In his new book The Undeclared War: The Struggle for Control of the World s Film Industry, David Puttnam, producer and West Cork resident, looks at the possible consequences of Hollywood s phenomenal and still growing dominance of the world s cinema.
Puttnam, who was at the Irish Film Centre in Dublin last week to launch the book, is well equipped to comment on the issue. The Oscar-winning producer of critically and in some cases commercially successful films like Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Local Hero, The Killing Fields and The Mission, he was chairman of Colombia Pictures from 1986 to 1988, when he famously resigned in disilllusionment.
American films take 73.5% of European box office revenues, and even the spirited French stand at the 1993 GATT talks, as a result of which EU countries are still allowed to impose individual quotas, has only temporarily stemmed what seems like an unstoppable tide. It has, he says, the potential to be a social time-bomb of the 21st century .
TOTAL DEFEAT
The idea for the book, Puttnam says, grew out of a report he compiled for EU President Jacques Delors on the future of the European audio-visual industry and his role as advisor to the British cabinet in the run up to the GATT negotiations, in which the film industry s position was a key issue and in fact almost scuppered the whole agreement.
I was stunned at the level of ignorance, he says. Here were these negotiations which had huge possible implications and, in between feeding them (i.e. the bureaucrats) information and figures, we were trying to get it across to them that this was not a marginal issue, that it was not about what film was playing at the Rialto cinema on Saturday night but involved a whole lot of other things.
The book is not just an arty farty whinge about the nasty vulgar Americans usurping the art form, cherrypicking the best of European talent and ideas and then making films which cater to the lowest common denominator. While he is critical of the American studio system, he is no more enamoured of the European tradition of the filmaker as auteur.
I m anti where it leads us, he says, though I m not quite sure exactly what auteurism is. For example I am very, very pro-Truffaut, and very anti-Godard. Because I think Truffaut was a humanist and he was nurturing. I m pro-Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, and probably, on balance, anti-Derek Jarman, and I m agnostic about Peter Greenaway.
It s really a question of love, he goes on. Filmakers that don t love their audience and aren t prepared to give their audience a chance to love them there is a certain sterility in their work. Traffaut was in love with the ideas that he propounded and he wanted you to share them. And therefore he offered them to you in a way that allowed you to love them. Personally I think Godard is a fraud. An intellectual fraud and, for the last 15 years or so, a cultural fraud as well. I don t think he has anything to offer that s remotely interesting.
This is not an attack on the Americans, he insists. It is an acknowledgment of how single-minded and smart they have been in spotting the significance and potential of this industry and absolutely going for it. And how simple-minded, in a sense, we have been in Europe in not understanding that. We have signed on to a very cultural vision of cinema and as such have weakened ourselves to a point where we are just not in the frame. We haven t nurtured a relationship with our audiences and we basically have deserved exactly what we got, which is almost total defeat.
CULTURAL THREAT
The battle for control of the cinema, he says, may well already be lost. What he is now concerned about is whether the US will also gain complete control over the information and technology industry which is currently exploding all over the globe.
What we, in Europe, have to do for a start is to work out exactly what we want in terms of this industry. Is Irish society and Irish culture content to have a presence in literature and theatre alone? Does it feel that it ought to have a presence in cinema? If it does, to what extent is the state prepared to invest if necessary in ensuring that presence? Much more importantly, what are the implications of an Irish presence in this cutting edge influence for the 21st century in other areas, such as information, education and the other what I would term cultural artifacts of our future?
The 21st century will depend very heavily for economic success on the products of our minds. The products of our minds can be loosely described as our intellectual copyright that s what we own. Intellectual copyright will be big, big business in the next century. It isn t just enough that we in Europe are good at generating good ideas, creating new biotechnology, medical technology breakthroughs. The issue is not whether we can generate it but whether we can protect it, exploit it and retain the earnings we get from it. In this country, for example, my guess is that Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan do not own one scrap of the intellectual copyright they are creating.
Though he has no foolproof plan to deal with the problem, he suggests that the first step must be to acknowledge that it exists.
Someone asked me what I thought was the best thing Michael D. Higgins had done for the Irish film industry. The best thing he did was to engage with the industry. We hope that Chris Smith (the new minister in Britain) will do the same. Once ministers engage with it, then the answers will begin to emerge. This is more than a numbers game. It s about how a nation sees itself, what its role in the world is.
Hollywood s dominance is not just culturally dangerous, Puttnam argues, but could have wider implications, especially in Islamic countries.
If we are lucky they will just impose quotas on American movies, though those won t hold because quotas tend not to hold. Or it might be something much more serious and whatever hatred already exists in Islamic countries for us in the West who are perceived to be colonising them will be fuelled in a way that won t be manageable.
All of which sounds ominous at the very least.
I think it is ominous, he says. I think anyone who thinks the backlash will be gentle and benign and trade-based is mad. Because nations will feel very threatened. And unfortunately the driving force in reacting to that threat will not be the nicest and most reasonable it will be people who to an extent will use that cultural threat as a kind of call to arms.
So we are not, after all, on the way to Global village-MTV Utopia. That s certainly the conclusion David Puttnam has come to.
I don t think the human psyche can cope with that kind of homogeneity. If all we are is recipients of education, information and entertainment, manufactured, devised and owned most importantly owned in a country several thousands miles away from us, who and what are we? Are we really Europeans, let alone Irish or British?
And we are lucky in that broadly speaking we are English language nations and we can look across the Atlantic and have some sense of the manner in which our culture equates to American culture. But imagine the situation in India or Egypt. Imagine ten years from now where the feature films showing in Cairo cinemas are American, where the information coming off the computers in every single office and school in Cairo is American and where the education system is completely reliant on American educational software.
What you have got there is something completely new, I would suggest, in the history of mankind. A system where all the products of the mind, everything that feeds the mind, is coming from one culture whereas your day to day experience when you step out of your office or your house is something quite different. And I have no idea what form of cultural dislocation that is going to cause. What I do suspect is that sooner or later, and probably sooner, there will be a massive backlash. Because Islamic society will not be able to cope with that. Neither, in my judgement will Indian society or, possibly, Chinese society.
And the problem is that Americans don t debate these issues. They are clumsy. They really do believe in the notion that the market will sort all that out. I guess what I m saying is that in the 21st century, many of these issues are too complex for the market to sort out and if the market attempts to sort it out in a brutal way, there will be a reaction.
My book is just a trumpet blast, he says by way of conclusion. It doesn t say the Americans are villians, it says these are the circumstances, this is the manner in which we have been sleepwalking through the 20th century. If we sleepwalk through the 21st century the problems and the issues are going to be that much more sharp and the problems we accrue for ourselves are going to be that much more painful. n
The Undeclared War: The Struggle for Control of the World s Film Industry is published by Harper Collins at #18.00.