A History of 1970s Experimental Film

Britain's Decade of Diversity

P. Gaal-Holmes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349474912, 9781137369376
• eBook ISBN: 9781137369383
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This comprehensive historical account demonstrates the rich diversity in 1970s British experimental filmmaking, acting as a form of reclamation for films and filmmakers marginalized within established histories. An indispensable book for practitioners, historians and critics alike, it provides new interpretations of this rich and diverse history.

1

Questions of History

What are the decisions made when a historical moment is selected, contextualised within particular frameworks and used to narrate the past? What exactly is the evidence determining the ‘facts’ of history? Should history, as cultural historian Marius Kwint suggests, ‘fully admit to its illusory and constructed nature, and stop pretending that it refers to a real process which is amenable to systematic analysis and even prediction’?¹ Should it admit to the sometimes arbitrary choices made by the historian who follows a hunch or a path with a head already full of ideas, but who through necessity gets momentarily side-tracked as new discoveries make themselves visible? What are the positioned approaches taken by historians, bringing their world-views to shadow the table where chosen sources are spread out for examination? How are these sources revealed in the light of the future moment of the new history’s arrival? These questions raise possibilities which the practice of history brings to the fore, and to my mind these positioned approaches cannot pretend to exist within the certainties of a definitive methodology. Instead, I believe they should embrace an openness required for a methodology of discovery more akin to Paul Feyerabend’s ‘conviction that anarchism, while perhaps not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly excellent medicine for epistemology’ (Feyerabend’s italics).² I believe that an openness to chance findings within and outside of the established historical paradigm is required by the researcher, whose approaches necessitate a passion for the subject of exploration equalled by a rigour to bring a new history to cohesion. These approaches to history are more akin to Robert Musil’s ‘Digression Three or Answer Number Four’:

The course of history was therefore not that of a billiard ball – which, once it is hit, takes a definite line – but resembles the movement of clouds, or the path of a man sauntering through the streets, turned aside by a shadow here, a crowd there, an unusual architectural outcrop, until at last he arrives at a place he never knew or meant to go to. Inherent in the course of history is going off course.³

The ‘going off course’ but remaining within the radar signal of intention has been my chosen historical method. I wanted, at the outset, to bring the films to the fore as readings of this 1970s history but without a doubt to also recognise the necessary contexts of the films and histories preceding this one. It has, therefore, been important to consider historiography and the way in which canons or dominant readings can problematically be shaped and remain unchallenged. These considerations underpin the discussions here together with some pertinent questions asked about the roles of curation, the responsibility of national collections in accumulating representative histories of experimental film, and how we might look to untangle the complex histories making up contemporary moving image.

An initial discussion in the first half of this chapter is framed by a number of essays whose titles reveal ongoing questions which are still urgent for this history today. These are Malcolm Le Grice’s ‘The History We Need’, Lis Rhodes’ ‘Whose History?’ (both 1979) and David Curtis’s more recent Tate symposium paper ‘Which History?’ (2001).⁴ The second half of this chapter is central to the argument put forward in this book, namely that 1970s experimental filmmaking was far more diverse than accounts have determined. It importantly challenges the ‘return to image’ thesis, a myth continuing to dominate accounts of this history. This flawed myth, problematically privileging formal investigation over others types of experimentation, has offered a biased account of events. Evidence to dispel this claim and inconsistencies within some written accounts are provided in order to highlight problems with the ‘return to image’ thesis and how this argument has been perpetuated since the early 1980s.

Historiography and history through curation

While the study of history is a long-established discipline, more recent approaches raised in the late 1960s by historical theorists such as E. H. Carr and Hayden White, and in the 1990s by Keith Jenkins, provide useful considerations about the positioned nature of the historian. These approaches have informed an understanding of the vagaries of historical analysis in determining the impossibility of truly objective accounts of history. Jenkins’ assertion that a single, ‘true’ history is unfeasible – ‘the same object of enquiry can be read differently by different discursive practices […] whilst, internal to each, there are different interpretive readings over time and space’ – identified analyses of the same period as being dependent on choices of critical framework, subjective interpretation and methodological process.⁵ Despite arguments for the reliability of sources as evidence, Jenkins also noted that the writing of history was never an impartial task – an unpositioned history – no matter how objectively a historian attended to the sources or intended the analysis to be:

The empiricist claim – that one can detect bias and expunge it by attending scrupulously to ‘what the sources’ say – is undercut by the fact that sources are mute. It is historians who articulate whatever the ‘sources say’, for do not many historians all going (honestly and scrupulously in their own ways) to the same sources, still come away with different accounts; do not historians all have their own many narratives to tell?⁶

The different narratives that historians have to tell are also invariably informed by institutional or ideological reasoning.

