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1981
Volume 14, Issue 1
  • ISSN: 2045-6298
  • E-ISSN: 2045-6301

Abstract

In 1970s Britain, film collectives like Cinema Action (CA), Amber and Newsreel used cinema to support working-class struggles through collective production and itinerant exhibition practices. Contemporaneous film theorists analysed such practices through notions of collective space in which collaborative film analyses and discussion produced active political subjects. More recently, scholars have critiqued this theoretical model for its de facto connection of collective space to active spectatorship and politicization. Equally, contemporary scholarship overemphasizes textual analysis over the sociality of political cinema. Responding to these shortcomings, this article re-engages and retheorizes the collective space of political cinema to explore its political pertinency in working-class struggle. Taking CA as case study, I analyse oral histories and films through Bahktin’s chronotope concept to investigate the collective spaces generated by CA’s practices. My overarching argument is twofold. Firstly, I reinstate the significance of CA to the historiography of 1970s British independent film. Secondly, I use CA to establish the significance of reading radical cinema as social practice. I claim that a chronotopic analysis helps us to think through how the social spaces of moving-image production, exhibition and reception shapes the politics of radical film.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • AHRC (Award AH/R012709/1)
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2025-04-30
2026-04-17

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The chronotopes of radical film: Collective exhibition and the social practice of ‘Cinema Action’
MIRAJ: The Moving Image Review & Art Journal 14, 11 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00138_1
/content/journals/10.1386/miraj_00138_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): 1970s; chronotope; film collective; integrated practice; radical cinema; space; time; working-class

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