exReview.doc

A review of, 'Rogue Reels, Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90' Edited by Margaret Dickinson. BFI June, 1999.

Margaret Dickinson did more than just edit this book, the first ninety or so pages are her account of the period in which she was an active film worker. There follows around 100 pages of selected 'key' texts mostly from the seventies and eighties. Finally, there is another 100 pages of oral histories of seven of the radical groups of the time. This last section is particularly valuable. Collectives and groups are influential in the cultural activity of any period but tend to be poorly represented in art, film or cultural history. Any movement or tendency tends to be represented by the activities of the individuals who 'made a name' for themselves.

So this book is valuable for its focus on groups in a period when collective working practices were important and there was widespread disillusionment with the star system, leaders, and with centralised power in general. However the reaction against individualism and authority could also result in a reticence in documenting activities fully, which can make the later historicising of collective cultural production difficult.

Another problems of writing books like this, that consider cultural practices with merge with or confront their socio-political context, is the extent to which often well-known wider frames of influence such as 'Paris 1968' are described. Too little information can be banal and repeat what most of the readership already knows, to much and the subject is overwhelmed by the complexity of the greater context. Dickinson achieves summaries of the political climate which are concise and sharp. (Footnote: see her elegant critique of Marcuse's 'One Dimensional Man' p.37.)

Dickinson's prime narrative starts after the trauma and upheaval of World War II:

"After the war it was communists who took the initiative to re-establish a left film service - Stanley Foreman with Plato Films and Charles Cooper with Contemporary Films." p.18

This distribution flourished at a time in which 700 film societies were active but mainstream cinemas representations excluded the majority. The lives of women, foreigners, blacks and the working class were rarely shown in anything but caricature. The Free Cinema movement (footnote from Stuart Laing, 1986, chapt.5) of the late 1950s was a reaction against these exclusions. The left film distribution services and the Free Cinema Movement were the lasting achievements of fifties radical film culture and formed an important background to the activities of the subsequent decades.

It was not until the sixties that non-commercial film production came to the fore, inspired by a USA underground cultural opposition that had arisen from the virulent McCarthyist suppression of left politics. By the end of the sixties two types of film groups were emerging in England: one, like the London Filmmakers Co-op (1966), offered access to resources and had an open membership; the another, which was collectively organised and overtly political, was focused on production, although equipment was lent on an ad hoc basis. The latter type were the 'film workshops' like Cinema Action (1968), with its mobile cinema and agit-prop productions, or Amber (also 1968), a community film outfit based in Newcastle. Little has been written about these important groups whose members were mainly lower middle and working class.

Dickinsons attention and arguments in the first two sections concern the relation of 'independent' filmaking to the state. It seems like a sad history of recuperation in the main, and a one-sided account of what was also a period of high idealism and grassroot cultural activity.

This lively radical scene was gradually institutionalised and brought under the paternal wing of state patronage during the late seventies and eighties. This was undertaken by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Film Institute (BFI). The filmmakers own organisation the Independent Filmmakers Association (IFA) was sandwiched between the BFI and the workplace demands of the ACCT, the union of the film industry. This process of institutionalisation of independent film production was completed by the formation of Channel Four television.

"By 1984 many IFA activists were working for, or funded by, the new Channel Four... Within ten years the IFA and nearly all the other structures which promoted oppositional film-making were gone." p.62.

The lure of a TV channel 'of their own' was a major factor in the decimation of oppositional film-making. I would say the process started with the BFI's funding of the IFA in 1977. Or earlier when The First International Underground Film Festival was held at the National Film Theatre in 1970.(Footnote: An anonymous article in Cinematics 3, July 1970, refers to this festival as an 'establishment take-over bid, disguised as an open screening.' I am indebted to Duncan Reekie for this quote.) Even further back the myth that the state could fund cultural activity without smothering it must bear much of the blame. The idea that the state is benign and necessary for culture is a cruel illusion which is amply illustrated by the events described in this book.

