 I hate music. I hate film too of course, but I hate music more. I hate the pretence that it matters, the idea that Pete Docherty’s personal abuse is in anyway heroic or elevates his lazy, posturing, sixth-form poetry into something life affirming or revolutionary. I hate the lack of standards and the idiot noise that seems to consider “The Beatles” or “Bob Dylan” to be a permanent position which can be filled by each successive generation, as if this were either true or necessary.
Of course my problem is that I’m a believer. When Joe Strummer died I was appalled to find that within hours he had been recast by the voices on my radio as a friendly joker who hadn’t really meant it. A sort of reverse rigour had fallen across him leaving his furious spitting rage commemorated in a soft glow of good-blokeishness. That night my friend Zee and I played a gig in Camden and sung a dirge version of London’s Burning and it’s the only time I’ve made grown men cry with my singing.
It’s been sometime since Zee or I played in public and with most of my time taken with filmmaking and with our drummer living in France, it seems unlikely that this will change much before the clocks go forward and I can’t pretend that this bothers me. Nothing inspires likes inspirational company but holding my guitar I look around and all I can see is guys like me who like the White Stripes. Why rush to be a part of something where innovation is as simple as copying someone other than Joy Division?
Why would I need the Kaiser Chiefs when I can have Blur? What on earth am I going to do with the Ordinary Boys when I already have the Jam? What could I possibly want with James Blunt? Listening to it all gives me the distinct sensation that my Mum has nicked all the presents she gave me when I was seven and has rewrapped them for Christmas: The Kooks are the musical equivalent of Go-Bots.
Holding my camera (metaphorically, in truth no one lets me near a camera in case I drop it) I see people who actually have something to say for themselves and are finding new ways of saying it. Most importantly what they are saying is true, actual poetic truth, as opposed to a garbled mush of received wisdoms and good hair cuts. These people have yet to make an impact on the public consciousness but they are there in a way they aren’t anymore upstairs at the Barfly.
What excites me about the advanced guard of British filmmaking is that, unlike music, this is not an effort to recapture the strength of the past but the result of pure frustration at the moribund structures of a creative industry that has been in permanent decline for the best part of forty years. Like I said, I hate film too but here at least I’m not on my own. There are hundreds, thousands of us who are sick to the eyeballs with the embarrassing toss that spatters out of this country and into the cut price video basket.
Like Alice, I’m not a great believer in comparisons but the much trumpeted ‘digital revolution’ has changed the face of British filmmaking in a way roughly equivalent to the change the portable tape recorder gifted to the music industry. The compelling new voice of British film is one forged through this technology. I think I’ll always be able to recognise the work of Dishad Hussain, Lee Kern or Scott Morgan, film makers who have all developed their own unique style thanks to the freedom granted by digital technology. A style which is both personal and sublimely British.
For cinema to be truly universal it must first be truthfully local. In this matter we face a unique problem, one that for far too long has only been addressed with a dependence upon shallow cliché and tired stereo-type. What is so delightful is that at long last our film makers have found the freedom to be different, to be identifiably British simply by calmly being themselves.
For some time now the dominant grammar of contemporary British cinema has been fundamentally American. This is partly because the wealth of Hollywood and the American strangle hold of distribution makes for a very unfair playing field. It is also because they make better films than we do.
For some, American cinema’s claim on global cultural dominance is a threat or a problem. Personally I agree with Karl Marx that all progress and innovation stems from a pattern of challenge and counter-challenge. The strength and vigour of filmmaking in Japan and Korea is very clearly a response to American films. Sometimes a loving recreation, sometimes an angry riposte - all over the world filmmakers of other nations have picked up and answered the challenge laid down by Hollywood. Our problem though is that when it comes to wording our own response, our words, our language is no longer quite our own.
The language we share with America not only increases the cultural penetration of US filmmaking but hamstrings our response. “La Haine” is a seamless, beautiful, marriage of American and French cinema. “Goodbye Charlie Bright” is embarrassing like a Dad at a party, like William Hague in a baseball cap. Like an identical twin who somehow contrives to be the ugly one, when British and more especially English cinema attempts to borrow American clothes it has constantly managed to just look dumb. The film grammar that English filmmakers have is unmistakably American yet in our mouths it sounds gauche and unconvincing. We are so like them that it often seems impossible to do anything other than to copy what they do - but in copying America we endlessly prove how unlike them we really are.
It is a relief and a joy to find that at long last we have a rising generation of film makers who seem like they could be capable of finally making popular cinema that is truthfully, confidently, naturally British. It is also no surprise that so many of the best are second, third or, for all I care, fourth generation immigrants.
The strength of Black British and especially Anglo-Asian film making is compelling. These are people who come from communities already adept at taking a dominant form of cultural expression and reshaping it in their own image. These are film makers who have always needed to assert their identity and whose mixed genes shine a light on the nature of their Britishness. Alnoor Dewshi, Dishad Hussain, Oscar-Nominee Asvhin Kumar - gifted filmmakers whose work is honest, truthful and fundamentally British in way that Richard Curtis never has been.
Not that this is the whole picture by any means. Dictynna Hood and Jo Barnes both manage to be neither Asian nor especially influenced by digital film making yet both are diamonds whose work is so beautiful it can silence a room. Cath LeCoetur isn’t even remotely British yet her impact on British film making runs much deeper than her part in the creation of Shooting People, the internet community that plays such a vital role in focusing and uniting these many disparate new talents.
At the end of the day all of these filmmakers, and a great many more, are linked not by an ethnicity, not by a uniformity of style, content or even attitude. They linked only by talent, by time and by place. Nothing inspires like inspirational company and the filmmakers who I’ve met in the past couple of years are the best reason I’ve ever had for spending less time breaking guitar strings. -----------------------------------
Ben Blaine makes films with his brother Chris. In his spare time he is writing "Pierre Menard The Man Who Wrote Don Quixote by Jorge Luis Borges" as a joke. It has been claimed that he and Chris are two of the most gifted filmmakers of their generation, though he admits that this is mainly claimed by him. Not everything he says is true. For more information on the Blaine Brothers please visit http://www.charlieproductions.co.uk
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