Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives [Part II – 8]

Moran AM, et al., editors. Film Policy: National, international, and regional perspectives. 1st ed. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 8, Film Policy in Latin America; p. 142-161.

8

FILM POLICY IN LATIN AMERICA

Randal Johnson

In Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the countries with longest and strongest cinematic traditions, film industries have developed in a cyclical pattern in which moments of success have been followed by periods of decline and crisis. In smaller countries filmmaking has tended to be sporadic at best (…). Political turmoil, economic instability, high inflation rates and debt crises have contributed to the instability of national industries.

During the last three decades television has consolidated itself as what Thomas Elsaesser calls the ‘hegemonic force’ in most national contexts (Elsaesser 1993:123). With the ready availability of recent feature length films on video cassette, the home has replaced the movie theatre as the preferred venue for film viewing (…). […] Latin American film industries have by and large failed to do so. In countries such as Brazil, which possesses the fourth largest commercial television network in the world, TV Globo, there is little integration between the two media.

During a film festival held recently at the Museum of Image and Sound in São Paulo, one of the participants in an organized debate suggested that ‘film and video are things of the past’ (Coelho 1994:13). […] (…) established exhibition circuits have been unable to hold their own, much less modernize facilities, resulting in the dramatic decline of theatrical markets throughout Latin America. Transnational cultural products, including, besides the cinema, the programming of broadcasters such as ESPN, HBO, MTV and CNN, transmitted—in English, Spanish and Portuguese—via cable and satellite delivery systems, have become even more ensconced as a significant part of the daily fare of audiences throughout the hemisphere.

[…] Film policies have developed over time and with different configurations—depending on the specificities of the national context and the structure of the industry—in order to guarantee at least a modicum of stability for future development and to ensure the production of culturally serious or aesthetically experimental filmmaking which might not survive if subject to exclusively commercial measurements. (…) old paradigms (…) based by and large on corporatist support of (…) a portion of the production sector (…) at the expense of other sectors (…) have revealed their limited effectiveness. Theatrical markets continue to decline, films continue to be unprofitable (…). In some cases existing structures of film policy have been abolished (Colombia), revived and strengthened (Argentina, Venezuela), transformed (Mexico), or have simply imploded (Brazil).

OCCUPIED MARKETS

Any discussion of film policy in Latin America must be set within the context of the US film industry’s historical domination of national markets. […] The expansion of home video has only served to reinforce this almost absolute domination. Unable to depend even on home markets for a return on investments, and lacking access to significant ancillary markets, unprotected Latin American film industries have lacked the capital necessary to sustain continuous production on a large scale. (…) the result has been the underdevelopment (…), despite short-lived moments of success (e.g. the ‘Golden Age’ of Mexican cinema, the Brazilian chanchada).

Throughout Latin America, furthermore, the film going public historically has been conditioned by the standards of European and American cinema, which dominated local markets (…). These films displayed levels of technical perfection impossible for incipient national industries, and (…) they imposed certain cultural models of the ‘proper’ or preferred form of cinematic discourse. Audiences became accustomed to that form and have been reluctant to (…) alternative forms, even if produced locally. Latin American cinema has found itself in a double bind. On the one hand, it has not had the economic resources to equal the technical achievements of advanced industrial countries, and on the other, it has often lacked audience support for introducing different modes of filmmaking.

[…] Elsaesser goes on to say that the independent cinemas that had emerged, often with a politically or aesthetically radical thrust, faced the option of either coexisting with Hollywood on Hollywood’s terms, or virtually ceasing to exist

CINEMA/STATE

When state support has waned, as in Argentina after the fall of Peron in 1955 or during the López Portillo administration in Mexico (1976–82), the strength of the industry has also declined (Schnitman 1984:39–40; Maciel 1993:33). Feature films in Colombia were almost non-existent until the establishment of the Fondo de Promoción Cinematográfica (FOCINE) in 1978. Film production in Venezuela increased steadily in the 1980s after the creation of the Fondo de Fomento Cinematográfico (FONCINE) in 1981. The strongest period in the history of Chilean cinema coincided with the Unidad Popular years and Allende’s election to the presidency, when the cinema became incorporated into government policy. The state has been heavily involved in the re-emergence of a culturally and politically significant Argentine cinema in the post-dictatorship period—what has been called a ‘cinema of redemocratization’—through the activities of the Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía (Newman 1993). The same has occurred in relation to the recent resurgence of Mexican cinema, which has been supported by revigorated policies of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE). To a very large extent the hopes of Brazilian filmmakers rest on the promise of renewed investments in the film industry by recently elected president Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The modes of film production, distribution and exhibition are shaped by a variety of industrial, economic, cultural, aesthetic and ideological factors. As an industry, the cinema in Latin America is affected by state measures in ways not affecting other art forms. (…) it depends largely on imports for virtually all production equipment, as well as raw film stock, it is sometimes dramatically affected by changes in import or exchange policies. […] Development has been hindered by foreign trade accords in which, bowing to pressure from Hollywood, governments have agreed to the principle of free flow of motion pictures across international boundaries. (…) in Brazil trade accords have made it lessexpensive to import foreign prints than film stock. In short, even without direct government protection of intervention, Latin American cinema is in many ways dependent on or shaped by the state and its policies.

Cultural policies in different national settings by necessity vary according to the set of cultural and social values at stake. Rationales for state cultural policies are often cast in terms of the notion that culture is an integral part of development and that as the ultimate guarantor of a nation’s cultural unity and identity, the state has a legitimate responsibility to protect society’s cultural memory and heritage, to defend its cultural values, to stimulate cultural production, and to ensure that culture is not defined exclusively by market criteria.

Governments have their own interests and their own reasons for intervening—or not intervening—in support of different sectors of cultural production, and those interests may not always coincide with those of the cultural producers. By its very nature, the state determines the parameters within which artists may act, and in most cases they have relative freedom as long as they stay within these parameters.

The state, Weber suggests, has a monopoly on legitimate coercion and violence, which inevitably functions as a component of its policy towards culture. Although they can and often do control the distribution of cultural goods through censorship and repression, most states would normally prefer to control by indirect constraints and consensus. […] Cultural policies are never simply a question of ‘defending’ a national identity or ‘supporting’ certain forms of cultural production.

Cinema-state relations are a two-way street. Since at least the 1920s industrial groups or professionals in different Latin American countries have requested state protection and aid, and governments have responded in accordance with their own priorities and designs.

PROTECTIONIST POLICIES

Octavio Getino suggests that approaches to film practice and film industry development in Latin America have been shaped by two opposing strategies, one based on ‘economism’, which sees the film industry and its products in purely economic terms, the other based on what Getino calls ‘ideologism’, or a privileging of the ideological and cultural aspects of the cinema over commercial potential (Getino 1987:9–11) […] The fundamental opposition between commercial and cultural interests is often at the root of tensions which have arisen within Latin American cinema over the last few decades and has often shaped state policies of support of local industries.

By its very nature a film industry produces objects which are both symbolic goods and economic commodities. In most contexts the cinema’s viability as a form of artistic expression depends on the availability of production financing, which in turn depends on the film’s potential to attract a fairly wide audience and attain success in the market. The artistic and economic aspects are often intricately intertwined. In ideal terms, one might suggest that state policies towards national film industries have as their goal the creation of a situation in which the production of artistically or culturally relevant films is guaranteed through measures designed to strengthen the industry as a whole. The ideal, however, rarely becomes reality.

Jorge Schnitman distinguishes between restrictive, supportive and comprehensive protectionist policies. A restrictive policy, which includes such measures as screen and import quotas as well as import tariffs and customs duties, is designed to give the local industry some breathing room by impeding a complete takeover of the local market by foreign concerns. A supportive policy includes direct state support of the industry in the form of bank loans and credit, prizes, production subsidies and other forms of film financing, assistance in reaching foreign markets, and training of film industry technicians. […] A comprehensive state policy would include both restrictive and supportive measures (Schnitman 1984:46).

In Latin America, some kind of protectionist legislation is in effect in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru and Venezuela (Getino 1987: Table 46). (…) those countries have also imposed screen quotas—the compulsory exhibition of national films—which have often been the backbone of film policies in Latin America.

Screen quotas have taken various forms, including the forced exhibition of national short films in each programme of foreign films, the establishment of a certain number of days per year of compulsory exhibition, the stipulation of a percentage of films exhibited which must be locally produced, or the setting of a proportion of national films to be exhibited in relation to numbers of foreign films released.

In Latin America, compulsory exhibition legislation first began to appear in 1932, when the Brazilian government implemented a policy mandating the exhibition of a national short film with every programme of foreign films. The Mexican screen quota dates from 1939, when the Cárdenas government (1934–40) made the exhibition of one domestic film per month mandatory. In Argentina, compulsory exhibition legislation was first implemented in 1944. Screen quotas in Colombia, Peru and Venezuela are more recent, dating only from the 1970s. (…) after the bottom dropped out of the Brazilian film industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the quota became a dead letter, and in Mexico, following new legislation inspired by neo-liberal, free market ideas, the quota will be gradually phased out over the next few years (…).

