18th October 2009

When I started this blog I was told that I had to post entries at least every two weeks and from October to May, this proved no problem. However, once teaching had stopped it became much more difficult to hit the required note. Summer for me is a time for reflection of a kind ill suited to the diary form and I had decided that if there were any readers of my blog, and one or two had surfaced, they were going to have to cope with a summer recess just as long as Parliament’s. Even the New Labour outrage of forcing through the election of a Speaker without any support from the Conservatives had failed to wake me from my summer torpor.
However, just as the pulses were quickening and a new academic year starting I received an e-mail from a former student Matt Walker “Tonight I discovered your blog. As much as I’ve enjoyed reading it, please tell me they make you write it…please? I love the ferocity of it all, but you sound like a pissed-off ex-pat”. As Burns said it is a tremendous gift to see ourselves as others see us although it’s a gift which can often feel like a slap in the face. Matt had endeared himself to me as a student on my Pitt in London course when, after I had taught Wordsworth’s Upon Westminster Bridge (“Earth had not anything to show more fair”) he went down at dawn to Westminster to check on the poet’s observation. Indeed he was one of the brightest and sharpest students I had taught in my entire time at Pitt so I had to take him seriously.
The problem is, however, that I am pissed off. Very pissed off. The two passions of my life have been education and the media. Both have been ruined in my lifetime in my country by my generation, often by people who I have known personally. My generation was given everything and is handing on nothing. I hate New Labour with an unfortunately enduring passion but then so does nearly everybody that I know – the only difference is that I started early. In June 1998 to be precise when they sacked me. After mulling Matt’s e-mail for nearly two months I have decided that I will dedicate this blog for the next academic year to following the crimes of New Labour. To set the scene I will take us back 11 years to my sacking:

