Introduction

Following the production slump of the 1970’s, it was perhaps inevitable that the Oscar triumph of Chariots of Fire (1981) was taken as a sign of a resurgence in British Cinema. At the 1982 Oscar ceremony Colin Welland optimistically announced that ‘the British are coming’, but could British Cinema of the 80’s live up to the promise?
A ‘renaissance’ can apply on a number of levels; in terms of production, the number of films Britain produced increased in the latter half of the decade; in terms of style, British film won many international awards; in terms of cinema attendance, this too rose from 1985 onwards. But does an upturn in the fortunes of British cinema really count as a ‘renaissance’. Also, with the changing methods of financing British film and film-makers being forced to appeal to international audiences, how much of Britain’s celebrated 80’s output could be truly called British?

Margaret Thatcher

The Thatcher years undeniably changed the state of the British film industry. Thatcher, who never exhibited more than a dislike for film, made major cuts in support for arts institutions. The Tory government wanted the film industry treated like any other business, and hence be accountable to market forces. A Films Bill in 1985 abolished the Eady Levy; the law that had meant a percentage of box office takings in Britain were put into British production. Also, the 25% tax break for investors in film was abolished making film investment more risky for businesses. The NFFC(The National Film Finance Corporation), the only direct source of government film financing, was privatised. No new measures were introduced to replace the lost revenue.
But despite a government seemingly antagonistic towards film, the late 80’s still saw a steady increase in British film production.

With the traditionally impecunious industry more cash strapped than ever what can account for this increase? Leonard Quart, in The Religion of the Market, says ‘despite the Thatcher government’s unwillingness to aid the film industry, it did establish a general mood that encouraged economic risk-taking and experimentation with new and more innovative business practices’. One of these was Channel Four’s Film on Four project, probably the biggest single source of investment in British production during the 80’s. It was in some way television repaying its debt to the film industry. Film on Four financed or co-financed many of the great films of the decade including My Beautiful Laundrette(1984) and Letter to Breznev(1985).

As well as televisions input to film, the 1980s also saw the meteoric growth of the independent sector in British film production. In their introduction to Take 10, Johnathan Hacker and David Price say ‘the late seventies and early eighties saw the emergence and rapid growth of a variety of small dynamic independent British production companies, such as Handmade Films, Palace Pictures, Working Title, Goldcrest and those run by such entrepreneurial producers as David Puttnam, Jeremy Thomas, Dan Boyd and Simon Relph, they … have become the bedrock of the British film industry.’

Thatcher as Inspiration

Leonard Quart, in The Religion of the Market, says ‘Thatcher’s prime contribution to British film making was not the business climate she created, but the subject matter her policies and the culture she helped create provided British directors.’
The state of the nation was inspiring our directors to a more prolific artistic output. The implicit and explicit contents of many of the decade’s films were critiques of Thatcherite society, films such as The Ploughman’s Lunch(1983), My Beautiful Laundrette, High Hopes(1988) and on a more allegorical level Brazil(1985) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover(1989).

Peter Wollen, in The Last New Wave, says ‘Independent film-makers of the eighties reacted strongly against the effects of Thatcherism. They responded to the imposition of market criteria to every sector of society, to political authoritarianism, the ‘two nations’ project of Thatcherism”. Thatcherite politics provoked in film-makers an anger that translated artistically into some very good films. ‘It can be seen’, Wollen continues, ‘as a British New Wave’.

Audiences

The eighties saw the first upturn in cinema attendance since the fifties, a decline that is usually attributed to the introduction of television and later video. In 1945 there were 1,585 million cinema visits per year, this fell to an all-time low of 54 million in 1984 but has been steadily increasing since, the 1994 figure being 123 million. This growth could be attributed to the rise of the multiplex, the first having opened in Britain in 1985.
Unfortunately the growing audiences were not championing British film, the box-office being consistently 85-90% Hollywood dominated. This may have been good news for the exhibitors and distributors but with the Eady Levy abolished it didn’t benefit the producers in any way.