The brief but detailed analysis of how the professional practices of television destroyed the collectivist spirit is useful. It is within the details of such practices that hegemony reasserts itself. As an example of these mechanisms Dickinson points to the extra research and editing time required by experimental production which was excised by the fiscal control of schedules demanded by televisions professional practices. The result was that "most of those who started off with radical objectives found themselves drifting towards industry norms" p.78.

The selected 'key' texts that follow are not the sort of texts that were most key for me in the period. There is a tendency in such collections to choose texts that are more formal, complete and literary, written by those who had gained positions of authority. This tends to leave out the more fragmented, passionate texts and images which energised the period. It also tends to leave out working class voices, and what was going on was very much about class exclusion and oppression.

"Cinema Action were making films and showing them on the hoof. The people who were making the films were presenting them. It was a very exciting thing. They'd put films on in factory canteens, in bus depots, in dock areas, in shipyard assembly areas, in locations were there were masses of workers. The UCS film was shown at Plessey's during the occupation there. It's very evocative when you've got films thrown as a huge projection against a big factory wall showing images of workers in struggle!". Dave Douglas interviewed on p.273.

In this way the dry formalism of formal 'key' texts is balanced to some extent by the oral histories that follow.

Going back to her intial account, the Television History Workshop's relation to the Oral History Movement is mentioned but, unfortunately not followed up (p.74.) Radicalisaton of TV content did happen but such things as the influence of oral history through autonomous companies like Testimony Films, or the Federation of Worker Writers which gave us Jimmy McGovern, both go unmentioned. Culture is, in practice, not contained within the narrow categories of professional disciplines such as film - attention to the cross-disciplinary currents that influence culture needs to be more of a feature of art histories. The film 'workshops' arose at a time when about twenty five arts workshops (or 'arts labs') were active across Britain (Footnote: See James Allen, New Society 26/11/68, p.749).

It may be the tensions between Dickinson's identity as woman, and her middle class positioning as a Cambridge graduate and critic on the marxist film journal 'Screen' that produces the fascinating rents in the fabric of her historical narrative that enable us to glimpse other positions and cross-currents usually ironed out of formal histories.

In another place home-movies get a paragraph without any further explanation (p.65). This begs the questions as to whether there was any relation between working class amateur film-making and the workshop activity. And, implied by this question, what was the relation of workshop activity to working class culture generally? (Footnote: clues can be found on pages p.248, 270, 272 & 297).

The last third of the book is a series of transcripts of the interviews made in 1996. The interviews cover a range of issues not discussed in the earlier sections. It is almost as if the interviews were conducted after the first section was already written. One of the main issues of theoretical importance is brought up by the manner in which the workshops challenged conventional cinemas suppression of discourse amongst its audience. Many of the workshops put a high priority on film as a catalyst for discussion and debate. This comes up at least seven times in the interviews but is not analysed in any depth.(footnote: see pages 230, 236, 238, 240, 253, 273 & 277. Also see index for the use of 'trigger' films). The live film event in which tens of people meet, collectively witness a film, and then talk, tends to be valued as much less important than glamourous mass media exposure in which hundreds of thousands of people are addressed as individuals or family groups in domestic isolation. But this old assumption about the superior effectiveness of mass culture needs to be challenged. The function of the live forum in the democratic regeneration of culture is still not sufficiently articulated in spite of the interest in Bakhtin's ideas of carnival. The social forms through which, culture renews itself, traditions are passed on and re-evaluated, and people come to find new responses to changing conditions are still not sufficiently understood.

This book is refreshing because a historical narrative based on formal texts, enriched by self-reflexive experience, exists alongside a collection of oral histories which reflect a silent critique back onto the formal narrative. As a teaching aid for oral history it is useful for this very reason, even if one's interest is not with oppositional film. Within film studies the books rough cuts will hopefully become the spur to much new research.

Stefan Szczelkun August 1999