ARTS

National Film Theatre

Watching a pile of popcorn

Laurence Marks goes in search of the NFT's intellectual back-bone.

The Guardian noted gloomily not long ago that part of a season of exceptionally violent and regressive Japanese sci-fi animation films at the National Film The- atre was 'designed for the teen nerd mar- ket'. If even the Guardian's iron digestion is refusing the cultural junk-food on offer, things must be in pretty bad shape on the South Bank.

Some film critics and movie industry people, and a reportedly large number of discriminating cinema-goers, have been complaining for some time that the NFT's new downmarket programming policy is ruining a fine institution. It's hard to be sure about this because aesthetic valuations are so subjective, but there has certainly been a shift in the balance between works of art and formula entertainment.

The reason is economic. The three auditoria, with 747 seats, show 2,000 films a year. Attendances fell from 218,000 in 1990-91 to 166,000 in 1992-93. The governors of the NFT's parent body, the British Film Institute, decided to try and attract a younger and less cine-literate audience. It worked. In 1994-95 atten- dances recovered to 197,000.

`It was the thin end of the wedge,' says Alexander Walker, the Evening Standard's film critic. 'It opened up the NFT not only to popular programming but to a trashy attitude. It no longer distinguishes between kitsch and quality.'

For a start, it's showing far too many movies which are concurrently playing in the West End or on release. If these were selected films of quality, fine. There's no reason why the NFT should wait for them to become classics. But a lot of them are popcorn. Should the Exchequer (£2 million of the BFI's £17.1 million grant goes to the NFT) be subsidising a commercial second- run house?

Contemporary pop culture has a legiti- mate place in any cinematheque. But the NFT's programmers seem to be in thrall to it, abandoning critical judgment for a gush- ing celebration of mediocre movies. The May, June and July schedules are dominat- ed by an interminable 100-film season, Celluloid Jukebox, a publication tie-in with a book of the same title co-edited by the NFT's manager, Adrian Wootton. (Chutzpah! say his critics). Some of the films are good, many of them undistin- guished. The only discernible link is that they all have a pop soundtrack, a meaningless category since so many films do these days.

You can understand the temptation. A growing proportion of the NFT's audience, currently 15 per cent, is under 24. Many regard themselves as serious cinema-goers but seem to inhabit a continuous present unconcerned with classics of even the fairly recent past. The policy seems to be to drop in a great movie now and again when the teen nerds aren't looking.

The NFT's defenders accuse the accusers of fogeyism. 'The critics have missed the point,' says Julian Potley of Brunel Univer- sity. 'They're blaming it for changes in film culture they don't happen to like. The nature of the canon has changed. In these post-modernist times there are all sorts of alternative canons.'

But nobody ever suggested that the canon is closed and immutable — an endless recycling of The Battleship Potemkin and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It has always been subject to revision as criti- cal and generational perspectives change. That this is so i1 demonstrated by the instant recognition of Quentin Tarantino as as a dazzlingly accomplished young film- maker. What the NFT is being accused of is not eclecticism but abdication of critical responsibility.

Its programmers are obsessed with what they call 'great cult movies'. Their schedules are coloured by a taste for the bizarre, the extreme and the perverse for their own sake, not as essential elements in a work of the imagination — in other words, for camp.

Last month there was a season of Hollywood B-pictures by Ed Wood, once voted 'worst director of all time'. They are notorious for their wooden acting, wobbly sets and rambling dialogue. It tied in with the commercial release of Tim Burton's admired biopic of Wood. (The May programme described Wood, idiotically, as `the cult mastermind'.) Okay, bad art can be interesting. But the programmers seem to be confused about whether they are inviting us to snigger or to 'reassess' undetected qualities in these films.

It doesn't allay criticism that seasons are increasingly driven by commercial tie-ins. Business sponsorship is a great idea if you can persuade a company to pay for what you were going to present anyway. It goes wrong when the sponsor takes over, as anyone who once loved watching Sunday cricket will agree. The NFT has far too many promos for respectability.

`The Japanese animation season was drawn exclusively from one distributor, Manga,' says Trevor Willsmer, editor of Movie Collector. 'Trevor Burton's biopic bombed in the States, so its production company, Disney, formed an alliance with Pickwick and Warner Interactive, which distribute the videos of Wood's films. It's bad when Ed Wood gets a bigger season than Orson Welles. The NFT is being turned into a launchpad for commer- cial videos.'

You could defend any single film the NFT shows. We're talking about balance. Bad films are driving out good. There's room nowadays for far fewer scholarly, comprehensive seasons that explore in depth the work of some historically impor- tant director, writer or movement.

This month's Graham Greene fest is not negligible: six adaptations of his fiction, three of his screenplays. But it leaves out half a dozen important films including The Heart of the Matter. It's the sort of limited season Channel 4 and BBC2 are good at. We expect the NFT to be more ambitious.

These mini-seasons are gussied up with unrelated classics which the director or writer in question liked — or might have liked if he had lived long enough to see, them. The James Joyce season includes Groundhog Day because 'it would surely have appealed to Joyce'. The Greene season includes Duck Soup and Eisen- stein's October. Greene admired both, but then so have millions of cinema-goers. It tells you nothing distinctive about his criti- cal values, and makes the NFT look intel- lectually sloppy.

Mr Wootton argues that short seasons are useful introductions for the pastless young. He also says that the growth of the video industry has made film rights harder to obtain. But that didn't stop the Cinematheque Francois and New York's MOMA mounting complete Renoir retrospectives last year, shaming the NFT's limited Renoir season.

What the argument is about ultimately is the usual argument in troubled cultural institutions: taste, flair, passion and imagination. Balancing the books isn't enough. If anything goes, what is the NFT for?