The International Market

Despite the lack of support from the home market, Britain has always drawn great kudos from international critics. A third of all Oscars were won by British film-makers in the period 1976-96. Following a run of successful British films, Chariots, Breznev, Laundrette, etc., there was an increase in foreign, mostly American, investment in British product. In fact, some of what were considered British successes of the eighties weren’t actually, by definition, British films at all. A British setting and a British cast and crew do not make it a British film if the money behind the project, and hence the profits from it, lie abroad. A poignant example of this is Chariots of Fire itself, the, alleged, catalyst to the British renaissance; its finance was entirely foreign.
The director Derek Jarman, quoted in Take 10, sees it all as a sham; ‘In the eighties of Margaret Thatcher has come the ‘British Film Renaissance’. But it was a fake. A group of advertising men who had gone into film – Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson, and their chum David Puttnam ran this PR exercise, declaring themselves to be ‘British Cinema’, using their knowledge of how to manipulate the media – it was very astute. But in this publicity campaign they had hardly any truly British films. Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg and Lindsay Anderson were largely ignored, while they included American films like Revolution or The Killing Fields with some unbelievably tentative British connection – like an English producer or something’.

Cultural Identity Crisis

With American money acting as a crutch for British production it can be argued that some British films were compromised by pandering to the US market. Hacker and Price, in their book Take 10, say, ‘in an attempt to win [American] finance British producers are frightened of anything which might alienate these investors, and are attracted to subject matter which might result, for instance, in Anglo-American content or likely to cast American actors who could not really be justified on anything other than financial grounds’. There were many examples of this in 80’s British cinema; A Fish Called Wanda(1988), Scandal(1988) and High Spirits(1988).
Because of poor public support for British product, usually for a film to be a success it has to sell internationally as well. This creates a crisis of cultural identity, can a British film retain its identity, its essential Britishness, and still appeal to an international market. The films that sell well abroad have proved to be those which present a romanticised view of Britain, a ‘heritage’ Britain that never really existed. This appeals particularly to America, a relatively young nation compared to most other countries, who look to Britain for a heritage they can pretend to be their own. This results in a very stylised re-representation of Britain’s past in the name of international commercial appeal, A Passage to India(1984) and A Room With a View(1986) for example.

Us and Them

British films of the 1980’s seem to fall into two distinct camps. Firstly the more adventurous, small-scale productions, often inspired by the Thatcherite zeitgeist, typified by My Beautiful Laundrette and much of Film on Four’s early output, and secondly the more commercially conscious, internationally targeted productions such as A Passage to India.
Both seem to present a different perspective on British culture. This difference could be seen as how ‘we’ see Britain, and how ‘they’ see Britain (or more probably, how we/they want to see Britain). Thomas Elsaesser, in his book Images for Sale, puts it like this; ‘British cinema celebrates its renaissance’s with such regularity because it always functions around another polarisation – what one might call an ‘official’ cinema and an ‘unofficial’ cinema, a respectable cinema and a disreputable one’. This distinction is defined by a convention of myth and counter-myth. The myth is ‘home counties, country house, public school, sport, white flannel, rules and games; Edwardian England, Decline of the Empire, Privilege and Treason; male bonding; female hysteria’; films such as Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India and A Room With a View. The counter-myth is ‘Scotland, Liverpool, London; dockland, clubland, disco, football, punk, race-riots, National Front; working class males, violent and articulate; working class women, sexy and self-confident’; Gregory’s Girl(1980), My Beautiful Laundrette and Letter to Breznev.

A popular criticism of this counter-myth sub-group, and particularly the type of film championed by Film on Four, were their lack of scale. They were less cinematic, lower budget and of less appeal internationally. In my opinion, these films seem to represent Britain trying to keep a grip on its cultural identity against a tide of international, particularly American, influence.

British film in the eighties was barely more than a cottage industry, it had accepted that it couldn’t compete with the huge American budgets post-Star Wars(1977) but could still exist on a smaller scale, even if it was starved into producing, what were regarded in some quarters as overblown TV movies. Despite low budgets many of Film on Four’s, and the other independent companies, productions were very high quality cinema.

A Sense of Perspective

Thomas Elsaesser, in his article Images for Sale says ‘whenever the word ‘renaissance’ crops up in the context of British cinema (as it seems to do at least once a decade), one needs to be wary. Chances are the film industry is in deep trouble’.
It is important to keep a sense of scale here. The cinema attendance figures I have quoted illustrate this, yes, a doubling of cinema visits per year in a ten year period is good news, but compared to a figure more than 30 times bigger in 1945 it seems negligible. The increase in production is also promising but again it doesn’t compare to Britain’s 1940’s levels.In 1984 British production reached it nadir with only 28 major features released that year. This was two years after Chariots of Fire had reputedly been the catalyst for a British renaissance. Production has been steadily increasing since but didn’t really pick up to a respectable level until the 1990’s.

