A Call to Arms: Alex Cox Addresses the Film Parliament

Abstract

I’d like to start by thanking the Cambridge Film Festival, and Vertigo magazine, for inviting me here today to make this little speech. I should probably thank the Film Council as well, though whether it was wise to seek their sponsorship for an event which may turn out to be critical of them, you can all decide. Presumably I was invited to speak here because of an article I wrote at the end of last year, for Sight and Sound,1 in response to Sir Alan Parker’s bonfire night bombshell.2 I wrote the piece because Mr Parker’s proposals were so incendiary, so provocative, so destructive and downright weird, that it seemed like somebody – a working filmmaker, maybe – should respond to them. To be honest, I didn’t think I was the right person to reply. I think that one of the much greater guns of British cinema, a Ken Loach or a Mike Leigh or a Stephen Frears, would have been better placed, more knowledgeable, and more influential, to write about what Mr Parker said. But none of them replied – at least not publicly. And so, aware of that deafening and menacing silence, I wrote my little article. I know that Ken Loach was invited to speak here today, as well. He declined, because apparently he’s busy in Scotland. So, here I am again. For which, apologies. This parliament, based I believe on a model first tried in Rotterdam, is a very important thing. Less than four hundred years ago, another parliament took place in London, which so angered the King, he shut it down. A few months later, the country embarked upon a revolution, and the King’s head was cut off. I’m going to propose a little decapitation too. But first I’d like to look briefly at the Film Council. And at the past, and present, and future, of British film. I’ll leave distribution and exhibition to others: I’m no expert in either of those fields, and there are people here today who are. It’s interesting to observe that the Film Council, which last year failed