moments in Big Fights,” “Golf,” “Cup Final” (the latter two in the same week in May 1925) and “How I Play Tennis,” highlighting how the cinema was more than a venue for fiction films. The non-specific “Comedy” is noted repeatedly, though there are occasions when a comedy short is named, such as Buster Keaton’s Balloonatic (1923, but screened at the Tudor in November 1928), or his Day Dreams (1922, screened December 1928). The Prince of Wales was seen in a range of titles, from the Prince of Wales Tour (shown June and July 1925) to Our Farmer Prince (in 1932), a three-reel film showing the Prince on his Duchy of Cornwall estate. This highlights the importance of the short film into the 1930s, though the overall scarcity of information on supporting programmes makes it difficult to assess the extent to which other cinemas showed a similar mix of sport, comedy and other short content. Across the country, that importance declined over time. In 1936 Rowson noted an increasing reliance on “two long films in their programme instead of only one. There is then no time left in the programme for the inclusion of even the limited number of ‘shorts’ that formerly appeared” (Rowson 1936: 114). The Tudor followed this trend to a degree. There were some examples of double bills in the 1920s. The programme for Monday 22 to Wednesday 24 December 1924 consisted of two features, Norma Talmadge

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in Sign on the Door (1921) and Richard Barthelmess in Twenty-One (1923), supported only by an episode of Topical Budget. The week-long screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus in November 1928 was accompanied by Blackmail Monday to Friday and Web of Fate Thursday to Saturday, as well as Pathé Gazette. Web of Fate must be the 1927 film starring Lillian Rich, while Blackmail is too early to be the Alfred Hitchcock film; it is presumably the 1920 American film of that title, starring Viola Dana. The sound version of Hitchcock’s Blackmail played at the Tudor in November 1930, the cinema having converted to sound in February of that year, screening the Goldwyn Company’s Bulldog Drummond (1929) for a full week. However, over time the double bill became more prevalent at the Tudor in the era of the talkies. Thus the week beginning 4 July 1932 saw the musical Stepping Stones (1931) accompanied by Charles Farrell and Madge Evans in Heartbreak (1931) Monday to Wednesday, followed by the maternal melodrama Over the Hill (1931) and Once Bitten (1932) Thursday to Saturday. Once Bitten was made at Twickenham, and thus counted towards the Tudor’s quota of British films. The other titles were Hollywood films made for Fox. This programme allowed time for Movietone News and a trailer for Frank Capra’s Dirigible (1931), but otherwise short films were absent. The Tudor did not abandon the short film. It even reinstated the serial. It had screened different Pathé serials Thursdays to Saturdays in 1925 and 1926: Into the Net (1924), Sunken Silver (1925) and The Green Archer (1925). While the latter was playing, the Tudor also included a French serial, Gaumont’s The Pedlar/Le roi de la pédale (1925), on its Monday to Wednesday programme. Having seemingly moved away from this programming format, Lloyd of the C.I.D. was included on the programme in July 1932, followed by Lightning Warrior and then Jungle Mystery, all programmed Thursday to Saturday. This contrasts with other accounts of British filmgoing in the 1930s which identify the serials with children’s Saturday matinees, and indicates the persistence of the serial as adult as well as children’s entertainment into the 1930s (see Kuhn 2002: 56–8). A more consistent but still limited trend was towards a higher proportion of British feature films. Throughout the period covered by the ledgers, Hollywood accounted for the majority of feature films shown at the Tudor. This was particularly marked in 1925, when I can only identify three British features screened at the cinema: The Love Story of Aliette Brunton (1924), Sins Ye Do (1924) and Satan’s Sisters (1924). The situation began to change in 1926, when the British films screened included The Blackguard (1925), Southern Love (1924), She (1925), The Rat (1926), Riding for a King (1926), The Secret Kingdom (1925), The Last Witness (1925), King of the Castle (1926), Trainer and Temptress (1925), Somebody’s Darling (1925), Sahara Love (1925), Mons (1926) and One Colombo Night (1926). In the second half of the 1920s there was also an increase in the number of productions from continental Europe, as well as Anglo-German co-productions. Graham Cutts’ The Blackguard had been filmed in Berlin (with Hitchcock’s assistance), while audiences to the Tudor in 1927 could have seen The Waltz Dream (Germany, 1925), Jealousy (Germany, 1925), The Nest (France, 1926), The Road to Happiness (Germany/Austria, 1926), Human Law (Germany/UK, 1923), Maciste in the Lion’s Den (Italy, 1926), The Blue Danube (Germany, 1926), Circus of Life (Germany, 1926), Metropolis (Germany, 1927), Master of the House (Denmark, 1925) and A Sister of Six (Sweden/Germany, 1926). The continental side of the Tudor programme is less marked in the 1930s, though the screening of Kameradschaft demonstrates that it did not entirely disappear.

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British films become more evident. “The Tudor liked to book British,” notes Chibnall (Chibnall 2007: 201), identifying almost a third of the cinema’s programming in 1932 as British. Gracie Field’s Sally in Our Alley proved particularly popular, while Jack Raymond’s now little-known Up For the Cup, about a Yorkshireman’s efforts to see the F.A. Cup Final, attracted larger audiences than Hindle Wakes and Rich and Strange (all three dating from 1931). Sporting-themed films seemed to do well at the Tudor. There is a context to these programming decisions but they reveal local permutations. The scarcity of British films screened in 1925 was linked to the limited extent of British film production at or immediately before this time. Hollywood dominated British screens at this point even more than later. One response to this was the “Film Europe” movement designed to support European film production. Kristin Thompson has described this as having a relatively positive start in the 1920s but dying out in the 1930s (Thompson 1999: 56). Thus the proportion of German films on British screens increased overall from 5.8 per cent in 1926 to 12 per cent in 1928 before declining to 2.8 per cent in 1932 (a slight increase on the previous year) (1999: 64). The Tudor broadly fits that pattern, indicating that it was not limited to first-run cinemas. The introduction of synchronised sound was a further factor. The Tudor’s inclusion of the Famous Music Masters series on its programme from at least 1925 highlights the importance of sound in the “silent” era but the introduction of recorded dialogue cannot have made the appeal of non-Englishlanguage films any easier to sell. Thompson also identified a decrease in the proportion of American feature films in circulation in Britain, though these still accounted for the significant majority: 83.6 per cent in 1926 and 70 per cent in 1932. Over that same period, the proportion of British films increased from 4.9 per cent to 23.9 per cent (1999: 64). A key factor here was undoubtedly the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act and its imposition of a quota of British films for exhibitors as well as distributors. Yet as Chibnall points out, the Tudor actually exceeded its quota, which had risen to 12.5 per cent in 1932 (Chibnall 2007: 201). In the main, what the Tudor offered came from Hollywood, at least in the case of the feature film, but British comedies, musicals and crime dramas had enough appeal (or were either cheap enough or part of the package the cinema brought) to be booked on a relatively regular basis. On its own, this material cannot define audience taste even within this locality at this time. Those who watched Bulldog Drummond at the Tudor may have been interested in a film version of Sapper’s novel, a film starring Ronald Colman, to hear the Tudor’s newly installed sound equipment, or may even have been more taken by Lazy Days (1929), the Little Rascals comedy short that accompanied the feature (or perhaps not). As Rowson suggested, weather conditions may have had more of an effect on the box office than the attractiveness of the main feature. The records do tell us how exhibitors responded to changes such as the introduction of recorded sound, and the particular challenges faced by those who did not operate as part of a major chain of cinemas. While not providing a definitive account of film preferences in interwar Britain, they do indicate the eclectic nature of what audiences watched during this period, in terms of the nature of the films and their relative duration. Despite some movement from a mixed programme towards shows dominated by the feature film, the Tudor continued to show a combination of features and shorts into the 1930s, a fact not generally apparent in its advertisements, which tended to promote the main or the double feature, but clear from the records the

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cinema itself kept. In addition, while there are films listed here (such as The Gold Rush and Metropolis) that have established a place within film history, and some (in particular those directed by Alfred Hitchcock) within British film history, a high proportion of what was screened at the Tudor between the end of 1924 and the end of 1932 consisted of feature films, newsreels, shorts and serials that have been barely noticed in subsequent accounts. The history of British cinema as the 1920s became the 1930s is thus not just the history of Hitchcock’s Blackmail but also of another film of the same name. It is a history that includes Ben Hur and Laurel and Hardy films but also the 1,523 who paid for their token on Monday 18 October 1930 (159 at the matinee, 1,363 in the evening) to see Colleen Moore in Footlights and Fools (1929), child star Sunny Jim McKeen in Stop That Noise (1930), the third part of The Cockney Spirit in the War (1930) and an episode of Pathé Gazette.

Further reading Higson, A. (ed.) (2002) Young and Innocent: The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930, Exeter: Exeter University Press. Johnson, B. (2007) 100 Years of Leicester Cinema, Stroud: Tempus Publishing. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

References Barker, G. (1995) Interview by V. Hollyoak, East Midlands Oral History Archive, 607, CH/103/ 0184, Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. Bioscope (1914) “Leicester’s Latest,” 23 April, p. 361. Chibnall, S. (2007) Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British “B” Film, London: British Film Institute. Cinema News and Property Gazette, “New Companies Registered,” (1912), December, pp. 88–9. Gilbey, P. (2001) “Did Mice Live in Tudor Cinema?” Leicester Mercury, 4 May, p. 14. Harper, S. (2004) “A Lower Middle-Class Taste Community in the 1930s: Admission Figures at the Regent Cinema, Portsmouth, U.K.,” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 24(4): 565–87. Harper, S. (2006) “Fragmentation and Crisis: 1940s Admission Figures at the Regent, Portsmouth, UK,” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 26(3): 361–94. Hiley, N. (1999) “‘Let’s Go to the Pictures’: The British Cinema Audience in the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of Popular British Cinema (2): 39–53. Hiley, N. (2002) “Nothing More Than a ‘Craze’: Cinema Building in Britain from 1909 to 1914,” in A. Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent: The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930, pp. 111–27. Exeter: Exeter University Press. James, R. (2007) “‘A Very Profitable Enterprise’: South Wales Miners’ Institute Cinemas in the 1930s,” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 27(1): 27–61. Jeacle, I. (2009) “‘Going to the Movies’: Accounting and Twentieth Century Cinema,” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 22 (5): 677–708. Johnson, B. (2007) 100 Years of Leicester Cinema, Stroud: Tempus Publishing. Kinematograph Year Book (1914), London: Kinematograph Publications. Kinematograph Year Book (1929), London: Kinematograph Publications. Kinematograph Year Book (1931), London: Kinematograph Publications.

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Kinematograph Year Book (1948), London: Odhams Press. Kinematograph Year Book (1950), London: Odhams Press. Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Leicester Mercury (newspaper). Leicester Pictures Ltd (1925–32) DE14112/1–2, Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland. Poole, J. (1987) “British Cinema Attendance in Wartime: Audience Preference at the Majestic, Macclesfield, 1939–1946,” Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 7(1): 15–34. Rowson, S. (1936) “A Statistical Survey of the Cinema Industry in Great Britain in 1934,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 99(1): 67–129. Sedgwick, J. (2006) “Cinemagoing in Portsmouth during the 1930s,” Cinema Journal, 46(1): 52–84. Thompson, K. (1999) “The Rise and Fall of Film Europe,” in A. Higson (ed.), “Film Europe” and “Film America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, pp. 56–81. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Williams, D. R. (1993) Cinema in Leicester 1896–1931, Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press.

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THE RISE OF THE FILM SOCIETY MOVEMENT Richard MacDonald For four annual seasons the Film Society, established in London in 1925, was the only example in Britain of a volunteer-run, non-commercial exhibiting organization presenting films to a private membership on a subscription basis. Before the end of the decade, however, several factors would converge that led to a surge in the formation of societies by amateur activists around the country. These factors included: the transition to sound, the introduction of quota rules which consolidated commercial cinema exhibitors’ hostility to European productions, the heavy-handed censorship of Soviet films whose notoriety and fame preceded them, and the increasing circulation of serious film criticism in which films that could not be seen by most readers were appreciatively discussed. To activists, film societies provided a solution to the perceived cultural backwardness and homogeneity of the kind of cinema offered to audiences on a commercial basis in Britain. In autumn 1929 the Film Society of Glasgow was formed following a modestly attended meeting of thirteen enthusiasts. Film shows began soon after with a showing of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) in the private basement theatre of First National Pathé. At the end of its first season the society had eighty members (Anon. 1936: 26). At the same time, Billingham Film Society in Teesside in the Northeast of England began its first season with monthly mid-week public screenings at a local picture house. In London, meanwhile, the first and long-anticipated screenings of films from the Soviet Union at the Film Society of London provided the catalyst for moves to establish a Federation of Workers’ Film Societies which aimed to adopt the film society exhibition model to show films with the intention of mobilizing interest in socialism to a working-class audience (Bond 1930: 66–69). Soon afterwards the Federation’s first branch, the London Workers’ Film Society, held its inaugural screening in November 1929. Provincial workers’ film societies formed in quick succession in Britain’s industrialized and politically radicalized urban centres: the Edinburgh Workers’ Progressive Film Society met for the first time in February 1930 and within a year kindred organizations had been established in Salford, Glasgow, Merseyside, Newcastle and Sheffield, all of which sent delegates to the first annual general meeting of the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies in May 1931. Careful to distinguish itself from the workers’ film society already established in the city, the Edinburgh Film Guild began its first season in 1930 in a short-lived and financially unsuccessful collaboration with a commercial cinema which agreed to show an

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“advanced” film selected by the Guild once a month. The first film in the Guild’s repertory programme, Cavalcanti’s Rien Que Les Heures (1926), was appreciated by members but brought howls of protest from the public with whom the Guild shared the screening (Wilson 1950: 1–4). In October the same year, a small group of junior employees of the Birmingham City Corporation called the first meeting of “persons interested in the formation of a Birmingham Film Society”. Following an address by Paul Rotha, Birmingham Film Society launched in what was becoming the customary manner: a presentation of the film Rotha had described as “a drop of wine in an ocean of salt water” (1930: 43), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, accompanied in this case by a score composed for the occasion by founder member John Stone and performed by a group of unemployed musicians (Knight 1948). Birmingham would soon be joined by new societies in Leicester and Southampton, and at Oxford University. In another basement room in Leeds, eight sixteen-year-old Jewish schoolboys equipped with a 9.5-mm Pathescope projector and a homemade screen launched the Leeds Film Group. Their first season featured a film so popular, according the later recollections of the group’s founder Alec Baron, that it had to be shown twice: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Film societies and the better films movement The film society movement that so dramatically came into existence between 1929 and 1931 possessed two distinct but proximate currents which pulled towards different conceptions of reform and progress in the young medium of cinema. The first current was identified by a number of terms used by contemporary writers on the cinema: the “better films” movement, the “unusual films” movement and the “little kinema” or “repertory film” movement. The growth of serious writing on film as an artistic medium throughout the 1920s in the broadsheet press, literary periodicals and specialist journals and books has been well documented (Sexton 2008; Marcus 2010). A call for cinemas to show “better films”, and for audiences to support them when they did, ran through much of this writing. Critics writing about film in the 1920s and early 1930s used the term “appreciation” to denote a disposition of seriousness and discrimination in relation to cinema that they wished to encourage so that the medium might advance. Seeking for cinema the kind of cultural prestige enjoyed by the traditional arts, these critics borrowed the term “appreciation” from its established couplings with literary, musical and art appreciation. Appreciation was therefore closely aligned to a particular conception of progress for cinema. As Iris Barry put it in Let’s Go to the Movies, “seeing for oneself what the cinema’s function and its virtues are”, rather than indulging in blanket condemnation, is “the best way to help progress” (1926: ix). Among the handicaps for cinema in this regard was its mutability, “which makes it impossible for many of those who would appreciate the most novel, interesting, original films, ever to see them. It is important, really, that they should see them” (Ibid.: 166). As an intervention in exhibition culture, film societies sought to counter the medium’s mutability by programming what were judged to be the most novel, interesting and original films, and by giving these films an afterlife through criticism and discussion. A burgeoning discourse on cinema as an artistic medium contrasted cinematic advances abroad with backwardness and stagnation at home. In practice the category of artistically advanced cinema was very diverse, admitting films made in varied European production

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contexts, not least prestigious commercial films such as Caligari. An early influential contributor to the better films discourse and an avowed champion of the repertory film movement was C.A. Lejeune, who began writing a film column for the Manchester Guardian in 1922. Lejeune applied a critical schema that contrasted the “cut to pattern” film entertainment available in the “average house” (“artificial” American films and “vapid” English ones) with the artistic qualities of contemporary French, Swedish and German productions, finding in the latter close-ups and gestures that possessed beauty and stories distinguished by their restraint (Lejeune 1922: 7). Lejeune lamented the limited opportunity to watch these continental films as a kind of cultural backwardness and saw it as her role as a critic to support the rare cinema managers who pursued a “specialist” policy of showing continental films to discriminating patrons. For leading critics advocating publicly for the art of film, cinephile pilgrimages to France and Germany yielded cinematic cultural capital, knowledge of new films, directors and actors. Inter-continental travel to European cities facilitated contact with films and filmmakers and sharpened the sense of artistic impoverishment at home. Economically privileged cinephiles like the Swiss-based editors of the modernist magazine Close-Up thought nothing of cross-border pilgrimages to catch a screening of a rare film. Like other Oxbridge alumni, Basil Wright, later associate of John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board and member of the Film Society of London, beat a path to Berlin. He wrote an article for the Cambridge literary magazine Experiment on the cinematic riches to be found in provincial German cinemas and the comparative poverty of choice in British cinemas (Miller 2011). As travel companions on the Dover to London train, each returning from cinema-related trips to Berlin, Ivor Montagu, a young Cambridge graduate on an assignment for The Times, and actor Hugh Miller formulated their plan for a non-commercial exhibiting organization, a film society, that would be modelled one part on Britain’s theatrical societies and one part on the repertory programming of specialist Parisian theatres like Le Vieux Colombier. For many enthusiasts with a developing interest in film but without the means for inter-continental travel, contact with the continental films and filmmakers that captivated writers like Lejeune came not directly from viewing in a Parisian cinema, or from previews in private Cambridge Halls or Wardour Street basements, but vicariously from reading reviews in the newspaper. Newsprint circulated where film prints did not, the potential technological reproducibility of the latter held firmly in check by the frictions caused by the economics of film supply and a hostile censorship environment for films. In years to come, provincial activists identifying the initial impulse to start a film society named newspaper columns, reviews and books as the generative influence. The founders of the Leeds Film Group, Alec Baron and his school friends, won a Spot the Stars competition in a local newspaper and with their winnings bought a copy of Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (Baron, no date). Engineer and trade union shop steward Reg Cordwell, a founder of the Salford Workers’ Film Society, recalled reading a review of Huntly Carter’s polemical The New Spirit of Cinema in the Manchester Guardian (Cordwell 1960). Mass-circulation newspapers thus played an important part in the geographical and social dissemination of debates on film aesthetics. From its first season the performances and activities of the Film Society of London were also regularly featured in national newspapers. The Manchester Guardian and The Times covered monthly programmes and reported on highlights from the society’s AGM;

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in doing so they helped to construct the society as an exemplar for others outside London to follow. Serious writing about film in newspapers raised awareness for those living in Bradford, Edinburgh and Manchester of a lack of access and the frictions and blockages in the system of film supply that some enthusiasts channelled into volunteer-run film exhibiting organizations – film societies. Whilst the film society model was still in its first phase of provincial expansion, a quite distinct set of energies were focused on encouraging the appreciation of film in the field of education. Throughout the 1920s and with increasing regularity as the decade wore on, both local and national groups and organizations concerned with the moral welfare of children had sponsored commissions enquiring into the effects of cinema on young audiences. Where the focus of the church-affiliated bodies who sponsored some of these inquiries was on keeping morally questionable films off the screen through the intervention of the censor, some educationalists were arguing the case for a more constructive road to reform. A Commission on Education and Cultural Films was formed in 1929 following a conference convened by a broad coalition of educational and scientific organizations. The commission considered methods to improve the use of film in education and explored ways to raise standards of public appreciation of film (Commission on Educational and Cultural Films 1932: 1). The commission adopted the term “appreciation” and made it the cornerstone of the constructive approach to the film industry that it favoured. By the time the commission published its report The Film in National Life in 1932 – a report that would lead to the establishment of the British Film Institute the following year – film societies were already a nationwide movement.

Film societies and the workers’ film movement The second major current of film society activism sprang from a desire to use the model of the film society for the purposes of presenting socialist films of working-class interest, primarily films from the Soviet Union, to politically mobilize working-class audiences. For its first three seasons the Film Society of London established a pattern of highly eclectic programming in which typically three or four shorter films accompanied a main feature. The shorter work selected ranged from varieties of animation, both popular and experimental, instructional film, documentary, single-reel comedies, films of historic interest and occasionally extracts of features included for the purpose of study. Towards the end of its first season The Times’ correspondent wrote of the film society’s programming: “During the first hour of the film society performances everyone expects oddities, historical, medical, and eccentric” (Anon. 1926: 8). The majority of the features were German, a consequence, no doubt, of Ivor Montagu and Hugh Miller’s detailed knowledge of recent German productions. In its fourth season the Society realized a long-held ambition to present contemporary work from the Soviet Union and premiered two features by Pudovkin, Mother (1926) and The End of St. Petersburg (1927), along with the drama Bed and Sofa (1927) by Alexander Room. The following season showcased the other young luminary of Soviet cinema: it opened with Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and closed with the same director’s The General Line (1929). In the short period between the Society’s first and fourth seasons, powerful, formally innovative films celebrating the Soviet revolution had made waves across Western Europe, prompting moral panic from right-wing voices and efforts to

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suppress their exhibition by national censorship bodies. In Britain these censorship efforts proved highly successful in preventing audiences from seeing revolutionary Soviet films, although their suppression only served to enhance their notoriety. Following alarmist reports in The Times of social unrest at a showing of The Battleship Potemkin in Germany and in the wake of the nine-day general strike of May 1926, the British Board of Film Censors rejected the film when it was submitted later that year (Robertson 2005). Mother, Bed and Sofa and New Babylon (1929), Trauerberg and Kozintsev’s film of the 1871 Paris Commune, also shown in season four, had similarly met with the disapproval of the censors. The Film Society of London, however, was permitted to present films rejected by the BBFC because of its standing with the London County Council and the cast-iron respectability of its membership. As Ivor Montagu outlined in a pamphlet on the political censorship of films published in 1929 which was a distillation of lessons learnt over the previous four years, the BBFC was not a statutory body; rather, the exhibition of films was subject to the authority of local governing bodies which exercised their power under the 1909 Cinematograph Act (Montagu 1929). In gaining permission from the London County Council to present controversial Soviet films that the BBFC had not approved for exhibition, the Film Society of London played a tactical hand, emphasizing the private and exclusive nature of its membership and the purely artistic nature of its interest in the films in question as examples of pioneering film technique. A group of leading Communist Party members, members of the Minority Movement, including individuals closely involved with the Film Society of London such as Ivor Montagu, now planned to help establish film societies for working-class audiences where these Soviet films would be shown. Their first move was to establish a Federation of Workers’ Film Societies in October 1929 advising those interested in establishing groups of the best methods of carrying out their work and supplying films through a distribution arm, Atlas Films, working closely with a noncommercial German distributor, Weltfilm (Hogenkamp 1986). Any expectation activists had entertained that workers’ film societies might enjoy the same privileges as the Film Society of London was soon confronted by the realities of censorship law, which gave absolute discretion to local authorities at a time of rising conservative anxiety about working-class mobilization and discontent. A month after the establishment of the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies, the first local branch, the London Workers’ Film Society, was established. The first show, a programme which included a less widely known Soviet film, Two Days (1928), had to switch location to a cooperative hall in Tooting at the last minute when the LCC refused permission for a Sunday performance in a cinema as requested. In January 1930 it sought permission from the LCC to show The Battleship Potemkin but was refused. Both the early successes of the London Workers’ Film Society and the later thwarting of its plans to show Soviet films to its membership, and similar struggles waged by the Masses Stage and Film Guild affiliated to the Independent Labour Party, were publicized widely both in the radical press and in the Manchester Guardian and The Times. Like the proponents of the better films movement, workers’ film society activists deplored what they saw as the unreality of the great mass of films, their distance from what were frequently described as the problems of life. But for the politicized activists on the left, this criticism was filtered through a conception of cinema as an ideological weapon of class struggle. They argued that cinema evolved within a profit-making

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capitalist system and consequently served the interests of capitalists by diverting the working classes from an engagement with the conditions of their existence. Whilst Communist film activists in Britain and Western Europe struggled with the task of opposing capitalist manifestations of cinema at home, they looked to the Soviet Union as an example of cinema produced in the only country in which the working class were the ruling class. The value of Soviet films was incontestable, as Ralph Bond, a leading figure within the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies and a founder of the London branch, put it: “to aid and encourage the workers in their fight against capitalism” (Bond 1931: 186). Bond was defending the close identification of workers’ film societies with Soviet films from a criticism advanced by the polemicist Huntly Carter that the promotion of “unusual foreign goods” – namely Soviet films – within the workers’ film society movement diverted attention from the task of building up an indigenous workers’ cinema grounded in social and political changes in their own country (Carter 1930a: 247). In response, Bond affirmed that Soviet films held international appeal and moved working-class audiences in Britain, and that it was around these films that the movement had grown. Carter’s contention that workers’ film societies were being force-fed Soviet films or that the interest was being manufactured from the centre is difficult to accept. The Manchester and Salford Workers’ Film Society, to take one example, was formed spontaneously by Communist and trades union activists who gravitated to the Workers’ Arts Club in Salford. During their first season they published a pamphlet that expressed the conviction that the great directors of the Soviet Union could provide a political education that could not be found elsewhere in the commercial cinema. Bond’s insistence on the passionate interest in the celebrated Soviet films from a radicalized working-class audience resonates with the anecdotal recollections from this society’s members and the testimony of viewers from working-class backgrounds who encountered Soviet films elsewhere (Jones 1987). Whilst some cine-activists, notably Ivor Montagu and Kenneth MacPherson, moved fluently across the two streams of film society activism, exercising influential roles as critics and organizers in support of the promotion of both artistic film and workers’ film organizations, others applied their energies to the task of differentiating these two currents. Among the latter, Rotha, discussing the vogue for Russian films and the “complications attending the presentation of Soviet films outside their country of origin”, adopted an adversarial stance in Celluloid (1931: 136). Rotha argued that whilst an acquaintance with Soviet masterpieces like Earth (1930) was essential for a “full realisation of what contemporary cinema can mean”, the generality of Soviet productions was being overhyped without discrimination between the good and the bad by students of the cinema and the press (Ibid.: 138). A “legend of the unvarying greatness of Soviet films” had spread throughout the growing film society movement (Ibid.: 137). This had been met with opposition from local council authorities and watch committees, credited by Rotha with “a reasonable distaste for Communist beliefs” (Ibid.: 137). Moreover Rotha argued, conspiratorially, that the Russians, hoping to attract “fresh converts to the red banner”, were taking advantage of the situation and using “devious methods” to introduce “their films” into London and indirectly encourage “the setting up of film societies in big industrial centres where these pictures, under the guise of artistry, were most likely to have the most effect on working-class audiences” (Ibid.: 136–7).

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Rotha continued: “Under such conditions it is inevitable that the sheep should suffer with the goats” (Ibid: 137): the sheep here being “we, who are serious” about cinematic art, and the goats presumably film society activists with Communist beliefs, the wouldbe converts to the red banner, targeted by local authorities. From the other side, so to speak, Huntly Carter writing in The Plebs charged the Film Society of London with aestheticizing and neutralizing the revolutionary essence of the Soviet films it had been instrumental in introducing to a British audience. His book The New Spirit of Cinema continued this spirited polemic against the cinema aesthetes of the Film Society. As he saw it, “to attempt to detach the technique [montage] from the subject in order to hold the former up as a miracle of art expression is too stupid for words” (Carter 1930b: 282). In practice, despite obvious commonalities in exhibition methods, programming and mode of operation, clear differences did initially exist between the workers’ film societies and artistically oriented film societies in terms of their strategies of self-presentation. At a time of considerable official hostility to film societies explicitly aligned to working-class interests and audiences, the artistically oriented, reformist film societies were often under pressure to show themselves as above reproach, leading to the kind of foregrounding of artistic concerns of technique that Carter rejected, in this instance, for its stupidity. Film societies formed autonomously. They tended to succeed when they could draw on the support of key figures from established local cultural and educational institutions, tapping traditions of volunteer activism in arts and cultural provision, particularly in repertory and amateur theatre, and in politics. The Manchester and Salford Workers’ Film Society came to form part of the fabric of the Communist political culture of Greater Manchester in the 1930s and arose out of meetings of political activists at the Workers’ Arts Club (Jones 1987). The film society’s core founders were all experienced political activists in Communist-affiliated and socialist organizations: Jack Brewin, a founding committee member, was the Treasurer of the Salford branch of the National Unemployed Workers’ Committee Movement; Tom Cavanagh, the film society’s honorary secretary, was the Secretary of the Salford Communist Party. Birmingham Film Society, described by the writer Walter Allen as the place where young artists in the city came together, was initiated by a group of friends who were junior clerks in local government (Allen 1981). Its committee was populated by individuals drawn from the university, such as the classicist E. R. Dodds, who served as the committee’s first chair, and from the city’s repertory theatre, whose director Bache Matthews succeeded him. Tyneside Film Society originated in a meeting at the People’s Theatre in Newcastle which remained an important source of volunteers and members for the society throughout its early history. Film societies also reached beyond their locality. As exhibitors they were the endpoints in an embryonic network of film supply whose key nodes at that time were in London. Initially, the film shows each film society presented were chosen by committees whose first point of reference was the programmes of the Film Society of London. Provincial film societies sent representatives to the monthly performances of the London society and received regular briefing on its programmes. Later, a small but growing cluster of cinemas in London’s West End were pursuing a policy of importing foreign language films and subtitling them for their English-speaking audience. Alongside the Film Society of London, these specialist cinemas exercised a significant influence on the programmes of provincial film societies.

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As film educators and pressure groups advocating appreciation of good films, some societies forged links with national organizations such as the new British Film Institute which brought a certain prestige. Provincial film societies began to form a circuit around which lecturers and speakers passed. During the 1930s key figures from the documentary movement (Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, John Grierson, Cavalcanti) were regular speakers on the film society lecture circuit. Strategically the documentary producers considered the film societies an important part of the new cinema public that it hoped to cultivate outside of the commercial cinemas.

Reinvention and consolidation The early histories of some film societies thwart the polemicist’s efforts to sort the sheep from the goats, the workers’ society from the film appreciation society. Manchester and Salford Film Society and Tyneside Film Society were pragmatic mutations arising from the decline of a workers’ film society. One of the most remarkable stories of renewal, reinvention and multiple identities is to be found in Leeds, as recalled in the memoirs of the city’s film society pioneer Alec Baron. After the Leeds Film Group’s first successful season in 1930–1, showing films on a 9.5-mm Pathescope, the schoolboys behind the group, using funds raised from a stage revue they produced at the Judean Club Theatre, bought two second-hand 35-mm silent projectors from a cinema that was converting to sound. For their second season the following year they presented 35-mm films in a hall that seated one hundred, positioning the projector outside the building to comply with the letter of the law on cinematograph safety. The next incarnation of the group was a summer season as the Leeds Workers’ Film Society where Potemkin, Mother, The End of St. Petersburg, New Babylon and The General Line were shown on 16mm. Alec Baron recalled that the response was poor and membership small. Like other film societies the Leeds Film Group looked to shift their operations to a Sunday screening in a cinema and they took over the lease of the Savoy Cinema, a repertory cinema linked to the Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion in London, which was not making the transition to sound. A season of silent films accompanied by orchestra was planned for 1932–3. Unfortunately, the Leeds watch committee intervened to prevent it, tipped off by the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association. Having read that Erik Hakim of the Academy Cinema in London was looking to open a regional repertory cinema, the Leeds Film Group then wrote to offer the Savoy Cinema. Baron’s memoirs recall the surprise of the deputation representing the Academy Cinema arriving at the Queens Hotel in Leeds for a meeting and finding two teenagers who had come straight from school with their school caps in hand. For several years the Academy Cinema Leeds ran successfully as “the Yorkshire home of unusual and artistic films”. A flyer from that time on “the Better Films Movement in Leeds” declared that the Academy Leeds was “the first specialised Repertory Cinema to be established in the provinces” (“The Better Films Movement in Leeds”, c.1934). The Academy Leeds, Alec Baron recalled, was “showing the very films we wanted to show, but now open to the public!” (Baron, no date). During those same years Baron and his associates established a Leeds Jewish Film Society and hosted an annual film show and fundraiser where they showed amateur productions by their Jewish Film Group. And finally Baron claimed the young activists of the Leeds Film Group had a hand in the formation of a branch of the British Film Institute, the Leeds Film Institute Society launched with a visit from the BFI’s first curator of the National Film Library,

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Ernest Lindgren. Like other Film Institute branches, this was a rather more staid and upstanding body, less focused on the buccaneering and improvisatory kind of exhibition engaged in by the Leeds Film Group in its earliest incarnations. By comparison with the energetic reinventions of the Leeds Film Group, film societies like the Edinburgh Film Guild, Glasgow, Merseyside, Southampton, Tyneside, Birmingham, Manchester and Salford, Leicester and others consolidated throughout the 1930s. The memberships of provincial film societies grew substantially, bringing financial security and a large pool of potential volunteer committee members. Established societies in large conurbations like Tyneside, Manchester and Salford had in excess of 1,400 members each at the end of the decade. Throughout the country film societies negotiated the volatile landscape of film supply and local censorship regimes to become an established presence among the cultural institutions of the cities in which they formed, with their activities reported in local newspapers. Despite their organizational character as private membership clubs, the provincial film societies saw themselves as agencies of cultural reform. Centres of authoritative critical judgement, information and advice on all matters to do with cinema, they aimed to guide their members to support what they judged to be good in the local cinemas of their area. Many societies began publishing regular reviews on the films shown locally aimed at their membership, providing in many areas the first examples of film criticism. In turn, prominent film society activists such as Forsyth Hardy of the Edinburgh Film Guild and Ernest Dyer of Tyneside Film Society wrote film columns for local and regional newspapers. Through their programme notes, lectures and exhibitions, the network of provincial film societies displayed their commitment to the progress of film, aimed at cultivating among their members an aesthetically broad, historically grounded understanding of the film medium.

Further reading Jones, S.G. (1987) The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918–1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sexton, J. (2008) Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

References Allen, W. (1981) As I Walked Down New Grub Street: Memories of a Writing Life. London: Heinemann. Anon. (1926) “The Film Society”, The Times, 15 March, p. 8. Anon. (1936) “Film Societies”, World Film News, June, p. 26. Anon. (1934) “The Better Films Movement in Leeds”, Alec Baron Archive, Box 8. Brotherton Collection. Leeds University Library. Baron, A. (n.d.) Unpublished memoir, Box 13, The Alec Baron Archive, Box 13. Brotherton Collection. Leeds University Library. Barry, I. (1926) Let’s Go the Movies. London: Payson and Clark. Bond, R. (1931) “Labour and the Cinema: A Reply to Huntly Carter”, The Plebs, August, p. 186. Bond, R. (1939) “First Step Towards a Workers’ Film Movement”, Close-Up, January, pp. 66–9. Carter, H. (1930a) “Labour and the Cinema”, The Plebs, November 1930, pp. 245–48. Carter, H. (1930b) The New Spirit in the Cinema: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Parallel Paths of the Cinema. London: Harold Shaylor. Commission on Educational and Cultural Films (1932). The Film in National Life: Report of the Commission on Educational and Cultural Films. London: CECF.

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Cordwell, R. (c.1960). “Thirty Years of Film”, Manchester and Salford Film Society Collection, Working Class Movement Library. Coxhead, E. (1933) “Towards a Co-operative Cinema”, Close-Up, June, pp. 133–7. Hagener, M. (2007) Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Hogenkamp, B. (1986) Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain, 1929–1939. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Jones, S.G. (1987) The British Labour Movement and Film, 1918–1939. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Knight, R.C. (1948) “Flashback: A Hundred Shows of the Birmingham Film Society 1931–1948”, pp. 1–24. Lejeune, C.A. (1922) “The Week on the Screen: A Worm that Turned”, Manchester Guardian, 4 November. MacDonald, R. L. (2016) The Appreciation of Film: The Postwar Film Society Movement and Film Culture. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Marcus, L. (2010) The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, H.K. (2011) “From Turksib to Night Mail”. The Soviet Influence from Turksib to Night Mail, DVD Booklet. London: BFI Publishing. Montagu, I. (1929) The Political Censorship of Films. London: Victor Gollancz. Robertson, J.C. (2005) The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913–1972. London: Routledge. Rotha, P. (1930) The Film Till Now. New York: Jonathan Cape. Rotha, P. (1933) Celluloid: The Film Today. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Sexton, J. (2008) Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Wilson, N. (1950) “History and Achievement”, Twenty-One Years of Cinema: A Twenty-First Anniversary Retrospect of the Work of the Edinburgh Film Guild, pp. 1–4.

Online Domitor – an international research community for early cinema The Bioscope – archive website of Luke Mckernan’s silent cinema blog

Film festivals Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, Italy Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, Italy British Silent Film Festival

BFI sources BFI Collections Database BFI Player BFI Screenonline

Trade publications The Bioscope Kinematograph Weekly Picturegoer Close-Up 118

Part II

THE CLASSIC PERIOD 1930–80

10

MAKE-BELIEVE AND REALISM IN BRITISH FILM PRODUCTION From the coming of sound to the abolition of the National Film Finance Corporation

Charles Drazin In The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Sir Thomas Cromwell urges the King to consider a fourth marriage. Henry answers that he would consider such a thing “the victory of optimism over experience”. As he laughs, the camera tracks along a row of courtiers laughing along with him. There is then a long shot of the vast banqueting hall, full of yet more laughing courtiers. But the laughter does not stop there. We see servants outside the banqueting hall laughing too. We then go down into the subterranean kitchens, where an army of cooks and scullery maids share in the amusement. Such lavish production values complemented the wit, style and glamour that helped to make The Private Life of Henry VIII the “first British talking picture to become a significant success in the international market” (Chapman 2005: 13). The film is rightly considered a landmark in British cinema history for having made this breakthrough, but it is the King’s comment itself, told on a Hollywood scale, that captures so well the essential delusion that lay at the heart of British film production. The idea that making British films could provide the basis for a profitable production industry reaping rewards from the international box office was, like Korda’s film itself, “a victory of optimism over experience” that carried the industry through as many decades as Henry VIII had wives. The Quota legislation that had created the British talking picture industry in 1928 was finally abolished only in 1985. For nearly 60 years British film production swung between boom and bust with a pendulum-like regularity that offered plenty of evidence of the industry’s systemic precariousness but did not undermine the desire of British producers to continue making films. To understand this extraordinary victory of optimism over experience, we must look at the experience. Insofar as it is possible to speak of a British film production industry at all, it was the creature of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927, which introduced a compulsory quota of British-made films that rose from 5 per cent in the first year of the

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legislation taking effect all the way up to a high of 45 per cent in 1948 (Hansard 1948: c.779). In the last year before the Act came into being, out of 749 films that were tradeshown in Britain, only 34 were British, less than 5 per cent. At a time when British production seemed on the point of extinction, the Cinematograph Films Act suddenly brought into being a landscape of new production companies and studios scattered in and around London, in response to the demands of the quota. The two vertical combines that dominated the industry during the first years of sound, Gaumont-British Picture Corporation and British International Pictures, were formed respectively in 1927 and 1928. Most of the other major British production companies came into being at about the same time: British Lion in 1927, British and Dominion in 1928, and Twickenham Film Studios and Associated Talking Pictures, both in 1929. A comparison of the number of new production companies registered in three successive years from the passing of the Act offers some measure of the production industry’s exponential growth: 26 in 1927, 37 in 1928, and 59 in 1929 (Political and Economic Planning 1952: 50). The strategy of all the British companies that hoped for more than simple subsistence was to make films that were of high enough quality to win access to the international market. British International Pictures began to distribute its talking pictures through the independent distributor Sono Art-Worldwide Pictures. But the American reception of the very first release, Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), which opened in New York on 4 October 1929 at the Selwyn Theater on 42nd Street, did not augur well. Its reception was, according to Ernest Marshall writing in the New York Times, “a very sore point at Elstree, where it is generally believed that the verdict of the American critics should have secured for it a much warmer welcome from the trade than it appeared to have had” (Marshall 1929: 202). The opinion that Motion Picture News offered of Hitchcock’s first talkie gave a good example of the cold water that the US trade would routinely pour on British releases: If this is a sample of the best that the English can turn out, we have only to say that it is of the quality that in this country is usually booked into Class B and C houses and never gets into the deluxe first runs. To bring it to Broadway and offer it at $2 top is going a little too far. The magazine concluded its lukewarm review with the comment, “There is no one in the cast that matters to this market” (Schader 1929: 33). British International Films persisted in its efforts to break into the American market with booking agent Harold Auten, who in late 1930 leased the George M. Cohan Theatre in Manhattan as a showcase for an extended programme of BIP’s early talkies, which included DuPont’s Atlantic (1929) and Hitchcock’s Murder! (1930). But eventually even The New York Times’ English-born critic Mordant Hall, who had done his best to push the pictures, had to acknowledge the failure of the experiment: “City Lights [1931], it is interesting to note, took in twice as much money in a day as the best of the British films had taken in during a week” (Hall 1932: 150). The disappointment was felt all the more keenly since the coming of sound had promised to create an entirely new market with the potential to level the playing field. There were even some who believed that British films might have an advantage: “The talking picture [is] our opportunity”, declared the former theatrical impresario Basil Dean when he launched Associated Talking Pictures in 1929,

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“for it is admitted that England has the dramatists and also the voices” (“A New ‘Talkie’” 1929: 10). At about the same time, Jesse Lasky, head of production at Paramount, spoke of the possibility of his entering the British film industry because “Britain was the natural home of the talkie film with actors and actresses whose pronunciation was the standard of English throughout the world” (“Effect of Talkies” 1929: 9). The name of Dean’s new company, Associated Talking Pictures, was calculated to show off what was perceived to be Britain’s trump card. At the beginning of 1930 Associated Talking Pictures reached an agreement with RKO that guaranteed distribution of its films in the United States and throughout the world. “Anglo-American cooperation means British talent and material and American world markets”, declared a triumphant Basil Dean (“R-K-O to Distribute” 1930: 5). But once the market was tested (as evidenced above), this quaint faith in the power of the British voice was exposed for the fallacy that it actually was. Only a few months later, in May 1930, BIP’s chief John Maxwell, on a visit to America, conceded that “the English method of enunciation is considered almost a foreign tongue” (“British Producer’s Views” 1930: 160). He gave as an example the experience of seeing Ronald Colman in an early Goldwyn talkie, Bulldog Drummond (1929): At a showing of this film … in an American theatre, there were two young girls sitting behind me. When Mr Colman, an actor who has been in the United States so long, began to speak from the screen, one of the girls whispered to the other, “What a funny English he speaks!”. (“British Producer’s Views” 1930: 160) In light of such a reception for British films, it is hardly surprising that the agreement between ATP and RKO lasted only a brief time. Although RKO used ATP’s films to satisfy its British quota obligations, it did not give any of them a general release in America. Resigning itself to a failed venture, ATP set up its own distributor, Associated British Film Distributors, in July 1932. The struggle they experienced in winning access to the American market led both ATP and BIP to adopt a more conservative, economical attitude towards film production. But perhaps it was in the nature of a business whose very lifeblood was showmanship and make-believe that the international success of The Private Life of Henry VIII should have swiftly rekindled confidence across the entire production industry. Through its Hollywood sense of pace, spectacle and extravagant production values, Korda’s film seemed to offer another way forward that circumvented the problem of the clipped British accent. Within months of its successful international release, Korda was on the verge of securing major investment from the Prudential Assurance Company. In July 1934, its chairman, Sir Connop Guthrie, outlined in a memorandum Korda’s conception of what a properly capitalised London Film Productions might achieve (Guthrie 1934): Korda thinks in the terms of the American Producing Companies and takes the Twentieth Century as his model. These people have earned £800,000 in their first year, producing 8 to 10 pictures. It must be remembered that Twentieth Century commenced with all the capital they required. Korda therefore thinks that with adequate Capital London Films could do as well in a year when he could produce

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8 to 10 pictures, because he has the same distributing agency as Twentieth Century, viz: United Artists, with whom London Films has a contract for the distribution of 16 pictures as and when he can finance them. Guthrie went on: “The entire cost of production is offset by the English receipts, leaving approximately £60,000 per picture from USA. When London Films is capable of producing 14 pictures per annum, £840,000 would be made” (Guthrie 1934). In light of the earlier failures of both BIP and ATP to make any headway in the American market, such credulity seems yet another example of the victory of optimism over experience. But it must be remembered that in 1934 talking pictures were still a very new industry, in which it was possible to believe that an appropriate adjustment to the prototype could make the vital difference. After Korda’s model, the key ingredients seemed to be story and stars that had universal appeal as well as an arrangement with a powerful US distributor. Several new British independent production companies flocked to United Artists. During just the one year of 1936 the number of United Artists’ English affiliations swelled from two (Korda’s London Film Productions and Herbert Wilcox’s British & Dominions) to eleven (Klingender and Legg 1937: 16). Meanwhile, Britain’s largest vertical combine, Gaumont-British, chose to rely on its relationship with the Hollywood major Fox, which had a large minority shareholding in the company. In October 1934, Gaumont launched its export drive in America with a statement to US exhibitors that boasted the connection: “Mr Sidney R. Kent, President of Fox Films Corp, after screening our product, invited us to release in the US through Fox. We consider this a compliment. And a responsibility. Mr Kent’s standards are high. We will measure up to them” (“Gaumont British Opens” 1934: 9). The lavish release programme boasted such international stars as Conrad Veidt, Anna May Wong, George Arliss and Paul Robeson, but Gaumont turned out to have no more success in overcoming American box-office resistance than BIP had had. Little more than two years later, in January 1937, its chairman Isidore Ostrer announced that unless the company could secure a bigger return in the American market it would be “compelled to abandon production” (“Financial Paragraphs” 1937: 3). A figure of over £500,000 was eventually set aside for the corporation’s anticipated production loss. At about the same time, it was reported that a receiver had been appointed to administer Julius Hagen’s production, distribution and studio companies in Twickenham. At a press lunch Hagen gave a frank account of his troubles which offered a revealing insight into the psychology of make-believe: While I was producing solid British program pictures for British audiences, I was a happy man. But all the time I was being told, “Why don’t you produce Henry VIII?” I was assured, if I spent more money on my productions, I would show a much greater profit in the world markets. All this was sweet music to me, and I fell for it – hook, line and sinker. (“Ostrer and Hagen” 1937: 7) Citing the production costs and receipts of six recent pictures, he revealed that only one had made a slight profit, and that in itself was a disappointment: he had estimated a yield of $200,000 from the US for Scrooge (1935) but received only $6,000.

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Throughout the annus horribilis of 1937 several other British companies, having made large losses on production, made similar announcements. The year ended with Basil Dean’s Associated Talking Pictures reporting an accumulated loss of £223,384 (Scotsman 24 December 1937). A few months later Dean was “politely invited to walk the plank” by the studio’s principal financial backer Stephen Courtauld (Dean 1973: 256). Korda only narrowly avoided the same fate when the Prudential Assurance Company wrested control of the heavily loss-making London Film Productions, but set him up in a new production company so that he could complete his distribution contract with United Artists. The only British film company that had managed to prosper during this period was Associated British Picture Corporation. Putting experience before optimism, it had learned from the production losses of the early 1930s not to rely on the American market. Instead, it pursued a policy of renting its studios to independent producers, who provided the quota requirements of its distribution and exhibition arms at minimal cost. The 1952 report of Political Economic Planning on the British film industry summed up the essential lesson of the 1930s: “British films could not capture a big enough share of the world market, more particularly of the American market, and the confidence which led to the expansion of the industry and the concomitant loans was unjustified” (Political and Economic Planning 1952: 70). Yet during the 1940s, once again, Britain’s largest vertical combine, this time the Rank Organisation, having subsumed GaumontBritish, attempted again to make the elusive breakthrough into the American market. The critical difference this time was the Second World War. An important financial factor was the emergency currency restrictions that the British government had imposed at the beginning of the war, which encouraged US distributors to buy British films as a means of accessing frozen funds. Such a situation created a favourable climate in which a handful of British films that addressed the common wartime theme could enjoy significant success in America. But it was not enough to change the long-term realities of the business. In Which We Serve (1942) achieved the biggest US gross of any British film up to that time, but in the same year David Selznick, who was one of the very few Hollywood moguls to look favourably upon the US distribution of British films, still issued several caveats when he asked his British representative, Jenia Reissar, to consider other British projects that might be suitable for distribution in America. Warning her that there was “resistance to English pictures unless they are tremendously outstanding”, he told her that even the exceptional projects would need a subject sufficiently familiar to the American market. While he thought the new Powell and Pressburger project, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), sounded “very interesting”, he warned her that “obviously Colonel Blimp is not a big attraction for this country, for the character is not known here to even one person for every hundred to whom it is known in England”. But even where a subject did suit the American market, he suggested that “an American in England go over the script in all cases where I don’t approve the script here, this American having sole job of checking the dialogue to make sure that there is no phraseology, no expressions, etc. that might not be understandable to Americans”. And then there was the old chestnut of the English voices, which would require similar supervision so that they did not sound “too English”. He gave Rebecca (1940) as an example of the sort of approach that would be required:

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We found through our preview cards, which are very elaborate in form, and unlike those used by any other studio, that Olivier was not understandable through a large part of the picture. We kept re-dubbing and kept previewing until this criticism was eliminated entirely, even though Olivier had to do hundreds of lines with a less British accent. (Selznick 1942) In late 1944 the Rank Organisation reached an agreement with United Artists to release seven of its prestige films in the United States (Sears 1944), but they failed to make any box-office breakthrough. The first of the seven films to be released was the very film that Selznick believed had only limited appeal in the American market, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Opening in March 1945, it did not even achieve sufficient receipts to cover the cost of prints and advertising. Once again optimism, stoked by wartime fervour, triumphed over experience as the Rank Organisation made an assault on the American market that ended with the same failure that had greeted the previous attempts of the 1930s. But after the war, there was nothing any longer to prevent the Rank Organisation from accepting the lesson that the City had already learned with the crash of 1937: British film production was an inherently unprofitable activity. After announcing huge production losses in 1949, the Rank Organisation radically altered the basis of its business to minimise the risk that production entailed. It is worth examining the overhaul of its business model here to understand how the market for British films changed in the post-war era. In the years 1949–50 Rank, which had been by far the largest producer of films in Britain, helped to finance 20 films. It provided 100 per cent financing for ten of them, partial financing for five, and guarantees of distribution to independent producers for the remaining five. In 1950–1, it helped to finance 18 films. Of these, only one received 100 per cent financing, while seven received partial financing, and the remaining ten distribution guarantees. This major structural change in the British film industry, which would never be reversed – at least as far as indigenous sources of finance were concerned – shifted the risks of production on to independent producers (Political and Economic Planning 1952: 251). The inherent unprofitability of the industry meant that once again the government had to intervene to maintain film production in Britain with the establishment (in 1949) of the National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC). Since distributors would not offer a guarantee of more than 70 per cent of the budget, independent producers relied on the NFFC to meet the shortfall. In the wishful thinking of the time the government expressed the hope that “temporary assistance from public funds, by way of loan not subsidy, would carry the independent producers until the confidence of private investors was restored” (NFFC 1950: 2). But the confidence of private investors never was restored, while the loans took on the character of a one-way subsidy (supplemented by the Eady Levy on box-office receipts), and the NFFC assumed an air of permanence, albeit dwindling in significance as the national importance of the British film production industry itself declined. When the NFFC took stock of the industry in the mid-1960s, it noted the rapidly increasing proportion of finance that US companies were investing in British production, which meant that Britain’s best film-makers were usually able to finance their projects without recourse to the NFFC. Woodfall’s Tom Jones (1963), Eon Productions’ Bond films, David Lean’s 1960s epics or the Beatles films were only a few of the decade’s more

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well-known productions that achieved success on the financial support and, as critically, worldwide distribution of the Hollywood majors. But nonetheless, the NFFC went on to make this case for its continued existence: [A] British film industry which had no alternative but to seek finance from US companies would not by definition be independent. Many would think this unfortunate, if not positively wrong. They would argue that the maintenance and development of a British film production industry, not completely dependent on outside finance, would be in the national interest. It can be argued that there is no assurance that the US distributors will continue to finance British films on the present large scale, or at all, and if for any reason “runaway” production (i.e. film production outside the USA) were to return to Hollywood, or go elsewhere, British film production would be so gravely weakened that its survival might be in peril. It can also be argued that no medium of mass communication of the psychological power of the film should be subject to complete control by outside influences. (NFFC 1966: 6) The equivocal nature of the argument, with its curious lack of urgency, was striking. No self-respecting quango can be expected to vote for its own abolition, but the NFFC made no effort to suggest that its continued existence was in any way essential. Its increasing marginalisation was born out of a recognition that the original goal of creating a profitable indigenous film industry separate from Hollywood could not only not be achieved but also no longer much mattered. In 1971 a Conservative government announced its intention “to withdraw from the financing of the production of films” (Hansard 1971: c.21). The return of a Labour government in 1974 provided a stay of execution, but the winding-up of the NFFC finally followed in 1985. When a successor quango, the UK Film Council, was abolished in 2010, David Puttnam accused the government of failing to learn from Britain’s film history (Puttnam 2010: 46–7). But his own defence of the NFFC betrayed a misconception of what its original goal had been: “[I]t was only after the Second World War that the concept of public subsidy for film, and the need for a dedicated, independent and expert body to administer and disburse such funding, were recognised.” In Puttnam’s rather rose-tinted view of events, a far-sighted government had set out to defend what might have been called the “cultural exception” of the British film production industry had such language existed at the time: a Labour government had created the NFFC, and the “great film fan” Winston Churchill, as Puttnam put it, “set about strengthening the NFFC and putting it on a long-term footing”. Not only that, but his government passed legislation to enable the NFFC to borrow an extra £2m and introduced a scheme to enable the NFFC’s loans to be written off. In reality the extra £2m had been needed to save British Lion from bankruptcy, although even then it was not enough to prevent the government from putting the company into receivership only a little later. The creation of the NFFC had been an emergency measure with which the government hoped to establish a profitable indigenous industry that could attract private investment. If that policy had been successful, then the need for the NFFC would have ceased. Its continued existence was an index

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of a government seeking to mitigate industrial failure rather than offering enlightened arts support. When did the make-believe of a profitable British film industry finally evaporate? The year 1974, when a Labour government took over from a Conservative one, was a significant turning-point. Required by the outgoing Conservative administration to make new loans on a “strictly commercial basis” (NFFC 1973: 1), the NFFC had in the past year approved a loan for one film only, David Puttnam’s Stardust (1974), the only project out of 134 submitted that seemed to have a good chance of commercial success. The corner into which it had been painted compelled the NFFC to articulate what it perceived to be the reality with an unusual openness. So long as the NFFC was required to make loans on a strictly commercial basis, then, it reported, it could not be regarded as “any kind of film aid”, nor could it make “any fundamental contribution to the problems which beset British film production” (NFFC 1974: 4–5). In the endless assessments that had been made of the British film industry since government legislation first created it in 1927, this was the moment of twenty-twenty vision: “[A]n already speculative business has become more speculative still”, declared the NFFC. “British films, even if they reach the audiences for which they are intended, are overall likely to incur losses in direct financial terms” (NFFC 1974: 4). This was the moment when the NFFC finally dared to push the concept of public subsidy, a word that had been strenuously avoided for most of its existence. The NFFC argued that “a subsidy or aid fund” was necessary if British talent was to be given the opportunity it deserved. This was the beginning of a new way of thinking about the British film industry, where indirect benefits were considered to matter as much as direct ones. Sketching out a concept that only much later would seem commonplace, the NFFC argued, “[T]he benefits of an active industry in terms of foreign trade and international prestige, though they cannot be exactly quantified, must be considerable” (NFFC 1974: 5). Twenty-five years later, the UK Film Council embarked on the exercise of exact quantification, although the make-believe of course could never entirely go away so long as British talent continued to want to make films.

Further reading Murphy, R. (2012) “English As She Is Spoke: The First British Talkies”. Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 32(4): 537–557. Porter, V. (2001) “All Change at Elstree: Warner Bros., ABPC and British Film Policy, 1945–1961”. Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 21(1): 5–35. Sedgwick, J. (1977) “The British Film Industry’s Production Sector Difficulties in the Late 1930s”. Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, 17(1): 49–66. Stubbs, J. (2009, May) “The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s”. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6: 1–20.

References Anon. (1929a) “Effect of Talkies”, The Times of India, 10 May, p. 9. Anon. (1929b) “A New ‘Talkie’”, Observer, 12 May, p. 10. Anon. (1930a) “R-K-O to Distribute”, The New York Times, 10 January, p. 5.

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Anon. (1930b) “British Producer’s Views”, The New York Times, 18 May, p. 160. Anon. (1930c) “To Show British Talkies”, The New York Times, 17 September, p. 30. Anon. (1934) “Gaumont British Opens”, Variety, 2 October, p. 9. Anon. (1937a) “Financial Paragraphs”, Irish Times, 11 January, p. 3. Anon. (1937b) “Ostrer and Hagen”, Variety, 27 January, p. 7. Associated Talking Pictures (1935) Observer, 22 December, p. 2. Chapman, J. (2005) Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film. London: I.B. Tauris. Dean, B. (1973) Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography 1927–1972. London: Hutchinson. Guthrie, Sir C. (1934) Letter to Percy Crump, 18 July. Korda Papers, Prudential Assurance Company Archive, box 2. Hall, M. (1932) “Blue-Ribbon Pictures of 1931”, The New York Times, 3 January, p. 150. Hansard (1948) HC Deb, 17 June 1948, vol. 452, c.779. Hansard (1971) HC Deb, 28 June 1971, vol. 820, c.21. Klingender, F. D. and Legg, S. (1937) Money Behind the Screen. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Low, R. (1985) Film Making in 1930s Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin. Marshall, E. (1929) “Screen Notes from London Town”, The New York Times, 24 November, p. 202. NFFC (1950) Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended March 31st 1950. London: HMSO. NFFC (1966) Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended March 31st 1966. London: HMSO. NFFC (1973) Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended March 31st 1973. London: HMSO. NFFC (1974) Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for the Year Ended March 31st 1974. London: HMSO. Political and Economic Planning (1952) The British Film Industry. London: Political and Economic Planning. Puttnam, D. (2010) “Director’s Cut: The End of UKFC”, New Statesman, 11 October, pp. 46–7. Schader, F. (1929) “Opinions on Pictures”, Motion Picture News, 12 October, p. 33. Sears, G. (1944) Letter to Alex Ardrey, Bankers Trust, 15 November. Gradwell Sears Papers, United Artists Collection, State Historical Society, University of Wisconsin, box 1, folder 1. Selznick, D. (1942) Cable to Jenia Reissar, 2 June. David Selznick Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, box 318, folder 9.

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11

LOCAL FILM CENSORSHIP The watch committee system

Alex Rock The Colonel sighed. “I wanted to bring the Yard in, but we’ve got a Police Committee in this county! Do you know what a Police Committee is? It is very much like the Drainage Committee of a City Council, except that it doesn’t know about drainage.” Edgar Wallace, The Coat of Arms (1931: 234)

The prolific crime writer Edgar Wallace was not too far from the truth in his characterisation of the frustrated Chief Constable of Sketchley, Colonel Layton, who, when deprived by his local watch committee of the opportunity to bring in the mercurial Scotland Yard detective T. B. Collett on a complicated country-house murder case, vented his frustration in the bar of the Coat of Arms in Wallace’s thriller of the same name. From 1895 watch committees oversaw all police work, micro and macro, within their council district, from the issuing of pawnbroker’s licences and the suitability of grazing land to the recruitment of police staff and discipline within the ranks of the force. As a result of a series of coincidences, loopholes and legal precedents established by the purposely vague Cinematograph Films Act of 1909, the watch committees were also responsible for deciding, on a case-by-case basis, whether newly released films were able to be screened within the boundaries of their district. The disparate ways in which the subject of onscreen morality was dealt with form the basis of this chapter, which makes use of the Derby, Dudley and Smethwick watch committee minutes to compare the ways in which watch committees delegated – or ignored – the task of local film censorship. Watch committees were introduced as a result of the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, which gave towns or municipal districts the power to police themselves under the control of a watch committee. The 1835 Act sought to open up and democratise local governance, and its effects were far-reaching. One hundred and seventy-eight municipal boroughs were constituted, with all ratepayers allowed a vote in local council elections. From these elected council bodies, a watch committee was elected to oversee the construction of a local professional police force; watch committee members often had no background in policing, but were responsible for appointing a Chief Constable for the borough. The Chief Constable remained accountable solely to this watch committee in a situation akin to that of a Chief Executive and a board of directors.

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The establishment of these powerful, autonomous councils was the result of a Whiggish move towards decentralisation in the mid-nineteenth century; their operational freedom is demonstrated by Chris Williams’ observation that “[t]he only compulsory statutory duty of the newly-elected councils was to select a watch committee from their number to run the police force” (Williams 2003: np). Godfrey, Lawrence and Williams (2008: 59–60) provide further insight into the level of autonomy held by watch committees over their forces: Watch Committees were elected annually from the newly elected local council, but once it was in place it was the Committee, not the council, who were the police authority. They had the power to promote, hire and fire any member of the force, right up to the top, and the local chief … could not fine his men more than one day’s pay without the watch committee’s involvement. They wrote the rules and regulations for their force. … Practically, this meant that local councils had direct control over how the law over many important local issues was enforced. These included licensing laws, the regulation of traffic, and the imposition of sexual morality through the ability to tolerate (or not) brothels. Despite concerted efforts, on occasion, over the next hundred years, this level of control over policing was largely maintained at a local level by watch committees. Successive Home Secretaries across the late Victorian era and at significant pinch-points such as world wars, the 1919 police strike and the high-level “Third Degree” scandal of the late 1920s sought to establish a more centralised, uniform approach to the application of the rule of law, arguing – without success – that the watch committee approach led to the implementation of politicised and corruptible policing strategies. It was not until the 1964 Police Act – itself an inevitable conclusion of the 1960 Royal Commission on the Police, which was instigated to report on police corruption following a sting led by three journalists employed by The Times – that watch committees were shorn of their powers, to be replaced by unitary police authorities. During the watch committee era, each council district’s committee met on a weekly basis, ruling on policing approaches to issues as diverse as the issuing of pawnbroker’s licences, the protection of wild birds, the amount of sick leave taken by individual officers and – of relevance to this chapter – whether to allow the screening of films within the police district. This latter responsibility allowed the watch committee (or, as was the case in several watch committees, another body to whom the responsibility of local film censorship was delegated) to assume the position of moral guardian within their area, preventing their subjects from viewing material deemed subversive. The power of local watch committees to regulate film exhibition in their district was granted as a consequence of the 1909 Cinematograph Films Act: The … Act was designed to protect audiences from fire hazards. All cinemas exhibiting inflammable films to the public had to acquire a licence from their local authorities. Conditions could be attached, and authorities began to impose regulations on films considered “unsuitable” on moral grounds. (Dickinson and Street 1985: 7)

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As Simon Brown has noted (2012: 6), trade organisations within the film industry responded – eventually – to the Cinematograph Films Act by discussing with the Home Office the potential of setting up “a form of self-regulated censorship,” which would become the British Board of Film Censors (hereafter BBFC). However, due to the Sunday Observance Act – an Act of Parliament dating from the reign of George III – the BBFC’s output could only ever be considered guidance, with the final responsibility of enacting (or contradicting) said guidance falling to the watch committees. The Sunday Observance Act was cited in a judgement passed in 1911, in an appeal lodged by Bermondsey Bioscope against a ruling supporting London County Council’s (hereafter LCC) licence clause which stipulated that the Bermondsey Bioscope – along with other cinemas within the LCC’s jurisdiction – was unable to open on a Sunday. The High Court judgement, delivered by the Lord Chief Justice of England, Richard Webster, was recounted in full in The Stage Year Book (1911: 465). The Lord Chief Justice bemoans the lack of clarity within the Cinematograph Films Act: I regret very much that the practice of having preambles in Acts of Parliament has disappeared. They were of the greatest assistance … and undoubtedly in those days enabled one to solve doubtful points. I regret that they have gone. The specific challenge raised to the Cinematograph Films Act by the Bioscope involved the appropriateness of inserting a clause within the cinema’s licence to operate restricting Sunday opening. The cinema’s management believed that, as the Act was ostensibly about ensuring the safety of cinema patrons, the local watch committee had overstepped the boundaries of the Act in imposing restrictions on Sunday opening, a contentious issue for many years to come. However, in passing judgement in favour of the LCC, the Lord Chief Justice enshrined a precedent whereby all local authorities are entitled, without restriction, to insert “reasonable” clauses at will within licenses granted to premises: [A]cts of Parliament are passed, sections are put in and amendments are made to clauses, the effect of which is to make them go far beyond the title [of the Act in question]. You will quite recognise that principle when you come to construe Section 2. That says that the County Council may grant licenses to such persons as they think fit, and on such terms and conditions and such restrictions as, subject to the regulations of the Secretary of State, they may determine. In my judgement that was intended to give the County Council a discretion to make conditions not, of course, conditions which are contrary and unreasonable, but reasonable conditions with regard to licenses. … [H]aving regard to the existence of the Sunday Observance Act, and the practice as regards music halls and the existence of a law with regard to places of entertainment, apart from the fact of custom, I cannot think that it is unreasonable or ultra vires to prohibit this class of entertainment on a Sunday. (Ibid.) The licensing system took as a precedent the system already in place to govern the opening of music halls, the regulation of which already fell within the jurisdiction of the watch committees, and as six-day openings were commonplace within the music hall and

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early bioscope arenas, this left watch committees with the freedom to decide whether cinemas could open on a Sunday at all. Not only that, but the wording of the judgement created a precedent for local authorities to regulate the materials exhibited in cinemas through the acknowledgement of past regulation of “places of entertainment.” In the archival materials examined for this chapter, local watch committees were heavily involved in the regulation of Sunday opening for cinemas within their district, but their approaches to this vary wildly. In Derbyshire, a Standing Joint Committee was established as part of the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act to oversee the work of the police force on a county-wide basis. The extant, incomplete materials related to the Standing Joint Committee paint a picture of an authority more detached from the regulation of cinemas than others I have encountered. Derbyshire’s committee principally met to discuss police housing, finance, staffing and discipline, although licensing also fell within the committee’s jurisdiction. This responsibility was delegated to the Chief Constable who enacted licensing regulations more autonomously than Chief Constables in other districts analysed, as the following minute of 1897, regarding the issuing of a music hall license, records: The Chief Constable mentioned a case that had recently arisen at Heanor where the Bench had directed him to oppose the renewal of a license although the Police themselves had no ground of complaint. It was resolved that in a future case of a similar nature the Chief Constable should exercise his own discretion in the matter and if he had any doubt he should apply to the Committee for Constructions. In fact, no reference to the Cinematograph Films Acts or cinema exhibition is made in the extant documentation housed at Derbyshire Records Office; the county seemed to hand over all film issues (if the Chief Constable sought guidance) to the Committee for Constructions, which became the Estates Committee. The Derbyshire Standing Joint Committee instead focused upon hackney carriage licenses, bus routes and regulating the sale of game in butchers. This approach contrasts sharply with that taken by Smethwick’s watch committee; their minutes demonstrate that issues surrounding specific films were discussed on a nearmonthly basis, with delegates often sent to preview screenings to judge suitability for exhibition, often alongside representatives from the neighbouring watch committee in Birmingham. These specific instances will be discussed later in the chapter. Smethwick’s local watch committee delegated responsibilities involving Sunday entertainments to a specifically formed sub-committee. This sub-committee – known formally as the Cinema Visiting Joint Committee – was established in 1938, and reported to the watch committee. The sub-committee was solely responsible for issuing licenses for the Sunday opening of cinemas in Smethwick, and inserting clauses into these licenses. They were also responsible for collecting and distributing charitable donations provided by the cinemas, as a stipulation of Sunday opening licenses (commonplace among exhibitors across England) involved a percentage of Sunday proceeds being donated to charity. Often cinemas would include vocal renditions of hymns or patriotic songs as part of the programme to help circumvent the Sunday ban. Their biannual meetings were dominated by these responsibilities, and the issuing of Sunday opening licenses – subject to a percentage of proceeds being donated to charity – appears to have been a formality. The charitable

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returns from Sunday opening, reproduced in the table below, shed light on the wellbeing of the cinema trade in Smethwick between the formation of the sub-committee and its (seemingly arbitrary) disbanding in 1965. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the Cinema Visiting Joint Committee never visited a cinema in the course of their duties; on occasion, when a deputation from the local cinema exhibition trade petitioned for an audience, the committee requested their presence at their meeting. This tended to happen when the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association presented a petition to reduce the percentage of ticket revenue donated to charity or – as was the case in 1955 and 1956 – when Sunday opening hours were queried. Table 11.1 Proceeds of Sunday cinema income given to charity (distributed by Smethwick Cinema Visiting Committee) Date of Meeting

Period Declared

Monies Accrued (£. s. d)

Percentage of Proceeds

6 July 1938

1937–8 season

£852. 11. 7

10%

5 July 1939

1938–9 season

£786. 11. 8

10%

10 July 1940

1939–40 season

£745. 10. 2

10%

20 June 1941

1940–1 season

£721. 1. 8

10%

16 March 1943

1 July 1941–31 December 1942

£2135. 17. 3

10%

5 May 1944

1 January 1943–31 December 1943

£1631. 9. 11

10%

7 March 1945

1 January–31 December 1944

£1590. 5. 9

10%

6 March 1946

1 January–31 December 1945

£1328. 2. 2

10%

12 February 1947

1 January– 31 December 1946

£1238. 5. 9

10%

11 February 1948

1 January–31 December 1947

£986. 6. 5

10%

9 March 1949

1 January–31st December 1948

£938. 15. 3

10%

5 April 1950

1 January–31 December 1949

£930. 4. 9

10%

7 March 1951

1 January–31 December 1950

£1119. 1. 11

10%

5 March 1952

1 January–31 December 1951

£1108. 9. 0

10%

11 March 1953

1 January–31 December 1952

£1207. 11. 5

10%

10 March 1954

1 January–31 December 1953

£1139. 10. 4

10%

9 March 1955

1 January–31 December 1954

£919. 15. 10

7.5%

7 March 1956

1 January–31 December 1955

£925. 9. 11

7.5%

6 March 1957

1 January–31 December 1956

£818. 6. 6

7.5%

5 March 1958

1 January–31 December 1957

£635. 1. 10

7.5%

4 March 1959

1 January–31 December 1958

£552. 4. 6

6%

9 March 1960

1 January–31 December 1959

£527. 12. 3

6%

8 March 1961

1 January–31 December 1960

£518. 9. 7

6%

4 April 1962

1 January–31 December 1961

£309. 15. 5

4%

3 April 1963

1 January–31 December 1962

£324. 16. 8

4%

4 March 1964

1 January–31 December 1963

£430. 17. 11

4%

7 April 1965

1 January–31 December 1964

£389. 19. 1

4%

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Setting the percentage of proceeds of Sunday cinema admissions was the responsibility of the Cinema Visiting Joint Committee, and therefore (one would imagine) the percentage set would have varied between each municipal district. The 1954 reduction was given as a result of a deputation, led by the West Midlands District Manager of Associated British Cinemas, of local exhibitors: The deputation based their claim for a reduction on three main points:(1) changed circumstances, (2) reduced receipts, and (3) rising costs. The Cinema Visiting Joint Committee in Smethwick was sympathetic to their petition, despite the previous two years of steady income generated by exhibitors on Sundays. However, other costs not apparent in the figures above had increased – including the Film Bank Levy and Entertainment Tax. The fact that these were taken into consideration by the committee demonstrates either an astute awareness of the intricacies of cinema finance or the persuasive power of the ABC District Manager. The Cinema Visiting Joint Committee reported, minimally, to Smethwick’s watch committee, but was not involved in deciding on the propriety of screening controversial films within the municipal district. That responsibility fell directly within the remit of the watch committee. Smethwick’s watch committee itself often fell in line with decisions reached by Birmingham’s watch committee. Birmingham’s, and therefore Smethwick’s, watch committee were seemingly not intimidated by resolutions reached by the BBFC, as demonstrated by the case of The Wizard of Oz (1939): Film: “The Wizard of Oz” The Town Clerk reported that the Birmingham Justices had consented to the above named film, which was classified as an “A” film, being exhibited in Birmingham under the conditions applicable to a “U” certificate. RESOLVED that similar action be taken in regard to the exhibition of this film in this Borough. A similar example of watch committees rejecting BBFC guidance has been unearthed by James C. Robertson (1989: 92–7). A script for No Orchids for Miss Blandish was submitted to the BBFC in 1944, subjected to BBFC-enforced rewrites, and then passed in film form – following further cuts – in 1948 (1989: 92–4). The moral panic that followed the release of the film has been well documented elsewhere (see McFarlane 1989). However, the film not only provides a provocative case study of BBFC procedure, but its release also demonstrates the statutory power of the watch committee. Robertson notes that, seven days into No Orchids for Miss Blandish’s six-week run at the Plaza Cinema on Lower Regent Street, London, the LCC demanded that the producers “cut the film still further or face a total LCC ban” (1989: 96). The LCC action against the film divided the other local authorities more seriously than at any time since the early 1930s. Four Surrey county councillors on the Surrey public control committee soon visited the Plaza after the LCC cuts and decided upon a ban as the film was judged to be “injurious to morality and offensive to public feeling,” a curious pretext in the light of the large numbers flocking to the Plaza. Some local

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authorities followed this policy, some the LCC, while yet others allowed the BBFC version. The local authorities were in disarray, and some were at loggerheads with the BBFC (Ibid.). This level of disarray highlights the lack of a uniform approach to film censorship, and one of the key weaknesses of the watch committee system; research into cinemagoing in this period has indicated that audiences were willing to travel across borough boundaries to see films, and in densely populated urban areas such as Birmingham and the Black Country, where three different watch committees occupied relatively small neighbouring municipal districts, it may be assumed that audiences would travel further afield if their watch committee disagreed with their neighbours on the suitability of screening a film in their district. It would appear that watch committees across Birmingham and the Black Country – including (at least) Dudley watch committee and its Birmingham and Smethwick equivalents – adopted a uniform, collaborative approach to No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Dudley watch committee minutes record an invitation from Birmingham watch committee to their Dudley equivalents “to attend a private exhibition of this film … at 10:30am this Saturday.” Smethwick watch committee representatives were also invited to this screening and the following was minuted prior to the screening: Film: “No Orchids for Miss Blandish” The Chairman and Chief Inspector reported upon the private view of the above film held at Birmingham on 29th May, and the Town Clerk read a letter from the Clerk to the Birmingham Justices stating that it had been decided to permit the film to be exhibited in Birmingham subject to the omission of certain incidents. RESOLVED that consideration of the matter be deferred to enable the members of the Council to see the film. In this instance, the three watch committees demonstrated considerable restraint in resisting the hyperbolic moral-panic discourses, choosing instead to view the film before articulating a response. In the end, they chose – as was often the case – to follow their Birmingham neighbours and screen the film with the cuts suggested by Birmingham watch committee. Reissues also proved to be a problem within the watch committee structure; three months prior to the No Orchids for Miss Blandish preview, exhibitors in both Smethwick and Dudley approached their respective watch committees for permission to exhibit The Birth of a Baby. Made in the late 1930s in America with financial backing from a large baby products manufacturer, and with the consent of the American Committee on Maternal Welfare: The Birth of a Baby was a detached, often dull picture, yet notwithstanding its prosaic qualities, it became one of the most controversial films of the 1930s. … For all its alleged good intentions and high-powered endorsements, in the final analysis The Birth of a Baby did not seem any more virtuous than the average Esper or Cummins exploitation epic. (Schaefer 1999: 188)

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The film charts the pregnancy of a newly married woman, culminating with the insertion of actual birth footage, presumably after the sixth reel, given Smethwick watch committee’s insistence that no-one be admitted after this point, presumably to deter those who only wanted to see that sequence: Film: “The Birth of a Baby” The Committee considered an application for permission to exhibit the above film in the Borough, and heard a report by the Medical Officer of Health upon the film. RESOLVED that permission be granted for the film to be shown … subject to the following conditions:1 No person under the age of 16 years shall be submitted to any part of the programme. 2 All literature and publicity matter shall be exhibited and distributed only after the express prior approval of the Medical Officer of Health has been obtained. 3 No supporting material other than those supplied by The National Baby Welfare Council shall be shown. 4 No person shall be admitted to the Auditorium after the showing of the fifth reel until the end of the film. The film, as Eric Schaefer has noted (1999: 190), proved highly successful in the US, and its ability to both exploitatively shock and educate appears to have made it a popular programming choice in Black Country cinemas even nine years after its initial release. Smethwick watch committee’s resolution to pass the film for exhibition subject to advertising restrictions appears to be an attempt to remove any potential for salacious exploitation, representing the film in a sterilised form through the prism of the National Baby Welfare Council. This approach was also taken in the US; following a controversial article in Life which carried stills of the childbirth sequence, the film was packaged by the American Welfare on Maternal Welfare. However, the success of the film in the US seems to suggest that the film’s exploitative potential was not ignored by exhibitors and audiences. As can be seen from the material above, the watch committee system is a crucial point of analysis for the film scholar. The legal precedents established above attest to the significance of this system which gave the committees powers over local film censorship. These examples also draw attention to the methods by which the watch committees asserted their control over cinemas within their jurisdiction. Through records held by local archives relating to their respective watch committees, the researcher can also judge the health of the exhibition industry within each district, as evidenced by the charity returns provided by Smethwick’s Cinema Visiting Committee. However, accessing this archival material is not without its difficulties; much like the watch committees themselves, local archive services enforce different access restrictions on the materials contained within the minutes. Birmingham Local Studies Library, for example, do not allow access to Birmingham watch committee minutes after 1948, whereas their neighbouring archives in both Smethwick and Dudley allow full, unrestricted access.

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Prior to the formation of local archives, watch committee minutes were often held (or discarded, as was the case in Derby) by the local police headquarters, and complete records rarely survive, with some destroyed in fires, others poorly maintained and many lost. Researching the watch committee system, then, is not a simple task, and these archival limitations mean that strong conclusions regarding the impact of the watch committee system are difficult to draw.

Further reading Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927–84. London: BFI. Lamberti, E. (ed.) (2012) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI. Robertson, J.C. (1989) The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1975. London: Routledge.

References Anon. (1911) “‘London County Council v Bermondsey Bioscope Company: Question of Sunday Closing”, The Stage Year Book. London: Carson & Comerford. Brown, S. (2012) “Censorship Under Siege: The BBFC in the Silent Era”, in Lamberti, E. (ed.) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI. Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927–84. London: BFI. Godfrey, B.S., Lawrence, P. and Williams, C.A. (2008) History and Crime. London: Sage. McFarlane, B. (1999) “‘Outrage: No Orchids for Miss Blandish”, in S. Chibnall and R. Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema, pp. 37–50. London: Routledge. Robertson, J.C. (1989) The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913–1975. London: Routledge. Rock, A. (2011) “Super Cinemas in the Suburbs: Clifton Cinemas and the Difficulties of Independent Exhibition, 1934–1966”, Post Script, 30 (3): 48. Schaefer, E. (1999) Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. London & Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Williams, C.A. (2003) “‘Britain’s Police Forces: Forever Removed From Democratic Control?” History & Policy, 5 November 2003. Accessed from: http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policypapers/papers/britains-police-forces-forever-removed-from-democratic-control.

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12

PRODUCERS AND MOGULS IN THE BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY, 1930–80 Andrew Spicer Introduction The role of the producer has been both caricatured and misunderstood, hence the absence of discussion in accounts of British cinema and in Film Studies as a discipline (Spicer 2004: 33–50; Spicer, McKenna and Meir 2014). And yet, as Alexander Walker argues, “the tendency to ignore the role of the producer or production chief has to be resisted if films are to make sense as an industry that can sometimes create art” (1986: 17). Straddling the competing worlds of art and commerce, and encompassing all the elements of the filmmaking process from conception to exhibition, producers need to be financial wizards, creative partners, efficient organisers, promoters and showmen, strategists and, above all, eternal optimists in the face of endless setbacks. In “The Context of Creativity”, which contrasts the policies of Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios with those of James Carreras at Hammer Films, Vincent Porter argues that producers play a crucial and creative role in filmmaking but their effectiveness needs to be considered over their career as a whole, contextualised within the conditions in which they operated (Porter 1983: 179–207). Porter’s analysis is one of very few to focus specifically on the producer. Alexander Walker’s accounts of British cinema in the 1960s and 1970s (1984, 1986) are exceptional in the space and importance given to producers, but other studies of British cinema history in this period afford some consideration to producers (Chibnall and McFarlane 2009; Harper and Porter 2003; Harper and Smith 2012; Low 1985; Murphy 1989, 1992). Charles Drazin’s The Finest Years (1998) provides several perceptive portraits of producers. There are biographical accounts of the better-known ones: Alexander Korda, Balcon and David Puttnam (see further reading) and critical studies of Sydney Box (Spicer 2006), Michael Klinger (Spicer and McKenna 2013) and Tony Tenser (Hamilton 2005). Producers’ memoirs, notably those by Balcon (1969), Betty Box (2000), Sydney Box (2005) and Herbert Wilcox (1967), are essential sources but need to be approached with

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caution as partial, often self-aggrandising accounts and checked against the trade press, another crucial source. Although the producer’s role is complex, we can distinguish three broad types. At the top were the moguls such as Korda and Balcon, who ran major companies and often employed other producers for specific films. Both were filmmakers who “raised money because [they] wanted to make films” as opposed to “financial magnates”, such as J. Arthur Rank, who “looked around for people to make films because they had the money” (Low: 217). Below the moguls was a heterogeneous middle tier of first-feature producers. Some, such as Sydney Box or Julian Wintle (Francis 1986), had periods as contract producers but their instincts were to operate, if possible, as independents (though they had to negotiate with the major corporations to get distribution or bookings on one of the major cinema circuits) and thus maintain control over budget, choice of subject matter, casting and technical personnel. Bumping along the bottom were the artisans producing low-budget films on tight schedules, who could survive and turn a profit, if they kept below a strict commercial ceiling. It must be emphasised that these types are fluid categories and producers may move between them over the course of a career. Occasionally, producers combined to secure finance collectively and support each other’s work as with Independent Producers in the 1940s (Macnab 1993: 90–9) or Bryanston and Allied Film Makers towards the end of the 1950s (Walker 1986: 72–5, 102–6; Harper and Porter 2003: 182–4). However, most producers were competitive individualists, though several worked in long-term producer–director partnerships where the roles were shared or interchangeable: Michael Relph and Basil Dearden, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, John and Roy Boulting and The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger). Some producers, such as Tenser, kept to specific genres (in his case sexploitation and horror); some confined themselves to a particular franchise: Peter Rogers and the “Carry On” comedies (1958–78) or Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the creators of the Bond films. Klinger was more typical, cultivating a varied portfolio of films, thereby spreading the risk across different genres and also modes of production by making films for both the domestic and international markets. Those risks, as will become clear, were ever present. Producers have consistently struggled to make feature films in a British film industry that has suffered from a weak, under-capitalised production base, where the major profits were made in distribution and exhibition. It was (and is) notoriously unstable, having a relatively small domestic market that necessitates, for higher-budget feature films, international success, and has been subject to ferocious competition and deep penetration by globally dominant American studios. The British industry has been poorly served by weak and inconsistent government interventions that did little to alter these structural imbalances. Only for one brief period, 1942–8, when the Rank empire was at its strongest and audiences at their peak, did certain producers, including the flamboyant Filippo Del Giudice (Drazin 1998: 13–42), enjoy stability and an unprecedented (and never repeated) creative autonomy and bountiful budgets. By the late 1940s, British cinema experienced another of its periodic crises and Rank’s draconian Managing Director, John Davis, ousted Del Giudice and centralised production, imposing strict controls on costs and subject matter. Such fluctuations were typical of the British film industry and indicated the vulnerability of producers and their limited agency in the face of the wider economic forces over which they had little or no control. However, as John Caughie has argued,

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the chronic instability that characterises an industry that lacks either a fully functioning studio system or a “national corporation” heightens the importance of studying the various producers who tried to create, against the odds, the conditions under which films can be made; he contends: “the history of the British cinema is the history of producers” (1986: 200). Within such a wide canvas, my approach in a short chapter must necessarily be highly selective and I have avoided choosing producers, such as Korda or Balcon, who have received detailed scrutiny (see further reading). To achieve a degree of representativeness and to demonstrate the varied tasks producers have to perform, what follows is organised into three case studies, exemplifying those broad types – artisans (Julius Hagen), independents (Joseph Janni) and moguls (Nat Cohen) – covering different periods. These accounts focus on their specific production policies, contextualised within broader economic and cultural paradigms.1

The artisan: Julius Hagen The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, the government’s belated response to a profound crisis in the industry, together with the coming of sound, stimulated production by imposing a statutory obligation on renters and exhibitors to screen a quota of British films. One consequence was the notorious growth of the “quota quickie” – low-cost, hastily assembled films designed primarily to fulfil the quota. It created a sector that attracted a wide range of artisan producers including Jerry Jackson and George King. One of the most prolific was Julius Hagen, a German émigré who had started as a salesman for Ruffles Pictures in 1913, and learned his cost-conscious craft in the 1920s through becoming production manager at Stoll Studios, run on factory lines in a converted aircraft hangar in Cricklewood. Sensing the Act’s potential, Hagen founded the Strand Film Company in 1928 and in December acquired the lease of Twickenham Studios; in April 1929 he secured a contract with the Radio Corporation of America to equip with sound. This dependence on American know-how and finance was typical: Hagen was completely reliant on US distributors for commissions. Having secured an initial contract with Warner Bros. in 1929, Hagen made six films with an efficiency and economy that ensured subsequent work for other Hollywood studios. By 1933, Hagen was producing twenty films a year, the highest of any “unaffiliated” producer, charging a flat fee per foot but ensuring extra revenue if the film attracted above average bookings (Chibnall 2007: 24). To fulfil his contracts, Hagen planned his production schedule meticulously, keeping the studios operating round the clock with separate crews working night and day on different films. However, the prospect of secure employment enabled Hagen to establish a good-quality, stable production team that demonstrated great loyalty despite the low wages, although he was prepared to pay handsomely for top technicians, including renowned German cinematographer Curt Courant. Hagen, whom Linda Wood characterises as a “natural salesman, flamboyant and gregarious, and willing to take chances” (1998: 38), had a showman’s sense of the importance of good publicity and was careful to establish direct contact with exhibitors to market his films. Those who worked at Twickenham recalled that, despite a “feverish and restless environment” with everything very strictly budgeted and costs trimmed wherever possible, there was a “keen spirit amongst the staff to raise the quality of the product” and

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that actors of the highest calibre were happy to appear in Hagen’s films (Pearson 1957: 193–5). Director Bernard Vorhaus remembered that Hagen would tear pages out of the middle of the script if the film fell behind, but conceded that he had “a genuine desire to make good films, in contrast to some quicky [sic] makers, and he didn’t interfere with what the director was doing so long as he did it fast enough” (2000: 64). Twickenham specialised in thrillers, whodunits and society melodramas adapted from novels, short stories and stage plays whose rights Hagen had acquired cheaply, such as The Ghost Camera (1933) directed by Vorhaus and starring John Mills and Ida Lupino. Hagen adopted a practice, used by several 1930s producers including Balcon and Wilcox, of making

Figure 12.1 A startled Edward Everett Horton stares at himself in The Man in the Mirror (1936); the elaborate décor and sophisticated lighting proclaim this as one of Julius Hagen’s “quality” productions

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two types of differently branded films: Real Art for the quickies and Twickenham for the “supers” that were more carefully distributed (Napper 2009: 194), such as I Lived with You (1933) written by and starring Ivor Novello. Hagen’s aspirations to make more ambitious films were fuelled by Korda’s sensational success with The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), which transformed both the industry’s horizons (indigenous subject matter that could command an international audience) and its finances by attracting City investors. Hagen announced in January 1934 that he was embarking on films aimed at the international market, refurbished the studios and set up Twickenham Film Distributors in May 1935. It seemed that the dependent artisan had now become an independent: “I have complete ruling over the subjects chosen and also over the stars and directors employed. I can spend what money I think adequate on each picture” (Hagen in Wood 1998: 46). Hagen concentrated on better-quality films that were carefully scripted and staged with longer shooting schedules, for instance The Man in the Mirror (1936). However, despite the increased budget, to the public these films still appeared to be “minor productions, with small sets and an air of frugality”; Hagen was unable to secure many cinema bookings (Low 1985: 255). Like all British producers in this period, including Basil Dean at Ealing, Hagen found to his cost that American distributors were reluctant to get behind films they had not financed. Hagen had to dissolve his distribution company because of the limited number of films produced. He went into receivership in January 1937 having also over-expanded by acquiring additional studios at Riverside and Elstree. Hagen’s difficulties were symptomatic of a wider crisis in the British film industry with numerous bankruptcies, severe cutbacks and considerable diminution of output. The insurance companies that had financed the boom pulled out, leaving Hagen and others like him with no alternative source of finance. The 1938 Act, which introduced a minimum cost provision, killed the quickie and encouraged American companies to make higher-quality productions (counting as double or triple quota). Hagen, who had taken little account of his own health in his fervid determination to make British films, died of a stroke in 1940. Despite being an artisan producer, Hagen should not be dismissed as a penny-pinching philistine; even his quickies, despite their invidious reputation, were an important training ground for talent. Having established himself as an efficient artisan through volume production, Hagen used his enhanced independence to make better-quality British films that might compete internationally. Like many other artisans, Hagen overreached himself, but his demise was caused not by poor-quality films, but by the stranglehold that American studios exerted and the government’s failure to support indigenous filmmakers effectively.

The independent: Joseph Janni As noted in the introduction, after a period of stability and expansion, the British film industry experienced another crisis in the late 1940s and both Rank and the other combine, Associated British Pictures Corporation (ABPC), cut back on production and the employment of contract staff, forcing many producers to become independent (Harper and Porter 2003: 155–84). These included Daniel Angel, Sydney Box, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Maxwell Setton, John Woolf and Joseph Janni, who formed

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Vic Films in 1948. Milan-born and half-Jewish, Janni had fled from Fascist Italy in 1939 and spent several months interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man before learning the craft of production as assistant to producers John Sutro and John Corfield. The cultivated, university-educated Janni saw films as artistic rather than commercial products: “It’s no use making films because one just wants to make money, or fill in time. … The only satisfying way is to wait until a subject comes along which is exciting enough to keep you totally involved in it for two or three years if necessary” (in Blume 1971). Vic’s first film, The Glass Mountain (1949), based on Janni’s idea and which he co-wrote, combined European opera and romantic melodrama with the other element he deemed essential, an important social issue; in this instance, the problems of readjustment experienced by returning servicemen. The Glass Mountain was a major success, reissued in 1950 and 1953. Although this initial success established Janni as a credible producer, like all British “independents”, he was actually dependent on ABPC or Rank for production finance, a distribution deal and cinema circuit release. The 1950s therefore proved to be a frustrating decade for Janni who was forced to subordinate his desire to find engaging subject matter to Rank’s demands for commercial product. He made a variety of films for Rank – comedies, thrillers, war films (A Town Like Alice, 1956) and action-adventure (Robbery Under Arms, 1957) – all of which were competent but indistinguishable from the work of other producers. Only White Corridors (1951), made on a slender budget and with minimal involvement from Rank, showed Janni’s desire to engage with urgent social issues, in this case the struggles of staff working in a provincial hospital. Janni found his métier in the development of the British New Wave, which replicated in Britain the engagement with new subject matter, social consciousness and sexual frankness that Janni admired in Italian Neo-Realism. Janni’s relationship with Rank ended in 1959 when they refused to finance his intended production of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Janni’s salvation came through Anglo-Amalgamated (see next section), which provided full funding for his plans to film Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, two more novels about contemporary provincial life and the sexual longings of young men. In a bold move, Janni hired John Schlesinger as director, having admired his television documentaries. It was the start of a highly productive partnership that encompassed six films and lasted intermittently until the late 1970s. The pair bonded as outsiders with a shared rebelliousness against a hidebound British Establishment (Mann 2004: 179). Their work together showed the value of the creative partnership that can develop between director and producer. As an independent Janni was not, like Hagen, enslaved to volume output and could afford to work slowly and meticulously on a single production. His creative influence was strongest in pre-production. Schlesinger recalled Janni’s absolute insistence “on long, detailed, sometimes exhausting re-examinations of the script. … He was a very creative producer – not very interested in selling a movie, but wonderful at the script stage and the casting” (in McFarlane 1997: 511). Janni was on set throughout to enable Schlesinger, an obsessive perfectionist, to concentrate on making the best possible film freed from financial worries; Janni “made deviousness a fine art [managing] to conceal a growing over-budget from the backers as long as possible so their complaints came too late to prevent us completing the shoot” (Schlesinger 1994: 32). Janni also intervened in post-production, arguing about particular scenes that might be shortened or cut altogether.

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A Kind of Loving was a huge success domestically, persuading Anglo to increase the budget for Billy Liar and fund a third film, Darling (1965), in which Julie Christie, Janni’s “discovery”, plays the eponymous lead as the woman unable to find stability or satisfaction, symbolising the anomie and rootlessness of a rapidly changing British society. As a major international success, Darling attracted the interest of the American studios that dominated British film production in the 1960s. MGM offered a huge $4 million budget for a “big roadshow” picture, which became an expansive adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). Janni later acknowledged that this departure into period melodrama was misjudged, the result of being “dazzled” by MGM’s money (Walker 1986: 264). He recovered his core purpose through enabling Ken Loach to direct his first feature, Poor Cow (1967), by convincing Anglo to back the film despite their misgivings about the commercial potential of a story about a South London mother who marries a petty criminal (Ibid.: 361, 377). Janni collaborated with Schlesinger again for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), funded by United Artists, helping to develop the screenplay alongside Schlesinger and the critic Penelope Gilliatt, and hiring others to rewrite some of her “unplayable” dialogue. Although Schlesinger’s highly personal film, another exploration of deracinated modern lives set in north London, was a critical and commercial success, like all independents Janni struggled throughout the rest of the decade as audiences declined and indigenous

Figure 12.2 Joseph Janni (on left) and John Schlesinger share a joke on the set of Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971). This partnership was the longest-lasting and most creative of Janni’s career

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companies became increasingly cautious. Schlesinger’s American reputation persuaded United Artists to finance Yanks (1979) alongside CIP Filmproduktion, which provided a German tax shelter. Set during the Second World War, Yanks was another carefully crafted and sensitive melodrama, which explored the relations between American soldiers stationed in northern England and the home population. Janni suffered a stroke as the film was being completed, ending his career as an active producer. Janni’s career demonstrates the creative potential of independent production, particularly through a mutually sustaining partnership with a talented director, to make challenging films that engaged with the shifting socio-sexual parameters of British society. However, it also shows the persistent struggle to find production finance and the difficulties in persuading film executives to fund innovative indigenous production rather than play safe. Janni was fortunate in finding an enlightened executive, Nat Cohen, in the 1960s but Cohen’s own position in the industry was subject to a different set of pressures.

The mogul: Nat Cohen Profiling Nat Cohen in the early 1970s, Alexander Walker considered him to be “in many ways a more urbane version of the one-man-bands who used to boss the studios in Hollywood’s heyday of the movie moguls” (1986: 111). Cohen controlled the whole of the conglomerate Electrical and Music Industries (EMI)’s film divisions, making decisions about budgets, distribution, scripts, casting and direction in almost three-quarters of British-made films (Murari 1973: 9). That so much power was invested in one man proclaimed Cohen’s ability to adapt, but also how the British film industry had been reconfigured in the aftermath of the departure of the American studios. Cohen’s career needs to be understood within that wider context. Like all movie moguls, Cohen started humbly. He built a small circuit of cinemas in the 1930s boom and after the war became an artisan producer, founding AngloAmalgamated in 1945, in partnership with Stuart Levy, an experienced distributor. Anglo combined the distribution of cheap American imports with the production of lowbudget, swift-moving crime thrillers such as Assassin for Hire (1951) for the “B”-feature market using the tiny Merton Park studios in which Cohen and Levy became major shareholders. Anglo became highly attuned to the requirements of the second-feature sector, specialising in “programme-fillers”, notably the Edgar Wallace adaptations (1960–4), dual-purpose films for cinema distribution and broadcasting on American television. Cohen was always an executive rather than on-the-floor producer, supervising the company’s overall output, not particular films; the Wallace adaptations, for instance, were all produced on a strict budget by Jack Greenwood. Anglo’s volume production ended with the extinction of the second feature in 1964, but the company’s fortunes had been transformed already by backing Carry on Sergeant (1958) whose huge success enabled it to pursue a more ambitious production policy (though they insisted Peter Rogers produce another “Carry On” each year until he switched to Rank in 1967). Cohen was anxious to raise Anglo’s status and produce “A”-features, but realised Anglo could not compete directly with the UK-based arms of the major Americans. His strategy was to pursue a progressive production policy by enabling new talent to enter the industry and make more individual films, including John Boorman (Catch Us If You Can, 1965)

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and Clive Donner (Nothing but the Best, 1964) as well as John Schlesinger. Cohen recognised that the film landscape had changed and therefore he had to take risks: “there is no such thing as playing safe [I am] a gambler, but an extremely cautious one … I back judgement, not luck” (in Walker 1986: 111). However, Cohen ensured Anglo’s financial security through a series of shrewd corporate manoeuvres. He sold half of Anglo to ABPC in 1962 and, after Levy died in 1967, a further 25 per cent to EMI in November 1968 when it took over the ailing company. In March 1969, Cohen joined EMI’s board and in May 1970 became the CEO of Anglo-EMI, a wholly owned production subsidiary with a revolving fund of £6 million. It was in March 1971, after Bryan Forbes’s resignation as head of EMI Films, that Cohen completed his ascent to mogul as controller of the entire film division, including the short-lived EMI-MGM productions, newly formed to co-finance international films with bigger budgets. Cohen, always a filmmaker and not a financial magnate, had, as noted, become the most powerful producer in the British film industry. He was in a position of exceptional freedom, able to make decisions quickly without reference to boards or committees. However, although Cohen continued to back aspiring young filmmakers including David Puttnam, the pressures of being a mogul – the responsibility of ensuring that the film division provided a profit for the parent company – made Cohen increasingly cautious. His production policy in the 1970s was characterised by circumspection rather than enlightened risk, investing in safe subjects such as television spin-offs including On the Buses (1971) and its sequels. Cohen’s most successful initiative was to encourage the

Figure 12.3 Poster for Murder on the Orient Express, the first of four star-studded adaptations of Agatha Christie for which Nat Cohen acted as executive producer

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production of a highly successful series of Agatha Christie adaptations – Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and three sequels – lavish productions set in exotic locations with all-star casts, which performed well on both sides of the Atlantic. The Christie films accelerated the trend towards American-orientated production, which did little to stabilise a declining industry or encourage indigenous talent, but pleased Cohen’s boss at EMI, Bernard Delfont, head of the entertainments division, who, like his brother Lew Grade, was fixated on conquering the American market through a direct assault. However, as the decade wore on, Cohen’s conservative commitment to family entertainment looked increasingly outmoded. Delfont gradually replaced him with younger talents, Michael Deeley and Barry Spikings, whose commitment to Americanorientated internationalism was more thoroughgoing; Cohen was ousted altogether in 1979. By the early 1980s, the failure of EMI and the film wing of Grade’s Associated Communications Company effectively ended the corporate era in the British film industry and the possibility of further movie moguls emerging. Cohen’s career exemplifies the inexorable pressures experienced by British film producers who become moguls, replicating the problems experienced by Balcon and Korda in the 1930s. The size of their companies and the budgets of their films could only be sustained by competing with Hollywood films in the international marketplace. The perceived demands of a global audience exerted a strong pull towards safe, formulaic material and an iconic Britishness that would play around the world. Cohen, subject to the machinations of the parent corporation over which he had little influence, had more power but less creative freedom than many independents.

Conclusion These three case studies have shown the varied activities in which producers typically engage. Each of the chosen producers was a genuine filmmaker, rather than a financial magnate, who wanted to create opportunities, despite all the difficulties, for creative talent to produce British films. Although there were many similarities, their priorities diverged because of their different positions within the industry. As heads of production-distribution companies, the major preoccupation of Hagen and Cohen was to ensure their financial stability; thus although they hired the principal personnel and set the budgets, they left the detailed production of their films to others. As an independent without direct overheads, Janni had the freedom to work closely on each individual film and his most substantial achievement came through a long-term creative partnership with the director John Schlesinger. However, Janni’s independence was circumscribed by the necessity to raise production finance on a film-by-film basis and therefore to negotiate with the major corporations that controlled the industry. Each producer had to struggle with a range of external problems, especially American competition, demonstrating the need to understand their work historically, within the shifting cultural and economic contexts in which each had to work. All three contributed significantly to the course of the British film industry. Understanding their achievements, and thus the pivotal role producers play, suggests the urgent need for other producers’ careers to be excavated, documented and carefully analysed rather than ignored.

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Notes 1 These are all men. For the few women producers who succeeded in a male dominated industry see Harper 2000: 155–66. The most important was Betty Box (see Ashby 2000: 166–78).

Further reading Drazin, C. (2002) Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul, London: Sidgwick & Jackson. (The most recent and most detailed study of the best-known producer in the British film industry.) Fluegel, J. (ed.) (1984) Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema, New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Porter, V. ‘Making and Meaning: The Role of the Producer in British Films,’ Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9:1, 7–25. (Synoptic historical overview of the producer’s shifting function and status.) Spicer, A. (2012) ‘A British Empire of Their Own? Jewish Entrepreneurs in the British FilmIndustry’, Journal of Popular European Culture 3:2, 117–29. (Overview of the significance of Jewish producers, distributors and exhibitors.) Yule, A. (1988) Enigma: David Puttnam – The Story So Far, Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. (Largely descriptive but nevertheless detailed account of a highly significant producer.)

References Ashby, J. (2000) “Betty Box, ‘the Lady in Charge’: Negotiating Space for a Female Producer in Postwar Cinema,” in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds) British Cinema, Past and Present, pp. 166–78. London: Routledge. Balcon, M. (1969) Michael Balcon Presents ... A Lifetime of Films, London: Hutchinson. Blume, M. (1971) “No Package Deals for Janni,” International Herald Tribune, 11 November, npn. Box, B. E. (2000) Lifting the Lid: The Autobiography of Film Producer, Betty Box, OBE, Leicester: The Book Guild. Box, S. (2005) The Lion that Lost Its Way and Other Cautionary Tales of the Show Business Jungle, Edited with an Introduction by Andrew Spicer, Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Caughie, J. (1986) “Broadcasting and Cinema 1: Converging Histories,” in C. Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, pp. 189–205. London: BFI. Chibnall, S. (2007) Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British ‘B’ Film, London: BFI. Chibnall, S. and B. McFarlane (2009) The British “B” Film, London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Drazin, C. (1998) The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: André Deutsch. Francis, A. (1986) Julian Wintle: A Memoir, London: Dukeswood. Hamilton, J. (2005) Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser, Godalming: FAB Press. Harper, S. (2000) Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, London: Continuum. Harper, S. and V. Porter (2003) British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harper, S. and J. Smith (2012) British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Low, R. (1985) The History of the British Film: 1929–1939, London: George Allen & Unwin. McFarlane, B. (1997) An Autobiography of British Cinema, London: Methuen.

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Macnab, G. (1993) J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry, London: Routledge. Mann, W. T. (2004) Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger, London: Hutchinson. Murari, T. “Nat King Cohen,” Guardian, 17 November, p. 9. Murphy, R. (1989) Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949, London: Routledge. Murphy. R. (1992) Sixties British Cinema, London: BFI. Napper, L. (2009) “A Despicable Tradition? Quota Quickies in the 1930s,” in R. Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book, pp. 192–201. London: BFI. Pearson, G. (1957) Flashback: An Autobiography of a British Film-maker, London: Allen & Unwin. Porter, V. (1983) “The Context of Creativity: Ealing Studios and Hammer Films,” in J. Curran and V. Porter (eds), British Cinema History, pp. 179–207. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Schlesinger, J. (1994) “Wit Behind the Scenes,” Guardian, 11 June, p. 32. Spicer, A. (2004) “The Production Line: Reflections on the Role of the Film Producer in British Cinema,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1): 33–50. Spicer, A. (2006) Sydney Box, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spicer, A. and A. McKenna (2013) The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry 1960–1980, London: I.B. Tauris. Spicer, A., A.T. McKenna and C. Meir (eds) (2014) Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Vorhaus, B. (2000) Saved from Oblivion: An Autobiography, Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press. Walker, A. (1985) National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, London: Harrap. Walker, A. (1986 [1974]) Hollywood, England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Harrap. Wilcox, H. (1967) Twenty-Five Thousand Sunsets, London: Bodley Head. Wood, L. (1998) “Julius Hagen,” in J. Richards (ed.) The Unknown 1930s: An Alternative History of British Cinema, 1929–1939, pp. 37–55. London: I.B. Tauris.

