By the mid-1970s Europe’s postwar economic boom was definitely over. The 1973 oil shock, in which the Middle Eastern petroleum-producing countries began drastically raising the price of oil, created inflation, unemployment, and a recession that lasted throughout the decade. Politically, the appeal of left-wing parties waned, and more conservative governments came to power. Although the left won some victories, as with Socialist Fran<;ois Mit-terand’s 1981 election to the French presidency, all governments faced persistent inflation and recession. Even leftist regimes took austerity measures that moved them closer to the center. During the same period, however, right-wing dictatorships in Spain, Greece, and Portugal ended and democratic reforms were introduced.
On the whole, western Europe’s economy recovered and restabilized in the 1980s. The European Community (EC) began to plan a unified market that, with 320 million persons, could compete with the United States and Japan. A European assembly, created in 1979, started to consider the possibility of a “Single Europe.” In 1994, the EC was renamed the European Union (EU), with fifteen member countries; in 2002, the Euro became the organization’s common currency.
The hard time of the 1970s were also felt throughout the European film industry. Attendance continued to drop, and theaters closed. Although in some countries production increased, the figures were artificially inflated by the growing number of pornographic films. Box-office income rose or remained steady, but this was chiefly due to increasing ticket prices. Overall, television—now in color, with good image quality—was reducing film audiences. Home video made deep inroads after the late 1970s, further damaging attendance and eliminating the theatrical market for erotic films. As in the United States, fewer and fewer films gained a larger portion of box-office revenues, and most titles were aimed at an audience aged 15 to 25.
What theater income there was went largely to Hollywood. Since the late 1940s, American firms owned powerful distribution companies in Europe, ensuring U. S. pictures preferred theaters and excluding imports from other countries. Moreover, the countries that had highly concentrated ownership of exhibition chains (France, West Germany, and Great Britain) welcomed the lucrative Hollywood product. Consequently, despite quotas, taxes, and other protectionist measures, American films dominated Europe. In the early 1980s, they attracted almost 50 percent of the attendance in Belgium, France, and West Germany; 60 to 70 percent in Denmark, Italy, and Greece; 80 percent in the Netherlands; and over 90 percent in the United Kingdom.
European film industries were not vertically integrated, so for most of the 1970s there was no coordinated response to declining audiences and increased U. S. penetration. For a time, there was hope that American financing might help the more visible auteurs. Bernardo Bertolucci and certain New German directors won such support in the 1970s. Some of the Majors established “classics” divisions to distribute foreign prestige pictures in the United States. But with the significant exception of Bertolucci’s scandalous Last Tango in Paris (1973), most Hollywood-supported art movies proved unsuccessful.
European filmmakers were obliged to rely chiefly on the systems of coproductions and government assistance initiated in the postwar era. The prototypical “Eurofilm” might have stars from Italy, France, and Germany, with a director from one country, a mixed-nations crew, and location shooting in several regions. East-West coproductions increased, with the USSR and eastern European countries participating in runaway projects and joint ventures. International productions also drew upon government aid, as European states continued to promote cinema as a cultural vehicle.
New Television Support to strategies put into place after World War II (p. 354), state subsidies carried national cinemas through hard times. Governments made funds available to producers through loans, grants, and prizes. Several countries modeled aid upon France’s policy of avance sur recettes—giving funding before production on the expectation of repayment from a percentage of the film’s earnings. In Greece, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, and Belgium, ministries and cultural bodies made funding available. In the United Kingdom, local filmmaking had suffered from a sudden decline in Hollywood investment, but producers’ demands on the National Film Finance Corporation were augmented by the National Film Development Fund, created in 1976. Governments drew such funds from general revenues and from taxes on tickets or license fees for televisions and VCRs. In Finland, the national film foundation raised money from taxes on televisions, VCRs, and blank videocassettes.
