Clinton Morgan

Taken from...http://www.mastersofcinema.org/

In the flurry of recent Cannes news, a major disappointment was quietly announced: Terence Davies' long-planned adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song has been canceled due to a "complete lack of interest" by the BBC, Channel 4 and the UK Film Council. This, despite the fact that Davies was recently voted as the best living director in the UK by the Guardian. The mediocre aspirations of film financing continue to marginalize this talented filmmaker (many of whose works have not yet appeared on DVD) and increase our cynicism about the rift between art and commerce. - D.C.

Here is the Guardian list he refers to
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/page/0...1082823,00.html

<span style="colorurple">" Well, you see, film is a business and we in Britain can no longer afford to...."</span>

Why? Why do we say such stupid things to defend mediocre product? If film is a business as people say ("It's not 'Showart' it's 'Showbusiness!'") then the film studios in Britain and America (cannot speak for anywhere else) should be liquidated and all their workers should be made redundant. That's what would happen with any other business. Why should film be exempt? After all, it is a business.

Wetherby Pond

That's the problem in a nutshell - what we term "the British film industry" is in fact a number of small businesses very loosely linked together by common interests.

If it were a proper industry, then someone like Davies might well benefit from the kind of arrangements that bankrolled Powell & Pressburger in the 1940s, Woody Allen in the 1970s, Stanley Kubrick from the 1960s to his death and the Coen Brothers in the 1990s - whereby their films were essentially backed by major studios as prestige projects, not necessarily intended to make a fortune but the critical kudos would compensate for them only just breaking even.

An even more depressing example - because he's only after a low six-figure sum, not seven million quid - is Patrick Keiller, who has apparently been trying to get a follow-up to his marvellous London and Robinson in Space made for ages. His previous films were funded by the BFI Production Board, which would undoubtedly have backed his new film as well - I believe London in particular turned a very healthy profit - but it no longer exists, so Keiller has to deal with the far less sympathetic Film Council. As he pointed out, he's after a tiny fraction of the money they put into Sex Lives of the Potato Men - his films are about as cheap as 35mm features get, since he largely makes them single-handed.