DB7

From what I understand, films are purchased as 'packages' so an the Xmas day blockbusdter like Pirates of the Caribbean may have come with 10 moderate films and a pile of TVM crap. So rather than old British films the graveyard shift becomes a dumping ground for a load of Hallmark films (normally about a woman being stalked by some 70's actor) that the channel doesn't want but has had to purchase.

ChristineCB

RAFFLES is on Turner here in Texas... a great little lunch-time film. There's a great creeping around the house scene, with an oboe comically 'stepping' with some of the darkened characters, then other moments, there are 30-seconds or more where nothing but their scurrying footsteps or drawn drapes occupy the soundtrack.

Very very well done...

Jim

If it's true, then it will be just another vehicle for MORE bloody commercials - with all the ludicrously timed 'un-natural breaks!'

Good morning boys.

DB7

Where did all the great movies go?

Film classics were all over terrestrial TV back in 1987. But where can the budding movie buff get a film education in 2007, wonders Matthew Sweet.

Friday February 9, 2007
The Guardian

Ever seen Last Year at Marienbad? It's a film about a bloke who follows a woman through a ghostly mittel-European hotel, insisting that he got his leg over with her the previous season? If you have seen it, how did you discover that it existed?

Maybe you're enough of a croc to have clocked it on its first run in London's West End in 1961, when a Soho showman named Tony Tenser decided that, like Paris Playgirls and The Call Girl Business, it would play well with filmgoers who fancied something a little bit Continental. Maybe you saw it in a revival at a repertory cinema, where the programme notes insisted on its landmark status. Or maybe, like me, you caught it around midnight on TV at the very end of the 1980s, watched Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig moving like ghosts through that baroque labyrinth of corridors and ballrooms and herbaceous borders, and felt that you were in the presence of something important - a film that anyone interested in cinema needed to see, in the way that anyone interested in French needed to know all those reflexive verbs.

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For me, it was a revelation. Not because I fell unequivocally in love with the picture, because I didn't. But it impressed on me its importance as a key piece in the jigsaw puzzle of cinema history. At last I understood where Peter Greenaway had stolen his best ideas. At last I understood that moment from Steptoe and Son, when Albert rounds on his son Harold and snarls: "You're always trying to make out how clever and sophisticated you are with the birds. I mean look at that lah-di-dah film you took that poor girl from the fish shop to see last week. That what-was-it? Last Year in Miriam-bad! Gawd strewth!"

In those days, the telly could teach you everything you needed to know about cinema in way that was, to use a nice New Labour buzzphrase, free at the point of delivery. Films were often introduced on screen by people who knew something about them. Silent movies were a regular component of children's television. Schedulers constructed seasons and double-bills with the same care as the most diligent cinema programmer - whether their subjects were Louis Malle or Charles Bronson or George Formby.

But today, the terrestrial part of the medium has abandoned that responsibility. In the past few years, more foreign films have been given away with newspapers than screened by BBC2. The late-night slots on Channel 4 that once were cleared for enormous retrospectives of Tarkovsky or Godard or Eric Rohmer are, this week, the home of The Enforcer - otherwise known as Dirty Harry 3 - and Under Siege, in which Steven Seagal is a ship's cook who uses his martial arts skills to defeat a crack squad of international terrorists. Great if you like watching paunchy men in checked trousers doing kung-fu moves. Not so great if you want to know something about films that you can't find piled up in wire baskets outside petrol stations.

"I got my cinematic education from television," says Nick James, editor of the film journal Sight and Sound. "But it would be hard to imagine anyone doing that now. What you see in the schedules now is an extreme geographical narrowness combined with an extreme lack of memory. On the terrestrial channels, there's really nothing made before 1980 unless it's very famous indeed. Not much, even, from Hollywood's great golden era. And hardly anything that's in a foreign language. It's pathetic and it's parochial."

From a 19th floor office overlooking the Thames, Gavin Collinson, ITV's film and television executive, has a rather different perspective. "Foreign movies aside," he argues, "the repertoire hasn't shrunk. The menu has just got bigger because, since the 1980s, there have been two more decades of film production on which TV schedulers can draw. Now there are some horrible dishes on that menu that you wouldn't want to touch, but there are some that are fantastic."