“It’s not working”, said the new Director of the British Film Institute brandishing the papers in his hand. That was all the explanation I ever received.
“So I’ve examined your contract and we can terminate at three month’s notice. I will write the formal letter today. You will leave the building forthwith”.
As my mouth opened and shut silently I must have ressembled a particularly dim goldfish. I shouldn’t have been surprised – after all I had interrupted the partygoers revelling in my house as we celebrated the defeat of the Conservatives in the early morning of May 2nd 1997 to declare that New Labour would be the worst government for education and culture that Britain had ever seen. By that token I should have been delighted that New Labour were sacking me only a year after Blair took office.
I’d met Blair first at a London Weekend Television lunch in l992.
I was raising money for the new Master’s degree that I was setting up at the BFI and had been invited to LWT’s monthly wining and dining of the great and the good. Melvyn Bragg was there, Hale and Pace the comedians and , amongst others, David Willets and Tony Blair the new shadow Home secretary. Blair was already being touted as a possible future Labour leader but, much more important in this context, he was the man now in charge of Labour’s television policy.
Television was the medium that had opened up the world for me in the sixties: Hancock and Steptoe, the plays of Potter and Mercer, Monitor, That Was The Week That Was. For a London schoolboy this was an education even more important than the transatlantic rhythms of pop music or my school essays. And in the past decade it was Channel 4 who had been the bank of first resort for all the films that I’d produced. So the future of British television mattered to me. And that future was under threat, Thatcher’s Broadcasting Act of l990 was deliberately aimed at humbling one of the few institutions that had remained relatively unaffected by her economic policies. Stripped of its frills, it was an attempt to recast the regulatory mechanisms of television. For forty years tight government regulation had tied the very small number of broadcasters who enjoyed a monopoly of production to tight public service remits. That regulation was being dramatically loosened while the broadcasters were having to abandon their monopoly on production. It was classic Thatcherite neo-liberalism attempting to produce markets where there had been monopolies, breaking producer power in favour of the power of the consumer. The trouble is that great culture be it Attic tragedy, Elizabethan theatre, classic Hollywood or British television depended on just such producer monopolies. The historical trick was when producer monopolies had been linked to stiff competition as between the Chamberlain’s men and the Admiral’s men in Elizabethan London, the studios in classic Hollywood or the duopoly of ITV and BBC in Britain. However the existing monopoly in television was bound to be broken by satellite technology and the argument that the production base should be broadened was in essence a socialist argument. Would the new man have the kind of fresh imagination which could shape these new configurations so that they would produce even better television?
It was obvious that Blair was one of the new group of Labour politicians who were now taking control of the party. What would someone of my own generation, the first television generation, have to say about this most crucial of mediums? We had lunched well when our host, Brian Tesler asked the politicians to sing briefly for their supper. Willetts spoke first and delivered the standard Thatcherite message: globalization, international competition, changing world etc etc. It was the current neo-liberal rubbish but to give Willetts his due it was fluently delivered. Now it was Blair’s turn. So far, he had sat there looking like the head prefect dining with the masters. “Well” he said smiling in a self-deprecating manner which was, I think, calculated to be ingratiating , I’m afraid that I left my briefing papers in my office” Another smile. “ And I can’t remember what our policy is” Another smile “But I suppose it will be like all our other policies – just like the Conservatives but we’ll say it’s different”. Then he gave us what would soon become known as the full Bambi and simpered to a stop.
At one level I just wanted to look away; a train wreck is not a pretty sight. Forgetting one’s papers was hardly the most heinous of sins, although admitting it by way of excuse reminded me of all those incompetent lecturers who thought that they could save an abysmal lecture by apologizing beforehand. But the statement about imitating the Conservatives was abject, a simple abandonment of any political principle. Much worse though was the fact that Blair obviously had no interest in television or its development. He was sitting at the table of one of the greatest of the ITV companies surrounded by men liked Melvyn Bragg and Barry Cox who might well be enlisted for an alternative future to the one promised by Rupert Murdoch, and he had effectively told them to abandon all principle in favour of getting their snouts into the trough. Blair had obviously taken the slogan of French nineteenth century liberals to heart: Enrichessez vous or in plain English – “Do you sincerely want to be rich”. The future of television simply didn’t concern him.
These rather hazy recollections went at some speed. Thought is quick said Thomas Hobbes and if Thomas was right about nothing else, he was right about that. Back in the world of action, however, things were moving pretty slow. My main problem was that all the saliva in my mouth had suddenly dried up as though I was sitting in a super- efficient dentist’s chair. Worse my tongue seemed to have swelled to about three times its normal size. I was trying to speak but having severe doubts as to whether any comprehensible sound would emerge from a mouth not often lost for a word. I knew that I wanted to say something about education but I also knew I would be wasting my breath.
The second time I’d run into Blair had been in l996. After my intial meeting I had been astonished by his meteoric rise. In long retrospect, that LWT lunch may have been much more calculated than I had naively imagined, his only concern to assure the rich and powerful that Labour would be on their side. There was no doubt that his transformation of the Labour Party after John Smith’s death was the work of a consummate politician. Indeed his determination that Labour would say in public what it argued in private had briefly caught my imagination deadened by two decades of ever more irrelevant leftism.
We were organizing a conference on media and education at the National Film Theatre and Blair had agreed to use the occasion to make a policy speech on education. When he finally arrived, a mere 5 minutes before he was due to speak, I was astonished by the transformation from the figure of four years earlier. This wasn’t the head boy – this was the headmaster. The immaculately cut suit, the pristine shirt, the trailing flunkeys – power came off him in waves. And boy, was he prepared this time. The speech was well constructed and delivered with real energy and conviction. Unfortunately by the time he was finished I knew that New Labour was a completely empty vessel. It was Harold Wilson lite. The white hot heat of the technological revolution minus any commitment to socialism. There was nothing new and nothing that hadn’t already failed us for forty years. Education, apparently, was important because it was essential to a modern economy. All questions of what kind of education and how it was to be differentiated were simply ignored. Blair may or may not have used the slogan Education, Education, Education but it was already clear that he was an estate agent flogging a desirable property. Questions of social justice; a crusade for a better society; the political or spiritual role of education weren’t dismissed – they weren’t even discussed. Education for New Labour was about making more money – end of story.
