Contemporary Radical Film Culture

Networks, Organisations and Activists

Steve Presence, Mike Wayne, Jack Newsinger, Steve Presence, Mike Wayne, Jack Newsinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351006361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 21. Jahrhunderts

Comprising essays from some of the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, this is the first book to investigate twenty-first century radical film practices across production, distribution and exhibition at a global level.

This book explores global radical film culture in all its geographic, political and aesthetic diversity. It is inspired by the work of the Radical Film Network (RFN), an organisation established in 2013 to support the growth and sustainability of politically engaged film culture around the world. Since then, the RFN has grown rapidly, and now consists of almost200 organisations across four continents, from artists' studios and production collectives to archives, distributors and film festivals. With this foundation, the book engages with contemporary radical film cultures in Africa, Asia, China, Europe, the Middle East as well as North and South America, and connects key historical moments and traditions with the present day. Topics covered include artists' film and video, curation, documentary, feminist and queer film cultures, film festivals and screening practices, network-building, policy interventions and video-activism.

For students, researchers and practitioners, this fascinating and wide-ranging book sheds new light on the political potential of the moving image and represents the activists and organisations pushing radical film forward in new and exciting directions.

For more information about the Radical Film Network, visit www.radicalfilmnetwork.com.

PART I

Issues in radical film culture, past and present

1

‘Admin will make or break the rebellion’

Building the Radical Film Network

Steve Presence

This chapter provides a history of the Radical Film Network (RFN) and its development to date. The network was founded in 2013 and since that time has expanded rapidly, in several exciting and unpredictable directions, and looks set to expand further, with iterations of the network developing in India, Nigeria and Sweden. This chapter is written partly in response to questions regarding the formation of the RFN that activists and academics from these countries asked at the RFN conference in Nottingham in 2019, as they considered how to build the RFN in their own countries. While the chapter is therefore partly a ‘how-to’ guide from one of the network’s founders, this does not, of course, mean those building versions of the network in their parts of the world should necessarily follow suit. Indeed, part of what I want to do here is to show how the RFN developed from a specific context in the UK, and to offer an account of the challenges involved in using the particular approaches to network-building that we have adopted so far. This is intended to record this history and to help others who follow in our footsteps to learn from our mistakes and make the RFN a stronger, more resilient network in the future.

Writing the history of the RFN is important partly because – as David Archibald notes in his chapter in this volume – so few activist initiatives manage to reflect on their development and do the work they were set up to do. Frequently unfunded and dependent on volunteer labour, it is often simply not possible for radical cultural organisations to document the processes involved or explain why things occurred in the way that they did, at the same time as organising a film festival, for example, or building a production collective. As a result, it is all too often the case that, as Julia Knight and Peter Thomas found in their history of alternative film promotion and distribution, ‘new generations of … practitioners and distributors … remain unaware of historical precedents… strategies and models that are now being heralded as new and [are] therefore unable to benefit from lessons learnt in the past’ (Knight and Thomas 2011, 27).

Moreover, the digital culture myth that everything is readily available online is simply not the case, especially when it comes to already marginal cultures. In a digital context, when so much work is done online via email and social media – and so little produced by way of a paper trail for future researchers – stepping back to record and analyse what happened and why becomes even more important. This is perhaps especially the case when it comes to the building of counter-cultural infrastructures such as the RFN, which inevitably require sometimes dull administrative work and are thus less glamorous than the cultures they seek to support. Consequently, as Simeon Blanchard has argued in relation to the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA) in the 1970s and 1980s, while much of the work of the IFA was about making independent film ‘visible’, much of that work itself was ‘often barely visible’ (Blanchard and Holdsworth 2017, 294). And yet that infrastructural, administrative labour is crucial – without it, long-term initiatives simply cannot function effectively. As Extinction Rebellion (2019) put it, ‘admin will make or break the rebellion’.

The chapter is organised into four sections: the first three explore the genesis of the RFN; the conceptual framework on which it is based; and the practical steps involved in building the network and how it operates on a day-to-day basis. The final section poses some thoughts on the future of the network and suggests three ways in which its contribution to activist and experimental film culture could be bolstered in the next decade or so of its existence.