Collinson is in an interesting position, because ITV is a distributor as well as an exhibitor of films. He oversees the exploitation of the gigantic back catalogue of movies inherited, in the main, from the Rank Organisation - and he's full of evangelical enthusiasm for some of the more outré titles that buyers from British channels rarely want to screen: Nothing But the Night, a Jungian horror flick starring Peter Cushing and Diana Dors; the Arthur Askey farce King Arthur Was a Gentleman; Assault, a sleazy 1970s shocker starring Anthony Ainley as a heavy-breathing doctor. But he doesn't believe that changes in broadcasters' attitudes to cinema are robbing us of our sense of cinema history.

"The British public is incredibly cine-literate, and I don't think they're often given the credit for that. When I tell people that I'm a Newcastle United fan or that I grew up in Blackpool, they're never interested in that. When I tell them that I deal with old films, they ask if I've got anything in the catalogue with Gordon Harker." He concedes that in recent years, broadcasters' attitudes to cinema has undergone a shift. Although Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl may have shanghaied 42% of the available viewers on Boxing Day, most film premieres on terrestrial TV now take place in far less prestigious slots. But he also notes that just because a film has done well at the cinema doesn't mean that success will translate into a big television audience. Pound for pound, he suggests, British material from the archive brings in money more efficiently for advertisers than the big blockbusters.

All of which explains why Channel 4 still satisfies fans of British cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. What adverts do you see on Channel 4 in the afternoon? The one in which Frank Windsor gets up from doing a little light weeding to tell you that his life insurance scheme requires no medical or bothersome visit from a salesman. The one in which a dolled-up middle-aged lady descends smiling into an orthopaedic bath. You don't need a degree in demography to see why advertisers would want to market their products during films in which Dulcie Gray helps win the Battle of Britain by pushing little counters around a map with a big stick.

"And perhaps," Collinson suggests, "there are some forms of cinema that aren't very well served by television. Silent cinema has largely disappeared from TV - but perhaps it's better to watch Napoleon at the Queen Elizabeth Hall than in your living room. Just because there's not much silent cinema on television doesn't mean that it's not out there to be discovered in other ways. These days, nobody is going to screen Birth of a Nation on Friday night at 7.30. But you can get it on DVD, with all the notes and supporting material." That, however, costs money. What terrestrial television channels once gave you for free can still be found - at a price. "The world of TV and film," Collinson reflects, "has become an enormous library - but it is largely a private library."

The result of which is, if you want to watch, say, a season of Ingmar Bergman films, you're obliged to pay £50 for a DVD box set containing Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal and Autumn Sonata, or rent it from a website such as Amazon or LoveFilm. So might these web-based businesses now be the best place to get a film education? Marc Boothe, producer of the acclaimed British film Bullet Boy, thinks so - particularly as such sites shift their business from despatching disks to their subscribers in the post, to delivering them in a downloadable format. "How do you create a sense of cinema in MySpace-generation kids who wouldn't know Godard from Hitchcock?" he asks. "The answer's in their pockets. The iPod made listening to music sexy again. It's turned music back into a communal experience, because it allows you to walk around with your record collection and share it with other people. And that's going to happen with film. In the same way that people of my generation swapped our Marvel comics and trading cards - they'll soon be swapping movie files. They will download films, pirate them and share them."

LoveFilm launched in March 2004 and attracted 50,000 subscribers in its first year. Today, that figure stands at 120,000 members, borrowing films from a stock of 62,000 titles. They offer "unlimited" rentals - but the speed of the postal system imposes its own limits. Theoretically, however, voracious movie fans could easily be consuming 10 titles a month for a flat fee of £9.99, and that number will rise as the firm's bank of downloadable titles expands. And if users are smart enough to sidestep the anti-copying software that protects this material, then for their mates and their mates' mates, film will be as free as it was for people of my generation who stayed up late to watch Last Year at Marienbad on BBC2. But something will have been lost. The sense of a canon shaped by the opinions of experts. The sense of a syllabus of film.