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ÉMIGRÉS IN CLASSIC BRITISH CINEMA Andrew Moor Every week Emeric sent his shirts by airmail [from Hampstead] to Paris to be laundered. (Macdonald 1994: 289) My brother Willi sent me a most depressing letter from Germany – they are on starvation … I have sent two parcels to my parents. (Hein Heckroth’s unpublished diary entries 4 and 7 January 1947)

The case for permeability: interrogating borders Like most claims to authenticity, the assertion that there is now or ever was such a thing as an authentically British cinema is highly dubious, yet the fact that the volume you are now reading is premised on the notion that “British cinema” can be a discrete object of study implies that the term holds some enduring use. Certainly, concepts of nationhood have long informed the way we have understood cinema. As Andrew Higson’s work sets out, despite the transnational forces that have always coursed through it, cinema is “one of the means of narrating nations” (Higson 2011: 1). Its history gets taxonomised within national boundaries and, conversely, models of “national cinema” have helped to inform the way we think about the mediated construction of national identity. For reasons ideological, cultural, critical, economic, political, pedagogical or just plain convenient, a national imaginary haunts the idea of cinema, and we cannot effectively dispose of the “national cinema” concept outright. Indeed, Higson emphasises that “it is far too deeply engrained in critical and historical debate” (Hjort and Mackenzie 2000: 73). We can, though, reframe some of the terms of that debate by focusing on the presence of émigrés and exiles in the industry, a presence that challenges the myth of national cinematic purity. By revisiting this topic to consider those migrants working in British film studios during the 1930s and 1940s, this chapter tests how far a different vocabulary can be brought to bear: this vocabulary addresses a range of transnational, migrant, exilic and diasporic conditions and experiences, all of which have been discussed before in debates about national cinema, but it also covers the fresher concepts of globalisation and what might be considered its cultural product, cosmopolitanism. It is worth reviewing some historiography to explain why the study of the exile/ émigré presence in British cinema has been important. Kevin Gough-Yates is recognised as

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having initiated much of this work, notably with his pioneering publication Michael Powell in Collaboration with Emeric Pressburger (Gough-Yates 1971). By 1997, his contribution to The British Cinema Book could open with the bald assertion that “European exiles dominated British film production in the 1930s” (my emphasis) (Murphy 2001: 170). He then proceeds to shine a spotlight on some of the industry’s important figures: Alexander and Zoltan Korda, Friedrich Fehar, Berthold Viertel, cinematographers like Georges Périnal, Otto Kanturek and Erwin Hillier, the designers Alfred Junge and Oscar Werndorff, and actors such as Anton Walbrook, Conrad Veidt and Dolly Haas. With his conspicuous act of redress, Gough-Yates sets out to give due and belated credit to the “continental” artists/technicians working in the British film industry and hence to correct what he sees as a more established though flawed historical record. That record’s familiar narrative thrust went like this: a mode of realism perpetuated in the British documentary movement, equated with “quality” and deemed to be more essentially British, had held sway in definitions of the national cinema. As an historical record, this history presents us with problems. How “British” was that documentary movement anyway? It is not as if the British have copyrighted documentary realism. The documentary movement was exposed to foreign influences from Soviet cinema to pan-European high-modernism, not least via the London Film Society to which many of the key “documentary-boys” belonged. Alberto Cavalcanti, a Brazilian intellectualbohemian fresh from the Parisian avant-garde and cosmopolitan to his core, was invited by John Grierson to join the GPO Film Unit in 1934, and he replaced Grierson at its helm from 1937 to 1940. Other non-Britons such as Len Lye, Robert Flaherty and Henry Cornelius played key roles in the movement. The notion that the documentary realist style can be trademarked as British derives from two coalescing lines of thought: from the observation that the movement’s ethnographic focus was trained so closely on aspects of the nation’s domestic industrial and social mise-en-scène (they “represent” Britain and are thus “British”); and from the rather powerful argument that this mode of filmmaking was a healthy stylistic and cultural antidote to Hollywood-Americanisation. John Grierson did as much as anybody to propagate these mutually supporting narratives. It should be noted that any historical revisionism that sets out to recognise the roles played by exiles or émigrés is necessarily and logically premised on an a priori notion of comparably stable and settled national industries into which (or from which) those people have come or gone. Put another way, it is not possible to celebrate hybridity without implicitly or explicitly conjuring up a more purist model of national cinema that veers towards essentialism, if only to help dismantle that model. Gough-Yates’s “counter-narrative”, his “alternative history”, relies ipso facto on its opposite, and effectively reinscribes it, locked as it is into a native/exile binary. Such writing on émigré culture in the context of British national cinema has often felt as if it is paradoxically shoring up the very citadel – native British realist cinema – that it sets out to dismantle. The exiles discussed rarely feel as if they constitute the industry, and singularly, it is their “exilic” status that is emphasised. I do not wish to underestimate the real difficulty suffered by some Europeans who fled political persecution from the European mainland in the 1930s, but some (particularly those who settled in London in the 1920s) were members of an international workforce who came to Britain as professional travellers. Names like E.A. Dupont, Arthur Robison and Paul Czinner present themselves – journeymen who, as Tobias Hochscherf points out, arrived after the 1927 “Quota” Act ushered in an

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expansion of British studio personnel (Hochscherf 2011: 18). In the rhetoric of exile, however, disparate migrants are often cast as individuals, perhaps exceptional ones, tragically overlooked, heroically surviving, traumatically dislocated from their homelands, and more or less assimilated into their host nations, especially where they are carriers and tellers of travellers’ tales and have been able to write their migrant narratives into their host nation’s cinema industry, through a distinctive style that can be read as a mark of their individual, geographically disrupted authorship. They are seen to interfere with rather than belong to (or constitute) the national cinema that plays host to them. Following Gough-Yates, Tim Bergfelder (in collaboration with co-authors and coeditors) has most articulately orchestrated debates about the significance of an international workforce in British studios. Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (Bergfelder, Harris and Street, 2007) and his “Introduction” to Destination London: German Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950 (Bergfelder and Cargnelli (eds.) 2008) successfully dislodge the centrality of the persistent “national” paradigm. Through close attention to the realities of the workplace in British studios, to individual experiences and to industrial practices/artistic methods that cross borders, Bergfelder et al. successfully reframe critical attention towards a history of British cinema that is more decisively transnational. This body of work is useful in establishing how readily ideas about film production could be exchanged between the chief studios in Europe, how thoroughly mobile many of their personnel were, and how the studios functioned as provisional communities. Nationalising pressures persisted, and for political reasons these became increasingly powerful after the Nazis came to power and the 1930s proceeded. Despite this, “attempts and strategies of national containment and introspection … always competed (at least until the late 1930s) with cosmopolitan practices, and these can frequently be located in popular cinema, and often on genres that emphasised spectacle through visual cues” (Bergfelder, Harris and Street 2007: 30). In the field of production design, some Europeans such as Alfred Junge, who arrived in Britain in the 1920s, were able to build up industrially streamlined production processes in British studios, along the lines that existed in France and Germany, and were able to exercise a high degree of control over their work. With detailed sketching and pre-planning, aesthetically unifying design schemes for film projects, and the sort of “camera-consciousness” in his designs which reveals his key collaborative position within the production crew (however quarrelsome his relationships with other studio personnel), Junge stands high as an example of industrial internationalism in the British studios. Unlike Junge, many of the hundreds of émigrés employed by British studios were working as jobbing technicians on commercial genre films, and perhaps this is not surprising, for, as Bergfelder suggests, “in their reliance on specific generic formulae (especially serial narratives, thrillers and melodramas), directors tapped into internationally circulating, in some cases universal paradigms, providing a localised version of the kind of popular cinema that became from the late 1910s increasingly identified with Hollywood” (Bergfelder and Cargnelli 2008: 25). Familiar stylistic practices and typical genre narratives could be trafficked easily from Germany, France and Britain into broadly similar commercial cinemas. These fed on the same popularist sensibility that held sway in Hollywood, which was itself heavily reliant on imported talent from Europe. If “continental” technicians went without critical praise in Britain, and they frequently did, it was often because they

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secured jobs in just this disparaged commercial cinema. Gainsborough Studios are a case in point, denounced as they were for producing feminised, germanicised, hybridised cinema. In a nation whose official discourse viewed any Hollywood-driven Americanisation as a mode of mass-cultural lowbrow degradation, similar forms of continentalisation that seemed to ape it were unlikely to accrue much cultural kudos. Even where migrant workers are not pedalling cultural debasement, their stylistically inter-European collaborations in the domestic industry could still be viewed with suspicion. They embodied what I will call a “mixed-upness” which was a solvent of any stable framework, singular identity or unique cultural tradition, and hence they were a threat to national distinctiveness. To hark back to the nineteenth century and beyond, nation-building rhetoric had long been replete with monological and romanticised notions of belonging. It propagated itself by overriding local attachments and by repressing a diverse range of other identities, all in the greater name of nationhood, a grander narrative that assumes a settled population residing inside settled borders. Unanchored lifestyles, jostling with cross-cultural differences, undo the goal of nationhood, which is one of systematic containment. At least “foreigners” can be framed conceptually within their own national borders. Unassimilated people – whether migrants, Jews, gypsies, queers, vagrants, bohemians or other interlopers – challenge discourses of nationhood, so nations do not really know what to do with them.

Terms for a cosmopolitan cinema The language of cosmopolitanism lets us see the culture and politics of mobility in a different way, and there is good reason for understanding cinema itself to be a cosmopolitan practice. We need to take care when retrofitting newer discourses to older situations, and it is true that much modern cosmopolitan thought has arisen to account for patterns of existence produced by the late twentieth and early twenty-first-century economics of globalisation. This said, the cosmopolitan “idea” dates from classical civilisation and is much older than any concept of nationhood. The Cynics and Stoics of Ancient Greece conceived of it to imagine citizens of the world, and it carries with it ideals of universalism, a global human community, the refusal of political boundaries and an open curiosity about foreign culture, what Nikos Papastergiadis sums up as “a spiritual sense of interconnectedness and an aesthetic interest in difference, as well as a sense of political equality and moral responsibility towards all humanity” (Papastergiadis 2012: 82). The true cosmopolite does not fixate on “place”. Hence, Anthony Giddens’ notion of “disembeddedness”, which accounts for its sense of mobility, noting its “‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space” (Giddens 1990: 21). We can see this disembedding in the ways globalised commerce impacts on locations that are distant from each other. Corporations (rather than nations) systematically drive this global order. Whatever vernacular lingua franca a film studio operates to address its national customers, it is likely to operate with an eye on foreign sales, and to employ an international labour force. Cinema, then, is what Giddens would call a disembedded institution. Zygmunt Bauman’s coruscating accounts of cosmopolitanism trade on the inherent tension between the mutually incompatible concepts of freedom and security (both of which we crave) to caricature and denounce those successful modern cosmopolites who

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are detached from parochial, geographically situated responsibilities. Citizens of hub airports, existing in an affluent “business class” bubble, connected by mobile telephones and email, this “new elite is not defined by any locality: it is truly and fully extraterritorial” (Bauman 2001: 54). Unlike most ordinary folk, these people are not truly connected to any place or to any ethical responsibility; they revel in their supposed freedom. Though thoroughly extra-territorialised travellers are genuinely free from the daily constraints of “community”, they can nevertheless conjure a miraculous communal spirit – think of this as a phantasmagorical security blanket – by identifying with their class, enjoying a sense of belonging without any real binding commitment to it. Bauman caricatures this elite class as a way of thinking about how and why contemporary societies still crave a genuine community spirit, and to make a stark contrast with more vulnerable populations whose sense of shared belonging is disrupted by geopolitical upheavals. Here, we should remember that any leftist critique of cosmopolitan “style” would see it as a veneer, a positive and extremely partial spin on modern consciousness that disguises the exploitative, unequal, unaccountable nature of global capitalism. There are two strands in these visions of cosmopolitanism that I will draw on to consider ideas of national cinema in the context of Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. The first partially echoes but extends Benedict Anderson’s oft-cited thoughts on “imagined communities”; the second eases us into an understanding of the form of real community offered by film studios themselves. Anderson’s seminal study (1983) argues that the spread of a capitalist printed press, written in vernacular language for a literate marketplace, inculcated a sense of national consciousness and caused people to identify with fellow readers who were geographically distant from them: a fantasy of proximity with a citizenry they had never met but with whom they share a sense of nationhood. This press effectively “addressed” and “constructed” a national identity. It is a potent argument, and Film Studies has transplanted it, too readily perhaps, to the form of mediated communication with which it is concerned, arguing that cinema similarly addresses a nation of people. As Andrew Higson stresses, however, the project Anderson defines sees the nation as a finite space with effective borders, and Higson is correct when he notes that descriptions of national cinema may “focus only on those films that narrate the nation as just this finite, limited space, inhabited by a tightly coherent and unified community, closed off to other identities beside national identity” (Hjort and Mackenzie 2000: 66). Anderson’s influence on the study of national cinema raises another problem. Whether the national press circulates exclusively among a national readership or not, surely those media communication industries that belong to a global economic system are less mindful of national consciousness and address less or differently territorialised audiences? If Anderson’s model allows that locally “disembedded” media industries produce national mind-sets, then by extension, more globally orientated ones engender fields of identification that stray beyond the national and encourage us to perceive imagined communities with more cosmopolitan ambits. The transnational distribution and reception of silent cinema, and the development of multi-lingual cinema networks through enterprises like “Film Europe”, producing different language versions of the same film in the 1930s, point to this. And of course, Hollywood efficiently penetrates national consciousness beyond the shores of the USA, showing that people readily identify with brands of popular culture in ways that offer a serious challenge to any imagined “national space” (for a

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more thorough examination of this, see Glancy 2014). The way British audiences have embraced non-British film stars shows how non-nationalistic film reception has always been. Emphasising these qualities allows us to focus on the de-territorialised, cosmopolitan identity that globally conscious cinema constructs. Inquiries like these dissolve rigid notions of national cinema. They emerge from the way exiles and émigrés in the cinema industry have been considered, but their premise is that studios are agents of both a global economy and a cosmopolitan consciousness. As such, they tend to focus on modes of address and points of consumption. They do not necessarily say anything about the “disembedded” (or otherwise transnational) workers themselves. Studios, however, can and do gather together cosmopolitan talents, and film production allows for provisional multi-national artistic communities to develop, giving space to migrants and allowing for networks to be maintained between and beyond them. Neither deep-rooted nor indigenous, I argue that they are just the form of community that cosmopolitan theory anticipates. Giddens himself acknowledges a process of “reembedding” through which non-territorial social relations might be partially and transitorily pinned down (Giddens 1990: 79). This process differs from the assimilation that is often part of the exilic narrative, because cosmopolitan networks transcend the national and resist that type of absorption into the “host nation”. A sense of detachment persists, perhaps one we can think of as a well-heeled bohemianism.

Emeric Pressburger and Hein Heckroth Accounts of non-natives working in the British film industry need to be alert to individual life-stories, and rather than survey the mass of émigrés in the British industry during its “classic” period, this chapter has sought to outline how and why the study of them has helped to frame debates about “national cinema”. I will conclude, though, with a brief look at two men who came to Britain in 1935: Emeric Pressburger, and the man who worked as his and Michael Powell’s designer from the late 1940s, Hein Heckroth. Pressburger began the war years as an enemy alien in Britain, though he soon felt at home identifying with the Allied fight against the Third Reich. He quickly achieved financial security, a central role in Britain’s film industry, and an international reputation as a screenwriter and producer. As the epigraph about him at the head of this chapter reveals, he was fastidious in his tastes. Kevin Macdonald (Pressburger’s grandson) is careful to explain Emeric’s extravagance. His grocery habits were those of the cosmopolitan gourmet; and if airmailing his shirts from austere, post-war, rationed London to Paris to be laundered strays into conspicuous profligacy (as it seems to do to me), he could afford it, and significantly it showed remarkable loyalty to the launderers he had known when he lived there. There is a painful exilic biography here that cannot be denied – the flight from the Third Reich and subsequent loss of close family at Auschwitz – but the story is also a richly cosmopolitan one. Pressburger was close to the international mogul and fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda. In 1945, Emeric and Michael Powell enjoyed a trip to the USA, generously funded by United Artists. On a luxurious train journey across the continent they coincidentally met Fritz Lang, whom Pressburger used to see when he worked in the Ufa Studios in Gemany. In Hollywood, Emeric saw many other migrant friends from those Berlin days (Macdonald 1994: 252–3). The partnership with Michael Powell was often

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genuinely international. Correspondence between them through the 1940s (held in the BFI Special Collections Archives in London) shows a professional dialogue sustained by letters to and from places as far afield as Winnipeg, Scotland, Stockholm and California. Despite taking out British citizenship in 1946, and marrying a British woman the following year, both of which suggest a wish to put down roots, Pressburger seriously considered relocating to Canada with Powell only a few years later, and this hardly indicates he had a particularly long-term commitment to Britain at the time. The late 1940s also saw Powell and Pressburger stepping back from the nationalist-patriotic register that had necessarily governed much of their wartime work. Their exploration of the possibilities of the “composed” film (shooting to a pre-composed music score) in Black Narcissus (1947) and more thoroughly in The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffmann (1951) shows that they were committed to a brand of aesthetic cosmopolitanism achieved with a conspicuously cosmopolitan crew and – in the case of The Red Shoes – representing exactly the sort of cosmopolitan-bohemian lifestyle they belonged to themselves (Moor 2005: 1–26). The style of these works – governed by spectacle and music – directly appeals to a transnational, non-vernacular consciousness. Arguably these are just the type of “art” films that appeal to audiences who define themselves by the “internationalism” of their taste. In 1951, around the US release of The Tales of Hoffmann, the assistant to the Director of the New York Museum of Modern Art made just this point about European film-makers’ ability to penetrate the American market: “Because metropolitan intellectuals are the only articulate audience for foreign films (in the USA) their taste constitutes the sole yardstick European film-makers can use in aiming at the American market” (Griffith 1951). Let Emeric Pressburger stand as an example of one whose lifestyle can be read through the prism of cosmopolitan thought, facilitated by the cosmopolitan structures of the studio system, and supported through the international networking that the global cinema industry can offer. Hein Heckroth’s biography sees this cosmopolitanism inflected differently. His “international-modernist” artistic credentials were securely in place long before he arrived in Britain at the age of 34 with his Jewish wife Ada. Trained as a painter, he had worked in theatre design with Kurt Jooss’s dance company from the mid-1920s. He had contact with Otto Dix and Max Ernst, showed the influence of the Bauhaus on his work, was affiliated to the surrealists and, when he was briefly interned in Australia at the outbreak of the war, his case was championed by Herbert Read, the British supporter of the surrealists’ work. This is very much the stuff of “disembedded” bohemianism. Heckroth’s unpublished personal diary poignantly records painful telephone calls to his family in Germany at the start of 1947. They are on starvation rations. Heckroth sends essential provisions to them. He worries about owing £80 to a friend, and records income and expenditure so carefully that we can assume money matters were concerning him. While this narrative of struggle chimes with the sort of hardship associated with the exile-narrative – and certainly he was distressed by the separation from his relatives – by 1948 he was due to shift to a salaried position with The Archers company, on a rather comfortable £75 a week. His diaries record frustrations with many colleagues working on The Red Shoes, as well as a fine time with Michael Powell scouting for locations and design ideas in France for The Elusive Pimpernel (1950). It clearly shows that the production company, and the extended contacts he has through his ad hoc theatre design work,

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provide him with a diverse and well-organised cosmopolitan network. The commercial cinema also allows him exciting opportunities for “High Art” too, and this reminds him of his early years. Enthusiastic about his work on The Red Shoes, he records that: The names are different, the Flag is different, but the practice. Result is as it was in Germany 1932 1933. I have the pleasure to live everything twice. The Russians, Steiner Theory, “Modern Dance”, “Modern Art”, Weimarer Republik and all the rest of it – again, but nearly 30 years later. On matters artistic, his elitism is clear. His contempt for bourgeois taste does as much to distance him from the mainstream of his host nation’s culture as it might have done in Germany. Its assumption of sophistication certainly helps to wrap him in a cloak of

Figure 13.1 Hein Heckroth working on designs for The Red Shoes, with his wife Ada, and daughter Nandi looking on. The lush fur coat that Ada is wearing was a gift from Lotte Lenya

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cosmopolitanism. The Polish émigré composer Allan Gray, whose musical credentials were considerable and whom he and Pressburger had vaguely known at Ufa in the early 1930s, is written off as “depressing, common, an idiot” whose soon-to-be-rejected scores for The Red Shoes reek of “the common places” and “Public Taste”. They have a “Lyon’s Corner quality” (he uses this term of disdain more than once). Even on the use of colour, Heckroth could sound a superior tone. Thus, in a published interview, he maintains that the hard, bright colours he associates with American films are only loved by “unsophisticated people, which is why they appeal to a great number of American audiences” (Powell and Heckroth 1950). Venting some workplace frustrations in private, his diary even reveals him castigating Michael Powell at one point (“I fight a bunch of middle-class brains to give this picture style”) and he bemoans the fact that among the people round him there are “no artists”. Heckroth’s clear identification with “the artistic” de-nationalises him, as it marks his affiliation to circles of European art operating on an international register. We can see the influences of Lautrec and Degas on his work for The Red Shoes (he and Massine studied both in preparation for the film), while Monk Gibbon’s study of The Tales of Hoffmann (a companion volume coinciding with the film’s release) securely lodges Heckroth alongside Bakst, Benois, Picasso and Dali, all of whom had worked on set design for ballet (Gibbon 1951: 43). Likewise, the art director who preceded Heckroth at The Archers, Alfred Junge, clearly exhibited a loyalty to Art Deco in many of his set designs, while Jack Cardiff, the very English cinematographer, spoke of the influence of painters as diverse as Pieter de Hooch, Rembrandt, van Gogh and the Impressionists on his work with light – evoking Vermeer in Black Narcissus, for example (see Craig McCall’s 2010 documentary film, Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff). When work like this is cited as source-material and inspiration, the boundaries of the national are blurred all the more.

Conclusion It is clear that cinema production and reception exist within complex transnational dynamics. The metropolitan centres where films are made are sites of cosmopolitan exchange, and are always already interpenetrated by ceaseless crosscurrents of cultural exchange. Indigenous workers are exposed to influences from abroad. Émigré workers may bring with them knowledge of their homeland’s industrial practices and may have their own cultural baggage, or they may not. We should not over-read the work of nonnationals for signs of their foreignness. In Britain, the Association of Cine-Technicians union in the 1930s campaigned against immigrant workers to protect native jobs. Nationalist concerns are rarely spirited away. However, as John Sedgwick has shown, even an attempt to protect British national cinema like the Cinematograph Films Act (1927), which set out to preserve space on British screens for British films, actually gave studios the confidence to invest on an industrial level and thus provided a more stable commercial environment for émigrés to find secure employment (Sedgwick 1999). Critical and academic discourses that have attempted to map out the space of British cinema have done so because they are themselves already permeated by a nationalist discourse, however critical they are of it. Studies of émigré workers in the industry do more than identify and celebrate transnational elements within “British cinema”. They advertise how problematic the

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term actually is. By recasting cinema as a cosmopolitan, disparately intercultural and decentralised set of institutions, we can begin to address some of its rich plurality in ways that are not hamstrung by border controls.

Further reading Bergfelder, T. and Cargnelli, C. (eds.) (2008) Destination London: German Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hjort, M. and Mackenzie, S. (eds.) (2000) Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge. Hochscherf, T. (2011) The Continental Connection: German-speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1927–45, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York & London: Verso. Bauman, Z. (2001) Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bergfelder, T. and Cargnelli, C. (eds.) (2008) Destination London: German Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bergfelder, T., Harris, S. and Street, S. (2007) Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Glancy, M. (2014) Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Gough-Yates, K. (1971) Michael Powell in Collaboration with Emeric Pressburger, London: British Film Institute. Griffith, R. (1951) Sunday Review of Literature, 13 January 1951 (cutting in The Tales of Hoffmann Scrapbook, Michael Powell files, British Film Institute Special Collections, London). Higson, A. (2011) Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s, London: I.B. Tauris. Hjort, M. and Mackenzie, S. (eds.) (2000) Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge. Hochscherf, T. (2011) The Continental Connection: German-speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1927–45, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macdonald, K. (1994) Emeric Pressburger: The Life and Death of a Screenwriter, London: Faber & Faber. Moor, A. (2005) Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces, London: I.B. Tauris. Murphy, R. (ed.) (2001) The British Cinema Book, London: British Film Institute. Powell, M. and Heckroth, H. (1950) ‘Making Colour Talk’, Kinematograph Weekly, 9 November 1950. Sedgwick, J. (1999) “The Emergence of a Protected Industry: Patterns of Film and Star Consumption in mid-1930s Britain”, La Lettre de la Maison Française d’Oxford, No. 11.

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‘OUT OF THE FRYING PAN, INTO THE FIRE’ British documentary, 1945–52

Steven Foxon It is no surprise that after World War II the position in which British documentary film-makers found themselves was somewhat precarious. With the urgency of war now dissolved, many practitioners sought a new purpose for their craft. The demands of the war had seen the Grierson-inspired beginnings of the sponsored documentary film expand from the Government’s own GPO Film Unit (renamed the Crown Film Unit from 1940) and a small number of independent production companies, most notably the Strand and Realist Film Units, to a wider selection of units all capable of producing documentary and informational films.1 In 1938–9 upwards of thirty documentary films would have been considered a good output from the units located in London’s Soho Square. However, well over 500 films for the Ministry of Information (MOI) were produced between 1941 and 1945, by a small handful of independent documentary outfits; combined with the Ministry’s own Crown Film Unit’s, the immediate post war offered a sizeable potential for documentary film-making. Supply and demand had increased significantly to fulfill the needs of the MOI such that almost all documentary output was considered to be under the influence of Government – even the private Shell Film Unit had been at the disposal of the Government throughout the war. Film-making, for the wartime Ministry, was considered ‘in the national interest’, and as such, technicians were reserved for their production skills. Significant finance had been available for production and distribution, and so long as there existed a need for documentary films from the Ministry, documentary practitioners had been protected with secure work. With the benefit of secure work came little support, however, and the wartime production units had no special treatment, no access to new equipment, and no special production facilities. The non-fiction film had no preferential treatment in the way it was distributed over entertainment films, advertising films, or newsreels. Units were left to improvise with whatever technical facilities they could source, to train new technicians – if personnel could be found – and to interchange staff and equipment among themselves. They emerged from the war, therefore, with increased film-making skills, with more units and more technicians, but with outdated and tired equipment, facing increased printing and processing costs, higher prices for film-stock and wages that

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had risen considerably. The immediate crisis for documentary was a hefty potential for supply but with the impetus of war now receding, where would the next big subject come from? Documentary faced an uncertain existence; furthermore, some old challenges, buried by the war effort, began to resurface. One of the medium’s most vocal critics of this emerging post-war period was Paul Rotha. Rotha had been among the core of British documentary practitioners in the pre-war Grierson-led years, though not always aligned with Grierson’s trajectory. He had, through his own opinions and writings, always considered himself, and acted as, an outsider to the Grierson group. The pre-war documentary practitioners had never had an easy or welcoming relationship with the British film industry. Distribution was a key sticking point. Before the war, documentary distribution was mainly a matter of ad hoc arrangements. The non-theatrical field was only just being developed, and along lines which would not repay expenditure on production for many years; indeed much of its distribution was free. Theatrical cinema distribution involved making a film and then having to persuade the cinema trade that it was worth showing. Certain documentary films, notably Night Mail (1936), The Future’s in the Air (1937) and North Sea (1938), had wide commercial bookings upon release, although it was claimed that even these films did not recover their production costs owing to the low prices paid by the exhibitors for this sort of film (Anstey et al. 1947: 11). Other pre-war documentaries such as Song of Ceylon (1934), To-day We Live (1937) and The Londoners (1939) also received significant showings, garnering their reputation largely in press reviews and at film society and specialist screenings. At no time in the 1930s did a documentary film (of the Griersonian tradition) ever return a profit. During the war, however, with very few exceptions, the distribution of documentary film was outside the concerns of the documentary production units. The MOI arranged its own theatrical distribution contracts with the cinema trade through the Kinematograph Renter’s Society, and built up its own free non-theatrical distribution through the Central Film Library.2 In 1946, the Central Office of Information (COI) replaced the MOI. Many practitioners complained that the Government was slow to indicate how it might function, how it might use films, and what production and distribution arrangements it would adopt. In reality the COI had greater concerns beyond that of films. It was indeed uncertain, following the dissolution of the MOI, whether a central Government agency should even continue at all: When the COI came into being on April 1st, 1946, it did not compare favorably in leadership, strength, or morale with the Ministry of Information of, say, a year before. In truth it was in crisis. It had lost almost all of its wartime leaders down to and including the crucial Director line. These losses, plus the exodus of many key technicians at lower levels, had sapped its powers. Its internal self-confidence was shaken by the prolonged uncertainty about its future – which in human terms meant uncertainty about the personal economic security of its staff and their families. Events had in truth conspired to give the central publicity agency of the Government a physical and moral beating-up. (Fraser 1946: 1) Under the COI’s 1946 proposals it was noted that the changeover from war to peace, from MOI to COI, and the consequential changes in relationships with other Government

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departments, combined with a considerable staff turnover, had necessitated a period of experiment and readjustment in the work of the Film’s Division, its operations falling into two distinct but closely related sections; production and distribution. There were two routes available to the COI for the production of documentary films; internally they could commission the Office’s own Crown Film Unit, which was by 1946 a fully equipped official film-making service that, from its wartime output, had earned a high reputation. Alternatively they could commission externally, by contract with one of the many independent production units. In 1946 it was reported that 70 percent of the COI’s films were made by external contractors with 30 percent produced from within by the Crown Film Unit (Fraser 1946: 3). The COI Film’s Division was responsible for advising the Governmental client Department on the suitability of the medium; the type of film; for choosing the production unit best suited to carry out the client’s wishes; for all the financial and technical control; and finally, for furnishing the client Department with a film that would subsequently meet with its requirements in a style worthy of the Government’s Information Service.3 The effect of the new system set in operation under the COI was first felt by its production wing. During the first six months it was feared that it would narrow the scope of COI films and concentrate the emphasis on short-term objectives or specialized projects such as training films. Wider projects did emerge, but the COI’s efficiency as film producers was largely dependent on the efficiency of the client’s Information Department, and the necessary planning ahead required to allow for a quality production. Even so, the COI was optimistic about its future and the production output of 1947 was forecast to remain consistent with that of previous years and included Children on Trial, Cumberland Story, Instruments of the Orchestra, The Bridge, As Others See Us, Your Children and You, and Cotton Come Back. The COI Films Division engaged in two forms of distribution: commercial and non-theatrical. The COI had contracted a significant number of their films to major distributors in 1947 which were reported as securing for the Exchequer between 70 and 80 percent of the gross rentals paid by the cinemas. These films included: Children on Trial, Now It Can Be Told, English Criminal Justice, Defeated People, Fenlands, Man, One Family, Cyprus Is an Island, Diary for Timothy, and This Is Britain cinemagazines Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 (all 1947) (Fraser 1946: 3). In the 1947 year’s review, Robert Fraser noted that whilst relations were considered to be good with major distributors, it was highlighted that routine documentary films were not popular with exhibitors and their commercial distribution was very difficult (Fraser 1946: 3). Average business on a good short film was reported to mean 800–1,000 cinema bookings and it was noted that some COI films had attained 2,000 bookings. In terms of attendance this was translated into over seven million people seeing these films. Longer films of 60 minutes or more, such as Children on Trial, English Criminal Justice, and Defeated People, were reported to attain between 1,500 and 3,000 bookings. An arrangement existed between the COI and the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA), which guaranteed circulation through some 4,750 cinemas for 12 one-reel films per year. Despite the partnership, no money was involved in the scheme, beyond the cost of the film, though it provided a very wide and speedy outlet for exhibition.

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For overseas distribution the COI made use of the Rank Organisation to represent them in Belgium, Denmark, Greece, the Netherlands and Italy, supplying films with translated soundtracks for each respective territory. In America the COI were represented by RKO cinemas in the greater New York area; their 1947 report on Burma Victory shows it to have totaled over 3,000 theatrical bookings. On the non-theatrical side, many COI productions were aimed at specialist audiences such as factories, schools, women’s organizations, and youth groups. In the first six months of the COI it was claimed that some 25,000 non-theatrical film shows were given in the UK. This represented a key audience for the COI who claimed to have given 10,000 shows per year for Government departments such as Agriculture, Food, Health and Labour; some 12,000 shows a year in factories; and some 15,000 in towns and villages to general audiences.4 Non-theatrical use of COI films all over the world was encouraged and in the USA distribution was considered to be ever-increasing. In 1946, 13 new films were scheduled for non-theatrical release including Pat Jackson’s Western Approaches – retitled for the USA as The Raiders. The most commercially successful of the Government’s war films were the feature documentaries showing the combat fronts: Desert Victory (1943), Tunisian Victory (1943), Burma Victory (1945), Target for Tonight (1941), Coastal Command (1942), Journey Together (1945), Western Approaches (1944), and The True Glory (1945).

Figure 14.1 London Can Take It! (1940). Produced by the GPO Film Unit for the Ministry of Information; it was co-directed by Harry Watt and Humphrey Jennings

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The public paid to see these films because they were dramatized news, with all the physical excitement and dramatic action of battle, raid and shipwreck but without the danger. Technically very well made, they were not in the tradition of peace-time documentary, and with a few exceptions, they were not made by technicians from the pre-war documentary group. Documentary practitioners of social and informational documentaries were largely engaged during the war in producing for non-theatrical exhibition.5 Their distribution was free by arrangement with the cinema trade and not on the commercial terms of the MOI’s feature documentaries. Despite the MOI’s claims that film distribution arrangements were in hand with positive outlooks for a commercial return, Paul Rotha was quick to criticize their lack of exploitation: In my opinion, a number of these non-theatrical pictures could very well have been shown in cinemas, being infinitely better quality than the great majority of commercially rented short films. Ralph Keene’s series Pattern of Britain, many of Realist’s films, and such pictures as Nightshift and Life Begins Again deserved cinema showing. But the Ministry of Information was notoriously weak in its Trade relations where films other than those of the Desert Victory class were concerned. Its renting arrangements for pictures like Our Country, Cyprus Is an Island, Today and Tomorrow, Silent Village, Diary for Timothy, and The Bridge left much to be desired. (Anstey et al. 1947: 13)

Figure 14.2 Journey Together (1945). Produced by the RAF Film Unit and starring Richard Attenborough

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Some documentaries such as Target for Tonight (1941), Desert Victory (1943), Western Approaches (1944), and other feature documentaries received a wide commercial distribution, earning considerable revenue. It is not recorded whether they earned back their capital outlay because of the difficulties in being able to assess their accurate cost.6 In any case, whilst it is fair to say a return from cinema screenings was expected, it was not the primary reason for which these films were made (COI 1944: 5). With regard to internal matters, in 1946 the documentary practitioners set up the Federation of Documentary Film Units to dispel a belief that all documentaries were by necessity short films – a popular misunderstanding of the time which Rotha (1947: 3) claimed had done much harm to the documentary film. The origins of this, Rotha claimed, stemmed from the establishment of the Association of Short Film Producers which had been formed to act on behalf of short-film-makers, including those associated with advertising and cartoons. It did not take long, however, to discover that the policies and agendas of all short-film-makers were not compatible and that by 1947 the Association of Short Film Producers had changed their title to the Association of Specialised Film Producers. Rotha argued that the motive underlying the production of advertising films, for which screen-space is hired by the advertiser, could not be remotely linked with the founding principles of documentary production. Though that may have been true for Rotha, the industrial films that were produced in the ensuing years from Arthur Elton’s Shell Film Unit, Edgar Anstey’s British Transport Films and the nationalized Coal Industry clearly directed an element of their production output toward a more commercial standpoint. Anstey and Elton, who had both gained significant experience producing films for private sponsors prior to the war, found it far easier to accept more commercial ambitions for their post-war documentary ideology. Throughout the post-war period Anstey and Elton both retained a foot in their Grierson-inspired outfit known as Film Centre, which had been established in 1937 to allow the GPO Film Unit practitioners an element of independence from Government restriction and an ability to take on work for private and commercial companies. From 1935 until the spring of 1940, the policy and unity of purpose of the documentary filmmakers was expressed through the Associated Realist Film Producers, which later worked in close cooperation with Film Centre. Associated Realist Film Producers was discontinued during the war because much of its membership had been scattered, but before long there arose the need for another body to express documentary values. In 1945, after more than six months of discussion, the new Federation began working in cooperation with Film Centre and its consultancy services. A further confusing factor cementing the association of documentary as a short film medium in general was the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT) union’s Short Film Agreement, which defined all films running less than 3,000ft (i.e. 33mins and 20secs) under one heading, with certain wage increases when documentary films of more than 3,000ft achieved cinema releases, ensuring that with ever-tightening budgets the documentary film remained a short film. The perplexities of an arrangement whereby a technician who worked on a documentary film of more than 3,000ft in length should be paid more than if the film was under 3,000ft, when in either case it may have gained a commercial screening, baffled many practitioners in the ensuing years.7 It was frequently suggested that the ACT should have its own documentary production agreement, as the Newsreel did, irrespective of length and the distribution characteristics of its films.

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The separation of film product into long and short categories was purely a legal convenience originating from the Board of Trade and defined in the Cinematograph Films Act:8 In seventeen years documentary has been developed as a method of film-making and an approach to the use of the screen totally different from other types of production. It is, and let us not be ashamed of it, a powerful aid to adult education, although its form may be drama. Documentary must always stand on its own two feet as documentary, no matter if it is two reels, four or eight in length, theatrical or non-theatrical in release. Documentary is not one thing when it is 2,999 feet and another when it is 3,001 feet. It is, in famous words, indivisible. (Rotha 1958: 232) The pre-war economic basis of all documentary production in Britain was founded on slender resources. When the Empire Marketing Board set up its production unit in 1929, from which most of the senior post-war practitioners had stemmed, money for production and wages was minimal. This continued into the General Post Office era and remained the case into the war. Rotha commented that film-making was hardly a respectable way for the Treasury to use public funds. Attacked as ‘unfair competition’ by the Trade, the Government production of now famous films including Night Mail (1936), Weather Forecast (1934), and Industrial Britain (1932) represented expenditure which would have shown little profit if the commercial industry itself had tried to make such films.9 Apart from this small Government sponsorship, the films commissioned as public-relations exercises by such bodies as Shell-Mex and British Petroleum, the gas industry and Imperial Airways were produced on equally slender budgets. The core of Rotha’s argument was that the full contract price went on the final production. That is to say, overheads were kept to a minimum and there was little capital in the few pre-war documentary companies which demanded repayment of dividends. Technicians received a weekly wage that compared unfavorably with colleagues working in feature film production. To compensate, Rotha, Grierson, and their acolytes believed personally in the pictures they were making. Films were produced for the sake of making good-quality, progressive films and as a contribution to the public good. Profit was not the primary aim. The growth of the pre-war British documentary had been made possible only by sponsorship. Interestingly, however, the sponsor of the documentary film was not primarily interested in the cash returns from the hiring of the film; s/he was concerned moreover that an audience, either specialized or general, should see the film and the sponsor’s message. Thus a method of documentary film finance was established for a handful of small independent producing companies, operating with relatively small capital, carrying out contracts for production and arranging subsequent distribution. There were no serious efforts to market documentaries as commercial products because it was always felt that the renters would not increase the hire charges. Only if a documentary ran over 3,000ft in length would an exhibitor pay more, and then this was not sufficient to offset the increased costs of production for a longer film. Documentary continued to exist, then, for a good number of years after the war on a remarkably small working capital which restricted its control over equipment and facilities for sound recording and studio floor-space. If documentary was to blossom into the

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1950s, Rotha (1958: 233) argued, it may well have to drastically re-organize its financial structure, with perhaps a common coordinating finance, leaving the units their individual production freedom. He also hinted that it was also possible to aid the independent producer such that documentary did not always have to rely on sponsorship for its production. Sponsorship, he stressed, whether Governmental, industrial or otherwise, is always limiting to creative independence. In retrospect, documentary did not receive the unified and coordinating financial structure for which Rotha had argued; instead the future of the medium lay within industrial sponsorship. Though the COI continued to produce government films for their non-theatrical libraries, the bulk of 1950s production would come from industrial sponsorship and private industry in the form of Shell, AEI and BOAC. Government production in its greatest manifestation came from the internal industrial film units of nationalized industry such as the Transport Commission and National Coal. The establishment of UNESCO in 1945 and the World Health Organisation in 1948 offered new international platforms for social awareness. In the rebuilding of Britain after the war, the potential for the use of film to aid interpretation, for explaining re-organization, and to convey corporate communication and policy was stronger than ever. The ideology of the ‘Grierson documentary’ has been pinpointed and challenged by many historians who nevertheless agree that to some extent, a common purpose underlay the concept of British documentary. There have been many deviations from this common purpose, some necessitated by the war and others because of the personal differences between practitioners interpreting documentary principles. The social motives and values which much of the 1930s output extolled remained for some time after the war. Certainly the optimism for films of social worth was high; a new Labour Government, more representative of popular thought, replaced that which had stood for a privileged minority. Rotha concluded that the documentary of the 1950s had much to look forward to: There are still many social problems to be solved, many miseries to be turned into happinesses, many inequalities to be spotlighted, and many constructive causes to be made widely known. In all the countless fields open to it, on the international as well as the national level, in the cultural, scientific, and educational territories, the documentary ideology can be carried forward in these next years provided that its technicians and creative workers maintain that integrity of purpose which has distinguished their contribution up until now. There are those who talk of documentary merging with the fictional film. … Documentary and commercial features serve different purposes. It will be hard to fuse the two unless the whole basis of theatrical distribution is changed. If the Government itself exercised some ownership over a proportion of cinemas in the country, so guaranteeing screenspace for its own produce, and perhaps that of independent producers, then documentary could enter into feature productions both for sponsors and on its own financial risk. Alternatively, if one or other of the big circuits would realise that playing good factual films in place of poor second features and job-lot ‘fill-ups’ would be both answering a public demand and restricting the export of pounds overseas, then documentary would also know where it stood. That is where one of the next big developments in documentary may lie. (Anstey et al. 1947: 15)

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Although the Labour Government of 1947 established the nationalized industries which went on to develop their own film units, the optimism placed in the Labour Party by Paul Rotha was to prove fruitless – it was in fact the successive Conservative Government that embraced the documentary as a communication tool for the 1950s. The industries of coal, oil, and transport continued to champion the documentary medium for the next decade – the notion of Government taking further controls could not have been further from reality. In 1952 the Crown Film Unit was closed, the Government citing that the COI’s filmmaking needs could be satisfied by contracting their films to the many independent production units established in the post-war years. The closure of Crown allowed the pendulum to swing entirely back toward one of Grierson’s original ambitions – that private industry and the industrial sponsor should embrace and drive the documentary film.

Notes 1 Over 100 new independent units had been established by 1947 including Analysis Films, Anson Dyer Studios, Paul Barralet Productions, Basic Films, Blackheath Film Unit, the Documentary Technicians Alliance (DATA), Films of Fact, Greenpark Production and Halas and Batchelor etc. 2 Grierson established a momentum for non-theatrical activities with the GPO Film Library in the years before 1939. 3 Film Centre acted as an agency run by Grierson’s colleagues to match industrial organisations and sponsors with production companies. It oversaw contractual arrangements and afforded an element of control to the Grierson ‘school’ over the selection of appropriate partners. 4 The MOI and COI supplied films to British territories immediately after their liberation. This was gradually phased out and replaced with overseas libraries of COI productions and projection equipment. 5 Most notably Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey. 6 The complex inter-departmental relationships that oversaw wartime film commissions do not easily allow the true costs of productions to be accurately recorded. These costs were skewed within greater bureaucratic departments as part of the war effort. 7 Such was the power of the union and the need for units to keep their costs down that films that came in greater than 3,000ft (33 minutes and 20 seconds) were often cut to stay within the 3000ft rule. 8 Rotha wrote ‘Documentary is Neither Short nor Long’ as an attack on this Union standpoint. The ruling remained unchanged until the demise of the Union and the prestigious theatrical release of documentary films in cinemas. 9 Report from the Select Committee and Estimates, 2 July 1934.

References Anstey, Edgar et al. (1947). Informational Film Yearbook, Edinburgh. COI (1944). Receipts from Commercial Distribution of Films, Summary of Statement 18 prepared for evidence for the Public Accounts Committee. London. Fraser, Robert (1946). COI: The Strategy of the First Six Months. London. Rotha, P. (1946) Documentary Film Focus. Edinburgh: Albyn Press. Rotha, P. (1947) “Documentary Is Neither Short nor Long”, Informational Film Yearbook 1947. Edinburgh: Albyn Press. Rotha, P. (1958) Rotha on the Film: A Selection of Writings about the Cinema. London: Faber & Faber.

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“ABOVE AND BEYOND EVERYDAY LIFE” The rise and fall of Rank’s contract artists of the 1950s

Steve Chibnall I maintain that a star should shine above and beyond everyday life. If every star is to be the girl next door – why bother to go to the cinema across the road? Publicist Leslie Frewin (1956) Film stars in the flesh … were nearly always a disappointment, shorter, older, less pretty and certainly less friendly than one had imagined or perhaps hoped. Isabel Quigly (2003) recalling her days as a film critic in the 1950s

The 1950s was the last decade of studio stardom in Britain. It was the end of a system in which talented actors, or even those who just looked attractive, were given exclusive contracts by large film producers, such as the J. Arthur Rank Organisation, Associated British Production Company (ABPC), London Films and Warwick Films, and might then be loaned out to other producers to appear in their pictures “by permission.” The “contract artist” system was supposed to add value by transforming a mere actor into a “star property.” Operating largely in the shadow of Hollywood’s larger and more polished star-making machine, Britain’s modest but not entirely unsuccessful attempts to emulate its mechanisms were largely ignored by academics until Geoffrey Macnab (2000) drew attention to them as part of a millennial re-kindling of interest in the national cinema. Unlike Hollywood stars, their British equivalents traditionally gained entry to the heavens via media other than cinema: theatre, music hall, radio and, later, television. Film enhanced rather than created their fame. There was a brief period in the history of film-making in the UK, however, when one studio in particular believed that it could manufacture stars in its own laboratory. Its attempts may ultimately have been futile in sustaining its own ambitious film production programme, but they were nevertheless rather magnificent in their optimism. The Rank Organisation was a giant vertically integrated corporation incorporating General Film Distributors, two profitable nationwide cinema chains (Odeon and Gaumont) and distribution and exhibition interests across the globe. However, the

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history of Rank as a production company, based primarily at Pinewood Studios, is one of rapid growth until the late 1940s when failure to break into the US market and escalating studio costs in Britain, combined with profligate production budgets and boxoffice disasters, forced a dramatic retrenchment. Its stable of prestigious independent producer/directors bolted to find alternative sources of finance and greater autonomy, and its notorious experiment in the grooming of young acting talent, “The Company of Youth” – known pejoratively in the press as “The Rank Charm School” – was abandoned (Macnab 2000: 178–82). The number of artists contracted to the Organisation which had once believed that it could beat Hollywood at its own game had risen to almost 50, but was now slashed to 22. By 1953, however, under the shrewd (and ruthless) control of Managing Director John Davis, Rank was getting back onto a more sustainable financial footing, and fortunes were then boosted by the unexpected success of a film full of second-choice cast members, Genevieve (1953), and the hit series of Doctor films (Harper and Porter 2003: 35–73). Although films were Rank’s ultimate products, their most vital component was undoubtedly the star performer. And the discourse around stars was the lifeblood of most publicity campaigns. The Organisation had inherited the template of star creation from Ted Black at Gainsborough, where publicist, Leslie Frewin, had worked tirelessly to promote leading players such as Margaret Lockwood, Stewart Granger and Patricia Roc. The publicity department operated as a buffer between producers, stars, distributors, press and public. It was there to cushion blows and facilitate interaction, to be reactive as well as proactive (Myers 1947). Frewin confessed that effective publicity was as much about what was kept secret as about what was promoted. The publicist was a keeper of the stars’ secrets, with a moral obligation to protect their reputations, especially vulnerable actors. Frewin knew how savage the public could be, having dealt with a post-war flood of obscene fan letters mailed to his stars: “Two men had to ‘vet’ the letters before the stars were allowed to see them” (Frewin 1956). In the 1950s, one the most delicate jobs of Rank’s publicists would be the protection of homosexual stars Dirk Bogarde and John Fraser. With the closure of Gainsborough Studios and Frewin’s defection to Associated British, however, Rank began to lose its star-making touch. The Charm School’s founder, a former general secretary of Equity named David Henley, whom Rank had made its Director of Artists, was subsequently replaced by his deputy, Olive Dodds. “She was a pleasant little woman in her early middle age,” remembered contract artist Michael Craig (2005: 64), “horn-rimmed glasses and the demeanour of a spinster schoolmistress.” Dodds acted as a mentor to the artists and her influence, and the esteem in which she was held by many of them, is evident in Dirk Bogarde’s (1978: 117) tribute: This was the woman who would push me, or steer me, whichever needed doing, through the Paradise-Hell of the Cinema Jungle. She it would be who would part the thorns and brambles and strangling vines, suggest new tracks, new directions, when to move, when to lie low. Realising that contract artists could be loaned out to other production companies at a profit, Rank briefly tried to corner the market by signing as many potential stars as possible. The roster of contract artists was built up again, rising to 43 by the start of 1955. There were senior figures such as Peter Finch, Jack Hawkins and Dirk Bogarde and

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unknowns such Michael Craig, Patrick McGoohan, June Laverick and Belinda Lee. Rank’s upbeat mood was based on record returns from overseas territories, an almost doubling of average screen time per camera day, and the halving of production costs (Kinematograph Weekly 1954). Within two years, Pinewood could barely accommodate the artists that had been signed up and inherited from London Films after the death of Alexander Korda, such as Shirley Eaton and Ronald Lewis. With Olive Dodds supplying a nurturing environment, and using the model provided by the Hollywood studios, Rank began to focus on its in-house stars, perhaps to the neglect of directorial and writing talent. The contract artist system allowed the Organisation to build the demands of publicity into the contractual obligations of its players, thus avoiding the notoriously publicity-shy stances of many British stars of earlier times. An informal hierarchy operated among the contract artists, with parts being offered first to one of the “senior” artists and then to one of the effective “understudies.” Looking back on the period he spent with the Organisation, Donald Sinden (1992: 197–8) emphasised the centrality of stars to its publicity strategies: Numerous interviews were arranged: reporters and gossip-columnists had apparently endless inches of column space and the Rankery [sic] was eager that these should be filled with news of their “stars.” Any excuse for a photograph or a story was leaped on. It was not uncommon for the face of a beautiful budding actress to be blazoned across the pages of the national press long before she even appeared in a film – if she ever did. For the frequent film premieres, each contract artist was assigned to a Rolls-Royce. As the limousine took its place in the queue of cars approaching the red carpet where arc lights lit the scene and the crowds had to be held back, the interior lights were switched on. As the car’s door lined up with the red carpet, it was opened by a commissionaire and the star stepped out to a barrage of flash bulbs, screams and proffered autograph books. In the foyer, newsreel cameras captured the arrival of the stars, and microphones were thrust before them and a few words were requested. The process was repeated on a smaller scale at personal appearances (PAs) when a star had a film on release at selected provincial picture houses. These were expected in the London suburbs once a week even when actively working on a production. There were mutterings in the trade press that the core business of film-making was being side-lined in favour of star publicity. However, beautiful people were easier to market than complex films, and Rank grabbed every opportunity to get its contract artists noticed, instituting a “Special Services Department” to handle their personal appearances. Bernard Miller worked in Special Services for most of the 1950s, and recalled that the major annual event was the charity Film Garden Party organised by the Sunday Pictorial newspaper. Every available contract artist and publicist was needed at the event, which attracted huge crowds (Miller 2003). For Rank’s starlets, events like these constituted an alternative “season” which might culminate, like the debutant season, in a presentation to Queen Elizabeth: in the starlet’s case, this would be at the annual Royal Command Film Screening. Personal appearances were complemented by an emphasis on pictorial publicity, which occupied a prominent position in the Organisation’s strategy of recovery and

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expansion. John Davis, for all his faults, at least understood the importance of glamour in the marketing of the cinema business and he ensured that Rank’s was the best of the extra-diegetic imagery that promoted British films. The finest Italian illustrators and portraitists were employed to give the Organisation’s film posters a vibrancy and celebration of colour that enlivened what had become a hackneyed design field. At the same time, the business of photographic image creation was entrusted to a young stills cameraman in a specialist studio in Pinewood where star portraits could be carefully worked upon. Cornel Lucas, once described by David Puttnam (1988) as “a ‘stills man’ with golden knobs on,” had served in the RAF’s photography unit during the Second World War before joining Rank as a stills photographer. On the basis of a fractious, but ultimately successful, portrait assignment with Marlene Dietrich, he managed to persuade Rank’s Head of Publicity that visiting American stars would expect a similar portraiture facility to those common in Hollywood studios. Built over a swimming pool, the Pool Studio included a permanent electrician, prop man, hairdresser, make-up artist and manager. In the early days, Lucas was doing four sessions per day, photographing contract artists with his large plate camera: “In those days whether you like it or not, films were sold on sensuality and sexuality,” he remembered (Lucas 2005). Lucas worked tirelessly to create a mystique around the plethora of starlets employed briefly by Rank, but his most frequent model was his wife, Belinda Lee, who joined Rank at the beginning of 1955 and rose to the top of its female pecking order before leaving under a cloud in 1958. Those portraits of Lee, described by John Russell Taylor (1985: 19) as “one of the most spectacular-looking women ever to find a place on the British screen,” come closest to the sort of glamour portraiture pioneered by George Hurrell and Clarence Sinclair Bull in Hollywood’s golden age.

Figure 15.1  The Rank contract artists at the time of the Cannes Film Festival 1957

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Lucas had plenty of opportunities to create his star images because Rank’s contract artists frequently had time on their hands. The sudden rush to sign up actors resulted in a serious surplus of “talent” and frustrated actors who had been encouraged to have high expectations, but who found they were waiting around for roles. A number, such as Claire Bloom, Sandra Dorne and Joan Collins, agitated to be released from their contracts. Collins became queen of the loan-outs, making ten films during her time with Rank, but none of them at Pinewood. When roles were offered, the artists frequently baulked at the low quality of the scripts. Refusing a role was often treated as a breach of contract and could result in suspension, as it had done for one of Rank’s biggest stars, Margaret Lockwood, in 1947. Seven years later, another of the Organisation’s biggest assets, Kay Kendall, star of Genevieve, suffered the same fate. She commented: “I turned down the parts for the simple reason that I felt they were getting me nowhere” (Daily Mail 1954). Eunice Gayson (2012: 73–4) spoke for many of Rank’s artists when she later complained: After six months I hadn’t made a single film with Rank, though I did just about everything else, from having scores of publicity stills taken with Cornel Lucas, reading script after script they sent me, and being rented out to advertising companies endorsing everything from hairgrips to car seat covers. Ronson lighters, ironing boards, coffee, furniture ranges and even toothbrushes! Then there were the public appearances – judging beauty contests, dog shows, opening fetes and attending film festivals. Gayson had already built a reputation on television, but some of the contract artists needed their fame building from a much lower base. Producer Joe Janni met a commercial artist named Jennifer Puckle at a party and persuaded Olive Dodds to offer her an acting contract as “Beth Rogan.” “They told me I had tremendous possibilities: a gamin-type with off-beat looks!”, she recalled: I thought I was going to be groomed and built up. … They sent me to do breathing exercises. When I complained that this wasn’t learning to act, they gave me a tutor. Then they said vaguely: “Go round and knock on producers’ doors.” I dutifully turned up at the studio bar – to be seen, you know. After months of doing that a director came up to me and said: “I’ve asked several people who you are. As no one knew, I assumed you were one of the secretaries.” (Garrett 1958) Poor Beth managed just 50 seconds of Rank screen time in her two years with the Organisation. Olive Dodds understood the frustrations of the Rogans and the Gaysons: Where the system failed was in not going along with the Hollywood idea of telling directors they must use people under contract. We never forced anyone to use one of our actors or actresses. So often you’d find our people hanging around for great periods of time without work. (Falk 1987: 3)

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During these fallow periods, the contract artists were expected to fulfil the expectations of what a glamorous film star should look like, expectations that were vigorously policed both by the studio and the press. In the influential fan magazine Picturegoer, Ken Stevens (1955) criticised a number of actresses, including Diane Cilento, for not being properly turned out in public: A film star should look the height of success, ability and achievement. And that’s off the screen as well as on. As one big cinema owner said recently: “If we are to crash the world market, we must have femininity that occasionally inspires wolf whistles in the males and sighing admiration in the females.” Some contract artists resisted the studio’s attempts to groom their image according to an overly conventional notion of how a British film star should look and behave. Michael Craig objected to being obliged to bulk up his physique in the Pinewood gym, and was censured for his insolence. “Other censorious memos were provoked by my wearing suede desert boots, by my choice of drink in the bar at Pinewood – Guinness rather than some more up-market concoction – and by my car, which … was an old and unreliable Ford Prefect” (Craig 2005: 65). He was suspended for refusing a part in The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958), but was forgiven when James Woolf of Romulus Films paid his year’s salary to appear in The Silent Enemy (1959). To persuade Rank to loan him out to play a role in the social realist The Angry Silence (1960), a part they considered would jeopardise the romantic image they had so carefully cultivated for him, he had to threaten to expose their refusal to the press, which was ever-ready to criticise Rank’s safe and conformist approach to story selection. Craig recalled major rows with John Davis that left Olive Dodds trembling in the corner of the room and later begging him to apologise (Craig 2005: 78–91). Rank never properly understood the process of nurturing, developing and differentiating star personas, with which producers such as Herbert Wilcox and Alexander Korda had much greater familiarity. Geoffrey Macnab (2000: 172–8) has depicted the British star of the 1950s as at best a pale imitation of American originals and, at worst, a bland bourgeois figure blighted by excessive niceness. The men mainly lacked rugged machismo and the women genuine sex appeal. Dirk Bogarde, Rank’s highest-paid artist, was extraordinarily outspoken on the matter: There’s still too much playing for safety in our studios. Everything’s a little too average and antiseptic. We’re so afraid of faces that don’t look like every other face, so suspicious of anything individual, so terrified of seeing a starlet with one curl out of place. As for sex. I still say we’re waiting for someone to invent it. When we do toy with it on the screen we handle it so sneeringly that it ends up as slapstick. (Wilson 1956) While his view might have been overstated, it contained an element of truth that Rank could not ignore in its quest for success in vital overseas markets (Harper and Porter 2003: 36–7). Consequently, the Organisation’s promotion of stardom underwent something of a sea change – appropriately between the release of Doctor in the House and the production of Doctor at Sea (1955) – as the primacy of domestic audiences gave way to that of

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international audiences. At the time, Rank’s Overseas Film Distributors had 42 branch offices worldwide, with the highest concentration in Italy and France. Almost half of the Organisation’s revenue came from overseas, and Rank owned, or had a financial interest in, more than 500 cinemas outside the UK (Rank 1956: 55). With the departure of Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios from Rank’s portfolio of corporate interests at the close of 1955, John Davis was finally able to reject Balcon’s view that “the only truly international picture is a national one. That is what the Americans expect from our studios, and that is what they will get from me” (Random 1956). The American market was no longer Davis’s international priority, so he was also able to ignore the popular wisdom that British films could never compete effectively in international markets without American stars. Davis believed that he could develop a stable of British stars and that he could increase their international profile by loaning them to overseas producers. In the third issue of General Release (May 1955), the Organisation’s magazine for exhibitors, Pinewood’s head of production, Earl St. John, outlined his strategy “concerned with the building up internationally of a number of exciting new players to enhance still more the showmanship of our pictures in the future.” At the same time, Davis and St. John believed they could swell the appeal of their pictures in the markets of Continental Europe by importing actors with an established profile in those territories. Over the next few years, Rank would bring in Continental stars such as Hardy Kruger (Germany), Melina Mercouri (Greece), Pier Angeli and Luciana Paluzzi (Italy), Juliette Gréco, Louis Jourdan and Anna Gaylor (France). British-based actors such as Herbert Lom and Belinda Lee would play sympathetic Italian characters, and Lee and June Laverick would be loaned to Italian producers. This was Rank’s big idea of 1955–7. Ultimately, it would not be big enough to finance British production. Ironically, that would be made possible in the 1960s by American investment based on the success of British films in the USA. There were early signs of this new Euro-facing policy in the casting of Doctor at Sea when contract artist Joan Collins was dropped in favour of Continental siren Brigitte Bardot, who offered Rank’s starlets a new role model. The publicists were delighted to emphasise her sexual otherness, and Bardot played along, supplying the press with outrageous quotes like “I’ve brought with me a lot of nightdresses – I’m hoping someone will ask me out” (Roberts 1984: 99–100). Cornel Lucas posed her in an Eastern rattan chair against a cane panel background with sand under her bare feet. The image strived for was of a foreign “nature girl” in contrast to the sophisticated, coiffured beauty which he usually captured. Doctor at Sea was eventually launched at the 1955 Venice Film Festival, where delegates were invited to a reception on the British warship HMS Sheffield, which was moored in the lagoon. The products of English studios had been touted previously at events like this, often with the promotional assistance of actors and directors, but this was the first concerted attempt to splash the presence of British films and stars across international media. Rank’s publicist Theo Cowan pulled off the promotional coup of the Festival by getting Cornel Lucas to photograph Diana Dors on a gondola in a “mink” bikini (it was actually rabbit). The stunt would become legendary, spawning a hit West End musical, Grab Me a Gondola (1956), which lampooned publicity-hungry film stars. The Rank publicists set out to top their Venice success at the 1956 Cannes Festival. Their stars were driven from Nice Airport in an English vintage car and arrived at the Carlton Hotel to

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be greeted by a crowd of waiting paparazzi fresh from the press circus that accompanied the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier. The stars were introduced to the crowds by Tony Wright, stripped to the waist and beating a Rank-style gong loaned by the local casino. To maximise exposure, the publicity department banned stars’ spouses and insisted on the contract artists escorting one another on sightseeing, shopping and boat trips and to screenings. That spring, Rank’s publicists embarked on a campaign to popularise its contract artists on a scale never previously attempted. Full-page and cover advertisements were taken out in the trade press “to keep you up to date with the names of Britain’s stars of tomorrow,” as the copy for Maureen Swanson’s featured moment put it (To-Day’s Cinema, 19 April 1956). Tony Wright, “broad-shouldered, fair-haired and green-eyed,” was the pin-up boy for the Cannes Festival on 3 May, followed quickly by Michael Craig, with the “dark, brooding appeal of a rugged Valentino” (10 May). Heading the procession of female stars was the “young and lovely” Josephine Griffin (24 May), with American-born Barbara Bates the last to be featured (13 September). By the time the Venice Film Festival rolled around again in September 1956, there were signs that the all-out assault on European markets was beginning to wane. Britain, together with the USA, officially ignored the Festival which was trying to return to a showcase for film art rather than salesmanship (Bowman 1956). After the excesses of the previous twelve months, a more austere regime was imposed. Rank was already preoccupied with the declining ticket sales in all areas reached by the new ITV stations and the severe impact on squeezed profits of the entertainment tax. One hundred and eighty-four cinemas were already making a trading loss. Although Rank did send a token contingent of five to Cannes in 1957, the principal attractions of the previous year’s shindig, Diana Dors and Belinda Lee, were otherwise engaged and were sorely missed by the Daily Mail’s Cecil Wilson, who bemoaned the shortage of glamour “and British glamour in particular” (Wilson 1957). Rank’s response to deteriorating trading conditions included a cull of contract artists and, in a film environment reacting to the box-office success of male ensemble war dramas, it was particularly harsh on female artists. In October 1955, Earl St. John had been optimistic that “we will be able to give our girls as many opportunities as our men. … We are now actively searching for subjects that can help the careers of the actresses we have under contract” (Picture Post 1955). However, his optimism proved misplaced. Jill Adams, one of the first of Rank’s “glamour” intake, but the most rebellious, was dropped after two years and bit parts in Doctor at Sea and Value for Money (1956). Julia Arnall’s contract was terminated soon afterwards. Diana Dors was unusual in having negotiated a non-exclusive arrangement with Rank, and was able to try her luck in Hollywood that year, but she later offered an elegy for her less-fortunate fellow “starlets”: It was always sad in the heyday of the film world to see the unending procession of young girls strutting and preening for the press, with their eyes on stardom, and in many ways they reminded me of shoals of seals, lying on a beach posing for a while in the sunshine, then being washed away by the merciless tide never to be seen again. (Dors 1978: 214)

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Some did manage to keep their heads above water, notably Belinda Lee, who briefly basked in the patronage of John Davis as “the brightest light among the women starlets; a wouldbe jewel in the Rank crown” (Hutchinson 1984: 147). Earlier, at the start of her contract, she had knowingly told film journalist Tom Hutchinson (1984: 150): “I don’t suppose I am going to learn all that much about acting with the Rank Organisation, but I am going to learn about being a personality.” In 1955, Rank had signed up the promising Ian Carmichael who had won critical acclaim in the Boulting Brothers’ Private’s Progress (1955). He was obliged to make The Big Money, which was put on the shelf for two years and released in 1958 only to cash in on the notoriety that his co-star Belinda Lee had by that time acquired. Little else was offered to him, apart from a script already rejected by Norman Wisdom. Instead he was lent back to the Boultings. By February 1957 he was inviting Rank to sack him, and he would depart by mutual agreement soon afterwards (Daily Mail 1957): I didn’t like factory farming which was what I assessed the film production at Pinewood to be at that time, and they, no doubt, didn’t like my argumentative interference in a side of production [scripting] which they probably considered to be none of my affair. (Carmichael 1979: 283–4) The following month, Rank dismissed Barbara Bates, who had dropped out of starring roles in Across the Bridge and Campbell’s Kingdom (both 1957). Her seven-year contract lasted only ten months. Jack Hawkins had already quit and Maureen Swanson and Anthony Steel would soon follow. Although Steel admitted that Rank had treated him “very well,” he was contemptuous of the scripts and the leading ladies he was given: I had to break away. I was sick and tired of being teamed up in films with unknown women starlets, little girls of whom nobody had ever heard. … Then there was the “rattle-of-teacups” mentality in the pictures. Everybody has a stiff upper lip and dialogue to match. (Hutchinson 1957) Rank’s departed artists could expect little sympathy from rival studio, ABPC at Elstree, where Robert Clark, the production head, had already made clear his feelings about contract artists: “Our people under contract are fortunate … they have security and a big chance to forge their own careers. They get the benefits of our publicity department … if they fail it’s their own fault” (Random 1956). But there was a level of public disquiet about Rank’s clear-out, and a letter by F. Roman of Woodford to Films and Filming (March 1957) expressed the concerns of many: “Has any film company a record to equal Mr. Rank’s for signing young players to contracts with a herald of publicity and then letting them sit around for a couple of years doing nothing?” Robert Lennard, Casting Director at ABPC, offered a partial answer in the magazine’s next issue: “The whole crux of the difficulties in building British stars is there is not enough continuity of production for one studio to constantly supply tailor-made roles for their own artists” (Lennard 1957). Undaunted, Rank began a final spring offensive of contract artist promotion in the trade press on 11 April 1957 with “the Californian girl with laughing eyes”, Betta St John.

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On 25 April, Patrick McGoohan was the “name to remember” (but was apparently forgotten by Rank 18 months later when his contract was terminated). Mary Ure, Keith Mitchell and Belinda Lee were also featured, but before the Organisation’s top box-office draw, Dirk Bogarde, became the last in the spotlight in the Daily Cinema on 1 August, Hardy Kruger, Rank’s ticket to German success, was presented on 27 June: “With his blond hair and blue eyes he is typically Teutonic.” Kruger, however, was an extreme example of the failure of the best efforts of publicity staff to generate press interest. His first Rank film, The One that Got Away (1957), was largely given the cold shoulder by a press that was nervous of its story about the only Nazi prisoner-of-war to escape from Britain and suspicious of its German star. A press reception that was arranged to greet Kruger on his arrival in London became an opportunity for an interrogation about his previous membership of the Hitler Youth and his current political sympathies. It resulted in only one mention in print, and the journalists continued to stay away throughout filming (Walker 1957). Nevertheless, the film became a major hit and Kruger went on to make a series of pictures for Rank. But around him, the ranks of Rank’s stars continued to grow thinner as the Organisation continually redrafted its strategic plan to combat the ever-dwindling home market for its films. 1958 began disastrously for Rank – from a production high only a few months before, an unprecedented deterioration in cinema attendances and the consequent reduction in the British Film Production Fund forced the announcement of substantial redundancies at Pinewood and the cancellation of part of the production programme. Cinema admissions had fallen off a cliff in 1957, down 17 per cent on the previous year (PEP 1958: 135). With falling admissions and rising costs, Rank was caught between a rock and a hard place. More than 20 per cent of Rank’s cinemas closed between 1956 and 1960, and its production programme was severely scaled down (Sparos 1962: 89). Pinewood Studios would increasingly be rented out to other producers (often American), while the parent company diversified its portfolio, which included an interest in Independent Television. John Davis summed up the new situation thus: “The Rank film empire is becoming a show business empire” (Bayne 1958). Davis’s protégée, Belinda Lee, embarrassed her boss by instigating an international scandal and vowing never to make another film in Britain. Her contract was not renewed, and by 1960 Rank contract artists numbered less than ten, and most of those would be gone before the year was out. Film production had fallen to three or four per year. Having seen the writing on the wall and his film-star wife leave him, ace photographer Cornel Lucas quit the Organisation in 1959 to set up his own independent portrait studio. The days of the meticulously posed and lit glamour portrait were, in any case, already numbered. The 1960s would bring more dynamic work, often shot on location using high-speed and more portable cameras. Pinewood would go on to give birth to some of the cinema’s greatest box-office hits, but the J. Arthur Rank Organisation would never again try to create its own brand of stardom.

Further reading Babington, B. (2001) British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dyer, R. (1979) Stars, London: BFI.

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Holmes, S. (2005) “A night in at the cinema: The film premiere on 1950s British television,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2 (2): 208–26. Macnab, G. (1993) J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry, London: Routledge. Plain, G. (2006) John Mills and British Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

References Anon. (1955) Picture Post, 8 October, pp. 16–17, 19, 38. Bayne, C. (1958) “The legend that rules the Rank empire,” Picturegoer, 30 August, pp. 6–7. Bogarde, D. (1978) Snakes and Ladders, London: Chatto and Windus. Bowman, P. (1956) “No, it won’t be happening this year,” Picturegoer, 1 September, p. 9. Carmichael, I. (1979) Will the Real Ian Carmichael…, London: Macmillan. Craig, M. (2005) The Smallest Giant: An Actor’s Life, London: Allen & Unwin. Daily Mail (1954) “Studio Bans Genevieve Star,” 22 December, p. 3. Daily Mail (1956) “The lure of ITV empties cinemas,” 13 September, p. 7. Daily Mail (1957) “Carmichael invites the sack,” 18 February, p. 3. Dors, D. (1978) For Adults Only, London: Star Books. Falk, Q. (1987) The Golden Gong, London: Columbus Books. Frewin, L. (1956) “I boosted the stars”, Picturegoer, 28 April pp. 12–13, 29, and 5 May, p. 17. Garrett, G.H. (1958) “The build-up that wasn’t,” Picturegoer, 19 April, p. 16. Gayson, E. (2012) The First Lady of Bond, Cambridge: Signum Books. Harper, S., and V. Porter (eds) (2003) British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchinson, T. (1957) “The facts about Ekberg and Steel” Picturegoer, 8 June, p. 7. Hutchinson, T. (1984) Screen Goddesses, London: Deans International. Kinematograph Weekly (1954) “Efficiency and economy in films,” 17 June, p. 7. Lennard, R. (1957) “How we find the stars of tomorrow”, Films and Filming, April, p. 8. Lucas, C. (2005) BECTU Oral History Project interview. 28 September. Macnab, G. (ed.) (2000) Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema, London: Cassell. Miller, B. (2003) “Out with the stars,” The Veteran 100, Autumn, pp. 12–14. Myers, J. (1947) “The film publicist”, in O. Blakeston (ed.) Working for the Films, pp. 178–83. London: Focal Press. PEP (1958) The British Film Industry, London: PEP. Puttnam, D. (1988) Foreword to Cornel Lucas, Heads and Tales: The Film Portraits of Cornel Lucas, Luton: Lennard Publishing, np. Quigly, I. (2003) “Being a film reviewer in the 1950s,” in I. Mackillop and N. Sinyard (eds) British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration, pp. 213–220. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Random, E. (1956) “I accuse”, Photoplay, June, pp. 8–18, 48. Rank (1956) The Rank Organisation Limited, London: The Cinema Press. Roberts, G. (1984) Bardot, London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Sinden, D. (1982) A Touch of the Memoirs, London: Hodder and Stoughton. Spraos, J. (1952) The Decline of the Cinema, London: George Allen & Unwin. Stevens, K. (1955) “Do they call this the star look?,” Picturegoer, 26 February, p. 10. Taylor, J.R. and J. Kobal (1985) Portraits of the British Cinema: 60 Glorious Years, London: Aurum Press. Walker, D. (1957) “The man nobody wants to know,” Picturegoer, 22 June, p. 16. Wilson, C. (1956) “Film stars! No wonder people turn up their noses… says Dirk Bogarde,” Daily Mail, 13 April, p. 8. Wilson, C. (1957) “A shortage of glamour at Cannes”, Daily Mail, 4 May, p. 8.

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“A FRIEND TO EVERY EXHIBITOR” National Screen Service and the British trailer industry

Keith M. Johnston Introduction The mainstay of N.S.S. is its Trailers … some two hundred feet of film, full of opticals, that tell the cinema audience all that is good for them to know about the coming attractions. As skilled, yet as limited, as the art of the miniature painter, the value of their work is seen by the fact that 92 per cent of our cinemas show a Trailer sent out by N.S.S. (Brunel 1954: 86) National Screen Service Ltd (NSS Ltd) was arguably one of the biggest studios in Britain. Between 1926 and the mid-1990s, almost every film trailer shown in Britain passed through its doors; most British films had trailers written and produced by the NSS production team; NSS re-edited all American (and other international) trailers to meet the censorship requirements of the British Board of Film Censors/Classification (BBFC), or the different promotional needs of British distributors. NSS teams worked closely with David Lean, the Boulting Brothers, John Huston, Michael Winner, Stanley Kubrick and Ealing Studios, and produced the James Bond trailers. At its peak, from the 1940s to the late 1950s, NSS Ltd produced around 600 unique trailers a year, distributed almost 9,500 trailer prints a week (and 4–5,000 titles and teasers) to over 4,000 cinemas, to be seen by 25 million people each week, or over 1.3 billion people a year (“760,000 Feet of Trailers” 1953: 6; “Notes on the Month” 1943: 194). It is fair to estimate that more audiences saw these NSS short films than any other film in British cinema history. Yet despite this activity, few audience members would have known they were watching a National Screen Service production, and fewer still would have been able to identify the company. In the years since, NSS Ltd has remained as ephemeral and elusive within British cinema history as its main output, the film trailer. This obscurity is largely because NSS was categorised as a “service industry” or “studio service company” (The Kinematograph Year Book 1957), designed to support and promote the main industry, and rarely hailed as a creative or economic force in its own right.

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National Screen trailers may have been seen by a huge audience, but that audience was not (likely) there to view the trailer; National Screen trailers did not, in themselves, generate any box office income (although great claim was laid in their ability to draw audiences back to the cinema); and NSS trailers were rarely seen outside of their initial run, only re-shown if the advertised feature was being re-released, and never sold to television for repeat viewings. While there have been attempts to claim creative and artistic status for the trailer (as Christopher Brunel does in the opening epigraph), NSS Ltd and its main product remain awkwardly placed between the worlds of support service, advertising and filmmaking. Researching National Screen Service Ltd represents a challenge for the media historian. Existing studies of the film trailer focus on trailer narrative, content and aesthetics (Hediger 2004; Kernan 2004; Johnston 2009; Gray 2010; Hesford 2013), and tend to see this ephemeral and transient text as “a distinctive source of historical and textual information” (Johnston 2009: 1). Such trailers, however, contain little evidence of the history of specific company activities, personnel or industrial situation. Academic work on trailer industry history remains partial and incomplete (Hamel 2012; Greene 2013) with little coverage of the British experience (Low 1973; Branaghan 2006; Street 2009). NSS can then be regarded as doubly ephemeral: its main product was transient, existing within a strict spatial and temporal frame, and only sporadically archived. That sparse audio-visual record reveals little about the company itself, and there are few traces of the company in popular or official documentation, despite its apparent dominance of production, distribution and exhibition of UK film trailers and promotional materials. The traditional media historian reliance on “supporting documents … scripts, interview notes, production papers, corporate memos … economic data … trade and fan publications” is only partly achievable here (Wilson 2009: 183). To construct this history of NSS Ltd, it has been necessary to collect piecemeal evidence from divergent sources. Primary NSS documentation (scripts, papers, memos) is lost, with surviving members of the British NSS team acknowledging trailer bonfires and the destruction of paper files during a 1980s management takeover and a further 1998 buyout (Mahoney 2014; McIlmail 2014). The account constructed below is based on trade and popular reporting on NSS and its employees, including articles, advertisements, commentaries and interviews garnered from both US and UK trade publications including Documentary Newsletter, Kinematograph Weekly, Motion Picture Daily, Today’s Cinema and Screen International. Supplementing those published reports, personal interviews were conducted with surviving ex-NSS personnel: Bill Seymour (editor), Brian McIlmail (production manager) and John Mahoney (managing director 1981–98). The perspective of key (but deceased) NSS production personnel was added through a 1953 speech by production director Esther Harris, a 2000 BECTU interview with Harris, and a 1979 edition of film programme Clapperboard (ITV) filmed at NSS Ltd.

Establishing National Screen Service Ltd Making trailers has never been an easy job. … The producer has an idea, the publicity people have an idea, the renters have an idea … you would have to please everybody around this little table. In the end I think they recognised that National Screen were trailer makers and knew their job. (Harris 2000)

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The opening of National Screen Service Ltd in London has been variously dated as May 1926 (Branaghan 2006: 246) and 1928 (Low 1971: 37; Street 2009: 434). American NSS president Joseph Pollak and William Brenner sailed to Britain in April 1926 and stayed until July to establish relationships and sign contracts with British studio executives and other partners on the Continent. Pollak wasted no time in promoting what a British NSS could offer, with a June 1926 presentation at the Brighton conference of one of the leading industry bodies, the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association (CEA). The presentation included examples of recent trailers for Lasky’s feature A Social Celebrity (Malcolm St Clair, 1926), Fox’s The Johnstown Flood (Irving Cummings, 1926) and MGM’s Dance Madness (Robert Z. Leonard, 1926). One trade paper report on the conference noted that NSS has contracts with all the big producing concerns … to supply trailers to exhibitors. … These trailers are carefully produced, so that they will whet the appetite of patrons, without giving away the story … there is no doubt that they will become as popular and as widely used here as they are in America. (“A New Trailer Idea” 1926: 54) The British National Screen Service Ltd was clearly promoted on the basis of the strong links its American parent, National Screen Service Corporation, had established with Hollywood studios since its inception in 1919. Designed “as a way of getting the eight major companies out of the nickel and dime business of selling trailers and posters and stills to individual theatres” (Paul N. Lazarus, quoted in Johnston 2009: 171), the American NSS was founded by Pollak, Tony Gruen, Herman Robbins, Leon J. Rubenstein and Akiba Weinberg, although it was Pollak and Robbins (who had worked in sales at Fox Films) who exerted initial control over the company. The creation of NSS to control and streamline film advertising practices points both to the increasingly industrialised nature of the film industry by the end of the 1910s (with its Fordist division of labour into specialised departments and occupations) and the importance of advertising materials and marketing campaigns within the growing oligopoly of the studio system. Whereas Hamel has cast doubt on the importance of the film trailer before the sound era, the establishment of NSS, and the identification of the trailer as its key product, points to its growing stature among producers, distributors and exhibitors in the early 1920s (Hamel 2012: 269). Operating out of Manhattan (alongside the studios’ sales departments), NSS signed deals with the major companies to exclusively produce trailers using feature film footage, with NSS employees initially based at each studio. Yet it was the distribution contracts with individual exhibitors and chains that were most important to NSS, as it made its money by selling monthly or annual rental packages to exhibitors for trailers, posters and accessories. Securing this market in its first decade, NSS expanded quickly across American distributors and exhibitors, with offices/exchanges open in Los Angeles, Chicago and Kansas City by the mid- to late 1920s, adding another 40 exchanges by the 1940s. Offering regional support and services, responding to local concerns (including different censorship laws), these exchanges dispatched and collected hundreds of trailers, posters, lobby cards, banners and other advertising materials each week. With those crucial studio and exhibitor deals in place, the company bought up its competitors

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(Ad-Vance Trailer Services, Exhibitor’s Screen Service) and had monopolised trailer production and distribution by the mid-1930s. National Screen’s desire to move across the Atlantic has been linked to the importance of UK exports for the Hollywood system, and the need to “influence how American films were presented to British audiences” (Street 2009: 434). Pollak and Brenner’s 1926 trip is best seen as an extension of NSS policy in America: the opening of a regional branch office would deal more efficiently with local distributor and exhibitor demands, have expertise in national censorship policies and allow the company to offer innovation in markets that had not yet developed their own film advertising specialists. While it remains unclear what (if any) meetings took place in terms of a wider presence across Europe, Pollak and Brenner were successful in securing NSS in the British market. At the 1926 CEA conference, Pollak and Brenner promoted their London offices (25 Denmark Street, Soho, near the main film companies) and key members of the British NSS staff. Managing Director Paul Kimberley, who had worked with British pioneer Cecil Hepworth, automatically gave the new outfit a well-regarded British face and lineage; the company also employed British cinematographer and director Leslie Eveleigh who had worked for Granger-Davidson, Associated Exhibitors and British Filmcraft (Low 1971: 197). These appointments were clearly a way to dispel concerns about an American company muscling into the British market. Yet the naming of Kimberly and Brenner as joint managing directors in the first NSS advertisements is a public statement that NSS Ltd would not be completely independent, but subject to some oversight from New York (“National Trailers Build Business” 1926: 22). The establishment of NSS Ltd in 1926 does tend to overlook the fact that Britain already had at least one established trailer production company. That “British owned and controlled” company was not pleased with this foreign interloper (Craig 1926: 48). As Pollak and Brenner were establishing NSS Ltd, producer E. Gordon Craig and exhibitor Leslie A. Thomson acquired a controlling interest in trailer company Winads Ltd to “organise this branch of exploitation to its limit of efficiency” (“This Week” 1926: 51; “Long Shots” 1926: 55). Winads was quick to distinguish itself from its new competitor, advertising itself as a “British Screen Service”, with Craig fuming in a letter to Kinematograph Weekly that the trailer service offered by NSS was not “a complete innovation as far as this country is concerned … over two thousand exhibitors … whom we have supplied for upwards of three years … are still our satisfied customers” (Craig 1926: 48). While the two companies existed in parallel for at least a decade (“Winads ‘Novel’ Trailer” 1938: 3), it is unclear if NSS Ltd followed its parent company and merged or bought up this competitor. With the British NSS fully operational by September 1926, records of specific production or staff activity are less frequent. Visitors from the American parent company were common in the first few years, including vice-president Gruen and Sidney Abel, who replaced Brenner as joint managing director in late 1926. Aside from Abel, Kimberley and Eveleigh, the rest of the 1926 staff are largely unknown. Rex Ingrams, one of the first regional representatives (for Birmingham), joined that year, and Esther Harris started around 1926 as a typist, before becoming Eveleigh’s secretary: I was terribly naïve, because I used to tell him what I really thought [of his scripts] … he got fed up of this … and said well if you know so much about it, why don’t you

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do it, you see? So the next time I went to the studios with him, instead of taking notes I was making a list of what I wanted … and we both wrote scripts and they took mine and not his … so I used to do scripts, I used to go and start doing these things … that’s how I got into it. (Harris 2000) While Harris arguably became the “main figure in the production of British trailers … [and the] dominant figure in NSS for 40 years or so” (Street 2009: 446, 443), her account of these early years lacks a firm timescale. Her progression from secretary to scriptwriter, producer and then director of the company remains important because she is one of very few female figures in this industry on either side of the Atlantic. Yet her visibility in the NSS story can also work to obscure the complex nature of the company’s day-to-day activities. The evidence that exists of the first decade of NSS Ltd does distinguish it from its American parent company, most obviously around the relationship with studios and production companies. Rather than base NSS employees within individual studios, NSS Ltd set up trailer production at Broadwick House, on Broadwick Street, while the office moved to 113–17 Wardour Street in 1930 (Branaghan 2006: 247). This set-up allowed NSS to become its own entity, only mirroring the American company when relevant: in this case, the American NSS followed suit and opened a Hollywood-based trailer department. Elsewhere, NSS arrangements were similar to the US. Instead of regional exchanges and offices, there were regional managers who visited exhibitors across their (often large) regions: names of regional NSS representatives such as Peter Beahan (Birmingham and Northern Ireland), W.W. “Pudde” Puddefoot (East Anglia and South East England), Leslie Ryder (Yorkshire) and Bill Walker (Scotland) appear in trade press reports, although these reveal little about the representative’s activities or responsibilities. With a client list of over 4,000 cinemas, these regional managers will have played a crucial role liaising between the main NSS offices in London and new and existing exhibitors. Through the 1930s, NSS continued to increase its monopoly over the British trailer industry, employing 160–70 people, including writers, a camera department, administrators and a seventeen-strong art department with animators and title designers (Eveleigh 1936: 90–91). While continuing to serve the exhibition sector with trailers for all forthcoming features, NSS expanded its original production work as well. Initially formed to deliver additional scenes or material for its trailers, NSS Productions worked on special short films that combined live action filming with optical and animated titles: mainly holiday greetings (at Christmas, Easter), patriotic events (celebrating the King’s birthday), special announcements and charity films. Most of these social or celebratory short films were designed with exhibitors in mind, reaffirming the connection between regular audience members and the communal space of the cinema. Yet the creation of a special production team would serve NSS well through the trials of World War Two and post-war film industry upheaval, allowing the company to expand into sponsored documentaries and television production, and ensure consistent usage of its extensive laboratory, printing and editing facilities. Wartime presented a series of challenges to NSS Ltd.: alongside the loss of staff to the war effort, film was not initially classified as an essential industry, and raw film stock was

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rationed. Some in the film industry suggested “an obvious and easy way of saving celluloid would be to abolish the screen trailer” (“Notes on the Month” 1943: 194). National Screen MD Paul Kimberly, also serving as Director of Army Cinematography, released a series of statistics that proved “trailer making was an important national industry” given that NSS was additionally “producing and distributing Government-sponsored trailers … employed by the Ministry of Information, Ministry of Food, National Savings Committee, Red Cross, and so on” (“Notes on the Month” 1943: 194). By virtue of its distribution network, and its expansion into short film production, NSS made itself an invaluable resource for the war effort. If NSS Ltd was unable to make money by serving its distribution network with trailers, it couldn’t use that same network to distribute potent MoI propaganda films such as Channel Incident (Anthony Asquith, 1940). While NSS won that battle, the company suffered a more permanent loss when the trailer production facility at Broadwick House was bombed in 1941 (Mahoney 2014). As a result, some of the production and all of the storage and dispatch business was moved to an empty laundry building in Perivale (a West London suburb near Ealing). Wartime also saw the main office moving from Wardour Street to 27 Soho Square (retaining the name “Nascreno House”), where it would remain until 1981. These moves were accompanied by the arrival of new equipment imported from America, part of the parent company’s insistence “that British trailer production should be advanced to a higher level”, possibly to ensure that NSS Ltd remained ahead of competitors such as Winads or a new trailer company based at Denham Studios (“NSS in England” 1946: 10). The war and post-war years also saw significant shake-ups in the leadership of NSS Ltd, with new appointments imposed from New York. Edwin Smith transferred over during the war, James Majorell was appointed “head of all trailer production” (“NSS to Expand in England” 1946: 1), while John R. MacPherson was appointed joint managing director from December 1945 until his death in July 1948 (“John R. MacPherson of NSS Dies Suddenly in London” 1948: 1–3). Yet much of the NSS post-war success was attributed to Kimberley’s replacement as British MD, the technocratic Arnold Williams. An ex-liberal MP, Williams became the well-regarded public face of NSS, a clever statistician familiar with both commercial and governmental pressures. Seen as a man of “quiet efficiency … the complete antithesis of one’s ideas of a production mogul … [with] his finger on the pulse of every department of the business” (Cricks 1954: 127), Williams led NSS’s post-war expansion.

Post-war expansion and growth In 1950, National Screen Service Ltd was at the height of its power and influence, with offices in central London and Perivale producing 600 trailers a year and dispatching them to over 4,000 cinemas (around 90 per cent of the British exhibition sector). Although immune to some of the boom-and-bust vagaries found in the British film industry, NSS was susceptible to major shifts in the exhibition sector given its financial model was based on rental agreements with individual theatres and chains. The closure of many British theatres through the 1950s was a significant issue, despite NSS’s virtual monopoly. The company survived through diversification of existing work and expansion into new fields. NSS facilities had grown to include one sound and two silent stages, a viewing theatre, cutting rooms and production offices at Nascreno House (Soho Square), with a

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larger silent stage, cutting rooms, laboratory and optical service at Perivale. Alongside the regular trailer production, NSS Productions used expertise gained in wartime propaganda shorts to produce sponsored documentaries (such as Picking Up the Threads in 1945, for cotton mill owners Fothergill and Harvey), technical films, appeal films (such as the 1954 Lynmouth Flood disaster relief film) and, by the mid-1950s, television advertising (Cricks 1954: 127). NSS advertised its ability to produce “TV commercials in direct sound, live action, animation, or a combination of all three … including the first TV commercials in colour”, worked with clients including BP and Hartley’s, and made over 40 commercials for Oxo featuring Harry Corbett and Sooty (“Studio Production Facilities for Television Filming” 1955: xvii). Following Arnold Williams’ statistic-led desire for efficiency, NSS was clearly using its existing creative and craft skills in different production arenas. The core film industry business also expanded, as NSS Ltd started to offer a full range of advertising accessories to theatres, first for MGM, then Fox, and all of the other major distributors (“NSS to Supply MGM Trailers” 1957: 10). From 1958, NSS also produced main and end titles for feature films such as Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) and Taste of Fear (Seth Holt, 1960); this was a new optical and creative element that would grow to include a range of titles, including the James Bond series (“Long Shots” 1961b: 4). Much of this work required new equipment, with the company investing in new animation cameras, modern cutting rooms and a private viewing theatre in Perivale (“National Screen Service plans expansion” 1962: 6). The post-war decades also saw an increased public profile for Esther Harris. Well known for her trailer work on Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) and The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Harris became a more visible NSS presence at industry events and in trade press reports: delivering a talk (alongside Arnold Williams) for the British Kinematograph Society, going on research trips to Hollywood (both to Hollywood NSS and other studios), serving as the NSS representative at producer and exhibitor conferences, and being presented as the “expert on trailers” at a 35th anniversary event for NSS in Britain (Harris 1953; “Long Shots” 1961a: 4; “Long Shots” 1961b: 4). While there is no suggestion that she was considered a replacement for Arnold Williams when he resigned due to ill health in November 1957, Harris continued to be one of NSS’ best known public faces. By 1968, she had become a Fellow of the British Kinematograph, Sound and Television Society (BKSTS), a full member of the NSS board and was described by NSS managing director Edwin Smith as “its leading chief executive” (Altria 1968: 4). While NSS did not suffer financially from losing Williams, the evidence suggests that the period of post-war expansion largely ended around the early 1960s. Under a series of managing directors, the company continued to grow its accessories and main titles work, but faced increased competition, and a perception that the company was growing too insular (Mahoney 2014; McIlmail 2014). Despite this, NSS produced some of its better known work in the 1960s and 1970s: trailers and main titles work for the James Bond series, trailers for Hammer, Stanley Kubrick and films as diverse as Zulu (Cy Enfield, 1963) and Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966), as well as television trailers for First Men in the Moon (Nathan Juran, 1966) and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Charles Walters, 1966). This range of work led a 1970 NSS advertisement to describe the company as “Creators of Trailers, Main Titles, Optical Effects, Commercials

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and Accessories for the World-Wide Motion Picture Industry” (“NSS advertisement: All Togetherness” 1970: 34). This was a significant shift from the 1926 “National Trailers Build Business” advertisement that launched the company.

Competition and takeover In a typical year, we create about a 1000 trailers, teasers, commercials, feature main titles and feature optical effects for domestic and world markets. It takes 30,000 sq. ft., some of the best optical equipment in the world, and 150 specialists to do it. … In an era where “three-men-and-a-boy” concerns are popping up everywhere, it’s reassuring to know you can depend on NSS. (“NSS Perivale advertisement” 1969: 21) Through the 1960s, the appearance of boutique trailer production companies challenged the dominant position of the US and UK arms of National Screen Service. The UK-based “three-men-and-a-boy” concerns included Gordon Shadrick Enterprises, the Picture Partnership Company, Edward Vaughn Ltd (trailer specialists) and Optical Film Effects, many launched and operated by ex-NSS staff. The growth of this market reduced some of the production work coming in to NSS but the company retained its monopoly around trailer distribution. A growing decline in UK-only cuts of trailers and a parallel dip in British film production was seen by many, including NSS managing director Russ Craddick, as the end of the British film industry, and the service industries that supported it. In 1981, fuelled in part by increased industrial uncertainty, NSS moved premises again. From the larger Nascreno House at 27 Soho Square (much of which was rented out to other companies) the company moved to smaller premises in Wedgwood Mews, still in Soho. In 1985, however, a more significant change affected the company. Burton and Norman Robbins, the sons of original NSS founder Herman Robbins, decided to sell the company. The American parent company was still based at the Times Square building it had bought in 1946: at the junction of Broadway and Sixth Avenue, the freehold was valued around $36m. One of the requirements of the deal was that the NSS divested itself of satellite companies such as NSS Ltd. UK managing director John Mahoney (who had taken over in 1983) arranged a management buy-out that required the new partners to slim down the company: the one thing that was apparent was that … we were looking at two escalators – exhibition going up, and production going down … I made the big decision, we’ve got to get out of production. (Mahoney 2014) In 1986, sixty years after it began, NSS stopped producing film trailers. A renamed National Screen continued to successfully service exhibitors with trailers and other accessories until June 1998 (when it was bought by Carlton Communications), while several ex-NSS employees (Bill Seymour, Mike Reeves and Jim Thorne) set up Screen Opticals in 1986 to provide feature titles, opticals and trailer production, still based in the old Perivale office.

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As NSS Ltd ended, the trailer industry it had defined and dominated had almost completely changed: the rise of the multiplex had redefined the use of trailers and altered the relationship with individual theatres; the blockbuster focus of Hollywood now stressed more trailers, often earlier in the release cycle and moving online (Johnston 2009); while trailer production had become a highly specialised and financially lucrative field increasingly led by marketing and focus groups rather than individual creative force. In the years since, NSS may have become more ephemeral, its documents and products largely lost to time, but the evidence that remains demonstrates it was a “friend to every exhibitor” and a company that dominated and defined a whole section of the industry.

Future research This chapter has added more complexity to scholarship around National Screen Service Ltd, but it can offer only a partial account. There has been no space to consider the textual evidence of the trailers NSS Ltd produced: identifying and analysing those that survive could be a fascinating study of specific British trailer production techniques (following Street 2009). More archival excavation is needed to explore the NSS staff. We know very little about editor Ian Darwood, who worked with Esther Harris on trailers including The African Queen (Cricks 1952: 21), Mike Stanley Evans, who ran a parallel NSS production team to Harris in the 1940s and 1950s, or Gordon Shadrick, who produced trailers for Rank in the 1950s and early 1960s, before leaving to form his own company (“Long Shots” 1961b: 4). Equally, NSS Productions, and the range of special, sponsored, technical, advertising and TV films it produced, remain unknown: who were Gordon Thow, Norman Cobb, Norman Hemsley, Donald Smith and “Miss E. Williams, at Perivale … [for] inquiries relating to such work” (Cricks 1952: 21)? Equally, the focus on NSS should not obscure the wider British trailer industry, including Winads and the other competitors listed above.

Further reading Branaghan, S. (2006) “‘New York, London, Perivale’: National Screen Service Ltd.” in British Film Posters: An Illustrated History. London: British Film Institute. Johnston, K.M. (2009) Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Kernan, L. (2004) Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press. Street, S. (2009) “Another Medium Entirely: National Screen Service and Film Trailers in Britain, 1940–60”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29–4.

References Altria, B. (1968) “Long Shots”, Kinematograph Weekly, 613: 3170. Anon. (1926a) “This Week”, Kinematograph Weekly, 111: 996. Anon. (1926b) “Long Shots”, Kinematograph Weekly, 112: 996. Anon. (1926c) “A New Trailer Idea”, Kinematograph Weekly, 112: 999.

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Anon. (1926d) “National Trailers Build Business”, Kinematograph Weekly, 113: 1004. Anon. (1938) “Winads ‘Novel’ Trailer”, Today’s Cinema, 51: 4018. Anon. (1943) “Notes of the Month”, Documentary News Letter, 3: 11–12. Anon. (1946) “NSS to Expand in England”, Motion Picture Daily, 60: 46. Anon. (1948) “John R. MacPherson of NSS Dies Suddenly in London”, Film Daily 94(5): 1 and 3. Anon. (1953) “760,000 Feet of Trailers”, Kinematograph Weekly, 432: 2387. Anon. (1954) “Studio Production Facilities for Television Filming”, Kinematograph Weekly, 462: 2610 [Supplement]. Anon. (1957) “NSS to Supply MGM Trailers”, Kinematograph Weekly, 478: 2584. Anon. (1961a) “Long Shots”, Kinematograph Weekly, 527: 2795. Anon. (1961b) “Long Shots”, Kinematograph Weekly, 532: 2815. Anon. (1962) “National Screen Service plans expansion”, Kinematograph Weekly, 539: 2846. Anon. (1969) “NSS Perivale advertisement”, Kinematograph Weekly, 640: 3220. Anon. (1970) “NSS advertisement: All Togetherness”, Kinematograph Weekly, 633: 3269. Branaghan, S. (2006) British Film Posters: An Illustrated History. London: BFI. Brunel, C. (1954) “Byways and Highways of Filmland”, The Cine Technician, 20: 113. Craig, E.G. (1926) “A New Trailer Idea”, Kinematograph Weekly, 112: 1000. Cricks, R.H. (1952) “Behind the Scenes in Trailer Making”, Kinematograph Weekly, 423: 2345. Cricks, R.H. (1954) “Featuring: The Trailer,” Kinematograph Weekly, 453: 2477. Eveleigh, L. (1936) “Trailers”, The Journal of the Association of Cine-Technicians, 1(4): 90–1. Gray, J. (2010) Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. Greene, F. (2013) “Working in the World of Propaganda: Early Trailers and Modern Discourses of Social Control” Frames Cinema Journal 3, http://framescinemajournal.com/article/working-in-theworld-of-propaganda-early-trailers-modern-discourses-of-social-control/. Hamel, K.J. (2012) “From Advertisement to Entertainment: Early Hollywood Film Trailers,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 29(3): 268–78. Harris, E. (1953) “The Production of Trailers,” British Kinematography, 23(4): 98–103. Harris, E. (2000) BECTU interview tape 465. British Film Institute Library. Hediger, V. (2004) “A Cinema of Memory in the Future Tense: Godard Trailers and Godard Trailers”, in Williams, J., Temple, M. and Witt, M. (eds.), Forever Godard, pp. 141–59. London: Black Dog Publishing. Hesford, D. (2013) “Action … Suspense … Emotion! The Trailer as Cinematic Performance”, Frames Cinema Journal 3, http://framescinemajournal.com/article/action-suspense-emotion-thetrailer-as-cinematic-performance/. Johnston, K.M. (2009) Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Kernan, L. (2004) Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press. Low, R. (1971) The History of the British Film, 1918–1929. London: George Allen & Unwin. MacIlmail, B. (2014) Personal interview with author. 24 June. Mahoney, J. (2014) Personal interview with author. 26 June. Street, S. (2009) “Another Medium Entirely: National Screen Service and Film Trailers in Britain, 1940–1960”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 29 (4): 433–48. Wilson, P. (2009) “Stalking the Wild Evidence: Capturing Media History Through Elusive and Ephemeral Archives,” in J. Staiger and S. Hake (eds.) Convergence Media History, pp. 182–91. London: Routledge.

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THE EADY LEVY, “THE ENVY OF MOST OTHER EUROPEAN NATIONS” Runaway productions and the British Film Fund in the early 1960s

James Fenwick “At one point at the beginning of this year,” ran the byline in Variety’s April 1964 issue, “there was only one film in production in British studios and that was being financed by a major American company” (Myers 1964: 35). Variety pointed out the irony of this given the existence of the British Film Fund, also known as the Eady Levy, which was meant to bolster British film production and had been lauded as “the envy of most other European nations” (Myers 1964: 35). The Eady Levy had been introduced as a voluntary scheme in the UK in 1950, before being made compulsory as part of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1957 (Terry 1969: 121), the intention of the subsidy fund being to support British film producers and provide them with an increased share of the “amounts paid by the public at the box office” (Stubbs 2008: 3). Contrary to the bleak view laid out by Myers (1964), the Eady Levy intensified the so-called Hollywood runaway production – the relocating of predominantly American-financed pictures to the UK, among other countries – and would profoundly affect the British film industry throughout the 1960s. But despite its intention to favor British film producers, it was American film productions that were reaping most of the Levy yield and were soon heading to the UK in large numbers. The snide remarks by Myers (1964) were perhaps indicative of the attitude held by many in the film industry toward what equated to state subsidization. Of course, how successful the Eady Levy fund was depended on one’s interpretation of the industrial context. Some regarded the health of the British film industry as being in fine form as a result of the Eady Levy fund, such as Andrew Filson, Director of the Federation of British Filmmakers, who commented that the continued success of British films is “well illustrated in a list of the films with the biggest U.S.-Canada rental in 1964. Of 65 films, 12 were British” (Landry 1965: 5); these included The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), From Russia with Love (1963), Becket (1964), and Dr. Strangelove (1964).

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On the other hand, there were those in the US who took a very different view. “I propose that we begin immediate steps to investigate and develop what I would call an American version of the British Eady Plan,” said Walter Mirisch, the Hollywood producer, who saw the increase in runaway productions brought about by the Eady Levy as detrimental to Hollywood (Anon 1960b: 11). Why is it that the fund caused such consternation for Walter Mirisch, delight for Andrew Filson, and indignation for the likes of producer Carl Foreman, who criticized the fact that his own film, The Guns of Navarone (1961), received $1,000,000 from the fund (Anon 1965: 14)? This chapter will outline the function of the Eady Levy fund and demonstrate how it was taken advantage of by the American runaway productions that came to dominate the British film industry during the early 1960s. This will be followed by a discussion of the issue of the Americanization of British film and the cultural and economic side-effects of the Eady Levy fund upon the runaway production. The chapter will conclude with two brief case-studies of films that exploited the Eady Levy fund for differing reasons, and with differing results: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) and the first film in the James Bond franchise, Dr. No (1962). Taken together, these chapter elements work toward a revisionist understanding of the Eady Levy fund and the apparent negative Americanization of British film. The chapter will argue for the fundamental positive side-effects of the fund on the British film industry during the time period discussed, with the Eady fund being the prime contributor to a British invasion of the American box office.

Defining the Eady Levy The Eady Levy, named after the HM Treasury official Sir Wilfred Eady, involved “reductions in Entertainments duty and certain increases in cinema seat prices” (Dickinson and Street 1985: 225). Half of the money raised by the increase in cinema seat prices was to be kept by the exhibitors, while the remaining amount was to be paid into the British Film Fund (though still referred to at the time as Eady money, or the Eady fund), which was then distributed to producers of British films according to box-office earnings. Previously exhibitors had paid a voluntary levy on cinema seat prices; this became statutory with the passing of the Cinematograph Films Act 1957, under the name The British Film Fund Agency (Cinematograph Films Act 1957: a.2, 1a). Government officials hoped the Eady fund would boost the industry’s income by £3 million (Dickinson and Street 1985: 225). Producers applying for Eady money had to ensure their film met the criteria for registration as British. Qualifying criteria included the need for the production company to have been legally set up in some part of the British Empire and at least 75 percent of labor costs to have been paid to British/British Empire persons (Parliamentary Communications Committee 2010). If a production met these criteria, then a payment would be made by the Eady fund “in proportion to the box office gross of their [the producer’s] film. The more popular the film, in other words, the greater the payment it received” (Stubbs 2009: 4). The British Film Fund was also used to make payments toward the Children’s Film Foundation, the National Film Finance Corporation, the British Film Institute, and the training of filmmakers (BFI Screenonline n.d.). The creation of the Eady Levy was spurred on by cultural fears of the Americanization of Britain and of Hollywood’s corporate dominance. It was believed that state protection

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of the British film industry could “bolster wider trade and [was] a means for British films to compete with their powerful rival” (Glancy 2014: 23). Such concerns had previously led to the introduction of a quota system in the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 (Chibnall 2007: 1–3), as well as measures in other film acts in the subsequent decades that included the blocking of assets and the prevention of American production companies from taking all of their profits out of the UK. Driving these measures was a judgment that British films could possibly be successful with audiences given a more equal market force and so the Eady fund was designed to allow Britain to compete with Hollywood (Glancy 2014: 23). What wasn’t anticipated was the nature of the American runaway production that would come to dominate the Eady fund by complying with its criteria and in the process becoming “British” films. A statistical overview of the distribution of the Eady fund during the early 1960s can lead to the assumption that the British film industry had become wholly Americanized, because runaway productions were the largest beneficiaries of the fund. But it wasn’t only Hollywood’s economic power that led to the popularity of these runaway productions at the British box office, but also the films’ content. The Eady fund shaped what films were made by Hollywood. To see the Americanization of the British film industry as simply a negative force because of Hollywood’s dominance of the Eady fund is to misunderstand the fund’s cultural impact upon Hollywood runaway productions. The Eady fund certainly attracted American producers eager to exploit it financially, but it also shaped the kinds of film they made to meet its criteria of “Britishness.”

The success of Eady and the Americanization of the British film industry The history of the Eady Levy fund has become intertwined with the notion of the runaway production. Far from creating a distinct national cinema, the Eady fund was contributing toward Anglo-American collaborations and the establishment of a transnational cinema that persists to this day. But the subsidy itself was not always the prime motivator for these runaway productions; other key factors included the exchange rate of the dollar, meaning cheaper labor costs in the UK and the desire for authentic locales (Dickinson and Street 1985: 236). An economic study conducted at the time by the Hollywood American Federation of Labor Film Council (AFL) concluded that there were five key reasons why producers shot abroad, including blocked currencies and tax advantages, with “easy money and/or subsidies” coming number five (Ulich and Simmens 2001: 358–9). Whatever the reasons for shooting abroad, and regardless of the seductive nature of the Eady fund, the number of wholly or partially financed American productions in the UK rose rapidly in the early 1960s, from 43 percent in 1962 to 88 percent by 1968 (Dickinson and Street 1985: 234). At the same time, because of the criteria demanded by the Eady fund, these films were being identified as British, allowing the Director of the Federation of British Film Makers to proclaim in 1965 that “a British film ‘Tom Jones’ won the Best Picture Oscar in 1964: two British films (‘Becket’ and ‘Dr. Strangelove’) are among the five nominations for the 1965 Oscar”, making the UK “a production centre of international importance” (Myers 1965: 55). If the Eady fund was a trigger for this supposed Americanization of the British film industry, then the fund can equally be seen to have instigated a British film invasion of the American

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box office. While many may have worried about an American takeover of British film, others saw the Eady fund and the runaway production as the death knell for American filmmaking in Southern California. The headline of Variety’s 12 May 1965 edition boldly declared that “Britons Top U.S. Pix Imports,” going on to say that “in the 1964 calendar year 83 British pix brought in domestic (U.S.–Canada) rentals totaling a whopping $49,098,000” (Canby 1965: 1). And even though the majority of these rentals were for productions backed by the US majors, 10 percent was earned by wholly independent British productions, a total of $5,038,000 (Canby 1965: 1). This was an increase of around $1,000,000 for British independent productions in 1964–5 and a step forward for truly “British” films in the American marketplace (Canby 1965: 30). This perspective of the British film industry in the 1960s, then, is opposite to what Dickinson and Street term a Hollywood colony (1985: 233). The American majors were not “stealing the Eady Money out of the mouths of starving British film-makers” but instead “getting back a fair share on a big investment” (Houston 1966: 55). It must be noted, however, that it wasn’t only Hollywood productions fleeing to the UK, but also Canadian ones, leading an editorial in Cinema Canada to claim that “the lack of a clearly defined tax leverage is causing our producers to seek investment advantages elsewhere, notably under Britain’s Eady plan” (Anon 1973: 5). And the advantages of the Eady subsidy to runaway productions were undoubtedly alluring. The Eady Levy yield could at times build to a substantial amount, as in 1960 when it totaled over $11,000,000 due to “the larger number of box office hits playing in Britain” (Anon 1960a: 13). The more successful films were at the box office, the larger the rewards were from the Eady fund. This was best emphasized in the Eady payments made to films such as the American runaway Thunderball (1964), which received an estimated $2.1 million payment from the Eady fund, equating to around 15 percent of the available fund money that year (Stubbs 2009: 7). Other filmmaking had been taking place within Britain at this time besides the Eadysubsidized Anglo-American runaway productions, most notably British New Wave films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). These films were not as successful at the box office as the runaway productions and so did not necessarily feel the effects of the Eady fund. This did lead to disquiet among the British Film Producers Association (BFPA), which called for an alternative distribution method for the fund, including an idea whereby “American-financed British pix should be excluded from the share-out” (Anon 1965: 14). Such a reaction is easy to understand given the above example of Thunderball reaping the benefits of the Eady fund. This could be misconstrued as negative Americanization of British film, and the runaway production as an undesirable cultural monopoly. Yet the productions taking advantage of the Eady fund were also often influenced by its criteria of “Britishness,” with the fund therefore possessing an unconscious cultural aspect and being responsible for “shaping the content of the films produced by American studios in Britain” (Stubbs 2009: 1). The Eadybacked runaways offered portrayals of Britain and British identity, thereby complicating “the distinction between British and American film-making” (Stubbs 2009: 1). Producers were conscious of ensuring that the content of their film conformed to this British identity required of the fund criteria to reap its financial benefits, and as a consequence were often turning to particular British-themed narratives and characters, such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Becket (1964). These films had intriguing transnational identities, being British-made, American-financed, Eady-backed productions.

