The British Film Industry in the 1970s

Capital, Culture and Creativity

S. Barber

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137305923
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Is there more to 1970s British cinema than sex, horror and James Bond? This lively account argues that this is definitely the case and explores the cultural landscape of this much maligned decade to uncover hidden gems and to explode many of the well-established myths about 1970s British film and cinema.

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 understanding 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 cultural texts, all film must be interpreted cautiously. Anyone can interpret a film and see within it relevant themes, political motivations, ideological messages and easily identifiable characters and narrative. It is also easy to ally particular films with particular social moments. Yet the relationship 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, letters 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 observations 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 intention 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 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 audience 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 audience, 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 A Mirror for England also suggested that cinema reflects the desires of the mass audience as cinema is the mass entertainment medium.³ Films are therefore made to reiterate and reinforce the desires, needs and ideological position of the audience. This may have been the case in earlier periods, 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 creates 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 example, 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 product. Furthermore, cinema in the 1970s was not a stable or predictable 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 historical contexts.’⁶ In order to adequately understand and acknowledge this historical context, a careful analysis of film production and reception 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 analysis 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 questions 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 studies which adds strength and depth to this work.¹¹ I will endeavour to tread a careful path between over-reliance upon the archival sources 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 incoherent 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. Such an approach would allow for adequate contextualisation, but would demonstrate little understanding of the visual culture of the period; without a consideration of visual style, a study risks being nothing more than a map of contexts. It is crucial to consider the way films look as this can help map trends in technology, innovation and industry. Such analysis allows for an examination of the work of cinematographers, visual artists and production and set designers and, as Harper and Porter suggest, ‘to establish categories or criteria by which to assess the competence of visual discourses.’¹⁴ These visual discourses are a vital part of film analysis. As well as illuminating the cultural and visual codes contained within the film text, the ‘look’ of the film can immediately suggest a great deal. For example, the colour, style and texture of the costumes and sets in Tommy (1975) suggest character, class and status as well as detail pertaining to narrative and setting. The visual style and ‘look’ of this film locates it as a 1970s cultural text but also reinforces the psychedelic influence of the music and the contemporary characters and locations.

The visual impact of film texts needs to be considered in order to examine the pleasures offered to an audience. Notions of visual pleasure in the text should not be limited to discussions of costumes, colour and set design, but rather should be developed to include style, performance and manner. Any discussion of film reception may shed light upon the pleasures found in the text, but how can we speculate about the nature of visual pleasure for an audience and where can we find evidence of agency and stylistic decisions? The answers can perhaps be found in the archive. As Sarah Street recently noted, when considering visual style, the work of set designers and art directors must be analysed through archival material such as pre-production sketches, storyboards and notes.¹⁵ Street persuasively argues that such material must be examined alongside other production data and, of course, the film itself. It is only through a consideration of all this evidence that an understanding of visual style and its specific objectives can be reached. Engaging with issues of visual style and expanding the textual analysis to include details on costumes, set design and performance allows for an expansion of the role of the film historian. The film historian must be conscious of issues of visual style, just as the film scholar who focuses upon the text and its visual pleasures must be aware of the archive.

The archive offers untold riches to the film historian and there are not the sorts of problems of calligraphy, discourse and paper quality which assail, for example, the medieval historian. Yet the film archive does pose problems of its own. Many of the papers which form the basis of film archives are personal material relating to the work of successful producers and directors. Much of this may have been carefully filleted to avoid issues of contention or embarrassment. In order to avoid reliance on such personal and subjective material, the film historian must often seek sources from elsewhere. As Sarah Street reminds us, ‘in order to tease out the diverse relations and meanings, the film historian has to draw on a plethora of source material, often not directly concerned with the films in question.’¹⁶ Drawing upon a breadth of archival material allows a wider picture of the filmmaking process to emerge. As Andrew Spicer has recently shown in his work on the personal papers of producer Michael Klinger, extensive material exists for Klinger’s successful film projects, but further material also exists for projects which were never made.¹⁷ This effectively illustrates the possible problems of beginning an exploration of film culture with the text itself, as the text, in certain cases, does not exist. An investigation which begins in the archive allows for the entire production process of a film to be unearthed, in such cases where sources remain. Sources which relate to film are diverse and eclectic, and range from personal accounts, production ledgers, unpublished letters, interviews and correspondence to scripts, bills and receipts. As with any archival work, the reliability and worth of these sources must be rigorously questioned.

