Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image

By Julia Knight and Peter Thomas

Through a series of case studies, this book tracks the inventive distribution and exhibition initiatives developed over the last 40 years by an array of small companies on the periphery of the beleaguered UK film industry. That their practices are now being replicated by a new generation of digital distributors demonstrates that, while the digital ‘revolution’ has rendered those practices far easier to undertake and hugely increased their scope, the key issues in securing a more diverse moving image culture are not technological. Although largely invisible to outsiders, the importance of distributors and distribution networks are widely recognized within the industry and Reaching Audiences is a key contribution to our understanding of the role they both do and can play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: May 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781841506029

Julia Knight

Julia Knight is professor emerita at the University of Sunderland. Between 2002 and 2009 she conducted a series of AHRC funded research projects exploring artists’ and independent film/video distribution in the United Kingdom, which have produced the book Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image (2011, co-authored with Peter Thomas), a series of journal articles, and the online Film & Video Distribution Database: http://fvdistribution-database.ac.uk.

Book preview

Reaching Audiences

To Lance, Sam and Jake, and to Maisoon, Heather and Pamela. Our most sincere thanks for all your support and patience.

Reaching Audiences

Distribution and Promotion of

Alternative Moving Image

Julia Knight and Peter Thomas

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Front cover:

Portraits of the Flat Iron, New York 2010 and Portraits of Spitalfields,

London 2010, Terry Flaxton (Photo: Charlotte Humpston)

Light Music (2 screen version), Lis Rhodes, Paris 1975 (courtesy of the artist)

Video sharing website interface, 2010 (courtesy of Peter Thomas)

Cover designer: Sarah Newman

Copy-editor: Macmillan

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-157-4

Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: So Much More than Meets the Eye

Chapter 1: DIY, Counterculture and State Funding: The London Film-Makers’ Co-op

Chapter 2: Exhibition, Political Agendas and Access to Audiences: The Other Cinema and Cinema of Women

Chapter 3: Technology, Television and Seeking Wider Audiences: London Video Access/London Electronic Arts and Albany Video Distribution

Chapter 4: Promotion, Selection and Engaging Audiences: Circles, Film and Video Umbrella, London Video Access and London Film-Makers’ Co-op

Chapter 5: Changing Conditions, Under-Resourcing and Self-Sustainability: Cinenova

Chapter 6: Questions of Strategy, Policy and Agency: The Lux Saga

Chapter 7: Understanding Distribution

Appendix: Research Sources

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is one of the outcomes of two research projects undertaken between 2002 and 2005 with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Full details of the projects can be found at alt-fv-distribution.net. We gratefully acknowledge the AHRC's support, without which the research would not have been possible.

For their various assistance in helping with the research on which this book is based, and with the accompanying Film and Video Distribution Database at fv-distribution-database.ac.uk (which was also AHRC funded), we would like to offer our sincere thanks to the following: Tom Abell, Karen Alexander, Dominic Angerame, Steven Ball, George Barber, Eddie Berg, Simon Blanchard, Steven Bode, Elaine Burrows, Jo Cadaret, Ian Christie, Ben Cook, David Critchley, David Curtis, Larry Daressa, Peter Dean, Helen de Witt, Tony Dowmunt, Mark Duguid, Mick Eadie, Deb Ely, Andi Engel, Sonali Fernando, Terry Flaxton, Alan Fountain, Rudolph Frieling, William Fowler, Chris Garratt, Peter Gidal, Clive Gillman, Jane Gowman, David Hall, Sue Hall, Liane Harris, Sylvia Harvey, Jackie Hatfield, Emma Hedditch, Gill Henderson, Judith Higginbottom, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, Sophie Howarth, Laura Hudson, David James, Mick Kidd, Edith Kramer, Mike Leggett, Steve Littman, Abina Manning, Paul Marris, Murray Martin, Michael Maziere, Steve McIntyre, Eileen McNulty, John Mhiripiri, Karen Mirza, Peter Mudie, Laura Mulvey, Kate Norrish, Mike O'Pray, Jane Parish, Stephen Partridge, Richard Paterson, Jim Pines, Rick Prelinger, Duncan Reekie, AL Rees, Maisoon Rehani, Lucy Reynolds, Lis Rhodes, Graeme Rigby, Chris Rodrigues, Peter Sainsbury, Philip Sanderson, Erich Sargeant, Nancy Sarre, MM Serra, Guy Sherwin, Caroline Smith, Mark Smith, Felicity Sparrow, Mike Sperlinger, Rod Stoneman, Geoff Stow, Mike Stubbs, Bronwyn Tarrier, Mike Taylor, Anna Thew, Gary Thomas, John Thompson, Albie Thorns, Margaret Trotter, Sarah Turner, Marion Urch, Mark Webber, Jeremy Welsh, Sandy Wieland, Irene Whitehead, John Wyver and Debra Zimmerman.

