A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain 9781838710958, 9781844570966
In recent years the use of film and video by British artists has come to widespread public attention. Jeremy Deller, Dou...
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Acknowledgments

This book was commissioned by and would not have seen the light without the encouragement of Rob White, sadly no longer an editor at the BFI. Rebecca Barden and Tom Cabot have ably picked up the project and steered it to its conclusion. The following friends read the manuscript at various stages, and their comments and corrections have enormously improved it: A.L. Rees, Felicity Sparrow, William Raban, Guy Sherwin, Christophe Dupin, Malcolm Le Grice and Mike O’Pray. Biddy Peppin has lived with it as long as I have, and I’m grateful for her patience and her deft sub-editing. My colleagues at the Study Collection Steven Ball and Lara Thompson have been supportive throughout, and our intern Poppy Shibamoto helped organise many of the images. Gary Thomas at Arts Council England generously supported the making of colour plates, which we all believed was essential to this project. Too many individual artists to list here have replied to arcane questions and searched through cupboards for images, and I’m grateful to them for their support. All errors of fact and thought that remain are mine alone. D.C., June 2006

Introduction Artists : Economics

ARTISTS At the end of the 1920s, as commercial film production in Britain appeared on the edge of extinction, and as cinema as a silent art form seemed threatened by the literalness of sound recording, artists and writers joined the debate about film’s future and potential. Particularly, they questioned cinema’s dependence on visually opened-up but intellectually cut-down versions of stage melodramas. In ‘An Open Letter to the Film Industry and to All Who are Interested in the Evolution of the Good Film’ the Hungarian photographer, film-maker and teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, living in London, wrote: Shall we look on while the film, this wonderful instrument, is being destroyed before our eyes by stupidity and dull-witted amateurism? The unbiased observer cannot fail to see, to his great distress, that the film production of the world is growing more and more trivial every year. To the trained eye and mind, the present-day film can give no pleasure”1.

Moholy argued that the industry’s exclusion of ‘the experimental film creator [and] the free independent producer’ was bringing about its own downfall, and urged support for a ‘pioneering group’ of makers (himself no doubt included). More radically, Virginia Woolf speculated that cinema had yet to realise its potential as a purely visual language, in which

‘thought could be conveyed by shape more effectively than by words’.2 This book is about how artists living and working in Britain3 have continued this debate about the moving image’s potential. It is a history of artists’ engagement with the moving image in all its forms. The term ‘artist’ in this context is not confined to those painters and sculptors who occasionally make films (though they too made their contribution), but identifies people who have worked with the moving image with a particular freedom and intensity, often in defiance of commercial logic, and knowingly risking the incomprehension of their public. Importantly, film and video art as discussed here is not a phenomenon restricted to one

2

INTRODUCTION

form of exhibition space. Some artists have responded specifically to the darkened void of the cinema, others to the seat-less white cube of the gallery, yet others to domestic spaces and even television. For many the ideal space in which to show moving images has yet to be designed, and this history is in part that of an ongoing search for a more equitable maker–viewer relationship. At the same time, most artists are pragmatists as well as visionaries and have accepted the necessity of working with whatever space is closest to hand. In the 1920s, Fernand Léger (one of the artform’s patron saints) could only show Le Ballet mécanique in cinemas because they were the only places equipped with the 35mm projector his film required, but who can say what his ideal showing space might have been? 4 The museum-world’s frequent assumption that the only significant film and video artists are those who design their works for the gallery and sell them in limited editions has distorted many national collections and is indefensible in terms of what it leaves out. By this logic, museums should be stripped of all paintings not originally designed for their spaces. Out would go works made for chapels, cardinals’ bedrooms, eighteenth-century dining rooms and nineteenth-century bourgeois sitting rooms, together with all prints and drawings, most photographs, etc. This book therefore takes an inclusive view of the subject, as museums should. The subject matter in artists’ films often reflects that of painting and poetry – portraits, still lives, the relationship of abstract forms, responses to landscape and particular environments, reflections upon the major events and stages in life, memory, identity, politics, human relationships. And, like other art forms, film reflects upon the nature of its own medium. And while some film artists work alone and conform to the stereotype of the solitary figure in the studiogarret, many work on projects with a close group of friends, and some act as the head of a team of professional collaborators – where, in this respect, their method becomes indistinguishable from that of mainstream cinema directors. Often in this history, success for an individual has depended upon the existence of the critical mass of a group of sympathetic peers. For this reason, London as a cosmopolitan centre with a large media industry and strong international connections has proved an irresistible magnet, with which artists based in the regions have had at very least to negotiate a relationship.5 The terms ‘artists’ film’ and ‘artists’ video’ have only gained anything like wide acceptance in recent times. In the early days of cinema no film-makers described themselves as artists, though as the language of film developed during the inter-war period, terms such as ‘the art of film’ and ‘film art’ were widely employed in magazines such as Close Up.6 Len Lye, Britain’s first internationally important film artist, was described as ‘an artist’ in the 1929 Film Society programme note that introduced the screening of his first film Tusalava, but probably because he was still primarily associated with painting and sculpture.7 And even towards the end of his film-making career, Lye referred to himself as ‘an experimental film-maker’ rather than film artist, perhaps to distinguish himself within the group of painters and kinetic artists with whom he associated.8 Humphrey Jennings – another major figure in this history – painted, organised exhibitions, took photographs and wrote poetry in addition to his prolific film-making, and discussed the creative process most readily in terms of poetry, but he too never

ECONOMICS

described himself as a film artist, and would probably have been content with Lindsay Anderson’s description of him as ‘the only real poet the British Cinema has yet produced’.9 In the post-war period, the committee of the BFI’s (British Film Institute) newly established Experimental Film Fund defined one of its aims as being ‘to explore proposals to give the creative artist, such as the painter or composer, much closer control over the design and production stages of a film’,10 but the context remained firmly that of the development of the commercial feature film. More self-evidently ‘artist film-makers’ were the several painters and sculptors and conceptual artists who in the early 1970s occasionally made films alongside their full-time practice in other media. Some made records of the evolution of works in other media (Liliane Lijn), others extended their painterly or sculptural ideas into a time-based form (William Pye), and some indeed made full-blooded time-based works in their own right (David Hall). Some of these film-making artists were the first recipients of funding from the Arts Council; others were among the few who had their work shown in commercial galleries during the same period. The term ‘artists’ film’ was possibly first officially used in the context of the setting up of an ‘Artists’ Films Sub-Committee’ by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1972, in response to what the Council then perceived to be a ‘new activity’. But while happy to apply for ‘funding for artists’, the majority of applicants to the Arts Council would generally refer to themselves as ‘film-makers’, because film was their primary medium (following Lye, a decade earlier). When their video equivalents arrived in the mid-1970s they more helpfully answered to the title of ‘video-artist’, but this was primarily to distinguish themselves from their dominant film-making cousins. Throughout the 1980s the terms film-maker, film-artist, experimental film-maker, and video-artist came to be used fairly indiscriminately, and embraced the growing number of artists who worked at the margins of the film or television industries, and who made what in industry terms would be described as experimental works. The term ‘independent’ was equally widely used from the early 1980s onwards, partly as a mark of solidarity with the contemporary political film avant-garde, but later with the growing number of wholly commercial independents, it, too, lost most of its earlier associations. In the mid-1990s a generation of artists who worked exclusively in film or video, but who exhibited primarily in the gallery, chose deliberately to style themselves as ‘artists’ plain and simple, keen to stress that they were operators in the art-world of commercial dealers and public collections. Now in the 21st century, all these terms – plain ‘artists’, ‘film-artists’, ‘video-artists’ and ‘film-makers’ – have currency.

ECONOMICS One factor that has shaped the history of artists and film more than any other has been the absence, till very recently, of any form of commercial market for the works produced. The moving image has been an art form uniquely devoid of its own sustaining economy. The artists’ films we have from the inter-war period, before public subsidy to artists was available, consist of sponsored films or of one-off experiments made covertly at the film

3

4

FILM AND FINE ART

industry’s margins, and works by a very few well-connected amateurs. The former involved the serious compromise of working at the government’s or a commercial manufacturer’s behest, yet these include almost all the works that made the reputations of Jennings and Lye; the latter remained few in number because artists found no way of recovering their costs. It was not until the mid-1980s with the advent of Channel Four that public broadcasting became an intermittent source of income for a very few artists, and not till the mid-1990s that any were able to make a living by selling to individual collectors and public collections. To survive, the majority have always had to find work in some other film-related field; in education (which began to take film seriously in the mid-1970s), or technical support of the commercial industry (camera-person, editor, etc.), or the sponsored film in its new guises: the corporate film; TV advertising; the music video. Public subsidy – available from the BFI from the 1950s and from the Arts Council and its Regional Arts Associations from the 1970s – never provided artists with an income, though it may have given the lucky few a psychological boost at significant moments in their careers, and did provide some of the infrastructure of workshops and viewing spaces that made film and video-making an attainable dream for many more. A commercial industry containing many more independent cinemas and producers, and the earlier development of a multi-channel broadcasting environment might have encouraged the development of a niche market for artists’ film. But, in practice, artists have fared little better in countries where the film and television industries were more open and less monopolistically structured than in Britain.11 Thus the historic problem for artists, and all independent voices in the moving-image area, has been the fundamental disparity between the high material costs of film-making and the low likely return from distribution and sales. To an individual maker, the price of film equipment and film laboratory charges – both based on the economics of the feature film and television – remained prohibitively high throughout most of the 20th century. This imbalance only began to change with the development of a widespread amateur market based on 16mm and 8mm/Super 8 film equipment in the 1960s and 1970s, then video cameras and recorders in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the arrival of professionalstandard video-editing systems designed for home computers in the late 1990s. It was the advent of DVD players and reliable video projection equipment also in the 1990s that reawoke the interest of the commercial art market, dormant after a brief flurry in the early 1970s, making artists’ films and videos a viable saleable commodity, and so providing a chosen few artists with a return on their outlay. Low-budget methods therefore feature strongly in the history of artists’ film and video. These include using borrowed or ‘amateur’ equipment; making collage-films from waste footage found in industry dustbins, or abstract imagery hand-painted or scratched directly into the filmstrip, or silent films (avoiding the complicated apparatus of recording and synchronising film-sound). The desire to minimise costs also helped motivate the setting up of production collectives and workshops – such as Unit Five Seven, the London Film-makers’ Coop (LFMC), the Berwick Street Film Collective, London Video Arts, and Sankofa. For some artists, the classic cinema-theatre developed by the commercial film industry

