Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives [Part II – 7]

Moran AM, et al. Film Policy: International, national, and regional perspectives. 1st ed. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 7, Policy rhetorics of an imaginary cinema: The discursive economy of the emergence of the Australian and Canadian feature film; p. 111-124.

7

POLICY RHETORICS OF AN IMAGINARY CINEMA

The discurse economy of the emergence of the Australian and Canadian feature film

Michael Dorland

Times have changed… [L]arger production companies and software houses… and the publicly listed production houses are leaving town and beating the competition at their own game rather than circling the wagon. It’s time to export or die rather than protect or die.

(Ellis 1994)

THE CANADIAN CONTEXT

Very early on in the institutionalization of the contemporary Canadian feature film, whose initial mechanisms of support were in place by the late 1960s, an astute observer of the cultural scene, a novelist, essayist and filmmaker in his own right, made the following observation. ‘The establishment of a feature film industry’, wrote Jacques Godbout in 1968, ‘is a mirage in our desert.’ And it was a mirage not least because of the contradiction between the discourses of Canadian filmmakers, who had been lobbying government for the previous half-decade for feature film production and assistance policies, and their own film making practices:

for the last five years they have all been clamouring and working for a traditional feature film industry, in which they will never participate themselves and against which, in fact, they have made their films. It is an avant-garde determined to create its own rear-guard—which is a very ironic situation indeed.

(in Paquet 1968: n.p.)

Eight years later (…) after the establishment of the Canadian Film Development Corporation in 1968 (and since 1982 Telefilm Canada), the principal federal state agency set up to fund feature film production, (…) André Lamy, the National Film Board commissioner (…) would come to a conclusion remarkably similar to Godbout’s. The entire enterprise (…) of attempting to create a feature film industry in Canada was founded upon an illusion; namely, the presumption that a feature film industry actually already existed in Canadian reality (as opposed to being a long-term objective of both cultural and economic policy). ‘The problem of the feature film industry in Canada,’ Lamy wrote, ‘is precisely that it is not an industry in the classical sense of the word. And any policy based on the presumption that such an industry exists can only produce catastrophic results, economically or culturally’ (NFBC Archives, Film Policy Box 262, Lamy to Litwack, 13 April 1977, my translation).

The end of the 1980s witnessed various attempts within the Canadian film ‘industry’ to provisionally assess what some twenty years of public funding of Canadian feature film production had brought about. (…) Connie Tadros, then editor of Cinema Canada, took the occasion of the magazine’s 150th issue (…) to review a course of development succinctly summed up in her title, ‘From community to commodity’. Until the mid-1970s, she argued, the developmental options had seemed clear: ‘One either participated in a communal adventure toward the creation of a national cinema, or one was reduced to a commodity in the American marketplace’ (Tadros 1988:9) If the Canadian industry had grown phenomenally since 1972, ‘fed by tax shelters and a weak dollar’, it had not become ‘an independent industry, despite the rhetoric’.

[…] In Tadros’ analysis, an initially articulate national cultural vision—integrating ‘production, distribution, information and promotion supported by government policy’—had resulted instead in a subsidized industry ‘so dependent upon public funds and tax measures that divergent points of view find no expression’.

In Tadros’ account, Canada’s bicephalous production ‘industry’ consisted of a dominant component which as a result of identifying with, and working with, the American entertainment industry, had made considerable economic strides. […] But the apparent wealth of the ‘industry’ had been secured at the expense of a national ideal of cultural production. Instead, that ideal had been replaced by a dominated production component, a subsidised creature of government policies, whose efforts produced ‘not the industrial products of a healthy, private industry,’ but the independently produced authors’ films that ‘the government takes on the festival circuit to impress the world with our ability’.

Tadros went on to make various attempts to explain how Canada’s two-headed production ‘industry’ had come into being. A key factor was the ambiguous role played by federal government film policies and agencies that ‘had delivered the Canadian industry into the hands of the American marketplace’ (Tadros 1988:12). (…) the ‘final arbiters’ of policy would be not the Canadian state, but Hollywood Canadians who had ‘convince[d] our government that economic independence for the Canadian film/television industry is unnecessary’ (1988: 9–10). (…) Tadros would conclude that the ultimate pressures on the course of Canadian film policy development were not external, but were, in fact, internal to the Canadian national ‘psyche’, in the form of a weakness of will—the will to independence, both individual and governmental (…). […] As a result, for Tadros, Canadian policy development consisted in a dialogue of illusions, between, on the one hand, a production milieu given to massive self-delusion as to its own capacities, and, on the other, a state apparatus given to ‘totally misguided readings of the industry workings’ (Tadros 1988: 8). The interaction between the two would produce film policies she characterized as ‘the great lie’ (Tadros 1988:9).

THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT

Assessments of Australian cinema since that country’s feature film revival beginning in 1968 identify many of the same questionings as found in the Canadian context. […] From the perspective of the late 1980s, ‘the ideal of a[n Australian] national cinema has looked increasingly naive and anachronistic’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:117). Australian cinema of the late 1980s was ‘safe and respectable’, ‘middle-class and middle-aged’, ‘subdued and tame’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:68, 74).

Australian cinema is in a limbo, poised between a past which is a history of the attempt to found a national cinema, or perhaps only a local industry, and a future which is uncertain and only dimly imagined by those who work with this local industry. There is a loss of vision, a failure of nerve… in spite of all the surface busyness.

(Dermody and Jacka 1988b:127)

[…] (…) the point, the touchstone, the justification for this activity remained the ambiguous ‘history of the attempt to find a national cinema, or perhaps only a local industry’. (…) Australian cinema remains positioned within ‘the complex set of discourse and institutions in which cinema exists’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:128). […] Above all, what characterizes this discursive apparatus, of which cinema is but one locus, is the consistency of the rhetorical positions expressed. […] (…) suffice it to be described as ‘a realistic aesthetic combined with a unitary conception of Australia’s national identity’ (…). First, it is a policy rhetoric that consists in the repetition of well-worn formulae (‘remarkably short on critical interrogation of the terms in which the debate is couched and the underlying philosophy of a national cultural policy’ [Dermody and Jacka 1988b: 120). Second, these formulae, by the late 1980s, remained significantly unchanged since the 1960s and 1970s. (…) the discourse of Australian cultural policy retains a high degree of autonomy both from changing historical circumstances and practices, is largely impervious to cultural critique (Cunningham 1992), and derives its efficiencies from a political nationalist discourse which ‘in spite of its inadequacies…does have…a strong rhetorical effectiveness…and is the easiest…to legislate for’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988b:120; emphasis added).