The 1980s have a reputation for being the moment when television set the body of Lord Reith spinning like something in the window of a kebab shop. It is the decade of Roland Rat, Howard's Way, The Price Is Right, and the slow death of the sing|e play. But the 1980s was a paradise for the armchair cinephile. Twenty years ago this month, the film preview pages of the TV Times and Radio Times looked like a handout from the film studies department of the University of Sussex. BBC2 complemented an Arena documentary on Louise Brooks with screenings of Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl - German silents as a weekend treat. On the same channel, Alain Delon and Jean Gabin fought it out in Henri Verneuil's gangster comedy-thriller The Sicilian Clan. The Philippine director Lina Brocka's Bona received its only television airing. So did Mrinal Sen's The Case Is Closed - an Indian Marxist version of An Inspector Calls that won the Cannes jury prize three years before. And in the slot from which Alan Carr and Jason Lee Collins now shout smut, Channel 4 screened Privilege, the 1967 film by Peter Watkins about a pop star who becomes the mascot for a fascist-flavoured British government. On Saturday nights, the channel continued its stately progress through the entire canon of pre-Hammer horror pictures: the complete works of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr, pervy monochrome Hollywood oddities starring Lionel Atwill and George Zucco. And Sunday nights were devoted to satisfying students of British cinema in the 1960s: Poor Cow, Up the Junction, Petulia, The Knack ... and How to Get It, Alfie, Georgy Girl, Charlie Bubbles.

Television will never do this again. The schedulers will never be your teachers and your guides, gently home-schooling you in the best of world cinematic culture. But popular music did not die just because the BBC decided to press a pillow over the face of Top of the Pops. And perhaps the technical know-how of a dedicated band of anoraks will bring Marc Boothe's vision to life: a new generation of cinephiles who will exchange seasons of European classics on the street by gently touching some sleek white object designed by Jonathan Ive. For these people, the idea of staying in on a Saturday night to watch a film on television may seem as archaic a practice as listening to ITMA on a crystal set.

But however swiftly the changes in the technology of consumption, one thing will remain as true as it was in Soho in the early 1960s, or in the days when movie fans committed the riches of the Channel 4 schedule to Betamax tapes. Despite Albert Steptoe's scepticism, exposing a prospective partner to a la-di-dah film is a perfectly respectable romantic strategy. And they're much more likely to accept an unsolicited media file than an invitation to sit on your sofa and watch something you taped off the telly. You never know, if all you have to do is zap it over the deep-fat fryer, that girl in the fish shop might yet discover the pleasures of Last Year in Marienbad. She might even zap you Hiroshima Mon Amour in return.

bobsterkent

if you set up a tv channel can it be in 405 lines and black and white only?

tvden

yes Bob I will second that

Mike Hobart

Indeed they do. About a decade ago the ABC seems to have made a deal to buy unlimited screenings rights to the backlog of Rank films. It takes them about a year to run through them all, whereupon they start again.

This has the advantage that if you miss a particular movie you know you only have to wait about eight or ten months and it will be on again.

The programmers usually schedule them at random, though occasionally they'll put together a sort of mini-season of a particular star or a series. I've lost count of the numbe of times they've screened the two Glynis Johns movies Miranda and Mad About Men either as a double-feature or on consecutive nights.

silverwhistle

I loved this article - it's too, too true! I discovered Bergman, Kurasawa, Tarkovskii and Eisenstein on terrestrial TV. It seems to me that TV film programming has declined horribly since the '80s.

daisyhall1

Why can't a Brit movie channel be set up?Whuy do many films just lie in (whose?)vaults and never be shown,even on daytime or early morning TV?Who owns movies4men and why do these channels just come and go?
I would have thought in this country it is not beyond having a home move channel or a library of movies on demand so eveyone could acees and pay for viewing

spill303

Yeah, would love to see more. You should try and contact Movie4Men and see what they could possibly show, request, or what they have coming up. It's owned by Dolphin TV (advertising specialist for many channels) and this is their first TV channel. Details are here.

Brief Encounter

That sounds like heaven to me. Why can't ITV set up a movie channel again?

Brief Encounter

Incidentally, Dear Octopus, I discovered yesterday, is tied up in legal issues. The Estate of Dodie Smith control it. Some deal meant it couldn't be shown in cinemas or released etc. Rank's rights to the film expired in 1956...

DB7

I'm sure I recall reading that Sky's EPG is nearly full. Maybe we need another platform that's free of the Murdoch monopoly but not suitable on Freeview.