In The Electric Mist (Bertrand Tavernier, 2008)

[Zazou dans le Metro]

Plus, who fucking cares if you and your implied alliance are "okay" with someone's perspective?

Absolument! Buy this guy a plate of freedom fries!

[Nothing]

Barmy, the French have had a centre-right government for quite some time.

You use the word 'subsidized' as if this is a bad thing. The truth is, genuine art is rarely of interest to the masses and rarely able to exist on commercial terms. You wouldn't expect an opera house or a concert hall to operate unaided and, despite a transient boom in the 60s-80s, (serious) narrative cinema is no exception to the rule. Some European countries and particularly France continue to subsidise such films not because the industry is failing (they know just as well how to make money from an ILS or a CAMPING) but because they believe the cultural value of such work exceeds the commercial concerns.

The Danish Film Institute, for example, always takes last position on the work they are involved with and has a 0.01% recoupment rate.

As for the French CNC, the principal of taking a small amount of money from box office receipts (American and French alike) and then using that to support not only their own national industry but artistically valuable work from around the globe is surely a principal that most here would agree with. The UK film industry has never been the same since Thatcher scrapped a similar policy in the 1980s.

Without the CNC, you would not have Flandres, L'Enfant, Cache or Persepolis. You also would not have Paranoid Park, Alexandra, The Wild Blue Yonder, Cyclo or Tropical Malady, just to give you a very small sample.

[Nothing]

I'm not sure I'd agree with that, because the reason Thatcher scrapped that policy (I'm assuming you're talking about the scrapping of the Eady levy?) was as a result of a government investigation that showed that the largesse was mostly being spent on soft porn and offering an attractive environment to Hollywood blockbusters like Alien and Superman (both legally 'British' for tax reasons). I normally instinctively opposed everything the Thatcher government did, but in this case I have to concede that they did have a point: the mainstream industry was in terminal decline for at least a decade before Eady was removed.

And I also think that the boost that this gave to independent companies like HandMade and Palace outweighed the problems faced by the mainstream industry - which famously didn't know what to do with Life of Brian and The Long Good Friday and probably wouldn't have funded The Company of Wolves, Withnail & I and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover under any circumstances.

That said, I think that the 1970s was one of the strongest decades for creatively interesting British film (once one delves beneath the surface, anyway), but most of the really outstanding work was made well outside the mainstream film industry and consequently wouldn't have benefited from the likes of Eady in the first place. And the BFI Production Board was able to nurture new talent until 1999, when it was unceremoniously scrapped - and I think that did far more damage to serious art cinema as a going concern in Britain.

Terence Davies is a much-cited case in point - he produced most of his best work in the supposedly cash-squeezed and philistine Thatcher era, but hasn't been able to get a new feature off the ground in nearly a decade.

But Nic Roeg and Ken Russell were amongst those to benefit from Eady right? And Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman (also Loach, Leigh) had begun to establish their careers before the policy was scrapped. Of course, a lot of crap was made too, and you'll always have arguments about what does and doesn't constitute a British film, etc, but it is actually this lack of discrimination that was the true benefit of such a system as it didn't allow the politicians to take hold.

I would agree that the interim Palace / Hand Made period was also fruitful, driven on, I think, by a handful of fierce and energetic individuals more than any kind of systematic trend. But - these companies were unable to sustain themselves on purely competitive terms (I realise Hand Made still exists, but as a shadow of their former self). Similarly, the various government-funded production wings began to look unviable during this time and so, after approximately a decade, the feeling came about that a new overall approach, a major 'overhaul' of the industry was required...

I remember in the mid-90s when the UKFC was being established (BFI Production, Arts Council and British Screen "rolled together" aka abolished). At this time, the key players were out there spinning the line that Greenaway and Jarman had between them "destroyed the British film industry" by making films that "no-one wanted to see" and that the aim of UKFC was to deal with national concerns in a commercial way for a mass audience.

What this has amounted to over time is a very narrow production mandade, presided over by middle-managers and Blairite cronies, that, through their slate-funding deals, has extended its reach across the entire British film industry. An agenda that is guided, on the one hand, by a quasi-liberal notion of positive representation and, on the other, a desire to mimick Hollywood / fear of making anything that cannot be easily 'explained'. In the last couple of years they've tried to deflect criticism by giving small amounts of co-production funding to some of the old guard (Greenaway, Roeg) but, at the same time, they've narrowed even further the criteria for projects they will initiate and/or develop.

With the CNC, either you quality for the funding or you don't, which, to simply things somewhat, means that either the film is majority French language and/or the money can be invoked through a billateral co-production treaty or one of their co-production treaties for developing nations. The result is - once again - a lot of what we might consider to be crap. French comedies and thrillers that will never get further than Canada. But it also means the films I listed above.

