| Despite the lack of support from the home market, Britain has always drawn great kudos from international critics. A third of all Oscars were won by British film-makers in the period 1976-96. Following a run of successful British films, Chariots, Breznev, Laundrette, etc., there was an increase in foreign, mostly American, investment in British product. In fact, some of what were considered British successes of the eighties weren't actually, by definition, British films at all. A British setting and a British cast and crew do not make it a British film if the money behind the project, and hence the profits from it, lie abroad. A poignant example of this is Chariots of Fire itself, the, alleged, catalyst to the British renaissance; its finance was entirely foreign. The director Derek Jarman, quoted in Take 10, sees it all as a sham; 'In the eighties of Margaret Thatcher has come the 'British Film Renaissance'. But it was a fake. A group of advertising men who had gone into film - Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson, and their chum David Puttnam ran this PR exercise, declaring themselves to be 'British Cinema', using their knowledge of how to manipulate the media - it was very astute. But in this publicity campaign they had hardly any truly British films. Ken Russell, Nicholas Roeg and Lindsay Anderson were largely ignored, while they included American films like Revolution or The Killing Fields with some unbelievably tentative British connection - like an English producer or something'. |
The Renaissance of the 1980s
Author:Matt Pearson 
Cultural Identity Crisis