DISCURSIVE ECONOMIES

In the case of both Australia and Canada, readily comparable countries in their constitutional and institutional histories as former, predominantly white, British colonies, with similar cinematic pasts and comparable government-film institutions (…) discovering—or rediscovering—the feature film at approximately the same time, in a process of mutual institutional and policy exchange, we are dealing, then, with equivalent semi-peripheral political economies (Alexander 1979). (…) the problematic of the discontinuous film industries of countries such as Australia and Canada (or New Zealand) is posed within a shared contextual paradigm of ambivalent decolonization, as Sylvia Lawson (1979) pointed out (…). […] (…) the difficulty of film history in the English-speaking ex-colonies is that it is confronted with a double form of continuous colonization, both practical and intellectual, to be recouped into conscious knowledge: 1) for the ‘industry’, not so much a struggle against American cultural imperialism as (often desperate) strategies of survival in spite of Hollywood; and 2) perhaps more importantly, for academics and policy makers, to have to overcome ‘the political and cultural apathy of their own societies’ (Lawson 1979:66). Because the ex-colonies were ‘politically divided, socially and culturally fragmented’ (…), a number of specific knowledge-effects had been produced that would have to be compensated for, not the least being the disarticulation (notably between technology and social structure) characteristic of peripheral economies. Principal among these (…) would be the dualistic structure of film industry organization. […] Thus, the ensuing disjunction of film industry organization between the exhibition-distribution-consumption of an imported cinema in Canada and Australia, and the chronic scarcity of resources allocated to the production of Canadian or Australian films. The fundamental structural disarticulation of industry organization would, in turn, systematically disequilibrate not only the subsequent development of national policies with respect to the local ‘industry’, but as well the reception context of movie-going (or TV watching) audiences for whom the norm has historically been determined by the audiovisual output of (highly selected) other countries. Among other relevant displacement effects that should be mentioned is the consistently problematic and chronic belatedness of the development of the academic study of the history of displaced national cinemas: not until the early 1980s in Britain, the mid-1980s in Australia, and the early 1990s in Canada, has serious study of each respective national cinema been much more than wishful.

                The point here is that, in the context of displaced national cinemas, of intermittent ‘film industries’ undergoing the major organizational and capitalistic upheaval represented by the transition towards increased private production of feature-length films—in the growing contradiction between economy and culture that crystallized by the late 1970s in the development of cultural industries policies—discourse, and the various forms of discourse, comes to play an increasingly central function in providing the semblance of coherence making the transition possible. […] This is, then, to foreground the primarily discursive or imaginary nature of the emergence of a feature film industry in the Canadian and Australian contexts, not as an economic object, but as the discursive articulation of a public idea, an imaginary construct upon which another imaginary construct, national identity, is seen substantially to rest and become manifest.

As a result of all that talk and declamation, ‘the industry’ was already an overdetermined and even fetishized object before it had any claim to material existence.

(Dermody and Jacka 1987:26; emphasis added)

In the historical polemic for feature film revival, the ‘overdetermined and fetishized object’ that survived over time (…) would not be a film industry per se, but at least certain elements of a peripheral film production infrastructure sufficiently established to support the periodic emergence of discursive formations (among critics, filmmakers, producers, or government bureaucrats, for instance) that produce ‘talk’ about an imaginary or potential industry. In displaced national cinema contexts, it is the survival of these production elements that made possible the continuation of the polemic. (…) the ‘film industry’ both exists and does not exist simultaneously. If its existence in the economic reality of the 1960s and 1970s was small-scale and precarious (…), its existence in the discursive economy constituted by the public talk of its protagonists, in ‘the verbal force field in which the industry has been conceived, argued and legislated for, and put into public existence’ (Dermody and Jacka 1987:197), is of another order of reality altogether. It is on this largely imaginary, discursive level that the perhaps naive, but honourable dream of a national cinema, and a film industry of one’s own, of the desire for cultural independence, of the aspiration to cultural modernity (…). (…) the distinction between economic and discursive realities becomes blurred, particularly in times of heightened cultural nationalism, and in periods of the emergence of new discursive formations, and the legislative and institutional forms by which these emerging discourses will be given more concrete incorporation.

However, as Dermody and Jacka would demonstrate in their study (…), the discursive economy of the emergence of the contemporary Australian feature would be formed from the combination of the two major discourses (…). Industry-1, the discourse of a national cinema, as articulated by the producers (but also many directors, writers, actors and union-leaders) who became established in the 1970s, represented

a certain style of film making (modest, artisanal, democratic); a certain style of film (socially concerned, gentle, humanistic, sometimes didactic, but nonconfrontational and often aesthetically timid), and a certain politics of Australian film culture—against the monopolies, somewhat distrustful of America and its cultural domination (…), in favour of government regulation and safeguards on the Australian character of the industry.

(Dermody and Jacka 1987:198)

Industry-2, the discourse of initially the traditional distribution/exhibition interests and latterly of the film financiers, packagers, brokers and producers who emerged with the tax incentive legislation of 1980, is, on the other hand, ‘reactionary’:

anti-intellectual, anti-film buff, anti-art, anti-government regulation of the industry, scornful of Australian nationalism and the concern about US domination, concerned with the mass audience, bums-on-seats, box-office dollars and the business of film (as against film as art or communication).

(Dermody and Jacka 1987:199; emphasis in original)

‘The life of this industry as a double personality is especially striking’, for it structures both an operational discursive space and at the same time establishes the limits of this discursive space. Thus, it allows, first, ‘the industry at any one time to say one thing and be the other’, which produces, second, an oscillation over time that evens out

into an uneasy, uncertain, unconfident status, leaving the industry neither one thing nor the other, neither a repository of the values of a potential national cinema nor an aggressively successful business, pushing into foreign territories. Between these two projections lies a zone of inertia, in which the past is being replayed for an audience that seems to have lost interest, patience, and any remnant of loyalty.

(Dermody and Jacka 1987:201; emphasis added)

Third, it establishes the aesthetic—indeed, discursive—patterns that define the limits of Australian feature production (and its discourses) as ‘a narrow field of conservative aesthetic choices [i.e. the repetition of well-worn formulae], repeated over and over’ (ibid.:201).

THE DISCURSIVE ECONOMY OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE CANADIAN FEATURE FILM

(…) the duality of the emergent film industry as a double personality (…) it will be even more pronounced in the Canadian case. Because of the linguistically differentiated enclave represented by Quebec, not only would the dualistic structuration prevalent in film ‘industry’ organization common to the political economy of displaced national cinemas be a decisive element of emergence, but (…) it would be multiplied and reinforced by the environing social and political organization of Canada as a cultural duality. Not only would dualism bear upon contextual organizing structures, it would apply as well to the political economy of language in Canada, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s politicization of language from an instrument of communication to a symbol of membership in an increasingly self-conscious collectivity that by the 1970s would distinguish itself from the rest of Canada by the use of the descriptor ‘Québécois’. Thus, the problematic of feature film emergence in the Canadian context takes place diachronically in not one but two languages at a time of rising contestation and renegotiation of the political, economic and cultural relations between Canada’s two founding language groups. In this sense, the Canadian feature film is, as much as the Australian, an over-determined and fetishized object, but additionally is the designator of a range of unresolved (constitutional, ideological and cultural) contestations, designating the historical sedimentation of existentially contrived values and norms in search of institutional denouement. (…) the emergence of the Quebecois feature film has been viewed as part of the larger ideological continuum of the struggle for Quebec’s affirmation of its ‘national’ identity, both prior to and since Confederation (1867) (Véronneau 1987).

