What is it about?
Due to the rise of television ownership (spurred on by the 1953 Royal coronation) and the decrease in cinema audiences in Britain during the early post-Second World War years, British filmmaking began to respond to this increasingly popular competitor in a number of ways. These responses included the setting up collectively of a protectionist body called the Film Industry Defence Organisation (FIDO) and the establishment individually of The Rank Organisation's Rank Film Distributors of America (RFDA), by which they hoped to gain a firm foothold in the United States marketplace. The article also considers the complex relationship with both television and film of Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios.
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Why is it important?
The article builds on and expands the scope of a chapter by Edward Buscombe that primarily addressed the phenomenon of the FIDO organisation, whilst bringing together the call for studies on individual and institutional agency made in the The New Film History (2007) by focusing not only on the aforementioned industry collective and RFDA, but also the key roles played by individual such as Michael Balcon and John Davies (Rank Organisation Chief Executive) in the evolution of film's relationship with television throughout the 1950s. The article draws on archive material from the British Film Institute, lending the analysis key primary materials to support its observations.
Perspectives
This was developed from an abandoned chapter for my doctoral thesis, very little of which I'd been able to use in the finished work. Despite this, there were some sections that I thought had potential to tell a story about how British cinema faced the challenge of increasing television ownership, and I was particularly pleased to be able to write about Rank Film Distributors of America (RFDA), a short-lived project that I think is emblematic of the ending of an era in British filmmaking.
Dr John David Ayres
University of Manchester
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Two Screens: FIDO, RFDA and Film vs. Television in Post-Second World War Britain, Journal of British Cinema and Television, October 2017, Edinburgh University Press,
DOI: 10.3366/jbctv.2017.0391.
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