Film Culture and the Spending Review on APEngine

The people at the marvellous APEngine have published an article of mine on film culture and the spending review, available here. Check out the rest of the site - great stuff.

Cultural Shock Doctrine Round-up

A round-up of news on cultural funding post-Spending Review 

1. How do you define 'front line' services in the arts? 

Charlotte Higgins' made a great speech at the Paul Hamlyn foundation awards for artists and composers. Here is an abridged version: 

The great artistic achievements of this country don't start in our rightly celebrated national institutions – the Royal Opera House or the National Theatre or Tate Modern. They start in bedrooms in Bradford and garrets in Glasgow and classrooms in Coventry. They start in grubby student accommodation and after-school clubs and through the energy of surprising and inspiring teachers. People become artists because of a complicated web of interconnecting threads. What happens in your school is hugely important. What happens in your university or conservatoire or art school is hugely important – and we are hearing terrible intimations of what might happen to funding for the arts in higher education. What happens in your town – the local museum, the library, the theatre – is hugely important. Our Government is happy to celebrate our great national institutions but it needs to protect the delicate network that supports them. It needs to provide the solid framework around which enlightened philanthropy can work.

Talking of the spending review... Well, George Osborne's announcing a cut of 15% to the arts really was quite breathtaking, wasn't it – when the actual cut to Arts Council England's budget was 30%. Jeremy Hunt promised us fresh ideas as culture secretary, but I don't think anyone anticipated an idea as creative as this: a completely new way of describing the national arts budget that no one had ever thought up before.

So: Arts Council England is going to be cut by an overall 30%, but Jeremy Hunt has asked them to pass on cuts of only 15% to the "front line".

Asked to define "front line", Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, said that the organisations that the Arts Council regularly funds are "front line" and everything else is not.

According to that definition, the funding that supports national touring for opera and art shows is not "front line". A scheme that offers parents interest-free loans to buy musical instruments for their children is not "front line". Manchester international festival, which has commissioned artists such as Jeremy Deller, Steve McQueen and Joe Duddell is not front line.

As Higgins has argued in another article, "These cuts within higher education cannot be seen in isolation from those to culture in general: to museums, to the theatres, orchestras and other arts organisations up and down the land and to local authority cultural budgets."

2. Boris and Cumberbatch get in on the action

An article in the Evening Standard details Boris Johnson and Benedict Cumberbatch's warnings that private sponsorship will not make up for the massive cuts in cultural budgets. Indeed, they actually fell by 8% last year, apparently.

(Johnson worried enough about re-election to have momentary memory laspes that he is a Tory?)

3. Where will the next generation of artists come from? Not from Somerset.

Tory Shire cuts 100% of its arts subsidy. Somerset council voted to end £160,000 of direct grants to 10 organisations, including theatres and a film production company, as part of a £43m programme of cuts across the services.

Charlie Dearden, director of Bridgwater Arts Centre, said 25,000 people were participating in arts and media projects in the county of Somerset, half of them located in deprived areas.

4. And the winner is...

According to the Mail (and reported in BFI Watch) the Government has announced that what remains of the UK FIlm Council's responsibilities to fund film in the UK will be transferred to the British Film Institute.

I'm not sure what to make of this last one yet. It effectively puts institutionalised film policy back where it was before all this Film Council nonsense. But it seems unlikely that this will result in a return to the days of the Production Board. The wider situation has changed - not least because of National Lottery funding. The BFI has changed too. So how will it cope?

Film Policy in the UK and the Spending Review: The Cultural-Shock Doctrine in Action?

The Spending Review and Film

In one of the first posts on this blog I speculated as to whether the closure of the UK Film Council would signal a return to the dark days of the 1980s and the almost complete collapse of British film production. As I said then, the devil is in the detail: how much will overall subsidy be reduced, how will it be distributed? The details of the cuts made to public subsidy for film in the UK are now emerging. What do these suggest?

Cuts or Restructuring?

The following article in Screen Daily outlines the cuts, reproduced via BFI Watch:

film-sector funding outside Lottery funds and the British Film Institute (BFI) has been slashed by over 50% . . .

. . . the annual grant-in-aid budget for film in each of the next four years will be around £18.618m, down from £23.9m in the year 2010/11. After counting the BFI’s newly reduced annual budget, that leaves just £4.655m for all other film activities (excluding Lottery development/production funding which the government has pledged to maintain at current levels). That £4.655m will have to cover:

• inward investment and the work of the British Film Commissioner
• National and regional screen agencies
• research and statistics
• film exports
• certification (assessing which films qualify as British and are therefore eligible for Lottery funding and/or UK Film Tax Relief)
• diversity initiatives
• anti-piracy initiatives
• co-production support
• The UK MEDIA Desk activities
• Sponsorship of work such as The UK Film Centre at Cannes

Cuts had been anticipated but the 50% figure for non-BFI and non-Lottery funding is a stiff reduction and confirms the fear of many in the industry that, while Lottery funding and the tax certification are safe, other areas of the film business will suffer . . .

