I see George Lucas has been talking about how it’s taken him
twenty years to be able to make a film about black American pilots during the
Second World War. It seems that none of the main studios would take it because they
said they couldn’t see how they could market a film that had no major roles for
white actors.
It isn’t the race issue that first strikes me about this.
Attitudes to race and colour are in a constant state of flux. What isn’t in a
state of flux is the attitude of the mainstream film industry to its perceived
priorities. In spite of all the pretensions oozing out of the actors, the
directors and the critics, the mainstream film industry is all about the bottom
line – the dollar. The keyword is ‘marketing.’ The mainstream film industry is
just another player in the big, global corporate machine that’s designed to
place the majority of the wealth in the hands of a relatively tiny number of
people. Art belongs in the third row of the chorus, or maybe the second in some
cases.
And that’s what I think David Cameron should be bearing in
mind while he’s telling the British film industry that they should be
concentrating on making more commercially successful pictures. It’s all about
the culture losing its soul.
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I was going to make another post around the story of the
Chinese workers who threatened mass suicide over a dispute involving job losses
and relocations. There was too much to say on the matter, and I decided I was becoming
bored with spewing out rants about the selfish, soulless nature of global
capitalism, and how it treats people as mere cogs in the machine, to be
manipulated, pushed about and discarded at the whim of fat men in suits.
Another time, maybe. Right now it’s time to prepare dinner,
and I don’t want indigestion after I’ve eaten it.
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