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What follows in this chapter are two brief case-studies of runaway productions that received Eady funding: Lolita (1962) and Dr. No (1962). These two productions reveal the economic and cultural imperatives faced by producers and how the fund influenced their content (Stubbs 2009: 2). What is revealed is that those producers who exploited the Eady fund purely for financial gain offered films that were weaker and suffered due to production in the UK, while those who shaped their content accordingly to meet the fund criteria of Britishness went on to produce a more successful product. Thereby, Eady was not contributing to a negative Americanization of British film, but rather guiding it toward a more British generic product.

Eady’s seduction of Lolita (1962) Perhaps the most celebrated of runaway exiles during this period was film producerdirector Stanley Kubrick, who in 1961, along with his business partner James B. Harris, took the decision to shoot Lolita in the UK at the Associated British Studios, Elstree (Corliss 1994: 16). What the production of Lolita demonstrates was how, contrary to Stubbs’ (2009) analysis of the cultural dimensions of Eady, independent producers and companies did choose to relocate to the UK purely for economic gain, the results of which had a negative effect on the final picture. Independent package-unit outfits like the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation were flexible about where they filmed, and often given creative freedom by their financiers; in the case of Lolita this was the Canadian company, Seven Arts, headed by Elliot Hyman, and the distributor MGM (Corliss 1994: 52). The shift toward package-unit modes of production saw the major studios becoming “managerial entities” and “capital intensive,” with runaway productions being a “direct cause, as well as an effect, of this shift in the fundamental business” of Hollywood (Monaco 2001: 12). To secure financing from Seven Arts, Harris and Kubrick decided they needed to film Lolita on a low budget in a country where production and labor costs were low and where subsidies were available (LoBrutto 1997: 202). James B. Harris had visited Europe in search of finance and locations, settling on the UK precisely to use the Eady fund (1997: 202–3). The complexity of the financial arrangements on Lolita went further, with Harris-Kubrick setting up two additional production companies, Anya Productions and Transworld Pictures, which were registered to Switzerland, presumably for tax arrangement purposes. By filming in the UK, Harris-Kubrick were easily able to gain financial backing, since MGM had frozen funds in the country that they wanted to use (Castle 2005: 328). Kubrick himself remarked in an interview with Gelmis (1971: 299) that “it turned out the only funds I could raise for the film had to be spent in England.” Harris and Kubrick realized that savings of upwards of 30 percent could be made by their decision to film in the UK (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 84). To qualify for the Eady fund, Harris had to ensure that 80 percent of the labor costs were toward British persons and all but two of the main featured actors had to be British subjects (Corliss 1994: 78). Harris obliged, with a number of British actors appearing in the film, the most notable being James Mason, Peter Sellers, and Lois Maxwell. The remainder of the cast were a mixture of American, Canadian, and British, with some able to “counterfeit American dialogue more persuasively than others” (Corliss 1994: 78). But it was in the choice of crew that the compliance with the Eady fund was most notably felt, with the majority

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being of British nationality, including the noted cinematographer Oswald Morris, editor Anthony Harvey, and assistant director René Dupont. The second half of Lolita is very much in the vein of an American road movie (LoBrutto 1997: 222), but shot in England for economic purposes. This decision to film Lolita in England, however, “sacrificed the grit of the seedy American town and the entire freeway culture which gave the book so much” (Higham 1972, cited in Monaco 2001: 15). The cost-savings led to the loss of the authenticity of the American highway locale of Nabokov’s novel and instead gave the film a decidedly cozy, British feel. This is one of perhaps many flaws in the final film (censorship issues aside). Whereas the content of other runaway productions had been influenced toward an authenticity that Britain and its Commonwealth could provide, Lolita turned this down in favor of financial discounts. Lolita and the Eady fund were successful in showing Kubrick how attractive Britain was to independent American film producers, there being “tax breaks for overseas artistes who made their permanent home in Britain and … a pool of technicians without any of the language obstacles of other European countries” (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 90–1). The Eady fund and its criteria for the use of British crew and technicians would persuade Kubrick to relocate permanently to the UK, using its innovative talent, studios like Pinewood, Elstree and Shepperton, and the post-production houses in London which were enjoying a boom. Kubrick would take full advantage of the Eady fund throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with British crews populating his sets. The government subsidy that had originally seduced Lolita and its producers and financial backers to film in the UK permanently married its film director to the British film industry.

Eady’s license to kill: United Artists and James Bond If Lolita exemplifies the balance of economic imperative at work in the relationship between the Eady fund and runaway productions, then United Artists (UA) and its James Bond franchise demonstrate the balance of cultural imperative (Stubbs 2009: 2). UA was possibly the American company best positioned to use the Eady fund, having no studio overheads to support like the traditional majors and thereby having the “freedom and mobility to deal with independent producers all over the globe” (Balio 1987: 233), while the issue of shooting on location was very much central to the company’s policy of distributing films with an international appeal. In the 1960s the company would agree to finance what would become one of the most successful film franchises in cinema history: James Bond. Whereas the producers of Lolita exploited the Eady fund for economic gain, the producers of Bond saw an opportunity to gain American backing for a “British” product and to offset the production financing risk with government subsidies. Bond, an American-financed film franchise adapted from the work of British author Ian Fleming, was subsidized – often substantially so, as in the case of Thunderball – by Eady money. The Bond series was packaged and produced by the duo of Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the former an American, the latter Canadian. In circumstances similar to Harris–Kubrick when they were putting together Lolita, Broccoli–Saltzman incorporated their production company, Eon Productions, in Switzerland (Balio 1987: 253). The original deal set out by UA was cautious, with the company decreeing that “the first Bond picture had to be a low-budget item” (1987: 257), and there lie the seeds of Bond’s application to the Eady fund. UA, which provided 100 per cent financial backing (Chapman

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2009: 43), insisted that to reduce the production financing risks, Dr. No – the first film in the series – “had to qualify for an Eady Plan subsidy, which meant that it had to have an all-British cast and be shot in British locations” (Balio 1987: 257) – this latter point extended to the entire British Commonwealth. Broccoli has said of the Eady fund that it was “the carrot that induced American production to come here [the UK]” (Chapman 2009: 40). The producers had initially wanted to film Thunderball as the first picture in the series, but were persuaded to adapt Dr. No because filming in the Caribbean allowed the film to qualify for Eady money. The Bond films were shot primarily on set at Pinewood Studios, which would become the historic home of the series, and used a large British crew, upwards of 80 per cent of the labor costs being toward British technicians, ensuring the producers would be eligible for an Eady fund payout (Chapman 2009: 43). The unprecedented success of the Bond films from the very beginning, with Dr. No for example grossing “$840,000 in two weeks [in the UK] and quickly becoming one of UA’s all-time box-office champions” (Balio 1987: 259), was indicative of a change in audience tastes within the UK. This perhaps reflects the kind of films that were subsidized by Eady money, which in turn were the films most popular with audiences at the box office. By around 1963/4 the taste for the British New Wave films had begun to flounder and by 1963 “there were strong indications that the tides of critical and popular taste had turned” (Chapman 2009: 51). Films like the James Bond series with strong entertainment value were seemingly what audiences now wanted. By 1974, estimates suggested that the Bond franchise had “drawn over £3 million from the Eady fund. Given that the Eady money was distributed among eligible producers on the basis of box-office takings, it amounted, in effect, to a subsidy for commercial success” (Chapman 2009: 150). Runaway productions being made to meet Eady fund criteria were not so much an Americanization of British film and its audiences, but a response to British tastes in entertainment. By the early 1960s, audiences were turning not only to epic Hollywood blockbuster fare in the vein of Ben-Hur (1959) and The Magnificent Seven (1960), but also to British genres, in particular war films, such as The Dam Busters (1955) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (Chapman 2009: 54). Eady films/runaway productions attempted to bridge the gap between these two tastes, with the likes of the James Bond franchise being of the British generic tradition, based on British literary material, including spy thrillers, while simultaneously containing high-production, Hollywood-spectacular values (Chapman 2009: 54). The primary influence of the Eady fund, then, was for British-themed films coming to dominate “Hollywood’s operations in Britain” (Stubbs 2009: 17). For UA, the Bond films were a part of its international operations and an integral element of its “British production strategy that also included Tom Jones (1963) and the Beatles films” (Chapman 2009: 43–44). This strategy involved UA taking advantage of the Eady scheme from its inception, with the company financing a “program of British-made productions”; the “Eady Pool not only encouraged runaway production, it also aided UA in its financing efforts” (Balio 1987: 236–237).

Conclusion Ultimately, these case-studies emphasize the importance of moving away from the consideration of Eady fund-backed runaway productions as distinctly “Hollywood,”

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“American,” or even “British,” and instead toward an understanding of their AngloAmerican collaborative nature and the way in which investment by American production companies helped foster the British film industry during this period. The extent to which the Eady fund can be seen as contributing to this success is debatable, but it certainly was one among many circumstances that attracted runaway productions. The Eady fund had a degree of influence on the content of runaway productions and forged a British national identity within big box-office fare (Stubbs 2009). The Eady fund was a force of positivity in the flagging British film industry in the 1950s and 1960s. Far from imposing an unwanted Americanization or cultural hegemony onto the industry, the Eady fund established Britain as a premiere ground for filmmaking prowess and technical brilliance. Stanley Kubrick chose to make the majority of his films in the UK as a result of the economic draw the Eady fund provided. And as a consequence, he went on to contribute to the UK’s status for technical excellence with his assembly of technical and special effects personnel on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (Parliamentary Communications Committee 2010). The Eady Levy would continue to be dogged by controversy, though, particularly among those in the British film industry who saw the Levy yield as being taken over by Hollywood corporations. Thus constant lobbying took place to try and halt or amend the Levy, particularly by members of the BFPA, who at one members’ meeting suggested, “part of the coin could be used to help promote the exploitation of British film production in national trade fairs which are sponsored by the government in various overseas territories” (Anon 1965: 14). Such a suggestion was never adopted and for a significant number of years the likes of United Artists with their James Bond franchise, and Stanley Kubrick who had made the UK his permanent workplace, continued to take from the Eady Levy, until the Thatcher government finally abolished it in 1985.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Cassie Brummitt and Nash Sibanda for the valued feedback they gave on the writing of this chapter.

Further reading Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84. London: BFI. (Provides a comprehensive history of the fiscal politics of the British film industry.) Monaco, P. (2001) The Sixties 1960–1969. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Provides a section on runaway productions that gives an American perspective on the issue of the Eady Levy.) Street, S. (2009) British National Cinema, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. (Like Dickinson and Street’s Cinema and State, this provides another comprehensive history of the fiscal politics of the British film industry.) Stubbs, J. (2008) “The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6(1): 1–20. (Provides new perspectives on the influence of the Eady Levy, with an understanding of its cultural influence on runaway productions.)

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References Anon. (1960a) “Smaller Brit. Exhibs May Get Eady Relief,” Variety, 22 June, 219(4), 13. Anon. (1960b) “Pros and Cons Re Runaway,” Variety, 7 December, 221(2), 11. Anon. (1965) “British Film Prod. Assn. Looks Into Future Handling of Eady Handouts,” Variety, 11 August, 239(12): 14. Anon. (1973) “Editorial,” Cinema Canada, June/July, 2(8): 5. Baillieu, B. and J. Goodchild (2002) The British Film Business. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Balio, T. (1987) United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. BFI Screenonline (n.d.) Financial Legislation [online] BFI Screenonline, UK, available at Accessed 28 May 2015. Canby, V. (1965) “Britons Top U.S. Pix Imports,” Variety, 12 May, 238(12): 1, 30. Castle, A. (2005) The Stanley Kubrick Archives. London: Taschen. Chapman, J. (2009) Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films, 2nd Edition. London: I.B. Tauris. Chibnall, S. (2007) “Quota Quickies”: The Birth of the British “B” Film. London: British Film Institute. Cinematograph Films Act 1957. (5&6 Eliz. 2, c. 21). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Corliss, R. (1994) Lolita. London: British Film Institute. Dickinson, M. and S. Street (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84. London: British Film Institute. Gelmis, J. (1971) The Film Director as Superstar. London: Secker & Warburg. Glancy, M. (2014) Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain from the 1920s to the Present. London: I.B. Tauris. Guback, T. H. (1985) “Hollywood’s International Market,” in T. Balio (ed) The American Film Industry, 2nd Edition, pp. 463–486. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Houston, P. (1966) “England, Their England,” Sight & Sound, 35(2): 54–56. Landry, R. (1965) “Andrew Filson, Pro-Yank Federation Checks British Film Impact in States,” Variety, 16 February, 241(13): 5. LoBrutto, V. (1997) Stanley Kubrick. London: Faber & Faber. Monaco, P. (2001) The Sixties 1960–1969. Berkeley: University of California Press. Myers, H. (1964) “Subsidy Plans Don’t Solve Ills,” Variety, 234(10): 35–36. —— (1965) “Happy Outlook in Britain,” Variety, 12 May, 238(12): 55, 74. Parliamentary Communications Committee. (2010) “The British Film and Television Industries: The History of the British Film Industry” [online] Parliament, UK, available at Accessed 25 August 2015. Street, S. (2009) British National Cinema, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. Stubbs, J. (2008) “‘Blocked’ currency, runaway production in Britain and Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 28(3): 335–351. —— (2009) “The Eady Levy: A Runaway Bribe? Hollywood Production and British Subsidy in the Early 1960s,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 6(1): 1–20. Terry, J. (1969) The Future of the British Film Industry. The Kinnaird Lecture, London: Regent Street Polytechnic, November. Ulich, P. C. and L. Simmens (2001) “Motion Picture Production: To Run or Stay Made in the U.S.A,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, 21: 357–370.

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THE CHILDREN’S FILM FOUNDATION Andrew Roberts Between 1951 and 1987 the Children’s Film Foundation was a brand that was as recognisable in British cinema as the Carry On series or Hammer’s fantasy pictures. Unlike the latter two, the works of the CFF – as it is colloquially known – have often been ignored by British film academia; even the indefatigable Raymond Durgnat does not cover the Foundation in his seminal tome on post-war cinema in the UK A Mirror for England, first published in 1970. In the past twenty years the major source materials have been Rowana Agajanian’s detailed study ‘Just for Kids?’ Saturday Morning Cinema and Britain’s Children’s Film Foundation (1998) and Terry Staple’s All Pals Together (1997). Even during the Foundation’s peak period of film, the trade press largely ignored the CFF. Yet in form and purpose the Foundation merits serious attention, quite aside from its sheer longevity. It was a unique collaboration between technical unions and producers to make children’s films to distribute across a range of venues, and as Rowana Agajanian notes, “All the trade organisations took membership of the CFF seriously and placed only their most experienced and influential people on the CFF board” (1998: 2). Furthermore, the product of the Foundation devised to promote film-going amongst the nation’s youth and to provide a locally made product of high quality – if low budget – to exhibit in a form of cinema that now appears as redolent of a lost past as Tommy Steele musicals; the Saturday Morning Clubs. Children’s matinees had been shown in British cinemas since the 1920s and Richard Ford, the executive in charge of the Odeon chain’s clubs, devised a questionnaire for the chain’s managers, estimating that in 1939 “4.6 million children were visiting the cinema every week” (in Hanson 2007: 89). In addition to films, the clubs offered community singing, various competitions, collections for charity and talks on subjects such as road safety. The origins of the Children’s Film Foundation can be traced to the decision by J. Arthur Rank, the flour magnate turned film impresario, to create his own Children’s Cinema Club. The Rank Organisation controlled both the Odeon and the Gaumont cinema outlets and so in April 1943: over 150 cinemas participated in the official ceremony that heralded the opening of Rank’s Odeon Children’s Clubs. Over 150,000 children took the Odeon Children’s Club oath: “I promise to tell the truth, to help others and to obey my parents”. The club was open to boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 15 years and although club membership was free, children were charged an admission 200

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which was kept to a deliberately low price. Rank, a devout Methodist, Sunday School Superintendent and believer in youth clubs as a means of preventing delinquency, budgeted the clubs to run at a loss. At first Rank imported films of several genres from America – comedies, adventures and westerns – but he was wary of their content and the possible effects they had on the children so the films were vetted and even re-edited when necessary. (Agajanian 1998: 2) It was a common practice to hold Saturday matinees in church halls and youth clubs in addition to cinemas. Rank wished to develop his film business but he also wished to produce pictures with a strong moral message. The first of these was Tom’s Ride (1944) which was made by his Gaumont British Instructional Films division. This proved to be a commercial success and so Rank established a division, the Children’s Film Department, in 1944, which became Children’s Entertainment Films (CEF) three years later. Mary Field, a former teacher, was appointed as the director of this special division, a position she held until 1950. Field acted as a deputy for Rank as she shared his desire to mould and educate children’s tastes by ensuring CEF films would not only be entertaining but would also set a high moral tone and encourage good behaviour. CEF films would provide a contrast to the standard matinee fare which usually consisted of Hollywood or British pictures made for general distribution, a situation that would continue well into the 1960s – in 1950 the Report on the Committee for Celluloid Storage noted that “On rare occasions we have, however, seen unsatisfactory ‘U’ films spoiling the otherwise excellent film programmes at these clubs”. One such apparent attempt to lead the youth of Britain to degeneracy was HammerExclusive’s 1948 adaptation of the BBC radio serial Dick Barton: Special Agent. This truly appalling epic, replete with teak-like acting, direction apparently by the comatose and cast members obviously fluffing their lines, was released as either a mainstream B-feature or a sixpart serial for the benefit of the dashing Dick’s youthful wireless fans. The Boys’ and Girls’ Cinema Clubs Annual of 1949 even contained a feature detailing a visit of the film’s star Don Stannard in his spiffing Allard K2 Sports to the Swiss Cottage Odeon Club (Anon: 111). The Hammer version of Dick Barton: Special Agent was tailored specifically to a young audience, using a holiday location wherein a sense of adventure might easily be evoked. Such serials came under the scrutiny of the sociologist J. P. Mayer whom Rank invited to visit his Odeon and Gaumont cinema clubs for research into a book on the impact of cinema on British life. Between August 1944 and June 1945 Mayer and his researchers attended children’s matinees, their observations being published in 1946 as The Sociology of Film. The chapter concerning the matinees was run, in a condensed form, in The Times later that same year, giving further airing to Mayer’s beliefs that educational psychologists rather than cinema distributors should be in charge of the matinees. Mary Field subsequently argued that his studies depended on questionnaires as a means of testing audience reactions. This was a method the CEF had found unreliable as “Children seemed most eager to co-operate and replied with any names they could remember – often ones they had seen on the billboards on their way to cinema club” (Field 1956: 16). Nor, in the course of his researches, did Mayer appear to actually interview any of the youthful cinemagoers, although he did identify one major challenge to providing fare of quality to children’s clubs – “Distributors are prepared to rent to children’s clubs only films that are not wanted for weekly performances. This means films available for matinee performances are either very old or sub-standard – a most unsatisfactory state of affairs” (Mayer 1946: 65). 201

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Thus, in December 1947 a Departmental Committee was established by the Home Office, the Scottish Office and the Ministry for Education to consider the effects of attendance at the cinema on children under the age of 16, with special reference to attendance at children’s cinema clubs. The Report of the Departmental Committee on Children and the Cinema was led by Kenneth Wheare, the Gladstone Professor in Government and Public Administration at the University of Oxford, and the final report, which was published in 1950, stressed the urgent need to produce quality film entertainment for children and fill the gap in the market – at that time some 52 per cent of children went to the cinema weekly (Agajanian 1998: 3). In the words of Alan Burton: Unease was shown following the findings of the Social Service Division of the Central Office of Information and its report on children’s leisure, and observers were left with the impression that some out of school activities like the popular cinema clubs would be better suppressed, not developed. (Burton 2005: 55) In the event the Report concluded that “The results, in our judgement, do not fasten on the cinema any primary share for the delinquency and moral laxity of children under 16” (Wheare 1950) and it further recommended the continuation of the work of the CEF. However, by the end of the 1940s the Rank Organisation was suffering from a post-war influx of imported Hollywood productions that was having an extremely detrimental effect on demand for domestic pictures. Rank lost money on the cinema clubs as “despite packed houses on a Saturday, he could only show this fare one day a week in most markets” (Trumpabour 2007: 180). By 1950, due to cut-backs within his film empire, J. Arthur Rank had been forced to close down the CEF division and it had become clear to the industry that no single company could or should have to carry the responsibility or financial burden of producing entertainment films for children (Agajanian 1998: 4). The memberships of the cinema clubs inevitably changed as the child audiences grew up and CEF films could be recycled, but “it took them up to fifteen years to go into profit” (Macnab 1993: 157). The response was the Children’s Film Foundation which was launched on 7 June 1951, with Mary Field as the first Chief Executive and the aim of making children’s films for domestic and export markets. The British Film Production Fund provided a degree of support – £50,000 in the early 1950s – and to ensure their product was attractive to cinema chains, the Foundation attempted to minimalise exhibitors’ costs. As a non-profit organisation they tried to ensure reasonable admission fees – ticket prices remained at 6d until 1971. Hanson also observes that although cinema admissions between 1948 and 1952 fell by 13 per cent, admission to children’s matinees actually rose by 14 per cent during this period, although the major chains “often ran the clubs at a financial loss for encouraging children to attend” (2007: 89). In addition to the CFF productions distributed through the major Rank and ABPC cinema chains, the Foundation also issued prints for smaller organisations such as Miners’ Institutes, amateur film clubs and the Services Kinema Corporation for children living on military bases both in the UK and overseas. The CFF also operated a “rota scheme whereby their films would be distributed fairly between both the independent and smaller cinema circuits as well as the main circuits” (Agajanian 1998: 4).

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When the CFF was first established Mary Field used approximately twenty production companies, all working on a freelance basis. The directors used by the CFF were usually reliable pros such as Lewis Gilbert or Don Sharp who could apply their wide experience of efficient low-budget filmmaking acquired on the British B-film circuit. As with many low-budget British films of this period, many of CFF’s early offerings were not only shot in black and white but largely eschewed historical narratives on the understandable grounds of cost. Indeed it was financial constraints rather than editorial input from the CFF itself that gave so many of its products a suburban patina, as Foundation directors would make extensive use of locations within easy reach of London or Home Countiesbased studios. Budget constraints meant that overseas locations were not viable unless subsidised by a foreign or Commonwealth tourist boards, and by 1963 Treasure in Malta was shot on location in colour although b/w productions were still being released as late as 1967. CFF products started to be exported in 1953 and by the end of the 1960s they were being screened in 30 countries; the Foundation increasingly used overseas revenue to augment production funds as the domestic market declined. Another factor shaping the Foundation’s product was the impact of the Wheare Report; the CFF’s role was to provide a “healthy” form of cinema that essentially celebrated childhood innocence. In 1952 the BFI commissioned Janet Hill to write Are They Safe in the Cinema? A Considered Answer to Critics of the Cinema. The booklet proudly listed the forthcoming CFF features that would provide such an uplifting contrast to such morally suspect – and ruinously awful – adult audience films that found their way into the children’s matinees. But Hill also contended that that “The heaviest responsibility must, as always, lie with the parents” (1953: 11); four years later, Mary Field contended that “You cannot have an intelligent film-going public until you have an intelligent child-going public” (in Burton 2005: 58). The CFF also had to consider the dictates of the British Board of Film Censorship and John Trevelyan, the Board’s then secretary, argued that: Cruelty, either mental or physical, should be avoided, whether to people or animals. Even mild forms of cruelty, such as children baiting adults or other children, or even teasing in an unkind way, are not to be encouraged. (Trevelyan 1964–5: 21 in Agajanian: 5) The Foundation’s management were extremely sensitive to the issues of law and order and the depiction of violence on the screen. Threats to life were acceptable only within the narrative structure if they imported a clear lesson; a prime example is Seventy Deadly Pills (1964) which used the thriller format to cloak its warning of never to consume tablets stolen from a doctor’s bag. The Foundation’s policy was to make films featuring well-spoken children who enjoy an England of clean, healthy, intelligent adventure that would never play for sensationalism or unhealthy excitement or vulgarity. Further shaping the product were the labour laws that prevented children under the age of twelve from doing any form of work, and as the school holiday schedules were too tight for Field to cast unknowns, several early CFF leads came from the Italia Conti Stage School, although more were plucked from the less rigid Anna Scher Drama School from the mid-1960s. The 1963 Children and Young Persons Act resulted in a relaxation of restrictions being placed on their employment but CFF producers would still often cast students from such institutions, ostensibly because they had no time to train a raw candidate. As Staples notes: “Stage schools made life easier for film-makers because they were geared

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to meeting the requirements of the law in respect of education while at the same time having actors available when the director needed them” (1997: 197). This use of young stage school leads resulted in a further key element in shaping childhood as seen by the Foundation. The sound of a CFF hero in full well-modulated vocal flight is as evocative of post-war Britain as the bell on a police Wolseley, the whistle of a steam train and the clank of Button A being pressed in a public telephone box. Such precise diction was a quite deliberate tactic on the part of the CFF, for not only were stage school students well trained but also Mary Field believed provincial audiences would not understand regional dialects. Field argued that she was promoting BBC English rather than a middle-class dialect per se, and the Foundation was responsive to its audiences. Each week the CFF would receive completed reports from cinema managers who recorded their audience’s reaction to the current week’s fare. This had been introduced during the CEF era - “by standing in front of child audiences and looking back over their uplifted faces, the staff of the CEF learned to foretell a loss of interest before it actually occurred” (Field 1956: 17) – and led to narratives centred on the principal child actors. The story would inevitably also contain adults, be they authority figures or cockney criminals given to wearing their hats indoors, but the narratives were almost always told from the children’s point of view. Older teenagers might appear in the guise of Teddy boys, the better to differentiate the clean-cut heroes from these delinquents. To further assist audience identification, the CFF liked to ensure that at least one boy and one girl were introduced as main characters in the narrative. Supporting the child cast were such fine character actors as Ronnie Barker, David Lodge, Patricia Hayes and Sydney Tafler who worked for Equity minimum rates to depict the schoolmasters, deputy managers or Ford Zodiac-driving wide boys who would either help or hinder the young protagonists – the criminal double act of Tafler and Barker in Runaway Railway (1965) is especially treasurable – but, crucially, adult characters would never provide the focus of the narrative and dialogue scenes without children were deliberately kept to a minimum. The top billing of George Cole’s in The Clue of The Missing Ape is atypical for the Foundation and the CFF would seldom use a child star; Mandy Miller in Adventures in the Hopfields (1954) provided a rare exception to this rule. As with other long-running phenomena of post-war British cinema such as the Hammer Horrors, the St Trinian’s series or the Carry On films, it was the brand itself that was deemed to be “the star”. The early Foundation output largely consisted of magazine programmes and short films – the latter aimed at cinemagoers in the 5 to 8 age range who may not have actually attended a cinema before, but by the end of the 1950s there was a need for more features and serials to cater for older viewers. The impact of television was such that 1960s CFF films were notable for the slickness of their editing compared with productions of the previous decade; a response to the exposure of much of the young audience to the conventions of TV. The influence of the aforementioned reconstruction of Sherwood Forest in Walton film studios, or even more adult TV shows that were shot on 35-mm film such as ITC’s Danger Man, meant that Geddes found his audiences “younger but more sophisticated” (in Staples 1997: 211) in terms of narrative convention. By the early 1960s Mary Field’s system of having stories generated by the CFF themselves prior to appointing a production company to actually shoot it – which, in the words of Staples, “resulted in CFF product getting a reputation within the industry as all

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being made to the same formula” (1997: 212) – was replaced by the Foundation openly inviting story submissions from directors and writers. Five on a Treasure Island (1957) was unusual for the Foundation in that it was an adaptation of an existing novel, a practice the CFF often avoided on the grounds of copyright costs. The Foundation received over 100 stories a year from publishers, agents and individual writers, “which would be scrutinised by the Foundation’s Production Committee, which was looking for a number of qualities, the most important being action rather than dialogue”(Agajanian 1998: 6) which their 1955 survey had shown to be more popular with the young. Mary Field resigned from the Foundation in 1958 and by the beginning of the 1960s John Davis was the MD of the Rank Organisation and the Chief Executive of the CFF; from 1959 Foundation products were distributed abroad under the auspices of the Rank logo. In 1964 the former general manager of the Crown Film Unit Henry Geddes was appointed Chief Executive and under his auspices the CFF commissioned a market survey; the results suggested that the cops-and-robbers dramas were losing their appeal in favour of pictures that appealed to “children’s strong instinct for fair play and a pronounced sympathy for the underdog”. CFF products such as Go Kart Go (1964), based on producer George H. Brown’s experience with his own children’s go carts, and the witty crime thriller Operation Third Form (1966), favoured rapidly paced action. The Foundation’s “respectable” image abided in the public imagination until it ceased its film production programme, but this was not entirely accurate. As early as the 1950s Field’s well-modulated child actors were augmented by the bleak Glaswegian landscape of Johnny on the Run (1953) and Operation Salvage, which has no inept bank robber but four well-meaning children with a pressing need for funds but a determination not to rely on outside adult help. Adventures in the Hopfields has an extremely well-realised opening sequence of bomb-scarred Victorian slums in Waterloo and Soapbox Derby (1958) manages to capture a changing London as effectively as any Free Cinema work. Here the gang members may live in antiseptic new breeze-block-shaped flats with glass front doors and TV sets in the living room, but their HQ is in a derelict crane and the boys regularly battle in railway sidings and hide amongst coal heaps. In 1965 the Manchester set Cup Fever (1965) offered a contrast to the overtly middle-class image of the Foundation, with seemingly endless summer holidays of smuggler catching on the Isle of Wight. By 1970 the use of more naturalist child actors from the Anna Scher Drama School, which was founded in 1968 and employed improvisational dramatic techniques, gave the London set Junket 89 a more contemporary air but the new decade saw the Foundation’s being screened in a rapidly decreasing number of venues. From the outset the CFF was funded via the “Eady Levy” which had been introduced in 1950 as a production fund derived from a cinema ticket levy – 50 per cent for the exhibitor and 50 per cent for British-based film-makers. The 1957 Cinematograph Films Act made the Levy compulsory in the form of the establishment of the British Film Fund Agency, and this guaranteed the Foundation around £125,000 per year. Two years earlier the CFF’s grant was increased so that production might be stepped up, and by this time television sets were to be found in 13,253,046 households. However, the decline of cinemagoing in the UK in the 1950–65 period is not so much dramatic collapse but a succession of defeats at the hands of TV. The first children’s TV programme in the UK was For The Children, first broadcast in June 1946. When the CFF began, cinema admissions in the UK numbered 1395.8 million

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as opposed to 343,882 TV licences, but in March 1953, the year of the Coronation, the figure for combined sound and television licences was 2,142,452. However, Joe Moran argues that: the coming of mass television was a continuum, not something sparked by one event. The number of new television licences rose from 400,000 in 1950 to 700,000 in 1951 and 1952, to 1,100,000, suggesting that the sales hike for the Coronation was part of a steady, inexorable rise. (2013: 73) In 1954 the Television Bill paved the way for the establishment of ITV in the following year. By 1958 TV had overtaken radio as the UK’s most popular broadcast medium with 6,996,256 licences, and two years earlier ABPC became the franchisee to ITV’s Midlands and North of England regions for the weekends. ABC Television broadcasts commenced on 18 February 1956 and the new channel’s managing director Howard Thomas somewhat disingenuously told the trade press that Associated British had “gone into television to boost cinema admissions” (in Holmes 2005: 32). In 1958 John Davis saw the future of adult film-going in the UK in terms of being “no longer … a routine weekly visit but an event like going to the theatre” (in Davenport 1958: 29). In that year the company’s Odeon and Gaumont cinema chains merged and Rank became a shareholder in Southern Television, the ITV franchise which served Hampshire, Dorset and Sussex. One of the pleasures of matinee-going was the ability of the young audience to control a space ostensibly ruled by adults. As Sarah Smith argues, children’s cinemagoing did present a potential challenge to guiding authority in the forms of parents, church, schools and youth groups (2005: 177). Shortly after the Second World War the then Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade noted of the clubs that “Fifty per cent of people I meet seem to be in favour of them, and the other 50 per cent regard them as the work of the devil in the person of Mr. Rank” (Griffiths 2012: 84). Matthew Thompson observes of child film-going that “it is too simplistic to see this (decline) as the replacement of social by private watching, for the watching of television still took place in the social setting of the family” (2013: 110–11). As such, television viewing could not replace the sense of children controlling the space of the matinees but the actual venues for such cinema clubs were decreasing year by year. Furthermore a lack of investment in the surviving Rank and ABPC cinemas of the 1960s ensured “their fleapits would remain forever fleapits, until the time came for them to close” (Park 1990: 105). Morning children’s television commenced in 1968 with the BBC’s Zokko, and by 1969 there were only 750 matinees across the UK. Five years later Geddes noted that one challenge facing the makers of children’s films was that “Admissions from children alone cannot possibly allow producers to cover their costs”, unlike Disney films which were aimed at the “family” audience (quoted in The Morning Record 9 October 1976). In that year the Rank Organisation re-branded its matinees “under the new name of Super Saturday Shows” (Eyles 1996: 168) but by 1978 there were only 300 British cinemas offering matinees. In 1980 the ABC chains ceased the practice altogether and, as Rowana Agajanian observes:

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In 1980 the Cinematograph Films Council had once again made its recommendation to the Board of Trade, but this time felt it could not support the CFF’s request for funding to the tune of £660,000. The council pointed to the severe decline of outlets and admissions. By then, there were only 151 regular matinee outlets and 119 cinemas holding seasons of children’s films, with attendances estimated being as low as 30,000 children per week. (1998: 6) It was the last major external payment to the CFF and in 1981 Rank abandoned its own matinees. The Foundation’s response was to enter into partnership with TV as the newly reconstituted Children’s Film and Television Foundation in 1982. However, the abolition of the Eady Levy in 1985 meant that filmmaking was no longer viable and this ceased in 1987. The Foundation then concentrated on script development on a loan basis and in 2002 it approached the UK Film Council in an attempt to establish a new fund to support British children’s film production. As the House of Lords Select Committee on the film industry noted: This was eventually set up as a three way development fund with the BBC (children’s TV department) as the third partner. Despite some good projects, some of which are still “live”, the fund was wound up before the end of its third year term. (Select Committee 2010: 542) Today the CFF is known as the Children’s Media Foundation and its back catalogue is being released on DVD by the British Film Institute. Throughout its 35-year career the best of the Foundation’s films did equate with Mary Field’s vision of allowing children’s taste in cinema to “develop naturally, through seeing films they can understand, well told and well made. In that way there is produced an audience that enjoys film going for its own sake” (Field 1956: 22–3). Over the years of its existence the CCF’s directorship included such names as Michael Powell and Richard Attenborough, donating their services on a voluntary basis, and nor should it be forgotten that by the mid-1960s the Foundation was one of the few British film production companies that did not rely upon Hollywood funding. In 1962 Vincent Canby observed that “American investment in British production has made it almost impossible to define a ‘British film’” (in Balio 2010: 229) and as Dominic Sandbrook observes, “In 1964 two out of three British releases had been made with American money; by 1966 it was three out of four and by 1967 it was more like nine times out of ten” (2007: 376). The Children’s Film Foundation also attempted to sustain and even nurture regular cinemagoing, with the support of the British film industry, and, from the mid-1950s onwards, at a time when television was in the ascendency. At its considerable best the CFF did fulfil John Davis’ claims that it gave its audiences “what they enjoy, rather than what adults think they ought to enjoy” (CFF 1972: 3) without compromising on quality. Operation Salvage was written and directed by the noted documentary maker John Krish, John Guillermin helmed Adventure in the Hopfields and as late as the 1970s the CFF employed Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger to make The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972). Films such as Sammy’s Super T-Shirt (1978) arguably offered more entertainment per minute than many a Hollywood epic.

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Further reading Lamberti, E. (ed.) (2012) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI Publishing. Shail, R. (2016) The Children’s Film Foundation. London: BFI/Palgrave. Thomson, M. (2013) Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Journal of Education (1955) Volume 87. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

References Agajanian, R. (1998) “‘Just for Kids?’ Saturday Morning Cinema and Britain’s Children’s Film Foundation”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 18(3): 395–409. Balio, T. (2010) The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Boys’ and Girls’ Cinema Clubs Annual 1949. Burton, A. (2005) The British Consumer Co-Operative Movement and Film; 1890s–1960s. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Davenport, N. (1958) “The Rank Story”, The Spectator, 25 September, p. 29. Durgnat, R. (2011) A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence. London: British Film Institute. Eyles, A. (1993) ABC: The First Name in Entertainment. London: BFI Publishing. Eyles, A. (1996) Gaumont British Cinemas. London: Cinema Theatre Association. Eyles, A. (2005) Odeon Cinemas: From J Arthur Rank to the Multiplex. London: BFI Publishing. Field, M. (1956) “Children’s Taste”, The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, 11(1): 14–23. Griffiths, T. (2012) The Cinema and Cinema-going in Scotland, 1896–1950. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hanson, S. (2007) From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hattenstone, S. (2004) “I just want to be back at my theatre”, The Guardian, 24 March. Hills, J. (1953) Are They Safe in the Cinema? A Considered Answer to Critics of the Cinema. London: BFI. Holmes, S. (2005) British TV and Film in the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You. Bristol: Intellect Books. House of Lords Select Committee on Communications (2010) The British Film and Television Industries – Decline or Opportunity? Volume II: Evidence. London: The Stationery Office Ltd. Macnab, G. (1993) J. Arthur Rank and the British Film Industry. London: Routledge. Mayer, J.P. (1946) The Sociology of Cinema: Studies and Documents. London: Faber & Faber. Moran, J. (2013) Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV. London: Profile Books. Park, J. (1990) British Cinema: The Lights That Failed. London: Batsford. Report on the Committee for Celluloid Storage, H.M.S.O Cmd. 7929, April. Sandbrook, D. (2007) White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties. London: Abacus. Smith, S. (2005) Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to Dead End. London: I.B. Tauris. Staples, T. (1997) All Pals Together: The Story of Children’s Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thompson, M. (2013) Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Trumpbour, J. (2007) Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry 1920–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheare, J. (1950) Report of the Departmental Committee on Children and the Cinema. H.M.S.O. Cmd. 7945, May.

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“AS LONG AS INDIFFERENT SEXY FILMS ARE BOX OFFICE THEY WILL ABOUND!!” The Jacey cinema chain and independent distribution and exhibition in 1960s Britain

Adrian Smith Introduction In 1952 the British Board of Film Censors introduced a new ratings system which would have unintended consequences in the 1960s: “U” meant a film was suitable for everyone including children, “A” signified that any child under the age of sixteen had to be accompanied by someone over the age of sixteen into the cinema, and “X” films were suitable for adults aged sixteen and over. This was the first time that any kind of “adults-only” certificate had been introduced. It did not take long for filmmakers and distributors to take advantage of the salacious possibilities the “X” certificate offered. Films were bloodier, sexier and more violent than ever before, and as audiences acclimatized to these new creative freedoms, expectations began to develop as to what an “X” film could offer. Hammer was the first company to exploit the new “X” profitably with such films as The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), while enterprising distributors such as Miracle Films began importing films from abroad to fill the newly emerging “X” cinemas with adult fare. Companies like Compton, founded in 1960, first screened European nudist films in their own private cinema club before soon producing their own nudist and sex-themed films and growing their own chain of cinemas. This included the six-hundred-seat Scala in Birmingham and a smaller cinema on London’s Oxford Street. They expanded throughout the 1960s while other mainstream exhibitors such as Rank were closing cinemas (Ahmed 2011). The “X” rating became another exploitable commodity in the independent distributor or exhibitor’s arsenal, its prominent position on the marketing material serving to lure audiences just as effectively as the imagery or title of the film itself. Jacey cinemas would thrive in this feverish atmosphere, where any “X”-rated film seemed guaranteed to bring punters in off the streets.

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The establishment of the Jacey cinema chain Jacey was a well-known brand to anyone who lived in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Brighton, Edinburgh or Bristol in the 1960s. The Jacey group was founded by Joseph Cohen, known to his friends as J.C. (hence Jacey). A lawyer and business magnate operating primarily in Birmingham, Cohen was so popular locally that two roads were named after him; Jacey Roads in both Solihull and Edgbaston. Born in 1889, J.C. was the son of a greengrocer and one of four children. As a young man in 1915 he attempted to get into silent film production through purchasing the film rights to the novels of Ethel M. Dell, a much-mocked yet hugely popular writer of romantic melodrama. Little archival evidence remains to explain what became of this venture, but it appears to have been unsuccessful (Josephs 1984). His empire grew as he successfully developed apartment blocks and restaurants (in one of which he once danced with Mae West, so delighted was she at the quality of the food and service), before moving into film exhibition. At their peak the Jacey group controlled eight cinemas in London and nine around the country, including three in Birmingham and two in Manchester. Most of the venues began life as newsreel or cartoon cinemas, and Jacey expanded their capability by having operating 35-mm film unit shooting newsreels rather than simply relying on those provided by Pathé and other news organizations. By the beginning of the 1960s, partly through their acquisition of the Monseigneur group of cinemas, Jacey was an important name in film exhibition. Joseph Cohen was lead director of the group, with his son George handling the day-to-day operations. In turn George’s son John Cohen made his way up in the business, beginning as a projectionist

Figure 19.1  Joseph Cohen, by permission of John Neville Cohen

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before going on to be responsible for publicity. This chapter will focus on four key distributors who supplied Jacey cinemas: Gala Distributors, E.J. Fancey, Antony Balch and Compton Film Distributors. Kenneth Rive was the man behind Gala and he had also dabbled in cinema ownership. He was able to supply Jacey with the quality continental films they were keen to exhibit, as well as the sexier continental films their audiences inevitably wanted. Jacey had a good working relationship with E.J. Fancey, who had far fewer quality pretensions than Rive and was a good supplier of exploitation film, both from overseas and those he was producing himself. Antony Balch, the distributor who had been responsible for finally having the Tod Browning classic Freaks (1932) released in the UK in 1963, was also hired to run the Jacey in Piccadilly, and then went on to run the Times on Baker Street. Antony Balch was somewhat unique in that he was a filmmaker alongside running a cinema and distributing films. Compton was a very successful distribution and production company, who also went on to run several cinemas around the UK. There were many other small and medium-scale independent distributors during this period, including Golden Era Film Distributors, Miracle Films, Amanda Films and Planet Film Distributors, who would have supplied Jacey cinemas. The major studios preferred to supply their Hollywood and British “quality” pictures to the bigger chains owned by Rank, who controlled the Odeon and Gaumont cinemas, and Warner Bros. who had a controlling interest in the ABC chain (Hanson 2007). Because of this, independent exhibitors relied a great deal on the generally cheaper and more readily available films provided by independent distributors. John Cohen ran his own department creating front-of-house displays for the Jacey cinemas. Compton, Connoisseur Films, Amanda Films, Miracle Films and many others would bring titles to John asking for promotional materials to be created as well as the displays themselves. Often when he looked at the material that arrived with these films from Europe he felt they would not attract any customers. Instead he would view the films and select different, more eye-catching stills, and a new tagline would be created. The resulting materials were often used by the distributors around the country, even at non-Jacey cinemas. The Jacey group, although small in terms of the number of cinemas they owned, were at the forefront of technical innovation. John Cohen had developed a form of photography in the 1950s which involved projecting images onto other objects and re-photographing them, for which he was winning major awards. Film producer and distributor E.J. Fancey was interested in using this technique for films, which presented technical challenges. E.J. funded John Cohen’s experiments in a studio, where he was successful in developing a way of keeping the camera and projector in sync. It was never clear why E.J. was interested in this, or whether he ever used the technique in one of the films he produced, but a very similar effect was used several years later to film credit sequences for James Bond films. An intriguing technical innovation trialled at Jacey cinema was the Supalux screen surround, a lighting process developed by John Friese-Greene, nephew of Claude and grandson of William, both of whom pioneered the development of colour film in the UK. John Friese-Greene ran a company called Modernisation Ltd, specialists in designing cinema screens and auditoriums. He created a lens which fitted over the projector lens, capturing the image and then reflecting it around the screen. Instead of the traditional black masking surround, the projected image took on a muted, constantly changing

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colour palette. It was first used in the Cinephone in Birmingham before being moved into other Jacey cinemas. It created a pleasing effect for audiences, but it does not appear to have caught on with other cinemas.

Miss Jacey Aisha Ahmed was seventeen in 1959 when she began working at the Cinephone in Birmingham as an usherette. Having won third prize in the beauty competition of a local newspaper, she was spotted by the Jacey management and relocated to the head office in Birmingham. By the age of eighteen she was responsible for the programming of eight different Jacey cinemas, working alongside booking manager Peter Johnson, and a year later she became the public face of the organization. The Cohen family took Aisha under their wing, reassuring her parents that she would never be left alone in potentially dangerous situations where she might be taken advantage of. Betty Cohen, George’s wife, helped to style her into the glamorous Miss Jacey, and Joseph Cohen allowed her to ride in his Rolls-Royce. As Miss Jacey she acted as a hostess at all major premieres and events, and her face appeared on most of the Jacey advertising throughout the early 1960s. Her first public event was the opening of the Jacey Continental on The Strand. It was a glittering première of the French film Torment (1960, released worldwide as The Wretches, and supplied by Gala Film Distributors), attended by stars of the film, a bevy of beautiful French starlets (including a young Catherine Deneuve) and a selection of prominent British pop stars including Adam Faith and Jess Conrad. Arriving in the Cohen Rolls-Royce and wearing a dress of gold lamé and chiffon, she was a long way from Birmingham. Aisha later recalled to Birmingham’s Sunday Mercury, “for the first few seconds I felt terrible. But it soon passed when I started meeting the guests” (The Birmingham Sunday Mercury, 19 March 1961). In 1962, following a screen test, Aisha was given an uncredited role in Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys, where she played a cashier opposite Felix Alymer and Colin Gordon. Shortly afterwards she turned down the suggestion of appearing in a Hammer horror film and her acting career came to a halt. Despite this she remained working with the Jacey group until marrying in the late 1960s.

Gala Film Distributors and Kenneth Rive Kenneth Rive was a fascinating character whose early life could be the subject of one of the films he distributed. He was born in London in 1918 to Joseph and Emily Rive. His father was a film cameraman mainly working in Germany. Known in his younger years as Kenny, from the age of nine Rive acted in several German films, appearing opposite Conrad Veidt in Rasputin, Demon With Women (1932) and Anton Walbrook in The Gypsy Baron (1935). He then returned to Britain and compered for a time with Hughie Green before working for British Intelligence during the war. Back on Civvy Street Rive found a job in a cinema, eventually buying it, before forming Gala Film Distributors in 1951. He was particularly interested in European cinema, and soon Gala were at the forefront of creating an audience in the UK for continental films. As well as quality productions, Gala made a not-insubstantial contribution to the successful distribution of erotic films which became much bemoaned by the Cohen family.

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Figure 19.2 A magazine advert for Jacey cinemas, Continental Film Review, October 1961, by permission of John Neville Cohen

Even when serious European films were being distributed, they were often retitled and repackaged as sex films, such as Verbrechen nach Schulschluß (1960), which translates as “crimes after school.” Gala retitled it Sex After School, something which the BBFC immediately took against. As a family friend of George and Betty Cohen, the friendship was cemented through a new business enterprise. In 1959 Gala-Jacey Enterprises was formed which by 1961 comprised joint ownership of the Gala Royal and the International Film Theatre in London. It was Rive who suggested that the Jacey cinemas convert in the mid-1950s from news and cartoon theatres to specialists in continental films. Rive was a good friend of the Jacey family for many years. He was considered a live-wire, and had movie-star looks. He had charm, and although he was married with children, Kenneth Rive was seen at the Cannes Film Festival every year with a different starlet rather than with his wife. One of the most controversial films of 1960 was the now highly praised Peeping Tom, but on its release the critical opprobrium virtually ended director Michael Powell’s career. The Gala Royal on the Edgware Road took a novel approach to promoting their screenings of Peeping Tom. In the foyer alongside posters featuring glamour model Pamela Green, who appears in the film, were large reproductions of press quotes, a tried and tested technique since the earliest days of film advertising. What was different in this case was the tone of the reviews: “It is the nastiest film I have ever seen.” “It’s a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom … beastly picture.” This tongue-in-cheek advertising was spotted by the suitably outraged Daily Mail journalist Pearson Phillips who immediately made contact with Joseph Cohen, who gave a somewhat embarrassed

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response: “Oh dear. Did the critics say that? Well, I certainly don’t approve of exploiting that kind of thing.” He passed the buck to his son George, who was more prosaic: “Let’s face up to it. Our business is really a kind of showmanship. We have got to attract the public. This is just one way of doing it. Psychologically, this is quite a good way of exciting their curiosity … though I suppose you could say it is rather an unwholesome kind of curiosity.” Frank Hazell, head of publicity for Gala, was also confronted and defended his somewhat brave marketing approach: “I am afraid you are putting me on a spot here. I was partly responsible for this. My line in using these quotations was simply to ask people ‘Do you believe this? Come and see.’ And incidentally, they are coming. Does the fact that they are coming justify my using this kind of draw? Well, let’s face it. This is what we are in the business for, to get people to come and see the films.” Phillips described them as “Three embarrassed men profiting from something they are ashamed of” (Daily Mail, Wednesday 8 June 1960). Kenneth Rive hit back at this criticism in the trade publication The Daily Cinema. He seemed to be addressing his critics within the exhibition and distribution industry even more than those in the press: What has happened to the old brand of showmanship which in our business means full houses and a thriving industry? If members of the associations and committees spent more time standing up and shouting “Roll Up, Roll Up,” than sitting on their bottoms and devising methods to curb showmanship we should reach the unsatisfactory position, for them, by having such a booming industry that their services would no longer be required. Strange as it may seem, I intend to carry on selling films in a manner that fills cinemas, when I am wrong the public will let me know. (The Daily Cinema, Friday 17 June 1960) Gala distributed dozens of European films from the late 1950s to the 1970s. They took great care to get national advertising for their films, and regularly featured on the covers of Films and Filming or Continental Film Review, the latter seemingly published with the intent of featuring as many near-naked European actresses as possible. Gala regularly applied exploitation techniques when distributing what would definitely be considered European art-house film. Visconti’s 1965 Grand Prix Venice award winner “Vague Stars of Ursa …” (1965) was distributed as the X-rated Of a Thousand Delights, with the brash press book imagery lingering on a mostly naked Claudia Cardinale. Luis Buñuel’s La Fievre Monte à El Pao (1959) which translates as “fever mounts at El Pao” was distributed by Gala in the UK as Swamp of Lust (Nowell-Smith 2010).

Antony Balch Antony Balch was a filmmaker, distributor and, for a time, operator of two Jacey cinemas in London. He was a close friend of George and Betty Cohen and was charming, eloquent and very good-looking (another distributor with movie-star appeal), although he wore his eccentricity on his sleeve. He once managed to sneak footage of himself masturbating by the usually vigilant BBFC (in his short film Towers Open Fire (1963)), and when

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staying in Cannes he would take a rope-ladder with him in case there was a fire in the hotel and he could not get out. The Cohens overlooked his idiosyncrasies and gave him the running of first the Jacey Piccadilly and then their premises at Baker Street. Through his regular visits to Paris, Balch had become friends with Beat poet William Burroughs. Their relationship resulted in two short films, the previously mentioned Towers Open Fire and The Cut Ups (1967), and a reissue of the silent film Häxan (1922) in 1968 as Witchcraft Through the Ages, with a new score and narration provided by Burroughs. A big fan of horror, Balch would hold mini-film festivals in his mother’s London apartment, and friends, Burroughs included, would spend up to four days watching 16-mm prints of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi films. Today, Balch is best remembered for his two feature films, both produced by Richard Gordon, an unsung hero of British horror film production. Some of those films had been distributed by Balch, after the two had become friends at Cannes in 1964. Secrets of Sex (1970), known under the rather non-specific title Bizarre in the US, was originally titled “Eros Exploding” but Balch felt the need to rename it after the BBFC had forced him to remove nine minutes from the running time. Renaming films for exhibition was something he was well used to: the West-German 1973 comedy Matrazen-Tango became When Girls Undress, and Finnish drama Käpy selän alla (1968) was changed to the far more exploitable Skin Skin. Secrets of Sex is an extremely unsettling and surreal portmanteau of sexual escapades, including a man who sleeps with the woman who burgles his house, and another who is sexually obsessed with a pangolin. Balch’s own mother even had a cameo, holding the creature in question. The raincoat-wearing audience must have struggled to follow what was going on. In both his filmmaking and his cinema programming he “straddled the intellectual/exploitation divide like no other Brit” (Rayns 2007). Antony Balch’s second film, Horror Hospital (1973), known as Computer Killers in the US, was a far more straightforward piece of exploitation starring Robin Askwith as an unfortunate pop star looking to take a relaxing holiday in a health spa run by Michael Gough and an army of lobotomized hippies. Sadly, Balch fell ill with stomach cancer and died in 1980 at the age of just forty-two. For a while he had been trying to develop Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch into a movie which Balch would direct, and Dennis Hopper was lined up to star. At the time of his death he had been working with Secrets of Sex writer Elliott Stein on a script for what could have become a genuine cult classic – The Sex Life of Adolf Hitler. His death hit hard. He had many friends in the industry, and was respected for his talents and his enthusiasm.

The Yellow Teddybears In 1963 the production company Compton-Tekli made their third feature, The Yellow Teddybears (sometimes referred to in archival material as The Yellow Teddy Bears). Compton-Tekli had been formed by Tony Tenser and Michael Klinger, owners of the Compton Cinema Club, to make films which they could then distribute as Compton Film Distributors. They had already produced one nudist documentary film, Naked: As Nature Intended (1961), and one fully fledged feature film, That Kind of Girl (1963). The film relied on the tried and tested formula of dressing up exploitation themes as education (Naked: As Nature Intended was a documentary eschewing the health benefits of nudism, That Kind of Girl warned about the dangers of venereal disease). The Yellow

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Teddybears was based on a supposed true story of schoolgirls in the West Country who wore yellow golliwog badges (the metal kind you saved Robertson’s jam labels for) to signify that they had lost their virginity. While completely untrue, this resonated with wider public concerns around pre-marital sex and teenage morality. Coupled with the rise of pop music, “X”-rated movies and the availability of the contraceptive pill, there was a great deal of concern about the morality of the younger generation. The idea of schoolgirls wearing their deflowering with pride was the icing on the cake. Compton decided to launch The Yellow Teddybears as something which could help encourage a healthy public discussion of teenage sexuality. Following a screening of the film to teachers and health professionals, a group of around a hundred sixth-form girls were invited to see it at the Jacey-owned Cinephone on Bristol Street in Birmingham. Seen at the time as a kind of social experiment, the screening was widely covered in both the local and national press in a positive light. As well as watching The Yellow Teddybears, in which one of the girls finds herself pregnant, the sixth-form girls were invited to talk about such issues with a doctor, a marriage guidance counsellor, a vicar, a headmistress and the star of the film, Annette Whiteley, who was still only seventeen. The girls in the audience pointed out that their own parents did not know how to talk to them about sex, and that boys should see films like this so that they can see how easy it is to get girls into trouble. With all that free publicity, Tony Tenser managed to raise the stakes even higher with the official premiere of The Yellow Teddybears on Thursday 11 July 1963 at the Jacey-owned Cinephone on Oxford Street. John Cohen had worked with Tony Tenser to create all the displays. John was also at the event representing the company, along with Miss Jacey. Crowds gathered outside to see the “stars” of the movie, including pop band David and the Embers, who featured in the film and were playing in the foyer. Perhaps the main surprise of the night was the appearance of Robert Mitchum. That a genuine Hollywood A-lister would be at the première of a low-budget exploitation film attests to the showmanship powers of Tony Tenser, although as the photos from the night show, the opportunity to meet pretty girls and enjoy free drinks was surely an attractive proposition. When Mitchum asked for a scotch and soda, Miss Jacey had to break the news to him that they were out of soda, to which he replied, “Just spit in it, doll.”

E.J. Fancey Edwin John Fancey (E.J. to his associates) was known in the trade as a rough diamond. In many ways he was the elder statesman of exploitation. He had been working in film production since the 1940s, mainly providing supporting “B” features and short films which were able to take advantage of the Eady Levy. In this capacity he had been responsible for the on-screen antics of The Goons (Down Among the Z Men (1952)) and the directorial debut of Michael Winner (Climb Up the Walls (1960)). Winner once claimed that E.J. would threaten production crews with physical violence if they refused to do overtime (Winner 2005: 68). According to some close associates E.J. would grab you by the balls when you were about to part, rather than shake hands. This was a good way of making sure you never forgot him. E.J. was born in Richmond in 1902 and was the oldest of three brothers. In 1927 he married Beatrice Benwell and they had two children, Adrienne, born in 1933 and Malcolm, born in 1938. The E.J. Fancey business empire was a family affair. His wife and

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both of his children worked for him, and when Edwin took a common-law wife at some point in the mid-1940s, Olive Negus-Fancey became part of the business as well. During his career he ran several companies including Border Films, D.U.K. Films, E.J. Fancey Productions, New Realm Pictures and S.F. Film Distributors. One wonders whether he felt the need to diversify into so many companies so that in the companies’ books it would look like he was making very little profit. When E.J.’s daughter Adrienne became a model, she also began starring in his films under the name Adrienne Scott. His wife was also a producer, and occasionally wrote screenplays under the name Beatrice Scott. One of their most prolific distribution companies was S.F. Film Distributors, which stood for Small Film. Adrienne acted for a while but the pull of the family business was too strong and she moved behind the camera, becoming a producer and distributor. Adrienne was soon running New Realm and became the co-director of S.F. E.J. Fancey made a very significant contribution to British cinema as a distributor of imported titles from both Hollywood and around the world. In the 1960s and 1970s hundreds of titles were released through his companies. He appeared to show little interest in anything remotely qualifying as art-house, with the emphasis almost entirely being on exploitation. Of the 160 films imported and distributed by New Realm between 1960 and 1979, 66 per cent were rated “X” by the BBFC.

Why pay more? In 1962 the Cohen family was getting sick of playing wall-to-wall nudist films in Jacey cinemas. It was not the kind of film they wished to be associated with, but they could not believe the takings. Producing these films cost barely anything and distributors were very keen. Compton supplied them with My Bare Lady (1962), Girls in the Sun (1962), The Nude Ones (1962) and Diary of a Nudist (1962) in 1962 alone. They were massively popular despite most nudity being only glimpsed in the far distance. The Jacey group could not understand why the nudist films were taking so much money, so they decided to mount a large advertising campaign deliberately berating the nudist film, and by extension the audience who lapped them up. Adverts were produced which stated: “Jacey: A nudist feature film with cartoon and news, 1/6 to 2/6, Why Pay More? Frankly patrons they’re a bore. 3 different nudist feature films NOW SHOWING. Charing Cross Road, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square. Take Your Pick! Next week a choice of 4 including Marble Arch.” Another advert complained, “As long as indifferent sexy films are box office they will abound!!” (their emphasis). With hindsight it is difficult to imagine how the Cohens thought that dropping the ticket price and offering a choice of films and theatres was going to put punters off. This attempt at reverse psychology, rather than persuading people to watch quality continental films, caused queues around the block. This dissatisfaction with their films and their customers contributed to the slow demise of the Jacey cinemas. As evidenced by George Cohen’s diverse business interests in the 1930s, Jacey were less committed to cinema than they were to the idea of being successful. During the 1960s cinemas were gradually sold off or converted to exploit other opportunities. The News Theatre, Marble Arch was converted into the Marble Arch Antique Center, and they hoped that it would be the first centre of its kind. Delays in the conversion process meant that the Bond Street Antiques Arcade opened first.

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Later the Jacey in the Strand was turned into a Postage Stamp Centre, controlled by Stanley Cohen, another son of J.C. and a keen collector. John Cohen ran a business dealing stamps from the Jacey offices in Birmingham. Other Jacey cinemas were taken over by Cinecenta and twinned or tripled (the process of splitting a single-screen cinema into a multiple-screen arrangement), or just closed down entirely.

Conclusion The Jacey cinemas were considered a happy place to work, and most employees tended to stay with the group for their entire careers. Wages were good and a family atmosphere was engendered through regular invites for drinks and feedback. The staff showed their appreciation through organizing charity events such as regular Christmas parties which were funded by the Jacey group. One very lively Christmas party at the Cinephone in Birmingham featured a church choir, members of staff forming a band and the manager, Ron Catton, dressing up as Acker Bilk. At the end of the festivities the 600 pensioners in attendance were each given a chicken to take home. Despite this camaraderie, by the end of the 1960s the party was virtually over. When the BBFC adjusted their certification in 1970 so that “X” meant audiences had to be over eighteen, the previously titillating nudist films and sexy European dramas gave way to far more explicit fare. Specialist pornographic cinemas thrived in Soho and other cosmopolitan city centres, while the mainstream British cinema industry struggled to compete with the triple-threat of television, a decrease in British-produced films and bingo. The Jacey group closed its doors for good following the death of Joseph Cohen in 1980. They may have been a relatively small concern compared to the larger chains, yet the contribution that the Jacey cinemas made to the British film industry has been at best underestimated. They worked with all of the major and minor players in British independent film distribution. They encouraged creativity and independence in their programmers. They may have inadvertently helped fan the flames of nudism for the furtive knuckle-shufflers in the cheap seats, but that was surely a small price to pay for bringing continental film to the otherwise culture-starved provinces.

Note Archival material referencing the Jacey group was provided by John N. Cohen and can be found on his website at www.jncohen.net. Personal interviews were conducted by the author with John N. Cohen and Miss Jacey, aka Aisha Wills née Ahmed, in July 2015.

Other archival sources Daily Mail The Birmingham Sunday Mercury Continental Film Review The Ideal Kinema, supplement to the Kinematograph Weekly The Daily Cinema

BBFC documentation referred to is available in their archives.

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Further reading Chapman, J., Glancy, M. and Harper, S. (eds.) (2007) The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, London: Palgrave Macmillan. (A clear summary of using archival material in approaching film history narratives.) Hamilton, J. (2005) Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Career of Tony Tenser, Godalming: FAB Press. (A comprehensive account of the Compton Group.) Hunter, I. Q. (2013) British Trash Cinema, London: BFI, Chapter Eight, “Eros Exploding”. (An in-depth account of the life and career of Antony Balch.) Spicer, A. and McKenna, A. (2013) The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry, 1960–1980, London: I.B. Tauris. Sweet, M. (2005) Shepperton Babylon: The Lost Worlds of British Cinema, London: Faber & Faber. (A personal exploration of the dustier corners of British film history, including the period covered in this chapter. Of particular interest is his meeting with Pamela Green, a model and stripper who appeared in both Peeping Tom and Naked: As Nature Intended.)

References Ahmed, M. (2011) “Independent Cinema Exhibition in 1960s Britain: Compton Cinema,” Post Script, 30(3): 39–50. Hanson, S. (2007) From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Josephs, Z. (ed.) (1984) Birmingham Jewry. Vol. 2, More Aspects 1740–1930, Birmingham: Birmingham Jewish History Research Group. Nowell-Smith, G. (2010) “The Reception of the Nouvelle Vague in Britain,” in L. Mazdon and C. Wheatley (eds) Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations, pp. 117–26. New York: Berghahn Books. Rayns, T. (2007) “Grindhouse Nights,” Sight & Sound, 17(6): 22–3. Winner, M. (2005) Winner Takes All: A Life of Sorts, London: Robson Books.

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CINEMA AND THE AGE OF TELEVISION, 1950–70 Sian Barber Introduction British establishment attitudes towards film and television shed important light on the ways in which visual culture was shaped and conceived in post-war Britain. Focusing on the film and television industries in the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter explores how successive British Governments by turns protected, neglected, championed and subsidised the film and television industries and how this in turn shaped their different cultural and social identities. During this period, in which the growth of television ownership was seen by many as representing the triumph of a new domestic form of entertainment over the established public medium of cinema, both industries were shaped by Government agendas. While the film and television industries in Britain can be mapped separately, the fates and fortunes of both cannot be divorced from the long reach of Government. Between the launch of ITV in 1955, the arrival of BBC2 in 1964 and the creation of Channel 4 in 1982, a series of Government reports into both industries were commissioned: Pilkington (1962), Terry (1976), Annan (1977) and Williams (1979). This body of work indicates how successive British Governments were engaging with the two different industries and how the ideas of the political establishment heavily influenced the positions occupied by both cinema and television in Britain. As Tom O’Malley asserts: Broadcasting has always figured in the calculations of the people who run the state – politicians, civil servants and business people – as one instrument among many which can be used to maintain political and social stability and to preserve the existing distribution of economic power within society. (1994: xii) From the 1950s onwards broadcasting assumed the central ideological space previously occupied by film and cinema, yet this was not simply a case of one medium being replaced by another. Both industries were shifting ground in this period. Pondering the emergence of the television medium, Raymond Williams observed that “the medium of the

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film screen and the television are only superficially similar” (1975: 62), while John Ellis would later note: “the two media are not in direct competition with each other, broadcast TV cannot wipe out cinema any more than cinema was able to wipe out theatre” (1992: 1). John Caughie argues that while histories of television and cinema “establish their separate characteristics and developments … [w]hat they often miss are the terms by which these separate developments and the ideological impulses behind them can be seen to belong to the same culture” (1996: 189). He suggests that both the Reithian BBC and the Griersonian cinema shared an “ideological and cultural nexus” (1996: 193). This may have been the case, yet the way in which the two industries perceived themselves was very different. Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street suggest that while the launch of public service broadcasting saw the BBC given a Governmentsanctioned monopoly in the field of programme-making that emphasised public service over competition and commerce, the film industry adopted a different path (1985: 3). The deciding factor for both industries was the level of Government intervention and the impact this had upon their programming, their funding and their cultural ideology.

Conflicting ideologies of subsidy and support Developing from a cottage industry in the early years of the twentieth century, and triumphing in the pre-war and wartime years, the British film industry was underwritten by successive Governments who considered that a successful domestic industry performed an important job of articulating notions of Britishness across the Empire and maintaining social cohesion on the home front. In 1936 the Government-appointed Moyne Committee succinctly expressed the perceived political power of cinema: The cinematograph film is today one of the most widely used means for the amusement of the public at large. It is also undoubtedly a most important factor in the education of classes of the community, in the spread of national culture and presenting national ideas and customs to the world. Its potentialities moreover in shaping the ideas of the very large numbers to whom it appeals are almost unlimited. The propaganda value of the film cannot be overemphasised. (HMSO Cmd. 530, 1936) These notions of film as a vehicle to shape perceptions of Britain and its identity were the dominant driving force in the film industry for the years that followed the Second World War. When the various mechanisms for the industry’s support were periodically reviewed, the important cultural role played by film in spreading ideas of Britain beyond its borders was seen to be an overwhelming reason for continuing to support an industry that could never hope to challenge the dominance of Hollywood. Despite formal Government support for the film industry in the shape of an exhibition quota (introduced in 1927), the establishment of a funding body (the National Film Finance Corporation in 1949) and the creation of the Eady Levy on exhibitors in 1950, the film industry was unable to make itself financially self-reliant. Chronically underfunded and torn between conflicting ideologies of cultural aestheticism and popular entertainment,

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the British film industry faced serious competition from the triumphant industrial machine of post-war Hollywood which was keen to expand into overseas markets. Although cultural arguments in favour of state support for the film industry ensured its continued Government subsidy, the introduction of specific legislation to stimulate production growth demonstrated that in some quarters the perception of the industry as a commercial entity still held sway. Dickinson and Street (1985) draw attention to the tension between the cultural and economic impulses present within the visual industries in the post-war period. They suggest that in neglecting to ally itself with the Arts Council (founded in 1946) and the television broadcasting model based upon broadcast radio’s traditions of public service, information and heavy subsidy, the British film industry committed itself to commerce and remained under the aegis of the Board of Trade (1985: 4). We can speculate that this decision was crucial for the survival of a commercial film industry, but it is important also to remember that the television and film industries were drawing upon different cultural traditions. The development of the cinematic form was rooted in the theatrical tradition, whereas the industrial structures of radio broadcasting provided the framework for broadcast television. For many years cinema’s preoccupation, like the theatre’s, was entertainment, while radio and later television foregrounded non-fiction, information and education. Su Holmes sees the BBC’s underlying ideology and structure as key factors in determining the film industry’s approach to both broadcasting and television broadcasters and the types of partnerships that would later prevail (Holmes 2005: 25). Sue Harper and Vincent Porter suggest that the preoccupations of the film industry in the 1950s were primarily domestic and centred around the uncertainties caused by social and economic developments, from the patriotic 1940s to the more consumer-focused 1950s (Harper and Porter 2003: 243). As both Holmes (2005) and Stuart Hanson (2007) document, public service television in Britain emerged in the post-war period following the hiatus imposed by the Second World War. The technological and economic determinants for the medium were present in the 1930s, but war in Europe shifted technical advancement elsewhere and British industrial endeavours were focused on winning the war rather than developing the broadcasting medium. As Dickinson and Street have identified, while different methods of subsidy and support were present for both the film and television industries, the Government made no formal or legislative efforts in the 1950s to regulate relations between the two industries, preferring instead to leave the trade to regulate itself (1985: 227). This is indicative of a governmental approach which conceptualised the two industries in completely different ways and supported them accordingly. In Parliamentary debates about the funding of the film industry in 1954, increased competition from television was considered to be of benefit to the film industry, with Conservative peer Lord Mancroft declaring: The competition for the public interest which television will provide may well act as a stimulus to further efforts on the part of the industry to put its house in order, and it is hoped that the film industry will continue to make the admittedly slow but certainly steady progress that they have made in the last few years and to continue that progress in the years to come. (21 January 1954, Hansard vol. 185, cc. 382–408)

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The notion of two industries in competition with one another is echoed within writing about British film and television. In his recent study of television, Jack Williams suggests that “television helped to keep cinema film production alive in Britain … the BBC started making films in 1947, though initially for documentary and news programmes” and this ensured continued employment for journeyman workers in both television and film (2004: 58). However, a mutually supportive media industry was unlikely due to the unevenness of Government support and the perception of these two industries competing with one another. The challenges posed to cinema by television’s ascendancy also affected broader film culture, with Janet Thumin noting that “popular cinematic imagery was far less widely consumed in the sixties than it was in the forties” (1991: 249). It was not just that people were choosing television, but that the hegemonic images of Britishness – of life and culture as it was lived – that had been perpetuated by cinema were being seen by ever-decreasing audiences. As a direct result Thumin argues that, “if the distinguishing feature of British society in the 1940s was a stoical collectivism, by the sixties there was instead an impatient fragmentation” (1991: 249). The cultural hegemony of British cinema had been challenged by changes in patterns of taste and consumption. This is a definite shift from notions expounded in the mid-1940s which held that “British films whether for home consumption or export or both must try to reflect the life of the British people as it really is and not as other people imagine it to be” (Bond 1946: 24). While this reveals a straightforward approach to cultural and national definition through cinema, such an approach would never be viable for an industry struggling to define itself in both cultural and commercial terms. As Harper and Porter (2003) argue, it was not that 1950s British cinema no longer had the power to speak to its audience, but that it simply had to find new ways in which to do so – technologically as well as ideologically – as old certainties were vigorously challenged. The 1950s saw cinema experimenting with Technicolor, cinemascope and new methods of audience engagement such as Smell-O-Vision and 3D in a bid to render the cinematic experience more modern and more engaging. All of this indicates scholarship that has explored how and why both industries were shifting ground in the immediate post-war period, yet the way in which the two industries would operate in the decades that followed was not simply ideologically driven but was actively shaped by and heavily reliant upon Government support. In charting new territory in a changing world, the activities of both industries were being driven by the agenda set for them by successive Governments. A careful exploration of Parliamentary debates and Government policy in this period offers new detail on how the film and television industries were positioned by policy-makers, and it is to this key primary material that this chapter now turns.

Parliament and the media debate The Parliamentary debates about these two industries from the 1950s onwards reveal that, despite its recent inception, the industrial structure of television was seen as far more viable and sustainable than the fluctuating economy of film production. When President of the Board of Trade and future Prime Minister Harold Wilson presented the first annual report for the newly established National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) in 1950, he claimed:

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Its success is not to be measured solely in terms of the number of films which have been made and which would not have been made but for its activities. I think its operations have also had a wholesome effect on the methods and financial working of film production. (29 June 1950, Hansard vol. 476, cc. 2489–592) A great deal of Wilson’s satisfaction lay in the fact that the newly operational NFFC had bailed out the ailing independent production company British Lion, thus shoring up one of the three major studios with substantial production and distribution interests. The NFFC was also promising investment in future film projects to help secure the future of the British film industry, an initiative that Wilson hoped would transform the British film industry and lessen its reliance on state support. These assurances, however, did not elicit a positive reaction from Parliament, with a number of MPs querying the purpose of the NFFC, its expenditure and its activities, as well as its capabilities in managing its own funds. One pointed out: The Government appear in the film industry, in three different roles. They first of all appear as tax gatherers; secondly, they have forced themselves into the position of being the patrons, impresarios and financiers of the industry; and, thirdly, they are indirectly, through the National Film Finance Corporation, setting up in the business of being the judges and arbiters of public taste in films. (Oliver Lyttelton, 29 June 1950, Hansard vol. 476, cc. 2489–592) Of course, this critique of the role of the Government in the film industry was not new, nor would it change for many years. The economic bail-out versus cultural subsidy debate was shaped in the subsequent years by arguments about film as art, film as an exponent of British culture and the film industry as a commercial enterprise capable of attracting inward investment. Joseph Reeves, the MP for Greenwich, countered this critique with an argument that neatly summed up the need to subsidise the film industry and claimed, “our national prestige is involved. We want to see British films not only in British cinemas, but in the cinemas of the world” (29 June 1950, Hansard vol. 476, cc. 2489–592). Views that oppose subsidies for the film industry have been conventionally rooted in a free market ideology which maintains that a commercial entertainment industry with widespread popular appeal should be self-sustaining and not reliant upon state support. Yet the Parliamentary discussions about the introduction of television were far more nuanced and presented a completely different debate about visual culture, consumers and its audiences. In 1950, during a House of Commons debate over the Post Office and Telegraph Bill, the Postmaster General, Ness Edwards, set out the Government’s position on the new medium of television. He declared: I am fully aware of the potential value of television, both in the life of our own people, in our national prestige and, what is equally vital in these days, in the markets of the world. … In this field, as in so many others, we must endeavor to keep abreast of the world. I think we are doing very well, and our native genius shows itself to excellent purpose in the development of this industry. It is an appropriate

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occasion, therefore, for me to announce that its provision should enable us to ensure that in little more than two years’ time television should be made available to about 70 per cent of the population of Britain. (Ness Edwards, 17 March 1950, Hansard vol. 472, cc. 1454–507) This speech indicated the Government’s desire to commit both British audiences and British finance and industry to the development of television. While much of the language about the importance of television to British culture and as a medium of export was echoed in similar discussions about the importance of supporting the film industry, the particular enthusiasm for television may be explained by the well-established relationship between the state and the BBC. The debate also highlights how the cultural claims of broadcasting which encompassed education and information were deemed to be superior to those of the cinema, which was commercial entertainment. This dichotomy was addressed during this debate in which one MP described television as “perhaps the greatest entertainment and educative medium of the 20th century” and suggested that much of the resistance to the development of television was due to the attitude of the entertainment industry (John Lewis, 17 March 1950, Hansard vol. 472, cc. 1454–507). Lewis further observed that: This resistance arises from the fear on their part that it will affect their gates and returns … I think these people are wrong and that, in fact, it is a very shortsighted point of view, because it is precisely the same narrow point of view as that which was expressed by those responsible for this entertainment industry in the early days of sound broadcasting. (Ibid.) The anxieties felt by the film industry were perfectly articulated here, but the position of the BBC as the national broadcaster was by no means unassailable and the fledgling industry was to be tested as the Government moved to commercialise television in the early 1950s. A 1952 Government White Paper drew attention to “the excellent and reputable broadcasting service for which this country is renowned”, but also noted that this reputation for quality and excellence was due to a monopoly and that “the expanding field of television provision should be made to permit some element of competition” (cmd. 5550 1952). Discussions in the House of Lords about commercial broadcasting from 1952 began with Lord Reith, who thundered: British broadcasting commands the respect and admiration of the whole world; an institution of which England – yes, and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland – can be proud; one which we should be jealous and quick to safeguard and defend. What grounds are there for jeopardising this heritage and tradition? (22 May 1952, Hansard vol. 176, cc. 1289–347) Here the debate shifted from the concept of television as an ideological medium providing information and entertainment in the domestic space to the ethics of competition within British industry and the introduction of commerce into the national institution of television broadcasting.

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While Reith’s objections to the proposals in the White Paper were supported by many in the House of Lords, there were those who considered that the BBC should not occupy such a privileged position. The Labour peer, the Earl of Listowel, argued: We on this side of the House dissociate ourselves entirely from this policy … but let me make it clear that we do not object to this policy because it would break the monopoly of the B.B.C. There is no reason why the B.B.C. should have a permanent monopoly of broadcasting. (22 May 1952, Hansard vol. 176, cc. 1289–347) The Earl of Halifax then wondered, “what effect is this going to have on the practice of television over the years and, consequently, upon the minds, thoughts and lives of our fellow citizens over those years?” (22 May 1952, Hansard vol. 176 cc. 1289–347). Joining the debate, the Lord Bishop of Sheffield spoke of the “immense social and moral influence of sound broadcasting” and argued that television is far more “persuasive and penetrating in its influence” and should not be in thrall to sponsored programmes motivated by the “desire to sell goods” (22 May 1952, Hansard vol. 176, cc. 1289–347). At this time the notion of British commercial television after the American model was unthinkable, and John Caughie suggests that the ferocity of this debate can be read as a rejection of the perceived “debased Americanised values” which were seen to characterise commercial television (1996: 193). While this may have been true for television, by the early 1950s cinema was a long way from its idealised Griersonian roots of social and cultural truth and was far more committed to commercial entertainment. A further key element of the Parliamentary debates on the future of television was the issue of regionality and broadcasting in and for the regions. Unlike cinema, which was perceived to be heavily urban and London-centric, the infrastructure of broadcasting was seen as a crucial way to reach people within the regions. In 1950 Sir Ronald Ross, the MP for Londonderry in Northern Ireland, highlighted the unfairness of a proposed television installation that would only serve the city of Belfast and its suburbs. In a lengthy and fascinating speech, he pleads for greater coverage for his region, wondering: If we consider who needs television most, is it the man who lives, in a thickly populated district and who can go down the street to the picture palace, or is it the man in the more scattered areas where there is no chance of entertainment and where, if he had a television set, he would be likely to bring in the neighbours to see the show? I suggest that it is in the latter areas that we want most to have television. (17 March 1950, Hansard vol. 472, cc. 1454–507) The outcome of these vigorous Parliamentary debates was the Television Act of 1954, which established commercial television in the UK and set up the Independent Television Authority (ITA) under Director General Sir Robert Frazer, with a brief to oversee the commercial broadcasters. Subsequent years saw the launch of regional independent television broadcasters including Granada, Border TV and Grampian; regional broadcasters who had a specifically local agenda. Recognition of different regional audiences and the need to cater to local as well as national tastes was one of the triumphs of television in the

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1950s. Both commercial and public service broadcasting could and did successfully deal with regionality by ensuring that programmes were made and broadcast which addressed the needs, desires and interests of viewers in different parts of the United Kingdom.

A televisual world Despite the introduction of commercial broadcasting and the loss of its monopoly, the BBC continued to develop its own programmes and remained committed to its original principles of education, information and entertainment. To better understand its audience, the organisation was also conducting its own research into programmes and audiences and was encouraged by the picture that emerged. Its 1958–9 audience report noted: The years since the war have seen the proportion of the public with television grow from a mere handful to a sustainable majority and there is no reason to suppose that this process will not continue. … It must be assumed that in a few years’ time the overwhelming majority of British homes will have multi-channel TV receivers. (BBC 1959: 69) Here the concern was less about competition and more about how television as a form was stronger than ever, and its position as the medium of choice for audiences was firmly established and looked set to continue. It also demonstrates that despite initial anxieties, the competition from commercial broadcasting had not weakened the BBC’s position. At the same time, its research also demonstrated a clear understanding of the caprices of audiences and the difficulties in attempting to meet audience demand. It observes sagely that, “although it is often necessary to make generalisations about a ‘public’ and to speak of ‘the listener’ or ‘the viewer’ it must never be forgotten that these are abstractions” (BBC 1959: 70). This acknowledgement of the complex nature of audience behaviour, patterns of popular taste and responses of viewers is something that the film industry was slower to recognise. Television also posed a challenge to the film industry and to cinemas when films became part of television programming. In a 1959 Sight & Sound article Derek Hill noted that ABC had recently purchased 25 Korda films and the BBC had bought 100 features from RKO, thus challenging the cinema as the only place to view films (Hill cited in Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 66). At this crucial moment and in this changing climate, the film industry chose to oppose rather than collaborate with television, and the Film Industry Defence Organisation (FIDO) was founded in 1958. As Hanson reports, instead of encouraging collaboration, FIDO sought to prevent producers from selling their films to television in an illconceived bid to assert their independence from the television industry (2007: 98). Holmes (2005) notes that FIDO was very much a short-term defensive strategy and quotes Edward Buscombe, who considered it was “doomed from the start. It took funds from a declining revenue base, the cinema box office, and used them to compete in the market with a rival whose economic strength was increasing every year that went by” (2005: 35). Despite the defensiveness of FIDO, there were those in the film industry who recognised the possibilities of collaboration with television as well as supporting the film industry in alternative endeavours away from the commercial mainstream. The Rank

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Organisation became one of the initial stakeholders of Southern Television in 1958, while Associated British Picture Corporation had an interest in ABC television (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 67). Baillieu and Goodchild suggest that in diversifying their commercial interests, these actions were less to do with supporting television at the expense of the film industry than demonstrating a keen understanding of the changing climate and shrewd business acumen (2002: 67). Such actions cannot be seen simply as television trumping the film industry or film industry players deserting the old medium for a newer one. Holmes suggests that it was this opportunity to “gain a foothold in the medium [of television] at an institutional level” that provided an opportunity for those in the film industry who were clear-sighted enough to work more closely with the newer medium while simultaneously strengthening their own position (2005: 31). This was less about competition and more about binding the two industries more tightly together, both financially and institutionally. While commercial television had provided audiences and viewers with choice, the findings of the Pilkington Committee published in 1962 condemned the product being shown on commercial channels and advocated a second channel for the BBC to “raise the cultural standards of the nation” (Murphy 1992: 117). Once again, the actions of the Government reinforced the ideological sensibility of broadcast television (and in particular the BBC) as the best way to reach viewers and promote positive notions of culture and identity. A final factor that fuelled the rise of television was its aforementioned regionality. Both commercial and public service broadcasting could and did successfully deal with regionality by ensuring that programmes were broadcast which addressed the needs, desires and interests of viewers in different parts of the United Kingdom. This was made possible through the growth of regional broadcasters who had a specifically local agenda. The commitment of the BBC to regional programming was one of its greatest strengths, while the infrastructure of broadcasting was seen as a crucial way to reach people within the regions. Of course, British cinema too had long capitalised on being domestic and patriotic. Indeed, this focus had worked well for a cinema in competition with the bigger budgets and grander visions of Hollywood and when there were fewer forms of leisure to compete with. But British television, with its innate domestic intimacy allied to a strong sense of regionality, proved itself to be far more British than British cinema in this period. The growth of television ownership in the 1950s, rising from 340,000 television license holders in 1950 to 10.46 million by 1960 (Hanson 2007: 99), as well as the development of new formats and segments such as soap operas, regional news broadcasts and magazine programmes which highlighted events of local interest, fitted in with shifts towards the home and habits of consumption which came to characterise this period. Frank Krutnik and Steve Neale suggest that, in this way, broadcast television was simply following the pattern already established by broadcast radio. Rather than being in competition with film and cinema, it was simply part of the ongoing process of the domesticising of leisure and entertainment (1990: 210).

Conclusions Early television broadcasting was dominated by the BBC monopoly, yet this idealised model of public service, education and information was challenged by the introduction of

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commercial stations in the mid-1950s. By contrast, the film industry was heavily subsidised by Government funds, and was consistently battling with its own separate identity: should its films be domestic or global; should it be culturally or commercially driven? This chapter has indicated the ways in which both industries were perceived by successive Governments and how the state helped to shape their identities and determine their scope and scale. Reading the relationship between the film and television industries as an oppositional model, which pits one industry against another, is an unhelpful way to explain or examine their fluctuating fortunes; rather it is a nuanced relationship which is never static and occasionally co-dependent: consider, for example, the numerous ‘TV spin-off films’ which became a feature of Britain’s cinematic landscape in the 1970s. While it is tempting to relegate British cinema to the margins in this period, the 1950s also saw the launch of the free cinema movement, a deliberate challenge to the commercial mainstream and the forerunner of the New Wave films, whose impetus led to more politicised and socially aware television programming in the 1960s, including the Wednesday Play and Armchair Theatre. While industrial studies help to highlight the shifting cultural values of the post-war period, as well as broader social changes related to leisure and the home, establishment views offer other insights. As shown, external forces were also responsible for the changing visual landscape; the Parliamentary debates reveal a difference of ideology that helped to shape the fortunes of two very different media industries. All of this work adds detail to the complex and often contradictory world of British film and television in the post-war decades.

Further reading Caughie, J. (1996) “Broadcasting and Cinema: Converging Histories”, in Barr, C. (ed) All Our Yesterdays, 3rd Edition, pp. 189–205. London: BFI. Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–1984. London: BFI. Harper, S. and Porter, V. (2003) British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, S. (2005) British Film and Television Culture of the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You! Bristol: Intellect Books. Williams, R. (1975) Television, Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books.

References Baillieu, B. and Goodchild, J. (2002) The British Film Business. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. BBC Publications (1959) The Public and the Programmes: An Audience Report on Listeners and Viewers, the Time They Devote to Listening and Viewing, the Services They Patronise, Their Selectiveness and Their Tastes. London: BBC/Broadwater Press Ltd. Bond, R. (1946) Monopoly: The Future of British Films. London: Association of Cinema Technicians. Caughie, J. (1996) “Broadcasting and Cinema: Converging Histories”, in Barr, C. (ed.) All Our Yesterdays. 3rd Edition, pp. 189–205. London: BFI. Dickinson, M. and Street. S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–1984. London: BFI. Ellis, J. (1992) Visible Fictions. Revised Edition. London: Routledge.

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Hanson, S. (2007) From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Harper, S. and Porter, V. (2003) British Cinema of the 1950s: The Decline of Deference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, E. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914–1991. London: Penguin Books. Holmes, S. (2005) British Film and Television Culture of the 1950s: Coming to a TV Near You! Bristol: Intellect Books. Murphy, R. (1992) Sixties British Cinema. London: BFI. Neale, S. and Krutnik, F. (1990) Popular Film and Television Comedy. London: Routledge. O’Malley, T. (1994) Closedown? The BBC and Government Broadcasting Policy 1979–1992. London: Pluto Press. Thumim, J. (1991) “The ‘popular’, cash and culture in the postwar British cinema industry”, Screen 32(3): 245–271. Williams, J. (2004). Entertaining the Nation: A Social History of British Television. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Williams, R. (1975) Television, Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books.

Government sources (accessed online) Cmd. 530 (London: HMSO, 1936). Cmd. 5550 (Government White Paper on broadcasting, 1952). House of Commons debate on National Film Finance Corporation, 29 June 1950 (Hansard) vol. 476 cc. 2489–592. House of Commons debate on Post Office and Telegraph (Money) Bill, 17 March 1950 (Hansard) vol. 472 cc. 1454–507. House of Lords debate, 22 May 1952 (Hansard) vol. 176 cc. 289–347. House of Lords debate on Broadcasting Policy, 22 May 1952 (Hansard) vol. 176 cc. 1289–347. House of Lords debate on Cinematograph Film Production (Special Loans) Bill, 25 November 1953 (Hansard) vol. 521 cc. 417–57. House of Lords debate on Cinematograph Film Production (Special Loans) Bill, 21 January 1954 (Hansard) vol. 185 cc. 382–408.

Online source www.screenonline.co.uk

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THE BBFC AND THE APPARATUS OF CENSORSHIP Lucy Brett The power to classify films in the UK, and sometimes to restrict theatrical releases with age ratings, cuts or in rare cases to deny a certificate at all, lies in licensing legislation. That legislation designates the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) as the body to certify films on behalf of local authorities. The BBFC is required to protect younger filmgoers and to consider whether material is in conflict with the law or if it has been created through the commission of a criminal offence. It may not pass any material likely to infringe the criminal law. The certificates themselves are also named in that legislation. The current certificates are recommended in the Government’s Supporting Guidance for the Licensing Act (2003) and known to the public as the last thing they see before the feature presentation begins. The certificate notes the film’s title, rating and other information, and has a small coloured logo (also used on home entertainment products, advertising materials and classified digital works online). The “U” is the only rating that survives in any form from the BBFC’s inception in 1912. Of today’s certificates some are advisory (“U” and “PG”), one has requirements (you must be at least 12 to see a “12A” unaccompanied by an adult) and others are mandatory (“15” and “18”). At time of publication you are not allowed to see an “18” film at the cinema unless you are an adult, or a “15” if you are under 15. Cinemas can lose their licence for admitting children to see an “18” or younger teens to a “15”. No offence has been committed by a child sneaking into a “15” or an “18”, though; the fault lies with the cinema selling the ticket. This chapter tracks the evolution of the category system and the age ratings individually over the first century of UK cinema censorship.

The early days of the BBFC The creation of the British Board of Film Censors was announced in November 1912 (Censors was replaced with Classification in the organisation’s name in 1985). Its roots are often described as emerging from health and safety legislation. The same laws that require fire exits provide a surprising basis for nationwide censorship, perhaps. A more accurate analysis might go further, stating that the roots of all modern classification lie not in health and safety laws but in their unexpected and variable interpretation.

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Early cinemas, often temporary “pop-up”-style entertainment, were susceptible to dangerous fire risks. Limelight, like early celluloid stock, was a fire hazard. The heart of the new enterprise was potentially perilous, a dangerous process taking place in small, darkened and crowded spaces. Concern for the bodily protection of cinemagoers, not their moral preservation, underpinned The Cinematograph Act (1909). The Act gave local authorities the power to provide or withhold licences for cinemas in their region, as they do with theatres or public houses. Soon authorities started to add conditions. The Bermondsey Bioscope case in 1910 brought matters to court, when the owner of London Bridge Picture Palace and Cinematograph Theatre was prosecuted for ignoring a condition of London County Council’s licence by opening for business on a Sunday. He challenged the ruling but lost the appeal, in which he’d argued authorities couldn’t add unrelated conditions to licences. This established the precedent that film licensing could extend beyond just health and safety and into any reasonable restrictions, an extension that ranged from the permitted showing times to the character of the film. This interpretation theoretically gave local watch committees autonomy in regulating film material (from home and abroad). In practice, the system was even more chaotic, analogous to the situation in video shops in the early 1980s before the Video Recordings Act was passed in 1984, when the owner of a rental or retail video store had to choose stock not knowing if it would be seized by police. Though films could be banned or cut in one area and treated with less caution in another, most were not regulated in advance, with few films watched before release at all. A cinema manager would have to screen the film not knowing whether the local authority may subsequently object to it. This uncertainty was problematic for exhibitors and distributors. Within three years the film industry created the independent, not-for-profit BBFC to classify films on behalf of all local authorities. Aiming at greater uniformity, it was introduced with the pamphlet The British Board of Film Censors (published c.1912). The Censors certified, cut or refused to classify films, offering a one-stop shop for distributors who paid them directly. Films (excluding current newsreels) were viewed in a process of “absolutely independent and impartial censorship” (BBFC 1912: 2). The first BBFC President George Redford, a late Examiner of Plays under the Lord Chamberlain, appointed four “Examiners”. The Secretary was Joseph Brooke Wilkinson. His role was administrative (though over time the Secretary role became more prominent, eventually replacing the President as public spokesperson and face of the BBFC, and changing title to Director). Redford’s early Examiners had to watch films, forwarding objectionable material to him for final approval or rejection. Sound pictures stopped the original practice of two teams of Examiners watching different films projected simultaneously in the same room. Before sound equipment was installed in 1929, Examiners viewed sound films silent, as another employee read the script aloud (March Hunnings 1967: 131). Examiners have always been a source of interest. Currently most BBFC Examiners are full-time members of staff – in the past they have been variously full and part-time, and recruited through public advertising, recommendation or because they expressed an interest in the BBFC’s work. In John Trevelyan’s time they did not advertise, fearing “a large number of applications from people who had the misconception that an examiner was continuously seeing ‘blue’ films” (Trevelyan 1973: 57). Trevelyan started as an Examiner and went on to become Secretary in the late 1950s. Mostly, though, Examiner identities have been kept secret. During the BBFC’s centenary in 2012, it was hard to uncover information about the individuals behind the first

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decisions. In his pamphlet The Principles of Censorship (published c.1923), the second BBFC President T.P. O’Connor notes applicants for an Examiner’s job included “many candidates of eminence, men who had served in important judicial military and official positions in the Empire” and that “following public opinion” a “lady Examiner” had been appointed from a strong field of candidates (O’Connor 1923: 4). In the beginning Redford asserted no film subject that was not “clean and wholesome and absolutely above suspicion” would be passed at all (BBFC 1912: 2). The first banned film (noted in the BBFC’s internal “register of films rejected” on 24 January 1913) was called Interrupted (c.1913) though no further information about the film, or whether it was resubmitted or retitled, now exists. For films that passed that hurdle, there were two certificates – “A” and “U”. “U” films were those deemed particularly suitable for children’s matinee performances. Forty films were classified on the BBFC’s first day of censorship in January 1913, all passed “U”. “A” films were more suitable for adults. As there was no formal age restriction for “A”, unaccompanied children could see films at either certificate. Unlike today, there were no published Guidelines to help those early Examiners decide. The “Forty Three Grounds for Deletion” are often quoted as early rules published for the industry, but they were not a rubric for examining. They are simply examples of “Exceptions”, i.e. material cut from films, noted in BBFC Annual Reports from between 1913 and 1915. They were presented by T.P. O’Connor, with whom they are now

Figure 21.1 Modern-day certificate used for a limited period in 2012 to celebrate the BBFC Centenary using the style of the earliest BBFC certificates which were white rather than the now iconic “black cards”

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synonymous, as evidence to the Cinema Commission of Inquiry, set up by the National Council of Public Morals, in 1916. Essentially, he was summarising BBFC policy and practice, defining the Board by the material it would remove from film scenarios:   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Indecorous, ambiguous and irreverent titles and subtitles Cruelty to animals The irreverent treatment of sacred subjects Drunken scenes carried to excess Vulgar accessories in the staging The modus operandi of criminals Cruelty to young infants and excessive cruelty and torture to adults, especially women Unnecessary exhibition of under-clothing The exhibition of profuse bleeding Nude figures Offensive vulgarity, and impropriety in conduct and dress Indecorous dancing Excessively passionate love scenes Bathing scenes passing the limits of propriety References to controversial politics Relations of capital and labour Scenes tending to disparage public characters and institutions Realistic horrors of warfare Scenes and incidents calculated to afford information to the enemy Incidents having a tendency to disparage our Allies Scenes holding up the King’s uniform to contempt or ridicule Subjects dealing with India, in which British Officers are seen in an odious light, and otherwise attempting to suggest the disloyalty of British Officers, Native States or bringing into disrepute British prestige in the Empire 23 The exploitation of tragic incidents of the war 24 Gruesome murders and strangulation scenes 25 Executions 26 The effects of vitriol throwing 27 The drug habit, e.g. opium, morphia, cocaine, etc. 28 Subjects dealing with White Slave traffic 29 Subjects dealing with premeditated seduction of girls 30 “First Night” scenes 31 Scenes suggestive of immorality 32 Indelicate sexual situations 33 Situations accentuating delicate marital relations 34 Men and women in bed together 35 Illicit relationships 36 Prostitution and procuration 37 Incidents indicating the actual perpetration of criminal assaults on women 38 Scenes depicting the effect of venereal disease, inherited or acquired 39 Incidents suggestive of incestuous relations 40 Themes and references relative to “race suicide”

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41 Confinements 42 Scenes laid in disorderly houses 43 Materialisation of the conventional figure of Christ Some seem very conservative or laughable today, though it is worth remembering some of the more outrageous “Exceptions” would have reflected more prevalent social issues then; the BBFC took issue with discussion of work and labour, for example, because of the backdrop of the Russian revolution and the General Strike. Political intervention is no longer a BBFC matter, but indelicate sexual situations and illicit relationships are now encompassed in contemporary concerns about sex and innuendo, and many of the 43 are examples of what would now be termed violence or threat. Even the more obscure grounds, such as indecorous dancing, are perhaps antecedents for contemporary concerns about twerking and sexualised images in music videos. Interestingly, the inclusion of animal cruelty pre-empts specific legislation precluding filmmakers from deliberately inflicting cruel treatment on animals. That followed later with The Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937, reflecting public concern about the mistreatment of animals on film sets, especially horses in Westerns.

The “H” and “X” certificates Local Authorities were relatively slow to recognise the BBFC – only 35 authorities had made the BBFC certificates a licensing condition by 1915 and some large urban areas, including London and Manchester, stayed outside the BBFC system. By the 1920s, and after some encouragement from the Cinema Commission of Inquiry, BBFC certificates were more widely used. London County Council finally accepted BBFC classifications in 1921, and tweaked “A” – children under 16 years would no longer be admitted without adult accompaniment in the capital. Despite film industry opposition, the restriction was adopted by others and endorsed by the Home Office in 1923. Required accompaniment is not full restriction, though. Actively excluding all youngsters from screenings with stronger material was first attempted with “H”. Launched in 1932 “H” stood for “horror” or “horrific”. It was brought into use partly in response to the wildly popular horror films of the 1930s, and specifically after the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children complained to the Home Office that scenes in Frankenstein (1932) were too intense for children (Dewe Matthews 1994: 78). The film had been passed “A”, with cuts, on Christmas Eve 1931. Technically, “H” didn’t have the legal force to forbid admission and local councils took varying stances (some allowing accompanied children, some excluding all under-16s, some showing no “H” films at all) but the black cards clearly stated the BBFC view that “H” films were for public exhibition “when no children under 16 are present”. During the Second World War, to protect morale, the BBFC stopped issuing “H” certificates, and when peace returned still allowed only one “H” film release a month. “H” wasn’t a success. It was inconsistently adopted and some local councils didn’t enforce the under-16s rule as there was no clear legislative basis for excluding children altogether. Also it offered no effective way of preventing children from seeing strong films that weren’t horror works, resulting in some films cut for “A” which could have been better placed at a higher restrictive category uncut.

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In the late 1940s, some new (Home Office) men joined the BBFC. Secretary Arthur Watkins (also a playwright) was appointed under the Presidency of Sir Sidney Harris. Joining at a complex time, they oversaw the period in which the general principles evolved. Films were analysed as follows: •• Was the story, incident or dialogue likely to impair the moral standards of the public by extenuating vice or crime or depreciating moral standards? •• Was it likely to give offence to reasonably minded cinema audiences? •• What effect would it have on children? (March Hunnings 1967: 131) Though a far cry from the BBFC’s later stance that “adults should as far as possible be free to choose what they see, provided that it remains within the law and is not potentially harmful to society” (BBFC 2009: 8), they bring children to the fore and differentiate between a general audience and a more specifically vulnerable (or easily outraged) one. From the mid-1940s the Board had been under pressure. In 1946 the County Councils Association recommended that the BBFC should be replaced and the Home Secretary, Minister of Education and Secretary of State for Scotland consequentially set up a committee now known as the Wheare Committee charged with looking into how censorship worked in the UK, particularly regarding children. They made several suggestions including calling for a “C” certificate for children’s films (the idea was rejected), and for “H” to be absorbed into a mandatory age-restricted category that completely excluded children (an idea which proved transformative). From this kernel emerged the most evocative certificate of all: “X”. The “X” certificate retains cultural currency still, though it was problematic in its time and hasn’t been used for over 30 years. Barring children from viewing some films required a change to licensing legislation. A legal loophole made this possible. As the 1909 Act had referred specifically to inflammable nitrate stock, it no longer applied to most screenings in the late 1940s when technical advances in projection meant safer film stock was almost always used. In 1952 the Cinematograph Act was amended to ensure it applied to non-flammable film and to change the Model Licensing Conditions to endorse an adult category. The suite of certificates became “U”, “A” and “X”. No children under 16 were permitted to see an “X”. John Trevelyan later held that choosing 16 instead of 18 was a “mistake”, limiting the scope for stronger material. He also felt the letter X was the wrong choice as it had too much “value in exploitation advertising” (Trevelyan 1973: 53). It wasn’t clear whether the public would accept stronger material, and some in the industry were suspicious over whether “X” would really allow stronger material to pass uncut. Watkins was clear, though: “X” films should not be “merely sordid films dealing with unpleasant subjects, but films which, while not being suitable for children, are good adult entertainment and films which appeal to an intelligent public” (March Hunnings 1967: 145). Detective Story (1951), Cosh Boy (1953) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955) all received an “X” in that first decade. In spite of initial scepticism from the industry, as TV grew in popularity through the 1950s and 1960s and impacted on cinema audiences, “X” gave cinemas a “USP” – they could show stronger material than audiences could see at home. In difficult cases, the BBFC would sometimes encourage liberal councils to test the water by passing a film it was not prepared to allow. If there was no clear or widespread

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outcry and a favourable critical reaction, then the BBFC would generally issue a national certificate. This was a deliberate attempt to keep up with, but not get ahead of, public opinion at a time of rapid social and cultural change. The BBFC needed to avoid becoming irrelevant or disappearing, a perceived threat given UK theatre censorship was abolished in 1968.

New challenges and new certificates The 1960s saw a rapid liberalisation of what was permitted at “X”, landmarks including the first full female nudity in Blow Up (1967), full male nudity in Theorem (1969) and an erection in Flesh (1971). Various European countries and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in the US were experimenting with abolishing adult film censorship at this time too. It was hard for the BBFC to judge legality in this new landscape of increasingly explicit material. In 1970 the BBFC raised the age bar for “X” films to 18 and created a teenage category, “AA” (meaning under-14s were not permitted). Perhaps the BBFC’s most confusingly named category, it was never entirely clear what “AA” meant. The letters didn’t stand for anything in particular, simply indicating a film was stronger than an “A”. The intention

Figure 21.2 Modern-day certificate used for a limited period in 2012 to celebrate the BBFC Centenary using the style of earlier BBFC “black cards”

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was less censorship for adults, in line with the prevailing liberal views of the late 1960s. However, the shift was fraught. A sudden swathe of now famous controversial films between 1970 and 1973 increased the pressure for the BBFC and its new Secretary, Stephen Murphy. The society-wide backlash against 1960s permissiveness was evidenced as nervous local authorities started to ban films that had been passed “X” including Straw Dogs (1971), A Clockwork Orange (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1972) and The Exorcist (1973). Moral campaign groups such as The Festival of Light became household names as individuals challenged the legality of the BBFC and local council decisions with private prosecutions. Last Tango in Paris was unsuccessfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act (OPA), which was found not to apply to the exhibition of cinema films, while the Greater London Council-certificated More About the Language of Love (1970) was successfully prosecuted in 1975 under the test of common law indecency. The OPA, which had so famously in the 1960s made a distinction between art and pornography, freeing the novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover from its 32-year ban, became a stumbling block. The Act didn’t apply to cinema films so the overarching context of the work as a whole could not be taken into account; an individual scene deemed indecent would result in complete rejection. Murphy’s successor James Ferman, who took over as Secretary in 1975, campaigned for film’s inclusion in the OPA and in 1977 the Act was extended. It ruled that films may still be deemed obscene when, taken as a whole, they have a tendency to “deprave and corrupt” (i.e. make morally bad) a significant proportion of those likely to see them. However, there were mitigations. A film that might otherwise be considered obscene could still be shown if “in the interests of science, art, literature, or learning or of other objects of general concern”. This allowed a more robust approach to passing strong material. It was good news for serious and mainstream films, especially as it allowed artistic merits of the film to be considered. It also meant that any future prosecutions must be authorised by the Director of Public Prosecutions rather than being brought by mischievous groups or individuals. However, it was bad news for other products, such as those dealing with rape, which although not necessarily “indecent” in visual terms, could now be considered liable to “deprave and corrupt” depending on the manner in which they dealt with their subject. Hence while the change led the BBFC to retract an original cut to sexual detail in Last Tango in Paris because the whole film could now be considered on its artistic merits, it also invalidated the “X” certificate for Emmanuelle (1974), and a visually discreet (and therefore not “indecent”) rape scene, passed in 1974, was deleted because of its potentially “corrupting” message that women can enjoy and learn from rape. Private members’ clubs could and did show unrated films featuring explicit sex, very strong violence and rape scenes, though, as their premises didn’t fall under the reach of the licensing laws. The loophole was closed with the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (1982) which brought commercial sex cinemas within the remit of local authorities, permitting the exhibition of restricted films classified “R18”. “R18s” could only be viewed by adults in specially licensed clubs. The same year, under Ferman’s leadership, and with parliamentary consent, the BBFC completely revised the classification system. “U”, “A”, “AA” and “X” became “U”, “PG”, “15”, “18” and “R18”. The new certificate logos had colours and shapes inspired by road traffic signage (triangles = warnings, circles = mandatory restrictions) following a traffic light-style spectrum.

