The 1970s Project

Beyond its general reputation for glittery rock music and brash films, the '70s has long struck me as a combination of three intriguing things (and in terms of British cinema, these can be linked well). These three things have not been particularly well covered by film researchers, to date.

Firstly, the rise of a certain type of film entrepreneur. By this I mean the contemporary, globally integrated film financier, the 'integrated media' specialist, the technologically informed, the marketeer, the "nationally driven internationalist", the culturally entrepreneurial film producer. In that regard, it is interesting to consider the rise of, and work of David Puttnam, with a emphasis on his movement through to Chariots of Fire (beyond the calendar end, if not cultural end, of the 1970s). This is one thing I think is worth visiting, or revisiting, and reconsidering, in terms of where Puttnam's personal story fits with a new way of looking at successful, commercial cinema with a non-Hollywood centre (in this case, British Cinema).

Secondly, I'm interested in the technological changes that took cinema from the big screen and put it smack bang in the domestic space. So little has been done to look at the domestication of cinema, and next to nothing on domestication as a concept within the study of British cinema in the 1970s. Again, this takes us ' as does the Puttnam case ' beyond the linear end of the '70s into the early 1980s. But it is the technologies and, more importantly, the ethos of technological reconfiguration that drives this well before the high point of, say, early video player purchasing in the early '80s.

Finally, I am intrigued by the "media-fication" (to coin a horrible term) of British creative industries in this period, with film as one of the focuses: the cross marketing, the rise of horizontal integration. But not just in commercial terms; rather, I'm intrigued by the "arts relational" aspects (I seem to be coining jargon by the bucketload!) elements. For example, the relationship between literature, TV and Film (the Booker Prize, for example) in the period. The way in which marketing and new uses of the media met traditional arts related dissemination.