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By David Thomson

Under plangent chords written by Brian Eno, an empty bottle floats into view on dark blue water, coming closer, until we read the pink message—”Arena”—on the glass. No, it’s not a cola elixir or the best bottle of beer you ever threw away—but it’s the opening to one of the greatest television shows ever put together and sustained for 40 years.

As a BBC program it was launched in 1975, led by Humphrey Burton, the then Head of Music and Arts, as a way of extending the traditional attempt to cover the arts on mainstream television. But as time passed—and as leadership was taken up by Leslie Megahey, Alan Yentob, Nigel Finch, and then Anthony Wall—the format has been flexible enough to take on various shapes and sizes, and very different emotional moods. Indeed, the initial air of celebration of art and its participants acquired deeper tones of melancholy and even tragedy, as if to show that creative work for all its glory and popularity could be a hard life to pursue.

Arena does not appear regularly, and it frequently surprises its own admirers in the directions it takes, but in nearly 45 years it has produced more than 600 shows, ranging from a four-part survey of jazz musician and bass player, comedian, motel manager, and orange farmer Slim Gaillard, to a two-part biography, The Private Dirk Bogarde (2001), directed by Adam Low, that gently revealed the closeted homosexual in the great actor and that deserves a key place in his filmography alongside movies like The Servant (1963), Death in Venice (1971), and The Night Porter (1974).

On several occasions, Arena’s ambitious programs have become stand-alone feature films that have won theatrical distribution. These include Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), with Lili Taylor winning several prizes as Andy’s would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, Jared Harris as Warhol, and Stephen Dorff as Candy Darling. Then there is Martin Scorsese’s 208-minute documentary on George Harrison, Living in the Material World (2011). But maybe the most remarkable of all is director James Marsh’s somber film essay, Wisconsin Death Trip (1999), inspired by Michael Lesy’s book, published in 1973 and haunted by events in the Black River Falls area from 100 years earlier. The book is a unique marriage of text and archival still photographs. The movie followed that model but acted out several voices from the book, and included an austere but poetic narration by Ian Holm. It also had an original score composed by DJ Shadow and John Cale.

The television show had its roots in theater and music, but it quickly reached out to literature and cinema. Over the years, Arena would deliver classic portraits of Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles, and Ingmar Bergman, all of which were notable for searching interviews that lasted several hours before being shaped and edited for the show.

The range is so open, and so dedicated to a personal vision in its every work, that Arena deserves to be recognized as an essential element in British culture, along with the BBC itself, Penguin Books, the several enterprises gathered on the South Bank in London, and the unique British respect that can take things all the more seriously through a mixture of irony, fond challenge, and reverent mockery. There’s no need for all arts commentary to be solemn, academically high-minded, or elitist. The imagination may be our most democratic function, and Arena has always preferred to bypass those institutions and doctrines that feel they control art.

So Arena has delivered groundbreaking studies on punk, on the relationship between Princess Diana and the media, on the subversive TV program Spitting Image (1984-2014), and on such diverse iconic figures as Amy Winehouse, Sister Wendy, Harold Pinter, Jonathan Miller, V.S. Naipaul, and Edna Everidge. And don’t forget the program that explored the bonds between Charles Dickens and cinema.

But Arena has adored America, too, even if it sometimes finds our cultural landscape hard to credit as anything other than a surreal movie. It is remarkable that it took a British team to deliver Wisconsin Death Trip, and it’s just as important that Arena has also covered Sonny Rollins, New York’s Chelsea Hotel, Dave Brubeck, Hedy Lamarr, Phil Spector, The New York Review of Books, and The Burger and the King: The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley (another James Marsh film).

The versatility of the format, the apparent eccentricity in some choices, and the consistent depth of attention are not easily balanced. In its heyday, the BBC turned wayward impulses into huge hits (like Monty Python’s Flying Circus), but that has raised problems in a schedule more and more drawn to system and repetition. The BBC once so open and impulsive has been subjected to cost analyses and business plans that can have a chilling effect. That leaves the continued presence of Arena all the more remarkable. It is a tribute to Anthony Wall who has stayed in charge of the show since 1985, and who has some bruises and unhealed wounds from that experience. Not everyone at the BBC has admired the castaway bottle. It would require unreasonable optimism about British bureaucracy to feel confident that Arena’s messages will keep floating into our thoughts. In so many ways, the show has now earned the right to deliver a program about itself (it would require many parts) that presents both the achievement and the dismay of Anthony Wall, and the team he has worked with.

More recently, the program created Arena Hotel, a rich website archive of its many episodes and invaluable background materials that may not have reached the screen, which is as absorbing as the sketchbooks of a painter or the early drafts by a novelist. No wonder Werner Herzog once remarked that Arena was “an oasis in the sea of insanity that is television.”

