Cinema and Brexit

The Politics of Popular English Film

Neil Archer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350104488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Neil Archer's original study makes a timely and politically-engaged intervention in debates about national cinema and national identity. Structured around key examples of 'culturally English cinema' in the years up to and following the UK's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Cinema and Brexit looks to make sense of the peculiarities and paradoxes marking this era of filmmaking. At the same time as providing a contextual and analytical reading of 21st century filmmaking in Britain, Archer raises critical questions about popular national cinema, and how Brexit has cast both light and shadow over this body of films.
Central to Archer's argument is the idea that Brexit represents not just a critical moment in how we will understand future film production, but also in how we will understand production of the recent past. Using as a point of departure the London Olympics opening ceremony of 2012, Cinema and Brexit considers the tensions inherent in a wide range of films, including Skyfall (2012), Dunkirk (2017), Their Finest (2017), Darkest Hour (2017), The Crown (Netflix, 2016), Paddington (2014), Paddington 2 (2017), Never Let Me Go (2011), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), The Trip (2010), The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), The World's End (2013), Sightseers (2012), One Day (2011), Attack the Block (2011), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and The Kid Who Would be King (2019). Archer examines the complex national narratives and representations these films expound, situating his analyses within the broader commercial contexts of film production beyond Hollywood, highlighting the negotiations or contradictions at play between the industrial imperatives of contemporary films and the varied circumstances in which they are made.
Considering some of the ways a popular and globally-minded English cinema is finding means to work alongside and through the contexts of Brexit, he questions what are the stakes for, and possibilities of, a global 'culturally English cinema' in 2019 and beyond.

1

Film politics: Brexit, brand Britain and soft power

Both film policy and industrial strategies rely on certain ideas about, expectations of, and indeed promotions of, a cinema for and of a ‘nation’. In practice and reality this representation of and for the national body excludes as much as it may notionally include. It is also as much directed towards global perceptions of Englishness or Britishness as it is aimed at any domestic audience.¹ Far from reflecting social realities, there may be a profound disconnect between cinematic representation and what it purports to represent. This inevitably raises questions about why, but also for whom, a national cinema exists and operates.

This chapter engages, then, with the sometimes under-explored question of what we really mean by the analysis of a ‘national cinema’. Rather than rely on a consensual idea that ‘British’ or ‘English’ cinema exists, and that it constitutes a subject of study, in this chapter, I want firstly to identify what is at stake both in its institutional and critical construction. In this chapter, I work with the idea that a ‘British’ cinema, which in this case is more accurately an English cinema, while in some senses a diffuse descriptive category, can also be applied to the particular mobilization of certain cinematic motifs. In this case, this mobilization plays an active role in the promotion of a British cinematic ‘brand’. One of the questions I ask here, then, is what an idea of ‘British cinema’ is actually for, rather than just taking it as a given. In asking this question, this chapter suggests that we think clearly about how and why filmmaking policy and practice interrelate. In this instance, it is to create specific images and meanings not so much for the nation (such as it exists), but as political manifestations of the nation and the national at a global and geopolitical level.

Film policy, promotion and propaganda

As John Hill has pointed out, conceptions of a national film culture in terms of policy have not always been economic in their focus, but have perennially been informed by conceptions of film and its cultural value, including its value as a national product.² Ideas around a ‘culturally British’ film industry have been reinforced in this century by various initiatives, such as the distribution of National Lottery funding by the former UK Film Council, or the ‘cultural test’ as a means to promote British production through tax relief.³ In effect, these initiatives conflate cultural and economic concerns in their combined emphasis on sustainability of production and appropriate representation. The complexities of this model, in terms of what it actually means for British film production and culture, have been discussed at length elsewhere.⁴ For the present purposes of this chapter, I am interested more in what is often mentioned only in passing, or at least in less quantifiable terms, within the discussion of British cinema. As Hill states, film policy in the UK has also ‘depended upon cultural assumptions about the significance of film for the projection of “national culture” at home and abroad’.⁵ He goes on to add that ‘while government film policy has sometimes been promoted as a hard-headed commercial industrial strategy it has rarely turned out to be so straightforwardly the case.’⁶

