1890 - 1900
In the begining...
In Britain, the enjoyment of moving pictures had been underway for decades; magic lanterns, zoetropes, and peep shows had been the highlight of penny arcades and country fairs. Then, in 1895 a revolution. The Lumiere Brothers screened a 20 minute programme of short films (the first is one of workers leaving their camera manufacturing factory in Lyons) and they became the fathers of cinema. A year later, the Lumieres were in London. They organised an exhibition screening in London at The Old Regents Street Polytechnic, and the audience of invited guests were suitably amazed. One of the most prominent theatres in the land, the Empire Theatre Leicester Square, promoted the show for three months and the transition from cinematography as an academic pastime to a leisure activity was instantaneous. By 1900, filmmakers across the globe were shooting actuality films of sports and news events, like Royal Ascot and Queen Victorias funeral.
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1900 - 1909
In the early years, British cinema was about paying a penny to watch a man lose his head and find it again. Cloth screens, hand cranked projectors and a cinema that left town on a steam tractor were the order of the day. Now that's showbiz!
The Films
Instead of reality films, Frenchman George Mlis uses the new medium to tell tales of fantasy and horror. In other words, to entertain. 1902 saw the debut of his fantasy, 'Le Voyage Dans La Lune', about a rocket going to the moon, the very first science fiction film. For the most part, spectacle or trick photography films, like a man getting decapitated, chasing his head, and then putting it on again, were all the rage. In New York, Edwin S. Porter, the head of production at inventor-manufacturer Thomas Edison's company, made tens of so-called 'primitive films': firemen fighting a fire, a sexy comedy about shoe salesmen getting frisky with a lady client, a social injustice film about a policeman releasing an upper class lady for shop lifting while roughing up a poor girl for doing the same thing, and a well paced thriller about a train robbery. In Britain we had the likes of Lewis Fitzhamon and his Rescued By Rover (1905), where a dog leads a father to his kidnapped daughter...
The Stars
In the 1900s, film was silent and, therefore, international. French director/performer Max Linder, bedecked in top hat and scarf, fell on his backside in Max Learns To Skate (1907) and was a worldwide hit. The young Charles Chaplin saw it and, setting a trend for the rest of the century, emigrated to Hollywood to seek his fortune. Two pioneering Brighton based filmmakers George Albert Smith and James Williamson, known to film historians as The Brighton School, made films which boasted an array of techniques like point of view shots, close ups and moving camera shots. In 1908, Smith even projected a black and white film with one shot and red and green filters to give a quite successful colour effect. American D W Griffith produced and directed the first ever film made in Hollywood, In Old California (1910) and can take most of the credit for the decade's advances in story-telling technique.
The Cinema
In 1900 Brighton pier boasted an advert for The Bioscope, a projector devised for a travelling American exhibitor called Charles Urban. Vaudeville theatres, amusement parks, fairgrounds, and penny gaffs (shops converted into screening rooms) were all venues for the exciting new entertainment of film. The atmosphere was close to cheap music hall: noisy, dirty with plenty of audience heckling at the screen. Prints were sold direct to cinemas, until French producer-distributor Pathe, with its distinctive cockerel title card, decided to lease them to venues, a profitable move allowing them to make huge in-roads into UK distribution. By 1910, French and American producers control 85% of the world market. In the provinces, travelling bioscopes were how most country folk first saw cinema. As with circus shows, a salesman or 'barker' enticed punters through a gaudy facade into a canvas tent were short films were projected against a cloth screen, interspersed with dancing troupes or bands. At the end of the run, a steam engine would drag the mobile projector booth on to the next town...
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1910 - 1919
Film business is now big business. British born Chaplin builds his own studio (in Hollywood, sadly) but you can now see a film in something resembling a cinema and read about it in a new fanzine.
The Films
By 1910, films were big business in Britain. A new breed of film producers demanded better, more sophisticated pictures, with more camera set-ups, lavish sets and increased production values, so we see the emergence of specially designed factories or studios. One example was Ealing, built in 1907 near the Green by keen amateur cameraman turned professional, Will Barker. In 1912 Barker took a day to shoot Hamlet, in 22 scenes, at a cost of 120. The film made 600. In the US, production companies were lured by the endless sunshine, varied scenery and the cheap real estate and labour costs of a small farming town called Los Angeles and production moved from the East to West Coast.