ECONOMICS

not only failed as a source of income, but fell short as a social space. The dream shared by many has been to show work in a domestic-scale setting – where repeated viewings might lead to greater familiarity – as through re-reading a piece of literature or re-viewing a painting12. The film clubs run by and for film enthusiasts that came into being in the 1920s established another context, and introduced a tradition of alternative viewing-spaces that continues till today. A domestic scale was also the appeal of Super 8 film – adopted by several artists in the 1980s, notably Derek Jarman, whose enthusiasm did much to promote its use, often showing work in his own loft. Some tried to sell copies of their works on this home-movie format, though the practice never extended beyond a core of enthusiasts. But the dream of an alternative home-based market began to become more credible in the 1990s with the advent of personal libraries of VHS tapes and DVDs. If unlikely to make an income from the exhibition of their work, artists could at least try to influence its distribution. The idealism of film society enthusiasts replicated itself – particularly in the post-war years – in small specialist commercial film distributors, some of whom added artists’ films to their lists. But more typically, artists developed strategies for self-promotion and collective distribution, notions which first seriously took root in the mid-1960s, following precedents established in the USA. A history of the changing patterns of activity and of the changing definitions of ‘artists’ film/video’ in Britain could be constructed entirely from the pages of the many limited-circulation magazines and books self-published by artists and others over the decades. Magazines such as Close Up and Film Art, from the 1920s–30s, Sequence (which spawned Free Cinema) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cinim in the 1960s, Afterimage in the 1970s, and Independent Media, Undercut, and Filmwaves in the 1980s and 1990s, have marked the emergence of new movements and theories, provided space for manifestos and warnings against errors of thought and practice, and recorded the ongoing business of self-definition. Artists have never been slow to talk-up the distinctiveness of their own work, and to theorise the ideas that had shaped it. And in the absence of interest from the daily press, many have by default become reviewers of their own and colleagues’ works. If the odds against progress have sometimes seemed overwhelming, the history of artists’ film has been characterised by an inextinguishable optimism; a sustaining belief that a production and distribution economy, and appropriate viewing spaces might one day be established. The first part of this book provides an account of the many ways in which artists have responded to these challenges and circumvented the inevitable difficulties, inventing institutions, or adapting and influencing those they encountered, in order to get their work made and viewed. The second part describes some of their individual achievements.

NOTES 1. ‘An Open Letter from Moholy Nagy,’ Sight & Sound vol. 3 no. 10, 1934. 2. ‘The Cinema’ first published in Arts, June 1926; reprinted in Michael O’Pray (ed.), The British AvantGarde Film (Luton: Arts Council/University of Luton Press, 1996). 3. Its scope includes both artists born in Britain and those from elsewhere who have worked in Britain.

5

6

INTRODUCTION

4. Léger was however a friend of Frederick Keisler who designed the remarkable experimental film-screening space the Film Guild Cinema (1928) on 8th Street New York, in Keisler’s words an ‘entire building … as a plastic medium dedicated to the Art of Light’. Unpublished papers quoted in AFI Tribute to Anthology Film Archives’ Avantgarde Film Preservation Program (New York, MOMA 1977). 5. At least two thirds of the British-based moving-image artists listed in the LUX online distribution catalogue live in London. The proportion of artists represented by commercial dealers is probably even higher. 6. Following the lead of prior French avant-gardists – see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 7. Programme of 1 December 1929. 8. ‘Is Film Art?’, Film Culture, vol. 29, 1963; reprinted in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds), Figures 2 Frederick Keisler’s Film

of Motion: Len Lye/Selected Writings (Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 1984).

Guild Cinema, New York;

9. Sight & Sound, April–June 1954.

see Footnote 4.

10. ‘Experimental Film Fund 1951–9’ [uncredited], 1951–1976 Catalogue of BFI Productions (London: BFI, 1977). 11. Not least, the USA. 12. Perhaps most eloquently articulated in lectures by the American pioneer Maya Deren, where she proposed the idea of ‘chamber cinema’, as in chamber music; see Maya Deren, Essential Deren, Collected Writings on Film (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 2005).

Part 1

1.1 Artists The Film Society : Little Magazines : Internationalism and Festivals : Schooling Artists : The London Filmmakers Co-op : Into the Gallery : Video as Video : The 1990s

THE FILM SOCIETY Film-making by artists in Britain began in the second half of the 1920s and, as with many

(Opposite) Point Source,

such creative bursts, coincided with a period of intense speculation about the future of the art

Tony Hill, 1973.

form. In the last years of silent cinema, the commercial studios of France, Germany and Denmark had produced feature films that were highly individual, strongly visual and bore the mark of their individual authors – simultaneously expanding the language of commercial narrative film, and laying the foundations of today’s ‘art cinema’. But new technological developments, such as full-colour film stocks and reliable sound film technologies, seemed to change the nature of film radically, upsetting past certainties. And commercial film-makers throughout Europe were becoming anxious about the growing domination of production from the USA.

3 The logo designed by

In London, the Film Society1 (1925–39) provided a space for viewing new films and

E. McKnight Kauffer, spliced

encouraged debate about cinema. Its once-a-month screenings were run by a group of intel-

onto all film-prints shown by

lectuals from many different disciplines – film, literature, the visual arts – initially brought

The Film Society.

together by the desire to see foreign films, and the need to circumvent Britain’s cumbersome censorship and film licensing laws. Adrian Brunel and Ivor Montagu, both working at the fringes of the film industry, were two of the Society’s founders, and while artists such as the sculptor Frank Dobson, the painter/writer Roger Fry, the designer E. McKnight Kauffer, and the illustrator Edmund Dulac constituted a small minority among its members, they were none the less essential to its mix. The breadth of members’ professional interests was matched by the eclecticism of the Society’s programming. Typical of what was to follow, its first programme of 25 October 1925 included the wholly abstract animations Opus 2-3-4 (1923–5) by the German painter and later documentary maker

10

FILM AND FINE ART

4 Oskar Fischinger ‘at work’

Walther Ruttmann, the comedies How

on his Experiments in Hand

Bronco Billy Left Bear Country (Essanay USA

Drawn Sound (a staged

c. 1915), Champion Charlie (Chaplin /

publicity photo), Germany,

Essanay 1916), Brunel’s ‘burlesque’ Topical

1928.

Budget (1925), and Paul Leni’s expressionist feature film Waxworks (Germany 1924). Programmes regularly featured episodes from

5 (below) ‘Rayogrammed’

Mary Field and Percy Smith’s popular natural

strip from Le Retour à la

history series Secrets of Nature, reflecting

Raison, Man Ray, France,

Montagu’s training as a zoologist and interest

1923.

in scientific film, and might include demonstrations of new colour processes and sound-film systems, designed to be of interest to film industry members such as David Lean, Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock, and

experimentalists

alike.2

Oskar

Fischinger’s Experiments in Hand Drawn Sound (aka Ornament Sound 1932) were shown together with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s similar translation of images into sounds A B C in Sound (1933). Silent feature films were usually accompanied by a full orchestra, but even the problem of sound could be approached experimentally. Jack Ellitt, a modernist composer who was also Len Lye’s preferred sound editor, provided ‘non-synchronous’ musical accompaniments to silent films for the Society throughout the 1934–5 season. The Society made it possible for artists to see the work of their film-making contemporaries abroad. It staged the first English screenings of Rene Clair’s Entr’acte (France 1924), Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique (France 1924), and works by Sergei Eisenstein, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Germaine Dulac, Charles Scheeler and Paul Strand, Dziga Vertov, and many others, where possible introduced by their makers. In addition to Brunel and Montagu, British artists and experimenters who exhibited at the Society included Len Lye, John Grierson, Oswell Blakeston, Francis Bruguiere, Kenneth Macpherson, Desmond Dickinson, Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, the partnership of Anthony Gross and Hector Hoppin, and many others. The formal style of the Society’s programme notes, which refer to directors and technicians alike by their titles (‘Mr Richter’ etc.), evokes screenings received in respectful silence, but Montagu reports this was not always the case. Entr’acte appropriately provoked a near riot: cries and catcalls rang out, pundits within the audience came within an ace of punching each other. Frank Dobson was sitting near Clive Bell, whose excitement was fever pitch in defence of what he regarded as an unjustly denigrated opus of genius, Dobson murmured pensively afterwards: ‘Makes one [wonder] what they say of one’s own work, doesn’t it’.3

THE FILM SOCIETY

11

While it encouraged interest in film-making, the Society held back from direct involvement

6 The Film Society

in film production. However in 1929 it invited the German painter/film-maker Hans Richter

‘workshop’ group; with

to direct an experimental film-making workshop to accompany a lecture series given by

Richter (left) Eisenstein (with

Eisenstein. The workshop was held in an attic above Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road,

policeman’s helmet), Jimmy

and attended by (among many others) Eisenstein, Lye, and a young Basil Wright.4 But the

Rogers at the camera, Basil

Society’s focus remained firmly on exhibition and, almost by default, on distribution, as other

Wright (glasses and

societies and even commercial cinemas sought to show works that the Society had imported.

cigarette), Len Lye (extreme

The significance of the Society to Britain’s emerging film avant-garde was its function as a

right, seated) and others.

venue for showing work, and the promise it extended of a critical response from a group of interested peers. In this the Society acted as a role model for many similar groups throughout Europe and America. Politically inspired film-makers of the period had even greater reason to form groups in order to get their films seen while avoiding censorship. Kenneth Macpherson and Henry Dobb, the film critic of the left newspaper The Sunday Worker, had proposed a scheme to enable workers’ groups to see important films at a price they could afford. After a legal struggle with

12

ARTISTS

local authorities which seemed determined that the privileges of a film society should be restricted to the wealthier middle-classes, this was effectively realised by Ralph Bond and others with the setting up of the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies in 1929. A national distribution organisation Kino followed in 1934. The Federation brought together the interests of making and exhibiting groups such as the Socialist Film Council, the London Workers Film Group, and the Workers’ Film and Photo League (itself an association of amateur groups). Montagu left the Film Society to set up the Progressive Film Institute (its name a dig at the recently founded and strenuously 7 Peace and Plenty,

apolitical British Film Institute), which was to engage directly in political film-making, and to

Ivor Montagu with

distributed films such as Eisenstein’s Potemkin to leftist groups. The Depression of the early

Norman McLaren, 1939.

