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]
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