Monday 10 August 2020

Diversity in cinema

 Sir Alan Parker, who died last week, rose from the post-room in an advertising agency to directing some of the most significant films of the late 20th and early 21st century. His description of British film's being a cottage industry and other scathing remarks made good copy for the tabloid press. In his friend David Puttnam's words, he saw through the laziness of the business as compared with the hard-driven advertising background they shared. What received less attention was Parker's interest in improving matters. Although he made virtually all his movies in Hollywood, he became an effective chairman of the British Film Institute. He was also founder chairman of the UK Film Council. Never forgetting his north London roots, he pushed the British industry to be more diverse. He started a company in Birmingham so that young film-makers not in London could make their first films. 

Coincidentally, last week's Film Programme on Radio 4 opened with a diatribe by a guest presenter against the nepotism and class structure of English drama. 

It seems to me that we have come full circle. The British films of the nineteen-forties and -fifties were replete with trained actors from a middle- or upper-middle-class background. When called upon to speak in a regional or working-class accent, their efforts were often painful. It was the British "New Wave" from 1959 onwards which  redressed the balance. A whole generation of actors of both sexes from the regions were encouraged by the new breed of film-makers to use their natural tones, even though many had been trained in RP by drama schools. Later, there was also encouragement for natural actors like Bob Hoskins. That generation has largely passed on, though Sir Tom Courtenay is happily still with us. Otherwise, it is all private-school or Estuary English, with the occasional Welsh or Scottish voice thrown in.

Will there be another "New Wave"? Probably not in cinema or on the stage. The administrators of institutions in decline tend to circle the wagons and not let fresh blood in. BBC Radio is consciously doing its bit, but rumours about the intentions of the Johnson/Cummings government throw its future into doubt. Perhaps something will come from the Web, from gaming or from Internet personalities. We shall see.


1 comment:

Frank Little said...

I shall never know whether it was entirely a coincidence that the character played by Jodie Foster, later to "come out" after years of speculation was named "Tallulah". The most famous bearer of that name in pre-war America was the flamboyantly bisexual Tallulah Bankhead.