Culture: Cinema

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to encourage a cinema culture within the United Kingdom.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have signed up to speak in this debate, and I very much look forward to hearing their comments.

In introducing the topic this afternoon I will draw on my experience as a former head of the British Film Institute, and in particular my worry that in the 20 years since I left the BFI the issues that affect cinema policy have not changed significantly. I am struck, for instance, by the continuing split between those who view film as industry and those who see it as an art form, or culture, and there is the parallel question of whether cinema is truly an art form on a par with other performing arts such as music and theatre. A colleague at the BFI used to say that you could tell how the British ranked cinema as an art form by looking at the buildings on the South Bank. There are the glass palaces for the orchestras of the Southbank Centre, the new brutalism of the National Theatre—and the National Film Theatre, as it used to be called, hidden under Waterloo Bridge.

I will argue that cinema is both art and business. The price you pay for getting to make a piece of popular culture in the form of a feature film is that you have to do it within a huge industrial process with staff, equipment, marketing and the whole damn thing. When you visit American studios it is no surprise to discover that they are largely staffed not by creatives or even accountants—although there are plenty of those—but by lawyers, who mainly specialise in intellectual property. That is what is being created, and why in many ways the case of cinema is paradigmatically also the case of the creative industries more generally.

How do we set out to achieve a vibrant cinema culture in the country? My starting position is that the Government must provide political leadership at the highest level and that they must sponsor and fund properly an effective and trusted arm’s-length body that must have sufficient resources to achieve what it feels are the necessary actions to achieve its cultural, creative and economic remits, either directly or in partnership with others. Therefore the key question for the Government to answer today is whether what we find on the ground is capable of delivering a cinema culture for the UK, and if not, what needs to be done to remedy that situation?

On the question of political leadership, responsibility for cinema comes under the DCMS. But is that the right place for a key sector of the creative industries, and one which, as I have said, is both art and industry? The film industry creates intellectual property, and many of the policy issues it faces relate to IP. For example, we are shortly due to debate a number of copyright statutory instruments, at least one of which, it is argued, materially affects this industry, although they come from BIS, not the DCMS. Higher education, apprenticeships and training report to different Ministers in BIS, the school curriculum is in the DfE, and export and other support services for the creative industries are funded and operate from BIS. The Treasury delivers over £1 billion of funding each year for the film industry through tax breaks, and it could do more if we could persuade it to look at reworking some of its enterprise allowances so as to work better for the risk-based industries, of which film is but one example. It is, therefore, a complex picture.

A good case could be made for responsibilities for film to be located in the Department for Education, in BIS, or even back to the Cabinet Office, where it originally started as the Office of Arts and Libraries. But at the last reshuffle there was no change. In truth, there is no “right place”. However, unless and until the DCMS gets more powers and responsibilities, I fear that these questions will continue to be raised. I ask the Minister to comment on this, although he may well respond that it is not a matter for him and that it is well above his pay grade. However, this is a question that we need some answers on at some point.

Given that we have leadership at the political level, our system of organising the various art forms has until recently been common ground between the parties, and is usually referred to as the arm’s-length principle. Under that, the department does not take the cultural decisions, which are delegated to the various sectoral bodies. My question is: does the arm’s-length body speak for and enjoy the confidence of those interested in the art form it champions, as well as those who work in every part of the industry?

We have some external guidance on this in the form of a report from former DCMS Secretary of State my noble friend Lord Smith—who unfortunately cannot be here today—who recently published a second report. I know that other noble Lords intend to refer to that, so I will not go through all the details. However, the sense that comes through on reading the report is, on the one hand, approval of the progress that has been made since the merger of the BFI with the UK Film Council, albeit on the other hand it is made clear that there is rather a lot more to do. As the report notes, a triennial review of the BFI will take place in 2014. When he comes to respond, can the Minister therefore give us some more detail about what will happen when that report takes place, at what point in the year it will happen, and what the main objectives will be?

As I left the BFI in 1997 I was arguing with the DCMS that there ought to be one lead organisation for film in the UK and that it should have a cultural, creative and economic remit. Like many people I disagreed with the way the present Government shut down the UK Film Council within weeks of taking office. However, I feel that having one body, independent of the Government, is the right way forward. I am therefore delighted that the BFI now occupies that role, with a mission to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, as it says,

“by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences”.

Surely, it is axiomatic that a successful film industry depends on a flourishing audience culture, and vice versa. Indeed, in this digital era, with the problems of physical distribution that bedevilled cinema in its first century all but evaporated, the two are more interdependent than ever before. Out of that combination ought to flow a vibrant cinema culture. So will the BFI be able to do what is required to achieve a cinema culture in the UK? I suppose that depends on its plans, the partnerships it can build and the willingness of the Government to support them financially.

In very broad terms, what we want is a chance for everyone to access a wide range of cinemas and types of film from all round the world, including films from different periods of film history. We want to be able to see these films in comfortable surroundings as part of a mix of contemporary popular films, and we want similar access to DVDs and downloads. We want a successful British film industry, making films that appeal to a wide range of tastes and audiences, an education system that prepares our young people for jobs in that industry, and a properly organised and funded archive to retain this material for scholarship and study—dead easy.

The BFI has a five-year strategy for supporting UK film—Film Forever—which includes as core priorities expanding education and learning opportunities and boosting audience choice across the UK, supporting the future success of British film and unlocking our film heritage for everyone in the UK to enjoy. This seems to me to fit the aspirations I have sketched out, so the question is: is the money there to deliver it? There is the rub. Does the BFI have the funding? The strategy will work only if it is supported financially by the Government.

First there is the question of the current budget cuts. At a time when most other arts institutions have been asked to find cuts of 5%, which is in all honesty bad enough, the BFI has been asked to find a cut of 10% in 2015-16. This, of course, comes on top of funding reductions of 18% over the past two years. Although the BFI is a lottery distributor, it cannot spend funds on itself, so the lottery funds the BFI gives to the film industry for making films are not threatened. These budget cuts actually threaten not only the cultural work of the BFI, the very activity from which film-making artistic talents emerge, but also the capacity to preserve the nation’s film culture for the future.

In a recent editorial in the BFI’s excellent magazine, Sight and Sound, the editor, Nick James, explains that,

“it is the cultural side of the BFI—the National Film Archive, the South Bank film and events programme, the London Film Festival, the BFI Reuben Library, film education, film distribution, publishing which has effectively had its funding squeezed year by year for the whole of this century”.

He concludes:

“What these cuts threaten is not only the cultural basis from which filmmaking artistic talents emerge, but also the preservation of the nation’s cultural memory on film … What sticks in our craw at Sight & Sound is the feeling that, for the British media, film never quite makes the grade as an art form and therefore it’s an easy mark for the government to target”.

So, once again, the feeling grows that we do not yet have the governance, the capacity, the funding or the commitment to create a cinema culture for the UK. Is this because film never quite makes the grade as an art form? Is it because we think of film, at heart, as an industrial process? Perhaps it is the combination which makes it too easy for the Government to pick on it as a soft option.

Does the Minister agree with my analysis and, if so, can he suggest ways forward for the Government, the BFI and the country which will remedy that situation? I look forward to the contributions from others more expert than I am in these matters.