SUBMISSION 46
Memorandum submitted by Ms Tilda Swinton
I submit the following contribution to your
inquiry into the position of British Film in general and the question
of the performance of the UKFC in particular.
I am a film practitioner. I have worked as a
performer in films made in the UK since 1985.
I have the privilege to be one of the generation
of film-makers to benefit from the "alma mater" support
and development strategy of the British Film Institute Production
Board. The film-maker with whom I worked for eight years between
1985 and his death in 1994, Derek Jarman, was only one of several
internationally established British names enabled by that body
to develop a voice and an identity as an artist over the course
of several films without the pressure of the profit motive to
inhibit him.
I work, still, most consistently within the
constituency of low budget independent and very often experimental
film—what may be referred to as "cultural film"—here,
in Europe and the United States of America, where the independent
film culture, alternative as it is to the great looming industrial
fact of the Hollywood studio system, thrives with diverse and
energetic freedom.
My contribution is, therefore, not an industrialist's,
nor even that of someone who necessarily believes that there is—or
can be—a really industrial identity for "British"
Film.
I offer a view based on the experience of having
been closely involved for 18 years with producers making—and
struggling to make—independent films in this country, many
of whom have never found themselves quite as stymied as they feel
to be now since the formation of the UKFC.
I offer these suggestions:
— that the drive to develop a film
industry without attention to the support of a film culture is
wrong-headed and inappropriate given the "luxury" status
"British" cinema enjoys internationally;
— that the UK film audience will always
be too small, however healthy and enlivened, to support a fully
fledged film industry in the UK;
— that the film industry here can only
ever operate successfully as an offshoot of a vibrant television
industry—now all but dismantled—and without the pressure
to be "representative" of anything or even economically
profitable;
— that, on the question of a "British"
identity for a "British" cinema, this Committee take
less seriously any examination of how the film industry might
work in Hollywood, California and look at the relative success
in recent years of a developing regional cinema in the UK—most
notably in Scotland;
— that the dissolution of the production
board of the British Film Institute dangerously undermines the
viability of our cultural film heritage as represented by the
bfi's archive and educational efforts by subordinating
cultural film in this country to the status of a dead language
no longer in current use, at least not supported by the government;
— that within the industry it sets
out to serve, the UKFC has failed to instil confidence in its
political will to recognise the broad spectrum of cinema it is
committed to enabling;
— that the fact that £18 million
of the budget allocated to the English Arts Council—supposedly
devoted to cultural funding—should find its way into equipping
the Warner and UCI multiplexes with digital gear seriously leads
one to doubt the UKFC's commitment to its responsibility to independent
cultural film which will always be the last sector to benefit
from such a development;
— I would urge this Committee to examine
the economic facts of the consultancy budgets at the UKFC. I would
urge it to compare and contrast these figures with comparable
budgets for British Screen and the bfi production board
combined;
— that it is possible that the UK Film
Council fails only insofar as its catch-all task is impossible
to fulfil: that there is patently a place open for the institution
of a body committed to the inexpensive production support, distribution
and exhibition of cultural film; and
— that Government be made fully aware
of the essential part played in educating, encouraging and enlightening
the film audience by smaller regional arts cinemas devoted to
independent film—national and international—in particular.
If any realm of the film-making tariff needs urgent government
support, I would suggest that it be this one, perilously threatened
as it is by the development of multiplexes dominated by Hollywood
studio product. Distribution and exhibition are the keys to a
properly served audience as they are to a fully enabled community
of film-makers.
21 June 2003
|