Foreword

Commodities, Karl Marx observed 150 years ago, do not go to market all on their own. Someone has to take them there. Goods must be moved, prices agreed, and only after a long and complicated process will the commodity in question be there for the end-user to enjoy. This applies to films and videos as much as it does to any other commodity, and it applies even in that sector of the film and video business that likes to think of itself as remote from and even antagonistic to the regular processes of commodity exchange. But perhaps because of this aversion, the process by which commodities get to market - generally referred to in the film trade as distribution - is the least studied of all the aspects of cinema and other forms of moving image. A lot is written about film and video production, about the films and videos produced and about how they are perceived/ received by the spectator, but very little about the intermediate stages between production and consumption. Sometimes it seems as if, in the world of cinema and the moving image, commodities do indeed mysteriously get to market all on their own.

Now admittedly films and videos are quite special commodities and sometimes may appear not to be commodities at all, particularly in those parts of the art world which manage to hold vulgar economics at a comfortable distance, cushioned by patronage, subsidy and the like. They are special because the needs and desires they satisfy are spiritual rather than material. Their field of operation is cultural rather than (or as much as) economic. Again Marx anticipated this objection, remarking right at the beginning of Capital that it makes no fundamental difference whether the need the commodities in question satisfy is that of the belly or the fantasy. Something circulates, and at some point in its circulation it becomes subject to the laws of commodity exchange.

To some extent this is received wisdom. The notion of cultural industries (or in the New Labour variant, creative industries) is now widely accepted and with it the notion of films or videos as commodities, or culture-goods as I would prefer to call them. What is striking about this book is that it extends the analysis of the two-faced nature of these goods - at the same time economic and cultural - into the rarely trodden and generally held to be arid field of distribution. For, unlike the mainstream film industry, in the world of artists’ film and video it was distribution where cultural interchanges were at their most intense. The artist might perform a solitary labour (in extreme cases, just him/herself, a camera and a landscape), reception might be no less solitary (particularly with the advent of video), but the intermediate world where films were assessed and ways devised to bring them to prospective audiences was one throbbing with collective life and political-cultural debate. Of course the mechanics were important, since the life of a small organisation could depend crucially on whether it could send films out to customers in a cost-effective way. But the mechanical parts of the operation were only carried out because workers in the field had a passionate commitment to the type, or types, of film and video for which they were finding an audience.

As Julia Knight and Peter Thomas point out in their Introduction to this volume, the types of film and video grouped together under the generic heading of'independent’ were indeed many and varied, ranging from the most practically political to the most aesthetically refined. They shared what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called a ‘family resemblance’ rather than any form of doctrinally defined unity. Although some might have a fringe relationship to the world of commercial cinema, what they most crucially had in common was a need to locate audiences outside the world of mainstream cinema-going. This externally conditioned common cause was not without effects of its own, fascinatingly documented in the book. On the one hand it led to internal arguments, often incomprehensible to the outside world. But on the other hand it could also contribute to a genuine unity of purpose in a counterculture which did not merely co-exist with but actively opposed the values of the mainstream. Film and video distribution was vital to this counterculture throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s and beyond, and the lessons of that period are of continuing relevance even in a world where films and videos are distributed via the internet rather than by cyclists carrying cans of film from venue to venue.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: So Much More than Meets the Eye

It is widely recognised by those working in the film and video sector that distribution is the vital link which connects producers to audiences throughout the whole sector, from the commercial film industry to grassroots community initiatives. But to those outside the sector, that link is largely invisible, and has become all the more so in the age of'broadcast yourself’ websites such as YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion. The term ‘distribution’ has often been thought to simply be the physical means by which a film is transported from its distributor to an exhibitor, and this is why video sharing websites, by removing the necessity for even that physical real-world delivery process, seem to give producers the potential to bypass traditional distributors and connect directly with their audiences.

