SUBMISSION 24
Memorandum submitted by Mr Anthony Smith,
CBE, President of Magdalen College, Oxford
I note that among the matters into which your
Committee is enquiring is the future of the bfi and the
Museum of the Moving Image.
I was director of the bfi through the
1980s when we constructed MoMI together with new archive buildings
and new central premises for the Institute and its libraries.
I recall it as an era of constructive stability within the bfi
after a time of internal ructions in the 1970s and one in which
great progress was made in renewing and maintaining, within the
relatively small world of people who still clung to cinema, a
sense of the crucial importance of cinema in the formation of
a modern society. The tremendous cultural and social changes of
the 1960s provided the bfi with new roles and opportunities
and the disagreements within the film culture worldwide which
followed the 1960s turned out in the end to be fruitful and necessary
clearings of minds for the ensuing era of growth. People in education
as well as in the industry came to realise the importance of film-as-art.
The film industry came to take new forms and built new connexions
with television and all of this left the bfi with a series
of constituencies which needed and appreciated it—often
demanding far more than it could supply.
Since those days—and perhaps to a small
degree attributable to the bfi's work with the "core"
specialist constituency of cinema aficionados—the medium
has revived and cinema attendance all over the UK has risen. Channel
4 played an important role in the revival of cinema production
and one of our recent national tragedies is the strange decision
of Channel 4 to cease investment in cinema film, something that
can only be seen as a regrettable abandonment of one of its own
principal achievements. Let us hope the board of the Channel (on
which I served during its early years) will reverse its decision
as soon as circumstances improve.
My intention is to offer you a line of criticism
of recent Government policy affecting the bfi. The establishment
of the Film Council signalled the Government's excellent intention
to privilege cinema as an art form and to provide some of the
forms of support which are enjoyed in neighbouring EU countries.
Post-war Labour governments have all attempted to help cinema
in ways appropriate to the era and it was expected that New Labour
would want to do something "big" for the moving image.
The sums of money made available to and through the Film Council
have clearly risen considerably. But an error was, in my view,
made in creating an all-encompassing film autarchy into which
the bfi itself was swept. The value of the bfi has
always lain in its autonomy as a national educational and archival
institution, separate from the film industry and with interests
which were not always the same as those of the industry (although
in the longer sweep of time their interests tended to coincide).
For half a century the bfi helped this
country count for something in cinema world-wide, even during
those years when the industry was moribund (which is emphatically
not the case today). It was seen around the world as the oldest
and best organised such body, with extremely large collections
of films and associated materials. Its libraries were and are
excellent. Its national outreach was greatly envied in many countries.
Its educational work and lobbying work within the world of education
was notably creative and effective. It also was the fortunate
possessor of a small film production arm which concentrated in
experimental film-making and in "first features" by
emerging directors (for many years much of the resource for this
arm of the Institute came from Channel 4). Its board contained
expertise from the academic and museological worlds, conjoined
with that of every branch of the film and television industries
and this the Institute built a reputation as a source of expertise
and reliable information.
In setting up the Film Council the autonomy
of the bfi in relation to film as industry was destroyed.
The production board was closed and its range of work not substituted
elsewhere. With changes in the organisation of the arts more generally
the bfi's regional network was swept away. Inevitably a
demoralisation occurred. The bfi had itself created within
the sphere of film-as-art a full-scale and comprehensive network
of activities and services. Its interface with the film industry
was positive and extremely seldom conflictual. It guarded the
heritage and inspired innovation. It honoured past achievement
in a scholarly way; it provided opportunities for the newcomer,
whether to production, distribution or exhibition and it worked
within the new visual media to sustain a place for cinema. Its
annual Awards drew attention to the year's achievements in film
as cultural form.
But once placed within the aegis of the new
Film Council its initiative was stymied and its range constrained.
It saw the Council, inevitably, as a body which existed to compete
or even subvert ever more of the bfi's many functions.
For the Council was not just its funding agency and therefore
desiring its success but an institution which competed as it funded,
supervised while demanding accountability. This conflict was inevitable,
given the relationship of Council and Institute and not the fault
of anyone in particular; but it does not help matters that the
Chairman and Chief Executive of the Council are the previous Chairman
and Chief Executive of the Institute, the Chairman being someone
who in the distant but still remembered past had been mockingly
hostile to much of the work of the Institute.
It was also a demoralising tragedy that the
Museum of the Moving Image had been permitted to go out of existence.
