Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s 9781350987449, 9781786732040

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Endorsement
Title page
Copyright information
Table of contents
List of illustrations
Introduction
Memories Of 1970s Independent Cinema
Acknowledgements
Notes
Part One Critical contexts for 1970s experimental filmmaking
1 Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture
Acknowledgements
Notes
2 Listening to Women
Audition
Recitation
Remediation
Repetition
Interpretation
Notes
3 Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking
Then and now: the Lucas Aerospace Plan and neo-liberal amnesia
Diverse practices of political engagement in the 1970s film collectives
Wider influences and creative strategies
Notes
4 Platforms of History: Brecht and the Public Uses of Radical History in 1970s Independent Cinema
Notes
Part Two Infrastructures, technologies and 1970s experimental filmmaking
5 Audiences: Not an Optional Extra
Creating opportunities to see and engage with the films
Developing initiatives to build audiences
Lessons to be learnt
Acknowledgements
Notes
6 Engaging Material Specificities: Aesthetics and Politics in the 1970s
Notes
7 The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK
Notes
8 ‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video
Acknowledgements
Notes
Part Three Practices, aesthetics and 1970s experimental filmmaking (the 200 avant-gardes)
9 A Whole New Attitude: The London Film-Makers’ Co-op in the Decade of Structural/Materialism
Notes
10 The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience
Between two critiques: notions of ‘documentary’ and ‘salvage’
History and perspective in Amber’s Tyneside Documentaries
Conclusion
Notes
11 Television Interventions: Experiments in Broadcasting by Artists in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s
Television and video art
Kevin Atherton and David Hall: television interventions
The demise of analogue television and the contemporary televisual turn
Notes
12 Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice
Introduction
Go back, to get here
Conclusion
Notes
Part Four Case studies
13 Views of River Yar: Reconsidering Raban and Welsby’s Landmark Landscape Film
Notes
14 Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert and the Camera’s Caress
Notes
15 Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair
Notes
16 ‘On Her Devolves the Labour’: The Cinematic Time Travel of The Song of the Shirt
Notes
Part Five Snapshots from the 1970s
17 Memories of The Other Cinema
18 Organising for Innovation in Film and Television: The Independent Film-Makers’ Association in the Long 1970s
Introduction
Commentary
A short chronology of the IFA in the long 1970s
Afterword
Notes
19 The International Forum on Avant-Garde Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 1976: Interview with Lynda Myles
Notes
20 The Workshop Declaration: Independents and Organised Labour
Notes
21 Campaigning for Innovation and Experiment on Channel 4
Notes
Notes on Contributors
Chronological List of Recent Events
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Sue Clayton is a screenwriter and film director. Her cinema films include The Song of the Shirt (1979), The Last Crop (1990), The Disappearance of Finbar (1996), Hamedullah: The Road Home (2012) and Calais Children: A Case to Answer (2017). She has made many award-winning dramas and documentaries for Channel 4, BBC, and ITV, including How to Survive Lifestyle, Japan Dreaming and Turning Japanese. She is Founding Director of the Screen School at Goldsmiths, University of London. Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989/2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996/2013), Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series 1992/2012), Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006) and Afterimages: On Cinema, Women and Changing Times (Reaktion Books 2019). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute 1977; dvd 2013) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4 1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).

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‘An invaluable reference source for academics, researchers and the wider public less familiar with this significant period of British film history.’ – William Raban, University of the Arts London; director of Thames Film (1986) ‘This anthology brilliantly reflects the struggles and achievements of a generation of filmmakers and film scholars outside Britain’s commercial entertainment industry. Edited by two key figures from the movement and introducing texts by leading contemporary scholars on this period, this book offers new insights into a vibrant, influential and often highly contested film culture.’ – David Curtis, BAFVSC, Central Saint Martins ‘This superb collection of essays presents a very timely reconsideration of many key independent and radical films of the 1970s, their context of production and exhibition then, and their continuing importance for the aesthetics and politics of image-making in our current era of the digital and global.’ – Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent

OTHER

CINEMAS POLITICS, CULTURE AND

EXPERIMENTAL FILM IN

THE 1970s EDITED BY

SUE CLAYTON AND LAURA MULVEY

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Paperback edition published by Bloomsbury Academic 2021 Copyright © Sue Clayton, Laura Mulvey and contributors, 2017, 2021 Sue Clayton, Laura Mulvey and contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design: nam-design.co.uk Cover image: Based on a still from Fournier Street (2013), a photographic exhibition by Sue Clayton, a critical reconsideration of The Song of the Shirt (1979) dir. Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling (exhibition courtesy of Leyden Gallery). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3718-0 PB: 978-1-3502-1312-8 ePDF: 978-1-7867-3204-0 eBook: 978-1-7867-2204-1 Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Illustrations

viii

Introduction

1

Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey PART ONE  CRITICAL CONTEXTS FOR 1970s EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING



1. Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture

25

Nicolas Helm-​Grovas

2. Listening to Women

41

So Mayer

3. Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking

56

Steve Sprung and Anthony Davies

4. Platforms of History: Brecht and the Public Uses of Radical History in 1970s Independent Cinema

73

Colin Perry PART TWO  INFRASTRUCTURES, TECHNOLOGIES AND 1970s EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING



5. Audiences: Not an Optional Extra: Artists’ Distribution Practices from the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op to Lux

91

Julia Knight

6. Engaging Material Specificities: Aesthetics and Politics in the 1970s Kim Knowles

v

107

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Contents

7. The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK

121

Ed Webb-​Ingall

8. ‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video

138

Lucy Reynolds PART THREE  PRACTICES, AESTHETICS AND 1970s EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING (THE 200 AVANT-​GARDES)



9. A Whole New Attitude: The London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op in the Decade of Structural/​Materialism

153

Steven McIntyre

10. The ‘Salvage’ of Working-​Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries

168

Jamie Chambers

11. Television Interventions: Experiments in Broadcasting by Artists in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s

185

Catherine Elwes

12. Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice

205

Daniella Rose King PART FOUR  CASE STUDIES



13. Views of River Yar: Reconsidering Raban and Welsby’s Landmark Landscape Film

219

Federico Windhausen

14. Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert and the Camera’s Caress

231

Rachel Garfield

15. Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair Amy Tobin

vi

242

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Contents

16. ‘On Her Devolves the Labour’: The Cinematic Time Travel of The Song of the Shirt

257

Kodwo Eshun PART FIVE  SNAPSHOTS FROM THE 1970s



17. Memories of The Other Cinema

273

Nick Hart-​Williams

18. Organising for Innovation in Film and Television: The Independent Film-​Makers’ Association in the Long 1970s

279

Simon Blanchard and Claire M. Holdsworth

19. The International Forum on Avant-Garde Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 1976: Interview with Lynda Myles

299

Kim Knowles

20. The Workshop Declaration: Independents and Organised Labour

307

Claire M. Holdsworth

21. Campaigning for Innovation and Experiment on Channel 4

313

Claire M. Holdsworth and Rod Stoneman Notes on Contributors Chronological List of Recent Events Select Bibliography Index

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319 327 331 347

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Illustrations 1.1

Cover of Cinim 3 (Spring, 1969), which contained the Pasolini essay translated as ‘Discourse on the Shot Sequence’.

27

3.1

Poster-​Film Collective, ‘Grunwick strike’ (1977) poster. Courtesy of Faction Films.

59

3.2

Poster-​Film Collective, Year of the Beaver (1985) poster. Courtesy of Faction Films.

68

3.3

Poster-​Film Collective, ‘Solidarity with Women of Ireland’ (1978) poster. Courtesy of Faction Films.

70

5.1

Extract from ‘London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative, Draft By Laws and Constitution’ (July 1966), p. 1. Available at http://​ fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC660705.pdf. Image: Lux/​Peter Mudie.

93

6.1

Annabel Nicolson performing Reel Time (1973). Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

117

7.1

Promotional material published by Sony of DV/​CV-​2400 (1967).

123

7.2

Promotional material published by Sony of AV-3400/8400 (1975).

124

8.1

Lis Rhodes, Light Reading (1978). Courtesy of the artist.

143

9.1

David Crosswaite, Man with a Movie Camera (1973). Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

163

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List of Illustrations 10.1 Signing the Amber partnership agreement, 1975. Pictured left to right: Graham Denman, Graham Smith, Peter Roberts, Lorna Powell, Murray Martin, Sirkka-​Liisa Konttinen. Courtesy of Amber.

169

10.2 Murray Martin with Bolex (1970s). Photo by Sirkka-​Liisa Konttinen. Courtesy of Amber.

175

11.1 David Hall, This is a TV Receiver (1976), featuring the newsreader Richard Baker. Broadcast on Scottish Television. Courtesy of Debi Hall.

187

11.2 Catherine Elwes, With Child (1983). Broadcast on Channel 4 (1985). Courtesy of the artist.

193

12.1 Isaac Julien, Territories (1984). Courtesy of Isaac Julien Studio. 206 13.1 William Raban and Chris Welsby, 2-​screen showing of River Yar (1972). Courtesy of William Raban.

220

14.1 Carola Regnier in Stephen Dwoskin, Behindert (1974). Courtesy of the Dwoskin Estate.

234

15.1 The London Women’s Film Group, The Amazing Equal Pay Show (1974). Courtesy of Esther Ronay.

244

16.1 Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, The Song of the Shirt (1979), title sequence. Courtesy of Sue Clayton.

260

16.2 Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, The Song of the Shirt (1979), title sequence. Courtesy of Sue Clayton.

261

17.1 The Other Cinema poster for Jorge Sanjinés, Blood of the Condor (Bolivia, 1969). Design by Oscar Zarate (1973). Courtesy of the artist and Faction Films.

275

17.2 Part of The Other Cinema team standing outside the cinema in Tottenham Street, London (October 1976). Photo by Ron Peck ©. Left to right: Charles Rubinstein, Paul Marris, Susan Feldman, Tony Kirkhope, David Glyn, [unidentified], Nick Hart-​Williams, Peter Sylveire. The team also included Peck (photographer), Pam Engel and Patsy Nightingale.

276

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newgenprepdf

List of Illustrations 17.3 Marc Karlin on the picket line against the closure of The Other Cinema, British Film Institute (13 December 1977). Courtesy of the Marc Karlin Archive.

277

18.1 Page from Simon Blanchard’s diary (12 January 1980). Courtesy of Simon Blanchard.

280

19.1 List of panelists, ‘International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film’. Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

300

19.2 Programme, ‘International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film’ (22 August –​4 September 1976). Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

303

20.1 Cover of Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979 (edited and designed by Rod Stoneman).

309

20.2 Flyer/​postcard, ‘What can you do with a passive culture?’ showing MP Norman Tebbit kicking a television screen. Produced by Sheffield Independent Film. Image: Adrian Friedli; design: Steve Jinks (1987/​1995). From the collection of Sylvia Harvey.

310

21.1 Cover of the ACTT report on Nationalising the Film Industry (compiled by Simon Hartog, 1973).

314

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Introduction Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey

In recent years there has been a significant surge of interest in 1970s independent cinema, although this challenging and demanding cinema had fallen out of currency for quite some time as its counterculture of activism and ideas receded. The interweaving of radical aesthetics and radical politics, that had so captured cinematic and intellectual imaginations in the 1970s, appeared perhaps utopian and obscure to succeeding decades. But when the editors of this book, themselves both filmmakers from that transformative decade, happened to meet a couple of years ago, they both noted with interest that there was a revival of interest in their films and in 1970s filmmaking more generally. Since then, events, seasons and publications have proliferated and Other Cinemas is a response, and yet one more contribution, to the phenomenon. At the end of the book is a list of events that gives a sense of the range and variety of the ‘return to the 70s’. Here we only note some particular and characteristic events. Dan Kidner’s Inoperative Community at Raven Row in winter 2015−16 gave an overview of 1970s experimental film (following the pioneering season in 2010 Visions, Revisions and Divisions, programmed by Kidner and Petra Bauer). In addition, filmmakers such as Four Corners

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Other Cinemas Films, Malcolm Le Grice, and Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen have been the subject of high-​profile retrospectives. Key films such as Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Collective, 1975) and The Song of the Shirt (Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, 1979) have been rescreened widely. There have been definitive events and publications on Marc Karlin (from Berwick Street Collective and Lucia Films), Peter Gidal (a founding member of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op, LFMC), and Sally Potter (whose early films might be more usually associated with the 1980s but whose roots are in the 1970s). Rewind: British Artists’ Video in the 1970s and 1980s (edited by Sean Cubitt and Stephen Partridge) covers electronic media across the period. The 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death in 2014 saw publications and seasons celebrating one of the great filmmakers associated with the period, who also continued to work and film until his death in 1994. The LFMC’s 50th anniversary in 2016 generated, among other events, seasons dedicated to individual filmmakers at the BFI Southbank and intergenerational discussions at Tate Britain. This revival of interest has extended beyond the UK, with events such as the 2016 Cinéma du Réel Retrospective in Paris and the Courtisane Festival In Between Times in Ghent.1 The presence of these recent publications has influenced our selection of topics for the present book, in that we have attempted to avoid over-​duplication where film-makers or topics have been extensively covered elsewhere. Perhaps most significant for us in commissioning this collection was the fact that some contemporary organisations have found relevant not only the films, but also work practices and underpinning ideas from the 1970s independent movement. For example, the Radical Film Network, a UK-​based network of independent filmmakers worldwide, recreated in 2015 the First Festival of British Independent Cinema 1975, in its original venue, the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol.2 MayDay Rooms, an archive of material associated with radical cultural movements, has held events looking at the 1970s legacy of ‘community video’ and community mobilisation. The Lux, the present incarnation of the LFMC, archives and re-​presents 1970s films in current context. The arts organisation No.w.here maintains facilities for processing and working with 16mm celluloid that characterised artist-​filmmaker practice at the LFMC in the 1970s. 2

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Introduction In response to this extraordinary burgeoning of interest, and to the discovery that many others were researching and writing about independent film in the 1970s, we, Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, decided to commission the collection of essays that has become Other Cinemas. One of our key editorial principles has been to invite the participation and collaboration of younger scholars and practitioners, most of whom were not yet born when the 1970s radical arts movements took place. It has been inspiring to discover that our contributors have identified, in that crucial decade, political strategies, forms of aesthetic experiment and ways of engaging with audiences that they consider to be directly relevant to today’s very different independent media culture. This Introduction cannot give an in-​depth background to the 1970s film that is usually known as independent (outside the industry) or experimental (challenging cinematic aesthetic and narrative conventions). Our personal perspectives are inescapable and we have attempted to trace influences, contexts and developments as we see them retrospectively and necessarily partially. We have, however, also tried to give some sense of the interwoven nature of the material conditions and the ideas that enabled the films that characterise the 1970s aesthetic to come into being. Radical film of the 1970s in the UK absorbed a variety of international and historical influences, not necessarily coherent, not all equally effective, that interacted with local, indigenous movements, aspirations and conditions. In the first instance, there was some continuity with the 1968 cultural and political uprisings in Europe and around the world, most particularly Paris. Ripples of ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’ (‘Under the pavements, the beach!’) reached the UK cultural sector in various forms and the late 1960s saw the spread of Paris-​influenced art school and college protests and occupations.3 The buzzword of the early 1970s was ‘liberation’ and the politics that inspired women’s liberation, gay liberation and black liberation came mainly from the USA. The fusion of an American-​inspired concept of liberation with the further implications derived from new intellectual and aesthetic developments in France embedded in the term a new, and more theoretically orientated, perspective and a new desire; liberation would involve not only overcoming the literal forms of oppression but also challenging and analysing how oppression was inscribed into society through language, images and ideology. This new kind of politics was crucially influenced by translations from the 3

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Other Cinemas French intellectual movement whose work on history, ideology, semiotics and psychoanalysis (for instance, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, to name the most significant, and to whom we return briefly below) was published in the UK. All these developments influenced a cultural shift and a search for new ways of articulating issues around language, class, gender and power, which, in turn, put so many new creative and intellectual forces into play. Obviously, the question of representation arose very directly for the women’s liberation movement. Campaigns against the social exploitation of women’s bodies led directly to campaigns against the erotic oppression of women’s bodies in image across popular culture and the history of art. And feminists began to use ideas taken from semiotics and psychoanalysis to detach (semiotically) signifier from signified, and thus detach (psychoanalytically) actual women from patriarchal fantasy invested in the image. These kinds of questions, ultimately about meaning itself as constructed rather than transparent, were also of great importance to any gender struggle and very specifically to any politics of racism or post- colonialism. Inevitably, these kinds of issues, however theoretical, threw a spotlight on the cinema, on its easy illusions, seemingly inherent tendency to transparency and obvious ability to reflect a credible image of an ideologically constructed world. While Hollywood might have been the pinnacle of achievement for this kind of cinema, a politics of doubt about illusion and ways of seeing, as such, led to further questioning of any realist aesthetic. Screenings of new films by Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub/Danielle Huillet, for instance, seemed to suggest that the politics of film should also include a politics of the language of film. In addition to this already heady cocktail, during the 1960s the concept of the Third World (the term meaning ‘non-aligned’ and differentiated from the First, capitalist, and Second, communist, blocs) emerged. Although the early optimism inspired by anti-colonial struggles and newly independent nations was mitigated by the rise of dictatorships (most particularly in Latin America), in the UK active support of Chile and Argentina, and the presence of exiles, raised awareness of and solidarity with the continent’s radical cultural politics. New Latin American cinemas that reached the UK, most importantly from Brazil and Cuba, brought completely new and unexpected forms of film and surprising approaches to narrative; almost as importantly, accompanying essays and political reflections on the cinema 4

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Introduction gradually appeared in English. The summer 1971 issue of the journal Afterimage was devoted to Third World cinema, translating key texts that argued, in the words of Julio Garcia Espinosa, ‘For an imperfect cinema’, and including the outline of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s film La Hora de los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, Argentina, 1968), shot entirely on 16mm and without sync sound. Not only did the screenings of this film (distributed by The Other Cinema) have an extremely important impact in the UK, but its formal use of cinema, embodied by Espinosa’s concept of ‘imperfection’, challenged the ‘perfection’ of 35mm film. These influences gave a Third World and specifically political perspective to the use of 16mm otherwise more generally associated at the time with the ­artist-​filmmakers of the New American Cinema movement. The great significance of these American films for the UK was revealed by Jonas Mekas’s screenings, first in 1964 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and then P. Adams Sitney’s in 1968, at the National Film Theatre. These films (by Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, for instance) later became the core collection of the LFMC and the key filmmakers were also given critical political attention in Afterimage. With the growth of the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s, women filmmakers took up the radical potential of experimental film to challenge mainstream conventions and patriarchal norms. Films by Chantal Akerman, Joyce Wieland and Yvonne Rainer, for instance, were shown at the Festival of International Avant-​Garde Film, held at the National Film Theatre in London in 1973 (organised by David Curtis and Simon Field) and reflected this new critical relation between women filmmakers and experimental cinema. These kinds of juxtapositions and contradictions, coming to the UK from abroad, initiated and inspired debates throughout the 1970s about the politics and aesthetics of radical cinema. Although neither the theory nor the practice of ‘experimental’ or ‘independent’ cinema had established a solid base in the UK, by the end of the 1960s/​early 1970s, there was a definitely an underground ‘scene’, represented by the Arts Lab and International Times (founded by John Hopkins, known as Hoppy, and Barry Miles, known as Miles, in 1966), disseminated across indie art, music and theatre as well as some experimental television drama. Intellectually, there were significant contributions to radical British culture at the time. For instance, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded by 5

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Other Cinemas Richard Hoggart in 1964, initiated research into the politics of popular culture, particularly under the directorship of Stuart Hall from 1968. And the radical history movement, focused from 1976 on the History Workshop Journal founded by Raphael Samuel, introduced the practice of oral history in the interests of ‘history from below’. Although both were associated with universities, both presented rigorous, politically based, challenges to traditional ideas of history and culture; in these new, specifically left, intellectual movements, questions of representation and narration were also central. There are echoes of parallel ideas in films such as Glauber Rocha’s Antonio da Mortes (Brazil, 1969) and Straub/​Huillet’s Anna Magdalena Bach (Germany, 1968) that were exploring how history is represented, whose history is represented and ways in which cinema could perform a political role as image maker and storyteller. These kinds of contexts and influences fed into the 1970s essay films about myth, the retelling of history and the re-​presentation of stories, and a disconnected, tableau-​like form of narrative. There were early signs that independent film, in its differing forms, had begun to take root in the UK by the early 1970s. To select two emblematic examples: in 1966 the LFMC was founded and in 1969 Pam and Andi Engel founded Politkino, through which they distributed and screened European films of the left, starting with Straub/​Huillet’s The Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach. Looking back from the vantage point of 40 plus years, it is clear that by the middle of the decade, British experimental film had achieved momentum and the self-​awareness of a movement. As a sign of this cohesion, the Independent Film-​Makers’ Association (IFA) had been founded in 1974 (see Chapter 18). Under its auspices, in the autumn of 1975, the First National Festival of Independent Film was held in Bristol. The selection of films, specifically and consciously, covered the range of work that was emerging at the time, screening avant-​garde artists’ films alongside films from politically motivated filmmakers and collectives. Malcolm Le Grice, filmmaker and a foundational figure in the LFMC, writing in Studio International, commented that, while there might be very little in common between the festival’s furthest wings, ‘there were sufficient points of contact between political groupings and experimental makers to convince me that the process should continue’.4 Afterimage of summer 1976 devoted a special issue to ‘Perspectives on English Independent Cinema’, 6

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Introduction again covering the spectrum of contemporary filmmaking. It is precisely this juxtaposition, and the range of work it represents, that formed the basis of the 1970s independent film ‘movement’ and made the film culture of the period so rich. Although there was a recognition that ‘independence’ might mean something different to, say, the artist and the political propagandist, there was a common commitment, at least among those centred on the IFA, to ‘radical’ filmmaking, whatever form that radicalism might take. Inevitably, intellectual, aesthetic and political debates began to feed into the evolving practice and, as the concept of the ‘political’ widened, quickly came to embrace questions of form alongside content. The impact of this conjuncture between filmmaking theory and filmmaking practice can be found across many of the chapters in this book. To recapitulate a point made at the beginning of this Introduction, political commitment came to involve ‘analysing how oppression was inscribed into society through language, images and ideology’, so that a politics of representation could be included, for the first time, in the wider framework of political struggle. These ‘theory/practice’ debates fused with the contemporary revival of interest, both from a left and from an art-historical perspective, in the radical avant-gardes of the 1920s. The art, the films and the concept of radical aesthetics for radical politics of that period came alive again during the 1970s, with Bertolt Brecht and the Soviet avant-garde as prime examples. Once again, momentum about and around these issues had built up slowly but, by the mid-1970s, a frame of reference was in place to which specific film debates contributed. In his 1975 essay ‘The two avant-gardes’, Peter Wollen boldly reconfigured the historical avant-gardes within the contemporary context and, implicitly, his own political and aesthetic agenda.5 His argument articulated the juxtaposition between the wings of radical film noted at Bristol by Malcolm Le Grice, but its influence also reached further. At the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976, Wollen co-organised with Simon Field an International Forum on Avant-Garde Film. The event was intended not only to develop the dialogue between the ‘two avant-gardes’, bringing together key exemplars from British and international filmmakers, but also to extend the dialogue to one between theory and practice. At the forum, each panel was carefully balanced, bringing together, from Europe and the US, key theorists of radical film practice with filmmakers 7

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Other Cinemas themselves. (See Chapter 19 for further details and for the Forum’s programme.) Perhaps paradoxically, state financial support, particularly through the British Film Institute and the Arts Council, made a crucial contribution to the intellectual infrastructure of the radical film movement. The implications of this policy came back to public notice in 2015, the 50th anniversary of Jennie Lee’s groundbreaking White Paper on arts funding, with considerable discussion of government responsibility for funding the arts, as well as equally considerable comment on the contemporary deterioration of that tradition. Most particularly in the light of the extreme cuts in funding, attempts to commercialise the arts, and a philistine emphasis on ‘value for money’ made by the 2010 coalition government and continuing to this day, it is important to emphasise the question of state support for the arts, and to look back at its impact on film in the 1970s. Due precisely to the determination and influence of Jennie Lee, the first British Minister for Arts appointed by Harold Wilson in 1964, funding for the arts increased across the board, including the Arts Council’s government grant-​in-​aid. But, radically and farsightedly, she also increased the British Film Institute’s grant-​in-​aid and acknowledged, for the first time, the place of film in ‘the arts’, insisting that ‘part should go to experimental film production and young filmmakers’.6 For artist-​filmmakers, invaluable support came from new film departments as British art schools expanded and grew in cultural significance from the 1960s into the 1970s. David Curtis, in his book A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain, points out that, once accepted as a ‘fine art’, film and its technological infrastructure came to be incorporated into the art school curriculum. Curtis specifically mentions that the ideas and energy from Malcolm Le Grice’s pioneering Department of Fine Art Film (set up in 1972 at St Martin’s School of Art) ‘were one of the catalysts for the explosion of activity that occurred [at the LFMC] around the turn of the decade’.7 Alongside these institutional ‘bases’, the Arts Council, from 1972, also began to include film-makers among artists eligible for grants; this opening towards film culminated with the appointment of David Curtis, a founder member of the LFMC, as Arts Council Officer with responsibility for artists’ film and video in 1977. In an interview with Michel Mazière, he comments on the symbiosis between art colleges and 8

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Introduction the Arts Council, but also emphasises the role of institutions in establishing support structures: Well, I  think you have to recognise that actually a lot of the best things that you’re involved in had absolutely no relationship to funding at all. And this is something which people, when they’re talking about funding don’t realise, that the Arts Council supported only a tiny fraction of [existing] avant-​ garde work. The majority of it was funded by artists themselves who, in a sense, were subsidised by their working in the colleges or wherever else. The majority of the avant-​garde work is not funded by grants. All that said, one of the most important things that funding can do is support the exhibition and distribution of work − where you’re intervening on behalf of a very broad range of artists in the marketplace − to help those artists to get their work out and to get some money back.8

The British Film Institute received a grant increase in 1972 and its resources, its activities and its constituency also expanded across the decade. Both the BFI and the Arts Council supported screenings and seasons of avant-​garde and independent films, but they also financed other kinds of cultural activities, such as symposia, publications and so on. Both institutions supported the Edinburgh Film Festival (where experimental film was strongly represented), which expanded its activities to include symposia: for instance, the Brecht event in 1975, Psychoanalysis and Cinema in 1976 and the Avant-​Garde Forum (mentioned above; also see Chapter 19, Lynda Myles interviewed by Kim Knowles). Although the BFI Production Board had been funding films for some years, developments in the independent sector (of the kind described above) began to affect its production policy. Remarkable films were funded in the early 1970s that made an extremely important contribution to experimental and independent British cinema.9 However, with the appointment of Peter Sainsbury as director of the Production Board, while the tradition of the independent feature continued, films began to be made from the diverse, but theoretically inclined, movement that is one of the main concerns of this book. Sainsbury had, with Simon Field, founded and edited the journal Afterimage with its ambitious policy of covering new cinemas from across the world, from a politically and aesthetically radical 9

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Other Cinemas perspective. In this sense, his appointment to the Production Board has a certain symmetry with Curtis’s appointment at the Arts Council: both had a deep commitment to enabling new forms of cinema to come into existence. In his editorial for Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972), explicitly titled ‘For a new cinema’, Sainsbury reflects on recent screenings of Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (1970) and Jean-​Luc Godard’s Le Gai Savoir (1969): Frampton and Godard might seem an unlikely pair; yet beneath the familiar ideological surface of things they meet in a concern to establish a cinema which does not seek to portray, reflect, interpret, symbolise or allegorise –​but to enquire. The new cinema is an epistemological one.10

It is, perhaps, this ‘epistemological’ preoccupation that characterises the particular kind of films produced at the time. As examples, one might mention those made by the editors of this book: Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977) and The Song of the Shirt (Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, 1979). But these films are simply emblematic of that spirit of inquiry, stretching from political documentaries to artists’ films, into the nature of the cinema itself and the extraordinary potential of film as a system of representation. Although universities were just beginning to incorporate Film Studies into a variety of academic disciplines, there was no theoretical or intellectual equivalent in the university context to the support system that underpinned filmmaking in art colleges. At the Royal College of Art, however, where Peter Gidal and Stephen Dwoskin also taught, Stuart Hood as professor of Film initiated an intensely politically conscious period for the graduate Film Studies programme, augmented by the presence of Noel Burch, from 1973. Burch’s book Theory of Film Practice, published in 1973, was already an essential text for the development of radical film theory, with its Marxist and materialist perspective. His presence left a visible impact on the films of some Royal College graduates (see Colin Perry’s Chapter 4) but his presence also contributed to the wider debates that were going on in London and beyond. The Slade School of Art’s Post-​graduate Diploma in Film Studies (founded by Thorold Dickinson) focused on programming rather than production but, under the auspices of James Leahy from the early 1970s, the course also absorbed the theoretical ethos of the 10

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Introduction moment. Both Rod Stoneman (see Chapter 21) and Simon Field, for instance, were graduates. Alongside these developments in educational institutions, it was more generally the innovative policy of left publishers and publications that formed the intellectual ‘infrastructure’, enabling debates on the relation between politics and aesthetics to engage with its histories and to bring them into the contemporary context. In the 1960s the cultural and political status quo in the UK had been challenged by ideas and influences coming from European left and intellectual movements, exemplified by the New Left Review’s turn away from specifically English political traditions to engage with European Marxism (but also, extremely importantly, the Third World and the Non-​Aligned Movement). Due to this policy, NLR published the first translations of essays by Louis Althusser, strikingly ‘Freud and Lacan’ in issue 55 (May−June 1969), Régis Debray’s ‘Notes on Gramsci’ in issue 59 (January−February 1970), and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Conversations with Brecht’ in issue 77 (January−February 1973). These early essays led on to New Left Books republishing, in the 1970s, key writings on Marxism and aesthetics from the Frankfurt School.11 From the film point of view, these (and other) publications are significant for their influence on Screen’s new editorial policy in the early 1970s. The British Film Institute Education Department funded Screen as it brought key historical debates back to contemporary consciousness (‘Soviet avant-​garde of the 1920s’, issue 4, Winter 1971−2), new theoretical developments to its UK constituency (‘Cinema semiotics and the work of Christian Metz’, Spring/​ Summer 1973), the political implications of Althusserian theory for film spectatorship and two special issues on Bertolt Brecht and the cinema. Independent filmmaking of the 1970s was also defined by its commitment to alternative distribution and exhibition. Central to IFA analysis and practice was the call for ‘production, distribution and exhibition’ to be treated as integrally connected. Radically opposed to the economic organisation of Hollywood, with its vertically integrated studio, distribution and cinema chain ownership and control, and excluded from the aesthetics and economics of the ‘second circuit’ of European art-​house cinema, the IFA proposed a ‘third circuit’ whereby filmmakers committed themselves to create new mechanisms for film exhibition. This involved engaging with new screening venues: guest-​programming events, for instance, at the ICA 11

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Other Cinemas (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), local arts centres, conferences and meetings. Filmmakers invited to screen their films at non-​specialised venues often carried with them 16mm projectors and improvised screens. Small start-​up distribution companies and collectives such as The Other Cinema and Cinema of Women joined the better-​known art-​house names of the Screen on the Green and Artificial Eye (Pam and Andi Engel’s successor to Politkino; see Chapter 17 on The Other Cinema). This was not just a commitment to a new kind of economy, it was also a means of using films to generate political or other relevant kinds of discussion, following the practice of Otavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s screenings of The Hour of the Furnaces. Ultimately, it was also a commitment to finding and building audiences through the interactive processes of discussion, debate and feedback. This ‘notion of “social practice” demands the exhibition of films in locations which are precisely not assimilable into the art-​house film culture’.12 Several factors began to erode the conditions that had made the 1970s a particularly rich period for independent film-making in the UK but Other Cinemas extends its discussion to a ‘a long 1970s’ in order to take in important and relevant events in the early 1980s. The Conservative Party victory of 1979, launching Margaret Thatcher’s first term as prime minister, came as a blow to the sector as a whole. The new government’s policy on the arts (that has been resurrected by recent Conservative regimes) had an immediate impact on funding; but also, and just as importantly, it was hard to maintain the utopian spirit, the hope in the future, that had inspired 1970s filmmaking and other activities and activisms. But there were also positive developments. In 1982 Channel 4 came on air and filled, at least for some time, the vacuum left by funding cuts and policy changes at both the BFI and the Arts Council. The planning leading to the constitution of Channel 4 had generated an intense period of negotiation between the independent sector (through the IFA), the trade union (the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians) and the new channel (see Chapters 20 and 21). In a change on quite a different front, universities were beginning to inaugurate departments of Film Studies, Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies. These developments were obviously extremely welcome: but they took the theoretical side of the independent film movement away from its ‘free-​floating’ intellectual context into 12

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Introduction an academic environment, bringing an end to the kind of experimental writing, speculative and in a way wild, that had characterised Screen in its 1970s/​early 1980s mode. But more profoundly, the cultural atmosphere was changing and a new generation was emerging. Although punk had its origins in the 1970s, it had an important influence on the rise of the music video in the 1980s. The ‘new romantics’ and the development of gay culture, art and theory brought new dynamics to the independent film world. However, to reiterate, Other Cinemas carries over into the 1980s to cover areas that were still inspired by and worked with the political principles and aesthetic ideas that had marked the previous decade. Why are the films and the film culture of the 1970s of such interest to the current generation and current concerns? Once again, the new voices that have returned to this earlier radicalism have quite varied interests and concerns. However, there is an overall excitement derived from that time of political radicalism, when the concept of liberation developed by feminist, anti-​racist and early gay movements was new and only just beginning to articulate previously unheard ideas and launch new forms of activism. Part One of Other Cinemas, ‘Critical contexts for 1970s experimental filmmaking’, takes up the question of theory, its significance at the time and its innovative interaction with filmmaking. In Chapter 1, Nicolas Helm-​ Grovas examines the specific place of semiotics in film theory, tracing its arrival from Italy and France into the UK context, through Screen and other little magazines, and ultimately to film itself. In Chapter 2, Sophie Mayer looks at the influence of psychoanalysis on the development of feminist cinema. In Chapter 3, Anthony Davies interviews Steve Sprung who recalls the practices of 1970s independent film in dialogue with trade union and workers’ movements, and the way political ideas and positions influenced the activist filmmakers of the time. And in Chapter 4, Colin Perry analyses the influence of (reinterpretations of) Brecht, notions of performance and the telling of history in this period. Part Two of the book, ‘Infrastructures, technologies and 1970s experimental filmmaking’, is manifestly relevant for this generation. Many younger researchers and filmmakers have commented on parallels between technological developments in the 1970s (16mm lightweight cameras, and video recording with greater capacity for non-​linear assembly and editing) and the recent new formats such as the Beta and Sony HD cams, Go-​Pro and 13

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Other Cinemas smartphone capacity, that have revolutionised production opportunities and creative choices in this last decade. Kim Knowles discusses the significance of the 16mm film format for the 1970s independent sector (Chapter 6). Ed Webb-​Ingall assesses the technologies and practices of ‘community video’, arguing that greater access to recording and editing technology expanded not just video’s social use but video aesthetics too (Chapter 7). Julia Knight looks at LFMC artists’ film distribution from its origins to the early days of the Lux (Chapter 5). Lucy Reynolds traces the collective, women-​only research into the history of lost women directors and its relation to 1970s feminist filmmaking practice that led to the founding of Circles (Chapter 8). There are clear parallels between then and the aspirations of today’s film culture, most particularly reflected in the recent increase of pop-​up screenings, curated events in multi-​use venues, which aspire to ‘creating an audience’ as well as the diffusion of films via indie webs. Nowadays there are also the associated developments of interactivity as well as crowd-​funding/​crowd distribution support sites such as Indiegogo and Fairpie. Independent filmmaking of the 1970s was also marked by its working practices, in terms of both material methods of making films and the social organisation of its workforce. Part Three of the book is called ‘Practices, aesthetics and 1970s experimental filmmaking (the 200 avant-​gardes)’. The latter phrase is a reference to Peter Wollen’s essay ‘The two avant-​gardes’, which Sue Clayton recalls was further adapted in IFA discussion forums as ‘the 200 avant-​gardes’ in order to emphasise and celebrate the great diversity of work and style across the sector. Steven McIntyre discusses the significance of ‘Structural Materialism’ at the LFMC, emphasising this strand of filmmaking’s engagement with wider theoretical debates about the politics of spectatorship and film’s materiality (Chapter 9). Catherine Elwes traces the important, if limited, history of the interaction between avant-​garde video and television, from occasional BBC commissions to the arrival of Channel 4 (Chapter 11). Jamie Chambers profiles Amber Films’ Tyneside documentaries and the complex interweaving of re-​enactment with document in their films about disappearing working-​class labour (Chapter 10). Daniella Rose King discusses the interaction between politics and aesthetics adopted by the Black Workshops in the early 1980s, particularly their attention to the refilming and re-​interpretation of existing colonial film (Chapter 12). 14

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Introduction The case studies in Part Four of this book further highlight the very diverse aesthetics and practices of the period. Federico Windhausen discusses River Yar (1972) in which Chris Welsby and William Raban experiment with the interaction between film and landscape (through time, the seasons and the weather) that was pioneered by these filmmakers and is specific to the UK. Rachel Garfield’s chapter on Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert traces the development of this founder member of the LFMC into a remarkable chronicler of his own life through autobiography and reconstruction. The last two case studies are both of films influenced by feminism and the women’s movement, both representing the importance of experimentation with modes of storytelling and point of view to challenge traditions of patriarchal narrative. In her discussion of the London Women’s Film Group’s Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair, Amy Tobin brings out the significance of the film’s aesthetic of fragmentation and social comment, but also gives an extremely important insight into the group’s own experiments with collective working, its problems as well as its possibilities. Kodwo Eshun’s chapter on The Song of the Shirt emphasises the film’s interweaving of different time levels, cinematically and narrationally, as a means of interconnecting histories of experimenting with cinema’s own temporalities. Finally in Part Five, we present data and views on phenomena from the period that we consider important for a general understanding of its ethos. The independent film culture of the 1970s offered many models of collective working. Chapter 20 describes the Workshop Declaration, the prototype for collective organisation that IFA members developed with the ACTT, as a model under which independent practices could be brought into areas of production such as theatrically released films and national broadcast television, which were at that point governed by corporate/​union agreements with more hierarchical labour relations. It is important to remember that these restrictions, while designed to protect workers’ pay and rights, also prevented the independent sector from working in the larger media and engaging more with mass audiences until we were able as a community to negotiate terms. In today’s highly deregulated and casualised media labour market, this history of collective bargaining and of the ‘closed shop’ may seem very remote; but the struggles and contradictions of the 1970s illuminate the blurred line between art practices and industrial filmmaking, and cause us to reflect on the notion of artist/​filmmaker as worker. 15

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Other Cinemas Kim Knowles has interviewed Lynda Myles about programming the Edinburgh Film Festival and about her memories of the Avant-​Garde Event in 1976. Two dialogues between a key figure of the 1970s and a contemporary researcher throw light on crucial ways in which the independent sector campaigned on its behalf. Simon Blanchard and Claire Holdsworth reconstruct the origins, the campaigns and the wide influence of the IFA. Rod Stoneman and Claire Holdsworth trace the place of the IFA in the campaign for an independent Channel 4 and for the Workshop Declaration. In addition, Nick Hart-​Williams discusses the history of The Other Cinema and its distribution and exhibition practices (Chapter 17). The dialogue between younger researchers and those who were active in the 1970s highlights comparisons and questions that relate to contemporary interests. Perhaps most interesting here is Blanchard’s adaptation of Fredric Jameson’s term as ‘the long 1970s’. While the UK plunged towards 1979, Thatcherism and a continued neo-​ liberal and post-​modern agenda, the activists of the independent film sector, like so many arts and cultural groups, did their best to maintain the radical work associated with this decade, and carry forward its principles, as here described, with varied results. Today’s huge proliferation of filmmaking and new online distribution platforms as evidenced by the groups associated with Radical Film Network, Lux, the advent of radical cinemas such as London’s Genesis, Bristol’s Cube and Newcastle’s Star and Shadow and countless pop-​up venues showing independent films, the renaissance of the radical cinema documentary, the new wave of interactive web production and gallery work, all follow on from the rich and diverse flowering of the 1970s. It is to the future, and the hope of greater cultural/​political/​ epistemological advances, that this collection is dedicated.

Memories Of 1970s Independent Cinema Laura Mulvey I was born in 1941, brought up in the country during the war, and by 1950 had seen only one or two films after my family returned to London in the late 1940s. (From that early film-​going experience, I have four vivid images that have stayed with me across the decades. I mention them only to draw 16

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Introduction attention to the way in which a film moment can inscribe itself into and persist in memory.) My film going during the actual 1950s was driven by my francophilia and italophilia; Hollywood rarely figured. The onset on my love for Hollywood came later. In the Introduction to the new edition of Visual and Other Pleasures I speculate about the reasons why the 1950s French reassessment of Hollywood and its associated, film-​orientated, lifestyle drifted across the Channel and was taken up eagerly in the 1960s by various groups of British intellectuals. Early in the 1970s, my love for this cinema and my investment in the connoisseurship of movie going were punctured suddenly by my encounter with feminism. At least on the face of it, my relationship with cinema began to shift towards investigation and curiosity. Writing ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ in 1973/​4 marked my break with Hollywood and my new interest in experimental cinema, focused, in the first instance, on the small but heroic tradition of women’s experimental film. But these personal, intellectual and political shifts would not, as such, have enabled me to make films myself. It was the wider intellectual context in the UK in the 1970s, backed institutionally by new funding sources, that brought a new movement of radical experimental film into existence. For Peter Wollen and my collaboration, it was a logical step to expand our written theoretical essays into image and sound. Peter and I were both writing about film from a theoretical perspective before we ever imagined that we would make films ourselves. Our writing was, however, ‘essayistic’: quite short pieces published in journals and magazines, outside either a film criticism or an academic context, with personal commitment and original ideas compensating for the lack of foot-​notes or in-​depth research. Then, new radical European cinemas and, for example, Brazil’s cinema novo also reached the UK through festivals, special seasons and so on. Two influences on Peter’s and my move into making films stand out, one to do with urgency and the other with possibility. The rise of the women’s movement and its collective perception that images of women are a political issue and site of struggle gave us an immediate impetus to take our written theoretical work about film into practical theoretical work with film. Second, for Peter in particular, Godard’s late 1960s/​early 1970s films showed that cinema, out of, or alongside, modernist aesthetics, could be used to convey ideas and depict thought. 17

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Other Cinemas But it was, above all, the flourishing independent cinema movement in the UK during the 1970s that made our filmmaking possible. The movement’s political, creative and intellectual energy is vividly evoked in this book.

Sue Clayton My introduction to the ideas of independent filmmaking came in the mid-​ to-​late 1970s. While growing up in a northern working-​class background, I had watched some exceptional TV drama on BBC2 (I best remember the brilliant Roads to Freedom starring Daniel Massey) but my experience of cinema had only been that of mainstream Hollywood. I had never seen an ‘independent’ film. Accepted from a state school to read English at Cambridge, I was taught by iconic socialist thinkers like Raymond Williams on one hand, and exponents of new French New Left theory and semiotics − Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe − on the other. I was active in the women’s movement and other solidarity campaigns, and hoped to work as a political journalist and photographer. I moved to London to study photography at the Polytechnic of Central London (PCL, now Westminster University) in Regent Street, supporting myself by working as a hospital cleaner and living in a street of squatted housing in Camden Town. I’d always had an interest in Modernist art movements and kinetic art − my first photographic job was recording the exhibition Simultaneity at Kettle’s Yard Gallery − but it had literally never occurred to me that I could bring together my interests in writing, image-​making, literary theory, semiotics and feminism, and actually make films, as I’d never heard of any woman film director; and my viewing was still limited to Hollywood and British mainstream, and some French and Italian art films. However, at PCL I was exposed to early Soviet and recent Latin American cinema, and at the Electric and the Academy I would watch independent classics such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the Maysles’ Grey Gardens and Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. Together with Jonathan Curling, also at PCL, and Jonathan Collinson, Anne Cottringer and others at the Royal College of Art where I later went on to do a Masters, I began what started as a short experimental video about 18

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Introduction women in the clothes trade and became after four years of formal experimentation a trilogy known as The Song of the Shirt (1979) (see Chapter 16). The work was influenced by the films of Dziga Vertov and Jean-​Luc Godard, by Humberto Solas’s Cuban film Lucia and by the films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, and of the German director Alexander Kluge. Like many films of the period, it was not simply an end-​product shown in cinemas: during its making it was screened to all interested and involved groups and campaigns, whose responses and support fed into the next stage. (In this sense we pre-​defined the term interactive, as well as crowd-​ funding and, in a crude leaflet and badge and banner form, arguably, social media.) Our loose collective known as the Film and History Project joined the newly formed Independent Film-​makers’ Association (IFA) in 1976 and engaged with groups such as Cinema Action (where we completed The Song of Shirt), Film Work Group, the London Film-​makers’ Co-​op and the Berwick Street Collective, later Lusia Films. By 1980 I had curated and written the Women’s Catalogue for the independent distributors Other Cinema, and become a joint organiser at the IFA as it prepared the battle for the new ‘independent’ TV Channel. I was also in a feminist group shooting adverts for the independent cinema circuit, making short 16 mm films against the Corrie anti-​abortion bill, and promoting the radical arts magazine Wedge. By 1982 I  was finally earning a wage in film, working regularly as a director for the Independent Film and Video slot at Channel 4, making films whose aesthetics had been forged in the avant-​garde and political independent sector − and which could now be seen on national television, which to us at that time seemed an extraordinary victory. While these are the facts of how I spent the 1970s, I struggle to convey the ethos of that decade. It transformed me, and many like me, from a fairly conservative young woman with still limited work options, into an artist and activist who would traverse music, film and video making, exhibition, writing and political organisation. In the 1970s, every night of the week brought a meeting − for activist campaigns, reading groups, screenings, Co-​op courses, demos − and writing − for every magazine and newssheet from Time Out to Framework to Screen to People’s News Service. Events included supporting women strikers at Grunwick the huge culture festival called in solidarity with new liberation movements in Chile and Portugal 19

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Other Cinemas and Angola; the 1976 Patriarchy Papers conference, which changed the face of feminism in the UK and brought it more closely into confluence with class politics; the explosion of new independent filmmaking at the yearly Edinburgh Festival. Rather like large music festivals today, these were events that took on significance from the fact of being there, from breathing in that air, not just from what was said and heard. Before 1979 and the Conservative Thatcher’s rise to power, many of us on the left, still fanned by the flames of Paris 68, envisaged and expected greater change to come. We saw the possibilities of artists and filmmakers working in solidarity with gender and anti-​racist movements, with housing and wages campaigns, with the trades unions, and with theorists and intellectuals. We saw the rise of feminism, of black power and gay liberation. The world seemed new, if challenging, every day. The passion for change was matched by the possibility –​even probability or imminence − of seriously big and transformative political change. We did not predict the Thatcher project to break the unions and to turn the traditional working class into one of aspiring shareholders and homeowners: the neo-​liberal project of wealth for the West and deregulation for the rich. But the value of the vital decade of the 1970s remains; key is that it was oppositional. We were against Hollywood, against the tidy narratives of what Chantal Akerman called ‘kisses and car crashes’. We were for a new cinema, a new language, a new grammar, that allowed us to deconstruct the old order and rewrite the future. In this post-​modern, pluralist, relativistic age, the scale and vision of our aspirations for change − though our numbers and resources were so few − is what we hope will shine through in this collection and inspire current and future generations of filmmakers.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank Claire M. Holdsworth for her research and picture research during the production of Other Cinemas.

Notes 1. Festival du Cinéma du Réel 1970s Retrospective, 20−22 March 2016. Tate Liverpool hosted a one-​day symposium on film on 29 April 2014. See http://​ www.artinliverpool.com/​tate-​liverpool-​film-​screening-​seminar/​, accessed 11 November 2016.

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Introduction 2. The Radical Film Network has held a series of meetings around the history of independent filmmaking in the UK; they discussed, and then adopted, many of the original tenets of the Independent Film-​Makers’ Association, which was the crucible for so much of the creative innovation of the 1970s. 3. A slogan painted on walls in the Paris revolution of 1968. See M. Mould, The Routledge Dictionary of Cultural References in Modern French (Abingdon, 2011). 4. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Vision’, Studio International 89:975 (May/June 1975) p. 224. 5. Peter Wollen, ‘The two avant-​gardes’, Readings and Writings: Semiotic-​Counter Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), p. 20. 6. Christophe Dupin, ‘The BFI and film production’, in G. Nowell-​Smith and C. Dupin, eds, The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture (London: British Film Institute, 2012), p. 202. 7. David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: British Film Institute, 2007) p. 25, includes an extremely valuable account of the key place of fine art courses that included film and their origins. 8. http://​www.studycollection.co.uk/​maziere/​interviews/​Curtis.html, accessed 11 November 2016. 9. For instance, under Mamoun Hassan and Bruce Beresford, the BFI began the Bill Douglas trilogy and funded Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley (1975) and Horace Ove’s Pressure (1976). 10. Peter Sainsbury, ‘Editorial’, Afterimage 4 (Autumn 1972), p. 3. 11. Fontana published the Hannah Arendt collection of Benjamin’s essays in 1968 including ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. 12. J. Curling and F. McLean, ‘The Independent Film-​Makers Association –​Annual General Meeting and Conference’, Screen [Online] 18:1 (1977), pp. 107–​18.

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Part One

Critical contexts for 1970s experimental filmmaking

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1 Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture1 Nicolas Helm-​Grovas

In this chapter I sketch some of the contours of the film semiotic discourse in 1970s British film culture, particularly from the first half of the decade. Although I proceed in broadly chronological order, this does not purport to be a definitive narrative. Nor is it supposed to be another account of 1970s film theory centred on Screen.2 Instead, the aim is to trace some of the crucial figures, texts (translations and critical essays), publications, pedagogical spaces and institutions, almost all centred on London; and to give an idea of a certain trajectory, concluding with the importance of semiotics for the politics and aesthetics of a number of independent films in Britain in the period. While I do not wish to imply that semiotics occupies a unique place in film theory, since it is essential to realise the way it came into contact and reacted with other methods, practices and systems of thought (notably those of radical politics, of independent and avant-​ garde film production, of other intellectual paradigms such as psychoanalysis and Marxism), in this manner sinking so deep into the soil of film culture that many of the most valuable texts and films do not immediately appear as easily labelled ‘semiotic’ works, the objective is to isolate it in order to highlight its specificity. The developments of the 1970s in the UK are in fact traceable to movements in French and Italian thought in the 1960s. Rather than providing 25

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Other Cinemas a broad outline, I merely point to the 1964 issue on ‘Recherches sémiologiques’ of the French journal Communications, published by the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which was to have significant repercussions in Britain, as a microcosm, a sourcebook for the most important issues and approaches.3 As well as essays by Claude Bremond, Christian Metz and Tzvetan Todorov, and Roland Barthes’s ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, this issue contained Barthes’s ‘Éléments de sémiologie’ in full, a work that Peter Wollen –​a central figure in the history narrated below –​states ‘swept me off my feet’ when he read it in Communications.4 Barthes’s text was translated into English as a book in 1967.5 Though Elements of Semiology says almost nothing about cinema, its impact can be seen in the fact that it was the core text for the 1974 British Film Institute/Society for Education in Film and Television (BFI/​SEFT) seminar series on semiotics devised by Ben Brewster, and the first work listed in Kari Hanet’s introductory semiotics bibliography published in Screen the same year.6 It is likely that Elements of Semiology also led British theorists to the earlier texts Barthes uses as his basis, such as Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and Louis Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, which had already been translated into English but are little referenced in British writing on cinema before the late 1960s.7 Christian Metz’s essay in this issue of Communications –​his most influential early work, ‘Le cinéma: langue ou langage?’ –​is hardly less crucial. Even before they appeared in English, the ideas of Metz, one of Barthes’s students, were discussed at length by Wollen in two texts that comprise the central early Anglophone encounters with semiotics in the field of film: ‘Cinema and semiology: some points of contact’ and the chapter of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema titled ‘The semiology of cinema’. The first of these was presented to a BFI Education Department seminar, published in the magazine Form in 1968, and again in Working Papers in the Cinema: Sociology and Semiology, edited by Wollen the following year.8 Signs and Meaning in the Cinema appeared in the British Film Institute Cinema One series, also in 1969.9 Across these two texts, Wollen provides an introduction to and critique of Metz’s ideas, placing Metz’s work in the lineages of both film aesthetics and the semiotic enterprise as a whole, with particular reference to Saussure and C.S. Peirce. Stephen Heath, who like Wollen would shortly be on the editorial board of Screen, gave a BFI 26

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture Education Department seminar in 1970 envisaged as an introduction to cinema semiotics and to Metz’s work in particular.10 For a brief time, then, there was the somewhat curious situation that English-​language critical scholarship on Metz existed, but English translations of his works did not. Instead, perhaps the first text of film semiotics to be translated into English, at least in the UK, is one by Pier Paolo Pasolini that appeared in 1969 in Cinim (see Figure 1.1), the magazine of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op, under the title ‘Discourse on the shot sequence, or the cinema as the semiology of reality’, originally a paper given at the 1967 Pesaro Film

Figure 1.1:  Cover of Cinim 3 (Spring, 1969), which contained the Pasolini essay translated as ‘Discourse on the Shot Sequence’.

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Other Cinemas Festival.11 (The Italian festival was another decisive locus for the development of film semiotics.)12 The year 1969 also saw the publication of a book of interviews edited by ‘Oswald Stack’ (a pseudonym for Jon Halliday, later on the Screen editorial board), in the Cinema One series, Pasolini on Pasolini, which disseminated some of the director’s semiotic reflections to a wider audience.13 Critical engagement with Pasolini’s theories can be found at the same time in the magazine Cinema, published in Cambridge.14 In 1970, Umberto Eco’s ‘Articulations of the cinematic code’, a paper given at the same 1967 Pesaro Film Festival, was translated and published in yet another little magazine, Cinemantics (the fusion of ‘cinema’ and ‘semantics’ in the magazine’s name bespeaking the semiotic or linguistic influence).15 The Eco and Pasolini texts in Cinemantics and Cinim are both accompanied by explanatory notes as a gesture to the newness of the concepts they contain. Those for Eco’s essay are provided by Peter Wollen; his notes go beyond mere exposition into critical commentary, reinforced by their appearance in the magazine not as footnotes but as comments in the margin, as annotations. Taking these texts as a group, something of a contextual network should be visible. Much of the writing in question was in short-​lived magazines with small print runs (Cinim and Cinemantics both ran for only three issues, for instance). Each magazine situates semiotic theory in a slightly different discursive framework:  Cinema has significant Hollywood proclivities for example, while Cinim and Cinemantics, importantly for what follows, place it alongside writing on the avant-​garde.16 As well as this independent publishing culture, a state institution  –​the BFI Education Department –​is central, not merely through its Cinema One and Working Papers publications, but also via the forum of the Education Department seminars.17 It is worth reflecting on the reasons for the interest being paid in the UK at this time to semiotics. The texts by Pasolini, Eco and especially Metz were seen as perhaps able to meet a need already felt in some British film writing –​the need for a systematic method and nomenclature for talking about cinema. As early as his first published article in 1963, Wollen laments the futility of approaching investigations of film ‘unarmed with any methodology’.18 The same felt need is discernible in the exploration of other ‘new’ methods, particularly Structuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s,19 and Russian Formalist concepts in the early 1970s.20 28

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture Despite such claims, there were problems with Pasolini’s, Eco’s and Metz’s early work (the essays of 1967 and before collected in the first volume of Essais sur la signification au cinéma) that were acute for writers such as Heath and Wollen. The gravest issues were Pasolini’s and Metz’s interconnected realist and mystical or romantic tendencies, which in both cases gestured to a continuity with André Bazin’s understanding of cinema.21 For Pasolini, reality and filmic representation basically collapse into one another: ‘The cinema is a language which expresses reality with reality. So the question is: what is the difference between cinema and reality? Practically none’.22 Elsewhere he states, in high Bazinian mode, ‘I believe in reality, in realism’, and that ‘God, or reality itself ’ speaks through cinema.23 Despite the rigour and systematicity of Metz’s work, which had already ensured it a fundamental place in British debates, his early writings separate signification from expression and assign film’s visual regime to the latter sphere: the meaning of film’s mode of representation is natural, global and continuous, immanent to objects, rather than conventional, discrete and pertaining to the realm of ideas.24 The stance that emerges, Wollen argues in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, is a romanticism banishing conceptual thought and justifying a realist aesthetic.25 Without wishing to imply that the journal had a simple, single position, one can see how such ideas would be anathema to many of the writers associated with Screen, as Wollen and Heath very soon would be –​Screen being the discursive space most identified with cinema semiotics in the 1970s. On the one hand, they run up against Screen’s general anti-​realist, anti-​Bazinian problematic. On the other, they sit badly with the journal’s aspirations to scientificity.26 The collection Signs of the Times, containing translations of Barthes and Julia Kristeva, was published in 1971 and led to invitations to the Screen editorial board for two of its editors, Heath and Colin MacCabe.27 Meanwhile, the journal of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, published translations of Barthes’s ‘The rhetoric of the image’ in 1971 (from the 1964 Communications issue) and Eco’s ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the television message’ in 1972.28 The crucial moment for a semiotics of cinema, though, is the well-​known Screen double issue of 1973, which translated two Metz essays from 1967 and 1968, a critical commentary on the author taken from Cinéthique and another by Heath, and essays by Kristeva and Todorov included for context. The issue is nearly 250 29

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Other Cinemas pages long and provides a glossary, bibliography and biographical notes.29 In 1974 Metz’s Langage et cinéma and the first volume of Essais sur la signification au cinéma were published in English.30 The same year, Ben Brewster, editor of Screen, devised the syllabus for a seminar series on semiotics organised by the BFI Educational Advisory Service (formerly the Education Department) and SEFT, which also published Screen. At the same time as advanced researches were being published elsewhere, then, these seminars served a pedagogical function, popularising difficult new ideas and terminology, providing a base knowledge of the field so far. The syllabus reaches back to Saussure and contains sessions on ‘Langue and parole’ and ‘Signifier and signified’, taking in ‘the whole pre-​war Formalist and Structuralist tradition’ (Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetskoy, Jan Mukarovsky) and postwar French Structuralist thought (particularly Barthes, but also Kristeva and Gérard Genette). Metz was pivotal because he formed part of this tradition but unlike others focused specifically on film.31 Having provided something of a timeline, I would like to isolate two broad instances in relation to film semiotic texts written in the UK (i.e., not translations). The first we might call descriptive, formal or –​appropriating Bill Nichols’s word –​‘taxonomic’:32 an implicitly neutral attempt to grasp and utilise semiotics in order to conceptualise cinema. The second is the political and aesthetic mobilisation of the semiotic discourse. Though not consequential, generally speaking the first instance temporally precedes the second; while most of the writings of the late 1960s tend towards the taxonomic, Wollen’s criticisms of Metz already suggest an embryonic aesthetic politique; meanwhile Brewster’s BFI/​SEFT syllabus of 1974 is in the vein of the first, descriptive moment.33 Let us take the political aspect of this mobilisation first. The main point to recognise is that semiotics, in its attempt to construct a science of meaning production, was viewed as useful for an advanced understanding of ideology. A single representative example: in a 1974 interview Wollen states that Ideology isn’t just ideas poured into a mold. It isn’t just ‘there’ in a film. For Cahiers du cinéma, it is impossible to understand the ideology without understanding the mechanisms by which the meaning is generated. Semiology is precisely a study of how meanings are generated.34

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture Much weight is placed on the conventionality rather than the naturalness of signs; semiotics is seen as the denaturalisation of filmic writing, the revelation of it as writing (following Kristeva, Barthes and Eco). For Heath, this is present in Metz even as early as 1966’s notion of la grande syntagmatique (‘the large syntagmatic chain’); in this model the semiotician decomposes a film into its narrative units and classifies each of these into one of eight recurring types.35 Heath describes this as above all an écriture in the sense in which the term is used by Roland Barthes, a set of accepted social conventions of articulating reality, even if that écriture is, in the ‘realism’ of the cinema, naturalised, absent as writing, received as Reality.36

Developments in Metz’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in Language and Cinema (published in French in 1971), strengthen this tendency, as Metz begins to emphasise the coded character of the image rather than the immediate expressivity of reality: ‘What is called reality –​ i.e., the different prefilmic elements –​is nothing more than a set of codes without which this reality would not be accessible or intelligible, such that nothing could be said about it, not even that it is reality’.37 Ideology is conceived by Heath and others primarily as naturalisation of what is cultural, a concept standing in a mutually conditioning relationship with the increasingly dominant anti-​realist paradigm of British film theory I have already had cause to mention: ‘Realism’ in the naive sense in which it is still generally understood in connection with film, is simply the repetition of the forms of the ideological (‘naturalised’) representation of reality dominant in a particular society; in film, moreover, this ‘realism’ is bolstered by a whole ideology of the ‘visual’ which needs to be carefully and continually questioned.38

As well as the limitations of identifying ideology with the single operation of naturalisation,39 this writing tends to overstate the politically progressive implications of semiotics. Heath, for instance, argues that Metz’s stress in Language and Cinema on the codedness of the pro-​filmic world ‘places semiology firmly within the Marxist perspective in emphasising the given “reality” as the realisation of a social praxis’.40 Nevertheless, the use of semiotics as a tool for ideological analysis of film can also be seen to have 31

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Other Cinemas been tremendously productive.41 A case in point is feminist criticism; for instance, Claire Johnston’s ‘Women’s cinema as counter-​cinema’ or a collection like E. Ann Kaplan’s Women in Film Noir exemplify the way this approach might deepen the ‘images of women’ criticism that preceded it.42 In terms of its aesthetic mobilisation, semiotics contributed to a theory of the avant-​garde. Indeed, according to Terry Bolas, the special Metz/​semiotics issue of Screen was originally supposed to be followed by one dedicated to avant-​garde cinema, guest edited by Malcolm Le Grice. When this fell through, the semiotics material was expanded into a double issue.43 While the fact that Le Grice’s material was rejected is emblematic of Screen’s vexed relation with contemporaneous independent and avant-​garde filmmaking, it nevertheless illustrates a desire to link up methodological reflections with experimental practice and to investigate both fields simultaneously. Metz’s own lack of interest in and ignorance of avant-​garde filmmaking is encapsulated in his scathing reference to ‘various experimental films, with their avalanche of gratuitous and anarchic images against a background of heterogeneous percussions, capped by some overblown avant-​gardist text’.44 However, Metz’s theories had by the time of Language and Cinema been stripped of much of their previous integral bias towards narrative, fictional, feature-​length, realist cinema. He now conceptualised film as a meeting point for a vast number of codes (e.g., of montage, of lighting, of actors, of costume) interacting and displacing one another rather than the simple enthroning of narrative as the only coded or linguistic element in la grande syntagmatique.45 As semiotics was understood as a means of making cinematic writing visible, Language and Cinema was amenable to being put at the service of an aesthetic that was modernist in the Tel Quel vein –​avant-​garde film as écriture, deconstructive, self-​reflexive interrogation of its own conditions of meaning. Heath, for instance, writes of how semiotics is constituting itself as the point of this interrogation [of cinema] at the same time that a certain practice of cinema is itself refusing the unreflexive ‘innocence’ of the films that are produced in overwhelming number alongside it, that is itself deconstructing the naturalism of that cinema, working on cinema as process of production of meanings and comprehending itself in its very practice: a cinema no longer of film, but of texts.46

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture In the same essay, he argues for an understanding of Eisenstein’s work of the late 1920s as the vanguard of this cinematic écriture, and speaks of a break between film and text [that] is beginning to make itself felt as radical experience of cinema; whether naively, as in much of underground cinema, in a flurry of activity that occasionally marks a real advance (Rice’s Chumlum [1964]), neuralgically, without any real basis in a conscious theoretical practice (Varda’s Lions’ Love [1969]), in a complex reading of ideological formations, including cinematographic ones, in an activity of deconstruction reduction of cinema (Le Gai Savoir [Godard, 1969], inscribed explicitly and precisely in a space that includes, for example, Derrida and Sollers), or, finally, in one or two scattered attempts at a materialist ‘cinema of writing’ (Méditerranée by Jean-​Daniel Pollet and Philippe Sollers [1963]).47

Much the same position can be found in the conclusion added by Wollen to the third edition of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema in 1972. This conclusion, placed alongside the chapter on semiotics from three years earlier, marks the change that had taken place in this time. As well as reading the history of modernism through semiotics, Wollen advocates a semiotic vocation for experimental film: ‘I think codes should be confronted with each other, that films are texts which should be structured around contradictions of codes’.48 Like Heath, Wollen assigns a central place to Godard’s post-​1968 films, which have ‘increasingly been […] both politicised and semiologised’.49 Similarly, Noël Burch and Jorge Dana, writing in a 1974 issue of the magazine Afterimage guest edited by Burch and significantly subtitled Aesthetics/​Ideology/​Cinema, speak of ‘[disturbing] the functioning of the codes’, of ‘[setting] them in crisis’,50 and of how Work we have done recently on a number of films generally accepted as ‘masterpieces’ by the least venturous of critics and historians, has made it possible for us to state that it is precisely through the work of ‘deconstruction’ and ‘subversion’ of the dominant codes of representation and narrativity that these films distinguish themselves so strikingly.51

By looping back to the political field, semiotics allowed the reconceptualisation of avant-​garde strategies as political –​as reflections on, interrogations 33

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Other Cinemas of, signification, they examine the operations of ideology. The editorial by Peter Sainsbury in the same issue of Afterimage, for instance, argues that ‘[i]‌n studying the constitution of meaning, [semiotics] might be expected to expose the impregnations of the “classical” narrative and illusionist cinema by dominant ideology, and to illuminate the formulation of aesthetic strategies which might be set in opposition’.52 In such theories these writers established their distance from Metz, who argues that his work is merely descriptive, not normative,53 that displacement and destruction of codes are characteristic of all films,54 and who tends to sideline political questions arising from cinematic codes.55 This constellation of ideas, I would argue, is one that had a substantial impact on certain strands of British independent filmmaking in the 1970s, the above political and formal propositions, assumptions, provocations opening up a field of possibilities for film-makers. By way of conclusion I would like to bring forward a few examples. Unsurprisingly, the films Peter Wollen co-​directed with Laura Mulvey can be immediately highlighted. Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons (1974) in particular may be conceived of as, among other things, an attempt to instantiate the semiotic vision of a political avant-​garde outlined in Wollen’s writings of the previous five years.56 In an interview from the time of the film’s release, the film-makers speak of the need to consider Penthesilea as a text that must be read.57 The film itself, perhaps the semiotic film par excellence, is built around an examination of pre-​existing texts and artworks beginning with Heinrich von Kleist’s play Penthesilea. It is a montage of heterogeneous cinematic codes (for instance those of the camera –​static and on a tripod, handheld and mobile, rostrum camera) and representational codes (theatre, plastic arts, verbal language, film and video), juxtaposing speech, writing and image. I would suggest, however, that the semiotic impulse is central to other works. Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (London Women’s Film Group, 1978) retells the same familial drama using different cinematic sub-​codes –​ those of film noir and melodrama –​thus showing the viewer the divergent meanings produced in each case.58 Like Penthesilea, Rapunzel has as its very content the political investigation of a myth or story, in this way taking up the function of much semiotic criticism.59 It also highlights representational systems in the recurring image of the theatre/​stage space framed 34

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture by curtains. Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Collective, 1975), meanwhile, although perhaps not directly influenced by these theories, is certainly readable as expressing similar concerns. The film interrogates documentary’s ability to represent reality, through its use of slow motion and extreme close-​up –​a crisis of faith in the analogical power of cinema, manifested in the black leader that punctuates the film, sometimes accompanied by speech (language, the supreme semiotic field, implied here as a corrective to image). Similarly, the footage of the cleaners shot from a distance, through a window, without sound, seems to figure the obstacles to direct representation. Such strategies are extended yet further in the film’s 1978 sequel, ‘36 to ‘77. All these films are self-​evidently political works, yet they question or reject the realism or documentary tendencies that leftist politics has often been allied with in a way that bears the imprint of the semiotic debates I have discussed. At the end of the 1970s, Raymond Bellour, reflecting on the semiotic enterprise, calls it a sadly dated debate, imaginarily devoted to a discipline that no longer exists today except in bad books, and that never truly existed except in its first incarnations as pure methodological space, as programmatic overture to a work or as a merely virtual study.

For Bellour, by the time he is writing there is no pure semiotics: it is ‘unrecognizable and dispersed’, indissociable from ‘the intellectual inquiry of these last years’.60 Certainly one can agree with the second claim. Yet the interest of the historical trajectory I have delineated above is not so much its attempt at a formal and scientific (pseudo-​scientific, one might say now) approach to film, but rather how the semiotic discourse opened up a range of questions that redounded within and stimulated the theory and practice of political, experimental, independent cinema –​its productivity, in other words. Semiotics was used for purposes beyond its own immediate theoretical scope, for ‘political modernism’ and the avant-​garde, for an aesthetic that was dedicated to countering and deconstructing transparency and ideology. In reverse, it could be argued that film was harnessed by Althusserian accounts of ideology: as seeing was of the essence, film became an exemplary site for ideological struggle. Theory of ideology 35

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Other Cinemas and aesthetic practice appropriated and conditioned one another. Much as the oppositional film culture of the 1970s was marked by a return to the films and writings of the interwar period earlier in the century, as it searched for the building blocks of a revolutionary film tradition, so one can look back now to the 1970s –​to a historic debate, though not dated, as Bellour calls it –​and recuperate what is useful for a political aesthetics in the present.

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Ben Brewster for answering questions via email and for providing me with a copy of the syllabus for the 1974 BFI/​SEFT semiotics seminars. Thanks also to Mandy Merck, Laura Mulvey and Kathryn Siegel for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Notes 1. For consistency, I use the now standard term ‘semiotics’ rather than ‘semiology’, though in the late 1960s and early 1970s the latter is more common. 2. For this, see Philip Rosen, ‘Screen and 1970s film theory’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds, Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 264–97. 3. Communications 4 (1964). 4. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 5th edn (London:  BFI/​ Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 223. I refer to this fifth edition throughout this chapter. 5. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). 6. Kari Hanet, ‘Cinema semiotics in English’, Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 125−8. 7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959); Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1963). 8. Peter Wollen, ‘Cinema and semiology:  some points of contact’, Form 7 (March 1968); Peter Wollen, ed., Working Papers on the Cinema:  Sociology and Semiology (London:  BFI Education Department, 1969). This collection also contains an essay by Frank West, ‘Semiology and the cinema’, pp. 23−30. Wollen’s essay is also reprinted in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, An Anthology, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:  University of California

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture Press, 1976), pp. 481−92. My references are to the modified version in Peter Wollen, Readings and Writings:  Semiotic Counter-​Strategies (London:  Verso, 1982), pp. 3−17. 9. The chapter had actually appeared with very slight differences as ‘Cinema –​ code and image’, in New Left Review I/​49 (May−June 1968), pp. 65−81, under Wollen’s recurring pseudonym ‘Lee Russell’. 10. Later published as ‘Film/​ cinetext/​text’ in Screen 14:1−2 (Spring−Summer 1973), pp. 102−27. The Education Department seminars were set up by Wollen. 11. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Discourse on the shot sequence, or the cinema as the semiology of reality’, Cinim 3 (Spring 1969), pp. 6−11. The original Italian is ‘La paura del naturalismo (osservazioni sul piano-​sequenza)’ (see Oswald Stack, ed., Pasolini on Pasolini (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p. 175). The translator of the Cinim text is not given and indeed the rendering of the essay’s central term is wrong and extremely misleading: ‘sequence shot’ or ‘long take’ becomes ‘shot sequence’, that is, a series of shots. For better translations see ‘Observations on the long take’, trans. Norman MacAfee and Craig Owens, October 13 (Summer, 1980), pp. 3−6, and ‘Observations on the sequence shot’ in Heretical Empiricism, ed. Louise K. Barnett, trans. Ben Lawton and Louis K. Barnett (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 233−7. 12. See Don Ranvaud, ‘Pesaro revisited’, Framework 18 (1982), p. 34. 13. See note 11. 14. Mike Wallington, ‘Pasolini:  Structuralism and semiology’, Cinema 3 (June 1969), pp. 5−11. There is also a shorter piece by Philip Crick, ‘Pasolini: philosophy of cinema’, Cinema 6−7 (August 1970). Crick was editor of the first two issues of Cinim (the third issue was edited by Simon Hartog). 15. Umberto Eco, ‘Articulations of the cinematic code’, trans. John Mathews, Cinemantics 1, pp. 3−9. The essay is reprinted in Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, Vol. 1, pp. 590−607. Page numbers refer to this reprint. 16. Issue 1 of Cinemantics, for instance, includes texts by Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal, as well as an interview with Jean-​Marie Straub conducted by Andi Engel. 17. For the seminars, see Peter Wollen, ‘Towards a new criticism? The first series of film seminars’, Screen Education 41 (September/​October 1967), pp. 90−1. For more on the Cinema One series, see Mark Betz, ‘Little books’, in Grieveson and Wasson, eds, Inventing Film Studies, pp. 323–7, and Peter Wollen, ‘Structuralism implies a certain kind of methodology …’, interview with Gerald Peary and Stuart Kaminsky, Film Heritage 9:4 (Fall 1974), pp. 22−4. 18. Lee Russell [Peter Wollen], ‘Culture and cinema’, New Left Review I/​21 (October 1963), p. 115. 19. For a picture of this see the structural auteur and genre studies in the Cinema One series, such as Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith’s Luchino Visconti (London: Secker

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Other Cinemas and Warburg, 1967) and Jim Kitses’ Horizons West (London:  Thames and Hudson, 1969); see also Ben Brewster, ‘Structuralism in film criticism’, Screen 12:1 (Spring 1971), pp. 49−58; Geoffrey Nowell-​Smith, ‘I was a star*struck structuralist’, Screen 14:3 (Autumn 1973), pp. 92−9. 20. Screen 12:4 (Winter 1971) and Screen 15:3 (Autumn 1974). 21. Wollen, ‘Cinema and semiology’, p. 4. 22. Stack, ed., Pasolini on Pasolini, p. 29. 23. Ibid., pp.  39 and 153. See also Stephen Heath, ‘Film/​cinetext/​text’, Screen 14:1−2 (Spring−Summer 1973), pp. 102 and 109. 24. Christian Metz, Film Language:  A  Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 78. 25. Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, pp. 114 and 120. In his annotations of ‘Articulations of the cinematic code’ Wollen also criticises Eco’s production of a ‘metaphysics of the cinema’ (p. 607n14). Eco’s relatively unimportant place in British film semiotic exchanges may also be attributed to the fact that he wrote little on cinema. Ben Brewster states that ‘Eco’s work is resolutely literary, debouching on a pretty sterile OULIPOian experimentalism (the “opera aperta”) which had nothing to say about the film traditions that concerned us –​ centred on American popular film’ (email to the author, 7 September 2015). 26. For the most well-​ known articulation of Screen’s anti-​ realism, see Colin MacCabe, ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’, Screen 15:2 (Summer 1974), pp. 7−27. The Althusserian assumptions partially determining these positions (e.g., the relation of this anti-​realism to a critique of empiricism as ideology of knowledge through specularity) have been elucidated by many authors. For more see Rosen, ‘Screen and 1970s film theory’, in Grieveson and Wasson, eds, Inventing Film Studies, pp. 270−3; Andrew Britton, ‘The ideology of screen’, in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 384−93; and D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 69−85. 27. Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Christopher Prendergast, eds, Signs of the Times: Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics (Cambridge: Granta, 1971). 28. Roland Barthes, ‘The rhetoric of the image’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1 (Spring, 1971), pp. 37−50 (an alternative translation appears in Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London:  Fontana, 1977), pp. 32−51); Umberto Eco, ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the television message’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 3 (Autumn 1972), pp. 103−21. 29. Screen 14:1−2 (Spring−Summer 1973). Most of the key 1970s Screen semiotics essays are collected in Mick Eaton and Steve Neale, eds, Screen Reader 2: Cinema and Semiotics (London: SEFT, 1981), which contains an excellent introduction by Eaton and Neale.

