America one, Europe nil?
To
compete with America, European cinema needs a shakeup.
To
mark the start of Cannes this year, France's most prestigious
daily, Le Monde, warned that "independent" French film production
is threatened by "its ever greater dependence on a host of intermediaries
the TV channels, distributors and exhibitors who all
prefer American output that is better adapted to the audience's
tastes". One cannot help noticing that, while the blame is spread
evenly across the board, the film-makers are exempt.
Not
just in France but throughout Europe, audiences are regularly
chastised for neglecting their home-grown fare, as though they
were under an obligation to consume and enjoy the films that they
have, to a large extent and without complaint, paid for as taxpayers
or in the case of the UK, as National Lottery gamblers.
If American films are overwhelmingly preferred, is it because
they are American? Surely not nowadays. It may have been so in
the wake of the World War II, when even chewing gum seemed glamorous
because it was American, but who remembers those days? Moreover,
back then European films were as popular on their home turf as
those shipped in from across the Atlantic. And the supply was
tailored to meet the demand. What we are lumbered with now in
Europe is a vast supply of films for which there is no demand.
(Every year, Europe produces over 150 more cinema features than
Hollywood and the rest of the US combined.) In the words of Alan
Parker, "there are too many people with T-shirts saying, 'I want
to direct'".
European producers can and do survive with their
backs to the audience. Distributors and exhibitors cannot. TV
stations dependent on advertising, and even those sustained entirely
by public funding, must give the ratings their due.
European
producers have come to rely excessively on TV funding, on the
assumption that the channels must get their hands on films that
have had theatrical exposure. But Alan Howden, until recently
the BBC's veteran head of feature film acquisition, explains that
this applies primarily to new and smaller channels, which will
indeed have to up the prices they pay as they proliferate and
compete with each other.
The heavies the well-established big channels in
each country have found, he says, that while feature films are
useful, only the great blockbusters have a significant impact
on their market share. According
to Howden, all but the top box office hits are in danger of being
pushed to the sidelines of the TV schedules by a new generation
of made-for-TV movies, not only because these are easier to slot
in
being made to a required length with comparable budgets and talent
attached but because they are more tightly scripted.
"Cinema films tend to be less disciplined," Howden believes. "Once
in a cinema, people aren't so likely to get up and leave. But
anyone working for television knows that it is essential to hold
the audience's attention throughout. Unless they feel that they
absolutely must know how the story will evolve or end, viewers
will simply turn off the set or switch to another channel. Apart
from Richard Curtis (Four Weddings, Notting Hill)
few English screenwriters take enough trouble tightening and polishing
a script until it is just right".
This is the sort of discipline the Nouvelle Vague railed against,
because it had become stifling. They brought back excitement and
a freshness that was invigorating. But over the years the impetus
gelled into a routine and the auteur theory was endlessly invoked
to legitimise every film-maker's jealously guarded right to bore
the audience. Having been bored repeatedly, audiences lost confidence
in the ability of the Nouvelle Vague to provide quality entertainment.
So, we're back to square one. Are American films preferred because
they are American, or because they are more entertaining in the
widest sense and generally simply better made?
At a time when it is being said that new technologies will enable
virtually anyone to make a film in three weeks for next to nothing,
it may seem retrograde to harp on about craft. But the astounding
success of a few little films that managed to break out has generated
the false premise that there is a market for many such films.
In the past five years, around £100 million of lottery money
has been invested in around 200 British films, though only about
half have been made so far. To date only £6 million of that
£100 million has been recouped a proportion not unlike
that in France and Italy, much to the chagrin of the Brits.
The poor results have been blamed on the fact that the disbursement
of funds
has been in the hands of bureaucrats. Henceforth, industry professionals
will be in charge, under Alan Parker's leadership. Will poachers-turned-gamekeepers
do any better? How will the audiences respond?
A
limited amount of lottery money will be earmarked for what would
be considered R&D in other industries the nurturing
of new talent, new techniques and new approaches
to story telling and script development will be given a
substantial boost. But the new priority is vaguely described as
support for films that are commercial, as though that were a specific
genre and everyone knew what it meant.
