Page 7 - 06_Bafta ACADEMY_Winners_ok

INSTITUTEMODERN
INSTITUTEMODERN
With new multi-million pound plans in the pipeline,
British Film Institute Chair, Joan Bakewell, shares her vision with Quentin Falk
The BFI is at the crossroads. Or, to be more topographically accurate, its exciting future is presently an architectural dream still waiting to be realised in a large car park on London’s South Bank.
After more than 66 years – since its inception in 1933 – the BFI will, the blueprint dictates, be eventually incorporated for the first time ever within just one facility.
This new BFI Film Centre, already touted boldly as “a beacon for film, TV and the mov- ing image in the 21st Century and beyond” will, among many other things, encompass five cinemas, an ambitious education com- plex, a much-revamped Interactive museum and, of course, staff offices.
Joan Bakewell, just over a year into her three-year Chair at the BFI, is confident the ‘dream’ is now firmly on track to becoming reali- ty. It may not be complete by the end of her stint in the hot seat but, she smiles, “I like to think something significant will be rising by then.”
“Our analysis of our funding and the analysis of our capacity to meet that is good and sound. In fact, we’re rather ahead of the game in terms of the planning already done. Actually we’re almost having to mark time while the South Bank Centre [a cultural and artistic master plan for the whole area] catches up with us.”
And if anyone doubts whether Bakewell - a long-time BFI governor and then vice-chair before following Alan Parker into the top job in October ’99 - lacks the visionary zeal to oversee such a radical new future for the BFI, listen to her own style of ‘mission statement.’
“My vision? First, it’s to have a vision. The BFI should be a hive of activity focused around all moving image activities. There will be scholarship, there’ll be an area in which people can see a huge diversity of cinema and it will be a place where we can hold celebrations and awards.
“As for the museum – or whatever we finally decide to call it – it’ll not simply be a museum, not just a chronology of cinema. It
must have sudden bursts of creativity to real- ly excite visitors. The Film Centre has to be a place where the young will want to come as part of the whole South Bank experience.”
Such dreams cost money way beyond the BFI’s annual remit of £16m which now gets doled out via the Film Council.
Says Bakewell: “We have a lease on the site of the NFT and where the Museum of the Moving Image is so we have that to offer up to the South Bank Centre as a quid quo pro. They’ll take that and give us the shell and core of the building under the Hungerford Car Park. So we have already got a big footprint, as it were.
“Then there’s our current building in Stephen Street that’s going to be worth money on the open market. We’ve also set up a huge development committee fund-rais- ing operation led by David Puttnam and we’ll put in for some Lottery money too. We’re confident we’ve estimated for an achievable deal. It is, nonetheless, a huge enterprise and there’s still a long way to go. But where we are now is, I believe, right for the time.”
But there is, as Bakewell quite rightly points out, much more to the BFI than just achieving a new Film Centre including advanced plans to go online.
“We have, for example, this fantastic archive and it’s been kept locked away. The campaign is to open the doors and get the stuff out where people can see it, through, say, the Internet or film societies. That’s much more our core activity philosophical- ly than just putting up a splendid building. The building is part of the means to it, but isn’t, by any means, all of it.”
Bakewell agrees that, to the general public, the BFI ‘profile’ is perhaps not high enough: “I don’t think people are well enough informed about us. Which is why,
for example, at the launch of the London Film Festival this year, I thought I’d just remind people that the LFF hap- pens to be run by the BFI.
“No, we don’t sing our praises enough. But, on the other hand, I also don’t think we should be slickly branded because that can lead to disappointment.”
Another long-time perception is that, internally, the BFI itself is an endlessly seething hotbed of unrest. If that has been the case, Bakewell, a self-styled “reconciler”, sees it now actively changing for the better.
“There seems to be a lot of very happy people there. Look, it’s a very extensive and complicated set-up and I think that there isn’t perhaps enough joined up inter- department contacts for people. The move to connect more is on the way.”
Bakewell, who’s to embark soon on a “major” new series for BBC2, makes no excuses being, to coin the catchphrase of Odeon, the cinema chain which has estab- lished a fruitful link with the BFI, “fanatical about film.”
She saw Snow White at five, had a teenage crush on James Mason and thinks she probably visited all fourteen cinemas in Stockport where she grew up during the war. Later, European cinema and, in partic- ular, the French Nouvelle Vague weaved its spell on the Cambridge graduate and broadcasting aspirant.
“Does that mean I have an overly romantic view of cinema? I really, really believe in the power of cinema. The plea- sure I’ve had has been romantic but I’m conscious I’ve also been shaped by cinema too. I believe that all works of art should be available for people and people’s education should be sound enough to assess and appreciate those things.”
She could almost be Queen of the anoraks – but one daren’t phrase it quite like that.
“Anoraks are often scholars,” she says, firmly. “Going to the movies isn’t exactly a trainspotting activity. It’s much more across the board than that. In fact, what you’re calling ‘anorak’ may actually be designer chic.” ■
5
Photo: Joan Bakewell, Chair of the British Film Institute
Academy Profile