Bigger Picture Research

Unblocked at last

I recently came across mention of BPR in a student blog. The author writes encouragingly of the ‘quality and depth’ of my posts, but wonders when I find the time to ‘eat or sleep or go to the toilet’.

For the record I can confirm my basic biological needs are attended to. I find the knack is not to do any two of them at the same time.

Ironically, the student’s post coincided with the longest period of inactivity on this blog since it started in June 2008.

This is principally due to an abundance of paid work, because of necessity I have developed the freelancer’s aversion to saying ‘no’. In consequence, gainful employment (rather than eating, sleeping or the other) has kept me from blogging.

The weather hasn’t helped. February, the season of sniffles and fellow mournfulness, always casts me into a bit of a funk.

Then a curious thing happened: I developed blogger's block. The longer I left writing the next post, the easier it was not to bother at all.

But now the paid work flow has eased somewhat, and the days are getting discernibly longer, I feel able to pick up the pace again; starting with a skim through some of the more notable research items since I last posted.

The 60th Berlin International Film Festival came and went during the month, and to mark the occasion the European Audiovisual Observatory published its annual round up of admissions and box office data. The Observatory estimates total EU admissions increased to around 985 million in 2009, up 6.5% on the 2008 tally and marking the highest level since 2004.

According to the press release:

Admissions increased in 18 out of the 24 EU member states for which data were available. In absolute terms Germany registered the most significant growth (+16.9 million, +13.1%), followed by France (+10.9 million, +5.7%), the United Kingdom (+9.3 million, +5.6%) and Poland (+5.4 million, +16.1%). For the first time in the past five years Spain reported an increase in admissions (+2.8%), whereas attendance decreased marginally in Italy (-0.4%).

Click to enlarge:

Source: European Audiovisual Observatory

There was more European-themed news this month with the launch of Screenbase, an online database of European film information courtesy of Screen International. If you’re not a Screen International subscriber be advised to check out the database while you can. It’s free to use during beta stage, but will soon be bricked up behind the Screen Daily pay wall.

At a time when trade publications like Screen International are switching online business models it’s heartening to find a new service that’s free at the point of use (for the time being, at least). Hong Kong based Film Business Asia, co-founded by Patrick Frater and Stephen Cremin, provides a business news and data service built on information contained in ‘a multilingual database of Asian cinema that has been in active development since 1993’.

The beta site launched in January this year, and is due for a ‘fuller launch’ in Q2 2010, when some form of pay wall may well come into operation.

‘Get in there while you can’ is a recurring theme of this post. Which reminds me: I have to see a man about a dog, so if you'll excuse me...

Lords and superheroes: saviours of British film?

Having waited diligently for nearly a year, there’s a certain irony in the fact that, now it has finally been published, I’m too busy to write a decent post about the Lords Communications Committee report into the British film and television industries.

Fortunately there’s not a great deal to say. It’s a perfectly respectable report of its kind, full of facts and opinion, plus the familiar spectacle of well-intentioned hand wringing and exhortation. Just the sort of narrative one would expect.

Trouble is, it’s all so familiar. In cinematic terms, the Lords report is not so much a sequel to previous Parliamentary enquiries (like the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on The British Film Industry 2002/03). It’s actually closer in spirit to a remake.

Not a slavish shot-for-shot copy, like Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (1998), or a pointless transposition like Stephen T. Kay’s Get Carter (2000). It’s more like James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) when held up against Delmer Dave’s 1957 original. Different, and not without merit, but the same.

Perhaps it was inevitable. Evidence was heard from many of the same witnesses, and the challenges besetting our home industry are well known and, it would appear, largely unchanging.

But I can’t help feeling an opportunity has been missed. The Lords Committee took nearly a year to arrive at its conclusions, and commendable though they are (extend the tax credit, outlaw camcording in cinemas, encourage more private investment in film production, invest more in training, secure greater support for British film by broadcasters etc.) I’d like to have seen evidence of more innovative thinking and some fresh voices in the public policy debate.

In short, I’d like to have seen a ‘reimagining’, not a remake; a report resembling the 21st Century Battlestar Galactica, not The Thomas Crown Affair (1999).

The Lords report is subtitled ‘Decline or opportunity?’, but there’s very little in it of real substance about future opportunities. The ‘coming of digital distribution could offer opportunities for a different distribution model’, states one of the report’s conclusions, but without any concrete detail about the form this might take, or how the British industry, as opposed to the US studios, might benefit. The Lords report simply echoes the earlier Commons report observation that digital technology will have a transformative effect on the business. And…?

On another tack, there’s an example of alternative thinking in the latest issue of Screen International, where Slingshot CEO Arvind Ethan David speculates on the lessons the British film industry might learn from Marvel Entertainment’s strategy of superhero franchise-building.

I don’t know whether the case has genuine merit (when I read the article, Stormbreaker [2006] came to mind, a British property made and distributed by UK indies that failed to take off as a franchise). But it’s surely worth considering within the public policy mix, along with other more radical perspectives that would benefit from an airing once in a while.