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Over the years “U” had broadened to encompass more than just children’s film, especially as “A” became more restrictive. It was now tightened up to mean very mild material. Films of no interest to children but with no issues likely to offend or harm even very young viewers could, however, also be passed “U”. In the 1980s and 1990s, the BBFC attempted to create an entirely “squeaky clean” video category for films which could be watched by the youngest viewers unsupervised, “Uc”. The certificate was inconsistently applied, though, as distributors could choose either “U” or “Uc”, and after research showed parents did not understand it, “Uc” was abandoned in 2009. The “A” went full circle and was back to being advisory. It was replaced with “PG”. The phrase “Parental Guidance”, borrowed from the US, warned parents a film may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive children, without imposing an accompaniment requirement. As now, milder films that were not specifically aimed at children but were too strong for “U” were passed “PG”. One of the first was The Return of the Soldier (1982) but it is a category most associated with junior school-aged and family audiences. The BBFC checked the “PG” suitability of Jurassic Park (1993) by screening it to 200 eight to ten-year-olds and watching their reactions. The mood was described as “cheerful terror” in the film’s BBFC file, and confirmed views that a “12” would be too high, though explanatory advice for consumers on publicity material warned parents the film may be too scary for younger children. Interestingly, an earlier Spielberg blockbuster, Jaws (1975), carried a warning too. Rated “PG” on video in 1987, the film had been an “A” in 1975 only on the condition that its distributor, CIC, warned parents it contained “sequences which may be particularly disturbing to younger, unaccompanied children”. Even more than with Jurassic Park, which could have been rated “12”, Ferman had been keen to avoid the more restrictive next rating up, and preventing 11+-year-olds seeing and enjoying it. Poor “AA” had remained confusing throughout its brief life. It was changed to the more self-explanatory “15”, raising the age bar by a year to serve older teens. It was felt that 14 had been too low but that a “16” would bring the middle and top categories too close together. The first “15” was French film The Dogs (Les Chiens) (1982) which was first submitted in the late 1970s with Examiners suggesting “AA”. The “X”, which had become increasingly synonymous with pornographic and extreme material, was replaced with the neutrally named “18” as a home for grown-up themes and classification issues. Nineteen films were rated “18” in 1982, an early example being the re-named and cut down “R18” (or club certificate) work Body Lust (1982) which had over nine minutes of sex removed. The gulf between “PG” and “15” remained difficult, though, and over time some films fell unnaturally into one category or the other. This was exacerbated in 1984 by the introduction of the “PG-13” in the US. “PG-13” warned that a film might be unsuitable for under-13s but didn’t restrict the age of admission. It was introduced by the Motion Picture Association of America following parental concern about the “PG” for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) (the film was heavily cut for a “PG” in the UK). “PG-13” rapidly became popular, appealing particularly to American teenagers too young to see an “R” (where under-17s had to be accompanied) but who didn’t want to watch “kids’ films” (i.e. with lower ratings). Increasingly blockbusters were made with the “PG-13” in mind, forcing the BBFC to cut films with huge appeal to younger teens to obtain a “PG” or exclude the primary audience by passing them at “15” (for example,

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Gremlins (1984) was passed uncut at “15”). The need for a new certificate for works with pre-teen appeal was clear and “12” was introduced in 1989, securing a logical series of three-year progressions: 12 – 15 – 18 for the restrictive categories. The first “12” was Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). In the 1990s Andreas Whittam Smith, who was President from 1997 to 2002, and Robin Duval, Director from 1999 to 2004, pushed an agenda of BBFC accountability to the industry and the public. Whittam Smith oversaw the publication of BBFC Draft Guidelines for Classifying Films and Videos in the Board’s 1997/8 Annual Report, outlining the standards and allowances for classification. He commissioned wide-scale public research throughout 1999 to underpin the published Classification Guidelines in 2000. It would start a regular cycle of research and publication, to ensure decisions reflected contemporary public feeling. He summarised the approach in the BBFC’s Annual Report 2001: “Show the public what you do; listen to what people say. These are our guiding principles” (BBFC 2001: 3).

The BBFC today The century ended with this new approach applied to the creation of a new certificate. Responding to a groundswell of opinion from parents, cinema staff and filmmakers that “12” was too specific to be useable or useful without parental discretion, the Board ended the century with an experiment. It asked the public to try out a new certificate and decide for themselves how it should work. Following a trial in Norwich of a “PG-12” certificate, a mandatory/advisory hybrid certificate was rolled out across the UK in 2002, taking into account name suggestions and caveats from the public. The new “12A” required an adult to accompany a child under 12 in the cinema, but allowed patrons of 12 or over to view unaccompanied; the decision to view underscored by descriptive content advice written by the BBFC. Increasingly more information is provided to those who want to know more before they see a film, and since 2007 BBFC insight has been published for all films, not just those for children. The first century of cinema saw big changes in the approach to censorship of films for public release and the process for that censorship in the UK. In 2012 the BBFC celebrated 100 years. Through a retrospective film season at the BFI, exhibitions and various talks and publications, Examiners and academics discussed films which had started as “X” or banned and were now rated “U” or ‘PG”, works that remain problematic to the public or in the eyes of the law, and borderline films (those which contain issues or themes that could be classified in either of two adjacent categories). Alongside moral debates and retrospective analysis of specific films, the certificates of licence and the little symbols remained talking points. Each month each new film released in the UK carried a commemorative certificate from another time. January releases had the ornate paper white cards of the 1910s, the autumn saw the colour block cards of the 1970s and the winter new digital cards of the 2000s. Accountability and working with the public remain key under subsequent BBFC directors after Duval retired in 2004. The BBFC now works with filmmakers, pre-schoolers, students, academics, the general public and industry partners between Guideline publications. Few cinemagoers now remember a time before mandatory classification, and the

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first “18” or “X” you saw, depending on your age, is still a rite of passage. From make-up artists wondering whether their gory effects will get an “18”, to the 5-year-old whose parents won’t let her see a “12A” via the audiences still expecting “A” to pop up after the trailers finish, the symbols themselves which started out as health and safety notices remain part of the UK cinema experience.

Further reading Barber, S. (2011) Censoring the 1970s: The BBFC and the Decade That Taste Forgot. Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. (Analysis of the BBFC’s work in a decade of change.) Lamberti, E. (ed.) (2012) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI Publishing/Palgrave Macmillan. (Decade-by-decade analysis of the BBFC’s work including case studies on interesting classification and censorship decisions, created by the BBFC for its centenary in 2012.) March Hunnings, N. (1967) Film Censors and the Law. London: George Allen & Unwin. (A detailed look at the formation of the BBFC and its early work, with detailed reference to local government, legal changes and the early development of the UK film industry.) Mathews, T. D. (1994) Censored: What They Didn’t Allow You to See, and Why – The Story of Film Censorship in Britain. London: Chatto & Windus/Random House. (Exploration of key decisions and social change from the early days of film censorship to the 1990s.) Trevelyan, J. (1973) What the Censor Saw. London: Michael Joseph. (An account of the BBFC history preceding, and during, the tenure of John Trevelyan as Board Secretary.)

References Barber, S. (2011) Censoring the 1970s: The BBFC and the Decade That Taste Forgot. Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. BBFC (1997–8) BBFC Draft Guidelines for Classifying Films and Videos, Annual Report 1997–98, Appendix 1, pp. 1–16. BBFC (2001) Annual Report. BBFC (2002) The Guidelines. Dewe Mathews, T. (1994) Censored: What They Didn’t Allow You to See, and Why – The Story of Film Censorship in Britain. London: Chatto & Windus/Random House. Johnston, O.R. (1977) “The Law of the Cinema: Some recent changes in the commercial and legal background of Britain’s film industry,” The Third Way, 1(18), pp. 13–15. Lamberti, E. (ed.) (2012) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI Publishing/Palgrave Macmillan. March Hunnings, N. (1967) Film Censors and the Law. London: George Allen & Unwin. O’Connor, T.P. (c.1923) The Principles of Censorship. London: British Board of Film Censors. Petley, J. (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Phelps, G. (1975) Film Censorship. London: Victor Gollancz. Robertson, J.C. (1985) The British Board of Film Censors: Film Censorship in Britain, 1896–1950. London: Croom Helm. —— (1989) The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913–1972. London: Routledge. Trevelyan, J. (1973) What the Censor Saw. London: Michael Joseph. (Files quoted from the British Board of Film Classification archive and www.bbfc.co.uk.)

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THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Between culture and industry

Richard Paterson Introduction The BFI was established in 1933 following an intervention from the education community and with the emerging recognition, reflected in the Film Society movement from the 1920s, that film was a modern art form, culturally significant and important educationally. In counterpoint, cinema had become increasingly industrialised as a form of entertainment with, in 1927, the first Government intervention to sustain the film “industry” (the first Cinematograph Films Act) regulating the number of British films to be shown by cinema (Dickinson and Street 1985). Nearly 80 years later the BFI took on many of the roles previously carried out by the UK Film Council, and became the lead agency for film and the National Lottery distributor for film, alongside its historic remit to develop the art and understanding of film and television. Throughout its history as a public body set up to engender a film culture in Britain, the BFI has been subject to pressures and counter-pressures from industry and public. The changing roles of the BFI at different points in time have to be understood in terms of industry politics and economic interests, alongside the dynamics of cultural development in the UK, the changing political perceptions of the role of public bodies and interventions by the state, and the evolution of the medium both aesthetically and technologically (Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012). This dynamic has been constantly negotiated by the BFI against a backdrop of a recurrent view of film as an industry of global significance both economically and as a cultural force which reflects a state’s identity. In consequence, issues of governmentality have followed a wider ideological framing. The BFI, in common with other public bodies, has responded, particularly in later years, to the transition from public funding to greater levels of self-generated funding in a neoliberal political framework. The structure of the BFI evolved in line with these changes as the organisation was expected to build, adapt and develop its operations to deliver a changing range of functions determined both by external political forces and internal agency. Each period necessitates a consideration of both the broader social political landscape and the evolution of the value chains underpinning and overlaying the cinema and later television industries: production, distribution and exhibition (Paterson 1997).

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The BFI’s activities are publicly funded and relate to an art form which is also a popular entertainment form underpinning many successful global corporations. These potential contradictions have been resolved through a multimodal response: film is a material object which has to be preserved once it has been produced; it is an aesthetic object which can be analysed, contextualised and curated; its consumption has implications for our identity and the cultural capital of individual citizens; it can be an object of study or can facilitate learning about many other fields; it is an industry subject to competing interests which sometimes lead to productive collaborations. In essence the BFI is a knowledge organisation where often this knowledge is a by-product of practice and that practice is invariably associated with the objective of constructing a film culture. It is possible to trace key decision moments and how instruments of governance and organisational direction have emerged – how “real events” and their changing context have been assembled and then endured in organisational design. There is an economic and organisational history, a cultural history and a technological history. The ongoing core of activity, however, has been structured by the specificity of film and television culture – the archive, education and the art of film. Where cultural activity has been opposed to industry there have been consequent instabilities and problems as the “institutional logics” have come into conflict. This leads to the necessity to trace the historically contingent nature of the institution through multiple levels of analysis (Thornton et al. 2012). The process of formulating the public interest which the BFI serves then has to be seen as a series of accommodations by the organisation in which actors, roles and responsibilities have been constantly redefined to address specific problems – particularly resource scarcity – and at times to exclude others such as industrial policy.

1930s: foundations The contradictions between culture and industry which have dogged the BFI for many decades emerged in the first years. The industry – particularly the interests of distribution and exhibition – feared influence and intervention in the commercial space by a public body and confined the Institute to a narrow role. The very funding of the BFI – initially through a levy on Sunday entertainments and therefore from the film industry – and the acceptance of the industry’s fears as valid, led to an initial focus on promoting film institute “societies” across the country offering superior film entertainment and on introducing film into schools. The educational objectives were less cultural than technical, offering guidance on making films available in schools. The BFI’s journal, Sight & Sound, which had been founded in 1932 but incorporated into the BFI in 1933, offered a similar diet. However, it was joined by the Monthly Film Bulletin in 1934 as the BFI began to develop its information role by providing coverage of every film released in the UK. This emerging role as an information repository was confirmed with the establishment of the Library, also in 1934, and was complemented by a nascent Archive role in 1935 with the creation of the National Film Library. Both initiatives have had long-lasting consequences with the founding archivist, Ernest Lindgren, playing a prominent role in the development of film archiving across the world (Houston 1994). However, the very fact that the Radcliffe Committee was set up in 1948 to consider the BFI’s future role confirms how precarious were the institutional foundations of the organisation at the end of the Second World War. The Radcliffe Committee

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recommended a new brief for the BFI “to encourage the art of film”, which remains to this day, and suggested a firmer financial basis for the BFI’s operations. Fortuitously, these recommendations coincided with the planning for the 1951 Festival of Britain where Herbert Morrison, Lord President of the Council, and a film enthusiast himself, was the driving force and wished to reflect this medium as well as television in its programme. The revised objectives were creatively implemented following the key appointments of Cecil King, chairman of the Daily Mirror, as Governing Body Chairman and Denis Forman as Director. They were assisted by a new governance structure which reflected a wider range of interests including representatives from the trade and regions.

1940s and 1950s: institution building The Forman/King years were notable for their awareness of a need to establish an institutional presence which was both physical (the National Film Theatre – a cinema) and grounded in a set of cultural principles complementary to those of the commercial sector. Their strategic insight was that to properly develop a film culture required intervention by the BFI across the film value chain in areas which were complementary to and not competitive with the commercial offer. This entailed a number of significant developments which took advantage of the close connections to Government (through Herbert Morrison) and on-the-ground material facts (the Festival of Britain): the Telecinema site on the Southbank became the first home of the National Film Theatre in 1952 (and remained so until the current site was opened in 1957). It quickly built a membership of 30,000. Funding for the Festival of Britain also facilitated the development of the Experimental Film Fund, chaired by Michael Balcon, which was later to become the BFI Production Board, nurturing new talents in film making. In parallel, through the 1950s the Archive collections and Library and Information Resources facilities continued to grow. Education activity turned towards an early form of lifelong learning with provision of a lecture service across the country while Sight & Sound became a serious journal with the importation of the editorial team of Sequence, Gavin Lambert, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Penelope Houston, to instil a new vision of film culture. Direct funding from Government replaced the Sunday levy. While the BFI established firm institutional roots, the commercial British film production sector went through a period of ups and downs. The introduction in the 1950s of the Eady Levy and the establishment of the NFFC (National Film Finance Corporation) led to a mixed picture of successes and failures in the production sector which coincided with the collapse of the exhibition sector as television’s growing popularity had a major impact on cinema audience numbers. When Forman moved to a key role in the nascent ITV at Granada Television in 1954, the newly appointed Director, James Quinn, was able to continue to build on the modern foundations. He sustained the Library and Archive operations and continued to support educational work. The opening of the purpose-built NFT, with significant financial backing from the London County Council (LCC), was marked in 1957 by the first London Film Festival which provided an opportunity to focus attention on “art cinema” to a degree not previously possible. Politically and institutionally the BFI still had its critics, within and without, and a sometimes strained relationship with industry (particularly the CEA, KRS and Rank Organisation). It also had to contend with

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continuing uncertainties over funding and was criticised for its metropolitan bias in a review of operations by the Treasury (HM Treasury 1959). However, the BFI sought and had achieved at least a degree of self-reliance and entered the 1960s with an institutional self-confidence about its role in the film culture.

1960s: consolidation, regional expansion and accountability The change of government in 1964 led to a cash boost from the Labour Minister for the Arts, Jenny Lee (no doubt supported by Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, with his longstanding interest in film dating back to his role at the Board of Trade in the 1940s), with the expectation that the BFI would play a more active role in film culture outside London and would invest in developing new talent. James Quinn had resigned as Director in 1964, and was succeeded by Stanley Reed, BFI Secretary and previously an Education Officer at the Institute. Under Michael Balcon’s chairmanship the reconstituted Experimental Film Fund, now the BFI Production Board, provided a nurturing environment for young directors including Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and Stephen Frears. These investments coincided with a resurgent UK film production sector – often funded by the Hollywood majors. “Art” cinema became more popular and, with BFI investment, albeit badly coordinated, Regional Film Theatres emerged in towns and cities across the UK keen to programme non-Hollywood films. Alongside the scheduling of World Cinema on BBC 2 and the continued vitality of the film societies across the country, a growing audience of film cognoscenti developed. Growth in Library provision, as well as the consolidation and development of the Archive, continued through the decade, although an attempt to use a Private Members Bill to introduce Statutory Deposit for film was lost in 1969 as concerns about the cost of implementation emerged. Television was added to the BFI’s objects in 1961 and played an increasingly important role in future work as the British film production sector’s plight became ever bleaker. In 1965 the TV connection had interesting consequences when the BFI took on the distribution of the controversial Peter Watkins-directed BBC production of The War Game, moving the BFI into a new sphere of activity – distribution – while easing criticism of the BBC for censorship for refusing to broadcast the film. While relations with Government remained positive during the decade, with consistent rises in grant in aid, relations with both the industry and the BFI members became ever more strained, leading to a Governors’ review of activities in November 1971. The BFI’s role had become a contested area: one view from various quarters was that the membership of the Board was too heavily biased in favour of the industry and didn’t reflect the interests of the members; another that the BFI had lost its focus and was increasingly pursuing middlebrow culture.

1970s: renewal and political difficulties The activities of the next 10 years reflected the interplay of a complex of forces: the political stirrings of the membership; the precipitate decline of parts of the UK film industry with no apparent answers to the challenges of television; a renewed interest in the importance of film as a cultural form leading to major differences between BFI staff about how its “educational” role should be formulated; in short, the BFI was an institution

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whose objectives were under scrutiny and at times under siege. The challenge faced by a new Director, Keith Lucas, appointed in 1972 from the Royal College of Art, was to negotiate these turbulent times to secure the BFI’s right to exist. This task had to be carried out while the Institute continued to be seen with suspicion by some key figures in industry, particularly John Davis of the Rank Organisation, still the most powerful commercial actor in UK film. In the UK production sector there was feast-to-famine as the US majors withdrew their production activity; in exhibition, a crumbling set of cinemas with little appetite for capital investment to combat the attractions of television; in distribution, the continued dominance of the US majors. By 1978, the Labour Government was considering a proposal for a British Film Authority from the Terry Committee set up (by Harold Wilson) “to consider the requirements of a viable and prosperous British film industry over the next decade” (HMSO 1976). This would have brought together all aspects of film activity but had emerged as a proposition with little input from the BFI. The proposal was shelved with the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election to be resuscitated in a different form by the New Labour administration elected in 1997. In the 1970s the organisation arguably reached a critical moment in its development. Denis Forman had returned as chairman in 1971 to find the organisation lacked direction, and although in post only a short time, he rebalanced its governance with the introduction of member governors. Despite this apparent disarray, possibly because of it, major developments had been instigated by the BFI through the late 1960s and the 1970s: investment in the first film lectureships in UK universities alongside support for the emerging discipline of Film Studies, a major programme of Archive preservation of its nitrate collection, a renewed production programme, extended film distribution activities to facilitate film culture development across the country, and continued expansion in the regions. As noted above, paradoxically all these achievements occurred at the time when every part of the film value chain in the UK was under extreme pressure from changes in markets and the lack of financial investment.

1980s: institutional renaissance Following the resignation of Keith Lucas, Anthony Smith, formerly a television producer, was appointed as Director in 1979 and brought this period of confusion to a close. By both using and adding to the many talents that had gravitated to the BFI in the 1970s, he reinvigorated the organisation in the shadow of the Thatcher government. With new pressures on the Institute’s finance because of cuts in Government grants, there was a new emphasis on commercial growth and the need to secure additional sponsorship. This direction of travel was initiated by Smith with the support of a new Chairman, Sir Basil Engholm, who secured the BFI’s Royal Charter. This work was then taken forward by Sir Richard Attenborough when he was appointed Chairman in January 1982. Confidence in the objectives of the BFI was reaffirmed. This was most fittingly expressed through the building and opening of the privately financed Museum of the Moving Image next to the NFT and the building of the state-of-the-art Getty Preservation Centre at Berkhamsted (both beneficiaries of the generosity of Sir John Paul Getty). It was also reflected in the rapid development in Film Studies in universities and a renewed attempt to include the study of film in the national curriculum. While the film production sector across the UK

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went into further steep decline in the 1980s, the BFI Production Board became, with funding from Channel 4, one of the major producers of British films in that decade with significant critical successes from directors such as Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and Terence Davies. With British Screen Finance replacing the NFFC to provide state funding to production after the abolition of the Eady Levy, an interim order and some stability were established for independent film production but at a low level of investment. Television had been added to the BFI’s objectives in the 1960s, and the 1980s saw this expressed through a range of projects as the convergence of the working lives of behind-the-screen personnel as well as actors – both film and TV – became increasingly apparent. By the time Wilf Stevenson took over as Director in 1988 (he had joined the BFI as Deputy Director in 1986), the BFI had re-established its legitimacy in the cultural world of film and was considered of little threat by the increasingly unconfident commercial sectors of British film.

1990s: new ambitions Attenborough continued as BFI chairman until 1993 and, with Stevenson, actively sought a renewal of British film production capability. This initiative led to opposition, or at best suspicion, from industry, and this grew through the nineties. However, the Downing Street seminar in 1990, which Attenborough persuaded Margaret Thatcher to host, can be seen in retrospect as the start of a resurgence in all parts of the British film industry through increasing Government interventions to address areas of market failure (Relph and Headland 1991). Ideas which later became commonplace in the speeches of Ministers – tax incentives, film commissions, exports, skills – all emerged in the early 1990s with the rallying slogan of Britain becoming the “Hollywood of Europe”. A significant change in the machinery of Government in 1992 with the creation of the Department of National Heritage (later the Department of Culture, Media and Sport under Labour from 1997) brought together for the first time the interests of film as industry (from DTI) with those of film as culture (OAL) and those of television (the Home Office). This had ongoing positive consequences. Successful arguments were made for film production to be recognised as a capital investment which led to the allocation of lottery funding for film, first through the Arts Council of England and then through the UK Film Council. This became a major new source of finance for a beleaguered industry (Advisory Committee on Film Financing 1996). Education provision by the BFI too was refocused in the early 1990s and the capabilities of the Institute to offer its own MA were captured and realised. Plans for a new Film Centre and an IMAX cinema began to take shape. Television productions on film subjects were funded by broadcasters, including a major series of international co-productions to commemorate the centenary of cinema in 1995. Films produced through the Production Board continued to garner awards. While the Archive stalled to some degree as financial pressures grew, by the late 1990s with lottery funding now a major source of investment, a period of consolidation followed as the promise of digital technologies enabling wider access began to emerge. A more confident BFI looked forward to the millennium, even beginning to consider whether its longstanding role as the film culture agency might hold the potential for extension by becoming more industrially focused. However, the views of stakeholders and, more

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importantly, the political context led in a different direction as there was continued opposition from across the film industry to the BFI taking such a major hybrid role.

2000s: in the shadow of the Film Council Shortly after Labour’s election victory in 1997, Jeremy Thomas, the successful Oscarwinning producer who had succeeded Attenborough as chair in 1993, was replaced by film director Alan Parker who, in turn, appointed John Woodward, Chief Executive of PACT (the producers’ trade body), as Director after Wilf Stevenson had resigned to run the Smith Institute. This presaged major changes in the film landscape in Britain when Labour commissioned a Film Policy Review, A Bigger Picture, which was published in March 1998. The report focused principally on industrial rather than cultural policy but led to a radical shake-up of the publicly funded film bodies: BFI, British Screen, the Arts Council Film Lottery Fund and the British Film Commission. By late 1998, the Government had determined a new structure, whereby the BFI would become a funded client of the newly created Film Council (later UKFC). In its new role it was shorn of many of its functions – in particular, regional funding and production – and asked to focus on education, heritage and culture. This occurred as the ramifications of digital technology for all parts of the film value chain were beginning to emerge, and just as the expectations of being able to create a “sustainable film industry” looked less achievable in the short term as the only European major, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, a subsidiary of Philips Electronics, folded just as this new agency was being established, thus confirming the continuing dominance of the US majors for British film. In an early intervention, Alan Parker, who moved across from the BFI to become Chairman of the Film Council, controversially argued that the new body would follow the business precepts of the US majors whereby distribution held the key to success. John Woodward was appointed as Chief Executive of the Film Council and replaced as BFI Director by his deputy Jon Teckman, while Joan Bakewell became Chairman. Film director Anthony Minghella succeeded Bakewell in 2003 and appointed Amanda Nevill, formerly at the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television, as Director. In the next ten years of subsidiarity, the BFI lacked the confidence or political support to provide leadership on key areas like film education, and focused its attentions first on the renovation of the South Bank complex which had been neglected following the closure of MOMI in 1999, while developing ambitious plans for a new Film Centre. Notable achievements in this period included a successful lobby to Government for investment in the BFI’s world-leading archival collections, which were increasingly threatened by chemical deterioration, leading to the opening of a state-of-the-art Archival Store at Gaydon in 2010. The UK Film Council – seeing itself as the conduit between Government and industry, and with significant lottery funding available – made significant investments in independent British films, skills training and regional screen agencies. The consequences of technology change – the dawning of the digital age – were significant challenges for senior management at both the UKFC and BFI. The BFI embraced the opportunities for education of increased access through Screenonline, an online encyclopaedia of British film and television, launched in 2003, while the Film Council

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invested heavily in the exhibition sector, equipping more than 200 cinemas with digital projection equipment. UK Film Council investment in production culminated in the Oscar success of The King’s Speech in 2011, while the gradual re-entry of the Hollywood majors into UK production, encouraged by ever more lucrative tax incentives and a highly skilled workforce, saw a steady rise in the number of films produced in Britain. The increase in the quantity of high-budget films produced in Britain led to a significant increase in box office revenues for these “British” films, leading to investment in new studio capacity to handle demand.

2010: new roles In the run-up to the General Election in 2010, both organisations were engaged in merger talks at the DCMS with Greg Dyke, former Director General at the BBC, who had succeeded the film director Anthony Minghella as chairman, leading for the BFI. These discussions had manifested a clash of institutional approaches in which the older BFI retained the advantages of being a long-established institution with both charitable status and a Royal Charter, while the UK Film Council was vulnerable institutionally as a company limited by guarantee totally beholden to Government. The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition abolished the UK Film Council and subsequently transferred many of its roles to the BFI in 2011. The BFI became the new lead agency for film as well as the film lottery distributor, but with the ongoing financial crisis, suffered a significant reduction in the grant in aid it received for its core activities. After the abolition of the UK Film Council the DCMS set up a review of film policy under Lord Smith, the original architect of the Film Council, to make recommendations on future film strategy. His report, A Future for British Film, was published in 2012. The BFI accepted many of the proposals and published a five-year plan, Film Forever, with three priority areas: audience and education, heritage, and developing British independent film. As a result of the changes the BFI was now beset again by the culture/commerce contradictions which had so affected its early years, but this time as much within the organisation, in terms of setting priorities, as with dealing with external pressures and interests. The Institute was now in a much stronger position than throughout its entire history with responsibility for the distribution of lottery funds and the new role as the lead agency for film. Most of the pre-existing lottery funding streams from the UKFC were maintained but, with the BFI forced to curtail its own educational and archival work because of budget cuts, lottery funding was allocated both to a new organisation, Into Film, to develop educational work, and to a major project to digitise the country’s Archives, Unlocking Film Heritage. For the BFI in its traditional roles, there was a need to understand and address technology issues across the value chain after the initial wave of creative destruction in the wider industry while also needing to sustain its core cultural and educational mission. With the Government looking for economic growth through inward investment and improved exports, the BFI’s operations now had to be seen in the context of the global marketplace. Indeed the BFI fitted the creative industries discourse which had emerged strongly after 2000 as the audiovisual sector was seen by Government as a potential source of significant economic growth. The emphasis on inward investment and its

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underpinning features – international trade, skills needs and development, access to finance – now became dominant in a body which had been founded as an educational and cultural organisation. The fact that “soft power” was then invoked on a variety of international issues – culture boosting commerce – and that educational activity increasingly tended towards vocational training were signs of the straitened times facing all public sector organisations. The BFI’s new dual role was a juggling act balancing potentially contradictory issues of developing audiences and innovation in filmmaking while seeking to address market failure in the industry, balancing an ill-defined public interest mandate on issues like copyright while marshalling resources to assist economic growth.

Further reading Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84. London: BFI. Doyle, G., Schlesinger, P., Boyle, R. and Kelly, L.W. (2015) The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Houston, P. (1994) Keepers of the Frame: Film Archives. London: BFI. Nowell-Smith, G.S. and Dupin, C. (2012) The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

References Advisory Committee on Film Financing (chair: Sir Peter Middleton) (1996) Report to the Secretary of State for National Heritage. London: Department for National Heritage. Butler, I. (1971) To Encourage the Art of Film: The Story of the British Film Institute. London: Robert Hale. Commission on Educational and Cultural Film (1932) The Film in National Life. London: George Allen & Unwin. Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government 1927–84. London: BFI. Film Policy Review Group (1998) A Bigger Picture: The Report of the Film Policy Review Group. London: DCMS. HMSO (1976) The Future of the British Film Industry: Report of the Prime Minister’s Working Party (chairman: John Terry). Cmnd 6372, London. HM Treasury (1959) British Film Institute: Organisation, Methods and Staff Structure Report (CM474/1/01) The Mendoza Report. London. Houston, P. (1994) Keepers of the Frame: Film Archives. London: BFI. Nowell-Smith, G.S. and Dupin, C. (2012) The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Paterson, R. (1997) “Policy Implications of Economic and Cultural Value Chains” in Exploring the Limits: Europe’s Changing Communication Environment. European Communications Council, Berlin: Springer Verlag. Relph, S. and Headland, J. (1991) The View from Downing Street. London: BFI. Report of the Committee on the British Film Institute (Radcliffe Report) (1948). London: HMSO. Thornton, P., Ocasio, W. and Lounsbury, L. (2012) The Institutional Logics Perspective: A New Approach to Culture, Structure and Process. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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TRADES UNIONS AND THE BRITISH FILM INDUSTRY, 1930S–80S Iain Reid Introduction For nearly five decades from the early 1940s, almost every production decision on a British feature film had to consider union agreements that prescribed crewing levels, remuneration and many peripheral working practices which often had little to do with the functional requirements of film production. These included the demarcation between various grades and unions; the class of aircraft seats for foreign travel; the provision of “wash-up” time; and the menu options at meal breaks. As the director John Boorman wrote: “Wherever we shoot, the first question is how and where do we feed the crew …” (1985: 158). The three main unions involved in film production (i.e. not distribution and exhibition) were: the Electrical Trades Union; the National Association of Theatrical, Television & Kine Employees (NATTKE) which covered the theatrical construction trades; and the dominant technicians’ union, the Association of Cine and Television Technicians (ACTT). The latter operated a pre-entry closed shop which meant that only ACTT members could work in designated grades and that a technician had to be a member of the union before being considered for employment. This control of admission meant there was never any alternative labour force, so giving the ACTT the controlling hand in any negotiation. Those negotiations and the history of film production employment are poorly recorded, not least because the creative aspects of a film (the director, actors and script) are often deemed more interesting; the critic Alexander Walker observed “most books about films dwell on their directors” (1974: 16). In addition, production technicians have been a minority within the total film industry since 1914 when the film industry divided into three distinct sections: production; distribution; and exhibition (Street 1997: 5). Thus, when Low devotes a chapter to “The organisation of labour” in the 1930s, her first interest is the 45,000 full-time exhibition workers (cinema projectionists, ushers and box office)

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organised by NATKE (1985: 22) or the 14,000 laboratory workers, rather than the mere 1,389 registered as working in production (1985: 31). Additionally, distribution and exhibition are where the profits were made and so much of the industry’s business literature concentrated on the business fortunes of those who financed films (Klingender and Legg 1937; Wood 1952; Kelly 1966). The latter is unique for its six and a half pages reviewing topics such as the union’s insistence on first-class travel and the practice of closed-shop admission (Kelly 1966: 170–176). Last, no union archives are available because all were discarded in several mergers: in 1989, NATTKE and the Association of Broadcasting Staff became the Broadcasting and Entertainment Trades Alliance – which in 1991 merged with ACTT to form the Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union. Nevertheless, using the trade press, literary anecdotes and the recollections of those who worked in the industry, it is possible to track the evolution – and the demise – of trade union activity in British film from the 1930s to the 1990s.

The early development of the film technicians’ union The Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT) was founded in 1933 (the second “T” was added in 1956 to incorporate commercial television technicians). The trade press emphasised the educational objectives of the new union, noting that “the association hopes to be able to play an important part in enhancing and improving the prestige and quality of British productions through keeping its members in touch with the latest technical progress” (TC 29 June 36), but the incentives for association were diverse, and not always compatible. The directors and producers hoped for a professional guild that would seize creative control from the distributors (who often re-edited films to suit particular markets (Low 1971: 270)), while the majority of workers were more concerned with working conditions: “working very hard, without proper breaks, night and day, very irregular, if any meal breaks, often to the point of illness” (ACTT 1983: 170). Eventually the organisation was registered as a trade union (21 June 1933) because that “satisfied the majority of the founding activists” (ACTT 1983: 10), and it was based around a Captain Cope who ran a café in Shepherds Bush market from where “unlike other ACT founder members, he was in a position to venture forth from studio to studio collecting subs from new members”. New members could also join at the café: “you entered this café, jerked your head towards the [union] placard while at the same time putting half-a-crown on the table, whereupon the proprietor would … lead you round to the back of the café where your name would be entered in a book” (ACTT 1983: 11). However, Captain Cope proved unreliable and he was replaced by a General Secretary, George Elvin. This clarified the union’s purpose (Elvin’s father was Chairman of the TUC) because “it hadn’t worked terribly well up to that point … trying to be respectable and just a sort of chartered association, not strictly a union” (Sidney Cole). The union affiliated to the TUC in 1936. The new union made steady progress. The ACT’s third Annual Report in April 1936 reported a membership of 845 and the union was socially and educationally active: the first ACT Ball & Cabaret took place on Shrove Tuesday at Chiltern Court, Baker Street (TC 16 April 1936); and a lecture on the “Manufacture of the Cine-Camera and Apparatus” was announced (TC 14 December 1935).

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What is rarely mentioned in the trade journals of this period, or the ACTT official history, is any collective bargaining on behalf of members, even though working conditions were poor in an industry “in which the difference between showmanship and racketeering is often slight” (Klingender and Legg 1937: 7). Most studios refused to negotiate: in 1937, British International Pictures forbade the union representative entry to the studio and threatened instant dismissal for any continuing members of the union (FTT April 1979), but there were some successes: “an agreement with Alex Korda that overtime should be paid after sixty hours’ work” (FTT February 1980: 10). Only in 1939, helped by a strike threat by the members employed in the laboratories, did the ACT sign “the first collective all industry agreement” with the Film Employers’ Federation. But the success was short lived when the federation disintegrated to be replaced by four separate employer organisations (ACTT 1983: 14). The ACT made more progress with parliamentary lobbying, managing to insert a fair wages clause into the 1938 Cinematograph Films Act: “to qualify as a British film under the new Act, productions had to honour trade union (i.e. ACT) standards on conditions and pay” (ACTT 1983: 17). It also challenged the number of foreigners (invariably Americans, but later German and Austrian refugees fleeing Nazism (Oakley 1964: 136)) taking valued work from British technicians. Their recruitment was to improve the quality of production (Spencer and Waley 1939: 176) and these newcomers were often described as “ace technicians”. Today’s Cinema reported that: The ACT stated that they were not opposed to foreign technicians working in British films provided they were ace men; that their crews were British; that their employment did not deprive equally expert British technicians of employment; that they were not engaged to work under less favourable conditions and salaries than those of British technicians and that the Association was given an opportunity to be consulted when renewals of such permits were applied for. (TC 20 March 1936) The ACT Annual Conference in May 1936 was “pleased to learn that there has been a stricter supervision with reference to the granting of Labour permits since the Ministry of Labour received a deputation from the Association” (TC 6 May 1936). These worries about the job prospects for British technicians were well justified because the industry was financially precarious, dependent on speculative capital that often left studios idle (Klingender and Legg 1937: 7). “By 1937 the boom was over and the industry was in dire financial straits” (Street 1997: 10) and film crews suffered accordingly: “at the time of writing [1938] more than half the skilled film technicians are out of work” (Spencer and Waley 1939: 176). Kinematograph Weekly (4 February 1938) reported that “voluntary organisations in Borehamwood opened a soup kitchen to feed the children of those who had lost their positions at Elstree Studios” (cited by Sweet 2005: 111). Between 1925 and 1936, 643 film companies had been registered, but by 1937 only twenty remained in production (Wood 1952: 91). In such a highly unstable and speculative industry, where productions were often abandoned and companies dissolved into bankruptcy, crew members needed all the protection that could be mustered.

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The 1940s and 50s On the declaration of war, all studio production was cancelled and cinemas closed in the expectation of aerial bombardment, but “when no raids came … they were gingerly re-opened” (Wood 1952: 103–104). Many film technicians voluntarily enlisted but the introduction of conscription initiated a debate about the best contribution that trained film crews could make to the war effort: conscription “must be set against the contribution to the fighting services and the munitions factories of approximately 1,400 men, for the most part untrained for such work but expert in their own branch of modern warfare” (TC 1 April 1941). The government had also decided that mass communication would be a contribution to the war effort as reported in the Daily Film Renter: “the Ministry announced a suspension of calling up as far as studio personnel was concerned and it will now be a function of the committee [which included ACT, NATKE and others] to advise what adjustments should be made to the Schedule of Reserved Occupations” (11 November 1940). Initially the committee considered individual names (DFR 18 November 1940) but, needing some immediate method of identifying legitimate film technicians, the Ministry of Labour then appointed the ACT’s employment bureau as the vetting authority: henceforth all ACT members were exempt from conscription and would work in film production, while those not members would be called up for military service. The official history records “technicians now queued to join the ACT, the only body with the authority to categorise them as a reserved occupation” (ACTT 1983: 21). Furthermore, George Elvin, the ACT’s General Secretary, negotiated a military rank structure for ACT members serving in service film units: clapper loaders would be privates; cameramen would be treated as captains; and directors would have field rank as majors. For a trade union to maintain its own structures within the armed services was an exceptional position (ACTT 1983: 21) while at home the closed shop meant the union could establish the practices that would prevail long after the end of hostilities: with three-quarters of the men in the film industry fighting in the Armed Forces, those who stayed behind were in a strong bargaining position to demand what they wanted. It is dubious whether, in fact, the ACT raised wages any more than could have been done by individual bargaining; but it standardised restrictive practices. (Wood 1952: 212) It is unclear exactly when the closed shop became effective but Muriel Box, who had worked at Gaumont-British in the 1930s, returned to work in continuity at Elstree in 1941 and, asked to show her union card on her first day, was saved only by friends who signed her up (Box 1974: 158–159). John Mitchell, who had been an ACT member in the 1930s, did not find the shop stewards so accommodating when he returned after war service in 1946: on that first Monday, I was approached by Frank Sloggett, ACT shop steward, for my paid up card. Not having one, he told me I could not start work and that I must go to Head Office there and then, pay my subscription and have a card on my return for his examination. (FTT October 1988)

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In the early 1940s, “British cinema was at its peak” (Oakley 1964: 161) and the film industry, and especially its technicians and those responsible for production, had acquired a status of respectability. Post-war, the ACT used this standing to achieve three objectives: it consolidated its demarcation from NATKE, with ACT taking responsibility for all technical roles; it agreed minimum crewing levels with the British Film Producers Association; and the ACT formalised the closed shop which had existed since the early years of the war (Seglow 1978: 51). This was a strong position (PEP 1952: 279), and Seglow (1978: 54) observed that “whatever one’s view of the union, there is no doubt that by the early 1950s it had become a force to be reckoned with in its relations with the employers with whom it dealt. Its power and influence were out of all proportion to its size”. Despite its power, the union could do little about the contraction of the British film industry despite working closely with the post-war government on the Eady Levy, the National Film Finance Corporation and the Anglo-American Film Agreement (Street 1997: 15). The public’s preference for American productions, and the decline in cinema admissions (Spraos 1962: 14), meant that by 1949 the number of people employed on feature films in British studios (not all of whom were in ACT grades) fell from 7,700 to 4,400 (Oakley 1964: 198). However, a Board of Trade Working Party set up to examine production costs did not mention the closed shop (although demarcation was to be “examined”) (Gater 1949: 7) and the ACT’s control of employment continued unchallenged.

The 1960s and 70s By the early 1960s, the ACT had evolved to control employment negotiations in three very different sectors – commercial television, the laboratories and film production. However, the television and laboratories workforces were in full-time employment with corporate employers who had formal structures for collectively bargaining with the ACTT. The situation for film technicians was now very different. After the closure of the big production companies (the last closed in 1959), the studio buildings became “four wallers”, empty space to be rented by independent production companies often registered for the production of just one feature film. Thus, the great majority of film crew became freelance technicians who were employed on short-term, perhaps daily, engagements because they had the necessary skills to film specific sequences (Blair 2001: 151). What makes this era interesting is that freelancers are notoriously difficult to unionise, yet the operation of the ACTT’s pre-entry closed shop held firm for another thirty years; so how did the ACTT enforce its operation despite the constant turnover of film crew and production companies? The ACTT first ensured that all productions were fully manned in accordance with the agreements through the organisations most in contact with the workforce – the production companies. Most were members of the Independent Film-makers’ Association (later PACT, the Producers’ Alliance for Cinema & Television) and the ACTT’s collective agreements specified the minimum crewing levels for all productions: the norm was colloquially known as “four, four & four”: four union members on camera, four on sound and four in the production team. To ensure compliance, the union checked the daily callsheets (the production companies’ listing of each day’s crew) and made spot-checks of

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technicians’ union cards at the studios. One ACTT representative was Joe Telford whose reputation as a union enforcer was legendary: “[Joe] was feared by most … production companies. They were particularly nervous about his unexpected visits, and particularly about his almost second sight which let him know when an agreement was being breached” (Obituary FTT November 1987). Foreign shoots were also monitored through the issuing of Overseas Location Clearance certificates which theoretically assured the crew member that the ACTT confirmed that the member was correctly insured – but in practice this was an opportunity to apply pressure on those members whose subscriptions were in arrears. Failure to obtain a certificate would mean no union support should an accident happen abroad or the production company go bankrupt (FTT March 1980). All these checks helped the union ensure there was a balanced pool of labour; sufficient to meet employers’ requirements but also to ensure reasonable employment for all their members. Thus anything that disguised the true employment situation, such as television employees taking film jobs in their spare time, had to be eliminated and those who broke the rules were warned that they would be “expelled from the union – sacked – and that’s the end of a career, because you won’t be able to join the ranks of the freelancers without a ticket” (FTT April 1979; March 1980). Keeping one’s membership was critical because there was no right to re-admission and the union frequently imposed a rule of “no more union cards as long as a union member was unemployed” (Wood 1952: 213). Thus membership had to be maintained, even when unemployed. A 1983 study found more union members than employees in the entertainment industries (112 per cent) but observed that this was necessary because the pre-entry closed shop required that membership had to be maintained if a worker was to be available to take up employment at any time (Bain and Price 1983: 15). It might also have been the case that the difficult hurdle of first gaining union membership was a good reason for maintaining it. The classic route to union membership was to work in some minor, non-union role (runners, location fixers, traffic marshals, third assistant directors, drivers and production assistants). This employment had no protective union agreement and could be very demanding – but perseverance was regarded by many as a useful means of eliminating the indifferent or unambitious. Once 365 days had been worked on film shoots (which might take three or four years to achieve), the applicant was entitled to union membership if supported by two sponsors and this quasiapprenticeship was used to ensure that applicants were fully socialised into the culture of the industry, and therefore would conform to its accepted practices. Similarly, another route to admission was to apply from sectors where the union was keen to increase its presence; from the BBC; Visnews; the laboratories; or NATTKE. Social connections were undoubtedly important. Muriel Box had been instantly accepted into the union (Box 1974: 158–159) whereas Karel Reisz (who went on to direct Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960) waited seven years to become a member of the ACTT. Kelly identified Reisz as typical of the industry’s problem in identifying new talent, writing of “an apparently rigid system, peppered with loopholes and inconsistencies” (1966: 174), and it is probable that the situation never changed. Linda Loakes, a National Organiser of the ACTT, rebutting the supposed restrictive nature of admissions, insisted: “you can hardly call ACTT a private club when it admits 1,500 new members each year” (FTT February 1987). Yet certainly some contemporary commentators believed that potential talent was discouraged, though this “attracted no attention

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when unknown lads whom nobody had heard of were not allowed to become clapper boys; but among them might have been the David Leans of twenty years hence” (Wood 1952: 213). So individual membership was a valuable asset, but why did the employers comply with the union’s rules? Production companies were often transitory and there was no obligation for a company to be a member of the IFA. But, regardless of whether they were bound to the collective agreements, all companies invariably worked closely to the recognised template despite the complications and costs this would entail. Besides paying employees to a fixed scale for each grade, producers had to recognise nearly thirty different overtime payments including a very early call (before 5am), standard overtime, excess overtime, time off the clock and no lunch break. Those overtime rates varied between grades and the agreement further specified the times of meal breaks, the appropriate transport outside London, per diem payments and many other minor details. In reality, no one knew how efficiently the ACTT monitored the arrangements for each shoot; spot-checks could easily be evaded and every production company knew of friendly freelance crew that could be hired retrospectively to make up the numbers. However, the ACTT held one trump card: the laboratories. The laboratories were 100 per cent ACTT closed shops and very different from the dispersed creative workers on the studio floor, being “less glamorous, perhaps, but … the backbone of the union” (ACTT 1983: 71). In this era, all production was dependent on the laboratories. Film was processed overnight and the print (“rushes” or “dailies”) delivered to the studio for the director and editor to view. From then on almost every succeeding stage of post-production would involve the laboratory – and in a time-critical industry, any delay was potentially disastrous. Thus pressure was easily applied to any producer who deviated from the collective agreement; the delay might be as trivial as a print missing a delivery van – or as major as a negative being “misplaced”. In 1980, the Film & Television Technician, in a section describing a “personal dispute” with a production company, recorded that the writer was “relieved to know that the negative is lodged at Rank Laboratories so, if the worst comes to the worst, I am sure we can rely on our labs colleagues” (FTT March 1980). The threat was more than implicit.

The 1980s In the late 1970s, the closed shop and collective agreements seemed unchallenged. Industrial relations were conducted in reasonable harmony, not least because a unique peculiarity of the film industry was that the producers, “the management”, were members of the same union as their rank and file employees. Thus, all having been imbued with the union’s ethics, there was a universal acceptance of the collective agreements which few challenged. In 1956, a legal ruling had confirmed that any producer who was not in an entrepreneurial capacity had to be a union member (ACTT 1983: 33), so only those funding the films were beyond the union’s control; an official report in 1989 noted that “many of the directors of these [production] companies are understood still to be members of one or other of the main industry trade unions” (MMC 1989: 6). Thus producers rarely deviated from the collective agreements, mindful that every stage of their film process was dependent on the unionised laboratories. However, the 1980s would deliver

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several new challenges to this seemingly happy status quo and within ten years the closed shop had gone and the ACTT was in terminal decline. The first challenge was the post-1979 Thatcher government’s legislation which slowly stripped away, “step by step” (DE 1987: 1), the protections that had enabled the closed shop to operate. The ACTT did little to respond to any of the successive Employment Acts, perhaps assuming that they would all be reversed by some future Labour Government, but the changes to secondary picketing were significant to an industry which used so many different commercial entities. Joe Telford, in a valedictory article, recognised that this presented particular dangers to ACTT. … If someone darted off to Spain … and instead of taking the proper crew and getting clearance, just two men had gone, and they weren’t insured, there’s a commercial our members in the labs are expected to process, our members in post-production are expected to edit, and our members in television are expected to transmit. Are we going to be prevented from taking secondary action to catch up with someone who’s dug a hole through our agreements? (FTT March 1980) Despite these challenges, the ACTT remained relatively mute on employment legislation. Not until the 1990 ACTT Conference was the closed shop specifically debated in two motions (FTT February 1990) and these motions are only significant because it is questionable whether a closed shop still operated in 1990 (MMC 1989: 1). The second challenge to the status quo was the increasing use of video, and later digital, technology. The ACTT had seemingly recognised the challenge very early: “video tape will curtail the employment of lab members and put a strong weapon in the hands of the employers” (FTT June 1958); but it was another fourteen years before the first laboratory closed because “ENG [Electronic News Gathering] has meant that far fewer pictures are being put on film” (FTT December 1982). ENG related to news and documentaries rather than feature films but the trend of laboratory closure was clear: Reeds (FTT November 1981); Humphries (FTT April 1985); Brent (FTT June 1986); and Technicolor, one of the largest labs, reduced its workforce from 1,200 to 300 (ACTT 1983: 33). Video was still an unsuitable medium for feature films because of the quality of lenses and the lack of appropriate projection, but the changes to post-production processes eliminated the role of the laboratories – and with it the power of the union. As already shown, the physical manipulation of film was critical to editing: “cutting and joining, adjusting the soundtracks, looking at the off cuts, hanging up the strips of film in bins, rearranging them. All around us, on shelves, cans of films cover the walls. Every shot numbered, each can labelled” (Boorman 1985: 210). Digital editing eradicated all of those processes and the associated employment because, while feature productions continued to be shot on film, the entire developed negative was transferred immediately onto a format that could be loaded into a digital editing machine, where the rough cut could be assembled, with no further interaction with the laboratory necessary until the editing was finished. The evolution of post-production technology thus neutralised the laboratories as the “industrial powerhouse of the union” and removed the opportunity to informally enforce the union agreements.

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The third factor eroding the union’s strength throughout the 1980s was the failure to respond to these changes by encompassing the new technological workforce. Traditionally, film editors had worked their way up through the cutting room ranks and were ACTT members. Those now recruited into digital post-production were more likely to be engineering graduates interested in programming and creative challenges with little awareness of union activities. The ACTT had few representatives in this field to be effective recruiters and, given the reluctance of the new digital facility employers to negotiate, there was no formation of appropriate union agreements for jobs which had not previously existed in the film-based industry. Moreover, recruitment into film production was changing too. No contemporary analysis exists for the 1970s and 1980s, but the Feature Film Workforce Survey 2005 asked the educational qualifications of film employees and their year of entry into the industry (see Figure 23.1). This growing number of graduates, from film schools and universities, created a constituency which, besides being more self-confident and assured in their own status, had bypassed the traditional on-the-job training and thus had no induction into the customary rules that had shaped the industry for so long. These “newcomers”, women, software engineers, university and film school graduates, were motivated by their creative interest – or the challenges of the new digital technology – and so had little time for the established conventions of the industry and its collective agreements. As with all evolving changes it is difficult to fix specific dates, but an incident at Shepperton during the filming of Aliens in 1986 provides a small glimpse of the watershed: “things finally came to a head over the endless breaks that the crew insisted on taking – for tea, to go to the pub for lunch … ‘It was union-regulated, whether you

Figure 23.1  Highest academic qualification obtained (by year of entry to film industry) Source: Skillset 2005: 98.

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wanted it or not’ said Giler [the executive producer]”. Matters were finally settled when the director, James Cameron, destroyed the tea-trolley – he “mashed it into a cube” (Shone 2004: 165).

Epilogue By 1991, the ACTT had gone, overwhelmed by changing circumstances. However, so well engrained were the industry’s employment practices that, even without union enforcement, they persisted well into the twenty-first century (DCMS 2003; Reid 2008) – informal social networking replacing the closed shop which the ACTT had managed so efficiently.

Further reading ACTT (1983) Action! Fifty Years in the Life of a Union, London: ACTT. Bain, G.S. and Price, R. (1983) Union Growth: Dimensions, Determinates and Destiny, in Industrial Relations in Britain (ed. Bain, G.S.), Oxford: Blackwell. Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) (2003) The British Film Industry, London: Stationery Office HC667.

References ACTT (1983) Action! Fifty Years in the Life of a Union, London: ACTT. Bain, G.S. and Price, R. (1983) Union Growth: Dimensions, Determinates and Destiny, in Industrial Relations in Britain (ed. Bain, G.S.), Oxford: Blackwell. Blair, H. (2001) You’re Only as Good as Your Last Job: The Labour Process and Labour Market in the British Film Industry, Work Employment & Society 15:1. Boorman, J. (1985) Money into Light, London: Faber & Faber. Box, M. (1974) Odd Woman Out, London: Frewin. Department of Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) (2003) The British Film Industry, London: Stationery Office HC667. Department of Employment (1987) Trade Unions and Their Members, London: HMSO CM 95. Gater, Sir George (1949) Report of the Working Party on Film Production Costs, London: HMSO. Kelly, T., Norton, G. and Perry, G. (1966) A Competitive Cinema, London: Institute of Economic Affairs. Klingender, F.D. and Legg, S. (1937) Money Behind the Screen, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Low, R. (1971) The History of British Film 1918–1929, London: George Allen & Unwin, Low, R. (1985) The History of British Film 1929–1939: Film-Making in 1930s Britain, London: George Allen & Unwin. Monopolies & Mergers Commission (1989) Labour Practices in TV and Film Making, London: HMSO Cm666. Oakley, C.A. (1964) Where We Came In, London: George Allen & Unwin. Political and Economic Planning (1952) The British Film Industry: A Report on Its History and Present Organisation, with Special Reference to the Economic Problems of British Feature Film Production, London: PEP. Reid, I. (2008) The Persistence of the Internal Labour Market in Changing Circumstances: The British Film Industry During and After the Closed Shop, Unpublished PhD thesis: LSE.

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Seglow, P. (1978) Trade Unionism in Television: A Case Study in the Development of White Collar Militancy, Farnborough: Saxon House. Shone, T. (2004) Blockbuster, London: Simon & Schuster. Skillset (2005) Feature Film Production: Workforce Survey 2005, London: UK Film Council. Spencer, D.A. and Waley, H.D. (1939) The Cinema Today, London: Oxford University Press. Spraos, J. (1962) The Decline of the Cinema: An Economist’s Report, London: George Allen & Unwin. Street, S. (1997) British National Cinema, London: Routledge. Sweet, M. (2005) Shepperton Babylon, London: Faber & Faber. Walker, A. (1974) Hollywood, England. The British Film Industry in the Sixties, London: Michael Joseph. Wood, A. (1952) Mr Rank: A Study of J Arthur Rank and British Films, London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Periodicals Daily Film Renter Film & Television Technician Kinematograph Weekly Today’s Cinema

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THE PUBLIC FILM ARCHIVES AND THE EVOLVING CHALLENGE OF SCREEN HERITAGE PRESERVATION IN THE UK James Patterson Thus the cinematographic print, in which a thousand negatives make up a scene, and which, unrolled between a light source and a white sheet, makes the dead and gone get up and walk, this simple ribbon of imprinted celluloid constitutes not only a historic document, but a piece of history, a history that has not vanished and needs no genie to resuscitate it. It is there, scarcely sleeping, and – like those elementary organisms that, living in a latent state, revive after years given a bit of heat and moisture – it only requires, to re-awaken it and relive those hours of the past, a little light passing through a lens in the darkness! (Matuszewski, Une Nouvelle Source de L’Histoire, 1898)

The proposal from Matuszewski’s 1898 pamphlet that there should be a repository created to hold cinematograph film to allow future generations to see and understand history was remarkable in its perceptiveness. Whilst not unique in its recognition of the archival potential of this new medium, and film had been a developing technology for several years, Matuszewski’s pamphlet was published less than three years after the first public projection of moving images by the Lumière brothers, for whom he worked as a cameraman. The development of the public film archives in the UK was slow to respond to Matuszewski’s call. This chapter will consider the history and some of the challenges that faced the UK public film archives as they developed, and examine their status and situation as they stand in 2014, offering thoughts on the practical and intellectual challenges that future generations of custodians of British screen heritage are likely to face.

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Matuszewski’s call was echoed by a number of others in the pioneering days of the new medium, but was not immediately acted upon. Indeed prevailing attitudes viewed film as ephemeral and lightweight and in consequence not worthy of saving. As Alex Philip stated in 1912, “very many of these films are frankly amusing, and would find no place in a national historical repository” (Philip 1912: 8). With the exception of the Imperial War Museum in London, where the filmed record of the Great War formed part of its collection from its foundation in 1917, there was no formal repository to collect and look after cinematograph materials in the UK until the establishment of the National Film Library (NFL) in 1935 as one of the departments of the recently created British Film Institute. It is, however, worth reflecting that the creation of a national institutional archive, to collect a new medium within 40 years of its invention, might not be judged an unreasonable or untimely response. But by the time the NFL was established, the entire era of silent cinema had passed, which is perhaps a contributing factor to why only an estimated 10 per cent of silent cinema production survives to the present. But the loss of the output from the silent period was the least of the challenges facing the new NFL archive. At the point of its establishment the perception that the medium was hardly worth taking seriously, let alone collecting for posterity, still held sway. The Economist summed up this negative view, “It is not occasional impropriety but consistent fatuity which may be charged against … film” (Houston 1994: 24). Arguably the view that cinema (and by extension all moving image material) was, with notable exceptions, low-brow popular entertainment has continued to undermine the film archive movement. Former curator of the archive at the BFI, David Francis, speaks of the same difficulty in the late 1970s. “[Film has] been regarded as the product of an industry, and the only argument you’ve been able to use [for film preservation] is not a cultural one because, on the whole, governments didn’t think that cinema was of cultural importance” (Cherchi Usai et al. 2008). In consequence the level of public funding for film archiving was, and still is, very low compared to other cultural endeavours. The commercial nature of film also impeded the development of British film archives and the later growth of the national and regional collections. Film companies were suspicious of the motives of archives and anxious to protect their product from inappropriate exploitation and piracy. In the absence of a system of statutory deposit (as is the case in France, for example), it took many years to convince the companies that it was important to deposit material in the National Film Archive (NFA), as the NFL became in 1955. As late as the 1980s many major film production companies remained unwilling to deposit their material. Successive attempts to introduce a system of statutory deposit in the UK to ensure good-quality material in the archives have never had a successful passage through Parliament. From the beginning of the NFL in 1935, it was recognised that a system of selection would be necessary. The first report of the Library Committee at the BFI recognised that whilst “any form of selective system must be unsatisfactory it would be a practical impossibility to keep everything” (Houston 1994: 27). So from the start, the NFL was selective and, though the mechanisms and criteria of selection have developed over the years, it remains selective to this day. Achieving the contribution of films without statutory deposit legislation and making selections from this is still as challenging today as it was in the 1930s.

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Another impediment to the development of a national film archive was the increasing perception of the NFA as, in Penelope Houston’s words, a “fortress archive” (Houston 1994). The archive’s first curator, Ernest Lindgren (between 1935 and 1973), is often portrayed, in opposition to the flamboyant Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Franç aise (in office 1936 to 1977), as the architect of an organisation whose interest was in preservation to the exclusion of allowing access to the films. In the last years of his tenure, this was probably true, and an overwhelming concentration on preservation was still very apparent at the NFA in the 1980s. But in earlier years it is clear that Lindgren had a very different vision of the archive. Writing for the Penguin Film Review in 1948, he proposed that the collection should be housed in “a large and attractive building” equipped with a 500-seat cinema, exhibition space, collections of books, stills and film music, facilities for students and researchers and a lecture hall (Houston 1994: 38). That this vision has never been realised, despite repeated attempts by the BFI over the years to create such a film centre, illustrates the way film struggled, and is still struggling, to be taken seriously as an art form worthy of preservation. Another challenge faced by the film archives was from the material itself. From the pioneering years in the 1890s until the middle of the twentieth century, nearly all cinema film was made on a nitrocellulose base. It was recognised from the first that this was inherently unstable. An early history of the film industry stated: “public and official opinion holds a most positive opinion that motion picture film is a deadly explosive. The reputation of nitro-glycerine is trivial beside it” (Ramsaye 1926: 353). In cinema’s early years, both the industry and the archives had to concentrate on managing this volatility. During the 1940s it became apparent that nitrocellulose was subject to an irreversible breakdown that resulted in the total loss of the image before the reel of film eventually decomposed into a powdery mass with similar properties to gunpowder. Archives around the world set themselves the task of copying nitrate film onto the apparently more stable triacetate film that had superseded nitrate when it was outlawed in 1951. The decomposition of acetate film, dubbed the “vinegar syndrome” because of the smell of acetic acid the process releases, was first spotted in India in the 1950s and in the northern hemisphere in the mid-1970s, and threatened to undo the preservation work of the previous 30 years or more. Furthermore, whilst nitrate decay presented a serious problem to the national archives, particularly affecting the 35-mm cinema collections, vinegar syndrome affected 16mm as well. This impact spread across the newer collections in the archives of the UK Nations and Regions whose holdings of nitrate were less significant in terms of quantity. Faced with two forms of decomposition in their film holdings, the major national archives turned, at least in part, to the newer polyester-based film stocks which did not carry the risk of decay. But from the mid-1960s, a new form of moving image was emerging which was to bring a new set of challenges to the archives and which was to usher in the long demise of film. Over a period of 30 or so years, videotape became the predominant format for broadcasting and amateur film production, introducing a series of new archival challenges. One of the more remarkable features of film is how quickly and how firmly the industry settled on 35mm as a standard and how few other gauges emerged to challenge this. Like film, videotape is a fragile medium requiring technology to both create and display the product. Unlike film, a burgeoning number of different videotape systems emerged, all of which required their own particular technologies to decode. Videotape introduced new

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preservation challenges with the requirement to preserve not only the tape itself, but also a wide range of different, and ultimately obsolete, machines to read the tape. The maintenance of these machines is also a skilled undertaking and the years have seen a falling number of engineers with the ability to maintain such technology. This situation is further compounded by the dwindling availability of spare parts. Though different types of videotape present different characteristics, it is also very apparent that the material itself has a limited lifespan before the picture begins to degrade. This combination of the breakdown of tape, obsolescence of technology and dwindling engineering resource puts archival collections of videotape at a much higher level of risk than the film collections. The solution, as in the preservation of at-risk film collections, has been to create new preservation and access copies. Traditionally the accepted ethical position of the public archives has been to respect the original by creating copies in the medium of original production. But this position raises questions and issues for archivists when the medium of production is obsolete, as is now the case with nearly all videotape and will also soon be the case with film. Before becoming obsolete, the archival approach was to transfer decaying tape materials to a new and “best quality” tape format. Latterly the favoured option was broadcastquality Digital Betacam (Digi-Beta). In some cases, particularly where the cost of DigiBeta was too high, the decision was made to use its analogue equivalent, Betacam SP. But by the time archivists were making these decisions it was in the full knowledge that they were not taking the image into a permanent preservation medium but merely buying time by transferring the image into the best available alternative with as little loss of picture quality as possible. The new master copy could only be a temporary stop on the road to permanent preservation, should a solution ever become available. The era of videotape lasted little more than 40 years from its introduction to being superseded by (largely) tape-free digital technologies. In that time videotape made considerable inroads into replacing film as the technology of choice for home moviemaking and for many commercial, training, promotional and industrial uses as well as in broadcasting. In the cinema, however, it made almost no impact. By the turn of the millennium, new digital technologies were already well established and developing fast in terms of both cinema production and exhibition. In the context of the film archives, these developing technologies were initially viewed as having little application beyond high-end restoration. Entiknap explores the ways in which new technologies developed in film production were adapted and introduced into the major archival restorations at that time (Enticknap 2013). Any generalised archival application of digital technologies, beyond restoration, was too costly to be considered. However, the inexorable progress of digital as a replacement for video technology has inevitably overtaken the archives that have been moved into a position where the preservation of digital material is now a fundamental requirement. We will return shortly to the challenges that this presents to moving image archives but first we must acknowledge that video and digital technologies have presented new opportunities. Throughout the early years of the archive movement, there existed a tension between the needs of preservation and those of access. When the artefact in question was a roll (or rolls) of film, its use inevitably placed it at risk of permanent damage. The passing of a relatively delicate strip of film through the unforgiving mechanisms required

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for projection and the potential for damage meant that strict rules were introduced in the NFA from the outset, limiting use before preservation copying was undertaken. These quota rules along with the high cost of duplication and the relatively limited resource available combined to create the perception that the UK film archives were not interested in making their collections available for people to see, hence the “fortress archive” description alluded to earlier. However, pressure to make film archive collections more widely accessible built throughout the period and the videocassette, already universally used by the NFA for access to off-air recorded television broadcasts, eased that tension by making film materials available for access at lower cost than the full film-to-film copying process. This opportunity was tentatively explored and limited numbers of film titles were copied to tape for research access. However, for cinema exhibition this route was correctly never considered appropriate. The really significant change in the approach to access has developed across the public film archive sector in the UK since the millennium and it arrived simultaneously with a change in the approach to the long-term preservation of film materials. The 1980s saw the beginning of a programme of research into the breakdown of film materials, both nitrate and acetate. Work at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Image Permanence Institute in Rochester, New York pioneered a deeper understanding of the conditions required to inhibit decay. This research led, in turn, to the end of the systematic copying of film from decaying stocks onto new film, which had been driving the NFA since the 1950s. The knowledge that by reducing temperature and relative humidity in storage, one could arrest decay created the possibility of a preservation approach based on storage rather than endless copying. By creating storage conditions conducive to long-term stability of film, copying priorities could be focused on materials required for access. Following significant investment from the UK Government, this new approach was realised by the BFI National Archive when it opened its new worldleading, sub-zero film store at Gaydon, Warwickshire in 2010. But it was not only new understanding of the decay of film stocks that led to change. Other significant drivers were also in place. The perception that the NFA (by now the NFTVA, having added “television” to its name in the 1980s) was restrictive in terms of access was widely held both within and outside the BFI. Growing pressure was placed on the BFI to make the collections more accessible and in the late 1990s the Institute was restructured such that the Archive was no longer autonomous in creating its own policies. Access to the archive was transferred to a new department responsible for access to different services within the wider BFI. The arrival of new senior managers cemented these changes and led the archive to adopt new approaches to preservation. At the same time, the archive adopted a much more curatorial approach to its collections, appointing specialists in different subject areas, and began to invest in research and public presentation and dissemination. Work was also done on the archive’s acquisition policies which had not been formally reviewed for many years. The result was a re-focusing on the core interests of the BFI – the art, history and impact of the medium itself. All of this coincided with a rebranding of the NFTVA as the BFI National Archive. By the mid-1970s the NFA was well established as one of the world’s leading film archives and one that had also begun to embrace the collection of television. At this time a new chapter was beginning in the story of film archiving in the UK. Independently of

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the BFI National Film Archive and of each other, three new public film archives were inaugurated and became the East Anglian Film Archive (based in Norwich and founded in 1976), the Scottish Screen Archive (based in Edinburgh and founded in 1976) and the North West Film Archive (based in Manchester and founded in 1977). In the early 1980s the Film Archive Forum (FAF) was established with a neutral Chair from the British Universities Film Council (BUFC) to act as a meeting point for the NFA and the new archives. A Master’s degree in Film with Film Archiving at the University of East Anglia emerged from this initiative in 1990 and for many years was the only formal qualification for film archivists anywhere in the world. The NFTVA and the BUFC encouraged the establishment of a network of film archives throughout the remaining UK regions and nations. In 2000, that network was finally completed on the UK mainland with the establishment of the Media Archive for Central England (MACE). In 2014, despite some individual difficulties in the intervening years, there exists an increasingly robust, coherent and successful network of archives collecting moving image materials which reflect the history and culture of the regions they serve and increasingly work to support and complement the national collections at the BFI. That these changes also took place against a backdrop of budget cuts and their economic drivers should not be overlooked or underestimated. We will return to these issues in more detail as we look to future challenges. Since the millennium, the arrival and impact of both digital technologies and the internet have introduced opportunities and challenges to the sector. The replacement of VHS with DVD and digital files alongside the inexorable rise in quality and fall in

Figure 24.1  MACE Archive Store © MACE

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the cost of digital scanning and digital cinema projection equipment has meant that this technology rapidly supplanted 35-mm film. Indeed there is now almost no 35-mm projection left with the exception of specialist cinemas occasionally projecting archive prints. A technology that has been with us for 120 years is fast disappearing alongside the technical and projection skills required to maintain it as a viable medium. The first response of the film archivist is a mixture of dismay, anxiety and apprehension along with a sense of excitement at the possibilities opening up. The new digital domain is not just about film or moving images but encompasses everything. Film archives have tended to be ghettoised because of their medium specificity but now have the possibility of putting their treasures into a form where they can be easily accessed, contextualised and understood alongside any other digital artefact, whether it is digitally created or a digital surrogate of the analogue original. The reason for the apprehension around the digital revolution is because, despite its fragility, and its history of decay, if kept in optimum conditions film is still the most stable medium for the long-term preservation of moving images. Yet that stability is likely to be eroded over time as film stock ceases to be manufactured at a cost affordable for public archives and as film laboratories close. What will remain will be collections of film “set in time” where the reels themselves become akin to museum objects and where their sparing projection in cinemas will become a novelty attraction in itself. The opportunity to see film projected as it was at the time it was made is as crucially important to understanding the history of the medium as understanding the limitations of the technology as it developed. Not knowing about the limitations of location sound recording, in the 1930s for example, would prevent an understanding of the studio-bound nature of early sound cinema, or a failure to recognise why early documentaries often had quite an experimental approach to sound. The responsibility of the archives is to keep alive that understanding by maintaining the possibility of witnessing and understanding film in the way it was made to be seen. But this is only one of the many responsibilities and challenges facing archives in this fast-moving digital age whose priorities stretch beyond maintaining the “true” and original film experience. The moving image archives are not only about the history of the medium, although this is a core focus of the BFI. The primary focus of the regional archives is an understanding of the history and culture of their region as reflected in moving image, complementary to the national focus of the BFI. But if the primary focus of the regional archives is “region rather than medium” then access to the collections is a matter of greater concern than the medium in which they are presented, creating extra challenges for archivists in the digital world. A key ethical tenet of film archiving has always been to respect the intentions of the original film maker by preserving their work in the medium of its production. As those original media become obsolete, so it becomes increasingly challenging to meet this ethical standard. As already noted, it is no longer possible to preserve in the original long-obsolete videotape formats and or to preserve much film material in its original medium, forcing archivists to rethink the ethical tenets on which their collections were founded and to embrace new opportunities. It has been argued that the digital world has reopened the old Lindgren-Langlois debate about preservation versus access (Enticknap 2007). But that stark opposition does not reflect reality. Enticknap et al. are right to acknowledge that archives could once

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again be seen as restricting accessibility in an era with a general expectation for universal free access, but the truth is precisely the opposite. Digital technologies have made UK film archives infinitely more accessible and they will continue to increase access by embracing new technologies to enable further public engagement by developing the context and metadata surrounding the moving image material. Rather than archive film being the preserve of a privileged few who have been able to access it, usually on the premises of the archives themselves, the internet offers the opportunity for everyone to see, enjoy and engage with screen heritage. The presentation of this material by archives encourages public engagement and distinguishes it from the offerings of YouTube where, despite the huge mass of material, provenance and context are largely absent. But both approaches offer mutual benefit. The challenge facing archives is how to overcome the perception that, because they are not joining the rush to upload everything to digital platforms, they are somehow restricting access, and to disavow the misconception of the “right” to freely access archive materials. Archival holdings do not belong to archives but are deposited with them. To make them available not only requires investment and the creation of appropriate metadata, but also the permission of the owners. Copyright in moving images has always been a complex and difficult issue and the arrival of digital technologies and the internet has increased this complexity, particularly because the new platforms are global rather than national. If public archives make their collections freely available, they undermine their ability to generate income from the collections they hold. In the face of falling public funding, the requirement to earn becomes ever more urgent if the archives are to continue to acquire a representative selection of moving image and secure it for future generations. It is important not to overlook the challenge of preservation that digital technology presents. There is, as yet, no single, stable, quality platform for preserving digital artefacts. The digital domain is a space requiring complex computer technologies to store, manipulate and decode digital files, and these technologies are constantly changing and developing. Yet the archives have to use these technologies for preservation as well as access. And increasingly the archive’s responsibilities extend into material created digitally as well as digital items copied from analogue originals which, in the case of film, will continue to be preserved. The fundamental archival building blocks of acquisition, preservation and access remain core policy. The changing context in which moving images are created, interpreted and consumed will continue to challenge archives as they adapt established practices to new circumstances. The relative youth and lack of security of the archive sector make these adaptations all the more difficult. But the bold decisions about the future direction of film preservation adopted by the BFI at the turn of the millennium have proved a success. Cherchi Usai offered perspective on this matter in the last statement of his 2010 “Lindgren Manifesto”: “Be aware that the world is not interested in film preservation. People can and should be able to live without cinema” (Cherchi Usai: 2011). Whilst this is certainly true, it is also worth remembering that UK film archives hold important raw material for the study of twentieth-century history and the understanding of who we are and where we came from, and “archives are the bequest of one generation to the next. A society’s provision for its archives is a measure of its civilisation” (Film Archive Forum 1999).

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Further reading Cherchi Usai, P., Francis, D., Horwath, A., and Loebenstein, M., (eds). (2008) Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace, Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen. Enticknap, L. (2013) Film Restoration: The Culture and Science of Audiovisual Heritage, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Houston, P. (1994) Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives, London: British Film Institute.

References Cherchi Usai, P., Francis, D., Horwath, A., and Loebenstein, M., (eds). (2008) Film Curatorship: Archives, Museums, and the Digital Marketplace, Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen. Enticknap, L. (2007) “Have Digital Technologies Reopened the Lindgren/Langlois Debate?” Spectator 27(1): 10–20. Enticknap, L. (2013) Film Restoration: The Culture and Science of Audiovisual Heritage, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film. 1998 Code of Ethics, http://www.fiafnet.org/pages/ Community/Code-Of-Ethics.html. Film Archive Forum (1999) Moving History: Towards a Policy for the UK Moving Image Archives, London: UK Film Archive Forum. Houston, P. (1994) Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives, London: British Film Institute. Kosarski (ed), Film History Vol. 7, No. 3, Film Preservation and Film Scholarship (autumn), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Matuszewski, B. (1995) “A New Source of History, 1898”; Trans.: Laura U Marks, in Diane Kosarski (ed), Film History Vol. 7 No. 3, Film Preservation and Film Scholarship (autumn 1995), Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Philip, Alex J. (1912) Cinematograph Films: Their National Value and Preservation, London: Stanley Paul. Ramsaye, T. (1926) A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture, New York: Simon & Schuster.

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GOOD OF ITS KIND? British film journalism

Sheldon Hall In his introduction to the 1986 collection All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, Charles Barr noted that successive phases in the history of minority film culture in the UK have been signposted by the appearance of a series of small-circulation journals, each of which in turn represented “the ‘leading edge’ or growth point of film criticism in Britain” (1986: 5). These journals were, in order of their appearance: Close-Up, first published in 1927; Cinema Quarterly (1932) and its direct successors World Film News (1936) and Documentary News Letter (1940), all linked to the documentary movement; Sequence (1947); Sight & Sound (1949, the date when the longstanding BFI house journal’s editorship was assumed by Sequence alumnus Gavin Lambert); Movie (1962); and Screen (1971, again the date of a change in editorial direction rather than a first issue as such). Barr further observed: “A strong recurring feature within this influential succession of magazines is a hostility to the established practices of British film journalism and/ or British filmmaking, particularly when the one operates in chauvinistic support of the other” (1986: 6). In some cases, those established journalistic practices were associated with the immediately preceding minority magazine: Movie and its writers defined themselves partly in opposition to the critical ethos represented by Sight & Sound, while Screen similarly took up a position opposed to that of Movie (see, for example, the combative statements made in Perkins 1960, the Introduction to Cameron 1972, Rohdie 1972/3 and Neale 1975). However, aside from certain continuities (such as the importance accorded by both Sequence and Movie to Hollywood directors: see Gibbs 2001), if there is one thing that united these journals it was their antagonism to the prevailing currents of film journalism in the form of the reviewers writing for “lay” newspapers and magazines aimed at the general public: in particular the so-called “quality” press of broadsheet newspapers and middlebrow periodicals (see, for instance, Anderson 1947). Writing the year before the appearance of Barr’s anthology, in an issue of Screen (at that time the journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television) devoted to British cinema, Colin McArthur defined the majority of such mainstream critics (at any time, not just his contemporary moment) as lacking any clear awareness of, let alone having an ability to question, the role of film criticism in cultural life. Their assumptions of what criticism, or reviewing, should be had become so naturalised that it was impossible for such journalists even to articulate them or to detach themselves from the

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ingrained patterns of habit and custom: “You would be hard put to find a public statement by any British film reviewer as to what he/she considers his/her function since that is not the kind of thing the British go in for” (1985: 79). As a reviewer himself, McArthur had been an exception to this rule. When writing a regular column for the left-wing newspaper Tribune from 1971 to 1978, he aimed “to operate a kind of running critique of film journalism as practised in the bourgeois press … describing and interrogating from a socialist perspective all the impulses, mechanisms and institutions of a complex film culture” (1982: 24–5). However, in the three decades since McArthur and Barr wrote their respective accounts of film journalism, academic film studies has found other ways of using the press rather than constructing it as the antithesis of an intellectual or radical film culture. With the advent of “New Film History,” academics now eagerly avail themselves of past critical writing, often courtesy of the microfiche cuttings files held in the British Film Institute Library, as a route to “reception” studies. Rather than dismiss journalistic writing because of its institutionalised limitations or the failed percipience of its practitioners, historians now usually prefer to cite it as evidence of the contextual discourses shaping the perception of cinema; a film’s critical treatment thus becomes a part of its ongoing discursive history – a history of which the historical study itself is a further instance, to be studied dispassionately rather than decried (see Klinger 1997). Thus not only the film industry and its products but also film criticism and other aspects of film journalism have become appropriate objects for study and research by historians who are indeed interested in the complexities of film culture in all their breadth and diversity, albeit often without the oppositional, polemical impulse of earlier writers such as McArthur.

Trade journals and other periodicals There are a number of ways in which film journalism, including criticism or reviewing, can be categorised and its various manifestations grouped. Individual publications can be classed in terms of their intended readership and likely circulation patterns; their subject matter and typical areas of concern; the kinds of material they publish and the range of interests they address; their intellectual and cultural level or reach; and their relationship to the film industry and to other institutions and discourses, such as education, politics and religion. One basic form of categorisation is the distinction between publications aimed at “the trade” and those intended for a lay audience of “civilians.” Among the richest sources of material for film historians are the trade papers typically read by filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors and “showmen,” but rarely by the average filmgoer. From the late 1920s to the early 1970s, the major British film trade papers were Kinematograph Weekly (renamed Kine Weekly in 1960) and Today’s Cinema (known as The Daily Cinema between 1957 and 1968 and then as Cinema TV Today when it merged with Kine Weekly in 1971 before assuming its current incarnation, Screen International, in 1975). These journals, printed on glossy paper and often using colour for advertising displays by film distributors, published news stories and articles of interest to all sections of the industry, along with reviews aimed primarily at exhibitors who were looking for predictions of likely commercial performance as well as comments on production quality (see James 2006). The reviews editor for Kine, R.H. “Josh” Billings, who claimed to see and review all new films personally, also wrote a weekly column on box-office performance

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and compiled an annual box-office survey from 1938 onwards (both taken over on Billings’ retirement in 1963 by the journal’s editor, Bill Altria). It is these lists and summaries which now provide most of what little evidence there is for the commercial performance of particular films in the UK. Before the 1980s, the trade papers rarely published actual figures for either distribution or exhibition grosses, though this began to change in the mid-1960s when weekly figures for individual theatres in the West End of London were released to the press. More generally, however, news items, articles and columns provided plentiful coverage and comment on, and therefore contemporary evidence of, pressing matters of concern for the trade (such as campaigns against taxation), along with information on distribution patterns, exhibition strategies and “showmanship” in the form of advertising stunts and marketing gimmicks. Some of these were stimulated by distributors’ campaign manuals and the major cinema chains’ head offices but others were the work of theatre managers and staff at the local level. It is also worth noting that the major American trade journals, Variety and the Motion Picture Herald, also had London offices whose reporters commented on matters of transatlantic interest, often suggesting different points of view for the US and UK. The polar opposite of the trade press, though also ultimately serving the interests of the industry, were the “fan” magazines aimed at the broadest possible audience. These journals proliferated from about 1911 onwards: according to Andrew Shail (2008), the first UK fan magazine was The Pictures, which specialised in printing the stories (narratives) of current films; this remained a common form of marketing device in later years. Other fan papers, for example Film Pictorial, focused on the public and “private” lives of stars, along with their fashion, makeup and beauty regimes. Such material formed part of the intertextual construction of star images and fed the popular interest in gossip and glamour. More broadly, these publications mediated audiences’ experience of the movies themselves, with their tie-in articles, lavish photo spreads and, in some cases, reviews. The longest-serving British fan weeklies, Picturegoer (known from its inception in 1914 as Pictures and the Picturegoer before shortening its name in 1920) and Picture Show (launched in 1919), both carried review sections; both also published letters columns, an invaluable (if not necessarily uncompromised) source of readers’ opinions when firsthand access to audience responses is impossible (on Picturegoer, see Glancy 2011 and 2014). Ultimately, Picture Show and Picturegoer both went under in 1960, in a period of general commercial decline for the industry at large. The UK’s two major cinema chains, ABC and Odeon, each published a monthly to be sold in theatre foyers. ABC Film Review first appeared in 1950 and lasted in one form or another until as late as 2008; changing its name to Film Review in 1972, it subsequently became the independently critical, popular magazine the title suggests rather than a mere marketing tool. The Rank Organisation’s equivalent, Showtime, lasted only from 1964–7, but Rank and the once separate but jointly owned Odeon and Gaumont circuits also at various times had their own in-house newsletters aimed exclusively at company staff, as did the UK branches of several Hollywood majors such as MGM, Paramount and Universal. The specialist film magazines discussed by Charles Barr and cited at the head of this chapter were read by relatively small audiences, drawn mostly from the universityeducated elite or involved in intellectual film culture in its various forms, whether represented by the London Film Society (the principal influence on Close-Up), the

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documentary movement, the membership of the BFI’s National Film Theatre and other private clubs and repertory cinemas, or the steadily growing and, in the 1970s, blooming film education sector. Although Movie was not strictly an academic journal, initially being pitched at a general if upmarket readership, many of its regular contributors went on to become pioneers of film studies in higher education. It is not coincidental that its electronic successor, Movie Online, is hosted by the University of Warwick, where two of the original magazine’s leading lights, V.F. Perkins and Robin Wood, taught some of the earliest university film courses in the UK. Movie lasted in print form until 2000, but the most durable of the intellectual magazines remains its arch-rival, Sight & Sound, which has at various times since its founding in 1932 been a quarterly and a monthly (as it now is, incorporating the BFI’s previous long-running [1934–91] review journal, the Monthly Film Bulletin). Falling outside the categories of trade journal, fan magazine and “leading edge” critical review, one journal might simply have been written off as a middle-of-the-road publication for middlebrow film buffs were it not for its very distinctive audience address. Films and Filming was published continuously from 1954 to 1980, then following a cessation and a change of editorial policy it resumed publication from 1981 until 1990. Throughout its existence the magazine was home to a wide range of writing, represented at its most intellectually ambitious, as well as most critically offbeat, by the work of Raymond Durgnat. Its feature articles and lead reviews were often substantial, and as with the fan magazines its letters columns provide many insights into audience concerns and matters of public debate concerning the cinema. But Films and Filming has attracted retrospective attention mainly because, particularly in its 1960s heyday, it functioned as an above-ground forum for the still-closeted gay community (see Giori 2009 and Bengry 2011). This sub-cultural identity is most clearly manifested in the use of photographic material and advertising material, whether in the form of homoerotic paid ads from retailers or in the coded messages of personal columns. It often seemed as though the journal was operating two discourses at once, almost independently of one another: the critical and topical coverage of the cinema up front and centre-page, alongside and seemingly innocent of the co-presence of a more subversive voice speaking from the margins and between the lines.

Critics and reviewers Most commentators on criticism make a distinction between critics and reviewers, the latter usually being understood as inferior in seriousness and substance. Reviewers typically write their copy after a single viewing of the film under review, often close to the publication deadline. Because the review is usually published just before or shortly after the film is released, it is typically written in the assumption that the reader will not have seen the film before reading. For that and other reasons, such as the assumption that the review will most likely be used by readers as a consumer guide, influencing their choice of what to see, the writer is limited by how much and what they can say. Reviews are also normally written to fill a given space and several films may have to share that space, limiting further the amount that can be said about any one of them. Newspaper reviewers in particular were (are) also well aware that that space may shrink at short notice if other news or advertising material is added to the page at the last minute. Critics “proper,” on

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the other hand, may write about a film some time after its initial release, taking advantage of further opportunities to view it and feeling entitled to assume that the reader will also have had the time to see it. If the exegesis takes the form of an article or essay rather than a review, considerably more space may be afforded for contextualisation, interpretation and evaluation. Although Sequence, Sight & Sound, Movie and the other “leading edge” magazines all published reviews (often quite lengthy ones, periodicals having greater luxury of space than most newspapers), they all also devoted space to longer analytical articles of this kind. A number of their contributors also published critical monographs, including for example Movie’s Perkins and Wood. However, relatively few British newspaper critics have published books on the cinema, and few of those have been analytical studies of particular filmmakers, genres and so on. Notable exceptions include Observer critic Philip French’s monograph on Westerns (2005) and Times critic David Robinson’s several books on Charles Chaplin. Perhaps the most prolific book-writer among British reviewers is the late Alexander Walker, for many years the film critic of the London Evening Standard; his monographs included historical accounts of the British film industry since the 1960s, studies of stardom and sexuality on screen, several actor biographies and two anthologies of his journalism, but no work of sustained critical analysis. The number of British reviewers whose reviews have been anthologised is also relatively small. Besides Walker (1977) and French (2011), those who collected their journalism during their lifetime included James Agate (1946), more noted as a theatre critic; Graham Greene (1980), more celebrated as a novelist; Richard Winnington (n.d.), a critic well regarded by his contemporaries but now largely as forgotten as his defunct newspaper, the News Chronicle; and the “Sunday ladies,” C.A. Lejeune of the Observer (1947) and Dilys Powell of the Sunday Times (1989, 1992). Posthumous collections were also published for Agate (1948), Greene (2007), Winnington (1976) and Lejeune (1991). Collections of more substantial material, including essays, have been devoted to two influential figures associated mainly with the documentary movement, John Grierson (1981) and Paul Rotha (1958), and to two mavericks: the film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson (2004), who as a critic had been associated with both Sequence and Sight & Sound; and Raymond Durgnat (2014), a notably idiosyncratic voice who was also the author of a number of important monographs, some of them originally published in serial form in Films and Filming. When modern historians have turned to the published writings of reviewers, it has usually been to treat them diagnostically; that is, to read them as evidence of historical discourses shaping the perception and discussion of the cinema, rather than to find exegetical insights illuminating films themselves. There has been particular scholarly interest in the work of female reviewers, including Iris Barry (Wasson 2002, 2006), Winifred Horrabin (Taylor 1992), E. Arnot Robinson (Selfe 2011) and of course Lejeune and Powell (Bell 2011; Selfe 2012). Other figures have attracted attention partly because of their notable achievements outside criticism: not just Greene, Grierson, Rotha and Anderson, of the writers mentioned above, but the novelist George Orwell (Meyers 1979) and Ivor Montagu (Turvey 2002), an important pioneer in minority film culture and in the pre-war British film industry. At least two edited collections aimed to provide a cross-section of contemporary critical reviewing at their respective historical moments: the 1930s in Cooke (1971), which

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samples both British and American journalists; and 1949–51 in Anstey et al. (1951), limited to British writers alone. Cooke’s retrospective introduction to the reprint of his 1937 anthology has the diffident, dilettantish tone, disclaiming any hint of pretension, of someone who wishes to avoid any suspicion of straining after significance; a tone shared, in their prefaces to their own work, by Agate, Greene and Lejeune. Adopting a more incisive approach is perhaps the most cogent (and most frequently cited) study of British film critics from a modern scholar: John Ellis’s account of the “quality” press in the 1940s (Ellis 1978, revised 1996) treated the writings of more than a dozen reviewers as a univocal collective discourse, articulating for as well as through them a shared set of assumptions and values which, he argued, continued to underlie the professional practice of film journalism long after the period in question. It was the failure, the apparent inability, to achieve self-awareness and to practise a more reflective, interrogative form of criticism or commentary which so antagonised Colin McArthur in his “complaint” about British film reviewing, and indeed which had spurred him on to an oppositional practice in his own column in Tribune. But McArthur’s contention that “[b]ourgeois film journalists never reflect on their own critical practice” (1982: 24) is not entirely accurate. In 1959 and 1960 Films and Filming asked a varied selection of writers and broadcasters to do precisely that, in a series of articles appearing on a monthly basis over thirteen issues (the last article being contributed by the magazine’s own editor). I would like to conclude this chapter by summarising these articles to tease out the commonalities and differences among this group of journalists at a particular historical moment. That moment occurred just before the profound disturbance in intellectual circles caused by the “critical debate” over film aesthetics and evaluative principles initiated in 1960 by contributors to the student magazine Oxford Opinion (later to become the founders of Movie), taken up by Sight & Sound and subsequently spreading to virtually every Anglophone outlet of “serious” film criticism over the next few years (see Gibbs 2013). The Films and Filming articles picture British film journalism “before the fall” represented by this debate and by the appearance of Movie and subsequently Screen (little though these minority voices ultimately impacted on the mainstream of film writing); and as this source appears to have been little exploited by scholars, it seems appropriate to allow these self-reflective voices to be heard again.

Critical self-portraits Invited to contribute articles to Films and Filming’s series of “Critical Self-Portraits” were eight newspaper columnists, two writers for weekly periodicals and two regular broadcasters, along with the host magazine’s editor since 1955, Peter Baker. A number of the contributors had been in post since before the last war. The longest-serving, Jympson Harman, had been writing on films since 1913 and as the regular reviewer for the London Evening News since 1921. Campbell Dixon had been the film critic of the Daily Telegraph since 1931, Richard Mallett for the satirical magazine Punch since 1938 and C.A. Lejeune for the Observer since 1928; before that she had written for the Manchester Guardian from 1922–8. Dick Richards had recently taken up residence at the Daily Mirror but had been writing on film since 1929 (Richards also contributed reviews and reporting to Variety). Of the other newspaper regulars, Fred Majdalany had been critic for the Daily Mail from 1946, Leonard Mosley for the Daily Express from 1947 and Paul Dehn

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for the News Chronicle from 1954. It was the policy of The Times to publish reviews anonymously, so Dudley Carew was identified only as the critic of “the paper read by top people” and gave no details of the length of his service. Of the broadcasters, “the distinguished Scottish critic” Forsyth Hardy had written for the Scotsman from 1930–40 while Gordon Gow (Australian-born, like Dixon) was freelance but worked mainly for the BBC, also contributing reviews to Films and Filming. Finally, as a staffer on Picturegoer, Margaret Hinxman wrote for a more “popular,” downmarket film publication. The particularities of their various outlets accounted for some of the differences of emphasis among the critics. As a representative of the most avowedly populist journal, Hinxman insisted on the importance of taking every film equally seriously, asserting that “fans” were just as entitled to an honest opinion as any other type of reader, and in fact were likely to be a more knowledgeable and dedicated readership than most. Similarly, as the only tabloid reviewer, Richards emphasised “honesty of personal assessment” as a core principle. He argued that the critic’s opinion should remain the same irrespective of their outlet and offered the argument (commonplace among tabloid journalists) that he would find it “easier to write for a ‘longhair’ publication than their contributors would for the popular press” (1960: 15). The broadsheet critics did not feel a comparable need for defensiveness, but Mosley was the only writer to express overt disdain for the vulgarity of the popular audience, whereas Harman stated that the critic “does not achieve trust by totalitarian gestures of disdain for the average man’s preferences” (1959: 31). For Baker, the very popularity of the cinema, and of particular films, was a condition of their importance: “If … I devote most of my attention to what goes on in the ‘popular cinema’ it is because these are the films that make the greater impact on the greater number of people and the way they live” (1960: 35). Where did the critic’s primary responsibility lie? For Lejeune it was to her newspaper; for Mosley, to himself. Majdalany argued that the “first requirement of any critic in any field is that he should be entertaining even when the object criticised is not” (1960: 15). Most agreed on the importance of expressing their honest personal opinion and on the necessarily subjective nature of judgments. Harman, Dixon and Richards all made the point that consistently applying their own standards of evaluation made it possible for their readers to make allowances for personal idiosyncrasies and thus to know whether their own tastes coincided or contrasted with the critic’s. The question of “commitment” (a buzz-word in critical circles for several years following Lindsay Anderson’s polemical article of 1956, “Stand up! Stand up!”) was raised by several writers. According to Majdalany, who distinguished a range of different attitudes among his fellow critics, this meant that for some young, left-wing commentators, “criticism is a platform for the airing of political and social resentments” (1960: 15). To Gow, it would have seemed to be taking unfair advantage of the freedom of expression accorded broadcasters to impose his own “viewpoint” on a film; he claimed that his “enthusiasm helps me to recognise virtues in a film that expresses a point of view I don’t happen to agree with” (1960: 13). Harman claimed only to demand “sincerity” in filmmaking while Baker looked for films “that inspire with the right human qualities, that capture the imagination, excite ambition” (1959: 15). Insofar as any critics admitted to making other than aesthetic judgments (or judgments about entertainment value), it was in relation to wider experience of what Hardy called “real life” (1960: 15) as well as the arts. According to Dixon:

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a film is not what theologians call a special creation. It does not originate from nothing, in a void. It is a picture of men and women in a certain set of circumstances, and if the critic knows nothing about such people, and such circumstances, how on earth can he judge whether the picture be true or false? (1960: 15) Here is stated plainly enough the realist, humanist aesthetic often said (by McArthur, for one) to underlie British criteria of value. Lejeune disclaimed interest in “social significance” and stressed the importance of personal opinion but “not personal prejudice. … All critics, being human, have their prejudices, but when they let them get the better of their judgment they are stepping out of line” (1959: 9). Dixon, on the other hand, argued that “All criticism is prejudice,” whether “based on wide knowledge and a cultivated taste, in which case the criticism will be good, or … in ignorance and vulgarity, in which case it will be bad” (1960: 15). Mosley concurred: It is for this reason, especially in a popular newspaper, that a film critic is so inclined to make use of the personal pronoun. He wants to make it plain not only that this is an intensely personal opinion, but exactly what are his preferences and prejudices as he sits in judgment. (1959: 15) As for cinematic specificity, Mallett and Gow claimed to be enthusiasts of the medium for its own sake. Gow’s “idea of a good film is one that uses the techniques at its disposal to the best advantage” (1960: 13). Mallett expressed an interest in the use of “film language … the more interesting to eye and ear it becomes by the use of it the better and more enjoyable I think it is” (1959: 15). He even anticipated the editorial policy of Movie by claiming only to write at length about the films that he had positively enjoyed (for a favourable retrospective assessment of Mallett, see Chatten 2001). More common, however, was the assertion that it was unnecessary for the critic to have any special interest in the cinema as such. In recounting their early careers, Harman and Dixon emphasised that they had been assigned to the job of film reviewer rather than choosing it for themselves. Majdalany admitted frankly: “I think the importance of ‘loving the medium’ is often exaggerated. I do not love the cinema, though I enjoy films and the slightly mad frantic background which provides them. Too much dedication can be a bore” (1960: 15). Richards similarly argued that there was no need to love the medium, though it was best not to hate it, and Carew stated that “a certain coolness, a feeling of not being passionately involved, is to be desired in the film critic – and in the film critic only” (1959: 17). Lejeune claimed that there was “no longer any point in talking ‘art’ to readers. They know as much about film art as I do” (1959: 9). But Carew was the only one of these critics to state openly that “the commercial cinema is not an art; if it is, it is the art of compromise” (1959: 15). Lejeune and Hinxman acknowledged the practical constraints of their job, such as the limitations on space which obliged a certain economy in prose style. Lejeune also referred to the need to make allowances for the possibility of sub-editors’ cuts, which were more likely to be made to the end of a review than the beginning. Several writers hoped that their criticism might have a positive effect on filmmaking, and Gow and

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Richards mentioned the usefulness of having access to insider information about the industry; but only Dehn and Hardy had actively worked in film production: the former as a screenwriter, the latter in documentary. Dehn argued that it was beneficial, if not essential, for the critic to have had some practical experience of the medium, if only to know where and how to apportion credit or blame. Finally, what interpretative or evaluative method did these critics bring to bear on the objects of their scrutiny? Dixon resisted any such notion: “Are contributors to this series expected to lay down principles – to subscribe, as Poe did, to a rationale of criticism? I hope not” (1960: 15). Harman and Hardy hoped to be able to deduce directorial intentions, and the latter gave voice to an archetypal schema: “Discover the purpose, judge its worth, criticise the technique” (1960: 15). Richards offered his own variation: “(a) What is a film setting out to achieve? (b) Is such an attempt worthwhile? (c) How nearly does the film team achieve what it is trying to do?” (1960: 15). Neither critic offered any clue as to how they might “discover the purpose” of the films whose success in achieving it, along with its worth, was to be the subject of their reviews. Mallett acknowledged the challenge of trying to offer a balanced assessment of relative success and failure when the ordinary reader might want nothing more than a simple answer to the question, “Is it good?” (1959: 15). Baker stated plainly that the “critic’s function … is to find and encourage what is good for Cinema” (1960: 15) but could not produce a more precise definition of “a good film” than “the picture I would gladly leave a winter fireside and travel ten miles by public transport on a wet, windy night to see” (1960: 35). But one telling phrase recurs across several articles (Lejeune, Hinxman, Mallett), still begging the questions of definition and discrimination but in its very repetition pointing to a commonly held principle that the critics felt they could best articulate by recourse to a shared mantra: they looked for and applauded a film that was “good of its kind.”

Further reading Donald, J., A. Friedberg and L. Marcus, eds. (1998) Close-Up, 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism, London: Cassell. Selected articles from the first “serious” British film journal. Manvell, R., ed. (1977) The Penguin Film Review, 1946–1949 (two volumes), London: Scolar Press. Complete reprint (nine issues) of a key post-war journal. Wilson, D., ed. (1982) Sight and Sound: A Fiftieth Anniversary Selection, London: Faber & Faber. Complete back runs of Sight & Sound and its sister journal the Monthly Film Bulletin are available online to subscribing members of the British Film Institute.

References Adair, G. (1982) “The Critical Faculty or … ‘My readers may not know much about art, but they know what I like’,” Sight & Sound (Autumn): 248–57. Agate, J. (1946) Around Cinemas, London: Home & Van Thal. —— (1948) Around Cinemas (Second Series), London: Home & Van Thal. Anderson, L. (1947) “Angles of Approach,” Sequence 2: 5–8. —— (1956) “Stand Up! Stand Up!,” Sight & Sound (Autumn): 63–9. —— (2004) Never Apologise: The Collected Writings of Lindsay Anderson, ed. Paul Ryan, London: Plexus Publishing.

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Anstey, E., E. Lindgren, R. Manvell, P. Rotha, eds. (1951) Shots in the Dark, London: Allan Wingate. Barr, C. (1986) “Introduction: Amnesia and Schizophrenia,” in Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI Publishing: 1–29. Bell, M. (2011) “Film Criticism as ‘Women’s Work’: The Gendered Economy of Film Criticism in Britain, 1945–65,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31 (2): 191–209. Bengry, J. (2011) “The Queer History of Films and Filming,” Little Joe 2: 32–39. Cameron, I., ed. (1972) The Movie Reader, London: November Books. Chatten, R. (2001) “Richard Mallett at the Pictures: A Critic in Context,” Journal of Popular British Cinema 4: 30–9. Cooke, A., ed. (1971) Garbo and the Night Watchmen, London: Secker & Warburg. Durgnat, R. (2014) The Essential Raymond Durgnat, ed. H.K. Miller, London: British Film Institute. Ellis, J. (1978) “Art, Culture and Quality: Terms for a Cinema in the Forties and Seventies,” Screen 19 (3): 9–49. —— (1996) “The Quality Film Adventure: British Critics and the Cinema, 1942–1948,” in A. Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, pp. 66–93, London and New York: Cassell. French, P. (2005) Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre, London: Carcanet Press. —— (2011) I Found It at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile, London: Carcanet Press. Gibbs, J. (2001) “Sequence and the Archaeology of British Film Criticism,” Journal of Popular British Cinema 4: 14–29. —— (2013) The Life of Mise-en-scène: Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946–78, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Giori, M. (2009) “‘A Sensible Magazine for Intelligent Film-Goers.’ Notes for a History of Films and Filming (1954–1990),” Paragrafo V: 57–88; available online at https://www.academia.edu/2023952/ Glancy, M. (2011) “Picturegoer: The Fan Magazine and Popular Film Culture in Britain During the Second World War,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31 (4): 453–78. —— (2014) Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Greene, G. (1980) The Pleasure-Dome: The Collected Film Criticism, 1935–40, ed. J.R. Taylor, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2007) Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader, ed. D. Parkinson, London: Carcanet Press. Grierson, J. (1981) Grierson at the Movies, ed. F. Hardy, London: Faber & Faber. James, R. (2006) “Kinematograph Weekly in the 1930s: Trade Attitudes Towards Audience Taste,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 3 (2): 229–43. Klinger, B. (1997) “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies,” Screen 38 (2): 107–28. Lejeune, C.A. (1947) Chestnuts in Her Lap, 1936–1946, London: Phoenix House. —— (1991) The C.A. Lejeune Film Reader, ed. A. Lejeune, London: Carcanet Press. McArthur, C. (1982) Dialectic! Left Film Criticism, London: Key Texts. —— (1985) “British Film Reviewing: A Complaint,” Screen 26 (1): 79–84. Meyers, J. (1979) “Orwell as Film Critic,” Sight & Sound (Autumn): 255–6. Neale, S. (1975) “The Return of Movie,” Screen 16 (3): 112–15. Perkins, V.F. (1960) “Fifty Famous Films 1915–45,” Oxford Opinion 38 (April): 36–7. —— (1972) Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Powell, D. (1989) The Golden Screen: Fifty Years of Films, ed. G. Perry, London: Pavilion/Michael Joseph. —— (1992) The Dilys Powell Film Reader, ed. C. Cook, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Quigley, I. (2003) “Being a Film Reviewer in the 1950s,” in I. MacKillop and N. Sinyard (eds), British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press: 213–20. Rohdie, S. (1972/3) “Review: Movie Reader, Film as Film,” Screen 13 (4): 135–45. Rotha, P. (1958) Rotha on the Film: A Selection of Writings about the Cinema, London: Faber & Faber. Rotha, P., B. Wright, L. Anderson, P. Houston (1958) “The Critical Issue,” Sight & Sound (Autumn): 270–5, 330. Selfe, M. (2011) “‘Intolerable Flippancy’: The Arnot Robertson v. MGM Libel Case (1946–1950) and the Evolution of BBC Policy on Broadcast Film Criticism,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 31 (3): 373–98. —— (2012) “Circles, Columns and Screenings: Mapping the Institutional, Discursive, Physical and Gendered Spaces of Film Criticism in 1940s London,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 9 (4): 588–611. Shail, A. (2008) “The Motion Picture Story Magazine and the Origins of British Film Culture,” Film History 20 (2): 181–97. Taylor, I. (1992) “The Film Reviews of Winifred Horrabin, 1927–45.” Screen 33 (2): 174–83. Turvey, G. (2002) “Towards a Cultural Practice: Ivor Montagu and British Film Culture in the 1920s,” in A. Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930, Exeter: University of Exeter Press: 306–20. Walker, A. (1977) Double Takes: Notes and Afterthoughts on Movies, 1956–76, London: Elm Tree Books. Wasson, H. (2002) “Writing the Cinema into Daily Life: Iris Barry and the Emergence of British Film Criticism in the 1920s,” in A. Higson (ed.), Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain, 1896–1930, Exeter: University of Exeter Press: 321–37. —— (2006) “The Woman Film Critic: Newspapers, Cinema and Iris Barry,” Film History 18 (2): 154–62. Winnington, R. (n.d.) Drawn and Quartered, ed. N. Bentley, London: The Saturn Press. —— (1976) Film Criticism and Caricatures, 1943–53, ed. P. Rotha, New York: Barnes & Noble. “Critical Self-Portraits” series in Films and Filming:   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13

Lejeune, C.A. (1959) “On Not Being Committed” (June): 9 Hinxman, M. (1959) “Even a ‘Fan’ Deserves an Honest Answer” (July): 15 Mosley, L. (1959) “The Audience Is My Enemy” (August): 15 Carew, D. (1959) “A Compromise with Art” (September): 15, 17 Dehn, P. (1959) “Both Sides of a Fence” (October): 15, 29 Harman, J. (1959) “All I Demand Is Sincerity” (November): 15, 31 Mallett, R. (1959) “Honesty Is Best” (December): 15, 27 Majdalany, F. (1960) “In an Age of ‘No Time’” (January): 15 Hardy, F. (1960) “Looking at Reality” (February): 15, 34 Gow, G. (1960) “The Spell of Mere Movement” (March): 13, 34 Dixon, C. (1960) “All Criticism Is Prejudiced” (April): 15, 28 Richards, D. (1960) “Writing for the Masses” (May): 15, 35 Baker, P. (1960) “Without Fear, Favour … or Pretension” (June): 15, 35

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CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA 1980 to the present

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CULT FILMS IN BRITISH CINEMA AND FILM CULTURE Kate Egan In his book British Trash Cinema, I.Q. Hunter notes that “British Cinema is now as closely identified with its cult films … as with its literary, realist and heritage traditions” (2013: 8). One of the key aims of this chapter is to consider how and why this has come to pass. How, for instance, did Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), a putative horror film largely ignored on its original release in the UK, take its place at “the very centre of the new canon of British cinema” (Hunter 2013: 12)? The term and concept of the cult film is heavily associated with the US context, particularly because of its initial development within the midnight movie circuit of the mid to late 1970s. As the rise of television (among other factors) led to a rapid decline in cinema attendance during the 1970s, the midnight movie emerged as a key form of alternative film exhibition in American urban cinemas, which screened underground, art and exploitation films for younger, subculturally orientated or cinephilic audiences in search of alternatives to mainstream taste. As midnight movies such as El Topo (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Eraserhead (1976) inspired repeat viewings for sustained periods in these cinemas and on college campuses, the term “cult movie” gained currency as a means of identifying films which had acquired enthusiastic and devoted followings (in some cases, years after these films’ initial releases), and which exhibited textual features associated with the subcultural, the offbeat, the transgressive or the intertextual. A number of British films, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show, developed – or at least initiated – their cult reputations within this US-specific context. A key aim of this chapter is to consider other, Brit-specific contexts and practices that also informed the development of a parallel and, in some ways, distinct cult film culture in the UK. Indeed, the analysis of cult film processes (or “cultification” processes as they have been termed) has increasing relevance for British cinema studies. It allows for a consideration of how the cultification of particular British films has intersected with the attempts of critics, academics and fans to highlight the diversity of forms of British cinema. Studying the processes through which particular British films have been cultified is a useful lens for exploring how dominant scholarly and public conceptions of British

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cinema have shifted and changed from the late 1960s to the present day. This exploration will therefore involve a consideration of film production strategies, the contexts which have informed the cultification of particular British films and the shifting contexts of consumption that have fed into the wider development of cult film culture in the UK. As Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton have shown, “cult is a term that now has more currency than ever” and is becoming increasingly multi-faceted in its uses and meanings, encompassing not only film texts but also cultures of marketing, distribution, exhibition and consumption (2011: 242). This chapter will therefore consider the ways in which the increasingly complex uses of the term and notion of cult have impacted on the British context, in terms of both shifting conceptions of particular British films and broader conceptions of British film fandom, and its interplay with the contexts and platforms through which British and non-British cult films have been consumed, discussed and appreciated (including in different kinds of cinemas, through television screenings, on video and DVD, and via the internet). To begin with, however, we need to turn to what has come to be termed the classic “canon” of British cult films.

