Podium: Film puts our hopes up on the screen

David Puttnam

From the Sir Harry Brittain Memorial Lecture, delivered

at the American Embassy, London

MANY OF those surfing the Internet today should possibly reflect on what the American playwright, Wilson Mizner, said of Hollywood 50 years ago, when he referred to it as "a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat".

In deciding to disseminate all 445 pages of the Starr report via the Internet, Congress testified to the fact that the computer network is now just one more tool in the propaganda war; that ceaseless battle to influence our opinions and our beliefs which rages daily across newspapers, magazines and television stations throughout the world.

In fact, Kenneth Starr - for whom I have developed an under-informed but visceral dislike - may have done for the Internet what the Gulf war did for CNN.

The much-hyped "information age" is already, very much, upon us. Sex, lies and now, the videotape.

What do all of these developments say about the way in which our real lives are being reflected back to us in an information-saturated world? What does all of this say about what I'd describe as our "cultural morality"? As a child living in North London, I vividly remember one woman who lived in our street and who was avoided like the plague by my parents and pretty well everyone else. One day, out shopping, I asked my mother why. "Well," I was told, "We all like a bit of a gossip, that's human nature, but that woman's different - she's a malicious gossip. She doesn't mind who she hurts, and your father won't have her near the house."

Fifty years later, it seems to me that, as a society, we have all literally invited her into the front room - in fact into the kitchen, the bedroom and anywhere else where there's a newspaper, a radio, a television, or a wired-up computer.

Gossip, malicious gossip, has become institutionalised. Somehow, it has woven itself into the fabric of our everyday lives.

So what does all this have to say about our sense of "cultural morality"?

Not unreasonably, society at large finds it difficult to absorb any sophisticated level of responsibility for what, ethically, must surely be regarded as an altogether ugly and unwelcome drift.

I'm particularly proud that it was a fellow film-maker, the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who shortly before he died, said: "The connection between man's behaviour and his destiny is slowly being destroyed. He has been conditioned into the belief that nothing depends on him, that his personal experience will not affect the future... that he has no part to play in the shaping of even his own fate."

Film-makers have, for the most part, learned to keep their impact on the real world in perspective. For it is a straightforward fact that movies, along with all the other image-driven and story-driven activities which flow from them, are now at the very heart of the way in which we run our economies and live our lives.

We have hardly begun to do any really serious thinking about the social impact of the new technologies, and the way in which they are being used.

In particular, how can we ensure that we don't create an information underclass who, simply, for lack of access to these new technologies, find themselves permanently excluded from the shiny new Information Society of the 21st century?

The answer, unsurprisingly, lies in education; only by creating a serious and ongoing educational opportunity for all can we lay the foundations of a genuinely inclusive society.

It is my hope that the Third Way - if it is to mean anything at all - must offer us a "radical centre" at the heart of which lies educational opportunity, moral obligation and a recommitment to personal responsibility.

It is these values which we should be seeking to protect, certainly as we stand on the eve of the third millennium.

But it will not be that easy. We appear to have reached a point at which the bottom line so entirely dominates the priorities of most of the media that there is little hope they might raise their game, and confront their broader responsibilities.

Just last week, together with my wife and son, I attended a screening of Steven Spielberg's marvellous film Saving Private Ryan. It reminded me, if I needed it, that the best films still have the capacity to guide us toward what is truly universal.

Spielberg's movie provides a salutary reminder of just what extraordinary levels of sacrifice, discipline and courage were required to establish the foundation of our now familiar freedoms - and what an incredible price was paid for those freedoms.