Tuesday, July 10, 2007
More Skullduggery by New Labour
Looks like the British Film Institute is about to become the latest casualty of the now-departed Tony Blair and his odiferous policies. Hard to believe that this telejerk ever was a socialist, but then so was Mussolini. At any rate, you can read the bad news in the Guardian, right here. The whole story bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the kind of priority-making that the AFI used to engage in.
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3 comments:
Another reason to dislike Tony Blair, Bush's Poodle and destroying the BFI.
Anglophone film culture has so long relied on the BFI. I do not want to count the number of BFI publications I have but it is a lot. Their contempary series of Film classics has produced major work by major writers of different kinds on different types of films. No wonder it has slowed to a crawl. So much of British film culture and production has been the BFI.
Steve Elworth
Yes, it is true that the BFI (by the 1980s) was (perhaps) overly ambitious: not just the primary film archive in the English-speaking world, but also a publisher (with Sight & Sound and the Monthly Film Bulletin, and then books) and an educational center, a film exhibition center, and a production center. Because of various "diversity" bills passed in the 1980s, the BFI helped to fund movies by many "minority" artists in England, thus giving so many people (Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Gudrinder Chadha, et al) a chance to begin their filmmaking careers. And to see the current disarray, and the lack of cohesion in terms of policy for this essential film organization, is worse than disheartening.
It's just too sad.
The BFI was what the AFI would have beeen if it was not totaly under the thumb of the Industry.
Steve Elworth
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