PROOF Contents List of Illustrations viii Foreword ix Acknowledgements xi List of Abbreviations xii Introduction 1 1 Film and Cultural History 4 2 Understanding the 1970s 15 3 Film and Government 23 4 Funding Innovation 38 5 Movers and Shakers 46 6 Institutions and Organisations 59 7 Production, Genre and Popular Taste 68 8 Sunday Bloody Sunday: Authorship, Collaboration and Improvisation 77 9 The Go-Between: The Past, the Present and the 1970s 94 10 Confessions of a Window Cleaner:Sex,Classand Popular Taste 110 11 Stardust: Stardom, Performance and Masculinity 125 12 Scum: Institutional Control and Patriarchy 142 13 The Tempest: A Brave New World of Creative Endeavour? 160 Conclusion 177 Notes 184 Bibliography 205 Index 218 vii December 1, 2012 16:3 MAC/TBFI Page-vii 9780230360952_01_prexii PROOF 1 Film and Cultural History Cinema and film form an integral part of the culture of any period of the 20th century. The thematic preoccupations of film, music, fashion, art and literature can all offer important contributions to our understand- ing of any given historical period. Just as the film historian must strive for a rigorous methodology which acknowledges issues of historical research, the political and social historian should not ignore important cultural indicators. However, despite their importance as social and cul- tural texts, all film must be interpreted cautiously. Anyone can interpret a film and see within it relevant themes, political motivations, ideolog- ical messages and easily identifiable characters and narrative. It is also easy to ally particular films with particular social moments. Yet the rela- tionship between film and culture is rarely as straightforward as it first appears. Any study of film must consider carefully the experiences of audiences and the implications of popular taste. Box office figures, let- ters to popular magazines and critical reviews all allow an insight into popular taste, but recovering the experiences of audiences is difficult and many of the surviving sources of material which can be used to document popular taste are frequently sparse and uneven. The film historian needs to move beyond straightforward observa- tions and consider the wider context in which the film was produced. As with any field of historical enquiry, the film historian must pose a number of questions when approaching a film: Who made it? Who funded it? Who saw it? Where, when and why was it produced? Mainstream films are produced for commercial purposes; their inten- tion is to make money. As Harper and Porter note in their study of the 1950s, ‘too often the analysis of film texts has proceeded as though they can be simply plucked out of the cultural ether, rather than products which have to be financed and marketed.’1 Abstracting film texts from 4 December 1, 2012 14:18 MAC/TBFI Page-4 9780230360952_03_cha01 PROOF Film and Cultural History 5 the wider context of production negates the importance of both critical agency and social and economic determinants. All films offer important insights into the period in which they were made, yet they must be considered as crafted and sculpted artefacts rather than as uncritical mirrors of contemporary culture. It is too straightforward to see films as mirrors, yet they do offer an insight into culture, which is then carefully and deliberately reconfigured for audi- ence consumption through negotiated creativity. Films select, amplify, refract, distort, convey, idealise or reposition a partial impression of a society and its culture. The notion of films as mirrors is closely allied to the idea of audi- ence, specifically the mass audience, the ‘anonymous multitude’ who, Kracauer believed, watched and absorbed films which embodied and therefore satisfied their mass desires.2 Raymond Durgnat in AMirror for England also suggested that cinema reflects the desires of the mass audience as cinema is the mass entertainment medium.3 Films are there- fore made to reiterate and reinforce the desires, needs and ideological position of the audience. This may have been the case in earlier peri- ods, when the cinema dominated leisure time but, as Jeffrey Richards points out, by the 1970s, the audience was fragmented and television had replaced cinema as the mass entertainment medium.4 In this era, cinema and films could not and did not reflect the desires and needs of the mass audience as this audience no longer existed. While it is true that cinema could no longer be considered the dominant mass medium during the 1970s, it was still highly significant. While audience numbers were certainly declining, people were still going to the cinema. However, the fact that people did not go to the cinema as frequently as they had done in previous periods makes it hard to utilise the reflectionist model or draw upon the theory of the mass audience. A more useful model for understanding the 1970s is perhaps the base/superstructure model