The Stars
In The UK, it was still theatre that provided a film with its stars. After Hamlet, Ealing Studios' Will Barker maked Henry VIII with stage legend Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and it's the first home-grown hit. Barker stated that he would burn all prints six weeks after release, not to fuel demand, (which it did), but to protest against the circulation of worn-out prints. Barker then made an epic about Queen Victoria which grossed 35,000. Then Ealing Studios produced Joan Shore (1915). Using the Wars of The Roses as a backdrop, favourite actress Blanche Forsythe and a thousand extras, it was seen as a British epic to rival D W Griffiths' Birth Of A Nation. British audiences are fond of home grown stars like Alma Taylor, but with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd and Douglas Fairbanks, and an awareness that publicity was as important as the films themselves, America established itself as the home of the real stars. In 1919, in the first display of star power Chaplin, Fairbanks and Pickford created their own studio, United Artists.
The Cinema
var sect3option3text = "The public, by now, were well used to cinema as a medium. Simply filming a train coming out of a tunnel would have provoked a barrage of food and drink at the screen. Debate on the medium's aesthetic value, concerns about public morality and the potential corruption of youngsters in newspapers like The Times indicate cinema's place in the culture, while fanzines like Pictures And The Picturegoer and The Picture Place News attest to its place in the hearts of the public. Significantly, the middle classes now went to the cinema, demanding clean, well-provisioned theatres. Between 1910 and 1914, 3,500 purpose built cinemas were constructed, many in baroque or neo-classical style to compete with theatres. Later in the decade, 'luxury' theatres like The Electric in London's Portobello Road are constructed by specialist architects, complete with balconies, orchestra pits and luxurious waiting areas. The films themselves were silent, but accompanied by local orchestras of up to 20 musicians. In poorer districts, which could not afford orchestras, the predominant sound was whispering, as literate youngsters read out the subtitles to occasionally illiterate parents and grandparents.
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1920 - 1929
Hitchcock and Ivor Novello team up to make The Lodger but the ground breaking films are all foreign. Fortunately movies are still silent so there are no worries about irritating subtitles. Unless you can't read...
The Films
Thanks to Hollywood's industrial production, the energy and pace of their films, and their control of cinema chains, it began to dominate film. In Europe, the cultural hotbed of Weimar Germany combined with government investment to produce Metropolis (1926); the same energy and sponsorship in Russia produced Battleship Potemkin (1925), but in Britain a lack of confidence and investment meant the 20s were not a vintage decade for British cinema. One real artist, arguably the greatest British filmmaker born to date, made his debut in north London's Gainsborough studios in 1926 - Alfred Hitchcock shot The Lodger, there with Ivor Novello. In 1929, he made Blackmail, Britain's second ever movie with sound.
The Stars
Ivor Novello was the foremost star of 20s cinema. Beginning a career as a composer, (he penned the World War I flag-waver 'Keep The Home Fires Burning'), French director Louis Mercanton cast him on looks alone for Call Of The Blood in 1919. A series of British films swiftly follows and comparing him to Valentino, D W Griffith shipped him to the States to appear in The White Rose in 1923. It wasn't a huge hit and Novello returned to England. Nevertheless, film fanzines like Picture Show, popular radio shows and the press unit combined to propel Novello to unseen peaks of stardom. In 1925, Novello co-wrote a wildly popular play called The Rat, about a Parisian cat burglar, and then went on to star in a trilogy of films about the character before turning to the stage in the 30s. The decade's unlikeliest stars have to be a Canadian Eskimo and his family, who were the focus of Robert Flaherty's Nanook Of The North, a feature documentary about lost tribal traditions, which is a commercial and critical hit.