The major benefit of the screen quota is that it does guarantee some space in the market for national production which otherwise might not find exhibition outlets because of the almost total domination of domestic markets by foreign films. In this sense, it may well be a necessity for the continued existence of national filmmaking in some contexts.

                First of all, whereas governments can legislate the compulsory exhibition of national films, they cannot legislate compulsory attendance by a public long conditioned by the products of Hollywood. Second, quotas have been difficult to enforce, since exhibitors have long seen them as an unwanted (and unwarranted) government imposition. In somecases, exhibitors have simply refused to fulfil the quota.

                In one sense—and this has long been at the crux of exhibitors’ arguments against screen quotas—compulsory exhibition forces one sector to risk a potential financial loss for the benefit of another. Exhibitors have tended to respond in two ways: through the courts and by producing their own ‘quota quickies,’ that is, low cost films made exclusively to fulfil compulsory exhibition obligations. In Brazil, production by exhibitors gave rise to the soft-core pornochanchada in the 1970s and to hard-core pornography in the 1980s. […] One contributing factor for the decline of FOCINE in Colombia (…) is that exhibitors revolted when the government attempted to increase a tax on box-office receipts—FOCINE’s major source of income and, consequently, Colombian cinema’s major source of production financing—from 8.5 per cent to 16 per cent.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

Without a screen quota and other protectionist measures, Brazilian cinema very likely would exist only on the most crass commercial basis, if at all. At the same time, state policy towards the film industry has clearly led to a loss of profits for exhibitors and is at least partially responsible for the current decline of the exhibition sector, which has been pernicious for the Brazilian film industry as a whole.

The relationship between the state and the exhibition sector deteriorated steadily over the last two decades, primarily because of exhibitors’ resistance to increasingly interventionist government policies. In 1974, O Estado de São Paulo ran an article with the headline ‘The great duel of national cinema’, referring to (…) between exhibitors and state-supported producers as analogous to a Western movie, with the producer as hero, the exhibitor as villain, and the state as sheriff. […] In its report for the second half of 1988, Concine lists suits filed by thirty-two exhibition companies (not counting multiple co-litigants) representing over 10 per cent of the total number of theatres in Brazil (Concine 1988:314–17).

As of the late 1980s, Brazilian cinematic legislation stipulated that exhibitors must show national films at least 140 days per year, regardless of the number of Brazilian films produced in a given year or the quality of those films. Although exhibitors could negotiate with distributors of foreign films, they were obligated to pay a minimum of 50 per cent of net income for Brazilian films. They were also obliged to show a national short subject as part of each programme of foreign films, purchase standardized tickets and box-office income recording sheets from Embrafilme at inflated prices, and keep Brazilian films in exhibition as long as the average of total spectators for two weeks or more equalled 60 per cent of the previous year’s weekly average.

In return, exhibitors received virtually nothing from the state except the disdain which has long characterized producers’ attitudes towards the sector. Although it was among Embrafilme’s attributes to attend to the needs of the sector, it refused to divert funds from production and did not even provide subsidies or low-interest loans to help them renovate their equipment and theatres. The result of the authoritarian imposition of unwelcome measures was a decline in income and a deteriorating sector which led to the closing of many theatres, especially in the interior of the country (…). […] The proof of the failure of the Brazilian government’s policy towards the exhibition sector—and towards Brazilian cinema as a whole—is the dramatic decline in the number of theatres in operation in the country, now under 1,000 for a country of 150 million. […] Thus foreign films have an additional advantage since they have normally covered costs and made a profit prior to entering the Brazilian market.

                In Venezuela (…) the government has offered financial incentives to exhibitors for showing national films, including an increase in ticket prices, which had been frozen for several years, in exchange for 6.6 per cent of profits from foreign films. It has encouraged cooperation with the sector, by providing (…) an additional 6.6 per cent of receipts for Venezuelan films. All of this led to increased revenues for financing local production. Public support of national films has also led some distribution chains to invest in Venezuelan film production (King: 1990 219–20). In Argentina the government, while seeking increased access to the exhibition market, has offered to pay for the opening week’s expenses at first-run movie theatres when national films are shown (Variety 1993). In Mexico, which has long been the most statist of all Latin American countries with regards to the cinema, at one timeholding a virtual monopoly of distribution and exhibition outlets, the state exhibition sector is being privatized and the state is phasing out the screen quota, forcing Mexican cinema to sink or swim in the marketplace.

                (…) Latin American countries have tended to act within the same range of possibilities: financing credits, low-interest loans, state- backed coproductions, various kinds of subsidies and subventions, advances on distribution, and coproductions between the state and private producers or between the state, private producers and foreign concerns. (…) countries have resorted to taxes on box-office receipts, which puts a primary burden on the exhibition sector, taxes on profit remittances by foreign distributors, taxes on the production sector (e.g. in Brazil there existed a mandatory ‘contribution’ for film industry development paid by producers), and even direct budgetary appropriations.

Latin American film industries have discovered, however, that even comprehensive state policies—combining restrictive and supportive policies—are insufficient to truly guarantee stability. In some cases, such as Colombia and Venezuela, among others, when filmmaking got underway the domestic market had already been divided up among foreign interests. Competing in such a market, based on a precarious cinematographic infrastructure, is virtually impossible.

FILM POLICY IN BRAZIL

The Brazilian film industry has, in the last decade, faced the most severe crisis of its history, a crisis that threatens its very existence. Never has a Latin American film industry experienced such a rapid climb and such a precipitous fall. Its experience illustrates the pitfalls of film policies throughout Latin America and may well represent a lesson to be learned by other governments (…).

In the late 1970s, it seemed that Brazilian cinema, supported by the state film agency, Embrafilme (Empresa Brasileira de Filmes), would finally take off and reach an unprecedented level of stability and prosperity.

Despite such success, the 1980s witnessed a downturn that reversed the economic growth of the previous decade. The number of theatres in the country dropped from 3,276 in 1975 to slightly over 1,500 in 1984 to less than 1,100 in 1988. In 1994, Variety reported the number of screens in the country to be only 800. The occupancy rate for all theatres dropped from 19 per cent in 1978 to a mere 12 per cent in 1984, and annual attendance per capita went from 2.6 times in 1975 to 0.8 in 1983. Attendance figures for Brazilian films dropped from the 1978 high of 60 million to less than 24 million in 1988 and has continued to plummet, as national film production declined from 102 films in 1980 to eightyfour in 1983 to less than ten in 1991 (…). (…) the crisis was perhaps less apparent in the number of films produced than in their quality. Between 1981 and 1985, hard-core porn accounted for an average of almost 73 per cent of total production, a trend which continued at least through 1988, a year in which twenty of the thirty top-drawing Brazilian films were pornographic (Jornal da Tela, March 1986:3).

On one level, of course, the crisis of Brazilian cinema in the 1980s reflected the larger crisis of the national economy in a period when the so-called economic ‘miracle’ of the 1967–73 period (…) was replaced by an economic nightmare with a 100 billion dollar foreign debt and near hyperinflation. The economic crisis forced the government to impose severe restrictions on imports, making film production costs rise dramatically and accentuating what is often called the ‘dollarization’ of the film production process. Film production costs increased rapidly at a time when the market was shrinking, thus accelerating the process of decline, and ticket prices, which have long been controlled by the government, did not keep pace with inflation, further reducing the industry’s income. High inflation rates have made filmgoing a luxury for much of the Brazilian population.

One of the major lessons learned from the situation in Brazil is that without social legitimacy a successful government policy of film industry support is impossible. Such legitimacy is not automatic; it must be earned, and without authoritarian impositions on one sector (e.g. exhibition) in order to support the corporatist interests of another. […] Although it can certainly aid and assist, the state cannot, by itself, replace the private sector and ensure the future of film industries in Latin America.

[Film: Os Bons Tempos Voltaram: Vamos Gozar Outra Vez aka The Good Times Are Here Again: Let It All Hang Out (1985), dir. Ivan Cardoso, John Herbert]

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]

Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives [Part I – 4]

 Moran AM, et al. Film Policy: Internacional, national, and regional perspectives. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 4, The crime of monsieur Lang: GATT, the screen, and the new international division of cultural labour; p. 88-100.

THE CRIME OF MONSIEUR LANG

GATT, the screen, and the new international division of cultural labour

The diversity of European cultures and ways of life,…roughly translated, means the need to protect the sector from U.S. competition.

(Stern 1994a:18)

It’s a war to protect art, say the French. What art, ask the Americans.

(Cohen 1994: H1)

 We’re going to ruin your culture just like we ruined our own.

(Jay Leno, 1994 promotional spot for the pan-European NBC Super Channel)

[…] The last gasp of the GATT came with the 20,000 page protocols, weighing 850 kilogrammes, that were agreed in Geneva in December 1993, signed in Marrakesh in April 1994, and ratified domestically by its 125 members and fellow-travellers over the next eight months. But its effects will be felt—through the work of the new organization—beyond its life. Although the audiovisual market was extremely prominent in these deliberations, in keeping with the shift in emphasis from trade in goods to trade in services (TIS), the US attempt to proscribe cultural protectionism was opposed by virtually every other nation, and cinema and television were finally excluded from the agreement.

THE GATT

Who can be blind today to the threat of a world gradually invaded by an identical culture, Anglo-Saxon culture, under the cover of economic liberalism?

