Cinematograph Films Act 1927
Encyclopedia
The Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 (17 & 18 Geo. V) was an act of the United Kingdom Parliament
designed to stimulate the declining British film industry
.
saw rapid growth in the years immediately following the end of the First World War. The idea, therefore, was to try and counter Hollywood's perceived economic and cultural dominance by promoting similar business practices among British studios, distributors and cinema chains. By creating an artificial market for British films, it was hoped that the increased economic activity in the production sector would eventually lead to the growth of a self-sustaining industry. The quota was initially set at 7.5% for exhibitors, which was raised to 20% in 1935.
The Act was modified by the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 and further acts, and eventually repealed by the Films Act 1960.
Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the supreme legislative body in the United Kingdom, British Crown dependencies and British overseas territories, located in London...
designed to stimulate the declining British film industry
Cinema of the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has had a major influence on modern cinema. The first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. It is generally regarded that the British film industry...
.
Description
It introduced a requirement for British cinemas to show a quota of British films, for a duration of 10 years. The Act's supporters believed that this would promote the emergence of a vertically-integrated film industry, in which production, distribution and exhibition infrastructure are controlled by the same companies. The vertically-integrated American film industryStudio system
The studio system was a means of film production and distribution dominant in Hollywood from the early 1920s through the early 1960s. The term studio system refers to the practice of large motion picture studios producing movies primarily on their own filmmaking lots with creative personnel under...
saw rapid growth in the years immediately following the end of the First World War. The idea, therefore, was to try and counter Hollywood's perceived economic and cultural dominance by promoting similar business practices among British studios, distributors and cinema chains. By creating an artificial market for British films, it was hoped that the increased economic activity in the production sector would eventually lead to the growth of a self-sustaining industry. The quota was initially set at 7.5% for exhibitors, which was raised to 20% in 1935.
Results
The Act is generally not considered a success. On the one hand, it was held responsible for a wave of speculative investment in lavishly budgeted features which could never hope to recoup their production costs on the domestic market (e.g. the output of Alexander Korda's London Films, a boom-and-bust which was famously satirised in the film Shooting Stars (UK, 1927, dir. Anthony Asquith), in which a small British studio tries to emulate the genres and star system of a Hollywood major, and in Jeffrey Dell's 1939 novel Nobody Ordered Wolves.) At the other end of the spectrum, it was blamed for the emergence of the 'quota quickie', a low-cost, poor-quality film commissioned by American distributors operating in the UK purely to satisfy the quota requirements. In recent years, revisionist film historians such as Lawrence Napper have argued that the 'quota quickies' have been too casually dismissed, and are of particular cultural and historical value because they recorded performances unique to British popular culture (e.g. music hall and variety acts), which under normal economic circumstances would not have been filmed.The Act was modified by the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 and further acts, and eventually repealed by the Films Act 1960.