Peter Sainsbury (British filmmaker)
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Peter Sainsbury was Head of Production at the British Film Institute in the 1970s. Sainsbury worked with major British directors of the era, such as Derek Jarman, Chris Petit, and Peter Wollen. He is best known for commissioning Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982). Sainsbury spent his career promoting narrative art house films to the wider public, mainstreaming works that charted a path between avant garde experimentalism and conventional narrative form.[1]
Early reforms
Peter Sainsbury replaced Barrie Gavin as the BFI's Head of Production in 1975.[2]
Sainsbury's first priorities as BFI Head of Production were largely administrative ones, particularly relating to the process of film selection.[3]
Within his first year, Sainsbury attempted to rationalise the BFI's film application selection process. In concrete terms, Sainsbury wanted the BFI board to publicly and explicitly define what criteria it used in selecting films for financing. He argued this would make the process fairer for applicants.[2] The proposal met with resistance from the BFI Board of Governors, which believed it was politically motivated.[4]
Eventually, the Board of Governors and Sainsbury reached a compromise in the form of a new Guidelines to Applicants publication that laid out some of the BFI's selection criteria.[2]
Film commissioning as BFI Head of Production
During his earlier years as BFI Head of Production, Sainsbury focused on financing political documentary and avant-garde work.[5]
Characteristic films were Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), Elizabeth Taylor-Mead's Before Hindsight (1977), Ed Bennett's Life Story of Baal (1978), and Anna Ambrose's Phoelix (1979). This programming was a departure from the early seventies, when the BFI had mostly financed low-budget arthouse features with largely linear narrative structures.[5]
From the late 1970s onwards, however, Sainsbury returned to the BFI's earlier interest in cultivating a British narrative arthouse tradition which represented a middle ground between his early interest in avant garde experimentalism and mainstream cinema.[5]
Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) is the most famous example of the BFI's renewed interest in narrative form.[5]
Other examples were Chris Petit's Radio On, Menelik Shabazz Burning an Illusion (1981), Pat Murphy's Maeve, Edward Bennett's Ascendency (1983), and Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers.[5]
According to James Park, Sainsbury's aim here was to “maximize the audience for films which are innovative in their use of the film medium”.[6]
Ties to alternative cinema
Throughout his career, Sainsbury worked with independent film-makers to create more commercially viable works. The aim was to make experimental works that would still be marketable to more mainstream segments of the arthouse cinema audience.[7]
During his BFI tenure, Sainsbury also tried to strengthen institutional ties between the board and the world of independent filmmaking.
By the late seventies, he managed to get key figures from independent film onto the BFI board, including Roy Lockett from the Independent Film Association, Alan Fountain, and intellectuals such as John Ellis, Sylvia, Tony Rayns, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith.[2]
Sainsbury's inclination for independent film emerged early in his career. In 1970, before his role at the BFI, Sainsbury had founded an alternative distribution company called The Other Cinema with Nick Hart-Williams.[8] He also founded and co-edited the first six issues of Afterimage, an influential journal on avant garde, political, and underground film, which was published between 1970 and 1987.[9]