In defence of the Summer of British Film

Trust the Guardian to take exception to the BBC and the Film Council's Summer Of British Film. It's just a shame that the article in prints on the subject is so weak.

Step forward John Patterson.

Here he is on Brief Encounter:

foresee teenagers watching Brief Encounter and whispering confusedly among themselves, "What is wrong with these people?" and "Is he gonna make his move or what?"

What is absurd here is the assumption that the reactions of today's teenagers constitute the highest court of critical appeal. You might have thought that one purpose of education is to show young people that earlier ages saw the world in different ways and that we can learn about them and, just possibly, from them.

Patterson goes on to propose an alternative list of films that should be shown.Of course, the BBC does not own the rights to every film it would like to show, but even beyond that his article is rather undermined by the fact that the first two films he mentions - A Canterbury Tale and The 39 Steps - form part of the Summer. The 39 Steps has already been shown.

Yet there is a problem with Patterson even beyond this lazy journalism. He writes:

What a sorry, retrograde, inward-looking, cliche-driven sense of nationhood is laid before us by their choices ... Lists like this explain why foreigners make better British movies than the British themselves.

Here we have the usual anywhere-but-England Guardian mind-set, but it also explains a lack of intellectual curiosity. How can one not be interested in the history of how this country has represented itself to itself?

There is, in truth, no such thing as an uninteresting British film. Every one will reveal something enlightening, whether it is the social attitudes or merely the street scenes.

Take Clash by Night, the very B-picture thriller from that I wrote about the other day. Here there was not the slightest hint that the sixties were about to swing. There was nothing in the movie that would have been out of place if it had been made in the 1930s.

In its way, Clash by Night tells us more about the Britain of the 1960s than yet another viewing of Blow-Up or Performance ever could.

Thanks to D'log.