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Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture 30. Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-​Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), and see note 24. 31. Ben Brewster, email to the author, 7 September 2015. Hanet, ‘Cinema semiotics in English’, exemplifies a similar focus on the dissemination of foundational knowledge. 32. Bill Nichols, ‘Introduction to Paul Sandro, “Signification in the cinema”’, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, An Anthology, Vol. 2 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 391. 33. My description is not meant to replace accounts of a two-​stage history of semiotics provided by, for instance, Teresa de Lauretis, who describes a move from a classical semiology that seeks to describe signifying systems to a semiotics of sign production catalysed by the introduction of the concept of ideology: see her ‘Semiotics, theory and social practice: a critical history of Italian semiotics’, Ciné-​Tracts 5 (2:1) (Fall 1978), pp. 5−6, or Bill Nichols, who highlights the shift from a Structuralist to a psychoanalytic semiotics (see sections 4 and 5 of his edited collection Movies and Methods, Vol. 2). 34. Wollen, ‘Structuralism implies a certain methodology’, p. 27. 35. See Christian Metz, ‘Problems of denotation in the fiction film’, ‘Outline of the autonomous segments in Jacques Rozier’s film Adieu Philippine’ and ‘Syntagmatic study of Jacques Rozier’s film Adieu Philippine’, in Film Language, pp. 108–82; Christian Metz, ‘Bibliography’, Screen 14:1–2 (Spring–Summer 1973). Raymond Bellour traces some of the genesis, criticisms and reverberations of Metz’s model in ‘To segment/to analyze (on Gigi)’, trans. Diana Matias, in Constance Penley, ed., The Analysis of Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 193–7. 36. Heath, ‘Film/​cinetext/​text’, p. 118. 37. Metz, Language and Cinema, p. 103. As Heath notes, Metz was probably influenced here by Eco, who is at pains to emphasise the conventional over natural character of cinematic signs in ‘Articulations of the cinematic code’. See Stephen Heath, ‘The work of Christian Metz’, Screen 14:3 (Autumn 1973), p. 10. 38. Stephen Heath, ‘Introduction: questions of emphasis’, Screen 14:1−2 (Spring− Summer 1973), p. 11. 39. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 58−61. 40. Heath, ‘Questions of emphasis’, p. 11. A more balanced, cautious account of the political valences of semiotics is given in Chuck Kleinhans, ‘New theory, new questions: introduction to special section’, Jump Cut 12−13 (December 1976), http://​www.ejumpcut.org/​archive/​onlinessays/​jc12-​13folder/​intro.newtheory. html, accessed 8 January 2016. 41. I have left to one side (partly for space reasons, partly because less germane to the history I am narrating) the way semiotics, from the early 1970s onwards, interacts with psychoanalysis and theories of ideologies to produce a (purportedly

39

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Other Cinemas political) theory of the placement of the viewing subject by the film/​text. For commentary on this see the Rosen, Britton and Rodowick texts listed in note 26. 42. Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s cinema as counter-​cinema’, in Claire Johnston, ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: SEFT, 1973); E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1978), especially Richard Dyer, ‘Resistance through charisma:  Rita Hayworth and Gilda’, pp.  91−9. See also the introduction to section 1 on ‘Images and Signs’ in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–​1985 (London and New York: Pandora, 1987), pp. 125−6. 43. Terry Bolas, Screen Education:  From Film Appreciation to Media Studies (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2009), p. 207. 44. Metz, ‘The modern cinema and narrativity’, in Film Language, p. 225. 45. For the prejudices in his early work see Constance Penley, ‘Film Language by Christian Metz: semiology’s radical possibilities’, Jump Cut 5 (January−February 1975), available at http://​www.ejumpcut.org/​archive/​onlinessays/​JC05folder/​ FilmLangMetz.html, accessed 11 January 2016; Michel Cegarra, ‘Cinema and semiology’, trans. Diana Matias and Paul Willemen, Screen 14:1−2 (Spring− Summer 1973), pp. 153−4; Heath, ‘The work of Christian Metz’, pp. 22−4. 46. Heath, ‘Film/​cinetext/​text’, p. 104. 47. Ibid., p. 123. See also Heath, ‘Questions of emphasis’, p. 12. 48. Wollen, Signs and Meaning, p. 150. 49. Ibid., pp. 134–​5. For a detailed and lucid analysis of Wollen’s arguments, see Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, ­chapter 2. 50. Noël Burch and Jorge Dana, ‘Propositions’, Afterimage 5 (Spring 1974), p. 57. 51. Ibid., p. 42. 52. Peter Sainsbury, ‘Editorial’, Afterimage 5 (Spring, 1974), p. 2. It is worth noting that the same issue translates Jean-​Louis Baudry’s ‘Writing/​fiction/​ideology’ from Tel Quel’s 1968 Théorie d’ensemble. 53. Metz, Language and Cinema, p. 86. 54. Ibid., p. 102. 55. ‘Cinéthique on Langage et Cinéma’, trans. Diana Matias, Screen 14:1−2 (Spring−Summer 1973), p. 210. 56. Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons is an extra on the BFI DVD/​blu-​ray of Mulvey and Wollen’s 1977 film Riddles of the Sphinx. 57. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, ‘Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons’ (interview with Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen), Screen, 15:3 (Autumn 1974), p. 131. 58. Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair can be watched online on the BFI Player. 59. See, for instance, the description of semiotics as investigation of ideologies such as myths and art in Julia Kristeva, ‘The system and the speaking subject’, in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1986), p. 25. 60. Raymond Bellour, ‘A bit of history’, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Constance Penley, ed., The Analysis of Film, p. 11.

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2 Listening to Women So Mayer

‘A narrative of what wishes what it wishes to be.’ Gertrude Stein.1

Audition ‘It sounds very like a narrative not only it sounds very like a narrative not only allowed allowed for it it sounds very like a narrative to me. To me.’2

Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977) opens with the quotation from Gertrude Stein’s How to Write, given as the epigraph of this chapter. This places the film in a lineage of Modernist experimentation with aesthetic form and language, and particularly in a feminist genealogy of such experimentation. Looking at Riddles alongside Sigmund Freud’s Dora:  A  Case of Mistaken Identity (Anthony McCall, Andrew Tyndall, Claire Pajaczkowska and Jane Weinstock, 1979), and The Gold Diggers (Sally Potter, 1983), I argue that the three films reflexively and critically adopt the unconscious processes of psychic formation identified by Sigmund Freud, such as traumatic repetition, parapraxis and screen memory, in order to formulate a Marxist feminist political aesthetics. Adopting Freudian processes as Modernist strategies, similar to Stein’s strategic deployment of 41

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Other Cinemas automatic writing, the films simultaneously critique and recuperate the potential of Freudian psychoanalysis. There is a signal connection, in all three films, between the gestural and the aural, between bodily and vocal performances, and between a hermeneutics of the bodily and an attention to soundspace. Listening, as much as speaking, becomes their theoretical modality, unpacking Stein’s pun:  allowed/​aloud. Often called ‘theory films’, they use an innovative film language that shaped the essential theoretical writing that described them and ensured their place in the canon. Theorists such as Kaja Silverman introduced both Riddles and The Gold Diggers into the unconscious of feminist film students, foregrounding them as paradigms of a radical auditory cinema in The Acoustic Mirror, and thus maintaining their audibility.3 Both Riddles and The Gold Diggers were only released on DVD by the BFI in the last decade, and LUX has recently made a digitised version of Sigmund Freud’s Dora available on its website, facilitating screenings by emerging curators such as Disaster Film Club and I am Dora, as well as in institutional retrospective contexts at London’s British Film Institute (BFI), Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Whitechapel Gallery.4 Just as the films themselves emerged from an interdisciplinary and fluid movement between filmmaking, performance art, critical theory and activism at the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, attested in B. Ruby Rich’s Chick Flicks, so they are re-​emerging as similar horizontality is reinvented in austerity Britain.5 The deliberate, Modernist hiccupping of the films’ formal strategies created hiccups in reception, as changing alignments in British film and film criticism in the early 1980s became less receptive to experimentation. This particularly affected the circulation of The Gold Diggers.6 In some ways, their intervention into narrative was too successful, interrupting the possibility of their own insertion into film history. Yet it is that hiccupping –​now also temporal, an uncannily Freudian delayed audition –​that makes the films particularly valuable to contemporary audiences. Just as Stein’s How to Write is centrally a guide to reading her work, so these three films theorise and demonstrate their own spectatorial practices, auditioning a new kind of audience able to listen to women –​more able, now, through the subtle yet continuously present influence of these three films. 42

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Listening to Women

Recitation ‘If they wished to talk why did they delight delight makes it one at a time. This makes it a narrative of obligation.’7

Riddles of the Sphinx exactly follows Stein’s instructive investigation into the connection and conjunction between the Modernist project of changing and challenging conventional forms across all the arts, and the equally radical project of redefining ‘what wishes’: point of view, subjectivity, narration, action, participatory reading. To Stein’s Modernist tools of ostranenie (alienation) and language games, filmmakers Mulvey and Wollen add feminism(s), several single strands often uneasily braided, enlarging on the integration of political and cultural feminisms in their first film, Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons (1974). As Shohini Chaudhuri notes, the UK film feminism(s) in question: swerved away from the US trend [towards sociology] by using psychoanalysis, French structuralism, and semiotics […] [British feminist film theorists] used these theoretical discourses to understand how films produced their meanings and how they addressed their spectators [via] […] an unconsciously-​ held patriarchal fantasy, which does not reflect any woman’s ‘reality’ but in which her image functions as a sign.8

As Chaudhuri explains, using the constellation of psychoanalysis, Structuralism and semiotics enabled feminists to challenge the exclusion of a gendered analysis within each approach, and simultaneously to engage with and critique a similar exclusion on the European left. In feminist film theory, psychoanalysis operated as a fulcrum between ‘what wishes’ and ‘what it wishes to be’, between the identity of the narrator and the form of the narrative, as well as recognising the role of wishing –​or the libidinal economy –​in both individual and social formations. The 1970s feminist recuperation and re-​visioning of psychoanalysis brought to the fore what was clearly, from a reading of Joseph Breuer and Freud’s correspondence, the collaborative co-​creation of the ‘talking cure’ by Breuer and his analysand, feminist activist Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.). By recentring the analysand, 1970s feminists both interrogated Sigmund Freud’s later silencing of women’s voices (particularly with 43

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Other Cinemas reference to seduction theory) and constructed a feminist genealogy of psychoanalysis as, in the words of Juliet Mitchell, ‘not “a recommendation for a patriarchal society but an analysis of it” ’.9 That recuperation via recitation is the core strategy and purpose of Sigmund Freud’s Dora, wherein a reading of Freud’s case study is re-​embodied through renarration. It is particularly telling that it works with Freud’s only published unfinished analysis, undertaken with Ida Bauer (Dora), whose tutelary influence (particularly with regard to transference) could be regarded as parallel to Pappenheim’s. The powerful, unsettling strategy exceeds its frame of excerpts from advertisements and pornography, positioning psychoanalysis as semiotics’ supplément. Unlike semiotics, in which women’s ‘image functions as a sign’, Freudian psychoanalysis –​at least initially –​admitted of women as subjects, moreover as subjects narrating themselves, and it is in this guise that psychoanalysis enters feminist film-making. Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ had the brilliant insight of yoking the static ‘image [that] functions as a sign’ to its (im)mobilisation within the structural conventions of Hollywood narrative cinema. What conventional narrative wishes, Mulvey argues, is the containment and even punishment of the sign in response to the perceived threat of castration. ‘Sadism’, she noted, ‘demands a story’.10 While narrative cinema ‘depends on making something happen’, as Mulvey continued, it could also be seen as ‘demand[ing] a story’, as young children do at bedtime, requiring a speech act, and specifically narration.11 It is via this ambiguity that Riddles of the Sphinx makes its intervention, engaging in an act of narration that addresses dominant cinema, signified by a glimpse of a French-​language advertisement for René Clair’s American comedy-​drama I Married a Witch (1942) in the magazine Midi-​Minuit Fantastique, whose flick-​through forms the opening sequence. In the film’s second section, Mulvey, sitting behind a desk to read from a binder, speaks to camera about the myth of the (Greek) Sphinx as a figure that has traditionally functioned as a sign for femininity but is actually a narrative agent. Countering her apparent position as voice of authority –​there is even a small globe on the desk, by her right hand, in reference to the function of the globe as sign in news broadcasts –​Mulvey notes that ‘the Sphinx represents not an answering voice, not the voice of truth, but its opposite: 44

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Listening to Women a questioning voice, a voice asking a riddle’. What would it mean, the film asks, for the querulous, patriarchal-​sadistic demand for a story to be met with a question or riddle, rather than with the reassuring answers to which it believes itself entitled. In posing the narrative agent as ‘a voice asking a riddle’, the film both recuperatively foregrounds the psychoanalytic method –​the analyst who answers with a question –​and, in insisting on the Sphinx as female, shifts the balance from analyst to analysand. The film’s third section examines images of the Sphinx, drawing parallels between the Orientalist and male gazes, its experimental score by Mike Ratledge preparing us for the fourth and longest sequence of the film, thirteen 360° rotational shots in which the ‘narrative of obligation’ that is life under patriarchy is described and then destabilised in favour of ‘delight’. Ratledge’s multi-​tracked synthesiser soundtrack shifts the visual register into science fiction, an electronic transport between ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, European colonial wars in the Middle East, and the present day. For Mulvey, speaking recently about the film: it is very important to have the music mixed with the everyday in the three early sequences of pure motherhood because the music and the rather strange voiceovers represent, in some way, a kind of gesture towards an unconscious. We wouldn’t necessarily say that this is the unconscious but it is a gesture towards the mystery or difficulty of the status of being a mother.12

The aural dimension intermingles the space-​age sound and the female voiceover, whose poetic cadences, driven by rhyme and associative logic, are reminiscent of both Stein and Agnès Varda’s documentary voiceovers. The connection between music, poetic language and female subjectivity –​ including but not limited to motherhood –​was made by Julia Kristeva. As Silverman notes, in her reading of Riddles, within Kristeva’s writing, the image of the child wrapped in the sonorous envelope of the maternal voice is not only a fantasy about pre-​Oedipal existence, the entry into language, and the inauguration of subjectivity; it is also a fantasy about biological ‘beginnings’, intra-​uterine life, and [...] the primordial role played by the mother’s face, voice, and breast.13

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Other Cinemas In the 13th shot, there is a subtle but significant change of voiceover, and thus point of view, from Louise to her daughter Anna. Initially, the film seems to position Louise and Anna as a dyad that displaces Louise’s relationship with her husband Chris, but the shots shift from domestic to various public spaces, as Louise enters into a romantic relationship with Maxine, whom she met at Anna’s nursery. The 12th and penultimate shot is a radical depiction of Louise and Maxine’s intimacy in a red-​draped space that is at once bedroom and dressing room, where Louise reads a dream narration from Maxine’s diary; Maxine and Louise are predominantly visible as reflections in mirrors, as if in comment on Jean-​Louis Baudry’s mobilisation of Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage in his ideological account of the workings of the cinema apparatus.14 Towards the close there is a shot that reflexively complicates any naive invocation of the mirror moment: there is a view, lasting several seconds, of the cinematographer, Diane Tammes, reflected in a standing mirror. She is turning the crank that rotates her visible camera on its equally visible gear head, a realisation of Kristeva’s fantasy. Tammes’s appearance as both presence within the romantic dyad and mediator of memory prefigures Anna’s narration over the subsequent shot, which refers to a number of childhood memories.15 The first three memories Anna narrates conform to the first three shots –​Anna carried by Louise in the kitchen; Anna in her bedroom before sleep; Anna in Louise’s arms as her father Chris leaves the marriage –​but the other memories reported do not sync with the scenes depicted onscreen. The final memory relates to finding Maxine asleep in Louise’s bed one morning. As Ratledge’s music cues us to listen (differently) to the female voiceover, so the appearance of Tammes in the mirror cues us for the revelation that these shots are Anna’s (screen) memories, a film that she is making about –​but also from within –​the maternal dyad and its gentle conclusion, as Louise and Maxine’s relationship initiates a separation for Anna. The revelation that this is Anna’s narration, or confession, over the final shot embeds the scene of analysis within the film, but also moves that scene away from the stereotype identified by Silverman in classical Hollywood cinema, in which the female protagonist is encoded as a mystery to be solved by her own confession of her inadequacy or crime.16 The voiceover shifts from the opening internal monologue of a mother who is never 46

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Listening to Women allowed to feel good enough, to that of a daughter who holds onto the memory of the maternal dyad as a precious secret, described as a Sphinx in a silk-​lined box. Anna’s wish –​the wish that drives the narrative –​is to talk about the maternal relationship, and to delight in such talking. Her recitation, and what she remembers, are configured as plenitude rather than lack, as her current project of ‘drawing acrobats [as] bodies at work, expending their labour power upon the world’ is brought to life onscreen in the fifth, optically printed sequence of female acrobats at work. This is a film that listens to women.

Remediation ‘A narrative of undertaking to be only very well attended is what they used they are used they used it for. A narrative of undertaking to be chosen not solely because of probably remaining.’17

Riddles listens beyond the women represented by performers onscreen, and even those –​such as Mary Maddox –​who provide the voices off. Stein is not the only prominent female artist to be remediated: in the 11th shot of the central sequence, Louise and Maxine visit Louise’s ex-​husband Chris in the edit suite where he works, and he screens a short film that Mulvey and Wollen made for Riddles, based on material from Mary Kelly’s installation Post-​Partum Document (1973−9), first seen as an installation at the ICA in 1976. The film both remediates and recuperates the exhibits –​including Kelly’s diary and her son’s drawings –​to provide an account of the ending of the maternal dyad. This is marked –​as she describes in voiceover –​by her son’s use of the personal pronoun I in conversation; and by his drawings at nursery. The aural and visual fields of representation –​verbal self-​ narration and visual depiction –​are entwined and equally valued. This is modelled through the camera’s steady pan across three screens showing footage and the darkened spaces in between, while Kelly’s voice (marked out by her American accent) is a constant on the soundtrack. Voice exceeds vision once again:  the final narration occurs over darkness, as Kelly describes an ‘Oedipal triad’ that produces weaning, in which the mirror phase (visual field) and the Word of the Father (aural field) are once again enmeshed. The film asks exactly, of Kelly’s work, ‘what they used they are used they used it for’. 47

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Other Cinemas Appropriated to indicate the reframing or refashioning of one kind of cultural production by another, remediation initially meant to correct or make right; to heal. Just as curation has its root in cūra (both care and cure in Latin), so remediation suggestively offers a strategic, even psychoanalytic, method not only to reframe, but to repair, whereby a narrative (including the narrative of feminist experimentation) at risk of fragmentation and/​or erasure is listened to and documented: ‘a narrative of undertaking’. In Sigmund Freud’s Dora, it is Freud’s text itself that is remediated, and perhaps also Hélène Cixous’s theatrical remediation Portrait de Dora (1976).18 The undertaking refers both to documentary, in its use of talking heads –​albeit centrally framed and addressing the camera, breaking convention –​and to Samuel Beckett’s plays, particularly Not I (and particularly the BBC film of Billie Whitelaw’s 1973 Royal Court performance), as an extreme close-​up of a lipsticked, speaking mouth (performed by Suzanne Fletcher) precedes the segments in which the talking heads read Freud’s case study. The talking heads also refer, of course, to the ‘narrative of undertaking’ that is psychoanalysis, and highlight the problem of listening to women, both in analysis and (as Silverman will discuss) in cinema. This is most apparent in the multiple uses of sound:  initially, Freud’s account is read by a voice-​off, while the male performer (Joel Kovel) gazes silently at the camera; he interrupts the voice to continue the account, at which point it cuts to the female performer (Silvia Kolbowlski) who eventually speaks. This disruption of shot-​reverse shot, in which neither a shared space nor an eyeline can be established, is profoundly unsettling. That destabilisation is redoubled by the female performer’s reference to herself/​Dora in the third person, particularly the phrase, ‘she says’, as she is reading Freud’s account (remediation) of Dora’s words. This performative remediation is also contextualised by quotations from audiovisual media  –​television advertisements, pornography –​that add to the sense of performativity. The Dora Collective are working to cure the audiovisual medium/​field (as analyst) of counter-​transference, to return the focus to the voice of the analysand. Similarly, Mulvey and Wollen’s remediation positions Post-​Partum Document as an analysand whose voice is brought forward, an active example of care and cure set against the tabloid hysteria that greeted the ICA’s exhibition of Documentation 1, which included (or remediated) Kelly’s 48

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Listening to Women son’s stained nappy liners, his first form of self-​narration.19 The dreamlike screen space in which the film is remediated may be controlled by Chris but it is framed by Maxine’s expertise. She not only asks, ‘Is it by a woman artist?’ before Chris cues the tape, but also shows Louise how the cellophane on a cigarette packet reverses the mirror reflection of the brand name. She enacts, exactly, the ‘oppositional gaze’ described by bell hooks, as realised by women of colour whose identification is made mobile and critical by the insistence on whiteness as an attribute of to-​be-​looked-​at-​ ness.20 As a black woman, Maxine, played by popular television performer Merdelle Jordine who went on to play Trina Jameson in Crossroads, not only disrupts the heteronormative paradigm, but also queries the function of woman as sign, both initiating and standing for a feminist remediation. In Thriller (1979) and The Gold Diggers, Sally Potter repeats the foregrounding of a mixed-​race lesbian relationship as a way out of Oedipus; first, as the woman of colour offers an escape route to the white woman who is still immersed in a negative, patriarchal version of the maternal dyad; and second, as the woman of colour engages in remediations that illustrate the escape. In Potter’s films, influenced by her training in dance, these remediations come from ballet and opera. The Gold Diggers was co-​ created with performance artist Rose English and improvisational musician and composer Lindsay Cooper, with whom Potter had performed improvised music as the Marx Brothers. Just as Riddles remediates and archives Mulvey’s engagement with the Modernist feminist genealogy signalled by Stein and Kelly, so The Gold Diggers presents a rich snapshot of feminist performance art at the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s. The Gold Diggers creates a number of remediative analytical scenes that are reminiscent both of the analyst’s office and of dreamspace. On the surface, the film is a simple narrative in which girl meets girl, girl loses girl, girl finds girl. Celeste (Colette Lafont) is the active protagonist who frees Ruby (Julie Christie) from participation in a bizarre but resonant ritual in which she is carried on a palanquin to a bank, and forced into a courtship ball. Like Oedipus, Celeste has to solve a riddle, which is read in voiceover at the beginning of the film, and which equates the idealised female protagonist Ruby, ‘borne in a beam of light’, with cinema itself. Here, the Sphinx and the solution are one and the same: not man, but woman, and a specific woman who is reliving the traumatic moment in which her mother abandoned her 49

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Other Cinemas on her father’s return home. Once Celeste has rescued Ruby, she sets her to think about the problem of her mother, that classic question of psychoanalysis. It is also a remediation of the frame narrative of Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), in which Lieutenant General Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago asks Tanya Komarova, the niece he has just discovered, about her memories of her mother, Lara (played by Christie), as he narrates what he knows of her parents’ story. By contrast, in Potter’s film, Ruby must rediscover the story for herself by entering and re-​entering a theatre in which a play based on the scene of abandonment is being enacted over and over, and in which she finds herself inadvertently performing. The play looks, sounds and is performed like silent Hollywood cinema, down to Christie’s Lillian Gish-​style eye make-​up. This double remediation of cinema via theatre within film refers to Potter’s previous work in Expanded Cinema, but also, inescapably, to Freud’s theories of dream interpretation, creating a strange fusion of secondary revision, screen memory and traumatic repetition that both points to the persuasive, resonant validity of Freud’s account of unconscious processes, and reflexively undermines them. That process is furthered by dual strategies: a ‘vertical’ (in Maya Deren’s term) set of connections across the film between different kinds of performances by women, which is set against Ruby’s spiral of repetitions. The back door of the theatre through which she flees the men who hunt her opens on different versions of the performance, and then finally the homestead she remembers from childhood. Intertwined with that spiral is the series of performances experienced or dreamed by Celeste, which begin with the ridiculous performance of masculine authority by the Expert, swiftly substituted by a dreamspace populated entirely by (different kinds of) women, who dance and make music together. Potter’s choreographic colleagues from The Place, Siobhan Davies and Maedee Dupres, along with musician Marilyn Mazur, offer an avant-​garde vision of a lesbian feminist performance art bar/​squat that both condenses and memorialises Potter’s 1970s practice and community. The female−female dancing couples, in shirts and braces, mirror and invert the male−female couples in gender-​conforming (and class-​conformist) tails and gowns, from whose embrace Celeste rescues Ruby. Here, the danced labour is equal, and has the everyday quality of Yvonne Rainer’s work at Judson Dance. The bar/​squat also suggests the utopian, willed power of 50

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Listening to Women fantasy and dream for a person –​particularly a black lesbian –​who has freed herself from Oedipus; the dreamspace is no longer an illegible, compressed wishfear, but a clear and heartfelt expression of ‘what wishes what it wishes to be’.

Repetition ‘A narrative mean to I mean to be going to be once said Follow is exchanged for follow. This is one. One one one’.21 The Gold Diggers shares its cinematographer, Babette Mangolte, with Sigmund Freud’s Dora; in both films, her precise framing is signal for the structural repetitions and shifts therein. The focus of the audiovisual remediations in Dora is on repetition: repeated gestures that indicate the perpetuation of hysteria as symptomatic of female oppression. In the first narration from the case study, ‘The Kiss’, a single gesture –​a woman rubbing her throat to indicate pain or difficulty in swallowing –​is sighted and/​ or situated across three semiotically differentiated loci: first, in a pharmaceutical advertisement (for Tylenol, a US brand of paracetamol); second, in a pornographic depiction of fellatio performed by a naked woman; and third, in the description of Dora’s reaction to sexual assault by Herr K., which in Freud’s view translates her shock at feeling the much older man’s erection into the hysterical symptom of a sore throat. As E. Ann Kaplan notes, without critical attention to the historical, ‘[a]‌nalysis becomes a monotonous reiteration of the same set of signs, the same inevitable system’.22 The films suggest that the issue is not psychoanalysis (or, given its use of repetition, Structuralism), but its appropriation to prop up the status quo, which ensures that the same set of signs (including woman) is endlessly repeated. Sigmund Freud’s Dora’s repetitions, far from being a ‘monotonous reiteration’, observe –​as Breuer did in his work with Anna O. –​that what was then called hysteria was defined by such reiterations. The Dora Collective present an analysis of EuroWestern capitalist patriarchy as itself hysterical, unconsciously repeating images and narratives in the form of symptomatic 51

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Other Cinemas gestures  –​of both the body and the film  –​that point both to and away from their traumatic source. Mulvey and Wollen similarly locate repetition within camera movement, framing and editing, and both films engage performance as the source of what Luce Irigaray calls mimesis, or repetition with a difference. Shifts between, and layering of, voiceover, diegetic dialogue (often voiced off), to-​camera lecture, and music indicate the auditory as the realm of Riddles’ disruptive force. The Gold Diggers aligns its cinematographic repetitions with the repeated patterns of conventional narrative, particularly those of the femicidal thriller that Potter had begun investigating in Thriller. It, too, positions performance  –​taking on roles  –​as the necessary disruption. The exchange between the Tap Dancer (Jacky Lansley, with whom Potter had collaborated on a number of live site-​specific performances) and Ruby is a case in point. The Dancer has been trying to perform a solo routine that includes lifts, and failing because of a spiral created by her fear of the audience that causes her to attempt conventional, and gendered, dance language (lifts) within an experimental, feminist performance. Ruby becomes a more receptive, discursive and even participatory audience, pushing the dancer towards a new dance language –​and restructuring the analytic scene once again. Through taking, for the first time in the film, a role in which she assists rather than being assisted, and analyses rather than being analysed, she frees up the Dancer and –​as she heads towards the stage once again –​herself. Confronted by both her (stage) mother’s desertion and the (all-​male) audience’s derision, Ruby –​quoting Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) –​emits the laugh of the Medusa in the face of the Father.

Interpretation ‘It wishes it to be not by the time that they were there. Ten years as little twenty years to be twenty years very well read twenty years having them come ten years remaining to come remaining to come to come. Come along’.23

In Thriller, Colette Laffont (in the dual lead role of Mimi and Musetta) emits a similarly Medusan laugh after reading a passage of critical theory, a laugh that Jane Weinstock read in 1980 as signifying the film’s reflexive, 52

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Listening to Women embodied use of theoretical strategies to critique underlying theorists’ heteropatriarchal and classist ideologies.24 Twenty years after Riddles, Mulvey furthers that argument in her introduction to Fetishism and Curiosity: Feminist politics, when picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the crisis of the 1960s Left, played an important part in putting Freud on the political agenda alongside Marx: ‘Marx and Freud’ […] Feminism’s appropriation of psychoanalytic theory, in the first instance to develop a politics of images, unbalanced the potential alchemical mix in the direction of Freud […] The ‘images’ issue is no longer a feminist issue, or only a psychoanalytic issue, as advanced capitalism consolidates its world power through the entertainment and communications industries.25

Both Louise, in Riddles, and Celeste, in The Gold Diggers, work with communication technology, in roles that, apparently secretarial, give them power over information and the means of connection. Donna Haraway’s socialist-​feminist manifesto, begun the year The Gold Diggers was screened at festivals, describes such workers as cyborgs, noting also that ‘cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction’, and thus is outside both Oedipus and feminist pre-​Oedipal utopianism.26 Celeste in particular becomes alternative media, a counter-​formation to the classical cinema figured by Ruby, a hacker avant la lettre disrupting the circulation of information, which is money, which is the woman as sign, which is information. While Ruby moves through psychoanalytic spirals, Celeste is a decolonialist anti-​capitalist, finally performing the ‘Empire song’ for Ruby once she has worked through the individual trauma of her abandonment and can see the role that capital, and/as colonial ecocide (mining for gold), played in her mother’s desertion of her for her father. Celeste’s interpretation is not psychoanalytic so much as of psychoanalysis itself: connecting its libidinal economy to capital, and to their conjoined circulation as information and cinema. In doing so, she frees both herself and Ruby to pursue their revolutionary relationship –​romantic, erotic, narrative and labouring –​in the utopian space of a re-​visioned cinema represented by the moon on deep water. ‘Furthermore, when l speak of political economy and of libidinal economy, in putting the two together, I am not bringing into play the false question of origin, that tall tale sustained by male privilege’.27 Cixous’s visionary 53

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Other Cinemas comment is a reminder that an essay about psychoanalytic Marxist feminist film can never ask or answer the ‘false question of origin’ but rather must look inward, outward and forward. Like Ruby, we need to free ourselves from the Oedipal myth in order to remake a relation with the mother (or cinema) as political, historical being. The first section of ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ is subtitled ‘A political use of psychoanalysis’: that is the manifesto enacted by these films, both in their critiques of dominant cinema, and in their utopian generation of new images and stories.28 Revisiting them now is ‘a narrative of what wishes’, an attention to (almost) lost objects that still have so much to teach us about listening to women.

Notes 1. Gertrude Stein, How to Write (Paris: Plain Editions, 1931), p. 260. 2. Ibid. 3. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 4. http://​www.lux.org.uk/​collection/​works/​sigmund-​freuds-​dora, accessed 4 November 2016. 5. B. Ruby Rich, Chick Flicks:  Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 220–​32. 6. See Sophie Mayer, The Cinema of Sally Potter:  A  Politics of Love (London: Wallflower, 2009), pp. 60−4. 7. Stein, How to Write, p. 260. 8. Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists:  Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 8. 9. Ibid., p.  18, quoting Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. xv. 10. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975), p. 14. 11. Ibid. 12. Mulvey quoted in Chris Fennell, ‘Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx’, BFI. org.uk, 15 January 2014, http://​www.bfi.org.uk/​news-​opinion/​news-​bfi/​interviews/​laura-​mulvey-​riddles-​sphinx, accessed 4 November 2016. 13. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, pp. 101–​102. 14. Jean-​Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28:2 (Winter 1974−5), p. 45. 15. Christian Metz, ‘The imaginary signifier’, Screen 16 (Summer 1975), pp. 14–​76. 16. Silverman, Acoustic Mirror. 17. Stein, How to Write, p. 259.

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Listening to Women 18. Hélène Cixous, ‘Portrait of Dora’, trans. Ann Liddle, in Eric Prenowitz, ed., Selected Plays (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 35–​60. 19. William Fowler, ‘10,000 revolutions: meet Mary Kelly, the mother of all feminist artists’, Guardian, 18 May 2015, https://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2015/​may/​18/​mary-​kelly-​meet-​the-​mother-​of-​all-​feminist-​artists, accessed 4 November 2016. 20. bell hooks, ‘The oppositional gaze: black female spectators’, Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 197−213. 21. Stein, How to Write, p. 261. 22. E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Integrating Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches in feminist film criticism’, Millennium Film Journal 6 (Spring 1980), p. 16. 23. Stein, How to Write, p. 260. 24. Jane Weinstock, ‘She who laughs first laughs last (Thriller by Sally Potter)’, Camera Obscura 5 (1980), pp. 100–​11. 25. Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye, 2nd edn (London: BFI, 2013 [1996]), p. 1. 26. Donna Haraway, ‘A cyborg manifesto:  science, technology and socialist-​ feminism in the late twentieth century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 291−2. 27. Cixous, ‘Sorties’, trans. Ann Liddle, in David Lodge and Nigel Wood, eds, Modern Criticism and Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 361. 28. Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure’, p. 6.

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3 Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking Steve Sprung and Anthony Davies

This interview with filmmaker and activist Steve Sprung begins with his current work The Plan (2016−), and uses this as a springboard from which to look back and address the burgeoning relationship between a generation of filmmakers and workers engaged in struggles and campaigns in the 1970s. It both addresses a specific historical conjuncture − how workers overcame sectionalism, the development of class politics in the factory –​ and also reflects on the role of the filmmaker/​artist as immersed, connected, ‘functional’ and socially engaged. We will consider the historical practices of the Poster Film Collective, Cinema Action, Liberation Films, the Berwick Street Collective and Newsreel Collective, and comment on their social and political function at the time, looking at what shaped the organisational and film-​making practices of these groups. And we will try to identity and question what we see as a kind of historical amnesia (a by-​product of neo-​liberalism?) that often accompanies accounts of this period, as we try to reconnect the present to the past. Steve Sprung was originally a member of the Cinema Action collective, which he joined in 1972. It primarily gave screenings in workplace and community contexts across the UK, showing films such as People of Ireland (1970), Fighting the Bill (1970), UCS 1 (Upper Clyde Shipbuilders) (1971) and Arise Ye Workers (1973). He later worked on Cinema Action films, The 56

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking Miners’ Film (1975) and So That You Can Live (1982). (These films have no individual credits: breaking down specific film crew roles was an important part of the practice and Cinema Action members took on various roles.) In 1976 he joined the Poster Collective − later Poster Film Collective − which produced numerous posters for local and international labour and solidarity campaigns as well as series of posters on racism and technology for use in schools. He later co-​founded Faction Films, a production company that worked across community and television production that has produced numerous films, mainly for Channel 4, where he edited films such as A Whole Different Ball Game: VoortrekkerRuck (1994) and In Search of da Kat (1996). He edited the last four of Marc Karlin’s films (previously of Berwick Street Collective): Between Times (1995), The Outrage (1995), The Serpent (1997) and The Haircut (1998). Anthony Davies is a lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College. He is also a founder member of MayDay Rooms, an educational charity set up in London in 2011 as a haven for historical material linked to social movements and experimental culture. He has written on art, economics and politics in a number of journals including Art Monthly, Mute, Variant, Texte zur Kunst and Metropolis M.

Then and now: the Lucas Aerospace Plan and neo-​liberal amnesia SS:  In August 2015, I found myself in the Unite Trade Union building in Birmingham, with five of the veterans of the 1976 Lucas Aerospace workers’ audacious campaign to force their company away from military-​related production and into socially useful products, including wind turbines, hybrid cars and low-​cost environmentally friendly heating systems. I hadn’t filmed with them at that time –​and now over 40 years on, here we were filming, with borrowed gear and a crew I’d partially accessed through the recently established Radical Film Network. The film we were embarked on was partly to answer a question: why hadn’t I or any other political filmmaker made a major film about them in the 1970s? In the weeks leading 57

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Other Cinemas up to the interview I’d arranged screenings for the Lucas lads of several films from the 1970s, including Cinema Action’s Film from the Clyde, shot inside the occupied Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ shipyards in 1972; Between Times, a film I’d edited with filmmaker Marc Karlin in the early 1980s which portrayed workers trying to buy their coal mine rather than face unemployment; and The Year of the Beaver (1985), a film edited from material I’d shot in the late 1970s while working with the Poster Film Collective about, among other things, the emergence of Thatcherite ideas under the Labour government that preceded her. Finally, we had watched together a recent speech by Jeremy Corbyn opposing the renewal of Trident and arguing that the freed-​up revenue should be used to set up an investment bank that would use the skills of workers from towns like Barrow-​in-​Furness to develop alternative technologies that could meet today’s needs. (Corbyn himself had been a union researcher in the 1970s, and like the Lucas workers had focused on alternative workers’ plans.) This new film we have embarked on, The Plan, seeks not only to tell the Lucas Aerospace workers’ story, but also to ask what it offers us now, and show how it is perhaps even more relevant than ever. And in order to make it we were developing the methods of work we had pioneered in the 1970s. AD: We talked earlier about Thatcher’s dictum ‘There is no alternative’, and the ‘amnesia’ that 40 years of neo-​liberalism has produced. What do you think has been forgotten since the Lucas workers’ proposals were first on the table in the 1970s? SS:  I think in the 1970s we had more understanding of how key production is − manufacture, the economic base. It can be very narrow and shallow to think that you can actually develop cultural questions like race or gender, that all these things can move forward, without having to engage with the question of production and economy; of how the world is reproduced physically, economically. Who puts the bread on the table and what and how are we going to eat or consume all the things we do? It’s just as limited as the opposite, what is known as 58

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Figure  3.1:  Poster-​Film Collective, ‘Grunwick strike’ (1977) poster. Courtesy of Faction Films.

economism, that is, considering only economic factors in isolation. There’s been this separation from the way things are produced: much material production has moved to other parts of the world while we sit here seeking to develop a progressive culture separate from the actual global economy. Raymond Williams in Culture and Society (1959) argued that you can’t separate high from low culture; you have to think about culture as a whole. Thinking about that culture as a whole, you 59

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Other Cinemas have to newly connect to the base on which you stand − that is production. There’s the ‘bread and roses’ argument, the need for culture, yes, but a culture in which all are encouraged to be active participants, not a mirror of a top-​down world, including a top-​down specialised art world. AD: Do you think 1970s activist filmmaking was more attuned to these kinds of cultural and historical issues? SS:  Thinking about understandings of history, I’ve recently taught in Sheffield Hallam University and found that young people’s historical sense is very restricted, compartmentalised. They would say things like, ‘The trade unions in the past were too powerful, they were taking the country down’… that kind of attitude, which made me think of Patricio Guzmán’s film Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) in which we see him showing a group of students his earlier film Battle of Chile (1971) which confronts their view that the socialist Allende government was creating problems, that the left was too strong, and that the country needed a strong man to put things right. The students didn’t actually know what had happened until we see them watching Battle of Chile − and they for the first time have a different view, and in the next scene they’re all in tears saying they really hadn’t known what had happened. So The Plan seeks to talk about the past from the perspective of the present, through the Lucas plan, which was the most important, the highest moment of development, I think, of British working-​class consciousness in the 1970s. It was a plan that proposed ways of addressing this perceived separation between production and consumption, and who and what decides this, profit or social need; a campaign for workers, in conjunction with their communities, to decide what they should be making, what their communities need. Hence the additional question: why has no major film been made about it? It is looking at a continuum, questions that continue over time. I think that is what we began to explore in the 1970s –​using film to investigate processes, not only snapshots or moments. The Lucas project differed significantly from a filmmaking perspective from, say, the Grunwick 60

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking project, which was more visible, where there were people out on the streets, a huge police presence − more cinematic and dramatic. And because of this perhaps by 1970s standards the Lucas plan was thought by many on the left to be reformist: it wasn’t revolutionary enough, it wasn’t on the barricades and it certainly didn’t have obvious cinematic charisma − no dramatic incidents or fighting on the streets. But more important really, and certainly what I’m more able to appreciate now, is that the ideas were there, it’s a story that can reignite and reconnect us to the questions they were raising and give people an opportunity to understand differently, or anew, what the workers’ movement at its best was all about and what questions their actions pose to us today.

Diverse practices of political engagement in the 1970s film collectives AD: Why do you think 1970s filmmaking worked more with these kinds of continua? SS: Like at any moment, there was a wide range of work in the 1970s. There were some groups making the simple ‘campaign’ films, as indeed there are today. Cinema Action’s early films, Not a Penny on the Rent (1968) about rent struggles, Hands Off Student Unions (1972) about the student campaign to remain independent, GEC 2 (1968) about Weinstock’s rationalisation, are examples. It should be remembered of course that the films were shot on a hand-​wound Bolex camera without sync sound, often using camera ends, the bits of film left over on the reel from TV shoots, or East German Orwo film stock, very high-​contrast black-​and-​white film. It’s interesting to see how inventive they were because of this. But there was also work developed later, that was usually longer and that was trying to dig deeper, to ask more profound questions, films that tried to connect across individual labour/​capital ‘disputes’ and look at the deeper ideologies at work − more about process, as with Lucas. It’s difficult to draw a line in the sand though because there was a depth in some of the work that has tended to be defined as ‘campaigning’ which was about drawing out the 61

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Other Cinemas deep understandings developed by those engaged in struggle, beyond specific campaigns and of a more generalised nature. It’s also important to understand that the filmmakers themselves were developing and the later works were richer. AD: The differences between the collectives were in emphasis and interest. What were you seeking to achieve? SS:  So Cinema Action’s The Miners’ Film weaves a very rich tapestry of themes, histories and then current struggles that could only come from a sustained practice of living with and being part of struggles, not just the coal miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 but the earlier work-​in at the UCS shipyards as shown in Film from the Clyde or the fight against the anti-​trade union Industrial Relations Bill for which Fighting the Bill was produced. The trust, the understanding, built over time comes through in the attempt to represent class consciousness as it was being developed through these struggles. Cinema Action was in a sense the connector, being there, discussing, filming, quite literally in place and time. Berwick Street Collective’s Nightcleaners (1972−5) is a very different film formally − it works much more on processing the image, using slow motion and stop frame. It’s not in any straightforward sense a ‘campaign film’. But it too was made over an extended period of working with the subjects of the film. Also with Nightcleaners there was more process going on at the edit stage –​a vey extended period of editing for which Marc Karlin was very well known. This was possible because although we were hard pressed to afford film and its processing, we owned the means of production and certainly post-​production and this allowed us to give more time to the films. This also happened in the later films of Cinema Action, like So That You Can Live (1982) and my later film The Year of the Beaver. These are all films that were made out of the experience of engagement in struggle, but made at a point when the struggle, the situation, was in a downturn and the films themselves didn’t play such an immediate campaigning role. These last two films are seen as formally richer by film critics and theorists, but from our perspective lack the 62

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking necessary integration into active struggle to be in the full sense richer works. AD: Can you talk more about the various groups in the 1970s and the differences between them? SS: People were respectful and supportive but there were big differences. The theory people did attack Cinema Action as too close to agitprop. Peter Wollen acknowledged this tendency in an interview in Screen where he established what he saw as three necessary levels of political filmmaking:  agitation, propaganda and theory.1 The third was assumed to be more conceptual, reflecting on film form − no prizes for guessing the hierarchical status of this taxonomy! He went on to note that the problem of political film is often posed in terms of one against the other. And this has, in many instances, tended to continue. There was a presentation at the inaugural conference of the Radical Film Network in Birmingham 2014 about the IFA [Independent Filmmakers’ Association] and film practices from the 1970s. It still kept to a well-​rehearsed mantra that there were two types of film:  the political agitational and, in contrast, the films from those more concerned with film form, those which provoked thought. The assumption was that agitational films did not experiment with form or provoke new ideas. It’s a theoretical construct that’s too simplistic. There were films in both camps that were very thoughtful and those that were less so. Into this, on the clearly self-​identifying political film side, you can add the equally well-​rehearsed realism/​anti-​realism debate and you get another theoretical axis that also tends towards over-​simplification. This last layer was brilliantly traced by Christopher Williams in Realism and the Cinema (1980), where he looks at the discrepancies between the debating positions and actual practices on both sides of the ‘realism divide’. The whole thing is more complex than it has been given credit for. The concerns of, say, Cinema Action came from an engagement with workers and an attempt to develop class consciousness, to engage and hopefully capture the 63

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Other Cinemas spirit and thinking of those who engaged in the fight for a better and more equal world. At some points a talking head may be the most radical and significant thing to show, at others critical reflection is needed. But in any case, it won’t be the films in isolation that are determinant. I guess the practice of Cinema Action and what I  tried to continue in The Year of the Beaver was to engage at the point of struggle in a thinking way, among workers who were themselves not only acting but also reflecting within a context of struggle. Is a film theorist trained, interested or able to take account of this? Claire Johnston in Filmmaking on 16mm  –​Some Problems (1979) clearly had no interest in this kind of practice when she noted the kind of discussions Cinema Action encouraged after film screenings –​I’m not sure based on what concrete research –​ the tendency has been to discuss political issues raised by the films rather than the films themselves […] our position would involve a move away from this kind of accompaniment and towards a situation in which the film itself is seen as the political issue.2

Yes, there needs to be room for discussion of the politics of film but as part of a larger discussion. The filmmakers tended to just do their practice, they did their thing, and by that I mean making, discussing and reflecting but not limited to film. Often, people didn’t have much time for work that was of a different order, but in the interests of supporting each other wouldn’t tend to say that publicly. However, it’s worth recording that as practices they were indeed very divergent. Berwick Street Collective was originally part of Cinema Action but came out of it; there were antagonisms but they were also supportive. When we at Cinema Action wanted to go and show a film at the Yorkshire Miners’ Gala and didn’t have a car, I borrowed Berwick Street’s car − there was always support. AD: It seems to me, Steve, that the work of Cinema Action might be understood as having been engaged in a process of 64

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking ‘dis-​identification’, a part of which was to dissolve categories, to challenge roles and specialisms and to function outside the capitalist relation. It’s very different, say, from those practices that reproduce class and sector distinctions where artists/​filmmakers, for example, are defined and measured in terms of providing ‘social value’. SS: Yes, this also relates back to what I  mentioned about theorists as arbiters. A  more interesting theoretical base for the work of Cinema Action might be aspects of Jean Rouch and his kind of ethnographic practice. But really I think Paulo Freire and his reflections on practice would be a more fruitful start. Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building: it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated [...] an insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection –​true reflection –​leads to action. When the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection.3

Here was someone engaged in and reflecting on an active revolutionary process and what this entails, not in a closed prescriptive sense but open, ongoing and evolving, this being really the heart of what revolutionary change should be about: not a moment of simply seizing power but a process, sometimes abrupt, sometimes extended in time, but a continuing process of empowerment. And, yes, to use your language, in this process the dissolving of categories and specialisms, trying to change relations between the filmmaker and the viewer, is key, aiming for everyone to become a filmmaker in a world where no one is. And in this we of necessity are theorising continually, as an aspect of practice. And this is also an important part of breaking down, dissolving. Conventional film criticism 65

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Other Cinemas tends to try to fit work within established containable frameworks, too neat and often too neutering. AD: The methodology and theory behind Cinema Action, then, were consciously breaking away from other forms of filmmaking at the time. Can you explain more about how your practices were distinct from other film collectives’ work? SS:  This was central to Cinema Action’s thinking, though that’s not to say we always lived up to our aims. I think, to make some simplistic definitions, Berwick Street probably saw themselves first and foremost as film-makers or artists, the Newsreel Collective as alternative media, and Amber as closer to the oral history tradition. But all these, practised as they were, had similar elements, creating new contexts for screenings, working with their subjects in a different and more extended way than television would when covering the same subjects, trying to varying degrees and with different emphases to dig under the surface. Liberation Films differed in the sense that they were very much linked to the idea of working with a community and the camera itself being identified as a sort of magic totem that had a power by being present. It was almost as though they were taking the part of Jean Rouch, about the nature of a camera as an object; just the fact that the camera is there starts to raise questions, gets people to ask questions of themselves and of course there’s no doubt that it does. With a picket on a factory gate, you go, you start talking, and suddenly people are talking about all sorts of things that they would not have talked about without the camera being there, that’s a fact, but it is limited and I think Liberation Films did not necessarily go beyond that. They made a film in Balham, London, Starting to Happen (1974), screened on BBC 2 along with a critical discussion with the participants, that was essentially about their methodology, how they worked with the camera to activate a community, about the process of a community coming together activated by their presence, but the process did not seem to deliver beyond the ostensible issue − a pretty small issue, getting a new zebra crossing. Important locally, yes, but not, in my view, engaging with larger forces determining lives. 66

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking There were of course different people within all of these groups who also worked and developed with different emphases. There were many other groups not mentioned here, working with communities, with women’s issues, with race and ethnic minority issues, with local and community history. There is arguably a need for an extended analysis of all these individuals and groups, most of whom knew each other, many of whom worked like I did across a whole raft of projects with different approaches. This would deliver a more subtle understanding of similarities and differences. This could take a form perhaps akin to the undertaking made for the BFI [British Film Institute] book Realism and Cinema, which traces theoretical claims and actual practices around that particular paradigm. Could this be done within the spirit of the work and contribute to struggles here and now? Would it be useful? In my view it would be essential for a deeper understanding of current issues and how we as filmmakers might address them.

Wider influences and creative strategies AD: You studied on the ‘A’ Course at St Martin’s School of Art in the early 1970s and were also politicised during this period.4 What prompted you to work with film? SS: I would have to say first of all attending a screening of Cinema Action’s Fighting the Bill. I  was at art college and had seen a number of political films, such as The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968), which as we know from Solanas’s writing on Third Cinema was as much about the context where the films were shown. There was no argument about ‘isn’t this for the converted?’ as the premise was that people’s very attendance was a political act, they had to go out of their way and in Latin America were often breaking the law by simply seeing these films. There were screenings of films organised regularly by student unions − films from Latin America, from Cuba, on the independence struggles in Africa and the films 67

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Figure 3.2:  Poster-​Film Collective, Year of the Beaver (1985) poster. Courtesy of Faction Films.

of people like Jean-​Luc Godard and Chris Marker. Some were informative, campaigning for support for particular struggles, and others were more directed at raising questions about the nature of capitalist relations. Some of these films were screened in cinemas but many were shown in ad hoc setups and were usually followed by discussion. They felt part of a movement not so clearly defined, but a movement nonetheless. The feeling when watching films by people like Godard even in the more conventional cinema setting was subversive, in that it 68

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking called for a response beyond an idle viewing. The films questioned relations under capitalism, particularly gender relations. Chris Marker’s films too were not only about trying to question the more obvious politics of the mainstream, but were engaging a debate within the movement of those questioning the dominant system, questioning top-​down communism too. Like lots of students, I’d frequented the Electric Cinema on Portobello Road, London, which showed lots of interesting stuff and I’m sure it was going in under the belt and influencing me. But for me, seeing those workers talking in Fighting the Bill, the way they talked, the sense they talked, it was incredible and that’s what got me fired up. It made our college lecturers look tame and somewhat lame. This was stuff that mattered. It wasn’t over there or exotic in any way, but here and now and with people who came across as able to do something useful about it. And when the lights went up and the discussion started, the type of working people who’d been on the screen filled the room and had lots to say. And what did I know? What did any of my university lecturers know that mattered so deeply? Many years later, having screened films and participated in discussions, having filmed across the country and struggled to put pictures and sounds together that could contribute to that ongoing fight, I can now more fully participate. Making mistakes on the way of course, starting with the idea that films should be sync sound and with only the subjects’ voices, no narration from the filmmaker, and ending up making films which are as much film essay as vérité: starting with the idea that every word of the workers involved should be taken as gospel and realising later that there is a need for me the filmmaker to argue with them sometimes as well as continuing to listen, to lead sometimes. The important influences for me come from this engagement, including the idea of giving not just support but critical support too. It was the practice of engaging in struggles and watching the films of them collectively, talking collectively. What was good? How were they different? But more important was the constant political engagement, more Paulo Freire than any of the film gurus. 69

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Figure  3.3: Poster-​Film Collective, ‘Solidarity with Women of Ireland’ (1978) poster. Courtesy of Faction Films.

The Year of the Beaver is a good example because it was not made at the height of the 1970s class struggle, like Cinema Action’s UCS 1 which was directly used in the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-​in campaign. But nonetheless The Year of the Beaver did come out of direct engagement with the Grunwick workers’ struggle in 1976−7. It was a strike of mainly Asian women in north London about basic workers’ rights that lasted almost two years, supported by all the large battalions of the trade union movement. Ultimately it was defeated by an alliance 70

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Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking of the police, mainstream media, conservative politicians and a far right organisation, the National Association for Freedom. This was how neo-​liberalism, later called Thatcherism, emerged under a Labour government dictated to through an IMF structural adjustment programme. When we first started filming in 1976 some of the material we had shot was used in court cases defending pickets who’d been arrested; it was also shown in meetings to garner support for the strike. All of this proactivity, our engagement in this struggle, resulted in a film that people have found and still find enlightening. It was down to us to discover a form for the film. I mentioned earlier the transition from a vérité influence to a more essay approach, but the form came not just from watching films, but from literally struggling to find a means to express what we wanted to say, show and reflect on. I think here it is important to mention the difference in approach to, say, TV at the time where films were researched, written, filmed and then stuck together in the edit, the images only there to generally illustrate what was said. I edited a couple of films for the BBC and the executive producers would come in and watch the fine cut, looking down at the script most of the time and just occasionally checking the image matched what was being said on the commentary. I remember one lifting his head to comment that the voiceover had just said spring but I had an image of winter; he couldn’t understand the idea of counterpoint or the image perhaps telling a narrative that chimed with but wasn’t literal to the text. We independents on the other hand developed the films in a very different way. We worked with film rather than literalising a text and we did this in all sorts of ways, working with the camera rather than only the pen; from the outset right through to the extended editing, the film needed to develop away from literal illustration. Many people have put all sorts of theoretical frameworks onto films like Year of the Beaver, which I’m sure are perfectly valid, for instance that it has a Brechtian style of telling the story that looks at the underlying relations. But even this is quite a limiting way of understanding how and 71

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Other Cinemas why it was made as it is. It was not made with this kind of analysis up front, it was rather that these forms emerged out of a necessity − a simple vérité approach wouldn’t work. The voices of the workers who came to support the Grunwick strikers told part of the story, but we, the filmmakers, having engaged with the strike in a deeper way, now had to speak. For us it meant we had to be strong enough to know that we had that right. The important thing is that we evolved and hopefully made a richer contribution to the struggle. So, when I find myself in August 2015 in the Unite Trade Union building in Birmingham we are certainly all older and hopefully wiser because we have continued to practise, to act, to think, to reflect with film, yes, but towards an engagement beyond its seemingly immediate aims. It will never be simply about making a film but about a larger sense of trying to break down social relations. One of the Lucas workers, Mike Cooley, addresses essentially the same question of categories, specialisms and the relation between the role of the producer and the consumer, when he says in a piece of archive: ‘The way society is organised in general and industry in particular is to make people not think about what they’re doing or how they’re doing it or why they’re doing it […] so we really had to reverse that process.’ We’re trying to work with film, to use it in that spirit.

Notes 1 . Peter Wollen, interview in Screen (Autumn 1974), pp. 130−1. 2. Claire Johnston, Independent Filmmaking on 16mm –​Some Problems (unpublished conference paper, 1979), p. 6. 3. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 47−8. 4. In the late spring of 1969 four members of the teaching staff in the Sculpture Department at St Martin’s School of Art in London began work on a project for students who would be entering the new three-​year degree programme in the autumn. This experiment, which came to be known as the ‘A’ Course, had a significant impact on what was taking place in British art education at the time. For more information see Marina Vishmidt, ‘Creation myth’, Mute, July 2010, http://​ www.metamute.org/​editorial/​articles/​creation-​myth, accessed 23 October 2016.

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4 Platforms of History: Brecht and the Public Uses of Radical History in 1970s Independent Cinema Colin Perry

In the UK during the 1970s, the question of history, in its representation and in the political implications of its practice, became one of the key debates for those on the left, bringing radical filmmakers and historians into dialogue and disagreement. There were two main, significant strands of influence. Bertolt Brecht is the emblematic figure for uses of history for the present; film theorists and filmmakers turned to Brecht’s writing, mining his work for lessons on relations between film form and spectatorial agency. At the same time, important new developments in leftist historical writing and practice (including the ‘people’s history’ movement, the social histories of the New Left and the historiographical work of the women’s liberation movement had a direct influence on a number of filmmakers. While these latter currents shared Brecht’s political motive in using history for the present, they were frequently at loggerheads with one another. By revisiting these clashes and confluences, I argue in this chapter that a rich oppositional discursive field may be constituted precisely through its unevenness and diversity. Any consideration of the uses of history within the present, I argue, needs to account for the heterogeneity, complexity and shared energies of oppositional public discourse. 73

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Other Cinemas From the early 1970s, independent film discourses sought precedence in diverse historical examples: in the avant-​garde film of the Soviets, in activist documentaries of the 1930s, and in overlooked women film directors of classical Hollywood and the avant-​garde.1 Among these influences, one of the most vital was Brecht’s conception of epic theatre, and in particular the idea of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effects), which establish the reflexive conditions for the audience to question historically situated social contingencies. He argued that, by representing historical periods as radically different and dissimilar to the present, audiences could recognise their own time as ‘impermanent too’.2 This notion of reflexivity resonated strongly with what Sylvia Harvey, in a useful essay in Screen on the legacy of Brecht for the 1980s, and D.N. Rodowick, have called the discourses of ‘political modernism’, wherein a commitment to avant-​garde ideals is underpinned and reinforced by critiques of ideology.3 The political modernism of the 1970s reworked Brecht’s early twentieth-​century modernism via new theoretical impulses, including Althusser’s analysis of ideology, the conception of the decentred subject drawn from Freud and Lacan, and the textual theories of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida, among others. As Fredric Jameson notes, it is only apt that Brecht, the revolutionary playwrite, was rethought for a new time and new set of political concerns.4 Filtered through the critical engagements of post-​1968 Cahiers du Cinéma in France, and reworked once more in Britain in journals such as Screen, Brecht’s pedagogic-​participatory aims were rendered complex, deliberately foregrounding the difficulty of what Barthes had called the ‘writerly’ text.5 The intention thus was to ‘activate’ the viewer, to create an awareness of the workings of ideology, that is, in Althusser’s terms, the ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.6 Through this concept of ideology in particular, political modernism shared Brecht’s key concern with the conventions that induced audience passivity, and the concomitant need for avant-​garde strategies to activate it. For Brecht, viewers in the bourgeois theatre are like ‘sleepers’, who ‘stare rather than see’ and ‘look at the stage as if in a trance’, while his own epic theatre was capable of releasing spectators and reinserting them into history;7 while in the 1970s, the viewer’s physical immobility in the cinema was often similarly equated with a sleep-​like mental state (as Jean-​Louis Baudry argued). The audience’s passivity would be further produced and 74

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Platforms of History fixed by the transparency of the ‘realist’ film text, in which cinema reflected the ideological concept of reality, represented as static and unchanging (as Colin MacCabe posited).8 These conceptions of passivity have, of course, been hotly contested over the past three decades within film and media studies (cognition, for example, evidently does not depend on the mere physical stasis of the viewer, and audience agency is clearly diverse and historically situated).9 It is, nevertheless, important to note that political modernist discourse was itself made up of complex positions, with notions of passivity jostling against tendencies to read variabilities of viewing situation and position. For example, in Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure’ essay, the male look is active (and the female look absorbed into that of the male), but certain films (for instance, Hitchcock’s Vertigo) can implicate the viewer consciously within voyeurism.10 Viewers were also understood, increasingly, as themselves historical and complex, and the pleasures offered by Hollywood and the film industry were interpreted as both oppressive and liberatory. For Claire Johnston, in her 1973 essay ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-​Cinema’, Hollywood films, and their pleasures, should not be dismissed in the theorisation of a new counter-​cinema.11 This awareness developed during the 1980s within the context of the historiographical projects of the women’s movement to uncover sources of oppression in patriarchy and myth, as well as in feminist renegotiations of the legacy of auteur debates in the excavation of Hollywood genres, the ‘women’s film’ and melodrama. The shifting understanding of active and passive publics can be traced in developments within political modernism, from an engagement in the early 1970s with semiotics and the individual text, to an interest in discourse theories in the latter part of the decade. This same movement witnessed a frequent denigration of the very notion of history within an embattled, ambivalent engagement with it. An interest in Brecht’s aesthetic (or textual) strategies emerges most clearly in two special issues of Screen, the first published in 1974 and another following the Brecht Event at the 1975 Edinburgh Film Festival. The 1974 issue included translations of key articles by Brecht that foregrounded his antagonistic relationship with industrial film producers in Germany and Hollywood (‘The Threepenny trial’, Kuhle Wampe (1932) and Hangmen also Die! (1943)), as well as other important essays including Colin MacCabe’s ‘Realism and the 75

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Other Cinemas cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’, which posits Realism as an inherently, transhistorically, regressive form. A similar movement is evident in another essay published in this issue, Roland Barthes’s ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in which he argues that the very process of seeing images is ahistorically determined: in a relationship of opticality, a scene is arranged in a fixed triangle for the benefit of the spectator’s eye. Barthes asserts that ‘theatre and cinema are direct expressions of geometry’, and argues against the significance of historical content or themes:12 It matters little, after all, that Eisenstein took his ‘subjects’ from the past history of Russia and the Revolution […] what alone counts is the gestus, the critical demonstration of the gesture, its inscription […] in a text the social machination of which is clearly visible: the subject neither adds not subtracts anything.13

Following this logic, a radical art must be founded on the realisation of a radical, formal, rearrangement of the text that shifts the viewer from a position of spatial omniscience to one of critical reflection. This formalist-​ semiotic pattern is partly carried through into the 1975−6 issue of Screen in which a body of contemporary films are cited as examples of a ‘Brechtian’ cinema (Straub−Huillet, Jean-​Luc Godard, Nagisa Oshima and the Berwick Street Collective), suggesting a canon of works and methods, that specifically drew on Brecht, as the foundations of a political modernist cinema. In their essay on the Berwick Street Collective’s Nightcleaners (1975), Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen unpick the challenges to activist left film in the 1970s, arguing that a political cinema would be historically aware, providing ‘an understanding of the past and set up one central contradiction: between the dominant discourse of the time and that of the film text itself ’.14 The past in such examples is not used as an allegory or fable (as in much of Brecht’s work), but it nevertheless operates abstractly, called upon to draw attention to temporality, to contingency, and to the mutability of reality itself. These neo-​Brechtian debates set the groundwork for further discourses on the role of avant-​garde aesthetics in problematising historical narration. In 1977, the theme of the special event in Edinburgh was ‘History/​Production/​ Memory’, with a focus on the terrain of ‘popular memory’, grassroots and oral history, which had exploded in the UK, Europe and North America from the late 1960s onwards. At Edinburgh, the assumptions of the vitality 76

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Platforms of History of popular histories reliant on direct testimony and personal memory are contrasted with an interest in the notion of a materialist, constructed, historiography. At stake in these arguments is a concept of the need for a reflexive narration emphasising textuality, in contrast to a conception of the past as transparent and directly accessible through memory and speech. In the magazine published following the 1977 Edinburgh event, these concerns coalesced around an interview with Michel Foucault previously published in Cahiers du Cinéma (issue 251–​2, July−August 1974), in which two film writers (Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana) contrast the ‘fake archaeology of history’ evident in the bourgeois film industry and the ‘true archaeology’ of popular history.15 In her introduction to the English translation of this interview, Johnston critiqued Cahiers for its ‘crude, conspiratorial conception of ideology […] rooted in a romantic idealism of post-​’68 France’, that fails to take seriously Foucault’s own genealogical analysis of discourses.16 In the same publication, Stephen Heath continues this line of argument by recalling Brecht’s challenge to history: […] in the realm of artistic practice the watchwords of a Brecht are not memory and recovery but, more urgently, crisis or destruction. Effective memory for struggle that is, will not be a function of the past but of the present, will be a production.17

In Heath’s argument, the construction of the subject, and of history, is not an ‘immanence’, but is fractured, and the ‘production of discourse’. This reveals a shift within political modernism from a focus on the singular text (as in the Barthes essay discussed earlier), to a Foucauldian notion of discourse, of multiple points of intersecting communication. Following the 1977 Edinburgh special event, and the increased vitality of a Foucauldian notion of discourse, debates in Screen frequently called for a historical understanding of the film spectator.18 For Willemen, following Heath, ‘Real readers are subjects in history, living in given social formations, rather than mere subjects of a single text’.19 For Johnston, writing in 1979, the challenge for feminist film discourse was increasingly to locate viewers within the historical conjunction of discourses in which they were embedded: The problem must be thought in terms of which set of discourses the text encounters and how this encounter may restructure the

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Other Cinemas productivity of the text and the discourses with which it combines to form an inter-​textual field in ideology and history.20

However, this discursive turn nevertheless tended to remain theoretical and curiously ahistorical. Willemen, for example, remained deeply resistant to a notion of history as ‘empiricism’.21 (Lacking recourse to case studies, it is unsurprising, therefore, that he offers no analysis of actual historical audiences.) Nevertheless, it is clear that an examination of discourses situated within an ‘inter-​textual field’ might also lead towards an enriched understanding of those debates that may have had a wider oppositional importance to independent film practice and discourse, but that were often left outside the specific manifestations of political modernist film debate. An examination of these wider intersections will help to clarify the place that political modernist discourse, and the practices of independent filmmakers, occupied in relationship to the rich terrain of counterpublic debate in the 1970s. It is particularly useful here to reconsider the influence of British cultural historians and public intellectuals such as Christopher Hill, Sheila Rowbotham, Raphael Samuel, E.P. Thompson, Jeffrey Weeks or Raymond Williams (the latter was the most frequent visitor to Screen) on independent cinema, both as a practice and as a critical discourse. These intellectuals brought dissident socialist historical debate into the realms of television, newspapers, the alternative press, novels and popular histories, as well into academic scholarship. Their research fed into numerous socialist tendencies, from the New Left (E.P. Thompson had been involved since the mid-​ 1950s), socialist feminism (Rowbotham had been a key organiser within the women’s liberation movement), to the Gay Left (Weeks was a key contributor to the Gay Left journal). Like Brecht, such writers argued for the need for history to be activated in the present. Hill argued that history must be ‘rewritten in every generation’ to ‘rescue a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as “the lunatic fringe” ’; and Rowbotham wished her writing to be ‘useful […] as part of a continuing effort to connect feminism to socialist revolution’.22 As public intellectuals, these writers spoke in urgent and personable modes, carving out a new audience from a broad oppositional demographic: Raymond Williams, for example, combined history with literary thought within the wider ‘radical public sphere’ of the 1970s and 1980s in Britain.23 78

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Platforms of History Despite the popularity of such writing, it was sometimes problematic for film theorists influenced by Althusser: for historical writing was, Althusser argued, predicated on the assumption that the past was accessible, that it could be summoned ‘empirically’, rather than constituted within ideology.24 Within oppositional debate, a rupture appeared that led to refusals on both sides: some cultural historians (such as Thompson) remained stubbornly averse to theory; and most political modernists (such as Willemen) resisted the ‘empirical’ research that would have supported their calls for research into audience specificities.25 Such tensions underpinned the antipathies that became manifest in the Cahiers du Cinéma debates on ‘people’s history’ and historiographical method in general, as well as in the reflections on these debates within the Edinburgh Film Festival and Screen. Despite these antipathies, however, cultural historians evidently did have an impact on the work of a number of independent filmmakers in the 1970s. For example, Christopher Hill’s writing on the tumult of revolutionary seventeenth-​century England echoed powerfully with the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and can be traced clearly in a number of independent films. These films were hybrids, fusing the discourses of populist cultural history with newer reworkings of Brecht. For example, Winstanley (1975, Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo) utilises non-​professional actors reading historical texts verbatim, alongside the detailed narrative of Gerrard Winstanley, the Leveller leader, in a reworking of his story that had been developed previously by David Caute (as a novel) and John McGrath (as a play).26 In the Forest (Phil Mulloy, 1977) is a historical costume drama looking at several centuries of developing class consciousness, from the anarchic forest-​dwelling peasants of the Middle Ages to the dawn of the union struggle in the nineteenth century. Because I am King (Stewart Mackinnon/​Trade Films, 1980) includes spoken quotations from the Ranter Abiezer Coppe’s tract A Fiery Flying Roll (1649), a visionary text soaked with prophecies of the coming of the Levellers and the ‘end of days’, and prefiguring William Blake’s railing against the ‘dark satanic mills’ of the industrial revolution.27 Because I am King is thoroughly Brechtian: it is made up of a series of disconnected episodes, and includes extensive footage of a re-​performance of the Brecht−Hindemuth Lehrstück of 1929. Such neo-​Brechtian works owe an obvious debt to the costume drama of Straub−Huillet, but they also clearly draw on Hill’s popular writing on the ‘world turned upside down’. 79

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Other Cinemas Another interesting intersection of popular historical research and neo-​Brechtian discourse is evident in Cinema Action’s So That You Can Live (1982). A ‘people’s history’ filmed over a five-​year period in south Wales and centring on the lives of a single working-​class family (Shirley, Roy, Royston and Diane Butts), So That You Can Live is edited non-​ chronologically, with extensive use of quotation from the writing of Raymond Williams including his The Country and the City.28 The film is an uneasy hybrid, the textual quality valued within political modernism (emphasised by the editing process and the use of Williams’s writing) placed alongside the cinéma vérité sequences (which deliver a testimonial form of documentary evidence). These mixed methods led to both praise and criticism. Writing in Screen in 1982, Mandy Merck and Sue Aspinall argued that while So That You Can Live makes a refreshing move beyond the working-​class militancy of Cinema Action’s earlier films, it suffers from a loss of the sense of contradiction between country and city found in Williams’s writing, instead ‘creating an elegaic [sic] mood reminiscent of the Augustan idealisation of the obscure countryman dwelling in rural simplicity’,29 harking back to a lost unity of class struggle and militancy. Aspinall and Merck’s review echoes earlier critiques of identity derived from psychoanalytical-​Marxist theory that were central to the oppositions between political modernism and older socialist conceptions of class unity. For example, in the 1975/​6 ‘Brecht’ edition of Screen, Johnston and Willemen had argued for a form of film that might resist the ‘mythical unity of consciousness’ within class struggle in order to ‘confront the contradiction between sexism and class struggle’.30 In the Edinburgh 1977 magazine, Colin MacCabe extended this observation in relationship to socialist historical work, arguing that ‘discussions of memory have always been linked to problems of identity’, and that these issues include both the liberal notion of the atomised self and the collective subject of the working class assumed within politically left historical work.31 He argues: To talk of a working class or popular memory may all too easily lead to talking of class as a collective subject. A class, however, is not a subject, an identity, but rather the ever-​changing configuration produced by the forces and relations of production.

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Platforms of History Such views assume binary positions: the use of ‘empirical’ historical evidence and the idealisation of class identity in social histories versus the theoretical speculation of political modernism and its refusal of identity. If these positions at first seem irreconcilable, however, it is retrospectively evident that they shared fundamental goals as oppositional discourses rooted in Marxism, both deeply opposed to the dominance of liberalism and capital. Both political modernism and cultural history thus existed as part of the circulation of diverse ‘counterpublic discourses’, presenting a constant tarrying of ideas that are never fully resolved, and which worked towards the same broad goal of historical change. The notion of ‘counterpublic discourse’, drawn from the work of Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner and others, delineates a terrain of open discourse in which ideas are shared and contested via published materials.32 This theory helps to elucidate how various forms of discourse meet, and meld or clash. If the roots of public sphere discourse in Jürgen Habermas’s examination of the emergence of the literary ‘bourgeois public sphere’ suggest a single, normative ‘sphere’, Fraser and Warner assert that there are numerous publics centred on oppositional publishing activities.33 Public sphere theory, following Fraser, does not demand consensus as a goal in counterpublic discourse; what is instead vital is critical dissensus. Public sphere theory thus begins to account for the agonistic interrelation of the discourses of film theory and oppositional historical literature in the 1970s. Of particular importance here is the intersection of feminist and historical writing (Fraser cites the publishing activities of the US ‘feminist subaltern public’ as a key example of a pluralistic, partisan, oppositional discourse).34 In the British context, feminist activist-​historians such as Rowbotham, Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor were involved with the History Workshop group, and were instrumental in the development of the women’s liberation movement. Feminist historians contributed to a burgeoning feminist literary sphere (Rowbotham wrote in Shrew and Spare Rib; Taylor in Red Rag). At the same time, feminist film writers often contributed to the same journals and publications, or were members of the same collectives and discussion groups: Claire Johnston and Susan Clayton contributed writing to Shrew and Spare Rib; Alexander, Mulvey and others were 81

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Other Cinemas involved in the women’s History Group, where debates ranged from history to Engels and Lacan.35 Independent filmmakers were themselves often either directly involved in the women’s liberation movement (London Women’s Film Group), were supportive of its campaigns (Newsreel’s An Egg is Not a Chicken (1975) supported the National Abortion Campaign), or were made with contributions from socialist feminist writers (Rowbotham and Alexander featured in Nightcleaners, and Taylor was an important adviser on Song of the Shirt (Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, 1979)). This notion of counterpublics constituted through publishing needs to be modified in consideration of another conception of public discourse whose model is that of speech taking place within a delineated material space. Brecht’s notion of the theatre is a key model here. For Brecht, the theatre was a site of revolutionary historical struggle, an arena in which audiences could come to recognise their collective agency in processes of social change. A crucible for new forms of collective empowerment, agency and discourse, the theatre was, as Walter Benjamin asserted in his draft version of ‘What is epic theatre’ (1930−1), a ‘public platform’, in which the viewers are ‘an assembly of interested persons whose demands [the stage] must satisfy’.36 This spatialised notion of public action can be found in a range of arguments, from the conception of the theatre advocated by Brecht and Benjamin, and revived recently by Alain Badiou, to Hannah Arendt’s revisited ideal of the Greek agora.37 The possibility of an oppositional public is understood here as one of speech between co-​present agents, with the stage as a synecdoche of a political rally or meeting. Spatialised public sphere theories are problematic in many respects, for they may idealise the collective mass, and portray that which is political as only those (traditionally) male-​inscribed terrains of visibility, excluding those ‘private’ terrains of the home and family.38 They also fail to account for forms of discursive communication that exceed the spatial limits of the agora, street or theatre, and which are essential to the formation of nations and transnational publics. However, these notions of spatialised public discourse are significant, for they have been an important strategy for enabling those outside of published public discourse to be heard. Indeed, it is evident that such spatialised counterpublics do not preclude reading, for it is precisely in collective and oppositional groups that texts were and are often read, distributed and collectively produced. Open conversation 82

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Platforms of History allowed ideas to flow, and these discussions could then be recorded and reported on in newsletters, journals and books. This conjunction of distributive published and spatial publics is essential to counterpublic discourse: for example, numerous publications that emerged around spatial events such as the Edinburgh Film Festival, the gatherings and meetings of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association; publications also emerged through history workshops and oral history projects; and the constant presence of voiceovers, direct-​to-​camera address, and quoted speech in the neo-​Brechtian cinema of the period. The discursive site was also central to the ‘social practice’ of cinema that emerged in independent film debates from the mid-​1970s. Here, the film became a node within consciousness raising, or an educative-​discursive platform, in which the work acts as a catalyst for a seminar-​like discussion, for the reading and production of new texts. The Independent Filmmakers’ Association, The Other Cinema and even the BFI championed the social practice of cinema, with film screening becoming the pretext for a critically reflective discussion between invited speakers and the audience. These activities were a more deliberate extension of the collective filmmaking activities of Cinema Action, Berwick Street Collective, London Women’s Film Group, Newsreel Collective and Liberation Films, in which films or videos were taken to sites of alternative and even militant discourse, including union meeting rooms and shop floors. Within the social practice of cinema, a self-​conscious focus on the role of the audience as producer of meaning is invoked. Such a practice was, Ben Brewster argued, a means of moving beyond Brecht’s ‘fundamental reproach’ to the cinema: the inability for an active relationship to be established between audience and actors (who are, after all, locked temporally and spatially beyond the viewer).39 The first means beyond this situation that Brewster cites is the development of neo-​Brechtian aesthetics (Verfremdungseffekt); the second is the spatialised ideal of public gathering and communication, modified (via Brecht) to transform the cinema into a public agora. An example of this mixing of forms of spatial public debate and distributive publicity can be found in Song of the Shirt. The film is indebted to the literary counterpublic of feminist historical discourse of the 1970s, taking as its subject the role of patriarchy within a history of reformism and social welfare emerging in the nineteenth century, where women’s labour (hours and 83

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Other Cinemas conditions of work) was regulated not so much for emancipation as to return her to the discipline of the family unit.40 The film’s debt to neo-​Brechtian discourse is evident in its episodic structure, deliberate anachronisms and intertextual references (the film is composed of a series of ‘conversations’ about politics and historical situations, which can be expanded on in post-​ screening debates). At the same time Song of the Shirt is also a key example of the ‘social practice’ of cinema, in which the physical co-​presence of the audience and filmmaker engaged in spoken discourse was as vital as the consumption of a finished film (it was screened at a number of academic and non-​academic educational institutions, with audience comments reported on and published in the BFI’s 1979/​80 production catalogue).41 Independent cinema was evidently founded on an insistent hybridity of forms of public engagements that were governed by both idealism and pragmatism. Writing for a meeting of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association in 1976, Claire Johnston cites Brecht and Benjamin to warn of a concept of ‘independence’ simply as free from ‘productive forces alone’, without a concept of how a radical aesthetics may intervene in ideology (for example, collectives who make films using what she regards as naive cinéma vérité techniques).42 At the same time, she critiques the notion that experimental formal intervention in the film text is sufficient as a radical tactic for public action, arguing that a deeper consideration of the relationship between cinema and specific audiences is necessary. The notion of diverse publics within independent film in the 1970s brings a whole cultural field of oppositional debate and action into visibility: a dense web of discourses and practices that are themselves positioned within a time that has since passed. This is not only a historical matter, because the complex interplay of public discourses is also vital for an understanding of the political and affective force of film and video today. It is the potential for film and video to foment ideas and resonate with existing publics –​today, these include a raft of new political formations and parties on the left –​that will enrich and encourage the development of new socio-​political horizons.