The Cinema
In 1921, The Kinematograph Year Book listed 4,000 cinemas in Britain (the highest number ever recorded was 4,800 in 1949). The medium had become so popular that many live theatres were forced to become cinemas. The Piccadilly cinema in Manchester, a purpose-built luxury cinema, had lifts to reach two sloping balconies, and a restaurant in the basement which seated 500. In 1926, Paramount were the first UK studio to build their own cinema in the 'American style', with a Wurlitzer organ rising on an elevator to serenade the waiting audience before disappearing as the lights went down. During the interval, 'The Plaza Tiller Girls', a chorus of 12 precision dancers, took to the narrow stage. The rest of Britain gets the message; Hollywood wanted its epics screened in venues worthy of their cinematic ambitions.
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1930 - 1939
The Talkies are here. So is the 'picture palace', the 'quota quickie' and Britain's first Oscar for (you guessed it)... a period drama.
The Films
On October 6th 1927 Al Jolson exclaimed, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet!', and the audience at the Warner Theatre on Times Square became the first ever to experience synchronized sound at the cinema. Britain should have been best placed to capitalise on the invention of 'talkies'; we spoke English, had a dramatic tradition dating back to Shakespeare, and possessed actors of real quality. Yet Hollywood films dominated 75% of the market. That same year Britain introduced the Cinematograph Films Act which stated that a minimum of 7.5% of films showing had to be British so, throughout the 30s audiences had to endure 'quota quickies', short films churned out by the studios to meet government requirements. Production of course boomed. Music hall stars were signed up by the dozen to appear in these harmless vehicles for their talents, but few survived the test of time. In 1933, The British Film Institute was opened 'to encourage the development of the art of film', but in the early days it had little impact. There are two notable exceptions to Britain's lacklustre efforts in film during the 30s. Hitchcock made the 39 Steps in 1936, and proved himself to be a master of the medium. Meanwhile, Hungarian born Alexander Korda set up London Films, with backing from Paramount, and imported a range of international-behind-the-camera creative talent. In 1933, he tapped into a British love of history, and made The Private Lives Of Henry VIII, starring Charles Laughton as a jovial oaf of a King. It became the UK's first international hit and won Laughton one of the first ever Academy Awards for his performance.
The Stars
In America, Paramount studios worked on a huge publicity campaign for Marlene Deitrich to rival MGM's imported European star, Great Garbo. Meanwhile, Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll hit a home run with 39 Steps. Thanks to Alexander Korda's London Films, confidence in UK based productions bounced back, and Leslie Howard returned from Hollywood to play Sir Percy Blakeney, that most British of heroes, in The Scarlet Pimpernel in another Korda production. The epitome of the suave gent, Ronald Colman, remained stateside. By the end of the decade, Hollywood stars and films dominated and, Empire or no Empire, the idea that Britain could ever rival Hollywood was swept away by the sheer ballsiness of the American tough guys, Cagney, Bogart and Gable, the show-stopping pizzazz of Astaire and Rogers, and the all-round star appeal of Gary Cooper. British theatre phenomenon Laurence Olivier had an unhappy time with Hollywood directors and, despite a simmering performance opposite British screen beauty Merle Oberon in Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939), box office did not live up to expectations. On the comedy front, Britain staked a claim with ex-pat Chaplin whose Modern Times was a worldwide box office number 1, and one half of the gag factory Laurel and Hardy who are mobbed wherever they go.
The Cinema
The 1930s were the golden age for cinemas. 2 - 3,000 seaters were not uncommon. Thomas Lamb, a Dundee born architect, designed a host of fabulously opulent cinemas including a revamped Empire theatre (home to the first Lumiere screenings) with crystal chandelires, sweeping staircases and even antique Italian furniture in the foyer. Others employ a more modernist design, with concealed lights, subtle tins or dcor in deliberately exotic Egyptian, Chinese or Moroccan styles. The old live theatres are designed to project the human voice, but didn't adapt well to movies with sound soundtracks reverberated unattractively around the domes and narrow halls. So, managers faced a stark choice-wire for sound or go to the wall. As most theatres could only seat a maximum of 600, many did go under. Sound also brought the end of the hand-cranked projector, dialogue needing an unwavering speed of projection which could only be achieved with a motor.
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1940 - 1949
Hitler bombs Britain but saves the film business; cinema audiences are the highest they will ever get. The stars come home from Hollywood and a brief 'golden age' dawns for British cinema...
