why are 'british' films shit?

x-post: Haven't seen them. Really want to!

My favorite British film from the last few years - apart from the Paddingtons! - is probably Ben Rivers' 'The Sky Trembles and the World is Afraid and the Two Eyes are Not Brothers'.

And other countries that excites me: Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Portugal, Romania (still), Italy, etc. Lots of countries make exciting things. Russia is probably the one big one where I feel as confused about how little is going on as with Britain.

This is a weird complaint (and lol @ listing Denmark, Sweden and Iceland). Britain just doesn't (odd filmmaker aside) embrace the sorts of aesthetics in places like Romania or Argentina or Iran or parts of East Asia, say. Of the current bunch I think Hogg probably engages with it (given her interest in Akerman) but I haven't seen her films.

What we come out with is stuff like Apostasy and God's Own Country, and they are fine debuts that speak to things locally. There probably is something to be said for the aesthetic of BBC Films, which is illustrated by this pair - they are accomplished, well-acted, with nuance in their treatment of subject and yet they lack a scene that pushes it over the line. But that isn't to say that the people involved won't do something really great in future.

Overall a bunch of filmmakers are making good stuff, it feels like they are supported. xp

Lady Macbeth perhaps has that quality you can't quite pin down. GOC has it at times, the way the story expands to say or show something broader, more poetic or more widely relevant than what is being explicitly addressed on screen.

Maybe, anyway!

Well, I guess that's as comprehensive an answer to the question as can be.

I do get a bit sad at the idea that there's something inherently exotic about modern experimental film aesthetics. Most films from Romania and Iran and East Asia is just as drab and conventional as everywhere else, in most countries it's just a couple of weirdoes. (And the traditional East Asian film nations has kinda declined recently, which iirc has to do with China's rise as a film nation crowding out local industries. The flipside to that is that China has made a lot of great films recently, with that Elephant Sitting Still being the latest example)

But if what you say is right, perhaps it's the film system in Britain that makes it more samey than should be? Does BBC perhaps have too much power? The reason Danish cinema is so great at the moment is due to a specific political prioritization of low-budget cinema which has led to a bunch of young directors getting the chance, resulting in festival winners like Winter Brothers, The Guilty and Holiday the last year. And they've probably killed that by giving the power over the purse back to the tv-stations, who don't care about that.

jed - agree that it isn't as straightforward with GOC, just loved the sequence of the main leads working the land and building their r/ship. I enjoyed Lady Macbeth enough, that was an unexpected adaptation of a story I really like.

I should read that.

I know most local films in those countries are purely conventional made for the market and we are looking at things that travel on the festival circuit. But it isn't just a couple of weirdoes. Like, quite a lot of Romanian films in the last decade or more by quite a few directors, enough for the bfi to recently have a whole month retro.

Can't comment on how UK film is funded rn but there is more of (massive generalisation alert) a realist tradition going on here. That isn't bad at all, there is variety to this, its just not what you might count as exciting. It used to be that a lot of the talent was snapped up by TV as well -- which totally scanned when I watched a lot of it -- but that view is not something I've re-visited recently.

Romania is the big miracle country, but that's still only four really great ones (Puiu, Porumboiu, Mungiu and now Jude) and they've been greatly helped by the fact that the local cinema distribution system is still, well, pretty fucked if I understand it correctly. It's not as if there's something in the water in Romania that makes them see things differently, and that Britain couldn't equally easily get back the adventurousness from the Greenaway/Jarman/Potter period.

There was more than four of those directors in that bfi retro (and its a range of good to great - your "only really great ones" is part of the problem with your initial complaint - Romanian New Wave is a bit of marketing and scene/myth making making but it wouldn't stick if the films weren't there). Equally some countries just have that kind of arthouse cinema scene with ppl exploring similar types of aesthetics and issues (ppl that seem to know one another too) and its an interesting story of how the legacy of 60s/70s cinema took over in countries like Argentina or Romania (Iran is more 60s/70s but its definitely gone on and on).

Greenaway and Jarman seem totally diff sorts and again it never added to a kind of movement (and I don't like either, especially have very little time for Jarman). There was definitely more exciting stuff in Taiwan in the same period.