Notes 1. For example, Screen (12:4 (Winter 1971)) published texts on Novy Lef; the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival included a section on overlooked women directors in

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Platforms of History Hollywood selected by Claire Johnston, Lynda Myles and Laura Mulvey; the late 1970s saw an increased interest in oppositional documentary traditions in Britain. See Don Macpherson and Paul Willemen, Traditions of Independence: British Cinema in the Thirties (London: British Film Institute, 1980). 2. Bertolt Brecht and John Willett, ‘A short organum for the theatre’, in John Willett, Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 179–​205. Brecht’s theatre was historical in more literal ways too, presenting moments of Europe’s past through the ‘crude thought’ of his self-​avowed ‘vulgar Marxism’, providing the audience with diverse historical scenarios, from the 12th (Edward II) to the 17th (Mother Courage) centuries, in which greed and tradition constrain the realisation of social collectivity. Brecht was thus vitally involved in history as a discourse, as a set of publicly shared narratives open to contestation. Moreover, his activist work is eminently discursive in its uses of not only theatre but also distributive media –​the radio, film, and articles published in newspapers, journals and books. Perhaps the best example of his use of media was his tarries with the judicial system and the mainstream media in the ‘The Threepenny lawsuit’ (1931−2). See Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’, in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio (London: Methuen, 2001), pp. 147–​99. 3. Sylvia Harvey, ‘Whose Brecht? Memories for the eighties’, Screen 23:1 (1982), pp. 45–​59; D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism:  Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Criticism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). 4. Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998). 5. Roland Barthes, S/​Z (Maleden, MA: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991 [1974]). 6. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 162. One key distinction between Brecht and his successors in the 1970s was the notion of intelligibility. In his epic theatre as well as in his Lehrstück (learning-​plays), Brecht was committed to the use of historical allegory and anachronisms that would clearly elucidate the failures of capital and bourgeois individualism. For more on Brecht’s influence on Cahiers du Cinéma, see George Lellis, Bertolt Brecht: Cahiers du Cinema and Contemporary Film Theory (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research, 1983). 7. Brecht and Willett, ‘A short organum for the theatre’, p. 187. 8. Jean-​Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, Film Quarterly 28:2 (1974), pp. 39–​47; Colin MacCabe, ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’, Screen 15:2 (1974), pp. 7–​27. 9. Critiques of the notion of a passive viewer within political modernism have been developed from a number of perspectives. One significant challenge has emerged from feminist writing on audiences, notably by Judith Mayne, B. Ruby Rich, Mary Ann Doane and Annette Kuhn. Another important challenge

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Other Cinemas emerged from cognitive film theory, with direct attacks by Noël Carroll and David Bordwell. 10. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975), pp. 6–​18. 11. Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s cinema as counter-​cinema’, in Sue Thornham, ed., Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 [1973]). 12. Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, Screen 15:2 (1974), p. 33. 13. Ibid., p. 37. 14. Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, ‘Brecht in Britain: the independent political film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen 16:4 (1975), p. 104. 15. Claire Johnston, ed., Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine: number 2: History/​Production/​ Memory (1977), p. 20. Also see Michel Foucault, ‘Anti-​retro’, Cahiers du Cinéma 251:2 (1974), pp. 5–​17. 16. Johnston, ed., Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine, p. 18. 17. Stephen Heath, ‘Contexts’, Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine, pp.  37–​43. Heath goes on to argue that a notion of history should not be posited that escapes the cinema’s imaginary relations. Heath’s argument draws on Christian Metz’s ‘Imaginary signifier’ essay, which reflects on the contrast between cinema and the theatre in terms of a spatial, participatory relation between audience and actors, which Metz argues is most fully realised in Brecht’s work. For Heath, moreover, history itself may be conceived of as cinematic, in that it invokes a peculiar present-​absence: ‘film is like history, absent in the representation, in the past presented; history is like a film, another genre but the same narrative patterns, the same familiarity, without problem or division’ (ibid., p. 42). See also Christian Metz, ‘The imaginary signifier’, Screen 16:2 (1975), pp. 14–​76. 18. Paul Willemen, ‘Notes on subjectivity:  on reading Edward Branigan’s “Subjectivity under siege” ’, Screen 19:1 (1978), pp. 41–​70; Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, ‘On authorship’, Screen 20:1 (1979), pp. 35–​ 61; Claire Johnston, ‘The subject of feminist film’, Screen 21:2 (1980), pp. 27–​34. 19. Willemen, ‘Notes on subectivity’, p. 4. 20. Johnston, ‘The subject of feminist film’, p. 34. 21. Willemen, ‘Notes on subjectivity’, p. 43. 22. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down:  Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London:  Penguin, 1991 [1972]), pp. 15−16; Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance and Revolution:  A  History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (London: Verso Books, 2014 [1972]), p. 7. 23. Perry Anderson and Stefan Collini have explored the role of Raymond Williams as a public intellectual. See Perry Anderson quoted in Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 189. 24. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading ‘Capital’ (London:  New Left Books, 1970).

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Platforms of History 25. E.P. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors (London:  Merlin Press, 1978). 26. Hill’s accounts of the Diggers and Levellers had been popularised in David Caute’s novel Comrade Jacob (London: Andre Deutsch, 1961) (Caute had been a student of Hill’s), and in a 1969 theatre production of the same name by socialist playwright John McGrath. The actors included Sid Rawle, a well-​ known leader of the squatter group called the Hyde Park Diggers who had been dubbed ‘the King of the Hippies’ by the national press. 27. Coppe is profiled in-​depth in Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, and Thompson has written extensively on Blake. 28. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1975). 29. Sue Aspinall and Mandy Merck, ‘So that you can live, II’, Screen 23:3−4 (1982), pp. 157–​60. 30. Johnston and Willemen, ‘Brecht in Britain’, p. 104. 31. Colin MacCabe, ‘Memory, phantasy, identity: “Days of Hope” and the politics of the past’, Edinburgh ‘77 Magazine, p. 13. 32. Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1993), pp. 109–​42; Michael Warner, ‘Publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version)’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88:4 (2002), pp. 413–​25. 33. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 34. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the public sphere’, p. 123. 35. Mary Kelly, A Secret Agreement: An Era Defined by the Events of 1968 (2015) [online], http://​www.tate.org.uk/​whats-​on/​tate-​modern/​talks-​and-​lectures/​ mary-​kelly-​conversation-​hans-​ulrich-​obrist/​secret-​agreement, accessed 13 July 2015. The entwinement of these discourses would necessitate a much more detailed study. Some examples include Laura Mulvey and Margarita Jimenez, ‘The spectacle is vulnerable: Miss World, 1970’, Shrew (December 1970). Spare Rib included coverage of the Women’s Event at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival penned by members of the London Women’s Film Group (issue 5, November 1972), Claire Johnston reviewed Nightcleaners (issue 40, October 1975), Sue Clayton reviewed So That You Can Live (issue 117, April 1982). 36. Walter Benjamin and Stanley Mitchell, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso Books, 2003 [1998]), p. 3. 37. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Alain Badiou, ‘Rhapsody for the theatre: a short philosophical treatise’, Theatre Survey 49:02 (2008), pp. 187–​238. 38. Fraser and Warner point out that spatial ideas of the public have their limits, including a problematic notion of the privacy of the home, and restricted

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Other Cinemas capacity to establish gains made either with larger audiences or within the law (such as legal guarantees of equal rights). 39. Ben Brewster, ‘The fundamental reproach (Brecht)’, Cinétracts 2 (1977), pp. 44–​53. 40. The women’s liberation movement produced a number of critical reflections on the Welfare State, notably following the 1974 national conference, and the publication of Elizabeth Wilson’s Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977). A  number of articles appeared in History Workshop Journal on welfare histories: see, for example, Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and motherhood’, History Workshop Journal 5:1 (1978), pp. 9–​66. 41. Song of the Shirt was screened to university students studying Sociology, History, a Women’s Studies course, students at a Workers’ Education Association course on socialist feminism, as well as in arts centres as part of the South West Film Tour of 1979/​80. See R. Stoneman and H. Thompson, The New Social Function of Cinema: Catalogue, British Film Institute Productions ‘79/​80 (London: British Film Institute, 1981), pp. 124–​6. 42. Claire Johnston, ‘Notes on the idea of an independent cinema’, Independent Filmmakers Association, unpublished document, 1976, p. 1.

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Part Two

Infrastructures, technologies and 1970s experimental filmmaking

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5 Audiences: Not an Optional Extra Artists’ Distribution Practices from the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op to Lux Julia Knight

Among the defining characteristics of the independent film and video sector in the 1970s were a shared concern with critiquing the practices of the mainstream film and television industries, and a commitment to opening up spaces for under-​represented and marginalised voices to be heard. This sense of a shared endeavour was marked, in 1974, by the setting up of the Independent Film-​Makers Association (which later expanded to include first video and then photography) to represent and further the interests of the sector. Sylvia Harvey has argued that the origins of this activity can be traced back to the founding of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative (LFMC) in October 1966.1 The Co-​op, as it became known, was set up at Better Books, a bookshop in London’s West End, by a diverse group of people that included the shop’s manager and poet Bob Cobbing, filmmakers Simon Hartog, Steve Dwoskin, Andy Meyer and Harvey Matusow, and film critic Ray Durgnat. A  key aim, according to its draft constitution,2 was to stimulate and support the making of experimental films in the UK, since at the time little such production work was taking place in the country. Aside from Dwoskin, Meyer and Matusow, who were Americans, there were very few practising British experimental filmmakers.3 In the 91

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Other Cinemas 10–​15 years that followed, alongside enabling production work, both Co-​ op workers and members also undertook a range of initiatives to help build audiences for the films they produced, and it is a discussion of those early initiatives that forms the focus of this chapter.4 Until 1971 the Co-​op survived in a series of temporary and/​or shared premises, but in spring of that year Camden Council offered the organisation the use of a disused dairy in which it could house a production workshop, cinema and distribution operation in its own dedicated space. As the organisation became established, it provided the means for a growing number of experimental filmmakers to work with 8mm and 16mm film, producing both single-​and multi-​screen works to explore the creative potential of film. A number of Co-​op filmmakers also aimed to demystify the film process through the development of structural/​materialist films and to explore film’s relationship to other visual art forms through expanded cinema practices. Among the filmmakers regularly using the Co-​op’s production facilities by the mid-​1970s were Ian Breakwell, Peter Gidal, Nicky Hamlyn, Tony Hill, Mike Leggett, Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson, William Raban, Lis Rhodes, John Smith, Guy Sherwin and Chris Welsby, as well as founding members Dwoskin and Hartog.5 By providing such access to the means of production, the Co-​op played a key role in developing an experimental film culture in the UK. When the Co-​op’s founding members drew up its draft constitution in 1966, they had made it clear that the new organisation was also committed to facilitating the wider distribution of such work. They envisaged that ‘individuals, film societies, schools, colleges, universities, museums, galleries, festivals and other non-​commercial users’ would be among the potential hirers.6 Thus, from the very beginning there was a conviction that a range of audiences existed for the kinds of work the Co-​op filmmakers would produce (see Figure 5.1). While many of the films produced at the Co-​op have become mainstays of avant-​garde film shows and film studies courses –​such as William Raban’s Broadwalk (1972), Malcolm Le Grice’s After Lumiere (L’arroseur arrosé) (1974) and Lis Rhodes’s Light Reading (1978) –​the work done by independent filmmakers and their supporters around audience building often remains fairly invisible. In the case of the Co-​op, however, a range 92

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Audiences

Figure 5.1:  Extract from ‘London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative, Draft By Laws and Constitution’ (July 1966), p.  1. Available at http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​ PDFs/​LFMC660705.pdf. Image: Lux/​Peter Mudie.

of its documents –​now available for scrutiny online at the Film & Video Distribution Database (http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk)  –​ evidence the extent and nature of the initiatives that were undertaken. More importantly perhaps, they demonstrate that there was a highly developed understanding of the need to build audiences –​that the film culture the Co-​op’s founders sought to create could not exist without actively developing audiences for the films they were producing. While such documents –​sometimes written for promotional purposes or for funders –​cannot be taken unproblematically at face value, they nevertheless identify time and again the key issues that need addressing if audiences are to be developed for any kind of non-​mainstream moving image work. Many of the early initiatives undertaken by the Co-​op and its members have since been replicated by other organisations; some are still being continued by Lux  –​formed in 1999 from a merger between the Co-​op and its video art equivalent, London Electronic Arts (formerly London Video Access) –​and such initiatives are now commonly employed in various forms by online distributors and projects. 93

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Creating opportunities to see and engage with the films A key element in the Co-​op’s drive to build audiences was, from the outset, enabling audiences to actually see experimental films by arranging film shows. Indeed, one of the Co-​op’s first initiatives  –​in November 1966, barely three weeks after its formation –​was to stage a two-​week Festival of Underground Movies and promote it via a four-​page ‘Festival Supplement’ in a recently launched underground newspaper, International Times.7 When Harvey Matusow, as the Co-​op’s newly elected chairman, wrote to US filmmaker Jonas Mekas shortly afterwards, he explained not only that the festival had screened over 70 films, but also that screenings were an ongoing activity: ‘We have weekly screenings at Better Books and will have the Chelsea College available for weekly screenings also sometime after the first of January.’8 Coverage in International Times also announced that ‘The Co-​op’s eventual aim is programmes seven nights a week in its own cinema’.9 While Co-​op members searched for more permanent premises, the commitment to undertaking their own regular screenings remained central. When Better Books changed hands in autumn 1967 and halted the film shows it had been hosting, the Co-​op’s screenings shifted to the Drury Lane Arts Lab, and subsequently in autumn 1969 to the Robert Street Arts Lab. In his letter to Mekas, Matusow had also observed that ‘We have over one hundred requests for film programs from all over England’10 and during those early years the Co-​op was equally keen to expand distribution in order to facilitate additional screenings in London and elsewhere. For instance, a Co-​op newsletter dated February 1969 noted the willingness of the Electric Cinema Club in London’s Portobello Road to book Co-​op films, as well as negotiations with the Redmark Gallery in the West End. The latter was of particular interest because ‘we would be hitting a different audience than that which usually turns out for “underground events”, and this kind of exposure should be quite good’.11 Hence, the newsletter reiterated the conviction that there was a wide potential audience for Co-​op films and identified the need for more screenings to reach them. The Co-​op’s ability to create opportunities for audiences to see experimental film was assisted by the international nature of its distribution 94

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Audiences library. By 1968 American artist Carla Liss, who was employed briefly as the Co-​op’s secretary, had managed to persuade Jonas Mekas to ask a number of American filmmakers –​including Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Peter Kulbelka and Jack Smith –​to donate prints of their films to the Co-​op as ‘a permanent library’ in order to help raise awareness of the US work in Europe.12 At the same time, due to the Co-​op’s London location, it became a regular destination for visiting foreign film-makers who, keen for UK exposure, deposited their films in its distribution library. This international acquisition activity, and the networking it facilitated, soon made the Co-​op known for housing the largest collection of experimental films outside the USA and resulted in regular invitations to both the Co-​op and its members to participate in UK and overseas festivals and shows.13 By the time the Co-​op received its first revenue funding from the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1975 it was thus able to boast an impressive record of developing audiences and raising the visibility of experimental film both at home and abroad. According to the funding application it had submitted to the BFI earlier that year, in addition to around 200 films that had been produced since 1969 largely through the Co-​op’s workshop, through its distribution office and the activities of its members it had also contributed to a substantial number of shows in several European countries as well as the USA. Programmes of Co-​op films had also become a regular feature at London’s National Film Theatre, the Edinburgh Film Festival and several foreign festivals.14 This exposure was in addition to regularly supplying films to art college and university film societies, as well as staging 150 programmes of 90-​minute shows in the Co-​op’s own cinema –​which had built up a membership of 1,300 –​since moving into the disused dairy in 1971.15 And aside from Carla Liss’s short spell with the Co-​op in the late 1960s, this had been achieved with entirely volunteer labour. The funding application made a compelling argument for the key role played by the Co-​ op in nurturing a vibrant experimental film culture in the UK. This was clearly recognised by the BFI in its willingness to award revenue funding which enabled the employment of paid staff.16 Given this growth in activity during the first half of the 1970s, it is perhaps unsurprising that the application ambitiously concluded: ‘What we want to do is expand.’ While the Co-​op wanted to improve its workshop facilities to enable filmmakers to produce ‘more tightly controlled work’, it also wanted to facilitate ‘more 95

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Other Cinemas work by more filmmakers’ and saw this as the crucial underpinning to a desire to ‘double and triple audiences over the next five years, double and triple distribution’.17 Although committed to increasing audiences, the distribution office and cinema struggled to keep up with the dramatic expansion in workshop activity that resulted from the 1975 grant, which led fairly quickly to another funding application in 1976. One of the positive outcomes reported in that follow-​up application was that the cinema had not only increased its number of programmes, but also that ‘audience attendance has risen from twenty people per screening […] to a regular attendance of 60, special programmes drawing well over 100 people’.18 Thus, it is evident that during the Co-​op’s first decade there was an ever present interest in developing audiences. This is particularly apparent in the organisation’s report on its participation in the 1978 Edinburgh Film Festival. Under the sub-​heading ‘Notes on “what was wrong” ’, the report observed that audiences for the avant-​garde film programmes were ‘not large’ and attributed this to a combination of ‘poor’ publicity, the lack of space for discussion and engagement with audiences and critics, and the physical ghettoisation of the films in that they were ‘shown the other side of town from clubroom/​preview theatre’.19 Such was the concern that, in an attempt to rectify these problems for the following year, Co-​op members discussed several proposals both among themselves and with the festival’s director, Lynda Myles. This response stemmed at least in part from members’ awareness of the challenges that experimental film could present to audiences who might be unfamiliar with its aesthetic and conceptual concerns. As filmmaker and member Mike Leggett argued in 1979: [T]‌he films available from the LFMC have rarely sought simply to entertain; rarely too have they sought to represent through film itself aspects of life […] unconnected with either the production or a viewing of that film. The film viewer has, essentially, been asked to re-​assess their attitudes to and expectations of that experience as a representational system.20

As a result, Co-​op members had long since established a practice of accompanied screenings where filmmakers were on hand to discuss their work 96

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Audiences and foster audience engagement. In some guidelines drawn up for undertaking such screenings, Leggett also stressed the need for filmmakers and venues to work closely together to ensure that experimental films were publicised and introduced in a way that encouraged audiences to move beyond passively consuming film.21 Thus there was recognition that developing audiences for experimental film involved not only organising Co-​op shows and facilitating screenings elsewhere, but also the need to actively engage with both those hiring the films and those watching them.

Developing initiatives to build audiences Developing initiatives to build audiences for Co-​op films presented particular challenges for the Co-​op’s distribution workers. The Co-​op had been set up as an organisation that would be run by and for filmmakers to address their own needs. With regard to the distribution operation, it was argued that ‘there are no “taste” decisions –​ALL films submitted will be accepted’.22 The importance of this was that the work of any filmmaker, irrespective of how many films s/​he had made or how well known they might be, could be distributed and thus have a route to potential audiences:  essentially, the Co-​op provided equal access to distribution. This highly democratic approach to distribution stemmed from the organisation’s origins in the 1960s countercultural movement. While the Co-​op as an organisation gradually moved away from these roots, towards developing film as an arts practice in its own right,23 its distribution operation continued to be run in a way that refused to privilege any one filmmaker or group of filmmakers above any other(s). It not only maintained an open acquisitions policy, but also extended that approach to its promotional policy. As Co-​op worker Felicity Sparrow explained in a 1977 letter to all filmmakers: ‘The Distribution Office cannot be responsible […] for giving information on films to potential hirers other than what is in the catalogue.’24 As the distribution office refrained from making any programming suggestions or recommendations, all films were in theory promoted equally:  potential hirers were simply referred to the catalogue to make their own choices. Yet, despite the Co-​op’s resistance to selectively promoting particular films and/​or filmmakers, throughout the 1970s a range of initiatives were 97

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Other Cinemas proposed –​on the one hand by Co-​op workers, and on the other by Co-​ op members working both within the organisation’s structures and outside them as individuals –​all aimed at building audiences while deftly maintaining the Co-​op’s non-​promotional distribution policy. In the late 1970s, for instance, the distribution office was exploring possible collaboration with the BFI with a view to getting Co-​op films into the institute’s regional film theatres and other ‘more theatrical venues’.25 A couple of years later, in 1979, a committee was formed specifically ‘to look into expansion of venues’ for Co-​op films.26 Other initiatives sought to support such activity. In July 1977, for instance, distribution workers wrote to all Co-​op filmmakers asking them for their views on introducing ‘a more flexible arrangement’ for previewing films prior to booking. At the time, previewing was not allowed without either payment of a normal hire fee or the permission of the filmmaker. This was because each screening of a film exposed the print to wear and tear and potential damage. But it could also discourage programmers from considering Co-​op films if they had limited budgets or were unable to seek the prior permission of filmmakers. The workers therefore proposed that they be allowed to offer free previewing facilities ‘to potential bookers with definite shows/​festivals in mind’, stressing they would use their discretion to ‘discourage casual interest’.27 This was accompanied by the news that the distribution office was also setting up a resource centre ‘with documentation on films and filmmakers and other publicity material not actually included in the catalogue’.28 Thus, while Co-​op staff could not recommend particular films or filmmakers, they could facilitate bookings by making it easier for potential hirers to make informed choices. And once bookings were made, they could provide contextual material to help programmers publicise their screenings and engage their audiences. Other initiatives followed, some generated from within the Co-​op’s organisational structure. Discussion at its general meeting in October 1978, for instance, resulted in a group of nine members  –​Andrew Dunlop, Malcolm Le Grice, Jeanette Iljon, Mike Leggett, James McKay, Andrew Nicolson, Stuart Pound, Al Rees and Rod Stoneman –​setting up a Distribution and Exhibition Working Party to explore ways the Co-​op could be more proactive in finding future audiences. This was partly in 98

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Audiences response to a range of subsidised screening initiatives undertaken by the Arts Council  –​particularly the Filmmakers on Tour scheme, launched in February 197729 –​that were undermining the Co-​op’s role in organising and supplying films for shows by providing a cheaper alternative. But it also provided an opportunity to revisit the Co-​op’s deliberately non-​ promotional practices and see what could be improved. The working party drew up proposals for a festivals committee, a revamped catalogue to include contextualising articles, a Co-​op magazine, and what became Leggett’s guidelines for undertaking screenings.30 A  volunteer festivals committee was subsequently formed to enable LFMC members to ‘participate in festivals with the support of co-​op but not under its rubric’, while Leggett’s guidelines were adopted to ensure filmmakers and venues collaborated effectively to develop audiences. Although reservations were expressed about the promotional nature of a revamped catalogue and the proposal was shelved, response to the idea of a magazine was more positive and resulted in the launch in 1981 of Undercut as a means of developing a contextualising discourse that could introduce Co-​op films to a wider audience.31 The recognition of the need for such a discourse –​and a willingness to try and provide it –​had in fact been evident from the earliest days of the Co-​op, with founding members launching a quarterly magazine, Cinim (which ran to only three issues), and subsequently by members writing for other publications such as International Times, Art and Artist and Studio International. Co-​op members also undertook their own initiatives, especially around organising screenings, shows and tours. As individuals, they were not bound in the same way by the non-​selective promotional policy of the Co-​op’s distribution office. As early as 1972, for instance, filmmaker and member William Raban tried to persuade regional arts associations to help facilitate staging one-​or two-​week shows and festivals around the country. According to Raban, several filmmakers had sufficient bodies of work to be able to present a 75-​minute programme of their own films and, as part of his pitch, he cited a dozen names.32 In 1977, after organising and running the Arts Council show Perspectives on British Avant-​Garde Film, held at London’s Hayward Gallery, Co-​op Cinema organiser Deke Dusinberre had gone on to co-​programme a subsequent European tour of the show with the Arts Council’s assistant film 99

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Other Cinemas officer, David Curtis. While the selective nature of the touring show jarred with the Co-​op’s ‘non-​selective’ distribution policy, Dusinberre stressed to co-​workers and members that the Arts Council was able to promote British avant-​garde filmmaking to a much wider European audience and argued that: ‘The Co-​op wasn’t capable of making that intervention as it can’t make that administrative thrust.’33 The same year, Mike Leggett organised the first South West Independent Film Tour by drawing on the model provided by the Arts Council’s newly launched Filmmakers on Tour scheme, which funded filmmakers to present a programme of their work and subsidised the hire costs incurred by the venue showing the work. Leggett argued that if many of the film-​makers are travelling a great distance and occupying two days of their time to present just one show of work, it seemed appropriate for them as well as ‘a potential audience’ that their presence in the area should be extended to include further screenings.34

While Leggett included Berwick Street Collective filmmakers Humphrey Trevelyan and James Scott, the tour favoured those filmmakers ‘engaged in more formal exploration of the medium’35 and included Laura Mulvey, Lis Rhodes, William Raban and Peter Gidal, among others.36 Funded by the Arts Council, the British Film Institute and South West Arts, each week throughout October, November and early December 1977, one filmmaker toured a range of regional venues –​including Exeter Central Library and the regional film theatre at Dartington, as well as galleries in St Ives and Penzance, arts centres in Bristol and Plymouth, a college in Falmouth and a film society in Exmouth.37 In 1980, film-maker and Co-​op member Guy Sherwin proposed yet another variant of the touring programme model in the form of a ‘modular’ exhibition scheme. He argued that major shows like the Arts Council’s Perspectives exhibition were ‘too big and unwieldy for the small venues’ and that as a result ‘a large amount of potential interest is being lost due to lack of access to informed programmes on independent and avant-​garde work’. Sherwin envisaged ‘an open modular format’, whereby themed programmes –​or modules –​of 50–​90 minutes would be compiled by filmmakers or critics and individual modules could be ‘grouped into any overall 100

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Audiences shape or size’. When hired, modules would be accompanied by explanatory programme notes and a speaker to introduce the work. Sherwin followed Leggett’s lead and proposed the Arts Council provide funding to support the scheme, but stressed the programmes should be ‘distributed by the LFMC at the normal rental –​the rental then going to the filmmakers/​Co-​ op in the usual way’.38

Lessons to be learnt Perhaps unsurprisingly, these distribution and exhibition initiatives met with varying degrees of success. In October 1978, for instance, distribution workers reported to the Co-​op’s general meeting that their letter sent to all filmmakers in July 1977 soliciting views on the proposed free previewing service had garnered disappointingly ‘little response’.39 In November 1978, they wrote to filmmakers again, this time enclosing a simple questionnaire and prefacing their correspondence with clear instructions indicating the implications if they failed to respond: ‘This is not just another circular but will be used in forming Co-​op policy which will affect the distribution of your films. Please read it, fill in the questions and return.’40 In the end, the Co-​op moved to staging annual preview shows, showcasing all new acquisitions and inviting film programmers and potential hirers to attend free of charge. Although this removed the burden for making decisions about previewing from its members, the preview shows required a substantial and often impossible investment of time on the part of their target audience –​potential hirers were often unable or unwilling to sit through several lengthy programmes of work just to find the small number of films they might be interested in booking. On a more positive note, the magazine Undercut became a key forum in the UK for debate and discussion. Across 19 issues produced over a ten-​year period (1981–​90), its contributors comprised a large number of Co-​op members (both established filmmakers and those of a younger generation), as well as video artists, overseas practitioners, critics and curators, and covered topics such as film form, representation, feminism, identity, cultural and sexual politics, animation and landscape.41 But perhaps the most successful initiative was the organising of shows, whatever the size or scope, that facilitated film-maker interaction 101

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Other Cinemas with audiences and provided contextualising material. Evidence of audience responses to the Perspectives exhibition, Leggett’s South West Independent Film Tour and the Modular scheme has become dispersed in the intervening years, but where it and evidence from similar initiatives is available, it suggests that audiences both sizeable and –​in keeping with the founding members’ conviction –​diverse existed for experimental film. In reporting on his South West Independent Film Tour, for instance, Leggett noted that audiences ranged from an impressive 70−100 at Dartington’s regional film theatre, ‘with its “captive” resident student population’, to smaller but still reasonable-​sized audiences of 12–​40 at less experienced venues.42 Over the years several Co-​ op members participated in the Arts Council’s Filmmakers on Tour scheme. When the Arts Council reviewed it in 1981, Co-​op filmmaker Chris Welsby testified to how effective the model had been in reaching and engaging with diverse audiences. He reported that through the scheme he had shown his work to ‘crofters in Scotland, merchant seamen, farmers, fishermen, elderly people, young children and what can’t have been far short of half the population of Milton Keynes’. He went on to observe that: It is not every day that an octogenarian finds a parallel between the effect of one of my films and the camouflage used by the army during the War. Neither did I expect to be asked why there are no animals in my films! A genuine enough question for a farmer to ask.43

Indeed, the appropriateness of some of the audience-building initiatives introduced by Co-​op members is demonstrated by funders’ engagement with them and their subsequent development of similar ones. Although the Filmmakers on Tour scheme was set up by the Arts Council, it drew on the Co-​op’s long-​established practice of accompanied screenings. Leggett’s 1977 South West Independent Film Tour was deemed sufficiently successful by its two national funders, the Arts Council and the BFI, for them to suggest to regional arts associations that ‘the South West tour seems to offer a useful model for the efficient deployment of subsidy, time and effort’.44 And in late 1980 the Arts Council agreed to adopt Guy Sherwin’s proposed modular exhibition scheme,45 which laid the foundations for the Council’s future 102

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Audiences ‘umbrella’ scheme and in its turn became the Arts Council revenue-​funded Film and Video Umbrella.46 Indeed, the key outlet for the umbrella scheme’s early packages were the BFI’s regional film theatres, as had already been proposed by the Co-​op’s distribution office in the late 1970s and found by Leggett to attract sizeable audiences on his South West Independent Film Tour. It is perhaps unsurprising then that one of the key architects behind both the Filmmakers on Tour and umbrella schemes was David Curtis, who had from 1967 to 1970 run the Co-​op’s own screening programmes. Originating as a members’ organisation, the Co-​op was constrained in a number of ways. Furthermore, the receipt of its first revenue funding in 1975 introduced as many problems as it solved. But a key strength of its members and its workers during the first decade of its existence was their recognition of the central importance of audiences to sustaining a film culture. While the activity of building audiences has traditionally been invisible to the very people who benefit, its importance has become far more widely recognised as the growing number of online distribution initiatives –​amateur, DIY, grassroots, cultural and niche, as well as the purely commercial –​have resulted in an abundance of moving image work, all competing for audiences.

Acknowledgements The Film & Video Database and the research on which this chapter is based were both funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council. The material on the FVDD that is referenced in this chapter has been sourced via the British Artists’ Film & Video Study Collection, the Arts Council of Great Britain’s records (1928–97) held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Peter Mudie. Full source details are given on the FVDD.

Notes 1. Sylvia Harvey, ‘The “Other Cinema” in Britain: unfinished business in oppositional and independent film, 1929–​1984’, in C. Barr, ed., All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), p. 237. 2. LFMC, ‘London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative, draft by laws and constitution’, July 1966, at http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC660705.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016.

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Other Cinemas 3. See Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is … The International Free Cinema (London: Peter Owen, 1975), p. 62; and David Curtis, ‘English avant-​garde film: an early chronology’, in M. O’Pray, ed., The British Avant-​Garde Film: 1926–​1995 (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1966), pp. 101–​103. 4. This chapter draws on a larger project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, examining independent film and video distribution in the UK. Additional research findings from that project have been published in Julia Knight and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2011). 5. See LFMC, ‘The London Filmmakers Co-​operative, summer ‘75 application to BFI’, June 1975, p.  4, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC 750600.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 6. LFMC, ‘Draft by laws and constitution’, p. 1. 7. International Times, ‘Underground Film Festival Supplement’, 31 October–​ 13 November 1966, pp.  7–​ 10, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ IntTimes661113.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 8. Harvey Matusow (LFMC), correspondence with Jonas Mekas, 23 November 1966, p.  1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Matusow661123.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 9. International Times, ‘Festival Supplement’, p. 7. 10. Matusow, correspondence with Mekas, p. 1. 11. LFMC, ‘London Film-​ Makers’ Co-​ operative, Newsletter’, February 1969, p.  3, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC690200.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 12. Carla Liss (LFMC), correspondence with David Curtis (LFMC), 29 October 1968, p. 1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Liss681029.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 13. See LFMC, ‘Application for assistance’, March 1975, http://​fv-​distribution-​ database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC750300.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016; and LFMC, ‘Summer ‘75 application’. 14. LFMC, ‘Summer ‘75 application’, p. 7. 15. Ibid., p. 2. 16. BFI, ‘BFI Production Board minutes’, 9 July 1975, p. 3, http://​fv-​distribution-​ database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​BFI-​PB750709.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 17. LFMC, ‘Summer ‘75 application’, p. 11. 18. LFMC, ‘Application for financial assistance’, 22 March 1976, p.  11, http://​ fv-​ d istribution- ​ d atabase.ac.uk/ ​ P DFs/ ​ D usinberre760322.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 19. LFMC, ‘Report/​notes on Co-​op’s participation in Edinburgh Film Festival 1978’, November 1978, p.  1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ LFMC781100.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016.

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Audiences 20. Mike Leggett, ‘London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op: guidelines for film-​makers and renters (draft 1)’, 11 March 1979, p.  1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​ PDFs/​LFMC750600.pdf and http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ Leggett790311.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 21. Ibid. 22. LFMC, ‘Notice of Film-​Makers’ General Meeting’, 13 March 1968, http://​ fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC680313.pdf, accessed February– ​March 2016. 23. LFMC, ‘Draft constitution for London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative’, March 1968, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC680300.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 24. Felicity Sparrow (LFMC), correspondence with Mike Leggett, July 1977, p.  2, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Sparrow770700.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 25. Ibid. 26. Mick Kidd (LFMC) and Anna Thew (LFMC), ‘Distribution 1980:  bookings chart for 1978–​80’, November 1980, p. 1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​ PDFs/​Kidd-​Thew801100.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 27. Sparrow, correspondence with Leggett, p. 2. 28. Ibid. 29. ACGB, ‘Arts Council touring exhibitions, exhibition information news sheet’, February 1977, p. 1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ACGB770200. pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 30. See James MacKay, ‘London Film-​ Makers’ Co-​ operative, Festival Programming Report’, March 1979, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​ PDFs/​Mackay790300.pdf; Rod Stoneman, ‘London Film-​ makers Co-​ op Working Party:  catalogue proposal’, 24 March 1979, http://​fv-​distribution-​ database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Stoneman790324.pdf; Andrew Dunhop, ‘Some notes on the proposed Coop magazine’, 5 February 1979, http://​fv-​distribution-​ database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Dunlop790205.pdf; Leggett, ‘LFMC: guidelines for film-​ makers and renters’ (all accessed February–​March 2016). 31. LFMC, ‘Extraordinary General Meeting (Working Party Reports)’, 6 October 1979, p. 1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC791006.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 32. William Raban, correspondence with regional arts councils, 6 December 1972, p.  1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Raban721206.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 33. LFMC, ‘London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op General Meeting’, 10 December 1977, p.  2, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC771210.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 34. Mike Leggett, ‘A potential audience’, 29 May 1979, p. 2, http://​fv-​distribution-​ database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Leggett-​PA790529.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016.

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Other Cinemas 35. Ibid., p. 3. 36. Mike Leggett, ‘South West Independent Film Tour at multiple venues’, September 1977, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​Leggett770900. pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 37. IFA South West, ‘IFA Newsletter: independent film-​makers tour the South West (Interim Report)’, 11 October, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​ PDFs/​IFA771011.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 38. Guy Sherwin, ‘Proposal for a modular film exhibition programme –​for discussion’, June–​September 1980, p. 1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ Sherwin800600.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 39. LFMC, ‘Distribution Report’, October 1978, p.  2, http://​fv-​distribution-​data base.ac.uk/​PDFs/​LFMC781000.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 40. Felicity Sparrow and Mary Pat Leece (LFMC), correspondence with all LFMC filmmakers, 13 November 1978, p.  1, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​ PDFs/​Sparrow-​Leece781113.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 41. Such was the influence of Undercut that a book-​length anthology of its articles, together with newly commissioned contextualising essays, was later published. See Nina Danino and Michael Maziere, eds, The Undercut Reader:  Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video (London and New  York:  Wallflower Press, 2003). 42. Leggett, ‘A potential audience’, p. 6. 43. Chris Welsby, correspondence with David Curtis (Assistant Film Officer, ACGB), 17 November 1981, p. 2, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ Welsby811117.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 44. David Curtis (Assistant Film Officer, ACGB), Geoffrey Nowell-​ Smith (Head, Educational Advisory Service, BFI), Hilary Thompson (Film Promotions Officer, Production Dept, BFI) and Paul Willemen (Publicity and Documentation Officer, Film Availability Services, BFI), correspondence with regional arts associations, 3 November 1978, p. 1, http://​fv-​distribution-​ database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ACGB-​BFI781103.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 45. ACGB, ‘Minutes of the Artists’ Film and Video Sub-​Committee held on 27 October 1980’, p. 2, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ACGB801027. pdf, accessed February–​March 2016. 46. ACGB, ‘Minutes of the meeting of the Artists’ Film and Video Sub-​Committee held on 18 April 1983’, pp.  2–​3, http://​fv-​distribution-​database.ac.uk/​PDFs/​ Minutes830418.pdf, accessed February–​March 2016.

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6 Engaging Material Specificities: Aesthetics and Politics in the 1970s Kim Knowles

If the current state of experimental film practice reveals anything about the legacy of the 1970s, it is the relationship between autonomy and creativity in the context of film technology, situated within a general move towards the establishment of alternative infrastructures. On the surface, the twenty-​first-​century artistic landscape might seem somewhat removed from that of the 1970s, enmeshed as it is in the politics of neo-​liberalism, new digital technologies and a host of virtual platforms that have given rise to radically different modes of production, distribution and exhibition to those that characterise the earlier period. The transition from film to digital has, however, produced a climate of technological instability, as celluloid practice, like painting following the invention of photography, is forced to redefine and reinvent itself. Framed as obsolete and outmoded, time-​consuming and cumbersome, film technology has shifted from a dominant to a marginal cultural position, one of relative invisibility and insignificance in an increasingly digital world. But, as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his assessment of historical progress, it is at the point of becoming obsolete that a technology or practice rediscovers its true potential, releasing what he calls ‘revolutionary energies’.1 As commercial film labs across the world close their doors, a wave of artist-​run labs open theirs, creating a climate of DIY autonomy that parallels the activities of the 107

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Other Cinemas London Film-​ Makers’ Co-​ op (LMFC) between the 1960s and 1990s. Specific to both periods is a celebration of and investment in the processes of 16mm, the gauge that carries with it a history of independent, countercultural and personal filmmaking. This chapter draws out some of the resonances between then and now by tracing the centrality of technology to the relationship between aesthetics and politics and by revisiting the tensions between the film-​as-​ social-​practice and the film-​as-​material approaches. With the resurgence of interest in film materials in an age of digital ‘immateriality’, the question of medium-​specificity so central to 1970s film culture appears all the more pertinent. I align myself with Benjamin in believing that culturally outmoded forms continue to evolve new aesthetic possibilities that look backwards into the past while projecting forwards into the future. Analogue filmmaking in the digital era has taken on the character of what American artist Bradley Eros calls a ‘politics of resistance’.2 Indeed, the 16mm gauge has a history of countercultural associations, given its position on the margins of mainstream production. As Scott MacDonald points out, ‘16mm avant-​garde and experimental film has consistently been a form of aesthetic and political resistance to the hegemony of the film industry and “standard gauge” [of 35mm].’3 Introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1923 as a non-​theatrical alternative to 35mm, 16mm became the format of choice for educational, institutional and amateur filmmaking, the lower costs of production providing greater access to a wider variety of forms and opening up freedom to experiment. Its portability, technological convenience and immediacy (reversal stock removed the need for the two-​ step process from negative to positive) made it attractive for news reporting and documentary filmmaking, with the introduction of sync sound in the mid-​1950s playing a key role in the development of the cinéma vérité style. ‘Many people, places and activities that were previously not filmable could now be captured almost anywhere with synch sound and 16mm film’, observes Betsy McLane.4 This new technological freedom proved crucial to a number of politically motived independent film groups in Britain such as Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Collective. Operating between 1968 and 1981, Cinema Action collectively produced a series of socialist campaign films, which, as stated in one of its 108

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Engaging Material Specificities information sheets from 1975, emerge ‘through a discussion process in which all the elements, ideas and the dramatic composition of a particular project are decided according to the wishes of the community’.5 Documentaries were therefore made not just about the community but also with the community, and 16mm filmmaking equipment was made available through Cinema Action’s workshops in order to facilitate this way of working. One of the ‘rules’ of the Cinema Action films was that only sync sound should be used, ensuring a greater element of truth through the matching of image and voice, a feature that earlier documentaries lacked.6 The imperative during this period was not always to produce political documentaries through a wholesale subscription to realism, however, and films such as the Berwick Street Collective’s Nightcleaners (1975) presented a direct challenge to the more conventional forms of socially motivated cinema that came out of the Cinema Action group. A film about the campaign to unionise underpaid female office cleaners, Nightcleaners employs a number of disjunctive formal devices to render the viewing process problematic and to draw attention to the act of representation. By highlighting rather than hiding the filmic techniques, the collective pursued a new form of self-​reflexive political cinema that would, in their own words, examine ‘the processes of perception which in turn requires a re-​examination of film language –​photography, montage, sound, etc.’7 Despite criticisms about its inaccessibility, the film was hailed by the feminist theorist Claire Johnston as ‘the most important political film ever to have been made in this country’.8 The greater accessibility to film materials that the 16mm format allowed was a key contributing factor to experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s and the ongoing quest for new forms of political expression. Running parallel to these collective political endeavours was the incorporation of film into universities and art schools, engaging both theory and practice and further opening up the possibilities for the creative expansion of the medium. The LFMC, which had been established in 1966 primarily as an exhibition and distribution space, incorporated film production into its activities with the arrival of Malcolm Le Grice and several of his students from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. The LFMC’s first workshop space was established in the New Arts Lab in 1969 with 16mm equipment that was built, bought and customised with the intention 109

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Other Cinemas of creating access to production processes that were hitherto controlled by professional labs working to strict industry standards. With the newly acquired developing and printing machines, ‘[a]‌film-​maker could shoot footage and see it negative and then in positive within a few hours in black and white, within a couple of days in colour’.9 The common ‘desire to maintain control over every stage of the filmmaking process’10 led to a more artisanal form of practice that separated off the Co-​op work from that being produced in a more political vein by Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Collective. Self-​reflexivity was pushed a step further by extending the emphasis on technique and formal structure to incorporate physical materials and mechanical processes. As A.L. Rees states, the Co-​op developed a method of working that reflected the ‘craft ethos of the art schools from which most of its film-​ makers came’.11 This very often involved operating the machines in a manner contrary to their intended purpose, such as manually dragging the film through the optical printer to produce jarring variations in speed, from stillness to imperceptible rapid motion, and to make visible the sprocket holes and frame lines. The exploration and deconstruction of these mechanical procedures were intricately tied to an interrogation of the material basis of cinema  –​its tangible, organic and therefore reactive nature. Le Grice highlights these crossovers in an essay published in 1978: In its simplest sense, the question of materiality is seen in relationship to the: physical substances of the film medium, the film strip itself as material and object. Work in this area drawing, and paying attention to the physical base (acetate), emulsion surface, sprockets, joins, etc., easily shades over into an awareness of: mechanical and physico-​chemical processes. In this case attention is drawn to the photochemical response and its chemical development, the transfer of image through printing, the transformation of image through these processes and the mechanical systems of film transport in camera, printer, or projector.12

Guy Sherwin’s At the Academy (1974) is a good example of this dual awareness. Using a rudimentary home-​made contact printer, Sherwin repeatedly printed negative and positive images of Academy countdown leader one on top of the other, with the accumulation of up to 12 superimposed images slightly out of sync leaving an impression of relief in the eyes of 110

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Engaging Material Specificities the spectator. Since the light beam of the printer also hit the optical sound area of the filmstrip during the printing process, an audio equivalent of the image layering can be heard in the pulsating beep that continually drifts in and out. The mechanical procedure gradually stacks up a tangible audiovisual impression of the film itself, its material presence filling the space of expectation that the numerical countdown elicits, then self-​consciously thwarts. The choice of Academy leader as the film’s source material thus playfully references traditional cinema by reversing the conventions of film projection and spectatorship and refusing the ‘image’ in its more figurative sense. In Sherwin’s film, and in many others that defined the Co-​op’s output during the 1960s and 1970s –​works by Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson and Lis Rhodes, to name just a few –​content is reduced to process, with the image referring back to its own material existence as film. In his influential essay ‘Theory and definition of structural/​materialist film’, first published in Studio International in 1975, American filmmaker-​theorist Peter Gidal defines this emphasis on technology and materials in terms of a radically anti-​Hollywood stance. ‘Structural/​Materialist film attempts to be non-​ illusionist’, the opening line states. ‘The process of the film’s making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process.’13 The essay’s categorical rejection of all forms of representation as ideologically structured and bound up with the controlling identificatory mechanisms of capitalism regardless of the content of the image left open only one possible form of cinematic resistance: films that do ‘not represent, or document, anything’14 other than their own process of coming into being. The term ‘structural/​materialist’ drew on P. Adams Sitney’s earlier description of a body of American works where content was reduced to the film’s structure. Although Sitney’s definition of ‘structural film’ refers to technical characteristics such as ‘fixed camera position […] the flicker effect, loop printing, and re-​photography off the screen’,15 there is little in his account that relates to the ‘mechanical and physico-​ chemical processes’ of 16mm film that so defined the work of the Co-​op filmmakers. In setting out a theoretical agenda for materialist film, Gidal was to a large extent responding to a climate of intellectual debate around film, particularly among the Screen group of theorists, whose attention to work 111

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Other Cinemas emerging from the Co-​op had been minimal. His theory was an attempt to claim political legitimacy for a form of materialist engagement that pushed the creative possibilities of the medium through the liberation of technology. For Gidal, however, access to the means of production had more significant implications than simple formal innovation: ‘The control of the process by the individual was not an individualism’, he stated. ‘It was the possibility of having access into and thereby through and thereby onto the possible processes of representation.’16 There are resonances here with the Berwick Street Collective’s desire to develop a new cinematic language through ‘an examination of the processes of perception’, and it is useful to consider how a more radical break with traditional ways of perceiving (i.e., by enhancing attentiveness to surfaces and textures through an engagement with the actual material of film rather than the figurative image it holds) might open up a new form of social practice. Unsurprisingly, this perspective was rejected by those whose notion of radical political filmmaking was related to direct political action through an appeal to the masses. As Steve Sprung of Cinema Action remembers, ‘[w]‌e weren’t really interested in that kind of stuff. We weren’t going to show that work to miners in Yorkshire.’17 Mike Dunford’s assessment of materialist film, published shortly after Gidal’s essay, specifically highlights the incompatibility of formalism and politics, claiming that the focus on materials and processes leads to a bourgeois insularism that closes down rather than opens up social inequalities: Experimental film has evolved an insistent materialism and a form of perceptual dialectic, and this is supported by an existential and phenomenological philosophy which denies the intervention of this practice within social practice, ignores the existence of class struggle, and validates the existence of class ideology by omission.18

It is possible that Dunford missed the wider implication of Gidal’s argument, which is that perception is a fundamental part of a repressive ideology and class struggle. The schism between the formal concerns of the Co-​op and the more overtly political cinema of the time is what motivated Peter Wollen’s influential essay ‘The two avant-​gardes’, published in Studio International in 1975. Tapping into one of the key debates of the 1970s, the text was the 112

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Engaging Material Specificities focal point of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s International Forum on Avant-​ Garde film in 1976, and has continued to serve as a reference for any discussion about the relationship between aesthetics and politics in experimental cinema. Although Wollen does not specifically refer to the different uses of film technology, he relates the purist attention to medium-​specificity and materials to the abstract tendencies of Modernist painting –​‘the opening up of a space, a disjunction between signifier and signified’.19 In the more politically engaged work of filmmakers such as Jean-​Luc Godard, on the other hand, this space operates on the level of content, using formal dislocations to suspend meaning ‘in the destruction and re-​assembly, a recombination of the order of the sign as an experiment in the dissolution of old meanings and the generation of new ones.’20 We might ask to what extent a film like Nightcleaners could be incorporated into this framework, given its shared concern with the reinvigoration of film language. Additionally, it could be argued that Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons, a film that Wollen made with Laura Mulvey in 1974, presents an equally valuable example of how technological innovation and the concern with identification coalesce in a less purist approach to form than the films that could be described as structural/​materialist. It is important to note that engagements with 16mm at the Co-​op were not restricted to these materialist interrogations, and that process-​oriented work incorporated other elements that could be considered political from a different standpoint. Both Gidal and Wollen in their respective essays refer to a relatively narrow body of work where physicality is considered only at the level of the material substrate, yet one of the most crucial qualities of small-​gauge format (both 8mm and 16mm) is the ability to connect with the external world and thus other potential materialities. Physical freedom was explored in the traditional documentary mode by taking cameras out onto the streets, but another key form of documentary emerged during this period, one that forged new engagements with the environment. The most prolific in this area were Chris Welsby and William Raban, who worked together on a series of ‘landscape films’, in which the technical possibilities of the 16mm camera were exploited to produce a form of documentary filmmaking that departed quite radically from both the more socially oriented works of the Berwick Street and Cinema Action collectives and the formally ascetic films that constitute the basis of Gidal’s 113

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Other Cinemas theory of materialism. In Welsby and Raban’s double-​screen installation River Yar (1971−2), single-​frame shooting was employed to compress three weeks into 35 minutes, resulting in a dramatic shift in our understanding of geological time by making visible the changes that are otherwise imperceptible to the human eye (see also Chapter 13). From this perspective, technology, for Welsby, is ‘both a subdivision of “nature” and an extension of “mind” […] the camera, as a product of technology, can be seen as a potential interface between “mind” and “nature”.’21 In some of his subsequent works, Welsby pushes these connections further by allowing nature to dictate the shape of the film. Wind Vane (1972), another double-​screen presentation, involved setting up two cameras with wind vane attachments so that the force and direction of the wind would control how the landscape was filmed. Tree (1974) extended the technique to incorporate the movements of a branch onto which the camera was directly placed, the resulting image demonstrating a unified nature−technology perspective. In a separate discussion of Welsby’s films, Wollen highlights the importance of this shift in power relations, where ‘the automatic procedures of science and technology, instead of being inflicted on nature in order to dominate it, were directed by nature itself ’.22 This account is particularly valuable when assessing the continued relevance of 16mm film in a digital era and understanding the practices that sustain it. The legacy of British landscape film and its desire to bring out nature’s agential capacities can be found in a body of contemporary work that involves direct material engagements with the environment. In an attempt to draw attention to the physical material, film is buried in mud and earth, submerged in river and seawater, or exposed to the elements, as in William Raban’s early paintings where canvases were wrapped around tree trunks. In Tess Takahashi’s assessment of current experimental practice, ‘it is less film’s ability to produce recognizable iconic images of the natural world indexically that is emphasized, than its ability to physically record the influence of the material world on its celluloid body.’23 In this sense, we can note a shift from an interest in the ‘hardware’ of film technology to a fascination with its material ‘software’ –​the organic, porous and penetrable surfaces that offer the possibility of tactile exchange. Alia Syed’s Priya (2009), for example, was created by burying individual strips of film containing images of a north Indian classical dancer in her garden in south 114

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Engaging Material Specificities London for varying lengths of time, allowing the biochemical breakdown of the film to become part of the image content. Similarly, in the making of Reach (2014−15), Kayla Parker and Stuart Moore submerged 16mm filmstrips in mud on the banks of the River Tamar, setting up a dialogue between the film material and the tidal movements of the river that takes place largely outside the artists’ own intervention. These works perhaps demonstrate the meeting point between Gidal’s materialist agenda and the technology−nature explorations of Welsby and Raban, emphasising process and environmental engagement as a new kind of politically motived filmmaking that connects the concern with representation with contemporary issues of waste, decomposition and ecological destruction. Finding a new language for these practices involves activating a theoretical framework that not only recognises the turn away from traditional forms of representation, but also acknowledges the importance of material agency in a digital world. Concepts such as tactile engagement, haptic vision, sensation and embodiment have come to replace the hard-​ edged theoretical vocabulary of the 1970s as the processes of identification are shifted more towards the experiential, and the body, as much as the mind, is valued in the act of viewing. Despite the absence of the body from both Gidal’s theory of structural/​materialism and Wollen’s account of the two avant-​gardes, it played a significant role in the way artists interacted with film technology during the 1970s. Performance and gesture were an integral part of Welsby’s and Raban’s merging of technology and nature, and the resulting films were often presented as multi-​screen installations, eliciting a form of viewing that could also be described as performative. But it was in the field of expanded cinema that the body fully became part of the materialist encounter, alongside projectors, filmstrips and other technological paraphernalia –​all ‘primary signifiers in their own right’.24 Le Grice highlights the ‘projection situation as material event’ as ‘the only point of actual/​ material access to the filmic process for the film’s viewer’,25 echoing Gidal’s emphasis on demystification. Yet in the description of his own Horror Film 1 (1970), he neglects to mention the centrality of his own body in the constellation of ‘simple loops of changing colour, directly-​cast shadows and moving projectors’.26 Naked to the waist and with his back to the audience, the artist becomes performer, revealing the ripples of performance art that 115

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Other Cinemas had emerged a decade earlier. So crucial to the craft-​based approach to filmmaking but largely invisible in the work itself, bodily intervention is brought back into the live projection event alongside the physicality of the technology, where the audible chattering of the projector(s) provides a corresponding layer of tangibility that fills the viewing space. In some expanded works, non-​filmic objects also become part of the performance, bringing an additional element of material engagement to the signifying process. In the dual projection piece Aperture Sweep (1973), Gill Eatherley uses a broom with microphones attached to brush the surface of the screen, where one sees projected a pre-​recorded silhouette of the artist engaging in the same act. The work extends the exploration of multiple selves found in Horror Film 1 by incorporating different temporalities –​the present and ongoing time of the live action and the suspended moment contained within the filmic image. In recent restagings of the work, this temporal dislocation becomes all the more accentuated as the artist interacts with her younger self (an effect that Guy Sherwin plays with in performances such as Man with Mirror of 1976).27 With its emphasis on the repetitive processes of physical labour, Aperture Sweep ‘collapses the boundary between cinema and everyday life’,28 a gesture that could be read as an attempt to address the gap between materialist film and social practice that Dunford identified as one of structural/​materialism’s failures. Similar concerns emerge in Annabel Nicolson’s Reel Time (1973), where a complex choreography of live actions and pre-​recorded representations fuse the technologies of film with those of (feminine) domestic labour. Here, Nicolson threads a loop of film containing images of herself sewing through an actual sewing machine, which hammers holes into the celluloid and projects it back to the audience until the film eventually deteriorates and the performance ends. Located in the context of the 1970s, the themes and concerns of these live performances nonetheless resonate through more recent explorations of the body and technology in the expanded film work of a number of British artists, further demonstrating the ongoing dialogue around medium-​specificity across the decades. Mary Stark emphasises the relationship between filmmaking as labour and film as texture in her ‘tailored’ installations and performances such as Film as Fabric (2015) and From Fibre to Frock (2013), while Greg Pope 116

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Figure  6.1: Annabel Nicolson performing Reel Time (1973). Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

pursues, albeit in a more masculine register, the work of destruction that characterises Reel Time. In his Cipher Screen (2009−14), the body of the artist connects with the body of the film in a very visceral way. Attacking it with a variety of mechanical tools, the drilling and grinding sounds of which are built into the performance, Pope takes the film material to the point of failure. In recognition of the work’s historical origins, Catherine Elwes observes that ‘[a]‌fter fifty years, abstract film in its expanded form has developed its own vernacular revolving around the lingua franca of the live manipulation of the filmstrip and the projector, the miscegenation of sound and picture.’29 In the contemporary context, the presence of 16mm film in the live event takes the 1970s concerns with demystification a step further. The foregrounding of analogue equipment, often combined with other mechanical paraphernalia of a hand-​built, hybrid nature, creates in the work of British-Australian artist Sally Golding, for example, an environment of material excess that constitutes a defiant gesture of resistance in a digital world. 117

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Other Cinemas Assessing the importance of material specificity in the 1970s from a contemporary standpoint allows us to shed new light on a set of ideas that, while responding to a specific moment, relates to wider questions about the relationship between technology and the body, science and nature, form and politics. As an inherently marginal (or ‘substandard’) format, 16mm film opened up new creative possibilities across a range of filmmaking styles, allowing freedom of movement, spontaneity and immediacy, and, importantly, a new form of political engagement. The 1970s saw the liberation of technology and the creation of artistic autonomy, leading to the development of film as a craft-​based practice. The ‘death’ or ‘crisis’ of film that began at the start of the millennium gives rise to a situation that has remarkable affinities with the 1970s, and many of the questions about the political relevance of materialist film resurface in a new context. As Pip Chodorov in his overview of the contemporary film labs points out, the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op continues to play a role in the post-​digital landscape of 16mm production, much of its equipment having been used in 2004 to set up the No.w.here lab now located in east London. The model of collectivity and the spirit of invention continue as 16mm equipment, discarded and disused, recuperated and recycled, creates the foundations for a new wave of artists working on the margins and resisting the dictates of a market-​driven technological revolution. ‘We are not in an economy but an ecology,’ states Chodorov, ‘a grassroots network, filmmakers helping each other, outside of the capitalist system.’30 From this perspective, the 1970s seem more relevant than ever.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’, in Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcot (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 171−2. 2. Bradley Eros, ‘More captivating than phosphorus’, Millennium Film Journal 56 (2012), p. 47. 3. Scott MacDonald, ‘16mm: reports of its death are greatly exaggerated’, Cinema Journal 45:3 (2006), pp. 126−7. 4. Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd edn (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 219. 5. Petra Bauer and Dan Kidner, eds, Working Together:  Notes on British Film Collectives in the 1970s (Southend-​on-​Sea: Focal Point Gallery, 2012), p. 112.

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Engaging Material Specificities 6. Steve Sprung in conversation with Bauer and Kidner, ibid, p. 60. 7. Ibid., p. 117. 8. Claire Johnston, ‘The Nightcleaners (part one):  rethinking political cinema’, Jump Cut 12/​13 (1976), p. 56. 9. Peter Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology in/​through/​and avant-​garde film:  an instance’, in Mark Webber and Peter Gidal, eds, Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966−2016 (London: The Visible Press, 2016), p. 116. 10. David Curtis, ‘A tale of two co-​ops’, in David E. James, ed., To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the American Underground (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 258. 11. A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999), p. 78. 12. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Material, materiality, materialism’, in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), p. 165. 13. Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and definition of structural/​materialist film’, in Webber and Gidal, Flare Out, p. 37. 14. Ibid. 15. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film:  The American Avant-​ Garde, 1943–​ 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 348. 16. Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology’, p. 116. 17. Steve Sprung in conversation with Bauer and Kidner, p. 60. 18. Mike Dunford, ‘Experimental/​ avant-​ garde/​ revolutionary film practice’, Afterimage 6 (1976), pp. 107−8. 19. Peter Wollen, ‘The two avant-​gardes’, Studio International 190:978 (1975), p. 172. 20. Ibid. 21. Chris Welsby, quoted in Joy I. Payne, Reel Rebels: The London Filmmakers’ Co-​ operative 1966–​1996 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2015), p. 82. 22. Peter Wollen, ‘Chris Welsby’, in David Curtis, ed., A Directory of British Film and Video Artists (Luton: The Arts Council of England, 1996), p. 199. 23. Tess Takahashi, ‘After the death of film: writing the natural world in the digital age’, Visible Language 42:1 (2008), p. 49. 24. A.L. Rees, ‘Expanded cinema and narrative: a troubled history’, in A.L. Rees, D. White, S. Ball and D. Curtis, eds, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 14. 25. Le Grice, ‘Material, materiality, materialism’, p. 167. 26. Ibid., p. 167. 27. Expanded cinema in the UK emerged through a grouping of LFMC filmmakers called Filmaktion. The key members were Malcolm Le Grice, William Raban, Gill Eatherley and Annabel Nicolson. Between 16 and 21 October 2012, the Tate Modern hosted a series of re-​stagings of a number of works, including Horror Film 1 and Aperture Sweep. Additionally, as part of the series of screenings and events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Co-​op, the British

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Other Cinemas Film Institute hosted an evening of expanded film performances  –​‘LFMC 50:  Interrupting Light’  –​on 11 March 2016, which also included Aperture Sweep, as well as works by Steve Farrer, Guy Sherwin, Marilyn Halford and Tony Hill. 28. Duncan White, ‘Expanded cinema: the live record’, in Rees et al., Expanded Cinema, p. 34. 29. Catherine Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image (New  York:  Wallflower, 2015), p. 223. 30. Pip Chodorov, ‘The artist-​ run film labs’, Millennium Film Journal 60 (2014), p. 35.