Once again my rambling consciousness focused on the question at hand. I’d just been sacked – difficult to find the mot juste in reply. Suddenly I remembered that I was due to chair a seminar for the new Master’s degree which had taken its first students four years before. My tongue finally clicked into gear “ Well, I’m due to teach in the Boardroom at six o’clock this evening. I always honour my teaching commitments so if you want me out of the building before then you will have to summon the security guards to carry me out bodily”.
The new director looked slightly puzzled by this and a long silence ensued. You could almost see the attempt to calculate the adverse publicity against the desire to see me literally slung out of the building. I could understand why they loathed me. One of New Labour’s first decisions on taking office was to appoint Alan Parker as chairman of the British Film Institute. Parker, a director whose visual flair was routinely flawed by an imagination wedded to the most banal stereotypes, had loathed the British Film Institute with a public passion for over twenty years. His appointment signaled a government either criminally incompetent or determined to do away with the British Film Institute as it had existed for sixty years. Rumour already said that Parker and the sidekick that he had installed as director had simply taken interim appointments while they created a new industry body to which the British Film Institute would be subordinate and which they would run. Pollyanna that I am, I found it impossible to believe that a minister and two individuals had connived secretly to make huge policy decisions of such importance. Subsequent events were to prove rumour right but ostensibly Parker was engaged on turning the BFI, following new Labour’s watchword, into an educational institution. The trouble with this programme was that the BFI had always been an educational institution and it currently possessed an array of educational initiatives inspired with the vision of linking the most rigourous of traditional educations to the new audiovisual technologies. That was certainly not what new Labour meant by education, education, education. Parker’s vision of the BFI seemed to mean abandoning its historical role in the forefront of British education in order to become a glorified cheerleader for contemporary British cinema. I say “seemed” because there was no public debate of our much invoked educational role. I was told that my experiments were considered “elitist” – the ultimate New Labour boo word – but this was whispered gossip. Nobody dared to put this ridiculous charge in public because the simple truth was that they had no interest in education, a fact which any public debate would have made all too evident. So I could understand why they didn’t like me and for a brief moment I thought that they were going to make my day by ejecting me physically from an institution I had served with distinction for some thirteen years. The Director, who larded his conversation with City jargon, obviously fancied himself a square mile baron in red braces and was reluctant to give up the pleasure of treating me like a humbled banker. However, New Labour are nothing if not spinners and you would have to be a media idiot to physically prevent a teacher conducting his scheduled class.
The long silence came to an end and I was told that I could teach my class. I attempted to gather my thoughts as I returned to my office. I had to give my enemies some credit. They’d managed to surprise me. That my time at the Institute was at an end had been obvious from the moment of Parker’s appointment and indeed I was in the process of negotiating for a new job but I’d told my new employers that I had teaching commitments on the BFI’s graduate courses that I would have to honour. I had assumed that the BFI would take the same view. Indeed I had expected my just concluded interview to have been a civilized discussion as to how I would wind down these commitments, commitments not only to the students but to our partner institutions: Birkbeck College, the Architectural Association and the Tate Gallery.
But then probably I’d asked for it. Earlier that month I had sent a memo to the Board of Management commenting on a management consultant report that we had just received from KPMG. Even by the very low standards of such documents, this report had been a masterpiece of incompetence . For my own television department they had suggested that we should cut costs by making sure that when we interviewed film-makers like Scorsese, Tarantino or Tim Robbins that we should interview them at the same time and in the same place. A more comprehensive ignorance of the reality of Hollywood diaries would be hard to invent. In addition to listing a few more such idiocies, I had suggested that we could have saved a lot of taxpayer’s monies if the new director has simply repaired to The Wheatsheaf, the staff’s pub of choice, and spent a few lunchtimes hearing their views. Finally, I had inquired whether the Treasury rule which require competitive tendering for such consultancies had been complied with. I suspected that it was this final question was the “it” that was “not working”.
I was no sooner in the office than I was reaching for the phone trying to think of the most suitable paper to break the story. It seemed to me, particularly if there had been no competitive tendering, to promise a few juicy morsels. But as my hand reached out I heard clearly the very distinct tones of Lady Bracknell from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of being Earnest: “to lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness”. I paused. The sad fact of the matter was that my many accomplishments to date were as nothing beside the media storm which I had provoked when I had been sacked twenty year earlier by the English Faculty of Cambridge for arguing that a modern literature degree must include the teaching of film. While there might be a pleasing symmetry in the fact that I was now being sacked by New Labour for arguing that the teaching of film and the teaching of literature should go hand in hand, I doubted whether the symmetry would be the major focus of the media attention. The headlines I feared would ring changes on “MacCabe sacked again in academic row” and I would be put in a permanent media pigeonhole.
In any case it would serve no purpose whatsoever to have a public row. This was a new government with an almost unprecedented mandate. If they wanted to close down an organization which didn’t suit their purposes, so what? And if they did it without any debate either before or after, so what again? Even a scandal around management consultants would be very small beer. And anyway I was exhausted from years of working as a middle rank civil servant and I didn’t trust my own ability to distinguish the wood from the trees. If the BFI had been holed beneath the waterline then I had been one of the officers on the bridge when it happened. It would take a good year or two before I could get any perspective on that
There was a much more important consideration. The style of my sacking was pure New Labour thuggery, but the real conflict went much deeper than that. My real argument was with the total failure to realize the Utopian dream of comprehensive education. As a schoolboy playing truant from school to canvass in the l964 and 1966 elections, I had thought that comprehensivisation would usher in a New Jerusalem. In fact, it had disenfranchised a generation of working class children from the highest levels of university education. In the past ten years I had felt that the real key to an emancipatory education was one in which traditional literacy and the production of audiovisual material went hand in hand. I had been astonished to find that any approach which stressed the possibility of teaching children to read and write was regarded with deep hostility by the educational research establishment. But to take an overview of the last forty years of British education, to try and understand what had been gained and what had been lost, above all to sketch a traditional humanist education in an age of mass media that would take me more than a year or two. I put the phone back in its cradle.