proposed by Raymond Williams, which utilises Marxist cultural theory to suggest that the economic base cre- ates the cultural products which form the superstructure of any given society.5 While it is true that in the 1970s the financial instability of the industry and wider economic recession gave rise to many films which had been funded – through necessity – in an unorthodox way, this does not adequately recognise the role played by creative agency. For exam- ple, The Go-Between (1971) arose from the economic base of the early 1970s, but the artistic endeavour of Joseph Losey, Harold Pinter and Carmen Dillon, along with the post-production involvement of Bryan Forbes and Bernard Delfont at EMI Films, greatly influenced the final December 1, 2012 14:18 MAC/TBFI Page-5 9780230360952_03_cha01 PROOF 6 The British Film Industry in the 1970s product. Furthermore, cinema in the 1970s was not a stable or pre- dictable cultural form, and the economic base itself was highly unstable and fluctuated wildly throughout the decade. This relationship between culture and society is pivotal to any study of film for, as Allen and Gomery state emphatically, ‘films do not just appear; they are produced and consumed within specific histor- ical contexts.’6 In order to adequately understand and acknowledge this historical context, a careful analysis of film production and recep- tion must be undertaken. This is not to underplay the importance of visual and textual analysis, but rather to show that any such analysis should be firmly grounded in order to avoid speculation and modern interpretation. As with the study of any historical period, it is crucial to understand and acknowledge the historical specificity of the period. In his analysis of historical films, James Chapman suggests that ‘interpretative analy- sis of films becomes justified only when the historical circumstances of production and reception have first been established.’7 To ignore these issues of historical location is to remove films from their social, political and economic space. As Allen and Gomery remind us, ‘film histories are works of historical explanation and as such cannot escape basic ques- tions of historiography.’8 In order to fully comprehend these issues of historiography, it is necessary to consider how historical evidence can be used to study film and how such approaches can be carefully combined with textual and visual analysis. Film history verses film studies? As Jeffery Richards outlines in ‘Rethinking British Cinema,’ any approach which is grounded in firm archival practice must take note of what close textual analysis can offer.9 Richards argues that despite the differences in approach – film studies’ concern is with the text itself as opposed to film history’s overriding preoccupation with the contexts of production and reception – scholars of film need not privilege one approach over the other. Chapman, Glancy and Harper also suggest in The New Film History that film scholars must now acknowledge the importance of a balanced approach which utilises contextual evidence within a theoretical framework.10 As Andrew Spicer has also noted, ‘each side has learned from the strengths of the other’s approaches’ and it is this balancing of the twin approaches of film history and film stud- ies which adds strength and depth to this work.11 I will endeavour to tread a careful path between over-reliance upon the archival sources December 1, 2012 14:18 MAC/TBFI Page-6 9780230360952_03_cha01 PROOF Film and Cultural History 7 and over-dependence on textual analysis. In this way it is possible to pay equal attention to the archive and to the text. Adopting the archival approaches favoured by Richards in his work on the 1930s and Harper and Porter’s study of the 1950s will allow for an investigation of a range of historical sources pertaining to the study of film, as well as foregrounding the importance of production and reception.12 Historical and archive work will be complemented by investigating the attention given to the cultural, social and political importance of film, as demonstrated by Robert Murphy and John Hill in their studies of the 1960s and 1980s.13 Hill’s work on the 1980s charts the development of different thematic trends and issues within film texts of the period, and considers the social and political implications of Thatcherism for film culture. By contrast, the 1970s saw no such cohesive and unified political movement. In fact, it was the political instability of the 1970s which created such an uneasy and often incoher- ent relationship between successive governments and the film industry, thereby preventing any attempt to contextualise the films of the period in terms of overriding political trends and motivations. Just as it is not sufficient to base an analysis of film solely on the film texts itself, it is equally inappropriate to limit the study of film to the confines of the archive.