SUBMISSION 30
Memorandum submitted by bfi
Amicus-MSF Members
What has the Council contributed to education
about, and access to, the moving image? What should the Council
do with the bfi and the Museum of the Moving Image?
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 It has been three years since responsibility
for the British Film Institute (hereafter bfi) transferred
from the DCMS to the Film Council, effectively removing the institute's
policy and funding functions and not replacing them with anything
strategic or coherent. In addition, the simple mechanisms of funding
withdrawal have had much larger implications. In real terms, the
allocated standstill grant constitutes a cut in an organisation
at the mercy of inflationary pressures including general price
increases, rocketing insurance premiums and the Government's 1%
increase in employers' National Insurance contributions.
1.2 Over the last five years, the bfi
has been in a state of permanent restructuring as each new financial
crisis becomes apparent, with no end in sight for either staff
or tax-paying members of the general public. In the following
submission, we argue that the Film Council has no interest or
expertise in managing a cultural remit for the moving image primarily
because it is an industry-focused body and because the bfi
is too different an organisation to be managed effectively by
the Film Council.
2. THE IMPACT
OF THE
FILM COUNCIL
2.1 It can be argued that John Woodward,
previously director of the bfi 1998-2000, now CEO of the
Film Council, has made little secret of his agenda to dismantle
an organisation which he regards to be bureaucratic and élitist.
This process began in "A Time of Change" in 1998 when
the organisation was "refocused" onto its "primary
role", Education, and restructured into four simple operating
departments. The acronym bfi was then "rebranded"
and appeared subsequently in lower case, the capitals thought
to be too imposing. Since then, Woodward has "achieved"
the following, either directly during his tenure as Director of
the bfi or indirectly through his administration of the
bfi's grant in aid:
— Closure of the bfi's national
policy unit—the Regional Development Unit.
— Closure of the Museum of the Moving
Image.
— Closure of bfi Production.
— Closure of bfi's regional
exhibition function.
— Closure of the UK Media Desk (subsequently
reopened at the Film Council three years later when it was realised
that there was an impact in terms of UK access to EU funding).
— Cessation of the NFT's weekday matinees.
— Closure of the NFT Box Office during
the daytime.
— Cessation of the bfi's Film
Festivals Fund.
— Reduction of the number of titles
screened at the NFT.
2.2 These are in addition to other "losses"
sustained as a result of the creation of the Film Council including
closure of British Screen and the Arts Council of England's (ACE)
Film Department.
2.3 What was been put in place of these
things and how is the money now being spent? Let's not forget
that there isn't actually any more money in the system now than
there was three years ago. There are some clues to be found in
the Film Council's Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended
March 2002. For example:
(a) The Film Council's own operating costs
are around £8 million per annum (more than half the value
of the bfi's grant-in-aid). This figure includes salaries
which are, on average, almost double those paid to bfi
staff.
(b) The creation of nine new regional screen
agencies in England with operating costs totalling some £5.7
million. Regional film clients were formerly funded by the bfi
from Treasury funds. Treasury funds are now used to finance central
operations to administer Lottery funding to regional clients.
2.4 All these overhead costs are new. There
is no new money in the system; on the contrary, with Lottery receipts
in decline, there is less money available now. Inevitably, therefore,
delivery has been cut. This is manifest not only at the bfi
but nationally, as resources for regional delivery are squeezed
by pressure from the centre to fund core overhead costs. What
is happening regionally is a microcosm of what has occurred nationally.
However, no such strictures on spending have applied at the Film
Council. Operating costs for 2001-02 were up 35% on the previous
year with pay and pension awards above inflation. While it is
claimed that the payroll count is capped at its current level
of 80, this is merely evaded through the employment of large numbers
of self-employed consultants or sub-contracting organisations.
Yet despite its lavish internal spending, the Film Council is
still sitting on massive Lottery reserves which it does not appear
to know how to spend.
3. THE IMPACT
ON THE
NATIONAL FILM
AND TELEVISION
ARCHIVE (ACQUISITION,
CATALOGUING AND
PRESERVATION)
3.1 There has been no apparent attempt on
the part of the Film Council to bolster the ever-diminishing resources
of the National Film and Television Archive's Conservation Centre
(NFTVA). While, as elsewhere in the bfi, the Archive's
budgets are at standstill, its conservation and preservation activities
are subject to increasing costs outside its control. If the Archive
is to continue to be the custodian of the nation's moving image
heritage, then it must be resourced appropriately.
