British Film Institute
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The British Film Institute (BFI) is a charitable organisation established by Royal Charter to:
- encourage the development of the arts of film, television and the moving image throughout the United Kingdom, to promote their use as a record of contemporary life and manners, to promote education about film, television and the moving image generally, and their impact on society, to promote access to and appreciation of the widest possible range of British and world cinema and to establish, care for and develop collections reflecting the moving image history and heritage of the United Kingdom.
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[edit] BFI activities
[edit] Cinemas
The BFI runs the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre (NFT)) and IMAX theatre, both located on the south bank of the River Thames in London. The IMAX shows popular recent releases and short films showcasing its technology. The NFT shows films from all over the world particularly critically-acclaimed historical & specialised films that may not otherwise get a cinema showing.
[edit] Festivals
The BFI runs the annual London Film Festival and London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
[edit] Archive
The BFI maintains the world's largest film archive, the BFI National Archive, previously called National Film Library (1935-1955), National Film Archive (1955-1992) and National Film and Television Archive (1993-2006), containing about 500,000 works of television and film in total.
[edit] Other activities
BFI publishes the monthly Sight and Sound magazine as well as DVDs and books. It runs the BFI National Library, a reference library. BFI also maintains the SIFT (Summary of Information on Film and Television) database, which contains credits, synopses and other data on global film and TV. It also has a substantial collection of around 7 million film and TV stills.
[edit] Organisation
[edit] History
The institute was founded in 1933. Despite its foundation resulting from a recommendation in a report on Film and National Life, at that time the institute was a private company, though it has received public money throughout its history - from the Privy Council and Treasury until 1965 and the various culture departments since then.
The institute was restructured following the Radcliffe Report of 1948 which recommended that the institute should concentrate on developing the appreciation of filmic art, rather than creating film itself. Thus control of educational film production passed to the National Committee for Visual Aids in Education and the British Film Academy assumed control for promoting production.
The institute received a Royal Charter in 1983. This was updated in 2000, and in the same year the newly-established UK Film Council took responsibility for providing the BFI's annual grant-in-aid (government subsidy) and acting, alongside the Charity Commission and the Privy Council, as its regulator.
In 1988 the BFI opened the London Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) on the South Bank. MOMI was acclaimed internationally and set new standards for education through entertainment, but subsequently it did not receive the high levels of continuing investment that might have enabled it to keep pace with technological developments and ever-rising audience expectations. The Museum was "temporarily" closed in 1999 when the BFI stated that it would be re-sited. This did not happen, and MOMI's closure became permanent in 2002 when it was decided to redevelop the South Bank site. This redevelopment was itself then further delayed.
[edit] Today
The BFI is currently managed on a day-to-day basis by its director, Amanda Nevill. Supreme decision-making authority rests with a chairman and a board of up to 14 governors. The current chairman is Anthony Minghella. The chairman of the board is appointed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport who receives recommendations from the UK Film Council. Other board members are co-opted by existing board members when required. These appointments are ratified by the UK Film Council.
The BFI operates with three sources of income. The largest is public money allocated through the UK Film Council from the funds given to it by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In 2003, this funding amounted to approximately £15m. The second largest source is commercial activity such as receipts from the National Film Theatre and IMAX Theatre (2003, ~£10m). Finally grants of around £5m were obtained from various sources, primarily National Lottery funding grants, but also through donations. J. Paul Getty, Jr. donated around £1m in his will following his death in 2003.
The BFI also devotes a large amount of its time to the preservation and study of British television programming and its history. In 2000, it published a high-profile list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, as voted for by a range of industry figures.
The much-delayed redevelopment of the National Film Theatre finally took place in 2007, creating in the rebranded "BFI Southbank" new education spaces, a gallery, and a pioneering mediatheque which for the first time enabled the public to gain access, free of charge, to some of the otherwise inaccessible treasures in the National Film & Television Archive. The mediatheque has proved to be the most successful element of this redevelopment, and there are plans to roll out a network of them across the UK.
The BFI has operated with the same level of government subsidy for the last four years (a cut in real terms). Despite that, it has achieved considerable success (for example, it is easily the most effective of any comparable national institution at engaging with people other than the usual white middle class beneficiaries of state-subsidised culture)[citation needed]. Its work at the National Film & Television Archive, though severely reduced by inadequate funding, is world-leading[citation needed]. Its innovative digital and mediatheque strategies are achieving some success in making the archive accessible to other than a tiny group of researchers, policies which are supported by its active DVD production work.
There are some signs that government is recognising this: an announcement of a £25 million capital investment in the National Archive Strategy was made by Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport at the opening night of the 2007 London Film Festival. It is expected that the bulk of this money will pay for long overdue development of the BFI's NFTA facilities in Hertfordshire and elsewhere. The BFI itself is lobbying for the award of £200 million for the creation of a brand-new Film Centre, to replace the near-life-expired facilities at the National Film Theatre.
[edit] See also
- Screenonline is a website run by the BFI.
- BFI Top 100 British films
- 100 Anime, a BFI Screen Guide to the top 100 Japanese animated films and television programs.
- American Film Institute
- Australian Film Institute
- Finnish Film Foundation
- Swedish Film Institute
- Independent Cinema in the United Kingdom
[edit] External links
- BFI homepage
- About the BFI
- The BFI Royal Charter
- Optronica - BFI/Addictive TV
- Research Project on the history of the BFI
- The BFI's Top 100 Film List
- An independent blog dedicated to spreading the word about events affecting the BFI
- Broadway Media Centre homepagede:British Film Institute
fr:British Film Institute ja:英国映画協会 pl:Brytyjski Instytut Filmowy