This invisibility has meant that the distribution link in the ‘supply chain’ has been critically neglected in cinema and moving image scholarship. In the history of film studies as a discipline, it has tended to be the ‘text’ and those prestigious roles most overtly associated with it - the director and the star - that have enjoyed most critical attention, with a growing interest in audiences, spectatorship and exhibition practices. Next to the scale of critical energy invested in those subjects, the distribution process and its crucial links with promotion and exhibition have been addressed by only a small (albeit growing) body of work. A few books have appeared which deal with some of the processes involved in delivering films to audiences, such as Tiiu Lukk’s Movie Marketing: Opening the Picture and Giving it Legs (1997), Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000), Tom Shone's Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (2004) and Peter Grant and Chris Wood’s Blockbusters and Trade Wars: Popular Culture in a Globalized World (2004). At the same time, a small number of books have appeared which examine the rise of the more distinctive independent distributors such as Angus Finney's The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures (1996) and Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance & the Rise of Independent Film (2004). Over the years there have also been a handful of chapters in edited anthologies, including, for instance, Archie Tait's ‘Distributing the product’ in Martyn Auty and Nick Roddick's British Cinema Now (1985), Lee Baupré's ‘How to Distribute a Film in Paul Kerr's The Hollywood Film Industry (1986), Justin Wyatt's chapter on Miramax and New Line in Steve Neale and Murray Smith's Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (1998), a chapter on theatrical distribution in Jason Squire's revised The Movie Business Book (2006), and Philip Drake's ‘Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood’ in Janet Wasko and Paul McDonald's The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (2008).

While most of these publications deal with the mainstream industry, there has been some academic interest in other areas, such as a section in Charlotte Brunsdon's Films for Women (1986) and a handful of articles in Screen on feminist distribution and exhibition initiatives,¹ Margaret Dickinson's inclusion of interviews with left-wing film distributors Contemporary Films and Plato Films in her edited collection Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90 (1999) together with a brief discussion of the implications of video distribution, a chapter on Film Co-ops by Jack Stevenson in Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider's Underground USA: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (2002), Michael Zryd's article on "The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Dependence and Resistance’ (2006), the publication of Scott MacDonald's Cinema 16 (2002) and Canyon Cinema (2008), the appearance of books on the film festival circuit - in particular Marijke de Valck's Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (2007) and Dina Iordanova's Film Festival Yearbook series (2009, 2010) - and the University of Salford's conference ‘Europe on Screen: Issues in the Future Distribution and Exhibition of European Cinema’ (June 2008). The fact that this area of scholarship continues to gather pace indicates that the influential role the distribution link plays is now more widely acknowledged. This is perhaps most crucially evidenced by the addition, since its original publication in 1979, of an introductory chapter on ‘Film Production, Distribution and Exhibition’ in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's key text book, Film Art: An Introduction (2010), now in its ninth edition. Yet, despite this emerging body of literature, moving image distribution remains a relatively under-researched and little understood area.

Through their acquisitions policies, their promotional and marketing practices, and their links with production and exhibition, together with their relationship with national arts policies, funders, and financiers, distributors play a crucial role in determining what we as audiences get to see and hence in helping shape our film culture. Thus the distribution link does far more than simply provide a physical delivery system. Maintaining the availability of collections and promoting that work are crucial to ensuring films reach their potential audiences. The distribution link has also played a key role in shaping our film history. As Ian Christie, Vice President of Europa Cinemas (and formerly of the British Film Institute's Distribution Division), has stressed, our understanding of film history has been dictated by those films that have been distributed - unless films are seen, they do not get written about.² David Sin of the UK's Independent Cinema Office recently echoed this argument and went on to assert that distribution, with its links to programming, is ‘the most important aspect of the film chain'.³ Indeed, in assessing the needs of the film and video sector, together with the music and the press/publishing industries - collectively termed the ‘cultural industries'⁴ - the former Greater London Council accurately observed: ‘It is clear that control of distribution, of the route to the audience, is the key site of power in the cultural industries’ (our italics).⁵ In a practice and policy document written in 1984, they argued that, however, 'the distribution of all forms of cultural product remains firmly in the control of a handful of companies which are geared to providing a narrow range of high turnover products'.⁶ Hence there has been a long tradition of filmmakers and other communities of interest setting up ‘alternative’ distribution organisations and exhibition venues in order to ensure the circulation of both a wider diversity of cultural products and ‘alternative’ sources of information. In the UK, for instance, the Federation of Workers’ Film Societies - founded in 1929 specifically to circumvent censorship regulations prohibiting public cinema screenings of'communist’ films - set up their own distributor, Atlas Films, to keep them supplied with appropriate films,⁷ while the London Film-Makers’ Co-op was set up in 1966 to expand and improve the availability of experimental film in the UK. Although the success and sustainability of such initiatives have been variable, Ken Worpole of the Cultural Industries Unit at the Greater London Enterprise Board nevertheless argued in 1985 that ‘distribution’ had to be considered as ‘the key element in any definition of radical cultural practice'.⁸

