THE B MOVIE PHENOMENON: BRITISH CINEMA TODAY
People and Ideas
Michael O’Pray
The recent media hype about "the New British Cinema" has been enormous. Since Colin Welland's cry of "The British are coming!" while collecting the Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982, we seem to have been witnessing a renaissance in British cinema after the doldrums of the 1960s and '70s. In a recent interview, Peter Wollen made a thought-provoking comment on this upsurge: “One of the strengths of what has been happening in Britain is the possibility of a lot of B movies which have done well. Letter to Brezhnev is a B movie, so is My Beautiful Laundrette, Derek Jarman’s films are B movies . . . these small, low-budget films . . . have a certain kind of energy and political edge.” Wollen’s remarks assume a necessary distinction between mainstream feature films like Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Killing Fields, and A Room with a View, and the independents he refers to, who are making B movies in spirit, if not entirely in finances. He also isolates criteria—“energy and political edge”—which are useful in speaking of a New British Cinema.
While the idea of a renaissance in British cinema, with its implications of high quality, seems rather farfetched (overall, the quality is not all that high), nonetheless something has happened in filmmaking in this country over the past few years. Without doubt British film has achieved a visibility and identity at home and abroad it has never had before. There have been some notable successes, both at the box office and critically—enough to merit talk by some of a “new wave.” This implies, of course, that there were old waves. Perhaps there were, particularly in the British social realist films of the ’60s, the mainstream flowering of Lindsay Anderson’s Free Cinema. Beyond this example, though, the idea of a school or movement seems forced—the Ealing comedies, the Gainsborough films, Hammer horrors were all studio-based and, while they often shared common styles, hardly represented the political and aesthetic cutting edge of a new film movement.
Films like Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, Educating Rita, and A Room With a View have encouraged the current high profile of British film in the international press, but such lower-budget productions as Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman s Contract, Bill Douglas’s Comrades, Stephen Frears’s and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, and Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio have attracted the most critical praise. They also suggest that there exists in Britain a cinema engaged with its own culture and which has found new ways of expression—and, crucially, which has found an audience as well. These are Wollen’s B movies. They do not suffer from the bland visual patina that American money and obvious tailoring for the “international” market have given some bigbudget productions. The fate of Absolute Beginners is pertinent here. What began as a potentially successful B movie, in Wollen’s terms, was reduced to a bland flop by script changes demanded by the American funders. On the other hand, the B movies are usually small-scale, often idiosyncratic; they are marked by personality and have all the energy and edginess that stems from being made independently. The further novelty is that, because they are not narrowly addressed to the avant-garde margins or political fellow travelers, they often attract a young, unusually wide audience.
Three important factors can be pointed to as fostering this upsurge of new, adventurous films: the revamped funding policies of the British Film Institute (BFI); the important role played by Channel 4, with its progressive, broad-based funding and its “Film on Four” series; and the presence of filmmakers who had, by and large, a history of innovation and experiment before entering the commercial domain. Jarman, for example, had been making Super 8 films since 1970 and, working almost in isolation, had made the low-budget causes célèbres Sebastian, Jubilee, and The Tempest during the ’70s. Unbelievably, he had to wait until 1985 to raise funds for his Caravaggio, which was eventually made with BFI/Channel 4 money; he filled in the time with more Super 8 films and rock videos. Greenaway, too, had been making his own bizarre and witty tiny-budget films (A Walk Through H, Vertical Features Remake) throughout the 1960s and ’70s while employed at the Central Office of Communication.
Many of these filmmakers received their early training with very small-scale help from the Arts Council and their own personal finances. In the new, rather hysterical climate in which money is going into productions of all sorts, there is barely any concern for this seeding of young talent. Too many young filmmakers serve no apprenticeship at all before submitting scripts for large-scale productions to the BFI, Wardour Street. The result is at best bad films, and often failure. Furthermore, film and video departments in art schools, still the main area of training in this country for independent filmmakers—both Jarman and Greenaway were trained as painters—are now being systematically starved of money. Students are working with slidetapes, installations, and photography because departments cannot afford to sustain 16mm film training (even Super 8 is too costly for some!). For many younger filmmakers straight out of college, the pop video world is an obvious attraction—money is available, there is room for experimentation, and there is the hope of moving on eventually to feature films. Quite a few of Britain’s younger, ex-art-school talent is working in this area—Sophie Muller (who made the Eurythmics’s new video LP), John Maybury and Steve Chivers, and probably many more.
