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Some of my favourite films are corporate videos
Some of my favourite films are corporate videos
Matthew Baxter - 8/24/2007
Well in a way they are. Sad isn’t it.
How did I reach this conclusion? Well, I went to see the theatrical production of ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ on stage at the national theatre recently, I went because I’m a huge Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger fan. I think they are the greatest British film makers and perhaps the only ones with serious credentials in both art and commercial cinema.
Or I thought I did.
Because I am, if not an anorak, at least a Duffer wind-sheeter: I went straight home and went through my collection of Powell and Pressberger videos, a Michael Powell biography and a few film books and I came to the conclusion that I don’t – as I thought I did – love everything P & P ever did. Some of it in fact I don’t like at all. ‘The Red Shoes’ for instance is, well, silly. On the other hand ‘A Canterbury Tale’, ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’ and of course ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ are wonderful, wonderful films that I truly love and can enter into completely.
Some silliness, some genius. How so? What’s the difference between the ones I like, and the ones I don’t?
The brief. All the films I think are brilliant have been made with the discipline and constraint of needing to carry a message beyond the creative vision of an ‘Auteur’. The client in P & P’s case was the British Government, but they weren’t making Government Information Films they were making a corporate statement – projecting a positive image. And the relationship between client and creative team, whilst sometimes rocky, was what you would always want: The client identified a need; the creative team an original and yet appropriate way of meeting that need. The result is work that – because it delights and excites on it’s own terms – is still doing a great job for the client sixty years later.
Being someone who considers himself to be primarily interested in ideas and imagery; at first I was worried about drawing the conclusion that a commercial imperative improves what I do – but on reflection I find it very encouraging. I have always known that many of my favourite writers have come from the disciplined background of journalism; so the fact that film makers do good (perhaps their best) work under similar conditions just makes me want to try harder next time. Mind you it’s not just up to me. The key thing, as it always is, is the relationship between the client and the creative team which must be based on trust, responsibility and understanding. Building relationships is something we all have to try harder at.
Yes, yes, but the play dear boy, what about the play?
Well, people who like P & P for the clipped accents spouting from beneath the clipped moustaches sprouting from stiff upper lips won’t go for ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ this way. I thought it was often way too self-consciously trendy even for me! There has also been a glib, flippant, botched and plain wrong pacifist rant tacked on so clumsily the whole thing went barrelling down a spurious cul-de-sac for a while, only to have to gingerly reverse all the way back up to make it through to the end.
But the people who loved the imaginative visual flare of the film would have found this production intriguing – although it lacks the poetry both in imagery and dialogue. I’d go so far as to say it sometimes descended into “Carry-on Living and Dying” with it’s feeble girning and prat-fall approach, but equally some aspects were truly original and gripping. The table-tennis game frozen in time, which is a crucial junction in the plot would seem to be an idea so rooted in cinematic technique that transferring it to the stage would be (like so much of it) impossible, yet the staged approach is so brilliantly conceived and executed that it is, if anything better than in the film, and I shall certainly nick it if I get the chance – for a corporate video probably..