                (…) the emergence of the Quebecois feature—postulated on the aesthetic, technological and social continuity between madefor-television documentary and fictionalized series production of the late 1950s and the documentary shorts of the ‘direct cinema’—took place institutionally within the film agency of the federal state (…). (…) the role of federal institutions is paradoxically central to the emergence of French-language versions of the discourses of Industry-1 and Industry-2 in the Canadian context. In the first instance, a francophone version of Industry-1 as the emergence of the desire to make feature-length films (and in some instances to actually do so, as in A Tout Prendre in 1963 or Le Chat dans le Sac in 1964) identifiably occurs within the National FilmBoard in the early-mid 1960s. However, this discourse, in the context of its emergence in the National Film Board, is predominantly conceptualized (…) initially as a public service cinema (Caughie 1986). In the second instance (…) the creation of a second federal cinematographic institution, the Canadian Film Development Corporation, to support private-sector, commercial feature film making, would be both the result, and the principal institutional embodiment of the emergence of an Industry-2 discourse that some Quebecois film critics would see as the politically motivated ([…] culturally genocidal) move by Ottawa to ‘exterminate the Quebecois cinema that at the beginning of the 1960s had given birth to all the new (…) cinema throughout the world’ (Staram n.d.:37; my translation), (…) to preserve the American film monopoly in Canada. (…) the events do not respect linguistic compartmentalizations, but reflect instead the emergence of two cinematic discourses, whose boundaries are far from clearly delimited. (…) if there are two linguistic sites of the emergence of an Industry-1 discourse, one French, one English, their institutionalization will be defined in emergent Industry-2 forms. (…) one could say that, in the Canadian context, an embryonic Industry-1 discourse articulating an aesthetic or cultural desire to make feature-length films emerges from within the state film making (and television) apparatus, but, given the reluctance—or (…) inability—of the state agencies to alter the dominant (i.e. Industry-2) political economy of audiovisual circulation, of which they are now an integral component, the Canadian Industry-1 discourse has also to seek institutionalization in the form of an Industry-2 discourse, but in the claim to be the embodiment of an emergent Canadian industry, thus proposing a shift in the political economy.

This claim itself is partly real, and partly imaginary: it is real to the extent that the advent of television in the Canadian context of the early 1950s had created the infrastructure of a private production industry (…). But it is also imaginary, to the extent that the development of the alternative political economy being proposed is not only contingent upon the reduction of existing state structures, but its future growth was, at that point in time, purely speculative (…). […] In this sense, the dualistic role of the Canadian state would be that of coordinating the first and second options, of inversing the historical predominance of the state sector in favour of the emergent private sector by integrating the development of the latter into that of more developed private industries (…).

(…) the role of the liberal capitalist state, as that of the other actors, is also dual: on the one hand, the development of Canadian forms of capitalist enterprise in film, which is a cultural as much as an economic objective, and on the other hand the economic development of those forms through their integration within the dominant capitalist structures, those of the American (or global) industry. (…) the emergence of the Canadian feature film sees the discursive encryption of three intertwining processes of emergence:1) a Canadian film industry; 2) within it, the publicly financed but privately produced commercial feature film; and 3) within this, contemporary Quebecois cinema in its own forms of 1) and 2). […] In the period of its emergence (1957–68), the Canadian discursive economy remained disarticulated (…). (…) the discursive economy of the Canadian feature film in the period of its emergence established a verbal force field in which the dominant discourse is an Industry-2 discourse. (…) the 1960s witness the emergence of the discursive economy in which an Industry-2 discourse is predominant. In the first half of the 1970s, an Industry-1 discourse develops that, among other reasons, since it is internally divided by the increasingly vocal claim to difference of Quebec filmmakers, will remain marginal to the Industry-2 discourse that, as of mid-decade, is reinforced by 1) the governmentalization of Quebec cinema that follows with the entry in 1975 of the previously abstinent Quebec state as coordinator of a replica discursive economy, and 2) as of the same year, the ‘industrialization’ of feature film capitalization that results from modifications to tax legislation. The 1980s, following the largely self-inflicted collapse of the capital market as a result of the economic inexperience of the emergent private producer ‘class’, will as a result see the incorporation, by state policy, of the broadcasting system into the discursive economy. Throughout, it should be strongly emphasized, the dominant discourse remains an Industry-2 discourse, constant in its demands for the creation of a private industry oriented towards world markets as the dominant force in Canadian audiovisual production

SECOND CINEMA POLICY

The discursive economies of the emergence of the Australian and Canadian feature film were dualistic in the sense of being both discourse and economy, of both a public idea and an economic telos. Their emergence meant that, henceforth, the possibility of more speech about an object-field had been institutionalized; but this could not guarantee the coherence of that speech, nor even that it meant what it said about itself (…). If one can generalize from the Canadian-Australian experience, that experience would seem to suggest that the study of ‘second cinema film policy’ might constitute a discrete object of knowledge with particular problematics, structures, etc. of its own that would warrant more systematic preoccupation than it has so far received. (…) it might be possible toargue that the notion of ‘second cinema’, in post-colonial contexts, would appear to be a more productive one than that of ‘national cinema’, to the extent that the latter conceptualization has been so over-determined by the problematic notion of nationality (Buscombe 1980; Straw 1991; […]). The notion of second cinema, as Dermody and Jacka have suggested (1982, 1988), by foregrounding secondariness, acknowledges realistically, on the one hand, the primacy held in theatrical exhibition and distribution in peripheral national contexts by the ‘first cinema’ of Hollywood; but, on the other hand, at the level of the imaginary, also acknowledges the double dream of not only establishing a film (or television) industry of one’s own, but one that also (…) of being able to compete with Hollywood either at home (as in Australia), or, failing that, as in Canada, since the one need not imply the other, abroad. (…) the acknowledgement of the imaginary dimensions of second cinema film policy makes possible the realization that one is dealing with an historical phenomenon, albeit one that is fragmented and discontinuous, but which has been widely shared by the film cultures of respective English-language contexts (…). It further makes possible the realization of the extent to which the dimensions of the imaginary have been the touchstone of various national policies in film, not to mention the larger field of mass communication in post-colonial contexts. This entails inquiry in greater detail into how the dream/desire of a second cinema takes on material/textual form. But, most broadly perhaps, the acknowledgement of secondariness entails the recognition, in the study of film policy, of the complexity of the transition from disarticulated elements of (a state-supported) production infrastructure to the beginnings of capitalist forms of the internal economic organization of film production, of which the emergence of the commercial feature film signifies the highly condensed expression.

Not only is the transition to a capitalist economy always cataclysmic (…) but, simplifying considerably, the transition to an economy of generalized exchange is also accompanied by conjunctural transformations in the realms of subjectivity, aesthetics and discursive articulations. (…) one might look again at the Canadian and Australian discourses on national identity as experimental forms of ‘currency’ (nodes of sociability) attempting to establish a civil economy of symbolic exchange. (…) would make it possible to better understand the various shifting grammars that come into play in the transition to commodity exchange in the political economy of culture. The emergence of the feature film in the Australian and Canadian (…) represents particular articulations of the complex tensions between the spheres of economy and culture that all industrializing countries have historically experienced.

[Film: À tout prendre, 1963, dir. Claude Jutra]

[About the film above: « Dédié à toutes les victimes de l’intolérance »]

Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives [Part II – 6]

Moran AM, et al. Film Policy: Internacional, national, and regional perspectives. 1st ed. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 6, British film policy; p. 114-127.

PART II

NATIONAL FILM POLICIES

6

BRITISH FILM POLICY

John Hill

Fears for the future of the British film industry have a long history and stretch back to at least the 1920s when British film production came close to extinction (Hartog 1983). (…) during the 1990s such fears have been aired with increasing frequency. […]  UK feature production has been in decline (and well below other European countries such as France and Italy), the level of budgets has been falling and US films have increasingly dominated British screens and video outlets (accounting for over 90 per cent of theatrical box-office in 1992). A significant factor in these developments has been the role played by government.