The British cult film canon and the “age of the cult film” In his 2010 book Withnail and Us, Justin Smith focuses on the key group of British films that have come to form the familiar “canon” of British cult cinema. Smith recognises that the majority of these films – Performance (released in 1970 but made in 1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Get Carter (1971), The Wicker Man, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tommy (1975), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Quadrophenia (1979) – were made in what he terms “the age of the cult film” between 1968 and 1979 (2010: 3). Specific circumstances (both industrial and social) informed the emergence of this “age”, many of which paralleled changes which fed into the development of midnight movie culture in the US. Smith emphasises not just the critical and consumption contexts through which these films subsequently came to be appreciated as cult – during what he terms the “age of the film cult” running from 1976–96 (2010: 3) – but also “the importance of cultural and economic changes during the 1960s in the production of a new kind of film which is later considered cult” (2010: 214, my emphasis). First, and mirroring the US context, he identifies “the formation of niche tastecommunities as a result of the fragmentation of the exhibition industry” in the UK as a significant factor (2010: 87). Second, Smith points to key social shifts occurring in Britain during the late 1960s in terms of attitudes to sex, politics and class. These were propelled and exemplified by “the rise of a predominantly youth-orientated counter-culture” in the late 1960s, which, very much tying in with the industry’s attempts to address younger cinemagoers, “allowed for the treatment of hitherto taboo subjects in new forms across a range of cultural texts” (2010: 87). Third, in terms of British film production strategies, investors – in particular, Hollywood studios who were investing in British films heavily in the late 1960s and early 1970s – were willing (due to the first two contexts outlined above) to support films that produced, funded, wrote, directed and starred what Smith terms “loose associations of diverse (sometimes untried) talent” during this period (2010: 44). This included what Smith terms the “new ‘Chelsea set’ – of artists, film-makers … fashion people, actors, musicians … and underworld criminals who controlled and

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produced the cutting-edge cinema” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and were intimately tied to the youth-orientated countercultural developments and the flourishing of youth subcultural movements during this period (2010: 66). Of note here is the fascinating cultural influence of figures associated with the underworld, which seemed to feed into a distinctly British tradition of gangster films that would subsequently be heralded as cult (most prominently, Performance and Get Carter). However, the influence of this pool of diverse talent also clearly informs the intersections between British film culture and pop music culture that became firmly established during this period. The cross-media intersection of British film and pop music culture – and its relation to Smith’s “Chelsea set” – is most apparent in the casting of rock stars in some of these films or via the central showcasing of a rock band’s music (most obviously, in terms of Tommy and Quadrophenia’s status as film versions of The Who’s albums of the same name). This was clearly related to the attempt to appeal to the youth audiences and subcultural groups addressed by British film productions at this time, and there were a number of consequences for the potential cult appeal of these films. In the US, films like Quadrophenia, and the earlier Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964), were embraced as cult films because of the youth following for the “British Invasion” bands of the 1960s and 1970s. As Stephen Glynn notes, citing historian Arthur Marwick, a particularly pronounced aspect of Britain’s “cultural revolution” during “the long sixties” (the early 1950s to the early 1970s) was the development of British pop music as a “distinctive cultural artefact” (2013: 2). This gave British films that showcased the “glorious music” associated with “the Mod subculture in England” (Peary 1983: 133) a marked, nationally specific appeal in the US context. In addition, while Mick Jagger, Roger Daltrey and David Bowie were playing characters rather than themselves in Performance, Tommy and The Man Who Fell to Earth, they brought the “emblematic value” and “potent symbolism” of their “existing profile” to the films and these characters (Glynn 2013: 7; Smith 2010: 146–8). The tension between these stars’ amateur, “untrained” acting style (Smith 2010: 166) and the meanings they brought with them to the screen from their rock star profiles suggested that “the conventional distinction between actor and character” was breaking down in these films (2010: 148). The tension, for instance, between Jagger “being himself” and “playing the part” in Performance is key to the film’s distinctive qualities and its potential cult appeal (2010: 49). While this illustrates how “the dispersal of creative agencies at work during the production” of these films fed into their distinctiveness (Smith 2010: 13), other cultural contexts informed the films’ production. Many of the films are versions of a “familiar adolescent rites-of-passage initiation” (Smith 2010: 100), tapping into themes relating to identity, masculinity and adulthood, and the associated tension between rebellion and conformity. Such themes have a specific relation to the British countercultural and youth movements of the late 1960s. Although associated with sexual experimentation, drug cultures, anti-authoritarian politics and alternative belief systems, there was a tension in the counterculture between, on the one hand, hedonism and affluence and, on the other, a reaction against such “material hedonism” and its complicity with consumerism and capitalism (Smith 2010: 44). To some extent, these countercultural themes and influences were also prominent in key American cult films made during the 1960s and 70s, such as Easy Rider (1969), Harold and Maude (1971) and Two-Lane Blacktop (1971).

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However, the growing cult appreciation of the British cult canon films throughout the 1980s and 90s – as well as the cultification of more contemporary British titles during this period – was consistently related to specifically British subcultural movements and pop and rock-music-inflected cultures. This encompassed nostalgia for Mod and punk influences (informing the continuing cult reputation of Quadrophenia), the embracement of contemporary musical styles such as indie and rave (feeding, in particular, into the almost immediate cult appeal of Trainspotting (1996)), and the countercultural paganism associated with British occultist Aleister Crowley, which was an evident influence on Performance but also part of the growing cult appeal of a range of British horror films made in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, from Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) to Hellraiser (1987) (Hunt 2002).

Revising and cultifying British cinema: from critics to fans to home-viewing industries A number of critical contexts propelled the cult reputations of the British canon, long after their initial release dates. Some films became staples of midnight movie screenings in the US (A Clockwork Orange, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tommy and Quadrophenia), while The Wicker Man was initially rediscovered and championed in the US in 1977 through the American film magazine Cinefantastique and via a re-release tour of US college campuses and urban cinemas. The inclusion of a significant number of British film titles in Danny Peary’s Cult Movies trilogy of books in the 1980s further consolidated a canon of cult films in the American context. Two other key contexts, however, are British. Both relate to the project of uncovering lost and alternative traditions of British cinema, which has been taken up more recently by media companies as well as academics, critics and fans. The first of these two, slightly overlapping, contexts concerns the impact on British film studies of Julian Petley’s 1986 essay, “The Lost Continent”. Petley championed the cultural significance of a “lost continent” of popular cinema across British film history which was commercially successful but “received critically with fear and disapproval” (1986: 98). Encompassing the fantastic and romantic films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, as well as Gainsborough melodramas, the horror output of Hammer and Amicus studios, and the films of such art cinema auteurs as Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway, this “lost continent” of British cinema emerged, as I.Q. Hunter notes, “from deeply culturally embedded traditions of fantasy” as well as “romance”, “absurd humour” and “anti-realism” within British culture (2013: 4). Petley was the key initiator of what Hunter calls a “new wave of revisionism” in British film studies (2013: 10), whose attempt to identify alternative British film traditions impacted on the initial critical identification of the canon of British cult films. The second key context was established during the 1980s and 1990s, largely cognisant with Smith’s conception of “the age of the film cult”, and related to the activities of a number of key British cultural and media platforms. The cultification of Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia provides a useful case study for exploring these and their impact. As Stephen Glynn notes in his book on Quadrophenia’s cult status, it was only after the film’s cult consecration in the US that it became “a cult film in the UK rather than just a film about [the] cult” of the 1960s Mod youth culture depicted in the film (2014: 116). This was initiated by the film’s UK

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video release in 1986, and then solidified by its cinema and DVD re-release in 1997. But between these two releases, a “second wave Mod revival” (Glynn 2014: 108) – subsequent to the initial revival associated with Quadrophenia’s original release as an album in 1973 and then as a film in 1979 – was facilitated by a number of factors. As an emblem of Mod culture, the film was taken up and celebrated in music cultures in the 1990s through samples on indie dance tracks, Mod-themed nights at indie and rave clubs, articles in the British music press, and, most prominently, through its embracement by Britpop bands such as Blur in the mid-1990s, with the film’s star Phil Daniels featuring on their Britpop anthem, Parklife, in 1994. Furthermore, Quadrophenia (and other key titles from the British cult film canon, particularly crime and gangster films such as Get Carter and The Italian Job (1969)) was also embraced, during this period, by the “new lad” popular magazine culture in the UK, most prominently through the infamous “lads” magazine Loaded. This, while contributing significantly to their cult status, was based on the “nostalgic rehearsals of unreconstructed machismo” offered by malecentred films such as Quadrophenia, A Clockwork Orange and Get Carter (Smith 2010: 61). However, by highlighting a kind of British cinema distinct from, for example, the much-vaunted tradition of British heritage cinema, this was in line with the project of identifying a “lost continent” or, as Moya Luckett calls it, an, “alternative heritage” within British cinema since the 1960s. This alternative heritage focused on distinctly British versions of “everyday life” (Luckett 2000: 88) of the kind that Peary celebrates in his account of Quadrophenia in Cult Movies 2 (1983: 132–4). This tradition’s roster of titles would subsequently be bolstered by the inclusion of more contemporary British films about everyday life at the margins, including Naked (1992), Trainspotting and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), in Ali Catterall and Simon Wells’ 2002 book, Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties. The journey of Quadrophenia to cult status in the 1980s and 1990s also connects to another factor of central pertinence to the cult consecration of the British film cult canon, and which is foregrounded in Catterall and Wells’ book: the importance of location. Glynn notes that the premiere of the film’s 1997 cinema re-release was heralded by the cast, crew and the press taking the “Quadrophenia Express” from London to Brighton, the location of many of the film’s key scenes including the alleyway where the lead character, Jimmy, has sex with his girl, Steph (2014: 111). The real locations used in many of the canonical films have made them the “focus of nostalgic fan activity” for the films’ devotees – Performance’s Powis Square townhouse, Get Carter’s car parks and bridges in the North East, The Wicker Man’s caves and cliffs in South-West Scotland, and Withnail and I’s Lake District cottage (Smith 2010: 169). As Paul Newland has argued in relation to Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), pilgrimages to locations allow fans to reconnect spiritually not just to the diegetic world of the film but, echoing the subtitle given to Quadrophenia on its UK re-release, to the “way of life” which the films depict and explore (2014: 8). This cult tourism is similar and indeed an alternative to “the popularity of heritage sites, including locations that have featured within heritage films and television programs” (Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 59). The prominence of The Wicker Man as one of the most enduring sites of British cult pilgrimage also points to wider notions of alternative heritage associated with British cult films. This relates above all to the cult of British “folk horror” that has emerged in the last decade or so. While on the website www.folkhorror.com, folk horror encompasses “works of literature, cinema and

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television” (accessed 10/5/15), a number of folk horror’s key texts are British “occult horror” or “rural horror” films from what Leon Hunt terms the sub-genre’s “second phase” between 1966 and 1976 (2002: 83). Hunt identifies the “determinant” informing these “second-phase” films as a “growing popular interest in paganism” and occultists such as Crowley from the late 1960s, which “was partly bound up with uncovering a more ‘authentic’ national identity and culture” (2002: 92). This focus on the occult and paganism as an alternative, hidden form of British heritage has fed into fan pilgrimage culture in the UK, as evidenced, for instance, by the “English Heretic” organisation which has published a booklet and CD entitled “The Sacred Geography of British Cinema”, which maps out the sites in Southern England where the witch-hanging scenes in Witchfinder General (1968) were filmed. The associations of Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man with notions of “folk horror” and “alternative heritage” have strengthened their cult reputations, but these cultural trends have propelled cult interest in a wider range of British horror films from the 1960s and 70s, particularly Blood on Satan’s Claw but also, for instance, Hammer’s The Witches (1966) and The Devil Rides Out (1968). Indeed, in recent years the number of British films initiated into British cultdom has expanded rapidly, well beyond horror. On the one hand, this relates to the fact that the films at the centre of the British cult canon have become almost too familiar, well known and respected. As Stephen Glynn notes, that the mayor of Brighton introduced Quadrophenia on the occasion of its 1997 re-release premiere suggests that this cult film about subcultures had now become “explicitly incorporated” into mainstream culture (2014: 111). Particularly illustrative, in this respect, is Julian Upton’s film-fan-orientated book Offbeat. Foregrounding British cinema’s “curiosities, obscurities and forgotten gems” from the 1950s to the 1980s, the book’s back cover notes that “with critics singing from an over familiar hymn sheet of so-called ‘cult films’, there remains an epoch of British cinema still awaiting discovery that is every bit as provocative and deserving of attention” (2012: back cover). This focus on the forgotten and obscure in British cult cinema, rather than the longevity and intensity of fan investment in the British cult canon, is also evident in the British Film Institute’s Flipside DVD series. Flipside has released many of the titles featured in Upton’s book and its website states that it is “dedicated to rediscovering cult British films” and “reclaiming a space for forgotten British films and filmmakers who would otherwise be in danger of disappearing from our screens forever” (shop.bfi.org.uk/dvd-blu-ray/bfi-flipside-sale.html, accessed: 27/2/15). This suggests that the most familiar titles of the British cult film canon are losing their cult status through “frequent television broadcasts and regular, respectful DVD releases” (Upton 2012: 3). At the same time, it shows that the meanings and uses of the concept of cult have broadened within British film culture, as the term has come to be employed by a wider range of agents, including home media companies and film festival organisers.

The cultification of British consumption sites, practices and experiences Since the 1970s, a distinct cinephilic and cult film culture has emerged in Britain. As with midnight movie screenings in the US, independent and repertory cinemas, most prominently the legendary Scala cinema in London, have played a key role in show­ casing film titles (both British and international) that would come to be associated with

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the cult label, and bringing together communities of cinemagoers who became devoted to such films. Richard McCulloch (2011), in his research on contemporary British audiences of the recent US cult film, The Room (2003), has shown how contemporary equivalents of the Scala, such as the Prince Charles Cinema, London, are contributing to the development of new cult film communities and consumption rituals in the UK. However, midnight screening cultures have always been a much smaller-scale enterprise in the UK than in the US. The crucial cultural shifts that impacted on the development of British cult film culture were, first, the introduction of domestic video in the late 1970s and, second, the increasing importance of television as a site of film consumption in the 1980s and 90s. Both led to the wider dissemination of a range of films that had begun to develop cult reputations. In terms of video, the key, specifically British context for the development of a cult film culture was the “video nasties” media panic of 1982–4. The sudden availability of uncertified international horror and exploitation films on video in Britain became the focus of press attention, leading, ultimately, to many of these titles being banned on video via the implementation of the 1984 Video Recordings Act (VRA), which legally required that all video releases be submitted to the British Board of Film Classification for approval and certification. As I argue in my study of the cultural history of the video nasties, Trash or Treasure?, there are a number of factors that explain the importance of the “video nasties” panic to the development of cult film culture in the UK. First, and particularly for those living outside of London and therefore without access to repertory cinemas such as the Scala, the early pre-VRA years of video gave British film fans unprecedented access to European and American exploitation films from the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. Second, for many young British film fans in the 1980s, the subsequent media hysteria over and banning of these videos was their “first experience” of film censorship and media moral panic (Holmes in Egan 2007: 196). As Mathijs and Sexton note, the consequent “labeling of people who enjoyed such films as somehow deviant” through this censorship and media panic therefore “strengthened a sense of community” among fans of these films (2011: 63) and consolidated the status of this fan culture as anti-mainstream and anti-establishment. As a result, for fans like Hunter, defending the value of these films (and other associated horror and exploitation titles) perhaps “mattered more” for him and other British film fans than for cult film fans in the US (Hunter 2013: 30). Finally, fans’ investment in the video nasty titles and their associated meanings fed into a broader cult interest in horror and exploitation films among British film fans during this period, illustrated by the production of fanzines and the formation of video-collecting communities focused on obtaining both illegal pre-VRA and other video versions of these titles throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. The cultural impact of the video nasty era in the UK is still evident in many contemporary media products targeted at cult film enthusiasts. For instance, the contemporary British company, Arrow Video, not only re-released a number of the video nasty titles – Island of Death (1976), Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), Contamination (1980), Inferno (1980), The Beyond (1981) and Tenebrae (1982) – but explicitly reference the look of early UK video in their DVDs’ artwork, posters and company logo. In addition, Jamie Sexton has drawn attention to the contemporary proliferation of British independent record companies releasing cult film soundtracks for a range of titles associated with the video nasty era (particularly Italian horror titles) which, in some cases, have been released on cassette

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and packaged in “clamshell cases” clearly designed to “evoke the predominant mode of VHS packaging” (2015: 17). However, of equal importance to the development of cult film culture in the UK, from the late 1970s to the 1990s, was the increase in film screenings on late-night British television, which informed the shared experiences of different generations of British cult film fans. As Matt Hills has noted, the history of Hammer horror in the UK is very much tied to fans’ “memories of watching TV double bills” of Hammer titles on late-night television in the late 1970s (2014: 239). This fed into enthusiasm for and critical championing of British horror films among a whole generation of British fans, journalists and academics (see, for instance, Kermode 2001 and Hutchings 2008). Furthermore, in recent years, the range of internet sites devoted to the appreciation of the BBC2 television series Moviedrome have increased in number. Focused on screening cult films, Moviedrome ran on British late-night television between 1988 and 2000, with each film being accompanied by a contextualising introduction from British filmmaker Alex Cox and in later seasons British critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins. On dedicated fan sites (such as Moviedromer and the Moviedrome archive) and general fan and music sites like Den of Geek and The Quietus, fans of the series have identified the ways in which Moviedrome served as a cult film gatekeeper for a generation of British film fans, and not only introduced them to cult cinema but inspired an enduring love of cinema in general. Moviedrome gave fans background information about cult films – including British titles The Wicker Man and Psychomania (1973) – that was hard to access before the internet, and helped democratise access to and appreciation for cult cinema among those who saw it as a distant culture associated with film screenings in London or the US. The increasing existence of these accounts and the acknowledgement of the shared experiences of a generation of Moviedrome fans illustrate the illuminating nature of the ongoing work that is being done by both scholars and fans to flesh out the history of British cult film cultures, and the significance of the sites, platforms, practices and experiences that have characterised it. Justin Smith identifies a distinct shift in British cult cinema since the late 1990s, towards a “post-cult” world where films like Trainspotting can be seen to be self-consciously constructed and marketed as “cult” (2010: 193). However, the trends and practices identified in this chapter continue to play roles in the identification of more contemporary British cult titles (whether consciously constructed as cult, or otherwise). Consider, for instance, the pilgrimages to North London locations associated with Shaun of the Dead (2004) fandom (Newland 2012), the video nasty and folk horror-influenced aspects of Neil Marshall’s cult horror film Dog Soldiers (2002) (Walker 2011; Walker 2012), and the intertextual, Brit-cult references to Don’t Look Now (1973) and the British gangster tradition that constitute a key part of the growing cult reputation of In Bruges (2008) (King 2011). Cultifying practices within British cinema and film culture are clearly adapting to an era of new media and “self-conscious cultism”, but they still continue, to varying degrees, to draw on the legacies of British cult cinema’s past.

Further reading Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties, Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Charts the establishment of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, and the horror video-related fan and collecting cultures that subsequently emerged in the UK.)

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Glynn, S. (2014) Quadrophenia, London: Wallflower Press. (A comprehensive study of the cultural and social circumstances that informed the production and subsequent cult status of this canonical British cult film.) Hunter, I.Q. (2013) British Trash Cinema, London: BFI. (Tracks the historical development of trash cinema production with the UK, which has significant crossovers and connections with the shifting status of British cult cinema.) Mathijs, E. and J. Sexton (2011) Cult Cinema: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. (A comprehensive overview of a wide range of debates and historical traditions relating to cult cinema.) Smith, J. (2010) Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. (Explores the cult appeal and status of the key canonical British cult films of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, focusing on salient production and consumption contexts as well as key textual elements of the films concerned.)

References Catterall, A. and S. Wells (2002) Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties, London: Fourth Estate. Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Glynn, S. (2013) The British Pop Music Film: The Beatles and Beyond, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. —— (2014) Quadrophenia, London: Wallflower Press. Hills, M. (2014) “Hammer 2.0: Legacy, Modernization, and Hammer Horror as a Heritage Brand,” in R. Nowell (ed.) Merchants of Menace: The Business of Horror Cinema, pp. 229–50. New York: Bloomsbury. Hunt, L. (2002) “Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in British Horror,” in S. Chibnall and J. Petley (eds) British Horror Cinema, pp. 82–98. London: Routledge. Hunter, I.Q. (2013) British Trash Cinema, London: British Film Institute. Hutchings, P. (2008) “Monster Legacies: Memory, Technology and Horror History,” in L. Geraghty and M. Jancovich (eds) The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labeling Films, Television Shows and Media, pp. 216–28. Jefferson: McFarland. Kermode, M. (2001) “I Was a Teenage Horror Fan: Or, ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love Linda Blair,’” in M. Barker and J. Petley (eds) Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, pp. 126–34. London: Routledge, 2nd edition. King, G. (2011) “Striking a Balance Between Culture and Fun: ‘Quality’ Meets Hitman Genre in In Bruges,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 9 (2) (June): 132–51. Luckett, M. (2000) “Image and Nation in 1990s British Cinema,” in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 88–99. London: British Film Institute. Mathijs, E. and J. Sexton (2011) Cult Cinema: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell. McCulloch, R. (2011) “Most People Bring Their Own Spoons: The Room’s Participatory Audiences as Comedy Mediators,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 8 (2) (November): 189–218. Newland, P. (2012) “Shaun of the Dead and the Construction of Cult Space in Millennial London,” Research Seminar, Aberystwyth University. —— (2014) “Another Kind of Pilgrim Walks the Way: A Canterbury Tale, Fan Pilgrimage as Spirituality, and the Cultural Landscaping of Kent,” Conference Paper presented at the Screen conference, Glasgow. Peary, D. (1981) Cult Movies, London: Vermillion. —— (1983) Cult Movies 2, London: Vermillion. Petley, J. (1986) “The Lost Continent,” in C. Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, pp. 98–119. London: British Film Institute.

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Sexton, J. (2015) “Creeping Decay: Cult Soundtracks, Residual Media, and Digital Technologies,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 13 (1): 12–30. Smith, J. (2010) Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris. Upton, J. (ed.) (2012) Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems, London: Headpress. Walker, J. (2011) “Nasty Visions: Violent Spectacle in Contemporary British Horror Cinema,” Horror Studies, 2 (1): 115–30. —— (2012) “A Wilderness of Horrors? British Horror Cinema in the New Millennium,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9 (3): 436–56.

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27

THE SCALA CINEMA A case study

Jane Giles The Scala was a notorious and influential London repertory cinema operational in Fitzrovia (1978–81) and King’s Cross (1981–93) during a time of significant change for the British film industry. This period saw both an all-time low in cinema-going in 1984 and the emergence of video home entertainment as an important economic force for film. The Scala’s parent company Palace Pictures (1981–92) changed the film landscape with its video shops, VHS label, film distribution arm, production company and offshoots for video games, music videos and television. The British Board of Film Censors grappled with the evolution of film classification and the Government passed the Video Recordings Act in 1984 to restrict home video. Years of Tory government (1979–97), the recession and a greater social awareness of global concerns created politicised divisions that were part of youth culture. All of this shaped the history of the Scala and was reflected in its programme. The Scala was never the oldest or most heavily subsidised cinema in the UK, nor did it always find favour within the law or with film’s guardians of good taste. But since the Scala’s closure in 1993 its name has become a byword for both a certain type of film and a subversive attitude towards cinema exhibition and experience, with its cultural influence strongly attested. Interviewed for the 2011 film programming project Scala Forever (later Scalarama), Peter Strickland said “It felt as if the Scala cinema was an extension of the film I was watching … that cinema was a refuge from Suburbia” and fellow director James Marsh said, “As a teenager, even going there was an adventure … I always picked up the monthly calendar. I loved that – with all its promise of more movies to watch” (Pierce 2011: 15, 24).

The Scala Theatre (1911–69) The pre-story of the Scala starts in the site of a theatre dating back to 1772 in Charlotte Street, London W1. Charles Urban first took over the theatre as a cinema from 1911–18, during film’s early boom years. It was in the Scala Theatre that Olwen Vaughan (1905–73) with writer Rodney Ackland began the New London Film Society, successor to Ivor Montagu’s highly influential Film Society, with a “Festival of Great Films” in December 1945. The New London Film Society ran for ten seasons, screening mostly silent cinema but also some premieres, and members were actively encouraged back to Vaughan’s Piccadilly

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drinking establishment, The French Club, to discuss the films. Vaughan would move the New London Film Society’s programme from the Scala to the newly built National Film Theatre in 1953. The Scala Theatre was used by the Beatles for the concert sequences in the film A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and was finally demolished after a fire in 1969.

The Other Cinema 1976–7 In 1969, a conference at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) examined the distribution and exhibition of British and independent films. How to take control of the route to audience was an enduring concern of filmmakers, and the agenda focused on setting up a “third circuit” of regional exhibitors linked by a central programming organisation. Peter Sainsbury was appointed to the (unpaid) position of organiser of the “Parallel Cinema”, soon to be known as the Other Cinema, joined by Nick Hart Williams (ex-ICA) and reporting in to a council of management. The Other Cinema started as a distribution company, building its catalogue with the films of Peter Whitehead, Jean-Luc Godard and the post-revolutionary Cuban cinema programmed at the NFT by Politkino’s Andi Engel in 1969. With no venue of its own, the Other Cinema screened at The Place dance studios in Euston, Cinecenta’s King’s Cross Cinema and the Collegiate Theatre of University College London in Bloomsbury. In the mid-1970s the Other Cinema’s council of management included filmmakers Marc Karlin, James Scott, Laura Mulvey and Stephen Dwoskin who raised funds matched by the BFI for a venue. The site was an empty shell in the basement of a nondescript new build at 25 Tottenham Street on the edge of the former Scala Theatre; for an estimated £35,000 it could be converted into a subterranean 300+ seat cinema with a café bar. Plans to include a smaller second screen were considered too costly, although in every other way the venue was designed to accommodate plurality and different formats, with 35-mm, 16-mm, doubleband projection and a screen that could mask all ratios, plus a PA system for simultaneous translation of unsubtitled film. Former Collegiate usher and politically active Slade film student Paul Marris, then organising the first major annual conference of the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA), was appointed as programmer. In October 1976 the Other Cinema opened with a first run of a BFI-funded feature that suited the collective’s ideals, Winstanley (1975), the life story of the seventeenthcentury social reformer. The Other Cinema developed a tight programme structure to support a range of films. It opened a new first run feature every month, screening daily at 9pm. With a focus on socialist cinema, seasons based around auteurs or national cinemas showed earlier on weekday evenings. Thematic programming included a season on “Women and Work: Waged and Unwaged”; another was built around Eric Hobsbawn’s theories of social banditry. The programming of feature-length documentaries, including Joris Ivens’ multi-part documentary How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976), was an adventurous move for a West End cinema, but logical given how many of the collective were non-fiction filmmakers. Once a week, the cinema profiled the work of a young new British independent filmmaker. On Saturday evenings it was rented out to campaigning organisations such as Music for Socialism (the precursor to Rock Against Racism) and the show was integrated into the public programme. Sundays were reserved for a film plus event, including speakers, discussions and live music; the events were the single most successful element of the programme.

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The collective believed that the Other Cinema needed to be located in the prime real estate of London’s West End, but its films appealed only to a niche market, and over-extended runs soon exhausted an audience that could not be significantly developed or expanded. Furthermore the cinema was operated by filmmakers and academics with inexperienced and volunteer staff, which meant a lack of professional presentation. The Other Cinema’s distribution library by then featured 170 titles including the films of Peter Watkins, David Cronenberg, Stephen Dwoskin, Werner Herzog, David Larcher, Fred Wiseman and Ousmane Sembene, amongst the Latin American cinema and subject-driven documentaries. But with the distribution company self-defeating by scrimping on print investment and the cinema haemorrhaging cash, soon the entire operation was struggling. The collective went public with financial appeals in September 1977, but the project could not be funded by individual subscriptions and state funds for the arts were limited. In November the Other Cinema asked the BFI for a further £50,000. Peter Sainsbury, by then running the BFI Production Board, later noted that the Institute was divided on the grant request, with agreement on the principle of additional financial support, but disagreement on whether this should be at arm’s length or conditional on policy and guidance. Despite the fact that the venue was committed to showing exactly the type of film that it was producing, the BFI’s Board of Governors turned down the application. The Other Cinema moved into liquidation and the venue closed in January 1978.

The Scala 1979–81 Amidst the chaos and power struggles that a collective can generate was Stephen Woolley (b.1956), a front-of-house manager and the token punk on board the Other Cinema. He had already worked as an usher at Islington’s Screen on the Green, an audacious, commercially successful cinema that had once been Woolley’s childhood favourite local fleapit, the Rex, and was transformed by Romaine Hart into an art house in 1970. The Screen’s programmer Roger Austin was a former studio publicist and great showman with a keen sense of how to attract audiences; he had Little Nell naked in a bathtub onstage for The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and was one of the first to put on punk gigs (the Sex Pistols played there in 1976). Woolley also understood what made a good cinema and what audiences wanted from his obsessive trawling of London venues in search of films to cross off his list. He was not a specialist and hungered to see everything from new releases to Hollywood classics, European art house, political cinema and experimental filmmaking. The Other Cinema had advertised in Time Out for a manager, and Woolley got the job. Going from the raucous world of the Screen on the Green to the right-on politics of the Other Cinema was a culture shock, but as a true cinephile Woolley loved the films, if not the collective’s unprofessionalism. After the closure of the Other Cinema, Nick Hart Williams obtained private backing to reopen the venue as the Scala. But the programming was the same kind of films in over-extended runs. House manager Woolley was fired after an incident involving a disastrous combination of a sold-out children’s matinee, technical breakdown and the short-changing of an important customer (John Cleese, one of the Scala’s investors at the time), but returned to stage a programming coup with co-worker Richard Dacre. They put on a series of music movies that had a larger appeal, and through Woolley’s

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association with the American-born film and music producer Joe Boyd, Virgin’s Richard Branson and his business partner Nik Powell were persuaded to invest in a new programme model, one that was very rock ‘n’ roll. Impressed by the Scala’s aggressive young management and their promise of American marketing techniques, the cinema was a good fit for Virgin whose property interests at that time included record shops, music venues and a video editing facility. Just weeks after the May 1979 election which saw Margaret Thatcher come to power, Woolley re-launched the Scala with a daily changing programme of double bills and Saturday all-night shows, publicised on an iconic monthly calendar sheet that was inspired by the publicity materials of Californian repertory cinemas the Roxy and the Nuart. The Scala was a club cinema, charging a democratic 30p (about £1.30 today) for annual membership. Membership status enabled the cinema to apply to its local licensing authority (Camden Council) for permission to show films unclassified by the BBFC. Membership also gave a sense of ownership and belonging to segmented audiences. The sense of place was further reinforced by the appeal of the Scala’s bar area, which by 1980 boasted the best juke box in London, a state-of-the-art Pac Man video machine and Flashbacks in the foyer, selling vintage film posters, stills and magazines. The Scala’s programme comprised a daily changing mixture of star-driven classic Hollywood (the Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe, Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert), edgy British cinema (Peeping Tom; Radio On), cult movies (John Waters), new Hollywood (The Godfather), Japanese classics (Kurosawa; Woman of the Dunes) and European art house auteurs (Herzog; Godard; Fellini; Cocteau). There was a comic book sensibility to the Scala programme. For example, August 1980 included a Marilyn Monroe season every Thursday (showcasing a new print of Bus Stop); a oneday “Animation Festival” including the work of Max and Dave Fleischer, George Pal, Richard Williams and Jiri Trnka; All Night Fantasy featuring Harry Hausen (sic); double bills of Luis Buñuel, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, Thunderbirds Are Go + Goldfinger. The Scala’s children’s cinema club showed Japanese sci-fi The Mysterians, plus a weekly serial (1940s Republic production The Adventures of Captain Marvel). WTVA (Wider Television Access) presented episodes of The Prisoner. A direct import from the Roxy was the underground gay cinema of John Waters, Curt McDowell and George Kuchar, whose films were homages to classic Hollywood genre movies – melodrama, film noir – but through a lens of explicit, boundary-pushing sexuality and sensibility. The Scala owned a 16-mm print of Thundercrack!, which set a benchmark for its collection of unique offerings, stored in the projection box. The Scala regularly presented live music on Friday nights, energising the cinema and making it a key venue on the alternative cultural scene. In 1980–1 gigs at the Scala included Spandau Ballet, the Dolly Mixtures, The Mekons, The Fall, Richard Strange, The Subterraneans (with Nick Kent), The League of Gentlemen (with Robert Fripp), The Thompson Twins, Final Solution, Altered Images and New Order. The bands were supported by movies, introducing film to the music crowd and vice versa. The gigs and the films programmed at the Scala were covered by the national broadsheet music press – NME, Sounds and Melody Maker, which at the time were politicised, with large circulation figures and space not only for extensive interviews with musicians who talked about their cultural influences, but also for film reviews with striking black-and-white film stills that captured the imagination and turned many art students on to cinema.

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The programme strategy worked; there was something for everyone and yet audiences were not confused by the proposition. Critical to this was the Scala’s monthly calendar sheet designed by Mike Leedham, whose company 2D produced it for the next 15 years. Highly desirable, collectable and destined to adorn many a wall, the programme range could be seen at a glance, and somehow it all seemed to fit together despite the differences between the films and their potential to attract different audiences. It looked rich and exciting and full of promise. The front page showed what was on each day, with a lead image, film title and programme times. Sometimes the name of the director or the star appeared in small type, and if the bill had nominated a theme, this tended to be simply by name or genre (e.g. “Classic Bogarts”; “50s Sci Fi”). The programme favoured the use of each film’s original artwork, so the design included a multiplicity of fonts and styles but visually it worked – Mike Leedham’s template unified the programme, with a strong background colour and bold highlights. The reverse of the programme gave basic filmographic information and 50-word synopses, the editorial tone of which was informed but accessible even when presenting something relatively obscure. There was a bit of information about the cinema, a word of thanks to a few distributors or collaborators and any spare space was used for extra stills. Constructed manually with a ten-day lead time, the monthly programme sometimes featured a smattering of typographical errors and mis-credits that became part of its texture, an identity somewhere between fanzine and comic book. Under Stephen Woolley the Scala was profitable, but April 1981 would be its last programme in the Tottenham Street cinema. It closed with a Mizoguchi double bill to make way for the redevelopment of the site for the offices of the new Channel 4 television (who would continue to use the auditorium as a private screening room). Virgin silenced Woolley’s objections to the sale of the cinema’s lease with £10,000 (in return for a 15 per cent stake in the Scala) which gave him the capital to quickly move the business to a new location.

The Scala 1981–93 It took Woolley, his co-programmer Jayne Pilling, front-of-house manager Alan Gregory and engineer Billy Bell just two months to relocate the Scala to the King’s Cross Cinema at 275–7 Pentonville Road, N1, where the Other Cinema had presented The Battle of Algiers in 1971. There had been plans for a cinema on this site as early as 1913, but war delayed its opening and in 1919 the Labour Exchange commandeered the almost completed building for dispersing payments to demobbed servicemen. Designed by architect H. Courtney Constantine, the cinema finally opened in 1920 as a magnificent, cavernous, 1390-seat picture palace that attracted audiences from well outside of its local area. The King’s Cross Cinema was damaged during the Blitz, refurbished as a Gaumont (1951), then an Odeon (1962–70), a Cineclub sex cinema (briefly, in 1971), a sometime music venue – Iggy and the Stooges (1972), Hawkwind (1974) – and a Cinecenta repertory cinema from 1971–5, closing with a double bill of A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. In 1980 the building was transformed into the Primatarium, the headquarters of the International Primate Protection League. The stalls were a forest clearing with jungle sounds playing through the speakers and multi-image projection linked by computers showing environmental films. The enterprise failed within a

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year and the landlords converted the ground floor into a snooker club, leaving the circle area vacant. With a blue neon sign on the front of its fairy-tale white building, the cinema was once again a destination venue albeit amidst the vice, petty crime, homelessness and drugs of King’s Cross. The box office was at street level, with two flights of marble steps and a gilt handrail leading up to a high-ceilinged bar/café area, which had chandeliers

Figure 27.1 Alan Gregory, Jayne Pilling and Steve Woolley reopening the Scala at the King’s Cross Primatarium, 1981

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and a jungle mural. The Pac Man machine (later a Space Invader) sat on the marble mosaic floor with its central star motif. Doors either side of the café led into the auditorium, deep and dark with a steep rake, 478 red velvet seats and a large screen. The cinema was directly over the King’s Cross Thameslink tracks, and the auditorium regularly reverberated with the extra-dimensional rumble of trains. The Scala’s resident cats were also a popular addition to the usual cinema-going experience, and often seen in the auditorium, café or box office. Up several more flights of stairs were administration offices for the cinema and Palace’s video company, and the projection box which had two 35-mm projectors, a 16-mm projector, a rewind bench and its permanent collection of prints. The attic and the roof were both accessible to staff. Behind the box office was the managers’ office for cashing up, a storeroom and a dingy corridor known as “the back passage” which connected with the side entrance on King’s Cross Bridge for deliveries of café supplies, VHS stock and the many film prints that passed through the building every week. The 35-mm prints were delivered on a Thursday from the film storage facility at Rank Perivale; they came in transit cases containing 20-minute reels in metal cans. There was no lift, and the projectionists carried entire feature films in their arms up the many flights of stairs to the projection box. The film prints were sometimes in poor condition, with scratches, tears and faded colour, but they were often the only copies available and were carefully repaired before every screening. It was a heart-stopping moment to witness a print stick in the projector gate and burn on screen. On 9 July 1981 the King’s Cross Scala’s first double bill was King Kong + Mighty Joe Young, an affectionate tribute to the building’s last occupants. The programme noted: Although we’ve moved to larger and more comfortable premises we plan to continue our successful policy of repertory programming – offering members a wide range of films and events, reviving “lost” films in new prints, vintage TV reruns … plus our usual policy of good value double bills and accessible times. The programme was initially very similar to that of “the old Scala”, daily changing double and triple bills with room for experimentation and all types of film. In addition to Stephen Woolley, the King’s Cross Scala programmers were Jayne Pilling (1978–81), JoAnne Sellar (1982–6), Mark Valen (1984–8), Jane Giles (1988–92) and Helen DeWitt (1992–3), all non-conformists in their twenties while programming the venue. They were supplemented by a number of individuals who brought their specialist expertise, film prints and audience networks to the Scala in a series of regular events. Over the years these included Dave Wyatt (the Laurel and Hardy Fan Club), Bal Croce (Psychotronic – vintage American B-movies), Alan Jones and Stefan Jaworzyn (Shock Around the Clock horror previews), Ricky Baker (the Jackie Chan Fan Club and Eastern Heroes martial arts movies), and guest programmers such as Derek Jarman, Saskia Baron of City Limits listings magazine, I-D Magazine, the Piccadilly Film Festival, Skin 2, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, Mute Records’ Grey Area and Jonathan Ross, who presented an all-night version of Channel 4’s Incredibly Strange Film Show. But the Scala was also programmed by its own audience, with films repeated for as long as the attendance figures (and the prints) held up. There was also a selection box in the foyer for requests.

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During the King’s Cross years the programme mix changed and the Scala became best known for its more sensationalist titles. 1983–4 saw an all-time low in UK cinema attendance but the video industry spearheaded access to a new wave of films that combined sex, violence and black comedy. Moral panic about “video nasties” raged, with stock seized by the authorities and substantial fines aimed squarely at the distribution of the material. Palace faced charges over The Evil Dead and the Scala used its programme to campaign against “the Bright Bill” in 1983–4. At stake were Palace’s finances, but also the principle of freedom to see such films. Having strongly made its mark as an advocate of horror films, and with video distributors desperate for a venue to launch their product, the Scala’s January 1985 programme saw the first of what would become an annual tradition, the New Year’s Day horror previews, joined in August 1987 by Shock Around the Clock (the precursor of Frightfest) and Splatterfest in February 1990. Monday is traditionally the lowest day of the week for cinema attendances, but while other cinemas cut ticket prices the Scala programmed sexually provocative films to attract audiences: Ai No Corrida, Last Tango in Paris, Salo, Russ Meyer. The “Blue Monday” strategy worked, and gay films often fared best. The Scala had always been a gay-friendly venue, and Mark Valen’s signature programming specialised in queer and camp cinema. Post-Earls’ Court and pre-Soho, in the early 1980s King’s Cross was a gay enclave thanks also to The Bell, a famous pub with a mixed lesbian and gay clientele. In June 1985 the Scala programme featured a Gay Pride season every Monday; in 1986–7 club nights starred Dooreen Daily aka Dave Dale, Lily Savage (New Depression), Jayne Country and Holly Warburton (the Zap club). And the cavernous nature of the Scala lent itself to cruising. The Scala wore its allegiances proudly on its programme, such as a fundraiser for Gay’s the Word bookshop when it was raided by police in April 1984. The December 1984 programme included a Christmas benefit for miner’s families, featuring an unlikely double bill previewing The Hit + Carmen, screenings of the Miners’ Campaign tapes in the bar, live miners onstage and a competition to guess the weight of the miner. Nothing was sacred. Other benefit shows in the late 1980s included: the Terence Higgins Trust; Project & Survive, a benefit for London Youth CND; international AIDS Day; the King’s Cross disaster fund (1988); Gay Switchboard; Frontliners; Outrage against Clause 25; the Birmingham Six; the King’s Cross Campaign (against redevelopment). The juxtaposition of films and events could be bizarre, such as a run of the porn film Café Flesh ending just before the Camden Anti-Apartheid Action Day, or La Cage aux Folles + Cabaret with DJ’s all-night showing hours before the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s day of film and discussion to celebrate International Women’s Week. Exclusive presentations at the Scala included Anita Dances of Vice; Café Flesh; Django; Glen or Glenda?; Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer; Ms.45 [Angel of Vengeance]; Mano Destra; Nekromantik; The Night Porter; Pink Narcissus; Thundercrack!; Twister. Some of these titles were booked from film distributors, producers or collectors. Others were owned by the Scala, and the programmer diligently applied in writing to Camden Council every month for permission to screen any unclassified title. Key directors associated with the Scala were Dario Argento; Walerian Borowczyk; Abel Ferrara; David Lynch; Dusan Makavejev; Russ Meyer; Pier Paolo Pasolini; John Waters. Steve Apostoloff, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Richard Kern and Penelope Spheeris, amongst others, appeared in person at the Scala. The programming celebrated birthdays (Salvador Dali; Bette Davis)

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and was nimble enough to mark deaths (John Cassavetes; Graham Chapman; Michael Powell; Serge Gainsbourg; Francis Bacon; Anthony Perkins) almost as soon as they were announced. A substantial season of Andy Warhol films showed in spring 1987, including Chelsea Girls presented via two projectors (prompting complaints that the reels had been screened in the wrong order). Some of the most popular all-night shows were those dedicated to Steve Martin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Mad Max trilogy and Monty Python. By 1990, Pedro Almodóvar and Eric Rohmer played strongly on Sundays. Whereas the Tottenham Street programme had featured live music, from 1984–8 King’s Cross was more about all-night clubs, such as the Mix, JC’s Sleaze party, Alice in Wonderland and the Andy King Roadshow. The club nights were part of rave culture which led to overcrowding and an appearance in court by the Scala management. Due to a redecoration clause in the cinema’s lease, in December 1986 the café jungle scene was replaced by an urban graffiti mural entitled “Urbanites Go to the Movies” by street artists Yuval (Zommer) and (Mark) Wigan, which gave the Scala foyer an edgier vibe not appreciated by all. The music that played between films on the PA was part of the overall experience, and well chosen by the projectionists. To hear Joy Division for the first time on the cinema’s PA during an all-nighter was a profound experience. Onstage guests included Nick Cave, The Cramps and Lydia Lunch, and music films remained a consistent part of the cinema’s identity. Admissions fluctuated, but the programme was well established and turned over so rapidly that an off-day (such an ill-judged showing of Dumbo) could be quickly absorbed. Despite acknowledging a capital grant from Camden Council in 1987, the Scala existed without state funds for subsidy. This was typical of London’s repertory cinemas of the time, with the exception of the BFI’s heavily subsidised National Film Theatre; independence from state funding was a critical factor in the cinema carving out its own identity and speaking to audiences in an unrestricted way, with no other authority to declare entire sections of cinema history “bad” or irrelevant. In March 1988 the Scala programme announced the start of Pearl and Dean screen advertising to help meet its costs (specifically film hire fees) as an alternative to increasing ticket prices. In 1991 the by then over-diversified Palace Group of Companies faced bankruptcy while Stephen Woolley was producing The Crying Game. The film was not fully financed, and he was reduced to leaving IOU notes in the tills at the Video Palace shops and the Scala. Meanwhile the Scala was served with notice of a compulsory purchase order as British Rail’s plans for the new Eurostar high-speed train threatened to run straight through the cinema. The Scala’s lease was running out and a condition of its renewal was a costly schedule of dilapidation, but with the compulsory purchase order in place, no financier would invest in the redevelopment of the cinema. The following year the Scala was subjected to a lawsuit brought against it by the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) for having screened A Clockwork Orange on 1 April 1992 (the film was at that time withdrawn from distribution). The case dragged on for a year and depleted the cinema’s resources, although it also mobilised the support of audiences and key parts of the film industry. A fundraising campaign to Save the Scala covered the legal fees and fine. But fleapits and repertory were going out of fashion, with attendances declining and the range of titles narrowing; few wanted to see classic Hollywood on the big screen, while other films disappeared due to lack of rights or prints and distribution consolidated dramatically into fewer companies. In an

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Figure 27.2  Scala programme from April 1992 featuring the fateful screening of A Clockwork Orange

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effort to keep going, the Scala showed more sex-themed films, which started to outweigh the balance of the programme, and the club nights were ramped up, taking their toll on what was an already battered and cold building with a broken boiler. With no means of financing the future of the Scala, Powell insisted it was let go and the last double bill was shown on 3 June 1993: Witchfinder General + The Wicker Man. Most cinemas are beloved, but the Scala was special because its environment amplified the effects of its films. The showmen who ran the great picture palaces of early cinema knew the value of an impressive venue, and today promoters such as Secret Cinema (also known as the Other Cinema) take over buildings to create temporary spaces for deep immersion to heighten the audiences’ engagement and excitement about the film. The King’s Cross Scala became a music venue in March 1999. The Eurostar station was eventually built at the back of St Pancras, the incredible Gothic architecture of which was once destined for demolition but has now been restored. Even the Lighthouse, the peculiar landmark building that sat empty for years in front of the Scala, is being renovated. But our cinema heritage is valued less highly than its real estate, and if the King’s Cross Cinema was ever restored, it would probably be for offices and luxury apartments rather than the stuff that dreams are made of.

Further reading Drazin, C. (2007) The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s, London: I.B Tauris, pp. 235–246. (On Olwen Vaughan’s New London Film Society at the Scala Theatre.) Finney, A. (1997) The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures, London: Mandarin. (The definitive story of the Scala’s parent company.) Giles, J. (1994) “Scala!!!! Autopsy of a Cinema” in Shock Xpress, London: Titan Books. (Focuses on the King’s Cross Scala.) Harvey, S. (1986) “The Other Cinema – a History: Part I, 1970–77; Part II, 1978–1985” Screen volumes 26–27. (The history of the organisation that became the Scala.) Knight, J. and Thomas, P. (2011) Reaching Audiences, London: Intellect, pp. 71–84. (On audience in the 1970s and the history of the Other Cinema.)

Reference Pierce, M. (2011) Scala Forever, London: Scala.

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UNDERGROUND FILM-MAKING British Super 8 in the 1980s

Jo Comino As a general term untied to any specific country or period, “underground cinema” has connotations of secrecy and subversion. Underground film-making implies minority activity that is anti-establishment or runs counter to the mainstream. Coming at the end of a whole evolutionary chain of home movie apparatus which stretches back beyond the turn of the twentieth century, almost to the invention of cinema itself, the Super 8 format was designed specifically for the home movie mass market. This chapter looks at a brief period in the mid-1980s (more or less from 1979 to 1986), barely half a decade in British cinema history, during which the availability of a particular medium gave rise to a version of underground film-making with its own subject-matter and distinctive visual style. It examines the origins of and both positive and negative influences on 1980s British Super 8 and takes the work of one proponent, the artist and film director John Maybury, as a case-study. A feature of this work is that very little has been written about it, both at the time and subsequently, and much of the information here has been gleaned from primary research undertaken for a documentary, Super Eight, commissioned by Channel 4 television and transmitted in May 1986, and from an interview with John Maybury conducted in November 2014. The notion that everybody should be able to make or watch moving pictures in their own home is not a recent one. When cinematography was first developed in the 1890s, amateurs used professional film formats. The first lower-cost equipment was marketed in 1899 in England using film 17.5mm wide, splitting the standard 35-mm gauge down the middle, but the pursuit was highly dangerous as the nitrate stock used was very inflammable. It was not until 1912 that cellulose acetate safety film was introduced in a 28-mm film gauge with hand-cranked projectors, contraptions that looked rather like sewing machines. Cheapness and ease of operation were the elements most likely to appeal to amateurs so manufacturers aimed to produce smaller camera and projectors and use less film by devising smaller-width gauges. Film companies in different countries developed their own products; in France in 1923 Pathé brought out the popular 9.5-mm format while in the United States at approximately the same time Kodak introduced its Kodascope range of 16-mm movie equipment, with cameras that were

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originally hand-cranked but later motorised. The first 8-mm or Double 8 cameras and projectors appeared in 1932 and were scaled-down models of the 16-mm ones. The film stock, still 16mm wide, was passed through the camera once, then, the spool having been turned over and reloaded, the remaining half was exposed and, after processing, split down its length for projection. Both 9.5-mm and 8-mm gauges proved extremely popular and film-making as a hobby took off. A whole sub-culture of film enthusiasts, magazines and clubs came into being. The editorial of the first issue of Amateur Cine World in 1934 defines the philosophy of home movie-making: Within the last few years the amateur cine movement has made extraordinarily rapid progress. From being the pastime of the favoured few it has become the absorbing hobby of the many. Yet there are thousands of potential enthusiasts who are not yet aware of the never-failing fascination of amateur cinematography. … It is one of the objects of Amateur Cine World to make them aware, to open up the limitless pleasures to be derived from the intelligent use of the camera and projector. The crusading spirit in which this is written, the confidence that movie equipment will became a feature of every home in the way that the wireless and later television did, is echoed in manufacturers’ manifestoes after the Second World War and the period of postwar austerity, but with a rather different emphasis. Gerald B. Zornow, Vice President, Marketing, Eastman Kodak Company announced the launch of the Super 8 range of products in New York on 26 April 1965: I think the movie-making market is gigantic; it’s just temporarily asleep. A few years ago, Kodak decided to take a close-up picture of this sleeping giant. Our research showed us that most people haven’t bought 8mm movie-making equipment for a list of reasons as long as your arm: Let’s just list five or six strong reasons: They find cameras hard to load, hard to set, hard to learn to use. They fear failure. They are uncertain of success. Research told us much more: but in the main it told us that it was high time for Kodak to stop just supplying the home movie market and to start shaping our product to the consumer’s needs, to start by doing a thorough product and marketing job that is 100 percent consumer oriented. From sales within the United States of roughly a million cameras per year in 1959, the industry sought to expand fivefold to approach the selling power of still cameras, and

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Kodak, with its Instamatic range of Super 8 equipment, led the field. By 1972, approximately 10 million feet of colour Super 8 print stock (compared to 125 million feet for 16mm) was being processed annually (Harris 1972). Super 8 cameras were more sophisticated than previous formats, featuring automatic exposure and focusing, while the film had been preloaded into push-in cartridges. Exposed cartridges were then sent off in a process-paid mailing pack to any one of an empire of Kodak laboratories from Rochester, NY, to Denmark, to Panama. Many of the projectors had automatic threading and the new gauge, with its smaller sprocket holes, also allowed for a larger image area than Double 8 with its 16-mm perforations. High-speed XL cameras that permitted filming in low light conditions were introduced in 1971 and research into electronics meant that synchronous sound cameras and projectors came onto the market in 1973. Meanwhile, in Japan, Fuji had developed its own system known as Single 8 using a thinner, polyester film base and cameras that took a different type of cassette. The film was essentially the same gauge and could be viewed on any make of Super 8 projector. Despite these minor incompatibilities (and a good deal of industrial controversy), Super 8 superseded 8mm as the home movie format and established itself as a universal standard for all manufacturers. Film stocks became available all over the world and although sales were unsurprisingly concentrated in the affluent West, even the Eastern bloc had its own Russian version of Super 8. The characteristics of the medium and the properties that made it convenient for amateurs led to its use by practitioners of many different types of cinema, many of them professional. The lightness of Super 8 equipment and its relative unobtrusiveness have made it suitable for war reporting, news retrieval and documentary under physically perilous or politically volatile circumstances in which full camera crews would be too conspicuous. French news agencies such as Telescoop operated mainly on Super 8 and in Canada, CBC Ottawa had a Network Film Unit from 1979 to 1982 which specifically undertook documentaries in politically sensitive parts of the world such as Cambodia, Somalia, China, the Philippines and Korea. The reporter Gwynne Roberts undertook solo assignments for BBC Panorama, TV Eye and ITN, among others, to such trouble spots as Kurdistan, Angola and Peru using Super 8 cameras, taking advantage of their lightness, lack of dependence on conventional power sources and the ubiquity of film cartridges, and above all, their unassuming presence as tourist accoutrements. Footage shot for news broadcasts would be transferred either to 16-mm or 1” video for editing and transmission purposes. In Britain, the full potential of Super 8 as a professional format was never fully developed. The BBC’s World in Action series covered Clare Francis’s journey in the 1976 single-handed transatlantic yacht race. Francis’s yacht was rigged up with three remotecontrol Super 8 cameras in waterproof cases on specially designed quick-release mounts. The appeal of the finished programmes was the immediacy of the event as caught by the cameras which Francis was able to trigger herself; a certain rawness, a sense of shared adventure. Even with the cost of transferring the original footage via 16-mm to 2” video, the outlay had been small where conventional broadcast equipment would have been prohibitive. Though the medium had influential supporters, for example Kodak Motion Pictures Service’s representative on the Clare Francis project, Brian Wright, who believed it could be successfully used for microphotography, surveillance, advertising and above all, TV, there were simply not the back-up services; none of the “dry” labs

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that handled the printing of feature films onto Super 8 were prepared to invest in bulk processing or Super 8 rigging. Specialist services for Super 8 in the 1980s, the processing of black-and-white Super 8 by Anne Whitfield in Keighley, and printing and blow-up work by John Hall of Colour Technique in Beaconsfield remained solidly one-person enterprises. Because of the relative cheapness and universal availability of Super 8 cameras and stock, almost simultaneously during the late 1970s and early 1980s, film movements sprang up in countries all round the world: in Bolivia, where film workshops were set up to enable peasant communities who had never seen moving images before to make their own films, in the Philippines, in reaction to the profit-motivated sex and violence of the commercial movie industry, and through the cine-club movement in Tunisia. In Iran Cinema-Azad or “Free Cinema” was extremely active both nationally and internationally until its members were forced into exile by the Khomeini regime, while in Puerto Rico there was a small but thriving film group called Taller de Cine La Red. International film festivals specialising in Super 8 abounded, in Caracas, Montreal, Brussels and Leicester, among other places, during this period. The International Festival of Non-Professional Film in Kelibia, a fishing village in Tunisia, was actually one of the major film events in the Arab world, attracting participants from Africa, Asia, Europe and America. It was in the capital cities of the West, notably London, Berlin and New York, during the late 70s and early 80s that Super 8, in the hands of a younger generation of filmmakers, became linked with Punk. In London in 1977, DJ Don Letts used a Super 8 camera to capture live and often very raw footage of the early gigs of the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Slits at the Roxy Club in Covent Garden. He later edited this together as a feature, The Punk Rock Movie. In the same way that new groups came together in the spirit that music was not just the rock business’s thumping ground, there was the belief that anyone could make films and Super 8 was the way to do it. The “throwaway” nature of the medium was absolutely in tune with the times: images were stolen from random, disparate sources, cut up and hung back together again. Berlin in the 70s and 80s was home to many young people who had left their homes in West Germany, partly to avoid the National Service draft, but also because the city was the most culturally and politically radical in the country. The social and political movements that took place there in the late 70s around the issues of nuclear disarmament and communal living were reflected in Super 8 films. Beginning with Schlag mich (Beat Me, Kerkhey/Schuhmacher, 1979) that covered a demonstration about the freedom of political prisoners, the pace and rhythm of these films intensified, as did the clashes between squatters and the police. One film actually captured the death of a demonstrator under a bus during a police attack. As one Berlin Super 8 film-maker, Knut Hoffmeister, described: in the early 80s you could react to what was going on outside. There was street fighting in Berlin and Reagan was coming and in Berlin there was this big fear of the nuclear war in Europe and there was this situation where you could take your Super 8 camera out in the street and find something. Hoffmeister’s Berlin/Alamo (1979), with its chaotic stop-frame images, is typical of the genre, as is Christoph Doering’s black-and-white Taxifilm: 3302 (1979), which explores

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the lurid gallery of characters who inhabit the city at night. It is a high-contrast film, full of sudden starts and defiant gestures, while the Sex Pistols and The Stranglers soundtrack was exactly contemporary. These films were shown informally in bars and cafés like the Esso 36. Hoffmeister and Doering went on to make films in combination with painting and performance as part of their band, Notorische Reflexe. Similar things were happening in the United States and in Britain where, during the 60s and 70s, independent film had been dominated by the concerns of structuralist or materialist cinema, based around the New York and London Film-makers’ Co-operatives, which aimed to reveal the process of film-making and expose the illusionistic nature of mainstream film. The films made in New York by Eric Mitchell, Beth and Scott B and Vivienne Dick, among others, were different; they were predicated on Hollywood cinema in defiance of the structuralist film hegemony, and featured melodramatic if inconsequential plots, flamboyant indie stars such as Lydia Lunch, lead singer of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and rough, handheld camerawork. In Britain, the strong narrative element that was apparent in New York film counterculture was missing. It was the home movie aspect of the medium, its painter-like quality, that first drew Derek Jarman inadvertently into this type of film-making: I started because in 1970 I was asked by Ken Russell to design The Devils and it completely stopped all my painting, which is what I did till then, and during that year a friend of mine arrived from America on holiday with a Super 8 camera, which we had in the studio during the course of the summer. He lent it to me one afternoon so I made my first S8 film which was filmed quite simply with 18 frames of one object in the studio, and then 9 of another. It was really a series of still lives. The intense colour that the most popular Super 8 stocks afforded was a significant draw: Derek favoured Kodachrome over all other film stocks. Its vibrant colour (it was a dye-additive film stock, producing deep jewel-like colours not a million miles from Technicolor) needed bright light. If the conditions were gloomier, Derek would shoot in the faster but less colourful Ektachrome or in black and white. (Mackay 2014: 23–4) The film-maker Cordelia Swann also commented on the concentrated reds that Kodachrome delivered, exerting a powerful nostalgic pull: “I can remember making as a sort of test a film called Red that was taken from the National Geographic photographs from the 1950s, a sort of trip around the world of red in the National Geographic.” Jarman additionally used gel filters while shooting to deepen colour further, and yellow filters, for example for Journey to Avebury (1971) (Mackay 2014: 24). Jarman initially regarded this pursuit as casual and recreational; he would hold regular film shows for friends who dropped in at his Bankside studio: “I didn’t think of it having a place in what was called underground or experimental film.” Films were filmed and shown at varying speeds, often at three frames per second instead of 18 or 24, and the images, lingered over in this way, acquired a quality that was closer to painting than film. What gradually made him change his mind was viewing some of Stan Brakhage’s Super 8

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output and the optically printed 16-mm films of one of the regular visitors to his studio, the structuralist film-maker, John Du Cane. Encouraged and assisted by Du Cane, Jarman began to experiment with superimposing films, layer on layer, combining as many as six sets of images together in the highly sophisticated In the Shadow of the Sun (1980): The visual effect of this layering is that detail is suddenly obscured or revealed by changes in the density of each layer. Images don’t just appear; they arise out of an abstract ground, float on the screen then disappear again. (Mackay 2014: 26–7) Jarman picked up on the oneiric quality of the format: “an audience, because of its conditioning, perceives hazy or degraded images, (degraded is a terrible word because it makes you think it is not as good) but I would say it gives the impressionist image. Super 8 is dream-like.” In the meantime, John Maybury, who had worked on the set of Jarman’s feature film Jubilee (1978) and lodged with him while studying art at North East London Polytechnic, had started making his own Super 8 films, citing the influence of the earlier US avant-garde: The thing that started me off was seeing all the Kenneth Anger movies … when I was a little baby Punk. There was a secret Sex Pistols gig at the Screen on the Green and in between the Pistols, The Clash, The Slits, The Buzzcocks, a pretty good line-up, … they showed all of Kenneth Anger’s Magic Lantern Cycle and that was what made me start making Super 8s, watching all of those. Maybury describes how he took advantage of the eclectic scheduling of London repertory cinemas such as the Paris Pullman, the Electric and the ICA and even the London Filmmakers Co-op where he acquainted himself with the work of Maya Deren, Jack Smith, Ron Rice and Anger, as well as European directors such as Cocteau, Pasolini and Fassbinder. He visited Compendium bookshop in Camden Town to seek out books on films he had heard about but never seen. At art school he was taught by structuralist film-maker, Dave Parsons, who brought in a range of visiting film practitioners from the anarchic Brighton-based animator, Jeff Keen, to Guy Sherwin who impressed Maybury by mixing performance with film, using a mirror to bounce the image from the projector around the room. Maybury’s friend, Cerith Wyn Evans, was taught by London Film-makers’ Co-op stalwart, Malcolm Le Grice, at St Martin’s School of Art; information and ideas quickly sparked across the network of art students at different institutions. Maybury and Wyn Evans churned out films on Super 8 prolifically during the late 70s and early 80s; a three-minute cartridge cost approximately £5, including postage-paid processing. As they ceased to be students, The Arts Council of Great Britain’s Artists’ Film and Video Panel provided small amounts of funding that covered the cost of materials, make-up and props as much as film stock. Mise-en-scène, what was placed in front of the camera to be filmed, was highly significant. Props, from classical statuary to flowers to sadomasochistic gay paraphernalia, mixed high-art references with trashy popular culture and it was the clash between these elements that came across as transgressive. Maybury

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Figure 28.1  Still from John Maybury, The Technology of Souls, 1981, Super 8

and Wyn Evans were both fascinated by body art and performance and the ballet dancer, Michael Clark, was a friend and collaborator. The film-makers were part of the vibrant London club scene and their friends and acquaintances Leigh Bowery, Princess Julia, David Holah, Hermine Demoriane and Siouxsie Sioux “were extraordinary, exotic creatures, in the best Jack Smith sense of the phrase, ‘Flaming Creatures’”, who often arrived fully costumed and ready to participate. 1980s British Super 8 is perhaps best characterised for its celebration of rarefied artifice. John Maybury and Cerith Wyn Evans, but also Steven Chivers, Holly Warburton and Michael Kostiff, worked within carefully constructed sets, in which lighting and props could be adjusted and perfectly controlled. They rarely filmed outdoors except on trips abroad to distant locations; Kostiff’s work as a professional photographer took him fairly frequently to the Far East while a trip to Japan provided Maybury with a new, somewhat alienated image repertoire. Chivers developed much of his own film stock and experimented with Super 8 film stocks in a way that was particular to the medium: “I will light something in a certain way to react with a certain chemical process.” Though his films featured elaborate Gothic scenarios (Catherine des Medicis Parts 2, 1984, for example), foregrounding chandeliers, test-tubes and copious dry ice, there was a sense in which Chivers was dismissive about his subject-matter (“I read a lot of romantic nonsense to do with history, French history in particular. I don’t know why, I just do”) but desperately serious about the shimmering effects he could achieve. Holly Warburton’s installations incorporated props, images on slides and Super 8 projected onto mirrors and screens, themselves part of rich, intricate sets which wrapped the spectator in a cocoonlike other world.

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Figure 28.2  Still from Steven Chivers, Catherine De Medicis Part 2, 1984, Super 8

By 1982, home VHS recorders had begun to reach the mass market and machine rentals became affordable. The effect was to open up a new source of imagery from TV and feature films for students and film-makers to plunder, and with a degree of licence they began to devise ways of combining Super 8 and video. It served to bypass the limitations of editing on such a tiny-scale gauge. Scratch-video by proponents such as George Barber, the Duvet Brothers, Jeffrey Hinton and Gorilla Tapes, inspired by the cut-ups of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, juxtaposed jarring and disparate images, which took off in a big way. Others like Cordelia Swann used the new facility to manipulate the quality and sequence of images: with a VHS recorder one could have total control and film with a Super 8 camera so that the gradations of colour, very strong primary colours, could come across. Especially in slow motion, one could find that the disintegration of the image of things that were on TV was very, very appealing. There were very strong reds and very strong blues that came up and transposed to Super 8 film very well; it was almost as if the Super 8 was perfect for it. Maybury, who was given a VHS camera by Olympus as a promotional tool in the early 80s, used it to explore the effects of superimposition: Corrupting the image and breaking it down and re-filming; with the VHS video cameras that really came into its own. You could just stick gels over the projectors to change the colour. At one point, I think we might have had four projectors going simultaneously to pile up the images with different things going at different speeds.

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Stretching the material was the point at which Maybury identifies an affinity with structural film-making: “what pleased me most was the more I could distance the original material I’d shot from my own hand. It was almost trying to make it look like it had been through some elaborate process even though it hadn’t.” Stimulated by the work younger film-makers were doing, re-filming footage off the wall, refining and manipulating it, rekindled Jarman’s interest in Super 8 and, during the hiatus on funding for Caravaggio (1986), resulted in the development of a radical new process of low-budget film-making on Angelic Conversation (1985): shooting in Super 8, transferring to video, and blowing up to 35mm on the final print. Another way of avoiding the restrictions of editing was to superimpose or place images side by side as double or triple-screen projections. Often the screening event was more important than the films themselves. Shows took place largely outside the accepted contexts for independent film in more intimate surroundings: in people’s living rooms, in occasional London clubs like the Reely, hosted by Kenny Macdonald and photographer Mark Lebon held first at the Danceteria, then above Ronnie Scott’s, where film was shown with music, at the B2 gallery in Wapping, at the Salons of 1983 and 1984 (curated by Cordelia Swann along Salon des Refusés principles) and occasionally at small repertory cinemas such as the ICA Cinemathèque or the London Film-makers’ Co-op. Occasionally, at a London Film Festival screening at the Lumière Cinema, and at the Leicester International Super 8 Film Festival, which ran at the Phoenix Cinema from 1984 to 1987, Super 8 films were shown in optimum conditions in a 300-seat auditorium using powerful Xenon projectors. Within shared parameters, the films within this body of work had individual traits; Maybury’s, for example Tortures That Laugh (1983), were angry, a frenetic indictment of the chaos spawned by technology; Wyn Evans’s work, Still Life With Phrenology Head (1979), was cooler and more detached, with ironic excursions into the nature of perfection and immutability: “I always thought of the first films as sculptures or recorded performances; they were documents, if you like” (Wyn Evans 2002). What the best of them had in common was bravura, an “intense visceral thrill” (Hollings 1984: 23). Detractors of this type of film-making would pick up on the recurring presence of roses, gold dust, statues and drapery, male torsos, white pan-stick, shades of fin de siècle sadomasochism and above all opulent operatic or noisy electronic soundtracks that they branded “Decadent” or “New Romantic”. These labels were not self-coined (Maybury later subverted the latter to “Neuro Mantic”) and had a derogatory slur. The fact that many of the artists were co-opted by the music business to direct pop-videos further

Figure 28.3  Still from Cordelia Swann, Passion Triptych, 1982, Super 8

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reinforced their shallowness in the eyes of the old guard. Unlike the structuralist movement that preceded it, this work had no intellectual framework, no manifestoes (Rees 1999: 106) except ephemeral ones and, in a post-Punk spirit, was defiant (Maybury talks about “deliberate provocation” and “trying quite deliberately to be annoying and throwaway”). He describes how he replaced the 40-minute Shallow Terrorists (1981) that was destined for his first ICA Show (with Wyn Evans) with an alternative, made within five days. The work was scarcely reviewed at all and, in the absence of a “critical midground”, chiefly by mainstream film journalists. David Robinson of The Times had this to say about Maybury’s first one-man show, The Cultural Impotence of Stupid Boys at the ICA in 1983: He attempts a subconscious scrambling of the audio-visual influences and private anxieties of his generation, coming out adolescence in the 80s – sexuality, religion, advertising, old films, Brando, … pop, punk, terrorism. His films, with their electronic musical accompaniment, may madden you, but they are not ordinary or mediocre. By the late 1980s video technology had progressed rapidly, superseding Super 8 in the mass market. Super 8 labs across the world began to close, running down the range of stocks and services. Hardware was no longer developed and equipment became increasingly hard to obtain. The factory in Lausanne, Switzerland that processed Kodachrome finally ceased operation in 2006. Though people still use Super 8 film, it is now a niche activity. Because of increased costs, the profligacy that spurred on an intense period of creativity during the early 80s has vanished. The protagonists of this movement have moved on. Steven Chivers is a successful cinematographer on adverts and feature films in Los Angeles; Cerith Wyn Evans is an acclaimed artist, best known for his sculpture and installations, which have a strong bias towards language and communication; Cordelia Swann has continued to make films using 16-mm, video and phone footage; Holly Warburton is renowned for design and illustration; Michael Kostiff is best known within the fashion world. John Maybury has directed three feature films, Love Is the Devil (1998), The Jacket (2005) and The Edge of Love (2008), and his television work on Marco Polo (2014) for Netflix has seen him, ironically for someone who started his career with Super 8, direct the most expensive production ever made for television on 4K. In April 2014 BFI Southbank screened a series of shows under the title This Is Now: Film and Video After Punk, the culmination of a BFI National Archive project to unearth and preserve much of this ephemeral work by scanning it at 2K and transferring it to 35mm. As is evident in the history of how Super 8 has been appropriated for multiple usages, the key is not the medium itself but the resourcefulness with which the tool is used. According to John Maybury, the heirs to the Super 8 film-makers of the 1980s have the technological means at their fingertips: there’s an app on the iPhone that basically has got my entire experimental film career on it; there’s a Super 8 button, there’s psychedelic video. Things that twenty years ago in a digital post-production facility would have cost you £50,000 to generate for a 30-second car commercial are one element of a free app on an iPhone.

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I like that the democracy of filmmaking has been restored and it’s back to being like a palette of watercolours. If there are kids out there with ideas, then they can put those ideas into a film, whether it’s a narrative film or a non-narrative film; it’s all there to be done. What happened in the 1980s was that young film-makers used a mass-market device to take liberties both with what they filmed and how they filmed it: Sarah Turner talks about tying a Super 8 camera to a tree and whipping the branch about (Mackay 2014: 82). Piercing the seriousness of the prevailing avant-garde, with its rigorous anti-representational and structuralist concerns, they originated a species of underground cinema, passionate but selfmocking, that explored sexual and cultural identity in fresh and exciting ways.

Further reading Curtis, D. (2006) A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain, 1897–2004, London: British Film Institute. (A comprehensive history of artists’ moving image work in Britain.) Mackay, J. (2014) Derek Jarman Super 8, London: Thames & Hudson. (Richly illustrated essays on Jarman’s Super 8 output.) O’Pray, M. (2003) Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (Short Cuts), New York: Columbia University Press. (An introductory reading of avant-garde film.)

References Harris, R. (1972) “Super 8: Its Progress and Development Towards a Professional Status,” British Kinematography, Sound and Television, 54 (4). Hollings, K. (1984) “The Dead Rose, Anger and After,” Performance Magazine, n. 28. Mackay, J. (2014) Derek Jarman Super 8, London: Thames & Hudson. Rees, A.L. (1999) A History of Experimental Film and Video, London: British Film Institute. Wyn Evans, C. (2002) Interview: “Innocence and Experience,” Frieze Magazine, Issue 71.

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THE RISE OF THE MULTIPLEX Stuart Hanson In February 2015 Britain’s first multiplex, The Point in Milton Keynes, which had opened in November 1985, closed its doors for good. This landmark building will be demolished to make way for a shopping centre, its application to English Heritage for listing having been rejected in 2013. The Point had been a joint venture with Bass Leisure and American Multi-Cinema (AMC) and the first US-owned multiplex in a foreign country, though by the time it closed it was part of the Odeon chain. When construction began in August 1984 it was to be a “glittering landmark for a 21st century entertainment centre in Central Milton Keynes” (MKDC 1983). The building, a 70-foot structure that resembled a Mesopotamian Ziggurat, contained bars, restaurants, a bingo hall, discotheque and social club, with an adjoining windowless silver block at the rear housing the ten-screen cinema (for a history of The Point see Hanson 2013a). Britain’s second multiplex, opened by Cannon Cinemas in December 1986 (see Turner 1997) and closed in 2001, was in contrast architecturally inauspicious; indeed, as McFarling (1986: 16) observed, “from the outside the cinema could well be a large warehouse of some kind”. However, its significance lay in its location in Salford Quays, which had been the Manchester docks, opened in 1894 at the terminus of the ship canal. Once the third busiest port in Britain, it had declined in the 1970s and was closed in 1982. Acquired a year later by Salford City Council, the area was subject to redevelopment for housing, offices and leisure as part of the Salford Quays Development Plan. In the 15 years of its operation the multiplex had five different exhibitors’ names above its doors: in 1990 Cannon was taken over by MGM; in 1995 it was acquired by Virgin; it was taken over by UGC in 1999 and finally became a Cineworld who closed it in 2001. These two cinemas embodied many aspects of the multiplex’s development in the first years since their inception: many were built by vertically integrated film companies that were primarily US-owned; many were closely associated with the development of out-oftown leisure and shopping complexes; their construction was encouraged by a range of financial incentives that were associated with the regeneration of post-industrial Britain; many were built by cinema chains who were subject to a succession of takeovers and mergers; and many were functional buildings with little architectural merit and which were not designed to endure.

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The multiplex was a new generation of picture palace that fundamentally changed the cinema landscape. Conceived from the outset as a multi-screen cinema, the multiplex came to represent the “brave new world” for both exhibition and film distribution from the mid-1980s. Furthermore, the appearance of the first multiplex and their burgeoning growth thereafter presaged a renewed interest in cinema-going. The mid-1980s was a crucial period since it marked a significant transformation in the fortunes of cinema-going in Britain. In 1984 the figures for cinema attendance stood at 54 million admissions per year, which was to be the nadir. In 1946 there were 1,640 million admissions as over three-quarters of the population attended the cinema at least once a year, and one-third once a week or more. By 1984 the situation had reversed with 74 per cent of the adult population not attending the cinema at all (Docherty et al. 1987). This decline in cinema attendance, particularly from the early 1960s, came to be seen as a “slow death”, as every year produced ever-lower number of cinemagoers and many cinemas closed. To better understand the cinema industry and cinema-going since 1984 and what conditions prevail now, we must briefly consider the period immediately prior to this, as we must chart the reasons for cinema’s decline up until 1984. It is not enough to speculate that multiplex cinemas were the saviours of cinema-going, as the companies concerned were apt to do, if we have not given consideration to the reasons why they proliferated. The equation is complicated in this instance since we must analyse not only how multiplex cinemas developed but also why the mid-1980s came to be a significant starting point. As the exhibition industry shrank, a “duopoly” of two companies – ABC and Rank – effectively dominated exhibition through to the eve of the multiplex cinema in 1984. Throughout this period there was a steady decline in cinema attendance and both ABC and Rank rationalised their operations, instigating sub-division of some cinemas and widespread closures of others. Both operators nevertheless continued to stress the provision of more choice for cinemagoers. From the 1960s onwards this duopoly introduced the concept of multi-screen cinema via the dividing and sub-dividing of their existing sites (see Hanson 2007). Between 1970 and 1980 the number of cinema buildings fell, although the number of screens remained fairly constant (see Table 29.1). Observing the state of the exhibition industry on the eve of the multiplex, Olins’ (1985) analysis is unambiguous: that as part of large conglomerates with interests in a variety of other fields, the duopoly had neglected their cinema businesses, and worse, failed to listen to outside advice. It was a period in which there was not only a decline in cinema-going but also a corresponding contraction of the cinema infrastructure, in which it seemed that the cinema was increasingly less important in the lives of people than other forms of leisure, though what was more enduring was the feature film. Olins (1985) was writing at a time in which the videocassette recorder (VCR) was more affordable and ubiquitous. Moreover, these developments coincided with a significant drop in cinema admissions in the first years of the 1980s. Between 1981 and 1985 some 41 per cent of British homes acquired a VCR and by 1991 this figure had reached 71.5 per cent (Screen Digest, June 1992). The British embraced the VCR more enthusiastically than any other country in Europe (see Cameron 1988). By 1988 video accounted for 68.7 per cent of the film market as opposed to 27.3 per cent for cinema (Screen Digest, March 1993). However, from 1985 onwards, as we have

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seen, cinema admissions rose at the same time as domestic viewing technologies became ever more advanced and the scope for film viewing greater. In their research into the fledgling video market, Docherty et al. (1985: 84–5) pointed out that “cinema and film are not inseparable, one can love film separately from the cinema”. In many ways the context for video is the same as that for the first televisions: domestic film viewing was still subject to the conditions of domestic life and the clear importance of home-based leisure. The steady decline in admissions in Britain, however, was not unique in the industrialised world, and neither were the conditions around the transient nature of contemporary capitalism. Cinema audiences in all western capitalist countries had been consistently falling since the zenith of cinema-going in 1946. In the USA cinema audiences fell correspondingly; however, the strategies employed by the exhibition industry to stabilise this were different. US exhibition companies like National Amusements (owners of the Showcase chain) and AMC adopted a new-build, suburban-orientated policy of cinema construction. Sumner Redstone, the founder of US exhibitor National Amusements, who ran the Showcase multiplex chain, had both coined and trademarked the term “multiplex” by 1973. Implicit in this was a fresh marketing approach based around a new generation of purpose-built cinemas with multiple screen facilities, which were allied with some of the features of other US leisure forms, as many sites formed part of the burgeoning shopping malls. In Britain, during the 1960s and 1970s, the picture was one of contrast with very few new cinemas being built, whilst the splitting of sites into two or three auditoria was often a prelude to an eventual process of closure. Such closures were not confined to smaller towns or cities, as large ones like Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds lost prime-site cinemas. Between 1983 and 1991, when its first multiplex opened, Birmingham city centre, for instance, lost five major cinemas totalling some 6,000 seats. As Table 29.1 shows, in 1984 the number of cinema sites in Britain was 660 compared to 1,176 only ten years previously. It is not possible to analyse the development of the multiplex in Britain without recognising that the story of the multiplex cinema began in the USA in the 1960s. Implicit in this analysis is a recognition of the domination of US media multi-nationals and Hollywood cinema, and the development of the multiplex cinema as symbolic of the Table 29.1  Number of cinema sites and screens in Britain 1969–84 Year

Sites

Screens

Year

Sites

Screens

1969

1559

1581

1977

1005

1547

1970

1492

1529

1978

 985

1563

1971

1420

1482

1979

 978

1604

1972

1314

1450

1980

 942

1590

1973

1269

1530

1981

 877

1562

1974

1176

1535

1982

 803

1439

1975

1100

1530

1983

 707

1327

1976

1057

1525

1984

 660

1226

Source: Screen Digest, June 1986

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extension and maintenance of the USA’s cultural and economic power. Here it can be argued that there were explicit parallels between the context for development of the multiplex in the USA – suburbanisation, shopping malls and reliance on the motorcar – and developments in Britain in the 1980s in particular. As the multiplex was consolidated in the USA, some of the major new chains had begun to look to the overseas market for new opportunities. As Hollywood looked to increase its foreign box office there was a feeling that western Europe, for instance, was under-screened, with about one-third of the number of screens per capita of the USA, even though it had about the same population (Balio 1998). Moreover, by the mid-1980s the hegemony of Hollywood was more or less complete in many world markets and US companies felt that along with Hollywood films audiences might be drawn to US-style multiplexes. Given their assessment of the technological backwardness of much of the world’s cinemas, many company executives considered they were on a mission to change overseas exhibition along the lines of those undertaken in the USA. Indeed, Warner Bros. executive Salah Hassanein opined that, “There has needed to be a change for a long time, and we are responding to that” (The Hollywood Reporter, May 1991: S-4). This recognition of transformative business potential, however, cannot fully explain the turnaround in admissions from 1985 onwards. For many in the industry, and importantly in the USA, the turning point was the designation, amid a wave of publicity and jingoism, of 1985 as British Film Year. This attempt to raise the profile of British cinema and encourage people to see films in the cinema corresponded, paradoxically, with a spate of high-profile Hollywood studio blockbusters like Beverley Hills Cop (1984), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Back to the Future (1985). The growth in admissions of an unprecedented 31 per cent during 1985 appears impressive, but it marked a rise from the lowest point ever – only 3.3 per cent of the 1946 admission level (Screen Digest, June 1986: 111). British Film Year’s target was a modest 4 per cent growth, whilst in the event the projected 56 million admissions turned out to be 70.4 million. It was against this background – the decline in cinema-going and the development of the VCR – that in November 1985 in the provincial new town of Milton Keynes AMC opened Britain’s first multiplex cinema. With ten screens, mass free parking and a wide range of food and drinks, The Point was a radical departure from the traditional cinema. Indeed, Screen International (1985: 4) hailed it as a “whole new breed of cinema, heralding, so the UK industry hopes, a new concept in cinema-going”. AMC were a new name in British cinema exhibition but they were drawing on more than 20 years of cinema developments in the USA with the out-of-town shopping centre (or mall) and the suburb as the main focus for these cinema developments. By the mid-1970s AMC had opened, or were in the process of opening, some 457 cinemas in 68 cities in 25 states of the USA (Independent Film Journal, 24 December 1976: 16). The main selling feature was “choice” with the facility to operate up to 300 film showings of some 14 different titles per week (Hanson 2013a). Also new was the form of marketing adopted as the cinema was seen as part of a wider leisure imperative. United Cinemas International (UCI no date: 1), who took over the ailing AMC’s British sites in 1988, said of The Point: [j]ust as important, was the development of new ways of marketing movies, a trend that rated attitudes as most influential, particularly where a movie was seen to be only part – although a high point – of a great night out. The philosophy can be

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simply stated. Give people a choice of movies at a modest ticket price, then set the cinema in an attractive environment where everything is always clean, fresh and inviting. Discerning people will beat a path to your door. AMC had begun to research the British exhibition market in 1979, some five years before they committed the funds to the development of The Point. The research undertaken involved a market survey of a variety of localities. Milton Keynes was ultimately selected, with a “greenfield” site offered by the Development Corporation near a shopping centre, which had good road access and space for parking. The Point’s proposed catchment area was within a 15-mile radius in which some 1.5 million people were believed to be within a 45-minute car drive. Companies like AMC (and its successor UCI) and Showcase set in motion a chain of developments that changed the whole complexion of the exhibition industry in the UK. However, admissions in 1985 were still some 30 million short of those figures achieved only five years before. In 1988 Boston-based National Amusement’s Managing Director felt that the UK was “an underscreened market” and that “given the competing types of options available such as video cassettes the facilities are not as good as they should be” (The Producer, 1988: 4–5). As the first complex of its kind in Britain, it is clear that The Point did establish the template for multiplexes that followed – siting, design, features, programming – especially in the first ten years after it opened (Hanson 2013a). In general, one of the major points of divergence between traditional cinema and multiplexes has been their relative geographical siting. Historically the cinema had been seen as an urban experience, though with the advent of the multiplex it could be best described as a “suburban experience”. From the mid-1980s new multiplexes were built

Figure 29.1 The Point in Milton Keynes, taken by author in 1997. When opened by AMC in 1985 it was the UK’s first multiplex. It subsequently closed in 2015

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all over the country with the initial wave sited either on the outskirts of major conurbations on greenfield sites close to motorways and large suburban populations, or as part of existing out-of-town leisure and retail developments. Companies assessed the potential custom by building in specific catchment areas, in which population figures of 300,000 to 600,000 people within 25 minutes’ drive were looked for. Construction and openings were rapid with multiplex share of developments going from one site in 1985, to 14 in 1988 and 29 just one year later (Dodona 2001). Total investment up until 1990 was estimated at some £300 million with average building costs of £5 million per site (The Point cost £7.5 million). In line with American domestic developments, multiplex owners continued to look to Britain for new sites for their new cinemas. Milton Keynes, where The Point opened had, as a designated new town, relaxed planning regulations. In the 1980s a series of regeneration policies adopted by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government used planning legislation such as the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 which allowed for the setting up of Urban Development Corporations and Enterprise Zones. These sought to speed up the planning process and create a relaxed regulatory environment to stimulate commercial and retail development. As the UK’s traditional manufacturing industries declined, the emphasis was increasingly placed on the rapid development of out-of-town shopping and leisure complexes across Britain, often on old industrial sites. It is no coincidence that multiplex operators looked to these new out-of-town sites for opportunities to build. When Cannon opened their multiplex in the redeveloped Salford Quays areas of Greater Manchester, they were able to take advantage of the area’s designation as an Enterprise Zone, which was exempt from Development Land Tax and council rates, and subject to simplified planning and controls. The multiplexes in Milton Keynes and Salford Quays were followed by many similar examples: a development area in High Wycombe adjacent to the M40 motorway; an out-of-town development in Slough; the Metro Centre shopping and leisure complex in Gateshead. These were followed by a succession of new builds in out-of-town shopping complexes in places like Warrington, Sheffield, Glasgow Clydebank, Nottingham, Peterborough, Telford, Dudley Merry Hill and Derby. All of this construction was undertaken in the first five years of the UK multiplex’s development in what can only be described as a building boom (see Table 29.2). This was surpassed in a second boom from 1990–5 when a further 46 multiplexes were constructed, so that in the first ten years 82 multiplexes were built in areas carefully chosen on a range of criteria. It is no exaggeration to suggest that by the mid-1990s Britain had become the most developed multiplex market in Europe. In selecting predominantly out-of-town sites, multiplex owners were implicitly relying for the most part on the private motorist. Research at Sheffield’s UCI Crystal Peaks multiplex, opened in 1988 (closed in 2003 and demolished in 2005), and located some seven miles from the city centre, suggested that some 60 per cent of users were willing to travel more than ten miles to get to the site (Screen International, 26 July–1 Aug 1991: 815). The primacy of the motorcar, first developed as a central criterion for planning in the USA, was paramount in the development of multiplexes in the first ten years in Britain. If primary sites were defined by criteria like ample population, accessibility by car, parking facilities, nearby leisure or shopping complex, infrastructure and lack of nearby multiplex competition, then these sites were more often than not found in outlying areas or suburbs. One of the prime motivations for this position, apart from the

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Table 29.2  Growth in multiplex sites and number of screens in Britain 1985–2013 Year

Multiplex Sites

Multiplex Screens

Year

Multiplex Sites

Multiplex Screens

1985

1

10

2000

190

1875

1986

2

18

2001

224

2115

1987

5

45

2002

229

2299

1988

 14

142

2003

234

2362

1989

 29

288

2004

238

2426

1990

 42

390

2005

242

2453

1991

 59

518

2006

249

2512

1992

 65

562

2007

258

2578

1993

 70

624

2008

269

2689

1994

 77

689

2009

275

2735

1995

 82

725

2010

278

2767

1996

 95

864

2011

285

2833

1997

114

1089

2012

288

2851

1998

166

1357

2013

295

2915

1999

190

1617

2014

301

2959

Sources: Dodona (2001); UK Film Council (2005); Dyja (2002); BFI (2014); and BFI (2015)

perceived advantages of space and accessibility, was that land was considerably cheaper than in the town or city centre. In the first 15 years of their development, sites for multiplexes in town and city centres were rare since the real estate and development costs outweighed potential profits. As a US phenomenon the multiplex had been shown to be successful in its techniques and approaches to providing the facilities for exhibiting films in ways that were seen as both new and innovatory. Despite this, the principle has remained the same: people sat in a darkened room and watched images projected onto a screen. Therefore, to encourage audiences to come, multiplex owners had to market cinema-going as an “event” and their own as the best cinema in which to watch a film. With the multiplex came a whole host of subsidiaries like restaurants, bars and new forms of food concessions, which were seen as placing the cinema as central to a whole night out. Moreover, the new multiplexes were closely associated with new forms of leisure and retailing through their adoption of new techniques of organisation and management (see Hanson 2000). The aesthetics of the multiplex reflected the contemporary importance of consumption as both the prime determinant of the economy but also of personal identity. This has found expression in the notion of the consumer society, in which lifestyle was also an integral feature of one’s conception of the “self” – assumed to determine consumers’ motives, feelings and beliefs (see Odih 2007). In the same way that the first US multiplexes (often referred to as “cookie cutter theaters”) reflected the functionalist style of the concrete mall, the first wave of multiplexes that emerged in Britain also reflected the functionalism of the shopping centre though this was often masked by a range of postmodernist flourishes, like The Point’s Ziggurat design. Therefore, to fully understand the diffusion of the multiplex,

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Figure 29.2 Telford multiplex, taken by author in 1992. Housing ten screens, it was opened by AMC in 1988. The glass canopy was removed when it was rebranded as an Odeon in 2004

one must accept that the design of the multiplex echoed the aesthetics and spatial features of other sites of consumption such as leisure centres, bowling alleys and fast-food restaurants, to which people were increasingly drawn. Though the development of The Point and Cannon’s multiplex in Salford Quays set the model for the out-of-town multiplex developments and the break in this relationship with the city centre that characterised the first 10–15 years of the multiplex’s development, it has been re-established in the first years of the twenty-first century. The impetus for this is a complex interplay between urban planning, the market and the resurgence of the urban centre as the focus for leisure, especially the so-called “night-time economy”. This has been largely as a result of a growing sense of unease about the impact of outof-town leisure on the city centre and the introduction of more restrictive planning guidelines intended to rejuvenate Britain’s neglected urban spaces (see Hanson 2013b). Specifically, these began under John Major’s Conservative government and its introduction of planning restrictions designed to halt the out-of-town shopping centre. The shift in emphasis from the periphery to the centre was one of the cornerstones of Tony Blair’s Labour government from 1997, which called for “sustainable development” and the regeneration of Britain’s neglected city centres. On the eve of the new millennium the opening of two enormous complexes – the Trafford Centre, near Manchester, and Bluewater, off the M25 motorway in Kent, in 1998 and 1999 retrospectively, marked the effective end of the giant out-of-town, shopping centre site in favour of town and city centre developments, though the emphasis was still determinedly on the mixed shopping and leisure development, in which the multiplex important element is attracting people back to the urban centre.

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If one analyses the data available it is true to say that the number of people going to the cinema has increased almost every year since 1984, the number of multiplex visits is significantly higher than the proportion of multiplex screens, and the multiplex sector accounts for a disproportionately large percentage of total box-office revenue. Therefore, if one concludes that the annual increases in attendance are accounted for by the advent of the multiplex, then the key question is why were multiplexes so popular with audiences when cinema had been declining prior to their inception? Any analysis of the development of the multiplex cinema must recognise that this decline in cinema-going characterised a particular phase of capitalism, which might be characterised as the demise of Fordism and the relative importance of manufacturing for large numbers of settled communities. Implicit in this decline was the corresponding decline of many of Britain’s towns and cities and the cinemas therein. Therefore, it was the way in which the multiplex re-established cinema as a site for the consumption of films, as the multiplex companies set about marketing the cinema as not only the best place to see a film (in an echo of 1985’s British Film Year), but a place where people wished to go. Multiplex companies did this by ensuring that their cinemas took account of new trends in retailing and leisure, by locating them amid other kinds of attractions both before and after the film had been viewed; this reflected the lifestyles of consumers, such as multiple show times and new kinds of concessions; the auditoria had improved sight lines, sound and picture quality; tickets could be booked by credit card on the telephone or later online; and the sites were accessible by car with lots of free parking. In conclusion, it is important to consider the development of the multiplex cinema as part of a wider narrative about the re-positioning of cinema-going as a collective, public form of visual entertainment, in the context of some dramatic changes in the transient nature of capitalism. During the 1980s the market began to be seen as a way of dealing with complex and seemingly insoluble problems to do with an increasingly post-industrial Britain. Specifically, the key imperative in the development of multiplex cinemas in Britain was the impact of neo-liberal economic policy promulgated by successive Conservative governments and in particular, attempts to mitigate the effects of de-industrialisation, especially in the regions. In 1984 UK cinema exhibition was in seemingly terminal decline and yet, notwithstanding some fluctuation in attendance, the year-on-year increase in the number of multiplexes has been echoed in a rise in admissions. The multiplex fatally undermined the previous exhibition duopoly, which for many was restricting cinema quality and choice, though the story of the multiplex is one of a comparable concentration of ownership. Multiplex operators have trumpeted “choice” yet the evidence is homogeneity in terms of films shown with a concomitant reliance on films from the major Hollywood studios and distributors. To argue for the importance of the multiplex in the reinvigoration of cinema attendance is not, however, to deny that they constitute a powerful economic and cultural force in cinema exhibition that might not be seen as wholly positive. By 2013 an oligopoly existed in which three companies effectively controlled the multiplex market in Britain – Odeon (who merged with UCI), Cineworld and Vue (who purchased Warner Bros’ sites) – and they accounted for 63 per cent of screens and took some 72 per cent of the annual total box office, which was £1.14 billion in 2014 (BFI 2015: 11).

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Multiplexes have revolutionised and modernised the business of cinema management, with greater emphasis on customer service, comfort and convenience. However, their business and employment practices have relied to a great degree on low-paid, de-skilled and increasingly non-unionised staff. Nevertheless, cinema remains an important public entertainment whose immediate future, at least, looks healthy. Indeed, the re-emergence of cinema in the middle of the UK’s towns and cities suggests a continuing and important place for it in the cultural life of these places.

Further reading Allison, D. (2006) “Multiplex programming in the UK: the economics of homogeneity”, Screen, 47(1): 81–90. Eyles, A. (2009) “Exhibition and the cinema-going experience”, in R. Murphy (ed.) The British Cinema Book, Third Edition, pp. 78–84. London: British Film Institute. Hanson, S. (2000) “Spoilt for choice? Multiplexes in the 90s”, in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 48–59. London: British Film Institute. Hanson, S. (2007) From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hanson, S. (2013) “From out-of-town to the edge and back to the centre: multiplexes in Britain from the 1990s”, in A. Moran and K. Aveyard (eds.) Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, pp. 245–260. Bristol: Intellect. Jancovich, M. and Faire, L. with Stubbings, S. (2003) The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption, London: British Film Institute. Smith, J. (2005) “Cinema for Sale: The Impact of the Multiplex on Cinema-Going in Britain, 1985–2000”, Journal of British Film and Television, 2(2): 242–255.

References Anon. (1985) “AMC development heralded as industry-saving concept”, Screen International 525 (30 November): 4 and 27. Balio, T. (1998) “A major presence in all of the world’s important markets: the globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s”, in S. Neale and M. Smith (eds.) Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, pp. 58–73. London: Routledge. BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014, London: British Film Institute. BFI (2015) “Exhibition: Research and Statistics”, BFI Statistical Yearbook 2015, London: British Film Institute, available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/film-industry-statistics-research/ statistical-yearbook (accessed 3 April 2016). Cameron, S. (1988) “The impact of video recorders on cinema attendance”, Journal of Cultural Economics, 12(1): 73–80. Docherty, D., Morrison, D. and Tracey, M. (1986) “Who goes to the cinema?”, Sight & Sound, 55(2) (Spring): 81–85. Docherty, D., Morrison, D. and Tracey, M. (1987) The Last Picture Show: Britain’s Changing Film Audience, London: British Film Institute. Dodona (2001) Cinemagoing 9, Leicester: Dodona Research. Dyja, E. (ed) (2002) BFI Film and Television Handbook 2003, London: British Film Institute. Hanson, S. (2000) “Spoilt for choice? Multiplexes in the 90s”, in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 48–59. London: British Film Institute. Hanson, S. (2007) From Silent Screen to Multi-screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain since 1896, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Hanson, S. (2013a) “A ‘glittering landmark for a 21st century entertainment centre’: the story of The Point multiplex cinema in Milton Keynes”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 33(2): 270–288. Hanson. S. (2013b) “From out-of-town to the edge and back to the centre: multiplexes in Britain from the 1990s”, in A. Moran and K. Aveyard (eds.) Watching Films: New Perspectives on MovieGoing, Exhibition and Reception, pp. 245–260. Bristol: Intellect. McFarling, T. (1986) “Cannon’s £3.5m Salford Quays multiscreen becomes UK’s second”, Screen International, 580 (Dec 20): 16. MKDC (1983) “Pyramid landmark for Milton Keynes entertainment”: Press release, MKDC Information Unit, 20 July 1983. Odih, P. (2007) Advertising in Modern and Postmodern Times, London: Sage. Olins, W. (1985) “The best place to see a film?”, Sight & Sound, 54(4) (Autumn): 241–244. Turner, P. (1997) Cannon Cinemas: An Outline History, St. Paul’s Cray: Brantwood Books. UCI (no date) Management Careers in the Cinema for the 90’s, published by UCI Cinemas (UK) Ltd, Parkside House, 51/53 Brick Street, London W1Y 7DU. UKFC (2005) Statistical Yearbook 2004/05, London: UK Film Council.

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REWIND, PLAYBACK Re-viewing the “video boom” in Britain

Johnny Walker Introduction By the late 1970s, thanks to the availability of 8mm (and later Super 8) film and projectors, cineastes in Britain had been watching commercially released films in their homes for decades. The arrival of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) to the UK in 1978, however, completely revolutionized the ways that such images were consumed. Whereas 8mm/Super 8 (and, to a lesser extent, 16mm) constituted a decidedly niche market populated mostly by die-hard collectors (Greenberg 2008: 18), the influx of newfangled videocassette systems—comprising Sony’s Betamax, JVC’s Video Home System (VHS) and, for a short while, Philips’s V-2000—broadened the home-viewing market considerably, and afforded the general public a number of advantages that would further push film reels to the periphery. The biggest advantage was that, for the first time in history, consumers could now completely sidestep the rigidity of television scheduling, as video granted them the ability to record films (and other programs) directly off air (Greenberg 2008: 21). And whereas this practice—known as “time-shifting”—remained one of the main usages for home-video users in Britain in the 1980s (Levy and Gunter 1988; Gunter and Wober 1989), there was also a growing demand for feature films released on pre-recorded video cassettes; a demand that was met by an increasing number of video distributors and member-only video rental outlets (Gray 1992: 1; Kerekes and Slater 2000: 17–19; on the North American context, see Herbert 2014). This chapter specifically examines the relationship between “feature films” and home video in Britain from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. Key to understanding this relationship is to recognize the business practices of the many video distributors. How did they acquire feature films for distribution? What kinds of genres did they specialize in? And how did the companies advertise their products? The final question will prove the most pertinent as the chapter progresses. As has been heavily documented elsewhere, the arrival of video was also met with a degree of resistance from some societal factions, including, as Frederick Wasser has recognized, corporate Hollywood (Wasser 2001: 82–91). One of the main reasons for this was concern that the “illegal copying” of studio films would proliferate and affect box office figures (McDonald 2007: 114). But in Britain, most resistance to video came from factions not directly affiliated with the film industry. Because there was, at first, no legal requirement for videos to undergo

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the same censorship procedure as theatrically released films, moral campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse, along with some British newspapers and politicians, believed that children were at risk of being “depraved and corrupted” by uncertified violent horror videos (Petley 2011: 23–32; also Barker 1984 and McDonald 2007: 89–92). This chapter will therefore also acknowledge some of the key arguments surrounding the so-called “video nasties” panic, and how the video trade responded to it in the lead-up to the passing of a new law, the Video Recordings Act, in 1984. Did it exercise caution? Or did it conversely welcome the negative publicity? By using these questions as guide marks, this chapter aims to offer as concise a history as possible of home video’s formative years in Britain.

The way to the stars? Video distributors and feature films The Video Explosion has created a confusing number of companies who are jostling for your business. Some offer excellent services or products, while others seem to spring up overnight only to disappear just as quickly. (Walton Video associate [Anon.] 1982a: 1) Before major film distributors came to dominate the video industry in the mid-1980s, the market was populated by a burgeoning number of independents with no corporate ties. In the first year or so of the video boom, there were only a small handful of such companies in existence, including the likes of Intervision and VCL, which operated initially as mail order firms, and whose catalogue offerings were, understandably for the period, rather limited. But video boomed very quickly, and by the middle of 1982, there were 82 video distributors operating—the majority of which were independently owned—offering thousands of titles between them to wholesalers and shops throughout the country (Anon. 1982b: 45–6). There were a number of ways that distributors acquired video content. In the late 1970s it was common for trailblazing firms such as Intervision and VCL to turn a blind eye to copyright, and release films informally (Upton 2012; on “informal” film distribution see Labato 2012). However, as the industry gained momentum, and as more companies started to appear, the video businesses sharply began to legitimize. Some of the bigger establishments were able to make deals with American studios on old films that were never likely to be seen in cinemas, and advertise them as quality Hollywood products. This was true, for instance, of Guild Home Video, whose eclectic 1981 catalogue promised to show its customers “The Way to the Stars”. Other, smaller, companies had to look closer to home, striking deals with independent British cinema distributors, such as Alpha Films, Tigon, and Miracle Films, that were known to the trade and to audiences for their exploitation programs of action, sex, and horror. Yet, whereas such companies may have lacked the critical cachet of the Hollywood studios, the product they handled proved very successful with British cinemagoers. It therefore made sense for new video companies to license product from these kinds of firms, for not only did they have a string of proven hits on their rosters, but many of their films had also been shown in British cinemas very recently, and thus could afford the video companies that acquired them an aura of the “new”, at a time when Hollywood studios were only willing to license much older films for video release (as Guild’s first catalogue attested).

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To this end, Intervision and Alpha came to an arrangement whereby the former would license a number of the latter’s most popular theatrical films for video release. Titles included the violent action film The Exterminator (James Glickenhaus, 1980), which was released onto video in mid-1981 having topped the London box office charts when it debuted in January (Anon. 1981: 1; Vaines 1981: 7), as well as the Jaws-esque monster movie Alligator (Lewis Teague, 1980), which Intervision rushed onto video to coincide with the film’s London cinema release in 1982 (Anon. 1982c: 5). Similarly, Hokushin licensed a number of exploitation films (from a variety of companies) that had recently proven popular with contemporary theatrical audiences. Included in a string of releases was the sex comedy Come Play with Me (George Harrison Marks, 1977), which, despite being released onto video in 1979 (some two years after its first cinema release from Tigon), remained a box office favourite among contemporary cinema-going audiences. Other companies adopted similar approaches, including VPD, which set up a licensing agreement with Inter-Ocean, a company that had recently theatrically distributed popular Kung Fu fare such as Exit the Dragon … Enter the Tiger (Tso Nam Lee, 1976); and Merlin Video, which was established in April 1982 by exploitation distributors Miracle Films (Anon. 1982d: 12), likely to capitalize on the growing popularity of horror videos (Spiers 1982: 74–80). It may seem odd that cinema distributors were keen to work so closely with video companies, especially when Hollywood studio representatives were vocal about keeping their distance. However, where some cinema distributors saw cause for concern, others saw an excellent business opportunity. Video was not something that would necessarily rival cinema going; rather, it might complement it. This is precisely how some of Intervision’s early clients, Alpha and the US distributor Manson Films, viewed the situation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Speaking to Screen International at the beginning of 1980, Stanley Long of Alpha (who was also, incidentally, a seasoned exploitation film director) argued that video, rather than destined to have a negative “impact on cinema going”, was instead likely to “help” film distributors “because people are going to discover very quickly that they can go out for the evening and then watch the ‘telly’ later” (Long 1980: 13; on Long’s exploitation filmmaking career, see Long with Sheridan 2008 and Hunter 2013: 112–13). In Long’s view, the two platforms could co-exist because they offered differing enjoyable experiences. By the same token, Michael Goldman of Manson went on to publicly thank Intervision because its video releases had become “a nice source of income”, and complemented the company’s other dealings in cinema and television (Goldman quoted in Anon. 1980b: 128). If the likes of Intervision, Alpha, and Manson agreed that cinema and video should (or at the very least could) happily co-exist, many other independent distributors wanted to promote video as being not simply different to the theatrical experience, but better. Key to making these claims appear credible was the distributors imbuing their catalogues with a sense of exclusivity regarding the films they had to offer. A number of approaches were taken to meet this goal. Some companies experimented with gimmicks. For instance, in 1982, the independent distributors Electric Video Ltd and Derann Audio Visual advertised two videos which contained 3D sequences: Electric Blue 008 (Various, 1982)—“THE WORLD’S FIRST 3-D CENTREFOLD”—and Four Dimensions of Greta (Pete Walker, 1972)—“The girls and gangster thriller that leaps from your screen!” Retrospectively, these two releases were very much ahead of their time. However, just as Hollywood would discover with the

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theatrical releases of Amityville 3-D (Richard Fleischer, 1983) and Jaws 3D (Joe Alves, 1983), 3D did not have much in the way of audience pulling power. As such, it failed to take off on video too. It was common for independent video distributors, in their quest for exclusivity, to bolster the fact that some of their releases had not yet been seen in cinemas. For instance, both Precision Video and Video Instant Picture Company (VIPCO) respectively advertised “pre-cinema” releases of the action film Borderline (Jerrold Freedman, 1980) (Anon. 1982e: 12), and the horror film Nightbeast (Don Dohler, 1982). Similarly, Cinema Features launched an ad campaign in the same year inviting its prospective customers to “Discover”, using its catalogue as a guide, “the films the critics loved and most cinema’s missed” (Video World, January 1982). Beneath the text was an image of a cinema ticket machine from which video covers of the company’s newest releases were being dispensed: Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978), followed by Madron (Jerry Hopper, 1970), The Tomorrow Man (Tibor Takacs, 1979) and, last, Metal Messiah (Tibor Takacs, 1978). The clear aim of this advert was to present Cinema Features as a gatekeeper of hidden gems. Certainly, most consumers would have been unfamiliar with the films it was advertising: Patrick was an obscure Australian exploitation film, Madron an equally obscure western, while both The Tomorrow Man and Metal Messiah were Canadian TV movies. Yet the Cinema Features ad implied, as per its company name, that, in spite

Figure 30.1 Spectacular scenes? Some independent video distributors adopted novel ways of making home video appear attractive to new consumers, including Electric Video Ltd (L) and Derann Audio Visual (R), who briefly experimented with 3D technology

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of these films being relatively unknown, they were still “great movies” that were surely worthy of a cinema release yet remained exclusive to a video label. Indeed, if distributors like Guild could show viewers “the way to the stars”, Cinema Features held the key to an uncharted cave of wonders. Such campaigns ultimately showed that video, a medium frequently dismissed as secondary to the theatrical experience, could in fact be a primary distribution outlet for new and exciting films. Finally, a number of distributors employed more provocative strategies. Some celebrated the fact that several of their releases had either been refused a certificate from the British Board of Film Censors (meaning that they were “banned” from being theatrically exhibited), or were uncensored versions of films that had already been released in cut form in cinemas. Hikon Video adopted this approach when promoting its three launch titles (“THE FILMS THEY DID’NT [sic] WANT YOU TO SEE! IN THEIR ORIGINAL UNCUT VERSIONS”): Dial Rat (aka Bone, Larry Cohen, 1972), Lenny Bruce without Tears (Fred Baker, 1972), and The Sadist (James Landis, 1963). While Dial Rat was promoted as “A MASTERPIECE OF BLACK COMEDY”, Lenny Bruce and The Sadist were promoted as having been, respectively, “DEPORTED and BANNED in 1962” and “BANNED IN THE U.K [sic] for 22 years”. Similarly, VIPCO would often carry titles with the legend “STRONG UNCUT VERSION” stuck onto their boxes to indicate that the film contained on the cassette was an uncensored—and thereby an exclusive—version of a film that had previously been shown in cinemas. This happened, for example, with a video release of Zombie Flesh Eaters (Lucio Fulci, 1979), which the BBFC had censored prior to its theatrical release in 1980, but which was eventually released fully uncut onto video in 1981. Like Hikon’s promise of forbidden treasures, VIPCO’s “STRONG UNCUT” gimmick gave consumers the opportunity to see a film in its authentic unexpurgated form, anticipating the vogue for unrated and director’s cuts in the decades to follow.