Genesis

The RFN was founded in London in September 2013, but its origins really begin in Bristol several months before. I had completed my PhD thesis in the spring: a study of activist documentary filmmaking in the UK from 1990 onwards (Presence 2013). In 2012, partly to provide a platform for the work I and other colleagues at my university were researching, and partly in response to the lack of political film screenings in Bristol at that time, I and a handful of others co-founded the Bristol Radical Film Festival, which quickly became an annual event following the consistently large audiences it attracted (Ager 2016, 205–40). Several things became apparent as a result of the festival and the research that underpinned it.

First, radical film culture in Britain was alive and kicking – albeit significantly under-resourced – with organisations up and down the country making, showing and sharing political and/or experimental film of all shapes and sizes. Second, while some groups active in the culture were in touch with one another, there were many gaps where organisations with clear affinities or aligned interests were unaware of their contemporaries in other parts of the country. Third, while some of these groups were conscious of the more recent history of activist filmmaking in the UK, these were the exception rather than the rule, and there was often little awareness of the deeper tradition of radical film, in the UK (Hogenkamp 1986, 2000; MacPherson 1980; Dickinson 1999; Burton 2005) or elsewhere (Waugh 1984; Eshun and Gray 2011; Dickinson 2018). Fourth, as indicated by the striking number of international relationships we formed from the film festival, similar film cultures were thriving all over the world – though again, there was little sense that those involved felt part of a global community.

Yet the history of radical film culture is also in part a history of various attempts to coordinate and network at regional, national and international levels. In the UK, the nearest historical predecessor to the RFN – indeed, in many ways the inspiration for it – was the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA, 1974–1990). I have written about the formative influence of the IFA on the RFN elsewhere (Presence 2019), but there are many other examples from different epochs and other parts of the world. The Workers’ Film and Photo League was active in the United States (Campbell 1977) and the UK (Hogenkamp 1976) in the 1930s, for example. In the late 1960s and 1970s, SLON and the Medvedkine Groups in France (Lupton 2005, 110–18; Hennebelle 1972, 15–17) overlapped with the IFA in Britain and the various Newsreel groups in the United States (Renov 1987), which also sought to connect with the revolutionary film movements taking place across much of Africa and Latin America.

Indeed, several efforts were made to formalise international relationships throughout this history (though sustaining them beyond initial conferences – major achievements in themselves – proved difficult). The Independent Cinema Congress, held in September 1929 in La Sarraz, Switzerland, and attended by Alberto Cavalcanti, Walter Ruttmann, Ivor Montagu and Sergei Eisenstein, among others, is probably the earliest example (Lenauer 1929/1980, 168–9). A Third World Filmmakers Meeting took place in Algiers in December 1973 and was attended by leading filmmakers from across Africa (Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo) and Latin America (Manuel Perez, Jorge Silva) as well as members of Third World Newsreel in the United States (Young 2006, 180; Bakari and Cham 1996, 17–24). In August 1978, the European Federation for the Progressive Cinema was founded in Utrecht, but appears to have faltered soon after (IFA 1978, 7–11). Yet, while these and other precedents existed, in 2013 there was no network for radical film culture in Britain or anywhere else, despite the clear need for one, and despite the opportunities presented by the Internet for network-building.

Conceptual framework

The core conceptual framework for the RFN was established in the first stage of the RFN’s development, which stretches from that spring/summer in 2013 to the inaugural conference in February 2015. In part, the framework was based on an analysis of the factors that contributed to the splintering of activist and experimental film culture in the UK since 1990. Margaret Thatcher’s brutal de-funding of cultural organisations in the latter half of the 1980s, for example, wiped out much of the independent film culture of the time – including the IFA itself. As a result, experimental filmmakers gravitated towards the art world and gallery space, where funding could still be found, while the more militant, activist-oriented organisations were largely left ‘out in the cold’ (Chanan 2015, 28) – surviving on meagre self-generated funds and exhibiting in squats, pubs and community and social centres. By the 2010s, while the ‘two avant-gardes’ – political and aesthetic – still existed, they were no longer in dialogue with one another, or even particularly aware of each other’s existence.

