The Problem with British Cinema - a diagnosis
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- čas přidán 24. 06. 2024
- In this episode, Ralph and Owen journey into the spectral wastes of British film, asking: what went wrong, and what is to be done? Through kitchen sink realism, folk-horror spooks, socially-engaged documentarians, materially-inclined avant-gardism, and more than a handful of oddballs, the situation seems as underwhelming as it was in 1927, when Kenneth Macpherson opined that “it is no good pretending one has any feeling of hope about it”. Ninety-seven years later, is the landscape still as dispiriting - and why did ‘we’ never get our own New Wave - and why are we still stuck in the kitchen sink? Through cash, ‘character’, class, and capital, there’s a lot to unpick. Regardless, the boys do their best to keep the aspidistra flying.
Who do they discuss? Who don’t they! Anderson, Macpherson, Grierson, Hogg, Keillor, Reisz, Clark, Watkins, Jarman, Brook, Greenaway, Powell & Pressburger, Reed, Lean, Hitchcock, Loach, Leigh. The lot.
00:00:00 Intro
00:04:20 Early Silent British film
00:05:27 Talent leaving Britain for America
00:06:52 British documentaries and municipal filmmaking
00:09:09 The Studios of the interwar years
00:12:01 Powell and Pressburger
00:15:22 Class and politics in film
00:17:56 Free Cinema movement
00:24:30 Woodfall
00:28:15 The Third Man
00:30:37 60s-70s studio films/Merchant Ivory
00:31:54 60s counterculture
00:35:12 Folk horror
00:37:04 London Filmmakers Coop
00:48:04 Playwrights
00:55:27 The Paternalism of Social Realism
01:00:11 Pedro Costa as a counterpoint to social realism
01:04:16 Peter Watkins
01:09:47 Lindsay Anderson making an arse of himself
01:10:55 Peter Wollen's 1963 essay on the British New Wave
01:13:10 Kenneth MacPherson's 1927 article about British film
01:19:02 TV's influence in the 70s-80s
01:19:16 Alan Clarke
01:23:05 Sally Potter
01:30:10 Peter Brook
01:31:47 90s
01:32:34 British art film/essay films
01:37:09 00s and 10s
01:40:06 Joanna Hogg
01:43:08 Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson)
01:48:13 Peter Greenaway
01:55:09 Top 5 worst tendencies
01:57:31 Alternative Top 5 British films
01:59:59 Conclusion
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I've always felt this but no one seems to agree; most people think that because Harry Potter and James Bond exist, Britain is some kind of a world leader in cinema. But it's really not. A hugely disproportionate amount of films made in the UK have historical settings. There just seems to have always been a serious shortage of funding for interesting ideas featuring everyman characters.
5:46 Louise Brooks was American. Born and raised in the ‘heartland’ of the country actually. My great-grandfather was born in the same town as she. I would’ve assumed she belonged to that old stock of upper-crust anglos from the northeast, but nope; of a well-to-do family from the breadbasket.
'Powell and Pressburger don't have a dark'? Well each to their own, but I think that's a bizarre claim. I find a gorgeous kind of melancholy coupled with an ecstatic mysticism in their best films, perhaps missed if you are too readily distracted by the clipped period accents. Films utterly unlike any others. Part of Britain's film problem is that it doesn't recognise its own geniuses - no surprise that P&P were consigned to the dustbin, and it took the American New Wavers to rehabilitate them. It's incredible to me that, even now, P&P are not household names. You can't help come to the conclusion that Britain gets the cinema it deserves.
Correct. Britain doesn’t recognise what it has. You would probably disagree because he was never as commercially successful but I feel same way about Nic Roeg. In his last 20 years, he made 1 film. In the 90’s, he worked a lot in American television. He deserved better.
I learned a lot from this episode, and I commend your breadth of film and film theory knowledge. Yet while I mostly agree with your conclusions, I think you make it too easy on yourselves by dismissing nearly every single counterexample. You somehow dismiss Powell and Pressburger, who are rightfully being canonized now as titans of a melancholic romanticism unmatched in world cinema. Comparing their operatic epics to Douglas Sirk feels like a total non sequitur.
I understand the tendency to fixate on the flaws and limits of one's own culture (as the french new wave did with le cinema de papa). It is a big world, and cinema has much to offer. But there is no need to dismiss Mike Leigh, Nic Roeg, even Greenaway and Hogg, which you seem to do here, as if they were necessarily second-tier filmmakers. And there is always something worthy to be found even in stale and overdone genres, from social realism to the documentary, from comedies to the period film (all pioneered by the British). Lawrence of Arabia is probably the greatest historical epic ever made, surely that counts for something. And I am not entirely convinced that Chaplin, Hitchcock, Nolan, McQueen and Glazer's Britishness can be disregarded just because they worked in America.
Thank you for highlighting Watkins, Keehler, Macpherson, Clarke, Potter, the coop, and all the others, you made me watch more of them.
What do you guys think of Ken Russell?
You mentioned Carol Reed. Why not mention Outcast of the Islands? Or The Fallen Idol. They are amazing films. Lynch copies the opening of The Fallen Idol for Blue Velvet. Outcast of the Isalnds is not discussed enough. It’s amazing.
Do you dislike Lanthimos. I have never seen the favourite, but every film I have seen of his I have liked.
Agree with u generally. Especially about social realism films in UK. They suck.
But why not mention Anthony Asquiths silents or Terence Fisher?
My unpopular opinions validated and my watch list doubled, thanks lads!
A conversation on British cinema and you don’t go into detail about Nic Roeg. He’s not discussed enough. Why is he constantly overlooked? It’s such a fucking ball ache. Did Ken Russell even get a mention?
Much of Roeg's work is made and financed abroad - this episode aims to address work made within the British film industry or independently by British directors. Roeg's success reinforces our point that Britain lost many of its best talent in the 20th century.
Ken Russell is an omission we regret. He fits firmly in the tradition of TV/BFI-funded arthouse films of the 60s-90s we discuss in the second half, alongside Greenaway/Watkins et al - on balance the most hopeful moment for British film.
Thanks for listening and sharing your thoughts!
Nic Roeg did Mulholland Drive in the opening 25 minutes of Eureka. The Dont Look Now comparison to Mulholland was correct. And then you have Track 29, Cold Heaven. Track 29 foreseeing the rest of David Lynch’s career almost but in a very take the piss way.
seemingly one mention of Mike Leigh and it's only 'we don't like them', but praising the canonised classic.. Boring & dismissive take for seemingly curious people, who obviously are dedicated to film, but have got lazy. he is much more like Rohmer than people give him the credit for & is unfairly dismissed as social realist adjacent when there is a lot more going on in his films
this pod episode is a remarkable record of how feeling like if you can name all the disparate elements & put it in neat nameable cognitive chunks you may well feel you know the width and breadth of a medium, place, director, etc - which ironically becomes one of the most constraining attitudes you can have. No mention of 'Bablyon' too, surely one of the best British films ever & certainly of the 80s.
Brit-ish. Classic!
Not much mention of Nic Roeg when you mention Douglas Sirk and then I have to hear David fucking Lynch mentioned for the billionth time. Next it will be Stanley Kubrick.
Yes, Lynch is great. But what about Roeg? What about Eureka? That was touching on the Sirk thing in 82 before Lynch with Blue Velvet. Roeg even nods towards Written on the Wind in Eureka’s court room scene. How could he not? But that pastiche of melodrama Roeg was doing before Lynch.
Then Roeg made Track 29, which preceded Twin Peaks. The Gary Oldman character in that is essentially Bob and I feel like that film is Roeg’s amused reaction to Blue Velvet. It’s annoying when people refer to that film as Lynchian when it’s clearly Nic Roeg.
The Man Who Fell To Earth is never mentioned when talking about Twin Peaks. Lynch even cast Bowie in Fire Walk With Me. And Candy Clark is in The Return. Isn’t Twin Peaks partly about TV or how TV corrupted American society? There’s an internet famous 4 hour long video about it all. Twin Peaks finally explained it’s called. Am I fuck watching that but I think that’s the conclusion he comes too. But iv known that for years through it’s obvious connection to Man Who Fell. That central theme is basically an expansion on the famous TV scene from Roeg’s Man Who Fell and who is in that scene? Bowie and Candy Clark only. Both appear at Twin Peaks at some point. I’m not the only one to make these connections but in different ways. That Marilyn Monroe film Blonde, the director Andrew Dominick just keeps visually referencing The Man Who Fell To Earth and Fire Walk With Me throughout with Fire Walk With Me mostly referenced through the sound.
The ending to Fire Walk With Me with the Angel even mirrors The Man Who Fell To Earth’s ending aswell but it feels like abit of a rip off of Eureka’s ending more so, but I’m 100 percent certain Lynch never saw Eureka. Nobody has. It’s not like Paul Anderson with There Will Be Blood. He took freely from Eureka.
Both Man Who Fell and Eureka written by Paul Mayersberg and Roeg only worked with him on those two films so maybe Roeg, Lynch and Mayersberg all reading the same things? With it being a Roeg film though, I doubt the final film resembles the script. I doubt even the writer of the film can understand half of the visual language in the film. No one watches films visually. It’s annoying. Roeg outright references the TV title sequences of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man in Eureka. And everyone bangs on about Lynch’s connection to quantum mechanics blah blah. What about Roeg?! It’s throughout all his films. Roeg understood relativity and cinema are closely linked with cinema breaking linear time before relativity was discovered, which sounds pretentious but it’s true.
The very final episode of The Return is a retread of one of Roeg’s later films Cold Heaven but I’m certain Lynch hasn’t seen that either because like Eureka nobody has. So probably reading the same things or similar beliefs. They even use similar visual symbols when trying to portray something visually. Cold Heaven even has a Twin Peaks cast member in it. Took me over a decade to be able to see Cold Heaven and I already knew about the Roeg, Lynch connection so that really made me chuckle when the Twin Peaks cast member turned up in the Cold Heaven.
It goes even deeper with Lynch and Roeg though. I’m sure Don’t Look Now influenced the black lodge in Twin Peaks. The dwarf in red being the most obvious but it’s all very similar. Probably has something to do with Jung. Even Roeg’s last film Puffball has many similarities with The Return but of course Lynch hasn’t seen that either.
I don’t even no what point I’m trying to make. I like both filmmakers but Nic Roeg is insanely underrated, even though Don’t Look Now was voted greatest British film by critics, the rest of his filmography is seriously untapped. Insignificance? Castaway? EUREKA? He even did a really fucking great adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for TV in the 90’s. He humanised Kurtz. It’s a great little film. What I’m saying is you should probably do an episode on Nic Roeg. Yes. Nic Roeg forever. And his films, you can tell Roeg was British. He was a British romantic in a way.
And maybe a Monte Hellman episode too? Erice’s Close Your Eyes was influenced by Hellman’s last film Road to Nowhere. That’s also referenced in Blonde funnily enough. Connections galore. And it’s closely linked to Roeg’s Bad Timing.
Hellman has an amazing spaghetti western film stuck in limbo called China 9 Liberty 37 that needs some attention shone on it.
The one on the left knows what he is talking about: but overall this is a huge f mess, and feels like unscripted and opinionated