My interest here in this ‘projection of national culture’ responds to a slight vagueness or limitation in its wider discussion. Jack Newsinger summarizes the strategic position of New Labour film policy earlier in this century, in terms of its promoting ‘cultural and social aims … but only in so far as they could be justified in terms of training, infrastructure development, tourism and so on’.⁷ The final unresolved ‘tourism and so on’, while situated within the context of Newsinger’s broader, nuanced discussion, only highlights how tricky it is to pin down the relationship between film production and the supposed promotion of a national brand. That this relationship exists, though, is axiomatic to most recent discussion of British film. From the perspective of British cinema’s international exposure, key production tendencies, for instance, such as the literary adaptation or period costume drama, given the global viability of these particular motifs, can be linked to the touristic promotion of national ‘heritage’ to viewers at both an international and national level.⁸ Typically this involves the perpetuation of a tourist industry around certain authors (Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters), or more recently, the promotion of Warner Bros.’ Harry Potter studio tour in Leavesden.⁹ The ‘Paddington Trail’, feeding explicitly on the popularity of the 2014 and 2017 films, and devoted to the metropolitan history of Michael Bond’s popular creation, is another recent manifestation of these tendencies.¹⁰ The economic benefits of such ventures are obvious. Speaking at a House of Commons committee session shortly after the dismantling of the UK Film Council, where she was asked to justify British film’s ‘value for money’ in the contexts of public spending cuts, British Film Institute CEO Amanda Nevill spoke of those benefits existing alongside ‘the hard industry edge’: in this case, ‘the way in which [film] promotes Britain as a place to come to – the tourism benefits’.¹¹ Nevill’s point though, from one perspective, is equally ‘hard’ in its focus on these peripheral or contingent economic benefits. Unless, that is, she is talking about something else: the cultural, or even political, dimension of film tourism. Less frequently considered in these discussions, in general, are the more intangible assets that cannot simply be reduced to the ‘hard-headed commercial’ logic of film export or publicity for tourist sites. At this point the commodity logic of film policy elides into the strategically political use of film imagery. Beyond any assumed economic use, what is politically in play in this ‘projection of “national culture” … abroad’, and how can we identify it?

This is briefly addressed by Newsinger, reflecting on the success of The King’s Speech (2010), and in Christopher McMillan’s recent essay on Skyfall (2012). These articles refer to the two films, respectively, as ‘a piece of royalist/tourist propaganda’¹² and ‘to some extent, an expensive promo for Britain’.¹³ These assessments of the films are easier to state than to prove, though, as well as indicating on face value a rather simplistic reflectionism. The King’s Speech may indeed elide some of the more problematic aspects of George VI’s reign, letting that particular monarch off the hook by drawing on Colin Firth’s affable star persona.¹⁴ Equally, Skyfall’s eventual reconstitution of Bond as a nostalgic figure, harking back to the start of the 007 series, appears to turn back ‘the uncertainty surrounding the future of Britain’¹⁵ in the era of post-imperialism and possible devolution (I will return to this in Chapter 3). Undoubtedly, the films can be interpreted or used in this way. However, to speak of such films’ narratives as active forms of national propaganda or promotion relies on an almost conspiratorial link between governmental policy and, in these cases, commercial cinematic forms. Specifying intention behind film, or showing how this intention is made visible, is a difficult task, especially with regard to political meanings.

Once we start focusing, as David Bordwell suggests we do, on the ‘specific causal processes’ underpinning film production, we get an even stronger sense of the dislocations between film’s apparent political representation and production contexts.¹⁶ These are telling in this instance, given that the ‘national’ influence on these films at the level of production is only ever partial. Though much touted as one of the great achievements of the UK Film Council, for example, The King’s Speech actually sits within a fairly familiar nexus of transnational production and exhibition parties, including the Weinstein Company and the distributors FilmNation. And as much as the UK basis of Eon Productions guarantees a certain British status for the Bond movies, their continued existence is only ever relative to the health of the Hollywood corporations that fund and distribute them (the production lull between Quantum of Solace [2008] and Skyfall, on account of MGM’s filing for bankruptcy, being illustrative of this point).

Rather than look to individual films out of context as somehow conveying political intent, the more pointed political concern here is to identify in what degree films like The King’s Speech or Skyfall exemplify the types or scales of British filmmaking that are, in the first instance, privileged by broader film policy. As Paul Dave has suggested, one of the peculiar but potent aspects of British cinema as an industry is that it is able to draw on cultural elements as its own form of commodity and promotion. For Dave, this cinema relies on the ‘historic hyper-visibility [of] Englishness’ as its most ‘exploitable’ aspect: a ‘mythic and globally recognized culture … with all its abstract, idealized and marketable characteristics’. This is a ‘legacy’ that, for Dave, represents ‘both a problem and an opportunity’ in terms of cultural policy.¹⁷ Dave’s view points to the idea, then, that popular English cinema (as ‘British’ cinema) is inherently driving cultural ideas around Britishness on a global scale – a process that is at the same time a political one – within the same process of marketization. And as Dave also intimates, this inevitably involves a narrowing of the parameters through which Britishness is understood.