In his curatorial essay for ‘The Elusive Sign’ (1987) exhibition, the critic Michael O’Pray similarly asserted Jenkins’ claims about the positioned nature of the historian, acknowledging how choices are often made to accommodate certain historical accounts by potentially omitting works sitting less comfortably within the arguments presented:

To this extent, the history of the avant-garde is always elusive. Art is continually re-writing its own history in order to provide an alibi for its contemporary ideas, strategies and tastes. Inevitably and necessarily, in such critical re-writings, aspects of the past are elided, and the present floods the future with its projects, ambitions and prejudices.⁷

Similar sentiments were also identified in an essay focusing on the theoretical, institutional and ideological approaches informing any historical analysis. The curator, Walter Grasskamp, for example, discussed the contexts shaping the acceptance of artworks into the historical paradigm and the selectivity inherent within any historical assessment:

Of course, historiography, including art historiography, is only possible if a few events are selected from the chaos and peddled. Historiography pretends to go by the worth of events, as contemporaries supposedly saw it, but uses its own evaluation.⁸

Grasskamp revealed how historical analyses were shaped by an array of complex discourses, decisions and intentions, providing as an example curator Wulf Herzogenrath’s 1978 restaging of a 1949 exhibition, whereby he hoped to offer new perspectives on art history. It was anticipated that the 30-year distance would provide a more representative history than the limited exhibits presented in the earlier exhibition. However, acquiring some of the work by ‘artists who had fallen through the sieves of art history’ became problematic for the reconstruction:⁹

How many forgotten paintings and sculptures are there for each painting that makes a career for itself in the colour reproductions of the standard works of art history? When do these decisions (which art historians take in order, they think, to separate the chaff from the wheat) start to be taken for granted? How often do these works remain unchallenged merely because the other works have simply been overlooked, forgotten or even frittered away by the heirs?¹⁰

Thus, unrepresentative histories are not only determined by a historian or curator’s intentions but are also dependent on the availability of artefacts/artworks or sources available for inclusion. This is a particularly important issue for this 1970s history as many of the films I argue for here were not in distribution during the decade, or the filmmakers were not within the boundaries of dominant screening/exhibition circles, as was the case with B. S. Johnson, for example. Many of Derek Jarman’s Super-8 films were only screened to a small coterie of friends or fellow-artists before receiving wider viewing, or only emerged when funding opportunities materialised, as he clarifies here:

During the summer of 1973 I filmed the main sequences of a full-length Super 8 film – In the Shadow of the Sun, which was to wait eight years before it saw the light in 1980 at the Berlin Film Festival.¹¹

Jarman’s films were not the only ones out of circulation in the 1970s. David Larcher’s two films were also rarely shown and not in distribution; as was the case with the films of Jane Arden and B. S. Johnson (possibly also related to their suicides). Margaret Tait’s films were also only screened in England in the late 1970s, once she had been ‘discovered’ at a 1975 film festival.

The screening of experimental films was often a rare occasion – ‘few films are likely to have more than one showing in a year even in London. So arrive 5 minutes late and you may have missed that masterpiece for ever’ – and written accounts were often wrought through single screenings.¹² Critical essays and reviews have therefore held a great deal of significance, becoming central to readings of experimental film histories.¹³ It is perhaps stating the obvious, but if films were not available – or so fleetingly available – there was less likelihood that they could be written about, critiqued or included in contemporary or retrospective screenings.

Accessibility to films

While digitisation and access to on-line materials has significantly changed things for the researcher, not all resources available on-line are representative of a given period as they have (prior to being uploaded) already been selected for dissemination. Before digitisation experimental films were also difficult to see as the following two examples indicate: D. N. Rodowick mentioned discovering (in 1989) that Pasolini’s whole oeuvre was available at his local video store whereas ‘five years earlier, I might have prioritised my life around a trip to New York to fill in the one or two Pasolini films I hadn’t seen, or to review en bloc a group of his films’.¹⁴ Curtis, similarly, noted: ‘I knew about Warhol, and was even prepared to go to New York to try and see what he was on about’.¹⁵ These details are significant for the way in which written texts about experimental film have dominated – and continue to in some respects – accounts of filmmaking. While the digital availability of films is certainly wonderful, providing access to a rich diversity of films, it does not account for the majority of 1970s films discussed here and it cannot stand in for the actual viewing of a film in a darkened room (and not on a computer screen) with projection mechanisms made visible where necessary.

Film also differs significantly to still artworks in its durational aspect, and it is therefore essential that the whole film be seen in order to grasp the work, differing significantly to the viewing of a drawing, painting or photograph. And this is where access has also been an issue, as LUX director Benjamin Cook identified:

It is easier to see a painting than it is to see a film for the basic reason a film has no secondary representation like a painting does. You could theoretically study painting from pictures and books and obviously that is not ideal but you could, to a degree, know these works. Now without seeing a film from beginning to end, you couldn’t know it. And there is a whole complex system of how works are circulated. How value is imbued in works that also affects them.¹⁶

One of the issues specifically overshadowing historical accounts of 1970s experimental film is that many of these to a large extent became prejudiced by a lack of – and inaccessibility to – the primary sources: the films. Reliance on accepted written texts therefore became problematically intensified as these inadvertently became representative of the period, as Cook continues:

There is a problem in discourse that lacks quite far behind in the practice in this particular area because of this particular phenomenological issue with these kinds of work and their inaccessibility. So the problem is because there is such a lack of writing and scholarship in this area. I mean in relation to other kinds of art history generally. What happens is that the books and the work that was made – maybe not meaning to – establishes a kind of canon or key texts become by default key texts.¹⁷

These issues have, since my discussion with Cook, begun to be addressed – and I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter: 1 Questions of History
• Chapter: 2 Institutional Frameworks and Organisational Strategies
• Chapter: 3 Experimental Film and Other Visual Arts
• Chapter: 4 Visionary, Mythopoeia and Diary Films
• Chapter: 5 Experiments with Structure and Material
• Chapter: 6 Women and Film
• Conclusion: (Re)cognitions and (Re)considerations for This History
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index