25th May 2009

I had intended to keep a daily blog in Cannes but the festival overwhelmed me. It was easily the most enjoyable Cannes in 25 years with each day bringing great films and great weather. However not all the films were great. Early on we watched Jane Campion’s Bright Star.
There are few stories as sad as that of John Keats. When he died in Rome in 1821 at 25 of consumption, he thought himself an abject failure and asked that his grave bear the simple inscription “here lies one whose name was writ on water”. In fact once dead both his poetry and the terrible story of his death became a staple of the Victorian imagination. Part of that story is his secret engagement to Fanny Brawne to whom he poured out, in some the greatest letters ever written in English, both his theory of poetry and the ambivalence and ambiguity of his attraction to Fanny.
James Campion’s biopic of Keats and Fanny, his ‘bright star’ has nothing to do with ambivalence or ambiguity nor indeed has it that distance from its characters essential to historical fiction. At no point does Campion let either the letters or the terribly spoken poetry breathe. Her camera has to emphasise every line while the pedestrian script turn Fanny and Keats into a couple of modern lovers who unaccountably never get around to exchanging bodily fluids.
It is clear that Abbie Cornish who plays Fanny has the presence to become a major figure in the cinema but Ben Whishaw struggles in a role that never begins to capture Keats’s obsession with death and his desire to ‘cease upon the midnight with no pain’. As if to underline the film’s oafishness, there is no quotation from Keats’s Ode on a Grecian urn, the poem that captures most perfectly his ambiguity about Fanny. I have great difficulty when teaching this poem to make students understand why Keats can prefer the bold lover on the urn who will ‘never never’ kiss to the ‘breathing human passion’ which leaves a heart ‘high sorrowful and cloyed’ but it can be safely said that Campion’s film doesn’t even attempt such a difficulty. After the film I learn that Bright Star was funded by the UKFC’s New Cinema Fund, the institutional successor to the BFI Production Board. That these monies are being used to fund established directors making conservative period pieces with no sense of history tells you everything you need to know about the moral and cultural bankruptcy of New Labour. But there is little time to dwell on the state of England although the papers each day bring fresh news of revolution and Flavia on the phone tells me that I am missing the biggest political story of our lifetime.
In Cannes the films continue to unspool, Audiard’s A Prophet is set in a jail but it is a Mafia rather than a prison movie. Its unknown star Tahar Ramin moves from humiliated underling to gang boss in a multi-lingual haze of violence. Ramin is set, if I’m any judge, for French superstar status. One who has achieved that over five decades is Johnny Hallyday and he turns in a magnificent performance in Johnnie To’s Vengeance. I say ‘performance’ but what Hallyday lends to the movie is his unbelievably ravaged features in which every pleasure and every vice is written deeply into his face. The face is as extraordinary in the flesh and my Cannes is made when I am introduced to him after the evening screening and mumble my congratulations.
Filipa Cesar has come down for a couple of days to sample the world of film and for us to discover whether we really share the same taste in film. Every film is followed by detailed discussion and I could spend all evening exploring the films of the day. Filipa, however, is a young person and she wants to go to a party. As a good host I provide and we go with Hanif to the Woodstock bash. Remarkably this is even less fun than the well-meaning but lack luster Ang Lee film and, quite remarkably, the music is terrible. I now feel that I am failing as a host but I’m rescued the next night by Jeremy Thomas’s Hanway films who are throwing a party for Nowhere Boy, a film about the young John Lennon which is in production. Jeremy throws the best parties and this is no exception. The music, all from the sixties, is excellent and within minutes Filipa has disappeared onto the dance floor. I find myself sitting next to Michael White, one of the greatest theatre producers of his generation and no slouch in the film business either having produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail and all the Comic Strip films. Michael has had a stroke and talking to him is relatively difficult but he continues to be a totally committed party animal and, as usual, he has the most beautiful women in the room sitting at his table. One blonde and one black, they are striking not only for their looks but also for their height – about 6ft 5inches. I ask them why they are both so tall and they reply, “We’re an experiment”. They are obviously desperate to dance and eventually to my astonishment I get them onto the floor and for the first time in ten years I’m dancing. The next time I look at my watch it is 3 o’clock (over two hours after my absolutely latest bedtime). The party will riot onto dawn but I walk home astonished at how much I have enjoyed myself. I revise this opinion the next morning at 7.30 when I have to carry out several technical checks to ensure that I’m not dead. Later the trades will vote the party a hit and comment on the fact that Hanway had hired a dancing bear for the proceedings. The early film is Loach’s Looking for Eric. I have admired Loach as a director all my life but his films about the past I loathe with a rare passion. Luckily this film is about the present and is a wonderful self-help film with Eric Cantona acting as a life coach to a postman whose family and work relations are in a mess. It is a touching and funny film with a simple ideological message: “the people united will never be defeated” – it’s very good to see a Communist film that one can applaud.
Filipa departs and I revert to early nights. The films continue to enchant – a charming Almadovar with a luminous Penelope Cruz and, then, in perhaps the most emotional moment of the festival the 87 year old Alain Resnais comes to present Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass). When he enters the cinema, the applause goes on forever. As indeed it should. Here is the man who first showed Andre Bazin the history of film; the man who made Les Statues meurent aussi with Chris Marker and whose Hiroshima, Mon Amour completely altered the artistic ambitions of cinema. Les Herbes Folles is a charming middle aged love story, although the last two minutes seem to come from another film and, like several of the movies that I’ve seen here, I’m going to have to go and see it again.
My next guest is my daughter Johanna who has come to every festival since she was 11 in 1986. She loves Cannes unlike her mother, who was banned after her second visit in 1990, when, upon being introduced to Isabella Rossellini and Nicholas Cage at the Wild at Heart party, looked at her watch and said “It’s 10.30 time for bed”. Johanna is determined to go up the red carpet so I miss the noon screening of the Hanneke film and we see The White Ribbon at the evening performance. Hanneke is one of my all time favourite directors but this story of a Protestant village in Northern Germany in the year before the outbreak of the First World War is his masterpiece. As I have got older Europe’s suicide in 1914 seems more and more the defining historical event of our era, and Hanneke’s film makes a major contribution to diagnosing Europe’s terminal state. I am also delighted for a more prosaic reason, Michael Barker of Sony Classics, who are the US distributors of the film, has agreed to come and talk at Pittsburgh in the Fall and, with any luck, he’ll bring this film with him.
Now the festival is beginning to wind down but no final Friday would be complete without the dejeuner des cinephiles on the Carlton Beach. This was Hercules Belleville’s lunch and for the preceding ten days he would be cajoling and entreating friends judged suitably cinephiliac to come. Truth to tell the last Friday is a terrible day for a lunch and there was always a crisis as to whether enough cinephiles would turn up. Paula Jalfon (BFI colleague 1988-1998, co-owner and chief executive of Minerva Pictures 1998-2002) and I have decided to continue the tradition and we have a table Herc would have loved: Tom Luddy of Zoetrope and Talluride, Mark Cousins, critic extraordinaire, Joumane Chahine, Lebanese film journalist, Johanna and her friend Linda Palaane. The talk is of all the wonderful films and if the eyes well once or twice, what are a few tears among friends. I vow to repeat the lunch as long as I come to Cannes and then while some go off to the Gaspar Noe – I head for my first swim of the festival with my daughter.

