Easy Riders, Raging Cinephiles: An Interview with Matthew Lloyd

The fate of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) has been on the minds of film critics, arts journalists and film fans over the last few months after financial constraints and inept leadership brought Scotland’s flagship festival to its knees back in June. When a much loved institution’s future is uncertain, it can be tempting to look back with dewy eyes at its salad days. Far more constructive, however, is to consider its history in a robust and thought provoking way, and that is exactly what film-maker and Glasgow Short Film Festival director Matthew Lloyd achieves with his new book, How The Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh, which gives a fascinating insight into one of EIFF’s most thrilling periods.

“I got the feeling [while working at EIFF between 1999-2008] that no one in the organisation seemed to have a sense of the history of this festival, which has been around since 1947, the longest continually running film festival in the world,” Lloyd tells me. “I didn't either, other than on a very superficial level, so I wanted to look at the festival’s history.”

Lloyd’s book examines one of the most creatively fruitful eras of the EIFF, from 1968-1980, a period which coincided with the British film community catching up with our friends across the channel. “In general, it was a really interesting time in film culture in the English speaking world because it was only in the late 60s/early 70s that a lot of the French theory was beginning to be translated and all the Cahiers du Cinéma lot were beginning to be noticed in Britain.”

Despite this bubbling of a new approach to film theory, the BFI continued to rely on the very safe quality European art house fare of Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni for its programming at the National Film Theatre and London Film Festival throughout the 60s. Lloyd details how it was at Edinburgh that this new cinéphile culture first took root in the UK in 1969, when EIFF staged an unprecedented retrospective that paid tribute to the career of laconic B-movie director Samuel Fuller. “It seems strange now because Godard had been celebrating Hollywood since À bout de soufflé, and before that with his writing in Cahiers du Cinéma, and in fact he’d even got to the point of rejecting Hollywood with Le Mépris in 1963 and retreated into avant-garde cinema,” explains Lloyd. “So things that seem quite obvious now, like celebrating Fuller, or Douglas Sirk, or Raoul Walsh and looking at them as auteurs: no one was doing that in the UK. That to me was interesting.”

Investigating this period with academic rigor, Lloyd has brought together information from a wide range of sources, from the inflammatory EIFF board meeting minutes, where change was being resisted by the old school committee members, to the meagre critical writing on festival culture in the UK. Interviews with many of the players who shaped the festival were also vitally important to Lloyd’s research and one of the joys of the book is being introduced to the personalities who brought about EIFF’s transformation. The first key figure is film-maker Murray Grigor, who took the job of EIFF director in 1967 with the less than altruistic hope that the position would give him the clout to get more of his documentaries made. “There are two important things that you need to know about Murray,” Lloyd explains, with obvious admiration: “he’s mischievously rebellious and not interested in toeing the line and following the status quo; and also he's incredibly generous towards people who he finds interesting, wherever they come from.”

This second quality proved key in revitalising EIFF. Shortly after Grigor’s first festival in charge (he was given three weeks “to act as ‘Director’ of a largely pre-selected programme” Lloyd tells us in his book), two upstarts, Lynda Myles and David Will, wrote an open letter to the Scotsman bemoaning EIFF’s dreary programming. Lloyd’s study shows how Grigor embraced these two movie brats, who had shaped their cinematic tastes at the Cinémathèque Française under the tutelage of legendary cinéphile Henri Langlois, and brought them into his programming team for the 1968 edition. “Ultimately it comes down to personalities in the end, and these three people made all this happen in quite a random, coincidental way.”

For the next decade, EIFF would bring the Gallic notion of la politique des auteurs to Auld Reekie. Mavericks like Roger Corman brought their movies to the festival; the early careers of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Wim Wenders were nurtured there; the whole question of the auteur retrospective was pushed to its limits by showing forty films from Raoul Walsh’s widely varying career; it held a large scale retrospective of female directors in 1972, the first of its kind in Europe. “It became so much more that just selling tickets. A film festival is an extraordinary thing, which is quite unlike anything else in that it is a conflation of people in a confined space. It’s a real opportunity to interrogate conventions of cinema. It’s not just about showing the best new films, whatever that actually means. Whether it's a trade mission, or a diplomatic mission, or a market, or just fun events: it can be all those things but it is also an argument, it's a proposal, it's a laboratory; there's a lot of potential in that combined space to do a lot of things. And Edinburgh was not only doing that, but it was also publishing its findings.”

With today’s EIFF floundering, I ask Lloyd if there are any lessons its organisers can glean from this purple patch. “One thing that I'm not saying is that Edinburgh Film Festival should be like it was in the 70s, that's absolute bollocks,” Lloyd replies, not missing a beat. “What I've tried to illustrate in this book is that the festival grew out of circumstances of its time: the post war film festival phenomenon, the politicisation of cinéphilia, and the emergence of film studies culture. What's important about the festival then that the festival now needs to learn is that in those years it was constantly seeking to say something about international film culture that wasn't necessarily being said anywhere else. Every year presented an argument. It wasn't just about showing the best new films, and I think Edinburgh needs to decide what it's about. What is its take on international film culture now, particularly when there are so many film festivals out there?”

How The Movie Brats Took Over Edinburgh is launched this Friday (12 Aug) at the Edinburgh Book Fringe, where Lloyd will be going into more detail about this period and giving his thoughts on the role of film festivals in 2011.

1.00pm at Word Power Books. Free