“X-RATED ACTION” Video boomed at a time of growing concern about the violent content of theatrically released films. In the early 1980s, a cycle of gory “slasher” films such as Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) generated concern from the press about the levels of violence in contemporary cinema, while James Ferman, the Secretary of the BBFC, repeatedly assured the general public that, due to a growing number of films allegedly “glorifying … the infliction of serious bodily harm through easily copied weapons”, censorship was more necessary now than it had ever been (Ferman quoted in Petley 2013). Inevitably, home video soon found itself in the firing line, especially since, unlike cinema, video was not regulated by a censorship body. Therefore, the ubiquity of so many horror and exploitation titles available in video shops throughout Britain generated a fair amount of concern surrounding the operations of the video business. Among video’s most vocal opponents were the religious moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse (who had established the National Viewers and Listeners Association in 1965 to combat the alleged rise in violence, sex, and bad language on television), the British press, and the Conservative government (Petley 2013). Their collective adverse reaction to unsavory videos was grounded in a number of factors. First, a number of horror and exploitation videos carried some distasteful titles, including SS Experiment Camp

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(Sergio Garrone, 1976) and The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979). Second, many were promoted with grisly box art and advertising campaigns (Egan 2007: 47), which led to various complaints being made to the Advertising Standards Authority (Petley 2011: 23; McDonald 2007: 89). For instance, the box art for Go Video’s SS Experiment Camp was an illustration of a semi-nude woman being crucified in front of a Nazi General; and the box art for VIPCO’s The Driller Killer was a (simulated) photograph of a man’s skull being attacked with a cordless power drill. Third—and the factor that proved most troubling— was that these uncertified “video nasties” were (supposedly) in arm’s reach of innocent children, who could watch them at their leisure, and potentially replicate the films’ horrifying scenes in reality. The seeds of a moral panic were quickly sown (Petley 2013). Newspapers—including most notably the Daily Mail (Egan 2007: 78–101)—claimed that people were becoming “ADDICTED TO ‘VIDEO NASTIES’” (Martin 2013: 14) and (falsely) that half of Britain’s children had seen one or more of the most contentious titles that the Director of Public Prosecutions had identified (Martin 2013: 30). Some researchers even went so far as to tenuously claim that video distributors were “endanger[ing] the health of … young people”, and in turn “generating crime and corruption on a large scale” which “threaten[ed] the very fabric of society” (Roth 1985: 6; for criticisms of this research, see Martin Barker’s contributions to the documentary Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape [Jake West, 2010]). Amid this hysteria, video distributors and shop owners were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for their handling of violent videos. Some, such as the owner of Leeds’ Whitkirk Film Library, faced large fines (see, for example, Anon. 1983a; also Pearce 2013), while others, such as David Hamilton Grant of distributor World of Video 2000, served jail time (Kerekes and Slater 2000: 49). The major end product of the panic, however, was the eventual passing of the Video Recordings Act 1984 (VRA), which dictated that all videos would be certified by the BBFC. In the lead-up to the passing of the VRA, the panic surrounding potentially “obscene” videos was causing frustration in the video industry. Part of this stemmed from the fact that distributors such as Go Video—regardless of how sensational their advertisements were—never intended to trade in material that would rock the boat as hard as some of these films did. As reputable companies that had a made a name for themselves, they did not want to (openly, at least) trade in potentially “obscene” materials (Egan 2007: 65). Moreover, it was often unclear which films were to be considered official “video nasties” and which were not. Official lists issued by the DPP were circulated, but titles were repeatedly dropped and then re-added without any notice given to those working in the video industry (Pearce 2013). The confusion led to unforeseen police raids at video trade fairs, shops and wholesalers throughout the country. For instance, S. Gold and Sons (a leading video wholesaler) was raided twice in 18 months (Anon. 1982g: 1). On the second occasion, the police reportedly “removed a lot of the videos that were returned … by the courts [after the first raid]”. This kind of hiccup showed, in the opinion of company director Barrie Gold, just how “silly” the video nasties panic had gotten, not least because it was causing damaged to genuine tradespersons who wanted to go about their business honestly. “The police don’t seem to know what they are doing”, Gold stated to Video Business, “and it’s causing a lot of aggravation throughout the trade” (Gold quoted in Anon. 1982g: 1).

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Of course, those in “the trade” had every right to be aggravated, especially those who had openly adopted tactics in an attempt to ensure children were not issued with adult material by video shops. As Kate Egan has noted, the more explicit marketing techniques that many distributors used were offset against more “responsible” strategies (Egan 2007: 47–77). This was particularly true of those companies trading in sex and horror videos. For example, Merlin Video’s “mature” releases carried the strap-line “X-RATED ACTION: NOT TO BE SOLD OR RENTED TO PEOPLE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE”. This strategy—which can be seen on the cover of Massacre at Central High (Rene Daalder, 1976)—worked both to explicitly invoke the rules of the contemporaneous British cinema certification system and to provide the video shop owner with clear instructions (should there have been any confusion). Some companies, in a bid to claim responsibility, went so far as to use a film’s American rating (awarded by the Motion Pictures Association of America), as Guild did with its “R” (for “restricted”) rated release of Terror Eyes (Kenneth Hughes, 1981). Other companies, such as Medusa, devised their own classificatory systems: for example, the box art for the Italian horror film Absurd (Joe D’Amato, 1981) carried a small white rectangle printed in the bottom left-hand corner, in which the letter “R” was printed in black, bold text. Next to the “R” was the following statement: “WARNING X-RATED: The film must not be sold or rented to minors.” Of course, such strategies permitted video distributors to walk a very fine line between “profit making [and] law and order concerns” (Egan 2007: 64). Certainly, exploitation film advertisers had been attributing such “warnings” to films in their promotional materials for decades, in the hope of drumming up publicity (ibid.). However, while the warnings and ratings on video cassettes did not possess any legal value, they at least offered a degree of consumer and trader advice at a time when regulation was lacking and suggested that the distributors were not acting wholly irresponsibly. The aforementioned strategies illustrated the measured approaches that some distributors were willing to take, to ensure that the video industry remained not only professional, but also accountable. It would be wrong to suggest that all distributors were as measured as those cited above. Some, in fact, welcomed the controversy. In the video trade, it was largely believed that the actions of Whitehouse, the police and the DPP were draconian and infringed on basic human rights (see, for instance, Anon. 1983b). To this end, some companies proceeded to invoke the discourse of the “video nasty” panic, as well as surrounding rhetoric, as marketing tools for their forthcoming releases. Arcade Video, for instance, promoted the release of Don’t Go in the House (Joseph Ellison, 1980) as “another ‘nasty’ from Arcade Video” (see Egan 2007: 71). Similarly, World of Video 2000 re-titled James A. Sullivan’s 1967 American horror film Night Fright as The Extra-Terrestrial Nastie. Promoted using artwork highly reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)—one of the most pirated films of the early video era (Anon. 1982h: 1)—the release of E.T.N. was destined to raise eyebrows. For not only was it advertised as a video nasty, but it was also presented in the style of an iconic family film. In other words, the advertising brought together all that video nasty campaigners were concerned about: horror films, children and people profiteering from illegal activity. Egan has suggested that “distributors … by binding themselves so publically to the emergent idea of the video nasties … were destined to be associated with it indefinitely” (2007: 71). One of the consequences of this was that wholesalers and shops were, on occasion, reluctant to trade in the product of those companies that had run into legal

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trouble. Another concern, of course, was the looming VRA. Following its passing in 1984, and the outright banning of 39 “obscene” videos (see Morris and Wingrove 2009), distributors were given until 1 September 1986 to have their entire catalogues certified by the BBFC. Rejected titles had to be removed from the distributors’ catalogues and the shelves of video shops, while those that were passed would need to have an appropriate rating sticker applied to their packaging (Anon. 1986d: 33). The pressure put onto distributors and rental shop owners by video trade bodies was immense. By 1986, the Video Trade Association went so far as to publish a “list of shame”, which included those distributors that had yet to supply retailers with the correct classificatory information regarding their catalogues (Anon. 1986a: 4; Anon. 1986b: 12). But perhaps the biggest pressures placed on the industry were time and money (or rather, a lack of them). Because video certification was an often lengthy and expensive process, the two years given to distributors made it difficult for most to get their films submitted to the BBFC in time (Anon. 1986c: 1). The high cost involved also meant that many of the independents simply could not find the funds and had no choice but to liquidate.

Conclusion The majority of the first independent video distributors had all but disappeared by the end of the 1980s (Upton 2012), but their memory has continued to live on in British popular culture. This has mostly been due to the original video nasties being attributed “cult” status, a process that began in the 1980s but which spilled over into the 1990s through black market collectors’ circles, and continues into the twenty-first century through glossy DVD re-issues of once-banned titles (Kerekes and Slater 2000: 287–313; Egan 2007). While collectors and DVD distributors seek romantically to recall and celebrate the controversial side of the early video era in Britain, this chapter has hoped to offer a more objective history. We have seen how the first video distributors in Britain licensed films for distribution, and how they marketed their product to prospective consumers. Finally, and by drawing attention to the video nasties panic, this chapter has shown how, while some distributors exercised caution by complying with the demands of the DPP as the video nasties panic ensued, others adopted voguish “video nasty” rhetoric as a marketing tactic; strategies that contributed to their downfall following the instating of the VRA.

Acknowledgments I’d like to thank Julian Upton for kindly sharing his MA dissertation with me.

Further reading Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Discusses the legacy of the video nasties in contemporary cult communities, with attention paid to video collecting.) Kerekes, D. and Slater, D. (2000) See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy. Manchester: Headpress. (Mostly concerned with the video nasties, but also discusses distributors and the video shop phenomenon.)

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Petley, J. (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (Collates early and contemporary writing on film and video censorship in Britain. Specific attention is paid to the video nasties, including a summary of the key debates.) Upton, J. (2012) Electric Blues: Sex, Class and Thatcherism—The Rise and Fall of Britain’s First Pre-Recorded Video Cassette Distributors. Unpublished MA thesis. London: Birkbeck, University of London. (The first academic study exclusively dedicated to British independent video distributors during the 1970s and 80s.)

References Anon. (1980a) “New home video firm”, Screen International 249, July 12–19, p. 7. Anon. (1980b) “Manson to unveil three in market”, Screen International 263, October 18–25, p. 128. Anon. (1981) “London’s top ten”, Screen International 277, January 31–February 7, p. 1. Anon. (1982a) “Walton Video: The Professionals [sic] Choice”, special magazine feature included in Video Business 2 (8), June. Anon. (1982b) “Software Directory”, Video Business 2 (8), June, pp. 45–6. Anon. (1982c) “Intervision’s big profits”, Video Business 2 (2), Mid-March, p. 3. Anon. (1982d) “Delayed Bruce Lee movie is available”, Video Business 2 (2), Mid-March, p. 11. Anon. (1982e) “Product news”, Video Business 2 (4), April, p. 12. Anon. (1982f) “Precision movie hits the market before release to cinemas”, Video Business 2 (4), April, p. 12. Anon. (1982g) “Police seize 450 tapes in second raid on Gold”, Video Business 2 (18), Mid-November, p. 1. Anon. (1982h) “E.T. masters seized in anti-piracy raids”, Video Business 2 (16), Mid-October, p. 1. Anon. (1983a) “£600 ‘nasties’ fine for Leeds dealer”, Video Business 3 (2), February 28, p. 1. Anon. (1983b) “Shock horror video campaign by the Daily Mail”, Video Viewer, September, pp. 54–5. Anon. (1983c) “VPD offers cold comfort to trade on ‘nasty’ tapes”, Video Business 3 (3), March 14, p. 4. Anon. (1986a) “List of shame”, Video Business 6 (12), March 24, p. 4. Anon. (1986b) “First classification report in April”, Video Business 6 (12), March 24, p. 12. Anon. (1986c) “VRA crunch time starts distributors certification flood”, Video Business 6 (41), August 18, p. 1. Anon. (1986d) “Let’s get VRA facts straight”, Video Business 6 (41), August 18, p. 33. Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gray, A. (1992) Video Playtime: The Gendering of a Leisure Technology. London: Routledge. Gunter, B. and Wober, M. (1989) “The uses and impact of home video in great Britain”, in M. R. Levey (ed.) The VCR Age: Home Video and Mass Communication, pp. 50–69. California: SAGE. Herbert, D. (2014) Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kerekes, D. and Slater, D. (2000) See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy. Manchester: Headpress. Labato, R. (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: BFI. Lamberti, E. (2012) (ed.) Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: From the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: BFI. Lardner, J. (1987) Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the Onslaught of the VCR. New York: W. W. Norton. Levy, M. and Gunter, B. (1988) Home Video and the Changing Nature of the Television Audience. London: John Libbey. Long, S. (1980) “Stanley Long of Alpha Films”, Screen International 226, February 2–9, p. 13.

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Long, S. with Sheridan, S. (2008) X-Rated: Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker. London: Reynolds and Hearn. McDonald, P. (2007) Video and DVD Industries. London: BFI. Pearce, H. (2013) Video Nasties: A True Story of Court Cases, Cock Ups and Collateral Damage. Print on demand, Amazon.com. Petley, J. (2011) Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Petley, J. (2013) “‘Are we insane?’ The video nasty moral panic”, available at: http://rsa.revues. org/839 (accessed 5 March 2015). Roth, M. (1985) “Introduction”, in G. Barlow and A. Hill (eds) Video Violence and Children, pp. 1–7. Sevenoaks: Hodder and Stoughton. Spiers, G. (1982) “A Touch of Evil”, Video World, January, pp. 74–80. Upton, J. (2012) Electric Blues: Sex, Class and Thatcherism—The Rise and Fall of Britain’s First PreRecorded Video Cassette Distributors. Unpublished MA thesis. London: Birkbeck, University of London. Vaines, C. (1981) “Hitting home with the punch-lines”, Screen International 277, January 31–February 7, p. 7. Wasser, F. (2011) Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF PRACTICALLY EVERYONE? The independent British film production sector from the 1980s to the present

James Leggott Introduction: the British film industry Scholars of British film-making have mostly tended to overlook histories and cultures of producers and production, in favour of studies of genre, auteurs, time-frames and representational issues. There are of course some notable exceptions, including some very detailed accounts of the contemporary film-making landscape. But for anyone looking for a forensic history of the key movers and shakers of independent UK cinema of the last thirty or so years, the most useful primary sources are likely to be trade press documentation or biographies and memoirs from key protagonists. As it happens, many of the latter published accounts are as eye-opening as they are gripping, casting light on the extraordinary individuals and developments behind the scenes of some of the most critically and commercial (but also some of the most excoriated and financially ruinous) works of British cinema since the 1980s. As noted by Andrew Spicer et al., the “financial side of art has always proved problematic for academics and critics alike, as its fetish objects are somehow sullied by the profit motive” (2014: 1). In their edited collection on producers, Spicer et al. take as a starting point the disparity between the centrality of the caricatured movie mogul figure in popular culture, and the apparent squeamishness of the academy toward “bottomline concerns”. Furthermore, scholarship on film culture has a tendency to dichotomize art and commerce, sometimes overlooking how production processes involve a complex negotiation of these. A significant impediment has been uncertainty over the precise role of the producer – and thus by extension, the production sector more generally – in the mediation between “commerce and creativity” (Spicer 2004: 34). For example, noting the ambiguity of the term in addressing a variety of roles and responsibilities, Duncan Petrie distinguishes between the figure “responsible for developing a project and

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approaching potential investors for financial commitment” (Petrie 1991: 181) and the “executive producer” connected with the production company involved. Turning more specifically to the British context brings further complications still. First, as the subsequent discussion will demonstrate, it is deeply unhelpful to apply any discussion or definitions of the Hollywood studio system to the under-capitalized British film industry, given that the latter has always been “smaller, less stable and more subject to outside pressures than its American counterpart” (Spicer 2004: 35). For Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild, authors of the only book-length survey to date of the British film industry, historically, “producers, exhibitors and distributors have operated in the shadow of Hollywood” (2002: xi). With the UK recognized early by Hollywood as a key market, it is tempting to describe a scenario of “colonization” as the backdrop to over ninety years of ineffective government intervention – or what Baillieu and Goodchild dismiss as “decades of half-hearted meddling by successive governments” with a “fragmented industry that has suffered from poor distribution and insufficient investment” (xiii). Duncan Petrie, writing of the developments within the industry in the late 1980s, argued that the general economic constraints under which all film-makers operate, regardless of cultural or national context, are compounded in the UK by the “fact that film-makers … have never enjoyed a stable source of finance, either commercial or state-subsidised” (1991: 205). In his book Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry, Petrie goes further, and identifies a tendency toward “conformity” in film production that was particularly marked in indigenous cinema in the late 1980s, and which stems in part from the “immense collective influence a small number of key decision-makers” have within a legendarily cottage-like industry (1991: 107). The handful of names he cites (in this case, and at that time, David Rose, Simon Relph, Margaret Matheson, Dennis O’Brien, Steve Woolley, Sarah Radclyffe and their close associates) are those that operate as gate-keepers determining the subject matter and approach, and hence the whole flavour of British cinema. What follows is a broadly historical overview of the key players, companies and developments in British film production from the 1980s to the present time. It will be immediately apparent that accounts of the British film industry of this period have not been free from polemicism, judgment and – it may not surprise – disappointment and despair. Baillieu and Goodchild (2002) describe a recurrent scenario of under-resourced independent producers focusing wrongly upon one-off production costs rather than marketing and distribution strategies, all within a weary cycle of boom and bust: about once a decade a small independent has a box-office hit against the odds, which temporarily entices City finance to the industry, before the inevitable slump. The language used in the very title of Alexander Walker’s book, Icons in the Fire: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everyone in the British Film Industry 1984–2000 (2004), makes no secret of the author’s jaundiced take on the “tragic history” (xxi) of an industry “falling into disorder and disrepute – often dramatically so” (xx). Walker’s analysis largely conforms to the perpetual “boom and bust” metanarrative identified by others, but he nuances it by reference to the “chaos theory” notion of “minute differences in the initial starting conditions of change” leading to “massively different consequences down the line” (xxi): there is thus a kind of tragi-comedy in the doomed attempts by main players (whether film-makers or governments) to exercise prediction and control. Observers have sometimes reached differing assessments of the problems and potential of the UK film industry; whereas Petrie

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diagnoses creative “conformity” (1991: 107), Baillieu and Goodchild make the “unpalatable” suggestion that British film-makers should learn from US film-makers’ prioritization of commercial imperatives (2002: 152). Similarly, whilst Baillieu and Goodchild optimistically saw the introduction of a single-body government funder as a potential solution to a fragmented industry, Walker predicted no major change, despite the collective hopes of film-makers, critics and audiences (2004: 309). However, there is agreement across the board that the production sector is best understood in terms of a series of (possibly irreconcilable) tensions: between boom and bust, the US and Europe, the truly independent and the conglomerate-affiliated, art and commerce, and – last but by no means least – success and failure.

The 1980s: rises and falls The mid-1980s is a well-documented period of excitement – or at least hope, if not quite renaissance – for the British film industry, following the doldrums of the 1970s. The era witnessed a few key developments. The newly minted Channel 4 television network (launched in 1981) gave opportunities for independent films to be produced directly for television, and remains an important presence in UK film culture to this day. Less welcome was the Thatcher government’s phasing out of tax incentives and subsidies such as the Eady scheme, which had been introduced in 1950 and directed money from ticket sales to producers in proportion to their takings. Although cinema audiences were falling, video sales and rentals would ultimately stimulate cinema attendances (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 106), the “multiplex revolution” (108) enticing young audiences was around the corner, and hopes were also pinned on cable and satellite broadcasting. Following the high-profile awards success of the likes of Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982), the government launched a British Film Year in 1985, effectively an initiative to increase cinema-going, but remembered by most as a “self-congratulatory trumpet flourish” (Walker 2002: 25). Changes were afoot too with the indigenous “majors” who had dominated production and distribution in previous decades. Rank, which had a history going back to the early 1930s, and was named after one of the most important figures within British film history, was no longer involved with in-house production. The Associated Communications Corporation (headed by Lord Grade) had failed in its attempts to lure US audiences with blockbusters: most famously, the costly ($35 million) flop Raise the Titanic (1980), forever associated with the witticism attributed to Grade: “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic” (Puttnam and Watson 1997: 307). Lastly, the film-making arm and local cinema chain of the EMI conglomerate, known as Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment (TESE), was taken over in 1986 by Cannon, who had already acquired the cinema chain formerly owned by Grade. The result was a duopoly of distributors, of which only one (Rank) was British. Cannon was an American company that specialized in a high turnover of critically unloved (but today rather cultish) low to mid-budget genre movies (such as The Delta Force [1986] and Masters of the Universe [1987]), led by the Israelis Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. For Alexander Walker, the events that led to this take-over, described in detail in his Icons in the Fire, constitute the “stupidest act of folly in industry-government relations”, in allowing “virtually half the British film industry” (2004: 50) to be sold to a company that was three years away from a collapse that would signal a point of no return for the sector. By this time,

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according to Walker, “the film industry had been irretrievably broken up, disseminated and debilitated – never again to stand a chance of being economically sustainable or independent of Hollywood domination” (50). Amid this turbulence, the success of a cluster of relatively new independent companies gave some buoyancy to the industry. HandMade Films, run by the ex-Beatle George Harrison and his business partner Denis O’Brien, had come into existence toward the end of the 1970s, primarily as a means to finance Monty Python’s biblical parody Life of Brian (1979) after its initial backers, Thorn-EMI, became nervous about its potentially inflammatory content. A long-term fan of the Python comedy team, of which Eric Idle also happened to be a close friend, Harrison provided $4 million for what he would describe as the “most expensive cinema ticket ever issued” (Sellers 2013: 28). A key strand of the HandMade portfolio would have a Python connection, such as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981), and the Michael Palin projects The Missionary (1982) and A Private Function (1984). These continued and maintained an indigenous tradition of (often class-oriented) satire, but HandMade’s output also included the gangster movies The Long Good Friday (1980) and Mona Lisa (1986), and the enduring comedy Withnail & I (1987). The company’s name, along with its irreverent films and “endearingly ramshackle logo”, conveyed an “impression of cheerful amateurism” (Brooke, date unknown) that was slightly at odds with its canny business sense, and its knack of producing films that left a “lasting cultural legacy” (Sellers 2013: 612). In his biography of the company, Very Naughty Boys, Robert Sellers makes the interesting claim that “not since the days of Ealing Studios … did an independent film company produce a body of work that was so intrinsically British, English even” (2013: 612). Perhaps unsurprisingly, their attempts at big-budget blockbusters (such as 1986’s Shanghai Surprise) and international co-productions proved unsuccessful, and production activity ceased in 1990. Like HandMade, Palace Pictures was characterized by an understanding of its youthful market. Capitalizing on the coming boom in home entertainment, Palace began as a video distributor, famed initially for handling The Evil Dead (1983), but later specializing in US independents, and UK and international art-house fare. No doubt keen to escape their reputation as “video barrow-boys” (Finney 1986: 65), its founders Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley moved organically toward production so as to be “less dependent on competitively acquiring films” (66). Angus Finney’s entertaining history of Palace’s eventful, decade-long existence begins with Woolley and Powell attending the 1993 Academy Awards, where the crowd seems to be rooting for The Crying Game (1991), their “little British film costing less than $4 million [that] was being tipped for Best Picture” (2006: 1), most likely unaware that ten months earlier the company was “collapsing under debts estimated to be between £6 million and £30 million” (3). As well as sketching in miniature the “rise and fall” of Palace, this little vignette pretty much encapsulates the perpetually uneven terrain of the UK film industry. However, it is the dramatic rise and fall of Goldcrest that is generally deemed the most calamitous and cautionary event of the period. Founded by Jake Eberts in the late 1970s, this “creative powerhouse” (Eberts and Illot 1992: xii) quickly became the “flagship” of the industry (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 109), taking popular credit for the success of the David Puttnam-produced Chariots of Fire for which it had played a developmental role, and ultimately investing about £90 million into film and television production (115). Goldcrest’s film development fund, Goldcrest Films International, was a move

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into production investment, but was less a film production company than a “specialist venture capital fund focusing on the independent sector, spreading the fund across a wide portfolio of film projects, and limiting the size of each investment” (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 110). Following the success of Ghandi, Goldcrest embarked on a production program that was “arguably the most catastrophic film investment programme ever undertaken by a British company” (Eberts and Illott 1992: 215). Of their three key films, Revolution (1985), Absolute Beginners (1986) and The Mission (1986), the first two were notorious flops, and the third only moderately successful. Eberts’s relationship with the expanding company became strained, and after leaving for a period, he returned in a vain effort to rescue the company from the severe financial problems that led to its final collapse in 1987. Baillieu and Goodchild cite factors such an unprofitable diversification into television, poor investment decisions and uncontrolled overheads, as well as the competition from younger companies buoyed by Goldcrest’s success, and the rise of a vibrant US independent sector competing for money, creative personnel and audiences (2002: 115). Eberts himself would give his own account in his lengthy memoir My Indecision Is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films (1992), co-written with Terry Ilott. His co-author makes the argument that the company was initially wedded to its founder’s personality and interests (xii–xiii), and that Eberts stepped down when that control was slipping. If there is admittedly a grandiose element to the language and scale of My Indecision Is Final, this is undoubtedly in keeping with the importance that Goldcrest held to both those inside and outside the company. For example, Ilott speculates that there were occasions when the “idea of Goldcrest was clearly a much more powerful factor in the minds of its decision-makers than was the reality”. He goes on to say that just as the enigma of Eberts’s character holds a key to the origins and growth of the company, so the confusion between fantasy and reality, between the ideal Goldcrests and the real Goldcrest, between the heroics on screen and the heroic self-images of the Goldcrest executives, provides a key to its crisis and collapse. (1992: xv)

The 1990s: renewals The 1990s saw yet another cycle of slump and renewal for the British film industry, which reached a peak of production in 1996. As the decade progressed, investment in feature film production rose considerably, and a number of commercial hits – such as The Full Monty (1997) and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) – were aided by canny marketing strategies, or by financial involvement from the television companies Channel 4 and the BBC. Accounts of the period tend to describe an almost dizzying acceleration of plenitude: more films, investment and audiences, but also more media outlets, educational opportunities (including schemes for emerging film-makers) and technological possibilities. For some (Brown 2000: 31), the media-hyped “boom” was less a renaissance than a “pile of miscellaneous product”, which just happened to be noisier and sometimes more profitable than those from previous decades. There were also misgivings about a seemingly market-driven, Hollywood-facing climate that was not necessarily beneficial to independent, artistic or low-budget film-making. Furthermore, a “crisis in distribution” (Ogborn 2000: 67) would make it increasingly difficult for

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product, whether commercial or non-commercial in orientation, to reach audiences; the trade magazine Screen Finance reported in 1998 that “nearly 60 per cent of the films involving a UK producer that went into production in 1996 have yet to be screened at a UK cinema” (cited in Macnab 2000: 135). Indeed, irrespective of some high-profile commercial and/or critical successes for the industry, “life for the small independent producer [was] still precarious” (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 149), with only a handful of companies prospering through the decade and beyond. Moreover, from the perspective of the historian or aficionado of contemporary British cinema, the unfolding stories of the most noted production companies of the 1990s are decidedly lacking in human drama when compared to their 1980s predecessors like Palace and Goldcrest. One emergent figure, who experienced the customary “rise and fall” of many trying to navigate the choppy waters of European film production, was the Nairobi-born Michael Kuhn. During the 1990s, Kuhn oversaw the short-lived triumph of the Dutch/German conglomerate PolyGram’s UK-based film-making unit, Polygram Filmed Entertainment (PFE), which would become the largest single investor in UK films during the decade (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 133). As described in his memoir A Hundred Films and a Funeral, Kuhn become the successful head of PFE in 1991, aspiring to undertake the “first attempts to build a world-wide Hollywood style film business based in Europe” (2002: iii). As well as developing a network of distribution companies, the studio-rivalling PFE would make films via subsidiary labels, the most significant British one being Working Title Films, who were behind the international box-office hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). The sale of PFE to the Canadian group Seagram Inc. by its parent company Phillips in 1998 was a major “shock” (Walker 2004: 291) to the UK film industry, and the abrupt end to a funding source following its subsequent incorporation into Universal Studios. In his historical overview of the era, Alexander Walker casts Kuhn as the “quiet man of the industry” (2004: 178), his cautiousness even extending to the memorandum-like quality of his autobiography, which only lightly touches upon the “behind-the-scenes maneuvering that was to bring tragedy to his enterprise” (288). The very title of Kuhn’s memoir highlights the importance of Working Title’s Four Weddings and a Funeral – a British take on the romantic comedy genre, written by Richard Curtis – not only in boosting PFE’s international presence, but helping to lift the UK film industry out of the doldrums. For Working Title, founded in 1984 by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, Four Weddings established a commercially successful template typically defined as “mid-Atlantic” in aspiration and content (Wayne 2006). Although the company’s cycle of rom-coms with a Curtis affiliation or influence – such as Notting Hill (1999) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) – can be taken as keynote co-productions, with their generic clarity and casting of American performers, their broad-ranging output also includes horror, costume drama and literary adaptation. Reaching across their oeuvre for consistency with regard to genre, subject matter, personnel, budget or target audience is therefore somewhat reductive (Hochscherf and Leggott 2010). However, Working Title have been identified as emblematic of broader trends in European cinema, in negotiating a position between the mainstream and independent sectors, and between European and international cinema cultures via their simultaneous connections with Universal and StudioCanal. As Pam Cook notes, this has arisen from the successful negotiation by certain European production companies “of a position of relative autonomy in cooperation

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with global conglomerates, which allows them to benefit from high-quality facilities and sophisticated promotion and distribution resources” (2010: 26). Beyond Working Title, there were arguably only two production companies to gain brand recognition during and beyond the period, both of which also commodified their trademark “Englishness” in interesting ways. Despite being founded in 1961, Merchant Ivory Productions had by the 1990s become closely associated with a particular type of (mostly UK-set) literary period drama. The irony of the core creative team (the producer Ismail Merchant, the director James Ivory, and very often the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) hailing initially from, respectively, India, America and Germany, was not lost on some observers. The Bristol-based Aardman Animations, founded on a very small scale in 1972, cornered the market in stop-motion clay animation shorts and then fulllength features geared at family audiences from the late 1990s onwards. The first fruit of their signing of a $250 million deal to make four features in conjunction with the major US animation studio Dreamworks was the successful Chicken Run (2000), which drew upon the Working Title method of combining indigenous humour with careful generic and casting strategies (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 150). The partnership was dissolved in 2007, amid speculation about creative tensions between Hollywood imperatives and the company’s highly individual working methods and sensibility.

The National Lottery and the UK Film Council The headline event for the British film industry from the mid-1990s onwards was arguably the radical shake-up of public funding mechanisms, first via the National Lottery up until the turn of the century, and then through the UK Film Council (UKFC) for the subsequent decade. Proposed by John Major’s Conservative government in 1996, the Lottery fund was set up when Labour came to power the following year. With the aim of establishing long-term investment and sustainability, a fund of £90 million was shared across three franchises, effectively “mini studios” comprising production, distribution and sales companies (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: 135). The beneficiaries were: DNA Film Ltd, run by Duncan Kenworthy and Andrew Macdonald; The Film Consortium, comprising Greenpoint Films, Parallax Pictures, Scala Productions and Skebra Film; and the France-based Pathé Productions involving six companies. The scheme proved to be neither financially nor artistically successful. One of its most vocal critics at the time was Alexander Walker, who condemned the scheme as “conceived in haste, under pressure of vested interests, and applied at random, with the pretence of competence”, which “never came near to achieving the announced goal of sustainable independence” (Walker 2004: 199). Nevertheless, by the time UKFC – a cross-UK agency chaired by Alan Parker – took over the administration of Lottery grants from regional Arts Councils in 2000, there was some optimism about the possibility for restructuring production on a “root-and-branch basis, with greater investment in project and script development, training and commercially viable screenplays” (Baillieu and Goodchild 2002: xiii). UKFC was abolished by the incoming coalition government in 2010, in keeping with their broader austerity measures for supposedly wasteful public bodies. In their academic study of the fate of this “superbody”, Gillian Doyle et al. conclude that “deliberation and due process were short-circuited by the immediacy of post-electoral political pressures and ideological commitments”, and that the rise and fall of the UK Film Council was

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simply the latest manifestation of a long history of “inconsistency in interventions to support film” (2015: 185). As James Caterer observes at the start of The People’s Pictures, his comprehensive analysis of the political context of the National Lottery fund, the disappearance of an “entire political dynasty” in the intervening years since its roll-out in the New Labour era casts this period in a somewhat altered light (2011: 1). Although there has been useful analysis of how individual figures navigated shifts in government policy (see Spicer 2014 for discussion of Simon Relph), perhaps unsurprisingly, given the overwhelming tumultuousness of the era, scholars like Caterer and Doyle et al. have helped to shift the critical focus from micro-narratives of individual producers and production companies, however emblematic of their times, to overviews of the broader political and cultural contexts for contemporary film-making. For Caterer, this was a “period of innovation and experimentation which irrevocably altered the relationship between British cinema and the state” (2011: 1), with the debates around the Lottery fund’s intervention in production illuminating the “contested status of cinema in our national life” (2). Both Caterer and Doyle et al. consider at length the “broader policy dichotomy between positioning film as an industry and framing film as a distinct cultural artistic form” (Doyle et al. 2015: 6), and suggest how the very public debates that ensued about the competing interests of commerce and culture resulted, in Caterer’s words, in a “time for experimentation: a chaotic and yet wonderfully unfixed moment in the history of UK film policy” (2011: 214).

The twenty-first century With the absence of historical hindsight, casting judgment on the state of contemporary film production is of course difficult, but commentary in the screen trade press does provide a useful snapshot of how the industry currently perceives itself. For example, a 2012 (non-ranked) survey of the “UK’s top 40 film production outfits” published by Televisual summarized, in the familiarly conflicted manner in which the sector is usually assessed, that the industry was “currently enjoying the best of times and the worst of times”: yes, there were home-grown hits such as The King’s Speech (2010) from the Anglo-Australian SeeSaw, but “financing and getting films made has not become any easier” (Dams 2012). Of the companies cited, Working Title, with over 100 films to their name, and over $5 billion generated from global office, towered over a top tier of about 14 companies – at the time, Aardman, Big Talk Pictures, Cloud Eight, DNA, Ealing Studios, Ecosse Films, Heyday, Hammer, Number 9, Jeremy Thomas’s Recorded Picture Company (see Meir 2009 for an analysis of Thomas’s distinctive promotional methods within a transnational context), Revolution, Ruby Films, SeeSaw and Vertigo – that typically made one or two films a year, some of which hit the jackpot of international success. The companies cited by the article suggest that the UK film industry remains a characteristically bewildering patchwork of operations of varying scope, scale, experience and success, with some defined by commercial victory, some by the distinctiveness of their output (one might cite, for example, Warp Films), and others by the involvement of veteran or unknown individuals, or association with particular franchises, genres or directors. This particular 2012 survey also included, rather pleasingly, two revived companies (Hammer and Ealing) associated with previous eras of successful British film-making, thus bringing

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at least a semblance of posterity and circularity to an industry associated with chaotic instability. Although scholars have risen to the challenge of making sense of the chaos, there is plentiful untangling work to be done on the history, present and future of the production industry. Aside from the political and policy contexts, more attention is needed, for example, to areas of the industry that have traditionally passed beneath the journalistic or academic radar. In response to the exponential rise of British horror film-making in the new millennium – much of which was extremely low budget, taking advantage of cheap technologies, and distributed and consumed non-theatrically – Johnny Walker identifies parallels between the impulses and context behind the production of more than 400 titles within ten years (2016: 14), and the commercially minded rhetoric of the UKFC. Another area for consideration is the changing relationship, convergence indeed, between the film and television industries (see Andrews 2014), not least because of the ways that many contemporary companies have portfolios spanning the two. There is little dispute that the traditional dichotomies used to define British film production – those of boom and bust, rise and fall, commerce and creativity – are not without relevance and value, but do not necessarily tell the complete story of a much-maligned and misunderstood industry.

Further reading For an overview of the period, good starting points are: Baillieu, B. and Goodchild, J. (2002) The British Film Business, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons; and Walker, A. (2004) Icons in the Fire: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everyone in the British Film Industry 1984–2000, London: Orion. Autobiographies/biographies of key players such as Jake Eberts (of Goldcrest), Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley’s Palace Films, and Michael Kuhn (of Polygram Filmed Entertainment) give insights into the personalities and events of the era. See: Eberts, K. and Ilott, T. (1990) My Indecision Is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films, London: Faber & Faber; Finney, A. (1996) The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures, London: Heinemann; and Kuhn, M. (2002) One Hundred Films and a Funeral, London: Thorogood. The most detailed scholarly assessments to date of the policy and political contexts are: Caterer, J. (2011) The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; and Doyle, G., Schlesinger, P., Boyle, R. and Kelly, L. W. (2014) The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

References Andrews, H. (2014) Television and British Cinema: Convergence and Divergence Since 1990, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Baillieu, B. and Goodchild, J. (2002) The British Film Business, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Brooke, M. (date unknown) “HandMade Films”, Screenonline, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/ id/499846/. Brown, G. (2000) “Something for Everyone: British Film Culture in the 1990s”, in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 27–36. London: BFI.

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Caterer, J. (2011) The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Cook, P. (2010) “Transnational Utopias: Baz Luhrmann and Australian Cinema”, Transnational Cinemas, 1(1): 23–36. Dams, T. (2012) “The UK’s Top 40 Film Production Companies”, Televisual, 16 May, http://www. televisual.com/blog-detail/The-UKs-top-40-film-production-companies_bid-356.html. Doyle, G., Schlesinger, P., Boyle, R. and Kelly, L. W. (2014) The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eberts, K. and Ilott, T. (1990) My Indecision Is Final: The Rise and Fall of Goldcrest Films, London: Faber & Faber. Finney, A. (1996) The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures, London: Heinemann. Hochscherf, T. and Leggott, J. (2010) “Working Title Films: From Mid-Atlantic to the Heart of Europe?” Film International, 6(1): 8–20. Kuhn, M. (2002) One Hundred Films and a Funeral, London: Thorogood. Macnab, G. (2000) “Unseen British Cinema”, in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 135–144. London: BFI. Meir, C. (2009) “The Producer as Salesman: Jeremy Thomas, Film Promotion and Contemporary Transnational Independent Cinema”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 29(4): 467–481. Ogborn, K. (2000) “Pathways into the Industry,” in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 60–67. London: BFI. Petrie, D. J. (1991) Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry, Houndsmills and London: Macmillan. Puttnam, D. and Watson, N. (1997) The Undeclared War: Cinema, Cash and the Struggle to Control Culture, London: HarperCollins. Sellers, R. (2013) Very Naughty Boys: The Amazing True Story of HandMade Films, London: Titan. Spicer, A. (2004) “The Production Line: Reflections on the Role of the Film Producer in British Cinema”, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1): 33–50. Spicer, A. (2014) “The Independent Producer and the State: Simon Relph, Government Policy and the British Film Industry, 1980–2005,” in A. Spicer, A. T. McKenna and C. Meir (eds) Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies, pp. 65–94. New York: Bloomsbury. Spicer, A., McKenna, A. T., and Meir, C. (2014) “Introduction”, in A. Spicer, A. T. McKenna and C. Meir (eds) Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies, pp. 1–23. New York: Bloomsbury. Walker, A. (2004) Icons in the Fire: The Rise and Fall of Practically Everyone in the British Film Industry 1984–2000, London: Orion. Walker, J. (2016) Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wayne, M. (2006) “Working Title Mark II: a Critique of the Atlanticist paradigm for British cinema”, International Journal of Cultural and Media Politics, 2(1): 59–73.

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FROM FILM FOUR TO THE FILM COUNCIL Film policy, subsidy and sponsorship, and the relationship between cinema and TV, 1980–2010

James Cateridge Film policy should be considered not just as a sequence of dry government reports, but as a vital and vigorous discourse where tensions around national identity, art and commerce, and the role of film within society come to life. This makes the study and analysis of film policy essential for a full understanding of British cinema history. Many of the established narratives of British cinema history do not make sense unless the role of the state is taken into account. For example, the documentary film movement of the 1930s and 40s, which casts such a long shadow over discussions of British cinema to this day, was nurtured by state subsidy through the General Post Office and later the wartime government’s Crown Film Unit. In the 1980s, the revival of the then ailing British film industry can be largely attributed to the launch of Channel 4, which redirected private sponsorship from television advertising back into film production. And in the 2000s, the success of the UK’s production and post-production facilities was due in no small part to government tax incentives, as well as other types of assistance offered by the UK Film Council (UKFC). The debates which surround all these policy initiatives constitute a site where the private vested interests that make up the film industry are forced into the public gaze. The resulting documents – including official legislation, reports from review bodies and the lengthy application forms required to access public funding – provide invaluable research data, and all are (eventually) open to public scrutiny or freedom of information requests. Understanding film policy is particularly important within the UK context because of the shape and size of the domestic film market. To put it bluntly, the only period when the UK’s film industry could be described as stable and profitable was between the mid1930s and the early 1950s when cinema audiences were at their peak. Ever since cinema audiences fell away at a dizzying rate in the 1960s, choking off the revenue stream which had built the vertically integrated combines of Rank and ABPC, film producers in the UK have struggled to find consistent sources of finance which are required to spread risk

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across slates of films. Developing unproven talent is therefore risky, and even the well established and successful must strike deals with international competitors, usually from Hollywood. This results in a production sector which is polarised between very lowbudget, independently financed films at one end and enormous blockbuster franchises at the other. Of course the biggest culturally British hits of recent decades, such as the Harry Potter franchise, are often made in the UK but financed by (and return profit to) Hollywood. Whether this lopsided industry adequately serves the needs of British filmmakers and audiences has always been the most fundamental issue of film policy in the UK. Between 1980 and 2010 this problem was framed in many different ways, from the neoliberal attack upon cultural subsidies to the relationship of cinema to traditional art forms and new media and the value of British film as a marketing tool advertising the UK to international tourists. It would be impossible to cover the entirety of this rich and complex period in this chapter, so I will bring these issues into focus through a pair of contrasting institutional case studies. Launched in 1982, Channel 4 was funded by private sponsorship (initially via ITV advertising revenue) but with a public service remit to innovate, experiment and serve minority audiences. Channel 4 was set up as a publisher (rather than a producer) of content to stimulate the market for independent TV production, but also had the power to directly commission films as well as other types of programming. By contrast, for its ten years of operation between 2000 and 2010, the UKFC was funded by public subsidy through grant-in-aid revenue from taxation and the National Lottery. An important element of New Labour’s emphasis on the creative industries rather than the arts, the UKFC was given the ambitious target of creating a self-sustaining film sector. The body therefore used the majority of its resources to support bigger-budget films which were capable of competing with Hollywood. Its remit also contained cultural objectives, such as funding a digital screens network to build the audience for so-called “specialised film”, but such initiatives were often lost behind the organisation’s claim for the economic rather than the cultural value of cinema. Before I attempt to untangle the intertwining strands of subsidy and sponsorship which permeate these institutions, it is worth pausing to provide a map of the film and television policy field as it exists within academic film studies.

Mapping the field of film and television policy Whilst film studies in the Anglophone world is built on the supposition that all culture is political, it has often ignored the institutions and systems – the policy processes – which help to sustain and regulate culture. One reason for this oversight, as diagnosed in the preface to the pioneering collection Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives, is that the British cultural studies paradigm (exemplified by Raymond Williams) tends to focus upon ideology, the politics within the text, rather than policy, the politics which surrounds it (Bennett 1996). To reconnect cultural politics with policy, this collection of essays leans towards the political economy approach to culture which is more commonly used by scholars in the US. One such scholar, Janet Wasko, describes political economy as an interdisciplinary method of analysis drawing upon history, sociology and economics, and influenced by Marxist theories of the structure of society in relation to capital and power (Wasko 1999: 224). Within film studies, this

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work has often investigated cultural institutions rather than their end products, which makes political economy an especially useful approach for film policy analysis. More broadly, cultural policy studies has also been influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, which lays bare the links between political institutions, systems of public support and social class. As an example, film scholar John Hill has applied Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital to the UKFC’s investment in notions of “social inclusion” (Hill 2004). Hill’s earlier piece on British film policy (published in Moran’s 1996 collection) helped to set the tone and methodology of later work in the area (Hill 1996b). Like many other academics of his generation, Hill draws upon cultural studies methods for film analysis, but his policy work has the institutional focus and empirical rigour of political economy. Hill has also breached the divide between academia and the policy sector by sitting on the Board of Directors of the BFI, the Northern Ireland Film Council and the UKFC itself. Similarly active on both sides of the academia/policy divide is Sylvia Harvey, who formerly sat on the BFI’s Production Board as well as helping to establish the cultural industries quarter regeneration project in Sheffield during the early 1990s. Harvey’s work is characterised by meticulous analysis of both film and television policy documents, such as the reports of government working groups. Along with her sometime collaborator Margaret Dickinson, Harvey is passionate in her support of the film workshop movement in the UK. Taken together, these major voices offer a leftist critique of UK film policy mechanisms which is against neoliberal deregulation, but also wary of New Labour’s creative industries rhetoric, and broadly aligned with cultural arguments for supporting filmmaking rather than economic ones. Their influence can be felt in recent work by scholars such as Jonathan Hardy’s account of the “professionalization” of media policy-making (Hardy 2012) and Jack Newsinger’s eulogy for the loss of the grassroots work carried out by the largely defunct Regional Screen Agencies (Newsinger 2012). Academics researching media policy are often motivated by a desire to bring information into the public arena and to stimulate democratic debate. For this reason, archival research has been a key methodology and indeed a hallmark of policy studies. The book which set the standard in this regard was Margaret Dickinson and Sarah Street’s Cinema and State (1985) which condensed and combined over fifty years of material from the Public Records Office, the Bank of England and the British Film Institute. More recently Charles Drazin and James Chapman have followed in this tradition by undertaking extensive research of the archives of Film Finances Ltd, a completion guarantee company active in London from the 1950s (Drazin 2014). Of course, institutions are not only defined by the documents they leave behind; they are made up of people, many of whom are willing to provide personal testimony via interviews. Such oral histories are vital for two major current research projects into UK policy institutions both funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council: Gillian Doyle and Phillip Schlesinger’s history of the UKFC (Centre for Cultural Policy Research 2012) and work on Channel 4’s contribution to British film culture at the University of Portsmouth and British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC 2010). Most film policy studies avoid the detailed consideration of individual films, but a few have attempted to draw out the connections between policy processes and the end products they enable (e.g. Caterer 2011b).

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Film Four: private finance as cultural subsidy Public support for filmmaking in the UK has often followed one of two very different paths. In one direction lies modest support for filmmakers with cultural or nonmainstream objectives, such as John Grierson’s documentary units of the 1930s or the BFI Production Board from the 1950s onwards, whilst the alternative, economic stimulus route involves the problematic use of public funding to support commercial organisations. The most commonly employed economic mechanisms include levies to redirect box-office receipts back into production, or screen quotas which attempt to modify the market to provide artificial demand for local films. Each of these strategies has its own benefits and drawbacks, but they both fail to address the most intractable problem of the UK film sector: that distribution has long been in the hands of large multinational corporations with no financial or emotional investment in notions of national cinema. In this light, the genius of the Film Four model established in the mid-1980s was that it was able to provide independent filmmakers with direct access to extremely large audiences – via television. As Paul Giles later noted, the viewing figures received by most films shown in the Film on Four strand were equivalent to selling out an average-sized London theatre every night for six years (Giles 2006: 59). Targeting television audiences may seem like a counterproductive measure if the goal is to revitalise film culture, but nonetheless Film Four did more to stimulate the UK film economy than perhaps any other intervention before or since, and all without directly dipping into the public purse. So how exactly did a broadcaster manage to achieve this, particularly given the political climate of radical deregulation in which it was launched? Channel 4 attracted the scrutiny of UK film scholars immediately, as its remit of supporting minority audiences resonated with the left-leaning politics of most academics. One such researcher was Simon Blanchard, who outlined the genesis and structure of the new channel. Blanchard explained that the UK’s fourth channel was a compromise between the demands of two opposing parliamentary campaigns going back at least 20 years. One faction wanted the development of commercial broadcasting, effectively an “ITV2”, whilst a different coalition of TV producers, critics and trade unionists called for an independent “TV4” with “educational, community-based and experimental” objectives (Blanchard 1982: 5–10). When Harold Wilson’s Labour government launched a review of broadcasting in 1974, the resulting Annan Report came down on the side of full independence for a fourth service. Therefore the incoming Conservative government in 1979 inherited a longrunning dilemma within broadcasting policy which offered no easy solution. Plans for a fourth channel driven by diversity certainly did not suit their ideological project, yet they were committed to the principle of making the television industry more competitive. The fourth channel created by the 1980 Broadcasting Act was a middle ground which managed to be both independent and commercially driven. The ITV companies maintained their monopoly over advertising space by selling the slots between shows on the new channel, whilst the channel’s costs would be kept down by commissioning programmes from third-party independents rather than producing them in-house (Harvey 1994). Channel 4’s publisher status enabled its fiction department to invest not just in traditional drama series but also in feature-length films. These films would be neither traditional BBC TV plays, with all their implications of theatricality and intimacy, nor US-style TV movies which were usually low-budget and equally low on critical cachet.

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Rather they would take the form of low-budget independent or art-house features. Channel 4’s first CEO Jeremy Isaccs recognised that some sort of theatrical release was vital if these projects were to be taken seriously as films, but initially cinema releases were only planned for overseas. At this point, UK exhibitors were still fiercely defensive of their three-year window – the time when they could exclusively screen films before they reached TV. However, this obstacle was removed when Channel 4 negotiated a deal with the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association to make films costing less than £1.25 million exempt from this time delay (Hill 1996a). As the fiction department was initially endowed with a modest £6 million to spread across 20 features, either as majority financier or minority co-producer, the majority of programming on the Film on Four strand would pass under this budgetary ceiling (Smith 2014: 518). This meant that some of the first films funded by Channel 4, such as Neil Jordan’s debut Angel (1982), were given limited runs in cinemas before appearing on television, increasing their critical status and pull for audiences. This arrangement represents an early phase of the major (and ongoing) rebalancing of power between the theatrical and non-theatrical sectors of the film industry in the UK. Channel 4 forged important creative partnerships with talented and ambitious filmmakers such as Neil Jordan, who would later produce one of the funder’s biggest international hits, The Crying Game (1992), but they also built crucial bridges between formerly separate areas of the production sector in the UK. For example, new audiences were found for avant-garde and experimental filmmakers through late-night TV screenings. Further to this end, an extremely productive “subvention deal” was arranged with the BFI’s Production Board, which had previously been chaired by Isaacs. Beginning in 1981, Channel 4 subsidised the production of the BFI’s slate of art cinema films in return for first option on the rights to broadcast them. As Christophe Dupin describes, the resulting first payment of £420,000 practically doubled the Production Board’s annual resources (Dupin 2012: 209). The subvention deal granted the BFI’s group of experimental filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and Sally Potter with the artistic independence required to make challenging films, as Channel 4 agreed to step back completely from creative decision-making. This helped Channel 4 to fulfil their remit to innovate and cater for minority audiences; but perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this deal, which enabled such films as The Draftsman’s Contract (1982) and Caravaggio (1986), is that the original source of half their funding was ITV advertising revenue. Such creative deal-making could not help but reinvigorate the UK’s largely moribund production sector. Summarising their research project on Channel 4’s contribution to British film culture in 2013, Paul McDonald et al. argue that the first decade of Film Four represented a genuine sea change for the British film industry. The channel’s role was not simply as a producer and financier of film production, but also as an exhibitor of marginalised content, a documentarian and historian of British film and a critical commentator through innovative magazine shows about film (McDonald 2013). However, writing some 30 years after his original study of Channel 4’s creation, Simon Blanchard argues that the battle between the cultural and commercial imperatives which once animated the channel has over time been won by financial interests and the need for larger audiences (Blanchard 2013). A key moment in this respect was when the channel set up a filmmaking subsidiary, FilmFour, in 1998 to capitalise on their successful brand, or as FilmFour boss Paul

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Webster later put it, “make good films, make money” (Smith 2014b: 533). Despite early success with East Is East (1999), FilmFour’s big-budget offerings such as glossy war movie Charlotte Grey (2001) and black comedy Death to Smoochy (2002) were high-profile failures. FilmFour lasted just four years, adding it to the long list of ambitious but overextended companies from British cinema history, which also includes Alexander Korda’s British Lion, Goldcrest and Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Between 2002 and 2010 the channel returned to its original strategy of using smaller amounts of private finance to support independent filmmakers, just as greater levels of public subsidy were becoming available for bigger-budget projects.

The UK Film Council: public subsidy for economic objectives As the commercial pressures upon Film Four grew throughout the 1990s, the policy environment had shifted towards the support of filmmaking from the public purse. John Major’s Conservative government shifted responsibility for film from the Department of Trade and Industry to a new Department of National Heritage, putting it alongside the traditional state-subsidised arts. This change was particularly significant given the introduction of the National Lottery in 1995, a new revenue stream created to support “good causes”: society’s desirables rather than its essentials. The film industry lobbied successfully for film to be included on the list of art forms supported by the Lottery through the Arts Councils. The first five years of Lottery support for film were characterised by mixed commercial fortunes and strident criticism from the UK press (Petley 2002), although the Arts Council of England was more at home supporting avant-garde filmmakers such as Carol Morley and Clio Barnard, who have since moved into features (Caterer 2011b). Meanwhile the Lottery franchise scheme aimed to bring together disparate interests in production, distribution and exhibition to create mini-studios capable of competing with Hollywood. Previous government attempts to restructure the film industry, such as the Group Production Plan of the 1950s, were under-resourced and curtailed before they could make a real impact, and the franchises suffered the same fate (Caterer 2011a). Above all, the early years of Lottery funding for film suffered from the same criticisms often levelled at subsidy for the arts: fund popular cinema and critics question the necessity of support, fund experimental work and the accusations change to wasting public resources on films nobody watches. Although film had somehow missed out on the mid-1990s PR bonanza dubbed “Cool Britannia”, whose primary beneficiaries were music, fashion and the arts (Harris 2004), the landslide election victory of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997 provided an opportunity to consolidate the place of the media sector within government policy priorities. John Major’s traditional-sounding Department of National Heritage was rebranded as the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which immediately commissioned a team of industry advisors to produce a film policy review eventually known as The Bigger Picture (DCMS 1998). This report outlines ambitious aims, including a doubling of the domestic market share for UK films, and a voluntary industry fund of around £20 million per year to support distribution and marketing (perhaps unsurprisingly, this never came to pass). At this stage, it was envisioned that Lottery support for film would continue to be provided via the Arts Councils, although there were hints that “rationalisation” of the government’s film policy machinery was required to provide

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“strategic leadership” and “greater coherence” (DCMS 1998: 50). The idea of a single body handling state finance for the film industry had been around since at least 1925 (Dickinson 1985: 12–27), and had existed in different forms since 1950: first as The National Film Finance Corporation and later as public–private partnership British Screen. Of course the BFI had been around for even longer – since 1933 – but successive governments had avoided granting this primarily cultural and educational body the industrial responsibility for film. The genesis of the Film Council was shrouded in mystery. One recent interview with the Council’s first CEO John Woodward indicates that he was approached by (the soon to become Secretary of State) Chris Smith as early as 1996 with the idea of pooling all the existing film bodies together (Doyle 2014: 132). Woodward worked on a plan, but a major sticking point was the status of the BFI, as its Royal Charter prevented it from being folded into the mooted new organisation. In the end the BFI kept its cultural remit and was placed into a subordinate position where it received its grant-in-aid funding from the new body. There were no such complications with assuming the role of distributing Lottery money to filmmakers from the Arts Council, along with the majority of British Screen’s remit. The Council’s principal aim, as described with characteristic bluntness by its first Chairman Alan Parker, was “to use public money to make better, more popular and more profitable films in real partnership with the private sector”. Furthermore, “well-targeted assistance” was to replace the previous “scattergun subsidy” (Parker 2000). This was a barely concealed reference to a significant policy development: unlike the Arts Councils, the Film Council would be allowed to directly solicit applications from the biggest and most successful production companies. The result was its Premiere Fund, allocated £8 million per year to support projects such as period murder mystery Gosford Park (2001). At the other end of the scale, the New Cinema Fund invested £5 million per year in short films and low-budget features from emerging filmmakers, including Peter Mullan’s award-winning drama The Magdalene Sisters (2002). The Film Council’s use of public funding in the service of its wildly ambitious goal of creating a “sustainable” film industry in the UK meant that it faced a higher level of public scrutiny than Channel 4’s filmmaking activity. Media policy scholars have also tended to be more critical of the Film Council; for example, Margaret Dickinson and Sylvia Harvey expressed concerns that the body was set up “without detailed parliamentary and Civil Service scrutiny … [but was rather] negotiated with a quite narrow range of trade interests” (Dickinson 2005: 425). Dickinson and Harvey also feared that the interests of independent filmmakers were not adequately represented on the Film Council’s board. The board’s numbers did, however, include fellow academic John Hill, who nonetheless expressed ambivalence about the Film Council’s strategies, including their support for “social exclusion”. Hill draws upon Bourdieu’s notion of “cultural capital” to question the Council’s policies which were designed to broaden the range of films available to UK audiences. For example, the distribution support granted to foreign-language titles such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) was intended to bring them to a wider cross-section of cinema audiences, but as Hill notes, the result was that these films were actually seen by more of the type of people traditionally interested in foreign-language cinema: affluent, middleclass audiences (Hill 2004: 37). Writing after the UKFC was abolished by the incoming Conservative–Liberal coalition government in 2010, Gillian Doyle is able to weigh the organisation’s overall successes, such as its consistency and strategic coherence, against

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its challenges, which included an impossibly ambitious initial remit and a problematic relationship with other key stakeholders, most notably the BFI (Doyle 2014: 143–149).

Conclusion: rethinking media policy in the digital age The UK film and television industries underwent rapid industrial and technological changes between 1980 and 2010, a period that also witnessed three handovers of political power in 10 Downing Street. However, despite this backdrop of dramatic change, the debates and discourses which make up media policy have continued to occupy broadly similar territory. Channel 4’s compromise between public service broadcasting and commercial television was the result of a long-running policy debate between deregulation and diversity. Its unique positioning enabled it to strike creative deals between previously disparate or even antagonistic sectors of a fragmented industry: bringing new audiences to experimental films and independent cinema, channelling ITV profits into radical filmmakers’ budget sheets, and rewriting the restrictive rulebook on exhibition release windows. However, as Simon Blanchard claims, Channel 4’s success as a publisherbroadcaster also opened a Pandora’s box of free market economics which has contributed to “a bruisingly conformist and routinised” media sector (Blanchard 2013: 373). Whether we fully accept Blanchard’s pessimistic assessment, it is clear that the problem of how to provide for the broadest spectrum of audience interests within a deregulated television industry is still unresolved. It is also increasingly obvious that this debate needs to move on in the face of the rise of digital media, which offers infinite programming choice at the cost of television’s special place at the heart of the nation’s imagined community. In this light, it was perhaps fitting that the first UK film to be released simultaneously across all available digital platforms, Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013), was financed and distributed by a resurgent Film4. The UKFC was created by New Labour’s policy focus on the creative industries, which moderated the deregulation of Thatcherism but could not reverse it. Instead public subsidy was increasingly spent with economic rather than cultural objectives in mind. The UKFC was hampered with an unwinnable aim to create sustainability within the film industry, but it did at least provide ten years of stability and coherence for film policy which has often been thwarted by short-termism. It also supported some successful films across a range of popular genres, including both 3D hit Streetdance and Oscar-winning The King’s Speech in 2010. But like any public sector body dealing with large-scale commercial interests, the UKFC was subject to public criticism of its policies, such as its decision to pay top executives salaries consistent with the film industry as a whole. Perhaps most importantly, its abolition in 2010 has not yet had the catastrophic effect some directors feared, partly because the BFI has so far proved perfectly capable of taking on and reshaping its commercial interests. Meanwhile the good news stories for the UK’s production sector, such as the post-production triumph of Gravity (2013) or Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) shot at Pinewood Studios, mask the financial scarcity faced by first-time filmmakers at the other end of the spectrum. Once again, digital technology appears to offer ways to rethink this equation, with its promise of crowd-funding, cheaper production equipment and internet distribution, but these changes have yet to be fully understood by the industry, much less incorporated into film policy debates.

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Further reading Caterer, J. (2011) The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Dickinson, M. and S. Harvey (2005). Film Policy in the United Kingdom: New Labour at the Movies. Political Quarterly, 76(3): 420–429. Doyle, G., Schlesinger, P., Boyle, R. and Kelly, L.W. (2015) The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hardy, J. (2012) UK Television Policy and Regulation, 2000–10. Journal of British Cinema and Television 9(4): 521–547. Hill, J. and McLoone, M. (eds) (1996) Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television. Luton: University of Luton Press.

References Bennett, T. et al. (1996) Series Editors’ Preface, in A. Moran (ed). Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives. London: Routledge. Blanchard, S. (1982) Where Do New Channels Come From? in S. Blanchard and Morley, D. (eds.) What’s This Channel Fo(u)r? An Alternative Report. London: Comedia. Blanchard, S. (2013) The Two Faces of Channel Four: Some Notes in Retrospect. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 33(3): 365–376. British Universities Film and Video Council (2010) Channel 4 and British Film Culture. BUFVC. , accessed November 2014. Caterer, J. (2011a) Reinventing the British Film Industry: The Group Production Plan and the National Lottery Franchise Scheme. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 17(1): 94–105. Caterer, J. (2011b) The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Centre for Cultural Policy Research (2012) The UK Film Council: A Case Study of Film Policy in Transition. University of Glasgow. , accessed November 2014. Department of Culture, Media and Sport (1998) A Bigger Picture: The Report of the Film Policy Review Group. London: DCMS. Dickinson, M. and Harvey, S. (2005) Film Policy in the United Kingdom: New Labour at the Movies. Political Quarterly, 76(3): 420–429. Dickinson, M. and Street, S. (1985) Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the Government, 1927–84. London: BFI Publishing. Doyle, G. (2014) Film Support and the Challenge of ‘Sustainability’: On Wing Design, Wax and Feathers, and Bolts from the Blue. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11(2–3): 129–151. Drazin, C. (2014) Film Finances: The First Years. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 34(1): 2–22. Dupin, C. (2012) The BFI and Film Production, in Dupin, C. and G. Nowell-Smith (eds). The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Giles, P. (2006) History With Holes: Channel 4 Television Films of the 1980s, in L. Friedman (ed.). Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 2nd ed. London: Wallflower. Hardy, J. (2012) UK Television Policy and Regulation, 2000–10. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(4): 521–547. Harris, J. (2003) The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock. London: Fourth Estate.

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Harvey, S. (1994) Channel Four Television: From Annan to Grade, in Hood, S. (ed). Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Broadcasting in the 1990s. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hill, J. (1996a) British Television and Film: The Making of a Relationship, in Hill, J. and M. McLoone (eds). Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television. Luton: University of Luton Press. Hill, J. (1996b) British Film Policy in Moran, A. (ed.). Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives. London: Routledge. Hill, J. (2004) UK Film Policy, Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion. Cultural Trends, 13(2): 29–39. McDonald, P. et al. (2013) Editor’s Introduction. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 33(3): 355–364. Newsinger, J. (2012) British Film Policy in an Age of Austerity. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(1): 133–144. Parker, A. (2000) Towards a Sustainable Film Industry. British Film Institute. , accessed November 2014. Petley, J. (2002) From Brit-flicks to Shit-flicks: The Cost of Public Subsidy. Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5: 37–52. Smith, J. and Mayne, L. (2014) The Four Heads of Film4. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11(4): 517–551. Wasko, J. (1999). The Political Economy of Film, in T. Miller and R. Stam (eds.) A Companion to Film Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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THE ARCHITECTS OF BBC FILMS Anne Woods Over the past twenty-five years more than 200 UK feature films have been made with the financial support of the BBC through its semi-autonomous filmmaking arm BBC Films. This “Contribution to British Film” was recognised by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in 2015, two years after Film4 (Channel 4 Television’s equivalent) received the award in that category. Yet despite industry recognition and the breadth of its output including My Summer of Love (2004), Fish Tank (2009) and StreetDance 3D (2010), public awareness of the unit’s role as a cornerstone of the British film industry remains limited. Why this should be is as complex as the BBC Films narrative itself, which combines not only the complicated “interdependency” of British cinema and television (Caughie 1996: 218), but also the internal debate as to the legitimacy of a licence-fee-funded broadcaster engaging in feature film production. As new writing and research on British cinema have burgeoned in recent years, a coherent overview of BBC Films, including its protracted genesis, unique mode of operation, and position as the UK’s third public funder (alongside Film4 and the BFI), is long overdue. Such forensic examination cannot be attempted here, but a useful entry point to examining BBC Films’ contribution to UK film – both economic and cultural – is to look at the role played by two figures who headed the unit during its formative and most turbulent period: Mark Shivas and David Thompson. As executive producers, commissioners and managers, their influence can be likened to that of the old studio heads, such as Michael Balcon at Ealing, where skilled operational and financial management was combined with enterprise, imagination and a passion for film. They were responsible for greenlighting up to ten feature films each year from the thousands of projects that landed on their desks, and they wielded substantial power and creative influence in the industry. All this was achieved while negotiating the tightrope between creative entrepreneurship and the institutional boundaries of the BBC.

Mark Shivas (1988–97) When Shivas took up his appointment as BBC Head of Drama in 1988, one of the first things he wanted to achieve was “to move the corporation into feature film production on a regular basis” (Hill and McLoone 1996: 184). This was an ambition for which he

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was well qualified. As producer of some of television’s most popular and highly regarded drama series, including The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) and The Glittering Prizes (1976), Shivas understood the BBC, but also had an intimate knowledge of cinema on both a theoretical and practical level. This included an early job as assistant editor of the magazine Movie (modelled on the French publication Cahiers du Cinéma), a brief spell as a presenter on the weekly Cinema series for Granada Television (1964–75) and as the independent producer of several feature films including Moonlighting (1982) and A Private Function (1984). His desire to steer the BBC into film production also represented the culmination of a long campaign in which Shivas, and others such as producer Kenith Trodd and BBC Head of Plays, Peter Goodchild, had lobbied to secure a theatrical release for some of the BBC’s filmed television plays. These were commonly shot on 16mm and in their opinion were the equal of, if not superior to, most British feature films being screened in cinemas at the time. When the BBC failed to be convinced that a filmmaking strategy was compatible with the its core remit as set out in the Royal Charter, Shivas argued: “The fact that there’s nothing about film in the Charter can be used another way – it means there’s nothing preventing us from taking the BBC into the film industry” (Hill and McLoone 1996: 184). From 1989 Shivas took over Screen Two (1985–2002) which was an annual season of films, originated by Goodchild as an alternative to Film on Four and broadcast on BBC2 in a post-watershed slot. This opportunity provided Shivas with the breakthrough he needed and he negotiated with the channel controllers for a small number of these films to be given theatrical releases in the UK and abroad. For producers the prospect of cinema release became a lollipop to attract finance, while a major weapon in Shivas’s armoury was the corporation’s fear of losing talent to its rival, Channel 4, whose innovative strategy for selective cinema release had been established since its inception in 1982. Prime amongst the arguments for theatrical release was that filmmakers working at the BBC deserved a share of cinema’s benefits, including opportunities for awards, international exposure at festivals, greater income and more serious critical recognition. In this context, Shivas fulfilled a vital role as a champion of British filmmaking talent, supporting the likes of Anthony Minghella, Michael Winterbottom, Gillies MacKinnon, Antonia Bird and Suri Krishnamma in their early careers, and nurturing relationships with more established figures such as Mike Newell and Nicolas Roeg. One of the most valuable components in the dowry Shivas brought to BBC Films was an almost universal respect in the cinema world. Talent liked to work with him and Shivas knew everyone. He was proud of the international star names he could attach to Screen Two such as Bruno Ganz, Anouk Aimée and Sandrine Bonnaire. As Shivas was architect of the corporation’s nascent film operation, it is tempting to view him as an exemplar of benevolent leadership, much as Balcon had been during his most fruitful period at Ealing. Like Balcon, and in the manner of a small-scale Hollywood mogul, Shivas assembled around him a creative team of writers, directors and actors, bolstered by all the advantages of the BBC as a “production house … equivalent [to] an American studio” whose resources were “incalculable in real terms” and “as good as anything … in the film industry” (Sutherland 1985: 21). His style appears to have been to get the best people to do the job and then trust them to get on with it, creating “space for the component creative personnel to focus on and fulfill their task more effectively” (Spicer 2014: 3). Significantly, as tastemaker for BBC

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Films and producer-auteur, Shivas not only commissioned the scripts but also oversaw the casting and determined the whole character of the final work. Aware of the importance of “global distribution networks” (Spicer 2014: 66), Shivas formed an early relationship with sales agency, The Sales Company, and adopted a strategy of showing films at major festivals, the principal testing ground for deciding whether a film would receive a cinema release. This led to films such as Antonia and Jane (1990), Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) and Enchanted April (1991) being fought over by the likes of Miramax and Sam Goldwyn Jnr, and screened in the US with considerable success. This, in turn, established America as a principal market for BBC Films productions. As a result Shivas was able to convince the channel controllers of the legitimacy of a corporate film arm – with all the benefits of a cross-pollination of publicity and guaranteed film rights – and assure them that it would not endanger the prospects of television productions when BBC Films’ budget came from the drama pot. Throughout Shivas’s tenure, corporate concerns continued, however, to cast their shadow. The fear was that the BBC might be accused of misusing and even wasting licence-fee payers’ money. As Caughie notes, these reservations can be traced back to the broadcaster’s “founding principles of social purpose and moral responsibility,” its sense of “cultural mission” and its “unease around Hollywood entertainment values” (Caughie 1996: 218). According to Richard Broke, Shivas’s commitment to cinema ultimately “upset a lot of people” and became a “huge bone of contention,” as he came to be seen as something of an “absentee landlord” with regard to television drama. Making films for theatrical release had not been in his contract as Head of Drama, but he blithely “just went ahead and did it” which ultimately led to his sacking in 1993 (Broke 2012). Although this appeared to be punitive, in fact a new role as Head of Film was created for him, which effectively sanctioned the unofficial operation that Shivas had been running up to this point. Free to concentrate on what he loved most – making films – Shivas went on to oversee an eclectic range of British projects including The Snapper (1993), An Awfully Big Adventure (1995) and Regeneration (1997) as well as supporting European co-productions such as The Hour of the Pig (1993) and My Mother’s Courage (1995). Yet even prior to Shivas’s return to the corporation, internal discussions as to the proposed nature of a filmmaking operation envisaged that it would be significantly different from Film on Four supporting grander-scale productions in keeping with the quality image of the BBC. Thus, while Shivas was described by the industry press as a transforming figure with “powers comparable to those of David Aukin at Channel Four” and the ability to “green-light or reject one of the thousand-odd projects that landed on his desk each year” (Jackson 1996: 7), BBC Films’ pursuit of a commissioning and releasing strategy for BBC Films similar to the low-budget model that Channel 4 had pioneered in its early years under Jeremy Isaacs (Chief Executive) and David Rose (Senior Commissioning Editor Fiction) may not have been what the corporation wanted. Significantly, while Shivas’s creative taste – which encompassed projects as diverse as Korczak (1990) and i.d. (1995) – may have set the tenor of BBC Films at this time, his ambitions were limited by a budget which rarely permitted an investment of more than £800,000 in any film. Foremost, too, was Shivas’s remit to provide films for each season of Screen Two in which projects such as Priest (1994) and Small Faces (1996) filled the gap left by the disappearance of the one-off play. As an increased rivalry developed between BBC Films and George Faber’s area of Single Drama (which also enjoyed the benefits

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of selective theatrical release), Shivas focused the remaining years of his tenure on the establishment of an independent BBC Films in conjunction with the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Enterprises, which was aggressively expanding its business aspirations. Shivas planned for a limited company that would operate as a subsidiary of the BBC, and was able to fund up to ten feature films a year, as well as taking on some acquisitions. However, once again he was to fall foul of the corporation’s ambivalent attitude to film and deep-seated institutional aversion to change. Although Jude (1996) was given a standing ovation when it received its gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival, the anticipated and much-publicised announcement of the launch of Shivas’s film company did not happen. The BBC effectively withdrew its support, leaving Shivas an unlucky victim of timing in the run-up to the ten-yearly renewal of the Royal Charter – a period when the BBC traditionally exercised caution and was concerned to demonstrate its value for money. In a highly competitive organisation like the BBC, assuming the persona of an auteur aroused departmental jealousies, including a perception that film people thought they were “superior” (Powell 2012): it was felt that a policy of cinema release meant money taken away from television, particularly as drama was viewed by other departments as spendthrift and extravagant (Born 2005). Shivas’s enthusiasm and commitment to finding a workable model for BBC Films – supported by creatives within the BBC and the UK film industry – was thus hampered by a number of factors in which corporate reservations, and the fact that BBC management had no experience of the film industry and little understanding of the way it operated, played a major part. In the eight years since its inception BBC Films had achieved mediocre broadcast viewing figures and only a handful of cinema hits. This lacklustre performance made it an easy target for those who saw the unit predominantly as an exercise in vanity, and the film industry as “full of thieves and sharks and louts” (Hill and McLoone 1996: 184). In this climate, a major restructuring of the institution by Director-General, John Birt, in 1997 – including the separation of the broadcasting and production units – saw Shivas, the man who had succeeded in making BBC Films a reality, replaced by another figure who had been waiting in the wings.

David Thompson (1997–2007) Like his predecessor, Thompson was initially seen as a safe pair of hands whose background as a TV documentary maker and drama producer made him an ideal figure to reaffirm BBC Films’ corporate position and provide popular hits for cinema and television. A new job title, Head of Film and Single Drama, which merged two previously distinct areas, also eliminated the kind of departmental turf wars associated with Shivas and Faber. This makes it all the more ironic that by the time of Thompson’s departure in 2007, having overseen the production of more than 70 theatrical features, he would be regarded as a maverick whose controversial role as solo tastemaker for the unit drew criticism both from the UK film industry and senior BBC management. Early success came as the producer of Shadowlands (BBC1, 1985) and other single television films, including involvement in BBC Films’ Sarafina! (1992), Captives (1994) and Go Now (1995). However, Thompson, who had little experience of the film industry, rapidly made up for his lack of expertise by bringing together a formidable creative and

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business team, including film professionals such as Jane Wright and Isabel Begg. With their assistance, Thompson ambitiously set about raising the profile of BBC Films both domestically and internationally, aided by broader government interventions to create a sustainable British film industry following the election of New Labour in 1997. Bolstered by the report of the Film Policy Review Group, A Bigger Picture, which identified broadcasters as a “vital” and “integral” component of the UK film industry (1998), Thompson’s ambitions for BBC Films may also have been influenced by Channel 4’s separation of its filmmaking arm with the establishment of the standalone company FilmFour Ltd. Here, under Paul Webster (fresh from Miramax), a strategy for increased collaboration with American production companies and investment in more populist material appeared to mirror Thompson’s own aspirations to produce bigger-budgeted films and to forge stronger links with Hollywood, which were manifested in the opening of an office in Los Angeles. Significantly, Thompson’s major strategic shift also chimed with the launch of the (UK) Film Council in 2000, whose Chief Executive, John Woodward, declared its support for “films that can really play on a Friday night” and not those “whose natural home is television” (Sight & Sound 2000: 3). One of Thompson’s most significant contributions to the evolution of BBC Films lay in the successful interweaving of the economic and cultural elements of its production strategy as embodied in the concept of the mixed-slate. This translated to a roughly 2:1 split between more expensive, mainstream projects (often Hollywood co-productions) and smaller, culturally British films, thus establishing a funding formula largely followed to this day. As Hill notes, while it has been common in analysis of British film policy in the 2000s “to comment upon the way in which cultural objectives were subordinated to economic ones, the actuality was rather more complicated” (2012: 337). The fact that the Film Council “exhibited little sympathy for the sort of film culture that might make a wide variety of films available” (Dickinson and Harvey 2005: 426) made the public service aspect of BBC Films’ role, as supporter of less obviously marketable but culturally important films, even more vital. Indeed, it was with two small, intrinsically British films, both originally destined for television, that Thompson achieved his first critical and commercial hits: Mrs Brown (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000). These examples of intelligent, middlebrow filmmaking seemed to exemplify what BBC Films was all about: strong storytelling accessible to both cinema and television audiences. More negatively, lingering associations with television and a televisual aesthetic also led to criticism, such as that made in relation to Dirty Pretty Things (2002), in which BBC Films was scathingly referred to as “that popular oxymoron” (Sinclair 2002: 32–34). Thompson’s response came in the implementation of a dual strategy. First, plans were made for more grandiose projects such as Mary Queen of Scots – an historical drama scripted by Jimmy McGovern and budgeted at £15.6m, which failed to happen – and a UK/Canadian co-production of The Snow Queen, in which Cate Blanchett and Cher were both in negotiations to star. Second, he envisaged the continuing development of lower-budget art-house product which appealed to BBC2 audiences and had the potential to crossover to cinema. This pragmatic approach recognised that UK hits such as Billy Elliot were rare and that it was unlikely BBC Films could build a successful brand on low-budget, culturally British films alone. UK audiences preferred to see American films, and an innovative element of Thompson’s strategy was to partner Hollywood stars with UK talent in an effort to increase domestic, as well as international, audience

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appeal. He further argued that giving UK talent “more expensive film productions to work on” would “allow the corporation to hang on to talent that would otherwise go to Hollywood,” while “teaming up [with] American producers” provided opportunities – in recognition of BBC Films’ public service requirements – “to bring British talent forward on the international stage” (Dawtrey 2001: 5). A major boost to Thompson’s ambitions came with the appointment of Greg Dyke as Director-General in 2000, whose support for BBC Films extended to a proposed increase in annual budget from £10m to £15m. This endorsement gave Thompson the tacit approval he needed. His cause was further advanced by an ironic turn of fortunes in which over-ambition led to the failure of FilmFour Ltd’s studio-model venture in 2002. As a much scaled-down version of the operation was brought back in-house, the new Film4 returned to the development of smaller, predominantly British films, as Channel 4’s film strategy had originally set out to do. This left a gap in the market for mid-range, international co-productions which Thompson quickly recognised could be filled by BBC Films. Aided by a number of factors outside of Thompson’s control, including the government’s desire for a more commercially oriented film industry and an official sanctioning of the unit’s activities from the very top of the BBC, further corporate reorganisation placed BBC Films under the aegis of another figure sympathetic to his aims, Alan Yentob. Yentob outranked Controller of BBC2, Jane Root, who had openly stated her preference that money allocated to BBC Films be invested in television drama. With her “important voice” in the creative decision-making process effectively silenced, “the ambiguity that previously existed over who [shaped] the destiny of BBC Films” was eliminated, enabling Thompson to “greenlight films outside the channel commissioning structure” (Dawtrey 2000: 2). In addition, a physical move away from Television Centre to its own offices in Mortimer Street – closer to London’s filmmaking quarter – had a symbolic significance for how BBC Films was perceived by the film industry both domestically and internationally. Between 2004 and 2009, 49 films with BBC Films’ involvement were released, including higher-budget, international productions – Match Point (2005), Miss Potter (2006) and Eastern Promises (2007) – and more modestly budgeted art-house films such as Bullet Boy (2004), Red Road (2006) and The History Boys (2006). Yet, because Thompson appeared to operate BBC Films as if it were a successful business through implementation of his strategy to partner UK and Hollywood talent, he became a potentially problematical figure for the corporation. This manifested itself most starkly with the production of Revolutionary Road (2008), an adaptation of Richard Ford’s American novel, said to be a personal favourite of Thompson’s. The film, which partnered Titanic (1997), stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and was directed by Winslet’s then husband Sam Mendes, was a critical and commercial success. Thus, for the BBC, the issue was not about wasting licence-fee-payers’ money but rather that support for non-UK stories, filmed in non-UK locations, and with American stars, sent out the wrong message. This provoked criticism both from within the institution and from UK film industry organisations such as PACT. Their concern was that BBC Films’ international strategy – which included support for established foreign filmmakers such as Woody Allen and David Cronenberg – was at the expense of home-grown talent. For Thompson the mid-2000s had been a golden period in which, aided by an expert and increasingly expanded team, projects greenlit by him had returned substantial ring-fenced

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profits to be reinvested in more films. But, at the height of his success, the bubble was effectively burst with an announcement in 2007 that BBC Films was to be brought back inhouse. The result of this “insane” intervention (Wright 2013) was to endanger the already limited autonomy of BBC Films which had never enjoyed the benefits – or experienced the perils – of operating as a separate subsidiary like FilmFour Ltd. It also provided an opportunity for senior management to exert greater influence on policy direction, including an effective mechanism “to promote the corporation as creator” (Caldwell 2008: 241). If BBC Films benefited indirectly from the closure of FilmFour Ltd, there were lessons to be learnt regarding the folly of over-ambition. Geographical separation from the corporation and a specificity of purpose to make a range of culturally significant and commercial feature films may have been greeted positively by the industry, but this had its limits as far as the corporation was concerned. And true creative independence was also something of an illusion, disguising the reality that BBC Films were public servants “plugged into the bigger BBC at all levels” (Scoffield 2013). By Thompson assuming the mantel of a studio-head, whose artistic taste was paramount, the balance in the struggle for creative control may have been tipped, in part due to the success of his relationship with the film industry. This not only set BBC Films apart but may have made it appear as if the unit had temporarily forgotten its place as a division of the television broadcaster which supported it. Significantly, the 2000s had seen the BBC operating in an increasingly hostile environment, faced with additional demands on the licence fee resulting from its leadership role in the switch to digital, and pressure to take a more market-driven approach to its activities. While an effect of government film policy during Thompson’s tenure was to increase pressure on the BBC to spend more on film with the implication that it should be more commercially oriented, a growing mismatch appears to have developed between what the corporation wanted in terms of value for money from its film arm and what BBC Films was providing. Thus, a perceived lack of Britishness in films such as Fast Food Nation (2006) developed into a serious issue, and the formerly positive benefits of a strategy to invest small amounts of money across a broad range of films were spun into a negative suggestion that the unit often had a very quiet voice in the productions it supported, and that there was little “BBC-ness” about them. In what appears to have been a clash of personalities and ideologies between Thompson and senior management, plans were made to integrate BBC Films’ television output back into BBC Drama, leaving Thompson with the prospect of a very different and possibly diminished role. This he chose not to accept and left the corporation to form his own production company, following lengthy redundancy negotiations to secure his executive producer role on a number of BBC Films projects already in development. With the unit’s budget temporarily frozen, and in what appears to have been an attempt by management to dilute the effect of individual taste and ambitions, Thompson’s position was filled by a new BBC Films board.

Conclusion Through the personal ambitions, creative skills and entrepreneurship of its first two heads, BBC Films succeeded in forging a distinct identity in keeping with the quality brand of the BBC which both complemented and challenged Britain’s other public funders. This was achieved despite the complexities of BBC Films’ institutional position, which

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required it to perform a delicate balancing act between corporate television responsibilities and support for the UK film industry. During their tenures, both Shivas and Thompson were frequently portrayed in the press as figures who did not quite fit the BBC mould. However, the role of maverick within a large institution remains a complicated one. As Hesmondhalgh (2002: 27) suggests: Companies grant symbol creators a limited autonomy in the hope that the creators will come up with something original and distinctive enough to be a hit. But this means that cultural companies are engaged in a constant process of struggle to control what symbol creators are likely to come up with. Therefore, while Shivas and Thompson enjoyed a level of creative autonomy previously associated only with independent studio heads and producer-auteurs, recent corporate interventions have included calls for BBC Films to exhibit greater Britishness and BBCness; an announcement in 2010 confirming BBC2 as the official broadcast home of BBC Films; and a requirement for the unit to produce a published strategy setting out its key objectives. This formalisation of BBC Films’ activities, together with the brief experiment of a board style of management, can be seen as an attempt to increase corporate control, to eliminate the prospect of a single tastemaker and to enable greater accountability. In an earlier era, Shivas’s and Thompson’s considerable achievement was to assist significantly in the acceptance and recognition of BBC Films as a key part of the corporation’s activities. They established the unit as a successful investor in both British and international feature films, mediating between production creatives and the international film industry (including co-financiers and distributors), and created a pathway for British talent from television to film following the demise of the single television play. Like studio heads of a bygone era their egos, ambitions and passion for film have contributed to an indigenous cinematic legacy, but one framed by the particularities of public service television and cultural subsidy.

Further reading Murphy, R. (ed.) (2000) British Cinema of the 90s, London: BFI Publishing. (Useful insight into Britain’s film landscape at this time; includes discussions around British film culture, the relationship between UK film and Hollywood, and the lack of talent development in the UK.) Petrie, D. (ed.) (1996) Inside Stories: Diaries of Filmmakers, London: BFI Publishing. (First-hand accounts written by key figures in the British film industry including Mark Shivas.) Street, S. (1997) British National Cinema, London: Routledge. (Examines cinema as a national cultural institution, bringing together developments in cultural studies and film history.)

References Born, G. (2005) Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, London: Vintage. Caldwell, J.T. (2008) Production Culture, London: Duke University Press. Caughie, J. (1986) “Broadcasting and Cinema 1: Converging Histories”, in C. Barr (ed.) All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, pp. 189–205. London: BFI Publishing.

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Caughie, J. (1996) “The Logic of Convergence”, in J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds.) Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television, pp. 205–209. Luton: John Libbey Media. Dawtrey, A. (2000) “Dyke Backs BBC Pix: Unit Gets Thumbs Up, Yentob to Pick Direction”, Daily Variety, p. 2. Dawtrey, A. (2001) “Kalmbach Leads Beeb Move into Hollywood”, Daily Variety, p. 5. DCMS (1998) A Bigger Picture. The Report of the Film Policy Review Group. Dewhurst, K. (2008) Mark Shivas: Obituary, The Independent, 17 October. Dickinson, M. and Harvey, S. (2005) Film Policy in the United Kingdom: New Labour at the Movies, pp. 420–429. London: The Political Quarterly Publishing Company. Editorial (2000) “Small Change”, Sight & Sound, 10(6), 3. Hesmondhalgh, D. (2002) The Cultural Industries, London: Sage Publications. Higson, A. (2011) Film England, London: I.B. Tauris. Hill, J. (2012) “This is for the Batmans as well as the Vera Drakes: Economics, Culture and UK Government Film Production Policy in the 2000s”, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(3), 333–356. Jackson, K. (1996) “The Transformer; 4 Mark Shivas”, The Independent p. 7, 4 January. Personal interview with Jonathan Powell, 1 February 2012. Personal interview with Richard Broke, 23 February 2012. Personal interview with Tracey Scoffield, 7 August 2013. Personal interview with Jane Wright, 9 August 2013. Shivas, M. (1996) “The BBC and Film”, in J. Hill and M. McLoone (eds.), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television, pp. 184–187. Luton: John Libbey Media. Sinclair, I. (2002) “Heartsnatch Hotel”, Sight & Sound, 12(12), 32–34. Spicer, A., McKenna, A.T. and Meir, C. (eds.) (2014) Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and Television Studies, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sutherland, A. (1985) Film on 1 and 2, AIP & Co, 64, 21.

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THE UKFC AND THE REGIONAL SCREEN AGENCIES Jack Newsinger Introduction The UK Film Council (UKFC) was formed in 2000 by the British New Labour government. The creation of a single agency to oversee all the industrial and cultural aspects of British film was one of the central recommendations of the Film Policy Review Group, intended to counter the perceived fragmentation of the industry after the previous Conservative government’s disastrous laissez faire approach. More than this, it appeared to signal the government’s strong support for the development of a prosperous British film industry, symbolic of the “cool capitalism” that was central to the identity of New Labour during its first term of office. The central debate about the UKFC – whether it was good for British film – is in many ways a straightforward reincarnation of the perennial film policy debate about the domination of Hollywood over the British film industry and the perceived cultural importance of indigenous production. What one thinks of the UKFC in particular is, however, inevitably tainted by its association with Blairism. As a key New Labour institution summarily executed by the incoming coalition government in 2010, it is difficult not to see the UKFC and its provincial outposts, the Regional Screen Agencies (RSAs), as straightforward expressions of New Labour’s cultural politics. What makes Blair’s film policy distinct is discussed below. But first it is worth briefly discussing the terms of debate on film policy and why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it was still impossible to reconcile what British film should be, and what was good for it.

Commerce vs culture? Film Policy in Britain shares a dilemma in common with that for most other national cinemas – the commerce-culture relationship. There is always a struggle between the desire to build a viable sector of the economy that provides employment, foreign exchange and multiplier effects; and the desire for a representative and local cinema that reflects seriously upon society through drama. (Miller 2000: 44)

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The tension identified by Toby Miller above – the commerce–culture relationship – is based upon a preconceived incompatibility between an economically viable film industry and a serious, representative film culture. It is reflected in two different arguments about the role of state subsidy for film production. The first is the argument for subsidy of film production in terms of its value to the economy, with film production conceived as a commercial activity and as part of a wider British industrial sector in an international capitalist market system. The second is the argument for subsidy of film production for cultural reasons. In this the state has a responsibility to subsidise forms of film production that have a cultural value, however conceived, that the market is unable or unwilling to provide on its own. The commerce–culture tension, understood in this way, has been a driving force within intellectual and public debate about national cinema, and central to the development of film policy. However, to understand film policy in this way is a mistake. First, as Margaret Dickinson has argued, the distinction between “commercial” and “non-commercial” filmmaking is flawed “because it posits a somewhat dubious distinction between profitable and subsidised activity, which responds more to the ideology than the actuality of ‘commercial’ production” (Dickinson 1999: 3–4). “Commercial” forms of filmmaking have been dependent on various kinds of subsidy and market regulation, often to a staggering degree. Furthermore, “commercial” policy frameworks do not necessarily exclude “cultural” ideas and “commercial” films are no less shaped by “culture”: “even if the former is shaped by the drive for profit it does not mean that, as individuals, the players are always or only maximising wealth, or a combination of wealth, power and prestige. Personal values, inclinations and interests are also important” (Dickinson 1999: 5). The adoption of a self-consciously “cultural” position is thus the adoption of a tactical position within film culture. That is, a way individuals, organisations and groups can define themselves against a dominant system of production and consumption that for one reason or another has been found inadequate. In the British context this dominant system has been Hollywood, and to a lesser extent British-based companies that seek to compete with and accommodate it on its own terms. The key point, however, is that “culture” and “commerce” are relative categories that refer more to an ideological tension than two completely separate kinds of filmmaking practice. To understand how the UKFC and RSAs were shaped by these tensions, we need to understand them within the development of the “creative industries” idea. That is, a quite specific amalgamation of industrial and cultural policy that aimed to position the UK within a global division of labour in the digital Information Communication Technology (ICT) and content industries.

Getting creative The history of the creative industries as a policy concept has been well covered in the literature (Garnham 2005; Hesmondhalgh and Pratt 2005; Schlesinger 2007; Flew 2012; Newsinger 2012a; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2014). One recent account describes it in the following way: Creative industries as a concept was consistent with a number of touchstones of the redefining of the British Labour Party as “New Labour”, as it was spearheaded

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by Tony Blair and his supporters within Labour, with its recurring concerns with economic modernization and Britain’s post-industrial future. Its focus on the role of markets as stimuli to arts and culture was consistent with the notion of a “Third Way” between Thatcher-era free market economics and traditional social democracy, which was nonetheless more accommodating of the role of markets and global capitalism than traditional British Labour Party philosophy and doctrine. (Flew 2012: 14) The incoming New Labour government moved quickly to solidify its ideas in an institutional framework. The Department of National Heritage was renamed as the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The Creative Industries Task Force published an oft-quoted report – the Creative Industries Mapping Document (1998) – which identified the creative industries as “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the exploitation of intellectual property” (quoted in Schlesinger 2007: 379). These were advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software, television and radio. This particular grouping together of, in some ways, quite disparate activities has been revised and debated in the years since (see, for example, Throsby 2001; Hopkins 2010), but the key point is the foregrounding of the commercial role of culture and the arts and their perceived benefits to the wider economy. Government support could be seen, therefore, not as subsidy and wealth redistribution but as a form of commercial investment which fitted well with New Labour’s political investment in capitalism and big business. The main critique of the creative industries policy discourse tends to centre on the attempt to resolve the tensions between art and economics, between commerce and culture, and the extent to which this failed. The creative industries are interpreted as the commodification of culture, part of a more general creep towards markets and neoliberalism that has its origins in Thatcherism in the 1980s. For example, Nicholas Garnham’s influential discussion situates the creative industries as an unconvincing attempt to artificially link the arts and culture to information and communication technologies: The shift to creative industries did not come out of the blue. It was motivated by a historically specific political context, but it brought together and was one among a range of products of strands of policy thinking going back to the early 1980s. The general context was the shift from state to market across the whole range of public provision, initiated under the Thatcher government. The Labour Party (rebranded as “New Labour”) wished to signal that it not only accepted, but wished to accelerate, this shift. This was linked to a new relationship under Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e., Finance Minister) Gordon Brown between the Treasury and the spending departments under which public expenditure was to be seen as an “investment” against which recipients had to show measurable outputs against pre-defined targets. This explains the shift to and reinforcement of “economic” and “managerial” language and patterns of thought within cultural and media policy. (Garnham 2005: 16)

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A debate exists as to the extent of New Labour’s alignment with neoliberal capitalism, and how far this is reflected in institutions such as the UKFC and creative industries policies more generally (see Newsinger 2012b; Hesmondhalgh et al. 2014). So how did the UKFC navigate the commerce–culture tension?

The UKFC In 1998 New Labour appointed a Film Policy Review Group mostly made up of industry company executives. Its report, A Bigger Picture, recommended the restructuring of the existing institutions responsible for administering film policy in England into a single organisation. The Film Council was created in 2000 (renamed UK Film Council in 2003), a body incorporating the Lottery Film Department of the Arts Council of England, BFI Production, the British Film Commission and British Screen Finance into a single agency charged with both the cultural and commercial activities of its predecessor organisations. The UKFC’s conception of film is summed up in the following terms: Film is a complex combination of industry and culture. Common to both are creativity and commerce. For the purpose of this review we assume that industry and culture are inextricably linked and, that, in public policy terms, to privilege one over the other would be to the detriment of both. (Film Council 2000: 12) However, in practice the distinction between cultural filmmaking and commercial filmmaking was maintained in institutional terms. As the UKFC’s first Chairman, Alan Parker, put it, “Essentially our intention is to use public money to make better, more popular and more profitable films in real partnership with the private sector, which drives our industry and largely creates our film culture.” By contrast, the “cultural role of the UK FILM COUNCIL has been largely delegated to the British Film Institute and its regional partners” (Film Council 2000: 1).

Production funding Under the UKFC, funding for the production sector of the British film industry was organised through a number of schemes designed as strategic interventions into the areas where support could be effectively channelled: higher-end “commercial” films, lowbudget experimental/digital films, script development and training. The flagship scheme was the Premiere Fund, with £10m per year. Other funds included the New Cinema Fund with £5m, intended as a more experimental, low-budget option for emerging firsttime filmmakers; the Film Development Fund with £5m; and the Training Fund, £1m. Unlike traditional cultural subsidy, funding was treated as an investment to be recouped if and when a film went into profit. Films that received support from the Premiere Fund include Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001), Gosford Park (2001), Valiant (2005), Five Children and It (2004), Stormbreaker (2006), The Constant Gardener (2005), Life ’n’ Lyrics (2006), Closing the Ring (2007), St Trinian’s (2007), How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008), Harry Brown (2009), Nowhere Boy (2009) and The King’s Speech (2010) (Hill 2012). These investments were always controversial, with critics often accusing the

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UKFC of either not being commercial enough by putting money into projects that did not turn a profit, or conversely, of being too commercial by putting public money into productions that did not need it. The UKFC were also heavily criticised for setting high targets for rates of return for Lottery-funded films, for paying their executives excessive salaries and for propagandistic research (for a more detailed discussion of these issues see Doyle 2014). In this way, they sought to emulate the business model of the Hollywood studios, following a market-orientated, distribution-led approach which was anathema to many indigenous, independent producers, and those who stood on the “cultural” side of the film policy debate. But, as John Hill has noted: What some of [the] films backed by the New Cinema Fund demonstrated … was the multiplicity of factors involved in the emergence of a film as “commercial”. This was partly revealed when the Coalition Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, reported UKFC recoupment figures for the period 2006–11 which showed how a relatively “uncommercial” project such as the documentary Man on Wire (2007), funded by the New Cinema Fund, had proved to be much more successful than a supposedly “commercial” comedy such as How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008), backed by the Premiere Fund. Thus, whereas How to Lose Friends … had only returned £9,977 on an award of £1,471,145, Man on Wire had returned £390,081 on a UKFC award of £385,000. (Hill 2012: 341) For Hill, “while government film policy has sometimes been promoted as a hard-headed commercial industrial strategy it has rarely turned out to be so straightforwardly the case” (Hill 2012: 337). Putting these complexities to one side, overall the UKFC appeared to have more success at the higher end of the market and particularly at attracting inward investment from Hollywood. While fluctuating enormously year-on-year, Hollywood cash spent in Britain increased steadily from £182.7m in 1994 to £356.8m in 2008 and £752.7m in 2009 (UK Film Council 2010: 134). This was achieved primarily through the Film Tax Credit system, and the subsidisation of workforce and infrastructure development which, while probably the least prominent aspects of British film policy, are without doubt the most significant in terms of subsidy and providing employment for British film and television workers (for a more detailed discussion of the tax credit system see Magor and Schlesinger 2009; Newsinger 2012a). This positioned Britain very successfully as an outpost for Hollywood’s global production practices. It is for this reason that independent filmmaker Alex Cox could comment: The Film Council became a means by which lottery money was transferred to the Hollywood studios. It pursued this phoney idea that James Bond and Harry Potter were British films. But, of course, those films were all American – and their profits were repatriated to the studios in Los Angeles. (Quoted in Bennett 2010) However, as Andrew Higson notes, at the end of the New Labour period British film production was “far more stable and substantial than many might have imagined in the mid-1980s” (Higson 2011: 11).

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The Regional Screen Agencies If the UKFC was primarily a “commercial” operation, what of the “cultural” remit? The Regional Screen Agencies make an interesting case study of the convergence of economic and cultural policy under New Labour. In 1999 the DCMS launched a consultation process which led to the policy statement, “Film in England: A Development Strategy for Film and the Moving Image in the English Regions”. The report recommended the creation of nine Regional Screen Agencies to coordinate film funding between the UKFC and the regions and the creation of a Regional Investment Fund for England (RIFE) with a budget of £6m per year to be used to “catalyse integrated regional planning, strengthen the existing regional infrastructure and to expand film activities” (Film Council 2000: 5). As a 2006 DEMOS report put it, Regional Screen Agencies were intended to “develop a sustainable UK film industry by developing the pool of creative skills and talent; developing entrepreneurial acumen and business clusters; and developing an industrial infrastructure” (Holden 2006: 37): The RSAs do not see themselves as funders of screen culture, but prefer to see themselves as investors in it. They do this by developing the competitiveness of businesses, assisting to build critical mass, addressing skills shortages, developing talent and innovation and offering sector-specific advice and expertise. (Holden 2006: 28) All this talk of investment, competitiveness and entrepreneurialism is exemplary of the discourse of creativity that dominates the film policy literature during the period. However, alongside the more risible business “newspeak” the same report also notes the explicit cultural function of the RSAs in the structure of film funding. For example: “The Government and the UK Film Council look to the RSAs to help capture the many facets of British communities” (Holden 2006: 20). The idea of the regions as being the site of authentic Britishness has a long social and cultural history (see Russell 2004). Critics have frequently noted the extent to which mainstream British cinema has presented a restricted version of national identity and this has frequently been associated with the location of the means of production and the specific class location of those in positions of institutional power. John Ellis, for example, argues that the “clearly demonstrable core of ‘British cinema’” was the result of a “dual hegemony of production facilities on the periphery of London and a central London creative and performance elite” (Ellis 2004: 21). Similarly, Brian Winston’s discussion of the “chasm between Britain and its cinema” refers to the studio system based in the South East, the “privately educated members of the upper middle-class” who worked there, and films which “inclined to obscure Britain behind a smokescreen of ‘one nation’ stereotyping and ersatz realism” (Winston 2004: 19). In this context the regional can emerge as a progressive site within British film culture, a more nationally specific cinema, less tainted by the bourgeois metropolitan elite or the philistine commercialism of popular “mainstream” and Hollywood film. It is no surprise that “cultural” British filmmakers, particularly those working within the realist tradition, have frequently (and often clumsily) plundered the regions as a location for oppositional aesthetic strategies (see particularly Higson 1995). As David Russell has argued, the

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regions – and particularly the North of England – occupy an ambivalent position, as England’s “other” but also as a rich cultural repository where alternative or critical cultural strategies might find expression (Russell 2004). The RSAs should be seen as the culmination of a rather longer trajectory of regional cultural/creative industries development that goes back to the 1980s in which the British Film Institute and broadcasters, particularly Channel 4, were the major players. As Steve McIntyre comments: By the early to mid-1980s … most of the elements were in place for a fairly radical shift in the terms of the debate about developing regional cultural/media industries. In effect, a meeting ground was effected between on the one hand local authorities which were looking for mechanisms and strategies for reinvigorating local economies, and on the other cultural activists attempting to develop workshop based practice but also, increasingly, to secure new private and public funding for cultural development underpinned by industrial rhetoric. (McIntyre 1996: 225) Regional media development agencies, screen commissions and investment funds, training funds and short film production schemes sprung up alongside a formidable library of scoping studies and economic viability reports. The RSAs were formed through the amalgamation of these organisations (see Newsinger 2009). They represented the consolidation of the “creative industries” model of regional film in a number of ways. First, they adopted the functions of the organisations that existed in the regions into a single agency: managing training provision, attracting inward investment, facilitating business development and investing in production. Second, as Nick Redfern has noted, they represented the bureaucratisation and professionalisation of regional film production funding with an increase in full-time, specialised administrators (Redfern 2005: 61). Third, their production funding activities reflected the formalisation of the existing tendencies in regional film production as a training route into the commercial film and television industries. For example, there was a growth of short film production schemes aimed at identifying and nurturing “new talent”, particularly writers and directors. In comparison to the uneven provision that existed previously, under the UKFC each RSA administered a “Digital Shorts” short film production scheme, designed as a training initiative and to provide a calling card for regionally based directors. These schemes were organised to facilitate linear career progression, through the regional schemes, to the nationally administered short film schemes such as Cinema Extreme run by the UKFC, and ultimately to feature film and television work. There was also the emergence of regionally produced feature films, made on low budgets and often using digital production technology, produced by small independent production companies and funded through co-productions, most often between an RSA and a broadcaster – notable examples here include the films of Shane Meadows and the partnership between production company Warp Films and EM Media. This was accompanied by a considerable growth in regional film production funding: in 2004/5, for instance, RSAs secured £13.5m in investment from sources outside of RIFE, with the total RSA budget reaching £21.3m (Holden 2006: 49). With increased European funding for regional media development, the continued involvement of broadcasters and, in many areas, an increase in investment from outside

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productions, there was a steady development of regional infrastructures that were better able to sustain commercial feature film production than ever before. There was a massive growth in regional short film production schemes which were accepted as a way in which regionally based filmmakers could begin a career in the commercial industry, side-stepping the traditional London film school or long, industry apprenticeship route. However, this growth was accompanied by the divorcement from the formally cultural role of the regions in the psycho-structural make-up of British cinema. As Sylvia Harvey and Margaret Dickinson argued in 2005: In the English regions … the intervention of the Council has had the effect of removing film from its previously strong links to arts policy and administration as well as from the sphere of influence and expertise of the British Film Institute. The sense of an arts and cultural framework for film in England has thus diminished and been replaced, in part, by the very different imperatives and performance indicators of an essentially industrial and economic strategy. The cost of administering public policy for film in the regions has also increased significantly. (Dickinson and Harvey 2005: 3) Taken together, in the development of regional production sectors during the New Labour period there is little sense of a corresponding development of a cultural politics of regionality. Questions of identity, politics, diversity and so on are notable in their relative absence from the discourses surrounding regional film. Instead, arguments in favour of regional film production in England have been more likely to appropriate and modify the traditional arguments in favour of state subsidy for film production in national terms; that is, regional film production is economically valuable and therefore worthy of public support.

Conclusion In 2005 Nick Redfern argued that: The regional is increasingly seen as the best scale at which to formalise film policy, the institutional infrastructure, and the discourses surrounding the cinema, as such the industrial and cultural activities of film production, distribution, and exhibition are carried out at the regional level more and more. (Redfern 2005: 61) In 2010, just five years later, this brief experiment in regional film policy was ended by the incoming Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government when they disbanded the UKFC and RSAs. Many figures from the industry expressed shock and disbelief that such a well-functioning, commercially orientated set of institutions could be sacrificed. Yet the main planks of film policy – production funding, the tax credit system – remained in place. Perhaps more significantly, the “commercial” argument for government support that achieved primacy during the New Labour period and was institutionalised in the UKFC – that British film should be funded because of the value they add to the economy – remained untouched. This is the major contribution of Blairism to British film culture.

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Further reading Caterer, J. (2011) The People’s Pictures: National Lottery Funding and British Cinema. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Doyle, G., Schlesinger, P., Boyle, R. and Kelly, L.W. (2015) The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hill, J. (2012) “‘This is for the Batmans as well as the Vera Drakes’: economics, culture and UK government film production policy in the 2000s.” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(3): 333–356. Newsinger, J. (2012) “British film policy in an age of austerity.” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(1): 133–144.

References Bennett, R. (2010) “Axing the Film Council: a move that impoverishes us all.” Retrieved 18 June 2011 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jul/26/uk-film-council-abolished-reaction. Dickinson, M., Ed. (1999) Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90. London: BFI. Dickinson, M. and S. Harvey (2005) “Film policy in the United Kingdom: New Labour at the movies.” Political Quarterly, 76(3): 420–429. Doyle, G. (2014) “Film support and the challenge of ‘sustainability’: on wing design, wax and feathers, and bolts from the blue.” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11(2–3): 129–151. Ellis, J. (2004) “British? Cinema? Television? What on earth are we talking about?” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1): 21–26. Film Council (2000) Film in England: A Development Strategy for Film and the Moving Image in the English Regions. London: Film Council. Flew, T. (2012) The Creative Industries: Culture and Policy. London: Sage. Garnham, N. (2005) “From cultural to creative industries: an analysis of the implications of the ‘creative industries’ approach to arts and media policy making in the United Kingdom.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(1): 15–29. Hesmondhalgh, D., M. Nisbett, K. Oakley and D. Lee (2014) “Were New Labour’s cultural policies neoliberal?” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(1): 97–114. Hesmondhalgh, D. and A.C. Pratt (2005) “Cultural industries and cultural policy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 11(1): 1–13. Higson, A. (1995) Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Higson, A. (2011) Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. Hill, J. (2012) “‘This is for the Batmans as well as the Vera Drakes’: economics, culture and UK government film production policy in the 2000s.” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(3): 333–356. Holden, J. (2006) The Big Picture: The Regional Screen Agencies Building Community, Identity and Enterprise. London: DEMOS. Hopkins, L. (2010) Innovation by Nature: Creative Industries, Innovation and the Wider Economy. London: The Work Foundation, 1–21. Magor, M. and P. Schlesinger (2009) “‘For this relief much thanks.’ Taxation, film policy and the UK government.” Screen, 50(1): 299–317. McIntyre, S. (1996) “Art and industry: regional film and video policy in the UK.” Film Policy: International, National and Regional Perspectives, pp. 215–233. London: Routledge. Miller, T. (2000) “The film industry and the government: ‘endless Mr Beans and Mr Bonds’?” in R. Murphy (ed) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 37–47. London: British Film Institute.

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Newsinger, J. (2009) “The ‘cultural burden’: regional film policy and practice in England.” Journal of Media Practice, 10(1): 39–55. Newsinger, J. (2012a) “British film policy in an age of austerity.” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 9(1): 133–144. Newsinger, J. (2012b) “The politics of regional audio-visual policy in England: or, how we learnt to stop worrying and get ‘creative’.” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 18(1): 111–125. Redfern, N. (2005) “Film in the English regions.” International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, 1(2): 52–63. Russell, D. (2004) Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schlesinger, P. (2007) “Creativity: from discourse to doctrine.” Screen, 48(3): 377–387. Throsby, D. (2001) Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UK Film Council (2010) Statistical Yearbook 2010. London: UK Film Council. Winston, B. (2004) “Is ‘British cinema’ a zebra?” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1): 14–20.