The key event in the evolution of recent film policy was undoubtedly the arrival of a new Conservative government, led by Margaret Thatcher, in 1979. Although it was not until its second term of office that the government’s solitary white paper on the industry Film Policy (1984) finally appeared, its approach to the film industry was nonetheless apparent from an early stage.

This was not surprising of a government whose approach towards the arts in general involved cutbacks and the encouragement of business sponsorship and economic selfsufficiency. (…) in the case of film, the new Conservative government was reluctant to conceive of it in artistic and cultural terms at all, with the result that its policies were almost entirely concerned with the commercial aspects of the industry. (…) film policy corresponded to the government’s more general economic attitudes: (…) an unflagging belief in the virtues of the free market, a commitment to the minimization of state intervention in the economy and a (…) wish to reduce public expenditure and privatize public assets (Gamble 1988). […] The answer was obviously much less than previously and Film Policy explained how the government planned to do away with ‘the paraphernalia of Government intervention’ (…) (Department of Trade 1984:12).

GOVERNMENT POLICY

The quota dates back to the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 which, in response to the decline in the number of British films in British cinemas, had required distributors and exhibitors to handle a minimum percentage of specifically British films. The government did initially extend the life of the quota but in January 1982 reduced the quota of 30 per cent for feature films by half before suspending the quota altogether from 1 January 1983.

Abolition was also the fate of the Eady levy. This was originally devised by the Treasury official, Sir Wilfred Eady, and was introduced on a voluntary basis in 1950 before being made compulsory under the Cinematograph Films Act of 1957. Designed to return a proportion of box-office takings back to production, it consisted of a levy upon exhibitors’ earnings and was administered by the British Film Fund Agency. […] The 1985 Films Act which followed, however, abolished the levy completely. As the preceding White Paper explained, the levy—like the quota—represented ‘an unreasonable burden on the cinema exhibition industry’ and was not seen by the government to provide ‘an efficient way of encouraging an economic activity thatshould be essentially oriented towards the market’ (Department of Trade 1984:11, 12).

Similar reasoning was applied to the NFFC. Originally designed as a temporary measure to help alleviate the then crisis in British production, the National Film Finance Corporation was established in October 1948 as a specialized bank to make loans in support of British film production and distribution. […] (…) as a result of growing financial difficulties, the NFFC’s activities during the 1970s had become limited and between 1972 and 1979 it was involved with only twenty-nine features. (…) with the appointment of a new managing director of the NFFC in January 1979 it looked as if Labour was preparing to increase the organization’s funding as well as extend its cultural remit.

In contrast, the Conservatives sought to put the NFFC on an even more commercial footing than before. It ended its support for the Corporation (other than through Eady), encouraged greater reliance on commercial borrowing and, when it was decided to abolish the Eady levy, it effectively ‘privatized’ the organization. This involved the replacement of the NFFC by the British Screen Finance Consortium (subsequently British Screen Finance Limited). According to the White Paper, British Screen was to continue to fulfil ‘the positive functions of the NFFC, while at the same time being enhanced by the dynamic of private enterprise’ (ibid. 1984:15). […] Three private investors—Channel 4, Cannon and Rank—agreed to provide further capital (in the form of loans) and Granada committed later. However, at the end of five years, only Channel 4 had renewed its investment.

                […] It was already evident in the 1970s, for example, that the quota was not being enforced and that a number of cinemas, especially independents, were failing to meet their quota of British features. (…) reasons for this was the decline in British feature production, such that the number of films registered as British for purposes of quota fell by over half (…) between 1971 and 1979. If the original purpose of the quota had been to stimulate British film production the evidence suggested that it was now failing to do so (…).

This was also true of the Eady levy which, by the 1980s, represented in real terms only one-seventh of its original value. (…) it had been a recurring criticism of the levy (…) that its allocation on the basis of box-office success characteristically rewarded those least in need of it. This was amply demonstrated when the details of the levy’s distribution were made public from 1979 onwards and revealed the extent to which the most commercially successful ‘British’ films such as The Wild Geese, Superman, Alien and Flash Gordon accounted for the lion’s share of the pay-out. (…) with the decline in cinema attendances which was a feature of the late 1970s and early 1980s there was certainly some justice in the exhibitors’ claims that the levy was not only an increasingly onerous burden upon them but also an unfair one given the extent to which films were increasingly viewed on television and video. As a result, many accepted that the Eady levy should go, but felt that it should be replaced by a different form of levy, either on television or videotape. Indeed, in April 1985, the House of Lords went so far as to pass an amendment to the Films Bill in support of such a move. The government, however, remained resolutely opposed to levies of any kind and it was this unwillingness to find means to support British filmmaking (…) which represented the real problem for the production sector of the British film industry.

This reluctance to support production was also evident in the government’s approach to fiscal matters. In 1979 the Inland Revenue ruled that films could be treated as ‘plant’ and were thus eligible for 100 per cent capital allowances in the first year. As a result of this ruling the financing of film production became more attractive to City institutions which, through the operation of leaseback deals, became increasingly involved in the support of British films (including, for example, Chariots of Fire, Educating Rita and Local Hero). (…) despite the encouragement to production which these tax incentives provided, the Conservatives refused to maintain them. A number of amendments to the scheme were introduced and then it was phased out altogether in 1986. (…) the White Paper argued that this was designed to ‘encourage efficiency and enterprise’, the evidence suggested otherwise and investment in film (…) fell dramatically in the years which followed (1984:12). […] (…) while the NFFC was involved in only seventeen completed features between 1980 and 1985, British Screen had a stake (in the form of investments and guarantees) in forty-four features in the period 1986 to 1989. However, although British Screen achieved a generally respectable return on its investments and won some notable commercial success (as in the case of Scandal), it failed to succeed as a profit-making enterprise and did not, as the government had intended, become self-supporting by the end of the decade. (…) a postponement of loan repayments due to the initial investors in 1989 had to be re-negotiated and, in the same year, the Department of Trade and Industry was prevailed upon to provide further funding until 1994 (subsequently extended to 1996).

British Screen (…) benefited from the government’s apparent reluctance to follow through fully its commitment to the logic of the marketplace. A part of this (…) may have derived from a belated recognition of the almost impossible demands (…) had been made upon the organization. For, while British Screen was required to be run on a commercially successful basis, it was not free to operate as a purely commercial enterprise, obliged as it was to encourage specifically British film production and foster British talent. (…) what must also have become apparent was how important a role British Screen had come to play in this regard. In 1984 the White Paper had expected the contribution of the company to British film production to be no more than ‘modest’. (…) by the end of the decade, British Screen had become the main source of British production finance, outside of television. (…) even a Conservative government must have had reservations about simply abolishing it, especially given the failure of its otherpolicies to stimulate film production in the way that had been promised.

[…] The collapse of Goldcrest was particularly dramatic in this respect. It had not only come to symbolize the ‘renaissance’ of British filmmaking which was so much celebrated during the early 1980s but had also succeeded in attracting a substantial number of City institutions to invest in film production. The failure of the company, however, reminded the City of the high risk character of film investment and, with capital allowances also ended, City funding for film production virtually dried up.

