Michael Clifford
Biography
Teaching in further, higher, adult and residential settings, including 12 years at London College of Communication, University of the Arts: communication, media and cultural studies, film, photography and visual communication.
Study at University of Westminster: Film Studies (MA), Photographic Arts (BA); University of Greenwich: Cert. Ed.
Trained with BP as an industrial chemist, followed by management of a motor dealership and engineering firm.
Interests: broad interests in film and television, the arts generally, the environment, the sciences and cultural and societal subjects. An active member of my residents' association.
Supporting statement
The shop window of the BFI, the NFT, is my local cinema. Close acquaintance with the South Bank, together with recent soundings and correspondence, has indicated more than usual levels of disquiet over Institute affairs. Concerns have emerged in national and regional press articles and letter pages. The board's attention has been drawn and awareness is growing under the current chair. If elected, I would seek to further existing work on these issues, seeing that as fitting with a member governor's role: to clearly frame and mediate members' reasonable expectations of the Institute, within the usual protocols of collective debate and accountability.
Intractable problems on the table indicate in general terms a serious democratic deficit and lack of transparency in the conduct of operations at BFI, shortcomings that display degrees of systemic failures that are detrimental to BFI's work. A litany of specific examples might be given, some of which follow.
Representations by members over technical standards and policy at archive and cinemas have attracted peremptory dismissal by BFI. Member consultation forums have been discontinued. Board minutes have been unavailable. A long promised member/visitor charter has not materialized. Figures for cinema occupancy rates are not published (or compiled). NFT provides no (long requested) member facilities within the large inhospitable foyer areas or adjoining rooms. Visitor satisfaction questionnaires are cursory and a promised formal comments/complaints volume has not been provided. The design of the catering and lounge areas – not consulted upon – has yielded a sameness of provision under a single concession.
The key, central offer of the BFI, the programming at NFT, has attracted sustained criticism from every constituency of the membership, to minimal or no response. Many seasons remain routine or repetitive, lacking imaginative conception or range, with little associated original research or publication and many idiosyncratic and lasting omissions of crucial and representative works of world cinema.
The changing, diminishing shape of BFI has seen research, production, publishing and 'mass' education/summer school units dismantled – without member consultation. For more than a decade a 'management of decline' has proceeded, in turn associated with a climate of managerialism, rather than stimulating intellectual leadership, even during a time of dynamism elsewhere across the arts. This policy sits ill with the still extant founding principles of the Institute.
I would suggest that in its defensive unresponsiveness BFI has drifted into ordinariness and tired rhetoric, even irrelevance, rather than pursuing quality. A return to the authentic BFI ethos is essential to justify continuing public subsidy, to lift the morale of membership and staff and to mitigate the evident strains in Institute procedures, attitudes and relationships, and concomitantly its faltering standing nationally and internationally.
Be this as it may, independent and questioning voices deriving from the membership are surely essential to the board's work. Dealing with negative factors is part of constructing the positive, in this case a BFI we can all again unequivocally approve and value.