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HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTERS AND UK PRODUCTION TODAY James Russell Introduction At the climax of Marvel’s boilerplate superhero sequel Thor: The Dark World (2013) the titular hero takes a brief ride on the London tube before battling alien invaders in the skies above the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. As Thor boards the underground at Charing Cross, the assembled commuters look on in dismay, clearly wondering, “What are you doing here?” One might ask a similar question of the film’s production. Thor: The Dark World is one of many high-budget Hollywood films to make extensive use of UK production facilities since 2000. Not only was the movie shot in Britain by a predominantly British cast and crew, but it was also partially funded by the UK taxpayer, and most of its special effects were realised by the London-based company Double Negative. The film drew in British audiences too, earning £19.8 million at the British box office, making it the 14th highest-grossing film of the year (BFI 2014: 5). This piece asks how a film like Thor: The Dark World came to be made in Britain. I start by looking at the history of Hollywood’s investment in UK production, and move on to focus on tax relief, infrastructure and content. Rather than rehearsing concerns about the threat of “Americanization,” I focus on the impact of overseas production activities on UK-based production. Marvel’s movies may not look anything like what we expect from a typical British film in cultural terms, but they actually are entirely typical of the films made in the South East today. This piece aims to explain why.

History Hollywood has been investing in Britain for most of its history. In the 1930s the major American studios established a series of British-based subsidiaries to circumvent quota regulations, led by Warner Bros. in 1931. Paramount British was established shortly afterwards, and in 1936 MGM created MGM-British studios, purchasing a substantial facility at Borehamwood in 1944 which remained active until the early 1970s. The Second World War destabilised relationships in the film market but the terms of the Eady Levy, first implemented in 1950, “locked” the earnings of Hollywood studios in

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Britain and encouraged American producers to either make films in the UK or re-commit to international production partnerships. Hollywood studios were keen to capitalise on lower production costs in Europe, but also saw another advantage as markets opened across the world. One Variety editorial noted: With the necessity of broadening subject matter to appeal to a world audience and better meet competition from foreign producers, the entire US picture industry is agreed that with prospects of production costs increasing and income sliding in their country there must be more concentrated effort to sell pictures to foreign audiences. (Anon. 1946: 1) For over 20 years, the assumption that production in the UK resulted in cost savings and more internationally appealing films led to long-standing partnerships and very influential movies. These ranged from depictions of sixties Britain in Alfie (1966) and If … (1968) – both funded by Paramount – to transnational blockbusters like the James Bond movies and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In each case, the Eady Levy had provided funds for a British or Commonwealth-based production via a tax on UK box office receipts. US-based film companies began to withdraw from Britain in the late 1960s, as overproduction led to declining profits on the larger blockbusters and domestic theatrical audiences collapsed. This didn’t necessarily mean that Hollywood films were no longer made in the UK – rather, US-based producers extricated themselves from direct involvement in the UK film business and increasingly tended to treat the UK as little more than a site to stage runaway American productions, with most UK facilities shifting to service TV. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1970s, films such as Star Wars (1977), Superman (978) and Alien (1979) were being filmed at Pinewood and Shepperton. Production levels reached a nadir in 1989, when only 30 films were produced at all in the UK (House of Lords Communications Committee 2010). The companies which had emerged during the 1980s, such as Working Title and FilmFour, forged closer relationships with Hollywood in the 1990s, a period that marked a turning point in the UK’s relationship with international investors. At the same time, the nature of Hollywood’s output changed, becoming more intensely geared around extremely high-budget fantasy franchises than ever before. Tino Balio explains that movies studios since 2000 have focused increasingly on producing “more and bigger franchises that are instantly recognisable and exploitable across all platforms. There is nothing new about this strategy; it is the intensity of its implementation that is different” (Balio 2012: 25). During this period of intensification, the UK became a principal site where these new kinds of productions would be made. The nature of this changing relationship can be seen very clearly at Leavesden studios in Watford. At the start of the 1990s, Leavesden was a derelict aerospace manufacturing plant. In 1995, the site was identified as a viable production space for the James Bond film GoldenEye (1996), when the franchise’s preferred home in Pinewood was unavailable. Once the facilities had been upgraded for film work, 20th Century Fox then shot George Lucas’ Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace there in 1999, before Warner Bros.

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leased Leavesden to accommodate the production of Heyday Films’ Harry Potter series, starting in 2000. In 2010 Warner Bros. purchased Leavesden outright, invested £100 million in extending the existing production facilities, and also created a permanent attraction based around the production resources of the Harry Potter films (Sabbagh and Sweney 2010). In 2014, Warner Bros. announced further expansion of the facility to accommodate the production of David Yates’ Tarzan (2016) and a new series of films set in the Harry Potter universe. Leavesden alone now makes up one third of the production space available in the UK (Wiseman 2014), alongside large sites owned by the Pinewood group (Pinewood, Shepperton and Teddington), facilities at Elstree and Ealing, as well as smaller spaces across the South East, such as Cardington in Bedfordshire and Bourne Woods in Surrey. Warner Bros.’s studio at Leavesden is “the only facility outside of the US to be owned and operated by a Hollywood studio” (Wiseman 2014) and it has made Warner Bros. “the first Hollywood studio since the 1940s to have a permanent base in the UK” (Sabbagh and Sweney 2014). Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced the expansion during a visit to Downing Street and presented the company’s growing investment as a ringing endorsement of UK talent: “The expansion of Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden will allow us to further tap into the world-class creativity and innovation available here to continue this tradition of filmmaking excellence” (Szalai 2014). According to the BFI, £1.075 billion was invested in production in the UK in 2013, £868 million of which came from overseas-based producers (principally Hollywood) (BFI 2014: 2). From Harry Potter and The Dark Knight (2008) to Thor: The Dark World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), the UK has come to occupy a privileged position as a site for blockbuster production, more so today than ever before. By looking at the conditions of contemporary production, we can begin to see why.

Film tax relief Perhaps the key reason why Hollywood companies might make films in the UK is rooted in economic expediency. In 1992 the government had introduced tax relief for production expenditure in the UK, which was supplemented in 1995 by a production fund drawing capital from the newly established National Lottery. These funds would come under the aegis of the UK Film Council in 2000, which was itself folded into the BFI in 2010. In 1997, the finance act which facilitated the initial round of tax relief was amended to allow all tax to be written off for the first year of production on any film costing less than £15 million (House of Lords Communications Committee 2010). In 2004, efforts to close tax avoidance scams resulted in a major review of tax relief for film and a new regime was established. The resulting Film Tax Relief scheme introduced in 2006 remains in place, and is available to films that meet four criteria: •• Applications must come from production companies, not financiers. •• The film being produced is intended for theatrical release. •• The film qualifies as a British film, either because it is a co-production or because it meets the BFI’s criteria for a culturally British film. •• 25 per cent or more of the total core expenditure is in the UK.

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Having met these criteria, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) allows the following forms of relief: •• For films with a total core expenditure of £20 million or less, the film production company can claim tax relief of up to 25 per cent of UK qualifying film production expenditure. •• For films with a core expenditure of more than £20 million, the film production company can claim a tax relief of up to 25 per cent on the first £20m of UK qualifying expenditure and 20 per cent of UK expenditure thereafter. (HMRC undated) To give an example of the actual support provided, Thor: The Dark World was filmed in London, Pinewood and Bourne Woods, it had a reported budget of £147.5m and received £22.4m as a direct payment from HMRC, making it the single largest recipient of the Film Tax Relief scheme in 2014 (Sylt 2014a). Reporting on this story in 2015, the journalist Christian Sylt noted that Disney, which owns both Marvel and Lucasfilm, had already received nearly £215m from UK taxpayers since the introduction of the Film Tax Relief scheme (Sylt 2014b). A jaundiced observer might reasonably assert that such tax arrangements are part of a neoliberal “plot” whereby public funds are tacitly channelled into the hands of a stateless corporate private sector. Of course, this is not the publicly stated view of either the UK government or the producers drawn to the UK by the tax regime. In a 2012 report commissioned by the BFI and other stakeholders, the scheme was described as “Vital to maintaining the competitiveness of the core UK film industry” (Oxford Economics 2012: 50). It found that total fiscal support for production had varied between £125m and £200m per year since the introduction of the scheme, depending on production levels. It also argued that the relief resulted in a larger, more robust, more lucrative industry: Today the core UK film industry is directly generating 43,900 full time jobs and contributing £1.6 billion to national GDP. In employment terms, the industry is larger than fund management and the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. Overall, when considering the film industry’s procurement, spending effects from those directly and indirectly employed and its contribution to UK tourism, trade and merchandise sales, the core UK film industry supported a total of 117,400 FTE jobs, contributed over £4.6 billion to UK GDP and over £1.3 billion to the Exchequer (gross of tax relief and other fiscal support) in 2011. (Oxford Economics 2012: 6) For large distributors, high-budget blockbusters can generate massive profits, but they can also lose staggering amounts of money. Filmmakers therefore seek out tax incentives and rewards that help to offset or mitigate the enormous risk associated with high-budget films, which cannot be guaranteed to reach amortisation, let alone profit. A recent example of a film that benefitted from the Film Tax Relief scheme, but resulted in massive writedowns, was Disney’s John Carter (2012). Shot partly at Longcross Studios in Chertsey, John Carter had a stratospheric budget of $306m, and received approximately £25m from HMRC (Sylt 2014c). The film grossed $285m worldwide, performing particularly poorly in the US (Box Office Mojo undated).

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The UK’s favourable tax regime clearly offers a chance to mitigate against the fiscal impact of such dramatic flops, but it is only one of many schemes available in different countries and different regions. Industry analyst Jeffrey Ulin notes that “Australia is one of the more aggressive regimes” (Ulin 2014: 140), while similar schemes exist in New Zealand, Canada, France and in states across the US, such as Louisiana, which has become the fourth most active production site in the world (after Canada, the UK and California) as a result of its credit scheme (Scott 2014). Whatever one thinks about the Film Tax Relief scheme in the UK, it has undeniably acted to increase production of a certain kind of internationally appealing blockbuster, and the criteria for qualification have had two key effects, beyond simple increases in investment. First, numbers of production companies of all kinds have increased in the UK, and second, more films have been made which incorporate a clearly British flavour.

Client companies Perhaps the best-known example of a UK-based production company which has worked closely with American distributors in the modern period is Working Title, which started out making low-budget independent films like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and moved into more broadly appealing genre releases such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). In the words of Andrew Higson (2011: 17), Working Title “operated in the middle ground of the UK market, somewhere between the niche art-house film and US-led blockbuster.” Since 1999, when Universal acquired its parent company PolyGram, Working Title has found success with mid-budget middlebrow genre films aimed primarily at the British market and international arthouse audiences, like Hot Fuzz (2006) and The Theory of Everything (2014). As overseas investment has flowed into Britain, similar companies have appeared which more directly service the high-budget end of the film business. One example is Heyday Films, which has combined producing relatively low-budget British movies and TV shows with the largest possible blockbusters imaginable. The company was set up in 1999 by David Heyman, an English producer who had previously worked at Fox and Warner Bros. Unlike Working Title, it has always worked in fairly direct partnership with a Hollywood distributor. Although his company is ostensibly independent, Heyday Films has a “first look” deal with Warner Bros., which pays Heyman’s staff and funds his London office in return for first refusal for the distribution rights of the company’s projects. As a result, Warner Bros. agreed to provide the $12 million budget for Heyday’s first film, Ravenous (1999), a low-budget horror movie set on the American frontier in the 1840s. Ravenous underperformed at the box office, generating a scant $2 million on American release, but by then Heyday had found a more reliable prospect. David Heyman first encountered J.K. Rowling’s novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone several months after its British publication in 1997 (Pendreigh 2001). Heyday acquired the right to adapt the first four proposed Potter novels, with the option of extending the contract to include the remaining three. In this way Warner Bros. acquired licensing rights to Potter and related products, in return for providing production capital and distribution for the movie adaptation to be produced in the UK by Heyday Films. Potter would become Warner Bros.’s standout product, safeguarding profits during a difficult financial period. In 2000, Warner Bros.’s parent company, Time Warner, had merged with AOL to create the largest entertainment conglomerate in the world.

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Harry Potter was, according to Richard Parsons, then AOL Time Warner’s co-chief operating officer, a prime example of an asset “driving synergy both ways” (Anon. 2001). He explained that “we use the different platforms to drive the movie, and the movie to drive business across the platforms” (Anon. 2001). The merger was notoriously misjudged, and between 2000 and 2002 the value of AOL stock dropped by over $200 billion. By 2009 AOL had been sold on, and the name dropped from the company header (Arango 2010). Nonetheless, Warner Bros.’s relationship with Potter, Heyday and AOL reveals shifts in the priorities of US-based distributors, who were increasingly coming to see themselves as purveyors of branded, marketable media content, in the form of huge globally appealing franchises. Synergies with AOL may never have transpired, but synergies with Heyday, and Potter, remain ongoing. Warner Bros.’s deal with Heyday is illustrative of the close relations between US distributors and UK producers. Hollywood “studios” are, in the main, large multinational institutions that fund and release movies made by smaller, client companies, which develop projects and manage the actual business of production. Heyday Films has a track record of developing lucrative and appealing content to feed Warner Bros.’s distribution pipeline, including the Potter movies, Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 space drama Gravity, and Paddington (2014). Consequently, Heyday has been given autonomy to manage production as it sees fit. In 2008 David Heyman described Warner Bros.’s hands-off approach in the following terms: Warners has been really good to us. They’ve given us lots of money and lots of independence. It defies belief how much independence we have on these films. They give us the money, they read a draft of the script. I choose the director, we make the film, they come and visit. We show them a cut of the film, they say they like it, they give us some notes, we make the changes that we want to make. We test screen it once and show it to them, and then the movie is released. (Douglas 2008) This has meant using British crews and production facilities, but also making use of PinewoodShepperton for the filming of Gravity, and expanding facilities for future franchises. Heyday was not the only British-based company to benefit from Warner Bros.’s commitment to UK production. In his keynote speech at BAFTA’s 2014 Media Summit, Warner Bros.’s UK President Josh Berger claimed: Potter, it’s fair to say, was very important to the growth of the VFX industry in the UK. Some people say it was the thing that propelled the industry here. There was an expansion of the skill base, the assets, the sheer numbers of people working in the industry. Gravity in a way is a crowning achievement in that period of growth and expansion. With successes like that, companies like Framestore and Double Negative can expand, people can start their own firms – the ecosystem is expanding and growing. (Mitchell 2014) Covering the event, Screen International reported that “with the first Harry Potter film in 2000, less than 15% of the VFX work was done in the UK. By the final film’s production in 2010, more than 85% of the effects were done in Britain” (Mitchell 2014).

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The post-production companies which sprung up at this time are based in London, and “Soho is widely acknowledged as the most important hub for visual effects production after Hollywood, and houses four of the world’s largest visual effects companies (Double Negative, Framestore, Cinesite and MPC)” (Oxford Economics 2012: 28). Most of these companies provide computer imaging and effects for a range of media, including TV, advertising and games. However, after 1999, all took on effects work for Hollywood movies. Double Negative was founded in 1998 and by 2012 had set up its own film production wing specifically targeting films produced via the Film Tax Relief scheme. Framestore had been established in London in 1986, initially as a production company. By the mid1990s, it was branching out into visual effects, as was the Moving Picture Company (MPC). In each case, as production levels increased in the UK these firms expanded, opening offices across the world. None works in direct partnership with major distributors. Instead each bids competitively for asset creation work, often working together on different aspects of the same films – for example, Framestore and Double Negative each created and imaged one of the two central CGI characters in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) before meeting to swap assets, and each rendered particular shots according to their contract. Framestore, Double Negative, Heyday Films and Working Title were established, and grew, in response to the Film Tax Relief scheme. However, the majority of staff employed in the UK film industry are self-employed freelancers, and this area too has grown over the last decade (Oxford Economics 2012: 22). Infrastructure and investment in the UK film business have improved since 1999 as a direct result of inward investment, encouraged by tax relief. However, most of the resulting production work services a relatively narrow subset of films, and most of the companies which take on this work exist in client status to multi­national distributors. One might argue that the links between Disney and the UK effects industry, or Warner Bros. and Heyday Film, have their roots in the kinds of convenient partnerships established by American distributors to circumvent quotas in earlier decades. It would be easy to assume that the resulting films bear few signs that they were made in Britain, because so many are rooted in fantasy, science fiction or comic book heroics. However, one of the more curious features of post-1999 blockbuster production is the extent to which British subjects and settings have been privileged.

Content In Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015), the spy agency of the title derives its structure from Arthurian legend, the agents are named after knights and their code of honour is rooted in adherence to class prejudices. The Kingsmen’s secret lair is accessed via Savile Row, the group is led by Michael Caine’s “Arthur,” and Colin Firth’s superspy Harry Hart (codenamed “Galahad”) informs his newest recruit that “The suit is the modern gentleman’s armour, and the Kingsmen are its knights.” The film combines pastiche and parody of British spy narratives, notably James Bond, with grisly violence and CGI heavy spectacle. It was funded by 20th Century Fox, and produced by Matthew Vaughn’s Marv Films in the UK, where it qualified for tax relief, and nine UK-based effects companies worked on its CGI assets. Many more UK freelancers contributed other aspects of the production.

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Unlike Thor: The Dark World, which is set in London, but could really be set anywhere, Kingsman is about Britain and has strong roots in Britain’s cultural and cinematic heritage. At the time of writing, it is the latest in a long line of similar blockbuster productions, which emphasise their British setting, and acknowledge British preoccupations with class directly within the narrative. Other examples might be the Harry Potter films, the James Bond movies, or lower-budget prestige movies like The King’s Speech (2010), which was distributed and co-funded by The Weinstein Company. Each of these films or franchises was made in the UK, pitched at the largest possible global audience, and rooted in a relatively conservative vision of British culture. The Harry Potter films, for instance, bring together a long-standing tradition of public school stories, with gothic fantasy, concerns over class prejudice, nostalgia for a medieval and Victorian past, and a focus on British youth. The films rarely depicted Britain as it is. Instead they provided a CGI-augmented vision of Britain (or the “Wizarding world”) as it might have been if post-war modernity had never occurred. The Britain of the Harry Potter is the fantasy that flutters to life in tourist attractions like Salisbury Cathedral, or the Shambles in York, or the Cotswolds. The same is true of James Bond’s stoic, colonial masculinity, or Kingsman’s knowing mish-mash of Arthurian idealism with Savile Row tailoring. They are precisely the kinds of films that overseas viewers might comprehend as quintessentially British, in the same way that buddy action movies and westerns seem quintessentially American to European eyes. Kingsman’s explicit evocation of British cultural tropes cannot be attributed solely to the Film Tax Relief scheme or to the convenience of a UK-based production. Rather it is indicative of the other key factor influencing inward investment in UK production – the marketable value of British culture itself on a global stage. One of the key promotional efforts associated with Kingsman has been the production’s licensing association with online clothes retailer Mr Porter. Every article of clothing worn in the film was designed by Savile Row tailors, and is available to buy as part of the Kingsman clothing line developed by Vaughn. He explained, “A lot of people do these cheap lifestyle brands off these movies – and I thought, ‘Let’s do the opposite’” (Ellison 2015). On its website, Mr Porter describes Kingsman as “a brand for the modern gentleman,” and claims that “Kingsman: The Secret Service isn’t just a movie that reinvigorates the spy genre; it also injects new life into the classic British gentleman’s wardrobe” (Mr Porter 2015). The Kingsman clothing line is one tangible sign of the commercial value that a British setting or subject can bring to a blockbuster movie. The suits, setting and association with Savile Row underpin the film’s story, but they also act to add commercial value to the production. One can make exactly the same claims about the James Bond films, which foreground brands and promotional partnerships very explicitly, and the Harry Potter films, which sit at the centre of a wider commercial web that includes apparel, theme parks, games, etc. Even films like The King’s Speech or The Theory of Everything derive much of their marketability on a global stage from their British setting. Thus “British-ness,” of a slightly unreal, regressive stripe, is a commercially viable and valuable characteristic that helps market and sell films on a global stage.

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Conclusion Throughout this short account, I have avoided describing blockbusters as “American” films. It is not straightforward to ascribe national belonging to a company like 20th Century Fox, which is owned by the transnational conglomerate News International, nor is it easy to classify their output as unproblematically American. Kingsman, produced by Marv Films, grounded in British culture, promoting global brands, and distributed by 20th Century Fox, is a case in point. In a similar fashion, “British” companies like Framestore, Heyday and Double Negative also resist easy classification. Framestore recently opened an office in Montreal partly to take advantage of Canada’s favourable tax regime. Double Negative has offices in New York to cater more easily to the American advertising market. Heyday Films’ rent is, presumably, still paid by Warner Bros. The factors that draw large multinational media producers to Britain also draw “British” companies overseas. In Andrew Higson’s words, “Most national cinemas are now a complex amalgam of often competing local, national and international forces” (Higson 2011: 5). As I have sought to explain here, the recent growth in blockbuster production in Britain has been facilitated by favourable tax relief, which has led to improved infrastructure and employment, but both factors exist alongside the marketable value of British-based film content. For better or worse, the internationalisation of the movie marketplace means that Britain primarily makes blockbusters. Thor showed up on the circle line because he belongs there.

Further reading Bloom Walden, K. (2013) British Film Studios. London: Shire. Follows, S. (undated) Film Data and Education (website focusing on data relating to UK film production: https://stephenfollows.com/). Higson, A. (2010) Film England: Culturally British Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. Peerless, G. and Riding, R. (2011) Leavesden Aerodrome: From Halifaxes to Hogwarts. London: Amberley. Walker, A. (1995) Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the 1960s. London: Orion. Wasko, J. and Erickson, M. eds. (2008) Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? New York: Cambria.

References Anon. (21 Aug. 1946) “Pix in New Europe Invasion,” in Variety. Anon. (8 Nov. 2001) “Harry Potter and the Synergy Test,” in Economist [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.economist.com/node/853542. Arango, T. (10 Jan. 2010) “How the AOL-Time Warner merger went so wrong,” in New York Times [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/media/ 11merger. html?pagewanted=all. BFI (30 Jan. 2014) “BFI statistics show increase in overall UK film Production investment,” Press release [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-pressrelease-film-statistcis-2013-2014-01-30.pdf. Box Office Mojo (undated) Fiscal Data on John Carter [ONLINE] Available at: http://boxofficemojo. com/movies/?id=johncarterofmars.htm.

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Douglas, E. (30 Oct. 2008) “David Heyman on the Half-Blood Prince Delay,” in ComingSoon.net, http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/news/50111-david-heyman-on-the-half-blood-prince-delay. Ellison, J. (16 Jan. 2015) “A suit fit for a Kingsman,” in Financial Times [ONLINE] Available at: http:// www.ft.com/cms/s/2/de0610a6-9a43-11e4-9602-00144feabdc0.html. Higson, A. (2011) Film England: Culturally English Filmmaking since the 1990s. London: I.B. Tauris. HMRC (undated), FPC55010 Manual [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/ fpcmanual/FPC55010.htm. House of Lords Communications Committee (2009) The British Film and Television Industries [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldselect/ldcomuni/ 37/3705.htm [Accessed 18 February 2015]. Mitchell, W. (4 June 2014) “Harry Potter Key to UK Effects Boom” in Screen Daily [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.screendaily.com/territories/uk-ireland/josh-berger-harry-potter-key-touk-vfx-boom/5072718.article. Mr Porter (2015) “Kingsman, A Brand for the Modern Gentleman,” Mr Porter Website [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mrporter.com/Content/kingsman_movie. Oxford Economic Forecasting (2012) The Economic Impact of the UK Film Industry, Oxford: Oxford Economics [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfieconomic-impact-of-the-uk-film-industry-2012-09-17.pdf. Pendreigh, B. (9 Nov. 2001) “Hogwarts ‘n’ All,” in IO Film Online [ONLINE] Available at: ttp:// www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/filmmaking/harry_potter.shtml. Sabbagh, D. and Sweney, M. (9 Nov. 2010). “Warner Bros. buys Harry Potter Studios in £100m Boost for UK films,” in The Guardian [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/ nov/09/warner-Bros.-leavesden-studios [Accessed 18 February 2015]. Scott, M. (10 March 2014) “Louisiana Outpaces Los Angeles,” Times Picayune [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.nola.com/movies/index.ssf/2014/03/louisiana_outpaces_los_angeles.html. Sylt, C. (7 July 2014a) “Government paid a record £22.4m towards the production of Thor: The Dark World,” in Independent [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ films/news/government-paid-a-record-224m-towards-the-production-of-thor-the-dark-world-ina-deal-to-encourage-moviemaking-in-the-uk-9590265.html. Sylt, C. (7 Feb. 2014b) “Disney Rides Off with £215m Tax Boost for its UK Movies,” in Mail Online [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2943987/Disneyrides-215m-tax-boost-UK-movies.html. Sylt, C. (22 Oct. 2014c) “Revealed: The $307 Million Cost of Disney’s John Carter,” in Forbes [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/csylt/2014/10/22/revealed-the-307-millioncost-of-disneys-john-carter/. Szalai, G. (30 June 2014) “Warner Bros. to Expand Studio Space,” in Hollywood Reporter [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/warner-Bros.-expand-uk-studio-715699. Ulin, J. (2014) The Business of Media Distribution, 2nd Ed. New York. Focal.

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DISTRIBUTING BRITISH CINEMA Julia Knight There is agreement among most working in the UK film industry and related sectors that a healthy film culture is one that can be characterised by a broad range of films that can be seen by a wide range of audiences (Porter 1988: 1; Stafford et al. 1999: 8). Similarly, they recognise that distribution lies at the heart of enabling such a culture: traditionally it has been distributors who get films from their producers to their audiences. Yet for those of us outside the industry, we frequently only become aware of the distributor’s role when something goes wrong. In October 1997, for instance, Empire magazine ran an article exploring why a significant percentage of British films had not been picked up for distribution, despite critical acclaim at film festivals or positive feedback at test screenings (Westbrook 1997). Conversely, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) is known in the UK as much for its director’s request that Warner Bros withdraw the film from British distribution and the Scala cinema’s unauthorised screening of it in the early 1990s as it is for its actual content. In a similar vein, it is likely that Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen’s The Interview (2014) will be mainly remembered for Sony Pictures’ initial cancellation of the film’s US theatrical release following terrorist threats from hackers believed to be working with North Korea. While digital technologies have opened up new possibilities beyond the conventional cinema release – in late December 2014 Sony Pictures was, for instance, considering YouTube as a possible distributor for The Interview – having access to the means of distribution, whatever that means may be, is crucial: it determines what audiences get to see. For British cinema to be part of a healthy British film culture, its films have to be distributed. While in the digital era film distribution may no longer be the sole preserve of conventional distributors, films still have to be made available, while potential audiences have to be made aware of their existence and persuaded to watch them. For British cinema, this has not been without its problems.

The problems of being British If you consult virtually anything written from the 1970s onwards about the British distribution sector, it invariably notes the domination of the British market by American studio-owned distributors, the so-called US majors (Dawson 1973; Tait 1985; Dobson 1997;

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McDonald 2008). The details vary from year to year, as changes in ownership take place and box-office revenue from a distributor’s annual slate of releases impacts on market share, but usually around five or six US majors are consistently in the top 10 and take the majority share of the UK box office. In 1996, for instance, the five leading distributors in the UK (in descending order of box-office share) were UIP, Buena Vista, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros and Columbia TriStar, with an 80 per cent combined market share (Dobson 1997: 25). In 2013 the top seven included Warner Bros, Walt Disney, Universal (no longer distributing jointly with Paramount as UIP), 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures (having acquired Columbia TriStar) and Paramount, with a 79 per cent market share (BFI 2014: 94). This, together with the US distributors’ alignment in the past to the UK’s two major cinema chains (Edson 1980: 37; McDonald 2008: 228) and since the mid-1980s their investment in UK multiplexes (Allison 2006), has meant that Hollywood films have dominated UK cinema screens, resulting in limited opportunities to see British films. Although Rank was a key British distributor for several decades, in the last twenty years only one British distributor, Entertainment Film, has succeeded in rivalling the dominance of the US majors, but it has been as a distributor mainly of American films. Over the past two decades it has consistently been in the top ten distributors in terms of market share and frequently in the top six. This is not to suggest that films dealing with specifically British subject matter do not get into UK cinemas. While Entertainment Film has benefited from being the UK distributor for the US studios New Line Cinema and The Weinstein Company, it has also distributed some British product, including in 2013 both Sunshine on Leith and The Harry Hill Movie. Furthermore, during the 1980s and 1990s films such as Chariots of Fire (1981), Letter to Brezhnev (1985), My Beautiful Launderette (1985), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996), The Full Monty (1997) and Notting Hill (1999) generated sufficient box office to be considered as marking a British cinema renaissance. However, not only are these a very small minority of the films made in the UK, but some of them also raise the issue of how we define “British.” More than one observer has questioned, for instance, the extent to which we can celebrate Notting Hill as a British success story. Shot in the UK, using identifiable London locations, the film had a British writer and director, together with a mostly British cast, and was made by Working Title Films, a leading British production company in the 1980s. However, as Stafford et al. (1999) have noted, Working Title was bought by the Dutch company PolyGram in 1991, which was in turn sold in 1998 to Canadian drinks company Seagram and absorbed into their subsidiary, the Hollywood studio Universal. Picking up the story a decade later, McDonald notes that Universal was sold on twice in the intervening years, ending up with US network NBC, in turn owned by General Electrics (McDonald 2008: 224). To help address the problem of definition, the BFI has identified what it terms “independent domestic UK films.” These are defined as “features made by UK production companies that are produced wholly or partly in the UK,” with the creative input coming from their UK producers (BFI 2014: 83). While these films may in some cases have financial backing from non-British companies, the term “independent” is used to indicate that there has been no support from major US studios. Unlike Notting Hill with its American star (Julia Roberts) and reported £40 million budget, the vast majority of independent domestic UK films lack big name stars and have a budget of less than

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£2 million. Indeed, during the period 2003–11 nearly two-thirds had a budget of less than £500,000 (BFI 2014: 84). Unsurprisingly, there is also an absence of the lavish spectacle and special effects found in much contemporary Hollywood cinema, and the films tend to be informed by a cultural rather than commercial imperative. As a result, such films often attract relatively small audiences and can struggle to cover both their production and distribution costs. According to Macnab (2000: 138), at the level of distribution, British product has therefore typically been “almost by definition deemed ‘difficult’,” resulting in either a reluctance to handle independent domestic UK films or a recognition of the need for “specialist handling” (Macnab 2000: 143; Dobson 1997: 24; McIntyre and Hibbin 1997: 5) on the part of the distributor and/or exhibitor. Without such specialist handling domestic UK films can fail to find an audience, as Dobson (1997: 25) illustrates with Michael Winterbottom’s Jude (1996), starring Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet. Jude took a paltry £2000 in its first week at an Edinburgh multiplex, but produced six times that during the same period when programmed at the Edinburgh Cameo, an arthouse cinema. This is of course also true for anything that does not easily sit within mainstream commercial genres (see Knight and Thomas 2011).

The distribution landscape Although the UK distribution sector is dominated by a small number of US majors, the majority of films released in the UK are in fact distributed by a much larger number of small distributors. These companies are often referred to as “independents,” suggesting that they are “neither owned nor part-owned by a larger company, be it a television broadcaster or an international media concern” (Dobson 1997: 22). However, by this definition Entertainment Film, owned and run by the Green family, is a UK independent, even though its releases and box-office share put it among the US majors. And although many small distributors are indeed independent, not all remain so, or indeed are set up as such. What these small distributors usually have in common – and what distinguishes them from the larger companies – is their commitment to distributing and building audiences for less commercial fare. Hence, over the last decade they have had a combined annual market share of less than 8 per cent. It is among these much smaller distributors that most independent domestic UK films released find their distributor. The major distributors are guided largely by the need to produce substantial financial returns, and will tend to invest in films and select release patterns that are likely to generate the highest revenue. As most films take the majority of their box office early in their run, these distributors frequently employ a “saturation” release strategy, especially if a film is widely anticipated. According to Allison (2006: 88), both Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) were, for instance, released on over 1000 prints. In contrast, small distributors are frequently driven by a desire to ensure that films which may appeal to much smaller audiences nevertheless do get seen. Hence they are willing to invest their more limited resources into the specialist handling that such films require for relatively small returns. In the 1990s, for instance, Liz Wrenn of Electric Pictures took on Shane Meadows’ Small Time (1996) and Andrew Kötting’s Gallivant (1996). As Wrenn observed:

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These are very particular movies, movies that wouldn’t otherwise get onto the screen. We will probably lose money on both but we’ll try to make it up somewhere else because we think that distributing these films is the right thing to do. Distribution can’t just be about money. (Quoted in Dobson 1997: 26) Nevertheless, money does play a key role, and the make-up of the so-called “independent” distribution sector changes on a fairly regular basis. Although new small distributors have emerged over the years, seemingly established ones can go out of business almost overnight, accept investment from new partners or be acquired by larger companies. According to the BFI, over the last decade the top 10 distributors by market share have taken over 90 per cent of the total UK box office. During that period the number of small distributors accounting for the remaining box-office revenue grew from just over 50 to well over 100 (BFI 2003/4–14). Among the many new ones to emerge in recent years is Guerilla Films. Set up in 1995 by David Wilkinson, the company moved into theatrical distribution by building on Wilkinson’s earlier success in video distribution and TV sales and now concentrates solely on distributing British and Irish films. However, over the years a significant number of small, often groundbreaking distributors have also disappeared, including: The Other Cinema, known in the 1970s for distributing political and Third Cinema; Cinema of Women, specialising during the 1980s in European/US feminist features; Palace Pictures, which distributed the films of a number of British directors working on the peripheries of the mainstream industry during the 1980s (including Peter Greenaway, Mike Leigh and Ken Loach), alongside the work of US, European and world cinema directors; and Tartan Films, which in the 1990s carved out a niche market with its “Asian Extreme” and Japanese horror titles. Among those that have pursued longevity, various strategies have been employed. Set up in 1951 as a distributor of European arthouse and world cinema, Contemporary Films eventually withdrew from the financial risks of first-run theatrical distribution and now operates its back catalogue as a library, available for hire or purchase. In 1997, after running Electric Pictures as an entirely independent operation for eleven years, owner Liz Wrenn formed a joint venture with Alliance Communications, a Canadian filmed entertainment company. Under the deal Alliance acquired a minority stake in Electric Pictures and an opening in the UK market for its own films, while Wrenn secured muchneeded financing for her acquisition and marketing costs. Taking yet another approach, Guerilla Films have become more involved in the production and postproduction stages of the films they distribute to ensure their appeal to wider audiences.

The challenges of surviving As is evident, very few small distributors specialise solely in independent domestic UK film. However, many include such films in their slate of annual releases – hence their survival has been crucial to ensuring that British product gets seen. Although the above-mentioned strategies can help, distributors’ ability to remain in business depends primarily on three things: the acquisitions they make; access to cinema screens; and building audiences for the films they release. The acquisition decisions of small distributors are guided in part by an enthusiasm for the product. Speaking in 1987 about his experience of working with Palace Pictures,

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Patrick Cassavetti – producer of UK films such as Mona Lisa (1986) and Paris by Night (1988) – observed: Palace are brilliant because they will take a film and they will push it. They will invest a tremendous amount of enthusiasm into the marketing and selling. … [T]hey are great film enthusiasts so they will enjoy the whole business of promoting a film. They believe in film in general and they will spend a lot of time encouraging people, encouraging exhibitors. (Quoted in Petrie 1991: 120) But such commitment has to be balanced with the very real need to finance or fund, recoup or spread the costs of distribution. In deciding whether to take on a film, a distributor has to be reasonably confident there is, or it can build, an audience for it. According to BFI statistics, films with a higher budget are more likely to achieve a higher box office and can thus be more attractive propositions. However, in the UK such films are in limited supply: of over 1500 films produced during the period 2003–11, only 56 had a budget of £5–10m, and only 12 a budget over £10m (BFI 2014: 84). Moreover, in the 1990s, as the US majors saw some of the successes smaller distributors had managed to achieve with European arthouse and world cinema releases – such as Artificial Eye’s release of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) – they began to encroach on this territory (Dobson 1997: 23–24), further limiting the ability of small distributors to access the more commercially viable product that can ensure their survival. Historically, some small distributors have supplemented their cinema releasing activities by engaging in non-theatrical distribution. During the 1970s and 1980s The Other Cinema and Cinema of Women derived significant levels of income from supplying political documentaries and issue-based shorts to education, local authorities, health centres, trade unions, women’s groups and the like (Knight and Thomas 2011: 69–98). However, one of the key ways small distributors have managed to remain profitable is through TV sales, and the ability to sell to television has often guided their acquisition decisions. During the 1980s, small distributors benefited enormously from Channel 4, with its remit to promote experiment and innovation. Even before its launch in 1982, the channel began purchasing TV rights to a range of less mainstream films – both English and foreign-language features – to help fill its schedule. In 1981 Cinema of Women, for example, sold six films to the new channel, including Sally Potter’s experimental short, Thriller (1979), and two other UK shorts, as well as a West German feature film about domestic violence (Knight and Thomas 2011: 116). According to Andi Engel (2005), who co-founded Artificial Eye in 1976: “With the arrival of Channel 4, we suddenly sold every title we had. In the best of the years, it came to 30 films a year.” However, as Channel 4 became involved in financing feature film production, while in the 1990s it started to reduce its engagement with more innovative work and also set up its own distribution arm – FilmFour Distributors – the opportunities for other distributors to acquire and sell TV rights diminished dramatically. By 1997 Artificial Eye declared that Channel 4’s unwillingness to buy foreign-language films was severely hurting the company, denying it much-needed income (Ludemann 1996: 11; Dobson 1997: 24). This meant that small distributors often felt compelled to pass on films they might previously have taken on. Two years later, Artificial Eye reported that they now only took on films

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that had already created a “buzz” – at film festivals, for instance – since it made their job much easier (Magdalene 1999: 3). While the enormous popularity of DVD and online platforms have provided ancillary markets that have helped offset the 1990s decline in terrestrial TV sales, the need to access cinema screens – particularly in London – has remained important. Releasing a film in a first-run London cinema has been key to getting national media exposure for a film, thus alerting audiences to its existence and plugging into follow-on regional exhibition. However, this has never been an easy task for small distributors. Historically, UK exhibition has been dominated by a duopoly, initially the Rank and ABC cinema circuits, with EMI acquiring the latter in 1969. In fact, these two chains did not own the majority of cinema screens. Their position of dominance came from their control of first-run London screens and the high box-office receipts these generated, combined with their ability subsequently to book films into their own cinemas across the country. Distributors needed a Rank or ABC/EMI release to maximise audiences and because the US majors aligned themselves to one or the other circuit, it was difficult for small distributors to access them (Edson 1980: 37). UK cinema admissions started to fall off from 1940 (from 1.6 billion) and continued to decline every year until hitting a nadir of 54 million in 1984 (Stafford et al. 1999: 9). As early as the mid-1960s, the large cinema palaces began to be split into two and in some cases three or four auditoria in an effort to create more variety in programming and to draw in wider audiences. The decline in admissions was halted in 1985 only with the birth of the multiplex phenomenon and a dramatic growth in the number of cinema screens. However, the multiplex boom has done little to increase the choice of films available to audiences (Allison 2006). Multiplexes tend to prioritise projected blockbusters and to show them on multiple screens at staggered start times to maximise audiences. This, combined with the tendency for large distributors to favour saturation release strategies, leaves relatively little screen space for films released by small distributors. For instance, within five days of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets opening on 1275 screens in 2002, the Bond movie, Die Another Day (2002), was released on over 800 prints. As reported in Screen Daily, this meant that well over half the UK’s cinema screens were taken up with these two films during November 2002 (Mitchell 2002). As Allison (2006: 88) observes: “[T]his drastically reduced the choices available for viewers who wished to watch something else.” Although the Monopolies and Mergers Commission have identified monopolistic practices in the supply of films on at least three separate occasions since the mid-1960s, many small distributors, competing with both the US majors and each other, face a constant battle to secure screen playing time. Independent cinemas have always offered an alternative to the Rank/EMI exhibition duopoly and multiplexes, but these also have to screen their share of mainstream releases to survive. The Other Cinema (TOC) was set up in 1969 because a significant number of independently produced feature films were struggling to secure theatrical exhibition, especially outside London. The founders wanted to establish a “third circuit” of regional exhibition venues run via a central organisation that could both supply and programme the films. They planned to rent independent cinemas around the country on a part-time basis, but soon discovered such cinemas were unwilling to provide TOC with screening time for films that might have less mainstream appeal.

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The situation improved somewhat when the BFI started to develop its own network of subsidised regional film theatres. Nevertheless, there have been recurring complaints over the years that there are not enough cinema screens available to accommodate nonmainstream product (Finney and Webster 1993: 24; Ludemann 1996: 11; Magdalene 1999: 7). In the mid-1990s there were also predictions that the channelling of substantial Lottery funding into film production would only make the situation worse, flooding the market with additional product and contributing to what was already perceived as a “log-jam” (Ludemann 1996: 11; McIntyre and Hibbin 1997: 6). Alongside such complaints and following TOC’s abortive plans, there have continued to be intermittent initiatives to try and open up screening spaces to both independent domestic UK and foreign-language films. In 1981, for instance, the BFI approached Rank Leisure Services to discuss possible ways of bringing a wider range of films to towns without a BFI regional film theatre (Christie 1982). The discussions resulted in a series of one-day screenings at Odeon cinemas in Cheltenham, Exeter, Guildford and Colchester during April–June 1982. According to Christie: The films to be shown were selected as examples of relatively popular current “art cinema,” with the addition of two recent BFI 35mm productions: Radio On [1979] and Brothers and Sisters [1980]. The three other distributors involved were invited to relax their normal minimum guarantees and accept terms of 25%; while Rank in turn waived their house-figure requirements. In effect, the BFI acted as broker between independent distribution and the Rank circuit. (Christie 1982: 1) By targeting one of the big cinema chains, the BFI had succeeded where TOC had failed a decade earlier, albeit in a relatively modest way, with a programme of just six films running across six consecutive Thursdays. Although the box office was variable, it was sufficient for the initiative to be deemed a success and repeated in the autumn. But the exhibitor and other distributors had to be willing to make a financial compromise by subsidising the screenings, which many small distributors are not necessarily able to do. A more recent initiative can be seen in OurScreen, an online networking platform that facilitates screenings of particular films in local cinemas based on audience demand. This enabled the niche film Northern Soul (2014) to be screened far more widely than originally planned by its distributor. To secure guaranteed access to screen space, some small distributors have bought their own cinemas. During the 1970s and 1980s Contemporary Films owned the Paris Pullman in London, the Phoenix in East Finchley and a twin cinema in Oxford; while Artificial Eye acquired the Camden Plaza, the Lumiere, the Chelsea and the Bloomsbury (renamed the Renoir), all in London; and Mainline operated the small Screen chain of cinemas, including, in London, the Screen on the Green, Screen on the Hill and Baker Street Screen. According to Artificial Eye’s Andi Engel (2005), the impact was dramatic when he bought the Camden Plaza. He could acquire more films for distribution because he could now guarantee their exhibition. Indeed, this was precisely the reason TOC likewise acquired its own cinema (Knight and Thomas 2011: 76). But such an undertaking is rarely straightforward. In the mid-1980s, Contemporary Films wanted to expand its three cinemas to twenty or thirty, but was unable to obtain

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bank financing to do so since the margins were too low (Dickinson 1999: 215). Nor is it without its risks, as TOC quickly discovered. Conceived as a venture to provide theatrical exhibition opportunities for filmmakers, especially British ones, working outside the major production organisations, TOC opened their cinema in 1976 with Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley (1975). However, while Engel (2005) had been able to borrow the money to buy the Camden Plaza from “an old acquaintance … who was living with a very rich young woman in Germany,” TOC had to engage in fundraising but they failed to reach their target and also underestimated the costs. As a result, when the cinema opened, it was already operating at a deficit and, despite considerable advertising and editorial coverage in the media, the opening weekend box office achieved only a quarter of the weekly breakeven figure (The Other Cinema 1976: 1–2). The cinema never recovered from this disappointing start and had to close its doors less than eighteen months later (Knight and Thomas 2011: 78–79). Nevertheless, other distributors have repeatedly asserted that the audience is there (Finney and Webster 1993: 24; Ludemann 1996: 11). Indeed Engel (2005) has observed that: “When we started up the Camden Plaza, it was quite astonishing because we had queues around the block. … Later, we had very good audiences at the Lumiere.” Attracting that audience for every release is crucial and depends to a significant extent on a distributor’s ability to finance print and advertising costs. As small distributors often take on films without mass audience appeal, the financial returns can be relatively small. In 2012, for instance, the top ten distributors generated £1.15 billion in theatrical revenues, while the other 119 generated less than £60 million (BFI 2013: 105) – an average of just under £500,000 per distributor. This means small distributors cannot spend anywhere near the amounts the US majors spend on their releases. While it is not uncommon for US majors to release their films on 400–500 or more prints, most small distributors release theirs on fewer than fifty. Indeed, a third of all UK releases in recent years have been on fewer than ten prints (BFI 2014: 98). Similarly, the average advertising spend in 2013 for studio-backed UK films was £1.4 million, whereas for independent domestic UK films it was around £200,000 (BFI 2014: 102; Magdalene 1999: 3). In the absence of substantial financial resources, securing free editorial coverage becomes crucial, but this can be challenging in an overcrowded marketplace. Another possibility for smaller distributors is to apply for loans or grants at either a national or European level to assist with their costs. Although the nature of available grants changes, in the 1970s the British Film Institute, for instance, began helping small distributors offset their financial risk by offering “subsidy for prints and for the ‘strategic’ introduction of new (or forgotten) work” (Christie 1981: 1–2), while in the 1990s the European Film Distribution Office provided assistance for the release of such UK films as The Crying Game (1992) and Orlando (1992) in the UK, and Enchanted April (1991) and Close My Eyes (1991) in overseas territories (Finney and Webster 1993: 26). However, not all such schemes are equally accessible to all distributors. In the 2000s, for instance, the UK Film Council operated a scheme to assist with the distribution of British films for which distributors were planning relatively wide releases to maximise their exposure. The scheme therefore automatically excluded distributors taking on those titles that were more suited to smaller releases because they needed specialist handling (Minns 2004: 8).

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Drawing on a long tradition Throughout the history of distributing British cinema, there has been recognition of the need for specialist handling to build audiences for non-mainstream films. Such handling can involve, among other things, carefully targeted promotion via specialist publications and organisations; imaginative programming; undertaking regional tours with the filmmakers and cast; building public discourse around the work; facilitating screening subsidies; and engaging in accompanying educational activities. Many of these activities have become much easier to undertake in the digital era, and some producers and filmmakers can now bypass traditional distributors and engage in DIY distribution and exhibition. But the activities themselves have in fact not changed a great deal (Knight and Thomas 2011). The more specialised online film distribution platforms, such as MUBI, BFIPlayer and LUXPlayer, together with individual independent producers such as Spanner Films, have used various combinations of targeted mailing lists/newsletters, curated content, expert recommendations, blogs with contextual information and the offer of selected free content, along with accompanied physical screenings and other public events, to build audiences for the work they distribute. Now, as in the past, a significant part of British cinema distribution is about trying to carve out a space for independent domestic UK films in a US-dominated market. But it is a time-consuming activity that often carries minimal financial returns, and depends on the enthusiasm and commitment of individuals whose motivation is not entirely financial.

Further reading Finney, A. (1966) The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures, London: Heinemann. Grant, P.S. and Wood, C. (2004) Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World, Vancouver/Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre. Knight, J. (2013) “Getting to See Women’s Cinema,” in K. Aveyard and A. Moran (eds.) Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, Bristol: Intellect. Lobato, R. (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, Basingstoke: BFI/ Palgrave Macmillan. Lukk, T. (1997) Movie Marketing: Opening the Picture and Giving It Legs, Los Angeles: Silman-James.

References Allison, D. (2006) “Multiplex programming in the UK: the economics of homogeneity,” Screen, 47(1): 81–90. BFI Statistical Yearbooks (2002–14), available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/filmindustry-statistics-research/statistical-yearbook (accessed January 2015). Christie, I. (1981) “BFI involvement in distribution,” 10 April, available at http://fv-distributiondatabase.ac.uk/PDFs/Christie810410.pdf (accessed January 2015). Christie, I. (1982) “BFI/Rank programming experiment: April–June 1982,” BFI, 9 June, available at http://fv-distribution-database.ac.uk/PDFs/Christie-VMR820609.pdf (accessed January 2015). Dawson, J. (1973) “Editorial,” Film Comment, 9(6): 2–4. Dickinson, M. (ed.) (1999) Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI Publishing. Dobson, P. (1997) “Never a sure thing,” Sight & Sound, 7(9) (September): 22–26. Edson, B. (1980) “Commercial film distribution and exhibition in the UK,” Screen, 21(3), 36–44.

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Engel, A. (2005) Unpublished interview with Peter Thomas, 1 November, conducted as part of the author’s AHRC-funded “Independent Film and Video Distribution in the UK (1966–2000)” research project. Finney, A. and Webster, E. (1993) “Distribution,” Screen International, 22 January, pp. 22–26. Knight, J. and Thomas, P. (2011) Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image, Bristol: Intellect. Ludemann, R. (1996) “Fever pitching,” Screen International, 1084, 15 November, p. 11. Macnab, G. (2000) “Unseen British cinema,” in R. Murphy (ed.) British Cinema of the 90s, pp. 135–144. London: BFI Publishing. Magdalene, C. (1999) “Distribution,” Black Film Bulletin, 7(2), Summer, pp. 3–7. McDonald, P. (2008) “Britain: Hollywood, UK,” in P. McDonald and J. Wasko (eds.) The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industries, pp. 220–231. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, McIntyre, S, and Hibbin, S. (1997) “The Lottery: Where will all the money go?” Vertigo, 7, Autumn, pp. 3–7. Minns, A. (2004) “Distributing support,” Screen International, 30 April, p. 8. Mitchell, R. (2002) “Bond and Potter generate $22.5m weekend between them from 66% of the nation’s screens,” Screen Daily, 26 November, available at http://www.screendaily.com/bond-andpotter-generate-225m-weekend-between-them-from-66-of-the-nations-screens/4011391.article (accessed December 2014). The Other Cinema (1976) “Council of Management Meeting,” 18 October, at http://fv-distributiondatabase.ac.uk/PDFs/TOCmins761018.pdf (accessed January 2015). Petrie, D. (1991) Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Porter, V. (1988) “BFI exhibition policy: films and critical concepts,” BFI, April at http://fv-distributiondatabase.ac.uk/PDFs/Porter860521.pdf (accessed January 2015). Stafford, R., Lacey, N. and Pariser, L. (1999) “British cinema now,” In the Picture, 36, Summer, pp. 6–12. Tait, A. (1985) “Distributing the product,” in M. Auty and N. Roddick (eds.) British Cinema Now, pp. 71–82. London: BFI Publishing. Westbrook, C. (1997) “The great British movie mountain scandal,” Empire, 100, October, pp. 150–154.

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MEMORIES OF BRITISH CINEMA Matthew Jones From texts to memories For several decades after its emergence within universities during the 1960s, the scholarly study of cinema remained firmly under the spell of textual analysis. In its infancy, while still seeking to justify and substantiate its claim to being a valid scholarly discipline, the field adopted almost exclusively the methodological approaches deployed within the English departments from which it sprang. There was, and in some rare instances still is, a “persistent ambivalence towards anything that exists outside the text and beyond the edges of the screen” (Allen 2006: 15). While drawing explicitly from the intellectual lineage of literary studies certainly provided a relatively safe harbor from the derision of those who saw film as disposable entertainment unworthy of serious consideration, this beguilement with films themselves prevented other useful lines of enquiry from emerging. However, as the field has matured and the need to defend it reduced, more recent decades have been characterized by a broadening of the discipline’s methodological horizons. Since the mid-1980s, film studies has become highly interdisciplinary, benefitting from “contributors from different points on the disciplinary compass, including history, geography, cultural studies, economics, sociology and anthropology” (Maltby 2001: 3). In turn, this has dispelled the primacy of the text and refocused attention on other matters, such as film-goers, the flow of capital in the film industry and cinema buildings. This will be, of course, a reasonably familiar story for many, but my purpose here is not to revisit the history of film studies per se but rather to draw attention to ways in which the vanishing hegemony of the text produced a space for the history of national cinemas, including Britain’s, to be reconsidered through a range of lenses, including that of memory. Interest in the ways in which British films are remembered developed out of the tension between two trends in film research, at once complementary and seemingly incompatible, that developed in the vacuum the text left behind. As attention shifted away from films themselves, the experiences and responses of audiences became a key strand of a nascent, more diverse film studies. At the same time, the field took an empirical turn. With the text decentralized, robust evidence, rather than theoretical justifications, became the stock-in-trade of many within the discipline. Much of the new evidence presented by film scholars was historical in nature, but this posed an acute problem for those

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interested in audiences, since surviving historical accounts of individual cinema-goers’ experiences and reflections are few and far between. As such, other types of sources of information on historical reception have been sought, with the empirical turn leading audience researchers to scour various types of archives for evidence. Reviews in newspapers have been one popular means of discussing historical reception, but questions remain about the extent to which reviewers are reflective of the broader population. The archives may provide access to some people’s voices through these documents, but this risks reproducing the prejudices of the past by only accounting for those privileged enough to occupy positions that ensured their perspectives would be recorded. Similarly, letters to fan periodicals are of questionable evidential value since, as Jackie Stacey observes, they respond to an agenda set by the publications themselves, are filtered by the selection processes of the editors, and may ultimately have been falsified in an attempt to fill space on the page (1994: 55). While Stacey suggests the Mass Observation Archive as one resource through which a broad range of British cinema-goers’ voices can be heard, it is perhaps unique in this regard and other paper archives rarely provide the sources that audience historians seek. In response to this paucity of historical evidence of cinema audiences, a range of different approaches has emerged, with two in particular recently gaining traction. On the one hand, there has been a flight from the sporadic and uneven material in the archives to the seeming solidity of data. The opening and closing dates of cinemas, as well as their locations, attendance figures, programs and so forth, have provided a rich statistical vein of information about the spaces of cinema-going to mine. Innovative digital cinema data-mapping projects have led this charge. Beginning in America with the “Going to the Show” project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Allen et al. 2008), and coming to the UK more recently with Chris O’Rourke’s “London’s Silent Cinemas” website (2015), such projects are providing valuable insights into the geographical relationships that shape audiences’ experiences of cinema. On the other hand, digital modes of research have also made it possible for there to be a significant expansion of another body of work that instead focuses on the experiential qualities of cinema-going. Inexpensive and easily distributed digital questionnaires, as well as the widespread availability of the hardware and software necessary for conducting online interviews, have dramatically increased the reach of the ethnographic researcher, which has led to an increased capacity to collect and analyze British cinema memories. Developing from early ethnographic work on television audiences (Morley 1980; Ang 1985) and later from work on US cinema audiences (Bobo 1988), the examination of UK cinema memories began with Helen Taylor’s work on British and American fans of Gone with the Wind (1939) (Taylor 1989). This was followed by Jackie Stacey’s study of the place of female film stars in a sample of British women’s recollections of the 1940s and 50s (Stacey 1994). In 1999, Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby edited a collection of essays that demonstrated the more sustained attention this area of research was receiving by including five chapters on different forms of British cinema memories (Kuhn 1999; Austin 1999; Barker and Brooks 1999; Hill 1999; Cherry 1999). Kuhn’s essay drew on memories that would later inform her seminal book, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, which reported the findings of her ESRC-funded project, “Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain: Ethno-history of a Popular Cultural Practice” (Kuhn 2002).

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As such, by the point at which digital research methods became available to facilitate the expansion of memory collection activities, there already existed an established tradition of research into British cinema memories. Of course, as digitally mediated questionnaires and interviews became easier to produce and manage, there has developed a global focus on cinema memories research. Respondents from across the world are readily accessible and the practical, geographical limitations that necessitated a national focus to such work have become less restrictive. Projects of a global scope, such as the recent “The World Hobbit Project” (Barker et al. 2015) and the current “The World Star Wars Project” (Proctor et al. 2015), can now generate a wealth of responses from a diverse range of countries, opening up the opportunity to engage in comparative work on different national audiences. While this approach has been adopted by British researchers, current cinema memories research in this country with a national focus still exists. Notable within these projects is Melvyn Stokes’ “Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s” project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories/), which has collected approximately one thousand people’s memories of going to the pictures during this decade. I was fortunate enough to work on this project and responses collected through it will inform this chapter. These will be referenced through the code numbers assigned to each respondent to protect their anonymity.

Problems of memory Before reflecting on the ways in which memories of cinema-going have shaped our understanding of British cinema over the last thirty years, it is important to acknowledge that the nature of these sources necessitates the production of a different type of film history than that which results from archival research. While there are certainly problems inherent in relying on traditional archives, their contents are, as far as is possible, preserved in a historically accurate form. The same cannot be said of archives of memories, whose contents are “largely constructed rather than simply recalled” and consequently are never “wholly reliable” (Smith 2012: 15). This process of memory production, rather than creation, is explained by Mark A. Oakes and Ira E. Hyman Jr., who argue that “memory is not like videotape – people do not simply retrieve a memory and replay the experience. Instead, people construct a memory by combining schematic knowledge from various sources with personal experiences, suggestions, and current demands” (2009: 53). Memories are consequently not accurate records of the past, but are often half-remembered, half-produced amalgamations of past occurrences, both from the time of the memory and from the intervening years, and other types of information. Aside from its constructed nature, memory also presents other inherent fallibilities. As Kuhn notes, any attempt to understand film audiences through memory must engage with the fact that the “informant’s accounts are memory texts, or recorded acts of remembering, and that particular questions arise concerning the evidential status of accounts which rely on remembering – and thus also on forgetting, selective memory and hindsight” (Kuhn 2002: 9). Beyond these issues, the specific contexts within which the memories used by cinema historians are collected can also play a role in producing the nature and content of the stories that are told. The power dynamics at

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work in both interviews and questionnaires, alongside more nebulous issues such as the respondent’s disposition toward universities and their staff, their tolerance for filling in surveys and so forth, have a role to play in shaping the character of the informant’s contact with the project to which they contribute, which in turn will have influence, in subtle and often unacknowledged ways, over the memories that are recounted. For these reasons memories, in perhaps a more acute manner than many other types of sources, cannot be thought of as offering “access to, nor as representing, the past ‘as it was’” (Kuhn 2002: 9). This poses fundamental questions for the historian of cinema about the uses to which memories can be put. What, for example, might we make of the fact that prominent cycles of British films of the 1960s, such as Hammer’s horrors or the Carry On comedies, were mentioned only very rarely to the researchers on the “Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960” project? Tempting though it may be to assume that this indicates such films’ lack of popularity with audiences, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty whether this is the case or rather whether they were popular but unmemorable, have been shown on television less frequently than others since the 1960s, or simply spring to mind less readily when thinking about the era more generally. To make such an argument would be to overlook the nature of memories and to give undue credence to their representation of the past. Similarly, respondents have noted that audiences of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) have tended to “emphasize the visual over the political” given that “their recollections of Lawrence and Kwai focus on the films’ imagery and scale at the expense of their relationship to then ongoing debates about the terminal decline of Britain’s empire” (Jones and Stokes 2013: 12). Intriguing though this may be, it offers little reliable evidence of how British audiences understood or interpreted these films at the time of their release since it may be that Lean’s impressive cinematography has simply lasted longer in memory than audience members’ thoughts about post-colonial politics. As such, memory is a tantalizing source for cinema historians in that it offers glimpses of audiences across the chasm of history, but in truth it provides little meaningful access to historical experiences or interpretations of films. However, memory is far from a useless source when considering the audiences of British cinema. Indeed, there is much to be learned from such reminiscences if one disposes of the notion that they will enable one to make claims about the past. Instead, a more productive engagement with memory is possible if memory itself is allowed to become the object of study. The challenge that Kuhn offers is consequently not only to see memories as “data but also as discourse, as material for interpretation” (Kuhn 2002: 9). Rather than answering questions about how British films were understood at the time of their initial release, memories are much better suited to the exploration of how films are now recalled. This is not a trivial area of enquiry, since it provides the opportunity, for example, to assess the long-term cultural resonance and significance of particular films and the ways in which their later treatment by critics and the public has shaped the space that they now occupy in cultural memory. As such, the vagaries, elisions, inaccuracies and constructions of memory limit the usefulness of such sources to audience historians, but for those interested in the memories themselves, they can offer rich and vibrant accounts of the ways in which films have come to mean something to their viewers in the fullness of time.

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British cinema memories Despite the various collections of British cinema memories that have been produced in recent decades focusing on different periods and deploying varied ethnographic methods, there are several key commonalities between them that can offer insight into the ways in which British films are now remembered in their home territory. First, and perhaps surprisingly, the films themselves are often not a prominent feature of cinema memories. While key films, often those that have received significant attention from the media and scholars and which have been adopted into the canon of British cinema in the years since their release, may be the subject of some discussion, a number of researchers have noted that much more significant in many audience memories is the cinema experience itself. As Robert C. Allen observes of Kuhn’s 1930s British cinema-goers, “the spatiality and sociality of the cinematic experiences persisted long after the memory of particular films had faded or blurred into each other” (2006: 22). Indeed, Kuhn notes that “going to the pictures is remembered” by this audience “as being less about films and stars than about” the social, geographical and temporal contexts within which it occurred (2002: 100). Kuhn’s observation is not only true of 1930s cinema audiences, but can also be seen in the responses collected by the “Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s” project. For example, one informant recalled in their questionnaire a visit to see The Italian Job (1969) – now seen as an important icon of British cinema of this decade – which was memorable not because of the quality or content of the film, but because “I slammed the [car] door on my Dad’s thumb as we arrived” (respondent 0490). For others, the sequence in Lawrence of Arabia in which Omar Sharif’s character, Sherif Ali, rides on horseback out of the desert is recalled as an important, formative cinema experience from which many learned something of the potential power of cinema. However, a sizeable portion of these respondents now remember this scene inaccurately, placing Peter O’Toole, Sharif’s co-star, atop the horse. It seems that even sequences of great significance to individual viewers are liable to be misremembered, while cinema auditoria and foyers are frequently recalled in great detail. Reminiscences such as these highlight the extent to which the attention paid to classic British films has skewed our understanding of the meaning of cinema to its British audience. In memory, it often matters little what was on the screen since the cinema is recalled as a social space in which one’s engagement with fellow attendees is more memorable than any individual film. This can, of course, be explained by the habitual nature of cinema attendance in Britain throughout much of the early and mid-twentieth century, since the spaces of cinema exhibition and the people with whom one went were encountered on a weekly basis, and often even more frequently, while the films themselves were largely experienced only once. It is perhaps understandable in this context that the texts would fade away while the sociality of the activity remains prominent in memory. However, there are certain British films and bodies of films that are recalled with greater clarity. Respondents looking back on the 1960s, for example, frequently cite the James Bond films, with some able to recall them in significant detail. While this franchise has been screened frequently on British television over the last fifty years, which might explain the clarity of the memories, other films that have not received such wide circulation since the 1960s do also appear in the memories, often accompanied by recollections

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of very specific responses to them. In particular, two key cycles of British films of the 1960s, the British New Wave and the “Swinging London” films, appear, like the Bond films, to have lasted in memory longer and with greater clarity than most. As discussed above, this is a shaky foundation on which to make claims about the merits or appeals of these films to a 1960s audience, while it should also be noted that the questionnaire used to collect these memories specifically addressed these cycles, which may explain the regularity with which they are recalled. However, despite these areas of uncertainty, it remains possible from the data that has been collected to explore how these three cycles are now recalled. Just as cinema spaces are crucial to British cinema memories, recollections of these three key 1960s film cycles now connect the diegetic worlds on the screen to the real spaces and places that informants either inhabited or had heard about. Perhaps most obviously, “Swinging London” films, such as Darling (1965) and Blow-Up (1966), are indelibly linked in the memories of people who lived outside the capital to their experiences and fantasies of London. One respondent recalled that “living in a rural location, life just wasn’t anything like the London scene”, but that the glamorous parties and clothes seen on the screen were something that she would have liked “to have been part of” were she not “too shy and reserved” (respondent 0507). Another remembers longing to live in London, but having to make do with the images of the capital shown in cinemas, even if they did not always sit neatly alongside his fantasies of the city (respondent 0002). In both cases, the “Swinging London” films offered these viewers a glimpse of life beyond their own communities and located these glittering dreams within a very real, but often inaccessibly distant, cityscape. A similar process operates when the British New Wave films are recalled by audiences who lived outside the northern cities where their action took place. These gritty, social problem films, such as A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), were frequently both filmed and set in forbidding urban spaces in cities such as Manchester and Nottingham. The sense of alienness that this created for some viewers in other parts of the country was underlined by the northern accents with which the characters spoke, with one respondent recalling how they sounded “so different from” her local “west country ones!” (respondent 0198). However, for many more the industrial spaces, northern accents and explicit concern with the lives of workingclass people made these films seem “real”. This is a term that recurs with significant frequency in recollections of the New Wave, suggesting that, even though the spaces and places of these films were unfamiliar to many audiences, in memory at least they represent something authentic about the British experience of the 1960s. As such, both “Swinging London” and New Wave films are now connected very powerfully in memory both with the real spaces and places that they are set in, and also with the ways in which British audiences fantasized them. It would, of course, be possible to argue that such films enabled people to learn about the ways in which people lived elsewhere in the country, but it is also possible to see in memories of these films evidence of how the country was imagined by its inhabitants too. The James Bond films were also connected by respondents to notions of space and place, but here these processes operated largely on an international level. Britain is not, in these memories, seen as a nation of different people living different types of lives, as it was when the cycles of films discussed above were recalled, but instead as a single entity

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that could be set up in opposition to America. In this sense, the Bond films were framed by respondents as examples of the ways in which British cinema could be differentiated from US cinema during this period. This is often presented in reasonably crude terms, perhaps because the connections between these films and such ways of understanding the transatlantic relationship are reasonably obvious. Bond was most frequently discussed by respondents either as a British success story which demonstrated that the US was not the only country that could produce successful and exciting films (which, of course, overlooks the American money and personnel involved in the British film industry), or as a clear signifier of the Americanization of British cinema as it attempted to ape the Hollywood style. Both arguments are certainly open to challenge on multiple fronts, but both also present 1960s British culture at loggerheads with its American counterpart, and Bond films as a crucible in which this could be seen. The powerful transatlantic cultural flows of this decade, which would take the Beatles to The Ed Sullivan Show and Jimi Hendrix to London, are often erased in such memories in favor of a narrative of cultural competition with the United States, which was a common feature in British public discourse in one form or another both before and after the 1960s. Whether memories of Bond have been constructed around this narrative or whether the narrative itself did accurately reflect and explain British readings of Bond at the time is unknowable, but what matters more is that for some British audiences Bond films have now taken on these meanings in memory. There are connections here to the findings of projects on British audiences’ memories of domestic and American films from other decades. Jackie Stacey’s seminal work is notable in this regard in that it too found audiences using comparisons between British and US cinema as a means of vocalizing the perceived differences between these two societies. Stacey collected memories from British women who had attended the cinema during the 1940s and 1950s and discovered a tendency to compare the glamour of Hollywood stars unfavorably with the performances of British female actors. Stacey writes that “British stars are favored as ‘charming,’ ‘natural’ and ‘graceful,’ in opposition to American stars who are criticized as ‘artificial,’ ‘glamorous’ and ‘cheap.’ Similarly, British stars are perceived to have ‘personality’ as opposed to the American stars’ ‘looks’” (1994: 57). She goes on to argue that, for British women, “American stars are seen to lack acting talent and possess only glamour” while British stars had little need for the latter but possessed plenty of the former (1994: 57). Just as Bond’s British audiences remember these films possessing something special that US productions did not, even though this was perceived to be at risk from the process of Americanization, so too did earlier British audiences recall seeing in their own country’s stars unique and precious qualities that their American counterparts had failed to acquire as a result of their superficial desire for physical beauty. While the nature of the transatlantic comparisons performed by British audiences seems to have changed as time passed, it is clear that shifting notions of national identity underpin and produce the ways in which British films are remembered. Memory offers a distorted perspective on British cinema history, with historical experiences pulled out of shape by the events of the intervening years, the reappearance of older films in cinemas, on television and on home media, changing ways of understanding the nation and other countries with which audiences perceived Britain to compete, and a host of other factors. Like a reflection in a funhouse mirror, the interpretations

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of films from years gone by recalled by informants are not to be taken at face value. While for the respondent they may be an accurate record of their experiences, for the researcher their value as historical evidence is limited. However, that is not to say that memories can tell us nothing about British films. Indeed, they reveal much about how such films are understood now, even if they offer only very problematic evidence of their initial reception.

Further reading Kuhn, A. (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London: I.B. Tauris. (An extended ethnographic study of memories of 1930s cinema-going in Britain.) Maltby, R., D. Biltereyst and P. Meers (eds.) (2011) Explorations in New Cinema History, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. (A collection of essays that lays out the key methods of the empirical turn film studies undertook during and after the 1980s.) Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing, London: Routledge. (A seminal text that explores the ways in which British women remember female film stars of the 1940s and 1950s.) Stokes, M. and R. Maltby (eds.) (1999) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, London: BFI Publishing. (The first edited collection to bring together a range of different authors writing about British cinema memories.)

References Allen, R. C. (2006) “The Place of Space in Film Historiography,” Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis, 9(2): 15–27. Allen, R. C. et al. (2008) Going to the Show, accessed 24 March 2016, http://docsouth.unc.edu/gtts/. Ang, I. (1985) Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination, London: Methuen. Austin, T. (1999) ““Desperate to See It”: Straight Men Watching Basic Instinct,” in M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, pp. 147–61. London: BFI. Baker, M. (2015) The World Star Wars Project, accessed 24 March 2016, http://www.worldstarwars.net. Barker, M. and K. Brooks (1999) “Bleak Futures by Proxy,” in M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, pp. 162–74. London: BFI. Bobo, J. (1980) “Sifting Through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple,” Callaloo, 39: 332–42. Cherry, B. (1999) Refusing to Refuse to Look: Female Viewers of the Horror Film,” in M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, pp. 187–203. London: BFI. Hill, A. (1999) “Risky Business: Film Violence as an Interactive Phenomenon,” in M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, pp. 175–86. London: BFI. Jones, M. and M. Stokes (2013) “Post-colonial Britain? David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia in History and Memory,” British Politics Review, 8(4): 11–13. Kuhn, A. (1999) ““That Day Did Last Me All My Life”: Cinema Memory and Enduring Fandom,” in M. Stokes and R. Maltby (eds.) Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, pp. 135–46. London: BFI. —— (2002) An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London: I.B. Tauris. Maltby, R. (2011) “New Cinema Histories,” in R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst and P. Meers (eds.) Explorations in New Cinema History, pp. 3–40. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Morley, D. (1980) The “Nationwide” Audience, London: BFI.

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Oakes, M. A. and Ira E. Hyman, Jr. (2009) “The Changing Face of Memory and Self,” in D. F. Bjorklund, D. F. (ed.) False-Memory Creation in Children and Adults: Theory, Research, and Implications, pp. 45–68. Mahwah, NJ, and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. O’Rourke, C. (2016) London’s Silent Cinemas, accessed 24 March 2016, https://londonfilmland. wordpress.com. Proctor W. et al. (2015) The World Hobbit Project, accessed 24 March 2016, https://globalhobbitca. wordpress.com/home-a/. Taylor, H. (1989) Scarlett’s Woman: Gone With the Wind and Its Female Fans, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Smith, S. (2012) Children, Cinema and Censorship, London: I.B. Tauris. Stacey, J. (1994) Star Gazing, London: Routledge. Stokes, M. (2013) Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s, accessed 24 March 2016, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cinemamemories/.

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FROM LERWICK TO LEICESTER SQUARE UK film festivals and why they matter

Sarah Smyth Introduction Described by Alex Fischer as the “lifeblood of contemporary film culture” (Fischer 2013: xi), film festivals have come to occupy one of the most important places for peripheral or non-commercial cinema to reach global audiences in recent years (Iordanova 2010: 9). Demonstrating a seemingly unquenchable demand for the particular brand of cinematic discovery specifically provided by the film festival phenomenon, the larger global environment has experienced a boom over the past thirty years. This rapid expansion has been characterized by film festivals being established in literally every corner of the world. Hannah McGill puts this development into perspective by suggesting that at least one film festival opens every thirty-six hours somewhere in the world (McGill 2011: 280). Reflective of this thriving cultural phenomenon, the UK’s film festival environment consists of a rich and varied multiplicity of film festivals that defy simple categorization. These festivals manifest themselves in an array of different sizes, thematic concerns and geographical locations. UK film festivals encompass a broad spectrum ranging from the glitz and glamour of the capital’s behemoth festival, BFI London Film Festival (LFF), to the UK’s most northerly film festival, Screenplay, situated in Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. While LFF operates as an influential agenda-setting international festival complete with red carpet, Screenplay has no less an important role to play by waving the flag for British and local talent for the denizens of Lerwick. Although these two UK film festivals are seemingly worlds apart, they clearly highlight that all UK film festivals have a role to play in defining UK film culture. Since the late 1960s film festivals the world over have positioned themselves as “institutions of discovery” (de Valck 2007: 175). As the indie film festival, Raindance, neatly encapsulates it in its tagline “discover, or be discovered” (Raindance 2016), the undertaking of discovery forms a core objective for film festivals throughout the UK. A brief scan of Britain’s film festival marketing reveals that Raindance is not the only event that proclaims its commitment to discovery. Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) asserts that the discovery of the best in international cinema is its raison d’être, the very

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title of Dundee’s Discovery Film Festival proclaims its commitment to the project of cinematic discovery for young audiences, and East End Film Festival’s tagline makes clear that its core objective is “discovering, debating and developing new voices in cinema” (East End Film Festival 2016). However, the presentation of films as “newly discovered” is not the sole and exclusive purpose of film festivals. Within this dynamic and diverse realm the act of discovery is linked to the dual objectives of creating film communities and ensuring exposure for films. This chapter sets out to question how film festivals in the UK support the project of cinematic discovery by using these strategies and, subsequently, how they then contribute to contemporary UK and wider global film culture. This question will be considered in two ways. First, a brief history of how the film festival environment developed in the specific context of the UK will be presented. This will then be followed by a focus on two notable and influential film festivals within the sphere that helped to shape a distinctive UK film culture. Sheffield Doc/Fest will be considered in relation to the festival’s highly successful ability to create an invested festival community. Then the London Film Festival will be used as an example of how a high-profile and popular audience festival successfully creates a spectacular framework to generate all-important global exposure for the films it screens. It is important to note that the purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive overview of film festivals in the UK. Rather, the aim is to give an insight into specific characteristics of the field by focusing on two significant, and contrasting, focal points within the contemporary environment. In this way, by defining the specific characteristics of two very different film festivals, this chapter proposes that every film festival, regardless of size, geographical location or type, makes a unique and invaluable contribution to UK film culture.

Challenges to writing about UK film festivals One of the challenges of writing about the UK film festival environment is that, to date, there is no definitive history that encompasses the myriad film festivals operating in the UK. By its very nature the film festival environment tends to be an organic and moveable feast that is constantly in flux, making it a difficult phenomenon to document comprehensively. In spite of a lack of coherent source data with regard to film festivals, this chapter will attempt to contribute to the existing knowledge by charting and contextualizing a seemingly amorphous cultural phenomenon. A comprehensive statistical or economic overview of the value of film festivals in the UK – to both film culture and the exhibition sector – is notable by its absence in the official documentation and literature produced by the UK’s leading film agencies. There is an observable tendency throughout the academic and industry literature for film festivals to be referenced only in passing, if they are mentioned at all. An example of this is evident in the British Film Institute’s annual statistical review, BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014. In this publication of 249 pages, there is only one paragraph dedicated to UK film festivals. In addition, there is only the scantest reference to any figures that might offer any tangible insight into the size and scope of the film festival sector. This observation is not made to suggest that film festivals suffer from a lack of financial support from national film agencies as demonstrated by the BFI’s lottery-aided Film Festival Fund that provides £1 million per annum to supporting regional film festivals.

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Rather, the point is made to draw attention to the minimal acknowledgement of or information about festivals that can be found in nationally produced film reports. The lack of statistical data such as audience figures or even number of films screened makes it difficult to form a coherent impression of the environment or to draw conclusions regarding its important contribution to the UK exhibition sector. The knowledge that informs this chapter comes from a range of sources including trade publications such as Screen International and Variety, journal articles, national and local press coverage, festival-produced information such as catalogues, websites and other marketing information, and personal knowledge and experience of attending festivals in the UK. In addition, a burgeoning body of academic work has emerged in recent years that addresses the increasingly important role of the film festival as part of contemporary film culture on a global basis, and this literature will be used here to inform a greater understanding of the film festival’s contribution to film culture within the UK.

UK film festival development Since its earliest inception at the end of the nineteenth century, the film festival phenomenon has been attributed as a primarily European institution (Elsaesser 2005: 84; de Valck 2007: 14; Rastegar 2011: 311). The first recurring major film festival of international significance and ambition was established in Venice in the 1930s prior to the Second World War, La Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematographico (1932). The Venice festival helped to set the stage and establish a template for the initial significant phase of international festival development (circa 1932–68) (de Valck 2007: 23). The primary phase of development took place in the immediate post-war decades and was characterized by a film festival boom. During this time a whole host of film festivals of international significance were established across Europe including Cannes, Locarno, Berlin, San Sebastian and Karlovy Vary. Throughout this period of development the European film festival phenomenon can be partially attributed to the political impetuses of the post-war era. Film festivals established at this time were instituted as part of a popular post-war international relations effort that promoted peace and reconciliation. These festivals predominantly took the form of competitive national showcases for indigenous cinema designed to support the reassertion of national identities. This initial era was followed by two subsequent phases of film festival development. The first of these occurred throughout the 1970s and marked a distinct move away from nationalistic agendas. Marjike de Valck terms this the “age of programming” (de Valck 2007: 167) and argues that it was during this period that active programing practices and independent film selection started to gain precedence as an essential film festival objective. In the final contemporary phase of development (circa 1980 to today) the film festival setting became characterized by being a highly professionalized and institutional environment that can be considered a sustainable and key component of both the cultural industries and more specifically the international film industry. The present era is also defined by being a highly competitive environment where each new film festival established is forced to be innovative to carve out a unique identity. In this increasingly crowded marketplace Julian Stringer questions whether there is anything discernibly unique or special left to define the contemporary film festival (Stringer 2001: 137).

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Historically, film festival development in the UK deviates somewhat from de Valck’s proposed three-phase model; it can be more appropriately divided into two distinct phases. The first of these dates from the establishment of the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1947 and continues until the late 1980s. Throughout this first era of development, film festivals that were established in the UK’s capital cities, Edinburgh (1947) and London (1957), formed the larger part of the UK festival environment, joined by Cambridge Film Festival in 1977. Apart from these three key festivals, the UK’s film festival sphere mainly comprised smaller and non-recurring localized film festivals hosted by local cinemas and arts centres. The second phase of UK film festival development commenced in the late 1980s and continues to the present. This subsequent phase is marked by the appearance of a proliferation of film festivals that constituted a festival boom in the UK, directly reflecting developments in the global film festival environment. Over one hundred film festivals of varying size, programming focus and location now exist across the UK. From the beginning the UK proved to be an early and enthusiastic adopter of film festivals. Arising directly from practices forged within the UK film society movement, two film festivals of continuing international significance were established during the post-war decades. Both Edinburgh (EIFF) and London (LFF) festivals were established with a strong cinephilic determination that diverged from their European counterparts by being staunchly non-competitive events. Initially established by members of the Film Guild and Scottish Federation of Film Societies, the Edinburgh Film Festival is credited with being the longest continually running festival in the world and, as such, is considered to have played a defining role in determining the film festival format. Matthew Lloyd argues that the Edinburgh festival made “an explicit intervention into film culture quite unlike that of any other festival” (Lloyd 2011: 25) during the same period. During its formative years the Edinburgh festival focused primarily on presenting documentary film, making it the first specialized film festival of international significance. The festival also adopted an educational approach by framing its programme with a raft of lectures, discussions, debates and publications that bore the hallmark of intellectual rigour exemplified by the film society movement (MacDonald in Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012: 95) and resulted in an original and influential programming format. Just a decade later the newly instituted British Film Institute established the London Film Festival as part of its wider remit to become “the home of world cinema” (Dupin in Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012: 78). The festival specifically sought to promote cinephilia by bringing the best cinema sourced from the international film festival circuit to the London audience and formed the template for other significant international film festivals including the New York Film Festival (ibid 2012: 78) and the Hong Kong Film Festival (Hing-Yuk Wong 2011: 45). To date, LFF and EIFF have continued to retain their overall positions at the apex of the UK film festival hierarchy. However, the fortunes of these two festivals have not remained static. Over the past ten years LFF’s star has proved to be in the ascendant while EIFF has faced considerable challenges and disruption that have negatively impacted the festival’s profile. Contributing factors can be attributed to a significant calendar change, a rapid turnover of key artistic personnel and a range of funding cuts that have all had a cumulative effect on the festival.

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In 2007 the festival moved from its auspicious dates in August as part of Edinburgh’s citywide celebration of the arts to a less illustrious timeslot in June. Previously, EIFF had been considered an integral part of Edinburgh’s artistic offering during the city’s muchfêted festival season. Throughout its history the festival had successfully capitalized on the millions of arts-seeking festivalgoers visiting the city to sustain festival attendance and ticket sales. This resulted in an immediate and sharp decline once the festival moved to June. In addition, successive changes to artistic direction and vision caused by a high turn­ over of festival directors resulted in a persistent tearing up of “the Edinburgh Film Festival script” (McLeod 2012). The appointment of prolific film journalist, Mark Adams, in December 2014 marked the fifth festival director in only ten years to take the helm at the festival. As a result of successive changes, the quality and consistency of the festival’s programme and format have endured considerable fluctuations. The banishments of red carpet premieres and the festival’s most prolific award, The Michael Powell Award for best British feature, which were both later reinstated during the 2011 edition of the festival, are just two noteworthy examples of this disruption to the festival’s successful format. EIFF has also been beset by public and commercial funding challenges, not least of which was the now defunct UK Film Council’s £1.9 million funding injection coming to an end in 2011. However, in a return to form, the festival now appears to have stabilized, confirmed by a significant boost in attendance in 2015. Admissions were recorded as being the highest in seven years, bringing festival attendance back to pre-schedule change levels and demonstrating a renewed confidence in EIFF. The UK’s second phase of film festival development saw the emergence of a whole host of new and significant film festivals that materialized in quick succession in a range of geographically dispersed locations such as Leeds, Sheffield and Bristol. This raft of newly emerging festivals catered for a range of specialized and thematic tastes such as documentary and short film as well as ensuring that peripheral and independent cinema could reach local audiences. Building on this expansion, the proliferation of new film festivals has continued at pace up to the contemporary moment. Currently it is estimated that a maximum of 7 per cent of UK screens outside of central London are specifically dedicated to specialized screenings (BFI 2015). This statistic clearly signals an ongoing need for an alternative exhibition mechanism to ensure that non-commercial cinema reaches a wider UK audience. An unquestionable example of this is the case of Glasgow Film Festival (GFF). Established only eleven years ago in 2005, GFF registered circa 42,000 admissions during its 2016 edition (GFF 2015) and promotes itself as the third largest film festival in the UK. GFF’s close geographical proximity to the UK’s second-largest and longest-running film festival, EIFF, raises the question of whether there is a necessity for two significant annual film festivals so near to each other. During EIFF’s destabilization and GFF’s simultaneous growth it was expedient to position the two festivals as rivals competing for the same audience, even though they take place at different times of the year (GFF takes place each February). However, a closer examination of both festivals clearly shows they have different aims. Since its inauguration, GFF has unequivocally positioned itself as a highly accessible audience festival that primarily focuses on providing ‘cinema for all’ (Withoutabox 2016) to Glasgow’s film fans. In contrast, EIFF combines the dual role of audience and industry festival as exemplified by its profile as a festival of discovery. In the aftermath of EIFF’s recovery, neither

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festival’s popularity shows any sign of abating, indicating there is not only room on the circuit for both significant festivals to coexist so closely but also an increasing need. According to the BFI’s report Opening Our Eyes, the cultural contribution of film is “embedded in the UK’s way of life” (BFI 2011: 1). Arguably, the ongoing growth of this sector demonstrates that film festivals perform a valuable function within both UK film culture and as a wider global phenomenon in the contemporary era. But what exactly has driven this phenomenon? Certainly the acceleration of film festival growth can be directly correlated with the numerous and ongoing transformations that have taken place in relation to film-viewing practices during the same period. The growing complexity of the digital world makes it increasingly difficult for audiences to find and select films, making the function of professional curatorship provided by film festivals vital to contemporary film culture. In fact, Liz Czach suggests that as a result of the changing film environment it is hardly surprising that the film festival has emerged “as one of the last refuges of the cinephile” (Czach 2009: 141). Examples of film festivals that serve these increasingly complex tastes within the UK today include: Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol (a festival that nurtures and supports short film and filmmakers); Raindance Film Festival (an indie festival that acts as a platform for independent film); Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival (an innovative young film festival that professes to be “a state of mind” (Flatpack Film Festival 2015) rather than just a film festival); Abandon Normal Devices (AND) (a nomadic film festival that presents film at alternative sites and in alternative formats that hosted its last edition in a forest in Cumbria); and a whole range of genre-focused festivals from Open City Documentary Film Festival or Frightfest in London to Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema in Bo’ness, Scotland. As this short roll-call of film festivals attests, there is an ongoing demand for specialized film content and diverse film-going experiences amongst the British public. The following two case studies describe two film festivals that can be considered to be very different from each other: Sheffield Doc/Fest and BFI London Film Festival. These two cases represent examples of festivals from the first and second phases of UK film festival development. Both festivals individually fulfil a different and unique function within the film festival environment, illustrating how film festivals contribute to sustaining UK film culture.

Creating a community: Sheffield Doc/Fest At the 2015 edition of the Screen Film Summit it was reported that 53 per cent of people in the UK now believe they stream and download films more frequently than they did two years ago (Screen Daily 2015). Changes in film-viewing practices have created an extra burden for film festivals to provide extraordinary experiences and add value to entice audiences away from the myriad of home entertainment on offer. For international and more prolific film festivals, this is often achieved through a strategy of spectacle that involves harnessing star power to add glamour and popular appeal to screenings and events. But for a whole host of festivals, value is created through different strategies such as curatorship, community and forming either social or industrial connections. Festival programmers crucially shape the atmosphere and identity of festivals by crafting the conditions and context in which audiences experience films on show (Rastegar 2011: 311). Creating a film festival community is one of the key factors that sets film

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festival attendance apart from regular film-viewing practices by creating enhanced value. In the UK environment a particularly notable example of this is Sheffield Doc/Fest, or Doc/Fest as it is affectionately known. Established at the beginning of the second phase of UK film festival development, Sheffield Doc/Fest has become the UK’s premiere nonfiction film festival. Under former festival director Heather Croall’s tenure, the Sheffield festival has flourished, growing from a niche-localized “rather fusty affair” (Variety 2008) to one of international renown, known for its robust, innovative and energetic programming on the documentary circuit. In his 2014 review of the festival Sight & Sound’s Nick Bradshaw questions the point of film festivals in the highly mediatized contemporary moment (Bradshaw 2014). Bradshaw draws the conclusion that the resounding answer in the case of Doc/Fest is the creation of a highly engaged film community that seeks “authentic and complex” film experiences (ibid 2014). Evidence of the success of Doc/Fest’s community lies in its remarkable expansion from 800 to 3,000 industry delegates and 2,000 to 26,000 ticket buyers (Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015a) over the past ten years, demonstrating the festival’s popularity with both industry and community attendees. However, in spite of this rapid expansion, one of the sources of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s success as a festival community can be attributed to its commitment to maintaining its modest size. This strategy means that the festival retains its communal spirit and ensures that festivalgoers continue to interact and connect with each other. As part of this strategy Doc/Fest preserves a boutique feel that is sustained by the compact and contained layout of the festival in Sheffield’s city centre. Festivalgoers are never far from

Figure 38.1  Invested film festival communities – Sheffield Doc/Fest, 2014

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an easily recognizable festival venue or event, branded in Doc/Fest’s fluorescent colours, giving the festival a distinctly cohesive feel that can sometimes be missing in other city centre-based festivals. Complementing this, the festival runs for only six days, ensuring a densely packed programme that creates an energized and lively atmosphere. As a primarily specialized and industry-focused event, the format of Doc/Fest lends itself to the creation of a provisional, but exceptionally invested, film community for the duration of the festival. Industry-focused film festivals perform a highly specific function by acting as a marketplace for buying and selling films and film content. Many of the 3,000 or so industry personnel who attend the festival do so with their own specifically targeted agendas that have potential outcomes for current or future documentary projects such as securing funding, resources and/or distribution for their films. Conversely distributors, sales agents, broadcasters and funders attend to purchase or secure film products. The desire to make connections ensures a highly proactive, engaged and social cohort. Doc/Fest facilitates engagement through initiatives like Meet Market, Sheffield’s unique spin on traditional film markets, whereby projects and decision makers are paired in advance of the festival, ensuring that pitchers meet the correct people for their projects, resulting in valuable connections and tangible outcomes. Networking is key to proceedings at Doc/Fest and arguably the festival, as with many business-focused film festivals, can be considered to be reminiscent of a highly elaborate film industry conference. However, Doc/Fest has made a virtue of its sociability through strategic and innovative programming practices that are designed to connect attendees with each other. As the festival website explains, “every year, we’re proud to connect thousands of creatives in a nurturing environment, resulting in the discovery of new talent, new collaborations and new commissions for cinema, television and online” (Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015b). Countless industry-focused festivals can no doubt make a similar claim, but what sets Sheffield Doc/Fest apart is a strategic use of fun to create the festival experience and ensure that connections are made. Doc/Fest employs an innovative regime of receptions, parties, interactive and experiential events, and roundtable discussions, designed to bring the festival community together and break down barriers. In a tribute to former festival director, Heather Croall, filmmaker Robert Graeff charts the transformations at Sheffield Doc/Fest by describing the atmosphere in the festival’s bars as having gone from a “respectful hum to a deafening roar” (Sheffdocfest.com 2015) over the past ten years. It is safe to say that at few other film festival events will you find one of the main Saturday night attractions to be a roller-disco – an innovative way of breaking down barriers between attendees if ever there was one. All of that said, Sheffield Doc/Fest is not just important because it is a fun environment to be in. As a documentary festival, the subject matter of many of the films provides a space for real political, environmental and cultural issues to be raised and the festival format creates exposure for many emerging and established filmmaking voices to be heard. Doc/Fest also makes a real contribution to the UK film industry and film culture by providing an inclusive and participatory space where festivalgoers can interact, discuss and discover film, form collaborations, and meet decision makers – it is where ideas are born and progressed. Doc/Fest’s distinctive ability to create value through participation sets it apart within the UK film festival environment, but there are many other film festivals that perform equally important functions within the sector. The next case study discusses how BFI

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London Film Festival makes a virtue of its spectacular red carpet strategy to create exposure for the UK’s film sector and ensure an international platform for film discoveries.

Creating exposure: London Film Festival In 2007, the UK Film Council advocated that one of the most important values film festivals can demonstrate is the ability to deliver an increase in the value of individual films (UK Film Council 2007). Film festivals provide just one step in a film’s ongoing journey to reach audiences. One of the primary ways that festivals add value is by acting as a platform or launch-pad for films that are screened as part of the programme. Film festivals contribute to an individual film’s post-screening lifecycle by ensuring that the wider international film festival circuit, film industry and global audience can discover them. This objective is achieved by a range of approaches that include programming strategies such as the use of gala screenings, positioning within specific festival strands, public relations tactics such as celebrity attendance, generating critical media coverage, or creating prestige through festival awards. In recent years London Film Festival has successfully employed the strategies detailed here to reposition the festival as a key influencer within the global film festival environment that generates exposure for British and international film. Traditionally considered as an audience festival (Peranson 2009: 23) or a “festival of festivals” (Stewart-Hull 1960: 30), the UK’s flagship festival has retained a “best of fests” programming format since it was first instituted. Predicated on selecting and screening the best films that have premièred at the circuit’s heavyweight international festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Toronto, this programming strategy has helped to form the bedrock for LFF’s enduring popularity, making it a “massive and massively popular event” (Nowell-Smith and Dupin 2012: 277) that is highly accessible to the public. LFF’s continued popular appeal and spectacular framework go hand in hand to create crucial international exposure. An essential part of LFF’s profile-raising strategy involves rolling out the red carpet on a nightly basis in the iconic setting of London’s Leicester Square. This strategy enables the festival to facilitate a heavy-duty roster of film premières throughout the festival, thus ensuring a steady stream of media coverage for the festival at large. Over the past ten years this strategy has been augmented by a concerted and successful effort on the part of the organizers to increase press and industry attendance, thus helping to position LFF as a valuable potential launch-pad for film releases. The festival’s October dates also provide a crucial opportunity for creating exposure. LFF is ideally situated within the global film festival schedule to take advantage of the synergy with the announcement of Awards season nominations. Over recent years the festival has increasingly used its timely position to reposition itself as “one of the stepping-stones for films that have Oscar potential” (James 2014). This strategy has gained prominence over recent years, culminating in 2014 LFF gala screenings of Foxcatcher, Whiplash, Wild, Fury and Mr. Turner all going on to garner Oscar nominations in the subsequent 2015 awards (ibid 2014). In acknowledgement of LFF’s successful repositioning, the BFI’s Chief Executive, Amanda Neville, proposes that London now “marks a critical moment for the international film industry as it gears up for the all-important Awards season” (London Film Festival 2015).

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The resultant rise in LFF’s international status helps to perform a symbiotic function for the festival. On the one hand, films platformed in London now receive greater international status by being part of the official selection. On the other hand, the festival’s role in the journey of Oscar or BAFTA-nominated and winning films creates increased status and prestige for the festival. This strategy results in a knock-on effect for the ongoing exhibition and distribution cycle of these films in the global marketplace. Additional results are yielded, such as securing distribution, obtaining exhibition slots at other festivals and feeding into the overall marketing and PR strategy for a film’s general release. Naturally there is a risk associated with film festivals employing a strategy that is reliant heavily on creating spectacle. One of the criticisms levelled at this strategy comes from the perspective that directing media focus towards the red carpet festivals can potentially endanger the exposure of unknown and emerging films and filmmakers (Czach 2012: 114). While the glare of the media spotlight is shining on the festival’s celebrities, attention for emerging filmmakers is literally eclipsed. However, as Simon Field points out, many film festivals employ a “sandwich process” (Field 2009: 56). By generating greater media awareness for the festival as a whole entity, media attention should filter out throughout the programme to reach and cover lesserknown and emerging filmmakers. By raising the prestige of the film festival as a whole and situating it in the “flight path” of the Oscars (ibid 2014), LFF has become much more than a “best of fests” festival. Instead, the festival has carved out a position within the international film festival environment that can only benefit films screened within its programme.

Conclusion The UK film festival sphere continues to evolve and adapt to respond to a dynamic and thriving national film culture. As this chapter demonstrates, film festivals are not static entities. In the last ten years alone the UK’s film festival environment has undergone significant shifts that continue to shape both the role of film festivals in the UK and film-going practices. UK film festivals tend to be founded on a project of cinematic discovery not fulfilled through mainstream exhibition mechanisms, but given the expanded reach of contemporary home entertainment and the multiplicity of digital content available, the ongoing proliferation of film festivals can still be considered surprising. The dynamism of this sector clearly demonstrates that social encounters and the opportunity to create connections form an integral part of the film festival attraction for UK film festivalgoers. The increasing popularity of the UK film festival environment as illustrated by the establishment of the Glasgow Film Festival, the re-stabilization of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the London Film Festival’s increased international profile and Sheffield Doc/Fest’s amplified status as a must-attend industry festival bear out the fact that UK’s film festivals provide vital functions that go far beyond merely presenting and exhibiting film.

Further reading de Valck, M. (2007) Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. (Provides an insightful and comprehensive overview of film festival development in Europe.)

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Iordanova, D. (ed). (2013) The Film Festival Reader. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. (Brings together a range of key texts that form the foundation of film festival analysis.) Ruoff, J. (2013) Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. (Offers a diverse and detailed anthology of essays that addresses the specificities of film festival programming.)

References Anon. (2008) “Croall takes Sheffield to a new level,” Variety, 31 October. Available at: http://variety. com/2008/film/markets-festivals/croall-takes-sheffield-to-a-new-level-1117995112/ (accessed 11 January 2016). Anon. (2015) “Screen Film Summit: state of the nation,” Screen Daily, 18 December. Available at: http://www.screendaily.com/features/screen-film-summit-state-of-the-nation/5098195.article (accessed 22 December 2015). BFI (2011) Opening Our Eyes: How Film Contributes to the Culture of the UK. Available at: http:// www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-opening-our-eyes-2011-07_0.pdf (accessed 19 November 2015). BFI (2014) 58th BFI London Film Festival Enjoys Record Breaking Year. Available at: http://www. bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-press-release-58th-bfi-london-film-festival-enjoysrecord-breaking-year-2014-10-20.pdf (accessed 8 January 2016). BFI (2015) BFI Statistical Yearbook 2014. Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/ downloads/bfi-statistical-yearbook-2014.pdf (accessed 10 January 2016). Bradshaw, N. (2014) “Stretching the facts,” Sight & Sound, 24 (8): 18–19. Czach, L. (2004) “Film festivals, programming and the building of a national cinema,” in The Moving Image, 4 (1): 76–88. Czach, L. (2009) “Cinephilia, stars and film festivals,” in R. Koehler (ed.) Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, pp. 81–97. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Dayan, D. (2000) “Looking for Sundance. The Social Construction of a Film Festival,” in I. Bondebjerg (ed) Moving Images, Culture and the Mind, pp. 43–52. Luton: Luton University Press. de Valck, M. (2007) Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Eastendfilmfestival.com (2016) About Us: East End Film Festival. Available at: http://www.eastend filmfestival.com/about-us (accessed 4 January 2016). Edfest.org.uk (2016) About the Festival: History – Edinburgh International Film Festival. Available at: http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/about-the-festival/history (accessed 4 January 2016). Elsaesser, T. (2005) “Film festival networks: the new topographies of cinema,” in Europe in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, pp. 82–108. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fischer, A. (2013) Sustainable Projections: Concepts in Film Festival Management. St Andrews, Scotland: St Andrews Film Studies. Flatpackfestival.org.uk (2015) Flatpack Film Festival. Available at: http://flatpackfestival.org.uk (accessed 5 January 2016). Glasgow Film Festival (2016) Glasgow Film Festival Announces Record Admissions. Available at: http://www.glasgowfilm.org/festival/gff_news/8122_glasgow_film_festival_announces_record_ admissions (accessed 6 March 2016). Harbord, J. (2009) “Film festivals-time-event,” in D. Iordanova and R. Rhyne (eds) Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, pp. 40–48. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies. Hing-Yuk Wong, C. (2011) Film Festivals: Culture, People and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press.

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Iordanova, D. (2009) “The film festival circuit,” in D. Iordanova and R. Rhyne(eds) Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, pp. 23–39. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies. James, N. (2014) “All year red carpet,” Sight & Sound, 24 (12): 5. McLeod, M. (2012) “Another new director tears up Edinburgh film festival script,” The Guardian. 6 February 2012. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/scotland-blog/2012/feb/06/ edinburgh-film-festival-chris-fujiwara (accessed 20 February 2016). Peranson, M. (2009) “First you get the power, then you get the money: the two models of film festivals,” in R. Porton (ed) Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, pp. 23–37. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Quandt, J. (2009) “The sandwich process: Simon Field Talks about polemics and poetry at film festivals” in R. Porton (ed) Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, pp. 53–80. London and New York: Wallflower Press. Raindance (2015) Raindance Main Home Page: Raindance. Available at: http://www.raindance.org/ (accessed 5 December 2015). Schamus, J. (2012) “See here now: festival red carpets and the cost of film culture,” in J. Ruoff (ed) Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, pp. 69–74. St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. Sheffdocfest.com (2015) Sheffield Doc/Fest: Sheffield International Documentary Festival. Available at: https://sheffdocfest.com/ (accessed 20 December 2015). Sheffield Doc/Fest (2015a) Sheffield Doc Fest Catalogue. Sheffield: Sheffield Doc/Fest. Sheffield Doc/Fest (2015b) 2015 Festival Report. Available at: https://sheffdocfest.com/articles/333sheffield-doc-fest-2015-festival-report?tag=news (accessed 18 December 2015). Stewart-Hull, D. (1960) “London,” in Film Quarterly, 14 (2): 30–35. Stringer, J. (2001) “Global cities and the international film festival economy” in M. Shiel and T. Fitzmaurice (eds) Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, pp. 134–144. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. UK Film Council (2007) UK-Wide Film Festival Strategy. London: UK Film Council. Withoutabox (2016) Glasgow Film Festival. Available at: https://www.withoutabox.com/03film/03t_ fin/03t_fin_fest_01over.php?festival_id=8226 (accessed 2 March 2016).

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CROWDFUNDING INDEPENDENCE British cinema and digital production/distribution platforms

Bertha Chin and Bethan Jones Introduction Crowdfunding, that is the process of raising money for a project through donations, is not in itself a new phenomenon. US fans of the British rock group Marillion funded a concert tour in 1997, raising a total of US$60,000 through an internet campaign; in 1999 Mark Tpaio Kines, an independent filmmaker, raised more than US$125,000 through his website to fund his feature film Foreign Correspondents (1999). Crowdfunding has been a popular way to raise money for projects across a range of areas, but the term has taken on a slightly different meaning following the launch of crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter; and the high-profile campaigns spearheaded by Hollywood actors like Kristen Bell (for the Veronica Mars movie) who used Kickstarter to crowdfund a film. The model Marillion and Kines used relied on the donations of fans and friends with no expectation of reward – other than the final product (concert and film respectively). Marillion sent out 1,000 autographed copies of a live CD recorded during one of the US shows as a thank-you gesture to the fans who contributed to the tour, although this was paid for by money left over from the tour fund. Similarly Kines kept his investors updated on the project with copies of the script and rough cuts of the film, but framed this as a way to maintain their trust in him. Crowdfunding in the digital age functions on a reward system – backers donate a set amount of money to a project in exchange for a reward. Although Kickstarter only launched a UK platform in 2012, the site had played host to British campaigns since its creation in 2009 (Lee 2012). A whole host of sites have since appeared aimed at the British market, and British projects from Cornish ketchup (http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/cornish-ketchup/) to folk festivals (http://bloomvc.com/ project/Arran-Folk-Festival-2013-1) and memoirs (http://unbound.co.uk/books/spring field-road) have been funded this way. The internet has played an important role in crowdfunding, but not simply because it allows producers to reach a much larger audience. Digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed producers to connect more immediately and more personally with

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audiences as well as facilitating the sharing of the project to a larger network. Leibovitz, Roig and Sánchez-Navarro note that personal connections between creators and backers are the main reasons for backers to engage with crowdfunding projects, but they also suggest that “as collaboration extends across time and across different projects, interpersonal bonds get weaker and other reasons for collaborating arise” and “the engagement with the creative project tends to relay on a larger interconnected crowd” (2015: 19). Digital platforms also provided new ways of sharing content itself: from Vimeo to YouTube, trailers and films have found a new distribution model, and a new home on the internet. In this chapter we examine how crowdfunding and digital platforms are being used in the production and distribution of British cinema. We begin by tracing the history of crowdfunding before examining the effect that digital platforms have had on the production, marketing and distribution of British cinema. We follow this with a case study on the British documentary Still The Enemy Within (2014). We suggest that new and emerging technologies give British cinema a larger, more diverse but also more connected audience, and that crowdfunding allows for the production and distribution of British films which may be politically sensitive, cult or seen as financially unviable.

The history of crowdfunding The notion of crowdfunding is rooted in the broader concept of crowdsourcing, a term first used and coined by Wired contributing editor, Jeff Howe, in 2006. Leibovitz et al. note that crowdfunding “may be understood as a type of crowdsourcing in that it makes an allusion to the collaboration of, and contribution from the crowd for the success of a critical process” (2015: 16). Brabham, however, suggests that crowdsourcing is a “blend of top-down managed process and bottom-up open process, with the locus of control over production residing with both the organization and the crowd in a shared, give-andtake way” (2013: 38), whereas crowdfunding only benefits the content producers asking for funding, which requires no “creative energy or human intelligence” (ibid.) beyond choosing a product to support. This does not stop the comparison or the ties between the two processes, however, for, as Hills (2015) highlights, funders support a particular project due to a variety of reasons. For other scholars, such as Schwienbacher and Larralde (2010), crowdfunding is “an open call, mostly through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in the form of donations or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes” (2008: 4). For Kappel, it is an “act of informally generating and distributing funds … by groups of people for specific social, personal, entertainment or other purposes” (2009: 375). These understandings of crowdfunding impinge on an important factor, however, and that is the importance of the internet and web 2.0 that enables content creators using crowdfunding to mobilize a large group or groups of people into action and thereby still use “the crowd”. However, Leibovitz et al. (2015) suggest that Kappel’s approach is remarkable, as it does not make reference to the benefits or rewards received by the sponsors for their donations. Rewardbased crowdfunding is typically what is understood as crowdfunding in discussions of the topic, and is the type we focus on in this chapter. In addition to the four basic types of crowdfunding – donation-based, reward-based, lending-based and equity-based (De Buysere et al. 2012; Brannerman 2012) – it is also

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possible to consider two more. These are direct crowdfunding, which appeals directly to potential backers without the need for any fundraising platform, and indirect crowdfunding, which is “mediated by specialized platforms dedicated exclusively to the promotion of projects like Kickstarter, Indiegogo or Verkami” (Leibovitz et al. 2015: 17). Within the context of media and cultural studies, and the media industry, interest in indirect crowdfunding has been particularly prevalent since the successful 2013 campaign of the Veronica Mars movie. Crowdfunding campaigns spearheaded by popular actors often frame the campaigns using similar discourses: they want to make a film fans deserve, seemingly without studio intervention. Booth (2015: 150) identifies “entertainers drawing on their own fan audience for financial support … [as] key examples of neoliberal 21st century fan/industry relations”. He also argues that it is an uneven relationship, as the success of the crowdfunding is predicated upon a pre-existing fandom, as well as a (continual) relationship between the producers and fans, which may still not guarantee immediate success. There are also concerns about fan exploitation by the media industry (Pebler 2013) as established media producers and actors call on their fans to help finance what could be considered pet projects that could easily be supported by the traditional studio system. Reward tiers are dependent on how much a fan can pledge to a crowdfunding campaign: the larger the pledge, the more access fans can obtain to the filmmakers. As Chin et al. (2014) remark, this creates a hierarchized fandom with tiered access to content creators. This is complicated by access to digital platforms, such as the difficulty of international pledges that includes access to digital versions of a crowdfunded film on a platform that may be geographically locked to a specific region. The growth of social media like Twitter and the media industry’s use of it have, however, enabled content creators to reach out to a greater number of their fans and audiences. Furthermore, the proliferation of digital platforms has also enabled independent filmmakers to distribute their films using streaming sites like Vimeo and YouTube (Lobato 2007; Iordanova and Cunningham 2012), as well as making crowdfunding for films a viable option as the finished product can be delivered electronically to supporters.

