Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I An Industry in Crisis: 1945–1950
- Part II A Fragile Stability: 1951–1969
- Part III Crises and Contraction: 1970–1985
- Conclusion
- Appendix I Production Costs and Revenues of Selected Feature Films in the Late 1940s
- Appendix II National Film Trustee Company: Production Costs and Receipts
- Appendix III Budgets and Costs of Selected British First Features Guaranteed by Film Finances
- Appendix IV National Film Finance Corporation: Accounts, 1950–1985
- Appendix V Feature Films supported by the National Film Finance Corporation, 1949–1985
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I An Industry in Crisis: 1945–1950
- Part II A Fragile Stability: 1951–1969
- Part III Crises and Contraction: 1970–1985
- Conclusion
- Appendix I Production Costs and Revenues of Selected Feature Films in the Late 1940s
- Appendix II National Film Trustee Company: Production Costs and Receipts
- Appendix III Budgets and Costs of Selected British First Features Guaranteed by Film Finances
- Appendix IV National Film Finance Corporation: Accounts, 1950–1985
- Appendix V Feature Films supported by the National Film Finance Corporation, 1949–1985
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At one time, film and cinema used to go together like, well, Laurel and Hardy. No longer. Film financing has been hard hit. Film production, similarly. The government's White Paper on Film Policy is the culmination of a series of blows. At the other end of the distribution chain, film exhibition is fragmented and helpless. (Sight & Sound)
There was a sense in the mid-1980s that the fortunes of the British film industry had reached a new nadir. The vanishing cinema audience, the contracting domestic production sector, the collapse of Goldcrest and the withdrawal of Thorn-EMI from the film business contributed to a general sense of malaise. The dismantling of state support represented by the abolition of the Eady levy and the winding up of the National Film Finance Corporation confirmed that the government had finally abandoned any policy of continuing to prop up the ailing industry. There was no better indication of the decline of the British film industry since the heyday of Alexander Korda and the Rank Organisation than the fact that the most active financing and production group in the mid-1980s was the film arm of a television broadcaster specialising in low-cost films (Channel Four Films). British cinema was a shadow of its former self: it had become little more than a cottage industry producing a handful of films a year for a domestic market that more than ever was dominated by American interests.
Against this background the promotion of ‘British Film Year’ in 1985–6 now seems at best ironic and at worst utterly hubristic. This was an industry-led initiative to promote the idea of cinema-going: its aim was ‘to attract the lost millions back to the cinemas’. British Film Year involved a series of events – screenings, exhibitions, festivals and workshops – co-ordinated through the British Film Institute and the network of regional film theatres across the United Kingdom. In many respects it recalled the ‘British Film Weeks’ of 1924, not least in that it offered a cultural response to what was really an economic crisis in the film industry.
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- The Money Behind the ScreenA History of British Film Finance, 1945-1985, pp. 347 - 352Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022