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7 The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK Ed Webb-​Ingall

The invention of portable video cameras in the 1960s ushered in the development of a new form of non-​fiction moving image production that came to be known as ‘community video’. ‘Community video’ has hitherto evaded strict definition, considered anew each time a group who share a neighbourhood or interest choose to take up a video camera in order to collectively produce a video for, by and about themselves. Concurrent with the introduction of portable video technology, the term ‘community video’ originated in the early 1970s and has since been subsumed under the wider umbrella of ‘community arts’. Both were established at the same time and shared a similar understanding of the potential for art to liberate, effect change and create new forms of self-​representation for marginalised groups. This chapter traces the development of portable video cameras and describes how and why community groups used them in the 1970s.1 A historical and theoretical analysis of the processes adopted by community practitioners and the videos they made will align ‘community video’ with the wider history of political non-​fiction filmmaking. I begin by tracing the development of video technology from that which was largely the concern of television studios, accessible only by unionised professionals, to something that could be used by artists and activists and worn over one shoulder. In 1958, Japanese electronics company Sony 121

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Other Cinemas launched its first ‘pocket sized’ portable transistor radio for the export market. Following its success,2 Sony set about adapting broadcast video technology in order to develop portable video recording technology.3 Early broadcast video recording systems were made up of a large ‘Quadruplex’ or transverse system. This used four magnetic heads that vertically scanned two-​inch tape at a 90° angle to simultaneously record and reproduce images. Sony began to develop Helical, two-​head technology, which recorded diagonally onto half-​inch tape. This allowed the tape to hold the same amount of information as the ‘Quadruplex’ system but on a quarter of the width. With a need for only two heads and narrower tape, a compact and more portable model could be produced. In 1964 Sony unveiled the CV-​2000, a Helical-​scan, monochrome, open-​reel video recorder with attachable camera and monitor. It was the first step towards the creation of a video tape recorder that was for home use in terms of both size and cost. The recording unit itself weighed 20kg and was similar in size to a small suitcase. With the video camera attachment, it cost $1,425 (the equivalent of approximately $11,000 in 2016). Over the next five years, Sony released five more models in the CV range, each time improving the image and sound capabilities while decreasing the size and cost of the machinery. In 1967 it released the fifth and final CV model, the CV-​2400, also known as the Video Rover and described as a Portapak. It was made up of two parts: the handheld video camera and a half-​inch reel-​to-​reel tape recorder that could record up to 20 minutes of black-​and-​white videotape. The term Portapak was used in promotional materials and taken up as a short hand by its users to refer to the compact portability of what had previously been an inaccessible medium. Print advertising illustrated this point by showing it being worn by models with ease over one shoulder (see Figure 7.1). In 1969 portable videotape recording technology became standardised with the introduction of the EAIJ-​1 system across manufacturers and countries; this meant it was now possible to play back video material interchangeably on multiple models and brands. What followed was an increased investment in this new technology and the expansion of the consumer video market. In accordance with this standardisation, Sony launched the AV-​3400 at an initial cost price of $1,495. It weighed only 8.5kg and was able to record up to 30 minutes of half-​inch video footage viewable instantly on the camera’s viewfinder. Additional features included 122

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Figure 7.1:  Promotional material published by Sony of DV/​CV-​2400 (1967).

improved sound, such as the capability to add commentary or background music during playback. For the first time, the possibility to instantly video, play back and then record over the same piece of tape became available to those excluded from broadcast television. Unlike cine-​cameras, where celluloid stock required developing at a laboratory before playback was possible, video allowed for instant playback. It offered a self-​contained and autonomous mode of communication in a visual language that resembled television, one that was familiar in the way it looked to its users and its audience but where the content was in their hands. These new capabilities brought with them questions about how and by whom such a format could be mobilised. Artists were drawn to this medium, in part because of its contemporaneity, regarding it as untainted by the complex history film brought with it.4 As well as instantaneous records of performances and demonstrations, it allowed 123

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Figure 7.2:  Promotional material published by Sony of AV-3400/8400 (1975).

for new experiments. Live playback on monitors enabled introspection and intimacy in the form of self-​reflective diaristic modes. The cameras were still relatively heavy and had separate recording units; in order to take advantage of their portability, two people were required to operate them smoothly. While this made the cameras difficult to use for long periods of time, it made them particularly suitable for collaborative and shared forms of representation. In the context of a community video project, a single unit was often used by large groups of five to ten people, each wanting to ‘have a go’; this resulted in largely handheld camerawork and takes of typically two to four minutes. 124

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK In 1970 community arts group Interaction began using video under the name Infilms (Interaction Films). Members took some basic portable video equipment along to a group they were working with from the mental health charity, Mind. In an interview, Interaction founder Ed Berman describes their use of video as follows: When they got behind the camera, or in front of the camera, they were freed up from the various afflictions that they had, and I postulated that one of them could hold a microphone […] and one of them could talk fairly clearly, and one of them could press buttons, and see through a camera, and one of them could walk. So they had four different afflictions, but together they made up a team that could make videos.5

The collective handling of the equipment decentred the possibility for a single tone or viewpoint to be communicated and engendered new forms of collective authorship. The use of portable video cameras in non-​ profit areas has been recorded in Britain from the late 1960s, initially in education; since 1969 it has largely been considered in the context of community arts.6 The Arts Council of Great Britain began to use this term in the early 1970s when it formed a Community Arts Working Party. This was established in order to understand the proliferation of work by artists and activist groups that evaded the pre-​existing categories of artistic practice recognised by the Arts Council. They included playwrights and actors making street theatre performances, forming groups such as Full Moon and Interaction; filmmakers and photographers establishing community film and photography workshops such as Tower Hamlets Arts Project and Blackfriars Photography Project; and writers and artists transferring their practice to public spaces with self-​publishing and mural projects by organisations such as Free Form and Centerprise. These groups often carried out their work away from and in opposition to large institutions and dominant modes of representation. This oppositional stance included a rejection, by many community artists, of object-​ based art and a focus instead on process. The inclusion of community video under the umbrella of community arts and this emphasis on process have meant that the videos that were produced have since been regarded as 125

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Other Cinemas ephemeral and have remained largely under-​theorised. In order to address this absence, the following paragraphs set out the historical context in which these videos were produced and expands on the aesthetic and formal qualities the use of portable video cameras engendered. Community arts was constituted of three interdependent components, which also provide the context for the development of what became community video. First, many artists began to work outside galleries and instead moved into self-​organised, alternative spaces in London such as the Arts Labs, first in Covent Garden, then in Camden, as well as locally run community centres such as the Community Action Centre in Notting Hill and Centerprise in Hackney. These were collectively run organisations, often located in temporarily occupied buildings. They encouraged a multimedia and multidiscipline approach to art exhibition and sought to dissolve the boundary between the audience and the artist or art object. A timeline drawn up by the Arts Council describes the development of community arts and the impact of the opening of the Arts Lab: This was no longer one small room, but a collection of rooms which divided itself into cinema, performance area, coffee bar, bookshop, studios, gallery etc. It attracted a new youthful audience and presented work that otherwise would not have been seen in London […] The organisations were loosely organised and concentrated all their activities towards encouragement of new work.7

Second, there was the desire to generate new forms of expression specific to the needs of marginalised and under-​represented groups including young, elderly and working-​class people and later, with the development of ‘identity politics’, women and people of colour. Groups such as The Albany and the Walworth and Aylesbury Community Arts Trust ran projects on council estates for mixed groups with wide-​ranging needs and interests. Finally, there emerged, as Owen Kelly describes in his analysis of the community arts movement, ‘a new kind of political activist who believed that creativity was an essential tool in any kind of radical struggle’.8 One such activist was photojournalist-turned-club promoter, and early video pioneer John Hopkins, who in 1969 recorded a video of a demonstration in Notting Hill on a portable Sony video camera. This marks 126

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK the first known use of a portable video camera in what became the community video movement. During the mid-​1960s Hopkins (widely known in the arts community as Hoppy) co-​founded the underground newspaper International Times, set up the London Free School and co-​ran psychedelic night club UFO with his peers and Arts Lab co-​founders Jim Haynes and Jack Henry Moore.9 It was through Haynes and Moore that Hopkins first learnt about video in February 1969. He describes this encounter in an interview as follows: Jack said to me ‘video’. He only had to say a couple of sentences to me and I  knew what it was. I  went back to England, and I  went to see Sony, who were the producers, and I  borrowed from them a ‘Portapak’ and the necessary equipment to playback for six weeks, experimented with it and then I wrote them a report.10

During this period of experimentation Hopkins used his newly acquired portable video camera to record regional arts festivals, housing demonstrations and street theatre performances. Hopkins began to see video as a medium that offered a new range of cultural and political expression. In a letter written in December 1969 to the Arts Council, Hopkins describes his work at the Camden Arts Lab/Institute for Research in Art and Technology (IRAT) making a ‘visual record of events’,11 specifically regional music and cultural festivals. It also outlines his research using video as a means to communicate with those parts of society he describes as ‘disparate and decentralised’.12 Hopkins was chiefly interested in video as what he described as a ‘generalised tool, which could be used by various people for various means’.13 I will now focus on those groups who could see its benefits in relation to their specific shared experiences in order to produce community videos. The two most common uses of video by community groups, although not mutually exclusive, were to record firsthand the world around them, and second to engage action through their making and viewing. To draw out the specific aesthetic and formal qualities these approaches generate, this chapter uses examples of videos made by two ‘community video’ groups based in London. Both were interested in the relationship between representation and activism: for the former approach I examine Graft On!, a group that collaborated with John Hopkins to work within their own 127

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Other Cinemas community, and for the latter Liberation Films, whose work is indicative of the facilitation of video projects initiated by outside organisations invited in by communities, in order to facilitate projects for their benefit. Graft On! was founded in 1972 by artist and activist Sue Hall after she took up residence in temporary housing in the same neighbourhood as John Hopkins, in an area of north London that was home to 280 squatters and known as ‘Squat-​city’.14 Hall shared an awareness of her precarious housing situation with her neighbours, and in order to obstruct the demolition of their neighbourhood she founded Graft On!.15 Hopkins approached Hall and encouraged her to try using video in order to encourage a form of collective representation among the disparate residents. In a document written by Hall and Hopkins in 1975 reflecting on the work of Graft On! they describe it as ‘communications research, an action research agency applying communication theory to social change’.16 Hall defines the use of video technology for democratic aims as ‘participant observation’ and expands as follows: We were squatters ourselves, we were not from the outside. And at first people were very hesitant about the video, and we took it out and let other people handle it a lot. We showed them, this is what you do, this is how you zoom, this is how you focus. And then we’d erase it, we’d re-​use tapes, which were very expensive in those days. But after people had had a go themselves, they felt reassured. They didn’t see it as dangerous, or outside, or any of those things. And that was quite crucial. And we videoed occupations, parties, evictions, street actions, lectures, seminars and marches.17

Graft On! began by servicing their own short-​life housing18 and squatting community, a sector of society that they believed was either unable or unwilling to be served by others. They identified this sector as one suffering from a loss of democratic rights and social rejection.19 In 1974, Hall made the video Ben’s Arrest which illustrates the firsthand use of portable video technology within a community group. Hall had been organising the painting of some houses on Prince of Wales Crescent in north London, and on arriving on the corner of the street she saw a police van parked outside a row of squatted houses. Hall later recalled: 128

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK I went home to get the Portapak, thread the tape and put the battery in […] I  went back as fast as possible just in time to see the police coming out with what they claimed were stolen goods and violently arresting a young black man before apparently beating him up in the back of the Transit van whilst I was still shooting video.20

This handheld recording, shot on half-​inch Sony videotape, lasts only two minutes and comprises a single take, which follows the forceful eviction and arrest of an Afro-​Caribbean teenager by bailiffs and police. Hall takes advantage of video’s sync sound capabilities, herself narrating what is taking place from behind the camera. The shaky camera and live voiceover of this piece engender a sense of urgency and intimacy, both common characteristics of the firsthand use of portable video cameras. Furthermore, they position Hall in the role of witness, a role which, when the video is screened, is directly transferred onto the audience. The use of video by marginalised groups as a form of witness was significant as it took what looked like mainstream television, with its familiar grain and flicker, but used it to provide a counter-​narrative to the more sterile and detached presentation of similar scenes when broadcast as television news. These were videos that showed how it ‘really was’: this man was brutally evicted, these women think and feel like this, these people are being treated like this. Film theorist Roger Hallas locates witnessing in activist video as that which occurs in ‘a framework of relationality’.21 Thus he proposes witnessing as a performative act; through bearing witness, the reality of an event and the bodies and voices documented become affirmed. There is, however, the risk that the event witnessed may be read as what Hallas describes as a ‘confessional spectacle’, where the radical potential for public validity and recognition instead becomes a site that affirms dominant victim narratives and preconceived expectations of marginalised voices. Working from within the community to which she belongs, Hall is able to empathise with the individual needs of the subject in front of the camera. Avoiding the trap Hallas describes, Hall uses the role of witness for the benefit of her community. This was highlighted when Ben’s Arrest was later used as evidence to defend the youth in the title’s acquittal in court. 129

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Other Cinemas Reflecting on the role of radical political documentary, film theorist Chuck Kleinhans suggests that to ‘witness, move and interpret is not enough. We must also produce documentaries which deal with why things are the way they are and how they might change and be changed’.22 Kleinhans distinguishes such approaches as those which ‘elaborate the “here is…,” and they shape the viewers’ response in a deliberate direction’.23 In order to avoid such traps and direct the role of witness to effect change, not only through showing, community video practitioners developed strategies and formal techniques such as instruction. Community videos could be seen as being instructive at the point of production and again when they were screened in a discursive context, either through direct address or else through proposing different forms of behaviour. They avoid being didactic and authoritarian by expressing the instruction or information from a position familiar and similar to that of the audience members; the body and voice onscreen would have been recognisable to the people watching. There are many examples of this instructive approach, for instance tapes documenting poor-​quality housing, which were shown to housing authorities as proof of residents’ living situations, as well as videos produced offering advice to residents on how to seek fairer treatment from local councils. Other tapes used instruction to demystify the very process of making a video. They show participants being taught how to hold the video camera, control playback machinery and make collective editing decisions. Similar outputs became known as ‘trigger films’: non-​didactic presentations of situations that avoid speaking from a position of a ‘pre-​given moral attitude’,24 and instead suggest methods and, through screening, create a space to question the status quo. Community video group Liberation Films describes trigger films in its distribution catalogue and, in doing so, directly address the concerns raised by Kleinhans: Trigger films are short, open ended narratives, often ending before the problem reaches its climax, rather than ending as films usually do with the solution of a problem. It is this which often provokes the viewers into questioning how the problem has arisen, what possible solutions there can be and how these problems and issues have traditionally been thought about.25

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK Unlike Graft On!, Liberation Films were interested in facilitating site-​specific, localised community projects outside their own neighbourhood. Established in 1968 under the name Angry Arts, they began by screening and distributing political films, including those produced by the US-​based group Newsreel.26 They saw the screening of films as a means to open up a discussion, developing points of interest, identifying areas of concern and ‘encouraging participation towards social change’.27 They went on to produce their own politically engaged community projects, initially using 16mm film and later, as they recognised the advantages of immediate playback and its ease of use, they began using video. The first film that they made was End of a Tactic, filmed in 1968 in collaboration with the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. Shot on 16mm black and white film, it seeks to document changes in attitude relating to mass demonstrations. Following the production of End of a Tactic, members of Angry Arts went on to make another collaborative film, this time about the emerging women’s liberation movement, called A Woman’s Place (1971). The combination of producing and screening films of a political nature led the group to work more closely with the ‘growing grassroots movement in the community’,28 and form what became Liberation Films. In 1973, Liberation Films launched their first community video project in Balham, south London. It was named ‘Project Octopus’ because it was made up of eight linked stages, including the production and screening of a trigger film made by members of Liberation Films about the area where the project was due to take place. The trigger film is made up of interviews carried out with local residents about their attitudes to living in the neighbourhood and their response to local community activities. This was then publicly screened to encourage discussion and participation; basic camera training followed, so that community members themselves could produce their own videotapes. These in turn were screened with an invitation to the local community to come together and watch the newly made videos on TV monitors and be part of a group discussion on future community activities. Alongside the production of two short videos that focused on local issues relevant to the participants, Liberation Films and the people of Balham also made a documentary called Starting to Happen (1973). It is an example of both the firsthand use of video by community groups and the making and screening of a video by more established community video groups in order 131

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Other Cinemas to (in the words of the voiceover in the documentary) ‘arouse and involve the people of south London’ in community action. It adopts a linear structure, presenting the various stages a community might go through when using a portable video camera to record, edit and screen a video by, for and about a local issue. Lasting 40 minutes, it is a compilation of footage shot on 16mm film by Liberation Films, intercut with video material recorded by the participants. This was of group discussions, interviews and scenes of action, including street protests and sits-​ins demanding a zebra crossing for a busy road. The combination of film and video illustrates the different formal characteristics specific to the implementation of each. Where film is used by the Liberation Films crew in order to document the process and show distance and authority, video is used by the community groups in order to carry out interviews with one another and document relevant events in their daily lives. In contrast to the film elements, the grainy video footage appears closer to the action and evokes a feeling of familiarity and intimacy. The cast and crew of Starting to Happen are largely working-​class women and young children. We see and hear them in their homes, in libraries and on the streets, in group discussions and interviewing one another, their voices audible from in front of and behind the camera, both speaking of their personal experiences and making authoritative demands. These were voices and spaces who up until this point had remained mostly ignored or else misrepresented in mainstream media, rarely deemed as worthy of attention in front of, let alone, behind the camera. The editing and framing of voice further encourage the subjects’ control over their speech and position, in the following way. The interviewer(s) and recording equipment often remain in shot and their questions remain heard. This works on two levels: it rejects the traditional approach where statements are implausibly edited together to appear as one statement. Second, it refuses to hide the presence of the interviewer and other participants who have mediated the subjects’ contribution. This enables participants to develop arguments and points of discussion together, using familiar, often colloquial language. The portability of video and its capability for playback with minimal technological know-​how meant that those otherwise excluded from the process, perhaps due to commitments in the home or lack of access and confidence, were able to engage with the medium very much on their own terms. 132

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK The introduction of portable video recording technology enabled community groups to record and share their experiences in a medium suited to their specific politics and needs. However, the submission of community video into the wider community arts movement, with its focus on process over object, has meant that any discussion of the videos themselves has remained largely absent from wider non-​fiction film history. To conclude, this chapter addresses this current absence by situating the aesthetic qualities and formal strategies produced as a result of community video practices in the lineage of similar approaches to political non-​fiction filmmaking. I propose that community video, like the political films and feminist documentaries being produced at the same time, allowed for a more subject-​ specific approach to moving production than its predecessor, cinéma vérité, as well as anticipating activist video practices in the 1980s and 1990s. Although not all community videos are the same, the majority are structurally similar to the traditional realist documentaries that preceded them: made up of a series of talking heads interviews intercut with observational footage, occasionally accompanied by voiceover in order to direct or contextualise the action onscreen. Writing at the end of the 1970s, feminist film theorist Julia Lesage argues that such a conventional approach to the transmission of information is designed to reach as wide an audience as possible. She describes the defining facets of feminist filmmaking projects of the 1970s as ‘biography, simplicity, trust between woman filmmaker and woman subject, a linear narrative structure, little self consciousness about the flexibility of the cinematic form’.29 The formal characteristics that Lesage uses to describe feminist documentary can also be applied to community videos. Although they look and sound familiar, they do not simply reproduce and thus perpetuate dominant ideologies. There is a focus on the participants’ control over their image, often showing strategies that emphasise collaboration. Seeking to avoid or disrupt the traditional consent or surrender of the subject, the formation of the groups often remains unfixed, allowing each participant equal access and space, showing that there is no single author. Feminist documentaries and community video share characteristics with cinéma vérité, which preceded these genres. Lesage explains how vérité offered an ‘attractive and useful mode of artistic and political expression for women learning filmmaking in the late 1960s’.30 However, where vérité offered a sheen of objectivity while remaining ambiguous and complicit in 133

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Other Cinemas its relation to the subject, feminist documentary makers, like community video practitioners, avoided making films about people, instead favouring collaboration with them. Filmmaking practices that focus on the process of intervention and change and seek to reflect the position of the subject located in front of and behind the camera, as well as an understanding of the experience of their intended audience, have been described by film historian Thomas Waugh as ‘committed documentary’.31 Waugh offers a resolution to the otherwise oppositional filmic approaches of hands-​on collaborative video making and hands-​off vérité filmmaking with his use of the term ‘collaborative vérité’: A semi controlled event, usually within a defined space and one that might have taken place without the filmmaker’s intervention, proceeds with all participants aware of and consenting to the camera’s presence and with an unspoken but visible collaboration shaping the event.32

Waugh’s term departs from the traditional understanding of the interactive mode in documentary theory that privileged the camera at the centre of the action. Instead, the camera in many community video projects is not the object that produces conflict or expression; instead, it works alongside the already engaged and active subjects. Chuck Kleinhans expands on the relationship between formal, visual elements and content in political documentaries with the suggestion that they need not always conform to the characteristics that have been taken up to present authoritative, seemingly neutral impressions of reality. Instead he proposes: We remain aware of the ideological nature of forms, be they realist or avant-​garde, and can expand our options to embrace a variety of forms which depend on context, audience, intention and other concerns for effect. We can also be open to using new forms, mixing and creating forms appropriate to new political forces, and new voices within the progressive coalition.33

This proposition is demonstrated in community videos with the subversion of the traditional conceit of the ‘talking head’. Instead of being deployed to prove a single, authorial line of argument, the profusion and variety of registers often included in community video projects provides an opportunity 134

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK for often otherwise invisible subjects to demonstrate a variety of complex, often contradictory, perspectives in order to construct a narrative and image of themselves counter to dominant representations. Roger Hallas describes how in activist videos this ‘decentred authority and dispersed it among the numerous speaking subjects’,34 which reflects the collective and collaborative production of the community videos themselves. The take-​up of newly available portable video recording technology by community groups in the 1970s led to the construction of a new form of non-​fiction filmmaking that followed on from cinéma vérité. Where vérité used 16mm film cameras to observe and record action with an aesthetic of distance and of perceived neutrality, portable video cameras encouraged collaborative production and the ability for instant playback allowed participants to share in group reflection. Community video groups were influenced by the community arts movement and similarly found ways to challenge single authorship by dissolving the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject. They were able to collectively conceive of formal approaches and aesthetics that reflected their identification with the subject located in front of the camera and produce videos that were committed to intervening in the lived experience of those involved.

Notes 1. This chapter focuses on ‘community video’ groups in London as this is where the majority of early ‘community video’ work began. 2. Approximately 500,000 units of the Sony TR-​610 were sold throughout the world in 1958 (Product & Technology Milestones, Radio, Sony Global, http://​ www.sony.net/​SonyInfo/​CorporateInfo/​History/​sonyhistory-​b.html, accessed 22 June 2016). 3. For the purposes of this study I have focused on Sony’s development of portable video recording technology, as it was Sony models that were most widely used in the UK. Other companies developing similar technology at the same time were Ampex in the USA and Panasonic and Akai in Japan 4. British video artist Catherine Elwes describes the appeal of a medium that unlike film did not come with the history of being dominated by male artists. She relates the unique technological and material specificity of video to the exploration of feminine subjectivity she was working through at the time: ‘Video offered the perfect medium within which to explore autobiography

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Other Cinemas and manifestations of the self. The technology produced instant image feedback and could easily be used in a private space like a mirror, the images accepted or wiped according to the perceived success of the recording’ (Catherine Elwes, interview by Chris Meigh Andrews, http://​www.meigh-​andrews.com/​ writings/​interviews/​catherine-​elwes, accessed 14 November 2014). Catherine Elwes, Video Loupe: A Collection of Essays by and about the Video Maker and Critic, Catherine Elwes (London: KT, 2000), p. 9. 5. Unpublished interview with Ed Berman by Heinz Nigg and Andy Porter, 2014. 6. Steve Herman, The Broadcasting of Low Gauge Video:  A  Research Report (London: Centre for Advanced TV Studies, 1981). 7. The Development of Community Arts with the Arts Council, V & A archives, 1974. 8. Owen Kelly, Community, Art, and the State:  Storming the Citadels (London: Comedia in association with Marion Boyars, 1984), p. 17. 9. Interview by Jackie Hatfield with Sue Hall and John Hopkins, 17 November 2004, http://​www.rewind.ac.uk/​database/​searchrewind.php?table_​name=RE WINDArtistDetails&function=details&where_​field=Artist_​Name&where_​ value=SueHall/​JohnHopkins&Section=Details, accessed 6 November 2014. 10. Transcript of interview by Chris Meigh Andrews with Sue Hall and John Hopkins, London, 7 February 2005, http://​www.meigh-​andrews.com/​writings/​interviews/​sue-​hall-​john-​hopkins, accessed 6 November 2014. 11. John Hopkins, ‘Memorandum re: visual record of events’ (London, 1969), John Hopkins [JH] /​Sue Hall [SH] (TVX /​CATS /​Fantasy Factory), British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection. 12. Ibid. 13. Transcript of interview by Chris Meigh Andrews with Sue Hall and John Hopkins, London, 7 February 2005, http://​www.meigh-​andrews.com/​writings/​interviews/​sue-​hall-​john-​hopkins, accessed 6 November 2014. 14. Andy Roberts, Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain (London: Marshall Cavendish, 2008), p. 158. 15. Grafton was the name of the electoral ward where Sue Hall lived. 16. Sue Hall and John Hopkins, Socio-​Cultural Applications of Television Technology in the UK (London: Council for Cultural Co-​operation, 1975), p. 18. 17. Transcript of interview with Sue Hall by Heinz Nigg and Andy Porter, 2015, unpublished. 18. In the 1970s, councils purchased and emptied a number of properties for regeneration projects or demolition. When these projects fell through due to a lack of funding, with councils unable to afford to bring them up to the legal minimum standards to rent them out, they designated the properties as ‘short-​ life’ homes and allowed people to live in them paying little or no rent. 19. Hall and Hopkins, Socio-​Cultural Applications of Television Technology in the UK, p. 18.

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The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK 20. REWIND, Interview by Jackie Hatfield with Sue Hall and John Hopkins, 17 November 2004, http://​www.rewind.ac.uk/​database/​searchrewind.php?table_​ name=REWINDArtistDetails&function=details&where_ ​ f ield=Artist_​ Name&where_​value=SueHall/​JohnHopkins&Section=Details, accessed 6 November 2014. 21. Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 10. 22. Chuck Kleinhans, ‘Forms, politics, makers and contexts:  basic issues for a theory of radical political documentary’, in Thomas Waugh, ed., ‘Show Us Life’:  Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (Metuchen, NJ, and London: Scarecrow, 1984), p. 320. 23. Ibid., p. 320. 24. Rosalind Coward, ed., Liberation Films Distribution Catalogue (London: Liberation Films, 1978), p. 33. 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Newsreel was a network of independent political filmmaking and distribution organisations across the USA, founded in 1967 following a demonstration at the Pentagon against the Vietnam War. They made over 60 documentaries in conjunction with grassroots organisers. The focus was on subjects relevant to specific communities and workplaces that could serve as a catalyst for social change. 27. Heinz Nigg and Graham Wade, Community Media: Community Communication in the UK:  Video, Local TV, Film, and Photography (Zürich:  Regenbogen-​ Verlag, 1980), p. 138. 28. Ibid., p. 138. 29. Julia Lesage, ‘The political aesthetics of the feminist documentary film’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3:4 (1978), p. 508. 30. Ibid., p. 508. 31. Thomas Waugh, ‘Why documentary filmmakers keep trying to change the world, or why people changing the world keep making documentaries’, in Waugh, ed., ‘Show Us Life’, p. xiv. 32. Thomas Waugh, The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 209. 33. Kleinhans, ‘Forms, politics, makers and contexts’, p. 320. 34. Hallas, Reframing Bodies, p. 88.

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8 ‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video Lucy Reynolds

‘It is as though a line could be drawn between past and present, and pieces of a person’s life and work pegged on it; no exceptions, no change  –​theory looks nice  –​the similarity of item to item reassuring –​shirt to shirt –​shoulder to shoulder –​an inflexible chain, each part in place. The pattern is defined. Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I  prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.’ Lis Rhodes, ‘Whose history?’, Film as Film exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery 1979

The artist filmmaker Lis Rhodes slides a book across the table towards me. On its cover is the sepia image of a woman. Her clothes could date her to the late Victorian period, yet her direct gaze, turned towards the camera half amused, half guarded, engages me with a look of contemporary assertiveness. And this evocative face does not only confront me across the distance of the nineteenth century, it is also familiar from the more recent pages of distribution catalogues, brochures for touring film programmes by Circles, the moving image distributor for women artists that ran between 1979 and 1991.1 The book that Rhodes has passed me is Autobiographie d’une pionnière du cinéma (1873−1968), the autobiography of Alice Guy, one of the 138

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‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video earliest recorded female film directors to work successfully in the industry. Most of her films had been lost, the others had often been attributed to her male collaborators. Rhodes was unaware of Guy’s body of films until her friend the filmmaker Patrice Kirchhoffer gave her the book during a trip to Paris in the mid-​1970s, thus propelling a process of inquiry into forgotten female figures in film history. The subsequent writings, films and screenings not only echo the wider cultural rehabilitations then occurring in the women’s movement, but also helped to shape, as I shall discuss, a feminist film culture specific to experimental film and video practices. Alice Guy’s autobiography thus provided an important starting point for Rhodes. Certainly, as part of the exhibition committee involved at the planning stages of the exhibition Film as Film: Formal Experiments in Film at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1979, Rhodes was keen to address the absence of women filmmakers, such as Guy, from the exhibition, which had been originally instigated by the German filmmaker Birgit Hein2 for the Kunstverein in Cologne, and presented there under the German title of Film Als Film, two years earlier.3 Rhodes’s fellow committee members were all prominent spokespeople for the experimental, and particularly formal, practices and exhibition contexts of an alternative film culture now well established in Britain.4 Malcolm Le Grice, for example, had recently completed the book Abstract Film and Beyond (1977), which makes an explicit chronological and formal continuity between the early avant-​garde film experiments of Dada and Surrealism, and the ‘recent developments’, as his book puts it, by contemporary practices of a specifically Modernist, and Western, orientation. Rhodes’s objective as part of the committee, until her resignation in its latter stages, was to broaden and complicate this Modernist teleology, not least through the inclusion of more women artists. While in Paris in 1978, for a screening event at the Pompidou Centre,5 she and Felicity Sparrow, writer and then distribution officer at the London Film-​makers’ Co-​operative, took the opportunity to visit the Cinémathèque Française and the offices of Gaumont to track down further information about Guy and the whereabouts of her films, which had since become scattered and dispersed. With the objective of uncovering more works for inclusion in Film as Film, the trip also enabled them to conduct further research into the films of Germaine Dulac, who was best 139

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Other Cinemas known for her experimental film The Seashell and the Clergyman (1927), scripted by Antonin Artaud. The film, infamous partly because Artaud later denounced his involvement, was sufficiently canonised as an example of early avant-​garde cinema to be included in the Film as Film exhibition. However, as Rhodes and Sparrow contended, this was one film within a much wider body of works, some of which were made within the commercial film sector as well as the experimental circles in Paris of which Dulac was part. Sparrow, for example, credits her work, The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922), as ‘the first ever experimental and feminist film’,6 for its portrayal of a woman’s lack of fulfilment in an unhappy marriage.7 The early research processes in which Rhodes engaged in order to address experimental cinema’s omission of Guy and other significant figures can be linked to the burgeoning scholarship and debates in the women’s movement from the early 1970s, dedicated to retrieving women’s writing, art and other achievements that had been lost from history. It could be argued, then as now, that these historical revisions vividly illustrate women’s long-​term marginalisation in all fields of endeavour, from politics and medicine to film and art; looking back to past experiences of oppression not only enabled women to articulate their history, but also to politicise their own work. As the editorial for the 1973 issue of the US-​ based Feminist Art Journal urged: Women in all the arts must, at this time, make an all-​out effort to rediscover their own history. It is essential that we recognize and credit the first rate achievements of our forebears which have, for so long, been denied or downgraded by established male authorities. We must no longer allow ourselves to be robbed of our heritage past or present.8

Rhodes’s and Sparrow’s engagement in these feminist discourses of advocacy and research were preceded by notable early initiatives in the British context, such as the meetings of the Women’s Liberation Workshop’s History Group, which later became the Family Studies Group, between 1970 and 1974.9 Organised initially by Juliet Mitchell and Rosalind Delmar and including Sally Alexander, Mary Kelly and Laura Mulvey, the reading group model of the History Group developed alongside, and in close dialogue with, the ‘small group’ consciousness-​raising culture, foundational to 140

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‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video the women’s movement.10 Mulvey stresses that collective reading and discussion drew out new meanings for feminism in texts often embedded in the socio-​political discourses of patriarchy, from Engels and Lévi-​Strauss to Freud. As she recalls: looking at ideas, reading books, as politically conscious women allowed us to see things, blind spots. Ideas could be developed, concepts that particular writers had overlooked. So, without necessarily becoming experts on the particular topics, this conscious questioning provided a way into the text. And the text could speak to you and you could speak to the text.11

This study of history with a feminist filter manifested itself in a myriad of different contexts from the early 1970s, from small discussion groups, the History Group for instance, to articles on lost women artists by feminists such as Griselda Pollock, or the Virago publishing project. Women began to write about their lost history and about learning from the past in women-​run journals and magazines such as Feminist Art Journal in the US, or Shrew and Spare Rib in Britain. The need for artists to understand their own art practices through the struggles of past generations is also apparent in the activities of groups such as the Women’s Workshop of the Artists Union. The minutes of a meeting in May 1973, convened by the artist Tina Keane, and including, for example, Mary Kelly, Alexis Hunter and Sue Madden, detail a study (to be continued at their next meeting on 21 May) of slides of ‘women artists of the past (from, that is, the twelfth to the nineteenth century) and brought out the implications of their work from both a formal and feminist point of view’.12 The extent to which discourse around the visibility of women artists was embedded as part of the workshop’s objective to support contemporary practice is also indicated by the reading list at the bottom of the page, which includes Linda Nochlin’s rallying article ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’ alongside articles by Lucy Lippard and Miriam Shapiro. As Rhodes has stressed, these processes of consultation and engagement in the networks of historical advocacy and study already in place around women’s film history, were vital to her research. In December 1978 she travelled to New York and met with the artists and writers VeVe A. Clarke, Millicent Hodson, Francine Bailey and Catrina Neiman, who were 141

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Other Cinemas working on the publication project The Legend of Maya Deren, carefully and collectively piecing together documents, letters and writings to present a more representative picture of Deren’s life and work. Through their support, Rhodes was able to access more information about Deren and her films, including the extracts from her writings13 reprinted in the Film as Film catalogue, and to strengthen ties to other international networks of research into women’s art and film histories. The Women’s Event, organised by Laura Mulvey, Lynda Myles and Claire Johnston at the 1972 Edinburgh Film Festival, a first attempt at a corrective to cinema’s male-​dominated canons, might be a more direct antecedent to Rhodes’s project. Running over a week at the Film House,14 concurrent with the rest of the festival, Mulvey, Myles and Johnston screened a diverse programme of works by women associated with the history of Hollywood, such as Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, alongside works of experimental practitioners, both historical such as Maya Deren (At Land, 1944), and contemporary such as Joyce Weiland (Reason over Passion, 1969) and Beverley Grant Conrad (Coming Attractions, 1970). While Alice Guy was absent from the programme, the film by Dulac in which Sparrow identifies a feminist resonance, The Smiling Madame Beudet, is placed in a programme alongside Leontine Sagan’s 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform, acclaimed for its early representation of lesbian desire. The importance of setting up dialogues between contemporary filmmakers and their historical forebears is apparent in these juxtapositions of the old and new across the programme. Viewers were able to find resonances between the activist work of contemporary film collectives such as the US-​based Liberation Films (A Woman’s Place, 1971) or Kate Millet’s feminist documentary Three Lives (1971) and the work of Deren or Arzner. In this sense, the Women’s Event, like the first Women’s Film Festival, held in New York a few months earlier, and the programmes of screenings at the National Film Theatre which followed the Edinburgh Festival, all served to inscribe a marginalised history of women filmmakers into the debates and activities around what a contemporary women’s cinema might be.15 Rhodes’s experience on the committee for Film as Film just six years later shows how difficult it was to break down the barriers that excluded women in film, whether in terms of its histories or of its contemporary practices. Resistance on the committee to her ideas concerning the 142

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‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video inclusion of material gathered during her research caused her to resign and to withdraw her 1971–2 film Dresden Dynamo from the exhibition. Instead, Rhodes felt it was more important to formulate the political nature of these omissions from the exhibition in a written text. Published in the Film as Film catalogue, Rhodes’s essay ‘Whose history?’ challenges the exhibition’s historical survey of medium-​specific filmmaking by using the persuasive metaphor of history as a washing line: an ‘inflexible chain’16 that might be reduced to a ‘crumpled heap’. With this vivid and feminist image Rhodes evokes the exclusions and limitations of the exhibition’s male-​endorsed and male-​dominated chronology, which she had already foregrounded in the multiple cuts and rips of her contemporaneous film Light Reading (1978; see Figure 8.1), where measurement is signified in the recurring silhouettes of scissors and rulers. An extract from Guy’s autobiography was published adjacent to Rhodes’s article, and texts by Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac, gathered from her research, multiply the dialogue from a binary of then and now, past and present, into a number of different historical registers, in which Deren’s ethnographic inquiries of the 1950s could speak to Dulac’s discussion of film’s potential in the Paris of the 1920s. Through this

Figure 8.1:  Lis Rhodes, Light Reading (1978). Courtesy of the artist.

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Other Cinemas juxtaposition, a new model of historiography can be glimpsed. As Rhodes and her peers embed Guy, Dulac and Deren into their critique of film history’s canonic omissions, they also bring the concerns articulated by Guy a century earlier into dialogue with the contemporary urgencies of Rhodes’s questioning essay, finding a common cause between them. Here Rhodes’s ‘crumpled heap’ becomes a discursive model of history where different voices overlap, confront, converse, to form a choral configuration of simultaneous histories rather than a neat chain of cause and effect. Crucial to this chorus was the collective statement of withdrawal from the Film as Film exhibition signed by Rhodes alongside a number of fellow artists such as Annabel Nicolson, Susan Stein, Jeanette Iljon and Felicity Sparrow, also protesting the bias of the exhibition. The statement concludes: We made the decision not to carry on, not to continue working in a situation that was hostile and ultimately fruitless for the individual women involved. It is better that the historical research be published elsewhere and the work of contemporary women film-​makers, artists and critics be presented in a context where they are valued.17

Out of this stand, a gesture against the status quo, came a positive and innovative decision: the foundation of Circles, a film distribution collective for women artists formed in 1980 by Rhodes, Sparrow and others associated with the statement of withdrawal from Film as Film. Indeed, their statement, and Rhodes’s articulate critique of Film as Film’s male-​ dominated canon, have been read by new generations of feminist filmmakers and scholars as a compelling manifesto for the new feminist initiative. However, I would like to extend Rhodes’s washing line metaphor to argue that, rather than a neat historical line from Guy to Circles, the experimental feminist film and video culture which emerged in the years following ‘Whose history?’ has its genesis in the ‘crumpled heap’. Thus, the absence that Rhodes had first observed is further challenged by the extended and reflexive processes of historical advocacy, built on the emphatically discursive, creative and collective strategies that I have discussed. For the collective statement in the Film as Film catalogue has a further implication: not only does it read as an eloquent chorus of difference, inspired by the histories embodied in the words of Dulac, Guy or Deren, but it also asserts 144

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‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video the value of the meetings that many of its signatories had attended at the Co-​op over the preceding 18 months. As Sparrow has stressed: the women who put their names on that protest statement had all been meeting in the Film Co-​op’s Distribution Office (where I worked at the time) for at least the previous 18 months, where we were talking about all sorts of things, not just that exhibition, which only became the focus a few months before the opening.18

These informal evening gatherings drew from a range of different networks, including students at Croydon College of Art, where Rhodes and Mary Pat Leece (from the film collective Four Corners) were teaching, artists associated with the Co-​op such as Annabel Nicolson and workshop organiser Susan Stein, and the feminist film collective, Cine Sisters. As Sparrow has recalled, their debates were ‘about everything, from personal accounts of filmmaking to other films we’d seen, about our personal lives, about how so many of us had moved so far away from the kind of lives lived by our mothers’.19 The personal and broad-​ranging register of the discussions which Sparrow describes echoes the continued efficacy of the ‘small group’ consciousness-​raising model which had defined the early impetus of the women’s movement, and had also been generative for other cultural reconsideration projects such as the History Group. At the same time, harking back to the early initiative of the Women’s Event, screenings and discussions of a more public nature, occurring in parallel with the preparations for Film as Film, also played a significant role in advocating new visibility for contemporary, as well as historic, film practices. The 1979 Feminism and Cinema screenings at the Edinburgh Film Festival were to prove revelatory for many of the group concerning the width and depth of women’s filmmaking. Of particular importance, according to Sparrow, was the weekend of talks and screenings ‘Feminism, fiction and the avant-​garde’, which Deke Dusinberre and Rhodes organised at the Co-​op in 1978, in association with the American Camera Obscura Collective.20 The international programme of films, from Babette Mangolte’s to those of Valie EXPORT’, attested to the existence of a vital experimental film culture 145

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Other Cinemas by women, which embraced their diversities of voice, narrative and performance, in a manner extending joyfully beyond Film as Film’s Modernist parameters. The circumstances precipitated by Film as Film might thus be seen to crystallise a dissatisfaction that had grown increasingly articulate through these strategies, all of which contributed to Circles’ formation for ‘Women’s Work in Distribution’ in 1980. As Sparrow asserts, Circles emerged not from ‘anything as negative as that withdrawal from Film as Film’.21 A more accurate attribution might be the consultative and collective strategies rooted in the women’s movement − between friends, colleagues, researchers − which extended from meetings at the Co-​op to networks across Paris and New York. In addition, the limitations of Film as Film’s historical outlook were also thrown into relief by the more diverse and inclusive screening initiatives around feminism and film, such as ‘Feminism, fiction and the avant-​garde’, which coincided with its development. Indeed, Circles’ foundation was aided by discussions with other women’s distribution collectives, such as the London-​based Cinema of Women and New York-​based Women Make Movies, which helped to define Circles’ distinct focus on creative multimedia practices: from tape, slide and performance to single screen works.22 In an early interview Sparrow emphasised Circles’ relationship to feminism as more implicit than that of its counterparts, distributing ‘films by women that don’t necessarily articulate the campaign slogans but perhaps something more private, questioning representations of women in film and the whole language of film’.23 There is no doubt that the research that she and Rhodes conducted into the films of Guy, Dulac and Deren, all working before such a feminist articulation was possible, contributed to Circles’ identity; and all three were to be distributed by Circles alongside contemporary artists. One of Circles’ first women-​only screening events in February 1982, for example, placed Guy’s A House Divided (1913) and Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922) alongside Rhodes’s Light Reading and Joanna Davis’s Often During the Day (1979), lifting the two earlier films out of history into the discourses of contemporary women’s film practice. This generative dialogue in past and present registers provided the basis for Circles’ first touring programme, Her Image Fades as Her Voice Rises. An accompanying pamphlet, written by Sparrow and Rhodes, and 146

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‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video supported, like Film as Film, by the Arts Council, talks directly of the difficulties of rethinking history, first articulated in ‘Whose history?’. As they assert, it is not just ‘a question of balancing out the injustices […] [but] […] goes deeper than these crimes of exclusion and unequal opportunities’.24 The tentative solution, if my own reading is correct, asserts again the value of advocacy, for practices old and new, forged through multiple views and voices in ongoing dialogue and inquiry. felicity: We’ve shifted the ‘facts’ […] but they need shifting –​like my carpet they gather dust –​and that begins to obscure the patterns that make facts mean […] lis: Arguing all the way round to here […] sitting with her at the table –​ still talking –​25

Acknowledgements With special thanks to Laura Mulvey, Lis Rhodes and Felicity Sparrow.

Notes 1. For a detailed examination of Circles’ reconfiguration as Cinenova in 1991 see Julia Knight and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), pp. 187−207. 2. Hein remained involved in the discussions around its transfer to London, as the other female voice on the eight-​person exhibition committee. 3. As Maxa Zoller has contended, the German version of the exhibition was very different in its formulation, conceptually and in terms of the spatial configurations of the exhibition, proposing a ‘new “hybrid” exhibition format’, of darkened space and multiple looped projections, which replaced Film Als Film’s ‘scientific, encyclopedic, and information-​based style’ with ‘a more playful “fairground-​like” display’ (Maxa Zoller, ‘ “Festival” and “Museum” in modernist film histories’, in Tamara Trodd, ed., Screen/​Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 65. 4. They included artists associated with the London Film-​makers’ Co-​op, such as Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice, and writers and programmers such as Philip Drummond, Deke Dusinberre, Simon Field and A.L. Rees, and the exhibition officers David Curtis and Richard Francis, on behalf of the Arts Council and the Hayward Gallery respectively. It is important to stress that Peter Gidal, along with Annabel Nicolson who was invited to join in its latter stages, resigned from the committee in sympathy with Rhodes.

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Other Cinemas 5. Felicity Sparrow recalls that they were presenting a screening programme of works by the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative. See Katy Deepwell, ‘Felicity Sparrow: forming Circles’, n.paradoxa 34 (July 2014), p. 87. 6. Ibid., p. 88. 7. As the Cinenova catalogue would later describe it: ‘Whilst conveying a sense of Mme Beudet’s own feeling of captivity, the film looks critically at the state of marriage, especially within provincial life, as sealed and sanctified by the patriarchal institutions of Church and State’ (Cinenova catalogue entry, 1994, p. 16). 8. Feminist Art Journal (Winter 1973), Editorial, p. 2. 9. Mitchell and Delmar set up the History Group following the National Women’s Liberation Movement Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970. Following initial involvement, Sally Alexander went on to form the Pimlico Group and stopped attending meetings of the History Group from 1971. The Family Studies Group also included Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie. 10. For a contemporary explanation of the small group culture see Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom:  The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 14–​17. 11. Laura Mulvey in conversation with Lucy Reynolds, 13 November 2015. 12. Minutes for Artists Union –​Women’s Workshop, 7 May 1973, held at Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths College, London. 13. These include ‘The artist as god in Haiti’ (Tigers Eye 6 (1948)) and ‘A statement of principles’ in Film as Film: Formal Experimental in Film (London: Hayward Gallery, Arts Council, 1979), pp. 121−4. 14. From 21 to 26 August 1972. 15. The importance of creating a dialogue between history and the contemporary is apparent in the assertions of the three programmers’ collective statement in the festival brochure: ‘Because of the grotesque discrimination against women there has been in the cinema, it is right to pay homage to those who have managed to make films, against all the odds. But a festival such as this need not stop short of homage. The growth of the Women’s Liberation Movement gives us every right to expect that, sooner or later, the barriers will be broken down’ (Edinburgh Film Festival programme (Edinburgh, 1972), p. 7). For further writings on the relationship between historical precedents and contemporary practices, also see Notes on Women’s Cinema, a pamphlet edited by Claire Johnston and published by Screen to coincide with the screenings (Screen Pamphlet 2, London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1972). 16. Lis Rhodes, ‘Whose history?’, Film as Film, p. 120. 17. Annabel Nicolson, Felicity Sparrow, Jane Clarke, Jeanette Iljon, Lis Rhodes, Mary Pat Leece, Pat Murphy, Susan Stein, ‘Woman and the formal film’, Film as Film, p. 118. 18. Deepwell, ‘Felicity Sparrow’, p. 88.

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‘Whose History?’ Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video 19. Ibid., p. 89. 20. The Co-​op hosted, for example, an event with the editors of Camera Obscura, the American film journal, which had emerged from the earlier Women and Film journal. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Film, formalism and the avant-​garde’, in Michael O’Pray, ed., The British Avant-​Garde Film, 1926 to 1995 (Luton: University of Luton, Arts Council, 1996), p. 209. 21. Deepwell, ‘Felicity Sparrow’, p. 88. 22. Sparrow defines Cinema of Women, originally Cine Sisters, as ‘friendly rivals’, focused on feminism’s campaigning agenda, who had also taken on some of the features shown at the Edinburgh Feminism and Cinema screenings. See ibid., p. 89. 23. Jo Imeson, ‘Women’s film now’, an interview with Felicity Sparrow of Circles and Eileen McNulty of Cinema of Women (COW), held at British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, Central St Martins, London. 24. Lis Rhodes and Felicity Sparrow, Her Image Fades as Her Voice Rises (London: Circles/​Arts Council, 1982), p. 6. 25. Ibid.

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Part Three

Practices, aesthetics and 1970s experimental filmmaking (the 200 avant-​gardes)

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9 A Whole New Attitude: The London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op in the Decade of Structural/​Materialism Steven McIntyre

In this chapter I revisit a time of intensely productive filmmaking activity in Britain − roughly from the late 1960s to the end of the 1970s − associated specifically with the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative (hereafter LFMC). This period was later described by former LFMC member Peter Gidal as a ‘crucial juncture’,1 a critical point of reference for British experimental film in which certain aesthetic, formal, political and theoretical interests coalesced into a movement he defined as structural/​materialist film; this has more recently been called the only genuinely native avant-​ garde movement of the twentieth century in the UK.2 With such high stakes it is not surprising to find no shortage of commentary from that time about the films, the LFMC and Gidal’s formulation, and some debate and disagreement among critics, historians and LFMC members themselves, particularly about the nature and definition of structural/​materialist film, about how rigorously the formulation might be applied to the films and interests of the filmmakers and indeed about whether the filmmaking might be theorised at all. Such detailed and lengthy debate is typical and to a large extent definitional of artistic sectors,3 but all the more likely in this case where, as 153

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Other Cinemas I will discuss, the attitude and tone of the work − both written and filmic − was consistently oppositional. Although I  draw extensively on the rich, at times quite lively, textual history of the LFMC and structural/​materialism, my intention in this chapter is not to intervene in this irredentist field (as it might be called after Bourdieu3), nor to reproduce or reignite the polemic with one more argument, nor to set the record straight on certain finer points one more time. My concern is rather to attempt to identify and understand the broader issues and ideas at stake in what has become known as a highly influential moment for experimental film in Britain and reimagine the historical, cultural and technological contexts that informed them. Inevitably, in traversing what Laura Mulvey has called a ‘break or fissure in the continuities of history’ from the vantage point of our post​theory times,4 in which the master narratives of Marxist-​informed film study and indeed of the avant-​garde have been challenged, some of the ideas, positions and aesthetic strategies discussed here will likely seem quite characteristic of a particular time and context. Others, I will argue, notwithstanding the twin historical breaks of post-​modernism and digital technology which followed the 1970s, can be considered strikingly predictive and to some degree formative of the contemporary situation of artists’ film and video. In the sociological analysis of cultural groups, observed Raymond Williams, there is always advantage in historical distance and, with the passing of time, earlier groups are more easily placed and understood.5 An added advantage in the case of the LFMC is that, despite claims in sources that it has been generally unrecognised,6 neglected by art institutions7 and under-​theorised in the academy,8 there exists an extensive published body of testimony and documentation originating from the very first year of its formation. Almost all foundational members have recorded or written retrospectives of the group’s early years and nativity in the mid-​1960s and some, such as David Curtis, Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice, have authored more than one, not entirely mutually consistent, versions.9 The combined literature and interview material constitutes a somewhat contradictory but generous historical resource. All accounts at least agree that the LFMC was formed in London in 1966 on the cusp of an increase in countercultural activity. Filmmaker and founding LFMC member Stephen Dwoskin summarises: 154

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A Whole New Attitude The LFMC began as one of the liberating influences that hit Britain in the mid-​sixties, along with the Beatles, the miniskirt and ‘swinging London’. It was a time when the Vietnam War brought in many Americans [Plastic. The Albert Hall Poetry Wholly Communion. The Beats, the hippies, the Provos. Marijuana. Underground Press and the Anti-​University.]10

Through this testimony it is established that the LFMC had a defining occasion − in the back room of the Better Books bookshop –​and initial membership − ‘Dwoskin, Mayer, Hartog, Cobbing, and Matusow’11 and Geesin.12 In a pattern prototypical of the time, the group merged rhisomically with other personalities, groups and locales of the London-​centred counterculture, but ultimately formed into a discrete entity through a distinctive, defining interest in the promotion, screening and production of film, especially avant-​garde film. At first, the cooperative function and orientation of the LFMC was expressed predominantly through meetings, archiving, screenings and especially publication in the group’s own magazine Cinim and through the underground press, chiefly International Times and Oz. Interestingly, despite flamboyant appeals in the first issue of Cinim to ‘shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot stop never stop’, it is claimed that not one of the original LFMC members had shot a film in England.13 This changed in the late 1960s with the arrival of new members Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal, who brought with them what was termed by one observer an art school-​oriented interest in film practice and a new constituency for the group.14 From this point the LFMC becomes a more distinctive filmmaking movement and retained this core identity until its merging with the London Video Arts in 1996 to become the Lux Centre. From the late 1960s the importance of self-​sustained, collective, experimental film production at the LFMC, linked concomitantly to a clearly oppositional status and identity, is documented in all the published histories: since 1966, writes Gidal, ‘members of the LFMC have thought it necessary to have equipment at hand in order to allow for the making of films’.15 This equipment provided the technological support for ‘a whole new attitude towards the cinema’,16 yielded a ‘specific kind of work on representation that another system could not’,17 provided an impetus for experiment with access based on ‘socialist principles’,18 and allowed ideas about and interest in the possibilities of experimental cinema to become ‘an effective 155

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Other Cinemas reality in a country that had previously been starved’.19 This short summary of the origins of the LFMC, evidencing a powerful oppositional investment in film but also inklings of contradiction and controversy, raises a number of key questions. What was the nature of the specific kind of work on representation mentioned by Gidal and Dwoskin, who was going to define it, and using what terms? What were the distinctive characteristics and significance of the group’s investment in the film medium and film technology? How would a countercultural, archly experimental position in aesthetics, technology and political economy be sustained over time in a capitalist, increasingly neo-​liberal social context? What tensions might develop, paralleling other ‘anti-​institutions’ of the counter-​culture, between the communitarian nature of the organisation and the agreed identification with experimentation, creativity and expressive individualism? These questions are, it turns out, related and can be explored further through LFMC filmmaker and theorist Peter Gidal’s contribution and influence, especially his now notorious discussion of the LFMC films in intellectual and art world journals of the mid-​1970s, most notably Screen, Afterimage and Studio International. Gidal’s work is especially interesting and useful for my study here in that, through his years of involvement with the LFMC, he combined filmmaking, contributions to organisation and distribution, seminar discussion and engagement with technology, but also challenging theoretical writing which addressed key ideas informing his own practice and that, he argued, of the group. In a published letter to Screen Gidal asserted that the films being produced at the LFMC were ‘experimental in the most extreme form of that label’20 and were not only constitutive of a sui generis avant-​garde in Britain, but demanded attention from film critics and theorists due to their immediate relevance to the then-current debates about aesthetics and politics. Gidal responded to the continuing lack of interest on the part of Screen theorists by writing his own extended theoretical essay, first published in Studio International in 1975, categorising the LFMC work as structural/​ materialist.21 The key term which Gidal coined for his essay invoked politically left-​leaning continental intellectual sources, including Brecht, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and the literary theory of the journal Tel Quel, but perhaps most directly the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose writings had been translated and published in the New Left Review 156

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A Whole New Attitude and later in Screen. Althusser’s work, especially the essay ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’ (1971), was highly influential at the time as a reinterpretation of Marxism –​a new structural Marxism –​positing that individuals were not simply duped into sustaining capitalist production, but were invited through education and, most critically, aesthetic forms to recognise themselves as subjects within a self-​perpetuating and fundamentally exploitative social order.22 Gidal references this core idea in his choice of title, but, as I discuss later, develops it as a fundamental principle of his (and the LFMC’s) theoretical position. In May 1976, Gidal programmed the Structural Film Retrospective at the National Film Theatre, London, and edited a critical companion to the season, Structural Film Anthology (published by the BFI) in which he revised the Studio International essay with other relevant material. Gidal’s writings, especially the essay ‘Theory and definition of structural/​materialist film’ (1976), gave a highly specific definition to Dwoskin’s ‘new attitude to the cinema’ and the ‘kind of work on representation’ being done at the LFMC, but in their direct engagement with film theory, especially what later became known as Screen theory and their publication through the BFI press and BFI-​funded journal Screen, Gidal’s writings aimed and successfully contributed to bring the LFMC into much closer alignment with higher education and state arts patronage. One of the outstanding characteristics of the LFMC case, despite the group’s historical association with practice, is the long-​standing collective commitment to writing and publication. This investment in the textual, evident right from the beginning with the magazine Cinim and continuing in the 1980s with the journal Undercut, as well as in the books and essays by Steve Dwoskin, David Curtis, Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal, was part of a range of strategies − meetings, seminars, screenings, distribution, organisation, appropriation of technology − through which the LFMC tenaciously actualised itself, albeit in sometimes discursively conflictive ways. Publication provided what might be called, following Benedict Anderson, ‘languages of power’23 which articulated a lasting image of the LFMC, especially about its status as an avant-​garde community, for group members and their audience within the film culture of the time. The writing and self-​generated publication also contextualised and promoted the LFMC catalogue for local and international publics and as such can be seen as an early example of the kind of distribution activity still vital for the 157

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Other Cinemas success and sustainability of independent producers today. As Knight and Thomas point out, ‘operating online offers film-​makers a potential global reach, [but] given the abundance of material on the internet, establishing a presence and identity is still crucial’.24 Although subject to criticism then and after, theorisation of the work of the LFMC as structural/​materialist by Gidal and Le Grice was also highly progressive in its engagement with ideas and themes central to intellectual debate of the time. Over the ensuing decades, artists’ film and video were to move into closer and closer alignment with higher education, providing a ‘parallel reality’ of teaching income, technological resource, gallery space and above all the status for practice as research in which ‘an artist can operate throughout his or her life’.25 As Gidal understood presciently, if higher education was indeed to become so influential in the career of most artists and in the life of cultural groups, even filmmakers with an oppositional identity were more likely to be empowered through an engagement with, rather than resistance to, institutional and academic ambiences. Initially, the LFMC sustained itself working on very low costs via membership subscriptions (as advertised in International Times) and somewhat random personal donations, such as that serendipitously acquired by Malcolm Le Grice in collecting a debt owed to an American financier by Australian painter Arthur Boyd.26 During the group’s phase in the late 1960s as part of the multi-​media Drury Lane Arts Lab, the LFMC received no funding from the Arts Council, whereas, according to the lab founder Jim Haynes, it gave $37,000 annually to the kitchen of the Royal Opera House and considered them and the artists’ group Friends of the Arts Council ‘the London extremists’.27 In 1975 this changed when the LFMC received $16,000 from the BFI Production Board, beginning a series of annual grants that continued until 2001.28 Over the same broad period from the mid-​1960s, and with increasing momentum throughout the 1970s, British art schools added Film to their Fine Art curriculum and, in some notable cases, independent Film departments were set up. Gidal and Dwoskin taught filmmaking at the Royal College of Art, Le Grice was at St Martin’s School of Art from 1964 and later LFMC members would invariably continue this pattern.29 Furthermore, as the independent film sector itself grew and developed an increasingly high profile, funding bodies drew on its expertise. Le Grice 158

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A Whole New Attitude joined the BFI Production Board in 1972,30 and Curtis was enlisted in the Arts Council Artists’ Film Sub-​Committee at its inception in 1973.31 This was a considerable shift in social profile, if not value structure, in a short time for the LFMC. It was, after all, in the group’s own publication Cinim where in antinomian, countercultural spirit the BFI was called ‘one of those horrors born of modern bureaucracy’32 and readers were advised that the art of cinema could ‘not be created with money but with love’.33 The most decisive historical factor informing change at the LFMC was the emergence of Screen, whose initial bid in 1971 to establish Film Studies as a university discipline in Britain and to intervene in film culture were both made, as is well known, through an audacious claim upon the revolutionary role of avant-​garde art. The relatively expeditious success of this project and the growing presence of the Screen editorial board in the BFI, the Independent Film-​Makers Association and also the Edinburgh Film Festival, which from 1969 had been a prestigious and supportive venue for the LFMC, threatened to significantly alter cultural and economic conditions for London-​based experimental filmmakers. A recent reminiscence of Gidal suggests that he was certainly aware of these potentially displacing shifts: ‘so many people from the journal Screen’, he says, ‘thought of the Coop as a film-​practice somehow intuitive, artisanal, romantic. As if that were the only imaginable opposite of their reified academicism’.34 Indeed the cool epistemological themes of Screen − theory, methodology, scientific analysis − were clearly developed in critical opposition to countercultural values, to which, as Gidal suggests, the LFMC as an anti-​institution celebratory of the intuitive, artisanal and romantic qualities of the avant-​garde, had initially connected itself so spectacularly and so successfully, as verified by David Curtis’s and Barry Miles’s accounts of the crowds at LFMC screenings.35 Such developments in the social and cultural context necessarily ‘provoked defensive polemics’ from LFMC filmmakers, especially for Gidal and Le Grice who were more active as theorists and provided what Gidal called ‘very productive inducements to make theory and not just consume it’.36 Gidal’s response with the ‘Theory and definition’ essay and the follow-​up, ‘The anti-​narrative’ (1979),37 was extreme and controversial and, more interestingly for this discussion, proved to be enduringly influential for the LFMC identity and for artists’ film and video in the UK generally. 159

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Other Cinemas Although designed and received as polemical at the time, it is now clear that Gidal’s ideas were pitched squarely within the terms and tone of 1970s Screen theory. Echoing key essays published about avant-​garde film in Screen by Fargier and Mulvey,38 Gidal defines structural/​materialist film in opposition to mainstream cinema: whereas in Hollywood film the signifying codes and techniques used are typically secondary to the story or image content, avant-​garde film worthy of that name, he says, ‘does not represent or document anything’ and is instead defined by its structure and ‘materialist function’.39 In other words, those functions and properties specific to the film technology, the material of film − grain, exposure, framing, focus, movement, duration − were the films’ primary content. This exclusive concentration on film technology might seem odd or arcane from the perspective of digital culture, which, on the contrary, is characterised more by choice and interplay between various image capture formats and technologies. In the late 1960s, though, as film was synonymous with the totality of cinema, no alternative format was available for artists who sought to challenge Hollywood and conventional cinematic forms of production and screening. More practically, 16mm cameras with variable lenses and shooting speeds had become much more readily available than ever before and major cities had laboratories and film stock suppliers. In the case of the LFMC, Malcolm Le Grice and Bennett Yahya capitalised on these in 1969 by setting up hand-​made printing and processing equipment.40 Thus film technology, especially 16mm film, was central to the aspiration of the group towards self-​sufficiency, access and experiment, but also allowed for levels of spontaneity and immediacy approaching those we are now familiar with in digital video. The group’s comprehensive DIY approach to cinema, which combined an oppositional definition of experiment with technological innovation and an ‘in-house’ or vertical integration of exhibition, distribution and promotion of work is another remarkable feature of the LFMC. In the absence of funding or indeed any local cultural definition for what it was doing, the LFMC was offered an abandoned factory as its permanent premises and constructed a makeshift cinema, a workshop and production equipment with which, by the early 1970s, members would be making up to ten 16mm films each year, some, like Leggett’s Shepherd’s Bush (1971), completed in a single night.41 Moreover, all the films produced at the LFMC would have their 160

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A Whole New Attitude availability guaranteed through the group’s own distribution system. In retrospect, the interest of this achievement is not only that it foreshadows the kind of total command of independent filmmaking now readily available through digital capture and delivery through self-​maintained websites or memberships like YouTube or Vimeo, or that it underlines for filmmakers today the clear advantages of collectivity and of ‘real world’ screening and discussion, but above all that it yielded in its own context ‘a specific kind of work on representation’,42 a house style that successfully distinguished the group across changes in premises, membership and, to some extent, even technology. This work, it should be said, was more than just a catchy, enduring brand. Running through the theoretical biases and oppositional gearing of the structural/​materialist project was an aspiration to consider the connections between technology, artistic practice and politics, and intercede or, as Gidal said, bring these connections forth to operate in clarity for the audience.43 In the digital age where it is too often difficult to distinguish the artwork and its meaning from the distinctional surfaces of an operating system, a corporate logo or a sponsoring academic institution, such an aspiration strikes me as still as relevant as ever. Gidal aligned structural/​materialist film with the Screen political interest in how the cinema might, using the Althusserian terminology of the day, interpellate audiences differently, or engage viewers to question the oppressive social positionings of capitalism and (as Mulvey famously argued) patriarchy. Gidal agreed with theorists such as Stephen Heath, Claire Johnston, Paul Willemen and Laura Mulvey that perceptual activity was central to the politics of cinema and advocated mental activation of the spectator through specific forms of filmic address produced by the filmmaker, but argued more extremely that it was neither conventional narrative-​based film nor the independent cinema of Godard, Staub−Huillet or Mulvey−Wollen which had attracted some analysis from Screen theorists, but only structural/​materialist film that enabled what he termed a ‘reflexive attitude’ in the audience and allowed for a ‘non-​hierarchical’,44 truly open-​ ended production of meaning. Gidal further extended and qualified his position in ‘The anti-​narrative’ essay, ruling out any possibility of progressive political cinema even in structural/​materialist film. Meaning, he argued, echoing the fatalism of Althusser and Debord, cannot be anything other than ‘always and necessarily produced’ and so ‘that any representations of 161

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Other Cinemas the social, economic, sexual, political can be portrayed or operated upon and through cinema is useful for academics’ hopes and nothing else’.45 The reaction of critics was swift and correspondingly strong. In an appended response, Stephen Heath attempted to probe the limits of Gidal’s argument. For critics, he said, Gidal heralded the end of cinema as it had been defined by Screen, since for leftist intellectuals it implied there were no remaining valid positions to adopt, whereas for any artist interested in aesthetics and politics, Heath said, Gidal offered only two options: either the refusal to make films, or to work in the structural/​materialist mode which delayed or resisted the prevailing ideological order but would not overthrow it.46 More in its tone of defensiveness than in its content, Heath’s reaction confirmed the success of Gidal’s project to launch the work of the LFMC onto the centre stage of film theory debate in Britain. Such critical attention raised certain questions on which Gidal’s definition of the films as a social practice to some degree hinged (though no more so than other Screen positions) and which for artists and critics would come to the fore at the end of the decade: How closely did the theory of structural/​materialism parallel the experience of watching the films? How homogeneous was the LFMC filmmaking at the time and how thoroughly did Gidal’s ideas correspond with the work being done? Consistent with critical discussions in Gidal’s Structural Film Anthology, it is not difficult to find examples of LFMC films of the time which in different ways support and extend his theories of active spectatorship and the open-​ended production of meaning. The films Gidal himself produced while at the LFMC such as Clouds (1969) and Room Film 1973 (1973) are extremely minimal and non-​narrative, challenging the viewer to construct a stable perspective by briefly inserting a series of recognisable objects within a longer flow of blurry or obscure abstractions. In the prominent use of film grain, under-​or over-​exposure, extended duration and light flares, the films also continually remind the viewer of the materiality of film. In Man with a Movie Camera (1973), David Crosswaite similarly employs minimal glimpses of interior space and camera techniques − manipulation of focus, exposure and composition − rather than narrative as the primary content of the film and, with the unique device of a mirror placed in front of the lens, positions the audience as both witness to the film’s construction and interpreter of its meaning (see Figure 9.1). The shifting focus, exposure variation and camera shake, whose source 162

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A Whole New Attitude

Figure 9.1:  David Crosswaite, Man with a Movie Camera (1973). Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

(the actions of the filmmaker on the camera) is revealed in real time via the mirror, alternatively establish and interrupt visual stability with greatly disorienting effect. This film, in its almost total conflation of cinema technology with the visual, even more so than Gidal’s own work, might be seen as the locus classicus of structural/​materialist ideas. The materialist functions of cinema were not only explored at the LFMC through the camera. Malcolm Le Grice applied film printing techniques in Berlin Horse (1970) 163

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Other Cinemas to loop, distort and colourise a short home movie sequence. With each repetition, the sequence becomes emptied of meaning and the viewer instead becomes aware of the minute variations of film grain and dirt on the film’s surface, or of the different manipulations of perspective and colour that Le Grice introduces. Again, the film engages the audience actively and does so not through image content or narrative but through a formal dialectic between the continually shifting relations between the abstractions created through optical zooming and colour distortions and the fleeting moments of clarity where we recognise the familiar shape and movement of the horse reprised from the film’s opening. Echoing critical objections raised both to Gidal’s work and the Screen project in general, I would say that it is difficult to determine how these and other identifiably structural/​materialist films by LFMC members, for instance Gill Eatherley, Guy Sherwin, Annabel Nicolson and Mike Leggett, were actually read by audiences, or how any consistent reading relations then translated into a questioning of the narrow limits of experience placed on working people by capitalism, as Le Grice argued.47 Even the films of Gidal, Crosswaite and Le Grice were not as free of personal expression and of humour or visual pleasure as Gidal’s formulation would indicate, a point which he himself concedes in his discussion of the richness and visual experience delivered by Crosswaite’s work.48 The further question of how homogenous the LFMC was in the 1970s and how uniformly the group ought to be identified with structural/​materialism has, as I  suggested at the outset, largely been settled. In some ways the most definitive historical statement on this score was made by the extensive LUX Shoot Shoot Shoot screening programme of 2002, which organised the first decade of LFMC work into eight categories, representing structural/​materialist film with a selection of fewer than ten films. Early arguments for the diversity of work at the LFMC in the 1970s had already been made by Deke Dusinberre and LFMC member Lis Rhodes (1979) and followed by much later by book-​length studies by Duncan Reekie (2007) and Patti Gaal-​Holmes (2015), pointing to a continuation thoughout the 1970s of counterculturally inspired, personal and visionary filmmaking at the LFMC and to the work of women film-​makers at the LFMC which never strictly adhered to the structural/​materialist mode.49 These arguments, mostly set against Gidal’s theorisation of the films and 164

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A Whole New Attitude efforts to connect the cooperative movement with art institutions and higher education, both evidence and reproduce the confused, contradictory and uneven picture presented by the case of the LFMC and indeed middle-​class countercultures in general in which an alternative communitarian orientation typically clashes with expressive individualism, resulting in personality differences, internecine squabbles, inconsistency of image, dilution of commitment, defections or group termination. Perhaps the most striking of such anomalies for the LFMC was the withdrawal in 1979 of Annabel Nicolson, Tina Keane and Lis Rhodes to form their own collective, Circles. This immediately followed their public walk-​out from the Hayward Gallery Film as Film exhibit, in protest at the under-​ representation of women’s film and a continuing marginalisation of women from screening catalogues and the histories they constructed.50 In making any general assessment of the early years of the LFMC, it is difficult to move past the uncompromising critical challenge staged by Peter Gidal’s structural/​materialist theory and the oppositional, antinomian values that from various points of view informed both the LFMC practice and the broader context of film culture, especially now, as they have come to be associated with negative aesthetics and superseded epistemological positions. Indeed, it is tempting to join the critical voices which would dismiss work of the period for its quaintly exclusive fixation with film technology and its conceptual resistances which in the 1980s would be released by a new generation of artists and critics less invested in binary logic and animated instead by fresh approaches to representation, narrative and the potentialities of identity and post-​gender politics. But I would argue that the very associations and connections embedded in negative historical assessments which nevertheless acknowledge a distinctive, rigorous working-through of theory and practice, experiment with technology and interrogation of the relations between aesthetics, cinema and politics, may now also point us to the enduring relevance of 1970s avant-​garde film.

Notes 1. Peter Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology in/​through/​and avant-​garde film:  an instance’, in T. de Lauretis and S. Heath, eds, The Cinematic Apparatus (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 151−65.

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Other Cinemas 2. Sean Cubitt, ‘Foreword’, in Jackie Hatfield, ed., Experimental Film and Video (London: John Libbey, 2006), pp. viii−ix. 3. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The field of cultural production’, in R. Johnson, ed., The Field of Cultural Production (London: Polity, 1993), pp. 29−73. 4. Laura Mulvey, ‘Looking at the past through the present: rethinking feminist film theory of the 1970s’, Signs 30:1 (2004), pp. 1286−92. 5. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). 6. Michael O’Pray, The British Avant-​Garde Film: 1926–​1995 (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996). 7. Hatfield, ed., Experimental Film and Video. 8. Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and definition of structural/​materialist film’, in P. Gidal, ed., Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976), pp. 1−21. 9. For details, see David Curtis, ‘English avant-​garde film: an early chronology’, Studio International 190:978 (November−December 1975), p.  177, Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology in/​ through/​ and avant-​ garde film:  an instance’, pp.  151−65, Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (London:  Studio Vista 1977). 10. Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is … (London: Peter Owen, 1977), p. 62. 11. Curtis, ‘English avant-​garde film: an early chronology’, p. 177. 12. Raymond Durgnat, ‘Cooped in a co-​op’, Art Monthly 151 (November 1991), pp. 24−5. 13. Curtis, ‘English avant-​garde film: an early chronology’, p. 177. 14. Durgnat, ‘Cooped in a co-​op’. 15. Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology in/​through/​and avant-​garde film’, p. 151. 16. Dwoskin, Film Is …, p. 64. 17. Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology in/​through/​and avant-​garde film’, p. 151. 18. Ibid., p. 154. 19. Dwoskin, Film Is …, p. 65. 20. Peter Gidal, ‘Letter on ontology’, Screen 17:2 (Summer 1976), p. 132. 21. Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and definition of structural/​ materialist film’, Studio International 193:985 (November−December 1975), pp. 189−96. 22. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London:  New Left Books, 1971). 23. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 44. 24. Julia Knight and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences:  Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (London: Intellect, 2011), p. 269. 25. Michael Mazière (2009), ‘Institutional support for artist’s film and video in England, 1966−2003’, British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection (1979), p.  15, http://​www.studycollection.co.uk/​maziere/​paper.html, accessed 16 January 2016. 26. Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI, 2007), p. 9.

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A Whole New Attitude 27. Peter Thomas, ‘The struggle for funding: sponsorship, competition, and pacification’, Screen 47:4 (Winter 2006), p. 463. 28. Ibid., p. 464. 29. Duncan Reekie, Subversion:  The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2007), p. 153. 30. Thomas, ‘The struggle’, p. 464. 31. Reekie, Subversion, p. 156. 32. Simon Hartog, ‘The BFI dossier who governs what?’, Cinim 3 (Spring 1969), p. 22. 33. Jonas Mekas, ‘Open letter to film-​makers of the world’, Cinim 1 (1966), p. 7. 34. Peter Gidal, ‘Matter’s time time for material’, in Hatfield, ed., Experimental Film and Video, p. 24. 35. See Curtis, A History, and Barry Miles, The Sixties (London:  Jonathan Cape, 2002). 36. Gidal, ‘Matter’s time’, p. 24. 37. Peter Gidal, ‘The anti-​narrative’, Screen 20:2 (Summer 1979), pp. 73−93. 38. Jean-​Paul Fargier, ‘Parenthesis or indirect route’, Screen 12:2 (Summer 1971), pp. 131−44, and Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 6−18. 39. Gidal, ‘Theory and definition’, pp. 1−21. 40. Curtis, A History, p. 27; Knight and Thomas, Reaching Audiences, p. 41. 41. Curtis, A History, p. 28. 42. Gidal, ‘Technology and ideology’, p. 153. 43. Gidal, ‘Theory and definition’, p. 15. 44. Ibid., p. 9. 45. Gidal, ‘The anti-​narrative’, pp. 77−8. 46. Stephen Heath, ‘Afterword’, Screen 20:2 (Summer 1979), pp. 93−100. 47. Malcolm Le Grice, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London:  BFI, 2006), p. 85. 48. Peter Gidal, ‘Notes on Crosswaite’s films’, Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976), p. 95. 49. Deke Dusinberre, ‘St. George in the Forest: The English avant-​garde’, Afterimage 6 (Summer 1978), pp. 4−14; Lis Rhodes, ‘Whose history?’, in D. Dusinberre and A.L. Rees, eds, Film as Film:  Formal Experiment in Film 1910–​1975 (London:  Arts Council/​Hayward Gallery), pp. 119−20; Reekie, Subversion; Joy Payne, Rebel Reels:  The London Film-​Maker’s Co-​operative 1966–​1996 (Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse, 2015), p. 26. 50. Payne, Rebel Reels, p. 26.

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10 The ‘Salvage’ of Working-​Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries Jamie Chambers

From their inception, the work of Tyneside’s Amber Collective has been characterised by highly considered, conscious approaches to form. From the conscious modernism of 1968’s All You Need is Dynamite; to the classicist, ‘salvage’-​based Tyneside Documentaries of the 1970s (the primary focus of this study); the complex ‘interfaces between documentary and fiction’1 in Amber’s later social realist dramatic features Seacoal (1985), In Fading Light (1989) and Eden Valley (1995); the to-​camera reflexivity of Dream On (1991); the Marker-​esque photo montage of Byker (1983) and The Writing in the Sand (1991); the playful formal experimentation of T Dan Smith (1987) and the dual personal/​community focus and visible cameramen in Pursuit of Happiness (2008):  Amber’s approaches to form have remained reflexive, exploratory and adaptive. Working in Newcastle and the industrial North East of England, Amber was founded upon a collective desire to document and celebrate working-​ class experience, history and culture through the mediums of film and photography. Founded at a similar time to many other British film workshops in the late 1960s, the group would subsequently become a key player in the workshop movement’s interactions with the film and TV workers’ trade 168

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience union ACTT and Channel 4.2 Still based in 2016 at the iconic Side Gallery in Newcastle Quayside (where they moved in 1971), Amber are now approaching their fifth decade, making them the longest surviving of all the British workshops by a considerable stretch. Amber’s founding members met at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London. Looking beyond the capital to make a long-​term, embedded commitment to one of Britain’s key industrial cities, Murray Martin (who subsequently directed many of the group’s films), Graham Denham and Sirkka-​Liisa Konttinen (who went on to become one of the group’s principal photographers) investigated Liverpool and Glasgow before choosing in 1969 to settle in Newcastle,3 an area where Martin had studied and taught but to which none of the collective’s other founding members had any core tie. Once in Newcastle, Amber were joined by Peter Roberts, who became the collective’s go-​to cinematographer and a key contributor to the Tyneside Documentaries (see Figure 10.1). Considered within a wider context of politicised filmmaking in the 1970s and in particular alongside other British film workshops founded around the same time (such as Cinema Action and the Sheffield Film

Figure  10.1: Signing the Amber partnership agreement, 1975. Pictured left to right: Graham Denman, Graham Smith, Peter Roberts, Lorna Powell, Murray Martin, Sirkka- Liisa Konttinen. Courtesy of Amber.

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Other Cinemas Co-​op), Amber’s work is characterised by long-​term, embedded and collaborative work processes prioritising the input, opinion and perspectives of the communities depicted in what might be considered a semi-​ethnographic approach to cultural documentary. Amber’s work was motivated at least initially by many of its founding members’ strong identifications as working-​class artists. Martin and Roberts in particular felt their experiences of institutionalised education had distanced them from their cultural backgrounds in working-​class communities in Stoke and Leeds respectively: as Roberts described, ‘both of us felt a certain loss that that process [of education] had brought about’.4 A conscious sense of salvage or rescue might thus be described as innate within Amber’s founding impetus, a project of ‘salvage’ formed in response to the ‘deculturing’ or (in the words of Tony Garnett) ‘declassing’ effects of education,5 a desire to document, celebrate and give voice to lived working-​class experience that was at best misunderstood and at worst suppressed and unrepresented in the visual arts. This chapter reconsiders Amber’s Tyneside Documentaries − a series of short films the collective made throughout the 1970s to document disappearing labour practices in Newcastle and wider Tyneside –​from a contemporary perspective. Discussion focuses in particular upon Launch (1973), High Row (1973), Last Shift (1976), Bowes Line (1975) and Glassworks (1977). The focal concern of the Tyneside Documentaries with labour practices on the brink of disappearance has led commentators such as Darren Newbury to identify the films as ‘salvage documentaries’.6 Notions of ‘salvage’, ‘rescue’ or ‘redemptive’ cultural work currently wear a decidedly pejorative cast in the discourses surrounding contemporary cultural studies, key among them the widely referenced work of James Clifford.7 Newbury’s designation therefore raises interesting questions for contemporary readings of the Tyneside Documentaries: does the collective’s work bear the scrutiny of Clifford’s critique of the ‘salvage paradigm’,8 or might Amber’s highly politicised use of such methodologies inflect broader discussions of salvage? Reconsidering the Tyneside Documentaries in 2016 also unearths older critiques of the classical documentary technique adopted by the collective during the 1970s. How does the films’ choice of a classical documentary aesthetic now play in 2016? Does such a choice seem simplistic and regressive, as leftist critiques implied at the time, or does it now appear more informed? 170

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience

Between two critiques: notions of ‘documentary’ and ‘salvage’ In the 1970s, Amber faced hostility from a broad spectrum of leftist commentators towards notions of ‘the documentary’ itself.9 As Peter Thomas has written, ‘within an independent film movement substantially committed to a politicized avant-​garde aesthetic, Amber received much criticism for working in a realist mode, and have been accused of nostalgia and romanticizing their subjects.’10 For many cultural critics on the British left in the 1970s, ‘documentary’ embodied a supposedly objectivist stance on ‘truth’ and ‘the real’ that was considered outmoded and dangerously misleading. Critics such as Paul Willemen11 and Colin MacCabe12 advocated modernist, ‘anti-​illusionist’ approaches to cinematic form that decentred the ‘illusion’ of documentary, informed in particular by attempts to import Brechtian theory into cinematic aesthetics. Amber’s classicist documentary work in the 1970s, which consciously drew upon the work of the British documentary movement13 and Robert Flaherty (a ‘significant inheritance’ for Amber, according to Crouch and Grassick14), thus incurred inevitable scepticism. Willemen described the collective’s work as ‘simplistic’,15 and Amber faced ongoing criticisms from the 1970s onwards that its work was romantic,16 nostalgic and paternalistic.17 A few years before High Row inaugurated Amber’s 1970s salvage-​based Tyneside Documentaries, however, Martin, Konttinen and Denman had made All You Need is Dynamite: a bracingly avant-​garde piece of agit-​prop that ticked all the boxes of Willemen’s prescribed ‘Brechtian’, deconstructivist (anti)diegesis, juxtaposing the 1968 Grosvenor Square anti-​war riots with brutal scenes of execution in Vietnam. Formally provocative and abrasively ‘anti-​illusionist’, Dynamite remains an impassioned indictment of the complacency Martin, Konttinen and Denman saw within British society, staging an incisive attack upon the British public’s mindless take-​ up of media, popular culture and consumerism. The film renders Amber’s subsequent adoption of documentary classicism from Maybe and Launch onwards highly intriguing. Dynamite illustrates that Amber were most certainly cognisant and capable of working in the avant left’s favoured ‘anti-​ illusionist’ modes but chose not to. The subsequent adoption of a classical 171

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Other Cinemas aesthetic thus seems now more like a considered, pragmatic choice rather than a retreat into simplistic conservatism. Four decades after they were made, Amber’s Tyneside Documentaries face contemporary leftist critiques both similar and different to those the collective faced in the 1970s. Key among them are criticisms of the ‘salvage paradigm’, a term coined by James Clifford and widely adopted by humanities disciplines thereafter.18 ‘Salvage’ work, associated with exoticist ethnography,19 with retrospective rural pastoral,20 and latterly with more urban strains, purports to rescue vulnerable cultures from inevitable disappearance: a paternalist intervention into subaltern experience frequently complicit with neo-​imperialist discourse and institution. Discussing the ‘salvage paradigm’, James Clifford has questioned the mode of scientific and moral authority associated with salvage, or redemptive ethnography. It is assumed that the other society is weak and ‘needs’ to be represented by an outsider (and that what matters in its life is its past, not present or future). The recorder and interpreter of fragile custom is custodian of an essence, unimpeachable witness to an authenticity.21

‘Salvage’ performs narratives of disappearing authenticities, of subaltern communities whose voices will be lost without the intervention of outsider ethnographers, historians and filmmakers. To recall Edward Said’s bitter quotation of Marx:  ‘they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented’.22 Salvage cinema − perhaps best illustrated by the early, seminal work of Robert Flaherty − typically enacts a markedly inventive process whereby history is ‘framed out’ in command performances of the past. The hallmarks of the salvage documentary –​as in Flaherty’s ‘ethnographic pastorals’23 Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934) –​are the framing out of contemporary historical detail (particularly the ‘contact’ presence of the filmmaker themselves), productive interventions to ‘reconstruct’ cultural practices that have otherwise disappeared (the salvage film typically casts a retrospective glance back 50 years or so24), a relatively distanced or outside perspective upon the depicted culture, and a lingering sense of elegy. Many of Amber’s Tyneside Documentaries enact clear, conscious processes of salvage or rescue. Taking advice from industrial archaeologist Stafford Linsley as to relevant areas of interest, Amber made frequent 172

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience interventions to document working-​class industry and craft on the verge of disappearance. Linsley explicitly describes the work leading to his collaboration with Amber as ‘rescue recording’:  ‘In other words a building was about to be pulled down. “Can it be saved?” In this case no, in which case take some photographs, a measured drawing, written description, and so on.’25 Linsley came to the conclusion that, when documenting complex relationships and processes in space and time, film offered parameters for ‘rescue recording’ beyond photography, diagram and written account, a conclusion eventually leading him to seek an alliance with Amber. On paper, many of the Tyneside Documentaries read as textbook salvage. Before collaborating with Linsley, Amber had shot High Row, a documentary about a small drift mine in Cumbria shortly due to close. The collective rented the mine for several weeks and salaried its seven workers to act out a script reconstructing their working day. Working subsequently under advisement from Linsley, Amber went on to use similar methods to create in-​depth accounts of labour processes and working days throughout Tyneside in a series of documentaries drawing on the work of the British Documentary Movement.26 Bowes Line recorded the work of Matty and Luke, two workers on a soon-​to-​be obsolete railway moving coal from Kibblesworth Colliery to Jarrow Staithes; Last Shift intervened to keep a small hand-​made brick factory open for an extra week after it shut (once again Amber paid the wages of the workers for the time in which the film was made); and in Glassworks, the collective documented the painstaking work process of workers in an industrial glass factory in Leamington that closed shortly after the film was made. Indeed Amber became so well known for documenting industries on their last legs that a visit from the collective quickly took on blackly humorous significance for working-​class communities in wider Tyneside: a visit from Amber frequently meant you would soon be out of a job.

