Rage Against the Screen! (Part 1 a potted history)
Written by Jess Sweetman
part 1: a potted history of avant garde film cooperatives in the uk and usa
When people write off arthouse films as “pretentious” or elitist, I get a little bit angry. Scratch the surface and the field reveals story after story of artists coming together to make, screen, and preserve films which dare to ask questions about who deserves the spotlight and what film itself could be.
The story of cinema has always been led by those artists, filmmakers, organisers, and archivists who push against what is considered “normal.” Avant Garde means just that - the guard who forge ahead, showing the army where next to go. To forge a path socially can often mean confronting wider society with its demons - the fears of which it dares not speak, or the members it has chosen to shun. so that society can evolve. In this respect, creating art becomes an inherently political act that few can do alone - relying instead upon collective action.
If we want a different kind of world, first we must look to our artists to dream one. As a fully-fledged dreamer myself, I want to find out how the film collectives of the past worked, before exploring how contemporary film collectives model a future for film itself, and maybe a better world away from reboots, superheroes, and corporate overlords.
(Thanks for coming to my TED Rant.)
a potted history of some prominent western film collectives
Ah the ‘60s, the Age of Aquarius, long-haired kids dropping out because they visited Ken Kesey’s acid bus… We’re all picturing the same montage from the Woodstock documentary about now, right?
As it does at times of social upheaval, film was changing, freshened up by the kids graduating film schools or the university of Roger Corman who would change the way that American cinema looked and felt forever. At the same time, a number of important film collectives sprung up on both sides of the pond, first in New York City - influenced by the European film movements of the ‘50s - and then, influenced right back by the Americans - in London and beyond.
1960s-70s: the new york filmmakers cooperative
In 1962, filmmaker Jonas Mekas shared the draft of a manifesto for “The New American Cinema Group”:
The Filmmakers Cooperative in NYC was an artist-run collective and “self-help” group for those whose work had been subject to rejection or censorship from the mainstream. The filmmakers it exhibited works by were often those that questioned conventional taste, marks of decency, or stretched the idea of how film and audience could interact. Without the NYC Filmmakers Cooperative, works by Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and my hero John Waters may not have found an audience upon release. The Cooperative also spread its example far beyond New York City.
The cooperative still exists today. Their aim is to preserve, distribute, and exhibit avant garde cinema. If you check out their website, they have a rich collection of films as well as filmmaker training, information, and exhibition space.
british avant garde film cooperatives in the 1960s-1970s
The London Filmmakers Cooperative (LFMC) was established in 1966 by Simon Hartog, Stephen Dwoskin and Malcolm Le Grice, inspired by the work of the NYC Film Cooperative. It began as a club which screened avant garde films, it grew to become an egalitarian, member-run organisation, led by filmmakers.
According to A.L. Rees: “The LFMC effectively invented a new avant-garde genre.” Films were focussed more on prompting the audience to question or take action while filmmakers printed or worked upon the film strip itself. The films from this movement were thematically closer to the emerging conceptual art scene than mainstream cinema.
Focussing on filmmaking and distribution, the collective dissolved in 1990, but its work has been continued by the LUX organisation, who host an online resource and film library for exhibition purposes.
Meanwhile, up north - the Amber Collective formed in 1968 and moved to Newcastle in 1969, “driven by the founding members’ vision to reconnect with the working-class culture that shaped them.” According to their website: “Their early work was deeply rooted in humanist documentary traditions, focusing on Northeast England’s social and industrial life” and the collective played an important role in documenting the miners strikes in the 1980s. The collective was decimated by funding cuts into the 2000s, although the gallery space they opened in Newcastle is still going - albeit while actively fundraising to stay alive.
As the Age of Aquarius gave way to the “Greed is Good” era, the New York Cooperative changed the art world forever and many of its filmmakers went on to international renown. The time of the cooperative was over - for a while. But the political landscape of the 1980s soon pushed more artists to once more look to an alternative…
the lesbian and gay film collective, nyc in the ‘80s
New York City in the 1980s was poor, packed full of artists, and being decimated by the growing AIDS crisis. Queer people and their allies began to organise like never before, furious at the Reagan administration’s ignoring of the issue and the homophobic reactions to swathes of young people dying, and thus came the radical protest group ActUp, and from ActUP came the Lesbian and Gay Film Collective.
According to a history of the group by Out Magazine: “In 1987, when mainstream film festivals ignored queer stories and LGBTQ+ festivals avoided avant garde work, Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard created a space for both. Their New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now known as MIX NYC, was built on the idea that queer art deserves freedom, visibility, and experimentation.”
The festival ran to share the films of queer people, paying artists equally, allowing attendees even if they couldn’t pay the entrance fee, screening the first programme featuring the films of black, gay men, and even screening a rough cut of the now iconic documentary “Paris is Burning” (Jennie Livingston, 1990).
Back to Out Mag: “As the AIDS epidemic devastated the community, Hubbard began preserving queer film, ultimately archiving more than 2,000 hours of AIDS-related footage now held by the New York Public Library.”
MIX NYC continues in New York City, hosting a festival, screenings, and an online library of archive films and footage.
british film collectives of the ‘80s and ‘90s
Britain in the 1980s was split socially, mired by poverty and racism, amid the Thatcher government’s waves of privatisation, cuts, and violent anti-unionism. At the same time the UK media landscape was changing because of the formation of a new TV channel: Channel 4. According to journalist So Mayer:
“Years of negotiation between the British Film Institute and the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT) pushed Channel 4 to provide continued funding, including regular commissions and full-time employment, for selected film and video workshops across the country, as part of the channel’s remit to platform previously marginalised voices and stories.”
As a result, alongside the Amber Collective, two collectives of Black filmmakers were able to access more support in creating and broadcasting their work.
The Black Audio Film Collective formed in 1982, looking to start an open discussion of representation and post-colonialism. According to founder member Lina Gopaul: “What we wanted to do was to address those debates…and to bring that onto a visual landscape.”
At the same time, the Sankofa Collective had also formed. Both collectives came from a similar theoretical background “Influenced by contemporary debate on post-colonialism and social theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall.”
The work of both collectives was praised as topically and stylistically groundbreaking, with early examples of what would become the New Queer Cinema, coupled with a commitment to exploring alternative methods of storytelling, and, according to Mayer: “Such works stand out today as rare and precise evocations of almost-erased forms of collective action, both political and creative.”
Neither collective continued to today, although their legacy remains, wit regular screenings of their work continuing to this day.
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So where are the works of the historical collectives and co-ops now? It looks like the films of the New York Filmmakers Cooperative, Amber Collective, MIX NYC, and the London Filmmakers Cooperative, are available via legacy websites for exhibition rental and some video-on-demand.
Other works by the Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa Collective still seem to be being screened at festivals and amazing cinemas fairly regularly, this year’s Berlinale included a screening of Isaac Julien’s “Looking for Langston.” Meanwhile, the Criterion Collection has a selection of shorts by the Sankofa Collective while BFI’s video-on-demand offers “The Passion of Remembrance,” while both sites offer a wealth of further information on the filmmakers involved.
And if you’re stuck wondering why you don’t hear from film cooperatives or collectives in these trying modern times - I mean, there’s still plenty to rage against - then in the second part of this piece I’ll be exploring, and chatting to, a few representatives of film collectives and cooperatives working today.