(François Mitterrand quoted in Brooks 1994:35)

This is a great and beautiful victory for Europe and for French culture.

(Alain Carignon, French Minister for Communications quoted in Facts 1993:931)

Since its emergence in the late 1940s as part of a range of new international financial and trading protocols, the GATT has embodied in contractual form central aspects of the First World’s rules of economic prosperity (…). It was born under the sign of North American growth evangelism, whereby standardized methods, vast scales of production and an endless expansion of markets would be the engine of economic recovery and development for the West European detritus of the Second World War, (…) initial plans for an independent organization were shelved because the US Congress resisted any ceding of individual sovereignty (an ironic history […]). GATT stood for the paradoxically bureaucratic voice of neoclassical economics, dedicated beyond the call of parochial national interests and state intervention to the higher service of promulgating free trade. […] Such pristine forms of theorization routinely enunciate quite specific and partial material interests; in this instance, the agenda of the United States, which was suited by such arrangements until Japan and the European Community (EC) became powerful economic agents that were able to make some rules of their own. […] The seemingly transcendental nature of marginalist economics, which set up good/bad antinomies in the form of liberalism versus mercantilism, became a conditional argument, to be used as and when it suited the purposes of its self-interested enunciators (the US was extremist in one direction over cinema and television, in another on agriculture). The highly moral mode of the GATT itself became its legalistic ruination, as new forms of protectionism appeared via non-tariff implements and industry policy to match the varied positions of member states. […] On balance, the GATT has functioned most effectively for the First World, such that 20 per cent of the world’s population currently conducts over 80 per cent of its international business.

                The services (…) has expanded massively over the last decade, to the point where it now comprises 70 per cent of gross domestic product in the industrialized nations and 50 per cent in much of the Third World, accounting for US $1 trillion a year in trade, perhaps a fifth of the global total (Drake and Nicolaïdis 1992:37; Economist 1994: 55). The GATT was slow to notice this growth, in part because the tenets of neoclassical dogma, and the technological limitations of the ‘human’ side to the sector (…) were not especially amenable to conceptualizing and enumerating its frequently object-free exchange. […] TIS was found to comprise, inter alia, film, television, and broadcast advertising production and distribution (Sjolander 1992–3:54n. 5; Grey 1990:6–9). The Punta del Este Declaration of September 1986 put TIS at the centre of GATT debates, because of pressure from the US (always the main player in negotiations) in the service of lobbyists for American Express, Citibank and IBM. […] The final agreement struck to end the seven year Uruguay Round was negotiated by a small number of industrialized nations and then delivered to a hundred other countries with a weekend to ponder the final draft (Childers 1994:5).

                The GATT’s institutional legacy, the WTO, will have a legal personality, a secretariat and biennial ministerial conferences. This new machinery will make it easier for multinational corporations (MNCs) to dominate trade via the diplomatic services of their home government’s representatives (…). Multinationals will find it easier to be regarded as local firms in their host countries, and Third World agricultural production will be opened up further to foreign ownership (Lang and Hines 1993:48–50; Dobson 1993:573–6). Continuation of work on TIS should be amongst the first tasks of the new body. But despite its high-theory commitment to pure/perfect competition, political pressures mean the WTO will need to devote a great deal of care to archaeological, artistic and historic exemptions to free-trade totalizations (…) (Chartrand 1992).

AMERICAN AUDIOVISUAL EXPORT

Unrestricted advertising encourages the growth of the type of fast-moving, cheaply produced programming (‘satellite slush’) evidenced on Super Channel, with its bland melange of Dutch football, world gold sponsored by Korean air, re-run ads for Kelloggs cereals and Clausthaler beer, third-rate Australian movies, Flipper and other old Hollywood standbys, American college football and corporate-sponsored news and weather in slow, tedious English.

(Keane 1991: 82)

Entertainment is one of the purest marketplaces in the world. If people don’t like a movie or record they won’t see it or buy it. The fact that the American entertainment industry has been so successful on a worldwide basis speaks to the quality and attractiveness of what we’re creating.

(Robert Shaye, Chair of New Line Pictures quoted in Weinraub 1993: L24)

The fact that de-industrialization has left the US the most indebted nation in world history is mitigated by its surplus in aerospace and the screen, and by its immense internal audience of film goers and TV stations which is matched by a growing global market, following deregulation abroad of public-service broadcasters and the decline of state-socialist cultural and communication systems. Unacceptable barriers to a balance of screen trade that is even more favourable to the US include local media content quotas, restrictions on foreign ownership of the press, subsidies to screen industries, and subvention and diplomacy designed to assist audiovisual bourgeoisies in exporting their product.

[…] But attempts to have the Uruguay Round of the GATT derail such policies were almost universally opposed, with significant participation from India, Canada, Japan, Australia, all of Europe, and the Third World in the name of cultural sovereignty. […] Of course, American negotiators argued that the GATT must ‘agree to disagree on motives—cultural sovereignty or business opportunity—and then start negotiating.’

Despite this coalition of forces, everyone saw the French as the true bulwarks against open audiovisual trade. Hence my title’s troping reference to Jack Lang, initially French Minister for Culture and then with added responsibility for Communication (and finally Education) over most of the decade up to the conclusion of the GATT. He vigorously contested American dominance in the area (…). Lang ran a dualistic policy divided between the promotion of cultural industries, such as film, and the conservation of national heritage. The expansion of his portfolio responsibilities to include communications was a recognition of the significance of TV in both these areas. In the audiovisual sphere, he wanted to build French audiences, to draw them from Hollywood by following a producer—and writer-led model of industry development. At the 1993 Venice Film Festival, he outraged an audience that included Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese with a splenetic diatribe against American film (Hayward 1993:383–4; Weinraub 1993: L24). Meanwhile, US government agencies were pressuring distributors, exhibitors, and politicians around the world to open up the audiovisual sector to additional imports, leading to bizarre acts of resistance such as Korean film-industry people releasing snakes into theatres during screenings of Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) to scare audiences away (Buck 1992:129).

Some crucial facts are forgotten in this terpsichory of diplomatic and business hypocrisy. The US government endorses trust-like behaviour overseas, whilst prohibiting it domestically. And its local film industry has been aided through decades of tax-credit schemes, film commission assistance, state and Commerce Department representation, the Informational Media Guaranty Program’s currency assistance, and oligopolistic domestic buying and overseas selling practices that (without much good evidence fordoing so) keep the primary market essentially closed to imports on grounds of populartaste (Guback 1987:92–3, 98–9; Schatz 1988:160; Thompson 1985:117–18, 122–3;Guback 1984:156–7). (…) Hollywood’s Motion Picture Export Agency (…) referred to itself as ‘the little State Department’, so isomorphic were its methods and contents with US policy and ideology. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is authorized to classify all imported films, which it can proscribe as ‘political propaganda’ (…) (Sorlin 1991:93; Parker 1991:135, 137).

And too much is made of the barriers to American exports. […] the EC is clearly an expanding market for imports, despite its cultural protectionism: US film revenue from members of the Community increased throughout the 1980s, to 90 per cent of total sales there by 1990. If we consolidate TV, film and video textual traffic, the balance of screen trade is clearly lopsided. As at mid-1994, the American industry relied on exports for US $8 billion of its annual revenue of US $18 billion, with 55 per cent of that coming from Western Europe (Daily Variety 1994:16). Europe imported US $3.7 billion in 1992, compared to US $288 million in reciprocal sales; and the disparity is increasing. […] The top-ten grossing Hollywood films of 1992 all made more money overseas than at home, while screen exports totalled US $6.7 billion in 1991, up 13 per cent on the previous year and double the figure from a decade earlier. Film rentals amounted to US $4 billion in 1993, more than half from outside the US.

THE NEW INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF CULTURAL LABOUR

We have created a product that by, say, putting the name of Warner Brothers on it is a stamp of credibility. But that could be an Arnon Milchan film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Gerard Depardieu and Anthony Hopkins, and shot in France and Italy, and made with foreign money.

(John Ptak, Creative Artists Agency of Hollywood quoted in Weinraub  1993: L24)

The idea of the NICL echoes the retheorization of economic dependency theory that emerged from West Germany in the late 1970s after the unprecedented chaos of that inflationary decade. In place of the classical division of labour models, the opportunity provided by new markets for labour and sales and the shift from the spatial sensitivities of electrics to the spatial insensitivities of electronics pushed businesses away from treating Third World countries as suppliers of raw materials. They came to be regarded instead as shadow-setters of the price of work, competing internally and with the First and Second Worlds for employment opportunities. Manufacturing practices were not only divided within the plant, but across the globe. (…) the life of production is split across continents (Fröbel, Heinrichs and Kreye 1980:2–8, 13–15, 45–8).

                Unlike the vertically integrated studio system of the classical Hollywood era, most US film production is now undertaken by small editing, lighting and rental studio companies that work with independent producers and sell their services across a variety of audiovisual industries. Films are shot across the world, but central decisions and post-production facilities are concentrated as much as ever in Los Angeles in a hybrid complex of entertainment sectors. This is efficient for an industry where standardization is important to keep costs down, but innovation remains critical as a hook for audiences. […] Production went overseas from the 1950s as the world audience grew, location shooting became a means of differentiating stories, and studios purchased facilities across the globe to utilize cheap labour. Between 1950 and 1973, just 60 per cent of Hollywood films in production began their lives in the US (Christopherson and Storper 1986).