There’s just a final breakfast with Larry Kardish of MOMA to discuss a planned retrospective on Stephen Frears and Cannes 2009 is over for me.
Normally I leave on the Friday after the dejeuner des cinephiles but Jeremy Thomas has invited me to drive back with him. We became good friends when he was Chairman of the BFI and the friendship has grown as New Labour has destroyed the Institute we both loved. I am, however, a trifle apprehensive. Jeremy is a petrolhead and drives at speeds that reduce any nervous passenger, and I am a very nervous passenger, to a groveling wreck. He reassures me by telling me that he is driving his Audi saloon rather than the Austin Martin. This turns out to be a completely false reassurance as it is an Audi salon with a racing car engine and racing car suspension. However Jeremy is such a good driver that I’m probably safer in a car with him at 90 mph than driving myself at 25.In any case Jeremy, a man more dedicated to pleasure than any I have ever met, has planned a meticulous journey along the Route Napoleon with stunning vista after stunning vista as we race through the Basses Alpes. Luckily the French have just enacted a new rule that if you are traveling 50 kiliometres an hour over the relevant speed limit then you go straight to jail, and this places some restraint on Jeremy’s use of the accelerator. The route Napoleon is so-called because it is the route than Napoleon took when he escaped from Elba, landed at Cannes and headed for Paris. Every other village proclaims “ Napoleon slept here” but in fact he made good speed to Grenoble where the regiment dispatched to arrest him, proclaimed him emperor still. Then it was the 100 days in Paris and the final encounter with Wellington and Blucher at Waterloo where for the first time in 20 years the Old Guard gave ground and Napoloeon’s domination of Europe was finally ended.
These thoughts are interrupted by the need to lunch but we have left it a lttle late and I have to use all my charm and French to persuade a small restaurant to feed us. Eventually I agree that they will serve us their basic menu which is duck pate, duck, and potatoes cooked in duck fat. As we exit, Jeremy , whose uncle directed all the Carry On movies and whose life is devoted to quoting and inventing Carry On dialogue opines “We ducked up”. By 8 we are in Lyons and the miracle of GPS takes us to a hotel right in the very middle of the old city where a Jesuit college has been transformed into the most comfortable of hotels. The next day is yet more of the same as we speed through the Champagne country and up towards Calais. Pierre Edelman ( with whom Paula and I tried to make a film from a Jean Binta Breeze script in 2000) rings through with the prizes from Cannes. Hanneke, the Palm d’Or, Audiard, the Grand Jury prize. Prizes also for Fish Tank and Alan Resnais. A perfect end to a perfect festival. I ring Marie Pierre Hauville ( Head of Communication at Cannes and close friend since we took 7 Century of Cinema films to the festival in 1995) to thank her for all her help and waspish comments. Paula also phones through and asks how the drive went. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets La Grande Bouffe”, I say. Without missing a beat Paula says “ Cliff Richard for you and Meryl Streep for Jeremy, “Outrageous “ growls Jeremy and we trundle onto the Eurostat and glide into London. And so to bed.

15th May 2009

Andrea Arnold’s first film Red Road was set in Glasgow. Her second Fish Tank inhabits London’s East End. Not the fabled alleys of Whitechapel nor even the familiar parks of Hackney but further East where the white working class fled the slums in search of new jobs at Dagenham and the new houses that Harold MacMillan built. Now, where the edge of London meets the Essex marshes, it is home to the underclass that Thatcher and Blair built. A world of terrible deprivation – deprivation of speech, deprivation of feeling, deprivation of life. Here Arnold finds her heroine Mia(Katie Jarvis), fifteen years old, isolated from her peers, rowing constantly with her party loving single mother and her brattish younger sister. Every conversation is nasty brutish and short and Mia tries as hard as possible to be unlikeable. But she is as beautiful as the dawn and as Arnold’s camera captures her in her landscape, we are irresistibly drawn into her young life. Arnold’s first film was marred by too melodramatic a script but Fish Tank effortlessly takes the most ordinary of stories and turns it into a gripping plot.
Michael Hamburger takes up with Mia’s mother and the physical attraction between 15 year old girl and charming hunk is perfectly realised including a sex scene as moving as it is cliched. The final scenes of the film are unbearavbly painful and yet Arnold manages to salvage a credible happy end. This really is direction of the very highest order.

13th May 2009

I first went to Cannes in May of l985. I had been appointed Head of Production at the BFI early in that month but everybody that I phoned for a meeting, had declined on the grounds that they would be In Cannes. It struck me very quickly that if I went to Cannes, I could meet everybody. Indeed that remains one of the main reasons for going to Cannes. Everybody is there: producers, distributors, stars, critics, programmers. This year the recession means fewer people but not fewer film people, Indeed the festival is vastly improved by the absence of all the state funded hangers on who had become such an unpleasant feature of recent years. Almost all my friends are there, and those who are not are those who have died. Maybe it is just Hercules’s death or my own age but I am exceptionally conscious as I walk the Croisette of the dead as well as the living.
My first 15 years at Cannes was drink fuelled meetings with distributors and film funds as I tried to raise money for future productions followed by drink fuelled parties. If I saw 2 or 3 films I was lucky. For the last decade, however, I have come to watch films and hope to watch between 30 and 50 in ten days. Parties are a thing of the past as I wake early and without a hangover for the first film of the day at 8.30.
The pleasure of watching a newly struck print perfectly projected with perfect sound first thing in the morning is very considerable and if you follow it with another film at 11, you can eat lunch with a good conscience. And as you eat you can talk. For Cannes is not just watching films, it is discussing them and for ten days movies are discussed under every aspect; technical, financial, social, aesthetic.
Now I always try to make the opening ceremony but this year I am a little late and rather than run the gamut of the hundreds of photographers, I nip up the back stairs. By great good fortune I arrive at the top of the stairs just as the jury are making the long march past the photographers. In the middle of them, looking as though he’s getting ready for a rumble in South London, is Hanif Kureishi. When they reach the top of the stairs he sees me and we go into a Hollywood clinch and I whisper in his ear “ not bad for two poor boys from London. “But I’m from Bromley, Colin’ he exclaims and we roll into the cinema.
The opening film,Up, features a new 3-D technology which all the smart money is saying is the wave of the future. Unsurprisingly the smart money knows nothing. The effects are lame and underwhelming as is the Pixar cartoon We hope for better on the morrow.

