Author: pixel2coding

On Monday, the House of Lords voted through an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill to give parliament a “genuinely meaningful” vote at the end of Brexit negotiations. During the debate, Lord Puttnam made an intervention on behalf of young people and their feelings towards Brexit:  

“My Lords, I would like to speak briefly making a single point. The word “overwhelming” has tortured this House over the past many months — the notion that somehow or other the 52:48 majority was ‘overwhelming’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, overwhelming equates to massive; it was not massive—it was narrow or marginal. ​What is overwhelming is the support for ‘remain’ from young people generally in this country, amounting to around 70% of all young people and 80% in the case of young people with a degree.

The point that I would like to make to the Minister is that those 80% of young people are the ones we will rely upon to drive this country post-Brexit to any form of economic success. We are going to be wholly dependent on them; so do not diminish their belief in their European future by pretending that the result of the referendum represents the views or wishes of the overwhelming majority of young people in this country.”

The full debate and Lord Puttnam's intervention can be found on the Hansard website: https://goo.gl/7uc7Rz

Source: Tom Grater writnng for Screen Daily

Speaking in his annual keynote address as the president of the UK’s Film Distributors’ Association (FDA), David Puttnam has warned US-based online giants such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google must take action to tackle the misuse of users’ data.

The revered UK producer of Chariots Of Fire and The Killing Fieldshighlighted that while the so-called FAANG group, which now accounts for 10% of the entire US stock market, have “improved our connected lives”, recent questions have emerged around the safety of private data. All of the group are either producing or moving into the production of original content. 

“As has become all too apparent, data can be misused to a point at which it begins to threaten democracy itself,” Puttnam said.

The producer’s comments follow the recent scandal surrounding Facebook’s protection of its users’ privacy, which reportedly saw more than 87 million people have their data harvested by controversial firm Cambridge Analytica. The revelation led to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the US congress this week that his company could have done more to protect privacy. The online social media giant has also accepted some responsibility for its failure to deal with Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

Puttnam added the new online players must follow traditional organisations in “accepting responsibility for what they publish”, pointing to newspapers which he said “have always assumed levels of legal responsibility for their content, whether written by journalists or readers”

Puttnam’s comments follow his call last year for filmmakers to tackle the subject of ‘fake news’.

Market changes

The producer highlighted recent consolidation of the entertainment market, such as Disney’s proposed acquisition of 20th Century Fox’s entertainment assets. He said, “In the internet age, no one can be surprised that the market for content is increasingly competitive, global and dominated by a small number of media giants with remarkable firepower.”

“Whenever there’s an over-supply of content and a fragmented market, consolidation seems an entirely rational response. Not only do I believe that this trend will continue, but it’s natural that it does so,” he added.

Puttnam has held his position at the FDA for 10 years, during which time he has regularly addressed the topic of the UK’s theatrical windows.

He reiterated his opposition to traditional releasing models. “Imagine a business that, having launched a product that may have cost hundreds of millions to produce, promote and distribute, exposes it to the marketplace for, say, six weeks, then withdraws it from any form of legal consumption for a couple of months or more – that is manifestly not a business that’s maximising the interests of its customers or its shareholders. Yet that’s exactly what the UK’s theatrical window arrangements do to distributors,” he said.

“Independent films, in particular, can only lose out as a result of this hopeless lack of commercial flexibility. Cinema operators tell me they need a protracted window of exclusivity, affecting all mainstream releases, to protect their investment in real estate, otherwise cinema visits would fall. But I’ve still seen no evidence of that being the case,” Puttnam continued.

Brexit

Puttnam has previously issued warnings around the potential damage that could be caused to the UK’s film sector by its forthcoming exit from the European Union. In today’s speech he praised the government’s recently announced sector deal for the creative industries, saying that it “shows us being taken seriously and our needs properly considered as Brexit approaches”.

He also picked out four key points he believes the UK must address for its post-Brexit future:

“One: A new immigration system that allows the creative industries to go on attracting the best talent in Europe – and beyond – to come and work in the UK.

Two: An agreement that enables our future trading arrangements to be as frictionless as possible, with reciprocal market access for the distribution of UK and EU member states’ film and TV productions. It must be as easy as possible for UK businesses to work with partners in the EU, and it’s imperative that the existing flexibility to license content on a territorial basis is preserved

Three: That the UK continues to be recognised as one of the best countries in the world in which to protect and enforce intellectual property rights. It’s essential that a robust IP regime enables creators to turn their ideas into revenues.

Four: Continued access to new iterations of specific EU programmes such as Erasmus Plus for student transfers, and Creative Europe which, for many years, has helped to support qualifying film companies and their audiences would, I believe, benefit the remaining EU-27 as well as ourselves.”