The Films
World War II was good for British cinema. The GPO Film unit, which had made the classic Auden-scripted Night Mail, became the Crown Film Unit and turned to producing propaganda films, including London Can Take It, a 10-minute film about the Blitz aimed at American audiences. Its effect on the US was palpable, so it's arguably the most important film ever made. David Lean and Noel Coward co-directed In Which We Serve in 1942, Lean soon becoming a director in his own right with the quintessential film of English emotional restraint, Brief Encounter (1945). Carol Reed and Michael Pressburger both find their feet, spectacularly, in 1946 with The Third Man and A Matter of Life And Death respectively. After the war, the British movie business attempted to mimic the Hollywood production and distribution system with its own studio - The Rank Organisation - but Hollywood films still flooded in. With hindsight, post-war cinema can be considered to have been a mini golden age, with Lean's Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Pressburger's The Red Shoes, Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol and Ealing Studios' Kind Hearts and Coronets all now regarded as classics.
The Stars
In 1939, Laurence Olivier's fiance, Vivien Leigh, became the envy of Hollywood when she landed the part of the wayward, but sympathetic, Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind. Olivier and Leigh married in 1940 and became a 'star couple', united on-screen in Korda's Lady Hamilton the following year. David Lean's In Which We Serve saw theatre scribe Noel Coward put in a terrific turn as the captain of torpedoed HMS Torrin. Playing to the home crowd, Olivier charged into the breech with a stirring adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V, produced for a then record sum of half a million pounds. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, not obvious romantic leads, made one of the most romantic films of all time, Brief Encounter. British Hollywood export David Niven, the last of the English gents, returned after war service for a career best (excepting his 1954 Oscar for Separate Tables) in A Matter Of Life And Death (1946). Jean Simmons and Debra Kerr boiled over in the Black Narcissus a year later about the frustration of the nun's seclusion in a remote Nepalese Palace. Alec Guinness, John Mills and Richard Attenborough began careers that would last the rest of the century. In post-war Britain, the impossible glamour of Hollywood screen stars like Clark Gable and Rita Hayworth was hard to resist. Margaret Lockwood, however, was a British star who was mobbed wherever she went. Suburban and middle class she may have been, but her spirited and intelligent roles in many a Gainsborough melodrama, most famously opposite the suave James Mason in The Wicked Lady (1945), made her Britain's most popular female star.
The Cinema
When war broke out, the dangers posed to audience saw all cinemas closed by order of the government. However, the medium's potential for communication and boosting morale outweighed all other considerations and they re-opened within a week. Films began with short newsreels, but this was not 'the news' as such. The population got that from the wireless or newspapers. Newsreels tended to feature coverage of state occasions, sporting events or visual spectacles for which coverage could be organised in advance. On a more human scale, cinemas offer a much needed refuge to escape the danger and gloom of war. In 1941, a Milling magnate called J Arthur Rank opened the Odeon Group (Odeon is based on the Greek word 'Odeion' meaning amphitheatre), and with a team of architects committed to a house style of an imposing tower and large curving windows, Rank was determined to place an Odeon on every high street. The strategy worked; fifty years later, despite competition from other chains like ABC, the word Odeon is still synonymous with cinema. After the war, thanks to frantic cinema building, and a population in the habit of seeing films on a weekly basis, audiences hit the highest they would ever go in 1946, with 1,635 million admissions.
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1950 - 1959
Angry Young Men, Epics and Ealing comedies are good for British cinema, but the Queen's Coronation is not, as TV becomes the nation's new pastime.