1930s, the rise of Fascism in Europe and the Spanish Civil War were reflected in the theme of films such as Bread (1934) made by the Workers’ Theatre Movement, Montagu’s Defence of Madrid (1937), made with animator Norman McLaren as cameraman, and his Peace and Plenty (1939).5

LITTLE MAGAZINES Film’s potential was debated in a growing body of critical writing in the 1920s and 1930s. Films screened at the Film Society and its more political counterparts were reviewed by the commercial film press with a mix of interest and suspicion. The Film Society’s founding coincided with, and contributed to, the beginnings of serious film journalism, and many Society regulars were also journalists in positions of influence. Iris Barry, another founder member, became a prominent film journalist in the 1920s, and established the role of film critic at the Daily Mail. Montagu was the first film critic of The Observer and The New Statesman. And reviews appeared in unexpected contexts such as the Architectural Review, where Oswell Blakeston discussed ‘Len Lye’s Visuals’, and previewed his own film made with Francis Bruguiere, Light Rhythms (1930).6 More important to the development of an active film-making culture were the debates generated in specialist film magazines. Of these, Close Up (1927–33) and Film Art (1933–37) were the most significant, though Robert Herring’s literary magazine Life and Letters Today (1928–50) also made an important contribution. Close Up was edited by Kenneth Macpherson from Kenwin, a modernist pavilion at Riant Chateau in Territet, Switzerland, built by his partner Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, heiress to a shipping fortune). This artistic pair together with the poet HD (Hilda Doolittle) formed Pool Films to produced three short films credited

LITTLE MAGAZINES

13

to Macpherson, and the feature-length work Borderline (1930), so Close Up viewed developments from the engaged perspective of practising film-makers.7 Its contents included a mix that would be familiar again in the little film magazines of the 1960s and 1970s; manifestos, theory, passionate and often highly subjective responses to new films, campaigns (for example against censorship) and trade gossip. In addition to its publishers, its regular writers included Blakeston, Herring, the author Dorothy Richardson (close friend of H. G. Wells) and the psychoanalysts Barbara Low and Hans Sachs, with occasional contributions by Gertrude Stein and many others. Eisenstein contributed nine articles over the years – including his first published writings in English. Close Up’s informal and often conversational style of journalism is typified by a long essay by HD on Dreyer’s The Passion and Death of a Saint [Joan of Arc], who wrote: I know in my mind that this is a great tour de force, perhaps the greatest. But I am left weary, a little defiant. Again why and why and why and just, just why? Why am I defiant before one of the most exquisite and consistent works of screen art and perfected craft that

8 Close Up – the cover image

it has been our immeasurable privilege to witness? [Later answering …] This great Dane Carl

is from Macpherson’s lost film

Dreyer takes too damn much for granted. Do I have to be cut into slices by this inevitable

Monkey’s Moon, 1929.

pan-movement of the camera, these suave lines to left, up, to the right, back, all rhythmical with the remorseless rhythm of a scimitar?. [etc.]

Close Up’s less well known (because more hand-to-mouth) but even more adventurous rival Film Art was edited and published by another film-maker, B. Vivian Braun, who also briefly ran the Forum Cinema, ‘London’s advance-garde cinema’.8 Like Close Up, Film Art included reviews and polemic by film-makers including Robert Fairthorne,9 Blakeston, Braun himself, Irene Nicolson and Andrew Buchanan, and guest articles by Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others. An article on ‘Abstract Film’ by S. John Woods was criticised in a letter by Man Ray who thought Woods had failed to understand Surrealism, and had mis-described Ray’s films as ‘experiments’: ‘I affirm that I have never tried to invent anything, and I have never made … an experiment. The discoveries and the accidents of science have provided ample means for a lifetime of experiment’.10 Braun and Basil Wright together wrote a ‘Manifesto Dialogue on Sound’ for the third issue in 1934, calling for its more imaginative use.

9 Flier for Film Art, 1934, and for two films now missing

INTERNATIONALISM AND FESTIVALS In Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, as in Europe and the USA, the international circulation of more experimental and political cinema was strongly opposed by the established commercial industry, and it became clear that one of the functions of film clubs and societies might be to

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ARTISTS

10 (right) The Themerson’s magazine fa, Poland, 1937.

11 (far right) B. Vivian Braun’s short-lived New Cinema.

develop international networks to facilitate the distribution of films. The importance of this role is reflected in a Film Society programme note that accompanied its screening of Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken’s Rain (1929), which makes much of the fact that its makers ‘are the principal officers of the Film Liga of Holland [1927–33] … with branches in each of the Dutch university towns. Through the principal activity of the Liga consists, as does that of this Society its chief model, in the study of otherwise rarely seen films, the officers have themselves produced several films’.11 Similarly, the notes for Manhatta (1926) by Sheeler and Strand and The Loves of Zero (1928) by Robert Florey give pre-eminence to the Film Art Guild of New York, ahead of the film-makers’ names.12 Through these networks, the Polish artists Stefan and Francisca Themerson, founders of Warsaw’s Co-op of Film Authors, visited London in 1936 and organised a programme of films by Lye, Grierson, Cavalcanti and Wright shown in Warsaw in 1937, and arranged for the publishing of articles by some of the artists (Lye, Grierson and Moholy-Nagy) in the first issue of their magazine ‘fa’ (the artistic film, 1937). Amos Vogel, who as a post-war refugee in New York would found the most influential film society of the period, Cinema 16 (1947–63), saw and was inspired by a programme of English films at a film society screening in Vienna in 1938. ‘The whole notion of documentary became important to me because of [Night Mail (1936)] … I realised that this was a really poetic film. … Song of Ceylon (1934) was also tremendously important to me’.13 To strengthen these international links, delegates at the Congrès de La Sarraz in Switzerland in 1929, including Montagu, Richter, Eisenstein, Franken, Alberto Cavalcanti from France, and the futurist artist Enrico Prampolini from Italy, attempted to set up an international association of film societies and cine clubs. Seven nations signed up to the ‘International League for the Independent Cinema’; the clubs’ common distrust of the influence of the commercial

INTERNATIONALISM AND FESTIVALS

15

12 La Sarraz group portrait including Walther Ruttman (striped shirt), Bela Balaz (next right), Eisenstein, Richter and Montagu (behind Ruttmann, to the left).

industry reflected in their resolution that ‘to maintain the character of the Leagues as non-profitmaking organisations, … no commercial or semi-commercial association could affiliate as a

13 Design by Pierre

voting member’. Support for production was also on the agenda. A ‘Cooperative de Film

Alechinsky (of the Cobra

Independent’ was to be located in Paris as a production centre, with 25,000 French francs to

group of artists) for the 1949

be raised as starting capital.14 This, like the International League itself, was a dream that came

Knokke Festival.

to nothing. More successfully, the La Sarraz meeting seeded the idea of regular gatherings of the international film avant-garde community, to screen work and exchange ideas, which was achieved over the following decades through a succession of experimental film festivals, forums and competitions. Experimental work featured at the Brussels International Film Festival in 1935, where Grierson could boast, ‘Great Britain carried off the first award and almost all the others in the documentary class’.15 Song of Ceylon won the documentary prize, and Lye’s Colour Box, which ‘defied all categories’, was awarded a special medal. But this was not yet a specialist experimental festival. These began after the war in 1949, when the Royal Belgian Film Archive held the first of its international experimental competitions, usually staged at the seaside town of Knokke-le-Zoute.16 Although the 1949 festival included new work from the USA by Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Sydney Peterson, Mary Ellen Bute, John and James Whitney and others, the European contribution to the event was predominantly retrospective – a

16

ARTISTS

review of the pre-war achievement – made poignant by the absence of so many of the artists represented: Richter, Man Ray, Mclaren, Moholy-Nagy, Lye and others, who had left Europe for the USA. The Knokke festivals ran irregularly till 1974, and represented a rare opportunity for successive generations of new artists from North America and Europe to meet and see each others’ work. The 1958 festival moved to Brussels to coincided with a World’s Fair, and made a feature of multiscreen films, including the three-screen Magirama by Abel Gance, pioneer of the form in 1926 with Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, and – a link across decades – Kenneth Anger’s The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) re-versioned in multi-screen for the festival. Stan Brakhage attended the 1958 festival and encouraged other young American artists to enter. Though I know American filmmakers are generally disillusioned about film contests, myself sharing the disillusionment in retrospect, I really feel that this contest will prove all it’s cracked up to be, and film will perhaps really be considered as an art form for the first time in its history. My correspondence with [Jacques] Ledoux [the festival director] only serves to strengthen this belief. You might pass this along.17

Americans who showed work included Hy Hirsh, Madeline Turtalot, Jordan and Jane Belson – whose work screened alongside that of the Europeans Georges Franju, Agnes Varda, Peter Kubelka, Roman Polanski, Robert Breer (then living in Paris), and others. At the 1963/64 Festival, Jack Smith, Ron Rice and Bruce Conner from the USA exhibited alongside Anthony Balch and Walerian Borowczyk from Europe; in 1967/8 Paul Sharits, Michael Snow and George Kuchar from the USA showed with Steve Dwoskin, Alfredo Leonardi, Willhelm and Birgit Hein, Yoko Ono, Jeffrey Shaw and John Latham from Europe. These encounters were also important to writers and critics. Karel Reisz showed his first film We are the Lambeth Boys (1958) at the 1958 festival, and reviewed the event for Sight & Sound, puzzling over the wisdom of bringing innovative feature films and experimental shorts into one programme. ‘The filmmaker who wants his work to connect with commercial production – either as a precedent or as protest – is after a different thing from the abstractionist and introvert who seeks an elite-cinema for the minority.’ Confessing his preference for the former, he found the work of Brakhage and Deren ‘symbol-happy’, but warmed to the ‘intricate symmetry and invention’ of Len Lye’s scratched animation Free Radicals (1957), which he compared to the work of J. S. Bach. The debate about what it was appropriate to include and exclude in experimental festivals would rumble on over the years. Also reviewing the 1958 festival, the un-named correspondent of the Continental Film Review regretted the absence of a stronger native movement in Europe: Over the past five years, we have, in a number of articles, dwelt on the lack of an avantgarde, an experimental school in Europe – a fact that the commercial cinema would regret in a future decade. There have been, of course, a number of avant-garde filmmakers who began their esoteric careers in the twenties and thirties and are today continuing their work (because