CHANNEL 4

(…) although Labour plans for the channel, as with those for the film industry, were altered by the succeeding Conservative government, these changes were not as radical as might have been expected of a government committed to market-orientated, deregulatory policies. Most importantly Channel 4 was provided with a clear ‘public service’ remit as well as a secure financial base. Under the Broadcasting Acts of 1980 and 1981, the Channel was obliged to appeal to tastes and interests not generally catered for by the existing television services and to ‘encourage innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes’ (Broadcasting Bill, 1981:13). Its programme-making was to be financed by advertising, but indirectly, in the form of a subscription paid by the ITV companies as a percentage of their net advertising revenues in return for which they sold and collected the income from Channel 4’s own advertising time. […] The most notable innovation (…) was that the Channel, unlike the existing BBC and ITV companies, did not itself operate as a production house but either purchased or commissioned work from independent production companies, the ITV companies or abroad.

                It was within this context that Channel 4’s contribution to the film industry took place. Drawing on the example of German television (most notably that of ZDF and WDR), the channel embarked upon a major policy of investment in films, intended not simply for broadcast but also proper theatrical release. The results of this policy were impressive in terms of both the number and range of films with which the Channel were involved. (…) the company invested over £90 million in 264 films, including many of the most distinctive features of the 1980s and 1990s (such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Letter To Brezhnev, The Draughtsman’s Contract, Caravaggio, Distant Voices, Still Lives, Mona Lisa, Riff-Raff and Life is Sweet). The success of the channel’s experiment also encouraged other television companies (…). The BBC became increasingly involved in film production (Truly, Madly, Deeply, Enchanted April, Edward II, The Snapper) and, following the experience of distribution problems due to pressures for early television transmission, committed itself, in 1994, to an annual slate of about five films per year intended for a proper theatrical and video release. A number of ITV companies were also tempted to invest in feature film. These included Thames (A Month in the Country, Dealers, The Courier), Central (Wish You Were Here, Prick Up Your Ears, Paris By Night) and Granada which scorednotable successes with My Left Foot and The Field. […] (…) the number of films dependent upon television finance rose dramatically during the 1980s, increasing from only 4 per cent (…) in 1982 to 49 per cent by 1989, (…) would be even higher if it did not include the nominally British off-shore productions of the US majors (Lewis 1990).

                (…) while a number of Channel 4’s films proved surprisingly profitable (as illustrated by the enormous successes of The Crying Game and Four Weddings and a Funeral), the ability of the company to succeed when other sections of the British filmindustry failed did not derive from any superior financial acumen on its part. (…) the Channel’s success in film production (…) depended upon its insulation from purely commercial considerations. Due to the funding of both television generally and Channel 4 in particular, the production of films by and for television does not depend upon direct financial returns in the same way as conventional film production with the result that Channel 4’s film policy has not been driven by purely commercial considerations and very few of its films have made them a profit. […] The channel, in this respect, has been committed to a ‘subsidy’ of film production on the grounds of its cultural worth and importance in a way in which government film policy has not.

CHANGING INDUSTRIAL STRUCTURES

[…] For despite the government’s belief in the restorative powers of the free market, it was apparent that the traditional commercial sector of the industry did not benefit from its actions and that what stability the industry enjoyed was the result of a continuing dependence upon the state (…) or indirectly through television, and Channel 4 in particular, for which, through license and regulation, the government possessed a statutory responsibility.

                […] (…) a reliance on the free play of market forces does not in itself reverse industrial decline. It only reinforces existing market strengths and weaknesses (Leys 1985). This was particularly so in the case of the film industry where state intervention has historically been based upon a recognition that the British film industry did not, and could not, compete on equal terms within the international film market.

                The basic weakness of the British film industry, in this respect, derives from Hollywood’s commanding position within the world market. Within the West it is only the Hollywood majors which have been able to spread the financial risks of film production in such a way as to make filmmaking, more or less, consistently profitable. […] These factors provide the Hollywood majors with such an overwhelming economic advantage that British producers have little prospect of competing on equal terms with them even in their home market. Hollywood domination of British screens has, of course, been a persistent problem for Britain (…).

                This is the result of two main trends: the decline of the domestic theatrical market and the divorce of production from distribution and exhibition interests. […] (…) whereas it was once possible for a British film to recoup its costs on the home market, this was virtually impossible to achieve during the 1980s, even on a low budget. In the face of a similar decline in audiences in the US, the Hollywood majors were able to sustain profitability through income from video and pay-TV. In Britain, however, this has proved impossible and the US domination of the video market is even greater than the theatrical market (…).

The diminishing profitability of film production resulting from this decline in the home market has therefore encouraged major British companies to abandon production in favour of distribution and exhibition and other non-film interests (…). […] (…) the increasingly risky business of production was left in the hands of independent production companies who put together projects on an irregular or one-off basis (often involving quite labyrinthine funding arrangements as a result of the absence of any one major source of finance). (…) no less than 342 production companies were involved in film production during the 1980s and, of these, 250 participated in only one film (Lewis 1990).

This growth in the independent sector is, of course, an example of the way in which media production more generally has been increasingly re-structured along what has been characterized as more flexible, ‘post-Fordist’ lines (Harvey 1989; Storper and Christopherson 1987). The diversification of activity which this represents, however, has been largely confined to production and has not extended to distribution and exhibition (Aksoy and Robins 1992).

                […] (…) three exhibitors—MGM Cinemas (as Cannon became following its acquisition by MGM Pathé), Rank and UCI (the leading UK multiplex operator owned by Paramount and MCA/Universal)—still accounted for over 65 per cent of box office receipts in 1993. In the case of distribution, the five leading distributors—all Hollywood subsidiaries—accounted for over 80 per cent of theatrical revenues.

This situation was documented by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (1994) when it found evidence of both a ‘scale monopoly’ in the case of MGM Cinemas and a ‘complex monopoly’ in the case of the main distributors and exhibitors. As a result, it recommended the ending of alignments and a further limiting of exclusive runs. […] British films no longer had the security of a guaranteed outlet which a vertically integrated industry had once provided and, due to the alignments of the main exhibitors with the major US distributors, often struggled to achieve a circuit release. Thus, even two such successful films as My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Brezhnev were turned down by both Rank and EMI. (…) while the UK majors may have dropped out of production, the internal pricing structures which had been a feature of a vertically integrated industry remained (Relph 1990). These arrangements had been designed to accelerate returns from exhibition and distribution rather than production.

In such a situation it is not difficult to see how the British film industry of the 1980s became dependent upon television and what state support remained. The shrinkage of the domestic theatrical market combined with the withdrawal of the UK majors from production created a crisis in the provision of production finance which only television and semi-state bodies were in a position to overcome with any reliability. (…) the merger of British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) with Sky in 1991, one year after its launch, brought to a halt its programme of investment in British film production although, under pressure to meet the European Commission’s directive on European programming Television without Frontiers, BSB did reach an agreement with British Screen in 1994 to make a modest investment in British productions in return for pay-television rights.