[MichaelB]

But Nic Roeg and Ken Russell were amongst those to benefit from Eady right? And Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman (also Loach, Leigh) had begun to establish their careers before the policy was scrapped.

Though in the case of Russell, Loach and Leigh, the BBC must take a huge amount of the credit for the initial nurturing process, without which it's unlikely their careers would have taken off at all. In fact, Leigh worked almost exclusively in television in the 1970s and 1980s, while Jarman and Greenaway were heavily dependent on the BFI and Channel Four - as was Terence Davies.

Which is why I tend to be a bit suspicious of arguments to the effect that scrapping Eady had a calamitous impact on British cinema, given that by 1985 there was already abundant evidence that its original aims of stimulating production had pretty much fizzled out many years before after the Hollywood majors significantly reduced their investment in British film following the fallout from their own widely-publicised financial debacles of the late 1960s. And 1984 - the year before Eady was scrapped - was and remains the worst-performing year in British cinema history.

Of course, a lot of crap was made too, and you'll always have arguments about what does and doesn't constitute a British film, etc, but it is actually this lack of discrimination that was the true benefit of such a system as it didn't allow the politicians to take hold.

...until they decided to have a look at exactly what their policies were funding!

I would agree that the interim Palace / Hand Made period was also fruitful, driven on, I think, by a handful of fierce and energetic individuals more than any kind of systematic trend. But - these companies were unable to sustain themselves on purely competitive terms (I realise Hand Made still exists, but as a shadow of their former self).

But then again, neither could Rank or EMI in the 1970s, and both were pretty much defunct before Eady was scrapped. Don't get me wrong - I'm not arguing that scrapping Eady was a good thing, just that its impact wasn't anything like as great as an equivalent abolition in France might have been. Or rather, the British film industry has been hit by far greater body-blows in the last 30 years or so.

Speaking of which...

I remember in the mid-90s when the UKFC was being established (BFI Production, Arts Council and British Screen "rolled together" aka abolished). At this time, the key players were out there spinning the line that Greenaway and Jarman had between them "destroyed the British film industry" by making films that "no-one wanted to see" and that the aim of UKFC was to deal with national concerns in a commercial way for a mass audience.

Which is a tad ironic, as it was a proud (and, as far as I can see, accurate) boast of Greenaway's that all his films prior to The Baby of Mâcon had been profitable - and in one or two cases, notably The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, very profitable indeed. Granted, we're not talking mass audience, but I doubt the accountants were complaining (at least prior to Mâcon). I also doubt that Jarman's films lost much money, given their typically minuscule budgets.

What this has amounted to over time is a very narrow production mandade, presided over by middle-managers and Blairite cronies, that, through their slate-funding deals, has extended its reach across the entire British film industry. An agenda that is guided, on the one hand, by a quasi-liberal notion of positive representation and, on the other, a desire to mimick Hollywood / fear of making anything that cannot be easily 'explained'. In the last couple of years they've tried to deflect criticism by giving small amounts of co-production funding to some of the old guard (Greenaway, Roeg) but, at the same time, they've narrowed even further the criteria for projects they will initiate and/or develop.

Now here we totally agree - I think what's happened post-1997 has been far more calamitous for the industry than anything that happened in the 1980s, when things like the abolition of Eady were counterbalanced by the rise of Channel Four.

Even the 1990s was far from unpromising, with PolyGram Filmed Entertainment developing what appeared to be genuinely workable model for balancing commercial viability with artistic risk-taking, and its closure through parent-company machinations just before what would have been its first international megahit (Notting Hill) was a tragedy, as was the more understandable closure of Film Four after its ill-fated decision to compete with Hollywood. Especially as there's been nothing to match them since.

[GringoTex]

The truth is, genuine art is rarely of interest to the masses and rarely able to exist on commercial terms. You wouldn't expect an opera house or a concert hall to operate unaided and, despite a transient boom in the 60s-80s, (serious) narrative cinema is no exception to the rule.

I'm all for increased public funding of the arts, but narrative cinema has fundamentally proved the exception to that rule.

[John Cope]

An update on this one now almost a year later.

This is particularly interesting:

Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier, combining two of the veteran French filmmaker's great passions: the American South (previously explored in his 1985 documentary, Mississippi Blues) and American pulp fiction (the basis for 1981's Oscar-nominated Coup de torchon, which transposed Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French colonial Africa). But it's been a long road to Berlin for In the Electric Mist, which was shot on location in 2007 only to become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film's American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).

When the dust finally settled, two different versions of the movie emerged -- an "international" cut prepared by Tavernier, which screened here in Berlin and will be released in most countries around the world, and an "American" cut supervised by Fitzgerald that runs 15 minutes shorter and will go directly to DVD in the U.S. next month. In comparing the two edits, Variety critic Leslie Felperin deemed the American version "brisker but less-coherent" with "tacky summing up and [an] oo!-spooky last shot mini twist that makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie."