INTERNATIONALISM AND FESTIVALS

of the war) in other countries – particularly in America. This poses a number of interesting questions. How long, for instance, can one continue to be an experimentalist – invariably in the short film form? How long is it before experiment gels into a style that must give birth to works complete and repetitive? In other words, the experimental film is very much the sphere of the young filmmaker – for the most part amateur or the private work of a professional technician. The big surprise of the Brussels Competition has been the discovery of so many comparatively unknown filmmakers working in this field.18

[He] goes on to call for more cinemas to show this work, and for encouragement to be given to ‘genuine experimental film-makers – as distinct from merely amateur film-makers’. Also at Brussels in 1958 were several London-based film distributors, including Charles and Kitty Cooper of Contemporary Film (founded 1951), Bill Polanka of Connoisseur Films, and John Gillett from the BFI. From then onwards, these distributors began to license films by US and European artists for distribution in 16mm in Britain, and work by Deren, Varda, Breer, Brakhage and others began to be seen in Britain’s network of university and amateur film societies, now numbering over 600.19 By the time of the founding of the London Film-makers Co-op in 1966, there were already more than 50 works from the international inter- and post-war avant-garde in circulation in Britain.20 The nineteen-year-old American critic P. Adams Sitney (already publishing his magazine Filmwise) attended the 1963 festival, and later admitted that ‘many of the filmmakers whose work I have most been most deeply concerned with I first encountered at that 1963 competition’.21 Michael Kustow, newly appointed director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), was at the 1967/68 festival, and describes the experience of being a festival audience-member, and the reception of Don Levy’s experimental feature Herostratus (1967), soon to open the ICA’s new cinema. [The screening] began at midnight and finished well after 2a.m. It held the audience of a thousand people absolutely rapt. More remarkable still, those thousand people had been watching films solid for the previous five days, ten hours a day. […] The audience … consisted of the most difficult spectators in the world: filmmakers judging each other’s work. For days we had watched Underground American movies shot in superimposed images on 16mm stock (naked boys wrapped in the Stars and Stripes); French hommages a Genet (electronic music and lowering homosexuals); a Japanese film of unbelievable sadism [The Embryo (1966) by Koji Wakamatsu], which I counted the most despicable work I’ve ever seen (and of which the director wrote ‘I want very much to let the world know that such fantastic films are being produced in Japan one after another’); films made by computers (a cybernetic mountain labouring for a year to produce an eight-minute animated molehill). Our eyes were aching, red-rimmed. We were suffering from severe anxiety symptoms, the sort … that come when you’ve sat through ten cinematic stinkers in a row, flee to the bar and grab a drink, and are suddenly hit (laughter, cheering from the auditorium) by the terrible fear that maybe the eleventh film was the film, the jewel beneath the garbage pile.22

17

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14 Steve Dwoskin at a festival in Mannheim in November 1975 (anticipating Spain’s rebirth).

Stephen Dwoskin (from London) won the Solvay Prize at the 1967/68 Knokke event and, perhaps encouraged by this success, a larger English contingent including Anthony McCall, 15 Poster design by

Mike Dunford, Richard Woolley and Anna Ambrose (all prize winners), David Hall and Tony

Dwoskin for the second NFT

Sinden, William Raban and Marilyn Halford participated in the 1974/75 festival. Peter Gidal

Avant-garde Festival, 1973.

reviewed it for Studio International, using the occasion to note juror Sitney’s failure to understand structural film properly, and to lament the Belgian pre-selectors’ preference for ‘quasi-surrealist meanderings’, which had led to the exclusion of his own and John Du Cane’s work from the official competition. Le Grice, he reported, boycotted the event ‘out of principled opposition to the competitive aspect of the festival’.23 In Europe, other experimental festivals began to fill the gap years between the Knokke events: the 2mme Festival du film de demain in Basel in 1954 (where, surprisingly, the American James Broughton represented Britain24), Oberhausen with its focus on the whole range of short films from 1958, the Rencontres Internationales Jeune Cinema at Hyeres/Toulon from 1968 to 1983, and a series of International Avantgarde Festivals held at the BFI’s National Film Theatre in London in 1970, 1973 and 1979, organised by various English experimental film groups.25 In contrast to Knokke and Toulon, and in the spirit of the times, these London festivals were definitively non-competitive and consciously a gathering of the tribes. In the 1970s, art-exhibition organisers began to take interest in the moving image. Prospect 71 Projection

INTERNATIONALISM AND FESTIVALS

19

in Dusseldorf was exclusively devoted to lens-

16 The avant-garde moves

based media and both video and film made

outside London to meet the

a strong showing at Documenta 6 (1977),

independent sector; the Bristol

with Hall showing alongside Paik, Emshwiller,

festival of 1975.

Douglas Davis, Joan Jonas, Kubota Shigeko and others from the USA and Japan, and Le Grice, Raban and McCall showing with Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and artists from the Lodz Workshop of Film Form.26 By the 1980s the field of avant-garde festivals was fragmenting, and both national and international events in Britain as elsewhere began to specialise in particular areas – the short film, animation, experimental film, video, expanded cinema and installation, and, later in the 1990s, interactivity

17 International visitors to

and digital work.

the1973 festival: Kurt Kren,

A series of national events in Britain in the 1970s announced that the many forms of the moving image were now firmly established, not just in London but in many of England’s regional cities. The First National Festival of Independent Film was held in Bristol in 1975, and brought together the avant-garde of artists with a political film-making wing, under the stewardship of the newly formed lobbying group, the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA) founded the previous year. Reviewing the event in his regular column ‘Visions’ in Studio International, Le Grice questioned ‘the main underlying assumption of the festival’, and observed ‘there can be very little point of contact between Mike Dunford and Derek Jarman’ (the former a politically-minded formalist; the latter an unrepentant Romantic/gay activist). But he concluded that: there were sufficient points of contact between some of those working within political groupings and experimental makers to convince me that the process [of bringing them together] should continue. The experimental film-makers should continue to be exposed to the problem of ‘accessibility’, counteracting the tendency to become simply incorporated into the ‘art-world’ where the formally sophisticated audience is most readily found. At the same time, the political film-makers should be made aware of the poverty of sensibility and reactionary conventionality of much of their film-form. That the process of interaction can be productive was shown most by Night Cleaners (1975) by the Berwick Street Collective27.

This debate on form and content was taken up by an International Forum on Avant-garde Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976, with Le Grice, Marc Karlin of the Berwick Street Collective, Annette Michelson, Hollis Frampton and many others as speakers,28 amplified by Peter Wollen’s influential article ‘The Two Avant-gardes’ of 1975.

Tom Chomont, Jonas Mekas (and Cynthia Beat). Polaroid portraits by Roger Hammond.

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In the summer of 1975 ‘The Video Show – first festival of independent video’, held at the Arts Council’s Serpentine Gallery in London, was the first substantial British survey of this still-new medium. Under a poster-headline proclaiming ‘Television has been attacking us all of our lives, now we can fight it back’ (the words of Korean/US video-pioneer Nam June Paik), it, too, pursued an inclusive selection policy, bringing together tapes by many community and political groups, work by international artists such as Dan Graham, William Wegman and the Vasulkas, and installations and performances by rising British stars such as David Hall, Susan Hiller and Tamara Krikorian. The month-long programme included a repertory of tapes shown on monitors. Some American tapes came with the smart logo of the Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery, New York, on the front – introducing the novelty of a well-heeled commercial gallery with a substantial stake in moving-image media. Interest by British galleries had been limited; many British artists disapproved of limited-edition works in principle; certainly any hope that a market might develop in Britain proved premature. But the Serpentine show was widely reported in the art and even daily press. 18 Video arrives: The Video

Expanded cinema – multi-screen work and films with a live performance element – had been

Show, Serpentine Gallery,

a feature of the 1973 London festival. In the Village Voice, Mekas recognised the importance

1975

to the British scene of this new form: Some of the best work done by the London film-makers is in the area of ‘expanded cinema’. … they are not repeating history: the London group picked up (or overlapped) what was done in New York and San Francisco and went further …The London school is deep into structural researches into process art, and formal explorations of space.29

The year 1976 saw a whole festival devoted to gallery-based installations at the Expanded Cinema Festival at the ICA in London, selected by a committee led by Ron Haselden and Tony Sinden with a catalogue edited by Deke Dusinberre and Gray Watson. Caroline Tisdall bravely summarised the artists’ aims for readers of The Guardian: Most of these filmmakers are involved in some kind of examination of the medium itself. They explore the nature of film, the cine-camera or projector, rather than telling stories … Many use quite modest means, 8mm film being as frequent as 16mm. Some experiment with multiscreen projection, as Warhol did. Others extend the concept of cinema so the projector or beams of light that bring the image to the screen become part of the area of interest; almost a sculpture of light and space. The time and duration aspect fascinates others and is analysed or demonstrated in anything from four minutes to seven hours.

30

INTERNATIONALISM AND FESTIVALS

21

19 (above) David Hall and Tony Sinden’s 101 TV Sets, at the Serpentine’s The Video Show.

20 (left) Marilyn Halford performing Hands, Knees and Boomsa Daisy, 1973, as illustrated in the catalogue to the ICA Expanded Cinema Festival, 1976..

