Response to the In Focus Dossier on the British Film Institute

The dossier on the BFI pays deservedly high praise to the early days of publishing activity and suggests a rosy future; but it omits due acknowledgment of the productive 1997–2005 period in the history of BFI Publishing. Reading the various accounts of BFI Publishing (by Rebecca Barden, Manuel Alvarado and Edward Buscombe, Pam Cook, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith), Cinema Journal readers might be forgiven for thinking that the period of our employment at the institute (together with other colleagues, notably Editorial Production Manager Tom Cabot, and Sales and Marketing Manager John Atkinson) was an inactive or even unsuccessful one. Compare Michel Ciment’s assessment in a lengthy Positif feature (October 2001): “It’s the BFI that shows the extreme richness of English publishing with its recent publications” (p. 77, our translation). The disparity here is such that we feel obliged to correct the record.

Rebecca Barden lists a number of books as evidence of the continuing vitality of BFI Publishing. All true, but even allowing for the slow-burn nature of book publishing and the inevitable overlaps, it should be mentioned that almost all of these books, including the 2008 Kraszna-Krausz winner and shortlistees, were developed by the previous team, as acknowledgments pages indicate. Moreover, she refers to the “award-winning” Classics books, referring (or so we assume) to the inaugural Limina “International Film Publisher of the Year” award which was conferred in 2004.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith suggests that after 1989 BFI Publishing increasingly disengaged from the rest of the institute: “Financial performance improved, but along with the bathwater they also threw out the baby. Useful synergies continued as late as 2000 with the publication of Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Visions of Modernity paired with a retrospective of the director’s work at the NFT” (p. 131). One of the key features of our time at BFI Publishing was in fact a persistent commitment to tie-ins. The best example is the 2002 BFI “Imagine Asia” project on Indian cinema, which was accompanied by no fewer than five books (Classics on Mother India and Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge, BFI World Directors volumes on Shyam Benegal and Yash Chopra, and Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema).

The 1997–2005 period was prolific in addition to being editorially ambitious. The Classics series owe their origins to our predecessors, but it was during this period that almost exactly one hundred Classics, the substantial majority, were published. We continued to publish works of historical scholarship (for example the multi-volume Griffith Project) in addition to an educational resources operation considerably expanded by Resources Editor Wendy Earle. Our commitment to Film Studies research was enthusiastic, resulting in new writing on transnational cinemas, film theory, digital media and television studies, documentary, and the avant-garde. Yet we maintained an independent editorial line as a matter of strategy, publishing books by major writers from outside film studies but known to a wider public, such as Simon Callow, Gary Indiana, Greil Marcus, and Camille Paglia, as well as new work by polymath intellectuals such as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Michel Chion, Raymond Durgnat, and Slavoj Žižek. If anything, BFI Publishing’s intellectual impact, breadth of appeal, and relevance to other institute activities increased during this period at the same time as the drain on institute resources dwindled. For, as Nowell-Smith states, financial performance improved steadily from the late 1990s onwards. By November 2003 BFI Publishing was causing the taxpayer little concern, in part due to the successful outcome of a new distribution agreement with the University of California Press, who were everything and more a U.S. distribution partner should be.

We are glad to have had the opportunity to contribute to a productive period of the institute’s work. We wish BFI Publishing in its new incarnation, and indeed the BFI as a whole, every success.