(iirc Jarman and Terence Davies got a lot of their funding from Channel 4 so there is a cinema/TV continuity there maybe to current BBC films era)

How could I forget Terence Davies!!! Tbf he made the best film of the last few years, so... perhaps not that shit.

The, relative, strength of British TV, historically anyway, is definitely a factor. Maybe the theatre too, it's generally shit but it has had exaggerated respect in the UK imo.

Thanks to someone's recommendation of the BFI Flipside documentary, I ended up buying one of the films profiled: Privilege by Peter Watkins.
It's about the british government using a pop star to seduce his fans into religious nationalism. I thought it was slightly too long and occasionally too on the nose but the portrayal of the pop star's anxiety, frustration and the way he has been infantilized was quite powerful. The advert for apples and the anarchist character were quite fun too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_dZEky0KAw

I've had that on my wish list forever, seems quite unWatkinslike in some ways. There's a fair bit of on the noseness in most of his films but he's so good at moving his camera and creating an authentic sense of documentary that it never bothers me

It's about the british government using a pop star to seduce his fans into religious nationalism.

Gotta say this doesn't appeal to me. But he is one of the greats and he made an appearance to introduce a screening of La Commune, which was a great way to go. Edward Munch is also fantastic!

I was not at that screening, sadly.

I didn't know there was a Flipside documentary - only know it as a BFI sub-label for brit grindhouse stuff. I own two releases: The Pleasure Girls (really good, surprisingly feminist movie about a flatshare of young women in 60's London - also has Klaus Kinski as a love interest, if you can believe that) and The Party's Over (about the dangers of bohemian nihilism - preachy, whiny moral majority bollocks. Good Oliver Reed perf tho!). I also saw Man Of Violence, which is in that collection too, on the telly once - terrible movie, but kind of fascinating in its total incompetence, and fwiw it does feature a male protagonist who has sex with a dude, which is pretty progressive for 1970's British genre cinema.

Other Flipside discs I would recommend:

Herostratus, Duffer/The Moon Over The Valley, Deep End, The Black Panther, the BS Johnson anthology You're Human Like the Rest of Them, Symptoms and Psychomania.

Privilege is Watkins' most conventional film, and yes, suffers a bit from didactic obviousness, but it's interesting too to see a 60s 'youth' film express disillusionment with the notion of popular music as a form of subversion.

I really enjoyed Black Panther, Donald Sumpter is tremendous in it.

He is. And yes, I loved the grimy banality of the 70s settings - brought to mind other, similar shabby British serial killer texts like the film of 10 Rillington Place, or Gordon Burns' Happy Like Murderers.

I have a lot of the Flipside films on DVD/BD; one of the few rewarding parts of my job around 2008-11 was getting these as freebies for working on the subtitling (yearned after all the COI / Free Cinema / Humphrey Jennings compilations too, but didn't have enough input on those to blag anything). Deep End might be the best.

I'll also rep for Queen Of Spades, KJB. May be Anton Walbrook's best performance.

― the clones of tldr funkenstein (James Redd and the Blecchs), Tuesday, February 2, 2010

This is newly released on disc by Kino Lorber in the US, and I recommend; superbly crafted, a Scorsese favorite.

Walbrook's antihero hisses with such reptilian duplicity that I couldn't help but see Peter Lorre in the role, and sure enough, he played it in a radio adaptation of the Pushkin story.

The Railway Children Return, fuck this let's take off and nuke the British film industry from orbit

Wonder if I need BFI Player to watch Queen of Spades again.

hey look it's the guy who has bad, wrong, smug opinions on TV for money

Like all 1970s British movies, great cast shit film.

— David Quantick (@quantick) July 17, 2022

i just watched dirty pretty things with my kids and 3/4 of the way through they asked why it was so boring and i wanted to throw them both through the window

IT’S FUCKING ART YOU CRETINS

DPT is grebt but it's also a very "keep these spaces liminal!" film

now that i’ve settled down i have had to admit it is not really a movie for kids

but yes it is full of liminality isn’t it - a minicab backroom, a hotel kitchen, an airport, an shared apartment with only one key, a mortuary… the river styx is even invoked at one point

the way the gang joined up at the end to pull off a plan made me think of kaurismaki