. . . Meanwhile regional screen agencies are anticipating a cut in funding along the same 15% lines as the BFI.

So these are big cuts, disproportionately placed on certain parts of the subsidised film sector. The tax incentives designed to stimulate commercial feature film production and inward investment are maintained, along with Lottery funding for production. The main cuts are to come from the BFI and the Regional Screen Agencies. The Spending Review can be seen, therefore, as a restructuring exercise for film subsidy in the UK. We can understand it by looking at the structure of film subsidy during the New Labour period.

The Structure of Film Subsidy under New Labour

In the UK Film Council’s first major policy statement, ‘Towards a Sustainable Film Industry’, then Chairman Alan Parker described the UKFC’s strategy thus: "Essentially our intention is to use public money to make better, more popular and more profitable films in real partnership with the private sector, which drives our industry and largely creates our film culture." On the other hand, the “cultural role of the UK FILM COUNCIL has been largely delegated to the British Film Institute and its regional partners." (Here, page 1)

While the separation of industrial and cultural functions proved to be not as neat as Parker would have us think, this demonstrates the structural division between commercial subsidy – primarily via the tax incentive and lottery investment in production – and cultural subsidy – via the BFI and the Regional Screen Agencies – that characterised the New Labour period. As a DEMOS report put it: “The Government and the UK Film Council look to the RSAs to help capture the many facets of British communities”:

To encourage the growth of a sense of community and identity, to identify and empower under-represented and marginalised voices, give support for different forms of distribution, and ensure diversity of access and participation. (Here, pages 20 and 17)

In policy terms, the social and cultural objectives of film subsidy – community, identity, diversity, social inclusion – were placed onto the RSAs and the BFI. The extent to which the Regional Screen Agencies concerned themselves with social and cultural initiatives in practice is a bigger topic than I have space to discuss here, but it is undoubtedly true that they provided a badly-needed inroad to the industry for marginalised social groups. However imperfect they were, these aspects of film policy recognised the failure of the market to be representative of British social and cultural life. It is these sorts of initiatives that will be reduced. We’ve already seen Screen East, one of the Regional Screen Agencies, close (although the circumstances of this are unclear).

So while operators like Clint Eastwood, Dreamworks and Directors UK might be breathing a sigh of relief for the moment, this spells trouble for community film-makers in Leicester or Newcastle. In short, these cuts are not fair; like the more general attack on the welfare state of which they are a part they will disproportionally effect the poorer, more independent and vulnerable sections of the film sector. 

In the 1980s commercial subsidies – the Eady Levy in particular – were slashed leading to the almost complete collapse of commercial feature film production in this country. At the same time, cultural-film subsidy was maintained at a certain level, mostly through BFI Production. This produced some memorable, often oppositional films (My Beautiful Laundrette, Orlando, The Draughtsman’s Contract, Young Soul Rebels).

In this phase of neoliberal restructuring we appear to be witnessing the opposite strategy: the maintenance of subsidy to the commercial film sector at the same time as the withdrawal of state support for the cultural sector. This is the cultural-shock doctrine in action.

The Spending Review 2010 and Cultural Funding Cuts

How badly has Cultural Funding been slashed in the Spending Review?

Museums and Galleries breathed a sigh of relief at cuts of 15% - and admission will remain free.  Similarly, the British Film Institute came in at 15% although this should be seen in the context of earlier cuts to promised, badly needed investment.  The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has had its budget cut by 24%.

Arts Council England has been particularly badly effected with its budget cut by nearly 30% over the next four years.  This is the top end of what was expected, but what will it mean in practice?  Clearly it is difficult to know at this stage.  As Nicholas Serota, the Director of the Tate, previewed in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago:

"A 10-15% cut in cash terms over four years would be a challenge of the kind that arts organisations regularly surmount; more than this will threaten the whole ecosystem, cutting off the green shoots with the dead wood, reducing the number of plays and exhibitions, discouraging innovation, risk and experiment and threatening the ability of organisations to earn or raise money for themselves."

According to Alan Davey, the Arts Council's Chief Executive, this will mean the end of at least 100 organisations.  That sounds like a conservative estimate to me.

Fair?

The Con-Dems ludicrous mantra is that the cuts are both neccessary and fair, or even 'progressive'.  The evidence does not bear this out.  For example, Jeremy-culture-vandal-Hunt has asked the Arts Council to attempt to limit cuts to its 850 Regularly Funded Organisations - big theatres, opera houses, that sort of thing - to no more than 15% meaning that the rest must be made up from cuts to administration and other programs.  Programs such as Creative Partnerships and Find Your Talent that focus on cultural provision children and young people from disadvantaged communities.  In the cultural sector, as in society more generally, the savage attack on the welfare state will affect the poor disproportionately, but at least the likes of George Osbourne will still be able to go to the opera.