Having seen only Tavernier's version, I can say that it's unfortunate American audiences may never get a chance to experience this superior detective yarn on the big screen, in the form its director intended. Unfortunate, but by no means surprising. Indeed, where the default Hollywood position would have been to strip-mine Burke's source material for its narrative chassis while junking all its atmospheric touches, tertiary supporting characters and curlicue digressions, Tavernier (working from a script credited to the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) does exactly the opposite. Much like Burke himself on the page, he plays up the bass at the expense of the melody, showing markedly less interest in the identity of the killer(s) than in a long and winding history of Southern injustice that stretches from Jim Crow to George W. Bush. Long ago, Robichaux says in the lyrical voice-over that opens the film, people placed heavy stones on the graves of the dead so as to weigh down the souls of the departed. But in Burke and Tavernier's world, every time a storm blows through, those stones become displaced, and restless spirits take to wandering the bayou.

This is all very reassuring to know (as I'm sure a director's cut DVD will eventually surface). I actually saw the screener for what I assume is the American cut awhile back and thought it was shockingly flat. I guess I now know why. It's amazing to think that a film about America won't be released properly in America.

[Grand Illusion]

As an American, I really didn't take offense to the "insular" comment. Every country, I'm sure, is nationalistic about their own cinema to a degree, if for no other reason than it is easier to understand in their native tongue and easier to identify cultural touchstones.

Tavernier was working within Hollywood, though, which can be particularly insidious with its insularity. A prime example being the trend of remakes of foreign language films, especially when the original doesn't even get US distribution. I have to pop a Xanax to calm down just thinking about the fact that Let the Right One In didn't even play wide before the remake rights were given to the director of Cloverfield.

Oh, we've moved onto public financing. Throw me in with the opposition group. Definitely against that.

[Fiery Angel]

Interview with Tavernier

[Oedipax]

So, uh... did anyone actually see this movie? I watched Tavernier's cut last night, via the French region-locked bluray, and found it to be an excellent, if somewhat flawed film. The main cast is uniformly excellent while a few of the supporting players tend to stick out - but in a way that's mostly consistent with the film's occasionally surreal/psychedelic tone. Tavernier paces the movie slowly and deliberately, really soaking up the Louisiana atmosphere, but the narrative is actually quite eventful with several big turns throughout that keep it interesting. The last 20 minutes do unfortunately give way to a more conventional police procedural ending, although Tavernier somewhat mitigates this with a lovely final shot that brings Kubrick's The Shining to mind.

It's a shame that this cut of the film will go almost entirely unseen in the U.S.; reading peoples' reactions on IMDB, it seems the producer's cut eliminated (oddly enough) a decent amount of exposition that helps draw the right connections between all the characters. I'm quite sure I missed a lot even with the longer cut, having not read the series of books involving Tommy Lee Jones' character, Dave Robicheux.

[flyonthewall2983]

I watched it on Netflix last year. It's just ok, but then again I only saw the producer's cut.

[HistoryProf]

Can anyone give any actual specifics on the differences between the two versions? All I see anywhere are comments about differing tones, the US version is "less coherent", etc., but no one actually gives an example. having watched the American release tonight, I quite enjoyed it...and really loved the texture of the setting, the bayou is palpable and very much a central character. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I've read this book and most of the others that I never found it remotely "incoherent" - thought the final shot is pretty lame. what is the "shining-esque" shot that ends the longer version mentioned above?

[Oedipax]

Can anyone give any actual specifics on the differences between the two versions? All I see anywhere are comments about differing tones, the US version is "less coherent", etc., but no one actually gives an example. having watched the American release tonight, I quite enjoyed it...and really loved the texture of the setting, the bayou is palpable and very much a central character. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I've read this book and most of the others that I never found it remotely "incoherent" - thought the final shot is pretty lame. what is the "shining-esque" shot that ends the longer version mentioned above?

It's been a few months since I've seen it, but about the ending:

Spoiler

Robicheux returns home with his child and embraces his wife, then the camera slowly pans and dollies to reveal a book sitting on a desk, opened to a page with an old civil war photo. It's a lineup of soliders, like a class picture, and as the camera gets closer you can see Robicheux and the general he speaks with throughout the film standing next to each other in the center.

[HistoryProf]

so that's the same ending of the American version....what's funny is i've seen it lauded in reference to the director's cut, but panned as cliche and movie of the week silliness in reviews of the U.S. version. So i'll stand by my verdict that it's still a fine film, with some outstanding cinematography and very evocative, steamy, settings. I'm sure the longer version is better, but that doesn't mean what was released is without merit. But again, this is from someone who's read the series and knows the story going in.