2012: History, parody, spectacle

To explore this further, I want to look at a British event motivated and defined precisely by its role as a projection of the national culture for a mass international audience; one which also drew significantly on the global currency of cinematic and other media figures. In deploying both the figure of James Bond and Queen Elizabeth II within its programme, the London Olympics opening ceremony of July 2012 tapped into the same national iconography that supposedly informed the success of films such as The King’s Speech and Skyfall. This is overdetermined by the form and expectations of such events, as the obligation to address a mediated global audience has been structured into the planning and delivery of the Games since Moscow in 1980.¹⁸ Given the inflated costs involved in both bidding for and producing such events (the London ceremony alone cost £27m), they have frequently been seen in economically promotional terms, with the staging of the Games itself once viewed as ‘part of a whole development strategy for a city’.¹⁹ This idea only goes so far, though. In the historical contexts of then emerging or re-emerging global cities such as Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992) or even Beijing (2008), ‘development strategy’ makes sense. But it is less obviously relevant to the already-established ‘world city’ of London in 2012: a city that had not only enjoyed decades of global cultural and touristic recognition, but was also the financial hub of contemporary Europe.

From this point of view the Olympic Games were specifically political in their inception: part of a broader attempt on the part of the New Labour government, as Robert Hewison argues, to erase memories of the earlier Millennium Dome – an economic and public relations fiasco – as well as its disastrous intervention in the Iraq War, which began in 2003.²⁰ The Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) (formerly the Department of National Heritage) played the energizing role in preparing the Olympic bid in 2005, with its public body, the Olympic Delivery Authority, vowing to manage the games and its varied physical and symbolic legacies. As stated on its official website homepage, among the aims of the DCMS are ‘to drive growth, enrich lives and promote Britain abroad, and highlight … Britain as a fantastic place to visit. We help to give the UK a unique advantage on the global stage, striving for economic success’.²¹ The Olympic Games and its legacies were also a key focal point of the GREAT Britain campaign, a wide-scale initiative drawing on the work of the British Council, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK Trade and Investment, Cabinet Office, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and Visit Britain. According to its mission statement, the GREAT Britain campaign aims to ‘showcase … the best of what the UK has to offer to inspire the world and encourage people to visit, do business, invest and study’; emphasizing in turn the country’s ‘global leader’ status in ‘industries like music, fashion, design and film’.²² As McMillan notes, the same campaign ran a short film in conjunction with promotional drive for Skyfall.²³ In the video, brief moments from various Bond movies, including the upcoming film, were match-edited into various shots, showing, for instance, fly-by images of British landscapes or views of London, interspersed with various words splashed in capitals (EXCITING … INSPIRING … TIMELESS …). The film ends with the slogan ‘BOND IS GREAT BRITAIN’ across a shot of Daniel Craig’s 007, in one of the last images from Skyfall, looking out across the rooftops of central London.

The importance of cinematic and more broadly media archetypes was hardly lost on the producers of the 2012 opening ceremony, coordinated by film and theatre directors Danny Boyle and Stephen Daldry, along with writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce. But it was also a specific inflection on the use of these media figures that distinguished the event. As I have argued elsewhere, the strategically parodic use of generic Bond motifs, as the Queen – within a short inserted film – leapt from her own helicopter strapped into a Union Jack parachute, suggested a self-reflexive and ironic relationship to the national iconography that is already hinted at in the James Bond GREAT Britain advert (Figure 1.1). If part of an opening ceremony’s ‘galvanising function’ is to ‘forge a national narrative [and] sense of an “imagined community”’,²⁴ the London event showed a canny sense of the way this community, such as it may exist, operates through media images (whether fictional or actual). This status of the images was underscored by their incorporation into an eclectic bricolage (integrating, in the case of the above short film, fictional and actual figures), and a parodic juxtaposition of incongruous elements.²⁵ The later introduction of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean persona, playing the one-note synthesizer part in the theme from Chariots of Fire (1981), only underscored this idea further. The fact that Atkinson’s daydreaming persona here lampooned the opening sequence of this Oscar-winning film, one so tied up with discourses around nostalgia and heritage, emphasized the ceremony’s often self-deprecating and irreverent reflection on its national past. This ‘domestic’ focus was at the same time strategically global, inasmuch as these media figures are also significant international exports. The Mr. Bean series (Thames Television/Central Independe...