DOWNING STREET SEMINAR

The problems facing British film production came to a head in 1989 when the number of films produced fell to thirty. This appeared to lead to some rethinking of government policy and, in June 1990, Margaret Thatcher herself chaired a one-day seminar at Downing Street on the future of the British film industry. (…) a number of promises were made: financial support for European co-production; a commitment to MEDIA 92 (subsequently 95), the audio-visual programme of the European Community; a review of policies designed to stimulate overseas investment in UK film production and to market and promote British films abroad; and, finally, the establishment of two working parties on the structure of the industry and related fiscal matters. (…) Thatcher was, somewhat ironically, replaced as prime minister by John Major only five months later.

The early Major years did, nonetheless, see a modest retreat from the Conservatives’ original stance of aggressive non-intervention. A British Film Commission was established in May 1991, a European Co-production fund to be administered by British Screen was also set up and, after a futile attempt to attract private finance, the subscription to Eurimages, the Council of Europe’s production and distribution support fund, was finally paid (but only to be withdrawn again in 1995). (…) film was also reorganized, along with the arts and sport, into a new Department of National Heritage which seemed to suggest that a greater degree of recognition was being given to the cultural importance of film than hitherto. […] Plans for an export agency were dropped and the recommendations of the working party on fiscal matters were rejected. This group reported at the end of 1990 and made three main proposals: tax relief for foreign artists working in the UK; accelerated write-offs against tax; and the establishment of a new tax vehicle modelled on the French Sociétés de Financement de l’Industrie Cinématographique et Audiovisual (Soficas). All three ideas were dismissed by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, although, in 1992, he did announce a small measure of accelerated tax relief. […] The group was initially composed of representatives from the production sector (…) (Stevenson 1994). However, when the group was joined by representatives from the distribution and exhibition sectors it proved impossible to reach agreement.

(…) television’s involvement in film production also underwent some changes. For whereas a number of European countries have formalized (sometimes through legislation as in France) the relations between television and film, the support for film by television in Britain during the 1980s was a largely unplanned, and possibly unexpected, consequence of government film and broadcasting policy. […] This became evident in 1988 when the government altered the way of collecting the ITV levy (in effect a tax paid by the ITV companies for the right to broadcast). The levy, originally on profits, was now to be on advertising revenues and this had the effect of closing off a form of ‘tax shelter’ which hadallowed ITV companies to write off up to 30 per cent of their production costs. As a result, the making of features became much less attractive than before and ITV involvement in feature production fell by one-third between 1989 and 1990 and virtuallydried up thereafter. The ITV companies’ retreat from film production was also related to the uncertainty surrounding the allocation of television franchises in 1991 (…). The now notorious system of competitive bidding, used to decide the new franchise-holders, also reduced the amount of money available for programme-making which meant that, given its high cost, feature production was destined to become less attractive to the ITV companies.

This new commercial climate in broadcasting also affected Channel 4 which, from 1993, became responsible for selling its own advertising. So far it has done so with such success that it is has ended up in the peculiar position of subsidising the ITV network. (…) this change has meant that the channel has had to become more commercial (…) its commitment to high cost programming such as feature film production will inevitably depend on its ability to compete effectively for both ratings and advertising revenue. (…) some evidence of the channel’s increasingly commercial orientation has already been provided by the decision of the Department of Independent Film and Video to end its support for the workshop sector and move away from film features. This department has traditionally funded more unorthodox features (such as The Gold Diggers,The Last of England, Rocinante and The Passion of Remembrance) than the Drama Department which has had the responsibility for ‘Film on Four’. As a result of its decision, the range offilms produced by Channel 4 is destined to narrow (Hill 1996).

CONCLUSION

A recent discussion of British government policy towards broadcasting suggests that it has failed to achieve either a coherent market-based system or a clearly regulated practice of public service broadcasting (Prosser 1992). Something similar may also be said of the government’s policy towards film. […] This did not, however, generate support comparable with other European countries or encourage any rethinking of the cultural role which a cinema in Britain might play. (…) the importance of a ‘national cinema’ which is capable of registering the lived complexities of British ‘national’ life (Hill 1992). The feasibility of such a cinema, however, depends upon the kind of political and cultural support for film which the Conservative government has chosen not to provide.

[Film: Educating Rita, 1983, dir. Lewis Gilbert]

Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives [Part I – 5]

Moran AM, et al. Film Policy: Internacional, national, and regional perspectives. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 5, European co-production strategies: The case of France and Britain; p. 102-113.

EUROPEAN CO-PRODUCTION STRATEGIES

The Case of France and Britain

Anne Jäckel

The 1993 GATT talks and the vociferous campaign led by the French to exclude audiovisual productions from the GATT Agreement in the name of culture focused the world’s attention on France’s capacity to retain both a specific film culture and a relatively prosperous film industry. The survival of French cinema in a world dominated by American movies was largely explained by France’s protectionist attitude towards its domestic film industry. (…) the international aspects of French film policy, (…) which, regardless of nationality, has benefited many individuals who (…) have found it difficult to make films in their own country. […] It has been argued (…) that France’s paternalistic attitude towards its former colonies has produced a situation where black and beur filmmakers in France seem to be ‘too close for comfort’ to the funding bodies (Blackwood and Givanni 1988:116).

Of the 101 ‘French-initiated films’, six were shot in languages other than French, and ten were made by non-French directors. (…) do not include the thirty-six cinematographic co-productions where France was a minority partner (half a dozen of which were in English with a British partner), nor the fifteen films shot by filmmakers from the former Eastern bloc (…).

In the early 1990s, the number of films co-produced with a foreign partner remained fairly stable and equal to the number of 100 per cent French films.

Co-productions are by no means a new or a French phenomenon. […] The 1920s were a period of fertile activities by Scandinavian, British, French, Italian and German film companies to establish European film concerns in order to combat the economic and cultural dominance of Hollywood on the world market. For a variety of reasons, all those attempts collapsed in the 1930s (Vincendeau 1988:29). They were revived in the late 1940s with the negotiation by national governments of international co-production treaties. France and Italy were the first countries to sign a co-production agreement in 1949. […]

[…] The Italian and French industries had substantially increased their production, employment figures had risen, French and Italian actors had achieved international stardom, and many of the co-produced films were not only popular in both their domestic markets but also in the rest of Europe and beyond. The Treaty marked the beginning of a long partnership between the two countries. (…) well over 1,500 films have been made under the Franco-Italian Agreement. […] One can hardly claim that all Franco-Italian films are masterpieces, but many of the Classics of European cinema were developed as co-productions: Visconti’s Rocco and his Brothers, Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt, Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad, and many of Fellini’s films were made under the official Agreement. […] Such fruitful cooperation not only led the two countries to sign agreements with other partners, but encouraged other countries to follow their example. (…) France has co-production agreements with almost forty countries and co-productions have become a way of life for the smaller countries of Europe.

Britain entered the field of co-productions relatively late in the day and, for a long time, the number of films co-produced under its official agreements remained insignificant, even those made with France, the first and the most productive of its European partners. Linguistic and cultural differences, as well as opposing film policies and practices, made it difficult for the two film industries to cooperate under the Anglo-French Agreement.

The first registered co-productions include a forgotten Brigitte Bardot vehicle (Two Weeks in September), and two of the most expensive productions made in the late 1960s, The Night of the Generals and Mayerling. […] On the whole, the films coproduced under the aegis of the Anglo-French Agreement laid little claim to British or French culture. Least of all Moonraker, the most expensive and the most successful James Bond movie of the 1970s, a film shot on location in France, Italy, Brazil, Guatemala, the United States and in outer space. Several Anglo-French films had record budgets in their times, such as Moonraker in 1978, Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Day of the Jackal, Roman Polanski’s Tess, and in the late 1980s, Axel Corti’s The King’s Whore and Milos Forman’s Valmont.

