Consecration and Categorisation: The Impact of Perspectives on the UK Avant-Garde Film
Presented at the Society for Cinema
and Media Studies conference, Philadelphia, March 2008, as part of the Collection and Canon: Affirmative Historiographies of International Experimental Film panel
The London Filmmakers’ Co-operative was formed as an open-access, filmmaker-run distributor in the London underground of 1966. The key UK avant-garde film organisation, its workshop, cinema and collection were responsible for the making, showing and availability of nearly all UK experimental work for decades to come. It was also the launching pad of a campaign for exposure and recognition of the work as Art nationally and internationally. Its vision of the avant-garde favoured unregulated diversity in the pool of available works, and a maximally polysemic viewing context.
The campaign for recognition was rewarded by the Arts Council of Great Britain in the early 1970s with increasingly regular production grants, followed in the mid-1970s by a series of exhibition interventions to promote the results. Though another step in the UK film avant-garde’s consecration as Art, it brought the LFMC-based urge to diversity into sharp conflict with the ACGB’s constituent need to discriminate. The exhibition schemes intervened in both the visible face of the UK film avant-garde and the context within which the work was presented, experienced and understood. Worse, the massive, canon building Perspectives on the British Avant-Garde Film exhibition of 1977 was billed only as a retrospective of work funded by the ACGB. This crossed the UK film avant-garde’s constituent discourse at every point – it was selective and exclusive, its categorically themed programmes eroded the films’ polysemy, and it ignored the existence of the artists’ own organisation, the LFMC. The darkest fear that emerged at LFMC was that this legible but misleading history, and its narrow selection of films, would become an ‘Official’ history and canon, superseding and occluding the films’ actual cultural context and history, and rendering the exclusion of many works and artists permanent.
On the back of this, LFMC filmmakers began to worry about the uses to which the ACGB’s own collection of funded work – something their films might go into as a condition of production grant – might be put. Thus, briefly, the struggle for history and significance settled on the issue of whether the ACGB would challenge LFMC campaigning with the deployment of its own collection of films, which substantially replicated the high-value end of the LFMC’s distribution collection. This paper will investigate the nature and stakes of this cultural-political dispute, and the significance of the collections underlying it.
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
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