I'll leave the final word to Ian Brown, West Yorkshire Playhouse artistic director:

“As a direct result of these government reductions there is the potential that a whole generation of people will lose out and be unable to enjoy the fruits of a complex and diverse cultural landscape. I strongly believe that these cuts will make no, or very little, impact on the UK’s deficit and that what we are looking at is a very conservative approach to subsidised arts funding.”

Conservative indeed.

RIP UKFC: Geoffrey Macnab's Obituary of the UK FIlm Council

Geoffrey Macnab gives his obituary to the UK Film Council in October’s Sight and Sound.

This piece is worth a read for the insight it sheds on the debates that took place when the UK Film Council was formed, particularly the elusive desire for a sustainable, large-scale UK film industry.

As Macnab says, “the furore over the announcement [of the closure of the UK Film Council] underlines just how dependent on public funding the British film industry remains. It also reminds us how bitter the debates about public film policy have always been.”

He continues:

“We’re now at the end of a cycle. The UKFC is faced with abolition and the public film-funding model will almost certainly have to be redesigned. It was telling that in April 2010 the UKFC announced that its current chairman Tim Bevan would chair a think tank to identify ways of ‘growing UK companies of scale’. This, of course, was exactly the goal back in 1997, when the government awarded the three lottery-backed franchises worth more than £90 million over six years. The truth is that in 2010, over half of independent production companies are loss-making.”

The goal of a self-sustaining film industry is no more realistic now than it was back in 1998, or 1968 for that matter. The question is now, as it was then, how to sustain film-making in this country.

Any ideas let me – or Jeremy Hunt – know.


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Cultural Shock Doctrine Part Two - Hunt Attacks Progessive Cultural Policy

Jeremy-culture-vandal-Hunt (who is fast becoming a favourite subject of this Blog) used his speech at the Media Festival Arts in London to reiterate his “long term commitment to the arts sector”. Hunt talked of sharing pain, future growth, blah blah blah...

But what shape is this sector going to take? Hunt also took the opportunity to take a swipe at instrumental aspects of cultural funding under New Labour, according to The Mail:

“Public money will no longer be given to arts organisations simply because they hire a high proportion of women or ethnic minorities”. The “days of securing taxpayer funds purely by box ticking – getting cash simply because a diversity target has been hit – are now over.”

This suggests a number of things about the politics of the cultural shock doctrine.

Firstly, the idea that organisations were hiring a high proportion of women or ethnic minorities to get cash is laughable – the problem has always been that were not hiring a fair proportion, ie one that reflects the population as a whole, the local area or the audience. Instrumental policies, where they actually existed, were designed to address systemic racism and sexism by increasing diversity to more equal levels. Attacks on policies that attempt to make the cultural sector a more equal place are, of course, quite natural Tory territory.

Secondly, there has been a popular and sector perception of this sort of reverse discrimination going back to the cultural industries days of the Greater London Council in the 1980s. However, the extent to which this ever informed creative industries policies in their post-1997 incarnation is debatable (The Mail can only give the example of one book of ethnic minority poetry, although, to be fair, this may represent poor journalism). New Labour were able, through the discourse of the creative industries, to draw together the genuinely politically progressive sections of the cultural sector that developed in the 1980s behind the idea of market-led diversity. To take an example from film policy:

“Diversity is both a catalyst for creativity and is key to the success of the UK film sector. However, the profile of the sector’s workforce shows it has a long way to go before it can demonstrate that it is inclusive of the diversity of contemporary British society. Inevitably, this has a significant impact on the stories that are told, the way they are told on screen, the levels of access to film for potential audiences and, in terms of content and portrayal, the images of Britain and the concepts of “Britishness” around the globe.” (Report here, page 5)

This is a reflection of a cultural policy that managed to align a progressive cultural politics with commercial interests. While this discourse paid lip-service to diversity, multi-culturalism and so on, its real focus was always the market. It therefore found it hard to interfere with areas of the market that worked but also happened to be white-male dominated. As a result, New Labour cultural policy was seemingly unable to make a case for diversity that is not based on commercial success; a moral or political argument, for instance. As mentioned in a previous post, after thirteen years of this, research has shown that the film industry is still inherently racist and sexist. Furthermore, in employment terms the cultural sector is more male dominated than the rest of the economy (63% compared to 53% - figure here, page 47). The idea that the last thirteen years were a bonanza in public funding for members of ethnic minorities and women regardless of talent or quality is a myth promoted by arseholes such as this one.

