Stuart Jeffries: FilmFour's blurred vision

Channel 4's venture failed because producers neither knew their market nor truly cared about cinema.

What is the point of the British film industry? Is it to make money with blameless, if fatuous, pictures starring Hugh Grant? Is it to create works of art that say something about this strange and sometimes lovable country? Or - this is just a crazy idea - both? These questions are raised by the collapse yesterday of FilmFour as a movie-making operation. For in recent years, FilmFour has fallen between two stools - neither making significant box-office money, nor producing creative works that might help improve this nation's negligible reputation in the seventh art.

When FilmFour arrived in April 1998, great things were expected. Britain was going to have a hip, astutely run film production company. As if to underline the point, its first chief executive was Paul Webster, formerly Miramax UK's head of production. Miramax, the US production company that had been critically and commercially successful for nearly two decades, had triumphed by combining sharkish business acumen with a middlebrow artistic profile. Perhaps FilmFour, on a smaller scale, could do something similar.

At the time, Channel 4 was still high from the heroin rush of 1997's Trainspotting, as well as earlier hits Secrets and Lies and Shallow Grave. C4's chief executive, Michael Jackson, doubled the TV station's film-making budget to £32m and a raft of features went into production.

The following year, the venture seemed to have paid dividends when East is East was released. It was produced for £1.9m but took £10m at the UK box office. Behind these figures, however, was another story. East is East, a little comedy about a Pakistani chip shop owner from Salford and his troublesome brood, rather than a sure-fire banker, was hardly expected to make that sort of money. Its success was more due to capricious audience tastes than FilmFour's cunning plan. That dearth of understanding of what the public wanted was going to make FilmFour come unstuck very quickly.

In May 2000, FilmFour signed a three-year deal with Warner Brothers to make seven films with budgets of £13m-plus. It seemed happening, expansive, bold. It was in fact cruising for a bruising. The first was a £15m adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's second world war novel, Charlotte Gray, starring Cate Blanchett. It was the most expensive British independent film ever, with a great deal riding on its success. With an accomplished star and an award-winning author, it may have seemed a safe bet, but the film's critical drubbing and inadequate box-office receipts dashed those hopes.

A similar fate befell FilmFour's 2001 comedy, Lucky Break, Peter Cattaneo's follow-up to The Full Monty. It was quickly branded The Half Monty - not funny, not clever and devoid of Robert Carlyle in the buff. At the same time, the British-based Working Title was making millions here and in the US with Bridget Jones's Diary, the only British film success of the year.

A growing crisis in confidence in British film was at its most intense at FilmFour. Though neither picture risked bankrupting FilmFour, both underperformed massively. But what was really bankrupt about Lucky Break and Charlotte Gray was that they were two genre films ineptly conceived to capitalise on the supposed thirst for such films. They suggested FilmFour didn't know its market and didn't care about cinema.

If one looks at British cinema, there are few film-makers who are able or allowed to make films that are not simply commodified genre pictures (gangster flicks, lifestyle comedies, hackneyed costume dramas) which borrow witlessly from Hollywood. The effect of lottery funding has not, as hoped, resulted in a cinematic renaissance but in a spate of derivative films that reek of cynicism and ineptitude. FilmFour's failure is symptomatic of a lack of vision and confidence in an industry that tries - and mostly fails - to make films that will satisfy British audiences and recoup costs in the US.

In a less jittery industry, FilmFour might not have been deemed expendable. Two duff films, after all, isn't unforgivable and failure can be instructive. But when C4 and ITV lost their bid for digital terrestrial licences to the BBC last week, FilmFour was deemed a luxury. Why should cash-strapped C4 bankroll producers who hadn't had a decent hit in three years?

This year at Cannes, where cinema that isn't entirely mired in commercial concerns still thrives, it was Ken Loach and Mike Leigh who were in competition with artistically respectable, though hardly commercial, films. Back home, these guys are unfashionable and their successors - Lynne Ramsay and a couple of others - are all but invisible.

This isn't really the fault of production companies, but rather of a cinematic culture - including audiences - too in love with Hollywood. When the British film industry dies, the event will warrant a paragraph in a US trade mag blaming its expiration on insufficient demand among Britons for cinematic representations of their homeland. The headline will read Brit Hix Nix Stix Pix.