                Before establishing nationality criteria, the Anglo-French Agreement states that ‘films of high quality, capable of enhancing the reputation of the film industries of the two countries, should benefit from the provisions of the Agreement’. In the past and particularly at times when the respective domestic film industries were facing a slump, high quality often came to mean films with an international appeal, usually backed by foreign (American) investment.

                In the early 1980s, only a trickle of commercially unsuccessful British-French films whose official status was left unconfirmed by the authorities were made. After 1985, cultural, institutional and political differences prevailed. With, on the British side, a producer/scriptwriter approach, close links with Hollywood and a lack of incentives under a Conservative government which appointed a new Minister for the Arts almost every year, and, on the French side, a directorial approach and the introduction of a new system of tax-shelter by a socialist government whose flamboyant Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, was openly committed to a programme of state intervention in the film industry, little wonder co-productions between France and Britain came to a halt for three years.

                In the late 1980s, however, the prospect of a unified Europe, combined with the deteriorating situation of theatrical admissions for the domestic products in France, led to the resurrection of the Anglo-French Agreement. (…) British producers began to look to the other side of the Channel for co-producing partners. They found French producers eager to endorse the statement made by a Unifrance official that ‘the international appeal of films shot in English such as The Bear or The Big Blue seemed to bear out the logic of France producing a handful of costly international pictures a year’. For French producers, making films under the official Agreement was a safer option in a country inclined to legislate in favour of national quotas and prone to defend and promote the French language (…).

The three British-French co-productions made in the late 1980s were all large-budget movies with high production values which included American stars and directors. These were Richard Lester’s The Return of the Musketeers, Jerry Schatzberg’s adaptation of Fred Uhlman’s novel Reunion, a story of friendship set in Germany in the 1930s, and Valmont with Colin Firth in the title role and two American actresses playing the devious Marquise de Merteuil (Annette Bening) and the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Meg Tilly). Milos was allowed to shoot his version of Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons in authentic Baroque locations such as the Opera Comique and the Chapel of Versailles.  [….] The choice of British and French producers to base their renewed collaboration upon a common European heritage of history and high culture seemed a safe commercial proposition but, unfortunately, neither the old recipe of a sequel to a swashbuckling adventure shot almost twenty years earlier—with the same but now older stars—nor the high production values of Reunion and Valmont worked with domestic or international audiences.

The following years proved even worse for the large-budget British-French co-productions. The King’s Whore, the first film to fly the European banner at Cannes in 1990, was booed by the festival audience. […] The King’s Whore was cited as ‘the classic Euro-pudding of all time’ (The Guardian, 18/6/90:36), a label also bestowed upon another Franco-British film, Mister Frost (…). Yet neither critical rebuff nor commercial failure dented the enthusiasm of the British or the French producers and, by 1991, a fully-fledged programme of largescale films had gone into production. Six of the eight most costly productions started in France that year were registered under the Anglo-French Agreement. The use of the English language and the size of the investments involved had traditionally set British-French films apart from other European co-productions, but the budgets of 1492, Conquest of Paradise (over $43m), The Lover ($30m) and City of Joy ($27m) reached unprecedented levels. On the one hand, the film-events of Ridley Scott, Jean Jacques Annaud and Roland Joffe responded to the demands of distributors for spectacular films (…). On the other hand, the European directors’ endeavours to shoot ‘unfilmable’ stories in ‘impossible’ locations represented a challenge few financiers were prepared to take.

All British-French co-productions made between 1988 and 1992 were shot in English, even 80 per cent French films such as Valmont and The Lover. The British partners responsible for raising finance often proved unable to fund their side of the deal from UK sources.

Despite the lack of British finance and the fact that the films were shot in far-away locations where costly sets had to be built and hundreds of extras hired (in India for City of Joy, in Vietnam in the case of The Lover, in Costa Rica for 1492), and that, in the case of the majority French film The Lover, the main principals were non-French nationals, the films were registered under the official co-production Agreement. (…) under the terms of the Anglo-French Agreement in spite of such obvious irregularities is highly informative on how far European—notably French—policymakers were prepared to go to let European films have a chance to compete with American products. A ‘glossy style’, high production values, a massive distribution and a mixed—not to say a poor—critical domestic reception were characteristics The Lover and 1492 shared with Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and Louis Malle’s Damage, another two British-French co-productions released in 1992.

The use of the Anglo-French Agreement to make English-language films with global appeal was not the sole prerogative of well-established European directors in the early 1990s. Non-European filmmakers who were attracted to Europe where they felt directors were able to enjoy artistic freedom and recognition, did not find the official Agreement obstructive. In 1990, Australian director Ben Lewin had filmed The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish in Paris. (…) New Zealander Vincent Ward made The Map of the Human Heart, a Canadian—Australian-French-British film, and Argentine Luis Puenzo shot his adaptation of Camus’s novel, The Plague, in Buenos Aires. 1993 saw therelease of Friends, Elaine Proctor’s South African drama, and Orlando, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Sally Potter shot on location in Russia in a deal with Lenfilmstudios. In 1994, came A Business Affair, (…) scripted and directed by Charlotte Brandstrom, a French, Swedish-born LA-based filmmaker, The Prince of Jutland, an historical drama shot in Denmark by the Oscarwinner director of Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel), and Before the Rain, a film directed by the Macedonian-born director, Milcho Manchevski.

By choosing a story that needs a large canvas, filmmakers from smaller countries—in terms of their film industry—are ‘condemned’ to work with foreign partners. Some found that, in Europe too, the logistics of a story spanning several decades (The Plague, Orlando) and/or several continents (The Map of the Human Heart) can be problematic, particularly for the less experienced filmmaker who must also learn how to control a multinational cast and crew and cope with the conflicting demands of producers involved in a multiplicity of deals (thirty-five in the case of Ward’s film). […]

Curiously, whilst the large-budget films of the ‘global players’ tend to ignore contemporary issues, the co-productions made by both non-European filmmakers and the British and French directors working with small budgets, attempt, with varying degrees of success, to confront and negotiate cultural differences. Prague, for example, deals with both the European experience of the Holocaust and the possibility of a new relatedness within Europe. In Britain, Ian Sellar’s whimsical portrayal of a Westerner obsessed with his past and confronted with Eastern Europeans living in the present was found so ‘contrived’ that a reviewer wondered ‘if it had been funded by an obscure EC grant encouraging Czech/ Scottish cultural exchange’ (Empire, no. 41, November 1992:36). […] Reviewing the film at the Cannes film festival and admiring the way Prague skilfully incorporated into the script communication problems and misunderstandings between people who do not speak the same language, Positif hailed Prague as a paradigm of European Cinema. The strong continental feel of a film like Sellar’s Prague may have won its director the appreciation of cinephiles and screenings at film festivals, but it did very little to improve the film’s chances of success with distributors.

[…] At the 1992 European Exhibition Conference, the Portuguese representative pointed out that ‘market prospects for European films were damaged by audience conception of what constitutes a European film, a preconception dating from the Nouvelle Vague’. According to Vasconcelos, European films were dismissed by European spectators as ‘films difficult to enjoy’ (Hopewell 1992:13). British-French co-productions were no exception, particularly those which did not benefit from generous production and promotion budgets.

