The postwar transformation of the British Film Institute and its impact on the development of a national film culture in Britain

Abstract

Among the few studies available on the early history of the British Film Institute (BFI), the Radcliffe Report (1948) is generally acknowledged as the first, and perhaps the most important, turning point in the BFI's history in that it signalled the rebirth of the Institute in a modernized form that still, nearly sixty years later, provides the template for the BFI's activities.1 This essay first looks at the circumstances of the BFI's creation in the early 1930s to try to explain the failure of its ‘first life’ (1933–1948); it then examines the process of its postwar transformation (of which the Radcliffe report was only the most ‘public’ stage); and, finally, it explores the early work of the new regime and its long-lasting impact on the development of a film culture in Britain. In the late 1920s a number of educational, scientific and religious organizations began to recognize that film, beyond its purely entertainment value, was ‘a powerful instrument for good and evil in national life’ (the expression was in vogue in those circles).2 It is in this context that a group of educationists from the British Institute of Adult Education launched, in November 1929, an active campaign to encourage the use of film as a visual aid in formal education as well as to raise the general standard of film appreciation among the public. They set up an independent (and, to their great disappointment, unofficial) Commission on Educational and Cultural Films to find ways of achieving these aims, for instance through the establishment of a ‘permanent central organization’.3 Its comprehensive report, The Film in National Life (1932), indeed recommended the creation of a national film institute funded by public money and incorporated under Royal Charter. By that time, however, the ever philistine British film trade had become aware of the Commission's activities and its representatives immediately showed their hostility towards a project which in their view could interfere with their short-term commercial interests. The trade associations demanded to be included in the negotiations on the future film institute, and from then on their representatives ensured that it would remain an innocuous body with as little influence as possible on the development of commercial cinema.

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