The German Experiment Few European films repaid their subsidies. A more practical form of government funding came from television. Up to the mid-1970s,
European television was dominated by state-owned public agencies, such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), France’s ORTF, and Italy’s RAI. These kept out independent television companies, banned advertising, and showcased national culture. Although some European television companies financed auteur directors in the 1960s and early 1970s, West Germany was the first country to use national television to support filmmaking in a systematic fashion.
The country had no private channels and three public ones: ARD, ZDF, and a regional chain. The Young German Film launched at the 1962 Oberhausen festival (p. 456) had suffered from cutbacks in government funding, but in 1974 a new Film and Television Agreement offered favorable terms for joint productions. Between 1974 and 1978, government television spent 34 million deutsche marks on films to be shown on television after they had completed a theatrical run. In addition, funding was allotted for script development. The agreement acknowledged the possibility that the Autorenfilm, or “author’s cinema,” could lift television above its normal programming by appeals to high art and national culture.
The 1974 agreement created a fresh burst of energy and led many New German filmmakers to international reputations and financing (see “Notes and Queries” at the end of this chapter). The new agreement and funding also gave German women directors their first significant chance to make features. The amorphousness of the New German Cinema as a film movement owes something to the fact that it is more a result of such favorable production circumstances than of aesthetic or political positions shared by the filmmakers.
As in most cases of government funding, West Germany’s television-financed films did not repay their investment: the New German directors were more popular abroad than at home. Still, the films did fill airtime. And when the government-assisted Tin Drum (1979) was successful at the box-office and won an Academy Award for best foreign film, the investment in New German Cinema yielded international prestige.
Privatizing Television: A New Crisis Other nations’ state-sponsored television agencies took up film financing in the German mode, supplementing coproduction arrangements with state subsidy. Soon, however, the depression of the mid-1970s and the declining income of public broadcasting forced many governments to admit commercial channels to the airwaves. France dissolved ORTF, created two public channels, and added several private channels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Britain admitted Channel 4 in 1982. The most unregulated growth in television programming occurred in Italy, where hundreds of small local stations sprang up, some broadcasting twenty-four hours a day. With the development of cable and satellite transmission, some countries could receive programming from all over Europe.
As commercial-television outlets proliferated, film attendance plunged. Between 1976 and 1983, British audiences fell from 107 to 70 million; Spain’s attendance dropped from 250 to 141 million. In Italy, where 400 local TV channels programmed a staggering 2,000 films per week, theaters lost about 50 million spectators each year. West Germany’s public-television system, which blocked private broadcasting the longest, began to strain under its film policy; the government continue to subsidize low-budget art films, but most were never released theatrically. Some German directors responded with hybrid works that could become “events” in either medium, such as the marathon films/series Berlin Alexan-derplatz (1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and Heimat (1983, Edgar Reitz).
By the early 1980s, the crisis in European filmmaking could not be ignored. Governments tried to attract private capital to the cinema. In Italy, RAI contracted with the Cecchi Gori group to produce fifteen films annually, with RAI paying the lion’s share in exchange for television rights. Mitterand’s minister of culture, Jack Lang, declared that he wished French cinema to return to its international prestige. Encouraging the industry to imitate Hollywood’s entrepreneurship, Lang helped create private investment companies. These Societes de Financement du Cinema et de I’ Audiovisuel (SOFICAs) offered tax-exempt investments to individuals, banks, and companies that bought rights to films’ future earnings. By the early 1990s, 25 percent of French production funds derived from SOFICAs.
The most powerful form of private capital came, once more, from television. Caught up in intense competition, Europe’s commercial broadcasters needed recent films to program. Moreover, if a television company financed a film that recouped its costs theatrically, broadcasting it would become even more profitable. As a result, during the 1980s private television firms started funding production. Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, owner of several networks, began investing in features in 1985; his holdings sometimes made up 40 percent of all investment in Italian production.
In the United Kingdom, new state policies turned producers toward television. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, adhering to a policy of privatization, abolished the quota in 1982 and the Eady levy three years later. Government funding for film production virtually ceased.
World History