The Films
The 1950s saw Britons come to terms with three competing cultural forces, the loss of Empire and 'identity', cultural invasion by Hollywood and a socialist movement invigorated by deep frustrations with class injustice. All three forces which became visible in the three distinct strands of 1950s cinema. Flush with confidence and home-grown success, directors David Lean and Carol Reed formed the 'Mid Atlantic School', and tried to mix British actors and technicians with Hollywood stars and money. The strategy was successful, Bridge On The River Kwai (1957) won Best Picture and Director for Lean at the Oscars and Lawrence of Arabia would do the same five years later. At home, playwright John Osborne led the 'angry generation' of artists determined to focus on working class life. Theatre director Tony Richardson formed the legendary production company Woodfall Films and made cinema adaptations of Look Back In Anger and The Entertainer, two plays by John Osborne. More popular with the punters were, of course, the little man against the establishment comedies of Michael Balcon's Ealing Studios, like Man In The White Suit (1951) The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) and The Ladykillers (1955). In 1951 on America's East coast, cinema acting changed forever as the most brilliant protg of New York's Actor's Studio, Marlon Brando electrified audiences in A Streetcar Named Desire.
The Stars
The early 1950s suddenly produced an immortal screen presence: Audrey Hepburn. Thought of as the quintessential English rose, Edda Hepburn Van Heemstra was actually born to Dutch and Irish parents in Belgium. She appeared in small productions like Laughter In Paradise and The Lavender Hill Mob before shooting to stardom (and Oscar success) as the princess in William Wyler's Roman Holiday. A string of gamine ingnues followed like Sabrina, Eliza Doolittle and, of course, Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany's. Despite convincing roles in more dramatic work like The Nun's Story (1959) and Two For The Road (1966), Hepburn became frustrated at being an attractive 'clothes horse' for directors and would retire from cinema completely by the end of the 1960s. Of a different mould entirely was Diana Dors. The lass from Swindon posed on a gondola in a fur bikini at the 54 Venice Film Festival and the press had a field day. Dors was already a tabloid sensation in the UK but, where France has Brigitte Bardot, Italy had Sophia Loren, and America had Monroe; Dors' pin-up status didn't travel beyond these shores. Stuffy critics patronised her acting ability, but her brazen sexuality and business acumen make her an interesting example of growing female economic and sexual empowerment in the mid-20th Century.
The Cinema
In 1953, Queen Elizabeth's coronation was covered by live TV and, everyone who could afford one, bought a TV set. Suddenly, the focus of family entertainment was the front room rather than the local picture palace. Cinema building came to a halt, while the less profitable venues closed. The movies went out of fashion during the decade and many cinemas fell into disrepair. If you want an idea of the typical 50s cinema, you can do worse than look at The Blue Lamp (1950), in which Dirk Bogarde emerges from a dowdy suburban picture hall, which he has just robbed, to shoot PC Dixon.
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1960 - 1969
In cinematic terms it's the French making all the waves, but in swinging London, no one's cooler than Terry and Julie.
The Films
Early 1960s cinema, like John Schlesinger's A Kind Of Loving (1963) and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), (both products of the Free Cinema documentary movement), strived to depict working class life as it was and are a deliberate riposte to the Conservative government's mantra: 'You've never had it so good'. But it was the French nouvelle vague that was the buzz of Soho coffee shops, and British filmmakers struggle to match the confidence and cinematic innovations of their French counterparts. In 1962, Tony Richardson directed The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, but the 'anger' of the social realists seemed to dissipate. In 1963, Richardson makes a Mid Atlantic picture (Tom Jones, starring Finney) for United Artists, and won a Best Picture Oscar. Then came the Beatles, flower power, mini skirts and Blow Up (1966), with David Hemmings as a London fashion photographer investigating a murder. Blow Up would become the quintessential film of 'Swinging London'. Ironically, like Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1964) (another key London film), Blow Up was directed by a foreigner, (Michelangelo Antonioni). With the Vietnam war and the threat of nuclear bomb, society and films got darker exemplified by Lindsay Anderson's If (1968) with Malcolm McDowell machine-gunning his public school open day in the same year Parisian students tear up the streets. In 1969, a young TV director called Ken Loach made his first foray into film with the story a young boy and his pet falcon 'Kes' and the comatose British social realist movement that began in the 1960s was revived.
