Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The - Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2017

A history of the mostly London-dwelling experimental film-makers, all of them associated with art schools, who came together to form the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative in 1966, and who mostly withdrew from it shortly afterwards.

This article examines uses of history in British independent film and video in the 1970s and 1980s, looking at ways in which radical pasts were called on to foster struggle in the present. In tracing the influence of New Left cultural historians on independent film and video, and television, during these two decades, this article also suggests ways in which the nation is figured, contested and re-drawn in specific works by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, Phil Mulloy and Black Audio Film Collective. A rich and diverse framework of leftist historical discourse is outlined, suggesting that the exploration of a socialized landscape (the city as well as the country) played on and renegotiated existing myths and tropes of Britishness, identity and belonging. This article also fills a gap in existing accounts of radical film’s uses of history, going beyond valedictory accounts of modernist historiography to assert the vitality of a complex counterpublic discourse. It concludes with a reflection on problems in the depiction and imagination of the past today.

Video technology had a relatively brief lifespan, but like digital it was once a new media technology. This article revisits the newness of video in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore the challenges it posed for supporting and promoting video art in Britain – including developing and funding a video infrastructure, creating an identity for video art and sustaining a video specific identity in the face of technological and social change. Aspects of this history resonate with the more recent history of digital technology and the article concludes that video can be understood as digital’s forerunner.

The Video Show: A Festival of Independent Video and the events that followed this exhibition, which took place at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 1975, will provide an historical context to consider the ongoing and complex relationship between art and activism, which surrounded the use of video since its arrival in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. ‘Artist video’ on the one hand and ‘community video’ on the other, will be framed by the actions of London Video Arts (LVA), who formed to support artists working with video and the Association of Video Workers (AVW), who formed to support people working with video on a not-for-profit basis.

This article undertakes close readings of two works by Cordelia Swann as a means of reappraising some cultural touchstones, in particular, discussion of ‘New Romantic’ film-making in British film and video during the 1980s. It examines how notions of the old and the new are displaced within Swann’s practice, altering understanding of much earlier, more distant times. By foregrounding her use of multi-source imagery and in later analysis, sound and the ‘voice’ – her personal, striking subjects create shifting conceptions of time and selfhood that affect perspective of this decade and encourage critical engagement with historiography within the moving image.

This article is an a posteriori reflection on the film programme entitled ‘From Reel To Real: Women, Feminism and the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative’ that I curated in the context of the 50th anniversary of the LFMC. This programme, which took place at Tate Modern and Tate Britain in September 2016, gathered more than 40 films – both single screen and expanded – by 25 film-makers from different generations. In addition to attempting to situate the unique contribution of the women film-makers associated with the LFMC in relation to both experimental and feminist film, I argue that the LFMC’s particular relationship with filmic materiality led the women film-makers to apprehend cinematic spectatorship but also subjectivity, the body or one’s relationship with the other in ways that can be productively explored in the light of recent developments in both film and feminist theory.

This article groups together a small number of films made at the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative in the first half of the 1970s, primarily by film-makers such as Chris Welsby and William Raban, who are more typically discussed in relation to the category of ‘landscape films’. The films discussed here explore the restrictive and expansive possibilities of systems, constraints and procedural processes. They often resemble other experimental films that deploy repetition, but they are distinguished by the following feature: the consistent use of predetermined rules and prescripts; in-camera editing that either follows preselected schema and set procedures or breaks from these for specific reasons; and causal mechanisms, often requiring the film-maker to react to events occurring at a specific site. These practices draw from and contribute to a broader interest in systems-oriented and constraint-based processes that also encompass literature and painting. Consequently, this study looks at two collectives, Oulipo and the Systems Group, in order to provide a more period-specific contextualization of this tendency within the Co-op. Linking together much of this work are beliefs and attitudes such as the resistance to romantic notions of creative activity and the view that the artwork’s form is more than simply a static construct.

This article charts the history of the British film magazine Afterimage, from its prehistory at the University of Essex in the late 1960s to its final issue in 1987. I trace Afterimage’s presentation of various interlocking strands of experimental and political cinema, the mutations in its theoretical and aesthetic postures, and the imbrication of the journal and its editors – Simon Field, Peter Sainsbury, and later Ian Christie and Michael O’Pray – in alternative, independent practices of film-making, programming, distribution and publishing. Via Afterimage, I sketch the history of a larger radical film culture in Britain that emerged in the late 1960s but had largely dissipated as the 1980s drew to a close.

In 2017 Hull has been designated UK City of Culture, a bid it won on the promise of ‘coming out of the shadows’. But in its recent past Hull has been very much in the spotlight in the area of time-based art. This article looks at the emergence of this activity in Hull in the late twentieth century, and in particular the role of the artist-led organization Hull Time Based Arts (HTBA). Examples of HTBA’s programme are discussed in order to understand the significance of this organization and in particular its programming of political, formal and community specific artworks. The wider issues of community, funding and arts education are also discussed as crucial factors underpinning artist-led activity in a city.

This article examines the situation of artists’ moving image works within existing archives and collections. With a specific focus on the archiving of experimental film in Scotland, the article makes use of existing research in the field, while drawing from recent interviews with artists, curators and archivists in Scotland, Ireland and Norway.

This article explores shifts in spectatorship when London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) transformed their existing cinema into a cinematheque (April 1981) and videotheque (January 1982). This space introduced a new model of interactive viewing and memory on demand that built on cybernetic systems and television broadcasting, whilst bringing together the cinema and the gallery. As described at the time ‘[i]n the midst of growing despair and austerity’ of the Thatcherite era, the ‘slick product’ of 1980s videos offered a way for counterculture to move into the mainstream of contemporary arts. Despite this, its history has been largely ignored by both exhibition studies and moving images histories. This article hopes to address this gap by considering dynamic spectatorship, programming and medial transferral through archival material at the ICA and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.