The 'Alternative' End of Marketing: Building Audiences for Artists'/Community Film and Video

This paper will look at the distribution, marketing and promotion of moving image work that has been produced at the extreme non-commercial, grant-aided end of the UK sector - looking mainly at artists' film/video and community/political activism tapes. It will explore how extensive and resource intensive promotional activity is absolutely essential if such work is to find audiences, but will also highlight the difficulties presented by the fact that in such cases the earned income generated never covers the cost of those promotional activities and hence has to be subsidised by grant-aid, volunteer labour, low pay, payment in kind, cross-subsidy from more commercial product, or some combination thereof. This will be contextualised within debates that arose around the distribution potential offered by the VHS cassette in the 1980s and more recently by DVD and the possibilities that these technologies seemed to offer for reaching wider audiences. These issues will be illustrated through references to intiatives such as the Shoot Shoot Shoot, held at the Tate Modern in 2002, focusing on the first 10 years of the London Filmmakers Co-op, the Miners' Campaign Tapes (1984-85), the work of Amber Film Collective, the women's distributor Cinenova, and a DIY sell-through initiative by video artist George Barber.

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