In a special extended version for the Film Ireland website, Séamas McSwiney reviews the notion of state intervention in film production ahead of the Copenhagen ThinkTank on European Film and Film Policy

Without government intervention, there wouldn’t be a film industry of any consequence in most European countries. For this we must be grateful. Even if, for the most part, these public systems are relatively ineffective, they do manage to nurture creative communities and, through them, offer celluloid mirrors that reflect individuality, originality and cultural identities. Nationally, they do not make the inroads into box office share that they hoped to and they fall far short of the European aspiration of crossing borders and impressing the neighbours.

Intervention strategies are changed and modified on such a regular basis, it is clear most are desperately seeking a formula that works better. On a European level, this means that maybe half a dozen national film strategies are reformed each year, mostly to satisfy the survival requirements of a local industry and rarely with any regard to what’s working well elsewhere or what might fit well or create synergies with EU partners.

Facing facts
The good news is that some prominent players are facing up to the bad news. Rather than passing the gravy, they’re insisting that we have a duty to do better in order to justify public intervention.

Because film lobbies are quicker to put a PR gloss on mediocrity than to make sincere stabs at critical self examination, there’s something promisingly pre-emptive about a sentence like: 'The rising cost of supporting film and worsening results of that support, as well as the little or no progress towards public policy objectives for which the support is given, will make it increasingly difficult to justify the current forms and levels of support.' These bracing words appear in the prospectus for a three-day conference in June, organised by the Copenhagen ThinkTank on European Film and Film Policy. The event is called Why (do) we fund film? It will involve about 150 distinguished players and industry experts, both public and private, including many European Film Agency Directors, or EFAD as they are known associatively. The event was announced during this year’s Berlinale and its mission is 'to consider effective strategies for strengthening and reinvigorating European Film'.

Covet thy neighbour’s good ideas
European cinema is an unnecessarily complex jigsaw. The European Audiovisual Observatory identifies eight categories of sectoral aid to support the film industry, ranging from direct subsidy in the cost of producing a film to obliging TV investment in film and, of course, tax incentives. Within these categories reside a plethora of variations, from country to country, agency to agency and even within agencies. Yet, even though the doorstep aspiration is to sell celluloid to our EU neighbours, the word harmonisation is taboo; the idea of many imitating the more successful mechanisms of their neighbours is rarely studied or pursued with any determination. This choice between harmonisation and simple interface will be on the menu in Copenhagen because it is necessary to co-produce for two very basic reasons: firstly, for many national industries it is impossible to raise a decent production budget at home and, secondly, funding from another territory creates a direct opportunity of finding an audience there. Given the audience results, it is clear today that more dynamic and effective co-production models need to be developed.

Mutatis mutandis
It is an economic truism to say that producers respond to incentives; it is a more interestingly complex observation to say that they mutate and develop skills to survive in the reality of their environment. In the old marquee days it was down to the impresarios to put bums on seats through their flair for talent and their marketing skills. There was a direct relationship between producer and punter.

Nowadays a producer – the entrepreneurial leader of a film project – acquires the skills to deal with the bureaucratic environment of public funding at the expense of honing his connection with public tastes. 'For some – if not all – accessing subsidy has become their principal role, more important to their business than the development of successful creative and commercial strategies.' Some public funding mechanisms try to overcome this unfortunate perversion by creating a direct link between box-office success and funding. The relative merits of such results-driven automatic funding will also be on the ThinkTank menu in an effort to determine how best to reinvigorate the waning rapport between European producers and their diverse publics.

Taxing questions
Tax break financing also has the tendency to create degrees of separation between films and audiences: accessing such funds is entirely divorced from box-office success, focusing on satisfying producers’ needs rather than consumers’ desires. Yet, mystifyingly, film tax schemes are becoming more and more popular across Europe. One EFAD recently bemoaned the fact that European Film finance is becoming a league of competing national tax breaks. This addiction won’t go away tomorrow, but, meanwhile, maybe there are ways of using funds generated in this manner to accentuate, rather than dilute, the producers’ motivation to reach audiences, whether they be art-house or multiplex.

Most tax incentives, like other national aids, also include a local spend requirement or territorialisation clauses. But an EU study into the (negative) cultural and economic impact, notably on co-productions, of territorialisation clauses in state aid is soon to be launched. That such a study be envisaged by Brussels suggests that there is a worry: rather than creating a strong collaborative European industry, we seem to be drifting further towards an inefficient collusion of national industries.

Culture clubs
The Copenhagen prospectus also refers to the film ecology in Europe to describe the filmmaking environment, implying rightly that there may be 'organic' solutions. It lists some unsatisfying characteristics of this ecology, ranging from the film 'mountain' (700 are produced annually) to the mediocrity-inducing effects of public subsidy.

There is also the question of bureaucratic ‘cultures’ whose actions lose sight of their original objective as their processes (and public relations prestige!) become ends unto themselves. There is a definite need to return to the original Keynsian principles underlying intervention, which quite simply is to capture and adjust market forces and use them to correct imbalances for a desired result, and not to replace the market with something that doesn’t work.

In a symbolically significant break with catering convention, there will be no fixed, formal lunches at the Copenhagen conference, but a running buffet, thus removing the counter productive effects of scheduling according to a free lunch.

www.dfi.dk/english/the_copenhagen_thinktank/thinktank.htm