History and perspective in Amber’s Tyneside Documentaries Last Shift is perhaps the closest the Tyneside Documentaries come to salvage archetypes. The film chronicles the titular shift in a small brick factory 173

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Other Cinemas in Swalwell-​on-​Tyne, forced to close when the bathroom-​ware manufacturers Adamsez went out of business. Last Shift articulates a potent sense of elegy, arising principally from an opening discussion between the factory’s workers about a horse (the problematically named Darkie) that is due to be decommissioned, which then leads on to talk of retirement and redundancy. In actual fact, the factory had already technically shut, and Amber intervened financially in order to keep it open (and its workers employed) for another week so that the film could be made. Ghostly crane shots (achieved with one of the factory’s fork-​lift trucks), shots of the men corralling Darkie into his final acts of service and a penultimate shot of the horse and his minder walking slowly away from the camera conspire to create a powerful elegiac tone, and a sense of industry, craft and working-​ class experience on the brink of disappearance. Glassworks has less a sense of such active framing. Like Last Shift, Glassworks intricately documents the processes undertaken by the workers, but, unlike Last Shift, does not provide additional allegorical comment. The film is largely wordless and the factory’s workers are not clearly identified as individuals. A  similar approach is taken in Bowes Line, which lacks Last Shift’s pronounced sense of elegy, focusing more on the rhythm, repetition and occasional moments of rest in Luke’s and Matty’s daily routine. It is worth noting that the workplaces featured in Bowes Line and Glassworks were, despite looming closures, still operational and that Amber thus had less control over the extra-​filmic environments than in High Row and Last Shift, where the collective paid both hiring fees and wages and could therefore afford to stop/​start proceedings and achieve a greater sense of control. The Tyneside Documentaries are notable overall for their lack of ‘handrails’: their insistence upon a highly particularised register chronicling the intricate specificities of working-​class industry and craft without appeal to a broader, ‘universal’ address. Despite accomplished visual aesthetics, Amber’s films do not cater well to tourist or interloper, reflecting a deliberately narrowed diegetic philosophy. As Peter Roberts says of Bowes Line, ‘the idea was to show the whole operation without any explanation’ (conversation with author). It is illuminating to compare Amber’s treatment of industrial glass-​blowing in Glassworks with that in Flaherty and Grierson’s Industrial Britain (1931), where working-​class labour is 174

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience seen, metonymically, as a cog in a harmonious, classless Griersonian vision of the industrial nation state. By contrast, Amber’s documentaries (with the partial exception of Last Shift’s allegorical elegy and High Row’s pastoralism) refuse the same process of metonymicisation: the industries are documented for their own sake, and complex working-​class experience is unapologetically presented as worthy of its own screen time, rather than cast in a supporting role within a sweeping, systematising vision (as Griersonian politics arguably cast the British working classes themselves). No commentary is provided in the Tyneside Documentaries (a creative strategy also followed by Cinema Action27), nor are the films structured to provide simplistic access to such ‘thickly’ determined working processes. Murray Martin − who frequently acted as a spokesperson for the group (and, despite Amber’s collaborative working methods, is accredited with directing many of Amber’s films) − described how the Tyneside Documentaries attempted to mirror the experience of a participant observer (see Figure 10.2):

Figure 10.2:  Murray Martin with Bolex (1970s). Photo by Sirkka-​Liisa Konttinen. Courtesy of Amber.

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Other Cinemas If you were just using your eyes, this is what you’d learn. You wouldn’t get all the answers. But if you were an observant person, you’d get an insight and other people can give you the answers if you’re curious about it, and that’s the principle on which we made the film[s]‌.28

Peter Roberts –​who acted as cinematographer for each of the Tyneside Documentaries (as well as making a key contribution to their collaborative process) − elaborates upon Amber’s decision to eschew ‘voice of God’ narrations, describing how the collective instead wished to prioritise observations of people in their everyday lives; people working, without any commentary, and just giving people the space to be themselves, and relate to each other as they do, without a great deal of direction it has to be said. We were just there, watching. It’s that kind of dignity of how people are, which I think that commentary may get in the way of. It puts another layer on it.29

There’s an interesting sense of Amber prioritising local registers of communication:  an anti-​metonymic process that, while occasionally frustrating to the uninitiated viewer, would seem in itself a sort of political, ‘anti-​illusionist’ strategy not so far removed from Brecht-​inspired alienation techniques in its denial of easy audience purchase. The Tyneside Documentaries exhibit a marked determination to speak locally, a robust, unsimplified epistemology whereby the films refuse to create privileged, penetrative access to interior aspects of working-​class experience for a casual exterior gaze. The manner in which Amber’s work counters semi-​ touristic perspectives on working-​class experience in British ‘kitchen sink’ realism30 has been discussed elsewhere by Honess-​Roe.31 Such discussions raise crucial questions of perspective in Amber’s work. Perspective is one of the most striking features of Launch, the short documentary frequently accredited with inaugurating Amber’s work as a collective. Launch enacts a revisionist perspective upon the grand public theatre of the manufacture and subsequent launch of an enormous tanker, the World Unicorn, at Wallsend. Rather than foreground the eventual royal presence at the Unicorn’s launch and the smashing of champagne bottles (perhaps the images most readily associated with launches in British mainstream media and popular consciousness), the film starts long before the 176

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience arrival of the royals, documenting the process of painting and preparing the boat, while alluding to the many lives involved in its manufacture. When the royals do arrive, they are seen from a distance, from the viewpoint of the crowds gathered on the shore, and the film ends, not triumphantly with the boat’s departure, but with the community members trudging back home. Viewed alongside the work of other British collectives and workshops working in the 1970s, it is perhaps easy to see how Amber’s concern with how things ‘are’ or ‘were’ (and thus the collective’s relationship to ‘the status quo’) was deemed ‘simplistic’ by critics like Willemen. While Amber’s later work (such as Quayside (1979) and the collective’s contribution to the Miners’ Campaign Tapes (1984)) can be seen to play a more dialectical, ‘forward-​ looking’ role in activist attempts to enact political change, the majority of the Tyneside Documentaries are more concerned with sensitive portraiture of the status quo, or indeed –​considering the salvage bent of many of the films − a ‘present-​becoming-​past’.32 This concern with documenting what might be described as ‘pre-​dialectical’ lived experience distinguishes Amber from the more dialectically focused groups like Cinema Action, whose work aimed explicitly to engage with ‘specific areas of conflict’,33 aspiring to support, engender or provoke forms of collective action among audiences. Most of Cinema Action’s films engage with particular causes, campaigns and struggles, such as the campaign against the Industrial Relations Act in Fighting the Bill (1970) and the Clydeside shipbuilders work-​in in UCS I (1971). While not explicitly engaging in political activism in the same manner as Cinema Action, Amber’s Tyneside Documentaries can still be seen to participate in a politics of recognition, in a struggle to gain representation and visibility for the day-​to-​day realities of working-​class experience in wider Tyneside in a cinematic arena where such voices were rarely heard. In this respect, Amber’s closest contemporary in the workshop movement was perhaps Four Corners in east London, whose founding principle was pursuing an ‘idea to research, live through and represent experiences with people’.34 Films such as the expansive Bred and Born (1983) recall Amber’s deeply embedded working methods and semi-​ethnographic concern to depict working-​class and subaltern experience as it is, rather than as it could be. Questions of perspective are also at the core of High Row, which at first glance appears to enact a distinctly Flahertian romance. The film has 177

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Other Cinemas a complex sense of pastoral in its depiction of the relationship between miners and their surrounding landscape: the grass is a luminous green and, perhaps tellingly, the film ends on the image of a man silhouetted against a verdant countryside. Inside the mine, the film portrays an easy camaraderie and kinship among the men. While the work itself is depicted as arduous, difficult and potentially dangerous, the miners are seen to take pride and even pleasure in it. From a critical perspective informed by Clifford, High Row could thus be seen to ‘salvage’ the experience of a disappearing industry in a somewhat idealised and romanticised form proximate to the poetic humanism of Flaherty, particularly with regard to the film’s celebration of work, kinship and connections to landscape. Exploring the roots of High Row’s semi-​romantic image making, however, proves illuminating. During the collaborative process of making the film an early treatment (written largely by Eric Northey) was rejected by the miners who felt it was too negative and pessimistic. Murray Martin describes When we showed [our] script to the men, they said, ‘if you think that, you’re not a miner’. Their view of themselves was romantic, they were fighting against the elements, and their success was that they achieved that, and dug twenty tubs at the end of the week. So we re-​wrote the script and made a film which reflected what they thought about themselves. That seemed to us more pertinent. What I thought about them wasn’t at that moment relevant. The film is about their vision of themselves.35

Adding to the sense of irony, the redrafted script (in which, one assumes, camaraderie and a sense of pastoral were given greater emphasis on the miners’ request) was subsequently criticised by the British Film Institute (BFI) Production Board’s Peter Sainsbury for being ‘totally romantic’.36 This would seem to highlight the clash of discourses, perspectives and cultural locations involved in the production of High Row. On one side, the film was mediated by the presumptions of the semi-​gentrified, cultural circle of artists and film production (as embodied by the film’s patrons at the BFI) of which Amber was an uneasy part, which then clashed with the self-​image of the miners themselves, who objected to such a bleak judgement upon 178

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience their own lives. Such an anecdote can perhaps be seen to challenge gentrified, scholarly assumptions about High Row’s supposed romanticisation of working-​class experience and Amber’s work more generally:37 it would seem a highly troubling epistemic imposition to foist upon a working-​class community an external conception of their own lives, casting them as unthinking victims without agency or choice.

Conclusion Amber’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries present a complex challenge to prevailing assumptions that Western-​based salvage projects are irredeemably regressive, chauvinist and imperious. On a superficial level, the cultural and temporal distances involved in Amber’s acts of salvage are small: a factory kept open for a week longer or a mine reopened for a month, in comparison with the 50-​year ‘retrograde’ glance staged by Flaherty.38 More importantly, as embodied by the Tyneside Documentaries, Amber’s salvage work self-​consciously enacts a highly localised process of working-​class history making: the documentation and ‘salvage’ of working-​class experience and history in the shadow of highly organised bourgeois and upper-​class institutions (Murray Martin explicitly spells out these motivations in an interview with Neil Young39). In this respect, Amber’s work should be considered within a wider context of British working-​class history-making during the 1970s: the context of projects pursuing a ‘people’s history’ such as the work of Raphael Samuel40 and Sally Alexander for the History Workshop Journal and of Hamish Henderson in Scotland.41 Amber’s work should thus be seen to arise from the desire to seek not only recognition but some form of record or history for working-​class experience that –​without institutional support, funding or priority –​was quite demonstrably being lost and forgotten. (Indeed, a recurrent problem of the ‘salvage paradigm’ is that it can risk masking historical instances when cultures and customs are genuinely being lost, often because of highly aggressive institutional and state-​directed campaigns like the dismantling of many British industrial plants in the 1970s.) Peter Roberts has described how work on the Tyneside Documentaries represented, for Amber’s largely working-​class membership in the 1970s, 179

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Other Cinemas a strange way of reconnecting with something [for us] which is much more personal […] In a way it was a way of some of us legitimizing something that had been almost unknown. I realised that I had only once seen the inside of my father’s workplace, and my uncle came home every night on a bicycle smelling of oil. I never knew where he worked. There’s all this pressure to be educated. ‘Don’t be like me son’ was a common mantra in a lot of households − and then coming across these workplaces where there were people working who were living deeply dignified and honourable lives, and suddenly kind of realised that this was nothing to be ashamed of, which was in a way a dominant pressure I think, that grammar school education, to get away from that background. It was something that needed to be left behind, and there was something that was quite moving and really valuable.42

Reconsidering Amber’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries from leftist perspectives in 2016, a compelling case can thus be made for the collective’s use of salvage methodologies in the service of a progressive politics of recognition. To borrow another term from James Clifford (via Stuart Hall and Gramsci), Amber’s highly contingent ‘articulation’43 of salvage would seem to place such methodologies in the service of localised, embedded and multivocal attempts to document working-​class experience, in the shadow of powerful middle-​and upper-​class hegemony. With regard to Amber’s use of documentary classicism, leftist opposition to Flahertian and Griersonian documentary aesthetics remains deeply justifiable. Flaherty’s work, despite its aesthetic achievements, has been rendered intensely problematic by contemporary critics such as Fatimah Rony44 and Anna Grimshaw,45 who describe films like Nanook as ‘taxidermic’ and deeply implicated in ongoing processes of imperialism. Similarly, the systematising Griersonian vision that underscored much of the British documentary movement now appears increasingly complicit in imperialist policy and neo-​liberal agendas, both at home and abroad.46 Nonetheless, the sharp binary drawn by leftist commentators in the 1970s between a prescribed ‘anti-​illusionist’ Brechtian modernism and an irretrievable, ‘illusion’-​peddling, realist documentary practice now appears, to this author at least, somewhat simplistic. The notion that particular aesthetics are somehow innately beholden to and encoded with the assumptions of particular 180

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience political projects now seems problematic when considered in the full light of a post-​modernist critique. The limits of such a notion are aptly demonstrated if one considers the take-​up of Tout va bien’s (Jean-​Luc Godard and Jean-​Pierre Gorin, 1972) supposedly revolutionary, MacCabe-​endorsed Brechtian aesthetics47 by relatively apolitical contemporary ‘pop’ directors such as Wes Anderson. Amber’s adoption of aesthetics and methodology from more problematic political projects would seem latterly, to this writer at least, to reflect a relatively post-​modern rather a than conservative choice. The Flahertian and Griersonian projects remain ambivalent; while driven by undialectical, problematic concerns with ‘ordinary people’, their aesthetics are still open to co-​option by diverse projects moving beyond poetic humanism to dialectical socialism. Amber’s work highlights the divergent voices and communities of significance involved in making and watching political film both in the 1970s and in 2016. In retrospect, the sometimes hostile reception to Amber’s work perhaps speaks more about the breadth and refracted nature of the British left as an all-​sum proposition, than it does about the ongoing value and significance of the collective’s work. It remains an essential consideration in reframing Amber’s work in 2016, that the collective’s engagement with the grass roots experience of working class communities in wider Tyneside went well beyond theoretical allegiances to an intense, reflexive and ever-unfinished commitment to the communities they live and worked in, and aspired to represent. Representation constitutes a living problem in Amber’s work, explored and pursued but never solved. To leave the final words to Murray Martin: Our paths have been in a difficult area because the idea of documenting people, documenting working-​class people is seen as passé, but also seen as dangerous, because it has the potentiality of being patronizing and exploitative; but only you’ve got to answer that question, you being me, ourselves.48

Notes 1. Jack Newsinger, ‘The interface of documentary and fiction:  the Amber film workshop and regional documentary practice’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6:3 (2005), pp. 387–​406.

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Other Cinemas 2. Peter Thomas, ‘The British workshop movement and Amber film’, Studies in European Cinema 1548 (September 2014), pp. 195−209. 3. Robert Hollands and John Vail, ‘Place imprinting and the arts: a case study of the Amber Collective’, Local Economy 30:2 (2015), p. 13. 4. Amber Collective, The Pursuit of Happiness (Newcastle, 2008), Amber Films. 5. Mark Dugid, ‘Tony Garnett: the interview’, Sight and Sound (2013), p. 62. 6. Darren Newbury, ‘Documentary practices and working-​class culture: an interview with Murray Martin’, Visual Studies 17:2 (2013), pp. 113–​28. 7. James Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds, Writing Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 98–​121; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture:  Twentieth-​ Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988); James Clifford, ‘The others:  beyond the “salvage” paradigm’, Third Text 3:6 (1989), pp. 73–​8; James Clifford, Routes:  Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1997); James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 8. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’. 9. Colin Perry, ‘What was British independent film? Part 2: Documentary taboos’, Lux (2016), http://​www.lux.org.uk/​blog/​what-​was-​british-​independent-​film-​ part-​2-​documentary-​taboos, accessed 16 May 2016. 10. Thomas, ‘The British workshop movement’, p. 205. 11. Paul Willemen, ‘On realism in the cinema’, Screen 13:1 (1972), pp. 37–​44. 12. Colin MacCabe, ‘Realism and the cinema:  notes on some Brechtian theses’, Screen 15:2 (1974), pp. 7–​27. 13. Amber Collective, Making the Tyne Documentaries (Newcastle, 2007), Amber Films. 14. David Crouch and Richard Grassick, ‘Amber Films, documentary and encounters’, in D. Crouch, R. Jackson, F. Thompson, eds, The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 42–​59. 15. Margaret Dickinson, ‘Amber: interview with Murray Martin’, in M. Dickinson, ed., Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945−90 (London: BFI Publishing, 1999), p. 254. 16. Geoff Andrew, ‘Seacoal’, in J. Pym, ed., Time Out Film Guide (London: Time Out Group, 2005), p. 1150. 17. Crouch and Grassick, ‘Amber Films’, p. 45. 18. Jay Ruby, Picturing Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye:  Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001); Fraser MacDonald,

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The ‘Salvage’ of Working-Class History and Experience ‘Doomsday field work, or, how to rescue Gaelic culture? The salvage paradigm in geography, archaeology, and folklore 1955–​62’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29:2 (2011), pp. 309–​35; Jimmy Casas Klausen, Fugitive Rousseau:  Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2014). 19. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’. 20. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Nottingham:  Spokesman, 1973). 21. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, p. 113. 22. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 23. Ruby, Picturing Culture, p. 69. 24. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, p. 114. 25. Linsley, quoted in Amber, Making the Tyne Documentaries. 26. Ibid. 27. Alice Fraser and Kieron Webb, ‘Cinema Action’, BFI (Screenonline) (2014), http://​www.screenonline.org.uk/​people/​id/​529319/​, accessed 7 July 2016. 28. Amber, Making the Tyne Documentaries. 29. Ibid. 30. Andrew Higson, ‘Space, place, spectacle’, Screen 4:5 (1984), pp. 2−21. 31. Annabelle Honess-​Roe, ‘Spatial contestation and the loss of place in Amber’s Byker’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 4:2 (November 2007), pp. 307–​21. 32. Clifford, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, p. 115. 33. Thomas, ‘The British workshop movement’, p. 198. 34. Ibid. 35. Newbury, ‘Documentary practices and working-​class culture’. 36. Dickinson, ‘Amber’, p. 254. 37. Thomas, ‘The British workshop movement’, p.  205; Neil Young, ‘Forever Amber: an interview with Ellin Hare and Murray Martin of the Amber Film collective’, Critical Quarterly 43:4 (2001), p. 67. 38. Pat Mullen, Man of Aran (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 100. 39. Young, ‘Forever Amber’, p. 68. 40. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994). 41. Hamish Henderson, ‘ “It Was In You That It A’ Began”: some thoughts on the Folk Conference’, in Hamish Henderson, The People’s Past (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1980), pp. 4–​15; Edward J. Cowan, People’s Past: Scottish Folk Scottish History (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1980). 42. Amber Collective, Making the Tyne Documentaries. 43. Clifford, Returns, p. 44. 44. Fatimah Rony, The Third Eye:  Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 45. Grimshaw, The Ethnographer’s Eye.

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Other Cinemas 46. Ibid.; Rob Aitken, ‘Provincialising embedded liberalism:  film, orientalism and the reconstruction of world order’, Review of International Studies 37:04 (2011), pp.1695–​1720. 47. MacCabe, ‘Realism and the cinema’. 48. Newbury, ‘Documentary practices and working-​class culture’, p. 12.

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11 Television Interventions: Experiments in Broadcasting by Artists in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s Catherine Elwes

‘although the content and style of video art are intimately related to the substance of broadcast TV, the two are split by an almost unbridgeable estrangement.’ Mark Kidel, ‘Video art and British TV’, 1976

Many video artists working in the 1970s and 1980s developed a deep antipathy towards television, rivalling only that of their colleagues in experimental film who laid many of society’s ills at the door of mainstream film. However, as in all troubled marriages, video art and broadcasting were bound together by a combination of animosity and obsessive fascination. While the British filmmaker Peter Gidal took to task a ‘manipulatory, mystificatory, repressive’ cinema responsible for ‘maintain[ing] the ideological class war and […] the state apparatus in all its fields’,1 in the USA, Nam June Paik famously declared, ‘I use technology in order to hate it more properly’ (sic).2 His compatriot Richard Serra dismissed the medium of television as a vehicle of unbridled consumerism whereby, as the title of his 1973 video suggests, Television Delivers People to the advertisers and, he observed, ‘the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold’. Meanwhile in the UK, 185

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Other Cinemas video artists such as David Hall, Stuart Marshall, Tony Sinden, Marceline Mori and Tamara Krikorian regarded television as a ‘one way street’ of information in spite of the avuncular Reithian principle, laid down for public service broadcasting, that it should be dedicated to the education of the masses and the ‘spread[ing] throughout the world [of] the doctrine of common sense’.3 This ‘common sense’ was, in the artists’ view, profoundly ideological and, following Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the ‘medium is the message’, they condemned television as fundamentally self-serving and manipulative, enabling the establishment to cynically recirculate oppressive cultural stereotypes and promote its imperial objectives, honeyed in the pleasures of entertainment. Beyond the analysis of spectatorship offered by film theorists/practitioners such as Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen and Peter Gidal, in which processes of identification arising from conventional cinematic narrative induced passivity in the viewer, a number of theories were offered as to how the mass hypnosis of broadcast audiences was so seamlessly achieved. Paramount among them in the early 1970s was Raymond Williams’s metaphor for television as a sensory ‘flow’ in which discontinuous fragments of scheduled programming were bound together through both a homogenous style of presentation and an unbroken soundtrack, the main objective being to keep people watching at all costs.4 Add to this John Ellis’s analysis of the spurious ‘co-presence’ of the ever cheerful announcers and chat show hosts who, with their direct address to camera, appear to bridge the cultural and technological gap between the studio set and our own homes and draw us into a fictional fellowship of shared values and perceptions.5 Within the embrace of this larger critique of television, one might have expected video artists to eschew the tainted arena of broadcasting and only approach television with suspicion or, like a cultural missionary, take it on as ‘an object of reform’.6 However, video artists’ relationship to television throughout this oppositional period remained consistently ambiguous, with scorn substantially mitigated by enchantment. In spite of their ideological differences, artists shared with the broadcasters the same base technology and a general excitement with formal innovation. Both camps displayed an eagerness to explore the expressive potential of the medium and tap into the global reach of telecommunications. Many artists wished to participate in the phenomenon of broadcasting, a creative medium that Hall viewed not only as a technology and an industry, but also as a ‘culture 186

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Television Interventions in which ideas ferment and develop and exhibit’.7 Artists and broadcasters drew from a common archive memory derived from television’s thenshort history. When Scottish Television in the late 1970s and Channel 4 and the BBC in the 1980s and 1990s briefly opened their doors to artists, many, like Hall, were unable to resist the opportunity to ‘widen [their] brief in terms of audience’ and counter the rarefied atmosphere of the gallery circuit that, in Hall’s view, catered to an elite engaged in ‘a pre-​war salon culture’.8 Although Hall acknowledged the difficulties of maintaining criticality and ‘alternative ideologies’ in the bosom of a conservative institution, he wanted ‘art to have a place, have a part of, have a piece of the action out there in the world’ of broadcasting.9 In this chapter I  revisit some examples of work that emerged in the short-​lived era of television interventions by artists in the UK, and take as a particular case study David Hall’s This is a Television Receiver (BBC, 1976; see Figure 11.1). I will offer a reading of Hall’s work that goes beyond

Figure 11.1:  David Hall, This is a TV Receiver (1976), featuring the newsreader Richard Baker. Broadcast on Scottish Television. Courtesy of Debi Hall.

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Other Cinemas the standard interpretation of his practice as a critique of broadcast culture and make some observations on the legacy of interventionist work now that television has dispersed across the multiple platforms of the digital universe. Finally, I will identify those early political, procedural and aesthetic strategies that resonate in the work of contemporary practitioners gripped by the recent ‘televisual turn’.

Television and video art For many years, television was hostile to the participation of video artists, not least because of the closed shop of unions such as the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) and the Association of Broadcasting Staff (ABS) at the BBC, both of which blocked the introduction of non-​union labour. As Mark Kidel reported in 1976, the unions feared ‘the deprofessionalization of programme making’ and the buying in of cheap content made by ‘amateurs’.10 Needless to say, very few artists had a ‘ticket’, that is, membership of the appropriate union, and even if they had, the broadcasters themselves were generally averse to letting artists loose in their studios.11 Independent video makers were liable to experiment dangerously with expensive equipment and in 1974 when Peter Donebauer was commissioned to create a new work by the programme Second House he was refused the studio time he needed to test new techniques developed on his own Videokalos Image Processor. Instead, he made the final work in the facility at the Royal College of Art, from where it was transmitted via a BBC outside broadcast link.12 This was exceptional because television executives were reluctant to broadcast the semi-​professional U-​matic videos that were produced in art schools like the Slade and artist-​run facilities, notably London Video Arts. On this issue, TV bosses were in accord with the unions, who banned the transmission of ½ inch videotape because, observed Kidel, it threatened ‘the unrivalled picture quality produced by British engineering’.13 The footage artists generated was deemed ‘sub-​standard’ and broadcasters claimed that their transmitters were programmed to reject any ‘irregular’ footage that might be smuggled into the schedule. The poor reputation of artists and activists in broadcasting was undoubtedly exacerbated by the redoubtable pair, John (Hoppy) Hopkins 188

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Television Interventions and Sue Hall, the founders of Fantasy Factory and TVX. In 1970, the BBC broadcast some footage of a police drugs bust that Hoppy and Sue had witnessed, the item going out within 24 hours of it being recorded. Hoppy reported excitedly that ‘this represented distribution –​not distribution by sending something through the post or having a cinema show, but distribution on national TV’.14 Lulled into a confidence it no doubt came to regret, that same year the BBC commissioned Hoppy and Sue to make Video Space in a studio at Television Centre. The pair created what Hoppy described as a ‘video happening’, an event that involved a group of their friends partying in the studio, some dancing frenziedly while others debated earnestly or just lazed around. The whole scene was ornamented with film projections and light shows, the action fuelled by a variety of hallucinogens.15 The following year, a rather more sober proposal found favour with Scottish Television which took the radical step of participating in John Latham and Barbara Steveni’s Artist Placement Group (APG), an organisation dedicated to embedding working artists in large companies or public corporations including British European Airways (BEA), British Steel and ICI. APG commissioned David Hall’s ‘site-​specific’ TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces) (1971), a series of short works (initially shot on film) dropped unannounced into the schedule. While David Hall developed a unique relationship with the Scottish broadcasters, the doors of all other television corporations remained largely closed to artists until the formation of Channel 4 in 1982 with its mandate to ‘encourage innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes’. Supported by a network of franchise workshops, Channel 4 funded innovative programming, commissioning community groups, social activists, documentary makers and progressive playwrights as well as individual artists whose work was broadcast in programmes such as Video 1, 2 and 3 (1985), Eleventh Hour (1985), The Ghost in the Machine (1986) and The Dazzling Image (1988). With the support of the film and video panel at Arts Council England (ACE) who acted as brokers and quality controllers, and a loosening of the restrictive practices of the unions under the new Tory government that swept to power in 1979, the door to television opened to the video avant-​garde, for a brief, magnificent interlude. In theory, Channel 4 commissions were intended to address the unique context of the televisual encounter, whereas in practice many artists, 189

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Other Cinemas American (who bagged some of the earliest commissions), British and continental Europeans, produced content that did not substantially deviate from their existing portfolio of works. Robert Cahen’s oneiric Juste le temps (1983) framed a romantic assignation on a train in a smoky, undulating landscape achieved by passing the video signal through an oscilloscope. The work brought to the fore Williams’s notion of the ‘flow’ of television, in that Cahen’s brief encounter demonstrated what the artist called mélange, that is, ‘the way time glides and [how we] slip quickly from one state to another’.16 Similarly, Robert Ashley’s American television opera Perfect Lives/Private Parts (1983−4)17 sat comfortably within a cinematic road movie tradition (‘These are songs about the corn belt and some of the people in them’) but with the addition of a stream-of-consciousness, chanted narration. The work was garlanded with a panoply of video effects and computer graphics, tricks that were becoming increasingly available to artists, many innovations being generated by the practitioners themselves.18 Perfect Lives/Private Parts was an early hybrid work, with its musical roots in the serialism of Philip Glass and its vocal style derived from the performances of Laurie Anderson that combined spoken word with complex electronic compositions. Ashley’s brand of humour owed much to Spalding Gray’s satirical theatricality and Ian Breakwell’s British irony, not to mention the anarchy of American TV comedies such as Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and British stalwart Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that in the early 1980s Channel 4 created a space for the convergence of these traditions in Ashley’s TV opera, a remediated artefact in a long form that, notwithstanding the more leisurely pace of television in those days, was unusually slow, and outside sports programming and coverage of national events, its extended duration remains unique in contemporary broadcasting. If Cahen and Ashley transmitted art on television, it was more commonly the British practitioners who made television art, conceived as an oppositional practice whose objective was to transform the grammar and content of broadcasting. This was achieved by harnessing for creative purposes the unique format of the medium, its direct address to viewers, the sculptural conditions of analogue technology  – the plugs and wires, the ‘box’ of the TV set – as well as the instability of the signal, its industrial production and the domestic setting of its reception. Stuart Marshall exploited broadcasting’s natural inclination to drama, and ‘the play between illusion 190

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Television Interventions and reality that the medium most readily (truthfully) supports’.19 In the late 1970s Marshall stepped back from the anti-narrative position of the structural/materialist avant-garde and its deconstructive programme dedicated to divesting the materials and mechanisms of film of their illusionistic powers. Instead, Marshall embraced storytelling, figuration and visual pleasure, especially in relation to the body and, influencing a whole generation of ‘New Narrative’ video makers, he became ‘embroiled in the practices of signification’ in order to determine the ‘ideological effects of dominant televisual forms’.20 According to Ian White, Marshall took a ‘skeleton’ approach to television, anatomising the power relations involved in broadcasting and the position of authority it adopted while encoding as ‘normal’ the social stereotypes of class, race, gender and sexuality then subsisting in Western culture. In The Love Show (1980) Marshall replicated the performative conventions and spatial parameters of the TV studio in a series of spare, stilted vignettes in which actors were revealed in stripped-back studio environments. Here they delivered didactic texts to camera in an amateur antiacting style, reporting on the circumstances of their own employment and the stratified managerial and economic conditions of production that ruled broadcasting. Within this ‘televisual essay on the televisual’,21 Marshall also probed the question of power relations inscribed in sexual mores under Western patriarchy and its ruthless censorship of any deviation from the norm. Th is would lead to a series of radical works for broadcast on the issue of AIDS beginning with Bright Eyes (1984), a televisual treatise on the vilification of gay men by the tabloid press during the epidemic and the long history of homophobia in Western culture. Marshall was one of the first to take television itself as his medium, abandoning the arena of fine art for a number of years until just before his death in 1993. In his interrogation of socially proscribed sexual identity, Marshall drew on the feminist dictum of the personal being political and although television was implicated in the perpetuation of stereotypical representations of women, the direct address, the one-to-one connectivity of the broadcast medium, allowed for the personal that had been politicised under feminism to be legitimised and widely disseminated. I was one of a number of women who were commissioned to make works for broadcast or whose existing videos were shown on the small screen. Together with 191

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Other Cinemas Jo Davis, Lis Rhodes devised for Channel 4’s Hang on a Minute (1983−5), a series of 13 one-minute films that, like David Hall’s interventions into Scottish Television, were to be infiltrated, guerrilla-style, in the commercial breaks. As Rhodes has described it in a recent interview, the content of the films was incendiary, holding up a ‘mirror to the 1980s, reflect[ing] free market economics, deregulation and privatization’.22 Using music, song and Rhodes’s own poetry, these television vignettes sniped at racism, sexism and the cynicism of ‘multinational thieves’ and governments that were using ‘food as a weapon’; it is no surprise that only six of the films were eventually shown, the remainder being blocked by Channel 4’s legal department.23 Tina Keane’s Shadow of a Journey (1980) combined stories from the Highland Clearances with a personal odyssey that took the artist on a ferry crossing to the Isle of Harris. Peggy Morrison performed a series of melancholy Gaelic songs that Keane used to envelop hypnotic images of sunlight scattering on the waves, while the shadow of the artist leaning on the railings of the ship provided its central but fugitive anchor. Keane’s intention was to ‘contrast the bitter story with the almost abstract beauty of the waves’,24 but in the context of broadcasting at the time, the reference to British brutality in Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forced into public awareness a shameful chapter of British history that was rarely aired on television. The transmission of my own With Child (1983; see Figure 11.2) was a compromise arrived at by Channel 4 and ACE. My preferred work for the small screen had been There is a Myth (1984) in which an engorged breast fills the frame and lactates under the rough caresses of an infant’s hand. This work had been deemed ‘unbroadcastable’; With Child, an elegiac work that charted the emotional and physical transformations of pregnancy, was the preferred option.25 While A.L. Rees commented on the lyricism of Keane’s use of a sea crossing, Chris Dunkley in the Financial Times identified in With Child a major contestation of the then ‘sexual prudery’ of mainstream television. He gave special mention to a stop-motion sequence of two toy monkeys ‘engaged in vigorous and explicit sexual coupling’.26 Although my strategy for bypassing the censors of the small screen with humour and soft toys was a bold enough step, the real challenge to broadcasting was the sudden presence of a number of feminist artists asserting their subjectivity within a cultural field that had served to 192

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Figure 11.2:  Catherine Elwes, With Child (1983). Broadcast on Channel 4 (1985). Courtesy of the artist.

misrepresent them or simply render them invisible. Paradoxically, within its own convention of direct address to camera, of feigned intimacy with the viewer, television offered a match with the strategies of consciousness raising, the sharing of experience that was driving the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Exclusion from the stage of terrestrial television was itself the content of a number of works emerging in that era. Following US artist Dara Birnbaum’s early TV appropriations first shown in London in 1983,27 a generation of Scratch artists in the UK hijacked television footage and reworked it into anarchic optical mash-​ups set to driving disco beats. By means of this video piracy, the disenfranchised sought to take control of the images that had long manipulated them without ever offering any right of reply. These found footage extravaganzas presented copyright problems for broadcasters and few works by the leading exponents of Scratch (George Barber, Jez Welsh, Gorilla Tapes, Sandra Goldbacher) found their way into the packages of artists’ films and videos that were broadcast, late 193

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Other Cinemas night, in the early 1980s.28 Undaunted, George Barber tapped into another branch of commerce and successfully distributed VHS compilations of his Greatest Hits of Scratch Video (1985) through record shops across the UK. In Poland, then under communist rule, another artist made televisual works highlighting the barring of all but the most privileged from broadcasting. In 1976, Józef Robakowski formulated his concept of artists’ video as the antidote to state-run television, which, he said, once invented was ‘immediately assigned the function of the mass expression of the wishes of those who control this miraculous 20th-century invention’.29 In a series of what he termed ‘television re-reports’, Robakowski pointed the camera at his blackand-white TV set and used the content of a day’s scheduled transmission to reflect on his own state of being as a subject ‘excluded from public life’.30 In Art is Power (1985), he re-recorded the pomp and ceremony of a televised Russian military parade and set it to rock music courtesy of the Slovenian group Laibach. The absurdity of the resulting juxtaposition highlighted the arrogance and belligerence of the Soviet oppressors whose grip on Poland would not be loosened for another four years. Not only was Robakowski refused access to the national television studios, but under martial law he was unable to shoot video on the streets; hence his re-scanned works from his TV set and his series From My Window (1987 onwards), shot from inside his apartment, his bird’s-eye view onto the street being as far as his camera could travel until the demise of the communist regime.

Kevin Atherton and David Hall:  television interventions Where Robakowski and the British Scratch video makers endeavoured to contest their exclusion from television by appropriating broadcast content at its point of reception, it was Kevin Atherton and David Hall, briefly released onto the airwaves in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who made the most sustained and cogent interventions into British broadcasting. In 1985, Channel 4 aired a series of programmes of artists’ videos entitled Video 1, 2 and 3, directed by Triple Vision. These formed an anomalous presence in the schedule of regular programming in spite of being broadcast late at night in the Eleventh Hour slot, well after the watershed. However, the series followed a conventional pattern of introduction, contextualisation 194

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Television Interventions and delivery, bookended by ‘experimental’ graphics that acted like a public service warning of ‘artists at work’, and did much to defuse the subversive impact of the videos that were broadcast. It was the intervention of short to-​camera monologues by Kevin Atherton inserted between works by other artists that highlighted the nervous reframing of the art for the delicate palette of the viewing public, and his invective went some way towards unsettling the sense of spectatorial ease that the programme commissioners had tried to promote. Atherton was framed in the conventional head and shoulders shot of the TV presenter, but he quickly invaded the personal space of the viewer by leaning into the lens in a threatening manner, as though he might at any moment climb through the screen. In a broad Manx accent (totally unacceptable in a newsreader), he berated the home audience for their lack of critical engagement with the medium and set up a fictional interview, firing a series of rhetorical questions and demanding of the viewer the impossible, that s/​he ‘answer the bloody questions’. ‘Do you remember learning how to watch television?’ he began. ‘Do you remember the last programme you watched? Do you consider yourself to be a discerning viewer?’ He answered on the viewer’s behalf, ‘You have just proved that you are not!’ In these television interventions, Atherton took the position of the grand inquisitor of a credulous viewer, betraying the ‘apparent didacticism’ which Rachel Withers first detected in the work of early video artists, but which she later reconsidered in the light of ‘the reflexive, ironic intentions’ behind their preaching.31 In a 2005 interview, Atherton declared that his objective had been to make the audience ‘think about the frame of television’ and, presciently, ‘the way television fetishises the notion of personality’.32 Here Atherton anticipated the cult of celebrity that formed the cornerstone of television presenting in the 1990s and beyond, from Oprah Winfrey in the USA to our home-​grown Rottweiler of the political interview, Jeremy Paxman. Beyond its clairvoyance, the work brought home, literally, the power of television to enter the physical and mental space of the viewer; simply by turning nasty, Atherton unmasked the underlying manipulations seamlessly stitched into the spurious intimacy television creates with an audience at home through the murmurings of the corporations’ unctuous onscreen representatives. 195

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Other Cinemas David Hall believed that video art, whether placed in a gallery or transmitted on television, should enact a requisite ‘level of transformation’.33 But what was Hall seeking to transform? I have already alluded to the imperative for practitioners to raise audience awareness, for ‘video as art […] to expand and in part to decipher the conditioned expectations of those narrow conventions understood as television’.34 I have also touched on Hall’s populist commitment to extending the reach of his work beyond the elitist coteries who frequented art galleries in 1970s. However, I would suggest that besides his declared invitation to viewers to critically reflect on the impact of broadcast culture on the human subject, Hall sought to expand the expressive possibilities of video, an approach that appealed to the emotional intelligence of the audience, to their aesthetic sensibilities and to their shared memories of televisual history as a social space. Hall’s This is a Television Receiver displayed many of these attributes but, on first viewing, one was immediately struck by the work’s deconstructive agenda. Where broadcasting worked to minimise audience attention to its vehicles of transmission, Hall drew viewers back to the television set not only as a domestic appliance, a piece of furniture, but also as an object of contemplation and a three-​dimensional material proposition. As he himself said, ‘wherever you see a television screen, before, I saw a sculpture’.35 Simply displayed on a monitor, the work began with a talking head, but not just any head; the audience was presented with the noble features of the newsreader Richard Baker. In the 1970s, Baker was arguably the most famous face on television, owing to his measured delivery of the BBC news every night of the week. In this case, Baker was enlisted to read a pre-​prepared script of Hall’s devising, a monologue that established the material facts of the matter. ‘This is a television receiver,’ intoned Baker, which is a box made of wood, metal or plastic. On one side, most likely the one you are looking at, there is a large rectangular opening that is filled with a curved glass surface that is emitting light […] in a variety of shades or hues […] these form shapes that often appear as images, in this case the image of a man.

In what must be the ultimate assertion of modernist reflexivity, Baker went on to qualify his statement: ‘But’, he said, ‘it is not a man; and this is not 196

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Television Interventions a man’s voice’. Hall, through his mouthpiece, was indicating that Baker’s image was merely an illusion, an effect of the mimetic properties of a culturally configured technology. This should have been enough, but Hall proceeded to prove his point at a structural level by exploiting a technological flaw inherent in the medium. He copied the sequence of Baker’s monologue down through several generations, and replayed it at different stages of signal degradation, the newsreader’s face becoming increasingly distorted until it was reduced to a sea of video noise, static interference, malfunctioning data. The sound gradually became an indecipherable echo, muffled like the voice of a man drowning in slow motion. There is no doubt that the ultimate transformation Hall set out to achieve was the raised consciousness of his audience vis-à-vis the veiled manipulations of screen culture. However, I would argue that there were other elements at play in This is a Television Receiver. Liz Kim recently remarked that the humour of Nam June Paik’s work is often overlooked.36 In Hall’s case, there is no doubt that he was having some serious fun de-​ facing one of the most respected and familiar countenances on British television at the time. He was also playing a conceptual joke on his audience, making a statement at the level of sound and image and then demonstrating its veracity by destroying the illusion with a defect of the technology that created the illusion in the first place. The work was also something of a meditation on the meaning of a human countenance. On television, faces, particularly those of talking head TV presenters, are constitutively unstable. The anchor’s smiling visage simulates the intimacy and co-​presence with the viewer that Ellis identified, and yet it cannot perform the functions that it must to qualify as a face. According to James Elkins, a televisual representation of a face is not something that ‘responds in kind, that is present before my eyes and looks back at me’;37 it cannot act as a mirror to the existence of the spectator. Inter-​ subjective exchange is impossible across the technological divide and the image testifies only to the one-​time existence of an actor, speaking his lines, who is now remediated into a facsimile, and internally programmed to repeat the message, endlessly. By enacting the slow-​drip erasure of Baker’s face, the final destruction of the already destabilised televisual presence, Hall created in us another level of anxiety. The face still spoke, but we could no longer read its expressions, the language of miniature contractions and 197

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Other Cinemas convulsions that helps us to connect with the mind behind the facial membrane. The melting face of Richard Baker aligns with Elkins’s evocation of the difficulties disfigurement presents for us, ‘when there is a person present’, he says ‘but not a working face’;38 or indeed when a person is present in our thoughts, but lost in the white noise that consumes us all in time. Finally, I would like to suggest that in David Hall’s work there was a further level of transformation, one that went beyond the conceptual conceit of deconstructing televisual illusionism and, as he says, ‘creating a problematic for the viewer’.39 Ina Blom has written about the ecstatic nature of Paik’s work, his immersion in the technological effect of the radiant and atmospheric light that analogue television sets emit.40 David Hall, I would suggest, was similarly engaged in the poetics of the luminous screen, its eerily pulsating scan-​lines, and the mysteries of its subterranean electronic anatomy that he so artfully illuminated in This is a Television Receiver. Analogue video, the glowing presence that accompanied us in what Hall called the ‘real-​time continuum’, remained, I believe, a source of constant fascination for him. His works for broadcast, rather than simply exposing the deceptions of conventional televisual representations, endeavoured to reveal something of the medium’s deeper resonances, the allusive meanings to which the banality of television entertainment habitually blinds us.

The demise of analogue television and the contemporary televisual turn Although Channel 4 continued to feature work by artists well into the 1990s, the policies of the Thatcher government began to bite in the late 1980s and broadcasters gradually narrowed their funding to commercially driven programming and artists returned to the galleries, which were beginning to accept video as a legitimate fine art medium. As Rod Stoneman concluded sadly in 2014, ‘access to experimental work via public service versions of television has now all but disappeared. In the two decades since [the advent of Channel 4], as television channels have proliferated, choice has actually narrowed’.41 Does this contraction of opportunity spell the end of the dialogue with broadcasting that artists began in the late 1970s? David Hall himself admitted that his television interventions would be impossible to recreate in the digital age with its multiple media platforms 198

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Television Interventions and the labyrinthine superhighways of the internet. Hall’s television works were at their most potent framed by the context of popular programming; as he remarked, ‘the juxtaposition is half the work’.42 It was critical to make a powerful statement ‘in the right place’ or, as Hall put it, ‘in the wrong place at the right time’.43 The interventions he and his contemporaries made were a response to their broadcast setting, which was configured around a small range of TV channels that created mass cultural experiences. Nowadays, people no longer discuss the evening’s viewing around the office water cooler. The shared social dimension is lost now that the terrestrial television context has been atomised into innumerable sources of content, tailor-made to user preferences. However, in recent years a resurgence of interest in television has led to what Maeve Connolly has dubbed the ‘televisual turn’, with contemporary artists adapting many of the working practices of broadcasting for a fine art context and operating across galleries and museums, as well as within the expanded field of the internet. Rather than set up television as the bad object of a critical practice, the artists instead mine the various archives of TV companies to demonstrate how the ‘public time of broadcasting […] intersects with other temporalities, including the unfolding of a career and family history’.44 Connolly cites in particular the work of Gillian Wearing in the UK and, in Finland, Laura Horelli, who in Haukka-Pala/A Bit to Bite (2009) sourced footage of a children’s programme from the 1980s in which her own mother took a leading role as presenter. Here, a more personal note is struck than in the Scratch videos of the 1980s that gathered apparently random footage and on a much smaller timescale, their recombinations being virtually coeval with the substance of television they purloined. My own Kensington Gore (1981) had a similar immediacy in that the story of an accident on a film set that I related and demonstrated with television make- up (including theatrical blood) had occurred relatively recently. In spite of the expanded temporality and the new patina of nostalgia burnishing the archival material featured in contemporary works, we can identify a continuity with certain earlier practices in their references to the interlacing of public and personal in broadcast culture. The legacy of the early years of oppositional practice can also be found in the work of artists such as the group Auto Italia South East, Celine Condorelli or Phil Collins who, like David Hall before them, have been 199

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Other Cinemas drawn to televisual formats because of their intrinsic sociality in terms of audience and their collectivity with the TV studio functioning as ‘a site of collaborative production’.45 As I have argued elsewhere, team work was always a feature of moving image practices46 and the Brechtian device of exposing the means of production with the technology, the technicians, the set, the costumes and the acting elevated to the level of content, strategies that are resurfacing now, was well established by the 1970s. Stuart Marshall’s or David Critchley’s interest in acting strained to the point of pure utterance can also be detected in the declamatory style favoured by Auto Italia South East who in Auto Italia LIVE Double Dip Concession (2010) featured a performer delivering an alarmingly overacted soliloquy on the subject of his ‘realness’. Where there is a divergence from the collectivity of old, it is in the rise of generously funded productions in which artists such as Nathaniel Mellors or Michele Dignan now employ professional technicians or low-paid, non-union collaborators. In the old days, video artists were paid little, if anything, so these issues of differential pay did not arise and, unlike the situation in television studios of the era, all the roles, the demarcated unionised specialisms, in artists’ video were interchangeable and of equal value. If the egalitarianism of early video practices is not much in evidence in the higher echelons of the contemporary art world, the drive to experimentation has not diminished. Connolly makes the argument that established accounts of oppositional practices from the 1970s and 1980s have constructed a false opposition between artists, seen to be holding a monopoly on creative thinking, and the broadcasters who are portrayed steeped in stultifying tradition. A similar challenge was made as far back as 1991, when John Wyver lauded the creativity of broadcasters in his essay ‘The necessity of doing away with “video art” ’ and declared ‘I believe LA Law to be as distinctive, as intellectually provocative and as progressive as most works of art’.47 I  would suggest that one of the reasons why Wyver detected an openness to formal innovation in LA Law was that by then the impact of artists’ work on the visual style if not the organisation of television had already been felt. The subjective camera, much in use in LA Law, was seen everywhere in artists’ moving image and the fragmentation, layering, abstraction and high-octane energy that practitioners such as Nam June Paik, Hoppy and Sue Hall 200

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Television Interventions or Mineo Aayamaguchi introduced translated smoothly into youth programming, advertising and music videos. In fact, practitioners such as Pat O’Neill in the USA and John Butler or John Scarlett Davis in the UK found themselves happily commuting between a commercial context and the world of experimental moving image. The reflexive references to the means of production much favoured by early video makers also made the transition from the ‘alternative’ margins of the 1970s art world to broadcast. Daytime TV, sports events and news programmes widened their shots to reveal the paraphernalia of production, and no attempt was made to render believable the ersatz sitting rooms of talk shows and reality TV, and television crews were regularly overheard interacting with the performers. The reflexive devices developed by artists from an oppositional stance were systematically appropriated by television and advertising and summarily divested of their political potency. The more lasting legacy of artists’ interventions into the broadcast medium of television, I would argue, can be found in the close observations of human affairs seen through the prism of conceptual pieces by artists such as David Hall, Lis Rhodes, Hoppy and Sue Hall, Robert Cahen or Kevin Atherton. These are videos that demonstrate David Hall’s vital ‘level of transformation’, an engagement with the medium that searches out its deeper resonances while maintaining a watchful eye on the ways in which that very investigation may be shaping the artists’ relationships to themselves and the social, political and material world they inhabit.

Notes 1. Peter Gidal quoted by Richard Grayson, ‘Embroiled’, catalogue essay for the Polytechnic exhibition, Raven Row, London, 2010. 2. Nam June Paik, quoted in John G. Hanhardt, Nam June Paik exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1982, p. 104. 3. Lord Reith cited by David Hendy, The Cultivated Mind (BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 18 June 2010). 4. See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover, CT:  Wesleyan University Press, 1992 [1974]). Williams’s view has been challenged in the intervening years, most recently by Amy Holdsworth who contends that television is not so much a source of undifferentiated viewing as a generator of cultural memory. See Amy Holdsworth, Television, Memory and Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

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Other Cinemas 5. See John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). 6. Maeve Connolly’s term in her TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2014), p. 21. 7. David Hall interviewed by Jackie Hatfield on 9 December 2005 for REWIND, http://​www.rewind.ac.uk/​documents/​David%20Hall/​DH510.pdf, accessed 26 February 2016. All of Hall’s quotes are derived from this interview unless otherwise indicated. 8. Ibid. Outside the UK, national broadcasters were traditionally inhospitable to artists, but the cable networks offered the possibility of reaching wider audiences at a local level, for instance WGBH in Boston and WDR in Cologne. 9. Ibid. 10. Mark Kidel, ‘Video art and British TV’, Studio International, Video Art Issue (May/​June 1976), pp. 240−1. 11. I was unusual in having an ABS card because I had trained as a BBC make-​ up artist, and membership was automatic after a probationary period, but my membership lapsed soon after I left full-​time employment with the BBC and my periods of freelance work at the corporation ceased abruptly after I led a strike protesting unreasonable working hours. 12. See Chris Meigh-​Andrews, A History of Video Art; The Development of Form and Function (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), pp. 136−45. 13. Mark Kidel, ‘Video art’. 14. Hoppy quoted by Julia Knight and Peter Campbell Thomas, Reaching Audiences:  Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2012), p. 114. 15. See Hoppy and Sue Hall interviewed by Chris Meigh-​Andrews, http://​www. meigh-​andrews.com/​writings/​interviews/​sue-​hall-​john-​hopkins, accessed 5 January 2015. See also Meigh-​Andrews, A History of Video Art, pp. 84−8. 16. Robert Cahen quoted by Sandra Lischi, The Sight of Time; Films & Videos by Robert Cahen (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1997), p. 85. 17. The work was directed by John Sandborn and Mary Perillo. 18. Consummate technological wizards included Peter Donebauer in the UK, Takahiko Iimura in Japan, Steina and Woody Vasulka in Europe and Nam June Paik in the USA. 19. Stuart Marshall, ‘Video art:  the imaginary and the parole vide’, Studio International (May/​June 1976), p. 243. 20. Stuart Marshall quoted by Grayson, ‘Embroiled’, and in Stuart Marshall, ‘Institutions/​ conjectures/​ practices’, Recent British Video catalogue, British Council, 1983. New Narrative describes a brief period of video practice in the late 1970s and early 1980s that came out of Newcastle Polytechnic and the Environmental Media department at the Royal College of Art, both

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21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

departments benefiting from Marshall’s teaching input. According to Maggie Warwick, the objective of New Narrative was to ‘construct fictions about existing fictions in order to gain a better understanding of how and in whose interests those fictions operate’ (unattributed publication). Ian White, ‘CONTEXT: Ian White on Stuart Marshall’, Artists’ Moving Image Festival catalogue, Tramway, Glasgow, 2015, http://amif.info/post/ 128700187597/context-ian-white-on-stuart-marshall, accessed 1 March 2016. Lis Rhodes in conversation with Jenny Lund, MIRAJ 4:1/4:2 (2015), pp. 180−96. Ibid . Tina Keane quoted on the Cinenova website, http://www.cinenova.org/filmdetail.php?filmId=169, accessed 25 March 2016. The ‘unbroadcastable’ nature of There is a Myth was discussed at an Arts Council meeting in which I was present together with John Wyver and other members of the film and video panel to which I belonged. Extracts from the work were eventually broadcast in November 2019 as part of Jim Moir’s Weird World of Video Art. Chris Dunkley, review of Eleventh Hour, Channel 4, Financial Times, February 1986. Dara Birnbaum’s Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman (1979) and Kojak Wang (1979) were shown as part of Video at the Kitchen, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1983. Exceptionally, George Barber and the Duvet Brothers were featured on Video 1, 2 and 3 on Channel 4 in 1985. Józef Robakowski quoted by Łukasz Ronduda (2006), ‘Polish Analogue Video’, in Chris Meigh-Andrews and Catherine Elwes, eds, Analogue: Pioneering Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968–88) (Preston: University of Central Lancashire, 2006), p. 78 . Robakowski quoted by Karol Sienkiewicz, online, June 2008, http://culture.pl/ en/artist/jozef-robakowski, accessed 28 February 2016. Rachel Withers, ‘ “Polytechnic”, Raven Row’, Artforum (January 2011), p. 232. Kevin Atherton interviewed by Jackie Hatfield, 21 July 2005, REWIND website: http://www.rewind.ac.uk/documents/Kevin%20Atherton/KAT510.pdf, accessed 29 February 2016. David Hall speaking from the floor at Video Art, from the Margins to the Mainstream, an event I convened at Tate Britain on 3 December 2005. David Hall, ‘British video art: towards and autonomous practice’, Studio International (May−June 1976), pp. 248−52. David Hall in conversation with Jackie Hatfield. Liz Kim in conversation with the author, London, 2015. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 168. Ibid. David Hall in conversation with Jackie Hatfield.

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Other Cinemas 40. See Ina Blom, On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture (Berlin and New York: Sterberg Press, 2007), p. 85. 41. Rod Stoneman, ‘Installation of the exotic’ (2014), online essay, http://​thecolumn. net/​2014/​09/​09/​installation-​of-​the-​exotic/​, accessed 6 September 2015. 42. David Hall in conversation with Jackie Hatfield. 43. Ibid. 44. Connolly, TV Museum, p. 150. 45. Ibid., p. 223. 46. See Catherine Elwes, book review, ‘TV Museum: contemporary art and the age of television, Maeve Connolly (2014)’, MIRAJ 3:2 (2014), pp. 282−90. 47. John Wyver, ‘The necessity of doing away with “video art” ’ (1991), reprinted in Julia Knight, ed., Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art (Luton: Arts Council of England/​University of Luton Press, 1996) pp. 315−20.

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12 Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice Daniella Rose King

Introduction We are struggling to begin a story, a history, a herstory of cultural forms specific to black peoples […] A history, a herstory, of its creation and recreation in the diaspora […] Colonial fantasy requires a fixed image of the black person or the ‘other’, but it is based on a complex kind of fixedness […] The ‘other’ signifies both fear and desire and disorder, due to the way in which blackness evokes both fear and fantasy on behalf of white society.1

This refrain is repeated sporadically throughout Sankofa Film/​ Video Collective’s 1984 film, Territories. The words speak to the heart of the British black filmmaking workshops of the same decade, and their project to challenge mainstream media and public discourse through a more multiplicitous and heterogeneous vision of Britain and British life. The contemporaneous Black Audio Film Collective’s (BAFC) aesthetic and political agenda closely paralleled that of Sankofa, while remaining distinct in its approaches. Yet both are noteworthy for their application of feminist film and cultural theory and semiotic deconstructions, radically deploying text alongside contemporary footage and archival images. Both used the iconography of the British Empire and extracts from political speeches in juxtaposition with 205

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Figure 12.1:  Isaac Julien, Territories (1984). Courtesy of Isaac Julien Studio.

their own cogitations in order to rupture the official, state histories of Britain and the former colonies and to allow suppressed, hidden narratives to re-​ emerge or provide spaces for new ones to be constructed. Though predated by these two collectives, the Workshop Declaration, negotiated between the ACTT (Association of Cinematographic and Television Technicians, the film industry union) and Channel 4 in 1982, provided essential resources for their strategic operation. As Channel 4 was constructed as a commissioning body (unlike the BBC and ITV, which employed their whole workforce in-house), the ACTT, under the auspices of Roy Lockett, understood that the independent film sector would necessarily expand, become more institutionalised, and need union recognition. Furthermore, Channel 4’s legal constitution required its programming to address innovative filmmaking and diverse communities: [The Declaration required] that the franchised workshops should be drawn from outside the mainstream of film and television culture − with a particular focus on ethnic diversity and a commitment to local issues. As a result, the funding stream

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Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice and support initiated by the Declaration helped many groups working on directly politically and socially engaged film-​ making to consolidate their activities and provide opportunities for others: Among the workshops that benefited from the Declaration were Black Audio Film Collective, the Newcastle-​ based Amber Films, Retake (an Asian film and video workshop) and Sankofa.2

In an interview with Coco Fusco, Black Audio Film Collective further explained the background: Film became available to us because Channel 4 came on the scene. That was a moment in which we had an entry point into media. There have been other Black people in television, but they were on the periphery, working on short-​term contracts, trying to negotiate membership into the union. The workshop movement offered a certain amount of security just to develop ideas, to make interventions that were broader than just television or just cinema or individual programs. The workshops were built around the idea of continuity of work. That’s what we wanted […] Now, we came into the movement knowing what the inadequacies were, realizing the ways in which Black film was marginalized. Nonetheless, the workshops offered the chance to have some autonomy over what we created. In addition to this, there were certain experiences − certain histories that hadn’t really been talked about in the British context − which we could begin to talk about.3

The contradictory context within which the workshops were operating is important to recognise, and is revealed within the very films that emerged from the circumstances. For instance, Territories was the second film made by Sankofa and was supported by the then-Labour-led Greater London Council, the British Film Institute and Channel 4, institutions that by their very nature were not exempt from association with histories of colonialism and the marginalisation of black voices, yet the film is a document of the filmmakers’ vision, which uncompromisingly addresses institutionalised racism and the legacies of the British Empire. This was a time of increasingly strained race relations and insurmountable discontent within black 207

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Other Cinemas and minority ethnic communities that, in 1981, erupted in uprisings across the UK, from Birmingham to Brixton. In their wake, the then-Conservative government commissioned the Scarman Report to identify why the tinderbox had caught fire, and how to ease the racial tensions at the heart of the protests and disorder. The report found a combination of factors to be responsible: the country was in the midst of a recession, housing was scarce, unemployment was at its highest since the 1960s. All these conditions hit the working class hardest but disproportionately affected ethnically diverse communities. Furthermore, specific, racist, conditions affected these communities. The Conservative government had introduced ‘sus laws’ which used the Vagrancy Act of 1824 to empower the police to stop and search people based on only ‘reasonable suspicion’. Relations between ethnic communities and the police were already poor as heavy-​handed and discriminatory policing provoked a general distrust of the police and authority as such. In addition to these strong socio-​political factors, mainstream media failed to represent these communities, or rather perpetuated a simplified set of stereotypical images, either still or moving, of ethnic minorities as either criminal, lazy, regressive (read uncivilised or primitive), suspicious and sexually deviant, or as smiling entertainers or sportspersons. There was very little in between these dichotomous, ill-​formed archetypes. In a powerful speech about half way through Territories, the narrator addresses the very issue of representation, borrowing a searing passage from Michelle Cliff ’s poetic essay, ‘If I  could write this in fire, I  would write this in fire’ (1982): It was never a question of passing, it was a question of hiding, behind black and white perceptions of who we were, who they thought we were  –​tropics, plantations, calypso, cricket  –​we were the people with the musical voices, and the coronation mugs on our parlour tables. I would be whatever these foreign imaginations cared for me to be, I  would be whatever figure these foreign imaginations cared for me to be, it would be so simple to let others fill in for me, so easy to startle them, with a flag of anger, when their visions got out of hand. But never to sustain the anger for myself, it could become a life lived within myself, a life cut off. I know who I am, but you will never know

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Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice who I am. I may in fact lose touch with who I am, I hid from my real sources, but my real sources were also hidden from me.4

In his seminal text Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order,5 Stuart Hall had written about both the constructed nature of race and the ways in which culture and the media formed consent, structured public discourse and, as a result, affected government policy and the criminal justice system. Hall’s research theories and arguments readily informed the practice and approaches of the filmmakers discussed here. A key question arose: how could filmmakers redress the imbalance of the image economy? The answer would not be found in filling in the gaps, as it were. Rather, new spaces should be carved out, for the production of images that would be reflexive and experimental at the same time. Rather than replacing the mainstream with the alternative stereotype of an ideal image, the task would be to create a plethora of images, ones that contradicted one another, and called into question the very nature of a national cinema, or a national image. These dialectical and experimental images would mine forgotten histories, and propose alternative futures. This was the way the filmmakers understood their task. Our task was to find a structure and a form, which would allow us the space to deconstruct the hegemonic voice of the British TV newsreels. That was absolutely crucial if we were to succeed in articulating those spatial and temporal states of belonging and displacement differently. In order to bring emotions, uncertainties and anxieties alive we had to poeticize that which was captured through the lenses of the BBC and other newsreel units –​by poeticizing every image we were able to succeed in recasting the binary of myth and history, of imagination and experiential states of occasional violence.6

Go back, to get here Sankofa Film/​Video Collective was set up in the summer of 1983 by Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-​Edwards and Robert Crusz, a group of black British aspiring filmmakers, all recent graduates from art schools and polytechnic colleges in London. With 209

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Other Cinemas the name Sankofa, which means in the Ghanaian Twi language ‘go back and get it’, the group announced its filmic intentions: first of all, to think about the present in terms of the past, but also, more urgently, to find and reclaim the past both as memory and as that which has been wilfully or incidentally forgotten. In Territories this impulse is evidenced in the use of archival footage, as well as audio recordings of interviews with members of the black community; their memories of the past were then overlaid onto images of the present. Revisiting the past to interrogate the present, Sankofa experimented with short and feature-​ length films, collective filmmaking practices, a rotating directorial role, and the exploration of a multitude of themes that complicated and conflated issues of identity, nationality, desire, history, civil rights and resistance. In Sankofa’s first film, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983) directed by Isaac Julien, the group explore the realities of the state, police and black civil rights activism through the lens of the death of Colin Roach and the police investigation that followed. Roach was a young black man who had perished inside the Stoke Newington police station on 12 January 1983 of a gunshot wound; the police then declared his death a suicide, in spite of a host of testimony and material evidence that called this into question. The film assembles a variety of imagery, including interviews, performances of music and poetry, media footage, the filmmakers’ own original footage and stills, oscillating between each in order to translate the personal tragedy of Colin’s death (Pauleen, his mother during one interview remarks, ‘He was my best friend’ and ‘Why would he want to die? He had to so much to live for’) into the overarching ‘climate of oppression’7 and technologies of state control. For example, Lester Lewis, in a speech at one of the Roach Family Support Committee marches, reveals that police tactics of intimidation and provocation used to arrest peaceful protesters on these marches were first developed and employed by the British army in Northern Ireland. The filmmakers’ juxtaposition of the spectre of the patriarchal military complex and the suffering matriarch at home collapses these strange binaries, highlighting Mrs Roach’s significant role in the campaign around her son’s death, and calling to attention the historic role black women have played in demanding and brokering civil rights. Further, Territories prominently foregrounds black British cultural figures and their work, highlighting their crucial role in galvanising and uniting diverse communities in the 210

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Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice 1980s. The British-Jamaican poet Benjamin Zephaniah’s recital of his poem ‘Who killed Colin Roach?’ (from which the film takes its title) is set against a soundtrack produced by the British-Guyanese dub music producer Mad Professor. It is important to remember that the British ‘black’ community was as heterogeneous as the number of Commonwealth nations that bore them, but they came together under the shared banner of civil rights, equal opportunities and creating awareness around important campaigns and movements. These included the case of Colin Roach, but also the long history of brutality and racial profiling at the hands of the police and the state. Another key workshop, BAFC, also received support and spotlighting under the rubric of Greater London Council funding and Channel 4. Founded in 1982 by a group of friends who had studied together at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the Sociology and Fine Art departments, the collective included John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison. Their debut, made around the same time as Who Killed Colin Roach?, was a two-​part tape-​slide work titled Expeditions (1983−4), consisting of Signs of Empire and Images of Nationality. Told exclusively through projected still images overlaid with text that faded in and out against an original soundtrack, the visual impact of the films lies in their radical reframing of archive materials that had originally celebrated colonialism, reaffirming British influence and power, on the one hand, and, on the other, the passivity or primitivism of colonial subjects. But through appropriation and the introduction of language these images take on new and sinister tones, revealing the very means through which cultural or racial inferiority is constructed. Painstakingly and collectively, the filmmakers applied layers of typography, colour and other visual interventions to their chosen images, giving the films a unique materiality and texture. Poignantly, a specific audio recording stands out in the film, repeated as it is in fractured speech throughout: Sir Ronald Bell QC on Panorama tells his audience ‘If you look at their faces […] I think they don’t know who they are or what they are. And really what you’re asking me is how the hell one gives them the sense of belonging.’8 Through repetition and editing, this incredibly divisive quotation takes on new meanings, suggesting the impossibility of positivist identity formation in the context of a tide of obliterated histories and traditions, contestation and colonial fantasy. Although the archive has since 211

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Other Cinemas been mined extensively in film and visual art practices, BAFC’s exploration of the British colonial archives was significant and innovative at this time to challenge not only these colonial images of the past but also the BBC as it continued to be a producer and disseminator of these same images. The film, which deconstructed and reformulated the colonial archive, was shown at film festivals and impromptu screenings, and broadcast on public television. It was a subversive and highly political act that recast the tools of the oppressor and his propaganda through dialectical and discursive means, into a reflection on and a reconsideration of the history of the colonial oppressed. Territories, directed by Isaac Julien, Sankofa’s second short film, looked at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, an annual celebration of British Caribbean culture, that had its genesis in traditional carnivals, including: Crop Over in Barbados, Mas in Trinidad and Tobago, Bacchanal in Jamaica, and others. From the late 1940s Windrush generation until the end of the twentieth century, Notting Hill was a stronghold and haven for Caribbean and black communities.9 Sankofa takes the microcosm of the Notting Hill Carnival as a metaphor for the ‘microcosm of the colony’10 and records ways in which disparate Caribbean communities coalesced around an event, forming new solidarities and horizontal affinities that extended far beyond the two days of the ‘black social-​aesthetic event’.11 The carnival as a site of contestation is explored throughout the film. Audio interviews describe the policing of the event and the anxieties it aroused: a generalised fear of black people assembling in large numbers, especially around sound systems, a site of distinctly non-​normative cultural activities; music and dancing could easily become sexual misconduct, debauchery or pure spectacle; this alien occupation could haunt the streets of civil (white) society –​but only temporarily. Montaging their own original footage with that of news channels, the group juxtaposes images of colourful bands, speedily assembled sound systems and general revelry with uprisings in the streets and police​provoked violence. The second chapter of the film, Territories II, features footage of a Union Jack in flames, two topless young black men (one of whom appears to be Julien) engaged in an embrace and footage of the police in riot formation, the images burning in and out of each other, while the sound of Joan Baez’s ‘The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti’ (‘Against 212

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Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice us is the law! Police know how to make a man a guilty or an innocent’) and Guyanese-​British producer Mad Professor’s ‘Freedom chant’ blur in and out of each other. This symbolic collision, dissonance and collapse between two conflicting sounds, lyrics and images stresses the role of sexual desire and transgression within and in contestation with the formation of lasting colonial narratives and bias. Handsworth Songs (1986) directed by John Akomfrah, BAFC’s second film, examines the civil disturbances in Birmingham’s Handsworth district in September and October 1985. This was the second outbreak of violence in the area, the first occurring in 1981, as a result of strained relations between the black community and police. The effects of systematic oppression, such as racial profiling, most readily evidenced in the form of ‘sus laws’ that disproportionately targeted ethnic minority communities, escalated into violent clashes between the multi-ethnic community and the police, with two deaths, many more injuries, the deployment of 1,500 police officers, countless arrests and extensive damage to property, as well as the eruption of uprisings across the country in solidarity. In perhaps the most imaginative and compelling appropriation of the archive, BAFC’s feature-​length film Handsworth Songs is centred on these events. But the archival, news documentation and first-​hand footage taken directly after the events reaches back into the past and to a much broader history for this flashpoint. The film returns to images of the first West Indian immigrants to the UK as they disembark from the steam ship, the Empire Windrush, at Tilbury Dock in 1948, and later, as they integrate into British society and the labour force. Handsworth Songs weaves together narratives of post-​colonialism, the cultural identity of diasporic communities and individuals, racism, violence, the role and position of the British media, the aesthetics of documentary and the ‘conundrum’12 of memory into a powerful and resonant non-​linear history that circles away from and back to the Handsworth ‘riots’. The various voices ascribed to different perspectives, whether the colonial archive, personal history or collective memory, constitute an overlapping history, in which impressions, or traces, of the past are presented as a complex overlay of carefully constructed visual and audio elements. ‘[Opening] an interpretative space to the viewer’,13 the filmmakers encourage their audiences to question each and every image presented in the film, especially those 213

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Other Cinemas employed to dictate ‘truths’ or ‘histories’. As its title suggests, the film is lyrical and its sonic environments, created by sound artist Trevor Mathison, reflect and construct the atmosphere throughout. The public reception of the film was remarkably split –​generating public debate, most colourfully across the review pages of the Guardian in 1987. Salman Rushdie reviewed the film for the aforementioned paper, decrying it as ‘no good’14 and accusing the filmmakers of producing an over-​intellectualised narrative that played into the hands of the mainstream media and stereotypes about the black communities in Britain. Stuart Hall responded, defending BAFC in the first instance, for the ‘struggle which it represents, precisely, to find a new language’ with which to articulate the important issues of race and criminality, breaking with the ‘tired style of the riot-​documentary’;15 and then, furthermore, for the group’s commitment to telling the black experience as an English experience, which necessarily demands covering the achievements, as well as the challenges, that the community faces. This debate was further expanded by black activist Darcus Howe, who pointed out that, while black culture had not yet built up a critical tradition, ‘we are left with nothing but cheer-​leaders on the one hand and a string of abuses on the other’.16 He defended Rushdie’s critique and agreed that BAFC’s use of language is not up to the task. However, almost 30 years later, the film continues to resonate, and has been recently celebrated as one of the most important films about the black British experience, precisely for its complexity, ambiguity and profound utilisation of disparate sources.

Conclusion The emergence of the black film workshops of the 1980s in Britain marked British film histories and paved the way for complex discussions around the role of film culture in the formation of national identities. Calling many histories and narratives into question, these collectives scoured archives, experimented with and invented new hybridised film technologies, while producing their own important social documents for future filmmakers and artists to further reposition. The workshops took an intersectional approach to disrupting the hegemonic apparatus of the cinematic male gaze, one that was white, male and heterosexual. The workshops actively 214

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Britain’s Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice countered gender disparities in the filmmaking by their founding by and membership of women, as well as their reconsideration of the construction and representation of narratives that centred women and women’s voices, literally, aurally and figuratively, as a polyphonic presence to disrupt and interrupt the patriarchy of the language of cinema. Both groups’ later films, including Sankofa’s Passion of Remembrance (1986) and BAFC’s Twilight City (1989) would go on to explore black female positionality more explicitly, though the films discussed here demonstrate the beginnings of the project of dismantling hegemonic whiteness and normativity in film. With points of departure as disparate and seemingly disconnected as the death of Colin Roach, Notting Hill Carnival and the Handsworth ‘riots’, these films have become constellations of the black British experience. Located in a history of colonialism, through these second-​and third-generation communities this experience had been relocated somewhere in the space between black and British. Their experimental practices were committed to finding new forms for discussing the present, creating new filmic languages that could speak to their own experiences and to those of their audience. Rather than producing a black British film, the workshops produced films that are testament to the need for visual technologies and modes of communication that could make space for the heterogeneous and often conflicting voices, realities, experience and visions of its very subjects. These aesthetic strategies that the workshops adopted are rooted in the political realities of their contemporary Britain.

Notes 1. Sankofa Film/​Video Collective, Territories (1984). 2. Tom Roberts, 1982, The ACTT Workshop Declaration provides financial security and new audiences for independent film and video workshops, www.luxonline.org.uk/​histories/​1980-​1989/​actt_​declaration.html, accessed 26 July 2016. (Also see Chapter 20.) 3. Coco Fusco, Young British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/​Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective, (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls, 1988), pp. 24, 33. 4. Ibid; Michelle Cliff, ‘If I Could Write This in Fire I Would Write This in Fire,’ in Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), pp. 15–​30.

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Other Cinemas 5. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis:  ‘Mugging’, the State and Law and Order (London: Hutchinson, 1978). 6. ‘Handsworth Songs:  some background notes’, an unpublished paper by the Black Audio Film Collective, 1987, p. 4. 7. Paul Gilroy, City Limits, London: 1983, http://​www.isaacjulien.com/​includes/​ filmDetail.php?filmID=colinroach, 3 November 2016. 8. Black Audio Film Collective, Expeditions: Signs of Empire. 9. Today the Notting Hill Carnival is regarded as a permanent, significant event on London’s cultural calendar, held over two days of the August bank holiday, flooding the streets with over a million participants and observers, and generating significant financial revenues for the city (the 2002 incarnation contributed £92  million). But its permanence has been contested, most recently in 2011 when a spate of uprisings were (unsuccessfully) used as justification for the cancellation of the carnival, and more prominently in its early years, when clashes between the police and carnival goers ended in violence and disorder. 10. Sankofa Film/​Video Collective, Territories. 11. Ibid. 12. John Akomfrah in Lina Gopal, ed., ‘RECLAIMED: the ghosts of songs’, Vertigo 3:7 (Autumn /​Winter 2007), p. 6. 13. Jean Fisher in Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers, (London: iniva, 2008), p. 198. 14. Salman Rushdie, ‘Songs Doesn’t Know the Score: Handsworth Songs by Black Audio Film Collective’, Guardian, 12 January, 1987. 15. Stuart Hall, ‘Song of Handsworth praise’, Guardian, 15 January 1987. 16. Darcus Howe, ‘The Language of Black Culture’, Guardian, 19 January 1987.