28th April 2009

Juries

22nd April 2009

For the 24th year I take the plane back to London from Pittsburgh. The delight of seeing my family after such a long break is always strong and the physical pleasure of London intense. Indeed this year it is more intense as after 35 years in the suburbs of Islington we have moved to the western edge of the City, less than 200 yards from Fetter Lane where I spent my happy childhood convinced that all we needed to inhabit Utopia was a Labour government. Now the country disgusts me. What Thatcher began , New Labour completed and we live in a world of greed and lies where the values of education and art count for nothing. On the news I watch that contemptible figure Brown who between 1991 and 1994 shed every belief he had ever held as he lusted after power. He took office saying that he would always go to Parliament before the Press but the man who was even more responsible for the culture of New Labour spin than Blair or Campbell is now attempting to manage opinion on Mp’s pay through the internet.. His grotesquely twisted features accurately portray a man whose inner being is now so riddled with mendacity that he is technically incapable of telling the truth. I tell Flavia that that this is not merely the last act but the last scene, The scandal of MPs expenses are going to destroy him much more thoroughly and completely than sleaze destroyed the transparently honest Major.
But I am determined not to waste mental energy on this corrupt and incompetent government. Not least because I am in deep mourning for J.G. Ballard. I do not know how many writers one discovers without any authority or guide, but I will never forget picking down from the shelves of Theobalds Road library the yellow coloured Gollancz edition of The Drowned World. The novel, although written within a recognizable science fiction genre, had a psychic intensity and a hard elegance of style unlike anything I had read. . The image of the hero always heading further south through a world under water has remained with me and I devoured the rest of Ballard’s writings at school. In university reading The Atrocity Exhibition was almost as profound a shock and by then there were others who had recognized the Master long before Crash bought him a wider notoriety. Meeting him in at Laura Mulvey’s house in the late seventies was a great thrill, intensified as the party repaired to a restaurant and Ballard announced that he had “wheels” and offered me a lift. He drove very slowly and in the middle of the road but driving with the author of Crash seemed every youthful ambition fulfilled. When I became Head of Production at the BFI, Ballard, or Jim as he was improbably called, was first on my list of writers to see. He was very wise in the way of film and liked my idea of a low budget science fiction movie but said that he had made an early vow only to write a film script when the money for the movie was already in place. Even in my first weeks in the film business this seemed very sensible. However, we liked each other well enough that I made a radio programme about his next novel The Day of Creation and got to visit him in his fabled Shepperton house with its 1950s telephone and extraordinary surrealist paintings. As all the obituaries make clear he was extraordinarily good company, a mine of information and opinion. The last time I saw him was at a screening of Cronenbourg’s Crash in late 1996. I was much besieiged at the BFI at this time and took great comfort from his unsolicited advice, after he had looked me up and down, that I still had one great effort in me, words which remained with me through the late nineties.
His writing continued to astonish: Super Cannes I thought almost as good as anything had done. His last book which announced his death I have still not been able to read but I shall read it slowly and carefully this summer.

12th March 2009

Spring break and I’m back in Europe. Eurostar again and my usual Paris meetings. There’s an unusual one too. In the summer 2007 my London Consortium colleague Marko Daniel asked me to give a talk at Tate Modern about some new video art that they were exhibiting. I agreed for collegial reasons but with a slightly sinking heart for the vast majority of video art simply uses the vast resources of this new palatte without any attempt to turn those resources into images. Amongst the dross, however, was some real gold. A short film, called Rapport, which took for its subject matter a neuro-linguistic programming seminar for senior German executives. If you wanted a picture of how individual narcissism is harnessed to corporate ambition to create the economic world in which we now live, Rapport is a key text and I devoted most of my Tate lecture to it.
A year later I got an e-mail from the artist asking me to come to Portugal to see her latest work and to teach a short course at the Gulbenkian. Insofar as I had imagined the author I had imagined an intellectually intense German but Filipa Cesar,as I discovered ,may live and work in Germany but she is an exuberant and witty Latin. We so enjoyed lecturing together that we have arranged to meet to see if we might construct some joint projects.
Filipa is a world-class flirt and , like all directors, totally unscrupulous when it comes to getting her films made. She still harbours ambitions to get me to produce her films. By the end of the day, however, I think she has come to believe my repeated protestations that I am no longer a producer. A producer is simply someone who has or has access to money. For nearly two decades I was such a person but no longer. Even more important I no longer wish to be. The endless stress of producing, so energizing for so many years, is now simply tedious and tiring.
The only thing that I miss from producing is the editing and I would love to find a way of teaching a course on editing. We talk a great deal about this and Filipa shows me a wonderful Pedro Costa film which shows the Straubs at work at an editing table.
The one unrealized film ambition is to work on a genre movie. If I no longer wish to produce one I do occasionally think I would like to try writing one. I tell Filipa this with some trepidation. She receives this news neutrally. “ and the most successful genre is romantic comedy”. Filipa looks at me with withering contempt “ Do you like romantic comedies?” “eerr no” We decide to think about thrillers.

