Anthony Simmons

Student Number: 06974612 Wednesday 19th November 2008

British National Cinema

With close reference to Anthony Simmons, how does the study of an individual producer or director help us understand the problems and successes of the British Film Industry?

I came into this industry as an outsider who never really fitted into the slots of the British Film Industry … I never quite fitted into a niche. (Simmons in Dolan & Spicer, 2008. p132)

Anthony Simmons is a British writer and director who has been producing feature films, documentaries and television since 1947 and exemplifies the patterns of most British film directors.

A major issue within the British film industry for many, many years has been that of funding. Although prior to World War I, Britain was leading in the development of film the country has never really regained its status or power in the film world. Due to cinema closures for fear of bombing and the shutting down of studios to create propaganda and training films during World War II, America and Hollywood gained control of the film market and dominated the film industry in Britain. American finance and distribution ruled the British film industry. The government bought American films and directors were encouraged to take American financing however this resulted in an unstable basis for defining films as British.

The British film industry was always smaller, less stable and more subject to outside pressures than its American counterpart. (Low, 1997)

Simmons, who began his film carer shortly after the end of World War II, has always had issues with funding for films. He confesses in an interview with Andrew Spicer and Josephine Dolan (2008) that he has never made any real profit from his films. He quite often invested money made from a film into his next production, and was also around to see the decline in film takings with the emergence of commercial television as a more common fixture in households in the late 1950’s.

Sunday By The Seas and Bow Bells made money which went back into production. The Gentle Corsican was financed by the NFFC [National Film Finance Corporation] and made some money but not a lot. With The Passing Stranger our fees were invested in the film, as often happened with small films, so we never got paid either. Time Without Pity unfortunately came out at exactly the time commercial TV started. Our first takings were good and the NFFC, which helped finance the film, assured us it was on track to do well. But, in fact, takings for all films went down ...

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Another obstacle that is often relevant for British film makers is that of the funding body. They leave less room for the ideas and styles of many independent film makers.

While funding bodies do not necessarily produce a house style, they allow directors to develop their work and at the same time teach them the often painful lessons of working within a framework which involves compromise and disappointment. (Street, 1997. p32)

Simmons himself had experience of this when working on the film ‘Green Ice’ (1981), from which he withdrew due to ‘artistic disagreement’. The script and the set action pieces were designed and written by Simmons, however most of the film was eventually shot in different locations to what was scripted and there were also major issues in hiring the female part.

Every artist for the part of the woman was turned down for being too ‘old’ (she was meant to be in her early twenties) but it turned out Lew Grade had already contracted Ann Archer, a good actress in her mid thirties. (Simmons in Dolan & Spicer, 2008. p140)

Funding bodies can also be described in terms of ‘structures’ as demonstrated in the following quote:

In a cinema which lacks stable systems of support, the producer has to create structures in which expression can happen, continually reinventing the wheel, and it may be those structures, rather that the individual artist, which give the cinema it’s shape. (Caughie in Vincendeau, 1995. p188)

This is to say that funding bodies are providing funding for directors and producers to make films that will make a profit, therefore directors and producers have to create film ideas that will appeal to the funding bodies that they will deem as having a chance of creating a profit. This is very unlike some of Simmons’s early experiences of film making in Rome. There he was ‘in touch with Neo-Realism before it was exported and learned that the whole thing was based on going out on the wharf or street or wherever, and shooting what you found.’ (Simmons in Dolan & Spicer, 2008. p134) However it is true to say that there was no such market in the United Kingdom.

We’re British, with too much respect for the budget and the bottom line. I was brought up in a street market where you managed to beg or borrow the cash to produce the goods, then took it to the market and hoped you could sell it at a profit. I felt that the Italian film industry had a lot more of that kind of spirit, probably a very romantic notion; after all, I was still young and in Rome. (Simmons in Dolan & Spicer, 2008. p135)

There are of course many positive examples in Simmons’s career which help demonstrate the successes of the British film industry. Amongst these are the way in which Simmons has effectively captured the national identity of Britain and its appropriate ‘imagined communities’.

An ‘imagined community’ describes how groups of people within a nation have a shared identity and sense of belonging within a distinguished geo-political space. Anderson described a nation as ‘an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’. (Anderson, 2006. p6)

National Identity is, in this sense, about the experience of belonging to such a community, being steeped in its traditions, its rituals and its characteristics modes of discourse. This sense of national identity is not of course dependant on actually living within the geo-political space of the nation, as the émigré experience confirms. Thus some diasporic communities, uprooted from the specific geo-political space of the nation or the homeland, still share a common sense of belonging, despite – or even because of – their transnational dispersal. (Hjort & MacKenzie, 2000. p64)

Simmons captures this idea particularly well in his film ‘Black Joy’ (1977), the story of an immigrant country boy in Brixton and his integration into the world of ‘black male unemployed sub-culture’. (Young, 1996. p149)

Simmons demonstrates how the black community at that time fully thought themselves as British, however he went against common portrayals of black communities in the 1970’s. Instead of negative and racist attitudes towards black communities, Simmons created the closest thing that Britain has come to a ‘Blaxpoitation’ movie, which focused on life in the ghetto. He showed the reality of life in an immigrant area which was angry and frustrated like many parts of Britain, however he focussed of the joy and humour of the situation. The criminal activity of the black sub-cultures that people were so worried about was mostly petty crimes of pick pocketing, smoking marijuana and sleeping with prostitutes and was self contained to within the black community.

In Black Joy the undermining of ‘traditional’ values of honesty and propriety is not constituted as a social problem – although it may have been viewed as such by many white audiences – rather the ‘threat’ is contained within this playful version of the black urban ghetto and does not permeate wider society. In this sense, Black Joy may be seen as a ‘safe’ film which does not challenge assumptions about, and stereotypes of black behavioural norms in regard to sexuality and criminality. (Young, 1996. p151)

This is a perfect example of one of Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ which helps make up part of what is Britain’s national identity. The Caribbean immigrants of Britain have always felt inherently British and taken on the British culture willingly due to British colonisation in the Caribbean islands many year ago, so it is therefore fitting that even though the black communities as featured in ‘Black Joy’ are not British by nationality, they are in culture.

It is only through Simmons European influences that he is able to write and produce films that fit into untypical British topics. As stated in the opening quote of this essay, Simmons confesses he never fitted in to any particular place in the British film industry, therefore he is capable of filling in the gaps and making the films that nobody else would.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, B. (2006) . New Edition. London: Verso Books.
Caughie, J. in Vincendeau, G. (1995) Encyclopaedia of European Cinema. London: BFI/Cassell.
Hjort, M. & MacKenzie, S. (2000) Cinema and Nation. London: Routledge.
IMDb (2008) Anthony Simmons. [Online] Available From: [Accessed: 17th November 2008]
Low, R. (1997 [1948-85]) The History of British Film, 7 vols. London: Routledge.
Simmons, A. in Dolan, J. & Spicer, A. (2008) The Outsider: Anthony Simmons. Journal of British Cinema and Television. 5(1) p132.
Street, S. (1997) British National Cinema. London: Routledge.
Young, L. (1996) Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema. London: Routledge.