Historical Struggle/The Struggle for History: Documents, Witnesses, Theories

Presented at the Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow, 2 July 2006

Chair: Dr Jackie Hatfield
Post Doctoral Research Fellow on REWIND: Artists Video in the 70's and 80's, at the University of Dundee.
jackie@carte.org.uk

Both 2005 Screen Conference Plenary sessions saw reports from research projects excavating UK independent and artists' film and video history, and that of its main funders. Despite speakers weighing into a conflicted and conflict-ridden history, the most energetic audience responses were not to the offered accounts but to methods, positioning of the historian in relation to the history, and narrational strategy. That is, to questions of information gathering, synthesis and presentation, to the accounts' underlying infrastructure and determinants rather than any overt content. As these historiographic issues remain live, the participants welcome the opportunity to discuss and debate their methods, aims and experience.

Given that the interest in and demand for histories of UK politicised and artists' film and video remains, while documents and participants are incrementally lost, this panel will examine the possibility of history, the stakes of its making, and provide an opportunity for feedback on what it is that audiences want from histories.

Chronologies, Databases and Documents: Historiography and the Qualities of the Evidential Base

Postmodern historiography has, at different times and with varying intensity, sought to undermine most of the claims and ambitions of historical representation, if that's understood as to make available a truth about the past through a text. While radically solipsistic, 'relativist' accounts exist, there is also a remarkable reluctance to abandon the possibility of accessing the past. From Hayden White's foundational Metahistory to contemporary trauma theory - and signalled at their convergence, Vivian Sobchack's Persistence of History - many writers have struggled to mediate between the postmodern critique and the desire to affirm past events.

Yet, while the significance and reliability of documentary and oral evidence has been repeatedly questioned, and 'empiricism' roundly condemned, it is narrative-realist representation that has drawn the most sustained criticism. White himself constructed a tripartite division between evidential base, chronologies and narrative representation, and has declared that his suspicion is firmly focused on the third. This presenter is not so sure that the past is so easily accessible through the evidentiary base and chronologies, but is engaged in a project to web-database documents, interviews and a chronology of UK artists' and independent film and video. The outcome of a three year research project, the presentation of the first two tiers of White's schema is there combined with a generational strategy, whereby users' interactions with the database call up an indeterminate number of chronologies and grab-bags of 'evidence'. White and other historiographers have long pushed modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, and algorithmic/generational strategies go back at least to Mallarmé (1), and yet the project's strategy is also the height of empiricism, outputting substantial caches of raw 'evidence' and compacted accounts of 'events'. This paper invites responses to the empiricist/serial historiography currently under development.

(1) See Mallarmé's never completed, dice-throwing poem "Livre."

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

Albany Video Distribution: The Problem of Dealing with a 'Partial' History

This paper will try and unpick some of the problems of documenting and analysing particular eras of activity in our moving image culture with reference to the intentionist/functionalist approaches to the study of history. It will do this by undertaking a case study of the setting up and development of a community video distribution organisation, Albany Video Distribution (AVD), in the 1980s. AVD was very much a product of the institutional strategies and funding policies that helped shape the UK independent film and video sector in the 1980s - indeed, it was one of several projects aimed at developing audiences for community video and raising awareness of media representation issues. However, the paper will argue that AVD's shift in identity towards a distributor of equal opps material (with particular emphasis on AIDS/HIV and gay issues) during the late 1980s/early 1990s cannot be understood without reference to the workers running the organisation. An understanding of both the relative success, the limitations and ultimate demise of AVD, and its successor organisation, Out on A Limb, has also in part to be related to the workers' capabilities and resources. This will be used to highlight part of the complex relationship between funders and their clients, to raise the issue of the reliability of oral testimony, especially in the absence of archival records, and the problem of writing up a partial history.

Julia Knight
Reader and Lead Researcher on the AHRC funded project 'Databasing Key Documents and Narrative Chronologies of Artists' Film and Video Distributors in the UK', University of Sunderland
julia.knight@sunderland.ac.uk

In the thick of it

Most history is written from documents (primary, for preference). Where the subject is modern, documents can be supplemented by the recollections of participants, which are often faulty and sometimes self-serving. But suppose the historian is also a participant. What problems does this pose for the "objectivity" of the history being written? Are the problems themselves of an objective nature and soluble only by the elimination of subjectivity or is subjectivity an essential part of the solution rather than a problem in itself?

This paper looks both at the historiographic problems raised in situations of this kind and (more subjectively) at the specific problems I have encountered in reearching and starting to write the history of the British Film Institute.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is a film historian and is currently directing an AHRC-funded project on the history of the British Film Institute at Queen Mary, University of London.
g.s.nowell-smith@qmul.ac.uk