Finally, Puttnam also suggested the UK film industry will continue to make bigger plays into the virtual reality industry, predicting that there could be a network of VR-specific cinemas “within 10 years”.

“As new technologies redefine the very concept of a ‘screen’, the industry will increasingly need to explore fresh ways to tell stories, and to find viable new business models for the production and distribution of those stories,” he added on the subject of technological innovation.

On the same day as the FDA’s annual event, the organisation is also celebrating the launch of Screencontributor Geoffrey Macnab’s new book Stairways To Heaven: Rebuilding The British Film Industry, which is backed by the FDA and contains a foreword from Puttnam. The book explores the transformation of the UK film industry over the last 30 years.

Source: Tom Morgan writing for Goldsmiths

Public service broadcasting must be properly funded and remain fully independent in order to provide a “bulwark” against fake news and “ill-informed populism”, Lord Puttnam has said in a new book from Goldsmiths Press which addresses the future of television. 

The Oscar-winning film producer argues that in an era of “alternative facts and online trolls our public service broadcasters stand as guarantors of accurate, informed and impartial information”.

Writing in the foreword to A Future for Public Service Television, which is published today, Lord Puttnam adds that “our need for trusted sources of information, comprised of tolerant balanced opinion, based on the very best available evidence, has never been greater”.

Lord Puttnam says that the truly successful societies of the 21st century will increasingly be those in which the provision of news and information is “rapid, accurate and trusted”.

He adds: “‘Rapidity’ is now a given, ‘accuracy’ remains a challenge, but ‘trust’ is proving increasingly elusive.’

“Trust lies at the heart of any sustainable democracy, yet… it is evaporating on a daily basis, and once shredded, could prove all but impossible to rebuild.”

The peer, who is a Goldsmiths Honorary Fellow, concludes: “A well-resourced and fully independent public service television system, free of political coercion, offers our most reliable means of rebuilding public trust and accountability.”

Published by Goldsmiths Press, the university press housed at Goldsmiths, University of London, A Future for Public Service Television reflects on how publicly-funded networks like the BBC and Channel 4 can adapt and thrive in the 21st century media landscape.

The book summarises and expands on the report of the Puttnam Inquiry and includes freshly commissioned chapters from a range of leading TV theorists and commentators including Mark Thompson, Amanda Lotz, Tess Alps, Paddy Barwise, Matthew Powers, Jennifer Holt, Jon Thoday, Trine Syvertsen, Gunun Enli, Sarita Malik, David Hendy and James Bennett.

It also includes submissions to, extracts from, and transcripts of the Puttnam Inquiry including contributions from Lenny Henry and Ken Loach.

The collection, according to its editors Professor Des Freedman and Dr Vana Goblot, “is designed to highlight some of the key challenges that face television in a digital and volatile media landscape".

They add: "Lots of analysis is focused on funding but we wanted to focus also on how to embed diversity in the sector, how to democratise commissioning and production, how to use emerging platforms for public service purposes and how to provide content that is genuinely relevant to all sections of the population. These are the questions to which public service media have to find answers.”

Lord Puttnam is looking forward to opening the ‘Through the Lens of John Thomson” exhibition at the Brunei Gallery|SOAS on Thursday 12th April 2018. This will be the first exhibition devoted to the Scottish photographer and writer John Thompson, who travelled around Asia during the 1860s and 1870s, photographing the people and communities he encountered along the way. The pictures that he took while on his various journeys now form one of the most extensive photographic records of Siam (Thailand), China and Cambodia in the nineteenth century. The exhibition combines some of Lord Puttnam's greatest passions then: photography and history, and also South-East Asia, a region he has been deeply involved with for several decades.  

John Thomson travelled east as a professional photographer only two decades after the invention of photography. Working with the wet collodion process he travelled with cumbersome crates, glass negatives, a portable dark room, as well as highly flammable and poisonous chemicals. It took sheer perseverance and energy, through difficult terrain, to document regions where previously unseen by westerners. It is particularly remarkable that Thomson was able to make photographs of such beauty and sensitivity.

His collection of 700 glass plates travelled back with Thomson to Britain in 1872 and since 1921 has been housed and expertly preserved at the Wellcome Library, London. These 150-year-old glass negatives are in excellent condition allowing the exhibition at the Brunei Gallery|SOAS to showcase very large, in some cases life-size, prints. The photographs will be exhibited alongside a selection of Qing robes, textiles and Siamese court objects.

Admission to the exhibition is free and its runs from  13 April – 23 June 2018. More information can be found here: http://www.johnthomsonexhibition.org/