Culture: Cinema

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for the opportunity to talk in this debate. If there were to be two little tweaks I would have made to the terms of the debate, they would have been to put “diverse” in front of “cinema culture”, and “access to a” in front of “diverse”, although the basic premise of having a debate where the accent is on cinema culture rather than on the film industry is an important one.

The way I understand the term “cinema culture” is that it is part of film culture more generally in this country, of which the film industry is then also a part. I think it is important to place it in this context because the cinema should not be regarded as merely an adjunct to, or only for the consumption of, contemporary British and American commercial cinema, important as that function is.

From the film industry’s point of view, it needs to be said that the film industry in the UK has not developed and does not develop in a cultural vacuum. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, made the point at Question Time on Monday about the interdependence of theatre and film, which has been a long-standing characteristic of British cinema and continues to be productive. One can add to that the influence of the visual arts, from Derek Jarman to Steve McQueen. As an artist, I am aware that the influences go the other way as well. One can see that in the work of Richard Hamilton, for example, whose retrospective is currently at Tate Modern. The arts world as a whole, which sometimes seems ghettoised, is a place where many influences pervade. This is certainly growing not just in the UK but in other countries in Europe and America, as many individual artists in the widest sense work more and more in different mediums of which film-making is one. With this wider cultural context in mind, the Government have to be careful that they do not simply narrowly support a film industry for purely commercial reasons while stripping away support for film culture and for the other less commercial arts that feed into that culture.

Cinema culture must include enabling access to global cinema and the history of film. The funding cuts to the BFI of 10% in the next year, in this context as well as others, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, pointed out, are worrying. I wonder, too, whether more can be done for our art-house cinemas generally, as I think that the appetite for world cinema is much greater than is commonly believed.

I want to take the opportunity of expanding further on an issue that we discussed in this Chamber late last year. I refer to the Competition Commission’s ruling on Cineworld regarding its arts Picturehouses, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, referred. There are two things I want to say about this. First, the Competition Commission must in such cases take into consideration cultural value, which perhaps ought to be a precept for the whole of this debate. There is a resonance here within the wider arts world about what all arts and cultural enterprises have to offer that is distinct from commercial interest. I think it is impossible for a body placed in this situation to make a meaningful decision without bearing in mind this concern. For example, one can cite the Cambridge Film Festival held at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse as having a distinct cultural value. The second, and related, thing is the Competition Commission’s insistence on there having to be two entirely separate markets, and the accent being on so-called value for money and the behaviour of the cinema-goer. I can see how the problem has occurred because of the development in recent years of what might be termed combination cinemas, where new commercial releases are played side by side with foreign language films or older classics. The reality is that individual cinema-goers will often go to many different kinds of films. I do not know of an avid cinema-goer who would not, for example, go to see a new subtitled release from Iran one day but the next go to see—perhaps with their family, perhaps not—the latest Muppets film. It is pure snobbery to suggest that such a separation has to exist in cinema-goers but that is not so say that art houses do not nevertheless offer a distinct and uniquely valuable product over and above the commercial screens which an exclusive commercial cinema does not. The proposal of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, of an art screen designation as a standard needs to be taken very seriously.

Commercial cinema is thriving in the UK, although it is also changing and may not always in future be completely about film in the traditional sense, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, pointed out. The rise of event cinema is testament to a burning desire that continues to exist for being part of an audience in front of a big screen. Such an event last year involving film, funded by the BFI Distribution Fund new models scheme, was Ben Wheatley’s film “A Field in England”, which premiered simultaneously at the cinema, on Film4 and on DVD and Blu-ray. Public funding should still have a hugely important part to play in promoting diversity and encouraging access and innovation in our cinema culture.