                […] By the end of the 1980s, overseas firms were crucial suppliers of funds invested in Hollywood and loans put up against distribution rights in their countries of origin (Buck 1992:119,123). Joint production arrangements are well-established between US studios/producers and French, British, Swedish and Italian companies, with connections to theme parks, cabling and home video. These are far from being straightforward instances of a unilateral exercise of power. […] The American Film Institute is anxious about any loss of cultural heritage, and others either question what is happening to local US drama that may now be scripted with special attention to foreign audiences or worry that the importation of ‘understated drama and subtle entertainment’ from Europe crowds out space for local production. The ‘quality’ versus ‘entertainment’ arguments may be shifting—tremulously but marginally—into reverse (Briller 1990:75–8; Forman quoted in Briller 1990:77; Quester 1990:56–7).

                (…) this is not a serious problem to anybody looking in from the outside. (…) the international screen has some peculiarities that do not apply to manufacturing. First, it is risky on all but a huge scale: the vast majority of investments are complete failures, a pain that can only be borne by large competitors. Second, whilst new technology problematizes the necessity for the co-location of shooting, editing and financing, it also reduces the need for ‘authenticity’. The tide of co-production is clearly towards the NICL, with host governments working together against or with American power. (…) the overall trend is still for the US industry to attract talent that was originally developed as part of national-cinema policies: expected to compete with North America, not be absorbed by it. This is what Michael Apted recently referred to as a ‘Europeanizing of Hollywood’ (quoted in Dawtrey 1994:75).

CULTURAL POLITICS: EUROPE=CIVICS, US=COKE

FBI + CIA = TWA + Pan Am • graffito written by Eve Democracy in One + One

(Jean-Luc Godard, 1969)

Think of the Mexican entertainment market, with its young population and fast-growing middle class, as a teenager out looking for a good time after being cooped up for too long. For economically emerging peoples all over the globe, Hollywood speaks a universal language.

(Gubernick and Millman 1994:95)

If the European Commission governments truly care about their citizens’ cultural preferences, they would permit them the freedom to see and hear works of their choosing; if they are really concerned about a nation’s cultural heritage, they would encourage the distribution of programming reflecting that heritage.

(Jack Golodner, President of the Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, 1994: H6)

                The 1993 GATT agreement on services, seven years in the making, was at risk until the last. Agriculture had long drawn the headlines (…), but the final obstacle (…) was the dispute enacted between Western Europe and North America, effectively France against the United States, over these questions of film and TV. The Americans sought a stop to all EC subsidies and quotas (…). (…) the French argued from an entirely other set of precepts, which accepted that cultural products are public as well as private goods, with an historic and national significance inimical to the calculus of utilitarian individual maximization. (…) one justifying monopolistic competition on the grounds of the fabled sovereign consumer, the other justifying state support in the name of the fabled sovereign citizen. Where the consumer was a fully formed subject making a rational choice in favour of entertainment and distraction, the citizen was an insufficiently knowing subject in need of education in civic presence and fealty.

                Both positions are the outcome of contingent moralisms. […] (…) US governments have often been alarmed at the very international, arriviste nature of their own industry (French 1994:37). For its part, the EC’s process of unification has been four decades of disagreement over the primacy of state sovereignty over supranationalism, internal economic competition versus cooperation, and centralized as opposed to demotic decision-making (Hainsworth 1994:9). The abiding logic of the Community’s audiovisual policy is commercial: it clearly favours existing large concerns that can be built upon further. And the NICL has served to bring into doubt the opposition US—entertainment, Europe—education, with art cinema effectively a ‘Euro-American’ genre in terms of finance and management, and, as was noted earlier, much of Hollywood itself owned by foreigners (Lev 1993). (…) when the EC had a primarily economic personality, is misleading: a notion of cultural sovereignty underpins concerns vis-à-vis the US, but so too does support for monopoly capital and the larger states inside its own walls (Burgelman and Pauwels 1992). Meanwhile, the old notions of state cultural sovereignty that were so crucial to Europe’s political traditions are being attenuated by the twin forces of ‘bruxellois centralization’ from outside and separatist ethnicities from within (Berman 1992:1515).

                For a long period towards the end of the Uruguay Round, Bill Clinton’s team of negotiators seemed to be indefatigably opposed to the French. […] Early in December 1993, Clinton’s principal delegate, Micky Kantor, accepted continued state subvention of cultural production in Europe and elsewhere, whilst remaining committed to the removal of levies on cinema admissions and video hire and purchase. But a week later, even this was gone in the interests of achieving some outcome at the GATT […] (Hill 1994a:1).

                It would be a mistake to regard the exclusion of audiovisual trade from the Marrakesh accord as a conclusion to the debate, however. As Jaques Attali (1994), founding President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, has said, an agreement to disagree is no zero signified. […] It may even be that part of the European taste for Hollywood is formed, paradoxically, by exposure to its own production; in other words, the US is an entertainment ‘other’, alluring precisely because it has the weight of Europe against it, and hence benefiting from competition that would not be present without the subsidized screen. For to be left with a monopoly in inessential items—which is what Hollywood desires—is ultimately to run out of stimulus, difference and appeal. […] On the negative side of the ledger, the WTO is unlikely to do much for screen growth in Africa, where local film industries are in any event hampered by the International Monetary Fund’s insistence on severe currency devaluations (building on the monopolistic conduct of the legally validated American Motion Picture Export Company (Africa)) (Ukadike 1994:306; Guback 1984:157).

                Inside the US, doubts are being expressed about the entire GATT process. Although the outcome will ultimately benefit the great and powerful, in the first instance it must eliminate tariffs of its own. Legislation means that this loss of revenue, potentially US $12 billion, has to be offset by increased taxes or decreased spending.

                […] (…) US firms are negotiating on a country-by-country basis over most communications issues, regardless of the European bloc’s stance at the GATT (Emmy 1994: A17). […] The Community itself makes both hostile and friendly sounds, with many commercial TV networks failing to observe national production quotas, while Valenti is claiming that the film and television industries should be conceptually disaggregated in policy making, as the latter is clearly growing of its own accord (Stern 1994b:39; Zecchinelli 1994:13; Stern 1994c:1). Meanwhile, France and the US have announced informal bilateral talks, and Spielberg is being reinvented by Paris. After Jurassic Park, he was derided in Europe for rampant commercialism, drawing particular opprobrium from French Culture Minister Jacques Toubon. And Spielberg was among the Hollywood directors who argued against the European position in the GATT. But less than a year later, Schindler’s List was being hailed as a triumph of serious filmmaking, and he was invited to meet Mitterand to discuss both the Holocaust and the film industry. He left the Élysée Palace full of support for the continuation of local film making and the maintenance of cultural heritage (Daily Variety 1994:1; Williams 1994:55–6).

                […] (…) referring to US satellite programming as ‘a genuine war machine’. Meanwhile, the new stations throughout the continent invest in local programming with cost savings from scheduling American fillers (Stevenson 1994:6). And the US Department of Commerce continues to produce policy materials on media globalization for Congress that run lines about both economic development and ideological influence, problematizing claims that Hollywood is pure free enterprise and that its government is uninterested in blending trade with cultural change (Ferguson 1992: 83–4).

                […] If the day comes when the United States complains that Japan’s ideological objections to organ transplants are non-tariff barriers to the export of the American heart, or takes issue with the French for prohibiting patents on DNA maps on the grounds that they represent an inalienable human heritage, we shall see this debate played out again on less entertaining terrain. For this is the crowded hour of the first instance of economic versus cultural determinations […].

[Film: Schindler’s List (1993), dir. Steven Spielberg]

Film Policy: International, National, and Regional Perspectives [Part I – Policy in a Global Industry – 1]

Moran AM, editor. Film Policy: International, national, and regional perspectives. London (United Kingdom): Routledge; 1996. 1 – Adjusting to the new global economy, Policy in a global industry; p. 38-52.

Adjusting to the New Global Economy

Hollywood in the 1990s

The 1980s were good to Hollywood. Without having nurtured the new television distribution technologies, Hollywood became the beneficiary of two lucrative ancillary markets, pay-TV and home video (Balio 1990:262–70). […] Changes in the global political and economic environment, particularly the commercialization of broadcasting systems worldwide, created additional sources of profit. And on the horizon, still newer technologies offered even more intriguing opportunities for growth.