The public understood this to be a temporary measure pending its
rebuilding at a nearby site; gradually this important arm of the
bfi seemed to evaporate from the Institute's plans and
the contents disbanded. No convincing statement as to the future
of the Museum has been issued, although much of a generally hopeful
nature has been said by Institute officers. Until MoMI was founded
the bfi catered entirely for adult or almost-adult specialist
publics. The National Film Theatre showcased cinema for people
for whom cinema was their principal cultural (or professional)
interest. The National Film Archive was similarly a service to
the film and television industries and to the academic and educational
community, as were (are) the Libraries of books and films. The
Education Department provided expert services for teachers and
lecturers. The bfi catered for a series of extremely important
specialist communities and through them reached out to the wider
public.
The idea behind MoMI was that it would be the
bfi's system of direct outreach to a much wider, younger
and less specialist public. And it fulfilled this vision admirably.
In the early years it became the 12th most popular attraction
in London (the Crown Jewels being Number One). After a decade
of operation it needed significant renewal. What it got was closure,
supposedly while a new site was acquired. But it was clear from
the cessation of involvement on the part of the bfi board
that any future MoMI would not really live out the ideals of the
original which was to be a modern "hands-on" venue providing
education in a thoroughly entertaining way.
One claim made was that MoMI was losing money.
But the bfi had been supplied with an endowment for MoMI
adequate to generate sufficient revenue to cover its budgeted
annual losses. The money, we learn, was spent on constructing
the Imax, which was itself, it was believed by some, going to
bring in an annual surplus to balance the loss on MoMI. This was
extremely unlikely. Let me hasten to say that I am in no way opposed
to the Imax; in fact in my closing months as Director, in 1988,
I chose the site and brought the president of the Imax Corporation
(who was also the inventor of the technology and is now, alas,
deceased) to see and approve the site. But it is inconceivable
that a free-standing Imax in its own building could generate a
large surplus, especially in an era when Imax is no longer confined
to a single other example in the UK, as it had been for many years.
Most Imaxes serve as income-generating arms of an existing museum;
a free-standing Imax is unlikely to generate a surplus.
Moreover, when building MoMI successive Ministers
had imposed upon the Board of the bfi, for perfectly good
reasons, the stricture that the Institute was never to approach
Government for support for MoMI, which was seen as a new and separate
venture and not a future unintended dependent upon government.
It surprised me, therefore, though many years out of office as
bfi Director, that the Secretary of State permitted the
bfi to spend its MoMI endowment in constructing the Imax.
But soon in any case the Film Council came into existence and
it rather than the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
was presumably overseeing the bfi. It may have forgotten
or decided to waive the various undertakings made by successive
bfi boards. At the very least, it seems to me, the Secretary
of State has some responsibility in the matter and should now
ensure that a new MoMI is established. MoMI was constructed entirely
on the basis of private benefactions but in the circumstances
a new MoMI would be unable to seek private benefactors, given
the failure of the bfi, the Government and the Film Council
to keep the object of previous benefactions in existence. It must
therefore be the responsibility of Government to bring it to life
again, in a form appropriate to the present era. Without it the
bfi has no, as it were, retail arm; it remains a wholesale
operation, serving specialist publics without a window on a wider
world. I do not think that in any other country a national enterprise
founded (and funded) by private benefactors for the public good
would be so churlishly treated, especially given its successfulness
and popularity among the young. In an age in which education of
the underprivileged has become a major political theme, it is
astonishing that this educational enterprise, praised the world
over, the object of prestigious European awards, dedicated to
the cultural forms of the present day, should have been abandoned
with so little attempt to protect it on the part of all the institutions
responsible. It is even more surprising that the public officials
responsible for the cultural institutions of the country who are
now all keen to encourage private support of the arts should avert
their gaze when the decision was taken to close MoMI. Potential
benefactors of the arts in Britain would do well to note what
has happened here. It should be noted that the building of MoMI
remains intact and it was the building which used most of the
private money generously contributed; the revival of the Museum
would therefore cost relatively little. If the National Film Theatre
and other parts of the Institute are to move to a new site the
cost of a new MoMI should be rolled into the project.
I recommend that the Committee consider the
restoration of an autonomous constitution and governance system
for the bfi, with its funding coming direct from government
once again. The Film Council would then be free to concentrate
exclusively on its industrial remit, no doubt sharing programmes
and activities with the bfi from time to time (especially,
one would anticipate, in the field of training). I recommend also
that the Secretary of State give urgent consideration to the revival
of MoMI within a new bfi complex and at public expense.
27 February 2003
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