The David Puttnam empire and, at first, Channel 4 were not in any rush to fund filmmakers like Jarman. Equally, the success of Greenaway’s The Draughtsman s Contract seems to have been the result of accidents. The original film was cut by almost half by the BFI. Originally a much longer film, quite differently and noncommercially paced, it just happened to coincide with a change in funding policies in the early ’80s in the BFI Production Board, under Peter Sainsbury. This change of policy—from supporting many small uncommercial (experimental) films to making a pitch for the market by backing fewer films but with bigger budgets—quite miraculously produced a hit immediately. Despite this, though, The Draughtsman’s Contract, one of the most successful among the independent films mentioned here, has yet to earn a profit. In his most recent film, Drowning By Numbers, Greenaway has returned to “play games in an idyllic English landscape.”
In 1983, Sally Potter made The Gold Diggers, financed by the BFI and very much a risky project. To that point Potter had worked in avant-garde film, performance, and dance. But she had had a small-scale success with her feminist film Thriller, made at the London Filmmakers co-op. Ken McMullen, a filmmaker who had made the performance-based Resistance in the 1970s and a series of documents on such performance artists as Stuart Brisley and Joseph Beuys, also entered the commercial arena with his Ghost Dance, produced by Channel 4. His recent film Zina, a mix of political history and fantasy, is a real step toward work which demonstrates an art-cinema aesthetic, unlike the more avant-gardist but awkward Ghost Dance.
Wollen’s own film Friendship’s Death was strangely muted and conservative in its approach, like a radio play turned unimaginatively into film. In the 1970s Wollen and Laura Mulvey had been in the vanguard of filmmakers unwilling to fall into either the fine-art avant-garde camp or the mainstream, attempting instead to stay somewhere between the two. Mulvey and Wollen’s Penthesilea and Riddles of the Sphinx were prime examples of independent film in the ’70s. Studio-based and with Tilda Swinton in a leading role, Friendship’s Death compared badly with Jarman’s The Last of England (also featuring Swinton), which had none of the rather cold and faintly English intellectual distance one associates with BFI work.
The reasons for the upsurge in this work cannot be reduced simply to economic factors. The 1970s had produced a generation of critics and filmmakers who had been nursed on Screen theory, post-’68 politics (mainly French), and avant-gardism. In the mid ’70s Mulvey and Wollen were among the first of this group of theorists, along with Chris Petit (Radio On) and Ron Peck (Nighthawks), to make the break into commercial production itself. And it is in trying to reach a wider audience of moviegoers that adequate funding begins to play a crucial role. In France and Germany, films had long been made with the help of generous central government and city funding; in the 1960s the French New Wave had taken full advantage of this support. Matters were entirely different in Britain, though. Jarman has stated that if he had been in Germany since making Jubilee he would probably have made a feature a year. On a train journey we shared a few years ago, just after he had made the underrated and largely unseen The Angelic Conversation, Jarman threatened to move to Berlin in desperation at Britain’s lack of funding and interest in his work. Ironically his least interesting film, Caravaggio, has been one of his most successful, earning him a nomination for the Tate Gallery Turner Prize in 1986.
November, 1982, saw the arrival of the new Channel 4, with its promise to support “innovation” in film and its reliance on independent producers to supply programs. Channel 4’s influence on filmmakers’ attitudes has been immeasurable, and its effects are still being felt. The role played by David Rose, the principal commissioning editor for drama, was crucial. The channel has helped finance a number of television films which have also had commercial theatrical release— a virtually unique phenomenon. Rose’s support of My Beautiful Laundrette, for example, was important in its being made. The film’s neat encapsulation of a number of “hot” issues—race, unemployment, Toryism, and homosexuality—made it a hit. It also fit into the English tradition of social realism, doing in the 1980s what A Kind of Loving, Room at the Top, and This Sporting Life had achieved in the early ’60s. Kureishi and Frear’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is within the same tradition, and recently excited the historian Norman Stone into an unfortunate polemic in which he accused Jarman, Frears, and others of moral turpitude, and pleaded for a return to traditional values in the cinema. Would such values have excluded Edgar Anstey’s classic 1930s documentary Housing Problems or Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom? Probably.