2nd March 2009

Today my great friend Hercules Bellville is buried in London. Flavia says that she has never seen the London Oratory so full. By coincidence the Independent publish my obituary the same day. I have spent the week since he died talking to his friends and writing it. Such writing holds off grief because somehow while you write you keep the dead alive. But with the final full stop the grief of loss can no longer be avoided.

Hercules Bellville devoted his life to the cultivation of friendship and the making of films. He was a very considerable film scholar and in terms of intellectual history he should be classed with his Oxford contemporaries and great friends Laura Mulvey, Jon Halliday and Peter Wollen as amongst the first in England to register the full impact of that French cinephilia that gave birth to the New Wave. But Bellville’s scholarship was from the very first to be devoted to the making of films. A list of the filmmakers with whom he worked is also a list of some of the greatest directors of the past forty years.
Unusually and perhaps because of his great privilege: a wealthy family, extraordinary good looks and a charm which was all the more engaging for being extremely hard edged, Bellville never sought the limelight. His credits are remarkable – second unit director on Roman Polanski’s Tess and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, producer credits on Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers – but he was supremely uninterested, even embarrassed, by them. What mattered to Hercules was to be using his extraordinary skills and knowledge to help talent and grace find form in the most powerful and democratic of artistic mediums.
Perhaps the single most important thread in a life woven of extraordinary friendships was the Peploe family. Hercules met the eldest daughter Clare very early at Oxford, where he was reading French and Spanish at Christ Church. His parents had been divorced, his father, Rupert, was a test pilot and his mother Jeanie (nee Fuqua) was the daughter of a diplomat. Hercules became a devoted admirer of Clare’s mother the painter Cloclo Peploe, a life long friend and collaborator with her brother the director and screen writer Mark and the boyfriend of the younger daughter Chloe through much of the sixties. It must be said that a beautiful girlfriend was one of Bellville’s trademarks although it was also typical that when the affair had ended the friendship endured. He was a regular visitor to the Peploe villa San Francesco in Florence in the early sixties and a fellow guest records her astonishment at meeting this impossibly beautiful and impossibly blond young man for the first time.
Bellville’s break came when Polanski hired him as a runner on Repulsion (the one credit he did claim with pride was that it was his hand which comes through the wall as the heroine collapses into psychosis) and he worked with Polanski and his producer Andrew Braunsberg for over a decade following them in the early seventies to Hollywood. From his base in the Tropicana Motel he adopted Los Angeles as one of his many home towns, returning each Christmas to what he called ‘the coast’ to renew and recharge his friendships there. His mother was American and he had been born in California so there, as in so many other places, he considered himself a native.
Bellville was a gentleman of a new school. Independently wealthy he would only live on what he could earn, a great dandy he scorned expensive clothes, seeking his elegant attire in the most unlikely of chain stores. He was a product of the great democratic settlement of post-war Europe and he was as interested in talking to the assistant manager at the Grand Hotel about the rhythms of the tourist season as he was exchanging information about downtown Los Angeles with his good friend Jack Nicholson or exploring a new topic of conversation with a young child.. His vast knowledge of film, art, restaurants, hotels, cities was at the service of anyone who he felt could benefit from what he knew.

Bellville finally found the ideal home for his talents when in the early eighties he joined forces with the great British producer Jeremy Thomas at the Recorded Picture Company. He and Thomas formed the closest of friendships at the heart of the most daring and international of British production companies. Rapiers to each others foils, their merged talents formed a single powerful film intelligence at the service of Conrad’s great dictum – “ above all, to make you see”. The list of films is staggering from The Last Emperor through Crash to Young Adam. Even the financial failures like Terry Gilliam’s Tideland were films of huge ambition. Bellville’s role was twofold. In development he would deploy his vast knowledge and erudition in ensuring that script and cast improved – when asked what he did, he said “I discourage people” but what he meant was that he encouraged them to try harder and to aim higher. Then when the filming began, Thomas did not have to spend a minute worrying whether anybody from the most famous of international stars to the gruffest of grips felt unappreciated or unloved. “Herc” was everywhere dispensing witty reassurance, tiny presents and always talking about films. That esprit de corps so crucial to almost any successful production was ensured on any film with which Bellville was associated.
At the annual festival of Cannes Bellville energized and enthused from dawn to dusk to dawn again. Here he and Thomas could meet with the full range of his international contacts, here he could deploy his perfect Spanish, his fluent French spoken with a cut glass English accent and littered with witty anglicisms, and his considerable Italian. Here he could usher young filmmakers from all five continents into meetings where he would immediately make everyone at ease. Here he could parry wits with that other great multi-lingual diplomat of recent European cinema Marie Pierre Hauville, the festival’s foreign minister.
It is unsurprising that so committed an internationalist was hit so hard by the events of September 11 2001. This outrage seemed to set back for decades everything that Hercules had believed in and to which he had devoted his life. He suffered what the French call a depression nerveuse and many of his friends wondered whether he would ever recover. However in 2003 in his much loved Mexico he met Ilana Shulman and she, who shared so many of his interests in cinema, art and travel brought a tenderness to his life which meant that his final years, even when his lung cancer was diagnosed, were full of happiness.. For a man who insisted that every dinner had a placement and every journey a movement order, it was natural that he should make final arrangements He had been educated by the Benedictines at Ampleforth school and as the end approached he married Ilana and received the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church.