Digital platforms In recent years, alternative film festivals such “iPhone Film Festivals” have enabled aspiring filmmakers in possession of smartphones and editing software to showcase their films and stream them through dedicated websites or video-sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube. While such festivals are not staples of the film distribution market, their existence illustrates that digital platforms and mobile technology have influenced independent and guerrilla filmmaking. Lobato writes about film studies’ over-dependency on the text, and the oversight of the discipline to overlook film distribution: “it is essential we … understand how films get to audiences – or, as is most often, how they do not” (2007: 114). In a piece on “subcinema”, which is defined as “feature films, which bypass the conventional release patterns … [such as] straight-to-video releasing, telemovies, cult cinema markets, diasporic media, popular video industries such as Nigeria’s ‘Nollywood,’ pornography, special interest cinema and so on” (2007: 117), Lobato argues for the importance of studying not only how major contemporary Hollywood films are distributed, but also films that normally do

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not receive much academic interest. While Lobato alludes to piracy as a distinct form of “subcinema”, we would like to propose that digital distribution and online streaming (particularly for films that bypass traditional distribution routes) should also be considered a form of “subcinema”. Streaming sites like YouTube and Vimeo and streaming services like Amazon Prime and Netflix play an important role here as they enable audiences to stream movies while they are on the go. Even British independent cinemas like Curzon provide a service that allows paying members to stream first-run (indie) films online through their Curzon Home Cinema feature. This range of distribution platforms allows for growing levels of interactivity, which in turn can increase the connections between producers and audiences. This interactivity suggests a possible link between streaming services and the crowdfunding model: both encourage active engagement with the (potential) audience and both are freely accessible through a range of devices. García-Avilés suggests: The synergies between television and the Internet have brought about innovative ways of considering the role of audiences and amplifying the reception of programs; as interactive technologies transform the way television communicates with the audience, they also increase the opportunities for audience feedback and engagement with programs. (2012: 430) As we examine later in this chapter, social media played a large role in raising awareness of the crowdfunded documentary Still The Enemy Within, with the Facebook post sharing the film’s trailer generating 119 likes, 21 comments and 842 shares.

The British approach In the autumn 2014 budget statement George Osborne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the expansion of the British Business Bank Act to encourage peer-to-peer lending as well as extending tax breaks to the creative industries. The Chancellor noted that tax breaks afforded to film and TV in Britain had “ushered in a golden age for Britain’s creative industries” (https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/ chancellor-george-osbornes-autumn-statement-2014-speech). The inclusion of peer-topeer lending in the autumn statement is an interesting one in relation to crowdfunding in the UK. Peer-to-peer lending typically takes place on websites like Zopa and RateSetter which match borrowers with lenders. Individuals or companies can borrow money from individual lenders, which is then repaid at a set rate of interest. Although not as well known as reward-based crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending does fall under the crowdfunding remit and its inclusion in the autumn statement demonstrates the UK’s interest in and approach to crowdfunding. The Culture Crowd report Equity Crowdfunding for the Arts and Creative Industries focuses on the UK where “equity crowdfunding is already successfully working in a regulated environment for other industries” (Nagle and Roche 2013: 5). Indeed, raising money from UK investors requires crowdfunding platforms to comply with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and by June 2013 two equity crowdfunding platforms in the UK had FCA approval. The report further notes, “The UK is ahead of every other

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country in the world in having created a legitimate environment where equity crowdfunding investors are protected by a national financial regulatory body and where equity crowdfunding platforms can operate successfully” (2013: 7). Equity crowdfunding in the UK, however, seems to have “typically focused on projects that can easily be described on the Internet. For example, equity crowdfunding platforms perform well for software, Internet, high-tech and media businesses” (Nagle and Roche 2013: 13). At the time of writing there is no equity crowdfunding platform dedicated to the arts and creative industries. There are, however, several reward-based crowdfunding platforms dedicated to the arts and creative industries, with hundreds of successfully crowdfunded projects. The Crowdfunding Centre’s August 2014 report revealed that London overtook New York and San Francisco to become the world capital of crowdfunding, with 2,463 projects created between January and June 2014. In addition, the report revealed that during quarter two the UK nearly doubled the amount of crowdfunding raised in quarter one. The 2014 State of the Crowdfunding Nation report for quarter two showed film in the top five for pledges, amount raised and most success, with 272,595, $22,911,189 and 1,083 respectively. In the UK, 128 film projects were successfully funded between April and June 2014, and film (117) is the second most popular category of project in the UK for quarter three, community coming top with 123 projects. We now turn to examine the case of the successfully funded British documentary Still The Enemy Within. Directed by Owen Gower and produced by Sinead Kirwan, Mark Lacey and Owen Gower, Still The Enemy Within is a documentary about the experiences of miners and mining families who lived through the 1984–5 miners’ strike. Describing the film on its Sponsume page, the producers wrote: With a Tory government back in power, and the recent death of Margaret Thatcher next year will see a huge battle of interpretation for the legacy of the strike. This along with the call for a public inquiry into the policing of Orgreave, means it has never been so important that people learn the lessons of that year and what really happened. (2013a: np) The film used archive material and dramatic reconstructions to take the audience through the events of the miners’ strike, as well as interviews with miners, their wives and supporters. The production team ran two crowdfunding campaigns for the documentary on Kickstarter and Sponsume. The filmmakers chose to use these two different crowdfunding platforms for several reasons. Initially unsure of the size and scope of the project, the Kickstarter campaign was created to film the first set of interviews, which were used mainly for archive purposes. They used Kickstarter for this campaign as it was the most well known and had a larger volume of traffic than other platforms: “We had little experience of crowdfunding at this point and used the most well-known site to help us. As Kickstarter is the most used and well known of funding platforms, we felt it was the best to use” (interview with the filmmakers). The Kickstarter campaign launched on 4 December 2012 with a goal of £6,500, and ended on 1 February 2013 with a total of £8,709. Describing what the documentary intended to do, the producers wrote:

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We want to share a unique and compelling story, introducing the amazing and brave characters who played such a massive role in British history. We want to create an archive, we want to ensure that those who lost in strike do not lose their place in history. We want to create a tool, for all those who wish to engage with current social and political struggles, to learn from one of the greatest social and political struggles ever fought. (2013b: np) Given the successful Kickstarter the producers felt it necessary to try and develop the film into a full project. This included using archive material from the time, filming dramatic reconstructions and interviewing miners from Wales and Nottingham. The second campaign was thus much larger and intended to raise enough funds to finish the film’s post-production in preparation for the Sheffield Doc/Fest festival launch. The Sponsume campaign was launched on 12 November 2013 with a goal of £35,000 and ended on 21 December 2013 with a total of £26,285.50. Sponsume allows projects to access all donations regardless of whether the target was met, and with direct donations from trade unions the campaign total reached £36,790. Kirwan and Lacey told us that the decision to use Sponsume lay partly in its ability to let them access funds at any time, and partly due to the networks they already had in place: As long as you can tap into those networks of people who are interested in your film and will spread the word for you, you are likely to raise your target. Sponsume allows you access to the money straight away, the fees are lower than Kickstarter and you don’t have to target to get money, you get it anyway. (Interview with the filmmakers) These networks were important to the success of both projects, as well as the film’s distribution, which we discuss later. In the “risks and challenges” section of the Kickstarter description, the producers wrote: We do not have access to the commercial footage that would come with making a film directly for a major channel, but neither do we have to deal with the pressure to stick to the mainstream narrative. We will tell the story from the side of the people who participated, and not sound bites from “experts”. However, this does mean we will have to be very creative to make the project visually exciting. (2013b: np) The focus on the people who participated in the strike rather than historians and politicians reflecting on the strike at a distance was a key factor in the decision to crowdfund the film. Kirwan and Lacey told us: “We have had some discussion with broadcasters early on but it was clear they had a very different film in mind to the one we wanted to make. Therefore we knew to a certain extent we would have to find an alternative source of funding.” The team was able to find support from trade unions and well-known filmmakers like Ken Loach and John Pilger, which helped to legitimize what the first-time filmmakers were

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doing. Having the support of British filmmakers also helped potential backers understand what kind of film would be made. One of the key factors in having support from wellknown individuals, however, was in the reach they offered: Crowdfunding is partly about getting as many people as possible to find out about your film, so having those names really helps push it outside of your local reach and fan base. For example if Paul Mason, who supported the film, tweets about it then that is over 100,000 people finding out straight away for free. (Interview with the filmmakers) Kirwan and Lacey also noted the difficulties facing documentary filmmakers in the UK. Broadcaster-backed fully funded commissions account for the majority of documentary financing in the UK, though this is in decline. As Sørensen points out, “Commissions by one of the four networked broadcasters fell from 90% in 2004 to 79% in 2009” (2010: 727). Both agreed that this was a key factor in crowdfunding the documentary: One [of the reasons we chose crowdfunding] is the limited ways of funding independent documentaries in the UK. If you don’t have a broadcaster on board, it is quite hard to access funding streams, so crowdfunding is a great way to alternatively fund a film. (Interview with the filmmakers) The networks that the team were able to build and nurture thus proved valuable in terms of distribution as well as funding. The trade unions which supported the film, including PCS, NUM, Unite and the NUT, were able to point the filmmakers to individuals who had been involved in the strike and who wanted their story to be heard. They were also able to provide additional support when it came to approaching venues to screen the film: Getting so many trade union branches and individual donations behind the film early on massively helped our confidence when approaching cinemas during the film’s release. Similarly, our supporters have approached cinemas directly to screen the film and been a huge source of free and creative marketing for the film. People feel more ownership of something if they have been involved early on or put money in. (Interview with the filmmakers) The producers were offered the opportunity to screen the film in various Picturehouse screens, followed by Q&As. A cinema tour throughout the UK also allowed them to engage with the audiences and build further screenings. However, the producers also worked with Dartmouth Films to distribute the film in independent and community cinemas across the country, which ensured they were able to screen in the heartland of the strike – areas such as Wales, Kent, Yorkshire and Durham, where there are no Picturehouse cinemas. Kirwan and Simmons told us that the crowdfunding fed into this as they were able to use the networks they had built up to help spread the word about the screenings. Their audience also approached them with suggestions of where they would like to see the film, which fed into their release plan.

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Unlike well-known crowdfunded films which had a distributor ready to deal with the film’s release, Still The Enemy Within’s producers chose to release the film themselves, with the aid of Dartmouth Films. Finance and time were both factors in this decision, as the producers needed the film to be released during the 30th anniversary of the miners’ strike as well as wanting to capitalize on the release of Pride (2014), the fictional film based on the support given to a Welsh mining village by a group of lesbian, gay and bisexual London-based activists. Kirwan and Lacey noted that the main challenge to distributing a crowdfunded documentary was having to do a lot of the distribution themselves: We could not afford to take a risk on a distributor not delivering. However, distributors have tons of experience with dealing with cinemas and bring their kudos so you have to work that little bit harder to persuade cinemas you can deliver. (Interview with the filmmakers) The producers also noted the significant challenges in crowdfunding, particularly the amount of time it took away from the process of creating the documentary itself. The team worked full-time for a month to prepare for the crowdfunding campaign and spent another month running it full-time. As they said, It is not just a question of putting the site up and sending a few e-mails or posting on social media. It’s constant phoning and e-mailing of networks and organization in individuals to send it to their friends and networks and them sending it to their friends and networks, etc. (Interview with the filmmakers) Given the state of documentary filmmaking in the UK, however, Kirwan and Lacey acknowledged the role that crowdfunding played in enabling them to make Still The Enemy Within: With broadcasters taking a lot less risks and the mainstream funding opportunities in the UK being minimal and quite narrow in scope, it is very hard to get a documentary made. In some ways we were lucky as we had established networks we could use and we were making a film about a subject that lots of people were interested in, so we could utilize them. However, not every film has that. (Interview with the filmmakers)

Conclusion Both direct and reward-based crowdfunding contributed to the financing of Still The Enemy Within, and social media also shaped the film and its success. Endorsements from well-known names raised awareness about the film, as the filmmakers noted: “because we have had such a small advertising budget, endorsements and tweets, etc. from wellknown names helps spread the word outside of your immediate circle” (interview with the filmmakers). In addition, the team also used their followers on Facebook and Twitter to obtain additional support. Kirwan and Lacey posted status updates to find extras, hair

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stylists, transcribers and filming locations, with campaign followers offering their services. Both producers acknowledged how fortunate they were that they had been able to raise so much money through crowdfunding, and noted that not everyone will have the same success. Writing about the impact of crowdfunding and online distribution on the UK documentary film industry, Sørensen discussed the differences between two feature documentaries which appeared on Kickstarter in August 2011. The directors of both documentaries were British, and the production teams had already made awardwinning films for UK broadcasters. Both projects asked for $30,000 to distribute and market, both were promoted and pushed heavily on social network sites, in the press and through Kickstarter’s updates, and both followed personal journeys in relation to contemporary political issues. Nick Broomfield, director of the first documentary, Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, wanted to uncover the homelands of Sarah Palin prior to the start of the 2012 US election campaign. Doug Aubrey, who directed the second project, followed a football coach who promotes reconciliation through football training with children in Iraq. Sørensen notes that: Only Nick Broomfield’s film reached its target of $30,000. Thus, although both projects had similar experiential surplus value, which Belleflamme et al. (2011) describe as necessary to attract investors to a crowdfunding project, crowd-financing is not a certain funding avenue for every worthwhile project. It is likely that the fact that Nick Broomfield and Sarah Palin are immediately recognizable names contributed to that film’s funding success. (2010: 739) Crowdfunding, as the producers of Still The Enemy Within noted, is not a sure-fire way of financing a film. A number of factors contribute to the success or failure of a project, and often the filmmakers are left out of pocket. Kirwan and Lacey told us: It’s important to realize that [crowdfunding] is often used alongside other forms of funding such as equity investment, grants, pre-sales and in some cases small amounts from broadcasters and that it is often one part of the budget of a film. We for example were only able to release the film with additional private investment once the film was completed. But it is an increasingly large part of the budget of many small and large films and is becoming more important. (Interview with the filmmakers) Indeed, a recent Guardian article indicated that alternative forms of funding, which includes crowdfunding, are “projected to grow to £4.4bn in Britain in 2015 – more than doubling in the next 12 months” (Booth 2014: np), suggesting the growing impact of crowdfunding in the UK. The inclusion of peer-to-peer lending in the 2014 autumn statement, as well as the extension of tax breaks to the creative industries, demonstrates the importance of film and television to the UK economy. The ability of crowdfunding to aid the production and distribution of films which may be seen as politically sensitive or financially unviable suggests that crowdfunding and online distribution will continue to play an important role in the British film industry.

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Further reading Bennett, L., B. Chin and B. Jones (eds) (2015) Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society, London: Peter Lang. (The first edited collection on crowdfunding in the digital age.) Lobato, R. (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution, London: Palgrave. (An analysis of international film culture outside of cinema/DVDs.)

References Booth, R. (2014) “Kickstarter: How Crowdfunding is Booming in Britain,” The Guardian. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/26/kickstarter-crowdfunding-boomingbritain?CMP=share_btn_tw. Accessed 2 January 2015. Booth, P. (2015) “Crowdfunding: A Spimatic Application of Digital Fandom,” New Media & Society, 17(2), Crowdfunding Special Issue: 141–148. Brabham, D.C. (2013) Crowdsourcing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chin, B., B. Jones, M. McNutt and L. Pebler (2014) “Veronica Mars Kickstarter and Crowd Funding” in M. Stanfill and M. Condis (eds) “Fandom and/as Labor”, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, 15. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0519. Accessed 2 June 2014. De Buysere, K., O. Gajda, R. Kleverlaan and D. Marom (2012) A Framework for European Crowdfunding. Available at www.crowdfundingframework.eu. Accessed 14 January 2013. García-Avilés, J.A. (2012) “Roles of Audience Participation in Multiplatform Television: From Fans and Consumers to Collaborators and Activists,” Participations Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, 9(2): 429–447. HM Treasury (2014) Oral statement to Parliament: Chancellor George Osborne’s Autumn Statement 2014 speech. Available at https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chancellor-george-osbornesautumn-statement-2014-speech. Accessed 7 November 2014. Howe, J. (2006) “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired. Available at http://archive.wired.com/wired/ archive/14.06/crowds.html. Accessed 1 November 2014. Iordanova, D. and S. Cunningham (2012) Digital Disruption: Cinema Moves On-line, St Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies. Kappel, T. (2009) “Ex Ante Crowdfunding and the Recording Industry: A Model for the U.S.”, Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review, 29: 375–385. Kirwan, S. and M. Lacey (2013a) “Still The Enemy Within”. Sponsume. Available at http://www. sponsume.com/project/still-enemy-within. Accessed 16 November 2014. —— (2013b) “(Still) The Enemy Within: A Film about the Miners’ Strike”. Kickstarter. Available at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theenemywithin/still-the-enemy-within-a-film-about-theminers-str. Accessed 16 November 2014. Larralde, B. and A. Schwienbacher, A. (2010) “Crowdfunding of Small Entrepreneurial Ventures” in D.J. Cumming (ed.) Handbook of Entrepreneurial Finance, London: Oxford University Press. Lee, D. (2012) “Kickstarter Crowdfunding Website Launches in the UK.” BBC News. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20145764. Accessed 6 October 2014. Leibovitz, T., A. Roig and J. Sánchez-Navarro (2015) “Up Close and Personal: Exploring the Bonds between Promoters and Backers in Audiovisual Crowdfunded Projects” in L. Bennett, B. Chin and B. Jones (eds) Crowdfunding the Future: Media Industries, Ethics and Digital Society, pp. 15–30. London: Peter Lang. Lobato, R. (2007) “Subcinema: Theorizing Marginal Film Distribution,” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, 13: 113–120.

427

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Nagle, P and C. Roche (2013) Equity Crowdfunding for the Arts and Creative Industries, London: The Culture Crowd. Pebler, L. (2013) “Guest Post: My Gigantic Issue with the Veronica Mars Kickstarter”. Revenge of the Fans. Available at http://www.suzanne-scott.com/2013/03/15/guest-post-my-gigantic-issue-withthe-veronica-mars-kickstarter. Accessed 19 May 2014. Sørensen, I.E. (2012) “Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing: The Impact of Online Funding and Distribution on the Documentary Film Industry in the UK,” Media, Culture & Society, 34(6): 726–743. The Crowd Data Centre (2014) The State of The Crowdfunding Nation Documenting The Global Rise of eFinance & the eFunding Escalator, Birmingham, UK: The CrowdFundingCentre.

428

INDEX

1895–1901: Victorian era 24–6 1902–1910: Edwardian era 26–30 1911–1918: pre-war 30–3, 68–74, 132–3 1918–28 3–5, 34–7; cinemas and cinema-going 42–3; cinematography 47–55; critique 36, 43–4; distribution 39, 41–2; film design 57–65; film production 37–41; legislation 44–5; music 76–85; short sound films 34–5 1928–30: transition to sound 5, 87–97; exhibitors 89–90; film production 122–3; multi-lingual versions 95–6; musicians 84–5, 92–3, 96, 97; technology 91–2, 93–4; Tudor Cinema, Leicester 99–107; voices and accents 95, 96–7, 123, 125 1930–80: the classic period 6–11; British Film Institute 242–50; censorship 9–10, 133–8, 231–41; Children’s Film Foundation 192, 200, 202–7; documentaries 161–9; Eady Levy 191–8; émigrés 151–60; film journalism 272–9; film production 121–8, 209–18; Jacey cinema chain 209–18; National Screen Service 181–9; producers and moguls 139–48; public film archives 262–9; Rank’s contract artists of the 1950s 170–9; television and cinema: 1950–70 220–9; trades unions 251–60 1980–: contemporary British cinema 11–15; BBC Films 358–65; crowdfunding 418–26; cult films 285–92; distribution 387–95; film festivals 406–15; film policy 348–55; Hollywood blockbusters and UK production 377–85; independent film production 338–46; memories of British cinema 397–404; multiplex cinemas 317–26; Regional Screen Agencies 350, 367, 372–4; The Scala Cinema 290, 295–305; UK Film Council 367–71; underground film-making 306–16; the “video boom” 328–35

3-D digital technology 330–1, 331f, 355, 358 20th Century Fox 378, 383, 385, 388 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 198, 378 Aardman Animations 344, 345 Abandon Normal Devices (AND) 411 ABC 42, 94, 206, 227, 228, 273, 318, 392 ABC Dramatic 82 ABC Film Review (magazine) 273 Abel, Sidney 184 ABPC see Associated British Picture Corporation Absolute Beginners (1986) 342 Academy Awards 47, 193, 248, 249, 341, 414, 415 Academy Cinema, Leeds 116 Academy Cinema, London 116 Ackland, Rodney 295 Acock’s Green Picture Playhouse, Birmingham 79–81, 80f, 84, 85 Acres, Birt 25 ACT see Association of Cine-Technicians ACTT see Association of Cine and Television Technicians actuality films 24, 27, 57 Adams, Jill 177 Adams, Mark 410 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1921) 39, 42 Advertising Standards Authority 333 Aesop’s Film Fables (1920–) 104 AFL (American Federation of Labor Film Council) 193 Agajanian, Rowena 200, 202, 206–7 Agate, James 36, 275, 276 Ahmed, Aisha (Miss Jacey) 212, 216 Aimée, Anouk 359 Alfie (1966) 378

429

Index

Alf’s Button (1920) 38, 42 Alhambra 26, 100 Alice in Wonderland (1903) 28 Alien (1979) 378 Allen, Robert C. et al. 397, 398, 401 Allen, Walter 115 Allen, Woody 363 Alliance Communications 390 Allied Talking Pictures 94 Alligator (1980) 330 Allison, Deborah 389, 392 Alpha Films 329, 330 Altria, Bill 273 Amanda Films 211 Amateur Cine World (magazine) 307 American Federation of Labor Film Council (AFL) 193 American Multi-Cinema (AMC) 317, 319, 320–1 American Newsreel Company 96 American Studio System 34, 61 Americanization 44–5 Amicus studios 288 Amityville 3-D (1983) 331 An Awfully Big Adventure (1995) 360 An Obstinate Cork (1902) 32 AND (Abandon Normal Devices) 411 Anderson, Benedict 155 Anderson, Lindsay 244, 275, 277 Angel (1982) 352 Angel, Daniel 143 Angeli, Pier 176 The Angelic Conversation (1985) 314 Anglo-Amalgamated 146–7 The Angry Silence (1960) 175 Anna Scher Drama School 205 Annan Report (1974) 351 Annie Laurie (1916) 71 Anstey, Edgar et al. 166, 276 Antonia and Jane (1990) 360 Anya Productions 195 AOL Time Warner 381–2 Apostoloff, Steve 302 Arbuckle, Fatty 81 Arcade Video 334 The Archers 140, 157, 159 Argento, Dario 302 Arliss, George 124 Arnall, Julia 177 Arnold, C. Wilfred 52

Arnold, Norman 58, 62–3, 64 Arnold, Wilfred 64–5 Arrow Video 291 art directors 59, 60, 62 Arthur, George K. 37, 38f Artificial Eye 391–2, 393 Artistic Films 39–40 Arts and Humanities Research Council 350 Arts Councils 222, 247, 248, 311, 344, 353, 354 Askwith, Robin 215 Asquith, Anthony 36, 54, 88, 95 Associated British Film Distributors 123, 171 Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) 125, 143, 144, 147, 170, 178, 206, 228 Associated Communications Corporation 340 Associated Exhibitors 184 Associated Realist Film Producers 166 Associated Talking Pictures (ATP) 94–5, 122–3, 125 Association of Broadcasting Staff 252 Association of Cine and Television Technicians (ACTT) 251, 252, 253, 254, 255–7, 258–9 Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT) 252–3, 254, 255; Short Film Agreement 166 Association of Short Film Producers 166 Association of Specialised Film Producers 166 Astoria Cinema, London 92 At the Foot of the Scaffold (1913) 72 At the Villa Rose (1920) 36 Atkinson, G.A. 45 Atlantic (1929) 96, 122 Atlas Films 113 ATP see Associated Talking Pictures Attenborough, Sir Richard 165f, 207, 246, 247, 248 Aubre, Doug 426 Aukin, David 360 Ault, Marie 40 Austin, Roger 297 Auten, Harold 122 Aylmer, Felix 212 B, Beth and Scott 310 Back to the Future (1985) 320 BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) 13 Baillieu, Bill 196, 228, 339, 340, 342, 343, 344 Baker, Peter 276, 277, 279

430

Index

Baker, Ricky 301 Bakewell, Joan 248 Balch, Antony 211, 214–15 Balcon, Michael 37, 44–5, 50, 54, 64, 139, 140, 142, 176, 245, 358, 359 Balfour, Betty 36, 39, 67, 74, 95 Balio, Tino 196, 197, 207, 378 Balloonatic (1923) 104 Bamford, Kenton 36 Bamforth, James 24 Bardot, Brigitte 176 Barker, Ronnie 204 Barker, Will 59, 70 Barnard, Clio 353 Barnes, John and William 3 Baron, Alec 110, 111, 116 Baron, Saskia 301 Barr, Charles 54, 65, 271, 273 Barry, Iris 36, 43, 110, 275 Barrymore, Lionel 37 Barthelmess, Richard 105 Bass Leisure 317 Bates, Barbara 177, 178 Batley, Ethyle 32 Batman (1989) 240 The Battle of the Somme (1916) 32 The Battle of Waterloo (1913) 59, 70 The Battleship Potemkin (1925) 112, 113 Bauhaus 157 Bauman, Zygmunt 154–5 Bayley, Hilda 103 Bayley, Laura 27, 27f Bayne, C. 179 BBC 222, 225, 227, 228; BBC Enterprises 361; children’s television 205–6, 207; films 223, 245, 342; Royal Charter 359, 361; Single Drama 360–1; and Super 8 308 BBC Films 13, 96, 358, 364–5; 1988–97: Mark Shivas 358–61; 1997–2007: David Thompson 358, 361–4; films for theatrical release 359–60; The Sales Company 360; Screen Two 359, 360 BBFC see British Board of Film Censors Beahan, Peter 185 Beatles films 126–7, 197 Becket (1964) 191, 193, 194 BECTU History Project 84, 92 Bed and Sofa (1927) 112, 113 Bee-Mason, J.C. 30 Beerbohm Tree, Sir Herbert 32, 70, 81

Begg, Isabel 362 Belgrave Cinema, Leicester 102 Bell, Billy 299 Bell, Kristen 418 Ben-Hur (1925) 83, 103 Ben-Hur (1959) 197 Bennett, Colin N. 48, 50 Bennett, Joan 103 Bennett, Ronan 371 Benson, Louis 81, 82 Bentley, Thomas 31 Benwell, Beatrice 216–17 Berger, Josh 382 Bergfelder, Tim et al. 153 Bermondsey Bioscope 132, 232 Bernstein, Sidney 64 Berry, Gwen 85 better films movement 110–12 Betts, Ernest 36, 43, 44 Bevan, Tim 343 Beverley Hills Cop (1984) 320 BFI see British Film Institute BFI Statistical Yearbook 407 BFPA see British Film Producers Association The Big Money (1958) 178 The Big Swallow (1901) 24–5, 25f Big Talk Pictures 345 Billingham Film Society 109 Billings, R.H. “Josh” 272–3 Billy Elliott (2000) 362 Billy Liar (1963) 144, 145 The Bioscope (journal) 30, 36, 44, 53, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 89, 101 BIP see British International Pictures Bird, Antonia 359 Birmingham Film Society 110, 115 The Birmingham Sunday Mercury 212 Birt, John 361 The Birth of a Baby (1938) 136–7 Black, Arthur 102 Black, Edith 102 Black Narcissus (1947) 157, 159 Black, Ted 171 The Blackguard 105 Blackmail (1920) 105 Blackmail (1929) 35, 57, 88, 94, 105, 122 Blair, Tony 324, 353, 367, 369, 374 Blanchard, Simon 351, 352, 355 Blighty (1927) 53 Blood Arrow (1958) 103

431

Index

Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) 288, 290 Bloom, Claire 174 Blow-Up (1966) 237, 402 The Blue Danube (1926) 102, 105 Blume, M. 144 Blythe, Betty 37 Board of Trade 89, 97, 167, 222, 223, 245 The Boatswain’s Mate (1924) 39 Bogarde, Dirk 171, 175, 179 Bogart, Humphrey 298 Bogdanovich, Peter 52 Boles, John 103 Bond, Ralph 114, 223 Bonnaire, Sandrine 359 Boorman, John 146, 251, 258 Booth, Paul 420, 426 Borderline (1980) 331 Borowczyk, Walerian 302 Bouchier, Chili 95 Boughey, David 49 Boulting Brothers 140, 178, 181 Bourdieu, Pierre 350, 354 Bower, Dallas 95 Bowery, Leigh 312 Bowie, David 287 Box, Betty 139 Box, Muriel 254 Box, Sydney 139, 140, 143 The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972) 207 Boyd, Joe 298 The Boys (1962) 212 Boys’ and Girls’ Cinema Clubs Annual (1949) 201 Brabham, Daren C. 419 Bradshaw, Nick 412 Brakhage, Stan 310–11 Brandes, Werner 52 Branson, Richard 298 The Breaking Point (1914) 71 Brenner, William 183, 184 Brenon, Herbert 37 Brewin, Jack 115 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 191, 197, 400 Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) 343 Brief Encounter (1945) 187 Brisson, Carl 53 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) 13 British Acoustic 34–5, 91, 92

British and Colonial 59, 70 British and Dominion 122 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 7, 9–10, 231; “12” and “12A” certificates 240; “15” certificate 238, 239–40; “18” certificate 238, 239; “A” certificate 233, 235, 236, 238, 239; “AA” certificate 237–8, 239; classification system 209, 218, 231, 233–41, 233f, 237f; early days 30, 31, 113, 132, 231–5; Examiners 232–3; Exceptions 233–5; “H” certificates 235, 236; “PG” certificate 238, 239; “R18” certificate 238, 239; and sex films 203, 213, 214, 215, 238; today 240–1; and trailers 181; “U” certificate 231, 233, 236, 238, 239; and video 232, 239, 291, 332, 333, 334, 335; and the watch committees 135–6; “X” certificates 209, 214, 217, 218, 236–7, 238, 239 British Board of Film Classification see British Board of Film Censors British Business Bank Act 421 British & Colonial 30 British & Dominions 124 British Entertainment Films 41 British Film Authority 246 British Film Fund see Eady Levy The British Film Fund Agency 192 British film industry 338–40 British Film Institute (BFI) 3, 10, 23, 29, 30, 192, 242–3; 1930s: foundations 36, 112, 116, 117, 243–4; 1940s–50s: institution building 203, 244–5; 1960s: consolidation, expansion, accountability 245; 1970s: renewal, political difficulties 245–6, 394; 1980s: institutional renaissance 246–7; 1990s: new ambitions 247–8; 2000s: the Film Council 248–9, 370; 2010: new roles 207, 249–50; Film Festival Fund 407; Flipside DVD 290; independent domestic UK films 388; Production Board 244, 245, 247, 297, 350, 351, 352; Royal Charter 246, 249, 354; Special Collections Archives 157; see also National Film Archive; National Film Library; National Film Theatre British Film Producers Association (BFPA) 194, 198, 255 British Film Production Fund 179, 202 British Film Year (1985) 320, 340 British Filmcraft 184 British Filmograph 94–5

432

Index

British International Pictures (BIP) 47, 51, 53–4, 88, 94, 96, 122, 123, 253 British Kinematograph Society 187 British Lion 122, 224, 353 British Movietone 96 British New Wave 65, 144, 194, 197, 229, 402 British Petroleum 167 British Photophone 89, 91, 92 British Screen Finance 247, 354 British Silent Film Festival (BSFF) 23, 76 British Talkie Films Ads 95 British Transport Films 166 British Universities Film Council (BUFC) 267 Broadcasting Act (1980) 351 Broadcasting and Entertainment Trades Alliance 252 Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union 252 Broccoli, Albert R. 140, 196, 197 Broke, Richard 360 Broken Blossoms (1919) 41 Bromhead, Alfred C. 24, 30, 59 Brooke, Michael 341 Broomfield, Nick 426 Brothers and Sisters (1980) 393 Brown, George H. 205 Brown, Gordon 369 Brown, Julie 76 Brown, Joe E. 104 Brown, Simon 132 Brown, Tod 211 Brownlow, Kevin 394 Brunel, Adrian 64 Brunel, Christopher 181, 182 Bryan, John 64 Bryanston and Allied Film Makers 140 BSFF see British Silent Film Festival Buckland, Wilfred 60 Buena Vista 388 BUFC (British Universities Film Council) 267 Bull, Clarence Sinclair 173 Bulldog Drummond (1929) 105, 106, 123 Bullet Boy (2004) 363 A Bunch of Violets (1916) 72 Buñuel, Luis 214, 298 Burgess, Anthony 78 Burke, Thomas 41 Burroughs, William 215, 313 Burrows, Jon 70 Burton, Alan 202, 203

Burton, Tim 240 Buscombe, Edward 227 Butchers 41 Butt, Johnny 39 Butt, Lawson 95 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) 60, 109, 110 Cahiers du Cinéma (journal) 359 Caine, Michael 383 Calthrop, Donald 96 Cambridge Film Festival 409 Cameron, James 260 Canby, Vincent 194, 207 Cannes Film Festivals 173f, 176–7, 213, 408 Cannon 340–1 Cannon multiplex, Salford Quays 317, 322, 324 A Canterbury Tale (1944) 289 Cape Forlorn (1931) 96 Capra, Frank 105 Captives (1994) 361 Caravaggio (1986) 314, 352 Cardiff, Jack 47, 55, 159 Cardinale, Claudia 214 Careless Lady (1932) 103 Carew, Dudley 277, 278 Carl Fischer Publications 82 Carmichael, Ian 178 Carreras, James 139 Carrick, Edward 58, 61, 64 Carry On comedies 140, 146, 400 Carter, Huntly 111, 114, 115 Carter, Maurice 64 cartoons 32, 104 Cassavetti, Patrick 391 Catch Us If You Can (1965) 146 Catelby (Ketèlbey), Albert 83 Caterer, James 345 Catterall, Ali 289 Catton, Ron 218 Caughie, John 140–1, 221, 226, 360 Cavalcanti, Alberto 110, 152 Cavanagh, Tom 115 CEA see Cinema Exhibitors’ Association Celluloid (1931) 114 censorship see British Board of Film Censors; watch committees Central Film Library 162 Central Office of Information (COI) 162–4, 166, 169

433

Index

CFF see Children’s Film Foundation Chandler, Charlotte 52 Channel 4 247, 340, 342, 348, 349, 391; FilmFour 351–3, 355, 358, 362, 363, 364, 378, 391 Chaplin, Charlie 32–3, 34, 69, 70, 82, 105 Chapman, J. et al. 1, 2, 121, 197, 350 Chariots of Fire (1981) 340, 341, 388 Charlotte Grey (2001) 353 Cheetham, Arthur 24 Cherchi Usai, Paolo et al. 263, 269 A Chess Dispute (1903) 58 Chibnall, Steve 101, 106 Chicken Run (2000) 344 Children and Young Persons Act (1963) 203 children’s cinema 205–6; child labour laws 203–4; Children’s Film Foundation 192, 200, 202–7; Odeon Children’s Clubs 200–1, 202, 206, 273; and television 206, 207; Wheare Report 202, 203, 236 Children’s Film and Television Foundation (1982) 207 Children’s Film Foundation (CFF) 9, 192, 200, 202–7 Children’s Media Foundation 207 Chin, Bertha et al. 420 The Chinese Bungalow (1926) 63 Chivers, Steven 312, 313f, 315 Christie, Ian 393, 394 Christie, Julie 145 Chu Chin Chow (1925) 50, 62 Churchill, Winston 127 Cilento, Diane 175 Cinefantastique (magazine) 288 cinema attendance 33, 42–3, 102, 179, 202, 205–7, 318–19, 320, 321, 325, 392; see also memories of British cinema Cinema Canada (magazine) 194 Cinema de Luxe, Hastings 93 Cinema Exhibitors’ Association (CEA) 43, 89–90, 102, 116, 134, 163, 183, 184, 244, 352 Cinema Features 331–2 Cinema News and Property Gazette (1912) 100 Cinema of Women 390, 391 Cinema Quarterly (journal) 271 Cinema TV Today (journal) 272 cinemas: 1906–19 30, 33, 100; 1920s 42–3, 99; 1969–84: sites and screens 245, 318, 319, 319t; 1985–2013: multiplex sites and screens 322–3, 323t; see also Jacey cinema chain;

multiplex cinemas; The Scala Cinema; Tudor Cinema, Leicester Cinémathèque Française 264 Cinematograph Act (1909) 30, 100, 113, 130, 131–2, 232, 236 Cinematograph Films Act (1927) 34, 51, 57, 64, 88, 167; quota system 44–5, 90, 94, 97, 106, 121–2, 141, 152–3, 193, 221 Cinematograph Films Act (1938) 143, 253 Cinematograph Films Act (1957) 191, 192, 205 Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act (1937) 235 cinematography in the silent era 4, 47–55; cameras 48, 49, 52; foreign technicians and cinematographers 50, 52; German filmmakers 50–1, 62; Jack Cox 4, 47–8, 50, 52–5; lighting 48–50, 52–3; role specialisation 50; technical research 51–2 Cineworld 317, 325 The Circus (1928) 103, 105 City Cinema, Leicester 93 The City of Beautiful Nonsense (1919) 37–8 The City of Play (1929) 95 Clapperboard (ITV) 182 Clarendon Film Company 30, 50 Clark, Michael 312 Clark, Robert 178 Cleese, John 297 Climb Up the Walls (1960) 216 A Clockwork Orange (1971) 238, 286, 288, 289, 303, 304f, 387 Close, Ivy 32 Close My Eyes (1991) 394 Close-Up (journal) 36, 51, 54, 111, 271, 273 Closing the Ring (2007) 370 Cloud Eight 345 The Cockney Spirit in the War (1930) 107 Cody, Bill 103 Cohen, Betty 212, 213, 214 Cohen, George 210, 212, 213, 214, 217 Cohen, John 210–11, 216, 218 Cohen, Joseph (J.C.) 210, 210f, 212, 213–14, 218 Cohen, Nat 146–8 Cohen, Stanley 218 COI see Central Office of Information Cole, George 204 Cole, Sidney 252 Collins, Joan 174, 176 Colman, Ronald 123

434

Index

colour film 63, 203, 211 Columbia TriStar 388 Come Along Do (1898) 58 Come Play With Me (1977) 330 comedies 27, 32, 36, 69–70, 71–2, 104, 106 Comin’ Thro’ the Rye (1916; 1923) 36, 38, 71 Commission on Education and Cultural Films (1929; 1932) 37, 112 Compson, Betty 37 Compton Film Distributors 209, 211, 215, 217 Compton-Tekli 215–16 Comradeship (1919) 63 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 35 Connoisseur Films 206 Conrad, Jess 212 The Constant Gardener (2005) 370 Constantine, H. Courtney 299 Contemporary Films 390, 393–4 Continental Film Review (magazine) 213f, 214 Cook, Pamela 343–4 Cooke, Alistair 275–6 Cope, Captain 252 copyright 24, 205, 269, 303, 329 Corbett, Harry 187 Cordwell, Reg 111 Corelli, Marie 81 Corfield, John 144 Corliss, Richard 195 Cornelius, Henry 152 Corrick family 29 cosmopolitanism 154–6 A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) 54, 88 The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901) 58 A Couple of Down and Outs (1923) 36 Courant, Curt 141 Courtauld, Stephen 125 Cousins, Mark 292 Coventry, Tom 39 Cowan, Theo 176 Coward, Noel 96, 125 Cox, Alex 292, 371 Cox, Jack 4, 47–8, 50, 52–5 Craddick, Russ 188 Craig, E. Gordon 184 Craig, Michael 171, 175, 177 creative industries 368–70 Cricks, R.H. 186, 189 Crisp, Donald 37 Croall, Heather 412, 413

Croce, Bal 301 Cronenberg, David 297, 363 crowdfunding 14, 418–19, 425–6; the British approach 421–5; digital platforms 420–1; history 419–20; peer-to-peer lending 421, 426 The Crowdfunding Centre 422 Crowley, Aleister 288, 290 Crown Film Unit 161, 163, 169, 205 The Crying Game (1992) 303, 341, 352, 394 Cuarón, Alfonso 382 cult films 11, 285; the British “canon” 286–8; critics 288–9; cultification processes 285–6; fan pilgrimage 289–90; sites, practices and experiences 290–2; video 290, 291–2; see also The Scala Cinema “Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s” project 399, 400, 401 Culture Crowd 421–2 The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) 209 Curtis, Richard 343 Curzon 421 The Cut Ups (1967) 215 Cutts, Graham 48, 51, 67, 105 Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) 391 Czach, Liz 411 Czinner, Paul 95, 152 Dacre, Richard 297–8 The Daily Cinema (journal) 179, 214, 272 Daily Express 45, 69, 276 Daily Film Renter 254 Daily Mail 174, 177, 178, 213, 214, 276, 333 Daily Mirror 71, 244, 276 Daily Telegraph 276 Dalmon, Charles 62 Daltrey, Roger 287 The Dam Busters (1955) 197 Dams, Tim 345 Dana, Viola 105 Dance Madness (1926) 183 Daniels, Phil 289 Daring Daylight Robbery (1903) 28 The Dark Avenger (1955) 103 The Dark Knight (2008) 379 Darling (1965) 145, 402 Darlington, William Aubrey 38 Dartmouth Films 424, 425 Darwood, Ian 189 Davenport, N. 206

435

Index

Davies, Terence 247 Davis, John 140, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 205, 206, 207, 246 Davison, Annette 76 Dawson, Leslie 62 Dawtrey, A. 363 Day Dreams (1922) 104 DCMS see Department of Culture, Media and Sport De Forest Phonofilms 35, 91 De Mille, Cecil B. 33 De Valck, Marijke 406, 408, 409 Dean, Basil 94, 122–3, 125, 143 Dean, James 298 Dearden, Basil 140, 187 Death to Smoochy (2002) 353 Decameron Nights (1924) 50, 62 DeCordova, Richard 64, 68 Deeley, Michael 148 Dehn, Paul 276–7, 279 Del Giudice, Filippo 140 Delfont, Bernard 148 Dell, Ethel M. 35, 210 Demoriane, Hermine 312 Dench, Ernest 61 Deneuve, Catherine 212 Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) 247, 249, 353–4, 369, 372 Department of National Heritage 247, 353, 369 Derann Audio Visual 330, 331f Desert Victory (1943) 164, 166 design in silent cinema 4, 57; 1895–1907: pioneer phase 57–9; 1907–18: transitional phase 57, 59–61; 1918–27: early studio phase 57, 61–5; symbolist approach 60 Desmet, Jean 29 Desperate Poaching Affray (1903) 28 The Devil Rides Out (1968) 290 DeWitt, Helen 301 Dibble, Wilson 83 DiCaprio, Leonardo 363 Dick Barton: Special Agent 201 Dick, Vivienne 310 Dickens, Charles 35 Dickinson, Desmond 49, 50, 64 Dickinson, Margaret 131, 192, 194, 221, 222, 350, 354, 368, 374 Dickinson, Thorold 64 Dickson, W.K.L. 24 Dietrich, Marlene 173

Director of Public Prosecutions 238 Dirigible (1931) 105 Dirty Pretty Things (2002) 362 Discovery Film Festival 407 Disney 206, 380, 383, 388 distribution 14, 387; 1911–1831, 32; 1920s 39, 41–2; 1960s: independent film production 209–18; challenges of surviving 390–4; distribution landscape 389–90; drawing on a long tradition 395; Gala Film Distributors 211, 212–14; independent domestic UK films 388–9; problems of being British 387–9; video distributors and feature films 328, 329–32, 341; see also crowdfunding Dix, Otto 157 Dixon, Bryony 76 Dixon, Campbell 276, 277–8, 279 DNA Film Ltd 344, 345 Dobson, P. 389, 390 Docherty, David et al. 319 Doctor films 171, 175, 176 documentaries 28, 32, 152; 1938–45 161–2; 1945–52 8, 162–9; see also crowdfunding Documentary News Letter 271 Dodds, E.R. 115 Dodds, Olive 171, 172, 174, 175 Doering, Christoph 309–10 Dog Soldiers (2002) 292 Don Quixote (1923) 63 Donner, Clive 147 Don’t Go in the House (1980) 334 Don’t Look Now (1973) 292 Dorne, Sandra 174 Dors, Diana 176, 177 Double Negative 382, 383, 385 Douglas, Edward 382 Doyle, Gillian et al. 344–5, 350, 354–5 Dr. Mabuse (1933) 64 Dr. No (1962) 192, 195, 197 Dr. Strangelove (1964) 191, 193 The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) 352 Drazin, Charles 139, 350 Dreamworks 344 Du Cane, John 311 Ducal Studios 49 Duke, Ivy 49 Duncan, F. Martin 30 Dupin, Christophe 352 Dupont, E.A. 52, 95–6, 122, 152 Dupont, René 196

436

Index

Durgnat, Raymond 200, 274, 275 Duval, Robin 240 Dwoskin, Stephen 296, 297 Dyer, Ernest 117 Dyer, Richard 68 Dyke, Greg 363 Eady Levy 8–9, 126, 191–2, 221, 244, 340; and the Children’s Film Foundation 205, 207; defined 192–3, 377–8; Lolita (1962) 192, 195–6; success and Americanization 193–5; United Artists and James Bond 196–7; conclusion 197–8 Ealing Studios 139, 176, 181, 345 East Anglian Film Archive 267 East End Film Festival 407 East is East (1916) 33, 37 East is East (1999) 352–3 Eastern Promises (2007) 363 Eastman Kodak Comopany 307–8 Easy Rider (1969) 287 Eaton, Shirley 172 Eberts, Jake 341, 342 Eccleston, Christopher 389 The Economist 263 Ecosse Films 345 Edinburgh Film Guild 109, 117 Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) 406–7, 409–11 Edinburgh Workers’ Progressive Film Society 109 Edison, Thomas 30 editing 28 Edward, Prince of Wales 36–7, 104 Edward Vaughn Ltd 188 Edwards, Henry 32, 33, 36, 37–8, 71 Edwards, Ness 224–5 Eel Pie Island 70 Egan, Kate 334 Eichberg, Richard 96 EIFF see Edinburgh International Film Festival Eisenstein, Sergei 112, 113 El Topo (1970) 285 Elder Wills, J. 52 Electric Pictures 389, 390 Electric Video Ltd 330, 331f Electrical Trades Union 251 Elliott, Eric 57 Ellis, John 221, 276, 372 Ellison, Joseph 384

Elstree Studios 51–2, 94 Elton, Arthur 166 The Elusive Pimpernel (1950) 140 Elvey, Maurice 39, 52, 63, 81, 83 Elvin, George 252 EM Media 373 EMI (Electrical and Music Industries) 146, 147, 148, 340, 392 émigrés in classic British cinema 8, 151–60; Emeric Pressburger 156–7; Hein Heckroth 151, 156, 157–9, 158f; permeability: interrogating borders 151–4; terms for a cosmopolitan cinema 154–6 Emmanuelle (1974) 238 Emmott, Basil 47, 48, 51 Empire 26 Empire (magazine) 387 Empire Marketing Board 111, 167 Emson, Walter H.B. 101–2 Enchanted April (1991) 360, 394 Encounters Short Film Festival, Bristol 411 The End of St. Petersburg (1927) 112 Endfield, Cy 187 The Enemy Below (1957) 103 Engel, Andi 296, 391, 393, 394 Engholm, Sir Basil 246 Entertainment Duty 100 Entertainment Film 388, 389 entertainment tax 32 Enticknap, Leo 265, 268–9 Entrée du Cinématographe (1896) 26 Eon Productions 126–7, 196 Eraserhead (1976) 285 Ernst, Max 157 erotic films 212–13 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 334 European Film Distribution Office 394 European film festivals 408 European productions 105, 106, 110–11 Evans, Fred 69–70 Evans, Joe 69, 70 Evans, Madge 105 Evans, Mike Stanley 189 Eveleigh, Leslie 184 Evening News 276 Evening Standard 275 Eve’s Film Review (magazine) 104 The Evil Dead (1983) 341 exhibitors 26, 30, 31, 77, 89–90, 184, 185; see also multiplex cinemas

437

Index

Exit the Dragon . . . Enter the Tiger (1976) 330 The Exorcist (1973) 238 expedition films 30 The Exterminator (1980) 330 Eyles, Allen 206 Faber, George 360–1 FACT (Federation Against Copyright Theft) 303 FAF see Film Archive Forum Fahrenheit 451 (1966) 187 Faith, Adam 212 Faithfull, Geoffrey 49 Falk, Quentin 174 Famous Music Master series (1925–9) 104, 106 Famous Players-Lasky 41–2, 50, 62, 89 fan magazines 273, 398 fan pilgrimage 289–90 Fancey, Adrienne 216, 217 Fancey, Edwin John (E.J.) 211, 216–17 Fancey, Malcolm 216, 217 Far from the Madding Crowd (1967) 145 Farce, Aldwych 96 The Farmer’s Wife (1928) 48, 52 Farrell, Charles 105 Fast Food Nation (2006) 364 Fat Man on a Bicycle (1914) 69 Feature Film Workforce Survey 2005 259 feature films 31, 31f, 34, 105, 318; American films 106; European productions 105, 106; and video distributors 328, 329–32, 341 Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) 303 Federation of British Filmmakers 191, 193 Federation of Documentary Film Units 166 Federation of Workers’ Film Societies 109, 113, 114 Fehar, Friedrich 152 Felix the Cat 104 Fellner, Eric 343 Ferman, James 238, 332 Ferrar, Abel 302 Festival of Britain (1951) 244 FIDO (Film Industry Defence Organisation) 227 A Field in England (2013) 355 Field, Gracie 106 Field, Mary 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 207 Field, Simon 415 Film Archive Forum (FAF) 267, 269

Film Booking Offices 41–2 Film Centre 166 The Film Consortium 344 Film Council see UK Film Council film criticism 36, 43–4, 271–2, 274–5, 276–9 film education 9, 248, 274 Film Employers’ Federation 253 “Film Europe” movement 106, 155 Film Festival Fund 407 film festivals 14, 406–7; British Silent Film 23, 76; Cambridge 409; challenges to writing 407–8; development of UK film festivals 408–11; Discovery 407; East End 407; Edinburgh (EIFF) 406–7, 409–11; Encounters Short Film, Bristol 411; European film festivals 173f, 176–7, 213, 408; Flatpack, Birmingham 411; Glasgow (GFF) 410–11; Hong Kong 409; Il Giornate del Cinema Muto 76; London (LFF) 244, 314, 406, 407, 409, 414–15; New York 409; Raindance 406, 411; Sheffield Doc/Fest 407, 411–14, 412f, 423; conclusion 415 Film Finances Ltd 2, 350 Film Guild 409 Film Industry Defence Organisation (FIDO) 227 film journalism 11, 271–2; critical self-portraits 276–9; critics and reviewers 274–6; “fan” magazines 273, 398; New Film History 272; trade journals 30, 272–4, 275 Film Pictorial (magazine) 273 film policy 348; 1950–70 223–7; 1980–2012 12–13, 249, 345, 348–9; commerce vs culture 367–8; FilmFour: private finance 351–3, 355, 358, 362, 363, 364, 378, 391; policy studies 349–50; UK Film Council: public subsidy 353–5; rethinking media policy in the digital age 355; see also National Film Finance Corporation Film Policy Reviews 248, 249, 353, 362, 367, 370 film producers and production: 1911–18: 31–2; 1920s: 37–41, 121–2; 1930–80: 121–8, 139–48, 209–18; 1980s: rises and falls 340–2; 1990s: renewal 342–4; 21st century 345–6; artisans 140, 141–3; British film industry 12, 338–40; first-feature independents 140, 143–6; make-believe and realism 121–8; moguls 140, 146–8; National Lottery 344–5; terminology 338–9; UK Film Council 344–5,

438

Index

370–1, 379, 410; see also crowdfunding; Hollywood blockbusters and UK production Film Review (magazine) 273 film reviews and reviewers 274, 275–9 film societies 6, 109–10; and the better films movement 110–12; reinvention and consolidation 116–17; and the workers’ film movement 112–16 The Film Society 54, 64, 109 Film Society of Glasgow 109 Film Society of London 109, 111–12, 113, 115 Film Studies 246, 274, 349–50; see also memories of British cinema Film Tax Relief scheme 371, 379–81, 383 Film & Television Technician 253, 254, 256, 257, 258 film trailers see National Screen Service Ltd Filmophone Ltd 93 Films and Filming (journal) 178, 214, 274, 275, 276, 277 Filson, Andrew 191, 192 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 421 Finch, Peter 171 Finney, Angus 341 Fire! (1901) 28 First National 104 Firth, Colin 383 Fischer, Alex 406 Fish Tank (2009) 358 Fitzhamon, Lewin 3 Fitzmaurice, George 37 Fitzpatrick, James A. 104, 106 Five Children and It (2004) 370 The Flag Lieutenant (1926) 36 Flaherty, Robert J. 32, 152 The Flame of Love (1930) 96 The Flat 41 Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham 411 Fleischer, Max and Dave 298 Flesh (1971) 237 Flew, Terry 369 Florence Nightingale (1915) 59 Flugrath, Edna 37 Flynn, Errol 103 folk horror 289–90 Footlights and Fools (1929) 107 Ford, Richard 200 Forde, Walter 36, 93 Foreign Correspondents (1999) 418 Foreman, Carl 192

The Forest on the Hill (1919) 38 Forman, Denis 244, 246 Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) 343, 381, 388 Fowler, Roy 83–4 Fox Farm (1922) 36 Fox Films Corporation 13, 41–2, 89, 105, 124, 381 Fox Review 104 Fox Varieties 104 Foxcatcher (2014) 414 Framestore 382, 383, 385 Francis, Clare 308 Francis, David 263 Fraser, John 171 Fraser, Robert 163 Frazer, Sir Robert 226 Freaks (1932) 211 Frears, Stephen 245 French, Philip 275 Frenguelli, Alfonso 50 Freund, Karl 51 Frewin, Leslie 170, 171 Friday the 13th (1980) 332 Friese-Greene, Claude 52, 104, 211 Friese-Greene, John 211 Friese-Greene, William 24, 211 From Russia with Love (1963) 191 Fuji Single 8 307–8 The Full Monty (1997) 342, 388 Furie, Sidney J. 212 The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1922) 63 Fury (2014) 414 The Future’s in the Air (1937) 162 Gainsborough Pictures 44, 50–1, 53, 54, 63, 94, 95, 154, 171, 288 Gala Film Distributors 211, 212–14 Gala-Jacey Enterprises 213 Gallivant (1996) 389–90 Gandhi (1982) 340, 342 Ganz, Bruno 359 García-Avilés, J.A. 421 Garnham, Nicholas 369 Garrett, G.H. 174 Gaumont-British Picture Corporation 53, 85, 91, 96, 106, 122, 124, 125, 254 Gaumont Company 30, 31, 36, 37, 41, 42, 48, 105, 200, 206, 299

439

Index

The Gay Caballero (1932) 103 gay community 274, 298, 302 Gaylor, Anna 176 Gayson, Eunice 174 Geddes, Henry 204, 205, 206 Gee, Hugh 52 Gelmis, Joseph 195 General Film Distributors 170 General Film Renters 41 The General Line (1929) 112 General Release 176 Genevieve (1953) 171, 174 The Gentle Doctor 41 George Clark Productions 62 German film 50–1, 60, 61, 62, 64, 105, 106, 109, 113 Get Carter (1971) 286, 287, 289 Getty Preservation Centre 246 The Ghost Camera (1933) 142 Gibbons, Monk 159 Gibbons, Walter 24 Giddens, Anthony 154, 156 Gifford, Denis 23 Gilbert, John 85 Gilbert, Lewis 203 Giles, Jane 301 Giles, Paul 351 Gilliam, Terry 341 Gilliat, Sidney 140 Gilliatt, Penelope 145 Girdlestone, B. 50 A Girl of London (1925) 36 Glancy, Mark 45, 193 Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) 410–11 The Glass Mountain (1949) 144 Gledhill, Christine 67, 71 The Glittering Prizes (1976) 359 Globus, Yoram 340 The Glorious Adventure (1922) 63 Glynn, Stephen 287, 288–9, 290 Go Kart Go (1964) 205 Go Now (1995) 361 Go Video 333 Godard, Jean-Luc 296 Godfrey, B.S. et al. 131 Golan, Menahem 340 Gold, Barrie 333 The Gold Cure (1925) 53 The Gold Rush (1925) 103 Goldberg, Evan 387

Goldcrest 341–2, 353 Golden Era Film Distributors 211 Goldman, Michael 330 Goldwyn 41–2, 105, 106, 123 Goldwyn, Samuel, Jnr 360 The Golem (1920) 60 Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) 354 Goodchild, John 196, 228, 339, 340, 342, 343, 344 Goodchild, Peter 359 Gordon, Colin 212 Gordon, Richard 215 Gordon Shadrick Enterprises 188, 189 Gosford Park (2001) 354, 370 Gothic films 40, 41 Gough, Michael 215 Gough-Yates, Kevin 151–2 Gow, Gordon 277, 278–9 Gower, Owen 422–3 GPO Film Unit 152, 161, 164f, 166, 167 Grab Me a Gondola (1956) 176 Grade, Lew 148, 340 Graeff, Robert 413 Grand Guignol series 41 Granger-Davidson 184 Granger, Stewart 171 Granger’s 41 Grant, David Hamilton 333 Gravity (2013) 355, 382 Gray, Allan 159 The Great Game (1916) 69 The Great Train Robbery (1903) 28 The Great White Way (1924) 103 Greco, Juliette 176 Green, Guy 175 Green, Hughie 212 Green, Pamela 213 Greenaway, Peter 247, 288, 352, 390 Greene, George 24 Greene, Graham 275, 276 Greenpoint Films 344 Greenwood, Jack 146 Gregory, Alan 299, 300f Grierson, John 32, 111, 152, 167, 168, 169, 275, 351 Griffin, Josephine 177 Griffith, R. 157 Griffith, D.W. 33, 41, 48 Griffiths, Trevor 206 Gruen, Tony 183, 184 Guardian 426

440

Index

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) 383 Guerilla Films 390 Guild Home Video 329, 334 Guillermin, John 207 Guissart, René 50, 52 The Guns of Loos (1928) 82, 84 The Guns of Navarone (1961) 192 Guthrie, Sir Connop 123–4 Guy, Alice 32 The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1958) 175 Gysin, Brion 313 Haas, Dolly 152 Hagen, Julius 124, 141–3, 142f Haggar, William 28 Hakim, Erik 116 Halifax, Earl of 226 Hall, John 309 Hall, Mordant 122 Hall-Davis, Lillian 53 Hamel, K.J. 183 Hammer-Exclusive 201 Hammer Films 139, 187, 209, 212, 288, 290, 292, 345, 400 HandMade Films 341 Hansard 127 Hanson, Stuart 200, 202, 222, 227 A Hard Day’s Night (1964) 287, 296 Hardy, Forsyth 117, 277, 279 Hardy, Jonathan 350 Hardy, Robin 285 Hardy, Thomas 35 Harlesden Studio 50 Harman, Jympson 276, 277, 278, 279 Harold and Maude (1971) 287 Harper, Sue 222, 223 Harris, Esther 182, 184–5, 187, 189 Harris, James B. 195 Harris, Leonard 48 Harris, Sir Sidney 236 Harrison, George 341 Harry Brown (2009) 370 The Harry Hill Movie (2013) 388 Harry Potter films 349, 371, 379, 381–2, 384, 389, 392 Hart, Romaine 297 Hart Williams, Nick 296, 297 Harvey, Anthony 196 Harvey, Sylvia 350, 354, 374 Hassanein, Salah 320

Hausen, Harry 298 Havelock-Allan, Anthony 143 Hawkins, Jack 171, 178 Hawtrey, Sir Charles 70 Hayes, Patricia 204 Haynes, Manning 39, 40–1 Hayward, Lydia 39 Hazell, Frank 214 Head of the Family (1922) 40f Heartbreak (1931) 105 Heckroth, Ada 157, 158f Heckroth, Hein 151, 156, 157–9, 158f Helen of the Four Gates (1920) 38 Hellraiser (1987) 288 Henley, David 171 Henry VIII (1911) 59, 70 Hepworth, Cecil 3, 24, 28, 31, 31f, 34, 36, 37, 38–9, 42, 49, 58, 59, 60, 71–3, 74, 184 The Hepworth Picture Play Paper 72, 73–4 Herlth, Robert 51 Herring, R. 54 Herzog, Werner 297 Hesmondhalgh, D. 365 Heyday Films 345, 378–9, 381, 382, 383, 385 Heyman, David 381, 382 Hickey, Mickey 92 Higson, Andrew 151, 155, 371, 381, 385 Hikon Video 332 Hiley, Nicholas 100 Hill, Derek 227 Hill, Janet 203 Hill, John 350, 354, 358, 359, 360, 362, 371 Hill, Sinclair 35, 82, 84 Hillier, Erwin 152 Hills, Matt 292 Hindle Wakes (1927) 53, 106 Hinxman, Margaret 277, 278, 279 Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (journal) 2 historical poetics 47 The History Boys (2006) 363 Hitchcock, Alfred 35, 36, 47–8, 49, 50, 52, 53–4, 57, 64–5, 87, 94, 95, 105, 107, 125–6 Hjort, Mette 151, 155 Hobsbawn, Eric 296 Hochscherf, Tobias 152–3 Hodge Podge (1922–33) 104 Hoffmann, Carl 51 Hoffmeister, Knut 309, 310 Hokushin 330

441

Index

Holah, David 312 Holden, John 372 Hollings, K. 314 Hollywood: 3-D sequences 330–1; and multiplexes 320, 325; runaway productions 191, 192, 193–4; silent movies 33, 34, 42, 61–2, 68, 69; talkies 89; and video 328, 329, 330 Hollywood blockbusters and UK production 13–14, 377, 385; client companies 381–3; content 383–4; Film Tax Relief 371, 379–81, 383; history 377–9 The Hollywood Reporter 320 Holmes, Su 206, 222, 227, 228 Holt, Seth 187 Home Office 235 Hong Kong Film Festival 409 Hopper, Dennis 215 Hopson, Violet 71 Horrabin, Winifred 275 horror films 40, 204, 212, 215, 235, 302 Horror Hospital (Computer Killers; 1973) 215 Horton, Edward Everett 142f Hot Fuzz (2006) 381 The Hour of the Pig (1993) 360 Houston, Penelope 194, 244, 263, 264 How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2008) 370, 371 How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976) 296 Howe, Jeff 419 Howe, Lyman H. 104 Howgill, Richard 82 Hunt, Leon 290 Hunter, Ian 53 Hunter, I.Q. 285, 288, 291 Huntingtower (1927) 63 Hurley, Frank 32 Hurrell, George 173 Hutchinson, T. 178 Huxley, Aldous 43 Hyman, Elliot 195 Hyman, Ira E., Jr. 399 I Lived with You (1933) 143 ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) 296 ICA Cinemathèque 314 i.d. (1995) 360 Ideal 36, 41 Idle, Eric 341 If . . . (1968) 378 Il Giornate del Cinema Muto festival 76

Ilott, Terry 341, 342 Image Permanence Institute, Rochester, N.Y. 266 Imperial Airways 167 Imperial Sound Systems 93 In Bruges (2008) 292 In the Shadow of the Sun (1980) 311 In Which We Serve (1942) 125 Independent Film Company 59 Independent Film-makers’ Association (later PACT) 255, 296 Independent Producers 140 Independent Television Authority (ITA) 179, 226 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) 239 Industrial Britain (1932) 167 The Inevitable (1913) 74 Ingram, Rex 94, 184 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 296 Inter-Ocean 330 interest films 29–30 International Film Theatre, London 213 International Talking Screen Productions 95 The Interview (2014) 387 Intervision 329, 330 Irving, L. 64 Isaacs, Jeremy 352, 360 Isleworth 94 The Italian Job (1969) 289, 401 It’s a Long Way to Tipperary (1915) 81 Ivanhoe (1913) 59 Iven, Joris 296 Ivory, James 344 Jacey cinema chain 9, 209, 213f, 218; Antony Balch 211, 214–15; E.J. Fancey 211, 216–17; establishment 210–12; Gala Film Distributors 211, 212–14; Kenneth Rive 211, 212–14; Miss Jacey 212, 216; Why pay more? 217–18; The Yellow Teddybears 215–16 Jackson, Jerry 141 Jackson, Kevin 360 Jackson, Pat 164 Jacobs, W.W. 35, 36, 39, 40 Jagger, Mick 287 James Bond films 126–7, 140, 181, 187, 191, 192, 194, 195, 196–7, 211, 371, 378, 384, 392, 401, 402–3 James, Nick 414

442

Index

Janni, Joseph 143–6, 145f, 174 Jarman, Derek 247, 301, 310–11, 314, 352 Jaworzyn, Stefan 301 Jaws (1975) 239 Jaws 3D (1983) 331 The Jazz Singer (1927) 87, 91, 93, 94 Jenkins, Henry 47 Jerome, Jerome K. 39 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 344 John Carter (2012) 380 Johnson, Peter 212 Johnston, Keith M. 182, 183 The Johnstown Flood (1926) 183 Jolson, Al 87, 91, 92, 93, 94 Jonas, Harry 60–1 Jones, Alan 301 Jones, Ernest 60 Jones, Matthew 400 Jooss, Kurt 157 Jordan, Neil 352 Jourdan, Louise 176 Journey to Avebury (1971) 310 Journey Together (1945) 164, 165f Jubilee (1978) 311 Jude (1996) 361, 389 Julia, Princess 312 Junge, Alfred 52, 152, 153, 159 Jungle Mystery (1932) 104, 105 Jurassic Park (1993) 239 Jury-Metro-Goldwyn 89 Jury, William 39 Juston, John 181 Kameradschaft (1931) 103, 105 Kanturek, Otto 152 Kappel, Tim 419 Karlin, Marc 296 Karloff, Boris 215 Keaton, Buster 103, 104 Keen, Jeff 311 Kellino, Will 69 Kelly, Grace 177 Kelly, Terence 256 Kendall, Kay 174 Kent, Sidney R. 124 Kenworthy, Duncan 344 Kern, Richard 302 Keystone comedies 81 Kickstarter 418, 420, 422–3, 426 Kimberley, Paul 184, 186

A Kind of Loving (1962) 144, 145 Kine Weekly (journal) 272–3 The Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (journal) 58, 59 Kinematograph Renter’s Society 162, 244 Kinematograph Weekly (journal) 30, 40, 41, 44, 51, 52, 53, 77, 83, 184, 253, 272 Kinematograph Year Book 63, 100 Kines, Mark Tpaio 418 King, Cecil 244 King, George 141 King John (1896) 32 King’s Cross Cinema 299 The King’s Speech (2011) 248, 345, 355, 370, 384 Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015) 383–4, 385 Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1921) 37 Kirwan, Sinead 422–6 The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) 27, 27f, 58 Kitchen, Fred 83 Kitty (1929) 95 Klingender, Francis D. 253 Klinger, Michael 139, 215 Korczak (1990) 360 Korda, Alexander 123–4, 125, 139, 140, 143, 152, 156, 172, 175, 353 Korda, Zoltan 152 Kostiff, Michael 312, 315 Kötting, Andrew 389 Krauss, Werner 37 Krish, John 207 Kruger, Hardy 176, 179 Krutnik, Frank 228 Kubrick, Stanley 181, 187, 192, 195–6, 198, 387 Kuchar, George 298 Kuhn, Annette 398, 399, 400, 401 Kuhn, Michael 343 Kurtiz, Michael 37 La Fièvre Monte à El Pao (1959) 214 Lacey, Mark 422–6 Lady Audley’s Secret (1920) 36 Lafleur Motion Picture Edition 82 Lambert, Gavin 244, 271 Landy, Marcia 2 Lane, Lupino 103 Lang, Fritz 64, 105, 156 Lang, Matheson 70 Langley, Bryan 55

443

Index

Langlois, Henri 264 Larcher, David 297 Larralde, Benjamin 419 Lasky, Jesse 123, 183 The Last Appeal 41 Last Tango in Paris (1972) 238 Lauder, Harry 63 Launder, Frank 140 Laurel and Hardy 103 Lauste, Emile 50 Laverick, June 171, 176 Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 194, 400, 401 Lazarus, Paul N. 183 LCC see London County Council Le Grice, Malcolm 311 Le Prince, Louis 24, 25 Le Roi, Purcell 82 Leadbitter, Eric 77–8 Lean, David 64, 65, 125, 126–7, 181, 187, 400 Leather Pushers (1922) 103 Lebon, Mark 314 Lee, Belinda 171, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179 Lee, Frederick 24 Lee, Jenny 245 Leedham, Mike 299 Leeds Film Group 110, 111, 116, 117 Leeds Film Institute Society 116–17 Leeds Jewish Film Society 116 Leeds Watch Committee 116 Leeds Workers’ Film Society 116 Legg, Stuart 253 Leggott, James 1–2 legislation see British Board of Film Censors; Cinematograph Films Acts; licensing regulations Leibovitz, T. et al. 419, 420 Leicester cinemas 5–6, 42, 99–107 Leicester Mercury 93, 97, 101, 103–4 Leigh, Mike 390 Lejeune, C.A. 36, 111, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279 Lennard, Robert 178 Leno, Dan 32 Lenya, Lotte 158f Letter to Brezhnev (1985) 388 Levy, Louis 83 Levy, Stuart 146, 147 Lewis, Herschell Gordon 302 Lewis, John 225 Lewis, Ronald 172 LFF see London Film Festival

licensing regulations 131–8, 231; Birmingham 133, 135, 136, 137; Derbyshire 133, 138; Dudley 136–7; Smethwick 133–5, 134t, 136–7; see also British Board of Film Censors The Lie (1914) 72 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) 125, 126 Life ’n’ Lyrics (2006) 370 Life of Brian (1979) 341 The Life of Charles Peace (1905) 28 lighting 38, 48–50, 52–3, 95, 211 The Lightning Warrior (1931) 103, 104, 105 Lime Grove 50 Lindgren, Ernest 117, 243, 264 Lindsay, Vachel 44 Listowel, Earl of 226 Littler, Emile 48 Lloyd, Matthew 409 Lloyd No. 2 104 Loach, Ken 145, 390, 423 Loaded (magazine) 289 Loakes, Linda 256 Lobato, R. 420–1 Local Boy Makes Good (1931) 104 local films 28–9 Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act (1982) 238 Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) 289, 342 Lockwood, Margaret 171, 174 Lodge, David 204 The Lodger (1926) 64–5 Lolita (1962) 192, 195–6 Lom, Herbert 176 London Can Take It! (1940) 164f London County Council (LCC) 132, 135, 244 London Film Company 50, 59–60 London Film Festival (LFF) 244, 314, 406, 407, 409, 414–15 London Film-makers’ Cooperatives 310, 311, 314 London Film Productions 37, 123–4, 125 London Film Society 152, 273 London Films 170, 172 London Workers’ Film Society 109, 113, 114 The Londoners (1939) 162 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) 194, 402 The Long Good Friday (1980) 341 The Long Hole (1924) 35f

444

Index

Long, Stanley 330 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) 389 Lord Richard in the Pantry (1930) 93 The Loss of the Birkenhead (1914) 59 Love, Life and Laughter (1923) 60 Lovell, Alan 1 Low, Rachel 2–3, 23, 36, 37, 42, 49, 63, 68, 71, 140, 251–2 Lowkes, W.H. 84–5 Lucas, Cornel 173, 174, 176, 179 Lucas, George 378 Lucas, Keith 246 Luckett, Moya 289 Lugosi, Bela 215 Lumet, Sidney 147f, 148 Lumière Brothers 25–6 Lunch, Lydia 310 Lupino, Ida 142 The Lure of Crooning Water (1920) 36, 48 Lye, Len 152 Lynn, Ralph 96 Lyons, Harry Agar 41 Lyttelton, Oliver 224 McArthur, Colin 271–2, 276, 278 McCulloch, Richard 291 Macdonald, Andrew 344 Macdonald, Kenny 314 Macdonald, Kevin 151, 156 McDonald, Paul et al. 352, 388 McDonnell, Claude 52 McDowell, Curt 298 MACE (Media Archive for Central England) 267 McFarlane, Brian 144 McFarling, T. 317 McGill, Hannah 406 McGoohan, Patrick 171, 179 McGovern, Jimmy 362 McIlmail, Brian 182 McIntyre, Steve 373 Mackay, James 310 McKeen, Sunny Jim: Stop That Noise (1930) 107 Mackenzie, Scott 151, 155 MacKinnon, Gillies 359 Maclean, Quentin 83 McLeod, Michael 410 McLoone, Martin 358, 359, 360 Macnab, Geoffrey 170, 175, 202, 343, 389

MacPherson, John R. 186 MacPherson, Kenneth 114 The Magdalene Sisters (2002) 354 The Magnificent Seven (1960) 197 Mahoney, John 182, 188 Mainline 393 Majdalany, Fred 276, 277, 278 Major, John 324, 344, 353 Majorell, James 186 Mallett, Ella 83–4, 279 Mallett, Richard 276, 278 Maltby, Richard 397, 398 The Man in Grey (1943) 63 The Man in the Mirror (1936) 142f, 143 Man on Wire (2007) 371 The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) 286, 287 The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) 48 The Man Without Desire (1922) 36, 67 Man, Woman and Sin (1927) 85 Manchester and Salford Workers’ Film Society 109, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117 Manchester Guardian 111–12, 113, 276 Manchester Metropolitan University 266 Mancroft, Lord 222 Mannock, P.L. 51 Manson Films 330 March Hunnings, N. 236 Marillion 418 Marriott, Moore 39, 40 Marris, Paul 296 Marsh, James 295 Marsh, Mae 37 Marshall, Ernest 122 Marshall, Neil 292 Marv Films 383, 385 Marvel 377, 380, 383 Marwick, Arthur 287 Marx, Helmuth 52 Mason, James 195 Mason, Paul 424 Mass Observation Archive 398 Masses Stage and Film Guild 113 Massine 159 Masters of the Universe (1987) 340 Match Point (2005) 363 Matheson, Margaret 339 Mathijs, Ernest 286, 289, 291 Matthews, Bache 115 Matuszewski, B. 262 Maxwell, John 52, 123

445

Index

Maxwell, Lois 195 Maybury, John 306, 311–12, 312f, 313–14, 315–16 Mayer, J.P. 201 Meadows, Shane 373, 389 Media Archive for Central England (MACE) 267 Medusa 334 memories of British cinema 14; from texts to memories 397–9; problems of memory 399–400; British cinema memories 401–4 Mendes, Sam 363 Mercanton, Louis 95 Merchant, Ismail 344 Mercouri, Melina 176 Merlin Video 330, 334 Metropolis (1927) 64, 105 MGM 145, 147, 183, 195, 273, 317, 377 Michael Powell Award 410 midnight movies 285 Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) 370 Miller, Bernard 172 Miller, Hugh 111, 112 Miller, Mandy 204 Miller Toby 367–8 Mills, John 142 Minghella, Anthony 248, 359 Ministry of Information (MOI) 161, 162, 165, 186 Miracle Films 209, 211, 329, 330 Miramax 360 Mirisch, Walter 192 Miss Potter (2006) 363 The Mission (1986) 342 The Missionary (1982) 341 Mist in the Valley (1923) 38 Mitchell and Kenyon 24, 26, 28–9, 29f Mitchell, Eric 310 Mitchell, John 254 Mitchell, Keith 179 Mitchell, Wendy 382 Mitchum, Robert 216 Modernisation Ltd 211–12 MOI see Ministry of Information Mona Lisa (1986) 341, 391 Monaco, Paul 195, 196 The Monkey’s Paw (1923) 40 Monopolies & Mergers Commission (MMC) 257, 392 Monroe, Marilyn 298

Montagu, Ivor 36, 43, 64, 111, 112, 113, 114, 275, 295 Montana Kid (1931) 103 Monthly Film Bulletin (magazine) 243, 274 Monty Python 303, 341 Moonlighting (1982) 359 Moore, Colleen 107 Moran, Albert 349, 350 Moran, Joe 206 More About the Language of Love (1970) 238 More, Unity 36 Morley, Carol 353 Morris, Oswald 196 Morrison Herbert 244 Mosley, Leonard 276, 277, 278 Mother (1926) 112, 113 Motion Picture Herald 273 Motion Picture News 122 Motion Picture Patents Company 30 The Motion Picture Studio (journal) 39 Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) 237, 239, 334 Mottershaw, Frank 24, 28 Moulder, Paul 83 Moulin Rouge (1928) 52 The Mountain Eagle (1926) 50 Movie (journal) 271, 274, 275, 276, 278, 359 Movie Online 274 Moviedrome 292 Movietone 89, 91 Movietone News 103, 104, 105 Moving Picture Company (MPC) 382 moving pictures 57 Moyne Committee (1936) 221 MPAA see Motion Pictures Association of America Mr Porter 384 Mr. Turner (2014) 414 Mrs Brown (1997) 362 MU see Musicians’ Union Mullan, Peter 354 multi-shot films 27–8 multiplex cinemas 12, 317–18, 392; Cannon, Salford Quays 317, 322, 324; and the decline of cinema-going 318–19, 325; geographical siting 321–4; The Point, Milton Keynes 317, 320–1, 321f, 323, 324; popularity of multiplexes 325–6; sites and screens 322–4, 323t; Telford multiplex 322, 324f; in the USA 319–20, 323

446

Index

Mulvey, Laura 296 Municipal Corporations Act (1835) 130, 133 Murder (1930) 96, 122 Murder on the Orient Express (1974) 147f, 148 Murnau, F.W. 87 Murphy, Robert 152, 228 Murphy, Stephen 238 Murtagh, Cynthia 39 Murton, Walter 63–4 Museum of the Moving Image 246 music: in films 27, 35; finance 77, 79, 102; gramophone records 94, 97; instruments 79, 82, 83, 84; live silent movie accompaniment 5, 24, 43, 76–84, 102; pianists 77–8; programmes 80f, 81; sheet music 81–4; transition to talkies 84–5, 92–3, 96, 97 music halls 29, 33, 69, 70 musical directors 78–9, 81–2, 83, 84 Musicians’ Union (MU) 43, 84–5, 92–3, 97 Musicians’ Union Journal 83, 84–5, 97 My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) 388 My Mother’s Courage (1995) 360 My Summer of Love (2004) 358 Mycroft, Walter 53 Myers, H. 191, 193 The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu (1923) 41 Nagle, Penny 421, 422 Naked (1992) 289 Naked – As Nature Intended (1961) 215 Nanook of the North (1922) 32 National Amusements 319, 321 National Association of Theatrical, Television & Kine Employees (NATTKE) 251, 252, 255 national cinema 151, 152, 154, 155, 156 National Fairground Archive 29 National Film Archive (NFA) 24, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 263–4, 266–7, 315 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) 6, 126–8, 192, 221, 223–4, 244, 247, 354 National Film Library (NFL) 117, 243, 244, 245, 263, 272 National Film Theatre 244, 246, 274, 296, 303 National Grid 90 National Lottery 242, 344–5, 349, 353, 354, 379, 393, 407 National Screen Service Corporation 183–4, 185, 186, 188 National Screen Service Ltd (NSS Ltd) 8, 181–2; establishment 182–6; in wartime

185–6; post-war expansion and growth 186–8; competition and takeover 188–9; documentaries 187; short films 185, 187; theatre advertising accessories 187; trailers 181–2, 183–5, 186, 188–9; TV commercials 187; future research 189 National Viewers and Listeners Association 332 NATTKE see National Association of Theatrical, Television & Kine Employees Neale, Steve 228 Neame, Ronald 51, 55 Negus-Fancey, Olive 217 Nell Gwynn (1926) 36 Never Trouble Trouble (1931) 103 Nevill, Amanda 248, 414 New Babylon (1929) 113 New Line Cinema 388 New London Film Society 295–6 New Objectivity 64 New Realm Pictures 217 New York Film Festival 409 The New York Times 122 Newall, Guy 36, 49 Newell, Mike 359 Newland, Paul 289 News Chronicle 275, 277 Newsinger, Jack 350 newspapers 111, 155, 172 newsreels 30–1, 33, 58, 96, 103, 104, 166 NFA see National Film Archive NFFC see National Film Finance Corporation NFL see National Film Library Night Fright (1967) 334 Night Mail (1936) 162, 167 Nightbeast (1982) 331 No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) 135–6 non-fiction films 28, 32 North Sea (1938) 162 North West Film Archive 267 Northern Ireland Film Council 350 Northern Soul (2014) 393 Norton, Charles Goodwin 24 Nothing but the Best (1964) 147 Nothing Else Matters (1920) 39 Notting Hill (1999) 343, 388 Novello, Ivor 36, 65, 67, 74, 143 Nowhere Boy (2009) 370 NSS Ltd see National Screen Service Ltd Number 9 345

447

Index

Oakes, Mark A. 399 Oakley, Charles A. 255 O’Brien, Denis 339, 341 Obscene Publications Act (OPA; 1959) 238, 333 Observer 275, 276 O’Connor, T.P. 233–4 Odeon 206, 273, 299, 317, 324, 393; Children’s Clubs 200–1, 202, 206, 273 Ogborn, Kate 342 Old Man in the Corner (1924) 103 Olins, Wally 318 Oliver Twist (1912) 31, 31f O’Malley, Tom 220 On the Buses (1971) 147 Once Bitten (1932) 105 Ondra, Anny 88 One Good Turn (1915) 73 The One that Got Away (1957) 179 OPA see Obscene Publications Act The Open Road (1926) 104 Optical Film Effects 188 ’Orace the ’Armonious ’Ound (1928) 91 Orlando (1992) 394 O’Rourke, Chris 398 Orwell, George 275 Osborne, George 421 Ostrer Brothers 96 Ostrer, Isidore 124 The Other Cinema (TOC) 296–7, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394 O’Toole, Peter 401 OurScreen 393 Over the Hill (1931) 105 Oxford Economic Forecasting 380, 383 Oxford Opinion 276 Pabst, Gustav 64, 103, 105 PACT (Producers’ Alliance for Cinema & Television) 255, 363 Paddington (2014) 382 Pal, George 298 Palace Pictures (1981–92) 295, 302, 303, 341, 390–1 Palais de Dance (1928) 83 Palin, Michael 341 Palmer, Ernest 50 Palmer, S. 49 Pandora’s Box (1929) 64 panoramas 26

Paoluzzi, Luciana 176 Papastergiadis, Nikos 154 Parallax Pictures 344 Paramount 94, 123, 273, 377, 378, 388 Paris by Night (1988) 391 Park, James 206 Parker, Alan 248, 344, 354, 370 Parmeko Valve Amplifiers 93 Parsons, Dave 311 Parsons, Richard 382 Partridge and Mee 93 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 302 Pathé 30, 31, 105, 344 Pathé Gazette 104, 107 Paul, Fred 41 Paul, Robert W. 24, 25, 30, 57, 58, 59 Pauli, Gustav 50 Paying the Penalty (1913) 73 Peacock, Louise 69 Pearson, George 34, 37, 39, 50, 60–1 Peary, Danny 287, 288, 289 The Pedlar/Le roi de la pédale (1925) 105 Peeping Tom (1960) 213 Penguin Film Review 264 Peranson, Mark 414 Performance (1970) 286, 287, 288, 289 Périnal, Georges 152 Perkins, V.F. 274, 275 Peterson, Axel 91 Petley, Julian 1, 288 Petrie, Duncan J. 47, 338–40, 391 Petticoat Loose (1922) 53 phantom rides 26, 27–8 Philip, Alex J. 263 Phillips, Pearson 213, 214 Phonophone 93 The Pianoplayers (novel) 78 Piccadilly (1929) 52 Piccadilly Cinema, London 91 Picture House, Selkirk 94 Picture Partnership Company 188 Picture Post (magazine) 177 Picture Show (magazine) 96, 273 Picturegoer (magazine) 44, 63, 175, 273, 277 Picturehouse 424 The Pictures (magazine) 273 Pictures and the Picturegoer (magazine) 67, 69, 73, 273 Pierce, Michael 295 Pike, Oliver 30

448

Index

Pilger, John 423 Pilkington Committee (1962) 228 Pilling, Jayne 299, 300f, 301 “Pimple” comedies 32, 36, 69, 70 Pinewood Studios: blockbusters 197, 355, 378, 380, 382; Rank production 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179 Pink Flamingos (1972) 285 The Pipes of Pan (1923) 38 Plaissetty, Rene 41 Planet Film Distributors 211 The Pleasure Garden (1925) 50 The Point, Milton Keynes 317, 320–1, 321f, 323, 324 Police Act (1964) 131 Politkino 296 Pollak, Joseph 183, 184 PolyGram 343, 353, 381, 388 Ponting, Herbert 30 Poor Cow (1967) 145 Porter, Edwin S. 28 Porter, Laraine 76 Porter, Vincent 139, 222, 223 Potter, Sally 352, 391 Poulsen, Arnold 91 Poulton, Mabel 96 Powell, Dick 103 Powell, Dilys 275 Powell, Jonathan 360 Powell, Michael 65, 125, 126, 140, 152, 156–7, 159, 207, 213, 288, 289, 303 Powell, Nik 298, 305, 341 Powers Cinephone Equipment 95 Precision Films 69 Precision Video 331 Pressburger, Emeric 125, 126, 140, 151, 152, 156–7, 158, 158f, 159, 207, 288, 289 Prestwich, John Alfred 24 Pride (2014) 425 Priest (1994) 360 Prince Charles Cinema, London 291 Prisoner of Zenda (1922) 94 A Private Function (1984) 341, 359 The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) 121, 123, 143 Private’s Progress (1955) 178 The Producer 321 Promio, Alexander 26 propanganda 32 The Proud Ones (1956) 103

Prudential Assurance Company 123, 125 Psychomania (1973) 292 public film archives 10, 262–3; access 264, 265–6, 268–9; copyright 269; digital technologies 265, 267–9; Film Archive Forum 267, 269; preservation 263–6, 268, 269; regional archives 267, 268; videotape 264–5, 266; “vinegar syndrome” 264; see also National Film Archive; National Film Library Puckle, Jennifer 174 Puddefoot, W.W. “Pudde” 185 Pudovkin, Vsevolov 112, 113 Punch 276 Puttnam, David 127, 128, 139, 147, 173, 340, 341 Quadrophenia (1979) 286, 287, 288–9, 290 The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) 209 Quigly, Isabel 170 Quinn, James 244, 245 Quota Act (1927) see Cinematograph Films Act (1927) “quota quickies” 44, 100, 141, 143 Racing Outlook series (1924) 104 Radcliffe Committee 243–4 Radclyffe, Sarah 339 radio 88, 96, 97, 222 Radio Corporation of America 141 Radio On (1979) 393 RAF Film Unit 164, 165f Raindance Film Festival 406, 411 Raise the Titanic (1980) 340 Rambo: First Blood II (1985) 320 Ramsaye, Terry 264 Ramsden, Harry T. 82 Random, E. 176, 178 Rank Organisation 140, 144, 205, 211, 388, 392, 393; and the American market 125, 126; and the BFI 244, 246; Children’s Entertainment Film (CEF) division 201, 202; contract artists of the 1950s 8, 170–9, 173f; films 144, 171, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179; multi-screen cinemas 318; newsletters and magazines 273; Overseas Film Distributors 164, 176; production company 171, 340; Super Saturday Shows 206, 207; TV franchises 206, 227–8; see also Gaumont Company; Odeon

449

Index

The Rat (1925) 67, 105 Rathbun, John B. 57, 59 Ravenous (1999) 381 Rawnsley, David 64 Raymond, Jack 106 Rayns, Tony 215 RCA recording equipment 94 Read, Herbert 157 Rebecca (1940) 125–6 Reciprocity Films 104 Recorded Picture Company 345 Red Road (2006) 363 The Red Shoes (1948) 157, 158, 158f, 159 Redfern, Nick 373, 374 Redford, George 232, 233 Redhill Pavilion, Reigate 94 Redstone, Sumner 319 Reed, Carol 187 Reed, Stanley 245 Reeder and Walsh 82 Reeves, Joseph 224 “Regalscope” 103 Regeneration (1997) 360 Regent Cinema, Portsmouth 99 Regent House Estate 63 Regional Film Theatres 245, 393 Regional Investment Fund for England (RIFE) 372, 373 Regional Screen Agencies 13, 350, 367, 372–4 Reissar, Jenia 125 Reisz, Karel 194, 244, 256 Reith, Lord 225–6 Relph, Michael 64, 140 Relph, Simon 339, 345 Report of the Departmental Committee on Children and the Cinema (1950) 202 Report on the Committee for Celluloid Storage (1950) 201 Rescued by Rover (1905) 28 Reveille (1924) 60–1 Reville, Alma 52 Revolution 345 Revolution (1985) 342 Revolutionary Road (2008) 363 Richards, Dick 276, 277, 278, 279 Richardson, Tony 126–7, 193, 197 Richter, Hans 54 Rien Que Les Heures (1926) 110 RIFE see Regional Investment Fund for England Riley Brothers 24

Rin-Tin-Tin 103 The Ring (1927) 48, 52, 53–4 Rive, Joseph 212 Rive, Kenneth 211, 212–14 RKO cinemas 123, 164 Robbery Under Arms (1957) 144 Robbins, Burton 188 Robbins, Herman 183, 188 Robbins, Norman 188 Roberts, G. 176 Roberts, Gwynne 308 Robertson, J.C. 135 Robeson, Paul 124 Robinson, David 315 Robinson, E. Arnot 275 Robison, Arthur 152 Roc, Patricia 171 Roche, Conor 421, 422 The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) 285, 288, 297 Roddam, Franc 288 Roeg, Nicolas 359 Rogan, Seth 387 Rogers, Peter 140, 146 Rohmer, Sax 35, 41 Roman, F. 178 romantic melodramas 36, 38 Rome, Stewart 71, 73, 74, 103 Romulus Films 175 Rooke, Arthur 36, 48 The Room (2003) 291 Room, Alexander 112, 113 Root, Jane 363 Rose, David 339, 360 Rosenthal, Joe, Jr. 49 Roses of Picardy (1927) 36 Ross, Jonathan 301 Ross, Sir Ronald 226 Roth, M. 333 Rotha, Paul 43, 44, 51, 110, 111, 114–15, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 275 Rough Sea at Dover (1896) 24 Rowling, J.K. 381 Rowson, Simon 103, 104, 106 Royal Commission on the Police (1960) 131 Rubenstein, Leon J. 183 Ruby Films 345 Rudd, Bobby 39 Ruffles Pictures 141 Russell, David 372–3

450

Index

Russell, Ken 288, 310 Ryan, Robert 103 Ryder, Leslie 185 Sabbagh, Dan 379 Sabine, Martin 61 Sainsbury, Peter 296, 297 Sally in Our Alley (1932) 106 Salt, Barry 54 Saltzman, Harry 140, 196 Sandbrook, Dominic 207 Sarafina! (1992) 361 Sarah Palin: You Betcha! (2011) 426 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) 194 Saunders, H.T. 81 Saville, Victor 95 Savoy Cinema, Leeds 116 The Scala Cinema 290, 295; 1911–69: The Scala Theatre 295–6; 1976–7: The Other Cinema 296–7, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394; 1979–81: The Scala 297–9; 1981–93: at King’s Cross 299–305, 300f, 304f Scala Productions 344 Schader, F. 122 Schaefer, E. 136, 137 Schlesinger, John 144, 145f, 146, 147 Schlesinger, Phillip 350, 369 Schwienbacher, A. 419 Scoffield, Tracey 364 Scotsman 277 Scott, Adrienne (Adrienne Fancey) 216, 217 Scott, James 296 Scott, Ridley 245 Scott, Tony 245 Scottish Federation of Film Societies 409 Scottish Screen Archive 267 Scott’s expedition to Antarctica 30 Screen (journal) 271, 276 Screen Daily 392 Screen Finance (journal) 343 Screen International (journal) 272, 320, 322, 330, 382, 408 Screen on the Green 297 Screen Opticals 188 Screenplay 406 Scrooge (1935) 124 Seagram Inc. 343 Second Chances (Probation) (1932) 103–4 Secrets of Sex (Bizarre; 1970) 215 Seer, John 83

SeeSaw 345 Seglow, Peter 255 Sellar, JoAnne 301 Sellers, Peter 195 Sellers, Robert 341 Selznick, David 125–6 Sembene, Ousmane 297 Sequence (journal) 271, 275 service industries see National Screen Service Ltd Setton, Maxwell 143 Seven Arts 195 Sexton, Jamie 286, 289, 291 Seymour, Bill 182 S.F. Film Disbributors 217 Shadowlands (BBC1, 1985) 361 Shadrick, Gordon 189 Shail, Andrew 273 Sharif, Omar 401 Sharp, Don 203 Shaun of the Dead (2004) 292 Shaw, George Bernard 36, 43 Shaw, Harold 33, 37, 38f Sheffield Doc/Fest 407, 411–14, 412f, 423 Sheffield, Lord Bishop of 226 Shell Film Unit 161, 166 Shell-Mex 167 Shenton, William 47, 51, 53 Shepherd’s Bush 94 Sherwin, Guy 311 Shirley, Henry 79 Shivas, Mark 358–61 Shone, Tom 260 Showtime (magazine) 273 Siemens Halske 91 Sight & Sound (journal) 227, 243, 244, 271, 274, 275, 276, 362, 412 Sign on the Door (1921) 104–5 silent cinema 2–5, 23–4; 1895–1901 Victorian 24–6; 1902–1910 Edwardian 26–30; 1911–1918 pre-war 30–3, 68–74, 132–3; cinematography 4, 47–55; design 4, 57–65; music 76–85; programmes 80f, 81; stardom 4–5, 67–74; transition to sound 87–97 The Silent Enemy (1959) 175 Simmens, L. 193 Sinclair, Iain 362 Sinden, Donald 172 The Singing Fool (1928) 87, 90, 92, 94 single-shot films 26

451

Index

Sioux, Siouxsie 312 The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) 359 Skebra Film 344 The Slippery Pearls (1931) 103 Small Faces (1996) 360 Small Time (1996) 389–90 Smith, Anthony 246 Smith, Chris 354 Smith, Edwin 186, 187 Smith, George Albert 3, 24, 27, 27f, 30, 58, 59 Smith, Justin 286–7, 288, 292 Smith, Lord 249 Smith, Percy 30 Smith, Sarah 206, 399 The Snapper (1993) 360 A Social Celebrity (1926) 183 Society for Education in Film and Television 271 Song of Ceylon (1934) 162 Sono Art-Worldwide Pictures 122 Sony Pictures 387, 388 Sørensen, Inge E. 424, 426 Sorlin, Pierre 2 Sound Industries 95 sound-on-disc technology 35, 89, 91, 93 sound technicians 95, 96 South (1919) 32 Southern Reporter 94 Soviet films 109, 112–14, 152 Sparkuhl, Theodor 50, 52 Spencer, D.A. 253 Spheeris, Penelope 302 Spicer, Andrew et al. 338, 359, 360 Spielberg, Steven 239, 334 Spikings, Barry 148 Sponsume 422, 423 Squibs (1921) 39 St. John, Betta 178 St. John, Earl 176, 177 St Trinian’s (2007) 370 Stacey, Jackie 398, 403 Stafford, R. et al. 388 The Stage Year Book (1911) 132 Stannard, Elliott 81 Staples, Terry 200, 204 Star Wars films 355, 378, 379 stardom: in Hollywood 68; memories of stars 403; Rank’s contract artists of the 1950s 170–9; in silent cinema 4–5, 32, 67–74 Stardust (1974) 128

Starkey, Emanuel 83 State of the Crowdfunding Nation 422 Steel, Anthony 178 Stein, Elliott 215 Stepping Stones (1931) 105 Stevens, Gilbert R. 83 Stevens, Ken 175 Stevenson, Robert 48 Stevenson, Wilf 247, 248 Stewart-Hull, D. 414 Still Life With Phrenology Head (1979) 314 Still the Enemy Within (2014) 419, 421, 422–6 Stokes, Melvyn 398, 399, 400 Stoll Picture Productions Ltd 36, 39, 41, 50, 52–3, 61, 63, 103, 104, 141 Stoll, Sir Oswald 63 Stone, John 110 Stormbreaker (2006) 370 Strand Film Company 141 Straw Dogs (1971) 238 streaming sites and services 420, 421 Street, S. 131, 184, 185, 192, 194, 221, 222, 253, 350 StreetDance 3D (2010) 355, 358 Strickland, Peter 295 Stringer, Julian 408 Strong, Percy 47, 50 Stubbs, Jonathan 191, 194, 195, 197 StudioCanal 343 studios 59 “subcinema” 420–1 Sullivan, Pat 104 Summers, Walter 96 Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) 145 Sunday Observance Act 132–3 Sunday Pictorial (newspaper) 172 Sunday Times 275 Sunrise; a Song of Two Humans (1927) 87 Sunshine on Leith (2013) 388 Super Eight 306 super-productions 31 Superman (1978) 378 The Surrey Mirror 94 Sutherland, A. 359 Sutro, John 144 Swann, Cordelia 310, 313, 314, 314f, 315 Swanson, Gloria 67 Swanson, Maureen 177, 178 Sweney, Mark 379 The Swindler (1919) 63

452

Index

“Swinging London” films 402 Sylt, Christian 380 Szalai, Georg 379 tableaux 28 Tafler, Sydney 204 The Tales of Hoffman (1951) 157 Talking Films 95 Talmadge, Norma 104–5 Tansy (1921) 38 Target for Tonight (1941) 164, 166 Tartan Films 390 Tartuffe (1926) 64 Tarzan (2016) 379 Taste of Fear (1960) 187 A Taste of Honey (1961) 402 Taylor, A.J.P. 6 Taylor, Alma 31f, 36, 38, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74 Taylor, Gil 50 Taylor, John Russell 173 The Technology of Souls (1981) 312f Teckman, Jon 248 television 205–6; for children 206, 207; commercial television 187, 226; Granada Television 359; ITV 206, 244, 351; regionality 226–7, 228; trailers 187; see also BBC; Channel 4; television and cinema (1950–70) Television Act (1954) 226 television and cinema (1950–70) 9, 220–1, 228–9; government reports 220; Parliamentary debates 223–7; subsidy and support 221–3; a televisual world 227–8 Televisual 345 Telford, Joe 256, 258 Telford multiplex 322, 324f Tenser, Tony 126, 139, 215, 216 Terriss, Ellaline 96 Terry Committee 246 Terry, Paul 104 TESE see Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment That Kind of Girl (1963) 215 Thatcher, Margaret 247, 298, 322, 340, 369 theatre and cinema 70–1 Theorem (1969) 237 The Theory of Everything (2014) 381, 384 The Third Man (1949) 187 Thomas, A.D. 24 Thomas, Howard 206 Thomas, Jeremy 248, 345

Thompson, David 358, 361–4 Thompson, Kristin 106 Thompson, Matthew 206 Thomson, Leslie A. 184 Thor: The Dark World (2013) 377, 379, 380, 384 Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment (TESE) 340, 341 Thorne, Cyril 82 Three Men in a Boat (1920) 39 The Threepenny Opera (1931) 64 Thriller (1979) 391 Thumin, Janet 223 Thunderball (1964) 194, 196, 197 Thurston, E. Temple 38 Tigon 329, 330 Tilly films 32, 36, 71–2 Time Bandits (1981) 341 Time Out (magazine) 297 The Times 44, 93, 97, 111–12, 113, 131, 201, 277, 315 Titanic (1997) 363 To-day We Live (1937) 162 Tobis 91 TOC see The Other Cinema Today’s Cinema (journal) 40–1, 253, 254, 272 Tom Jones (1963) 126–7, 193, 197 Tomlin, Fred 95 Tommy (1975) 286, 287, 288 Topical Budget (newsreel) 31, 103, 104, 105 Torment (The Wretches; 1960) 212 Tortures That Laugh (1983) 314 Towers Open Fire (1963) 214, 215 A Town Like Alice (1956) 144 trades unions 10, 251–2; 1933: the film technicians’ union 252–3; 1940s and 50s 254–5; 1960s and 70s 255–7; 1980s 257–60, 259f Trainspotting (1996) 288, 289, 292, 388 Transworld Pictures 195 Trauerberg and Kozintsev 113 travelogues 27, 29–30, 104 Trevelyan, John 203, 232, 236 Tribune (newspaper) 272, 276 Trilby (1915) 81 Trnka, Jiri 298 Trodd, Kenith 359 Truffaut, François 49, 87, 187 Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990) 360 Trumpbour, John 202

453

Index

Tsujihara, Kevin 379 Tudor Cinema, Leicester 5–6, 99–107, 102f Turner, Edward 24 Turner Films 32, 68 Turner, Florence 32, 36, 37, 68 Turner, Sarah 316 Turvey, Gerry 83 Twentieth Century 123–4 Twenty-One (1923) 105 Twickenham Film Distributors 143 Twickenham Studios 93, 94, 105, 122, 124, 141–2 Twisted Tales (1925–26) 104 Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) 287 Tyneside Film Society 115, 116, 117 UCI see United Cinemas International Ufa 50, 52, 61, 95, 159 UIP 388 UK Film Council (UKFC) 13, 348, 350, 374; abolished 127; commerce vs culture? 346, 367–8, 370, 394; creative industries 368–70; establishment 355, 362, 367, 370; investment 248–9; lottery funding 247, 344–5; production funding 344–5, 370–1, 379, 410; public subsidy 349, 353–5; Regional Screen Agencies 372–4; see also British Film Institute Ulich, P.C. 193 Ulin, Jeffrey 381 underground film-making: British Super 8 11, 306–16; Berlin 309–10; early amateur film-making 306–8; film movements 309; professional use 308–15; VHS recorders 313 UNESCO 168 United Artists 89, 124, 125, 126, 156, 196–7 United Cinemas International (UCI) 320–1, 325 Universal 89, 103, 273, 343, 381, 388 University of East Anglia 267 University of Warwick 274 Up for the Cup (1931) 106 Upton, Julian 290 Urban, Charles 24, 30, 295 Urban Trading Co. 30 Ure, Mary 179 Vague Stars of Ursa . . . (1965) 214 Vaizey, Ed 371 Valen, Mark 301, 302 Valentino, Rudolph 67

Valiant (2005) 370 Variété (1925) 52 Variety (journal) 42, 191, 194, 273, 276, 378, 408, 412 Vaughan, Olwen 295–6 Vaughn, Matthew 383, 384 Veidt, Conrad 124, 152, 212 Vendetta (1915) 81 Venice Film Festivals 176, 177, 408 Veronica Mars (2014) 418, 420 Vertigo 345 VHS recorders 313 Vic Films 144 Victim (1961) 187 video 12, 328, 335; 3-D sequences 330–1, 331f; boom in Britain 258, 318, 328–9; censorship 232, 239, 291, 295, 329, 332, 333, 334, 335; distributors and feature films 328, 329–32, 341; and Super 8 313; systems 264–5, 328; and trades unions 258; “video nasties” 291–2, 302, 329, 332–5 Video Instant Picture Company (VIPCO) 331, 332, 333 Video Recordings Act (VRA; 1984) 232, 291, 295, 333, 335 Video Trade Association 335 Video World (magazine) 331 Viertel, Berthold 152 Virgin 298, 299, 317 Visconti, Luchino 214 visual effects 383 Vitagraph 41–2 Vitaphone system 35, 89, 91, 92, 93 voices and accents: 1928–30: transition to sound 95, 96–7, 123, 125; in children’s films 204 Von Bolvary, Geza 95 Vorhaus, Bernard 142 VPD 330 VRA see Video Recordings Act Vue 325 Walbrook, Anton 152, 212 Waley, H.D. 253 Walker, Alexander 139, 146, 147, 251, 275, 339, 340–1, 343, 344 Walker, Bill 185 Walker, Johnny 346 Walker, William 24 Wallace, Edgar 35, 130, 146

454

Index

Walls, Tom 96 The Wandering Jew (1923) 36 war films 32, 36, 59, 70, 112, 113, 144, 164, 197, 263 Warburton, Holly 312, 315 Warhol, Andy 303 Warner Bros. 35, 89, 141, 211, 320, 325, 377, 378–9, 381–2, 383, 385, 387, 388 Warp Films 345, 373 Warwick Bioscope Chronicle 31 Warwick Films 170 Warwick Trading Company 26, 27–8 Wasko, Janet 349 Wasser, Frederick 328 watch committees 116, 130–8, 232 Waters, John 298, 302 Watkins, Arthur 236 Watkins, Peter 245, 297 Watson, N. 340 Wayne, Michael 343 Weather Forecast (1934) 167 Weber, Lois 32 Webster, Paul 352–3, 362 Webster, Richard 132 Wegener, Paul 60 Weinberg, Akiba 183 The Weinstein Company 388 Wells, Allen 93 Wells, Billy 69 Wells, H.G. 35, 37, 43 Wells, Simon 289 Welsh, Robert E. 61 Welsh, T.A. 61 Welsh-Pearson 36, 50, 60–1 Weltfilm 113 Werndorff, Oscar 152 West, Mae 210 Western Approaches (1944) 164, 166 Western Electric 89, 92, 93, 94, 96 Western Import 41–2 A Wet Night (1926) 35 Wheare Committee 202, 203, 236 Wheatley, Ben 355 The Wheels of Chance (1922) 37, 38f Whiplash (2014) 414 White Cargo (1929) 94 White, Chrissie 32, 38, 71, 72–3, 74 White Corridors (1951) 144 Whitehead, Peter 296 Whitehouse, Mary 329, 332, 334

Whiteley, Annette 216 Whitfield, Anne 309 Whittam Smith, Andreas 240 The Wicker Man (1973) 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 292, 305 Wiene, Robert 60, 109, 110 Wife the Weaker Vessel (1915) 72–3 Wilcox, Herbert 36, 48, 50, 54, 62, 64, 67, 124, 139, 142, 175 Wild (2014) 414 Wilkinson, David 390 Wilkinson, Joseph Brooke 232 Will Barker 30 Williams, Arnold 186, 187 Williams, Charles 83 Williams, Chris A. 131 Williams, Jack 223 Williams, Lawrence P. 61, 62, 64 Williams, Randall 24 Williams, Raymond 220–1 Williams, Richard 298 Williamson, James 24, 25f, 28, 30, 58 Wilson, Cecil 175, 177 Wilson, Harold 223–4, 245, 246, 351 Wilson, Pamela 182 Winads Ltd 184, 186, 189 Winner, Michael 181, 216 Winnington, Richard 275 Winslet, Kate 363, 389 Winstanley (1975) 296, 394 Winston, Brian 372 Winterbottom, Michael 359, 389 Wintle, Julian 140 Wisdom, Norman 178 Wiseman, Fred 297 Witchcraft Through the Ages (1968) 215 The Witches (1966) 290 Witchfinder General (1968) 290, 305 Withnail and I (1987) 289, 341 The Wizard of Oz (1939) 135 Wodehouse, P.G. 35, 35f, 36 The Woman Who Obeyed (1923) 103 The Wonderful Story (1922) 48 Wong, Anna May 124 Wood, Alan 254, 256–7 Wood, Edward 96 Wood, John 81, 84, 85 Wood, Linda 89, 141, 143 Wood, Robin 274, 275 Woodward, John 248, 354, 362

455

Index

Woolf, James 175 Woolf, John 143 Woolf, Virginia 36, 43 Woolley, Stephen 297–8, 299, 300f, 301, 303, 339, 341 workers’ film movement 112–16 Working Title 343, 344, 345, 378, 381, 383, 388 World Film News 271 World Health Organisation 168 “The World Hobbit Project” 399 World of Video 2000 333, 334 “The World Star Wars Project” 399 The World’s Fair (periodical) 77 Wrenn, Liz 389–90 Wright, Basil 111 Wright, Brian 308 Wright, Humberston 96 Wright, Jane 362

Wright, Tony 177 Wyatt, Dave 301 Wyn Evans, Cerith 311–12, 314, 315 “X”-rated films 209, 214, 217, 218 “X Ray” 51 Yanks (1979) 146 Yates, David 379 The Yellow Claw (1920) 41, 52–3 The Yellow Teddybears (1963) 215–16 Yentob, Alan 363 Young, Freddie 47, 48–9, 50, 64 YouTube 269, 387, 419, 420 Zavattini, Cesare 58 Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979) 291, 332 Zornow, Gerald B. 307 Zulu (1963) 187

456