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Part Four

Case studies

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13 Views of River Yar: Reconsidering Raban and Welsby’s Landmark Landscape Film Federico Windhausen

Reflecting on the programme notes he had written for his screening series Avant-​Garde British Landscape Films at Tate Gallery in 1975, critic and curator Deke Dusinberre offered, eight years later, a rundown of the new terrain he had sought to chart through his programming. The cinematic tendency he had surveyed was especially pronounced around 1972 and 1973, when the landscape became a preferred subject of exploration among ‘new young film-​makers who embraced the radical vision of formalism but who felt uneasy with the strictures of “structural” film-​making’.1 He viewed the films as ‘ingeniously integrating a representational element which […] provided visual and immediate pleasure (as opposed to intellectual satisfaction)’, a constituent feature that he also described as ‘sensual’ and ‘illusionist’.2 In addition to figures rarely mentioned today, such as Jane Clark and David Pearce, his programmes showcased Chris Welsby and William Raban, perhaps the best known among filmmakers affiliated with the British landscape film of the 1970s.3 Despite their canonical standing, however, today the landscape films that Raban and Welsby each made in the 1970s are more often referred to than analysed. This is certainly the case with the focus of this chapter, the dual-​screen 16mm film River Yar (1972), their one still-​circulating collaborative effort.4 As a preliminary corrective to the generally cursory 219

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Figure  13.1: William Raban and Chris Welsby, 2-​screen showing of River Yar (1972). Courtesy of William Raban.

treatment that this film has received in the critical literature, I bring together, from a number of different sources, an assortment of noteworthy commentaries and remarks about Raban and Welsby’s film, in order to sketch out a few proximate contexts of production and reception relevant to River Yar and to examine some of the meanings ascribed to the film. In considering certain normative claims of the era, I also introduce my own contemporary perspective on the film. Of particular importance for what follows is the distinction suggested by Dusinberre between the landscape film’s visual/​ sensual/​ illusionist qualities and its intellectual/​ conceptual dimensions (see ­Figure 13.1). River Yar represents the coming together of two sensibilities that had recently been formed in British art schools. Having grown up on the south coast, Chris Welsby found himself drawn to landscapes, exploring them first through his painting, subsequently via ‘sequence pieces’ of still photographs and ‘tape-​slide presentations’, and eventually in short films.5 At Chelsea School of Art, where he was still a student during the shooting of River Yar, some of his instructors, including Malcolm Hughes and Peter 220

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Views of River Yar Lowe, were well-known for their participation in the Systems Group, an artists’ collective which sought to connect systemic structures to visual abstraction and geometric form. As Welsby continued to make representational imagery of natural environments, he took up their involvement with systems and, as we shall see, tailored it to his own interests. For Welsby, who had begun making films around 1968, all the early films were really about one thing − and I wonder if there’s anything else − just trying to explore the interface between technology and nature or between mind and nature, if one wants to think of the machine as being an extension or metaphor for the mind.6

As a painting student at St Martin’s School of Art in 1970, Raban was also exploring interfaces (without using that term) by ‘lifting traces from a range of natural phenomena’.7 Using thinned-​down oil paint and paper, he registered the imprint of breaking waves; covering part of a tree with canvas treated with organic dyes, he gave the fabric enough time to be changed by the tree, the dyes and the weather. He ‘saw them very much like photographic time exposures in a way’, and around the same time he began to shoot time-​lapse films.8 In View (1970), for example, he presents the River Test at two different frame rates, alternating between shots taken at a rate of a single frame per second and footage shot at the standard 24 frames per second (fps). When raindrops render the camera’s view of the river semi-​ opaque, Raban cuts, wipes the lens, and switches from one shooting speed to another, thereby creating a pattern of alternation partly governed by an aleatory factor. In 1971, Welsby and Raban produced time-​lapse studies in 8mm film, and late that year they set to work on River Yar, a film that presents, on both of its screens, an immobile camera view of a tidal estuary in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. Like View, their film follows a pattern, which is partially affected by natural phenomena. But whereas the accumulation of rain on the lens in Raban’s film was doubtless too variable to be forecast precisely, for River Yar the filmmakers created a compositional structure that had been planned in advance with more precision. They carried out this task by drawing upon and utilising a set of structures, systems and measurements tied not only to nature but also to science, mathematics and technology. 221

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Other Cinemas Interwoven throughout the sounds and images of the film are predictable and unforeseeable phenomena of various kinds whose kinetic interplay finds its sharpest contrast in the film’s predetermined arrangement. Before I address River Yar as an audiovisual experience, however, its formal architecture requires a fairly detailed elaboration. In describing River Yar, Raban and Welsby have divided it into two main sequences, with the first one (on the left-​side screen) commencing after the autumnal equinox and the second one (on the right) beginning before the vernal equinox.9 Various doubling and symmetrical relationships were generated within their two-​part structure. The left-​side sequence begins 21 days after the autumnal equinox and ends 42 days later. Its first 21 minutes consist of single-​frame shots (one frame taken every minute, so that a day takes up a minute of screen time), and its last 14 minutes are taken up by the final 14 minutes (at 24 fps) of the sunset on the final day of shooting (6 November 1971). The right-​side sequence begins 42 days before the vernal equinox and ends 21 days (three weeks) later. On the right screen, the first 14 minutes of the first day’s sunrise are shown at the standard frame rate, followed by 21 minutes of single-​frame-​per-​minute footage of the remaining three weeks of winter leading up to 27 February 1972.10 Direct sound of the exterior location was recorded at four moments during each day –​sunrise, midday, sunset and midnight –​and the duration of each recording was timed to match the duration of that part of the day onscreen.11 Texts that mention River Yar tend to underscore the importance for the film of naturally occurring transformations such as the equinoxes and the daily cycles of the sun, and with good reason, given their visual prominence throughout the film’s approximately 34-​minute duration. But just as integral to its overall make-​up are a series of constructs and conventions that are in daily use but rarely consciously scrutinised. These include the number of seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, and hours in a day, all of which are derived from ancient number systems. In their preparation process, the filmmakers availed themselves of the human measurement systems used to demarcate regularly occurring elements of natural systems, as when they selected dates and durations in relation to each equinox. They then incorporated an additional system into their calculations: the cinema. Theirs was not merely a de rigueur reflexive gesture, however, for they sought to tease out and exploit affinities 222

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Views of River Yar and differences between various systems co-​implicated in the film. Their norm for time-​lapse cinematography –​shooting a frame every minute –​ makes the multilayered quality of their exploration of systems especially apparent. In their reduction of an entire day (made up of 1,440 minutes) to a single minute of screen time (totalling 1,440 frames), Raban and Welsby join together two ways of dividing time: the containing of a day within 24 hours and the segmentation of a second into 24 frames on a filmstrip. Thus, the film’s time-​lapse representations of natural systems at work, including the progression from sunrise to sundown, are subjected to an ordering that is inextricable from the sampling of time through human systems. Describing a key element of the film in this way illuminates some common generalisations about this particular iteration of the avant-​garde genre of the landscape film. Dusinberre, for one, returned in 1976 to terms used in P. Adams Sitney’s writing on structural film in order to argue that in these British landscape films ‘the primary strategy for […] integrating the “content” of the landscape with the “shape” of the film is to establish a system or systems which incorporates the two.’12 Welsby, for another, had asserted that his films share with ‘contemporary landscape art […] [an] attempt to integrate the forms of technology with the forms to be found in nature’,13 and that his ‘aim is to mediate between the predictable and the unpredictable elements of the situation’.14 Describing himself as creating, through his cinema, an ‘interference’ between two kinds of phenomena, ‘clocks and clouds’, Welsby demonstrates the artistic usefulness of a provisional form of ‘bipolar differentiation’, while also arguing that it is derived from long-​standing philosophical traditions that should be critiqued and abandoned.15 This polemic echoes earlier statements by Welsby’s former teacher, Malcolm Hughes, who made frequent mention of certain ‘dichotomies’ and ‘paradoxes’, such as ‘the known with the uncertain, the finite with the infinite, the static with the dynamic, stability with instability’, the ‘working out’ of which was one of his main artistic concerns.16 While the details of Hughes’s formulations are probably best interpreted in relation to the artist’s own geometric paintings and reliefs, it is still possible to identify at least one point of convergence between his pursuits and Welsby’s: both see the generative potential of pairs of abstract notions and schematically divided categories, of the sort whose opposed attributes and 223

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Other Cinemas conceptual boundaries might be dissolved through the experience of the finished work. When speaking about the experience of viewing abstractly structured work, as the artists of the Systems Group were occasionally asked to do, Hughes explained that using systems to make visual art was a matter of ‘causing people to look quite hard at what is there, and then possibly getting them to speculate as to why it is that it is’.17 His avowed goal –​‘to take them, as it were, through the work, beyond the work, to the sort of concepts which inform it and which are there behind the work’ –​suggests a reluctance to have the value of his artworks located primarily in their visible forms. It is instructive to note that in the critical writing on systems-​oriented landscape films, as well as in various statements by filmmakers producing such work, the issue of spectatorial experience was also being broached, usually in a manner that acknowledged the films’ reliance on visually engaging footage while insisting that the typically absorptive, alluring nature of such imagery was mitigated by countervailing techniques or structures.18 Noting that such films ‘reintroduce the illusionist power of the cinematic image’,19 just as the ‘English avant-​garde cinema asserts the firstness of apprehension’, Dusinberre put forward the idea that the time-​lapse cinematography of River Yar amounts to both a ‘critique of landscape presentation’ (of its ‘illusionism of deep space and “real” time experience’ in particular) and an ‘analysis of the medium’ by way of ‘one of its fundamental characteristics, the shutter’.20 That a film associated with visual ‘power’ need also be framed as a ‘critique’, a commonly argued belief of the era, is also evinced by Peter Gidal’s (typically ungainly) description of River Yar as a film that is ‘powerful in terms of perceptual awareness and mental activation in terms of time-​relations and precision’, but that also ‘deals with nature in a nonpicturesque (and non-​idealistic, non-​mystificatory, non-​reactionary) manner’.21 The latter assertion certainly lines up with Raban’s own account of setting up, with Welsby, the camera for River Yar under low-​light conditions, with ‘no aesthetic, romantic decisions in terms of composition and so on […] I’m dealing with specific quantities –​the films aren’t just pretty colours, or optical effects, but precise investigations.’22 As we have seen, what was being investigated so precisely through the film’s production included the possible resemblances and differences between systems. Raban has made clear that another major object of 224

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Views of River Yar inquiry was durational experience: ‘I wanted to disorient people’s time senses, but by a very direct experience rather than by them thinking about how the film was made’ –​a statement of intention that perhaps finds its complement in Gidal’s mention of ‘perceptual awareness’.23 In part because he is speaking at the outset of an extended period of scepticism directed at two types of cinematic images –​the deceptive ‘illusionism’ disseminated by industrial filmmaking and the ‘visionary’, romantic iconography of the poetic avant-​garde –​Raban downplays the representational content of his film. Yet his apparent lack of interest in viewers’ ‘thinking about how the film was made’ is surprising if we recall his own artistic investment in process-​based work during that moment in his career.24 Nevertheless, both his tree prints and River Yar make prominent the element of temporality –​ although in the case of the film, it might be more accurate to speak of its multiple temporalities, displayed across and within two screens showing the same fixed, wide-​angle view of the troposphere. For the filmmakers, ‘the landscape is an isolated frame of space, observed within a given frame of time’, and that space, shot from an elevated position behind a window facing south, includes ‘fields, sea-wall/footpath, river and marsh’ in the foreground, trees and shrubs in the middle-​ground area, and a hilly background with enough of the sky included in the frame to make visible cloud cover, sun and moon.25 During the first 14 minutes of the film, time-​lapse imagery shot in autumn on the left screen is contrasted with a winter daybreak emerging slowly on the right screen, shot at 24 fps; this is the film’s first movement, to borrow a musical term, setting a rapid, abbreviated representation of astronomical and terrestrial cycles against a more traditionally naturalistic, fluidly continuous sequence that is focused on a single sunrise. This is followed by seven minutes of time-​ lapse imagery on both screens, in an arrestingly polyrhythmic middle movement of weather patterns, daily cycles and random events that is full of striking parallels and contrapuntal details generated within the dual-​ screen presentation format. The third and final movement of the film, lasting 14 minutes, juxtaposes a sunset on the left screen, turning gradually darker in a real-​time diminuendo, with the continuation of the right screen’s rapid-​motion winter footage. If the film can be said to ‘disorient’ our sense of time, it does so through an extensive series of visual and aural events that seem to belong to different time-​scales, including the 225

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Other Cinemas long durations of natural cycles and the fleeting instants of a moment in a given day. The filmmakers refer to River Yar as ‘an observational film, a comparative study of two seasons’, but I  suspect that Raban’s preference, at least in 1972, would have been to avoid placing much emphasis on photorealism or documentation, lest the dominant responses to the film were to become skewed towards its profilmic events.26 In fact, Raban has consistently offered an anti-​realist interpretation of the film, calling attention to the impact of his and Welsby’s use of 40 ASA Kodachrome film stock. He has characterised the film’s real-​time sunrise as ‘a record of emulsion slowly gaining light’,27 and noted that its night shots, for which ‘prolonged time-​exposures had to be used’, generated an ‘apparent distortion’ through filmic colour biases.28 Notwithstanding Raban’s resistances, however, the film’s depictive content retains a degree of significance, as Annabel Nicolson intimated vividly in print soon after the film’s completion. One among a few filmmakers who observed the shooting of the film, Nicolson offers a short description of River Yar that presents it as a portrait of a place: Along with the anticipated sounds of seabirds, herring gulls, foghorns, wind and so on, the microphone picked up foreign radio waves, giving almost cosmic implications to such a local scene. Within this chosen space and time, environmental changes occurred gratuitously. Local authorities decided overnight to build a sea wall along part of the shore and equally suddenly abandoned it. An area where cows were grazing in the first exceptionally beautiful autumn sequence was completely flooded by the time spring shooting started and then rapidly evaporated one clear morning. The reflection of the camera in the window (closed because of heavy rain at night) provides a self-​referential context at intervals.29

Raban’s and Nicolson’s accounts of the film are not incompatible if one simply accepts that the finished work exists as an audiovisual sampling that both depicts and distorts the profilmic environment. The fact that the filmmakers and their technologies of recording participate  –​‘interfere’, as Welsby would have it  –​in the local scene is suggested not only by the periodic appearance of the camera’s mirrored image 226

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Views of River Yar onscreen, but also by the filmmakers’ protracted deployment of time-​lapse cinematography. Through that technique, River Yar transforms the phenomenal world, exhibiting a manifestly unnatural rate of movement, but even a practice as manifestly anti-​realist as the shooting of one frame per minute can enhance what Dusinberre called the ‘sensual’ quality of the landscape image. The rapidly changing intensities of light and of natural aerosols such as fog and mist reveal, obscure and limn what the film shows us of the area, at times accentuating the physical properties  –​even the sculptural qualities –​of certain objects in the frame. Taking my lead from Nicolson’s emphasis on the specifics of the filmed situation and location, I conclude with a brief indication of where the study of films such as River Yar has yet to go. In a passage that resonates with Welsby’s claims about technology and nature, the historian David Nye has offered the following account of a core idea within contemporary scholarship on landscapes: It is in all likelihood impossible to imagine a landscape that  is not socially constructed in two senses. First, people have left their physical mark on the land, both intentionally and inadvertently [...] Second, landscape is always socially constructed because we see it through the invention of perspective vision, the technology of photography, the abstractions of maps, and the traditions of landscape painting that  have become a central part of Western visual culture. Thus social construction occurs on two levels, material and psychological, with a constant interplay between site and sight.30

In discussing River Yar, Raban, Welsby and most of their commentators elected to focus on fairly abstract issues more closely related to sight than site, but it is not difficult to imagine that more detailed treatments of place could be incorporated into future analyses of this film in particular and 1970s British landscape films in general. During an early moment in the modern history of British environmentalism, Raban and Welsby selected as their base of operations a late eighteenth-​century tidal mill, a structure that had been briefly used to harness the power of the sea’s natural cycles, and from within that location they carried out a technological intervention into a landscape visibly 227

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Other Cinemas impacted by human activities and tidal patterns. Even if the filmmakers’ own discourse has subsequently failed to invoke the material histories of that geography, the unique film they made nonetheless engages with it in ways we have yet to explore.

Notes 1. Deke Dusinberre, ‘Deke Dusinberre on British avant-​garde landscape films’, Undercut 7/​8 (1983), p. 49. 2. Ibid., p. 50. 3. For an introduction to British landscape films that also covers the work of Welsby and Raban, see David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 94−102. 4. According to Annabel Nicolson, River Yar was shown with an accompanying slide piece by Raban and Welsby titled Southampton Water. In 1972, Welsby also made Reflections on Glass, a photographic series related to the appearance of the camera in River Yar. See Annabel Nicolson, ‘Artist as filmmaker’, Art and Artists 7:9:81 (December 1972), p. 26; Chris Welsby, ‘Photographs’, in David Curtis, ed., Chris Welsby: Films/​Photographs/​Writings (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981), p. 16. 5. Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, ‘Interview with Chris Welsby’, Cantrills Filmnotes 63/​64 (December 1990), p. 44. 6. Ibid., p. 45. 7. William Raban, ‘Lifting traces’, filmwaves 4 (Spring 1998), p. 14. 8. Unpublished interview transcript, ‘Illuminations − The Frame − William Raban − Roll 1 − Roll 98 –​008’ (2003), p. 2. 9. The details in this paragraph are drawn from William Raban, ‘River Yar’, an unpublished and undated text archived in the William Raban folder at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection at Central St Martins. It appears to be from 1972. 10. The right-​side footage has been consistently referred to by Welsby, Raban and various critics as the film’s spring sequence, but according the filmmakers’ own dates, that material was shot in the winter dates that lead up to spring. 11. According to Raban, ‘We recorded fifteen seconds of sound at four sampling points in the day: six o’clock in the morning, midday, six o’clock in the evening, and midnight. We were controlling the sound recorder from alongside the camera so we used quite a long microphone cable […] [that] tended to act as an aerial, particularly at night. It was picking up radio transmissions so we’d get those curious radio signals coming through.’ The film can thus be said to juxtapose two types of waveform phenomena, tides and radio signals (William

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Views of River Yar Raban and Chris Welsby, ‘River Yar, 1972’, in Mark Webber, ed., Shoot Shoot Shoot:  The First Decade of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative 1966−76 (London: LUX, 2016), p. 153). 12. Deke Dusinberre, ‘St. George in the Forest: the English avant-​garde’, Afterimage 6 (1976), p. 11. 13. Chris Welsby, ‘Landscape film’ (1977), in Curtis, Chris Welsby, p. 5. 14. Chris Welsby, ‘Clocks & clouds’ (1975), in Curtis, Chris Welsby, p. 4. 15. Chris Welsby, ‘Technology and nature’ (1979), in Curtis, Chris Welsby, p. 5. Responding to being called a ‘dualist’ in an interview, Welsby clarified that, for him, the relationship between mind and nature should be regarded as ‘the constant modification of one system by another’ (Michael O’Pray and William Raban, ‘Interview with Chris Welsby’ (1983), in Nina Danino and Michael Mazière, eds, The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), p. 126). 16. Malcolm Hughes, ‘Malcolm Hughes’, in Systems:  Arts Council 1972−3 (London: Arts Council, 1973), p. 25. 17. ‘Interview with M. Hughes for BBC Local Radio N.D.’ (undated but possibly from 1973), audio recording TAV748A, Tate Archive Audiovisual Collection, Tate Britain Library. 18. Michael O’Pray has made a similar point: ‘If procedural and structural strategies were paramount for these film-​makers, it was the landscape film which asserted a problematic terrain of aesthetic pleasure, in its most acute form, such that a certain ambiguity towards landscape films’ imagery became a feature of the critical discourse of the time’ (Michael O’Pray, ‘William Raban’s landscape films: the Formalist imagination’, Undercut 7/​8 (1983), p. 104). 19. Dusinberre, ‘St. George in the Forest’, p. 13. 20. Dusinberre, ‘Deke Dusinberre on British avant-​garde landscape films’, p. 51. 21. Peter Gidal, ‘English Independent Cinema 2 –​William Raban’, National Film Theatre programme notes, 1972, n.p. 22. John Du Cane, ‘William Raban’, Time Out (14−20 July 1972), p.  51. In the later interview Raban clarifies that ‘the decisions were taken […] really for the dynamics of movement within the frame rather than in terms of [...] pictorial composition’ (‘Illuminations − The Frame − William Raban − Roll 1 − Roll 98 –​ 008’, p. 6). 23. John Du Cane, ‘William Raban’, p. 51. 24. Decades later, Raban commented, ‘Looking back on making [River Yar] it seems to me that the performance element of making the film is as important and I think Chris would agree with this’ (‘Illuminations − The Frame − William Raban − Roll 1 − Roll 98 –​008’, p. 4). 25. Raban, ‘River Yar’, p. 1. 26. Ibid., p. 3.

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Other Cinemas 27. Du Cane, ‘William Raban’, p. 51. 28. William Raban, untitled film grant application, March 1973, p. 28. This text is archived in the William Raban folder at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection at Central St Martins. Other visual distortions were the result of their use of 100ft rolls, as Raban notes, ‘so even in the real time passages you get kicks in the film when reloading the camera. These little jumps in time look like jump cuts. We would use long time exposures to try to pick up some detail on moonlit nights. Sometimes you see the moon trembling across the sky’ (William Raban and Chris Welsby, ‘River Yar, 1972’, in Webber, Shoot Shoot Shoot, p. 153). 29. Nicolson, ‘Artist as filmmaker’, p. 26. 30. David E. Nye, ‘Introduction: technologies of landscape’, in David E. Nye, ed., Technologies of Landscape: From Reaping to Recycling (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 16.

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14 Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert and the Camera’s Caress Rachel Garfield

Stephen Dwoskin (1939−2012) was at the height of his reputation in the mid-​1970s when he made the film Behindert. It won the award for best TV play in Germany in 1974 and is still very much admired.1 I am writing about Behindert as an example of Dwoskin’s approach to filmmaking in the 1970s but also I witnessed this same approach firsthand, when I worked with him in the editing suite on his later films.2 It represents merely one strand of his oeuvre but one that addresses some key preoccupations that marked his film work. Dwoskin was hungry for the intensity of the image as a haptic tool that would allow him to engage with the world, and his work was generally visually led.3 While the foremost driver for his filmmaking was a desire to connect with others, he recognised at the same time the very impossibility of the lasting and true connection that he craved. That his disability, the legacy of childhood polio, was the ‘prop’ that gave visibility to these other preoccupations (for instance, the impossibility of a love fulfilled) is not surprising, given his expressionist tendencies.4 He considered this physical difference to be merely a more extreme, material manifestation of self-​estrangement, of the so-​called normative condition of being, and this paradox is the nub that fuelled his work. He understood the paradox psychoanalytically, existentially and 231

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Other Cinemas metaphorically; it is also at the root of the preoccupation with desire in his films. To situate Dwoskin briefly: he is best known in the UK as a co-​founder of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op (LFMC) in 1966,5 and for his contribution to the burgeoning, and associated, cultural infrastructure in London. He was also, however, a celebrated graphic designer, painter and writer.6 Above all he was an artist, eschewing the many divisions that drove the worlds of art and film, an attitude that might have been formed by the New York milieu from which he emerged.7 It was following Jonas Mekas’ model that he co-​founded the LFMC in the basement of Better Books. When Dwoskin came to the UK from New York on a Fulbright scholarship, he was already a successful graphic designer working for CBS. His aim, on arrival, was to take time out of professional commitments to explore art and develop his work as an artist for a year. However, he stayed in London for the rest of his life, until his death in 2012. Dwoskin’s reputation as a filmmaker in the UK has been largely eclipsed except as an exemplar of sexually explicit films subject to censorship or as a commentator on experimental film due to his book, Film Is …. His oeuvre does incorporate at times the sexually explicit and the nude female subject, as well as his own nude body; however, the richness and innovation of his visual language and the complexity of the aims of his work are often missed or ignored in the extreme reactions to the more explicit work resulting from reductive versions of a certain period of 1980s feminist interpretative mechanisms that still linger. This is coupled with the doxa of structuralism,8 in itself a constructed orthodoxy that sought its authority in a mix of Althusserian9 discourse and the censorious purism of Greenbergian High Modernism.10 We are now emerging out of that era of self-​censorship, which is being replaced by a renewed current of interest in embodiment and subjectivity in film. This offers an opportunity to address Dwoskin’s contribution to the language as well as the cultures of the London film scene of the late twentieth century and to foster the kind of appreciation of his work that he has consistently enjoyed in the Francophone world. In sum, I would suggest Dwoskin as a problematising exemplar who, through his work, defied the divisions that these orthodoxies wrought. He demonstrates this in several ways in Behindert. 232

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Between Seeing and Knowing Behindert was one of three feature-​length films he made in the 1970s: part of a prolific artistic output, this film is sandwiched between two other feature films, DynAmo (1972) and Central Bazaar (1976), as well as several other smaller projects that he made between those dates. The German TV production company ZDF funded Behindert as the first part of a directorial trilogy comprising two other films, Silent Cry (1977) and Outside In (1981), about a range of handicaps, each explored differently.11 Silent Cry is an impressionistic narrative, inspired by reflections on the anorexia of a partner. The film is a portrait of a woman, unwittingly crushed by the men around her who love her in ways that undermine her sense of self. Outside In is an autobiographical re-enactment of responses to him and his disability. The film is structured as a series of witty and deflationary vignettes. Ostensibly a linear feature, Behindert visually narrates the moving arc of a relationship from its first captivating glance to its distressing end. The relationship between Steve Dwoskin, a disabled man, and Carola Regnier, an able-​bodied woman, is filmed by both of them retrospectively. Although his treatment for the film outlined a somewhat mechanistic series of vignettes, focusing on disability, like all Dwoskin films, to watch it is to be immersed in a world of experiential intensity, amplified through radical camerawork, rhythmic editing and evocative sound work, in this case an undulating drone composed by Gavin Bryars. Through these cinematic devices, in a careful and studied re-​enactment by the two protagonists, the film traverses a series of points in their relationship, from initial attraction to ultimate alienation. While the film reads as a fictive drama, the re-​ enactment renders it as a documentary: oscillating, in addition, between abstraction and narrative, its visual language scaffolds this intra-​genre aspect to the work. ‘The documentary is an embodied storytelling that, while a narrativizing of reality in images and sounds, engages us with the actions and feelings of social actors, like characters in fiction.’12 There are numerous debates about the parameters of documentary that are relevant to Dwoskin’s adoption of a subjective, personal, perspective. Michael Renov in The Subject of Documentary, picks out Wendy Clarke, the daughter of Shirley Clarke, and the anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch as the progenitors of self-​inscription in documentary 233

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Figure 14.1:  Carola Regnier in Stephen Dwoskin, Behindert (1974). Courtesy of the Dwoskin Estate.

film that gave rise to what he calls a ‘new subjectivity’.13 Jim Lane, in The Autobiographical Documentary in America, delineates an opposition between the autobiographical, avant-​garde works of Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneeman, Jonas Mekas and the 1960s development of cinéma vérité by, for instance, Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman. These tendencies started to merge in the late 1960s with mock documentary David Holzman’s Diary (1967).14 I would argue that, in 1973, Dwoskin identified the form in a different way with his descriptive definition of Behindert as a ‘subjective documentary’ in his treatment for the film. With the designation ‘subjective documentary’, Dwoskin was even then consciously subverting the ever debatable and still surprisingly pervasive expectation for ‘objectivity’ in the genre.15 Particularly interested in the line between fiction and documentary, he often spoke about Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and Robert Kramer’s Route One: USA (1989) as different examples of the interface that he engaged with.16 234

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Between Seeing and Knowing Behindert opens at the beginning of a dinner party: in comes a woman on whom the camera fixes its gaze. The viewer quickly becomes aware that the camera is a person, looking and immobile. While this is the filmmaker (Dwoskin), he is also the central protagonist, Steve, who is a dinner guest but is also filming the scene from behind the table. What follows is a long scrutiny of Carola’s gradual, growing awareness of his attention. These durational but edited shots that endeavour to penetrate the subject with repetitions, zooms and jump cuts are a hallmark of Dwoskin’s portraiture that sets up an interaction between the viewer, the viewed and, of course, the audience in an ongoing visual dialogue, focusing on the face and its expressions as if searching for an emotional truth. In this way the camerawork also replicates the way the eye moves back and forth between different kinds of information to make a composite whole picture. The film thus explores how it might be possible to know someone through the visual, and the generosity of Dwoskin’s camera seems to allow the subject to make herself knowable. Dwoskin’s abstract perception of the world is a key, but understated, component of the film. He finds abstraction in the structure of the frame and the architecture of the image, which he then uses to destabilise and interrupt the flow of the narrative. This dovetails with the tight focus on the face, on the fragmented gestures, the hands, the flick of the hair, the smile or angle of the head and particularly the look of the eyes that all operate, again through abstraction, as a penetrating study of emotion and internal struggle. On the one hand, the abstraction is a testament to Dwoskin’s painterly origins while, on the other, it acts as a distancing mechanism, adding a further layer of narrativisation through the visual. For example, after the prolonged introductory scene at the dinner party, Steve drops Carola off, presumably at her home. The seemingly casual mise-​ en-​scène of the first scene (white walls, Carola’s white shirt, her face occasionally out of focus, the soft light), as in a fly on the wall documentary, is now contrasted by a jump cut to an iconic and sharply focused shot of Carola’s face surrounded by the darkness of the night through the car door, as she says goodbye. She is in the centre of the shot, while a small satellite formed by a street light to the right of her head creates a punctum of sorts. He asks her if he can see her again. She says yes, adding after some hesitation, ‘gladly’, 235

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Other Cinemas and then disappears into the darkness.17 The iconicity of the image seals her importance as iconic for Steve and for his psychology, and visually it adds another layer of meaning to the film. It also marks a moment of recognition: that these two are going to begin a relationship but that her desire, in the ongoing interaction between them, will be somewhat reluctant. This segues directly to a sequence that is a contrast in its temporal as well as visual abstraction. The two are together, in a theatre, by some steps that lead to their seats. The zoom on Carola, as she stands on the stairwell, is posed and consciously stops the flow of movement, while, in contrast, the slow repeated pans of the banisters evoke Steve’s trepidation as he tries to climb the stairs. Carola is both the symbol of his fear and a spur to make him climb. At last it seems as though Steve is climbing. As the camerawork at this point is unfocused, fragmentary and abstract, the viewer is forced to experience the fragility of his movements; the camera looks down at the floor so that the viewer can see his vision and feel his fear. Dwoskin repeats these kinds of shots at certain points throughout the film to drive home the distinction between able-​bodied movement and his own. The vertigo envisioned here can be read both as physical (the difficulty of walking upstairs on crutches) and as psychological (the discombobulation of a new relationship). It also acts as an interlude between this scene and the next, which again uses the strategy of silent observation as a marker of distance between the protagonists. Carola is in a room, smoking; her red top, white shirt and blue trousers match the colour of the curtains, the wall and carpet respectively. The image creates a simple and beautifully framed portrait, moving from handheld turbulence to a static tripod shot, from one kind of composition to another. Carola is talking to the camera (Steve), and then talking with no sound (mostly), pacing the room. The soundtrack evokes the scene’s psychological state: a classical piano sequence comes to the fore while the drone, loud and insistent in the previous scene, begins in the background. The duality of the sound throughout the film allows a deeper commentary on the emotional dislocation between the two. Carola’s ambivalence is caught through a range of looks, pensive, loving and anxious, all through this sequence. The gulf that will grow between them is shown through the build-​up of sound, the silent speech and the contrast between his still camerawork and her agitated movements, in an inversion of the previous shot of her, standing still at the bottom of the stairs, and his jerky camera 236

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Between Seeing and Knowing movements. They are always at odds. The poignancy of their silent movements and the piano music signals the knowingness of the re-​enactment: a memory of that originary moment and a longing for its closeness stand alongside the distance set up through the continuous drone. At the heart of Dwoskin’s visual language is the paradox: a craving for the intimacy that relationships promise and the insatiability of desire that forecloses the possibility of real intimacy. Rather than mere sexual desire, with which Dwoskin is often associated, this is the desire to connect with other human beings in a deep and all-​consuming way (of which sexual connection is merely one component). The treatment for Behindert was shaped by the sense that, for Dwoskin, his disability was the source of this foreclosing and in it he explores the effects of his disability on his amorous encounters. I would argue, however, that, within the film, there are other forces at play. That his childhood polio was the impediment to closeness would be too literal a reading: the crutch of disability suggests a mask, hiding the fear that the intimate connection he craves is impossible.18 Underlying his whole oeuvre are wider implications, reaching beyond his disability: that his disabled body is merely a visible, material and more extreme sign of a universal sense of abjection, of the imperfection that possesses all bodies. This can be extrapolated further from his style of filming. Despite the important asymmetry of the camerawork, his insistent, continual close-​ ups on the face of his desired subject exemplify the impossibility of (and his rejection of) conventional standards of perfection. He reveals the flaws in the skin, the hair out of place, the shadow of a moustache on the upper lip. In this way also he acknowledges that desire has to involve real people; that the line that divides the abject from the desired and desiring body is very thin indeed. The Dwoskin camera is always ambivalent. As the film develops, Carola becomes increasingly irritated by Steve’s inability to help himself, his need for her to help him pick things up, buy things for him, and the way his disability always slows things down. Another key scene focuses again on stairs but this time the camera lingers on her impatience: she overtakes him and then waits with an air of resignation as he works his way downstairs, his hands clutching the hand rail and his crutches. Each shot draws out the differences between the able-​bodied swift movements down the stairs, hers and other people’s, and his slow struggle. A jump cut pulls out to view them from the middle distance. They 237

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Other Cinemas are then seen, in a metaphor for the structural difficulties between them, through the modern rectilinear architecture of the staircase: the camera then zooms in to a lingering close-​up of Steve’s legs and crutches as they painstakingly work their way down amid further architectural abstraction. Carola’s stare becomes ever more impatient and Gavin Bryars drone maintains the tension throughout the scene. The death knell comes one rainy evening that prevents them from going out to a social event. ‘Everything is so difficult,’ she exclaims in German. He says sorry. This is clearly the beginning of the end of the relationship. The camera lingers between her face and his, but mainly dwells on the shifting feelings that quiver across hers, her hands clutching each other, lighting a cigarette, moments of caught expression. Steve’s offending crutches are shot, in a framed diagonal, lying on the red carpet, a coffin-​like symbol of his uselessness that has killed her desire. The piano music returns and the camera sweeps the room, catching keys, photos, curtains, random inanimate objects of hers that amplify her absence. The last five minutes of the film consists of a four-​minute shot of her face from below as she finally leaves the house. Lastly there is a point-​of-​view shot out of the window as she glances back before walking out of the frame. A sudden and complete end. Except not: the viewer knows as she is watching the film that this is a re-​ enactment. Some might even know that Stephen Dwoskin and Carola Regnier were to stay lifelong friends. The ‘double déjà vu’, as Steve had called it in his original treatment,19 creates a gap, an excess, through which involvement lies. Therefore one had to act out each situation as if they were ‘real’, and to record them, by each other on to film. Over a period of many months, the re-​creations and the ‘acting out’ became subjected to many unknown and latent dangers –​that is: it became hard, and at times impossible, to discriminate between an ‘acted out’ or a ‘real’ (at the time) actual situation. So many subjectively personal and emotional expressions were occurring within and throughout the filming for myself, for Carola, and between us, that the maintenance of balance became difficult, but had to be constantly dealt with.20

This drama tells a recognisable emotional truth. When a relationship ends, anyone might play and replay its key moments to work out:  what happened and why? Where did the end begin? What could have been done 238

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Between Seeing and Knowing differently? Dwoskin stated in Cinim 2: ‘people look at films in the same way that they look at each other –​very distant from it all. In other words they “look at” but are seldom involved in.’21 As Steve and Carola made the film together, it had to be through a process of discussion, that is, a renegotiation as well as a re-​enactment. This process gave them the chance to become involved with each other again, this time through the distance of ‘friendship’. So memory became overlaid with a new reality of what their relationship could be; and with the film Behindert, the fiction became a ‘subjective documentary’ and an authentic vision of the world. Behindert is merely one example of the unique bridge that Dwoskin’s oeuvre represented between the realms of personal expression and a deep engagement with a materialist aesthetic. His brave and singular refusal to be defined or contained within any visual orthodoxy would erode his reputation in the UK, his chosen home. His marginalisation, within the context of the UK in the 1970s which was dominated by the advocates of structuralism and minimalism, was part of a wider turn away from the ‘underground’ of the 1960s, particularly in its American form, that valorised authenticity and a personal vision, much closer to Dwoskin’s own. Feminism also amplified his isolation because of his interest in sexuality, desire and emotion at a time when few would tackle these subjects. The cumulative effect in the UK, due to the ongoing legacies of these tendencies within British filmmaking, has been a reputation built on defining and establishing the infrastructure of film culture in the UK at the cost of considered scholarship on the work itself. That most textual readings of his work are written in French is a testament to the erasure under which he operated. However, recently there has been a re-​emergence of interest in a different 1980s from that of the dominant canon, in filmmakers such as Derek Jarman, as well as in discourses around subjectivity and embodiment that will shift again our understanding about what is important in film culture. Within that context, it is Dwoskin’s very refusal to be contained that may secure his long-​term legacy through his powerful and difficult cinematic language.

Notes 1. ‘His work has made quite an impression on me, and everyone who came to the screenings in February was completely enraptured by Behindert […] the

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Other Cinemas film has been voted as one of the best Spectacle screenings of the year’ (Greg Eggebeen, Spectacle Theater, personal email, 2 November 2012). Adrian Martin suggested that Behindert was not only a masterpiece within Dwoskin’s oeuvre but one of the greatest films of all time, in ‘The hungry cinema of Stephen Dwoskin’, Film Quarterly 61:1 (Autumn 2007). 2. He would ask me, as he would many of his friends, to look at films in development and show me different versions on his computer from 1996 onwards. I also made a film with him, Here There Then Now (2004−9). 3. This term was coined by Adrian Martin in ‘The hungry cinema’. Furthermore, Stephen would often complain to me when he was on the Lottery Film Board in the late 1990s that a script only was required for funding applications. This ignored the importance of the visual language for a film and made it impossible for a film to be visually led. 4. His childhood polio meant that he had to use calipers to walk as a young man but was later a wheelchair user. His polio contributed to his death. 5. Dwoskin also co-​founded The Other Cinema, and was on the Lottery Film Board and a disability arts activist. He was also Professor of Film at the Royal College of Art and London College of Printing (now LCC). 6. Dwoskin wrote Film Is …:  The International Free Cinema (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Books, 1978). 7. His manager was Emile de Antonio and he was well acquainted with Robert Frank, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas among others. 8. The debates that raged around representation in the 1980s over who has the right to speak for whom have re-​emerged through another highly charged debate in feminist discourse (and activism) around the trans community. All of this is a testament to the continuing importance of the body as a political litmus test within feminism (and other identitarian debates). 9. Althusser’s text ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophies and Other Essays (New  York:  Monthly Review Press, 2001), explores the role of ideology in alienating the subject and how structures of power disseminate and propagate ideology on behalf of the state. This was an influential essay in the UK and film was widely seen to be one of the ways in which ideology was transmitted. It also, via negative, showed possibilities for the critique of prevailing ideologies through the medium of film. 10. Clement Greenberg was an influential art critic who, particularly in his mature thinking, posited that art be judged by its separation of from popular culture but that ‘It is through the engagement with the demands of a specific medium, and through acceptance of the standards of achievement specific to that medium, that the artist engages to most enduring critical effect with historical and social conditions’ (Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds, Art In Theory 1900–​1999 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 685).

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Between Seeing and Knowing 11. http://​www.decadrages.ch/​interview-​stephen-​dwoskin, accessed 29 October 2016. 12. Elisabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Madison, WI: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 3. 13. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Madison, WI:  University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 176−9. 14. Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p. 14. 15. The film was planned years before Dwoskin met Regnier, despite the seeming re-enactment, further subverting the documentary form (thanks to Darragh O’Donoghue for pointing out the time discrepancy between the planning of the film and its making). 16. He was unhappy particularly that the BBC had declined to broadcast his later film Pain Is … (1997) on the basis that it was not a proper documentary and yet it had also been rejected as art (personal conversations with Dwoskin). 17. ‘Gern’ is the actual word stated, in German, which might loosely be translated as ‘happily’. 18. ‘It was an extension of my earlier work in terms of relationships. The impetus for doing Behindert was that in a relationship, where one person has a physical disability, that disability becomes an excuse for the relationship not to work’ (http://​www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/​stephen-​dwoskin, accessed 22 December 2015). 19. From the Stephen Dwoskin archive, accessed 22 December 2015. 20. Ibid. 21. ‘If a film’, Cinim 2 (1967), p. 2.

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15 Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair Amy Tobin

Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair is a 78-​minute feature film directed by Esther Ronay, Susan Shapiro and Francine Winham. It was the first all-​ female production funded by the BFI Production Board and was released in 1978, late in the decade that had seen a surge in activism around women’s rights and vital developments in feminist thought and cultural production. The film takes the fairy tale of Rapunzel –​the Grimm Brothers’ version –​remaking it several times over in a series of six sections. These range in style from animation, to live action drama, to an illustrated lecture, and with subsequent repetitions the story progresses from the magical, to the sensational, to the melodramatic and finally towards a liberation narrative. In what follows I will look at the context of the film’s production, then focus on the devices employed by the film itself and its creative strategies, and finish by considering its contemporary critical reception. In both its content and production values Rapunzel might appear to be an uncomplicated example of feminist retelling; however, the film’s apparently straightforward structure conceals its deconstructive work. Far from being a celebratory appropriation of the fairy story, the film carefully unpacks the ideological function of this particular story and folk and fairy tales more broadly. The Rapunzel project marked a shift in direction for the filmmakers, who had previously worked in a more documentary mode. Ronay, Shapiro 242

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair and Winham were all members of the London Women’s Film Group (LWFG), which had formed early in the 1970s in response to an advertisement placed by the filmmaker Midge McKenzie. The group met weekly in a women’s centre in Denmark Street to work on film ideas and scripts, and by borrowing equipment from the nearby Berwick Street Collective, they taught themselves to use a film camera. By 1971 some members of the group were already working on their first film, Women of the Rhondda (1971–​3). Although this film was not an LWFG production, its documentary realist style influenced the direction the group would take. The film focused on women talking about their memories of the 1926 General Strike in Wales, interspersed with footage of the streets and mines of the Rhondda Valley where actions had taken place. Ronay has described it as a ‘history film’ that came out of the need to remember past struggles and diversify the history of resistance to acknowledge the crucial roles women played.1 The stories told by women –​Doreen Adams, Alice Boxall, Beatrice Davies and Mary Elizabeth Davey –​focusing on their domestic labour, supporting the miners at work and during the strike, can be described following Siona Wilson as a ‘Marxist-​feminist inquiry’.2 This situates the LWFG within the context of other groups who sought to reframe the narratives of working-​ class people and bring new histories to light, such as the Berwick Street Collective and Cinema Action.3 After making two further short films, Serve and Obey and Bettshanger, Kent, in 1972, the LWFG recruited new members, including the feminist film critic Claire Johnston. Johnston had called Women of the Rhondda ‘progressive realism’, a comment that highlighted her desire to move away from realism as a counter-​cinematic style and to develop new cinematic strategies for critiquing the everyday conditions of women’s lives.4 This resulted in Johnston translating the impetus behind her written analyses of Hollywood cinema into practical filmmaking. The next film by the LWFG departed from the realist approach of the earlier projects. Annette Kuhn notes the shift in a contemporary review of LWFG’s films, arguing that they ‘attempt to break with the “realist” documentary conventions operating in most political films’.5 The Amazing Equal Pay Show (1974; see Figure 15.1) was an adaptation for film of a play by the Women’s Street Theatre Group, which they had written and performed in 1972. It is a satirical take on women’s place in the capitalist economic machine, the passing of the Equal 243

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Figure 15.1:  The London Women’s Film Group, The Amazing Equal Pay Show (1974). Courtesy of Esther Ronay.

Pay Act in 1970, and Labour politician Barbara Castle’s continuing struggle for the rights of women workers –​all organised into seven stylistically diverse tableaux. The film was made over a series of weekends because most of the women had full-​time jobs. Each time they met, the women swapped roles so that each member could develop varied skills, and in doing so challenge the hierarchy of conventional working relations on set. They wrote, ‘our intention was that everybody in the group becomes familiar with all the stages in the process of making a film, both at the level of technology and the level of ideas’.6 The Amazing Equal Pay Show allowed women not only to exchange practical skills on set, but also to share different approaches to cinema. It marked a departure from the documentary style of Women of the Rhondda, Serve and Obey and Bettshanger, Kent, as well as providing a precedent for the fictional feature, Rapunzel.7 Each of the films made by the LWFG experimented with different formal strategies –​playing with fragmentation 244

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair and weaving together interview footage with statistical information and fictional narratives –​testing out approaches to political cinema.8 The juxtaposition of genre forms, together with the collaborative filmmaking process, worked to disrupt the singularity of auteur filmmaking and disperse audience engagement with the film across different viewpoints. This resulted in films that undercut notions of objectivity, showing up the complexities and challenges of representing women in film, rather than simply ‘making films about women’. It was this formal experimentation, as well as the reorganisation into collective production, that characterised LWFG’s feminist filmmaking. In this way the group took up Johnston’s comment in her 1973 essay ‘Women’s cinema as counter cinema’ that all-​women crews did not necessarily result in a feminist film: ‘a repressive, moralistic assertion that women’s cinema is collective film-​making is misleading and unnecessary: we should seek to operate at all levels: within male dominated cinema and outside it’.9 In addition to making films, LWFG also petitioned for women’s rights in the filmmakers’ trade union ACTT (Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians), resulting in the formation of the Committee on Equality and the commissioning of the report Patterns of Discrimination Against Women in the Film and Television Industries.10 The report was approved at the 1973 ACTT annual conference, despite the fact that women made up around 5 per cent of the 500 delegates.11 Thus LWFG not only provided an alternative site for filmmaking, but also directly intervened in union activism, which in turn affected women’s access to professional qualifications and roles in the film and television industries.12 Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair approached the question of form quite differently from the group’s prior work –​it had no documentary sections and did not attempt to represent diverse women, nor did it explicitly deal with a political issue like equal pay or abortion. This was a sticking point that was ultimately to result in the breakdown of the LWFG (although other work and personal obligations of group members also played a part). That such changes coincided with the group receiving substantive BFI funding is not accidental; Ronay has described the ‘pressure’ the bigger budget put them under, especially as the only other funding they received was £200 from Camden Council for The Amazing Equal Pay Show.13 The opportunity to realise a more ambitious project not only demanded greater 245

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Other Cinemas commitment of time and work by group members, but also forced a split between different formal strategies, political alignments and professional interests. Four of the seven members (Linda Dahl, Barbara Evans, Claire Johnston and Fran McLean) were to quit the group in the early stages of discussion and development, leaving Ronay, Shapiro and Winham. This group maintained the collective process, each serving as director on different sections while developing the script together, but the reduced team and disaffection in the group made the process harder.14 While tasks were shared, each contributor took the role that suited her best, with Winham interested in direction of fictional elements and Ronay in editing. This division of labour clearly departs from the rotation of skills during the production of The Amazing Equal Pay Show. The difficulty of working on this film was also a product of the shift from political subject matter to the politics of storytelling and consequently of the investigation of the filmmakers’ own investment in these embedded narratives, rather than the representation of particular struggles. While Rapunzel marks the breakdown of an all-​ woman collective, it also makes women’s relationships the subject of the film, exploring the construction of gendered and heteronormative roles in the family and society. Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair begins with an epigraph from the poem ‘A cycle of women’ by Sharon Barba. The first section, directed by Winham, begins with a mother reading her daughter the fairy tale from a picture book. The camera is almost static through this section, closely focused on the mother reading: she is in profile, sitting on a bed, in front of the child whose face, expressing rapt attention, fills the centre of the screen. Sometimes the child looks at the pages of the book; sometimes she looks into her mother’s face. Sometimes she reacts to the story, particularly when the mother modulates her voice to perform one of the characters’ voices and sometimes the daughter mouths along, betraying her prior knowledge of this obviously much-​read bedtime story. The camera shot shifts when the mother reads the speech of the witch, cutting to a darkly lit close-​up of her face front on. Her voice shifts from its mellow tone, becoming croaky, as if she were possessed by the witch. This interruption prefigures subsequent sections of the films, which collide the mother figure with the witch, creating a sense of threat or danger. The change in shot also casts the viewer into the figure of the child, inviting immersion in the fairy tale within the 246

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair film, as well as in the film itself. The camera then focuses on the page of the picture book, cross-​fading into an animated sequence. The next section of the film switches from a commonplace contemporary scene to an animated retelling of the fairy tale, as if the pages of the book take over the screen. The narrative of this section is almost exactly the same –​the same actress reads the narration; the animation resembles the pictures in the book, which could only be glanced at in the previous section. Åsa Sjöström’s animation uses static background scenes across which cut-​out, jointed figures appear to move. Sometimes images are overlaid, fading on and off the screen, heightening the sense of magic in the story. For instance, when the prince calls for Rapunzel’s hair to be let down and he begins to climb, an expanse of golden tendrils fill the screen, fading in and out as if pulsating. The motif is suggestive of the intoxicating romantic effect of her innocent beauty, his love and his act of heroism. The witch appears on the screen as a pair of eyes surrounded by the face not of a hag, but of a fierce-​featured beauty. The eyes appear again when the witch is angry, flashing with the desire for retribution because it is Rapunzel’s secrecy and betrayal, we are told, that provoke her into punishing the prince. The witch casts the prince into the thorny bushes below the tower, which pierce his eyes. The eye motif appears numerous times in the animation, registering first the mutual attraction between the prince and Rapunzel with a spark, then Rapunzel’s tears which heal the prince’s blinded eyes, resolving the tale with a happy ending. This highly worked sequence is filled with evocative resonances that point to the lesson of the fairy tale –​that romantic love is redemptive and therefore good, while overbearing behaviour and maternal love are bad –​heightening the effect of the narrative with music and colour. The effect is dream-​like, particularly as the bridge between the first scene in the bedroom and this sequence is an animation of the daughter curled up asleep in the foetal position, whirling through a black space, then falling through a starry sky and finally into a patch of foliage. The now-​ animated child falls into the ground and up sprouts a flowering plant –​a Rapunzel plant –​that the Grimms’ fairy tale tells us was the herb to which the mother was addicted and which Marina Warner has linked to reproduction anxiety.15 This sequence recalls Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, suggesting that Rapunzel represents another kind of psychosocial battleground the child must negotiate to reach maturity. That the 247

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Other Cinemas viewer has already been invited to identify with the child in the previous section attests to the film’s focus on both individual and collective, psychic and social investment in fairy tales. The latter point is developed further in the animation through references to biblical stories, the Annunciation and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise as represented in various Renaissance paintings. The third section, also directed by Winham and announced by a curtain rising on a small theatre, switches to live action and a contemporary London setting. This time the narrator is a man, not a prince but a detective, who tells the story in the style of a film noir. However, the camerawork does not conform to that genre’s conventions, and actor Dave Swarbrick’s detective is sleazy rather than suave. The story is sensational: a real-​life Rapunzel has been given to her stepmother by her addict parents in exchange for drugs –​a clever transliteration of the Grimms’ story in which Rapunzel’s pregnant mother is addicted to the parsley that only grows in the witch’s garden. Now, though, Rapunzel is isolated in a flat high up in a tower block, which her stepmother prevents her leaving because of alleged but unspecified dangers outside. The detective-​prince sets his sights on rescuing Rapunzel, although this appears to be an entirely personal mission for his own romantic ends –​the story is narrated by his voiceover –​and so he visits Rapunzel’s flat and spies on the women inside through the keyhole. The scene he sees and relates is of the mother figure kissing Rapunzel full on the lips and holding her in what appears to be a romantic embrace. The detective assumes the girl is stuck in sexual slavery and possibly addiction: her long hair, too-fair skin and innocence now the product of her isolation. When the detective visits Rapunzel, offering her the chance to escape but only into his protection, she is confused and the angry stepmother returns, throws him out and cuts off Rapunzel’s hair in an act of rage. The narrative in this section is exaggerated and perhaps a little ridiculous, but this serves to highlight the misfit between the magical archaic fantasy of the fairy tale and contemporary society. We might question whether a child could be given up so easily, or ask if a teenager would ever put up with that isolation, especially one brought up with access to a television. But more than that, this sensationalised version of the prince/​ detective exposes the male perspective as a legitimising narrative for his 248

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair own heroic exploits. At the very least the viewer is left unsure of the veracity of the story. Are the women romantic lovers and therefore locked in an exploitative relationship? Or does the detective read the stepmother’s care for Rapunzel as a threatening same-​sex relationship that would exclude him? The story is couched in his interpretation of events, which are only ever gleaned from unsolicited glances through the keyhole. This section highlights the validation of masculine heteronormativity in the fairy tale through the alignment of romantic or sexual conquest with heroism. In this way the film parallels and prefigures feminist readings of the maternal relation and its representation in psychoanalysis, as well as offering a feminist update of Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation of the fairy tale as a symbolic structure for coping with trauma.16 The final three sections of the film focus on the other fairy tale characters. The fourth, titled ‘The Venus and the Witch’, directed by Shapiro, breaks from the dramatic and moves into the essay-​film mode. A female narrator discusses the iconography of the figures of Venus and of the Witch in fine art and visual culture, remarking on the interpolation of women in and against these types. A  series of animated sequences accompany the spoken analysis. Images of Venus –​primarily Primavera by Botticelli –​are juxtaposed with engravings and prints of witches, both hag and fatale. In one section Botticelli’s Venus is animated, with flowers, fruit, then jewels falling from the sky before a golden band circles around the figure’s head like a halo or diadem and passes over it, enclosing her neck and resting heavily on her chest –​an oversized wedding ring sealed tight with a padlock. While this archetype is locked in place and secured by the marital bond, the figure flicks between different personifications of Venus and then witches, so that the two exist on a continuum. The sequence ends with a fierce female figure, whipping up Botticelli’s calm sea. The narrator then considers the historical oppression of the figure of the witch and the containment of her threat through the association of female agency and skill with heresy. The narrator argues that this association arose as the Christian Church and Enlightenment science sought monopoly over control of body and soul in early-​modern Europe. Following the research of American historians Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, the narrator describes how the midwife and the witch were aligned as threatening figures of female power, which had to be 249

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Other Cinemas devalued or violently destroyed to secure the values of patriarchal power.17 Here the viewer learns that the woman is the marked term against which the male subject articulates and practises his power, annulling the threat of unruly women or those no longer deemed reproductive, by announcing and asserting his control.18 The fifth section, again directed by Shapiro, pulls the figure of the discredited witch-​midwife into the contemporary moment in the character of a female gynaecologist. She runs a successful clinic shown in the film with a montage sequence of content patients who discuss the importance of having a female doctor, acknowledging their sexuality and openly talking through health issues. But at home the doctor seems to struggle to care for or communicate successfully with her beautiful teenage daughter. In a series of encounters the mother and daughter fail to respond to each other: the mother’s chiding over school work and the importance of exams irritates the daughter, who feels her desire to go out and grow up is being thwarted by her mother. This leads to the daughter’s deceit when she goes out to meet her older boyfriend after telling her mother she is going to study with a friend. The drama of this section feels commonplace –​particularly in conjunction with the micro-​stories of the women patients –​yet it reverberates with allusions to the fairy tale Rapunzel. These allusions extend from considered citations like the boyfriend undoing the daughter’s wild curly hair from its combs, to tropes that pick up the emotional registers of the fairy tale: the daughter’s deceit, the mother’s fear, the lover as an agent of change, mobility, excitement and loss of innocence. These situate the fairy tale as an armature around which the negotiation between adolescent and parent is organised, subtly exploring how the fairy tale patterns the everyday from the social world of relationships to interior psychic life. While the mother’s job as a gynaecologist repeats the refrain, introduced in the previous section on midwifery, of the displacement of woman when her reproductive function is worn out or when she becomes too powerful. However, the survival or reproduction of the woman-​healer in this section is also a point of resistance, antagonising the power of the fairy tale, and of history, to suppress women’s agency completely. Indeed the final section –​directed by Ronay –​is transformative, following on from the window of resistance opened in the previous one. It is 250

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair the first from Rapunzel’s perspective, but we don’t meet her as a child or when she is locked in the tower. She is not ‘innocent’, but now herself the mother of twins. She works in a supermarket and writes songs. Perhaps this is Rapunzel after her seduction and expulsion from the tower –​she is alone caring for the children as the Grimms’ tale tells, but she doesn’t appear to be lost in a desert. She talks calmly with her absent partner but is not in thrall to him, neither is she estranged from her mother, who also cares for the children and discusses her own romantic life. The two even go out together, with Rapunzel telling her mother not to mind the differences in their ages. They attend an all-​woman benefit gig at a pub, which Rapunzel was invited to by members of the women’s band Jam Today while she was at work in the supermarket. After their earlier meeting, the film follows the band through the streets to the venue, on the way inviting women at factory gates, at home and in a school playground to attend. The audience is a mix of women and children who sit and talk, or watch and dance to the music. When Rapunzel arrives with her mother, the band recruit her to sing a song she has written and which impressively they all already seem to know –​despite having only just met. The song, written by Laka Koc who also performs it, tells a story of liberation with the chorus repeating the title of the film, ‘Rapunzel, let down your hair’, as a refrain. Taken from the mouths of the witch and the prince, the lyrics change association: here hair is no longer functional or pulled down by the weight of other bodies, it is loose and free. This image parallels the audience members’ various escapes from the rhythms of their daily lives and indeed from all kinds of binding and containment. Its address appeals to everywoman and no woman in particular, and suggests breaking out of fairy tale archetypes to explore other possibilities but also the limits of romance in everyday life. That this plays out in the context of the all-​women rock gig implies that these new roles, these new lives, are shaped by different social relations, which are here defined as a break with both paid employment and housework and are woman-​focused. As such the final section is another retelling of the Rapunzel tale, but it is also a rupture that sidesteps the resolution of a traditional fairy tale ending. Breaking into an undetermined space signalled by the turn to musical time, the song’s catchy, repetitious refrain unwinds the strict patterning of narrative by cycling through images and sequences from earlier in the film. 251

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Other Cinemas The contemporary critical reception of Rapunzel was not substantial, with few reviews, despite the platform it had as a BFI production. Nigel Andrews’s summation, in his review of the films funded by the BFI in 1978, describes it as a ‘feminist film’, within a disappointing array of productions, which, he writes, ‘do give one the feeling that ideological acceptability has overridden artistic merit’.19 For Andrews, the film even falls down in that category: [it is a] transliteration of the feeblest and most unilluminating kind. The film springs to life briefly when it gives a dissertation on witches […] But the idea, though fascinating and credible, is only aired briefly and it does not cohere too neatly, alas for the film’s logic, with the Grimm story, in which the witch is the imprisoning force and the man the liberator.20

While Andrews’s brief response might give some sense of the uncertain place women’s films or feminist-​influenced films occupied in the world of British cinema, Jill Forbes’s longer review in Monthly Film Bulletin unpacks the issues in more detail.21 Forbes situates Rapunzel in relation to ‘other recent experiments in feminist cinema’, namely Riddles of the Sphinx (Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, 1977).22 These films and a ‘few other[s]‌’, she writes, are part of ‘a tradition in which a central conceit is developed through variations, which, although eclectic, are held together by an almost mathematical formalism’.23 For Forbes, Rapunzel was nothing more than an example of this approach and she writes that it ‘provides an interim summary of its problems and possibilities: at the moment, the former seem to be as limitless as the latter are limited’.24 The key problem for Forbes is that the film appears to flatten out its references, jumbling them together in a kind of ‘eclecticism’ that lacks critical bite. In turn the ‘structure’ holding this eclecticism in place appears somehow empty and simply in opposition to narrative, so that ‘aesthetic problems’ are avoided in favour of ‘the didactic treatment of the most disparate material’.25 Forbes’s comparison between Rapunzel and Riddles of the Sphinx is apposite, as both films engage a similar formal structure, breaking the feature film up into discrete elements. Likewise text is central to both films, with Riddles of the Sphinx exploring theory against latent mythology and Rapunzel tracing the mutability of a text and its relationship to historical 252

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair incident. Both also centre on the family and the reproduction scenario as a framework to explore the formation of myth and archetype. Despite the formal similarities, the two films work quite differently: while Riddles of a Sphinx is composed of interruptions in the narrative flow, Rapunzel depends on a process of accumulation and undoing. Forbes’s reading aligns Rapunzel and Riddles because they both appeal to ‘a tradition’ of feminist filmmaking, but she gives little space to analysing their differences, only pointing out Rapunzel’s shortcomings. Forbes appears to be solely concerned with defining, containing and, as a result, neutralising the subtlety of the critical approach to narrative. Her discussion of the tension between ‘structure’ and ‘eclecticism’ would be better read as an antagonism. The formal structure of the fairy tale and the geometry of roles it sets out are worn down by the multiple retellings, while the eclectic selection of references –​ including character archetypes, genre conventions, historical figures and artistic representations –​is shown to bear the traces of the fairy tale logic. In contrast to Forbes’s review, Meaghan Morris, writing in Cinema Papers, describes Rapunzel as ‘a remarkably exciting and innovative film, which is inspiring in the best sense’.26 Rather than treat the film as only another iteration of feminist filmmaking, Morris sees it as a sign that ‘other things are becoming possible in feminist filmmaking and feminist aesthetics in general.’27 Morris notes how the film marks a departure from both the documentary form and avant-​garde experiment, opening up a different kind of encounter with political, feminist cinema. She writes: What is unusual about it is that it opts neither for filling a modified conventional narrative form with feminist content […] nor for the traditional avant-​garde method of disruption and deconstructing narrative structures in a way which leads us to reflect on the agony we might feel in the process.28

Although she does not refer to other feminist films by name, Morris implies a difference between other counter-​cinema techniques and the return to narrative and an affective model of storytelling in Rapunzel. Crucially this is a space of possibility and opening up, which had the potential to escape dominant discussions in political cinema, as well as gender roles. Morris comments: ‘Rapunzel suggests that a great deal can be done –​which has no bearing whatsoever on the questioning of feminist documentary, except 253

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Other Cinemas perhaps to argue that the opposition of narrative and documentary is a false one’.29 Instead, the film unpacks the politics of narrative, particularly the fairy tale’s influence on and place in constructing familial and romantic relationships. Rather than arrest these completely, the film undertakes to transform them. Morris describes this poignantly, writing: the possibility of a feminist aesthetic pleasure is opened up (the film ends appropriately with a women’s rock concert), in a way which does not involve painfully ‘breaking’ with the tales your mother told you, but starts from them as a basis to bend them another way.30

Rapunzel goes some way to enacting a feminist materialist analysis of the fairy tale, not only by showing up the development of archetypal figures and gender relations across time, but also by exposing the roots of emotional relations and behaviours in stories heard by children in domestic environments. In this sense, Rapunzel relates to Zipes’s now well-​known social history of fairy tales, which concentrates on their form and transmission to dispel their supposed universalism or magical effect.31 But the film is more than simply analytic. The feature format provides space to unravel the story without didacticism; likewise it moves away from deconstruction as destruction. Instead, the juxtaposed episodes offer different perspectives, breaking up the narrative, but also provide points of identification for the viewer. The film traces and transforms narrative through the act of telling, retelling and reflection, turning its space into one of psychic work and social critique. But despite Rapunzel’s political tenor and its focus on relationships, the film marked the breakdown of the LWFG. This raises questions about the limits of collective work beyond a feminist context, concerning accountability to funding bodies, but also the imposition of roles and hierarchies that accompanies large budgets. While Rapunzel was experimental, pushing the formal limits of a feminist feature film, it also put pressure on the grassroots collective, redirecting political filmmaking away from activism and into deconstruction.

Notes 1. Esther Ronay in discussion with the author, 2 July 2016.

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Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair 2. Siona Wilson, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 70. 3. The film received a warm response in the Rhondda Valley and toured nationally, as a consciousness-​raising tool, usually with the filmmakers in attendance. See Esther Ronay and Felicity Sparrow, ‘Women of the Rhondda’, Circles promotional material, 1982, reproduced in Petra Bauer and Dan Kidner, eds, Working Together: Notes on British Film Collectives in the 1970s (Southend-​on-​ Sea: Focal Point Gallery, 2010), pp. 190–​1. The LWFG screened all their films in this way, including Rapunzel, as did other groups like Cinema Action. 4. Ronay described Johnston’s reaction, discussion with the author, 2 July 2016. 5. Annette Kuhn, ‘Whose choice’, Red Rag 11 (1976), p. 25. 6. The London Women’s Film Group, ‘Notes’ (1976), reprinted in Margaret Dickinson, ed., Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, edited by Margaret Dickinson, London: BFI, 1999), pp. 119–​22 at 119. 7. The LWFG made Serve and Obey and Bettshanger, Kent (which is also referred to as Bettshanger ‘72) (both 1972), The Amazing Equal Pay Show (1974), Whose Choice (1976) and Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1977). Women Against the Bill, MISS/​MRS, Fakenham Occupation and Put Yourself in My Place were not made by all members of the group and so were ‘acquired’ by it. See London Women’s Film Group, ‘Notes’, p. 119. This document includes Women of the Rhondda in this list of acquisitions, but Ronay understands it as a product of the LWFG, although Humphrey Trevelyan of the Berwick Street Collective served as cameraman. Mary Capps, Margaret Dickinson, Mary Kelly, Sue Shapiro and Brigit Seagrave were also involved. See Ronay and Sparrow, ‘Women of the Rhondda’, pp. 190–​1. 8. Annette Kuhn discusses the formal strategies of the LWFG’s Whose Choice in her book Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), see p. 151–​71. 9. Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s cinema as counter cinema’, in Claire Johnston, ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema (London:  Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973), pp. 24–​31 at p. 31. Johnston’s position contrasts with Juliet Lesage’s argument that films made by women in the 1960s and 1970s ‘came out of the same ethos of the consciousness-​raising groups and had the same goals’. See Lesage, ‘The political aesthetics of the feminist documentary film’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3:4 (Fall 1978), pp. 507–​23. 10. The report was authored by Sarah Benton, who was appointed after the LWFG protested the appointment of a male researcher. See London Women’s Film Group ‘Notes’, pp. 119–​22. An extract of the report is reproduced in Dickinson, Rogue Reels: ‘Patterns of discrimination: ACTT Report’ (1975), pp. 123–​5. 11. London Women’s Film Group, ‘Notes’, p. 122. 12. Ibid., p. 119. 13. Ronay in discussion with the author, 2 July 2016.

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Other Cinemas 14. Ronay has described the difficulty of working on the film, because of its divorce from the political activist work she was interested in. She persisted in working on the film to gain more experience of editing (Ronay in discussion with the author, 2 July 2016). 15. Marina Warner, ‘Rapunzel, parsley & pregnancy’, The New  York Review of Books, 17 July 2008, http://​www.nybooks.com/​articles/​2008/​07/​17/​rapunzel-​ parsley-​pregnancy/​, accessed May 2016. 16. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairytales (New York: Vintage, 2010 [1976]). 17. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Woman Healers (New York: Feminist Press, 1973). 18. Ehrenreich and English’s book has been contested since its original publication in the early 1970s, although a similar framework is outlined in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New  York:  Autonomedia, 2004), which was developed from her book with Leopoldina Fortunati, II Grande Calibano. Storia del corpo sociale ribelle nella prima fase del capitale [The great Caliban. History of the rebel body in the first phase of capitalism] (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984). 19. Nigel Andrews, ‘Production board films’, Sight and Sound 48:1 (Winter 1978–​ 9), pp. 52–​5. 20. Ibid., p. 54. 21. Jill Forbes, ‘Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair’, Monthly Film Bulletin (December 1978), p. 245. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Meaghan Morris, ‘Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair’, Cinema Papers (December–​ January 1979), pp. 663–​5 at 663. 27. Ibid., p. 663. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 665. 30. Ibid., p. 663. 31. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (London and New  York: Routledge, 2011 [1983]).

