Independent Film & Video Distribution in the UK

Film Workshops in Europe: History, Theory and Methodology

To be presented at the Locating Media conference, European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS), University of Lund, Sweden, 26 June.

The Film Workshop movement flourished in the 60s and 70s but is hardly known today except for the well-researched and highly visible main ones in the US (in particular Filmmaker’s co-op in New York and Canyon Cinema in San Francisco).

The rise and fall of this major movement of regional, local, activist and independent cinema is one of the peculiarities of film history. Firstly, it is a history that needs to be told and researched while most of the material is threatened to disappear; due to the format of the production and the organization of the workshops themselves, archiving and preservation were not usually one of the favoured activities. Secondly, researching the workshops poses some fundamental challenges to established procedures and methodologies of research in film studies. The workshops should rather be characterized as local film cultures that challenges established notions of what film is (vast variety in format and out-put); how they should be made (amateurs and artists being among the majority of the filmmakers); what the object of film research actually is (object or person vs. practice and culture) and if the concept of national cinema is useful at all. What is significant for many of the workshops is that they were transnational stations, open spaces for individuals and collectives to use, or, make use of, regardless of your background.

On the other hand it is impossible to give a generalized description of the workshops in Europe due to their character as local practices. Therefore, the aim of this panel is to bring established scholars of minor cinemas together in order to present and compare the histories and developments of film workshops in different countries and to address some of the key theoretical and methodological issues regarding research on film workshops.

Chair: John Sundholm (Karlstad University, Sweden)
Respondent: Lars Gustaf Andersson (Lund University, Sweden)

Papers & Panelists:
L. G. Andersson & J. Sundholm: “Rather free than filmmaker: Film workshops in Sweden 1968-2001”

Miguel Fernández Labayen: “From dictatorship to democracy: the life and times of La Central del Curt. Managing Minor Cinemas in Spain”.

Masha Godovannaya (Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Science, St. Petersburg): “Film workshop Soviet/Russian style: St. Petersburg ‘Club of Cinema-lovers’”.

Peter Thomas (University of Sunderland): “The workshop movement in Britain: From radical politics to state assimilation”.

This paper traces the British Workshop Movement from its origins as a series of collectively-owned equipment pools engaged in anti-state political action in the early 1970s, through their campaign for state funding, to the movement’s dismantling and defunding in the late 1980s. While the paper will cite high points in the movement’s media interventions, it will concentrate on the collision between the radical democratic production base and the state bureaucracy that eventually funded and assimilated it.

Andersson and Sundholm have been researching Swedish experimental film culture funded by the Swedish Research Council (2006-2008) and have recently inaugurated a study on the Swedish workshop, Filmverkstan (1973-2001). Godovannaya is a filmmaker and lecturer who has been researching and curating Russian experimental cinema. Fernández Labayen is one of the foremost experts of Spanish experimental cinema and co-curator of the bi-annual XPERIMENTA organized by the Centre of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. Peter Thomas has been researching British artists’ film and video distribution for a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2002-09) and is a member of the open-access Exploding Cinema collective.