3.2 Indeed, the NFTVA is expected to do
more and more with less and less and the time is fast approaching
when irreplaceable material will be lost simply because there
is insufficient storage space for the necessarily growing collection
and no plans agreed to build more (the latest government funded
purpose-built stores were constructed nearly 20 years ago). In
addition, there is insufficient funding to keep storage conditions
at the optimum temperature and humidity, insufficient numbers
of staff to monitor decomposition of both nitrate and acetate
materials, insufficient numbers of staff to carry out essential
preservation duplication work, insufficient numbers of staff to
implement a thorough cleaning programme and eradicate mould, as
well as insufficient numbers of staff to keep up to date with
the rate of acquisition, to document the collection, and prevent
backlogs of unexamined material building up.
3.3 With regard to acquisitions and cataloguing
in particular, there are insufficient resources for staff to select
film, video and other non-broadcast material at the rate that
it is offered to the Archive and to formally acquire and catalogue
it. Consequently, the acquisition process is largely reactive,
responding to material that is offered to the Archive, resulting
in many gaps in the collection.
3.4 The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) recognised
this chronic state of affairs five years ago when it gave the
NFTVA an award to build two nitrate vaults, and to employ staff
to work through the existing safety backlogs. However, since then,
the level of DCMS/Film Council-funded staffing at the Conservation
Centre has decreased in several areas by more than 50%. At the
same time, the pressure to increase access to the collection grows
daily. Currently, a substantial number of Access requests are
eligible to be worked on by Lottery-funded staff. After these
staff leave at the end of August (the end of the HLF Project),
the NFTVA's ability to respond quickly to Access requests—while
continuing to ensure proper care of the nation's moving image
heritage—will be severely diminished.
3.5 The bfi continues to face the
problem of balancing the equally valuable activities of preservation
of material and provision of public accessibility of film, television
and related materials, with virtually no guidance from the Film
Council and with effective decreases in grant. In spite of this
the NFTVA continues to provide an essential service to the general
public, researchers and production companies, often being the
sole source of accessible material, and a vital role in the preservation
of material which is part of both national and international culture.
The long-term security of the national heritage is at risk because
the pressure is increasingly to deal with access priorities rather
than to deploy staff in conservation and preservation functions.
4. THE IMPACT
ON DISTRIBUTION
AND EXHIBITION
4.1 On exhibition and distribution there
has been very little activity to date despite funding commitments
totalling £19 million. Particularly frustrating is the way
that the Film Council has sat on £15 million of ACE funding
for cinema exhibition for two whole years (and counting) while
it decides what to do. It still has not decided how to spend this
money and now proposes Autumn 2003 as a possible announcement
date. One scheme (now apparently abandoned) was to spend the money
with the multinational multiplex chains to lease screens to show
"specialised product". The bfi currently already
does this through its bfi@Odeon, UCI, and Warner Village
schemes on a goodwill basis without incurring any capital cost
whatsoever. Indeed, the cinemas pay the bfi a service fee
for programming the screens. Proposing to pay commercial cinemas
from public funds to do what they are already doing in partnership
with the bfi indicates not only a lack of strategic foresight
but also a worrying lack of awareness about some of the activities
the Film Council is funding.
4.2 The latest scheme under consideration
is to invest the money in digital screens. Again, how this will
contribute to a strategy for specialised exhibition and distribution
is unclear (we must assume that Hollywood blockbusters do not
require public subsidy).
4.3 ACE had a proud history of investing
in cinemas, in particular through the commercial arthouse sector—City
Screen Picturehouses at York, Exeter, Stratford, Cambridge, Liverpool,
Mainline at Winchester. Accepted wisdom has it that arthouse movies
are best seen on arthouse screens. For £15 million, City
Screen could build 15 new cinemas (perhaps 50 new screens) through
leverage with private finance to which they already have access.
So far, the Film Council's strategy for specialised exhibition
and distribution has yielded not a single additional cinema admission.
However, in spite of this lack of strategy, the bfi's UK-wide
Cinema Services unit has continued to expand its work in the regions
with a 200% increase in cultural film tours and specialist venue
programming. These activities now reach in excess of 800,000 people
annually, the large percentage of whom are taxpayers living outside
London. Aside from fulfilling the bfi's national remit,
this increase also indicates a desire on the part of regional
film theatres and other independent cinemas to deliver cultural
programming.
4.4 There is a huge opportunity here. Cinema
going in the UK is the highest for the last two decades; the British
public is (contrary to Film Council mythology) hungry for a greater
diversity of product including foreign language, domestic product
and films whose themes are not those of the Hollywood blockbuster
machine. Young people in particular seem to have an ever more
eclectic taste for cultural products across all art forms including
film. This opportunity will be lost if we simply sit back and
accept the implication that the market will take care of itself
and the British public deserves nothing better than a diet of
almost exclusively American product.