For the Tories, attacks on this sort of thinking are a coded way of attacking the principle of anything remotely politically progressive in cultural policy in general and clearly they are signalling that they are withdrawing support and political influence from the liberal cultural intelligentsia. Further, this works to deflect criticism from the cultural shock doctrine – the cuts in cultural funding are about withdrawing the tax burden created by rampant political correctness and restoring cultural authority to the white middle-classes, as opposed to hamstringing the cultural sector. As Kristine Landon-Smith argues in the Newstateman, “we are seeing a retrogressive new conservatism at work.”

At the same time, this ties into a genuine hostility to the cultural management mechanisms favoured by New Labour – the hysterical emphasis on targets, application forms, report-writing; a bureaucratic centralised system which effectively stifled autonomy.

New Labour came to power in 1997 with a relatively coherent cultural policy developed during time in opposition with clear differences to their predecessors. Cultural conservatism was to be dispelled in favour of modernisation; the heritage industries became creative industries. So far the ConDems have only demonstrated slash and burn dressed up as right wing dogma. We can undoubtedly expect more of this sort of thing in the coming months and years.

Culture Vandals from Magdalen College

In a recent article, Evening Standard columnist Sasha Slater recounts her time at Magdalen College, Oxford. Magdalen College is, of course, the illustrious institution at the centre of the Laura Spence scandal of 2001. It is also the former College of no less than five members of the Cabinet including George Osborne, William Hague, Chris Huhne, Dominic Grieve and Jeremy-culture-vandal-Hunt.

Slater remembers:

“A drunken student (now a company director) swinging, Tarzan-like, out of the windows of the Junior Common Room gave an ancient sculpture of a greyhound a swipe with his feet and smashed it to smithereens on the flagstones below. Undaunted, the president of the college, who should have known better, borrowed a beautiful full-sized mirrored sculpture of a winged unicorn from the flamboyant artist Andrew Logan. This was erected amid great fanfares but only lasted a couple of weeks before the same student snapped its horn off. Andrew Logan's response was unprintable.”

I wonder if this is the sort of education that prepared the Culture Secretary to lead us through these tough economic times?

Cultural Shock Doctrine: Arts Funding Cuts and Neoliberalism

Further to a previous post, the cuts in arts funding in the UK are starting to take effect.  The Department of Culture, Media and Sport is expected to be one of the hardest hit in the upcoming spending review and is anticipating cuts of up to 40%.  Culture-vandal Jeremy Hunt already announced the closure of the UK Film Council.  According to Trisha Andres in the Guardian, we can now add to this list arts services and schemes specifically targetted to the young such as the Arts Journalist Bursary Scheme and the Find Your Talent Scheme.

Along with cuts to University places, apprenticeships and jobs the ConDems cuts are already hitting young people hard.  Unemployment among the young (under-18s) is already 33% and for those without GCSEs it is as high as 50%.  77% of the decline in employment has been felt by young people (under-24s).  Figures here.

On the other hand we have corporate culture-vultures waiting in the wings for their share of reconstructed neoliberal art once the flames die down.  For example, Rena De Sisto at Merrill Lynch - who has the Sith-like job title of Global Arts and Culture Executive - has argued that:

"The government proposes that the arts community adopt the US-based approach to arts funding, with less dependence upon public and more upon private funding sources.  In fact, the British arts community already has a tradition of private philanthropic and corporate funding, so the difference with the US is really one of degree.  And while the US may be further along the curve, with its longer, more comfortable relationship with private funding for the arts, in both nations the arts sector can benefit from new approaches to working with corporations.  Similarly, many types of companies can and do benefit greatly from supporting the arts.  But some fundamental changes need to occur to unlock this opportunity."

De Sisto argues that the days of public support are over and that arts organisations must allow companies to "extract sound business benefits, such as access for employees, brand visibility and client outreach opportunities."  Doesn't sound much like a culture to me.

This is, of course, nothing new.  The Thatcherite attack on the cultural welfare state was always predicated on the wider attack on the post-War social democratic settlement and this represents the latest phase of neoliberal restructuring.  For example, Richard Luce was Minister for the Arts in Thatcher's government when he made this statement in 1987:

“there are still too many in the arts world who have yet to be weaned away from the welfare state mentality - the attitude that the taxpayer owes them a living.  Many have not yet accepted the challenge of developing plural sources of funding.  They give the impression of thinking that all other sources of funding are either tainted or too difficult to get.  They appear not to have grasped that the collectivist mentality of the sixties and seventies is out of date.”  (Quoted here, page 30)

This again shows the need for opponents of cuts in arts and cultural funding to join the dots and link-up with the wider campaigns to defend public services.  And ideally this would be a grassroots campaign that is led by the people who have most to lose from a barren neoliberal-corporate culture, not by Damien Hirst.

Defend the Arts Animation by David Shrigley

Defend the arts video by David Shrigley.