Jarman, on the other hand, has never been a realist filmmaker. He owes more to Powell and Pressburger than to the documentarist strand of English filmmaking. Of course, My Beautiful Laundrette is a low-budget mainstream movie which, like Mona Lisa and A Room with a View, was a success in the world market but most probably still has not made its money back. Nevertheless, for any film with a budget of over £1.5 million, American money is a must—either through a distribution deal or by having half the budget committed in the United States. This figure is the watershed for independent production in this country. To have more than this amount of financing come from American sources is to incur the American effect, in which scripts are pulverized and any cultural identity is diluted. It is a ceiling many independent filmmakers cannot reach, but more importantly one that many do not want to reach—the price is too high. What is perhaps most heartening in the current scene is the willingness, although still limited, of funders to see films like The Last of England (which Simon Relph of British Screen described as “within the limits of its budget perfectly commercial”) as viable for support at all. Interestingly, Jarman’s film emptied the cinemas in Britain, but has played to packed houses in Germany.
As one might expect, there are a number of aesthetic strategies at work with the new climate for film. For example, The Last of England lacks any real plot; it is shot (quite beautifully) in Super 8, using pixillation and slow motion. Its aggressive editing and uncompromising imagery depict a Britain in the near future run by a fascistic army; in this dark and pessimistic view only personal love seems to provide a spark of hope. Greenaway’s work is ruthlessly intellectual, revealing an acerbic wit and love of the conceit, as well as a penchant for strong compositional photography. The mix is quirkily Modernist, with a surrealist twist in its repeated use of obsessive lists as a narrative device. On the other hand, Terence Davis, whose new film Distant Voices, Still Lives was made on a low budget cofunded by Channel 4 and Germany’s trailblazing ZDF television network, has explored a poetic realism embedded in autobiography, a journey into the interior. My Beautiful Laundrette comes out of British television drama, in which Frears has worked successfully for years (his 1978 TV film of David Hare’s Licking Hitler, for example, was brilliant). Kureishi’s excellent script for Laundrette pinpoints the important role writers have played in the new British cinema— screenwriter Stephen Poliakoff’s recent directorial debut in Hidden City (a thriller set in London) has all the hallmarks of a Wollen B movie; novelist Neil Jordan’s Angel and A Company of Wolves (the latter based on Angela Carter’s short story) were both early successes of the new British cinema.
As all this indicates, there is a renewed and general interest in filmmaking in Britain and a new willingness on the part of young filmmakers to enter the commercial world. Experimentalists are approaching Channel 4 for support for their projects. More importantly, organizations like the Arts Council are working with Channel 4 in order to provide regular funding (£20,000 per project) for younger filmmakers. But the overall picture of British film often appears rosier than the reality. After The Gold Diggers, Sally Potter returned to making a short film, The London Story, funded by the BFI. Jarman still finds it hard to attract major funding, and at every opportunity rails against government policy and American cinematic imperialism. Greenaway has gone abroad for help; since The Draughtsman s Contract he has looked to Europe to raise money for his two last films. Meanwhile young filmmakers, the talent of tomorrow, are still starved of funds. The Thatcher government’s assassination of the film industry with the Cinema Act of 1983, and the conservatism of the National Film School, mean we are unlikely to produce a New Wave proper. Ironically, the communist Eastern bloc countries and Soviet Union seem able to support a cluster of highly talented filmmakers who are not dominated by the box-office alone, from the brilliant animator Jan Svankmajer in Czechoslovakia to the late Andrei Tarkovsky in the Soviet Union, who could not have raised a penny in this country or America for films like Stalker or Mirror.
Whether the funders, financiers, and commercial film community in this country will learn before it is too late that talent does not appear out of the blue but needs support, especially at the level of art colleges and Arts Council small-grant funding, is a question still without an answer. Medium-range low-budget funding—in amounts from, say, £25,000 to £500,000—barely exists here. But this is the very area of film funding in which true film culture can flourish, where ideas can be tested, experiments made, and experiences expressed without the demands of the marketplace breathing down filmmakers’ necks. When audiences see a film they do not worry about its budget, but the fact remains that most films require a certain minimum of financing if they are to have a hope of reaching a popular audience. And too often producers and distributors judge projects and films solely on the basis of their commercial viability without really looking at them. In the final analysis, perhaps the crucial questions are whether our culture wants a cinema that will criticize, reflect the complexities of life, and create new ways of visually articulating ideas, and whether it is willing to take the financial risks such a cinema inevitably demands. At present the answer seems to be no.