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David Hall and Tony Sinden’s installation 101 TV Sets (1975) had been a spectacular feature of The Video Show at the Serpentine, and video installations were featured for the first time at the Tate in a small display – confusingly also called The Video Show – organised by the education department in 1976. Video artists gained their own festival in the modestly scaled but important Artists Video, held annually at Biddick Farm Arts Centre in Washington New Town, between 1976 and 1980, in which installations were a central feature. Similarly inspired by The Video Show’s success and by its inclusive policy, a loose coalition of video users – artists, community and political groups – organised an annual National Video Festival at Bracknell’s South Hill Park media centre, from 1981 to 1988, mixing themed programmes of tapes with installations. Throughout the 1980s, this would be the occasion for the launching of new work by established artists, students, groups and distributors, supported by the linked bi-monthly magazine Independent Media. The amateur film gauge Super 8 gained its own annual Super 8 Festival in Leicester in 1984. As early as 1965, the writer Ray Durgnat had urged use of the medium while discussing the work of ‘the 8mm poet’ Jeff Keen: 21 (top) The design used

Why take notes when you can make pictures? An 8mm camera is the ballpoint of the visual

each year for Artists’ Video,

world. Soon (and the sooner the better) people will use camera-pens as casually as they jot

at Biddick Farm, Washington.

memos today. Filmmakers will make ‘rough drafts’ of their films as rapidly as painters dash off preliminary sketches. And the narrow gauge can make finished works of art.31

22 (above) Video’s annual gathering at Bracknell.

But while Keen, Bruce Lacey, Robert Stuart Short, Victor Musgrave and others soldiered on through the 1970s, it took Jarman’s endorsement (and the ‘buzz’ surrounding the showing of Super 8 work by his protégés John Maybury and Cerith Wyn-Evans at the ICA in 1981) to stir up wider interest, and the momentum for a festival. The new but short-lived technology of video-walls formed the core of the first Video Positive biennial festival held in Liverpool in 1989, and large-scale installations and interactive works became its speciality in subsequent years. The LUX Centre’s Pandaemonium biennials held in London in 1996, 1998 and 2001 attempted to bring film and video back together, reflecting the convergence brought about by the arrival of digital technology. Behind all these festivals lay the impulse to meet fellow artists and to see their work. And for the majority of artists still outside the economies of commercial galleries and cinema releases, such events also presented a welcome spur to the making of new films and tapes.

SCHOOLING ARTISTS

23

SCHOOLING ARTISTS Artists’ film and video first became the specialist subject of an art/film-school course with the setting up of Fine Art Film at Saint Martins School of Art in London in 1972. Prior to that, artists had to make do with non-specialist film courses, often linked with photography, such as those at Harrow School of Art and the Polytechnic of Central London. The only institution uniquely devoted to practical film-making in the early 1960s was the London School of Film Technique (LSFT) founded in 195632 (London International Film School from 1974), but as a privately run independent school it offered no grants or scholarships, and its approach to film-making was conservative, based on workshops led by freelance and retired industry technicians.33 Grants and scholarships were one of the attractions of the Royal College of Art’s (RCA) post-graduate two- and three-year MA practical courses and a PhD, established in 1961. Here, too, the course was ostensibly focused on future industry practitioners, but the

23 Anne Rees-Mogg greets

presence of Peter Gidal on the staff from 1972, and Steve Dwoskin and writer/film-maker

Peter Gidal (plus film) at

Noel Burch from 1973 – all under the leadership of Stuart Hood – attracted artists and other

Chelsea School of Art,

progressive film-makers. The RCA had one of the earliest colour TV studios in the country –

c. 1975, recorded by

the result of a donation by ATV – the only place outside the BBC where experiments were

Le Grice.

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ARTISTS

possible with broadcast television technology. And from 1974 to 1986, its interdisciplinary Environmental Media Department attracted many artists who then gravitated to film, or more often to video. There: at any one time, a studio may contain projected slide and film images, video monitors showing pre-recorded and/or ‘on camera’ material, constructions and painted surfaces, light and sound projection and performance activities. That all these systems should be on hand is considered crucial to the Department’s creative work.34

At undergraduate level, film-making began to infiltrate fine-art courses throughout the 1960s, though often it was not till much later, if at all, that these courses openly re-named themselves as ‘Film’, or ‘Time-Based Media’ (Maidstone College of Art’s designation from the mid-1970s), or its equivalent. Clive Latimer and John Bowstead established a Light Sound Workshop at Hornsey College of Art in the mid-1960s, which offered access to Super 8 film among other media, but came to grief during the student uprising of May 1968 when Latimer was sacked for siding with the students.35 Hornsey’s loss was the North East London Polytechnic’s gain (NELP, now University of East London), for Latimer with Guy Sherwin 24 The first show by NELP

established film-making in the Communication Design course there in 1971, and NELP

staff and students at the

became – with Saint Martins School of Art – one of the most consistent nurturers of artists’ film-

London Filmmakers Co-op,

making in Britain. NELP’s first cohort included John Smith, Lis Rhodes, Tim Bruce and Ian

1975.

Kerr, joined in the next year by fine-art students Steve Farrer, Cordelia Swann and Penny Webb, all significant figures in the development of film in the 1970s. John Latham and Malcolm Le Grice had independently introduced film into the painting course at Saint Martins in 1965–66, and Le Grice. who was also teaching at Goldsmiths College, developed film and video there at about the same time. Sheffield Polytechnic’s Fine Art course included film from 1967, Chelsea School from 1968, David Hall’s Audio Visual Workshop at Maidstone began in 1972, film in Fine Art at Reading University after 1973 with Ron Haselden and William Raban, and so on. Film benefited from the climate of freedom and experiment that characterised many fine-art departments in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Students were encouraged to shift disciplines, to explore sound and environmental constructions, print media, music. Some formed rock bands, (Blur, Pulp from Saint Martins), others entered the advertising industry, some became film/video artists. Film/video was one medium among many. It is arguable that the influence of the Film Society continued even into the early 1960s, when Thorold Dickinson was appointed as the Slade School Film Unit’s first director, later Professor. A production assistant and film-editor in the early 1930s, Dickinson had

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP

25

been responsible for the ‘presentation and technical preparation’ (subtitling, etc.) of the Society’s film prints between 1930 and 1932. After directing feature films including Gaslight (1940) and Queen of Spades (1948), and a period of working for the United Nations Department of Information in New York, he was invited in 1960 to set up the first British university department devoted to film studies, at University College London, with initial funding raised from the industry by the BFI. His academic model was the Film Studies department at Pisa University, but his Film Unit was significantly based within an art-school, the Slade, and had the active support of the Slade Professor, the painter William Coldstream, himself a film-maker in the 1930s and yet another former Film Society member. Dickinson was not an admirer of artists’ films, nor of experiment for its own sake, but his screening-based seminars were illuminated by his practical knowledge of film-making, and by his experience of dissecting films on the Film Society editing table. He could also draw on his personal friendship with many of the great figures of inter- and post-war cinema. He placed the practice of studying sections of a film on an editingtable, then projecting the film complete in the cinema, at the centre of the Slade Film Unit approach to film studies.36 The course contained no practical element, but it nonetheless attracted and produced as many film-makers as academics, and the first cohort of students included the scholar-makers Lutz Becker and Lisa Pontecorvo, the writers Ray Durgnat and Charles Barr, and makers Peter Whitehead and Don Levy – all important figures in the shaping of film culture from the late 1960s onwards.37 A later generation of students included the critic-curators Simon Field and Deke Dusinberre, the scholar Annette Kuhn, artist Ken McMullen and Channel 4’s commissioning editor for Independent Film, Rod Stoneman.

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP By the mid-1960s the young painter Malcolm Le Grice and the young sculptor Barry Flanagan had joined John Latham on the staff at Saint Martins School of Art, and independently they began making films alongside their work in other media. With their very different approaches to the medium – one hands-on, the other more detached – Le Grice, Latham and Flanagan’s teaching at Saint Martins helped shape some of the most important films by artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s – the so-called structural film-making associated with the London Filmmakers Co-op (Le Grice) and the conceptual and minimal film and video work associated with the emerging small commercial galleries and artist-run spaces of the early 1970s, (Latham/Flanagan). The ideas and energy of these divergent groups emanating from Saint Martins were one of the catalysts to the explosion of activity that occurred around the turn of the decade. Le Grice’s approach to film was coloured equally by his training as a painter at the Slade which stressed truth to materials, and the experimental approach to art and media that characterised the early 1960s; the latter shared with Latham and Flanagan. This background made it unsurprising that Le Grice would provide the vision for a practical film-making workshop at the London Filmmakers Co-op (LFMC). Founded in 1966, the LFMC had initially been little more than another film society, distinguished only by its unusual commitment to experimental film. It grew from the programme

25 Thorold Dickinson, c. 1950.

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ARTISTS

26 The London Filmmakers Co-op ‘founders’ photographed by Town magazine, 1966. (l. to r.) Steve Dwoskin, Andy Meyer (visiting New York filmmaker), Simon Hartog, Bob Cobbing and Harvey Matusow.

of activities organised by Bob Cobbing, sound-poet and film enthusiast, who for a living managed Better Books paperback bookshop at the corner of New Compton Street and Charing Cross Road, in central London. Cobbing had established this cramped shop and its basement as a venue for readings, installations and screenings, and film-makers from all parts of the UK and abroad were among the many artists who gravitated to its door.38 Jeff Keen, Kenneth Anger and Robert Pike were among those who showed films there in the early 1960s, to audiences seated among the book-stacks and tables. John Latham, Yoko Ono and Kurt Kren showed work as part of the Destruction in Art Symposium of September 1966, organised 27 Installation by Jeff

by Cobbing and Gustav Metzger. In the same year, Oswell Blakeston, the experimental film-

Nuttall, Better Books

maker/writer of the 1930s, now an author/painter surviving by reviewing art for What’s On in

basement, 1966.

London, encountered an installation by Keen and writer/performer Jeff Nuttall.

