Issue 196 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published April 1996 Copyright © Socialist Review
Spellbound: Art and Film
The Hayward Gallery and the British Film Institute have organised an exhibition by artists and film makers that explores the relationship between art and film to celebrate the centenary of cinema.
The artists and film makers have approached the subject of the relationship between art and film from varied positions. Some have attempted to tackle the complete subject, others have dealt with what has influenced their own work from film, whilst some artists have simply indulged their own directorial fantasies. Therefore the exhibition is not particularly coherent but is nonetheless thought provoking.
The visual artists who have had a go at film making are the least successful contributors to the exhibition For example the photographer and animator Boyd Webb has made a silly film about a piece of popcorn on a cinema floor that comes to life and fails in love.
In a similar vein the biggest crowd puller, Damien Hirst, has made a puerile film about a middle aged, middle class has-been of the 1980s.
In general it is the film makers that bring most to the exhibition, although there is a pervading undercurrent of postmodernism which leads to a stunted interest in the form film takes rather than its content.
Terry Gilliam, ex-Python and director of Brazil, has created a wall of labelled filing cabinets. Each drawer contains an element that makes a complete film. This would be interesting if the drawers revealed the ideas and influences that make up a film but instead they merely display a process--a sketch on a napkin at a restaurant table, telephones ringing and so on.
The shining exceptions of the exhibition are the large pastel drawings by Paula Rego. It is almost worth seeing the exhibition for her work alone. Rego has responded to the Disney cartoons that many of us have been brought up on. She has drawn large portraits of strong noble looking women playing the usually sweet and refined characters from Disney films, and coarse and muscular women dressed as Degas ballerinas performing the dancing ostriches from Disney's
Fantasia.
Her pastels of Snow White reveal layers of truth about self conscious pubescent girls growing up with the pressures of trying to achieve a physical perfection which enables them to fall in love.
Despite the criticisms this exhibition was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Mostly this was because it demands some audience participation instead of visitors being just placid observers. It is a great way of reminding us of the enormous influence cinema has on our lives.
Patrick Connellan
Spellbound shows at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 6 May
Magic behind the Screen
This exhibition-which marks a hundred years of cinema as well as the beginning of the Bradford Film Festival 1996--shows how the growth of the film industry is linked to the development of capitalism in both America and Britain.
It includes some intriguing film clips which give glimpses of working class life at the beginning of the century.
The exhibition explores the use made by government of the film media, though in the very early days there appears to have been little state intervention. But when the film
industry moved fairly rapidly to a mass audience governments saw possible usefulness and dangers in its development. In 1909 the Cinematography Act introduced licensing on the grounds of health and safety (film was highly inflammable) and effects on crime and morality.
Licensing made censorship easier. In 1914-15 the government banned the showing of any newsreel of British troops on the war front. So the public had to rely on 'death and glory' drawings of 19th century artists. However, the government also took advantage of the new media and sent mobile cinema vans to rural areas to spread government propaganda about the war.
After the First World War the Empire Marketing Board produced documentaries which 'promoted trade and a sense of unity amongst various parts of the British Empire'.
The interwar period saw Hollywood setting the style and pace of progress. The British film industry was only sustainable if it followed the American industrial method of film production--modern large studios with massive workforces. It became dominated by a few individuals and their companies including Rank who opened Pinewood Studios in 1936.
By 1945 Rank controlled assets of £40 million and had a further period of expansion when the government imposed high import taxes on American films in an effort to solve a balance of payments crisis. The abandonment of this policy and the advent of television led to the collapse of Rank.
The postwar boom saw the advent of social realism on the screen with *kitchen sink' films such as A Kind Of Loving, A Taste of Honey, Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Inevitably in an exhibition concentrating on the history of the British cinema there is a large section devoted to the production of James Bond movies, particularly the legendary special effects. There is, however, an interesting comment on Fleming's army background and the use of the films for propaganda during the Cold War.
There is one glaring omission--there is no reference to workers in the film industry other than film stars, producers and directors, and no mention of trade union activity and disputes such as the cinema lockout of 1949. This omission also applies to the content of the films covered in the exhibition. This is briefly acknowledged in a reference to criticisms made at the time concerning the interwar documentaries about industrial Britain--they ignored all industrial disputes!
Paula Champion
Magic Behind the Screen at the photography, Film and TV Museum, Bradford