Conditions such as these led to the ‘globalization’ of the film industry. […]

Upgrading international operations to a privileged position, the Hollywood majors expanded ‘horizontally’ to tap emerging markets worldwide, formed ‘down-stream’ alliances with independent producers to enlarge their rosters, and ‘partnered’ with foreign investors to acquire new sources of financing. […]

THE DOMESTIC MARKET

Home video and pay-TV invigorated motion picture exhibition during the 1980s by enhancing the status of the theatre in the distribution chain. To consumers, the performance of a feature film at the box office established its value at the video store and on cable television. The vitality of the theatrical market, coupled with the laissez-faire approach to anti-trust by the Reagan administration, convinced the majors ‘to take another fling with vertical integration’ (Gold 1990). […]

Home video and pay-TV also stimulated demand for product. Domestic feature film production jumped from around 350 pictures a year in 1983 to nearly 600 in 1988. Oddly, the majors contributed little to the increase; in fact, the number of in-house productions of the majors held steady (…), between seventy and eighty films a year (Cohn 1990). The additional films came from the so-called ‘mini-majors’ (…). […] These companies took the plunge thinking that even a modest picture could earn money from the sale of distribution rights to pay-cable and home video. Although the proceeds from such sales were insignificant by Hollywood standards, the ‘pre-selling’ of rights to these markets could offset the entire production cost for an inexpensive picture and might make the difference between profit and loss for a more ambitious project.

Rather than producing more pictures, the majors exploited a new feature film format, the ‘ultra-high budget’ film (Logsdon 1990:11). The format was popularized by Carolco Pictures, an independent production company (…) that got its start with the Rambo movies starring Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s. (…) Carolco specialized in action-filled blockbusters and paid top stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger enormous fees to carry them. […] The most expensive pictures in 1989, such as Batman (Warner), The Abyss (20th-Fox), and Tango & Cash (Warner) cost twice the average (Fabrikant 1990a).

‘Ultra-high’ budgets and saturation booking went hand in hand. To recoup their investments as quickly as possible, film companies regularly booked new releases into 2,000 and more screens. Print and advertising costs tripled as a result to over $12 million per film on the average by 1989. […] The strategy resulted in ‘ultrahigh’ grosses; for example in 1989, six pictures grossed over $100 million in the US, (…) Batman (Warner, $250 million), Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (Paramount, $195 million) (…)

With pictures like these in distribution, it was no surprise that the 1980s concluded with record-breaking box office results. In 1989, admissions reached a five-year high of 1.13 billion, and the box office a high of over $5 billion (Velvet Light Trap 1991). […]

The blockbuster had the desired effect from the majors’ perspective of raising the expectations of movie goers for high production values, special effects and big-name stars. But in the process, the ‘ultra-high budget’ picture seriously undermined the ability of smaller firms to play the game. A shake out occurred in the independent market in 1989 as many independent producers went bankrupt. […] Marginal films—those judged unlikely to recoup print and advertising costs—were shelved; others were lucky if they secured any playing time. […] To get national exposure, a picture had to open in New York and receive favourable reviews.

THE FOREIGN MARKET

The growth of the overseas market during the 1980s was a result of the upgrading of motion picture theatres, the emancipation of state-controlled broadcasting, the spread of cable and satellite services, and the pent-up demand for entertainment of all types. […] The largest revenue components for Hollywood product overseas had become video, theatrical and TV, in that order.

The largest influx came from Western European television. When governments liberated the broadcast spectrum, the number of privately-owned commercial television stations and cable and satellite services grew enormously. […] By 1989, Western European television reached 320 million people and 125 million households (vs 250 million people and 90 million households in the United States) and showed the potential of becoming the largest single market for Hollywood entertainment (Logsdon 1990:50).

Although Hollywood had become the principal supplier of programming to these new services, the value of this trade was considerably less than theatrical distribution. This disparity existed because in most major European markets, governments had erected import quotas on television programs similar to those imposed on motion pictures after the Second World War.

But European unification did not proceed as planned, so that the largest single source of revenue for Hollywood in Western Europe remained home video. The spread of VCRs in Western Europe demonstrated that, given a choice, consumers preferred entertainment with greater appeal and more variety than their state broadcasting monopolies provided. […] Like their counterparts in the United States, European VCR owners not only wanted to time shift programming to suit their own schedules, but also to enjoy different kinds of programming, particularly Hollywood movies. […] By 1990, video sales in the European Economic Community totalled nearly $4.5 billion, with the lion’s share generated by Hollywood movies (Watson 1992).

Western Europe’s video business was likewise fuelled by theatrical exhibition. By 1990, the major American film companies collected around $830 million in film rentals from Western Europe, which came to about half of the film rentals they earned in the United States (Illist 1991).

Two factors helped sales: more and better theatres and more effective advertising outlets. Going into the 1980s, nearly every market outside the US was under screened. Western Europe (…) had about one-third the number of screens per capita as the United States, despite having about the same population (Illist 1991). And most of its theatres were old and tired. To rejuvenate exhibition and to encourage movie going, American film companies and European exhibitors launched a campaign during the 1980s to rebuild and renovate theatres on the continent.

Taking advantage of the advertising opportunities created by commercial television, Hollywood pitched its wares as never before. […] Spending lavishly on advertising, the majors were able to bolster their ultra-high budget pictures in theatrical and in ancillary markets and overwhelm smaller, indigenous films that could not compete in such a high-stakes environment.

GLOBALIZATION

Urges to merge

Hollywood’s first response to globalization was to shift operations from vertical integration (e.g. studios acquiring theatre chains) to horizontal integration (e.g. studios partnering with other producers and distributors) (Logsdon 1990:4). The shift departed significantly from the merger movement of the 1960s, which ushered the American film industry into the age of conglomerates. […] Acquiring theatre chains in the 1980s was an extension of this philosophy. Horizontal integration was designed to strengthen distribution and represented a new way of controlling the world entertainment market.

Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of 20th-Century-Fox in 1985 triggered the recent merger movement. Murdoch’s goal was nothing less than to create ‘the world’s first global television, publishing and entertainment operation’ (Cohen 1990:31).

Paramount Communications and Warner Communications, two of the strongest companies in the business, responded to globalization by ‘downsizing’ to concentrate on a core group of activities. Paramount Communications was the successor company to Gulf + Western, a multifaceted conglomerate that had acquired the studio in the 1966. […] Under the leadership of Martin Davis, G + W shed over fifty companies during the 1980s and created a new identity for itself by becoming a global communications and entertainment giant known as Paramount Communications.

Under the direction of Steven J. Ross, Warner Communications had evolved into a diversified entertainment conglomerate involved in a wide range of ‘leisure time’ businesses (…) In 1982, Warner decided to restructure its operations around distribution. […]

The ‘downsized’ Warner Communications emerged as a horizontally-integrated company engaged in three areas of entertainment: (1) production and distribution of film and television programming; (2) recorded music; and (3) publishing. […] (…) Warner had acquired the distribution systems associated with each of its product lines, including Warner Cable Communications, the nation’s second biggest cable operator with 1.5 million subscribers. Warner added considerable muscle to its distribution capability when it merged with Time Inc. in 1989 to form Time Warner, the world’s pre-eminent media conglomerate valued at $14 billion (Time Warner 1989).

Time Warner touted its merger ‘as essential to the competitive survival of American enterprise in the emerging global entertainment communications marketplace’ (Gold 1989:5). It had in mind not only the takeover of 20th-Century-Fox by Australia’s News Corp., but also the anticipated acquisition of Columbia Pictures Entertainment (CPE) by Japan’s Sony Corporation, which actually occurred later in 1989 at a cost of $3.4 billion. […]

The third takeover of an American media company by a foreign firm occurred when Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, the largest consumer electronics manufacturer in the world, purchased MCA in 1990 for $6.9 billion. Like its rival, Sony, Matsushita ‘thought the entertainment “software” business could provide higher profit margins than the intensely competitive, and now largely saturated, consumer electronics appliance business’ (Pollack 1994: C1).

The parent of Universal pictures, MCA, had relied on television production and distribution for stability. Year in and year out, MCA’s profitable television operations accounted for over a quarter of the company’s revenues. In 1985, MCA had more network shows on prime time than any other producer. […] Afterwards, MCA saw its share of the television market shrink as stations stopped buying one-hour action programmes, MCA’s strength, in favour of half-hour comedies. And because MCA’s share of the US box office had also declined, the company altered its course by going on an acquisitions binge in 1985. […] The diversification strategy was designed to strengthen MCA’s existing positions and to extend the company into contiguous businesses.

Partnering domestically

Hollywood’s second response to globalization was to compete for talent, projects and product for their distribution pipelines. After the breakdown of the studio system during the 1950s, the majors regularly formed alliances with independent producers to fill out their rosters and to create relationships with budding talent. A deal might involve multiple-pictures, complete financing, worldwide distribution and a fifty-fifty profit split. (…) they typically involved partial financing, domestic distribution and lower distribution fees. (…) the majors needed not only more pictures to increase market share but also a means of sharing the risks and potential benefits of distributing ultrahigh budget pictures (Hlavacek 1990; Natale 1991).

After aligning with TriStar, Carolco delivered three big-budget blockbusters in a row, Total Recall (1990), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Basic Instinct (1992). To raise financing, Carolco originally made a public offering of stocks (…). Carolco’s strategy was to cover as much of the production costs for a picture as possible by preselling the ancillary rights piece by piece, country by country. […] Thus the partnership lowered the risks of production financing for Carolco and enabled TriStar to share in the profits of an ultra-high budget picture without much of an investment (Stevenson 1991).