The Stars
A star was born in 1960 when Albert Finney appeared in Saturday Night Sunday Morning, as a hard living factory worker who battles for his individualism in the face of social and work pressures to conform. 1962 saw James Mason crack Hollywood as the obsessed Humbert Humbert in Kubrick's Lolita, while Dirk Bogarde's dark looks and abundant acting skills won him a large female fan base and critical acclaim at home in the Pinter adaptation of The Servant. Then, in 1963, Julie Christie sashayed into the public consciousness as the object of Billy Liar's unrequited desire, with Liar played brilliantly by Tom Courtenay. Christie projected an air of cosmopolitan sophistication and sexual emancipation that, for once, matched the European screen stars of the day like Monica Vitti and Catherine Deneuve. By the mid-1960s she and Terence Stamp had become the hippest showbiz couple in Swinging London, immortalised in the Kinks Song, Waterloo Sunset. Meanwhile, across the pond, Valley boy Richard Burton dated Elizabeth Taylor and they become the most famous couple in the world when they married in 1964. Such was Taylor's star power at that time that she was able to charge an unprecedented million-dollar fee for Cleopatra, plus 10 percent of box office receipts. The latter decade really belongs to two men: Michael Caine who shoots to fame in the classic Zulu (1964) and The Ipcress File (1965) and the most successful film star Britain is to produce; Sean Connery who thanks to the Bond franchise attains truly global stardom.
The Cinema
By the end of the 60s, Britain has half the number of cinemas it had in 1949. To combat the inexorable rise of TV, Hollywood invests in a decade of spectacular epics like Spartacus, The Fall of The Roman Empire and Cleopatra. Film distributors hit on the idea of 'roadshows' for their marquee films, promoting theese 'spectaculars' like a theatre event by rolling out the stars for a period of saturation advertising, and charging higher admission prices than for normal films. But these events were blips in an otherwise downward trend. The small cinemas of the 40s had disappeared. If they weren't knocked down they were converted into porn cinemas, one area of cinemagoing that had not stopped booming.
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1970 - 1979
Things get edgy with A Clockwork Orange and Performance and just plain silly with the Pythons. But it's the end of the road for the big old cinemas...
The Films
In 1970 Hitchcock came home from Hollywood to make Frenzy, but didn't stay and David Lean got such a drubbing from the critics for Ryan's Daughter that he bowed out of cinema for the rest of the decade. (In some ways the 1970s saw the passing of British cinema's old guard.) On a more positive note, the decade began well for a new generation of filmmakers, with two remarkable films: British cinema's hard boy James Fox and effeminate hippy Mick Jagger getting lost in Cammel and Roeg's ground-breaking Performance, and Roddy McDowell getting brainwashed in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). With their uncompromising violence and ambition to provoke, these films reflected a desire by filmmakers across the globe to deliver more permissive, morally ambiguous and 'realistic' films, the kind of drama that could not be shown on the more censorious TV. In the UK however, the confidence of the 1960s started to disappear and, by the mid-1970s, British cinema, (like the country), was struggling to find an identity. There were some domestic highlights, including Barry Lyndon (1975), Lindsay Anderson's O' Lucky Man! (1973), Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1976) and Richard Lester's Robin And Marian (1976) with Connery and Hepburn. The real action, however, was taking place in the States. Scorsese, Coppolla, Lucas and Spielberg all made their debuts in the early 1970s, going on to make some of the most memorable cinema ever.
The Stars
If British films weren't exactly thriving around the world in the 1970s, British stars were. Maggie Smith won an Oscar in 1970 for her mesmerising title role in The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, and another in 1979 for California Suite. Glenda Jackson won in 1971 and 1974 for Women In Love and A Touch Of Class. John Mills proved the critics wrong with his win for Ryan's Daughter, and Peter Finch won best actor in 1977 for Network. And that was just the award winners. The Pythons made the successful transition from cutting edge comic TV to world-wide cult status with Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975) and Life Of Brian (1979). Meanwhile, on the action front, the Americans had all the glory, we still had Connery and Caine but no one could compete with Sylvester Stallone, who achieved global stardom with his self-penned man against the odds, Oscar-winning, Rocky (1976).
The Cinema
By now, the cinemas that were split into two's and threes in the 1970s to make more money look, well, revamped. Smoking restrictions, the disappearance of usherettes in the interval and the demise of Saturday morning cinema clubs as kids take to computer games cemented an idea in the public's mind that cinemas were not the kind of places you'd hang around in. Advances were made of course: the seats became flame proof and, in the big chains, dirt resistant, Dolby Laboratories carried out rigorous site inspections of any venue screening one of their films and lab technicians at Kodak and Fuji worked day and night to squeeze ever better colour responsiveness and resolution from their film stocks. Outside London you could still see a film for between 1-2 if you went at the right time.