5. THE IMPACT
ON EDUCATION
5.1 With the Film Council preoccupied with
supporting film production and establishing a new structure for
regional funding, there is currently a policy vacuum in the area
of education. While the bfi is the principal delivery agency
for education (through book and video publishing, Sight and Sound,
its National Library, website, research unit and Education Projects
unit) there has been virtually no policy direction from its core
funder. Aside from continuing to fund the bfi the Film
Council has to date made zero contribution to film education at
strategic level. This is hardly surprising, as it has no in-house
expertise to deliver in this area. So far £1 million has
been allocated to cinema education initiatives but, as yet, there
is no sign of any actual activity. Despite sensible submissions
from a number of quarters including the new regional screen agencies,
Film Education and the bfi, there continues to be further
deliberation about how best to spend this fund.
5.2 In spite of this lack of direction and
confusion from the Film Council about whether bfi Education
should be concerned with strategy or delivery, education work
continues to thrive at the bfi. At a strategic level it
is engaged in curriculum development, particularly in England,
successfully gaining a greater prominence for, and understanding
of, moving image work in schools. It is involved in debates with
ICT lobbies around the use of digital video in education. It has
a UK-wide presence, at the moment most saliently in contributing
to the Northern Ireland Film Education Working Group, which will
inaugurate a significant change in the way film is handled in
the curriculum, as well as introducing, for the first time in
10 years, a new qualification in moving image studies.
5.3 bfi Education also manages a
range of courses for supporting teachers of film and other media
which, being delivered by distance learning, are accessed by teachers
from all over the UK, and abroad. The rationale for these courses,
as for the majority of its education work, is that similar provision
isn't available elsewhere. The bfi therefore plugs "education
gaps" where the moving image is concerned.
5.4 bfi Education Projects was recently
evaluated independently and recommendations were made about distinguishing
between its delivery and its developmental work. A lack of presence
outside London was criticised, and this is an area where the bfi
would look for leadership and guidance from the Film Council.
As cited above, none has been forthcoming. Neither is there "doctrine"
on how much, and what, of Education Project's work should be publicly
subsidised—an absence that affects all bfi work.
For a public sector organisation to operate confidently, it must
have a sense of what its strategic mission and principles are.
Until the Film Council sheds some light on these, the bfi
will be in the dark.
5.5 This is further evidence of the Film
Council's inability to operate a public sector cultural remit.
Instead, the Film Council insists on funding the film industry
body Film Education. Film Education's major contribution to education
about the moving image is to organise National Schools Film Week,
at an estimated cost of £100,000. For one week, approximately
80,000 children get to see a mainstream Hollywood film on current
release, for free. The educational impact, and the added value
to the taxpayer, of this initiative, is close to zero. At the
same time, the Film Council insists that bfi pays close
to £70,000 to Film Education as part of its core funding—money
essentially spent supporting Hollywood film product.
5.6 The shortcomings of the new regional
screen agencies have been documented elsewhere. In relation to
education, and culture more widely, the Film Council's priorities
are read with an increasingly heavy heart. It is unable or unwilling
to support cultural activity, and often hostile to dedicated education
work. Its interests are primarily in unrealistic ambitions for
creating mini film industries, and for training film industry
workers. There is no leadership from the Film Council in, at the
very least, specifying a minimum level of education activity in
a region, or in co-ordinating some aspects of provision (resource
publication, marketing of activity, training for cinema education
officers) which would benefit from strategic, national leadership,
and economies of scale. Overall, the Film Council's attitude to
education reflects an inability to understand or support a cultural
remit for film and TV, and a predilection for putting public money,
with little accountability, into industry activity.
6. THE IMPACT
ON DIGITAL
PROJECTS
6.1 Relatedly, the withholding of resources
makes new educational initiatives difficult. One of the bfi's
most promising developments in this field, the forthcoming
digital resource, screenonline, has been made possible thanks
to a grant from the New Opportunities Fund. In offering unique
access to moving image and other materials to schools and public
libraries in the UK, screenonline addresses exactly the questions
of how to extend educational provision that the Film Council claims
to be concerned about. The bfi is committed, as a condition
of the grant, to maintaining the project until at least 2007,
but if this is to go beyond a subsistence level then, under current
conditions, unacceptable cuts will be required in other areas.