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16 ‘On Her Devolves the Labour’: The Cinematic Time Travel of The Song of the Shirt Kodwo Eshun

‘Ordinary Woman joins women’s movement! Now there was a case for child benefit! The husband, of course, was never in work, but held the male prerogative of receiving every penny of the family’s dole money straight into his tobacco-stained fingers.’ Zoe Fairbairn, Benefits, 19791

On the back page of the booklet published in 1980 to accompany the release of The Song of the Shirt: A Film in Three Parts can be read a text credited to the Film and History Project, the name adopted by Sue Clayton, Jonathan Curling, their production team and the Marxist, feminist and labour historians associated with the Feminist History Group and the History Workshop Journal who advised on the film.2 The text described how The Song of the Shirt grew out of a video project on women and the Welfare State. We wanted to examine why the status of working women had deteriorated from the time of the Industrial Revolution, and how it

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The focus upon the garment-​making trade as a super-​exploited and mainly female group living and working in the London of the 1830s and 1840s developed from Clayton and Curling’s gradual realisation that ‘certain aspects of Welfare State legislation must have begun at that time. The amount of legislation that was passed in the 1840s was absolutely colossal, and it was mainly in relation to state control of different aspects of people’s social lives.’4 What compelled the formation of the Welfare State, according to the Film and History Project, was a forgotten moral panic experienced by the ruling classes of the British Empire at the unregulated figure of the needlewoman. In its opening scenes, voiced by a woman credited as Martha, The Song of the Shirt indicates the extent to which William Beveridge’s ‘co-​operation between the State and the individual’ had turned into antipathy directed at the former by the latter.5 Martha’s specific grievances against social security are split into three scenes. In the first, a modern-​day café scene, her voice is heard as a camera tracks right, towards a table on which stands a portable television monitor, isolated against a wall, below a painting. Martha unburdens herself to the camera. The customers respond to her troubles with a listless indifference. Martha emphasises some words, pauses on other words and rushes through others. Each hesitation testifies to a life that has accommodated itself to the double-​binds of Britain’s social security system. It is as if she has heard her story too many times before, told by too many women trapped in all too similar conditions: ‘umm I’d just had enough, I mean, the money I was getting was less than he’d have got for us all on Social Security, only, the interviews, you know, the sort of scrutiny they put you under, he just, he couldn’t face it.’ She explains that the family benefit that her ex-​husband will not claim pays better than the wages that she is forced to earn. The typewriter font of The Song of the Shirt − A Film in Three Parts − Part One obscures parts of Martha’s mouth as it scrolls across the monitor. Quotations such as ‘Robes moistened with her tears’, typed on two lines and connected by dashes, travel horizontally like a news ticker that previews highlights from the forthcoming attraction. The citations superimpose themselves upon Martha’s face 258

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‘On Her Devolves the Labour’ like newsflashes that nobody will read. In the second scene, dressed for work, Martha pauses in front of a shop window next to a London Evening News placard that reads ‘THE BIG SOCIAL SECURITY SWINDLE’. She explains how the social security provided by the state pays the same as the weekly wages that she earns. The smart option is to claim social security; work is best left to those stupid enough to work. In the third scene, filmed in a canal aqueduct, the camera pans across an expanse of dark water until it locates Martha entering the canal system along a footpath. As she walks, her voice asks whether she can trust her children with her ex-​husband. She dreads the moment when the state finds out that she has separated from her husband and enforces its laws upon him for her benefit. In these opening scenes, Martha articulates the extent to which the state imposes itself upon and inserts itself into the family structure that it claims to support. Zoe Fairbairn’s science fiction novel Benefits, published in the same year as The Song of the Shirt, envisioned a dystopian Britain in which the Welfare State preyed upon women’s reproductive labour. Benefits pursued the feminist critique of welfarism to its most radical conclusions. In ‘The great moving right show’ published in Marxism Today in January 1979, a month before Margaret Thatcher’s government took office, Stuart Hall argued that in the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives, the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition. And this ‘experience’ is not misguided since, in its effective operations with respect to the popular classes, the state is less and less present as a welfare institution and more and more present as the state of ‘state monopoly capital’.6

The initial scenes of The Song of the Shirt dramatised the ways in which working mothers experienced the Welfare State as a ‘powerful bureaucratic imposition’. Hall argued that ‘the anti-​statist elements in the discourses of the radical Right’ had become ‘key supports for the new populism’ that could not be dismissed as ‘mere rhetorical flourish’. The new populism worked to render ‘respectable the radical Right assault on the whole structure of welfare and social benefits’ which, in turn, revealed the extent to 259

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Figure 16.1: Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, The Song of the Shirt (1979), title sequence. Courtesy of Sue Clayton.

which the ‘work of ideological excavation, if well done, delivers considerable political and economic benefits’.7 At the same time as the Conservative Party’s work of ideological excavation was delivering benefits, Clayton and Curling’s work of ideological excavation into the Victorian origins of the Welfare State was yielding its own rewards: The Song of the Shirt. The duo’s aim was not to destroy welfarism but to expose its effects, undermine its foundational mythologies and critique the Victorian values that were being mobilised by the Tory government against the Welfare State. The figure of the needlewoman, as an isolated individual and as a single working woman, was excavated by the Film and History Project from the archives of parliamentary speeches, debates and bills and from the oppositional pamphlets, the popular Victorian song from which the film derives its title and the serialised pamphlets of the Chartist, Owenite and early Cooperative movements. The Song of the Shirt did not aim to reconstruct the lives of the so-called ‘slopworkers’ whose labour was subject to legislation 260

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Figure 16.2:   Sue Clayton and Jonathan Curling, The Song of the Shirt (1979), title sequence. Courtesy of Sue Clayton.

that aimed at the ‘state control of different aspects of people’s social lives’.8 It was impossible to ‘recapture them in themselves, such as they may have been in a free state’. Their speech, as Foucault argued in ‘The life of infamous men’ in 1977, could only be located in the ‘imperative falsehoods which the power games and the relations with power presuppose’.9 Instead of individualising the needlewomen, The Song of the Shirt exaggerated their anonymity so that they appeared as personifications of the common condition of working women. The needlewomen were voiced by actors and non-​actors whose role was to depict the shared fate of women undergoing enforced proletarianisation.10 To connect the contemporary burdens of welfarism to its forgotten formation in imperial Britain, The Song of the Shirt embarked upon a striking cinematic method of time travel. The opening scenes depicted Martha striding along a canal footpath that dates back to the Victorian era. On the other side of the canal bridge, the camera watched Martha. As she walked into the tunnel, the camera travelled slowly across the tunnel brickwork 261

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Other Cinemas revealing a sign that announced: ‘FROG LANE BRIDGE BUILT ABOUT 1820, IT IS ONE OF THE CANAL’S ORIGINAL BRICK BRIDGES LATER WIDENED WITH CAST IRON BEAMS AND JACK-ARCHES. THE ROAD IT CARRIES HAS CHANGED ITS NAME MORE THAN ONCE.’ As the camera pans across the sign that displays the continuity between the Victorian past and the present, a plaintive theme for cello and violin begins. A woman, unrecognisable as Martha, emerges from the tunnel, moving rapidly away from the camera that catches a glimpse of her crocheted shawl, sleeves and cuffs. Martha has walked away from the twentieth century towards the 1840s. She is dissatisfied enough with her life in 1970s Britain to change into clothes for a day’s work in the nineteenth century. She has literally enacted the Thatcherite injunction to embrace Victorian values. Martha becomes a woman who is not out of date but out of her own date. The Song of the Shirt personifies the figure of the needlewoman in the body of Martha as a woman who is out of date, not in the commonly used definition of antiquatedness, but in the sense that she is no longer locatable within her date. Her body is no longer bound to the time to which it is supposed to belong. Martha is a figure that exists in the simultaneous temporalities of anachronism. Her dress, checked and voluminous, sweeps the ground, trailing over laced-up boots as she walks past the lock, across the cast-iron bridge that spans the canal. She embodies, in the present of the 1840s that unfolds in the present of the 1970s, the fate of the anonymous needlewomen who wash shirts in grimy canals, stitch dresses on low tables and mend petticoats in crowded rooms under poor light, women whose lives ‘have only been able to leave behind traces − brief, incisive, and often enigmatic − at the point of their instantaneous contact with power’.11 The expressions of the needlewomen in The Song of the Shirt remain stubbornly contemporary even as their dresses weigh upon them. The past exerts what theorist Elizabeth Freeman calls a ‘powerful temporal drag’ upon women trapped in the present defined by social insecurity.12 In her project of rethinking the ‘gravitational pull’ that lesbian feminism ‘seems to exert’ on queer politics in 1990s America, Freeman argues that Judith Butler’s critical turn from performativity towards the psychic life of power entails a shift in the formulation of political temporality that requires ‘thinking about identity relationally across time’. This in turn suggests thinking of 262

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‘On Her Devolves the Labour’ the notion of ‘drag’ as a productive obstacle to politics traditionally understood in terms of progress. Temporal drag, from this perspective, exerts a ‘usefully distorting pull backwards and a necessary pressure upon the present tense’.13 It operates less in the ‘psychic time of the individual than in the movement time of collective political life’. The stubborn persistence of lesbian feminism exerts a temporal drag upon the forward motion presupposed by American feminism that tends to valorise the progression promised by performativity. In The Song of the Shirt, the Victorian needlewoman who labours in the industrial landscape drags the contemporary woman back towards a past that persists into the present. Time travel takes on the novel form of a costume drama of temporal drag that aims to frustrate the temporality of political movements in which generations automatically succeed and replace one another.14 In doing so, it performs a scene of regression that registers a profound disenchantment with the forward motion of progress.15 The cinematic method of anachronism developed by Clayton and Curling posed challenges for contemporary film theorists, critics and historians. In one of the earliest essays on The Song of the Shirt, Elizabeth Cowie argued that the presence of the actors and non-​actors in Victorian dress and in ‘modern dress walking through the London rag trade districts, and past Oxford Street clothes shops and department stores’ suggested a transhistorical identity shared by the nineteenth-​century needlewomen and twentieth-​century women workers that asserted ‘an affirmation of oppression rather than knowledge for action’.16 Clayton and Curling argued that their methods for ‘writing History in literary or film form’ addressed feminist history that was ill prepared for thinking through the aesthetic implications of ‘representing the past in the present (or is it the present in the past tense?)’. This oscillation between two ways of interpreting anachronism or temporal drag17 alludes to the confusion caused by Clayton and Curling’s cinema of time travel. Reinventing the terms upon which feminist history was to be filmed entailed rethinking the historical work of archaeology in the cinematic mode of anachronism. The Song of the Shirt was an epic of imaginative labour in which speaking and costumed bodies coexisted in a time that dragged the present into a past whose future they inhabited in the present. Together with cinematographer Jonathan Collinson, Clayton and Curling developed methods capable of joining historically distanced bodies into a cinema of embodied 263

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Other Cinemas coexistences. Novel forms of cinematic continuity were required for this project. As critic Volker Pantenburg has recently argued, the horizontal panning shot developed by cinematographer Diane Tammes with Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen in Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977) overcame the opposition between montage and the unedited take by inventing a cinema of rotary movement without spatial progress.18 The Song of the Shirt resolved this opposition by other means. Collinson, Curling and Clayton turned towards the continuous tracking shot to integrate the intervals of montage within an unedited take that produced a space of continuous discontinuity. The track and the dolly-​mounted camera travel in front of and across the surface of the image in a planar movement that gradually reveals the space it magnifies. When the camera tracks the full-​frame figure of Martha walking by the canal, what emerges is a choreographed movement that travels beyond the frame and into the magnified surface of an illustration of a Victorian aqueduct. It picks out the details of a man using a wind lock to open a lock paddle and continues across a lithograph that depicts bridges, locks, barges and factories and a lithograph of a crowd of Victorians congregated by a canal, past the white border of the picture and through the dark space of the studio. The camera continues leftwards across a video monitor that reveals a scene of women carrying heavy bundles of clothes and walking along a ramp whose right wall evokes the outline of a castle turret. It follows the direction indicated by a woman who points left and continues past the edge of the monitor and into the studio until it travels across a second monitor that depicts the women sitting by the side of the canal. A guitar needles and insinuates itself around the bassoon, like thorns around ivy. The camera slowly tracks left in a rotary motion across a railway line, below which can be seen the canal path, along which the women walk rightwards, out of shot. The overhead railway and ground-​level canal are revealed in passing by the camera that continues on its own path, past the scene of the women, across a white barge on which is a white man dressed in black, holding an oar, like an illustration come to life. It continues past the scene and the monitor, across the studio until it reaches another monitor that fills the frame with a granulated image refilmed by the camera. The full frame picks up the needlewomen now seated at ground level. It swings slowly past them; one of them lifts and scrubs white clothes against the 264

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‘On Her Devolves the Labour’ edge of the canal bank as another watches. It continues towards and then away from the face of the monitor in a direction contrary to the women’s progress along the path, which, in turn, counters the direction of the railway. The continuous track from the cinematic composition of the full frame through the intervallic void of the studio to the contained frame of the video monitor is experienced as a movement from expectation to estrangement to comparison. It is a movement that works by continually adjusting the presuppositions of spectatorship. The studio interior that distances each visual element becomes the spatial equivalent of the black leader that continually interrupt the images of women working in offices in Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Collective, 1975). The temporal intervals that organise the montage of Nightcleaners are replaced by spatial distances between images that are integrated by the continuous track. Pantenburg points to the final studio scene of Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1974), which consists of five video monitors, four of which replay earlier scenes from the film as the fifth introduces a new scene. The studio in Penthesilea functions as a space in which the grid of ‘monitors act as an electronic laboratory for analysis’ in which each video comments on the others.19 Video in The Song of the Shirt also functions as a laboratory that continually comments on its diegesis. Video analyses film by reframing, resizing and reformatting its scenes from different perspectives. A movement across still images gives way to movement across moving frames. The coexistence of speeds, directions and movements does not document the present or re-​enact the past as much as it reassembles the images and sounds from which the film assembles itself. A frame that moves reveals itself to be a monitor whose surface is tracked by a camera that travels across moving lines of grey that gradually disclose themselves as a landscape framed by the window of a moving train. A male voice identifies a quotation from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. It belongs to a white man dressed in a Victorian coat and hat, reading from a newspaper, seated in a compartment. The dolly-​mounted camera tracks right towards a second monitor behind which an illustration emerges into focus, past a monitor that depicts a graffiti-​covered brick wall that reveals itself to be a bridge bordered by a path from which emerge three women holding laundry, walking towards the camera. One sits at frame left, her head wrapped in a white shawl, holding her forehead. A  second, seated 265

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Other Cinemas in profile, looks right, her hands folded under chin, occupying the centre of the frame. The camera tracks across the women to descend across the studio towards a second monitor that reveals the women seated, outlined against the white sky. Two monitors are positioned beside each other so as to compare and contrast the two perspectives. The first monitor shows the view from the railway bridge. From this position, the railway tracks appear on the left and the canal system on the right. The second monitor is positioned at the middle height of the first monitor. The camera ascends from the base of the second monitor to depict three women seated on the grass, looking at the water, as if captured in a photograph filmed on video. A goods train, reflected in the dark water, travels above their silhouettes. The railway tracks are depicted in close-​up at ground level. The scene acts as a diagram that reveals the position of the canal within the railway system. The needlewomen walk the canals below as the male parliamentarians ride in the trains. Fred Frith’s guitar plays a broken refrain that evokes static between radio stations, the hooves of horses and the white noise of video from which rises the plaintive voice of Sally Potter. Such scenes announce and analyse a Victorian video art that broadcasts scenes from 1838 in the present of 1979. Grey moving lines, interrupted by white flashes and diagonal lines, fill the frame. A stentorian male voice is mixed above the grind of the train wheels. The frame tracks right until it passes across the frame of a train window that reveals the abstract lines as details of the landscape viewed from the moving window. In the compartment sits a Victorian man, reading. The granular lines continue through his face. They constitute a face that speaks from a mask of imperial hauteur. The camera tracks right across the moving lines of landscape as the train travels left. Lines resolve into gravel beds between the railway tracks. The dolly-​mounted camera treats the moving window as a vision machine that generates lines of force. It tracks across the compartment and leaves the monitor to travel across the studio towards a second monitor that shows the train arriving at the station platform. The camera has timed its track to match the arrival of the decelerating train. The camera and the train have synchronised their continuous tracking. They act as vision machines from two different eras that produce unedited tracks that generate two kinds of spatial montage. The encounter between the railway track and the camera track coordinates historical technologies into a continuous 266

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‘On Her Devolves the Labour’ track. The station platform comes into focus. It is the 1970s. Inside the compartment, a stentorian voice is de-acousmatised until it synchronises with an indignant white face that questions the man opposite him: And what is the ground under which the woman says she will no longer pay attention to her domestic duties? Or give the obedience, which is owing to her husband? Because on her devolves the labour which should fall to his share. And she throws out the taunt: ‘If I have the labour, then I will also have the amusement.’

He pauses to underline his next words to the older man: ‘Now, where, sir, under these conditions are the obligations of domestic life, how can its obligations be fulfilled?’ And he concludes with his name: ‘Lord Ashley, speaking in Parliament, 1844.’ The actor speaks in the name of parliamentary power. He articulates the potential threat posed by the anonymous needlewomen. The diagrammatic structure of the scene studies the performance of authority by Lord Ashley. It offers a sustained ‘scrutiny of male discourses about women’.20 In this scene, The Song of the Shirt dramatizes the figure of the male parliamentarian whose apprehension at the prospect of working women’s unsupervised leisure articulates the ruling class fear of their unchecked autonomy. Each philanthropic speech and Chartist pamphlet presupposes a male encounter with the needlewomen. The Song of the Shirt reveals these overreactions as indications of the masculine apprehension of unsupervised female power. Male speech reveals the extent to which the capacities of needlewomen capture the attention of power that is narrated in terms of male hysteria shared by opposing political positions. The power of needlewomen is continually overstated by the masculine class discourses of parliamentarian philanthropy and sentimental Chartism. In the contrast between individualised masculinity and female anonymity, The Song of the Shirt exposes the fear of the imperial state confronted by the unregulated movement of working women. The Song of the Shirt invented an aesthetic that personified historical fear in the present of the 1970s. It staged encounters between the anachronism of the archive and the temporal drag of history and the continuities of cinema and the coexistence of video. In doing so, it created an epic that excavated the ideology of Welfarism through the political aesthetics of time travel. It created a science fiction of the present whose feminist form drew 267

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Other Cinemas upon working-​class history, women’s history and Foucauldian archaeology in ways that question the presuppositions that continue to underwrite the histories of history, women, Britain, empire, feminist cinema, national cinema, the working classes and the Welfare State. To watch The Song of the Shirt today is to ask what forces it exerts upon the times and tenses of the present. What continuities does it summon? What unfinished pasts does it insist upon? And whose dissatisfactions does it summon?

Notes 1. Zoe Fairbairn, Benefits (London: Virago, 1979). 2. The Film and History Project numbered around 200 actors, musicians, film crew and researchers who worked for over four years on the costumes, the parliamentary debates, the Chartist and Co-​operative movement newspapers, the serialised sentimental novels, the illustrations, the cartoons, the melodies and the lyrics that constituted the images, sounds, music and voices of The Song of the Shirt. The Film and History Project was not so much a formal collective as an informal grouping that worked on specific materials at specific moments of research and production. As Clayton and Curling stated, ‘the film was shown during its production in assembly form to the various constituencies who were expected to use it, in particular to groups of feminist historians working in the context of the History Workshop Journal and to other teachers.’ See Susan Clayton and Jonathan Curling, ‘Feminist history and The Song of the Shirt’, Camera Obscura 3:17 (1981), p. 113. 3. Film and History Project, The Song of the Shirt: A Film in Three Parts, no publisher, unpaginated, undated. 4. Ibid. 5. Social Insurance and Allied Services, Report by Sir William Beveridge, Presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, November 1942), http://​news.bbc.co.uk/​1/​shared/​bsp/​hi/​pdfs/​19_​07_​ 05_​beveridge.pdf, accessed 6 July 2016. 6. Stuart Hall, ‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today (January 1979), pp. 17−18. 7. Ibid. 8. Alison Beale, ‘An interview with Jonathan Curling and Sue Clayton’, Ciné-​ Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies 3:2 (Spring 1980), p. 14. 9. Michel Foucault, ‘The life of infamous men’, in Michel Foucault, Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney:  Feral Publications, 1979), pp. 79−80.

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‘On Her Devolves the Labour’ 10. The exception to this rule is Anna, the fictional heroine of A Woman’s Wrongs, a popular sentimental novel serialised in a Chartist newspaper, whose fate is decided by male authors and whose fate is read by a Victorian debutante, presented in photographs by Sarah McCarthy and satirised by needlewomen from the lowest ranks in the trade. See Sarah McCarthy, ‘Photo-Practice 2’, Screen Education 36 (Autumn 1980), pp. 56–7, 60–1. 11. Foucault, ‘The life’, pp. 79−80. 12. See Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Packing history, count(er)ing generations’, New Literary History 31:4 (Autumn 2000), pp. 728−9, and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Deep lez: temporal drag and the specters of feminism’, in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC, and London:  Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 62−5. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. The dystopia of The Song of the Shirt can be paralleled with another feminist science fiction from 1979: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, in which novelist Dana Franklin is temporally dragged from Los Angeles in 1976 to the slave plantations of Maryland in 1815. See Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (New York: Doubleday, 1979). 16. Elizabeth Cowie, ‘The Song of the Shirt (Susan Clayton and Jonathan Curling)’, Camera Obscura 2:2 5 (1980), p. 90. 17. Susan Clayton and Jonathan Curling, ‘Feminist history and The Song of the Shirt’, Camera Obscura 3:1 7 (1981), p. 112. 18. Volker Pantenburg, ‘The third avant-​ garde:  Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen and the theory film’, lecture presented at Beyond the Scorched Earth of Countercinema, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 14 May 2016. 19. Ibid. 20. Clayton and Curling, ‘Feminist history’, p. 123.

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Part Five

Snapshots from the 1970s

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17 Memories of The Other Cinema Nick Hart-​Williams

In 1969 London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) convened a conference to discuss the future of film distribution and exhibition in the UK. At the time, almost all British cinemas were owned by one of two cinema chains: Rank (Odeon) and ABC. There were only a handful of ‘art-​houses’ (such as the Everyman, one of the few that still remain today) in the country. A  group of cinema luminaries, including Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, Albert Finney, Harold Pinter and Otto Plaschkes, gathered at the ICA to discuss what might be done. Out of this meeting, The Other Cinema was born. Those mentioned above became trustees, and two young enthusiasts ran it: Peter Sainsbury, who had recently graduated and was co-​editor of the radical film magazine Afterimage and, me, Nick Hart-​Williams, who had been a reporter and film critic in Scotland and then worked with the Edinburgh Film Festival. Our hope and intention was to bring to the UK screens those films and filmmakers who were radically changing the world of cinema as we saw it. Among those who gave us a good start were French director Jean-​ Luc Godard, who donated the distribution rights for Le Gai Savoir (1969), and Britain’s Peter Whitehead, who not only donated his film, The Fall (1969), but also, crucially, gave us a home in his flat on Dean St, near the British Film Institute, in the very centre of Soho. After this great start, we 273

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Other Cinemas soon had a huge hit. We discovered that Gillo Pontecorvo’s masterpiece, Battle of Algiers (1966), was languishing on the shelves of Rank, which had somehow acquired it as part of a large package of foreign films. They could not care less about it, and readily agreed when we offered to open it in London. One of our trustees had just purchased the old King’s Cross Odeon and generously let us reopen it with Pontecorvo’s film. The critics raved about it and we had a crowded cinema for a couple of months. Soon we were getting to know more and more of the UK’s ‘underground film-​makers’ and began to work closely with Steve Dwoskin, David Larcher, Simon Hartog, Peter Gidal and many others from the London Film-​ Makers’ Co-​op. Larcher’s 2 ½-​hour epic Mare’s Tail (1969) and Dwoskin’s feature Dynamo (1972) were key films in the early catalogues, along with Werner Herzog’s first (and brilliant) documentary, Fata Morgana (1971), as well as, from the USA, Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969) and a range of the groundbreaking political shorts made by the Newsreel Collective during the 1960s. We picked up on one of the most important new developments in the world of cinema: the vast and extraordinary range of radical feature films coming out of Latin America. We distributed Glauber Rocha and Ruy Guerra from Brazil, Jorge Sanjines (Blood of the Condor, 1969; see Figure 17.1) from Bolivia; and perhaps with the biggest impact, The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), the 4½-​hour epic by Argentina’s Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, which had a remarkably long series of screenings for its London premiere. We were also in close touch with new movements in our surrounding context. The London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative was thriving, and we had a close collaboration with them. Probably our closest relationship – literally, as they were just around the corner, but also in every other sense –​ was with the Berwick Street Collective: Marc Karlin, James Scott and Humphrey Trevelyan. Marc became one of our trustees, and in 1975 we screened and distributed the collective’s film Nightcleaners (1975). We also worked closely with what now seems, with hindsight, a quite remarkable group of exhibitors. On the ‘alternative’ side, a key venue was the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road, which had recently reopened to show more radical films and where many of our films were screened. At the Electric we also, wondrously, met our brilliant designer, Oscar Zarate, newly arrived from Argentina and busy doing a programme poster for the 274

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Figure 17.1:  The Other Cinema poster for Jorge Sanjinés, Blood of the Condor (Bolivia, 1969). Design by Oscar Zarate (1973). Courtesy of the artist and Faction Films.

Electric. Oscar joined us and, for many years, designed The Other Cinema’s catalogues and countless stunning posters  –​for most of the films mentioned above and many more. Other great collaborations were with Derek Hill’s New Cinema Club, noted for bringing a huge range of independent cinema to the London audience; and there were such stalwarts of the art-​ house circuit as Contemporary Films and their Paris Pullman cinema in Chelsea, the Academy on Oxford Street, Islington’s Screen on the Green, 275

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Other Cinemas The Gate in Notting Hill and the Hampstead Everyman. Outside London, most of our screenings were with film societies nationwide, and particularly at the new film departments that were just emerging in universities. Further theatrical successes followed, including even a couple at ‘commercial’ cinemas, to our surprise. One that really pleased us was Punishment Park (1971), made by Peter Watkins. It had been over six years since Peter had achieved great success with his experimental television dramas Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965). Finally, we heard in 1971 that he had a new film, and we wanted it. It was funded by Hollywood, but in the end the funders disapproved of it –​and were in no way open to our interest. But in the end, a ‘benefactor’, Sir John Whitmore, who really believed in Punishment Park and its message, bought it and willingly gave it to us for distribution when he heard of our interest. It ran for many weeks in Chelsea, then elsewhere –​our first real ‘commercial’ success with one of our own films. Soon after that came Themroc, Claude Faraldo’s 1973 comedy starring Michel Piccoli, which we opened at the Classic Piccadilly.

Figure 17.2: Part of The Other Cinema team standing outside the cinema in Tottenham Street, London (October 1976). Photo by Ron Peck ©. Left to right: Charles Rubinstein, Paul Marris, Susan Feldman, Tony Kirkhope, David Glyn, [unidentified], Nick Hart-​Williams, Peter Sylveire. The team also included Peck (photographer), Pam Engel and Patsy Nightingale.

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Figure  17.3: Marc Karlin on the picket line against the closure of The Other Cinema, British Film Institute (13 December 1977). Courtesy of the Marc Karlin Archive.

These successes with existing cinemas were rewarding, but were never going to give us the ongoing, reliable screen time we wished for our range of films. So, from the beginning, we started our own regular shows: first, from 1971, at The Place, a new arts venue near Euston Station. Then we discovered the Collegiate Theatre (later renamed The Bloomsbury Theatre), part of University College. It was a much larger venue (over 500 seats) and we ran a regular series of screenings there until, in 1974, we had a real breakthrough. We discovered that a new office block, built on the site of the old Scala Theatre in Charlotte Street, had an auditorium in the basement. We opened it in 1975 as The Other Cinema, Tottenham Street, W1, with the premiere of Winstanley by Kevin Brownlow (see Figure 17.2). Although after two years financial difficulties led to the cinema’s closure, it reopened as the Scala Cinema, thanks to some dedication, especially from 277

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Other Cinemas Steve Woolley, and generous financial support from Richard Branson. In 1980, when Channel 4 was created and took over the Tottenham Street building, the Scala moved to, of all places, the old King’s Cross cinema where Battle of Algiers had first been screened. The Other Cinema continued as a distributor, run by Tony Kirkhope, who eventually also opened the Metro Cinema in Soho. Tony died in 1997, but the Metro continued, and was later itself re-named The Other Cinema. But soon after, in 2005, due to financial hardships, it closed. Thankfully, the archive was handed over to Contemporary Films.

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18 Organising for Innovation in Film and Television: The Independent Film-​Makers’ Association in the Long 1970s Simon Blanchard and Claire M. Holdsworth

Introduction The Independent Film-​Makers’ Association (IFA) was founded in 1974 to promote the interests shared by a diverse coalition of ‘independent’ filmmakers working in Britain. The IFA provided a lively, sometimes heated forum where diverse filmmakers met and discussed campaigns about funding, exhibition or distribution, and engaged in radical campaigns, closely associated with changes in government legislation at that time. Prepared by Simon Blanchard (SB), who was an IFA member and National Organiser from 1980, in dialogue with archivist and researcher Claire M.  Holdsworth (CMH), this chapter offers a commentary and brief Chronology of this cultural network, with some reflections on its significance. SB: The commentary below offers a brief overview of the IFA’s work and its position within the wider landscape of film and television culture across what might be called  –​adapting Fredric Jameson’s phrase for the 1960s –​the long 1970s.1 This extended ‘moment’ saw a lively debate about the future of British film 279

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Figure 18.1:  Page from Simon Blanchard’s diary (12 January 1980). Courtesy of Simon Blanchard.

and television, one that saw these sectors as both culture and industry. The IFA nexus is only one piece of this complex mosaic, but it acted as an advocate for change and renewal across both industries, taking its place within a wider shifting coalition of voices and strategies. CMH:   The commentary reconstitutes a personal voice, that of SB, where the Chronology makes the development of this important association ‘visible’ in a technical sense. Drawing from 280

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television SB’s experiences, the Chronology of the IFA points towards other ephemeral material –​writings, minutes from meetings, newsletters, reports –​much of which is contained in the IFA Archive, now housed at Sheffield Hallam University. This charting provides valuable data –​a glossary of sorts –​that map the facts sometimes obscured by the process of telling a complex history such as this, involving assorted protagonists. Our structuring of this chapter responds to the difficulties of ‘constructing’ definitive accounts of film and video, which traverse sectors that are experimental, unconventional by definition, a topic discussed by Julia Knight, who reiterates that ‘much of the basic factual information –​especially concerning places and dates –​has either become difficult to access or is rapidly disappearing.’2 When details or ‘records get lost, destroyed or buried in an archive […], much of this information only lives in people’s memories or their old diaries’ –​a situation echoed in this chapter’s construction, for which Blanchard revisited his diaries [see Figure 18.1] and related material from the time.3 SB: The account sketched here draws on three resources: my office diary/​ notebooks from this time; my personal archive of primary documents (correspondence, newsletters, papers, reports); and secondary studies on themes and contexts, listed at the end. The narrative is unavoidably selective and somewhat provisional, and should be approached with that emphasis in mind. We see the past ‘through a glass darkly’ and many aspects of this fascinating cultural ‘moment’ are only now being explored, recovered, re-​evaluated. The chapter finishes with a short Afterword that touches on two contextual issues –​the later history of the IFA (or the IFVA /​IFVPA as it became) and the connections between these 1970s energies and more recent millennial upheavals.

Commentary SB:  B  eginnings and Endings. The IFA’s lifespan runs from the autumn of 1974 to the spring of 1990. This account concentrates on the first 281

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Other Cinemas decade of that history (1973–​83), which can be seen as a coherent first phase of a longer history. We open with a pioneering 1973 report from Britain’s film and TV union, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), which called for the film industry to be taken into public ownership with extensive workers’ control.4 This vision for a public film sector was rendered more resonant by the deliberations (ongoing between 1974 and 1977) of the UK government’s Committee of Inquiry on the Future of Broadcasting, set up by Prime Minister Harold Wilson when Labour returned to government in March 1974. The IFA emerged at a historical juncture when film and television policy were in flux, acting as an organisational fulcrum for new policies and voices in and across both contexts. The ensuing ‘upswing’ of activism and advocacy under the IFA banner in the mid-​to late 1970s achieved a measure of success on several fronts, celebrating the diversity of ‘independent’ practice and seeking to give it more political clout and financial backing. This advocacy led to a productive (but unfinished) dialogue with MP Michael Meacher in the final months of the Labour government under Prime Minister James Callaghan (who succeeded Wilson in 1976). The IFA managed to sustain momentum during Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government (May 1979–June 1983), rerouting its plans into the context of preparations for the launch of Britain’s fourth terrestrial television network Channel 4 (C4) in 1982. C4 set up an innovative Independent Film and Video Department with dedicated slots in the broadcast schedule. Echoing this department’s cross-​ media title, in the spring of 1983 the IFA extended its remit to include video makers (becoming the IFVA), thus signalling its embrace of ‘alternative’ practices across film and the electronic image. A decade after the ACTT’s report on nationalisation, independent work had found space on and support from television, secured the backing of the ACTT through the ‘Workshops Agreement’ and expanded in presence and profile via a deepening partnership with the British Film Institute 282

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CMH: 

(BFI) along with other local and regional funding agencies.5 This inaugural long 1970s phase of the IFA’s evolving project is symbolically bookended by the publication of a first sketch history of this sector, written by Sylvia Harvey and myself as a contribution to the edited collection British Cinema History.6 Our narrative stops here, but we return very briefly to later phases of the IFVA in the Afterword that follows. As Sylvia Harvey and I noted in our 1983 history, the internal ethos of the IFA was marked by a pragmatic ‘agreement to disagree’ about aesthetic and political questions, a shared commitment to the value of heterodox and ‘countercultural’ moving image practices and to an ‘integrated’ stance that mixed production, distribution, exhibition, audiences and critical/​ scholarly debate in a dynamic partnership. The IFA acted both as a network and a forum, giving voice and leverage to the variety of alternative moving image practices that had emerged in Britain since the mid-​1960s, largely beyond the walls of the film and TV industry. This diverse constituency had sharply divergent roots and outlooks, but shared a common desire to remake and reinvent the structures, routines and aesthetics of film and television in Britain.7 Those who joined the IFA were ‘independent’ in distinct ways. As well as filmmakers, the IFA included members who worked as programmers, film officers and academics such as Harvey, who was at this time working for the University of Sunderland.8 Members were not only connected through a countercultural non-​conformity to the ‘mainstream’; they were influenced by different stakes in these industries, often further complicated by the variety of left-​wing positions and theories that influenced the independent sector. IFA meetings were diverse, and the politics informing member attitudes took contrasting stances. There were Maoists, Trotskyists, members of the socialist organisation Big Flame, members from groups founded after the civil unrest in Paris during ‘May 1968’ (such as Cinema Action), those who supported or sought greater state funding and others who desired total autonomy from the 283

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Other Cinemas state, and some who defined themselves as artists interested in the processes of film or the possibilities of ‘video art’. Members tended to operate outside the heavily unionised industries of cinema and television –​avenues frequently closed to them due to budget, distribution or cinema/​broadcast industry agreements. Many pursued aesthetics that were radically different from pre-​ established conventions of narrative and technique (in art as well as cinema and television), adopting contrasting approaches, creating works that actively resisted straightforward definition.9 Ideas about technology and the ‘avant-​garde’ were constantly redefined as these debate-​based, critical cultures ever reframed the question ‘Independent, but from what?’ Although wide-​ranging in its membership, the IFA was foremost an ‘organisational context’ and the stylistic approaches, the aesthetics of film, video, cinema or television were not its main focus.10 By creating forums for sharing news and insights –​including the IFA Newsletter as well as their regular regional and national meetings –​the IFA enabled independent film and video practitioners to inhabit shared discursive arenas where they could examine common causes; as outlined in what follows, its campaigns affected British cinema and broadcasting in small but highly significant ways. SB: As the policy agenda for these industries went into flux in 1973/​4, the IFA was called into being by a small cohort of makers/​critics/​activists who sensed the need for an ‘ongoing forum where film-​makers can discuss common problems and formulate policy’.11 The inaugural meeting in November 1974 marks the start of a search for funds, membership, alliances, recognition and a rising rhythm of meetings, conferences, ‘position papers’ and publicity across the mid-​to late 1970s. As the Chronology below indicates, the IFA pitched its innovative ideas into debates about both television and film policy and into the associated cultural spaces of that moment (the BFI Production Board, the Arts Council of Great Britain, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, etc.). In July 1978 the IFA’s new paper on film policy attracted wider press coverage and an invitation to enter into dialogue with Meacher. The IFA’s distinctive critique 284

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television of the Labour government’s agenda, to create a publicly funded ‘British Film Authority’ (BFA), can be traced back to the intellectual roots in the ACTT’s 1973 report. Over the next few months this dialogue shaped an ambitious plan for a publicly funded and regionally dispersed film network on ‘integrated’ lines (encompassing production, distribution and exhibition support). At the start of 1979 these plans were set for inclusion in a forthcoming government white paper, but this plan ran aground with the fall of the Callaghan government. The incoming Conservative government under Thatcher did not see film policy as a pressing issue and was also temperamentally hostile to any expansive public vision for film on BFA lines. Conversely, the new government was keen to move ahead with plans for a fourth commercial television channel, so the IFA regrouped and reframed their scheme as part of the wider ‘TV4’ campaigns, calling for the new service to be an open, innovating and distinctive Channel 4, not an ‘ITV2’.12 Over the months from summer 1979 to autumn 1982, the IFA took its place as a distinctive voice within these wider lobbies for a ‘different’ C4, and issued a series of manifestos and position papers that reformulated a television-​centric version of its earlier proposals to Meacher. Underpinned from early 1980 by funding from the BFI, the IFA and its activist core embarked on an extended campaign of advocacy, alliances and dialogue with MPs, government departments, the ACTT, the film and TV trade press and a wider community of reform-​ minded colleagues within the film and TV industry. The IFA developed a ‘Foundation’ plan that was referenced on several occasions during the passage of the 1980 Broadcasting Act, which legislated the new fourth channel, giving the IFA’s proposals profile and legitimacy and helping to ensure that the channel’s legislative remit for ‘innovation and experiment in the form and content of programmes’ included some measures of support for the IFA’s constituency. The Channel 4 Company began work in January 1981 and in April that year the new Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs informed the IFA that the C4 285

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Other Cinemas Board would not adopt their Foundation plan; instead, the channel appointed a commissioning editor for the sector, who administered funding (that, among other recipients, supported around 12–​14 ‘franchised’ workshops following the Workshop Agreement). As a publisher-​broadcaster, the channel also purchased existing work for broadcast and commissioned new works. In the summer of that year, Isaacs recruited IFA activist Alan Fountain to head up the new Independent Film and Video department. The next 18 months saw a crescendo of meetings, programme proposals and speculation about the UK’s new channel, and October 1982 saw the publication of a collection of essays, What’s This Channel Fo(u)r? –​An Alternative Report (edited by myself and David Morley) that offered a portfolio of ideas and aspirations for the new network. Then –​finally –​the waiting was over: C4 went on air on 2 November 1982, with the Eleventh Hour, a Monday night showcase for independent work debuting the following week. With that new cornerstone of support in place, the IFA and the independent sector began to explore still wider horizons and connections.

A short chronology of the IFA in the long 1970s 1973 August ACTT publishes the report of its Nationalisation Forum, Nationalising the Film Industry, which proposes to bring the industry into public ownership under workers’ control. The Report acknowledges the ‘invaluable work’ of its researcher, the filmmaker and activist Simon Hartog. 1974 March General Election. Incoming Prime Minister Harold Wilson forms a minority Labour government. 286

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television April Start of the Government Committee of Inquiry, headed by Lord Annan  –​the ‘Annan Committee’  –​exploring the ‘Future of Broadcasting’. 9 October Letter circulated by London-​based artists/​filmmakers/​activists:  Steve Dwoskin, Peter Gidal, Simon Hartog, Nick Hart-​Williams, Marc Karlin, Malcolm Le Grice, Laura Mulvey and James Scott, announcing a day-​long conference for independent filmmakers at the Royal College of Art (RCA, London)  –​‘we hope that it will lead to the formation of some sort of organisation’. The letter is issued c/​o the offices of ‘alternative’ film distributors The Other Cinema (founded 1970).13 9 November Conference at the RCA, with approximately 50 attendees, who decide to form the IFA, adopt a draft constitution and create two sub-​committees: one to meet with the BBC to discuss a proposed season of independent work, and another to draft a paper for the Annan Committee. 1975 18 January IFA meeting at the RCA. A submission to the Annan Committee is revised and passed. 11–​18 February IFA meeting at the Festival of British Independent Cinema, the Arnolfini Arts Centre and Cinema (Bristol). June The IFA has around 100 members. Discussions are under way with the BFI Production Board, with the IFA undertaking separate conversations with the BFI about its policy for the English regions outside London. The IFA also received £65 from the Greater London Arts Association (GLAA), applied to the BFI for funding, made contact with the Association of Video Workers and formed an IFA Executive Committee. 287

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Other Cinemas August Prime Minister Wilson sets up a Working Party on the Future of the British Film Industry, chaired by lawyer/​film financier John Terry (report published 1976). November/​December Studio International publishes an issue on Avant-​Garde Film in England and Europe (edited by Richard Cork with the assistance of Malcolm Le Grice), which includes influential texts such as filmmaker and theorist Peter Wollen’s essay ‘The two avant-​ gardes’ and artist Peter Gidal’s ‘Theory and definition of structural/​materialist film’. 1976 January Publication of the government’s ‘Terry Report’ on the Future of the British Film Industry (Cmnd. 6372). 4–​11 January The Festival of Expanded Cinema, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, London). February IFA meeting at the London Film-​makers’ Co-​operative (LFMC), where members propose two IFA representatives to join the BFI Production Board. March Wilson resigns as prime minister. 5 April James Callaghan succeeds Wilson as PM. May Structural Film Retrospective at the BFI’s National Film Theatre (London), coinciding with the publication of the Structural Film Anthology, edited by Peter Gidal. 21–​23 May Weekend conference on Independent Film Making in the 1970s at the Architectural Association (AA, London) –​organised by the IFA with support from GLAA. Members pass a resolution in favour of a regional structure for the IFA. 288

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television Summer Issue  of Afterimage on ‘Perspectives on English independent cinema’. June The IFA Newsletter includes reports on distribution, the ACTT, funding policy, and detailed notes on IFA regional and national membership written by Mike Leggett. 30 August –​3 September International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival.14 September IFA applies to BFI Regional Department for a £6,000 grant to support office and staff (turned down in November). Foundation of London Video Arts (LVA), a video production facility and distributor founded by artists David Hall, Tamara Krikorian and Stuart Marshall among others in Soho, central London – later renamed London Video Access (1988), then London Electronic Arts (1994). 15 October Distribution organisation The Other Cinema opens a cinema space on Tottenham Street in London. 1977 7–​9 January Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT) hold weekend school on British Independent Cinema/​Avant-​Garde, Institute of Education (London). 4–​7 February IFA membership is now around 270. IFA AGM at the Architectural Association (with sessions on ‘Regions’, ‘Contracts’, ‘Exhibition’, ‘the ACTT’). Members elect a National Executive Committee. March Publication of the Annan Report on the Future of Broadcasting (Cmnd. 6753). March–​April Perspectives on British Avant-​ Garde Film, Hayward Gallery (London), organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB). 289

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Other Cinemas Spring–​autumn Formation of IFA regional groups. 12 December After The Other Cinema launches a fundraising appeal for the survival of its cinema space, it features on the BBC’s Open Door TV programme. 13 December BFI rejects The Other Cinema’s appeal for extra funds and the London cinema subsequently closes. The Other Cinema continues to operate as a distributor. 1978 January The Interim Action Committee on the Film Industry (set up in April 1977 and chaired by former PM Harold Wilson) publishes Proposals for the Setting up of a British Film Authority, which calls for a publicly funded British Film Authority (BFA) to develop the British film industry (Cmnd. 7071). February IFA applies (again) to the BFI for a grant to support office, a worker and conference. April IFA Executive meeting in Nottingham. Discussion/​ draft of IFA response to the government’s proposals for a BFA. July IFA publishes a submission to the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Trade on The Future of the British Film Industry. This calls for a broader vision of film, including ‘films of social and cultural merit’, funding for regional production workshops, and cinema exhibition. IFA begins dialogue with Secretary of State Michael Meacher MP, who encourages the IFA to develop more detailed proposals. 21 July Nigel Andrews publishes an article in the Financial Times discussing the IFA’s paper on The Future of the British Film Industry  –​ 290

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television ‘for anyone who cares about movies in this country the report is worth getting and reading in full’.15 26 July Variety (film business/​trade paper) runs a headline and short report on the IFA paper  –​‘Brit Avant Garde Asks Gov’t Handout for Highbrow Pix’. August Michael Meacher invites the IFA to meet and discuss their paper on The Future of the British Film Industry, ‘which contains some interesting concepts’. 2 September Meacher publishes article in the Guardian –​‘It’s lonely in the dark’ –​ on the future of film, drawing on the IFA’s critique. 19 September IFA delegation meets Meacher, who asks for more detail on their proposals (costings, criteria, timescales, etc.). Meacher expects BFA legislation to pass in parliament in 1980/​1. Publication of Independent Cinema? by Sylvia Harvey, discussing, among other topics, the independent sector’s ‘dependence’ on funding. December IFA National Committee meeting in Nottingham agrees ‘Supplementary memorandum’ to the July paper, proposing an Independent Film Foundation (IFF) separate from the BFA. The memo outlines a five-​year plan to support 25 cooperative production units (workshops) on a regional basis, with support for distribution and exhibition. 1979 1 February IFA members meet with Meacher to discuss costings and how to define ‘independent’ in legislation. Meacher indicates that there will be a white paper on film policy in the near future. March Referendums on devolved national assemblies for Scotland and Wales. The Welsh ‘No’ vote and the Scottish ‘Yes’ vote are below 291

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Other Cinemas the required 40 per cent threshold and trigger a confidence vote in the House of Commons, which the Callaghan government loses, prompting a General Election. April Labour Party manifesto includes an election pledge to set up a British Film Authority (BFA). 4 May Conservative Party wins the General Election under Margaret Thatcher. 15 May Queen’s Speech indicates that the fourth television channel is to be established ‘with safeguards’ under the auspices of the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the regulatory body for the existing commercial TV network. June Conference on Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979, Bristol.16 BFI Governors appoint Anthony Smith as the new director. 26 July House of Commons statement by the new Trade Minister John Nott announces that there are no plans to establish a British Film Authority (BFA). July–​August Meetings of the IFA’s TV4 group at the offices of the Berwick Street Collective (Earlham Street, London). TV4 finalises text/​graphics for pamphlet on Channel 4 and Independence. August–​September IFA distributes the TV4 group pamphlet Channel 4 and Independence at the Edinburgh Television Festival, which outlines a vision for C4 that embraces innovation and experiment and proposes a ‘Foundation’ to support this remit. It calls for a channel ‘committed to diversity, difference and innovation’.17 SB:  Cross-​currents. With Anthony Smith as its new reform-​minded director, the BFI was finally persuaded to provide some funding to the IFA at the end of 1979. In January 1980 Sue Clayton and I were appointed as the IFA’s first paid workers [as discussed in the diary page, reprinted in Figure 18.1]. Sue found us a first home in a tiny 292

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television office off Oxford Street (Dryden Chambers) that had been a base for Judy and Fred Vermorel, confidants and biographers of the Sex Pistols. In this way two of the important countercultural tides of the 1970s –​alternative film and punk rock –​briefly intersected. This reminds us how cultural milieux overlapped, drawing on each other for ideas, attitudes, inspiration. The IFA ‘thread’ is just one part of a much broader web of cultural/​political energy and innovation in music, fashion, theatre, graphics and publishing. Geographies. To grasp one key part of this wider ‘moment’ we also need to register how much it owes to the geography of central London –​Soho, Fitzrovia, Tottenham Court Road, and wider connections to Whitehall, the South Bank cultural cluster at the Hayward Gallery and the NFT, the GLC at County Hall and so forth. This made meetings, conversations and chance encounters possible, and fostered dialogue and debate. The Other Cinema’s new offices at 79 Wardour Street also became a base for the IFA, WFTVN (Women’s Film Television and Video Network), LVA (Lo\ndon Video Arts) and others –​only a short walk from colleagues at SEFT (Society for Education in Film and Television), the BFI, St Martin’s School of Art, the ACTT’s offices on Soho Square, preview theatres, cafés, bookshops –​in short a rich, complex cultural ecology with deep historic roots.18 1980 February Home Office publishes the Broadcasting Bill to establish a fourth channel. IFA circulates policy paper Channel Four and Innovation:  The Foundation. 19–​20 April IFA AGM in Nottingham ratifies IFA Constitution. 24 April Philip Whitehead MP tables amendments for an Independent Programme Foundation in the House of Commons during the Committee stage of the Broadcasting Bill. 293

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Other Cinemas 15 May BFI offers the IFA £4,000 as ‘first stage’ funding. 29 May IBA appoints Edmund Dell (chair) and Richard Attenborough to the C4 Board. June IFA presents the Foundation plan to regional arts association film officers. November IFA publishes the paper British TV Today –​circulated to MPs, the IBA and trade press  –​which reiterates the case for innovation, experiment and diversity in C4’s remit. 13 November The Broadcasting Act (1980) receives Royal Assent and passes into law. SB:  V  isible/​Invisible. Star and Strauss write about the ecology of visible and invisible work.19 Much of what the IFA did was to try to make independent work visible –​to itself, funders, journalists, politicians, the wider public –​and thus mobilise support and resources. Moreover, this case making and claim making had a broader purpose, to use those resources to ‘show and tell’ about other places, spaces and voices that had been ignored, silenced or marginalised by ‘official’ and orthodox media culture, AND to do so in ways that challenged traditional ideas about aesthetics, narrative and performance. Yet, as Star and Strauss suggest, much of the work done to achieve this visibility was itself often barely visible and only erratically recorded or recounted. There is a paper trail, but we have rather little by way of photographs, film, video or audio. 1981 January The IFA applies to the BFI Regional Department for an annual grant to continue office and worker. The Channel 4 Company starts work.

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television April Jeremy Isaacs writes to the IFA, detailing that the C4 Board will not adopt the Foundation plan, but outlines that they will appoint a commissioning editor for the sector, fund workshops and commission new independent work. Summer C4 recruits Alan Fountain to head up the new Independent Film and Video Department as commissioning editor. Publication of The New Social Function of Cinema, edited by Hilary Thompson and Rod Stoneman. 1982 February The Women’s Film Television and Video Network (WFTVN) is established. 2 November Channel 4 starts broadcasting. 8 November C4 launches the Eleventh Hour, a regular Monday night showcase for independent film, video and ‘counter cinema’ from around the world. 1983 April/​May IFA AGM votes to become the Independent Film and Video Makers Association (IFVA). June Women’s Film and Television Network (WFTN) secures Channel 4 grant of £7,500 to open an office and employ a part-​time worker. 9 June Conservatives win a second General Election. July Publication of ‘The post-​war independent cinema − structure and organisation’ by Simon Blanchard and Sylvia Harvey in British Cinema History, edited by James Curran and Vincent Porter. 295

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Afterword Phase Two 1983–​6. With continuing support from the BFI, the IFVA’s trajectory under the second Thatcher government (1983–​7) was one of consolidation and widening perspectives. The BFI and associated support bodies at local and regional levels were grappling with budget cuts, but the overall picture of activity remained broadly positive and hopeful of a change in government. The funding alliance between C4, the BFI, regional arts associations and local government meant that the independent and ‘workshop’ sector expanded in scope and scale across the mid-​1980s. In 1986 the IFA again extended its remit to embrace ‘independent’ photography, becoming the IFVPA. SB:  Phase Three, 1986–​90. In a final phase, foreshadowed by the abolition of the GLC in March 1986, the return of a third Conservative government in 1987 accelerated the pattern of funding cuts, with the BFI increasingly unable to shield its independent sector clients from their effects. After an interval of debate and manoeuvre there is a pattern of closure and winding down in the late 1980s/​ early 1990s with the loss of the IFVPA (as well as SEFT and the WFTVN), and a ragged sequence of retrenchment and closures in the workshops sector. This ‘down cycle’ can also be linked to the shifts in corporate ethos at C4 from early 1988, when Michael Grade replaced Jeremy Isaacs as chief executive. In January 1990 the BFI informed the IFA that revenue funding would be withdrawn at the end of March. Following its closure, the IFVPA’s archive of papers was transferred to the care of Sheffield Hallam University. CMH:  Members of the IFA shared a commitment to radical aesthetics and politics that made for an at times uncomfortable alliance among them, not to mention with the institutions of art, cinema, television and the governments that came and went in this short space of time. The broader period during which the IFA was active is aptly termed by Margaret Dickinson as one of SB: 

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Organising for Innovation in Film and Television ‘paradoxical success’ in which –​during the phases highlighted by SB –​the sector made gains only to retract when the infrastructures, the support upon which many had come to rely, were withdrawn or reassembled.20 As indicated by the numerous independent strands, the divergent, often contradictory film and video practices that interconnect within the commentary and early chronology outlined here, in spite of the retrenchments that punctuate the late 1980s the IFA was an important cluster of activity that progressed the industries of art, cinema and television. This nexus of dialogue signifies important, personal and sometimes deeply affecting experiences for those involved. The IFA’s causes galvanised thinking during this meaningful ‘moment’ to spur approaches to making and critique as well as change. SB:  A  Fourth Phase? –​Recovery, Renewal, Unfinished Business. If we look again, we might plausibly see that we are now some way into a fourth ‘upswing’ phase, one in which what Harvey called the ‘unfinished business’ of this earlier moment has re-​emerged as still relevant.21 The aftermath of the financial ‘crash’ of 2007–​9 has exposed the fragility and brutalism of the ‘free market and strong state’ model and left its media ‘wing’ even more exposed to dissent, refusal and the bubbling up of new ‘countercultural’ media projects. In this immediate context, a volume of this kind is part of a wider rediscovery of old agendas and connections, and a return to explorations of ‘alternatives’ that can still inspire and sustain us.

Notes 1. Frederic Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text No. 9/​10, The 60’s Without Apology (Spring–​Summer 1984), pp. 178–​209. 2. Julia Knight, ed., Diverse Practices:  A  Critical Reader on British Video Art (Luton: Arts Council of Great Britain/​University of Luton Press, 1996), p. 18. 3. Ibid. 4. See also Figure 21.1: Cover of the ACTT report on Nationalising the Film Industry (compiled by Simon Hartog, 1973), in Chapter 21.

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Other Cinemas 5. ‘The Grant Aided Workshop Production Declaration’ passed in 1982 and is also described in Chapter 20. 6. Simon Blanchard and Sylvia Harvey, ‘The post-​war independent cinema: structure and organisation’, British Cinema History (1983), pp. 226−41. 7. As suggested in Simon Blanchard, ‘The two faces of Channel Four: some notes in retrospect’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33:3 (2013), pp. 365−76. 8. This chapter also draws on a separate discussion with Sylvia Harvey, interviewed by Claire M. Holdsworth (June 2016). 9. This wording refers to an essay by Jackie Hatfield, ‘Video: resisting definition’, included in Sean Cubitt and Stephen Partridge, eds, REWIND: Artists’ Video in the 1970s and 1980s (London: John Libbey, 2012), pp. 17−30. 10. Description of IFA/​phrasing used by Rod Stoneman (deputy commissioning editor in C4’s Independent Film and Video department, 1983–​93), in an interview with Holdsworth (June 2016). See Chapter 21. 11. ‘Letter’ circulated by Steve Dwoskin, Peter Gidal, Simon Hartog, Nick Hart-​ Williams, Marc Karlin, Malcolm Le Grice, Laura Mulvey and James Scott, originally published in the Film and Television Technician (edition dated November 1974), reprinted in Margaret Dickinson, Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI, 1999), p. 125. 12. The IFA circulated a flyer/​statement entitled ‘Innovation or ITV2?’ in 1980, reprinted in Dickinson, Rogue Reels, pp. 160–​1. 13. Ibid., p. 125. See Note 11. The Other Cinema (TOC) is described in Chapter 17. 14. This event is described in Chapter 19. 15. Nigel Andrews, ‘Soft landings’, Financial Times, 21 July 1976. 16. See also Figure 20.1 in Chapter 20. 17. IFA TV4 Group, Channel 4 and Independence (1979). See also Note 12. 18. Kit Wedd et al., Artists’ London: Holbein to Hirst (London: Merrell, 2001). 19. Susan Star and Anselm Strauss, ‘Layers of silence, arenas of voice:  the ecology of visible and invisible work’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8:1 (March 1999), pp. 9–​30. 20. Margaret Dickinson, ‘Paradoxical success (1980–​90)’, in Rogue Reels, pp. 62−85. Dickinson also includes a short section entitled ‘Independent film: a chronology’ (ibid., pp. 86–​9). 21. Sylvia Harvey, ‘The “other cinema” in Britain:  unfinished business in oppositional and independent film, 1929–​ 1984’, in Charles Barr, ed., All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 225–​51.

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19 The International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 1976: Interview with Lynda Myles Kim Knowles

During the 1970s the Edinburgh Film Festival was a hub of innovation, creation and collective risk-taking, a place of alternative film culture and anti-​establishment values, that, as Peter Stanfield has pointed out, ‘challenged the accepted idea of a film festival as a showcase for new releases and a benign cultural event designed to foster tourism and investment’.1 Under the creative directorship of Lynda Myles, the festival played a central role in the emerging theoretical debates that were to shape the landscape of film criticism, and, throughout the decade, it supported all forms of radical avant-​garde cinema. As well as screening an eclectic programme of films selected by a group of tireless cinephiles, it also hosted some of the landmark events of the period –​the first ever Women in Film event in 1972, the Brecht and the Cinema event in 1975, the Psychoanalysis and the Cinema event in 1976, and, in that same year, the International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film. Between 30 August and 3 September, the event combined screenings and expanded performances with an impressive programme of talks by some of the leading filmmakers and critics of the time: Chantal Akerman, Adriano Apra, Raymond Bellour, Victor Burgin, Regina Cornwell, Serge Daney, Hollis Frampton, Peter Gidal, 299

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Figure 19.1:  List of panelists, ‘International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film’. Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

Birgit Hein, Marc Karlin, Malcolm Le Grice, Anthony McCall, Annette Michelson, Constance Penley, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland and Peter Wollen. The introduction to the festival catalogue reads: 300

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The International Forum on Avant-Garde Film Since the screening of Penthesilea by Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey in 1974, the Film Festival has wanted to extend its area of concern to the avant-​garde […] Avant-​Garde film has been gaining increasing audience and critical attention. However, on these occasions there has been a notable absence of any possibility of extended discussion, and of the extensive written critical debate surrounding and supporting that activity that continues in both Europe and North America. It is the intention of this forum to make such a debate possible for the first time on an international scale by bringing together some of the key critics with film-​makers known both for their pioneering film and theoretical work […] The Forum is modelled, to a large degree, on the issues established in Peter Wollen’s seminal essay, ‘The Two Avant-​Gardes’, published in Studio International in November/​December 1975 […] The rationale of the Forum is to bring these two groups together, to explore the points of similarity and difference between them.2

Despite the scope of the event and its importance in debating the central issues of the time, namely the relationship between form and politics, it has received little more than a passing reference in studies of 1970s film culture. This short interview makes a first step towards assessing the role played by the film festival in the history of avant-​garde film theory and practice. Lynda Myles:  We got involved in the festival in 1968 and then met Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey. Both of them were to be crucial in the development of the festival. The Women’s Film event in 1972, which I organised with Laura and Claire Johnston, was the first major event, and then the International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film was largely organised with Peter [Wollen] and Simon Field. We got a lot of support from the Arts Council of Great Britain. What was interesting about that event in 1976 was that a lot of the people hadn’t met because at the time there was no real locus for them to do so. On the whole, they were delighted to meet, and unlike the second Women’s Event in 1978, there 301

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Other Cinemas were no real political or ideological conflicts. During the second women’s event, views had become much more polarised and the arguments were pursued much more aggressively. In 1972 it was very much a common cause with a lot of mutual support and a shared desire both to celebrate the female directors of the past and to create the conditions in which they could flourish in the future. In 1972, it was much more of a feeling of ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’, but by 1978 there were factions that were far more prescriptive. KK: One of the central questions in the Forum on Avant-​Garde Film was the relationship between form and politics. Peter Gidal, for example, was extremely uncompromising in his view of representation. LM: My memory of it was that there seemed to be a certain amount of mutual respect and curiosity about one another’s work. I don’t remember confrontation. It was more examining each other’s positions. I do remember the moment of introducing Michael Snow to Jean-​Marie Straub, which gave me an irrational pleasure and seemed to define what we were trying to do with the festival. KK: They represent the ‘two avant-​gardes’ that Wollen talks about in his article at the time. LM: Yes, but they were terribly pleased to meet. I  think there hadn’t been an event that brought all them together. We had a huge number of filmmakers. We put the critics and the filmmakers on a level playing field and there was no privileged position for the filmmakers. Well, so many of them were also writing as well. KK: And there probably hasn’t been an event quite like it since! You mention in the introduction to the event in the festival catalogue that avant-​garde film had been gaining critical attention. LM: We’d always shown a certain amount of avant-​garde film, and David [Will] and I were excited by the fact that Peter and Laura were moving into filmmaking. KK: The programming in that period was driven by theory and by critical discourse. 302

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Figure 19.2:  Programme, ‘International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film’ (22 August –​ 4 September 1976). Courtesy of The British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, CSM Museum, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL).

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Other Cinemas LM: Our basic position was that discourse was just as important as the films. We got a huge amount of flak when we started publishing the more theoretical writing. KK: That was in the mid-​1970s. I read a review by Molly Plowright in the Herald, which began with the title ‘It’s time the Film Festival was run for the public –​and not for these “experts” ’. LM: Molly Plowright was one of the critics we did not take with us! She thought we were wonderful when we started, but was far less happy when the festival became more radical in terms of what was shown and how it was discussed. KK: This idea that the festival was run for the intellectuals, was that a common response? LM: The criticism was both that it was run for intellectuals and it was showing genre cinema. They were appalled by the avant-​garde, appalled by the genre cinema, and they hated the theoretical work! I  can see how we drove them mad. Some of the people who had been involved with the festival historically and who were devoted Griersonians couldn’t understand our love of directors like Samuel Fuller, Roger Corman, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, Raoul Walsh and Jacques Tourneur, to whom we devoted retrospectives and published books of essays. KK: In a way you made the avant-​garde publicly accessible. You so rarely see that kind of work so fully integrated into a festival programme. LM: There was no distinction in the programme at the time. KK: You’d already established a relationship with the London Film-​ Makers’ Co-​op. How did that come about? LM: I just remember going there every time I was in London. I’d go and chat and find out what was going on. It never seemed odd to me and felt like more of a natural alliance. It was always the most natural thing that we would show the panoply of films from Joe Dante and Roger Corman to the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op. KK: That was part of your programming approach, which was broad and inclusive. Do you think it was a festival of extremes at that time? LM: Paul Willemen said something about my aesthetics, that it was ‘schizophrenic’. The year 1974 was particularly extreme. I  think I  went a bit far because we showed 54 Raoul Walsh 304

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The International Forum on Avant-Garde Film films, which was really stretching things as this was in addition to the full festival regular programme. We were showing double bills first thing in the morning and last thing at night, with Peter Wollen and Paul Willemen and most of our key participants and devoted Walsh fans asleep in the front row! KK:  I think the most interesting thing about the Edinburgh Film Festival in the 1970s is the way people were invited to move between different forms. Avant-​garde film wasn’t separated from the other more traditional work so it seems to have allowed greater access. Was that actually the case? LM: Yes. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who came to Edinburgh during those years, some of whom subsequently became filmmakers. What they appreciated was that Edinburgh opened up the world to them –​anything was possible. They would take risks and they trusted us. There was no sense of separate audiences –​people seemed to go to everything. I was interested in breaking down barriers. KK: Did the 1976 event give rise to the series of New British Avant-​Garde Films in 1978? LM:  I think it was just part of the general progression. We were always just asking what would be the next thing. I don’t think it would have been possible without the support of the Arts Council. We were very lucky with Rodney Wilson and David Curtis, who were terrific supporters and allies. KK: What you did back then feels almost impossible now. LM: I don’t know how we got away with it! I think it had something to do with being young (in our early 20s) and not being afraid of anything. I’m not sure I’d be the same now. It never occurred to us that we couldn’t do something. We were also blessed with having such a terrific support network both at home and internationally, and especially the early involvement of Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey. We had a solid trio in the post-​68 period with Murray Grigor and David Will and then this amazing diaspora of support from people who wanted to transform the notion of what a film festival could be. Interview conducted in London on 3 August 2016. 305

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Notes 1. Peter Stanfield, ‘Notes toward a history of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1969−77’, Film International 34 (2008), p. 63. 2. Edinburgh International Film Festival catalogue, 1976.

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20 The Workshop Declaration:​Independents and Organised Labour Claire M. Holdsworth

Finalised in 1982, the Workshop Declaration was an agreement made between the newly established Channel 4 (C4) and the trade union, Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT); it was created through consultation with the Independent Film-​Makers’ Association (IFA), the British Film Institute (BFI) and Britain’s regional arts associations.1 The ACTT was a powerful force in the industries of cinema and television at this time that negotiated terms with them on rates of pay and conditions. These standing arrangements limited opportunities for freelance or non-​ professional ‘independent’ filmmakers working outside this unionised context on a non-​contracted and sometimes ad hoc basis. The Grant-​Aided Workshop Production Declaration addressed this issue by allowing productions made by not-​for-​profit groups with more than four ACTT members (paid at equal but lower rates agreed by the union) to show works on television or in cinemas. Many groups did not qualify and only some were given a franchise from the union. As filmmaker Margaret Dickinson indicates, the agreement was ‘an extraordinary innovation which gave formal recognition to the principles of workshop practice and opened up the possibility of extending them as a basis for fully professional participation in the industry’.2 The British workshop movement developed during the 1970s, influenced by a resurgence of the political ‘Left’ that had begun in the late 1960s. 307

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Other Cinemas Movement towards organised group filmmaking followed on from the establishment of organisations such as the London Film-​makers’ Co-​operative (LFMC, founded 1966) and related ‘arts lab’ facilities.3 Though not specifically designated workshops, other influential groups formed at this time include Cinema Action (London, 1968), Amber Film Co-​operative (Newcastle, 1969), the Berwick Street Collective (London, 1970), the Poster-​Film Collective (London, 1973 –​later Faction Films) and Four Corners Film (London, 1973). Such groups and facilities undertook exhibition and distribution as well as production, and expounded alternative approaches to cinema, often by addressing historical, political and social subjects in their works. Many used experimental forms and formats to address issues of working-​class history and struggle, race, identity and the rising tide of the women’s movement.4 Some of the workshops that developed out of this wider impetus facilitated open access to equipment, editing facilities, screening spaces or training, while others undertook unconventional and collaborative approaches to making works, reshaping or reframing the concept of ‘communities of interest’.5 The formal declaration of 1982 came about as a result of campaigns and consultations that had been undertaken by the IFA during the mid-​to late 1970s, when members lobbied the Labour government about ongoing film and television policy reviews. Established in 1974, the IFA comprised diverse members of collectives and individuals alike, and a significant amount of its momentum came from within the growing workshop sector. In 1978 the IFA submitted a document, The Future of the British Film Industry, to the government, proposing state funding dedicated to the independent sector, with part of this ‘vision’ positing plans for regionally based cooperative production units.6 Though discussed on several occasions with MP Michael Meacher, these plans were disrupted when the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, headed by the new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The policy-​based negotiations of the late 1970s are discussed by filmmaker Simon Hartog in his contribution to the publication Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979 (see Figure 20.1). Written in April, shortly before the General Election in May, his text foreshadows the uncertainty caused by this change, as the new government held a more market-​driven approach to television policy and was less interested in government subsidy of film and the arts. Independent Film Workshops was compiled by Rod Stoneman (who went on to work in C4’s Independent Film and Video department) and 308

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The Workshop Declaration

Figure  20.1:  Cover of Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979 (edited and designed by Rod Stoneman).

its publication coincided with a national conference in Bristol.7 Despite the fact that the new government had a different vision, Stoneman has observed that because the declaration had already been developed through the IFA’s earlier proposals, ‘it was possible to realise the workshop initiative through television, when Channel 4 turned up for the party!’ in 1982.8 The new channel administered funding to 12–​14 franchised workshops, but while C4 played a key role in finally implementing the declaration, most of the work screened on the channel ‘was made outside of this franchised workshop network, within the wider independent sector itself ’.9 309

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Figure  20.2:  Flyer/​postcard, ‘What can you do with a passive culture?’ showing MP Norman Tebbit kicking a television screen. Produced by Sheffield Independent Film. Image: Adrian Friedli; design: Steve Jinks (1987/​1995). From the collection of Sylvia Harvey.

The Workshop Declaration precipitated a diversification of British cinema and television, giving younger groups of filmmakers opportunities to gain support. The Black Workshop Movement represents a significant cluster and focus of cooperation, with groups such as Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Film/​Video Collective established around the time the Workshop Agreement was formalised.10 The works made by these collectives introduced audiences to Black and Asian experiences, new outlooks within and perspectives on British culture.11 Towards the end of the 1980s the principles of collective management, non-​hierarchical divisions of labour and the integration of production, distribution and exhibition that had been pursued by many workshops/​groups came under pressure from the increasingly influential free market policies advocated during this extended period of Conservative governance. Increasingly abrasive confrontations are indicated in Figure 20.2, which shows a postcard/​flyer inviting people to attend a screening of videos by members of Sheffield Independent Film (19 October 1987, The Untitled Gallery). It depicts MP 310

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The Workshop Declaration Norman Tebbit kicking a television, with the words ‘Enjoy yourself ’ and ‘break the mould!’ printed on the opposite side. C4’s management and commercial direction changed at the end of the 1980s, an alteration sometimes used to account for the channel restructuring or withdrawing workshop support at that time. However, as indicated by Fountain in 1989 and later discussed by Stoneman, this initiative intended to shift emphasis from the support of workshops as organisations, with an ever-​increasing dependency upon the channel as other funding streams dried up over the course of the 1980s, to focus upon commissioning content –​‘extending the workshop-​funding basis to any individual or group (including those not franchised by the union)’12  –​to enable new talent as well as these more established workshops.13 Although broadcast television was not the most sustainable model for workshops, it did facilitate pioneering groups who –​beyond the important topics explored within their work –​brought new viewpoints, influenced by collaborative working practices. The Workshop Agreement sowed seeds that pluralised filmmaking in Britain, enabling a generation of innovative alternative filmmakers to make and show work, and convey perspectives not yet seen or heard, to ever wider publics.

Notes 1. Margaret Dickinson includes a version of the ‘Grant-​ Aided Workshop Production Declaration (abridged)’ from March 1984 (revised) in Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–​90 (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 163–​7. 2. Ibid., p. 58. 3. For example the Drury Lane Arts Lab in London (founded by Jim Haynes in 1967). See David Curtis, A History of Artists Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI, 2007), p. 26. 4. From Claire M.  Holdsworth’s interview with academic and historian Sylvia Harvey (June 2016). 5. Phrasing used by Rod Stoneman, interviewed by Claire M. Holdsworth (June 2016). See also Chapter 21. 6. The IFA’s The Future of the British Film Industry (London: IFA, 1978) includes a supplementary memorandum, providing more detailed plans for workshop funding. See Chapter 18. 7. Simon Hartog, ‘The perils of film policy’, in Rod Stoneman, ed., Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979 (Torquay: Grael Publications, 1979). Published

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Other Cinemas with the support of the BFI, this booklet includes information about Amber (1969); Birmingham Film-​Makers Co-​operative (1970s); Colchester Film-​ Making Workshop (1973); Manchester Film and Video Workshop (1976); the Sheffield Independent Film group (1966, see also Figure 20.2); South Hill Park Film Workshop (1975); and the Fantasy Factory Video lab (founded 1974) run by Sue Hall and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins (Hopkins and Cliff Evans also founded TV workshop/​video research centre TVX in 1969). 8. Rod Stoneman, interviewed by Claire M. Holdsworth (June 2016). 9. Ibid. 10. Black Audio Film Collective (1982–​98) and Sankofa Film/​Video Collective (1983–​92); other groups include ReTake Film and Video and Ceddo. As well as being supported through the declaration and C4, groups such as these also received support through other channels, for instance the Greater London Council (GLC). 11. See Coco Fusco, Young British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/​Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Centre, 1988). 12. Rod Stoneman, ‘Sins of commission’, originally published in Screen 33:2 (1992), reprinted in Dickinson, Rogue Reels, p. 180. 13. See Alan Fountain, Workshop Policy in the 1980s:  A  Discussion Document (1989).

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21 Campaigning for Innovation and Experiment on Channel 4 Claire M. Holdsworth and Rod Stoneman

The fourth British terrestrial television channel, Channel 4, began broadcasting at 4.45pm on Tuesday, 2 November 1982. Prior to its establishment, British television comprised three channels, two operated by the public-​funded British Broadcasting Corporation’s television service (BBC1 started broadcasting in 1936 and BBC2 in 1964) and a third operated by the commercial Independent Television network comprising small regionalised services (ITV, launched in 1955). Channel 4 (C4), with its dedicated Independent Film and Video Department, opened up airtime to more diverse content through its alternative model which, rather than producing programmes in-house, operated as a ‘publisher-​broadcaster’ by buying in and commissioning work from independent companies. C4’s initial founding remit involved an ethos to foster innovation that, despite referring to a very different context of televisual production, echoes the experimental character of the ‘independent’ and ‘workshop’ film and video sectors that had developed in Britain in preceding years. From 1971, initiated by a drive to reform cinema and television within the Labour Party (headed by Prime Minister James Callaghan), a number of government committees were established. They consulted with broadcasters and other stakeholders, initiating what John Wyver summarised as a decade-​long ‘debate centred around the clash of commercial interests and 313

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Other Cinemas those dedicated to widely disparate forms of public service broadcasting’.1 The industries of cinema and television were heavily unionised, with the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) inhabiting a dominant position. The ACTT as a union encompassed a large proportion of industry technicians whose agreements with broadcasters and film producers (on rates of pay and conditions) often restricted opportunities for non-​union members, those working independently of these infrastructures in unwaged, informal or non-​contracted jobs. Following the ACTT’s publication of a report in 1973 (see Figure 21.1),2 calling for

Figure 21.1:  Cover of the ACTT report on Nationalising the Film Industry (compiled by Simon Hartog, 1973).

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Campaigning for Innovation and Experiment on Channel 4 the film industry to be taken into public ownership under workers’ control, these various government committees published their own reports, including the Annan Committee report on the Future of Broadcasting of 1977, which explored the functions and superstructures of television. In 1979, the Conservative Party came to power under a new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. This very different government exercised a more commercially minded approach to film and television that was less concerned with media reform in terms of the content and nature of programmes and focused more upon the economic structure of the industry. The Broadcasting Act passed into law in 1980 and Channel 4 started to be formed. The new Thatcher regime’s motive for creating the fourth channel was entirely different from the Labour government’s previous interest: the Conservatives saw the publisher-​broadcaster model as a welcome challenge to the BBC/​ITV monopoly and as a way of opening up and casualising British broadcasting as a whole. From the mid 1970s organisations such as the Independent Film-​ Makers’ Association (IFA, established 1974) and the ACTT, along with institutions such as the British Film Institute (BFI), engaged in these governmental debates about the future of film and television. The IFA published position papers that rallied the opinions of its varied members (artists, filmmakers, collectives) together with those of interested independents (academics, film officers, programmers), proposing policy for a new channel very different to ITV. A dedicated research group within the IFA, known as TV4, circulated the pamphlet Channel 4 and Independence at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 1979. The discourses and wording adopted by these ‘indie campaigns’ made a small but significant input, influencing the founding remit of what then became C4 when it was established.3 From the perspective of the Independent Film and Video Department, the founding remit and the phrase ‘innovative in the form and content of programmes’ was especially helpful in defending that part of the channel.4 C4 was a screening space for new perspectives and programmes, acting as an important support structure for independent freelance production. It commissioned a wide range of programmes and provided a modest contribution to other aspects of cinema and TV cultures by also supporting 315

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Other Cinemas publications, exhibitions, festivals and related activities. For example, C4’s department provided backing that enabled around 12–​14 franchised collective groups –​part of a wider workshop movement –​to gain regular public funding.5 With instrumental enthusiastic support from Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs (until 1988), the Independent Film and Video Department, led by Commissioning Editor Alan Fountain (1981–​94)6 and including Rod Stoneman (1983–93) as well as Caroline Spry (1985–95), commissioned or bought in programmes of differing formats and were given a dedicated ‘slot’ in the evening schedule to show them, known as the Eleventh Hour, which broadcast from 11pm into the witching hour before terrestrial channels shut down for the night. The Eleventh Hour was open and adaptable, meaning that it could embrace everything. When it started we had seasons of low budget feature work, Third World cinema, personal and political documentary, experimental work –​we did a lot of seasonal programming within it  –​the combinations of material were incredibly wide-​ranging and diverse.7

The department mounted occasional further ‘incursions’ into the schedule, experimenting with the frameworks for screening experimental film and video with varied success.8 At times they provided exposition or ‘contextualisation’ in the form of introductions and discussions, and the comprehensive press packs produced by Press Officer Chris Griffin-​B eale indicate the careful thought that informed this challenging programming.9 As anticipated in What’s This Channel Fo(u)r: An Alternative Report of 1982, in C4’s early years debates about the nature of the channel multiplied, as people explored the relationships between TV (public and commercial), independence and politics.10 The impetus to develop film policy and establish a fourth channel –​its braver aspects –​were altered and to an extent derailed by the cultural shifts of ‘Thatcherism’.11 However, the momentum to extend spaces for showing (and the production of) independent works continued into the early 1990s, with C4 providing support despite the hindrances of acute economic and social transformation during the first decade of its existence. Over the course of the 1980s, C4’s often emphasised ‘innovative’ remit adapted as its staff, commissioners and management 316

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Campaigning for Innovation and Experiment on Channel 4 structure shifted to gain wider slices of the market, in terms of advertising and audiences. The Channel was always able to do brave things, though it was easier to have an eye-​catching one-​off than implement a concerted policy over time. After all, the Channel was founded with Jeremy Isaacs’s notorious phrase that it would be ‘different –​but not too different’ (in his launch speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival).12

Over the years those involved with independent film and video practices, particularly those who campaigned for a fourth channel during the late 1970s, have heatedly debated programming selections, allocations of funding and what exactly ‘innovative in form and content’ constitutes on TV. These arguments have been intensified by the oppositional stance assumed by filmmakers or portrayed in film and video works that reflect the radical politics of these alternative practices and that continued to evolve into the 1980s, when equally radical practices emerged, fostered by money and momentum from C4. The fourth channel opened up new avenues to artists, collectives and independent production companies, providing them with the potential to reach wider, larger audiences, simultaneously extending and adapting their ability both to engage and to critique the ‘mainstream’.

Notes 1. John Wyver, ‘Television: the debate on TV4’, Screen (Winter 1979), p. 111. 2. Nationalising the Film Industry:  Report of the ACTT Nationalisation Forum, August 1973 (London, 1973). See Figure 21.1. 3. IFA TV4 Group (including Marc Karlin, also a member of the Berwick Street Collective), pamphlet Channel 4 and Independence (August 1979), reprinted in a special issue of Framework on ‘the documentary’ (1979). See also Chapter 18. 4. Within the department ‘we joked about our role as the Channel’s “alibi” –​pictures from our programmes were all over the C4 Annual Report, but we never had a big enough slice of the budget or schedule!’ (Rod Stoneman in conversation with Claire M. Holdsworth, London, 25 June 2016). 5. These franchised workshops are also discussed in Chapter 20. 6. The discussion referred to in this chapter took place in London the day after a ‘Memorial to Alan Fountain’ (Goldsmiths College, University of London, 24 June 2016), organised by Sylvia Stevens (of Faction Films, founded 1983) and

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Other Cinemas Tony Dowmunt. The memorial involved a few words from Jeremy Isaacs, colleagues, friends, family and a screening programme of C4 Independent Film and Video Department extracts compiled by Stoneman, including commissions for Eleventh Hour and People to People. 7. Rod Stoneman (June 2016). 8. See Rod Stoneman, ‘Incursions and inclusions: the avant-​garde on Channel 4 1983–​93’ in Michael O’Pray, ed., The British Avant-​Garde Film, 1926–​1995: An Anthology of Writings (Luton:  Arts Council of England, John Libbey Media and University of Luton, 1996). 9. Channel 4 Press Packs (1982–​2002) available online (The British Universities Film and Video Council). 10. Simon Blanchard and David Morley, eds, What’s this Channel Fo(u)r (London: Comedia, 1982), includes ‘New images for old? Channel Four and independent film’ by Sylvia Harvey and a ‘Users guide to Channel 4’ by Charles Landry. 11. Wider shifts during this decade and the word ‘Thatcherism’ are traced by Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). 12. Rod Stoneman (June 2016).