Columbia’s relationship with Castle Rock differed in that Columbia functioned as an equity partner as well as a distributor. […] Rather than going public for funding, Castle Rock sold stakes in the company to Columbia, Westinghouse Electric, Credit Lyonnais and other investors (Weinraub 1992). Castle Rock turned out hit movies just about every year, including When Harry met Sally… (1989), Misery (1990), City Slickers (1991), A Few Good Men, (1992) and In the Line of Fire (1993).

Warner’s deal with Morgan Creek provided substantial advances for production and advertising in return for domestic distribution rights. […] Founded in 1988 by James Robinson, a West Coast Subaru importer, Morgan Creek’s strategy was to produce big-name ‘event’ films to compete in the risky overseas market. The company’s biggest blockbuster was Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991).

Partnering with a group of independents that specialized in foreign art films and offbeat American fare, Walt Disney Co. and Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) moved aggressively into the independent field. […] (…) Disney hired a new management team headed by Michael Eisner to energize the studio. Setting a new course, Eisner transformed Disney into a motion picture heavyweight by forming Touchstone Films in 1984 and by aiming at the young adult market (Business Week 1986). As a result of a string of hits that included Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Ruthless People (1986), Three Men and a Baby (1987), Stakeout (1987),and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Disney captured an incredible 20 per cent share of the domestic theatrical market in 1988.

Branching out further into the adult market in 1993, Disney linked up Merchant-Ivory and Miramax Films, two of the most successful art film companies in the business. According to Peter Bart of Variety, Disney’s strategy was ‘to foster an eclectic slate of projects’ (…).

In addition to Howards End, Merchant-Ivory had made thirty-one films in as many years, including its breakthrough hit A Room With a View (1986) (…). The Disney deal was for three years and provided 50 per cent financing for any film the team developed with a budget up to $12 million in exchange for domestic rights. […] The arrangement freed Merchant-Ivory from having to raise substantial sums for financing and enabled it to take advantage of Disney’s considerable distribution might. The arrangement provided Disney with prestigious films aimed at adults that carried little financial risk (ibid.)

Disney’s deal with Miramax consisted of a $90 million buy out in which Disney acquired Miramax’s library of 200 art films and agreed to finance the development, production and marketing of Miramax’s movies. (…) Miramax had ‘become a logo that brings audiences in on its own’. Adopting a straight acquisition policy from the start, Miramax rose to the front ranks of the independent film market in 1989, when three of its pictures drew critical and commercial attention: My Left Foot, which starred a then relatively unknown Daniel Day-Lewis; Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which garnered a Palme d’Or at Cannes (…); and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, which won an Oscar for best foreign film and grossed $12 million to become the year’s highest-grossing entry in this category (Frook 1992).

Expanding its roster to over twenty-five pictures a year in 1992, Miramax released Mediterraneo, which won an Academy Award for best picture and became the top foreign language import of the year, and Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, which won an Academy Award for best screenplay and became a crossover hit by breaking into the mainstream market and grossing more than $50 million (Fleming and Klady 1993). In 1993, Miramax had two more big hits, Alfonso Arau’s Like Water for Chocolate and Jane Campion’s The Piano. A Mexican import, Like Water grossed over $20 million to become ‘the all-time foreign language box office champ’ in the United States, surpassing the record of $19 million held by the Swedish import I Am Curious (Yellow) since 1969 (Karlin 1993). Produced at a cost of $2.5 million, this award-winning Mexican romance returned its investment in a remarkably short time thanks to Miramax’s aggressive marketing campaign.

[…] Miramax acquired The Piano only weeks before it was shown at Cannes and shared the festival’s top prize with another Miramax pick up, Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine. At home, The Piano won a record eleven Australian Film Institute awards and in the United States, eight Academy Award nominations and three Oscars, including best original screenplay. […] As a fully-autonomous division of Disney’s distribution arm, Miramax sustained its position in the independent film market by releasing Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994 (Frook 1993b).

Turner moved into the independent film market by acquiring New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment in 1993 at a combined cost of $700 million. The founder of superstation WTBS in Atlanta and the owner of one of the largest film libraries in the business, Turner had become a principal programme supplier to cable. (…) the New Line and Castle Rock acquisitions fit neatly into Turner’s plans to become a major motion picture producer (Robins and Brennan 1993).

Castle Rock made its reputation producing top-shelf pictures (…). (…) New Line made its fortune during the 1980s producing and distributing genre pictures aimed at adolescents—the Nightmare on Elm Street horror series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and two House Party films. Under the leadership of Robert Shay and MichaelLynne, New Line (…)created a division called Fine Line Features in 1990 to produce and distribute art films andoff beat fare. Within two years, Fine Line rose to the top independent ranks by backing such American ventures as Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), James Foley’s Glengary Glen Ross (1992), and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) and by releasing such English languageimports as Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) and Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993)(Weinraub 1994a). Fine Line initially steered away from foreign-language entries, butsubsequently released Maurizio Nichetti’s Italian import, Volere Volare in 1992 (Stevenson1992). With Turner’s financial backing, Castle Rock and New Line announced plans to sharply increase production beginning in 1994, the expectation being that TBS wouldsoon rival Paramount and Warner as motion picture suppliers.

Partnering internationally

Hollywood’s third response to globalization was to seek an international base of motion picture financing. To reduce its debt load, Time Warner restructured its film and cable businesses and created Time Warner Entertainment as a joint venture with two of Japan’s leading companies, electronics manufacturer Toshiba and trading giant C.Itoh. The deal netted Time Warner $1 billion (Laing 1992). […] Following the tack of independent producers, 20th-Century-Fox pre-sold the foreign rights to two high-profile ‘event’ films, Danny De Vito’s Hoffa (1992) and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992), to reduce its exposure (Variety 1991b). Another common practice was to seek out co-production deals to take advantage of film subsidies in overseas markets. Studios chose this option mostly with ‘unusual material’—which is to say a picture that was not a sequel, that did not have a major international star, or that did not have an ‘unflaggingly high-concept’—such as Universal’s Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Paramount’s 1492 (1992) (Natale 1992b).

To finance television programming, the majors invested in foreign media industries. (…) the European Economic Community decided against removing trade barriers and tariffs on movies and television programmes in 1992 (…). No longer did these companies think of Western Europe only as a programming outlet: instead they considered it as another investment source and formed partnerships with European television producers, broadcast stations, cable and satellite networks and telecommunications services.

AFTERMATH

Signalling a resurgence in the merger movement, Paramount Communications, one of the two remaining major studios besides Disney not to change ownership during the 1980s, was acquired by Viacom Inc. for $8.2 billion in 1993. […] The following year, Viacom acquired Blockbuster Entertainment, the world’s largest video retailer with over 3,500 video stores and various side businesses—purchase price, $7.6 billion.

Aside from the belief that bigger is better to compete in the international market, the motivation for these combinations was a faith in synergy, a belief that one plus one could equal three. […] Acquiring New Line Cinema and Castle Rock Entertainment, Turner Broadcasting moved into the front ranks of Hollywood and positioned itself for global expansion.

After spending billions to acquire CBS Records and Columbia Pictures Entertainment, Sony lavished money ‘on hiring executives at enormous salaries and giving golden handshakes to others, on bonus pools reaching into the millions, on perks and for rebuilding the studios to make offices and dining rooms the sleekest in Hollywood’ (Weinraub 1994).

Sony performed reasonably well under the new regime until 1993, but afterwards, Columbia and TriStar struggled to fill their distribution pipelines. Virtually all of Sony’s hits had been produced by its independent producer affiliates, Carolco and Castle Rock. But when the Carolco deal lapsed and Castle Rock hooked up with Turner, Sony lagged behind the other majors in motion picture production and market share.

The Matsushita-MCA marriage foundered as well, but for different reasons. By producing a string of hits that included two Steven Spielberg blockbusters, Jurassic Park (1993) and Schindler’s List (1993), MCA become a financial bright spot in the Matsushita empire as it confronted the recession in Japan and the rising value of the yen.

The second surge of mergers that started with the Viacom takeover of Paramount Communications will continue and probably involve the three major American television networks. […]  Since the networks would likely reduce the number of programmes they ordered from outside producers and rely more on in-house projects after the expiration of the ‘fin-syn’ rules, big suppliers like Time Warner and Disney might be hard hit. To avoid this, conventional wisdom had it that the majors would work to control the networks to ‘assure themselves of a guaranteed outlet for their product’ (Fabrikant 1994a).

The globalization of motion picture industry has significant film policy implications for the following reasons: (1) it has resulted in the growth of giant media companies in Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Australia and Japan, as well as in the United States; (2)it has occurred with the consent of foreign governments, the same entities that formulatenational film policy; (3) it has resulted in ownership changes of Hollywood studios either through takeovers by foreign companies or through partnerships with overseas investors;and (4) it has created more demand for ‘software’, to the benefit of talent, and more entertainment options, to the benefit of consumers.

[Film: Pulp Fiction, 1994, dir. Quentin Tarantino]

Quarto de Despejo [parte final/entrevista]

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de despejo, Ed. Ática, 2014.