6.2 Furthermore, the Film Council and bfi
together have failed to create any coherent strategy for dealing
with the Internet and the potential of networked information applications.
Through the process of restructuring, digital projects have been
scattered across the organisation: the digitisation survey, digital
test-bed, digital scoping study, website, screenonline and database
integration project are currently taking place in five different
parts of the bfi. Each of these projects has its own emphasis,
some (screenonline, digital test-bed) are not core funded, and
the overall strategic impetus towards collaboration between the
projects has been minimal.
7. THE IMPACT
ON DIVERSITY
AND SOCIAL
INCLUSION
7.1 The Film Council has also failed to
take a strong lead on diversity issues within the areas of film
production, distribution, exhibition and education. Within the
film industry, the continued exclusion of practitioners and audiences
on the basis of "race", ethnicity, gender, class and
disability remains indefensible and nepotism remains a problem
for those trying to gain entry. Despite being underfunded, the
bfi has sought to implement some real changes via its cultural
diversity strategy which has foregrounded social inclusion within
its core activities over the longer-term and within the organisational
structure of the institute itself. However, development in staffing
and inclusive work cultures needs more work and greater support
from the funding body.
7.2 Obviously, during the last two years,
the Film Council has put considerable money into production although
the quality of output is not necessarily higher. However, with
regard to extending and diversifying the range of films produced,
it is dangerous to focus all the available resources in the hands
of just one organisation and the three individuals heading their
respective production funds. Whereas formerly, film producers
could go to either the bfi, ACE or British Screen (all
these organisations made funding decisions based on the expertise
of a number of individuals), they now have to approach one individual
whose political/cultural agenda may be wholly different from their
own. The new schemes, when compared with those that were available,
seem more likely to result in less diversity than more. Furthermore,
half the funding is allocated to anticipated "box office
successes" through the Premiere Fund, but these are not necessarily
British films by any definition and of course in order to chalk
up a few "quick wins" the Fund Manager has of necessity
invested in productions which frankly would have raised their
money on the open market (for example, Gosford Park).
7.3 Of course, it is not all bad news. There
are two things the Film Council has done which seem to be genuinely
of "public benefit". These are:
(a) The £1 million First Light Scheme
for young film-makers.
(b) An allocation of £500,000 to invest
in equipment for captioning and audio describing cinema films
(although there is no delivery mechanism in place to put this
into practice).
7.4 It should also be noted that about £1
million per annum has been invested in training initiatives, some
of which are genuinely grass roots, alongside some provision of
exceptionally high calibre. However, many of these initiatives
predate the creation of the Film Council and were formerly funded
by the bfi and others. The recent research report Developing
UK Film Talent, commissioned jointly with Skillset, promises a
more strategic approach but unless genuine resources support this
it is unlikely to have much impact.
8. SUMMARY
8.1 The bfi has been in existence
for seven decades. It is at the heart not only of British film
culture but also world film culture. Indeed it is perhaps only
by observing the huge respect it commands internationally that
it is possible to realize the true extent of the danger with which
this cornerstone institution is being confronted by being made
dependent on the Film Council, without direct recourse to a governmental
department. It is in the nature of film production that it exists
in the short term. History is littered with state-funded British
film production schemes that last a few years and then fail. Nothing
suggests that the Film Council will be any more successful than
its predecessors in this role (quite the contrary perhaps). It
seems to us misguided to the point of recklessness to risk the
future of the bfi, with its proven historical track record,
by subordinating it to so precarious and potentially short-lived
a body as the Film Council. If the Film Council fails it will
soon be replaced, like the head of the hydra, by a similar body.
But if the bfi is destroyed in the process it will not
be so easy to replace.
9. RECOMMENDATION
9.1 For the BFI's long-term survival and
continued health, and the integrity of its activities, as outlined
in its royal charter[3],
the bfi needs to be granted a degree of autonomy that is
not easily accommodated by the funding arrangements for a third-tier
public body. Indeed, such autonomy cannot be guaranteed by funding
alone, but only by positioning the bfi in relationship
to Government in such a way that it can continue to carry out
and develop its mission, bringing all of its activities under
a coherent cultural and educational programme.
March 2003
3 To encourage the development of the arts of film,
television and the moving image throughout our United Kingdom,
to promote their use as a record of contemporary life and manners,
to promote education about film, television and the moving image
generally, and their impact on society, to promote access to and
appreciation of the widest possible range of British and world
cinema and to establish, care for and develop collections reflecting
the moving image history and heritage of our United Kingdom. (http://www.bfi.org.uk/about/charter/charter.pdf) Back
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