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP

27

The cellar gallery at 94 Charing Cross Road is a perfect home for an exhibition in which one may encounter a ghost of soiled linen in a corner. But what, you may ask, is it all about? Some years ago some dustmen started a museum in London; and then the surprise was to see the amazing objects which people abandon, such as stuffed heads of cross-eyed tigers. But Jeff Nuttall and Jeff Keen rely on the magic of what obviously should have gone into the dustbin: crumbled bits of cellophane, burnt coloured cartons, sinister lengths of piping. They thrust them together into some outrageous ensemble which (and here lies their art) somehow comments on our sex habits, our routines, our victimisations.39

The first Filmmakers’ Co-op had been established in New York by Jonas Mekas in 1962 as a specialist distributor of experimental film, and by the mid-1960s Mekas was looking for a base for a European satellite. The presence in London of New York film-makers Steve Dwoskin and Andy Meyer encouraged Cobbing to take on film distribution, closely following the American model, and with the hope of an eventual donation by Mekas of a collection of American work. With film-maker Simon Hartog, and critic Ray Durgnat joining the group, the London Filmmakers Co-op was formed.40 Responding to the Co-op’s birthday twenty-five years later, Durgnat listed the elements that had contributed to that moment: The 1966 Co-op was a response to American (not Soviet) models, and related upsurges (beatniks, bebop, Humph’s, folk and skiffle, an Albert Hall poetry reading, psychedelia, flower power, the Arts Lab, the Oz trial). I wrote a third of the LFMC’s first catalogue with one hand, while writing for Oz, IT and Movie, and teaching ‘bourgeois’ art history with the other. The general zeitgeist was non- (but not anti-) academic, a late bloom of Bohemia-andbackwoods counter-culture, reinvigorated by popular affluence; apolitical anarcholibertarian, Come-all-ye.41

Le Grice’s workshop was initially associated with the Drury Lane Arts Laboratory, an artist-run space for experimental film, theatre, poetry and performance founded by Jim Haynes in 1967,

28 Drury Lane Arts Lab’s

where I, another Slade-trained painter, was cinema-programmer. As its name suggests, the

rarely used logo.

Arts Laboratory placed emphasis on making as well as presenting, and it was this combination that attracted Le Grice, who was looking for a base for production and exhibition for himself and his Saint Martins’ and Goldsmiths’ students, among them Fred Drummond and Roger Ackling, and later William Raban, Gill Eatherley and Annabel Nicolson. He began with hand-built equipment, a converted projector as a film-printer, wooden processing tanks and drying racks constructed from wooden discs and dowel rods. By 1969, his workshop group and the LFMC had joined forces and were housed at the second, Robert Street Arts Laboratory – the Institute for Research in Art and Technology (IRAT 1969–71). There, powered by Le Grice and Drummond, the film workshop had its own space, and acquired its first professional film developing and printing machines, which both dramati-

28

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29 Poster by Biddy Peppin, 1968.

cally reduced film-making costs, and gave artists control over aspects of the film-making process previously denied to them.42 Until video and computer-based editing became widespread tools in the late 1990s, the only other way in which an artist might make a substantial body of work without funding was to use the amateur gauge of Super 8, as David Dye and Derek Jarman notably did for part or all of their careers. The Co-op workshop gave artists for the first time a sense that they could make work using the newly established ‘professional’ gauge (for TV) of 16mm equipment, independently of sponsorship or funding. The explosion of filmmaking that followed was dramatic. In the year 1973, at the workshop’s next home in Prince of Wales Crescent, Le Grice made nine films, Roger Hammond five, Annabel Nicolson ten, Stuart Pound six, and John Du Cane an astonishing sixteen; almost all of them self-funded. Selfprocessed film also offered the possibility of near-immediate feedback, the opportunity to see what you had just shot and respond to it – the norm in video, but till this moment inconceivable in film. Mike Leggett recalled being inspired by tests he made on the printer at Co-op workshop and making the film Shepherd’s Bush (1971) the same night, then showing it the next day in the cinema.43 This immediacy was still enough of a novelty in the mid-1970s for artist and workshop-worker Steve Farrer to mount a virtuoso performance in which he filmed an audience as it arrived at a screening at the Co-op’s Fitzroy Road building and, a few minutes later, fed the developed film as it emerged from the processing machine, through a hatch in the wall and straight into a projector, so audience saw itself arriving.44 But to most filmmakers, immediate feedback was just one further aspect of a new, intimate involvement with the materials of film-making. At the Robert Street Arts Lab, IRAT, I was again programming the cinema, and the repertory of artists’ films I could include in its daily screenings also expanded at this time, as a

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP

29

30 (top left) The key relationship of film production, distribution and ‘viewing’ (exhibition) at the Co-op, as mapped by Le Grice and Hartog c.1969–70.

result of the long-awaited donation of a collection of American works to the London Co-op by Mekas. P. Adams Sitney had presented an International Exposition of New American

31 (top right) Le Grice,

Cinema at the ICA in Dover Street in 1964, and he returned in 1968 with the much larger series

c. 1969.

The New American Cinema, which screened at the National film Theatre (NFT) and toured to twelve regional university campuses. This collection included work by thirty artists, among them

32 (above) Schematic

Brakhage, Anger, Breer, Landow, Sharits and Snow. And it was these prints that returned to

drawings by Malcolm Le Grice

London in 1970, to become the core of the London Filmmakers Co-op collection, and thus

of Co-op’s home-made printer

part of IRAT’s repertory. For many British artists, these prints represented the first opportunity

(in a letter to Birgit Hein), and

to see contemporary and historic work by their American peers.

processor, c. 1970.

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ARTISTS

Funded by subscriptions alone during its early years, the London Filmmakers Co-op – with its workshop, its screening space and collection of prints – established itself as the centre of an intense film-making movement. Based in one short-life building after another, its collection of equipment and its black-box exhibition space were one attraction, but an equal draw to many was the sense of common purpose and shared commitment to film experiment. The Co-op became a mutual support-group and ideas factory. Le Grice claimed ‘what makes the London Filmmakers Co-op significantly different from other similar units in Europe is its continual emphasis on film-MAKING. A purely “distribution” facility is no basis for the day-to-day communication between makers, which allows the building of a cooperative for film-makers by film MAKERS’.45 Raban, who became a key workshop organiser in its Prince of Wales Crescent incarnation, traced the ‘ideals of the creative laboratory’ back to Dziga Vertov and his Kino Eye in the Soviet Union of the 1920s: ‘Vertov’s idea that experimentation should be at the forefront of all film production was the essential message. This … was picked up [by us] in the 1960s and early 1970s, just as it had been by the Dziga 33 (top left) Poster by

Vertov Group in Paris of 1968 by Godard and Gorin.’46 Peter Gidal and others saw their

Biddy Peppin, 1968.

work at the Co-op in the 1970s as gaining stature from being part of a collective enter-

34 (top right) Gidal’s first

prise, avoiding the individualist path.

solo show, 1969.

The emphasis on experiment had impact on the space designed by Co-op members for

35 (above) Robert Street

showing films. The Drury Lane Arts Lab cinema famously had no seats but a deep foam

Arts Lab / IRAT schedule,

carpet-covered floor (it was housed in a low-ceilinged basement); IRAT’s cinema had a very

1970.

large projection box and connecting ‘window’ to cater for the needs of multiple projection, but otherwise was conventional, with fixed rows of cinema seats. In the Co-op’s own subsequent buildings, these gave way to loose seats in a flat-floored black box, to better cater for

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP

31

performances and simultaneous projection on more than one wall.47 And this unconventional configuration was re-created even in the Co-op’s final architect-designed lottery-funded building the LUX in 1997. From the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1990s the Co-op cinema usually ran two screenings a week, mixing new work with a repertory of avant-garde classics, each generation of programmers giving their own inflection to – in Le Grice’s phrase – ‘the history we need’. Annabel Nicolson, who succeeded Gidal, emphasised the links with music and performance art; later programmers such as Lis Rhodes (1975–76) Deke Dusinberre (1977–78), and Cordelia Swann (1983–85), brought in more historical programmes, international work and single-artist retrospectives. James Mackay (1979–80) and a number of Slade School post-graduate students introduced the annual Summer Show where everything that had entered the distribution catalogue in the preceding year was given a screening, (often shown in alphabetical order, echoing the egalitarian inclusivity and startling juxtapositions of its Royal Academy namesake). The Co-op’s new orientation towards production didn’t suit everybody. Some were dis-

36 At ‘the Diary’ (the

couraged from joining by the Co-op’s perceived cliqueishness, and its apparent focus on one

Filmmakers Co-op at Prince

school of film-making. Artist John Hilliard who briefly used its facilities described it as being

of Wales Crescent), 1971.

like a private members’ club with no known rules of admission.

48

Founder-member Steve

(Clockwise from top left)

Dwoskin expressed frustration at the dominance of the workshop membership within the

Mike Dunford and Annabel

organisation, to the detriment – as he saw it – of distribution. He withdrew his films in the early

Nicolson, Dunford and Roger

1970s, and placed them with The Other Cinema, which promised selection and active pro-

Hammond, Le Grice.

motion. Several new culturally committed distributors were active in the early 1970s, all

Polaroid portraits by

touting for business. Some like The Other Cinema were not-for-profit organisations; others

Hammond.

such as CineGate, Politkino, Derek Hill’s Short Film Service and its associated New Cinema Club, 24 Frames, and Vaughan-Rogosin Films were ostensibly commercial, though few made

32

ARTISTS

a profit. The American ‘stars’ of the period, Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, all placed their films with commercial companies in Britain, to the disappointment of the Co-op group. For many, distribution remained the Co-op’s most important function. Even film-makers outside the core group of workshop users were attracted by the Co-op’s radical commitment to accept into distribution every film submitted to it, and to promote all films in its catalogue equally. This was the most important idea borrowed from Mekas’s New York model, and represented an extraordinary act of empowerment. By simply publishing a list of films in distribution, the Co-op stated ‘these films exist’, challenging the blanket of invisibility that had bedevilled artists’ film since its beginning. Catalogue descriptions of works were supplied by the artist and printed as submitted, good or bad, clear or obscure. Individual promotion was left to the artist, who was expected to refer any expression of interest back to the Co-op. In all this, London practice was paralleled by a growing network of Co-ops in mainland Europe, in Paris, Munich, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Rome. But the London Co-op took its egalitarian principles further 37 The Other Cinema staff, as portrayed in their

than most of its siblings, and decided that all salaried posts (which

catalogue of 1975.

it had from the mid-1970s onwards) should be held for a maximum of one year for cinema, two for workshop and distribution, to

38 The London Filmmakers Co-op’s first catalogue,

ensure that the advantage of paid employment should be shared.

designed by Dwoskin.