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1980 - 1989
'The British are coming... not!' The good films are on TV but at least you can go to the cinema for a quid.
The Films
Poor old Colin Welland. High on a dizzy cocktail of Oscar success, the writer of Chariot's Of Fire (1980) declared The British are coming. The 1980s saw anything but a British revival. Lew Grade sank with his epic Raise The Titanic (1980) and Rank, the biggest UK studio, went bust. In the grip of conservative Reaganomics, escapism took the form of inventive family fare. The young Turks of the 1970s came of age to make The Star Wars and Indiana Jones' trilogies, and Spielberg taught America with ET and Close Encounters that aliens (or maybe the Russians?) were not necessarily to be feared. The alternative was gung-ho action as Arnie and Sly shot up armies of cannon-fodder foreigners and the world (including the Brits) lapped it up. Merchant Ivory's A Room With A View (1986) launched a brand of what director Alan Parker called 'Laura Ashley cinema' but by then he and fellow commercials directors Ridley and Tony Scott were working in America. Britain was the poor man of Europe, Margaret Thatcher smashed the unions and the country fought a war in the South Atlantic. Cinema, however, reflected little of this as the medium's notable British exponents Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Terence Davies disregarded traditional narratives for more esoteric, experimental approaches. Cineastes were in heaven, but the general public stayed away. The 1980s was the worst ever decade for British film production since the 1900s, only 427 were made from 1980-1989. (810 were made in the 1970s). The best films were in fact on television. Alan Clarke made Scum (1979), Made In Britain (1982) and The Firm (1988), which thrive to this day on DVD. In 1982 came a glimmer of hope for the future; Channel Four Television began transmission and almost immediately began producing small films, including The Hit (1984) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The Channel went on to kick start the careers of a generation film-makers.
The Stars
In America, the untimely death of Rock Hudson to AIDS hailed the end of the old studio system, in which stars were groomed, packaged and promoted for public consumption. In its place came the 'Brat Pack' of Tom Cruise, brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn and Demi Moore. Over in Britain, Richard E Grant put in a career-defining role as Withnail, but audiences at the time failed to be impressed. Helena Bonham Carter was plucked from Cambridge to star in A Room With A View, but it would take Fight Club almost fifteen years later for British audiences to recognise her as a star. Gary Oldman and Tim Roth earned well-deserved fame for their commitment to British social realist cinema but, depressed by years of Conservative government and lost when their spiritual mentor Alan Clarke died in 1990, the pair headed to Hollywood. Daniel Day Lewis appeared one moment as the crew-cut boot boy in My Beautfiul Laundrette, the next as bookish Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View, and British cinema had a screen actor of meteoric potential, confirmed with an Oscar win for My Left Foot (1989).
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1990 - 1999
Love is all around as Brit flicks bounce back. Okay, most of our cinemas are like shopping malls but the Lumieres would give their last cinematographe for the incredible picture quality. A 100 years of films and we still can't get enough...
The Films
"Poor old Colin Welland. High on a dizzy cocktail of Oscar success, the writer of Chariot's Of Fire (1980) declared The British are coming. The 1980s saw anything but a British revival. Lew Grade sank with his epic Raise The Titanic (1980) and Rank, the biggest UK studio, went bust. In the grip of conservative Reaganomics, escapism took the form of inventive family fare. The young Turks of the 1970s came of age to make The Star Wars and Indiana Jones' trilogies, and Spielberg taught America with ET and Close Encounters that aliens (or maybe the Russians?) were not necessarily to be feared. The alternative was gung-ho action as Arnie and Sly shot up armies of cannon-fodder foreigners and the world (including the Brits) lapped it up. Merchant Ivory's A Room With A View (1986) launched a brand of what director Alan Parker called 'Laura Ashley cinema' but by then he and fellow commercials directors Ridley and Tony Scott were working in America. Britain was the poor man of Europe, Margaret Thatcher smashed the unions and the country fought a war in the South Atlantic. Cinema, however, reflected little of this as the medium's notable British exponents Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Terence Davies disregarded traditional narratives for more esoteric, experimental approaches. Cineastes were in heaven, but the general public stayed away. The 1980s was the worst ever decade for British film production since the 1900s, only 427 were made from 1980-1989. (810 were made in the 1970s). The best films were in fact on television. Alan Clarke made Scum (1979), Made In Britain (1982) and The Firm (1988), which thrive to this day on DVD. In 1982 came a glimmer of hope for the future; Channel Four Television began transmission and almost immediately began producing small films, including The Hit (1984) and My Beautiful Laundrette (1985). The Channel went on to kick start the careers of a generation film-makers.