…A pior praga da favela atualmente são os ladrões. Roubam a noite e dormem durante o dia. Se eu fosse homem não deixava os meus filhos residir nesta espelunca. Se Deus auxiliar-me hei de sair daqui, e não hei de olhar para trás.

p. 118-119

Quando os artistas foram almoçar os favelados queriam invadir e tomar as comidas dos artistas. Pudera! Frangos, empadinhas, carne assada, cervejas. (…) Admirei a polidez dos artistas da Vera Cruz. E uma companhia cinematográfica nacional. Merece deferência especial. Permaneceram o dia todo na favela. A favela superlotou-se. E os visinhos de alvenaria ficaram comentando que os intelectuais dão preferencia aos favelados.

p.120

O João e a Vera deitaram-se. Eu fiquei escrevendo. O sono surgiu, eu adormeci. Despertei com o apito da Gazetaanunciando o Ano Novo. Pensei nas corridas e no Manoel de Faria. Pedi a Deus para ele ganhar a corrida. Pedi para abençoar o Brasil.

Espero que 1960 seja melhor do que 1959. Sofremos tanto no 1959, que dá para a gente dizer:

Vai, vai mesmo!
 Eu não quero você mais.
 Nunca mais!

A entrevista que segue foi organizada a partir de depoimentos e textos da autora, e reproduz fielmente a linguagem dos originais.

Por que a senhora começou a escrever?

Quando eu não tinha nada o que comer, em vez de xingar eu escrevia. Tem pessoas que, quando estão nervosas, xingam ou pensam na morte como solução. Eu escrevia o meu diário.

Como é que uma pessoa que não teve educação escolar consegue compreender e expressar tão bem a realidade dos pobres e dos miseráveis?

Não é preciso ser letrado para compreender que o custo de vida está nos oprimindo.

O que a senhora sentiu quando viu o livro Quarto de despejo pronto, encadernado, com seu texto em letras de imprensa?

Fiquei alegre olhando o livro e disse: “o que eu sempre invejei nos livros foi o nome do autor”. E li o meu nome na capa do livro. “Carolina Maria de Jesus. Diário de uma favelada. Quarto de despejo”. Fiquei emocionada. É preciso gostar de livros para sentir o que eu senti.

Em seu livro, a senhora, além de mostrar a realidade dos favelados, falou mal dos políticos, dos poderosos. A senhora, sendo pobre e desprotegida, não tinha medo de fazer essas denúncias e acusações?

Eu era revoltada, não acreditava em ninguém. Odiava os políticos e os patrões, porque o meu sonho era escrever e o pobre não pode ter ideal nobre. Eu sabia que ia angariar inimigos, porque ninguém está habituado a esse tipo de literatura. Seja o que Deus quiser. Eu escrevi a realidade.

Quarto de despejo [parte nove]

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de despejo, Ed. Ática, 2014.

7 DE MAIO …Lavei todas as roupas. Jurei nunca mais matar porco na favela. Eu estou tão nervosa que recordei o meu provérbio: não há coisa pior na vida do que a própria vida.

p. 103

Antes de sair recordei que devia dar comida para a cachorrinha. Olhei ela, que estava deitada. Dei-lhe um pedaço de carne e tentei despertá-la. Ela estava morta.

Morreu de tanto comer carne.

…Fui no Juiz. Receber o dinheiro que o pai da Vera me dá por intermédio do Juizado. (…) O advogado não quiz me dar a Ficha.

—Sem a ficha eu não atendo!

E bateu a porta no meu rosto. Fui falar com o advogado que o Dr. Walter não queria atender-me sem a ficha. Ele mandou um guarda acompanhar-me e disse-me:

—Muito bem, Carolina! Põe todo o mundo no Diário.

Acompanhei o guarda, que disse para o Dr. Walter Aymberê que devia atender-me sem a ficha.

—Não atendo! Se não trazer a ficha vou falar com o advogado chefe.

A Vera assustou-se e disse:

—Que homem! Porque é que a gente precisa de advogado, mamãe?

Eu disse para o guarda deixar. Eu vou embora. O Dr. Walter já está no meu Diário. Ele é muito grosseiro.

p. 104

28 DE MAIO …A vida é igual um livro. Só depois de ter lido é que sabemos o que encerra. E nós quando estamos no fim da vida é que sabemos como a nossa vida decorreu. A minha, até aqui, tem sido preta. Preta é a minha pele. Preto é o lugar onde eu moro.

p. 105

A saudade é amostra do afeto.

8 DE JUNHO …Quando cheguei e abri a porta, vi um bilhete. Conheci a letra do repórter. Perguntei a Dona Nena se ele esteve aqui. Disse que sim. (…) O bilhete dizia que a reportagem vai sair no dia 10, no Cruzeiro. Que o livro vai ser editado. Fiquei emocionada.

p. 106-107

Li o artigo e sorri. Pensei no repórter e pretendo agradecê-lo. (…) Troquei roupas e fui na cidade receber o dinheiro da Vera. Na cidade eu disse para os jornaleiros que a reportagem do O Cruzeiro era minha. (…) Fui receber o dinheiro e avisei o tesoureiro que eu estava no O Cruzeiro.

…Eu estava impaciente porque havia deixado os meus filhos e na favela atualmente tem um espirito de porco. Tomei o ônibus e quando cheguei no ponto final a jornaleira disse que as negrinhas da favela havia me chingado, que eu estava desmoralizando a favela. Fui no parque buscar a Vera. E mostrei-lhe a revista.

[…]

O João disse-me que o Orlando Lopes, o atual encarregado da luz, havia me chingado. Disse que eu fiquei devendo 4 meses. Fui falar com o Orlando. Ele disse-me que eu puis na revista que ele não trabalha.

—Que historia é esta que eu fíquei devendo 4 meses de luz e agua?

—Ficou sim, sua nojenta! Sua vagabunda!

—Eu escrevo porque preciso mostrar aos políticos as péssimas qualidades de vocês. E eu vou contar ao repórter.

—Eu não tenho medo daquele puto, daquele fresco!

Que nojo que eu senti do tal Orlando Lopes. (…) Vim para o meu barraco. Fiz uns bifes e os filhos comeram. Eu jantei. Depois cantei a valsa Rio Grande do Sul.

p. 108

…Na redação, eu fiquei emocionada. (…) O senhor Antonio fica no terceiro andar, na sala do Dr. Assis Chatobriand. Ele deu-me revista para eu ler. Depois foi buscar uma refeição para mim. Bife, batatas e saladas. Eu comendo o que sonhei! Estou na sala bonita. A realidade é muito mais bonita do que o sonho.

Depois fomos na redação e fotografaram-me. (…) Prometeram-me que eu vou sair no Diário da Noite amanhã. Eu estou tão alegre! Parece que a minha vida estava suja e agora estão lavando.

p. 109

O céu está maravilhoso. Azul claro e com nuvens brancas esparsas. Os balões tom suas cores variadas percorrem o espaço. As crianças ficam agitadas quando um balão vem desprendendo-se. Como é lindo o dia de São Pedro. Porque será que os santos juninos são homenageados com fogos?

O tal Orlando Lopes passou na minha rua. Ele disse que tudo que eu falo dele as mulheres lhe conta. São umas idiotas. Eu quero defendê-las, porque há ladrões de toda especie. Mas elas não compreendem.

p. 111

6 DE JULHO O senhor Manoel saiu. E eu fiquei deitada. Depois levantei e fui carregar agua. Que nojo. Ficar ouvindo as mulheres falar. Falaram da D., que ela namora qualquer um. Que a R., irmã do B., pertence aos homens. Falamos do J. P., que quer amasiar-se com a sua filha I. (…) Ele mostra para a filha e convida…

—Vem minha filha! Dá para o seu papaizinho! Dá… só um pouquinho.

Eu já estou cançada de ouvir isto, porque infelizmente eu sou visinha do J. P. (…) É um homem que não pode ser admitido numa casa onde tem crianças.

Eu disse:

—E por isso que eu digo que a favela é o chiqueiro de São Paulo.

Enchi minha lata e zarpei, dando graças a Deus por sair da torneira. A C. disse que pediu dinheiro ao seu pai para comprar um par de sapatos, e ele disse:

—Se você me dar a… eu te dou 100.

Ela deu. E ele deu-lhe só 50. Ela rasgou o dinheiro e a I. catou os pedaços e colou.

Por isso que eu digo que a favela é o Gabinete do Diabo.

[…]

p. 112

Perguntei a uma mulher que estava atrás de mim:

—Quem é o seu advogado?

—Dr. Walter Aymberê.

—Ele é o meu também. Mas eu não gosto dele.

…Eu recebi o grande dinheiro. 250 cruzeiros. A Vera sorria e dizia:

—Agora eu gosto do meu pai.

Passei na sapataria e comprei um par de sapatos para a Vera. Quando o senhor Manoel, um nortista, lhe experimentava os sapatos, ela dizia:

—Sapato, não acaba, porque depois a mamãe custa a comprar outro. E eu não gosto de andar descalça.

…Passei no emporio do senhor Eduardo e comprei um quilo de arroz. Sobrou só 7 cruzeiros. Só na cidade eu gastei 25. A cidade é um morcego que chupa o nosso sangue.

p. 114

…Eu fritei peixe e fiz polenta para os filhos comer com peixe. Quando a Vera chegou viu a polenta dentro da marmita e perguntou:

—E o bolo? Hoje eu faço anos!

—Não é bolo. E polenta.