This decision had long-term consequences. Positively, it meant that over the years the Co-op provided dozens of artists with skills, equipping them to be film teachers, technicians, projectionists, and distribution workers in other organisations, almost incidentally providing the Co-op with a valuable network of contacts. The original relationship with Saint Martins and Goldsmiths through Le Grice was soon paralleled by links with film-making at the Royal College of Art and Chelsea, through Co-op worker Peter Gidal and key Co-op ‘executive’ member Anne Rees-Mogg. Later waves of ex-workers provided links with film and art departments in North East London Polytechnic, Exeter, Newcastle, Maidstone, Brighton and Sheffield. Equally positively, the rapid turnover of workers at the Co-op and its inevitable bias towards the young (the Co-op’s low pay and spartan working conditions were not designed to attract the old) meant that each new generation of film-makers was likely to find a sympathetic response at the Coop, and possibly jobs. Film festivals organisers, in search of the

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP

33

39 Installing the Co-op’s longest-surviving home at 42 Gloucester Avenue, c. 1979, and the same space, completed, as drawn by Agnes Hay, a young filmmaker just arrived from Hungary. 40 Journalist and filmmaker

latest crop of British artists’ films, could expect to see a good proportion of them in the Co-

John Du Cane (photos by

op’s collection. Negatively, the fixed-term employment rule meant that those with experience

Hammond).

– who knew how to work the film processing and printing machines; who knew the contents of the Co-op catalogue and had an understanding of programmers’ and educationalists’ needs; and who knew the selectors for important exhibitions and festivals – were ejected, just when their accumulated knowledge might have paid dividends. In this sense Dwoskin had been right. This absence of a collective memory and state of almost permanent flux also gave the organisation problems when it came to seeking funding for its activities; public funders moved more slowly and expected continuity in communication. The Co-op didn’t achieve revenue funding from the BFI till the mid-1970s, and never felt that its worth was adequately financially recognised. More significantly, it meant that the Co-op grew out of touch with the needs and expectations of its older members, and could be cavalier even in its treatment of its rising stars. Chris Welsby – riding a wave of interest in film installations and landscape film in the late 1970s – loyally offered to show his new six-screen Shore Line Two (1979) at the Co-op. Afterwards, he complained bitterly of the Co-op’s ‘inefficient organisation, lack of interest [and] apathy’, and withdrew his films.49 Many senior figures mutely accepted that they would have to continue to be their own agents, and to broker their own relationships with exhibitors. But the Co-op held to its principles and its egalitarian approach finally ended only when it merged with its sister organisation London Video Arts (LVA)50 to create the LUX in 1997. Then, in the face of an impossibly expanded community of artists and pressure from its funders, it accepted the conventions of permanent employees and the selection of work taken into distribution.

34

ARTISTS

The Co-op’s model of operation acted as a catalyst to other groups in one further way. From the early 1970s, artists associated with the Co-op had begun to articulate the concept of ‘an integrated practice’, by which they meant maintaining a close relationship between the acts of making and exhibiting work, so that each would provide feedback to the other in a virtuous circle. This built on Le Grice’s early intuition that ‘day-to-day communication between makers’ was central to the Co-op’s – and artists’ – development. Le Grice and Mike Leggett were core members of the lobbying group the IFA, where this philosophy provided common ground with other early political film collectives and workshops such as Cinema Action (1968– ) and Amber Films (1968 onwards). And ‘integrated practice’ was the mantra of the growing number of second-generation workshop-based political film groups, such as the Bristol Filmmakers’ Co-op and Sheffield Independent Film, and became enshrined in workshop revenue funding agreements with Channel 4 and in the ‘Workshop Declaration’ agreed with the film 41 Peter Gidal in Prince of Wales Crescent, Polaroid

union the ACTT in 1982, a code of practice which ‘legitimised’

portrait by Hammond.

certain forms of low-budget film-making.51 But by the end of the 1980s the phrase through overuse had come to mean little more

42 Annabel Nicolson and Paul Burwell’s Readings, 1977.

than ‘we make and show films’. When Gidal took over the running of the Co-op’s cinema in September 1971, he re-orientated its weekly programme to give stronger emphasis to new British work, and remarkably persuaded the London listings magazine Time Out to take copy from him each week, to promote the shows. As a journalist, his see-sawing mix of sharp insight and slang was infectious, and he rarely disguised his true opinion. His ambivalence is transparent as he announces a screening of Jonas Mekas’s film diaries at the Co-op: Although I find bits of the film loose, highly romantic and allembracingly naive, I also feel that if you are going to make personal cinema diaries, if you are going to believe in this cinema aesthetic, then Mekas’s films represent the epitome of that style. In scenes where millionaires have weddings on huge estates with some asshole cleric performing the ceremony, underground cinema surely ends. But as part of the diary situation this is unprejudiced seeing. On the other hand, all embracing harmoniousness, tolerance of this sort can obviously become dangerous. Mekas’s work should be seen. It betrays itself beautifully.52

THE LONDON FILMMAKERS CO-OP

35

During this period, issuing written texts that promoted artists’ filmmaking and new approaches to film became almost as important to those involved in the Co-op as making film. Du Cane was another regular contributor to Time Out, and provided the first serious appreciations of Larcher, Le Grice, Gidal and others in page-long articles. The magazine Art & Artists produced a special ‘Film Issue’ in 1972, with articles by David Dye, Simon Field, Gidal, Le Grice and Nicolson. Le Grice himself gained a monthly column ‘Film’, then ‘Vision’, in the leading art journal Studio International from 1973, reviewing local and international events and monitoring the achievements and shortcomings of the art establishment, as it responded – or failed to respond – to artists’ film. Studio International produced its own ‘Film Issue’ in 1975, and a ‘Video Art issue’ in 1976. The first crop of books appeared, assessing the international scene and attempting to recover and describe the art form’s history. My Experimental Cinema (1971) was written in 1969–70, overlapping my involvement in the Robert Street Arts Lab; Dwoskin followed with Film Is (1975) and Le Grice with Abstract Film and Beyond (1977).53 More unexpectedly, journal-

43 Artists’ film is acknowledged by the art press; Art and

ists not part of the Co-op’s inner circle were also showing interest.

Artists, 1972 (image from Le Grice’s Horror Film); Studio

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gordon Gow wrote

International, 1975 (image from Chris Welsby’s Seven Days).

about artists’ films in his column dedicated to the non-standard gauges of 8mm and 16mm in Films and Filming, and in the later 1970s Verina Glaessner, Claire Johnston, Jan Dawson and Tony Rayns were among those who contributed features on ‘independent’ film and ‘the underground’ to Time Out, City Limits and Sight & Sound. Academics associated with Screen, the BFI-funded journal of the Society for Education in Film and Television, such as Stephen Heath and Peter Wollen, also noted these developments, writing articles themselves54 and occasionally making space for contributions by the more engaged historians Deke Dusinberre and A.L. Rees and practitioners Gidal, Le Grice and Stuart Marshall. All this attention generated a level of awareness of the Co-op group rarely equalled in its later years. Echoing the links between film-making groups and self-published magazines of the 1930s, Co-op film-makers produced their own magazines. Durgnat, Hartog and Crick produced Cinim (1966–68), the Co-op’s first official magazine, which survived a circulation of a few hundred for three issues. Du Cane ambitiously launched Light One (1973), while juggling his reviewing for Time Out and his most productive period of film-making, not surprisingly

36

ARTISTS

stopping at one issue, a monograph on Michael Snow. Nicolson, busy film-making and programming the Co-op cinema, published a review magazine Readings (1977 – three issues) with musician Paul Burwell, which reflected their shared interest in film and performance; and Raban – keen to encourage international links – published Filmmakers Europe (1977–81, 22 issues), a poster/ broadsheet providing lists of screening venues across Europe and America, film courses, forthcoming festivals, reviews, comparative charts of lab costs, and news.55 A second Co-op magazine Undercut (1981–90, 19 issues) was produced by a collective within the collective, again achieving a tiny circulation, but providing an important launch-pad for new artists and writers. The struggles during Undercut’s gestation in 1979–80 reprised the Co-op’s earlier agonising over its egalitarian principles. Articles discussing areas of work, and not specific films, would help to break down rather than enforce, the existing selectivity (the small minority of films which enter public discourse through being mentioned in art magazines or ‘perspectived’ by 44 Undercut, the final issue

the Arts Council). [The latter a reference to the contemporary Arts Council exhibition A

1990, (image from Lis

Perspective on English Avant Garde Film] … The Co-op’s policy of non-promotion should be

Rhodes’ A Cold Draft).

interpreted as a refusal to select individual films/makers, not a refusal to publicise or contextualise the work cooperatively.56

The unsigned writer, almost certainly Mike Leggett, then quotes a prediction by Le Grice: ‘There is an inherent weakness in non-promotion which eliminates persuasion and tasteforming which are [then] open to competitors’.57 (Other curatorial perspectives were rarely welcomed by the Co-op group.) But over the next decade, the Undercut collective bravely made its editorial choices – often an attenuated and painful process – and visibly demonstrated its alertness to ‘the new’ in the avant-garde: feminist film, landscape film, work by black artists, Scratch video, the romantics associated with Jarman, gay and lesbian cinema and more. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, the Co-op continued to be a magnet to young artists, and provided a dependable showcase for their work. Many new groups and factions as they emerged happily colonised the organisation, and were able to sufficiently re-shape it to their own image to feel at home there, expressing their difference through seasons of film screenings, festivals, and the occasional angry public meeting. But it was no longer the only home available. Video artists had their own production and exhibition needs and by the mid1970s had organised their own structures, as would digital artists in the 1990s (for example, the London work-space Backspace, and the magazine Mute). The demand for women-only workshop sessions and screenings proved divisive, and the Co-op suffered a major trauma in 1979 when many women withdrew to set up the women-only distribution company Circles

INTO THE GALLERY

37

– Women’s Work in Distribution, coinciding with their withdrawal from the Arts Council’s exhibition Film as Film. Circles re-invoked the tighter focus and cohesion of the early Co-op. It stayed small; its artists (notably its founders Lis Rhodes, Tina Keane, Annabel Nicolson, Jo Davis and co-ordinator Felicity Sparrow) sometimes worked together on projects, and it bravely refused public funding – the artists initially each contributing £20 towards its start-up costs. It moved to the Four Corners workshop in East London in 1982, where as its distribution activity expanded, it was able to hold women-only screenings in tandem with Four Corners’ own programme of events involving the local working-class community. Inevitably, money became a problem, and eventually Circles merged with Cinema of Women (COW) to form Cinenova in 1991 (COW itself being the residue of the Cine Sisters (1979–91), which in turn had inherited equipment from London Women’s Film Group (1972–78), an organisation associated with Mary Kelly, Claire Johnston and others). The pluralism that characterised artists films’ in the 1980s was reflected in the growth of smaller specialist groupings, and a new accommodation with the private sector. It saw the establishment of the black artists’ groups

45 Circles first catalogue,

Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa, both founded in 1983, and both initially associated

1980.

with the Co-op, and the involvement of commercial production companies such as Mayavision, Koninck, Tall Stories, K.D. Digital and Illuminations, which offered a production base to artists undertaking works of scale and ambition, such as Jayne Parker, Patrick Keiller, Richard Billingham and Andrew Kotting. In the late 1990s, with some coercion from the funders, the Co-op and LEA (London Electronic Arts) finally accepted that their common objectives were more important than their differences, and they came together to create the Lottery-funded grand project that was the digital-friendly but ill-fated LUX Centre, in an episode described later.