On the eve of European unification, the renewed collaboration between Britain and France offered mixed results. If the large-scale film-events directed by well-known filmmakers claiming to be ‘citizens of the world’ were more successful with audiences than the domestic fare, their ratings did not necessarily benefit from the fact that they often came to be regarded as ‘Hollywood movies’ (and were even labelled as such in the French and British press). […] The discrepancies between the performance of the British-French-Spanish 1492, Conquest of Paradise in its coproducing countries emphasize the fragmentation of the European market and indicate that, ‘on the Continent’, cultural and nationalistic considerations continue to play a part in attracting domestic audiences still used to seeing national films with home-grown stars on their cinema screens. […] In France, the validity of a policy which allowed films in the English language and with a minimal French input to qualify as French works came under attack from both the intellectual establishment and the film industry. […] In 1992, access to French funds became restricted for films shot with a minimal French input and in a language other than French. (…) between 1992 and 1994, no film with a budget over $10m was registered under the Anglo-French Agreement and most co-productions were British-initiated. The only exception was the tripartite majority Canadian Highlander III.

Well before November 1994, when the Agreement was finally ratified to allow tripartite co-productions, Britain and France had entered into multi-lateral co-productions (five European co-producing partners were involved in Orlando) and non-English language productions. In 1993, Before the Rain was shot in Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Albanian and English; 1994 projects include two French-language films, Le Roi de Paris and Wind of Anger, and the Russian-language Chonkin.

In 1993, the United Kingdom had joined Eurimages, the Council of Europe’s pan-European support fund, of which France was a founding member. It had also signed the European Cinematographic Convention (…). (…) most registered co-productions have received the support of the British Screen-managed European Co-production Fund and several small and medium size budget co-productions have had the backing of Eurimages and/or several of the Media initiatives. If, for Britain, the shift to continental Europe reflected ‘both necessity and the inclinations of the management of British Screen’ (BFI 1993:29), the co-productions’ modest budgets bear witness to the meagre resources of British producers. French interest did not disappear, but the 1992 regulation changes meant that French producers no longer automatically looked to British partners for their international productions.

However, as the 1993 French production figures showed, the protectionist attitude of the French establishment and its obsession with francophony should not be exaggerated. […] (…) whilst the rules for accessing the funds of the Automatic Support Fund were being tightened, changes in the Sofica (Sociétés de financement de l’industrie cinématographique et de l’audiovisuel]  regulations were introduced whereby the Sofica’s possibilities of investing in non-French-speaking films were being enlarged.

Somewhat conflicting in nature, those various changes reflect the dilemma of the French caught between their global ambitions and their desire to retain a policy geared to helping domestic production and to promoting plurality and artistic autonomy. From a French perspective, the Anglo-French Agreement offered enough flexibility to depart from rules which could prevent the wider national strategy from achieving its goal and sufficient rigidity to consider complying with them, should such strategy be altered

(…) the Agreement has played an important part in the effort to produce in Europe large-scale international films which respond to the demand of distributors and cinema audiences for spectacular entertainment. Art cinema is also well represented with The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989), Prospero’s Books (1990) and The Baby of Macon (1992). The sustained popularity of Peter Greenaway’s films amongst European cinephiles demonstrates that a personal style can transcend national and linguistic barriers (Porter 1985:9).

(…) few filmmakers have attempted to explore the possibilities of a ‘new European cinema’ (Prague, Orlando) and non-EC citizens (Ward, Puenzo, Manchevski) have explored cross-cultural issues more readily than their French and British counterparts. (…) one can argue that it is a considerable achievement that, at a time when their countries are in the process of renegotiating their own identity, British and French producers are prepared to invest in new emerging talent from different cultures. Clearly, they cannot be accused of adopting the ‘Fortress Europe’ approach. […] (…) the use made of the Anglo-French Agreement in the late 1980s and early 1990s may even serve to testify to the vitality of an economic and cultural Europe open to others. In many ways the efforts of British and French producers, directors and policy-makers to work together and the problems they encountered are symptomatic of the situation faced by Europeans willing (…) to experiment with a changing form of popular culture.

In the late 1980s, the strategies adopted by policymakers for the various European and pan-European programmes, whether EC- or Council of Europe-initiated, along with an increasing range of private initiatives, seemed to bear witness to the ingenuity and the vitality of Europeans in the audiovisual sector. The number and diversity of the Media projects alone were sufficient to disperse any fear of cultural homogeneity. […] In recession-hit France too, financial incentives for film production are to be much more closely linked to the box office performance of films both at home and abroad. Ironically, state support and subsidies for ‘potentially commercial films’ are likely to be less acceptable than for ‘auteur films’ or films directed by first-time filmmakers. In a country which calls cinema ‘the seventh Art’ and where the director is still a highly respected (and often self-indulgent) figure and where commercial success is often frowned upon, such new direction makes the production of low-budget art movies more vulnerable.

On the co-production front, the archaic bi-lateral Anglo-French Agreement has now been replaced by a more flexible arrangement allowing for purely financial participation. If the recently amended Agreement better reflects the economic reality of film production, it offers no guarantee that the new co-productions express the diversity of European cultural identities. […] The Anglo-French Agreement does not carry a cultural remit. By contrast, in 1992, the European Convention on cinematographic co-productions emphasized again the somewhat conflicting aims of the Council of Europe: ‘to achieve a greater unity between its members’ and ‘to defend the cultural diversity of the various European countries.’ […] It has been argued that the attempted creation of a truly regional (or European) culture may ultimately be a hollow enterprise because the dominant media organizations are already connected to a web of audiences, finances and missions that extend beyond what those regional (or European) policymakers have in mind (Strover 1994).

European rhetoric continues to stress both unity and diversity despite the marked shift in emphasis from unity to diversity in audiovisual policy measures between 1982 and 1992 (Collins 1994:99). In 1994, a single European culture and identity is still a non-entity. Close examination of the evidence gathered on the films registered under the Agreement between France and the United Kingdom shows that such identity, as reflected in the English-language international co-productions, is little more than a longing for a mythical bond rooted in a lost past and used to sell Europe to the world markets. […] Their films mark the emergence of new symbol systems giving consideration and value to current European cross-cultural concerns. There is no reason to believe that, given a decent promotion budget and a better distribution schedule, their pictures could not prove profitable. […] The new proposals, in sharp contrast with earlier priorities given to low-budget productions and the promotion of artistic freedom and creativity, run the risk of cutting short the very experiments that stood a chance of supporting Europe’s claim to offer an original and healthy alternative to Hollywood. […] Several countries have shied away from direct government intervention in their rapidly disappearing film industries. Today, European legislators have become more vigilant. A stricter quota enforcement may do little to slow down the internationalization of film production, but it will ensure that the proper conditions for indigenous productions are met and that the cultural specificity of the sector is recognized and safeguarded. […] There are signs that in Europe, what may have begun as a necessary form of film financing can turn into the production of symbol systems that contribute to the fostering of both cultural pluralism and international unity and understanding. On the ability of such forms to develop depends not only the survival of the cultural specificity Europeans are anxious to defend, but the very possibility of the globalization of cultures.

[Film: The Lover/L’amant (1992), dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud]