The Sunday Times (London)
January 12, 1997, Sunday
Losing the big picture
Stephen Amidon
Without a credible flagship programme, television coverage of cinema has become little more than gossipy Hollywood chatter, says STEPHEN AMIDON.
With the debut this week of Channel 4′s cinema magazine, Film Night, it is perhaps time to ask if we really need another television programme about the film industry. Everywhere you flip, it seems, the airwaves are full of movie clips, showbiz gossip and trenchant reviews. From the avuncular Barry Norman to the laddish Richard Jobson, from the occasionally upmarket Arena to the resolutely lowbrow Moviewatch, it seems the small screen is engaged in a saturation-bombing campaign against its bigger cousin, a brand of visual overkill that would argue against the launch of yet another slot dedicated to film.
In fact, the opposite is true. Despite the large volume of airtime given over to the movie business, contemporary television barely begins to cover what is really going on in the cinema. Certainly, the viewer gets plenty of opportunity to see clips of this week’s releases, snippets of celluloid that are carefully chosen by the studios to cast their product in the best possible light. And there is no shortage of chatter about the inflated salaries, career moves and sexual indiscretions of the stars. But when it comes to sober analyses or penetrating investigations of the state of cinematic art, television appears to be decidedly uninterested.
It is a state of affairs made far worse by the BBC’s astonishing decision to cancel Moving Pictures, the best film programme in recent memory. During its five-year existence, Moving Pictures proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Fronted by the astute and uncompromising American screenwriter Howard Schuman, the show did something none of its rivals consistently managed – it took film seriously. Whether catching the Tarantinos and Trainspotters before they hit the mainstream, or sending Schuman on a mischievous visit to a screenwriting seminar, the programme managed, week in and week out, to see the movies as something more than simply what was premiering that Friday at the local multiplex.
Nowhere was the show’s value demonstrated more clearly than in its 1995 coverage of the strange career of the British director Mike Figgis. After a promising start with the Newcastle crime drama Stormy Monday, Figgis’s vaunted skills seemed by mid-decade to have abandoned him. His first two American films – Internal Affairs and Liebestraum – opened to mixed reviews and an indifferent box office. Then came his Mr Jones, with Richard Gere playing a manic-depressive. Once again, Figgis took a financial and critical mauling. It looked as though he lacked what was needed to create successful films. The career of one of Britain’s brightest film-making talents appeared to be over.
But then Moving Pictures did a profile of the director that revealed his films had been subjected to the most brutal and purblind cutting imaginable. Able to present his side of the story, Figgis came across as a creative force working among bean counters, a man making serious and coherent films that were being shredded by studio executives who wouldn’t have known a gifted director if he bit them in the bottom of their Comme des Garcons trousers. A year after the programme was aired, Figgis, seemingly inoculated against studio meddling, released Leaving Las Vegas, which had cash registers ringing and academies nominating throughout the world.
While it would be an exaggeration to say the Moving Pictures spot single-handedly revivified Figgis’s career, it sure did help, as the director himself has acknowledged. The show was a telling example of the potentially fruitful relationship between television and cinema, of how the small screen can examine, provoke and influence its grander cousin, celebrating those film-makers who do not make it to the Odeon’s big screens, while keeping the people running the film business artistically honest. With it, television was not just another passive spectator, capable of little more than meaningless opinions and vapid gossip. It was an active participant.
The cancellation of Moving Pictures returns television to its back-row seat in the audience. Since its departure, there has been no show able to step onto the set and mix it up; no programme willing to take in the big picture. Barry Norman’s long-running series on BBC1 is the starchy staple of the nation’s celluloid diet – sustaining the public even as it sticks in the craw of more discriminating film-goers. Reliable, prudent and accessible, Norman’s approach to cinema remains as cosily middlebrow as his jumpers. Certainly, Auntie can cut deeper when she chooses, especially with a series such as Naked Hollywood, which took the wraps off a scene dominated by predatory agents and greedy stars, or with those editions of Arena and Omnibus that focus on the wilder shores of the film business. While occasionally brilliant, these shows are too sporadic to satisfy the viewer seeking informed debate about current cinema.
Commercial television provides even bleaker prospects. Channel 4′s Moviewatch, with its weekly confabulations of chirpy post-teens, is perfect for those viewers who value the opinions of 21-year-old art students. The Little Picture Show, meanwhile, is only as cutting edge as a programme about video releases can be. In terms of documentaries, there are the soft-soap hagiographies of The South Bank Show (whose recent profile of Humphrey Bogart by his son Stephen was a monument to recycled gossip and vapid star-stroking), and the soft-core titillation of the current Hollywood Lovers. Cable, meanwhile, provides a glut of glossy slots fronted by jobbing presenters who share the frantic, eager-to-please de-meanour of actors one step away from the dole.
The emphasis throughout is on movies rather than cinema: what’s on release this week; which star has signed to play the lead in the latest remake of a hit television show; what’s breaking box-office records in America. In other words, whatever prepackaged information is on offer from the multinationals who now manufacture film. Treating cinema as a cultural entity that can be analysed and critiqued is simply beyond the remit of most of these shows. The penetrating analysis television can bring to subjects such as politics or the environment is abandoned for a shallow glibness, as if the medium were frozen in the spotlights of the industry’s most superficial aspects. Why go to the trouble and expense of searching out stories and excavating artistic currents when you can get a bigger, cheaper viewership with the pabulum spoon-fed by Hollywood?
Enter Channel 4′s Film Night, executive-produced by the Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark. Slated to be broadcast on Tuesdays at 11.30pm, the half-hour programme will precede a season of weekly, through-the-night screenings of work by independent directors such as Jim Jarmusch, Atom Egoyan and Percy Adlon. Presented by NME’s news editor, Tommy Udo, and the Radio Scotland broadcaster Janice Forsyth, the show claims it will focus on “maverick talents working in both independent and mainstream film”.
The magazine-style format is promising – mixed in with movie news and reviews are a two-minute film school on subjects such as 1950s horror flicks, profiles of such pivotal film figures as Reservoir Dog and budding director Steve Buscemi, and a weekly guest who will present a favourite film moment. But there is also an in-built amateurism threatening the series. Judging from a pilot programme, the presenters, however personable and stylish, lack the authority that Schuman or Moviedrome’s Alex Cox brought to discussions of cinema. And the show’s makers seem intent on charting the more obvious trends in “maverick” movie-making, such as rock musicians who decide to dabble in film. Indeed, one of the first guests on the show may well be Blur’s Damon Albarn, while Jarvis Cocker’s decision to adapt Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House for the screen caused a significant ripple on the show’s set.
It would be a pity if Film Night allowed itself to be sidetracked into trendiness, especially since 1997 promises to be a remarkable year for British film-making. An unprecedented number of young filmmakers are currently at work here, displaying an artistic independence and professional acumen rarely seen among their forebears. More established directors such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are finally gaining international success, while Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient stands poised to sweep the award board. For the first time in a long while, a British movie programme need not look elsewhere for material. It would be a bitter irony, indeed, if the very year that this country’s film industry gets its act comprehensively together, its television fails to get the picture.