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Notes on Contributors Simon Blanchard Dr Simon Blanchard is Senior Lecturer on the Media and History degree programmes at Leeds Beckett University and was National Organiser for the Independent Film, Video and Photography Association from 1980 to 1988. He is the author and editor of a number of reports and publications on film, television and media policy in the UK, including studies of Channel 4 and Channel 5 television networks and reports on media strategy at both local and regional levels. His paper ‘The Two Faces of Channel Four: Some notes in Retrospect’ appeared in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (September 2013). Jamie Chambers Dr Jamie Chambers is an Edinburgh-​based film scholar and the artistic director of the Transgressive North artistic community. He is the director of the award-​winning films When the Song Dies (2012) and Blackbird (2013), and the curator of the Folk Film Gathering, the world’s first folk film festival. Chambers is currently working on a monograph exploring the global possibilities of a ‘folk cinema’. Antony Davies Anthony Davies is a writer, researcher and Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (University of the Arts London). He has written on art, economics and politics in a number of journals including Art Monthly, Mute Magazine, Variant, Texte zur Kunst and Metropolis M and contributed to books such as Abstraction: Documents of Contemporary Art (edited by Maria Lind, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2013). He is a founder member of MayDay Rooms (London), an educational charity that acts as a meeting place and archive, providing a 319

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Notes on Contributors haven for historical material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of marginalised fi gures and groups. Catherine Elwes Catherine Elwes retired as Professor of Moving Image Art at Chelsea College of Arts in November 2017. She is known as a writer, video artist and curator emerging in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s. Elwes has written extensively about feminist art, landscape, masculinity and armed conflict, moving image, installation, motherhood and curatorial practices. She has published interviews and monographs on individual artists including Vera Frenkel, Rose Garrard, Bill Viola and Eleanor Antin. Elwes is author of Video Loupe (K.T. Press, 2000), Video Art, a guided tour (I.B. Tauris, 2005) Installation and the Moving Image (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2015) and Landscape and the Moving Image (Intellect, forthcoming). Elwes is Founding Editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ, Intellect) and has contributed to numerous edited anthologies, journals, exhibition catalogues and periodicals. She co-curated the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men and About Time at the ICA in 1980 and was the director of the biennial UK/ Canadian Film & Video Exchange (1998–2006) and co-curator of Figuring Landscapes (2008–2010), an international screening exhibition on themes of landscape. Her video practice is archived at LUX ONLINE and REWIND. Kodwo Eshun Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK and Professor of Visual Arts, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Geneva, Switzerland. He is also the co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (2nd Edition, 2021) and Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (2012). In addition, he is co-editor of The Fisher Function (2017), Post Punk Then and Now (2016), “The Militant Image: A Ciné-Geography”, Special Issue of Third Text (2011), Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom (2010) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998 (2007). Rachel Garfield Dr Rachel Garfield is an artist and Professor in Fine Art at the University of Reading, UK. She also writes on contemporary and modern art as well as popular culture. Her work has been shown in exhibitions such as 320

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Notes on Contributors Visions at the Nunnery (2016), Unsensed group show at the Hatton Gallery Newcastle (2015) and as part of the London Short Film Festival (2013). She has also published writings in journals including Screen Dossier: Stephen Dwoskin (Spring 2016) which she co-edited with Alison Butler, the anthology Between Truth and Fiction: The Films of Vivienne Dick (edited by Treasa O’Brian, LUX, 2009) and is currently writing a book on AV Punk: Women, Experimental Film and a Punk Aesthetic (I.B.Tauris, due 2018). Garfield makes video work exploring the lived experience of subjectivity in all its varied forms and is currently working on a trilogy commissioned by Beaconsfield Contemporary Art (London). Nick Hart-Williams Nick Hart Williams studied at Manchester and began his career as a reporter in Scotland. He then moved to London determined to get into the ‘alternative’ aspects of film or theatre. He started, with Peter Sainsbury in 1971, The Other Cinema (TOC), whose aim was to bring to the UK the best of the rising tide of ‘new wave’ cinema around the world, TOC started with regular seasons at special London venues, and built a catalogue of new films available to film societies and the few art cinemas around Britain. The National Film and Television School started in 1974, and Nick joined up in 1975 (meanwhile also helping to start TOC’s Scala Cinema in King’s Cross). He made his first series for Channel 4, Claret and Chips (1983), a 4-part series telling the story of the Social Democratic Party, and ultimately became Channel 4’s 2nd Documentary Commissioning Editor, where he created the True Stories strand. After leaving Channel 4 in 1989, he co-directed, with Gabrielle Kelly, the first film on climate change, Prophets and Loss (1990), and later went on to organise environmental conferences: Be The Change (2004–2010) and Schumacher Lectures (2010–1015). Today, he co-organises the Transition Film Festival in Totnes, Devon. Nicolas Helm-Grovas Dr Nicolas Helm-Grovas is Lecturer in Film Studies Education at King’s College London, UK. He completed his PhD on the films and writings of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018. Previously he taught in the Media Arts Department at Royal Holloway, in the Film Production Department at Arts University Bournemouth, and in the Fine Art Department at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His writing has appeared in publications such as Moving Image Review and Art Journal and Radical Philosophy, and he has written texts with or about artists such as Rachel Adams, Maeve Brennan and Imran Perretta (as Jerwood 321

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Notes on Contributors Arts Writer in Residence, 2018) and for Cypher Billboard. With Oliver Fuke he is co-curator of a series of interrelated exhibitions on Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Art at the Frontier of Film Theory (Peltz Gallery, London, 2019), A is for Avant-Garde, Z is for Zero (in association with Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2020) and Intersections in Theory, Film and Art (in co-operation with GAK: Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, 2021). Claire M. Holdsworth Dr Claire M. Holdsworth is an archivist, writer and researcher based in London and Lisbon. Specialising in British artists’ moving image (1960s–90s), her research considers sound and the voice, using interviews and archives to explore artists, collectives, artworks and texts. She has published articles in academic journals such as Vertigo and the Moving Image Review and Art Journal. Currently an independent researcher, she lectures at the University of the Arts London, UK and the Royal College of Art, UK. She completed an AHRC-funded PhD at Central Saint Martins (UAL) in 2016 and was previously an Early Career Research Fellow at Kingston School of Art (Kingston University London, UK. Holdsworth is writing a monograph on the intersections between experimental film and music in feminist expanded performance in the 1970s/80s. Julia Knight Julia Knight is Professor Emerita at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written and contributed to a number of publications on the history of the moving image and edited publications including Doing Women’s Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future with Christine Gledhill (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art (Arts Council of England/ John Libbey Media, 1996). She was principal investigator for a number of interrelated research projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which explored artists’/ independent moving image distribution in the UK. The key outputs from those projects were Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Intellect, 2011) and the ongoing online Film and Video Distribution Database (www.fv-distribution-database.ac.uk). Kim Knowles Dr Kim Knowles lectures in Alternative and Experimental Film at Aberystwyth University, UK and curates the Black Box experimental strand at the 322

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Notes on Contributors Edinburgh International Film Festival. She has written widely on historical and contemporary avant-garde film, poetry and photography, including A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (Peter Lang, 2009) and Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has published in Cinema Journal, NECSUS_ European Journal of Media Studies, Moving Image Review and Art Journal and Millennium Film Journal. Sophie Mayer Dr So Mayer is a writer, bookseller and activist. Their most recent book is A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula Press, 2020), a manifesto for queer visual cultures against fascisms, and their next project is a BFI Film Classics on Orlando (Bloomsbury, 2022). Previous books include Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B.Tauris, 2015) and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2015). With Corinn Columpar, they have co-edited There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Wayne State, 2010) and the forthcoming Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor (Wayne State, 2022). So works with queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes, and is a co-founder of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents and carers in the UK screen sector. Steven McIntyre Dr Steven McIntyre is Associate Lecturer in Audiovisual Communication in the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, Australia. His films and music videos have been published with labels such as Stones Throw, Ninja Tune and Mochilla, and screened at various international film forums such as the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Thessaloniki International, the San Francisco Cinematheque and Melbourne International Film Festival. Colin Perry Dr Colin Perry is a researcher, writer and lecturer. His PhD thesis examines independent film and video in relation to television in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s (University of the Arts London, 2016). His research interests include forms of persuasion and voice in documentary, counterpublics and issues of nationalism in the moving image. Perry teaches a documentary module on the Film and Television: Theory, Culture and Industry MA at the University of Westminster (London); he also teaches on the Culture, Criticism and Curation BA and MA at Central Saint Martins College of Art 323

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Notes on Contributors and Design (University of the Arts London). Perry is the reviews editor for the Moving Image Review and Art Journal. Since 2006, he has contributed features and reviews to magazines including Art Monthly, ArtAgenda and Frieze, and written essays on a wide range of practices for various arts publishers. He has edited publications including Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History, 1962–2002 (Phaidon Press, 2013) and Land Art in Britain (Hayward Publishing, 2013). Lucy Reynolds Dr Lucy Reynolds is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster, UK where she co-ordinates the PhD programme and runs the MRES in Creative Practice. Her research focuses on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice an artist, her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, the Showroom and The Grand Action cinema, Paris. She is editor of the anthology Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (2019), and co-editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ). Daniella Rose King Daniella Rose King is a London-born writer and curator based in New York. She is concerned with the social history of art, particularly when it brings to light forgotten, oppressed or difficult histories, moments of struggle and spaces of resistance. King recently completed a Whitney Independent Study Program Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellowship. Her essays, reviews and criticism have appeared in journals, magazines and catalogues while her curatorial projects include organising exhibitions and public programmes at The Kitchen (New York), HOME (Manchester), Nottingham Contemporary, MASS Alexandria (Egypt), Institute of International Visual Arts (London) and the Cyprus Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. In 2014 she co-founded the curatorial collective DAM Projects with Amanprit Sandhu and Morgan Quaintance. DAM Projects use temporary exhibitions and events to support emerging, underexposed and unorthodox artists, art scenes, discourses and debates. The inaugural programme Sunday School ran in 2014–15 and featured six solo shows from recent UK art school graduates along with six exhibitions looking at emerging international art scenes. 324

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Notes on Contributors Steve Sprung Steve Sprung is a filmmaker, editor and was Senior Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). He has worked for commercial film and cinema as well as with radical social movements and in experimental filmmaking since the 1970s. A co-founder of Faction Films production company he was part of the Poster Film Collective and a member of Cinema Action, where he contributed to films including Film From the Clyde (1977) and So That You Can Live (1982). As an editor worked on Between Times (1995), The Outrage (1995), The Serpent (1997) and The Haircut (1998), the last four films made by Marc Karlin. Rod Stoneman Rod Stoneman is an Emeritus Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was the Director of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media, Chief Executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board and a Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television. He has made a number of documentaries including Ireland: The Silent Voices (1983/1984), Italy: the Image Business (1984), 12,000 Years of Blindness (2007) and The Spindle (2009). He has written extensively on film and television as co-editor of ‘The Quiet Man’… and Beyond: Refl ections on a Classic Film, John Ford, and Ireland with Seán Crosson (Liff ey Press, 2009) and Scottish Cinema Now with Jonathan Murray and Fidelma Farley (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). He is the author of Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, A Case Study of Politics (Wallfl ower, 2008) and The Media, Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual (Black Dog Publishing, 2015) and Educating Film-Makers: Past, Present and Future with Duncan Petrie (Intellect, 2014). Amy Tobin Dr Amy Tobin is Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge, UK and Curator at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK. She completed her PhD on feminism, art and collaboration in Britain and North America in the 1970s at the University of York in 2016 and has published reviews and articles in Art History, Feminist Review, the Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Oxford Art Journal and Tate Papers. Tobin also contributed a chapter to A Companion to Feminist Art, edited by Maria Busek and Hilary Robinson (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) and is co-editor of London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent and Ephemeral Networks 1960–1980 with Jo Applin and Catherine Spencer (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). 325

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Notes on Contributors Ed Webb-Ingall Ed Webb-Ingall is a writer and filmmaker with an interest in the history and practice of collaborative modes of production and PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, where his research focuses on community video in the UK. He currently runs the public programme for the London Community Video Archive at Goldsmiths, University of London. Between 2014 and 2016 he carried out a community video project at The Showroom (London) and in 2016 was commissioned by Studio Voltaire (London) to develop a video that looked at the legacy of Section 28 (also known as Clause 28) of the Local Government Act in 1988, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in UK schools as a ‘normal’ family relationship. Other recent projects include curating an artist moving image festival that refl ects on conceptions of dissonance and disobedience in the cinema. Recent collaborations have been with Open School East, TATE Liverpool, BFI London and LUX. Dr Federico Windhausen Dr Federico Windhausen is a film scholar and programmer. He has written about British experimental filmmakers such as Guy Sherwin, Nicky Hamlyn, Lis Rhodes, John Du Cane, and John Smith for various publications including the Moving Image Review and Art Journal and the anthology Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966–76 (LUX, 2016). He is currently writing a book about Argentine experimental film and editing a collection entitled A Companion to Experimental Cinema (Wiley, forthcoming).

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Chronological List of Recent Events Exhibition, ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot, The First Decade of the London Film-​ Makers’ Co-​operative and British Avant-​Garde Film 1966–​76’, Tate Modern, London (3–​28 May 2002), curated by Mark Webber (touring programmes). DVD, Shoot Shoot Shoot: British Avant-​Garde Film of the 1960s and 1970s (Lux and Revoir, 2006). Exhibition, ‘A Century of Artists’ Film in Britain’, Tate Britain, London (19 May 2003–18 April 2004), curated by David Curtis (an Illuminations production for Tate). Exhibition, ‘The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982–​1998)’, FACT, Liverpool (2 February–1 April 2007). Exhibition, ‘Analogue’, The Box, FACT Liverpool (2–3 March 2007). Conference, ‘Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception’, Tate Modern, London (17–​19 April 2009), part of AHRC project Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema set up by the late Dr Jackie Hatfield, British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) in collaboration with Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee. Screenings/​events, ‘Visions, Divisions and Revisions: Political Film and Film Theory in the 1970s and 80s’, Raven Row, London (8 March– 28 April 2010), organised by Petra Bauer and Dan Kidner to coincide with solo exhibition, ‘Petra Bauer – Me, You, Us, Them’, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-​on-​Sea (27 March–8 May 2010). Screenings/​installations, ‘REWIND + PLAY’, Tate Britain, London (8 May– 27 June 2010), in association with Lux: artists’ moving image. DVD, REWIND + PLAY: An Anthology of Early British Video Art (Lux and Rewind, Branded Media, 2009). Exhibition, ‘Polytechnic’, Raven Row, London (9 September–7 November 2010), curated by Richard Grayson. Exhibition, ‘Nam June Paik’, Tate/​FACT, Liverpool (17 December 2010–​13 March 2011). 327

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Chronological List of Recent Events Exhibition, ‘Morgan Fisher: Films and Paintings and In Between and Nearby’, Raven Row, London (24 February–​24 April 2011), curated by Alex Sainsbury. Exhibition, ‘Seeing in the Dark: A Group Show’, CIRCA, Curtis Mayfield House, Newcastle-​upon-​Tyne (19 October–​12 November 2011), curated by CIRCA Projects with Steven Ball. Exhibition, ‘Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance’, ICA, London (25 January–​25 March 2012). Exhibition, ‘David Hall: 1001 TV Sets (End Piece) 1972–​2012’, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, London (16 March–​22 April 2012). Exhibition, ‘Remote Control’, ICA, London (3 April–​10 June 2012). Screening season, ‘The Lacey Rituals: Films by Bruce Lacey and Friends’, BFI Southbank, London (5–​31 July 2012). Display, ‘Lis Rhodes: Light Music’, The Tanks at Tate Modern, London (18 July 2012–​20 January 2013). Screening/​book launch, Rewind: British Artists’ Video in the 1970s & 1980s, Tate Modern, London (25 September 2012). Exhibition, ‘Filmaktion’, the Tanks at Tate Modern (16–​21 October 2012). Exhibition, ‘REWIND − British Artists’ Video in the 1970s and 1980s’, Dundee Contemporary Arts (24 November 2012–​1 December 2012), curated by REWIND and Graham Domke. Exhibition, ‘Jonas Mekas’, Serpentine Gallery, London (5 December 2012–​ 27 January 2013). Screening season, ‘Jonas Mekas’, BFI Southbank, London (6 December 2012–​26 January 2013). Exhibition, ‘Vidéo Vintage 1963–​1983: A Selection of the New Media Collection’, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (22 September 2012–​10 February 2013), curated by Christine van Assche. Exhibition, ‘Film in Space: An Exhibition of Film and Expanded Cinema’, Camden Arts Centre, London (15 December 2012–​24 February 2013), selected by Guy Sherwin. Screenings, ‘A Weekend of Anger: The Films of Kenneth Anger’, ICA, London (27–​28 July 2013). Screening season, ‘Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film’, BFI Southbank, London (1–​28 August 2013). Publications/​ exhibitions/​ screenings, ‘Jarman 2014: A Year-​long Celebration of the Life and Work of Derek Jarman (1942–​1994)’, 328

Chronological List of Recent Events multiple venues (including BFI, Tate Modern, King’s College (University of London). Symposium, ‘Stephen Dwoskin’, ICA, London (8 March 2014), organised by Rachel Garfield (University of Reading) and Ben Cook (Lux: artists’ moving image). Screenings/symposium, ‘Horace Ové’, Birkbeck University Cinema, London (24 January 2015). Inaugural conference, ‘Radical Film Network: Political Cinema for the 21st Century’, Birmingham City University (7–8 February 2015). The Radical Film Network was founded in 2013. Festival prelude screenings, ‘The work of Marc Karlin presented by Holly Aylett’ (6 March), inaugural Birkbeck Essay Film Festival, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the ICA, London (March 2015). Doctoral Symposium, ‘Writing Histories of the Moving Image’, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design (UAL), London (26 March 2015), co-​organised by Claire M. Holdsworth and Colin Perry. Screenings/book launch, Patti Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity, BFI, London (13 April 2015). Screening season, ‘Cinema Born Again: Radical Films from the 1970s’, BFI Southbank, London (10–​24 April 2015). Bristol Radical Film Festival 2015, commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Festival of Independent British Cinema (1975), Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (10–​11 October 2015). Exhibition, ‘The Inoperative Community’, Raven Row, London (3 December 2015–​14 February 2015), curated by Dan Kidner. ‘Fiftieth Anniversary of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative – LFMC50’, monthly programmes, BFI Southbank, London (from January 2016) in partnership with Lux:  artists’ moving image, curated by the original LFMC cinema programmers. ‘Fiftieth Anniversary of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative – Co-op Dialogues 1966–2016’, series of inter-generational screenings and artists’ conversations, Tate Britain, London (from March 2016). Festival du Cinéma du Réel, section ‘Rejouer –​Reenactment, representation, reinvention in documentary cinema’, Centre Pompidou, Paris (24 March–​2 April 2016). 329

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Chronological List of Recent Events Screenings/​book launch, Peter Gidal, Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–​2016, Tate Britain, London (14 April 2016). ‘Fiftieth Anniversary of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative – Crossing the Threshold: Experimental Films and Live Performances from Malcolm Le Grice’, BFI Southbank, London (4–​18 May 2016). Screenings, ‘Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Beyond the Scorched Earth of Counter-​Cinema’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (12–​22 May 2016). Exhibition, ‘Steina and Woody Vasulka: Machine Vision’, Raven Row, London (19 May–​5 June 2016), curated by Amy Budd. Screening/​talk, ‘Peter Gidal: Close Up’, Close Up Cinema, London (20 May 2016). Edinburgh Film Festival, ‘Regrouping: Discussions –​the Psychoanalysis and Cinema Symposium and International Forum on Avant-​Garde Film (1976)’, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (24 June 2016). Screenings, ‘40 Years of Film in East London’, Four Corners Film, London (2 July 2016). Note: chronology originally developed/compiled by Claire M. Holdsworth.

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Select Bibliography Aitken, Rob, ‘Provincialising embedded liberalism:  film, orientalism and the reconstruction of world order’, Review of International Studies 37:04 (2011), pp. 1695–​720. Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Althusser, Louis and Etienne Balibar, Reading ‘Capital’, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). Andrew, Geoff, ‘Seacoal’, in John Pym, ed., Time Out Film Guide (London: Time Out Group, 2005), p. 1150. Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press, 1998). Aspinall, Sue and Mandy Merck, ‘So that you can live’, II, Screen 23:3–​4 (1982), pp. 157–​60. Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians, Nationalising the Film Industry. Report of the ACTT Nationalisation Forum, August 1973 (London, 1973). Atherton, Kevin, interviewed by Jackie Hatfield, 21 July 2005, REWIND website, available at http://​www.rewind.ac.uk/​documents/​Kevin%20Atherton/​KAT510. pdf (accessed 29 February 2016). Aylett, Holly, ed., Marc Karlin:  Look Again (Liverpool:  Liverpool University Press, 2015). Badiou, Alain, ‘Rhapsody for the theatre: a short philosophical treatise’, trans. Bruno Bosteels and Martin Puchner, Theatre Survey 49:02 (2008), pp. 187–​238. Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). —​—​—, ‘The rhetoric of the image’, trans. Stephen Heath, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1 (Spring 1971), pp. 37–​50. —​—​—​, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, trans. Stephen Heath, Screen 15:2 (1974), pp. 33–​40. —​—​—​, S/​Z, trans. Richard Miller (Maleden, MA: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991 [1974]).

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Select Bibliography Baudry, Jean-​Louis, ‘Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus’, trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28:2 (1974), pp. 39–​47. Bauer, Petra and Dan Kidner, eds, Working Together: Notes on British Film Collectives in the 1970s (Southend-​on-​Sea: Focal Point Gallery, 2012). Bellour, Raymond, ‘A bit of history’, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Constance Penley, ed., The Analysis of Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis:  Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 1–​20. Benjamin, Walter, ‘Surrealism: the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcot (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), pp. 177–92. —​—​—​, Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso Books, 2003 [1998]). Betz, Mark, ‘Little books’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds, Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 319–​49. Blanchard, Simon, ‘The two faces of Channel Four:  some notes in retrospect’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33:3 (2013), pp. 365–​76. Blanchard, Simon and Sylvia Harvey, ‘The post-​war independent cinema: structure and organisation’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter, eds, British Cinema History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), pp. 226–​41. Blanchard, Simon and David Morley, eds, What’s This Channel Fo[u]‌ r? An Alternative Report (London: Comedia, 1982). Blom, Ina, On the Style Site: Art, Sociality and Media Culture (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2007). Bolas, Terry, Screen Education:  From Film Appreciation to Media Studies (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2009). Bourdieu, Pierre, ‘The field of cultural production’, trans. Richard Nice, in The Field of Cultural Production (London: Polity, 1993), pp. 29–​73. Brecht, Bertolt, ‘A short organum for the theatre’, in John Willett (ed. and trans.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1964), pp. 179–​205. Brewster, Ben, ‘Presentation of Althusser’, New Left Review 41 (January–​February 1967), pp. 11–​14. —​—​—​, ‘Structuralism in film criticism’, Screen 12:1 (Spring 1971), pp. 49–​58. —​—​—,​‘The fundamental reproach (Brecht)’, Cinétracts 2 (1977), pp. 44–​53. British Universities Film and Video Council, ‘Channel 4 press packs (1982–​2002)’, available at http://​bufvc.ac.uk/​tvandradio/​c4pp (accessed 21 July 2016). Britton, Andrew, ‘The ideology of screen’, in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 384–​424. Burch, Noël and Jorge Dana, ‘Propositions’, Afterimage 5 (Spring 1974), pp. 40–​66. Cantrill, Arthur and Corinne, ‘Interview with Chris Welsby’, Cantrills Filmnotes 63/​ 64 (December 1990).

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Select Bibliography Catterall, Peter, ed., The Making of Channel 4 (London: Frank Cass, 1999). Cegarra, Michel, ‘Cinema and semiology’, trans. Diana Matias and Paul Willemen, Screen 14:1–​2 (Spring–​Summer 1973), pp. 129–​87. Chaudhuri, Shohini, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed (London: Routledge, 2006). Chodorov, Pip, ‘The artist-​run film labs’, Millennium Film Journal 60 (Fall 2014), pp. 28–​36. ‘Cinéthique on Langage et Cinéma’, trans. Diana Matias, Screen 14:1–​2 (Spring–​ Summer 1973), pp. 189. Cixous, Hélène, ‘Portrait of Dora’, trans. Ann Liddle, in Eric Prenowitz, ed., Selected Plays (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 35–​60. —​—​—,​‘Sorties’, trans. Ann Liddle, in David Lodge and Nigel Wood, eds, Modern Criticism and Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), pp. 359–​65. Clarke, Jane, Jeanette Iljon, Mary Pat Leece, Pat Murphy, Annabel Nicolson, Lis Rhodes, Felicity Sparrow and Susan Stein, ‘Woman and the formal film’, in Philip Drummond, ed., Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–1975 (London: Hayward Gallery, Arts Council, 1979), pp. 118–29. Clayton, Sue and Jonathan Curling, ‘On authorship’, Screen 20:1 (1979), pp. 35–​61. —​—​—​, Communications 4 (1964). Clayton, Susan and Jonathan Curling, ‘Feminist history and The Song of the Shirt’, Camera Obscura 3:17 (1981), pp. 110–27. Clifford, James, ‘On ethnographic allegory’, in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds, Writing Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 98–​121. —​—​—,​ The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-​Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). —​ —​ —​ , ‘The others:  beyond the “salvage” paradigm’, Third Text 3:6 (1989), pp. 73–​8. —​—​—,​ Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). —​—​—,​ Returns:  Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Connolly, Maeve, TV Museum:  Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2014). Coote, Anna and Beatrix Campbell, eds, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women’s Liberation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). Cork, Richard, ed., Studio International Journal of Modern Art: Avant-​Garde Film in England and Europe 190:978 (November/​December 1975). Cowan, Edward J., People’s Past:  Scottish Folk Scottish History (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1980). Coward, Rosalind, ed., Liberation Films Distribution Catalogue (London: Liberation Films, 1978).

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Select Bibliography Cowie, Elizabeth, ‘The Song of the Shirt (Susan Clayton and Jonathan Curling)’, Camera Obscura 2:25 (1980), pp. 86–97. ———, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real (Madison, WI: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Crick, Philip, ‘Pasolini: philosophy of cinema’, Cinema 6–​7 (August 1970). Crouch, David and Richard Grassick, ‘Amber Films, documentary and encounters, in David Crouch, Rhona Jackson and Felix Thompson, eds, The Media and the Tourist Imagination: Converging Cultures (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 42–​59. Cubitt, Sean, ‘Foreword’, in Jackie Hatfield, ed., Experimental Film and Video (London: John Libbey, 2006), pp. viii–​ix. Cubitt, Sean and Stephen Partridge, eds, REWIND: Artists’ Video in the 1970s and 1980s (London: John Libbey, 2012). Curran, James, ‘A new political generation’, in James Curran, Ivor Gaber and Julian Petley, eds, Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), pp. 3–37. Curtis, David, ‘English avant-​garde film: an early chronology’, Studio International 190:978 (November–​December 1975), pp. 176–​82. —​—​—​, Chris Welsby: Films/​Photographs/​Writings (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981). —​—​—,​‘A tale of two co-​ops’, in David E. James, ed., To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the American Underground (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 255–​65. —​—​—,​ A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI, 2007). Danino, Nina and Michael Mazière, eds, The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video (London: Wallflower Press, 2003). Darlow, Michael, Independents Struggle: The Programme Makers who Took on the TV Establishment (London: Quartet, 2001). Deepwell, Katy, ‘Felicity Sparrow: forming Circles’, n.paradoxa 34 (July 2014), pp. 86–95. Deren, Maya, Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas, ‘Poetry and the film: a symposium’ [1953], in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture: An Anthology (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), pp. 171–​86. Dickinson, Margaret, ‘Amber: interview with Murray Martin’, in Margaret Dickinson, ed., Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–​90 (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 247–​62. —​—​—​, Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain 1945–​90 (London: BFI, 1999). Dickinson, Margaret and Sarah Street, Cinema and State: The Film Industry and the British Government, 1927–​1984 (London: BFI, 1985). Drummond, Philip, ed., Film as Film: Formal Experiments in Film (London: Hayward Gallery, Arts Council, 1979).

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Select Bibliography Dusinberre, Deke, ‘Deke Dusinberre on British avant-​ garde landscape films’, Undercut 7:​8 (1983), p. 49. —​—​—,​‘St. George in the Forest:  the English avant-​garde’, Afterimage 6 (Summer 1978), pp. 4–​14. Duguid, Mark, ‘Tony Garnett: the interview’, Sight and Sound 23:6 (June 2013), pp. 62–​6. Dunford, Mike, ‘Experimental/​avant-​garde/​revolutionary film practice’, Afterimage 6 (1976), pp. 96–​112. Dunkley, Christopher, ‘Eleventh Hour, Channel 4’, Financial Times, February 1986. Durgnat, Raymond, ‘Cooped in a co-​op’, Art Monthly 151 (November 1991), pp. 24–​5. Dwoskin, Steve, Film Is … (London: Peter Owen, 1977). Eagleton, Terry, Ideology: An Introduction, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 2007). Eaton, Mick and Steve Neale, eds, Screen Reader 2:  Cinema and Semiotics (London: SEFT, 1981). Eco, Umberto, ‘Towards a semiotic inquiry into the television message’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 3 (Autumn 1972), pp. 103–​21. —​—​—,​‘Articulations of the cinematic code’, trans. John Mathews, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, An Anthology, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 590–​607. Elkins, James, The Object Stares Back (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Ellis, John, Seeing Things:  Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Elwes, Catherine, Video Loupe: A Collection of Essays by and about the Video Maker and Critic, Catherine Elwes (London: KT, 2000). —​—​—​, ‘TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television’ Maeve Connolly [book review]’, MIRAJ 3:2 (2014), pp. 282–​90. —​—​—,​ Installation and the Moving Image (New York: Wallflower, 2015). Eros, Bradley, ‘More captivating than phosphorus’, Millennium Film Journal 56 (2012), pp. 42–​19. Fargier, Jean-​Paul, ‘Parenthesis or indirect route’, Screen 12:2 (Summer 1971), pp. 131–​44. Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film and National Film Archive, Cinema 1900–​1906: An Analytical Study –​Selected Symposium Papers and Transcripts, ed. H. Roger (Brussels: Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, 1982). Fennell, Chris, ‘Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx’, BFI.org.uk, 15 January 2014, available at http://​www.bfi.org.uk/​news-​opinion/​news-​bfi/​interviews/​ laura-​mulvey-​riddles-​sphinx (accessed 4 November 2016). Field, Simon, ed., Afterimage Special Issue:  Perspectives on English Independent Cinema 6 (Summer 1976).

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Select Bibliography Foucault, Michel, ‘The lives of infamous men’, in Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (eds and trans.), Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979), pp. 76–91. Fountain, Alan, Workshop Policy in the 1980s:  A  Discussion Document (London: Channel 4 Television, 1989). Fowler, William, ‘10,000 revolutions: meet Mary Kelly, the mother of all feminist artists’, Guardian, 18 May 2015, available at https://​www.theguardian.com/​ artanddesign/​2015/​may/​18/​mary-​kelly-​meet-​the-​mother-​of-​all-​feminist-​artists (accessed 4 November 2016). Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media –​The Documentary 11 (1979). Fraser, Alice and Kieron Webb, ‘Cinema Action’, BFI (Screenonline) (2014), available at http://​www.screenonline.org.uk/​people/​id/​529319/​ (accessed 7 July 2016). Fraser, Nancy, ‘Rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 109–​42. Fusco, Coco, Young, British, and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/​Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective (Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Centre, 1988). Gaal-​Holmes, Patti, A History of 1970s Experimental Film (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). Gidal, Peter, ‘Letter on ontology’, Screen 17:2 (Summer 1976), pp. 131–​2. —​—​—,​ ed., Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976). —​—​—​, ‘The anti-​narrative’, Screen 20:2 (Summer 1979), pp. 73–​93. —​—​—,​‘The current British avant-​garde film: some problems in context’, Undercut 2 (August 1981), pp. 4–​6. —​—​—​, ‘Flashbacks: Peter Gidal’, Filmwaves 7 (1999), pp. 16–​20. —​—​—​, ‘Matter’s time time for material’, in Jackie Hatfield, ed., Experimental Film and Video (London: John Libbey, 2006), pp. 18–​25. —​—​—,​‘Technology and ideology in/​through/​and avant-​garde film:  an instance’, in Mark Webber and Peter Gidal, eds, Flare Out:  Aesthetics 1966–​ 2016 (London: The Visible Press, 2016), pp. 116–​34. —​—​—,​‘Theory and definition of structural/​materialist film’, in Mark Webber and Peter Gidal, eds, Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–​2016 (London: The Visible Press, 2016), pp. 37–​68. Grayson, Richard, ‘Embroiled’, exhibition catalogue essay, Polytechnic (Raven Row, London, 2010), n.p. Grimshaw, Anna, The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2001). Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).

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Select Bibliography Hall, David, ‘British video art: towards an autonomous practice’, Studio International: Video Art, ed. Richard Cork (with the assistance of David Hall) 191:981 (May/​ June1976), pp. 248–​52. ———, interview by Jackie Hatfield, 9 December 2005, for REWIND, available at http://www.rewind.ac.uk/documents/David%20Hall/ DH510.pdf (accessed 26 February 2016). Hall, Stuart, ‘The great moving right show’, Marxism Today 21 (January 1979), pp. 14–20. —​—​—​, ‘Reformism and the legislation of consent’, in National Deviancy Conference, eds, Permissiveness and Control: The Fate of the Sixties Legislation (London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 1–​43. —​—​—,​ The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). Hall, Sue, and John Hopkins, Socio-​Cultural Applications of Television Technology in the UK (London: Council for Cultural Co-​operation, 1975). Hallas, Roger, Reframing Bodies:  AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Hanet, Kari, ‘Cinema semiotics in English’, Screen 16:3 (Autumn 1975), pp. 125–​8. Hanhardt, John G., ‘Nam June Paik’, exhibition catalogue essay, Nam June Paik (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1982), pp. 100–​21. Haraway, Donna, ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology and socialist-​feminism in the late twentieth century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–​82. Hartog, Simon, ‘The BFI dossier:  who governs what?’, Cinim 3 (Spring 1969), pp. 22–​3. Harvey, Sylvia, Independent Cinema? (Stafford: West Midlands Arts, 1978). —​—​—​, ‘Whose Brecht? Memories for the eighties’, Screen 23:1 (1982), pp. 45–​59. —​—​—,​‘The “other cinema” in Britain:  unfinished business in oppositional and independent film, 1929–​1984’, in Charles Barr, ed., All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 225–​51. —​—​—,​ ed., Experimental Film and Video (London: John Libbey, 2006). Heath, Stephen, ‘Film/​cinetext/​text’, Screen 14:1–​ 2 (Spring–​ Summer 1973), pp. 102–​27. —​—​—,​ ‘Questions of emphasis’, Screen 14:1–​2 (Spring–​Summer 1973), pp. 9–​13. —​—​—,​‘The work of Christian Metz’, Screen 14:3 (Autumn 1973), pp. 5–​28. —​—​—,​ ‘Contexts’, Edinburgh ’77 Magazine: number 2: History/​Production/​Memory (1977), pp. 37–​43. —​—​—,​ ‘Afterword’, Screen 20:2 (Summer 1979), pp. 93–​100. Heath, Stephen, Colin MacCabe and Christopher Prendergast, eds, Signs of the Times:  Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics (Cambridge:  Granta,  1971).

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Select Bibliography Henderson, Hamish, ‘“It Was In You That It A’ Began”: some thoughts on the Folk Conference’, in The People’s Past (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1980), pp. 4–​15. Hendy, David, The Cultivated Mind (BBC Radio 4, first broadcast 18 June  2010). Herman, Steve, The Broadcasting of Low Gauge Video:  A  Research Report (London: Centre for Advanced TV Studies, 1981). Higson, Andrew, ‘Space, place, spectacle’, Screen 4:5 (1984), pp. 2–​21. Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1991 [1972]). Hjelmslev, Louis, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963). Holdsworth, Amy, Television, Memory and Nostalgia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Holdsworth, Claire M., History has Tongues:  Re-​evaluating Historiography of the Moving Image through Analysis of the Voice and Critical Writing in British Artists’ Film and Video of the 1980s (London: Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 2015). Hollands, Robert and John Vail, ‘Place imprinting and the arts: a case study of the Amber Collective’, Local Economy 30:2 (2015), pp. 173–​90. hooks, bell, ‘The oppositional gaze: black female spectators’, in Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 197–​213. Independent Film-​Makers’ Association TV4 Group, Channel 4 and Independence (London: IFA, 1979). Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Caroline Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). Jameson, Fredric, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Social Text 9/10 (Spring–​Summer 1984), pp. 178–​209. —​—​—,​ Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 1998). Johnston, Claire, Notes on Women’s Cinema, Screen Pamphlet 2 (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1972). —​—​—,​‘Women’s cinema as counter-​cinema’, in Claire Johnston, ed., Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: SEFT, 1973). —​—​—,​ ‘The Nightcleaners (part one): rethinking political cinema’, Jump Cut 12/​13 (1976), pp. 55–​6. —​—​—,​ Notes on the Idea of an Independent Cinema (1976). —​—​—​, ed., Edinburgh ’77 Magazine:  number 2:  History/​ Production/​ Memory (1977). —​—​—,​‘The subject of feminist film’, Screen 21:2 (1980), pp. 27–​34. Johnston, Claire and Paul Willemen, ‘Brecht in Britain: the independent political film (on The Nightcleaners)’, Screen 16:4 (1975), pp. 101–​18. Kaplan, E. Ann, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1978).

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Select Bibliography —​—​—​, ‘Integrating Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches in feminist film criticism’, Millennium Film Journal 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 8–​17. Kelly, Mary, A Secret Agreement: An Era Defined by the Events of 1968 (2015) [online], available at http://​www.tate.org.uk/​whats-​on/​tate-​modern/​talks-​and-​lectures/​ mary-​kelly-​conversation-​hans-​ulrich-​obrist/​secret-​agreement (accessed 13 July 2015). Kelly, Owen, Community, Art, and the State: Storming the Citadels (London: Comedia in association with Marion Boyars, 1984). Kidel, Mark, ‘Video art and British TV’, Studio International, Video Art Issue (May/​ June 1976), pp. 240–​1. Kitses, Jim, Horizons West (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969). Klausen, Jimmy Casas, Fugitive Rousseau:  Slavery, Primitivism, and Political Freedom (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Kleinhans, Chuck, ‘New theory, new questions:  introduction to special section’, Jump Cut 12–​13 (December 1976), available at http://​www.ejumpcut.org/​archive/​onlinessays/​jc12-​13folder/​intro.newtheory.html (accessed 8 January 2016). Knight, Julia, ed., Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art (Luton: Arts Council GB/​University of Luton Press, 1996). Knight, Julia and Peter Thomas, Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Kristeva, Julia, ‘The system and the speaking subject’, in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 24–​33. Lambert, Stephen, Channel Four:  Television With A  Difference? (London:  BFI, 1982). de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Semiotics, theory and social practice:  a critical history of Italian semiotics’, Ciné-​Tracts 5 (2:1) (Fall 1978), pp. 1–​14. Le Grice, Malcolm, Abstract Film and Beyond (London: Studio Vista, 1977). —​—​—,​‘A reflection on the history of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op’, in Margaret Dickinson, ed., Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–​90 (London: BFI, 1999), pp. 106–​108. —​—​—​, ‘Material, materiality, materialism’, in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), pp. 164–​71. —​—​—​, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI 2006). Lesage, Julia, ‘The political aesthetics of the feminist documentary film’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3:4 (1978), pp. 507–​23. Lischi, Sandra, The Sight of Time: Films and Videos by Robert Cahen (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1997). London Film-​makers’ Co-​operative, Undercut 1: The Magazine of the London Film-​ makers’ Co-​operative (March/​April 1981). MacCabe, Colin, ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’, Screen 15:2 (Summer 1974), pp. 7–​27.

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Select Bibliography —​—​—,​‘Memory, phantasy, identity:  “Days of Hope” and the politics of the past’, Edinburgh ’77 Magazine:  number 2:  History/​Production/​Memory (1977), pp. 13–​17. MacDonald, Fraser, ‘Doomsday field work, or, how to rescue Gaelic culture? The salvage paradigm in geography, archaeology, and folklore, 1955–​62’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29:2 (2012), pp. 309–​35. MacDonald, Scott, ‘16mm:  reports of its death are greatly exaggerated’, Cinema Journal 45:3 (2006), pp. 124–​30. McLane, Betsy A., A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd edn (New  York: Continuum, 2012). Marshall, Stuart, ‘Video art: the imaginary and the parole vide’, Studio International (May/​June 1976), pp. 243–​7. —​—​—​, ‘Institutions/​conjectures/​practices’, Recent British Video catalogue (British Council, 1983), n.p. Mayer, Sophie, The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (London: Wallflower, 2009). Mazière, Michael, ‘Institutional support for artist’s film and video in England, 1966–​2003’ (2009), British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, pp. 1–​41 available at http://​www.studycollection.co.uk/​maziere/​paper.html (accessed 16 January 2016). Meacher, Michael, ‘It’s lonely in the dark’, Guardian, 2 September 1978. Meigh-​Andrews, C., A History of Video Art; The Development of Form and Function (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006). —​ —​ —​ , Interview with John Hopkins and Sue Hall, available at http://​www. meigh-​andrews.com/​writings/​interviews/​sue-​hall-​john-​hopkins (accessed 5 January 2015). Mekas, Jonas, ‘Open letter to film-​makers of the world’, Cinim 1 (1966), pp. 5–​8. Merck, Mandy, ed., Screen: Watching Television 25:2 (March–​April 1984). Metz, Christian, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). —​—​—,​ Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-​Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). —​—​—,​ ‘The imaginary signifier’, Screen 16:2 (1975), pp. 14–​76. Miles, Barry, The Sixties (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). Mitchell, Juliet, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Mullen, Pat, Man of Aran (London: Faber and Faber, 1934). Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16:3 (1975), pp. 6–​18. —​—​—​, ‘Film, formalism and the avant-​garde’, in Michael O’Pray, ed., The British Avant-​Garde Film, 1926 to 1995 (Luton: University of Luton, Arts Council, 1996). —​—​—​, ‘Looking at the past through the present: rethinking feminist film theory of the 1970s’, Signs 30:1 (2004), pp. 1286–​92.

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Select Bibliography —​—​—​, Fetishism and Curiosity:  Cinema and the Mind’s Eye, 2nd edn (London: BFI, 2013). Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen, ‘Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons’ (interview with Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen), Screen 15:3 (Autumn 1974), pp. 120–​34. Newbury, Darren, ‘Documentary practices and working-​class culture: an interview with Murray Martin’, Visual Studies 17:2 (2002), pp. 113–​28. Newsinger, Jack, ‘The interface of documentary and fiction:  the Amber Film workshop and regional documentary practice’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 6:3 (2005), pp. 387–​406. Nichols, Bill, ed., Movies and Methods, An Anthology, Vol. 2 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985). Nigg, Heinz and Graham Wade, Community Media:  Community Communication in the UK:  Video, Local TV, Film, and Photography (Zürich: Regenbogen-​Verlag, 1980). Nowell-​Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti (London:  Secker and Warburg,  1967). —​—​—,​‘I was a star*struck structuralist’, Screen 14:3 (Autumn 1973), pp. 92–​9. Nowell-​Smith, Geoffrey and Christophe Dupin, eds, The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–​2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). O’Pray, Michael, ed., The British Avant-​Garde Film: 1926–​1995 (Luton, Bedfordshire: University of Luton Press, 1996). O’Reilly, Paul, ‘“I will survive”:  forty years of Amber Films and the evolution of regional film policy’, Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 1:2 (2009), pp. 1–​15. Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock, eds, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–​1985 (London and New York: Pandora, 1987). Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘Discourse on the shot sequence, or the cinema as the semiology of reality’, Cinim 3 (Spring 1969), pp. 6–​11. —​—​—​, ‘Observations on the long take’, trans. Norman MacAfee and Craig Owens, October 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 3–​6. —​ —​ —​ , ‘Observations on the sequence shot’, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, in Louise K. Barnett, ed., Heretical Empiricism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 233–​7. Payne, Joy I., Reel Rebels:  The London Filmmakers’ Co-​ operative 1966–​ 1996 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2015). Penley, Constance, ‘Film Language by Christian Metz:  semiology’s radical possibilities’, Jump Cut 5 (January–​February 1975), available at http://​www.ejumpcut.org/​archive/​onlinessays/​JC05folder/​FilmLangMetz.html (accessed 11 January 2016).

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Select Bibliography Perry, Colin, Into the Mainstream: Independent Film and Video Counterpublics and Television in Britain, 1974–​1990 (London: Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 2016). —​—​—​, ‘What was British independent film? Part  2:  Documentary taboos’, Lux (2016), available at http://​www.lux.org.uk/​blog/​what-​was-​british-​independent-​ film-​part-​2-​documentary-​taboos (accessed 16 May 2016). Petrie, Duncan J. and Rod Stoneman, Educating Film-​Makers:  Past, Present and Future (Bristol: Intellect, 2014). Ranvaud, Don, ‘Pesaro revisited’, Framework 18 (1982), pp. 34–​5. Reekie, Duncan, Subversion:  The Definitive History of Underground Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2007). Rees, A.L., A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999). —​—​—​, ‘Expanded cinema and narrative: a troubled history’, in A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis, eds, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 12–​21. Rhodes, Lis, ‘Whose history?’, in Deke Dusinberre and A.L. Rees, eds, Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–​1975 (London: Arts Council/​Hayward Gallery, 1979), pp. 119–​20. —​—​—​, ‘In conversation with Jenny Lund’, MIRAJ 4:1–2 (2015), pp. 180–​96. Rhodes, Lis and Felicity Sparrow, Her Image Fades as Her Voice Rises (London: Circles/​Arts Council, 1982). Rich, B. Ruby, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Roberts, Andy, Albion Dreaming:  A  Popular History of LSD in Britain (London: Marshall Cavendish, 2008). Rodowick, D.N., The Crisis of Political Modernism:  Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:  University of California Press, 1994). Ronduda, Lukasz, ‘Polish analogue video’, in Chris Meigh-​Andrews and Catherine Elwes, eds, Analogue: Pioneering Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968–​ 88) (Preston: University of Central Lancashire, 2006), pp. 73–​87. Rony, Fatimah Tobing, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Rosen, Philip, ‘Screen and 1970s film theory’, in Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds, Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 264–​97. Rowbotham, Sheila, Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (London: Verso Books, 2014 [1972]). Ruby, Jay, Picturing Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Russell, Lee [Peter Wollen], ‘Culture and cinema’, New Left Review I/​21 (October 1963), pp. 112–​15.

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Select Bibliography —​—​—​, ‘Cinema –​ code and image’, New Left Review I/​49 (May–​June 1968), pp. 65–​81. Said, Edward, Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2003). Sainsbury, Peter, ‘Editorial’, Afterimage 5 (Spring 1974), pp. 2–​3. Samuel, Raphael, Theatres of Memory (London: Verso, 1994). de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in collaboration with Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). Screen 14:1–​2 (Spring–​Summer 1973). Silverman, Kaja, The Acoustic Mirror:  The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Sitney, P. Adams, Visionary Film: The American Avant-​Garde, 1943–​2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Star, Susan L. and Anselm Strauss, ‘Layers of silence, arenas of voice: the ecology of visible and invisible work’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work 8:1 (March 1999), pp. 9–​30. Stein, Gertrude, How to Write (Paris: Plain Editions, 1931). Stoneman, Rod, Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979 (Torquay:  Grael Publications, 1979). —​—​—,​‘Early cinema: an introduction by Rod Stoneman’, Screen 23:2 (July–​August 1982), pp. 2–​3. —​—​—,​ ‘Sins of commission’, Screen 33:2 (Summer 1992), pp. 127–​44. —​—​—,​‘Incursions and inclusions:  the avant-​garde on Channel 4 1983–​93’, in Michael O’Pray, ed., The British Avant-​Garde Film, 1926–​1995: An Anthology of Writings (Luton: Arts Council of England, John Libbey Media, University of Luton, 1996), pp. 285–​96. —​—​—,​‘The sins of commission II’, Screen 46:2 (Summer 2005), pp. 247–​64. —​—​—,​‘Installation of the exotic’ (2014), available at http://​thecolumn.net/​2014/​09/​ 09/​installation-​of-​the-​exotic/​ (accessed 6 September 2015). Stoneman, Rod and Hilary Thompson, The New Social Function of Cinema: Catalogue, British Film Institute Productions ’79/​80 (London: BFI, 1981). Takahashi, Tess, ‘After the death of film: writing the natural world in the digital age’, Visible Language 42.1 (2008), pp. 44–​69. Thomas, Peter, ‘The struggle for funding: sponsorship, competition, and pacification’, Screen 47:4 (Winter 2006), pp. 461–​7. —​—​—,​‘The British workshop movement and Amber film’, Studies in European Cinema 1548 (September 2014), pp. 37–​41. Thompson, E.P., Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors (London:  Merlin Press, 1978). Various, Miners’ Campaign Tapes (London: BFI, 1984). Wallington, Mike, ‘Pasolini: structuralism and semiology’, Cinema 3 (June 1969), pp. 5–​11.

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Select Bibliography Warner, Michael, ‘Publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version)’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88:4 (2002), pp. 413–​25. Waugh, Thomas, Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1984). —​—​—,​ The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011). Webber, Mark, ed., Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-​Makers’ Co-​operative 1966–​76 (London: LUX, 2016), Webber, Mark and Peter Gidal, eds., Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 (London: The Visible Press, 2016). Wedd, Kit, Lucy Peltz and Catherine Ross, Artists’ London: Holbein to Hirst (London: Merrell, 2001). Weinstock, Jane, ‘She who laughs first laughs last (Thriller by Sally Potter)’, Camera Obscura 5 (1980), pp. 100–​11. White, Duncan, ‘Expanded cinema: the live record’, in A.L. Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis, eds, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), pp. 24–​38. White, Ian, ‘CONTEXT: Ian White on Stuart Marshall’, Artists’ Moving Image Festival catalogue (Tramway, Glasgow, 2015), available at http://amif2015. tumblr.com/post/128700187597/context-ian-white-on-stuart-marshall (accessed 19 March 2017). Willemen, Paul, ‘On realism in the cinema’, Screen 13:1 (1972), pp. 37–​44. —​—​—,​‘Notes on subjectivity:  on reading Edward Branigan’s “Subjectivity Under Siege”’, Screen 19:1 (1978), pp. 41–​70. Williams, Christopher, Realism and the Cinema (London: BFI, 1980). Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958). —​—​—,​  The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). —​—​—​,  Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). —​—​—, ​ Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1992 [1974]). Wilson, Siona, Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Withers, Rachel, ‘“Polytechnic”, Raven Row’, Artforum (January 2011), p. 232. Wollen, Peter, ‘Towards a new criticism? The first series of film seminars’, Screen Education 41 (September/​October 1967), pp. 90–​1. —​—​—,​ ed., Working Papers on the Cinema: Sociology and Semiology (London: BFI Education Department, 1969). —​—​—​, ‘Structuralism implies a certain kind of methodology’, interview with Gerald Peary and Stuart Kaminsky, Film Heritage 9:4 (Fall 1974), pp. 21–​9. —​—​—,​ ‘The two avant-​gardes’, Studio International 190:978 (1975), pp. 171–​5 —​—​—​, ‘Cinema and semiology: some points of contact’, in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-​Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), pp. 3–​17.

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Select Bibliography —​—​—​, ‘Chris Welsby’, in David Curtis, ed., A Directory of British Film and Video Artists (Luton: The Arts Council of England, 1996). —​—​—​, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 5th edn (London:  BFI/​ Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Wyver, John, ‘Television:  the debate on TV4’, Screen 20:3–​ 4 (Winter 1979), pp. 111–​14. —​—​—​, ‘The necessity of doing away with “video art”’ (1991), reprinted in Julia Knight, ed., Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art (Luton: Arts Council of England/​University of Luton Press, 1996), pp. 315–​20. Young, Neil, ‘Forever Amber: an interview with Ellin Hare and Murray Martin of the Amber Film collective’, Critical Quarterly 43 (2001), pp. 61–80. Zoller, Maxa, ‘“Festival” and “Museum” in modernist film histories’, in Tamara Trodd, ed., Screen/​Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 53–​72.

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Index References to images are in italics; references to notes are indicated by n. 16mm film 5, 13–​14, 108, 109–​10, 113–​15, 118 ‘36 to ‘77 (1978) 35 Aayamaguchi, Mineo 201 After Lumiere (L’arroseur arrosé) (1974) 92 Afterimage (journal) 5, 6–​7, 9–​10, 33–​4 Akerman, Chantal 5 Akomfrah, John 211, 213 Alexander, Sally 81, 82, 140, 179 alienation effects (Verfremdungseffekt) 74 All You Need is Dynamite (1968) 168, 171 Althusser, Louis 4, 11, 79, 156–​7 Amazing Equal Pay Show, The (1974) 243–​4, 246 Amber Films 14, 168–​81, 308 Andrews, Nigel 252 Angry Arts 131 Annan Committee 287, 315 Antonio da Mortes (1969) 6 Aperture Sweep (1973) 116 Argentina 4 Arise Ye Workers (1973) 56 Art is Power (1985) 194 art schools 8–​9, 10–​11 Artaud, Antonin 140

Artificial Eye 12 Artist Placement Group (APG) 189 Arts Council 8–​9, 10, 12 and community arts 125, 126 and Edinburgh Film Festival 301, 305 and LFMC 99–​100, 101, 102–​3, 158 and television 189 Arts Labs 126 Arzner, Dorothy 142 Ashley, Robert 190 Association of Broadcasting Staff (ABS) 188 Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) 15, 169, 188, 206 and IFA 282–​3, 285, 286 and nationalisation 314–​15 and women 245 and Workshop Declaration 307 At the Academy (1974) 110–​11 Atherton, Keith 194, 195, 201 Attille, Martina 209 audiences 92–​3, 94–​5, 96–​7, 98–​9, 102 and television 186 audition 42 Auguiste, Reece 211 Auto Italia LIVE Double Dip Recession (2010) 200 Auto Italia South East 199–​200

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Index avant-​garde 7, 14, 112–​13 and Edinburgh Film Festival 299–​303, 303, 304–​5 and semiotics 28, 32–​4 Baez, Joan 212–​13 Bailey, Francine 141–​2 Baker, Richard 187, 196–​8 Barber, George 194 Barthes, Roland 26, 29, 76 Battle of Algiers (1966) 274 Battle of Chile (1971) 60 Bauer, Ida 44 Bazin, André 29 BBC 14, 188, 189, 212, 313 Because I am King (1980) 79 Beckett, Samuel 48 Behindert (1974) 15, 231–​3, 234–​9 Bell, Sir Ronald 211 Bellour, Raymond 35 Benjamin, Walter 11, 107 Ben’s Arrest (1974) 128–​9 Berlin Horse (1970) 163–​4 Berman, Ed 125 Berwick Street Collective 56, 62, 64, 66, 112, 308 and Other Cinema 274 Better Books 91, 94 Bettshanger, Kent (1972) 243 Between Times (1995) 57, 58 Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) 205–​6, 207, 211–​12, 213–​14, 215 black filmmaking workshops 14, 205–​ 7, 209–​15, 310 black liberation 3 Blackwood, Maureen 209 Blood of the Condor (1969) 274, 275 Bowes Line (1975) 170, 173, 174

Brakhage, Stan 234 Branson, Richard 278 Brazil 4, 17 Breakwell, Ian 92 Brecht, Bertolt 7, 11, 13, 75–​6, 82 and history 73, 74, 77, 79–​80, 85n.2 Bred and Born (1983) 177 Breuer, Joseph 43 Brewster, Ben 26, 30, 36, 83 Bright Eyes (1984) 191 British Film Institute (BFI) 8, 9–​10, 11, 12, 83 and Amber Films 178 and broadcasting 315 and IFA 283, 285, 287, 290, 292, 294, 296 and LFMC 95, 98, 102, 103, 158 and semiotics 26–​7, 28, 30 and women 242, 245 Broadcasting Act (1980) 315 Broadwalk (1972) 92 Burch, Noël 10, 33 Butler, John 201 Byker (1983) 168 Cahen, Robert 190, 201 Callaghan, James 282, 285, 288 campaign films 61–​2, 67–​9, 108–​9 Central Bazaar (1976) 233 Centre for Contemporary Studies 5–​6 Channel 4 12, 14, 16, 169, 189–​90, 192, 194–​5 and ethos 315–​17 and foundation 282, 285–​6, 292, 294–​5, 313 and Workshop Declaration 206–​7, 309, 311 Chartism 260, 267

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Index Chaudhuri, Shohini 43 Chile 4 Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) 60 Chodorov, Pip 118 Christie, Julie 49, 50 Chronicles of Anna Magdalena Bach, The (1968) 6 Cinema (magazine) 28 Cinema Action 56–​7, 61–​2, 63–​6, 108–​9, 177, 308 cinema novo 17 Cinema of Women 12 cinéma vérité 133–​4, 135, 234 Cinemantics (magazine) 28 cinemas 273, 274–​7 cinematography 51, 263–​6 Cinim (magazine) 27–​8, 99, 159 Cipher Screen (2009–​14) 117 Circles 14, 144–​5, 146–​7, 165 Cixous, Hélène 48, 53–​4 Clair, René 44 Clarke, Shirley 233, 234 Clarke, VeVe A. 141–​2 Clarke, Wendy 233 class consciousness 63–​4, 80–​1 Clayton, Sue 18–​20, 81, 292–​3 and Song of the Shirt 257, 258, 260, 263–​4 Clifford, James 170, 172, 180 Clouds (1969) 162 Co-​op see London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op Cobbing, Bob 91 Collins, Phil 199–​200 Collinson, Jonathan 263, 264 colonialism 205–​6, 207, 211–​12 Communications (journal) 26 community video 121, 125–​35 Condorelli, Celine 199–​200

Connolly, Maeve 199, 200 Conrad, Beverley Grant 142 Cooper, Lindsay 49 Corbyn, Jeremy 58 Cowie, Elizabeth 263 Critchley, David 200 Crosswaite, David 162–​3, 164 Crusz, Robert 209 Cuba 4 culture 59–​60 Curling, Jonathan 257, 258, 260, 263–​4 Curtis, David 8–​9, 10, 100, 103, 159 Dana, Jorge 33 David Holzman’s Diary (1967) 234 Davies, Anthony 57 Davies, Siobhan 50 Davis, Jo 192 Davis, John Scarlett 201 Debray, Régis 11 Delmar, Rosalind 140 Denham, Graham 169, 171 Deren, Maya 142, 143, 144, 146 Dickinson, Margaret 307 dictatorships 4 digital technology 107 Dignan, Michele 200 disability 231–​2, 233, 237–​8 distribution 94–​5, 97, 98, 101 and women 146 Doctor Zhivago (1965) 50 documentaries 113–​14, 233–​4; see also Tyneside Documentaries Donebauer, Peter 188 Dream On (1991) 168 dreams 50–​1 Dresden Dynamo (1971–​2) 143

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Index Dulac, Germaine 139–​40, 142, 143, 144, 146 Dunford, Mike 112 Dunlop, Andrew 98 Dupres, Maedee 50 Durgnat, Ray 91 Dusinberre, Deke 99–​100, 145, 219, 220, 223 Dwoskin, Stephen 10, 15, 91, 92, 274 and Behindert 231–​3, 234–​9 and LFMC 154–​5, 156 DynAmo (1972) 233, 274 Eatherley, Gill 116 Eco, Umberto 28–​9 economics 58–​9 Eden Valley (1995) 168 Edinburgh Film Festival 7, 9, 16, 76–​7 and avant-​garde 113, 299–​303, 303, 304–​5 and Feminism and Cinema 145–​6 and LFMC 96 and Women’s Event 142 Eisenstein, Sergei 33, 76 Electric Cinema Club 94, 274–​5 Eleventh Hour (TV series) 194, 286, 295, 316 Elwes, Catherine 117 End of a Tactic (1968) 131 Engel, Pam and Andi 6, 12 English, Rose 49 Espinosa, Julia Garcia 5 Europe 11 exiles 4 Expeditions (1983–​4) 211–​12 Faction Films 57 Fairbairn, Zoe 257, 259

fairy tales 246–​9, 250–​1, 254 Fall, The (1969) 273 Faraldo, Claude 276 Fata Morgana (1971) 274 feminism 4, 13, 14, 15 and audition 42, 43–​4 and criticism 32 and documentaries 133–​4 and history 81–​2, 140–​1 and politics 53 and Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair 252–​4 and temporal drag 262–​3 Festival of Underground Movies 94 Field, Simon 5, 7, 9, 11 Fighting the Bill (1970) 56, 62, 67, 69, 177 Film and History Project 257–​8, 260, 268n.2 Film as Fabric (2015) 116 Film from the Clyde (1972) 58, 62 film shows 94, 99, 101–​2 film technology 107–​8, 111–​18, 113, 114–​15, 160 Finney, Albert 273 First National Festival of Independent Film 6–​7 Flaherty, Robert 171, 172, 179, 180 Forbes, Jill 252, 253 Foucault, Michel 4, 77 Fountain, Alan 316 Four Corners Films 1–​2, 177, 308 Frampton, Hollis 10 France 3–​4, 17, 25–​6 Fraser, Nancy 81 Freire, Paulo 65, 69 Freud, Sigmund 41–​2, 43–​4, 48, 50 From Fibre to Frock (2013) 116

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Index From My Window (1987) 194 funding 8–​10, 12 Gai Savoir, Le (1969) 10, 273 Garnett, Tony 273 gay culture 3, 13 GEC 2 (1968) 61 George, Edward 211 Getino, Octavio 5, 12, 274 Gidal, Peter 2, 10, 92, 100 and Edinburgh Film Festival 302 and LFMC 155, 156–​7 and Other Cinema 274 and structural/​materialism 153–​4, 159–​60, 161–​2, 164–​5 and technology 111–​12, 113, 115 Glassworks (1977) 170, 173, 174–​5 Godard, Jean-​Luc 4, 10, 17, 33, 68–​9, 113 and Other Cinema 273 Gold Diggers, The (1983) 41, 42, 49–​51, 52, 53 Golding, Sally 117 Gopaul, Lina 211 Grade, Michael 296 Graft On! 127–​9 grants 8–​9 Great Britain 5–​7, 205–​6, 207–​9 Grunwick workers’ struggle 19, 59, 60–​1, 70–​2 Guerra, Ruy 274 Guy, Alice 138–​9, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146 Guzmán, Patricio 60 Haircut, The (1998) 57 Hall, David 186–​8, 189, 196–​9, 201 Hall, Stuart 209, 214, 259

Hall, Sue 128–​9, 189, 200–​1 Hallas, Roger 129, 135 Hamlyn, Nicky 92 Hands Off Student Unions (1972) 61 Handsworth Songs (1986) 213–​14 Hanet, Kari 26 Hang on a Minute (1983–​5) 192 Hangmen also Die! (1943) 75 Hartog, Simon 91, 92, 274, 308 Harvey, Sylvia 74, 91, 283 Haukka-​Pala/​A Bit To Bite (2009) 199 Haynes, Jim 127 Heath, Stephen 26–​7, 29, 31, 32–​3, 77, 86n.17 and Gidal 162 Henderson, Hamish 179 Herzog, Werner 274 High Row (1973) 170, 171, 173, 177–​9 Hill, Christopher 78, 79 Hill, Tony 92 history 6, 73–​4, 76–​82, 86n.17 History Group 82, 140–​1, 145 Hodson, Millicent 141–​2 Hoggart, Richard 6 Hollywood 11, 28, 75, 142 Hood, Stuart 10 Hopkins, John (Hoppy) 126–​8, 188–​9, 200–​1 Horelli, Laura 199 Horror Film 1 (1970) 115–​16 Hour of the Furnaces, The (1968) 5, 12, 67, 274 House Divided, A (1913) 146 Howe, Darcus 214 Hughes, Malcolm 220–​1, 223, 224 Huillet, Danielle 4 Hunter, Alexis 141 hysteria 51–​2

351

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Index I Married a Witch (1942) 44 Ice (1969) 274 ideology 30–​2, 35–​6 IFA see Independent Film-​Makers’ Association Iljon, Jeanette 98, 144 In Fading Light (1989) 168 In Search of Da Kat (1996) 57 In the Forest (1977) 79 Independent Film-​Makers’ Association (IFA) 6, 7, 11–​12, 15, 16, 63, 279–​81 and broadcasting 315 and chronology 286–​97 and history 281–​3, 284–​6 and members 283–​4 and set up 91 and social practice 83 and Workshop Declaration 308 Independent Film Workshops in Britain 1979 308–​9 Industrial Britain (1931) 174–​5 Inoperative Community 1 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) 273 Interaction 125 International Times (newspaper) 5, 94, 99, 127 Isaacs, Jeremy 285–​6, 295, 316 Italy 25, 27–​8 ITV 313, 315 Jarman, Derek 2 Johnson, Avril 211 Johnston, Claire 64, 75, 77–​8, 84 and feminism 81 and LWFG 243 and Nightcleaners 109 and Women’s Event 142

Jordine, Merdelle 49 Julien, Isaac 209, 210, 212 Juste le temps (1983) 190 Karlin, Marc 2, 57, 62, 274, 277 Keane, Tina 141, 165, 192 Kelly, Mary 47, 48–​9, 140, 141 Kensington Gore (1981) 199 Kidner, Dan 1 Kirchhoffer, Patrice 139 Kirkhope, Tony 278 Kleinhans, Chuck 130, 134 Kleist, Heinrich von 34 Konttinen, Sirkka-​Liisa 169, 171 Kramer, Robert 234, 274 Krikorian, Tamara 186 Kristeva, Julia 4, 29, 45 Kuhle Wampe (1932) 75 LA Law (TV series) 200 Lacan, Jacques 4 landscape film 114–​15, 219–​20, 221–​8 Larcher, David 274 Last Shift (1976) 170, 173–​4 Latham, John 189 Latin America 4–​5, 274 Launch (1973) 170, 176–​7 Lawson, David 211 Le Grice, Malcolm 2, 6, 7, 8, 92, 98 and 16mm film 109, 110 and avant-​garde 139 and LFMC 155, 158–​9 and Screen 32 and technology 115–​16, 160, 163–​4 Leacock, Richard 234 Leahy, James 10 Lee, Jennie 8 Leece, Mary Pat 145

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Index Leggett, Mike 92, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102 Lesage, Julia 133 LFMC see London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op Liberation Films 56, 66, 128, 130–​2 liberation politics 3 Light Reading (1978) 92, 143, 146 Linsley, Stafford 172–​3 Liss, Carla 95 Loach, Ken 273 London Film-​Makers’ Co-​op (LFMC) 2, 5, 6, 14, 91–​103, 108, 308 and 16mm film 118 and Dwoskin 232 and Edinburgh Film Festival 304 and Filmaktion 119n.27 and foundation 154–​6 and funding 158–​9 and IFA 288 and Other Cinema 274 and publications 157–​8 and structural/​materialism 153–​4, 159–​60, 162–​5 and women 145 and workshop 109–​11, 160–​1 London Women’s Film Group (LWFG) 15, 243–​51, 254 Love Show, The (1980) 191 Lowe, Peter 220–​1 Lucas Aerospace 57–​8, 60–​1, 72 Lupino, Ida 142 Lux, The 2, 14, 93 McBride, Jim 234 MacCabe, Colin 29, 80, 171 McGrath, John 79 McKay, James 98 McKenzie, Midge 243

Mad Professor 211, 213 Mädchen in Uniform (1931) 142 Madden, Sue 141 Man with a Movie Camera (1973) 162–​3 Man with Mirror (1976) 116 Mangolte, Babette 51 manufacturing 58–​9 Mare’s Tail (1969) 274 Marker, Chris 4, 68, 69 Marsh-​Edwards, Nadine 209 Marshall, Stuart 186, 190–​1, 200 Martin, Murray 169, 170, 171, 175–​6, 178 Marxism 11, 156–​7 Mathison, Trevor 211, 214 Matusow, Harvey 91, 94 MayDay Rooms 2, 57 Mazur, Marilyn 50 Meacher, Michael 282, 284, 285, 290, 291, 308 Mekas, Jonas 94, 95, 234 Mellors, Nathaniel 200 Metz, Christian 26, 27, 28–​30, 31, 32, 34 Meyer, Andy 91 Millet, Kate 142 Miners’ Film, The (1975) 56–​7, 62 Mitchell, Juliet 140 Moore, Jack Henry 127 Moore, Stuart 115 Mori, Marceline 186 Morris, Meaghan 253–​4 Mulvey, Laura 2, 16–​18, 34, 142, 301 and feminism 53, 81–​2 and History Group 140, 141 and LFMC 100 and semiotics 44–​5

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Index music 45, 46 music videos 13 Myles, Lynda 16, 142, 299, 301–​2, 304–​5 narrative cinema 44 Neiman, Catrina 141–​2 New American Cinema 5 New Cinema Club 275 New Left Review (journal) 11 Newbury, Darren 170 Newsreel Collective 56, 66, 137n.26, 274 Nicolson, Andrew 98 Nicolson, Annabel 92, 116, 144, 145, 165 and River Yar 226, 227 Nightcleaners (1972–​5) 2, 35, 62, 265, 274 and technology 109, 113 Non-​Aligned Movement 11 Not a Penny on the Rent (1968) 61 Not I (Beckett) 48 Notting Hill Carnival 212, 216n.9 No.w.here 2 Often During the Day (1979) 146 O’Neill, Pat 201 oppression 3–​4, 7 Other Cinema, The 12, 16, 83, 273–​8, 290 Outrage, The (1995) 57 Outside In (1981) 233 Paik, Nam June 185, 197, 198, 200–​1 Pappenheim, Bertha 43, 44 Paris uprisings 3 Parker, Kayla 115 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 27–​9

Passion of Remembrance (1986) 215 passivity 74–​5 Penthesilia, Queen of the Amazons (1974) 34, 43, 113, 265 People of Ireland (1970) 56 Perfect Lives/​Private Parts (1983–​4) 190 Pesaro Film Festival 27–​8 Pinter, Harold 273 Plan, The (2016–​) 56, 58, 60–​1 Plaschkes, Otto 273 Plowright, Molly 304 Poland 194 political modernism 74, 75, 81 politics 3–​8, 11, 63–​4, 67–​9 and feminism 53 and semiotics 33–​4, 35 and Thatcher 12 and women 17 Politkino 6 Pollock, Griselda 141 Pontecorvo, Gillo 274 Pope, Greg 116–​17 Portrait de Dora (1976) 48 Portrait of Jason (1967) 234 Post-​Partum Document (1973–​9) 47, 48–​9 Poster Film Collective 56, 57, 308 Potter, Sally 2, 49, 50, 52 Pound, Stuart 98 Priya (2009) 114–​15 production 58–​60 psychoanalysis 13, 41–​2, 43–​4, 45, 48, 51–​2 public discourse 82–​3, 84 publishing 11 Punishment Park (1971) 276 punk music 13, 293 Pursuit of Happiness (2008) 168

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Index Raban, William 15, 92, 99, 100 and documentaries 113–​14, 115 and River Yar 219–​20, 221–​2, 224–​6, 227–​8 race 49, 207–​9, 210–​11, 213–​14 Radical Film Network 2, 63 Rainer, Yvonne 5 Rank (Odeon) 273, 274 Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1978) 15, 34–​5, 242–​3, 245–​54 Ratledge, Mike 45, 46 Reach (2014–​15) 115 realism 31, 63 Redmark Gallery 94 Reel Time (1973) 116, 117 Rees, Al 98, 110 remediation 47–​50 repetition 51–​2 Rewind: British Artists’ Video in the 1970s and 1980s 2 Rhodes, Lis 92, 100, 138–​40, 141–​4, 146–​7, 165 and television 192, 201 Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) 10, 41–​2, 43, 44–​7, 53, 252–​3 River Yar (1971–​2) 15, 114, 219–​20, 221–​3, 224–​8 Roach, Colin 210, 211 Robakowski, Józef 194 Roberts, Peter 169, 170, 174, 176, 179–​80 Rocha, Glauber 6, 274 Rodowick, D.N. 74 Ronay, Esther 242–​3, 245, 246, 250–​1 Room Film 1973 (1973) 162 Rouch, Jean 65, 66, 233 Route One: USA (1989) 234 Rowbotham, Sheila 78, 81, 82 Rushdie, Salman 214

Sagan, Leontine 142 Sainsbury, Peter 9–​10, 34, 178, 273 salvage documentaries 170, 172–​3, 179 Samuel, Raphael 6, 78, 179 Sanjines, Jorge 274 Sankofa Film 205–​6, 207, 209–​10, 212, 215 Scala Cinema 277–​8 Schneeman, Carolee 234 Scott, James 100, 274 Scottish Television 189 Scratch artists 193–​4 Screen (journal) 11, 13, 75–​6, 159–​60 and semiotics 26, 29–​30, 32 Screen on the Green 12 screenings 11–​12, 94, 99 Seacoal (1985) 168 Seashell and the Clergyman, The (1927) 140 semiotics 25, 26–​36, 44–​5 Serpent, The (1997) 57 Serra, Richard 185 Serve and Obey (1972) 243 Shadow of a Journey (1980) 192 Shapiro, Susan 242–​3, 246, 249, 250 Shepherd’s Bush (1971) 160 Sherwin, Guy 92, 100–​1, 110–​11, 116 Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (1979) 41, 42, 44, 48, 51–​2 Silent Cry (1977) 233 Silverman, Kaja 42, 45, 46 Sinden, Tony 186 Sitney, P. Adams 5 Sjöström, Åsa 247 Smiling Madame Beudet, The (1922) 140, 142, 146 Smith, John 92

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Index Snow, Michael 302 So That You Can Live (1982) 57, 62, 80 socialism 78 Solanas, Fernando 5, 12, 274 Song of the Shirt, The (1979) 2, 10, 15, 19, 257–​63, 267–​8 and cinematography 263–​7 and social practice 83–​4 Sony 121–​3 Soviet Union 7, 194 Sparrow, Felicity 97, 139–​40, 144, 145, 146–​7 Sprung, Steve 13, 56–​72, 112 Spry, Caroline 316 Stark, Mary 116 Starting to Happen (1974) 66, 131–​2 Stein, Gertrude 41–​2, 43 Stein, Susan 144, 145 Steveni, Barbara 189 Stoneman, Rod 11, 98, 308–​9, 316 Straub, Jean-​Marie 4, 302 structural/​materialism 92, 153–​4, 158, 159–​60, 161–​5 and Gidal 111, 113, 115 Syed, Alia 114–​15 Systems Group 221, 224 T Dan Smith (1987) 168 Tammes, Diane 46 Taylor, Barbara 81, 82 Tebbit, Norman 310–​11 technology 13–​14 television 14, 29, 57, 185–​201; see also Channel 4 Territories (1984) 205, 206, 207, 208–​9, 210–​11, 212–​13 Terry, John 288

Thatcher, Margaret 12, 16, 58, 282, 285, 292, 308 and broadcasting 315 theatre 82 Themroc (1973) 276 There is a Myth (1984) 192 Third World 4–​5, 11 This is a Television Receiver (1976) 187–​8, 196–​8 Thompson, E.P. 78 Three Lives (1971) 142 Thriller (1979) 49, 52–​3 time travel 261–​7 tours 100, 102 Tout va bien (1972) 181 trade unions 13, 60, 62, 188; see also Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians Tree (1974) 114 Trevelyan, Humphrey 100, 274 trigger films 130–​1 TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces) (1971) 189 Twilight City (1989) 215 Tyneside Documentaries 168, 170–​81 UCS 1 (Upper Clyde Shipbuilders) (1971) 56, 70, 177 Undercut (magazine) 99, 101 universities 6, 10, 12–​13 Venus 249 video 14, 265–​6 Video 1, 2 and 3 (1985) 194–​5 video artists 188–​91, 193–​8, 199–​201, 282 video technology 121–​35

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Index View (1970) 221 Virago 141 Walsh, Raoul 304–​5 Warner, Michael 81 Watkins, Peter 276 Waugh, Thomas 134 Wearing, Gillian 199 Weeks, Jeffrey 78 Weiland, Joyce 142 Welfare State 257–​61, 267–​8 Welsby, Chris 15, 92, 102, 113–​14, 115 and River Yar 219–​22, 226, 227–​8 Whitehead, Peter 273 Whitmore, Sir John 276 Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983) 210–​11 Whole Different Ball Game: Voortrekker Ruck, A (1994) 57 Wieland, Joyce 5 Willemen, Paul 76, 77, 78, 171, 304–​5 Williams, Christopher 63 Williams, Raymond 78, 80, 186 Wilson, Harold 282, 286, 288 Wind Vane (1972) 114 Winham, Francine 242–​3, 246, 248 Winstanley (1975) 79, 277 Wiseman, Frederick 234 With Child (1983) 192, 193 Wollen, Peter 2, 7, 17, 63, 301, 305 and political filmmaking 63 and semiotics 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34 and technology 112–​13, 114

Woman’s Place, A (1971) 131, 142 women: and black filmmaking 215 and criticism 32 and filmmakers 138–​40, 141–​7, 165 and labour 83–​4 and listening 48 and lost directors 14 and semiotics 44–​5 and television 191–​3 and welfare state 257–​61, 267–​8 see also feminism; London Women’s Film Group Women of the Rhondda (1971–​3) 243 Women’s Film Television and Video Network (WFTVN) 293, 295 women’s liberation 3, 4, 5, 17 Woolley, Steve 278 workers’ movements 13 Working Papers in Cultural Studies (journal) 29 Workshop Declaration 15, 16, 206–​7, 307–​11 Writing in the Sand, The (1991) 168 Wyver, John 200, 313–​14 Yahya, Bennett 160 Year of the Beaver, The (1985) 58, 62, 64, 68, 70–​2 Zarate, Oscar 274–​5 Zephaniah, Benjamin 211 Zorn’s Lemma (1970) 10

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