DB7

Times look bleak for the BFI

The British Film Institute is in danger. I think Gordon Brown may be our last chance for a happy ending.
Geoffrey Macnab

Where is John Paul Getty when you need him? These are difficult times at the BFI. As the letters pages of The Guardian (The Heart is being ripped out of the British Film Institute) attest, plans for "realigning" the Institute haven't gone down well. Academics are outraged about the BFI's plans to hive off its book publishing operation and to look for a new partner (perhaps a London university) to house - at least temporarily - its much-vaunted library.

You can't blame them for their concern. The BFI was set up in 1933. It is a unique organisation with a world-renowned archive. Not only does it promote the appreciation of film as an art form. It has been collecting data about films and film-makers for more than 70 years. In a world before the internet and IMDB, it was just about the only place you could go for information about film credits. The library may be cramped but researchers and authors will all testify to its riches.

The problem for the BFI now is that its grant-in-aid funding of £16 million a year (administered by the UK Film Council) has been frozen for four years and shows no signs of increasing. Nor is there any immediate sign of a Getty-like benefactor, ready to pour millions into the BFI for the greater glory of British film culture.

By 2012, when trams are due to start rumbling across Waterloo Bridge, the BFI is likely to have to move out of its recently revamped South Bank premises. The arguments for the BFI to have a new Film Centre, housing all its activities in one place, are compelling. The question is how to pay for the new premises.

What worries many is the idea that the BFI - in its next home, wherever that will be - will be a shadow of its former self. Core activities will remain. The National Film and Television Archive is sacred. No one will dare tamper with that. The BFI will carry on showing films and will keep on publishing Sight and Sound. The Screenonline website will remain available in schools throughout Britain. Nonetheless, the BFI is so focused on securing its Film Centre - and so aware that its public funding is shrinking - that it appears ready to offload loss-making arms like its publishing division regardless of their cultural value.

"We are going to have to exist within a smaller financial framework. There are going to be job losses. We can't avoid that," said BFI director Amanda Nevill, who strongly defended the decision to seek new partners for BFI Publishing.

"If there are people out there who can deliver bits of things we do better than we can without drawing on the public purse so we can concentrate on the things that nobody else will fund, then that is absolutely what we are going to do."

Ironically, the rhetoric from the BFI's "parent", the UK Film Council, is currently all about film education and film training. The Film Council is spending around £6.5m a year in lottery funding on 'The Bigger Future', the £50m training scheme it runs with Skillset to boost the British film industry. For example, public money has been pumped into the new Film Business Academy. We will no doubt soon see a new generation of highly trained film executives who will know everything about marketing, distribution and how to use tax credits. What they may not be so confident about is film as culture. That has always been the BFI's province.

What now? In the past, when coffers have run low at the Institute, there has always been a Getty on hand. In the absence of wealthy, philanthropic cinephiles, the BFI is sitting on one prize asset -- the building it owns in Stephen Street in the heart of the West End, where the library is based. One option might be to sell this and use the proceeds as a down payment on the new Film Centre. Another hope, albeit a distant one, is that the next Prime Minister Gordon Brown may look more kindly on the Institute. After all, one of its former directors, Wilf Stevenson, is known to be part of his inner circle.

DB7

The heart is being ripped out of the British Film Institute

Wednesday June 13, 2007
The Guardian

While I share the concern of Professor Chanan and colleagues about the BFI's current difficulties (Letters, June 9), I feel their letter misses its target in two crucial respects. First, they present a list of BFI activities which appear to be equal in status and importance: while they are all vital, it must be understood that the essential core of the BFI is the National Film and Television Archive, probably the greatest archive of moving image media in the world. When the BFI was transformed into a funded appendage of the UK Film Council in 2001, the NFTVA became the only major national collection in the UK not directly accountable to government.