In Britain it only takes a single success to spawn a renewed optimism in cinema, an optimism which is rarely realised. Renaissance talk followed not only Chariots of Fire, but also My Beautiful Laundrette and more recently The Crying Game(1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral(1994) and Trainspotting(1996). Predictably, these more recent films prompted all the usual hopeful editorials on the future of British film, but they cannot really be said to represent the renaissance promised back in 1982.

Lester Friedman, in the introduction to his book British Cinema and Thatcherism, says ‘insiders during the Thatcher era clearly understood that, rather than a last renaissance, this period should at best be regarded, in director Christopher Petit’s phrase, as a ‘brief revival in production”. To describe it as a ‘renaissance’, in terms of British film as an industry, is perhaps too dramatic a word. In the spirit of Thatcherism the judge of success would be the market; were there money to be made in British Film I doubt Thatcher would have abandoned it as she did.

Industrial Renaissance

The increase in the number of cinema visits could be interpreted as some form of renaissance. Even if the interest wasn’t in British film it did indicate a growing film culture in Britain.
Hacker and Price, in Take 10 see the Hollywood dominance as unsurprising, ‘a British audience, which might naturally be reluctant to watch foreign films has always welcomed American cinema. This unconscious disposition has been so long standing that the taste of the British audience for film – their cinematic education – has been effectively formed by Hollywood’s finely crafted, glamorous entertainment. The result is that, today, a British film, despite its greater relevance for a British audience has little appeal’.

With the British audience’s taste being so obviously in favour of American product why should they care if their own film industry is in decline, or indeed in renaissance? John Schlesinger, one of the ten directors interviewed in ‘Take 10’, says ‘I think recently ‘British film’ has been given a higher profile than the reality it deserves … I don’t think the British as a nation are that interested in ‘The Cinema’ especially when compared with the US or France’. Truffaut is famously quoted as describing ‘Britain’ and ‘Cinema’ as a contradiction in terms.

Another film trend of the 80’s was the exodus of British film-makers who didn’t wish to struggle within their home country’s flailing film-making community. They went mainly to America where their talents were in demand. Alan Parker, a director who was part of this exodus, also interviewed in ‘Take 10’, says ‘anyway, with all those satellites buzzing around in space, soon Britain might not even need a film industry so hopefully they’ll stop wondering or caring where it went.’

Artistic Renaissance

The case for a renaissance on artistic ground is a lot stronger. The few films that Britain did manage to produce during the eighties were of a very high standard and received much international acclaim. Lester Friedman, in British Cinema and Thatcherism, says ‘whether part of a profound renaissance or a brief production revival, these pictures, often fuelled by their creator’s disgust with the current state of British life, rank with the best movies made during the 1980’s, in any country in the world’.
With a film industry on a smaller scale, as it is in Britain, the product is likely to be less formulaic and more innovative. In countries with a large prosperous film industry, such as the US, little room is left for experimentation. Having reached such a low production level in the early eighties it would seem inevitable that the few films that actually got made would be of such quality to warrant their production over, I imagine, a large number of British films that never saw the light of day because of the unfavourable film-making climate. Compared to the gluttonous US industry where the talent is spread a lot thinner it is unsurprising that British film would shine in comparison.

Towards a Healthy Industry

Nineteen-eighty-five was declared British Film Year, which seemed ironic coming at a time when production was at an all-time low, the cinemas were 90 per cent Hollywood dominated and there was a huge exodus of British talent to America. But 1985 did see the start of an improving trend, if it hadn’t, by now there wouldn’t be a British film industry to be writing about. As David Puttnam says in Take 10, Chariots of Fire took the British film industry ‘a long way from zero’.
During the 1980’s the gradual increase wasn’t marked enough to deserve the term ‘renaissance’, it is only into the 90’s that British film has been in danger of being seen as ‘healthy’. National Heritage statistics claim that ‘between 1990 and 1994, the UK was one of only four countries among the top 20 film making nations to show an increase in the number of films produced’ (in the same period France had a drop of 21% and the US dropped 12%). The 90’s have also seen a friendlier government attitude towards film and the recommendations of the Middleton Report, if implemented, promise a more stable British film industry.

Conclusion

If Britain is in Renaissance, and it’s not just hopeful PR, it is proving to be a slow process. Even today the British film industry is still struggling. It is probably too early to say whether the upturn in fortune British cinema has experienced can be sustained. There doesn’t really seem to be much point in saving the British film industry though while the home market remains so indifferent to its product. With international, and particularly American, markets the only place British films are appreciated there is a danger of Britain becoming little more than an offshore extension of Hollywood that specialises in quaint, heritage pieces and quirky, low budget social realism.