As Above, So Below: the Problem of US Dominance in the UK Experimental Film Market

In 2003, a programmer at New York's Anthology Film Archives told this author that the recent Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! UK experimental film retrospective was a revelation in that it showed that there was experimental film activity in the UK comparable to that in the US. The reverse could never occur, as US-made films have been at the core of UK experimental film exhibition and distribution since the late 1960s.

One of the impetuses for founding the London Film-Makers' Co-op in 1966 was the possibility that US distributors and filmmakers might deposit prints there. In this way the LFMC grew on supplying a mysterious print of Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures to the premier underground events of the late 60s, a cache of prints from the US distributor Creative Film Society, and possession of P. Adams Sitney's New American Cinema touring prints. Additionally, some émigré US filmmakers became leading figures in UK experimental filmmaking.

There has been some sensitivity over this in the UK. In the 70s UK experimental film's earliest chronicler David Curtis specifically down-played US influence in UK, and the 'Structural/Materialist' film came to represent a national school of filmmaking (and has since been memorialised as such). However, the term was coined and the manifesto written by US émigré filmmaker Peter Gidal. The problem persists, and the germ of Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!, a national experimental film retrospective, was criticism of a prominent curator for neglecting UK films in favour of US classics over several years of high profile screenings. The title itself is a quote from the telegram sent by the LFMC, on the occasion of its founding, to Jonas Mekas, founder of the New American Cinema and New York Film-Makers' Co-op.

This paper does not challenge the distinctiveness of UK experimental film, but considers the parallels between the experimental and feature film worlds. US films have been the 'crowd pleasers' that have supported much experimental film exhibition and distribution activity in the UK, just as their feature film counterparts are the mainstay of UK commercial distribution and exhibition. An early LFMC response to this, that all bookings and LFMC screenings had to be 50% UK work, bears an eerie resemblance to the quota regimes that have been used to encourage national feature production across the world. The quotas are gone, above and below, but the prominence of US film in the UK remains, as does the problem of exposing UK film at home and abroad.

Dr Peter Thomas
Post Doctoral Research Fellow on the AHRC funded project 'Databasing Key Documents and Narrative Chronologies of Artists' Film and Video Distributors in the UK', University of Sunderland
peter.thomas-1@sunderland.ac.uk