However, as Ludmilla Jordanova points out, it is not the role of any historian to ‘fetishise’ the primary sources, but rather to scrutinise all the types of source and actively and consciously seek out what is useful.¹⁸ In this way, the film historian is able to call upon a range of source and archival material in order to further his or her discussions of film and culture, unfettered by uneasy and often unhelpful distinctions between primary and secondary material.

It is also not the case that once this archival material has been used, it holds no other use for future film historians. As John Tosh has noted, ‘the modern discipline of history rests not only on what has been handed down by earlier historians, but on a constant reassessment of the original resources.’¹⁹ This is a key idea and it is this process of reassessment and active questioning of archival material which forms a vital part of my work here. I will not only be considering archival accounts which have been overlooked or inadequately considered, but also be actively re-evaluating material which has previously been utilised. It is the role of all historians, be they concerned with culture, politics, economics or society, to reconsider, challenge, oppose, question and re-examine the interpretations of existing sources.

As Raphael Samuel reminds us, history is ‘a social form of knowledge: the work in any given instance of a thousand different historical hands.’²⁰ As historians, we need to remember that the work we undertake on particular subjects and on particular decades contributes to and builds upon the work already undertaken by other scholars. All such scholarship should never be seen as the last word on a given topic or period, but rather should exist simply as part of a broader body of knowledge.

An integrated approach: Archive and text

The paucity of archival work in much of the scholarship of the 1970s period allows me to adopt a fresh approach which foregrounds the source material. I will use archival evidence to excavate beneath long-held assumptions of 1970s film culture and actively challenge perceptions about the decade. Although the 1970s has frequently been characterised as a period without adequate evidence for the study of film, diverse, eclectic and useful sources do exist. Along with the more traditional repositories of information for the film historian, such as the trade press and the library at the British Film Institute (BFI), I will draw on material from the National Archives, the British Library, the BFI Special Collections and the British Board of Film Classification. As well as the BFI Special Collections, which holds the papers of Joseph Losey, John Schlesinger, David Puttnam, Peter Rogers and Derek Jarman, I will also reference the papers of Michael Klinger held at the University of the West of England archive in Bristol and the Don Boyd papers held within the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter.

Although offering wonderful insights, the archival material does pose certain methodological, ethical and historical problems. For example, the papers of John Schlesinger are very detailed, yet there are definite omissions which suggest certain documents have been removed. These absences within the archive have to be recognised; these omissions, just as much as the inclusions, are highly significant. Secondly, inflammatory and possibly libellous material can often be found in these collections of private papers – for example, personal correspondence often yields unflattering and scandalous remarks, such as Dirk Bogarde’s opinions on Glenda Jackson’s acting abilities, which he conveys in a private letter to Joseph Losey.²¹ In the case of such sensitive material, the researcher must ask not only how such material could be used, but also whether it should be used at all. Such letters are usually private and not intended to be read by anyone other than the recipient, but what happens when they are placed, as both the Schlesinger and Losey papers have been, in a collection which can be accessed by members of the public? Finally, the preoccupations of the researcher must be considered. I have chosen certain extracts from a range of archival material, yet there are certain documents which I have utilised more heavily than others. All archival work is highly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Film and Cultural History
• 2. Understanding the 1970s
• 3. Film and Government
• 4. Funding Innovation
• 5. Movers and Shakers
• 6. Institutions and Organisations
• 7. Production, Genre and Popular Taste
• 8. Sunday Bloody Sunday: Authorship, Collaboration and Improvisation
• 9. The Go-Between: The Past, the Present and the 1970s
• 10. Confessions of a Window Cleaner: Sex, Class and Popular Taste
• 11. Stardust: Stardom, Performance and Masculinity
• 12. Scum: Institutional Control and Patriarchy
• 13. The Tempest: A Brave New World of Creative Endeavour?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index