—Polenta, eu não gosto.

Ela trouxe leite. Eu dei-lhe leite com polenta. Ela comeu chorando.

Quem sou eu para fazer bolo?

p. 115

26 DE JULHO …Era 19 horas quando o senhor Alexandre começou a brigar com a sua esposa. Dizia que ela havia deixado seu relogio cair no chão e quebrar-se. Foi alterando a voz e começou a espancá-la. Ela pedia socorro. Eu não imprecionei, porque já estou acostumada com os espetáculos que ele representa. A Dona Rosa correu para socorrer. Em um minuto, a noticia circulou que um homem estava matando a mulher. Ele deu-lhe com um ferro na cabeça. O sangue jorrava. Fiquei nervosa. O meu coração parecia a mola de um trem em movimento. Deu-me dor de cabeça.

Os homens pularam a cerca para impedi-lo de bater na pobre mulher. Abriram a porta da frente e as mulheres e as crianças invadiram. O Alexandre saiu lá de dentro enfurecido e disse:

—Vão embora, cambada! Estão pensando que isso aqui é a casa da sogra?

Todos correram. Era uns 20 querendo passar na porta. As crianças, ele chutou. A Vera recebeu um chute e caiu de quatro. Os filhos da Juana foram chutados. Os favelados começaram a rir.

A cena não era para rir. Não era comedia. Era drama.

p. 116

…Quando cheguei em casa estava com tanta fome. Surgiu um gato miando. Olhei e pensei: eu nunca comi gato, mas se este estivesse numa panela ensopado com cebola, tomate, juro que comia. Porque a fome é a pior coisa do mundo.

…Eu disse para os filhos que hoje nós não vamos comer. Eles ficaram tristes.

p. 117

Quarto de Despejo [parte oito]

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de despejo, Ed. Ática, 2014.

1959

[…] Cheguei no açougue, a caixa olhou me com um olhar descontente.

—Tem banha?

—Não tem.

—Tem carne?

—Não tem.

Entrou um japonês e perguntou:

—Tem banha?

Ela esperou eu sair para dizer-lhe:

—Tem.

Voltei para a favela furiosa. Então o dinheiro do favelado não tem valor? Pensei: hoje eu vou escrever e vou chingar a caixa desgraçada do Açougue Bom Jardim.

Ordinaria!

p. 94-95

7 DE JANEIRO …Hoje eu fiz arroz e feijão e fritei ovos. Que alegria! Ao escrever isto vão pensar que no Brasil não há o que comer. Nós temos. Só que os preços nos impossibilita de adquirir. Temos bacalhau nas vendas que ficam anos e anos a espera de compradores. As moscas sujam o bacalhau. Então o bacalhau apodrece e os atacadistas jogam no lixo, e jogam creolina para o pobre não catar e comer. Os meus filhos nunca comeu bacalhau. Eles pedem:

—Compra, mamãe!

Mas comprar como! a 180 o quilo. Espero, se Deus ajudar-me, antes deu morrer hei de comprar bacalhau para eles.

p. 95

15 DE JANEIRO …Deixei o leito as 4 horas e fui carregar agua. Liguei o radio para ouvir o programa de tango.

…O senhor Manoel disse que não vinha mais e apareceu. Ele penetrou na agua para chegar até o meu barracão. Resfriou-se.

Hoje eu estou contente. Ganhei dinheiro. Contei até 300! Hoje eu vou comprar carne. Atualmente quando o pobre come carne fica rindo atoa.

p. 96

16 DE JANEIRO …Fui no Correio retirar os cadernos que retornaram dos Estados Unidos. (…) Cheguei na favela. Triste como se tivessem mutilado os meus membros. O The Reader Digest devolvia os originais. A pior bofetada para quem escreve é a devolução de sua obra.

Para dissipar a tristeza que estava arroxeando a minha alma, eu fui falar com o cigano. Peguei os cadernos e o tinteiro e fui lá. Disse-lhe que tinha retirado os originais do Correio e estava com vontade de queimar os cadernos. […]

p. 96-97

O José Carlos perguntou-me se a gente vê a morte chegar. A Vera me mandou cantar.

…O José Carlos foi na feira catar qualquer coisa. Catou milho, tomate e beringelas. Eu almocei, fiquei mais disposta. Quando eu dou um gemido os filhos choram com medo do Juiz. O José Carlos disse-me:

—Sabe, mamãe, quando a morte chegar eu vou pedir para ela deixar nós crescer e depois ela leva a senhora.

…Para tranquilizá-los eu disse que não ia morrer mais. Ficaram alegres e foram brincar. O senhor Manoel chegou. Veio ver se eu melhorei. Fiquei contente com a visita.

p. 99

…Hoje o tal Orlando Lopes veio cobrar a luz. Quer cobrar ferro, 25 cruzeiros. Eu disse-lhe que não passo roupas. Ele disse-me que sabe que eu tenho ferro. Que vai ligar o fio de chumbo na luz e se eu ligar o ferro a luz queima e ele não liga mais. Disse que ligou a luz para mim e não cobrou deposito.

—Mas o deposito já foi abolido desde 1948.

Ele disse que pode cobrar deposito porque a Light deu-lhe plenos poderes. Que ele pode cobrar o que quiser dos favelados.

p. 100

29 DE ABRIL Hoje eu estou disposta. O que me entristece é o suicidio do senhor Tomás. Coitado. Suicidou-se porque cansou de sofrer com o custo da vida.

Quando eu encontro algo no lixo que eu posso comer, eu como. Eu não tenho coragem de suicidar-me. E não posso morrer de fome.

Eu parei de escrever o Diário porque fíquei desiludida. E por falta de tempo.

2 DE MAIO …Ontem eu comprei açúcar e bananas. Os meus filhos comeram banana com açúcar, porque não tinha gordura para fazer comida. Pensei no senhor Tomás que suicidou-se. Mas, se os pobres do Brasil resolver suicidar-se porque estão passando fome, não ficaria nenhum vivo.

p. 101

3 DE MAIO Hoje é domingo. Eu vou passar o dia em casa. Não tenho nada para comer. Hoje eu estou nervosa, desorientada e triste. Tem um purtuguês que quer morar comigo. Mas eu não preciso de homem. Eu já lhe supliquei para não vir aborrecer-me.

…Hoje o Frei veio rezar a missa na favela. Ele pois nome na favela de Bairro do Rosário. Vem varias pessoas ouvir a missa. No sermão o padre pede ao povo para não roubar.

…O senhor Manoel chegou e começamos a conversar. Falei de uma menina de um ano e meio que não pode ver ninguém mover a boca, que pergunta:

— O que é que você está comendo?

E a ultima filha do Binidito Onça. Percebi que a menina vai ser inteligente.

p. 101-102

Sempre ouvi dizer que o rico não tem tranquilidade de espirito. Mas o pobre também não tem, porque luta para arranjar dinheiro para comer.

Quarto de Despejo [parte sete]

Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de despejo, Ed. Ática, 2014.

Como é horrivel ouvir um pobre lamentando-se. A voz do pobre não tem poesia.

11 DE DEZEMBRO …Começei queixar para a Dona Maria das Coelhas que o que eu ganho não dá para tratar os meus filhos. Eles não tem roupas nem o que calçar. E eu não paro um minuto. Cato tudo que se pode vender e a miséria continua firme ao meu lado.

Ela disse-me que já está com nojo da vida. Ouvi seus lamentos em silêncio. E disse-lhe:

— Nós já estamos predestinados a morrer de fome!

[…]

14 DE DEZEMBRO …De manhã teve missa. O padre disse para nós não beber, porque o homem que bebe não sabe o que faz. Que devemos beber limonada e agua. Varias pessoas veio assistir a missa. Ele disse que sente prazer de estar entre nós.

Mas se o padre residisse entre nós, havia de expressar de outra forma.

p. 89

—Dona Carolina, eu estou neste livro? Deixa eu ver!

—Não. Quem vai ler isto é o senhor Audálio Dantas, que vai publicá-lo.

—E porque é que eu estou nisto?

—Você está aqui por que naquele dia que o Armim brigou com você e começou a bater-te, você saiu correndo nua para a rua

Ela não gostou e disse-me:

—O que é que a senhora ganha com isto?

…Resolvi entrar para dentro de casa. Olhei o céu com suas nuvens negras que estavam prestes a transformar-se em chuva.

p. 90

O senhor Pinheiro, digníssimo presidente do Centro Espirita, saiu para conversar com os indigentes. (…) Passou um senhor, parou e nos olhou. E disse perceptível:

—Será que este povo é deste mundo?

Eu achei graça e respondi:

—Nós somos feios e mal vestidos, mas somos deste mundo.

p. 91

Não sei porque é que estes comerciantes inconscientes vem jogar seus produtos deteriorados aqui perto da favela, para as crianças ver e comer.

…Na minha opinião os atacadistas de São Paulo estão se divertindo com o povo igual os Cesar quando torturava os cristãos. Só que o Cesar da atualidade supera o Cesar do passado. Os outros era perseguido pela fé. E nós, pela fome!

Naquela epoca, os que não queriam morrer deixavam de amar a Cristo.

Mas nós não podemos deixar de comer.

p. 91-92