Opinions will differ as to whether or not the UK Film Council is as "philistine and commercially oriented" as Chanan & co claim, but the real issue is that having the BFI managed by a body whose central remit is to address the fortunes of the British film industry is a bit like having the British Library run by the Publishers' Association: they are simply quite different kinds of organisation. In these circumstances, the professors' demand for the BFI to organise open discussion and take cognisance of the opinions of its members and stakeholders is unlikely to be met. Surely it is the culture department that bears responsibility for the lack of debate about the cultural, educational and academic functions of this extraordinary and unique national treasure?
Cary Bazalgette
Former head of education, British Film Institute

Even if former BFI writers find other publishers for their work, they will always need somewhere to carry out their research, and there is no obvious reason why this should not continue to be done in the BFI library at 21 Stephen Street. But this is most unlikely to happen, since for several years the BFI has been looking for an excuse to close down Stephen Street (the building was a gift from film enthusiast J Paul Getty).

Strong rumours are circulating that, unless the BFI library finds sponsorship from a commercial partner during the next 18 months, this resource will be jettisoned because the BFI's new installation (studio cinema, exhibition gallery and mediatheque), known as BFI Southbank, cannot operate successfully - ie balance its books - without raiding the budgets of all other BFI activities. Hence the threatened disappearance of the library, with its holdings of books, magazines and ephemera passed to some university campus, and removed from the loving care of the dedicated BFI employees whose accumulated knowledge represents 50% of what this unique facility provides.

The heart is being ripped out of the British Film Institute to pursue the vain concept of the all-purpose Film Centre on the South Bank. It could be a only a matter of months before the green light is given to piecemeal dismemberment of the BFI.
Cy Young
Freelance writer and researcher

kelp

One has only to look at the plight of yet another part of our Entertainment heritage, The National Theatre Museum, and what is happening to that, or rather what is not happening. The powers that be, seem to not be at all interested in our history, our heritage. I could go on and say things about where the money that could save these wonderful buildings is going, but I would be called a dinosaur for not "getting with the program" and looking to the future, or some such.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR...YOU MAY GET IT!

Rob Compton

A large part of the problem for both Film and Theatre heritage is a seeming national obsession with looking to today and tomorrow and not preserving yesterday

rgds
Rob

Fellwanderer

Perhaps, unfortunately, Andrew Marr was right about that bloody woman - many of today's society know the price of everything and the value of nothing

orpheum

Part of the problem is the stupid olympics which are going to bleed dry any potential source of funding for not just the BFI but many other worthy institutions

Rob Compton

Fell - on the contrary: I find today's government much more ignorant and anti-history than Thatcher's government ever were

rgds
Rob

ChristineCB

Orph, I can't believe you'd say this! Without the Olympics, how would anyone in the world know about London, or that it exists or ever did? C'mon - take the Jim Jones Memorial Koolaid and move to Yasgur's farm...

penfold

Orpheum, I knew we'd agree on something eventually....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

Aaryk Noctivagus

That is what I call desparate.

Aaryk Noctivagus

I totally agree. I wouldn't trust Brown to even pick his nose artistically!!! Thatcher was always referring to history... I can't remember a time I ever saw that from Blair.

The government these days are just middle-management types rather than having the class enough to value art or history.

Aaryk Noctivagus

The Olympics are a waste of breath.

kelp

While were on this subject our wonderful Minister for Culture has catagorically refused to give any guarantees that Heritage, and indeed Art of any type will not be hit by diversions of it's cash! Already the arts in general have had another Labour Government smash and grab of at least £137 million as a result of a decision to "divert" an extra £675 million toward the London games...I mean the Olympic Games. I would like to bet that once we have an accountant in charge of this Island we, that is those of us that make our living in this business, had better batten down the hatches for a massive "Diversion" of funds!

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR...YOU MAY GET IT!

penfold

She might have referred to History, but she learnt little from it....indeed, she tended to try to rewrite it....'Victorian values' for instance.

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

batman

The trouble with government(s) today is that very very few of them go onto politics with a desire for change, a cause, a vocation or whatevr you want to call it.

Politics these days is seen as just another 'career', like the law or the city etc. That's why we are ruled by a bunch of people who cannot see past the next opinion poll, soundbite, media interview or the size of their wallets.

Bats.

"Daddy .... what's that in your hand?"