In giving the Mel Novikoff award this year to Arena, the Festival honors its small army of men and women, an attitude that maintained independent ideals and—most important of all—the notion that television might be a medium through which we the people stay attached to the human imagination in an age when technology, materialism, and unconsidered or unmediated “progress” are owning and controlling our airwaves.

David Thomson is a film historian and critic. He the author of the oft-revised The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and many other books, including his most recent work, Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire (2019).

By Michelle Materre

How to begin to describe the career of Madeline Anderson? At the marvelous age of 91 years young and 4 feet 8 inches tall, Madeline continues to be a force to be reckoned with.

When Madeline Anderson began making films in the 1950s it was only white men making films. However, this trailblazing African-American woman had known since high school that she wanted to be a filmmaker. As an avid filmgoer throughout her childhood in her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she very early on grew weary of seeing her people depicted only as “savages” in Tarzan movies or “lazy and shiftless” servants in other Hollywood films. She wanted to show another side of Black history, and make films about the achievements of contemporary Black Americans. In her first film as a director, Integration Report 1 in 1960 –which screens as part of the POV tribute along with I Am Somebody – Ms. Anderson documented events that led up to the March on Washington in 1963, making her one of the first Black women to make a documentary film. She then went on to produce I Am Somebody in 1969, the first half-hour documentary directed by an African-American to be broadcast on television, as a union cardholding member, female director and editor, wife, and mother of four. She went on to become the first female supervising editor of the film department for Children’s Television Workshop (producers of Sesame Street) on public television and executive produced the educational series for children, Infinity Factory (1977-).

When Lincoln Center screened Madeline’s work as part of the “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York 1968-1986” in February of 2015, a series I co-programmed with Jake Perlin, then programmer at large at Film Society of Lincoln Center, it created a resurgence of interest in her work by two or three new generations of filmmakers, film scholars, and film enthusiasts. During the course of this two-week series, we screened three of her films: Integration Report 1, Malcolm X (1969), and I Am Somebody. Malcolm X was originally broadcast as part of the television public affairs series, Black Journal (1969-) produced by the renowned documentarian, William Greaves. Madeline’s work was the first work directed by a Black woman to air on this program for public television. And, as they say, the rest was history.

During an interview I did with Madeline on my radio program in February 2015, I asked her about what role the advent of television played in the 1960s in terms of defining careers. Madeline’s response was, “When I started out in the film industry, there were no film schools. The way you learned was by becoming someone’s assistant. That wasn’t easy for us, because if you weren’t a son or related to someone in the industry, no one would hire you. I was fortunate enough to meet Ricky Leacock while I was at NYU. He and his wife were such supporters of mine and I took advantage of every opportunity that came along… When you’re in the industry and you start having a track record, that’s how you get jobs. It was very difficult for Black people to gain a track record because we didn’t know who was in the union, and who were our ‘friends.’ Luckily, I had Ricky, D.A. Pennebaker, and Shirley Clarke in my corner and I worked in that space for two years, so people began to know about me. When Dr. King was assassinated, that was the recognition of the role of the media in controlling black people by broadcasting ‘Black product,’ such as Black Journal. When funding was discontinued, our popularity as filmmakers was lost because we weren’t (considered) a moneymaking entity. And the aesthetics we brought didn’t continue because they aren’t considered ‘moneymaking,’ even though we saved the Hollywood industry in the 1970s with the Blaxploitation era.”

When I asked Madeline about how she came to make I Am Somebody, here’s what she had to say:

“When I first heard about the women going on strike in Charleston [African-American hospital workers asking for increased wages and union recognition), I was working on Black Journalwith Bill Greaves. I had also heard that Bill was leaving the program, so I wanted to be at the forefront of a story about women in the struggle for change, and started doing the research on the story. I went to the networks to try to raise money, but they weren’t interested because they said there was no audience for this film. Then I went to the unions. I went to Local 1199, because they had a record of making films, and they were very enthusiastic about making this film, and gave me carte blanche. It was the first time in all my years of filmmaking that I had enough money and enough time, almost, to get a film made from the beginning. Because two weeks after finishing the film, I had my fourth child. And the story of these women was my story.”

In this age of the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and other campaigns for gender and racial equity in the workplace, it is essential to be knowledgeable of the lived experiences of these pioneers who came before, such as Madeline Anderson. She had the support of some generous individuals, but mostly had to make her own way through dangerous territory during a tumultuous time in this country’s history. And yet, she did it, along with many other courageous men and women of color whom we know little about.

Michelle Materre is an Associate Professor of Media Studies and Film at The New School and the curator and founder of the Creatively Speaking Film Series.