The notion of the two avant-gardes – first posited by Peter Wollen (1975) to explore shades of difference in art and experimental cinema, and later articulated in the political and aesthetic senses by Robert Stam (1998) and others – was therefore a key concept for the RFN. However, while the political and aesthetic avant-garde was and remains a useful conceptualisation of two historical tendencies in radical film culture, its relative obscurity outside of film history scholarship meant it was inappropriate as an everyday organising tool. The term ‘radical’ provided a useful – if more ambiguous and provocative – alternative and was eventually embedded in the title of the network for several reasons. The notion of ‘radical film’ has been explored in detail elsewhere (Presence 2019), so instead I want to focus on two further ideas that were key to the RFN’s development.

The first was that the RFN should be comprised of and aim to serve not just filmmakers but also all the groups and individuals involved in radical film activity of other kinds. This idea was adapted from the IFA, which quickly expanded its remit from a focus on ‘makers’ to ‘all those involved in producing film meaning […] not only independent film producers but also distributors, exhibitors, film teachers, critical workers and film technicians’ (IFA 1976, 8). For the RFN, this was expressed as all those ‘involved in radical film culture’ (my emphasis) – a similar attempt to emphasise that film cultures need all kinds of participation, and that the network was for everyone interested or active in radical film regardless of the nature of their participation. Indeed, though current measures to support film culture in the UK do not support cross-sector initiatives (Presence 2019, 444–5), fostering interaction across production, distribution and exhibition – something the IFA referred to as ‘integrated practice’ (see Robson’s Chapter 12 in this volume) – is a critical part of building any kind of non-mainstream film culture.

The second key idea was ensuring that the RFN reached out to those artists, activists and academics from previous generations, making clear the network was keen to learn from their successes and mistakes and to build a sense of continuity for those more recently involved. Again, the IFA was a key reference point here, both as a way of conveying what we were aiming to do to those who were involved in the earlier organisation but also as a way of sign-posting younger filmmakers and activists back into what is often viewed as a ‘golden era’ of radical film in Britain (Kidner 2013, 18). Enlisting the involvement of former IFA members meant that the RFN benefitted from their experience and advice and embedded the notion of the new network as a historically conscious one. As ex-IFA Michael Chanan later observed:

One of the notable features at the inaugural conference of the Radical Film Network in Birmingham last weekend was the mix of generations, from new blood to survivors from the days of the IFA … in the 1970s. Speaking as one of the latter, it was pleasing to find that what the comrades did back then has not been entirely forgotten, but more important, that this new initiative has a genuine sense of history, of historical inquiry, and is disposed to look to past experience both in order to commend what was achieved and to mull over its weaknesses.

(Chanan 2015, n.p.)

Finally, the RFN’s focus on ‘film’ and its description of itself as a ‘network’ (rather than an ‘organisation’ or ‘association’) provided important conceptual boundaries. ‘Film’ is of course intended to encompass all kinds of audio-visual work, but we could have opted to build a radical media network and open it up to artists and journalists working print and photography as well as film, for example. This has occasionally been raised at the RFN’s various conferences (discussed below) and it is an issue about which I feel ambivalent. On one hand, why intentionally exclude media-makers with whom we would have a natural affinity, and thus miss opportunities to foster relationships, facilitate communication and build a broader radical media culture? On the other hand, organising around ‘film’ provided a more manageable constituency (albeit still one that includes several hundred organisations spanning all kinds of film-related activity) and finding a strong shared foundation was important. At the time, with building the RFN something of an experiment, I think we made the right decision – but maybe that should change in the future, as the network develops. Similarly, building a network rather than an organisation was another important distinction: with most radical film groups already chronically under-funded, the last thing the culture needed was another organisation to run. In that context, aspiring to simply provide the connective tissue between already existing organisations was a key theoretical distinction.

Practicalities

These conceptual considerations continue to shape the practical activities of the RFN in many respects. In the early phases, the practical work of building the RFN involved initiating a multitude of conversations with many individuals and organisations from the various sectors the network was designed to support. Focusing on the UK at first, this typically took the form of email ‘pitch’ that explained the idea, asked if it was something the stakeholder would support, and outlined possible next steps. After receiving much enthusiasm and ‘buy in’ from UK organisations, the scope spread overseas – and the RFN very quickly became an international endeavour.

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