If it were that obvious, one could ask why commercial films would
require public support at a time when the market for screen fiction
is expanding. The Americans subsidised commercial film production
through tax breaks while Hollywood was reeling from the onslaught
of television, and phased these measures out again when audiences
began to come back to the cinemas. But in the European context,
there is no simple definition of what can be classified as a commercial
film, because they come in all shapes and sizes.
Essentially, any film project is commercial if it targets an adequate
identifiable audience to cover the production and financial costs
incurred, and to remunerate any investors. In that sense, Notting
Hill and France's Taxi II were conventionally
commercial projects. It was not their phenomenal score at the
box office (superbly engineered by Miramax and Fox Searchlight
respectively) which turned Life Is Beautiful and
The Full Monty into commercial projects. The former
was commercial from the outset, because there were enough Benigni
fans in Italy to justify the modest budget. The latter was a commercial
project because of the timing. At the height of concern about
unemployment a black comedy along those lines was viable as long
as the budget was kept low, which it was.
Knowing your potential audience is what makes a project commercial.
Clearly, the makers of the teen comedy Kevin And Perry Go
Large which was scorned by both high-brow and low-brow
critics and raced forthwith to the top of the UK charts
were well acquainted with an audience the critics hadn't even
read about.
In Italy, the snidely reviewed Bread And Tulips,
made for approximately $2 million, had already grossed over $5
million before it was sold to television. By the time the screenplay
had gone through an unusual number of drafts, it was so clearly
targeting an audience of women aged between 25 and 40 that the
normally unavoidable
TV pre-sale could be dispensed with.
One major problem in this connection is that it is increasingly
difficult for film professionals to know what type of potential
audience is likely to respond to any given film. They talk more
to each other than to anyone else, they rarely use public transport,
they do not go to see films in ordinary cinemas. The only audiences
they ever see are at festivals. The audience becomes an abstraction.
The
Americans attend to this problem (as best they can) by spending
time and money on market research, focus groups at various stages
of development, test screenings prior to the final mix and the
neg cut. But only in isolated cases have these habits crossed
the Atlantic to Europe. The auteur theory's indisputable rights
of the director to express him or herself even to the film's disadvantage
has spread like mildew. And audiences have voted with their feet,
lining up to see American films in the sure knowledge that while
they may often come out disappointed, they will rarely be intimidated,
lectured or bored.
For too long, European film-makers have paid less attention to
the opinion of the audience than to that of their peers, of TV
hierarchies and of the purveyors of public funding. It will be
an uphill struggle to restore the confidence that was heedlessly,
or perhaps arrogantly, allowed to trickle away. The catastrophic
trend can only be reversed by word of mouth. A year ago, in Finland's
box-office charts the top three spots were occupied by Finnish
films, which happened to be quite different from each other and
will probably not have appealed to the same people at all. What
helped all three at the box office was that for the first time
in years Finns were able to tell their friends that they had seen
a home-grown film they had enjoyed.
The latest Greek figures show that of the 14 Greek films produced
in 1999, nine have been released (five of these were European
co-productions) and six did well by Greek standards. The top film
hit one million admissions and those ranked second and third clocked
up 400,000 and 300,000 respectively, with total admissions rising
from 11 to 13 million and most of the 23% increase accounted for
by Greek films.
In Spain, local films have attracted double the number of admissions
in the six years since the government introduced an automatic
points system on the basis of success at the box office. No doubt
the scheme contributed to the emergence of badly needed new talent
by nudging producers into taking account of the audience.
With more and more people working
from home and spending more leisure time house-bound in communion
with the internet, cinema attendance is likely to keep increasing,
since it's the easy outing par excellence. And unless they are
given a real choice, with films adapted to their taste, the audience
will of course stick with the devil they know. But that needn't
be so.
If the European film industries do manage to claw back a significant
share of the audience in major territories, the next battle
will be to ensure that successful European films get fair exposure
on screens owned by the multi-nationals across the water and
are not hauled down before time to make room for inferior American
product, owned or controlled by those same multi-nationals.
In the long run it may be more fruitful to lobby for legislation
to stop such discrimination than to beg for ever more money
in direct or indirect subsidies, tax breaks and soft loans.
Gaudie
Lawaetz