The Stars
In America, the untimely death of Rock Hudson to AIDS hailed the end of the old studio system, in which stars were groomed, packaged and promoted for public consumption. In its place came the 'Brat Pack' of Tom Cruise, brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen, Sean Penn and Demi Moore. Over in Britain, Richard E Grant put in a career-defining role as Withnail, but audiences at the time failed to be impressed. Helena Bonham Carter was plucked from Cambridge to star in A Room With A View, but it would take Fight Club almost fifteen years later for British audiences to recognise her as a star. Gary Oldman and Tim Roth earned well-deserved fame for their commitment to British social realist cinema but, depressed by years of Conservative government and lost when their spiritual mentor Alan Clarke died in 1990, the pair headed to Hollywood. Daniel Day Lewis appeared one moment as the crew-cut boot boy in My Beautfiul Laundrette, the next as bookish Cecil Vyse in A Room With a View, and British cinema had a screen actor of meteoric potential, confirmed with an Oscar win for My Left Foot (1989).
The Cinema
By now, the cinemas that were split into two's and threes in the 1970s to make more money look, well, revamped. Smoking restrictions, the disappearance of usherettes in the interval and the demise of Saturday morning cinema clubs as kids take to computer games cemented an idea in the public's mind that cinemas were not the kind of places you'd hang around in. Advances were made of course: the seats became flame proof and, in the big chains, dirt resistant, Dolby Laboratories carried out rigorous site inspections of any venue screening one of their films and lab technicians at Kodak and Fuji worked day and night to squeeze ever better colour responsiveness and resolution from their film stocks. Outside London you could still see a film for between 1-2 if you went at the right time.
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2000 +
2000 AND BEYOND
The more things change, the more they stay the same is a saying that could be applied to the cinema. Take Michael Manns film Collateral (2004). Shot mainly on the digital format, High Definition video, it looks as good on digital home cinema systems as in the movie theatres. Nevertheless, whilst Collateral pushes movie technology forward, it still adheres to the timeless theme of a good, ordinary man (Jamie Foxx) with everything to lose, finding in himself the resources and moral conviction to overcome a far more powerful opponent (Tom Cruise). Other forms of film, where the emphasis is on more lyrical or spiritual meaning will continue to thrive, especially in other parts of the world, but it is likely that films featuring a star like Cruise, who the world is familiar with, and a story that transcends cultural boundaries will continue to dominate cinema for the next hundred years. This is the challenge for British cinema. Britain continues to produce very talented stars and filmmakers, but the industry struggles to have universal appeal. Hollywood remains the only industry with global reach in terms of distribution, and its stars are recognisable, dominant brand names. The UK cannot compete on this level, so to attract our talent back, aspiring film makers must offer our stars a braver, more ambitious, more dynamic vision to what is on offer there, not a pale imitation. We have done it in the past and we can do it again. This point is undisputed. The real question is how can the film business produce these kinds of films on a regular basis? If British cinema is to become a sustainable film industry, as the Film Council are striving to encourage, cinema must become more entrenched in the national culture. Read David Thompsons excellent historical guide Cinema Year By Year and youll see that, since the 1900s and the invention of film, the big news is usually whats happened in the US, France, Germany and Russia. In the face of ever-popular television and sport as national pastimes and the continuing ability of Hollywood to absorb the best talent from around the world, this is a challenge with no obvious solution.
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