INTO THE GALLERY The common perception that the video installation is an invention of the 1990s – born miraculously free of any evolutionary history – is understandable, if wholly wrong. Certainly, dealers in the 1990s succeeded in marketing the film video installation as a limited-edition commodity where their 1970s predecessors had failed, but the modern form of the installation in all its diversity was the product of long period of experiment shared by the post-Caro generation conceptualists with their commercial gallery shows, and by members of the Co-op and future LVA groups, exhibiting mostly in artist-run and public sector spaces. What the many artists from the Co-op, LVA and conceptualist groups shared was an interest in challenging the conventional screen/spectator relationship – by opening it out – allowing the spectator to approach the image, to walk in and around the space of projection, and to experience the

38

ARTISTS

work in different ways. By the middle of the 1970s, most of the conceptual artists had abandoned film and video, but the evolution of installations and performance-related work was carried forward into the 1980s and 1990s, latterly predominantly but not exclusively by video artists.58 In the inter-war period, portable film projection equipment was rare, and the exhibition of artists’ films was necessarily confined to the conventional cinema space. The availability in the 1960s of portable 8mm and 16mm projectors liberated artists, and film began to colonise other sites and spaces. As early as 1967, the artist Scotty had shown films in the gallery at the Drury Lane Arts Lab, making a visible feature of a rare portable 35mm projector, and his performance of keeping it fed with reels of found images. A year earlier, Jeffrey Shaw projected film into an environment of smoke, balloons and hanging screens in a performance at Better Books,59 and throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, he and the Event Structure Research Group (which included John Latham and others) would project into translucent plastic ‘inflatables’ in gal46 (above) Sequence of

leries, public parks and other environments. Tony Morgan showed loops of film (which

drawings for the animation,

allowed for continuous exhibition for as long as the loop lasted) at Strategy – Get Arts in

Emergences of Continuous

Edinburgh in 1969, and again at The Floor Show at the Lisson Gallery in 1972, hinting at

Form, Jeffrey Shaw, 1966;

the possibility of permanent film installations.

(below) Emergences of

Film was also included in a series of survey exhibitions in the early 1970s that show-

Continuous Form in projection

cased contemporary developments in art in all media – and which deliberately broke with

(with balloons), at Better

convention in their choice of venues and forms of display. One hundred artists took part in

Books, 1966.

the London version of Art Spectrum (1971) at the Alexandra Palace in London, selected for

47 (below right) Drawing of

the Arts Council by an eclectic group including performance artist and film-maker Stuart

loop projection installations,

Brisley, gallerists Annely Juda and John Dunbar (Indica Gallery), and film-maker and ‘outsider’-

1969–71 by Tony Morgan.

art collector Victor Musgrave.60 In a space associated with trade fairs rather than art shows,

INTO THE GALLERY

39

a repertory of films was shown in a side-aisle, and included works by Leggett and Breakwell, Bruce Lacey, Conrad Atkinson and Mark Boyle, and the first (and only) group-showing of a collection of self-documentation films by sculptors recently funded by the Arts Council. Prospect 71 – Projection in Dusseldorf (1971) was a similarly catch-all event, this time international in scope, and organised by Konrad Fischer, Jürgen Harten and Hans Strelow, at least in part inspired by Dusseldorf-based Gerry Schum’s radical approach to exhibition. There, the British contribution included twelve film-makers and two photographers.61 Video was more prominent in the media-mix in A Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain (1972) organised by Rosetta Brooks and Siggi Kraus at Gallery House in London, which included the spectacular installation 60 TV Sets by David Hall and Tony Sinden, videos by Denis Masi, and films by Raban, Gidal, Latham, Anthony McCall and others, and An Evening of Artists’ Film and Video at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (June 1973) which included many of the same cast, with the addition of video works by William Wegman (USA) and Bruce McLean. Uniquely in these shows, Co-op film-makers and their conceptual film and video coun-

48 Catalogue to A Survey of

terparts appeared side by side; the former hostile to the commodification of the art-object, the

the Avant-Garde in Britain,

latter at least accepting, if not always whole-heartedly embracing it; ideas rather than objects

1972.

being the common denominator.62 The links between conceptualism and early structural film were explored further in Structures & Codes at the Royal College of Art (1975) which included films by John Blake, Gidal and David Lamelas, alongside work in other media by Latham, John Stezaker and Stephen Willats, and in Structure and Function in Time (also 1975) at Sunderland

49 Ambient-Vision, Jane

Arts Centre, again organised by Rosetta Brooks, featuring many of the same artists. However,

Rigby, 1979 – schematic

by this date, many conceptualists (among them Hilliard, Flanagan and Masi) had abandoned

drawing for installation in the

film or like Blake and Morgan, moved abroad.

Acme Gallery.

Though historically important as announcements of the arrival of a ‘new art’, these big mixed-media shows rarely provided a sympathetic physical environment for the showing of film, and the most significant developments in the installation in the 1970s took place in the more familiar contexts of the Co-op’s black box and the controllable environment of the gallerist’s white cube. The expanded-cinema work of the group of artists who showed with Le Grice as Filmaktion first seen at Galley House in 1973 (Raban, Eatherley, Nicolson and David Crosswaite) essentially involved performance with the moving image, but also included static sections in which composite images were built from overlapping or adjacent projections of film-loops. Long loops suspended from hooks in the exhibition space, rotating slowly as the projectors chewed their way through them, became a familiar sight in galleries at this time. Some artists worked to transform the images on the loop, as it turned (Nicolson,

40

ARTISTS

50 Synchronised multi-screen

Rhodes); some used loops to animate all four walls of the gallery, or joined up the projected

projection, Thames Barrier,

images to create panoramas (Jane Rigby, Chris Welsby); some combined loops with slide

William Raban, 1977.

projections (Eatherley, Tim Head), or photographic still images (Haselden, Sinden, Darcy Lange). Some created visual paradoxes and jokes (Morgan, Dye), others pure light-sculptures (Brian Eno, Anthony McCall). Continuous film installations – in contrast to video – were always limited in duration by the length of the loop (rarely more than three or four minutes), and its vulnerability as it hung in space. The cost of replacing loops meant that installations generally were shown for a day or two, and rarely more than a week. In multi-screen installations there was the additional problem that film projectors would soon run out of synch, and most artists designed their works to accommodate this drift. However, technology developed for the trade-fair market provided solutions towards the end of the 1970s with interlocked projectors, used for example by Raban in his film Thames Barrier (1977),63 and film ‘loop-absorbers’ (‘loopers’ to Americans) first introduced to the art-world with the exhibition Film as Film in 1979, that allowed for the continuous projection of loops of up to thirty minutes long. By the end of the 1970s, video had taken over as the preferred medium for installations, though Welsby, Steve Farrer, Jane Rigby and others would continue to make substantial installations in 16mm, and John Maybury and his generation would re-discover multi-screen film in the more flexible form of Super 8 in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, just when 16mm installations were about to be declared dead, 16mm and loop-absorbers were chosen by a new wave of installation artists including Tacita Dean and Steve McQueen.

VIDEO AS VIDEO Video art, and artists’ first engagement with broadcast television, began to make their appearance at the very end of the 1960s. As so often, changes in technology – the arrival of the first domestic portable video recorders and experimental colour cameras in the professional sphere – provided one driver, but artists were also responding to the growing dominance of broadcast television in daily life. Activity was initially limited, simply because opportunities for access to video equipment and the apparatus of broadcast television were so rare. None the less, in the short span of the five years 1966–71, Lutz Becker was working experimentally with engineers at BBC television in London, David Hall was shooting his TV Interruptions in Edinburgh for Scottish Television, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins at IRAT was showing off one of the

VIDEO AS VIDEO

41

first Sony Portapaks to arrive in Britain (loaned to him by John Lennon), and the artist/entrepreneur Gerry Schum was in England shooting works (on film) for TV with Richard Long, and later Gilbert and George for his Fernsehgalerie (TV Gallery) in Germany. Hopkins, a successful freelance photographer in the early 1960s, was associated with many of the 1960s Underground’s more colourful enterprises. He was one of the founder-editors of the alternative newspaper The International Times; he ran the classic underground nightclub the UFO Club, where Mark Boyle created some of the most innovative light-shows of the period with house-band Soft Machine; and he was associated with The Free University in Notting Hill. At the Robert Street Arts Lab, IRAT, he formed the group TVX and promoted video as a medium for reflecting and mediating social change.64 In a letter to the Arts Council seeking funding in 1969, he wrote: we have been looking at society in terms of the disaffiliated and other groups within it, and have developed the concept of Social Matrix in which to describe our findings. The Social Matrix is a map of society seen from the individual’s point of view, and we feel it will be of tremendous use to any group or government wanting to communicate with the disparate and decentralised activity that is now part of young society.65 51 Colour and video

The hint of Mass Observation-like detachment in this statement was atypical. Most of

projection; novelties in the

Hoppy’s work, like that of the other social and political groups who discovered video,

age of black and white

responded to its potential for an immediate engagement with and possible empowerment of

monitors. John Hopkins and

its audience. And, famously, Hoppy went on to demonstrate video as a tool in guerrilla action,

Fantasy Factory, 1976.

with his team’s invasion of David Frost’s television studio during a live interview with Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman in November 1970, and his record of a drugs raid on the Robert Street Arts Lab (IRAT) in June the same year, shown the same day on BBC2’s Late Night Line-up.66 Many artists among the first generation of those who engaged with video responded more to the formal challenge of its very visible technical limitations. Early video was restricted to a black and white image; cameras were heavy to hold 