7th February 2009

Bataille said that what distinguished the human species biologically from other mammals was shame about performing sexual acts in public and the care of the dead. “Dogging” and Stan Collymore seem to have cut the list by one but care of the dead is essentially human. One penalty of spending my life in two countries is that I often miss funerals and memorial services but by great good chance, the date set for Derek Brewer’s memorial service coincides with my changing planes from Pittsburgh to Sri Lanka and I travel up to Cambridge on a brilliantly sunny morning with snow on the ground – almost the only combination which makes the Fens beautiful. Stephen Heath, friend and collaborator of nearly 40 years – we edited Signs of the Times: Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics in 1971 – provides a perfect light lunch with a couple of glasses of excellent wine and we reminisce about Derek.
Derek was the senior English Fellow at Emmanuel when I was appointed as a Research Fellow and it was he , a conservative medievalist, who thus offered me, a radical modernist, the first and indispensable rung on the academic ladder. The paradox is less acute than might first appear. Medievalists have long espoused the fundamentally anthropological approach which was the intellectual underpinning of the Parisian radicalism of the sixties and, at least in Cambridge, conservatives and radicals held each other in intellectual esteem reserving their scorn for the outdated Leavisites who, by the early seventies were an utterly spent intellectual force. Actually Derek didn’t scorn anybody He was a patient listener, even to youthful diatribes against the old, and he had the art of making the gentlest of arguments in a very self deprecating way. This meant that it was impossible to ignore what he said. He was the most persuasive advocate of the truths of conservatism that I have met.
When I left Emmanuel after two years to take up an assistant lectureship in the English Faculty and a Fellowship at King’s he had a very secure place in my affections. At that time Assistant lectureship lasted 5 years at the end of which the Faculty had to decide whether to convert it into a full one. In my case they decided to do so by a vote of 10-9, a vote which accurately reflected that the Faculty was hopelessly divided between a Leavisite rump and an unlikely coalition of radicals and conservatives. The full lectureship created, I still had to be appointed to the job and the appointments committee voted 4-3 against me. This vote was followed by a period in which the university tried to find ways of keeping me while respecting its own devolved constitution. Towards the end of this period and when it was becoming clear to me that, unbelievably on any objective academic criteria, I would not be appointed, Derek was named to the appointments committee. I went to see him to ask that he request the vote be retaken. In some ways, even when I look back on it, it was a remarkable conversation. But in that Michaelmas term of my fifth year I had had so many unbelievable conversations with so many of the university’s senior figures that nothing surprised and I was very fond of Derek. He said that it had been suggested that the case be re-opened but that there were voices, arguing for a quiet life, who said that I was anyway going to leave Cambridge to pursue a more worldly career. I said to him that it was not a question of my future but one of simple justice. I said that I felt like a small boy who had been set upon by a gang of bullies and that such bullying should not be rewarded. We left the conversation there but a couple of days later he rang to tell me , in a very solemn voice which did not invite conversation, that he would be asking for the vote to be retaken.
This time the vote was 4-3 in my favour but 5 votes were needed for an appointment and the stage was now set for ‘The MacCabe Affair”. It was difficult then, and it has been impossible since, to explain to anyone outside the walls that I had no animus against Cambridge, indeed that the university had treated me as a prince of the blood for a decade. Derek’s actions, which were brave as well as honourable, stood for the good faith of the university and my colleges. Above all it meant that I was spared any bitterness, a great boon at such a young age.
By great good luck I had gone to see Derek a month before he died. I was apprehensive that his motor neurone disease would be far advanced but apart from the fact he was in a wheelchair, he seemed unchanged and we chatted for nearly an hour much as we had talked thirty years before in Emmanuel.
The memorial service is very moving. Geoffrey Hill reads Herbert’s The Anthem with a passion and intensity which makes one think that one has never heard poetry before. Barry Windeatt his student and colleague of many years delivers a wonderful address which really does evoke the man. Afterwards to Emmanuel. The Front Court can rarely have looked so beautiful – sunlit snow on the ground and a moon hung in a blue sky behind the clock.

January 20th 2009

In Pittsburgh I drink less than London for the simple reason that unless I have guests I do not have drink in my apartment. Particularly in deep mid-winter I can go days without alchohol but today I do something very rare. I have brought a good bottle of claret and I open it at 11.30 am and sit back to watch Obama’s inauguration.
I have been politically numb for over two decades. That capitalism is subject to recurrent crises of over-production is evident but there is no evidence that a more advanced social organisation will arise from the ashes.
So, like the boys in Empson’s poem, I am simply waiting for the end. But Obama has unnumbed me, made me feel political enthusiasm and fervour. It’s not that I think he can provide an answer, the world’s problems are surely now too grievous and too multiple but I do think that if anyone can, he can. The speech is brilliant – the full resources of American English, the cadences of the black church and a speech in which every paragraph addresses the American people but many bring specific messages to his global audience. Obama is the first leader of the global village.