Over the years a significant part of the appeal of new media technologies - cable television, the VHS cassette, satellite television, DVD and the internet - has been the perception that they offer the potential to expand the diversity of our moving image culture and allow previously marginalised or under-represented voices to be heard by wider audiences. As early as 1981 the UK's Independent Film-Makers’ Association stressed the need to take on board the ‘video-cassette revolution'.⁹ A decade later at an Arts Council of Great Britain seminar addressing how best to nurture innovative moving image work - arranged as part of a consultation process for the drafting of a National Arts and Media Strategy - facilitator John Wyver posed the question: ‘what place is there for other forms of distribution including cassettes, laserdiscs and related interactive systems?'¹⁰ More recently, both DVD and internet technology have been heralded as offering new opportunities, paving the way for new distribution models,¹¹ and have given rise to international forums devoted to exploring their potential. In September 2005, the Canadian non-profit organisation Digimart held the first Global Digital Distribution Summit to consider the ‘new business opportunities created by the digital revolution',¹² followed just over two years later by the inauguration of the London based Power to the Pixel conferences to explore new ways of connecting with audiences.

Whilst cable and VHS met with limited success in terms of expanding the diversity of material available to wider audiences, developments in internet technology now mean that anyone with a broadband connection can make available their own content or ‘collection’ - can take control of its distribution, of ‘the route to the audience’ - by uploading it to sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, which has resulted in a proliferation of so-called ‘user-generated’ content. Although a significant proportion of this work could be described as falling within the ‘home movies’ genre,¹³ not necessarily aimed at wider audiences, video sharing sites have also facilitated the availability of a wider range of politically or socially engaged work, together with experimental work, that might have traditionally struggled to find a distributor. Much of the content on sites such as YouTube is also recycled TV programming, but other sites such as UbuWeb and the Internet Archive, together with the download/streaming facilities at DVD rental sites like LoveFilm, Netflix and MUBI, as well as internet TV channels like Amber Film's SideTV and BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, also give access to a huge range of contemporary and historical feature films, documentaries, experimental work, shorts and other genres. Furthermore, traditional film archives (such as the BFI National Archive and the North West Film Archive), museums with film collections (such as the Imperial War Museum) and some specialist distributors (such as Lux, Criterion and Light Cone) are also making their collections at least partly available online¹⁴ - in some cases via YouTube - while new sites or initiatives are also in development or being trialled.¹⁵

In tandem with the development of internet technology, a growing number of niche DVD labels have also been launched in recent years - such as Cinema16, Second Run, Journal of Short Film and Red Avocado - making a range of non-mainstream feature length films, shorts and experimental work from around the world more readily available. As the Second Run website states, they distribute ‘niche-market films ... which, crucially, have never before been available anywhere in the world on DVD'¹⁶ and, as with other niche DVD labels, these can be purchased through their own online shop. At the same time older niche video labels such as BFI Publishing and Peripheral Produce have found that titles released on DVD do far better business than their experience with VHS releases of comparable titles had led them to expect. As Erich Sargeant of BFI Publishing has observed: ‘[DVD] is something that people have just been mad for. I think people are much more prepared to take risks about buying a DVD than they were with VHS'.¹⁷ This widespread consumer take-up of DVD has also aided independent or DIY releases of niche films on DVD. Robert Greenwald's documentary, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (USA, 2003) was modestly projected to sell 2000 copies but, promoted through house parties, it sold around 120,000 copies.

This easy access to an unprecedented abundance and variety of moving image work has without doubt transformed certain aspects of our moving image culture. Films that in the past were virtually impossible to see unless you lived within easy reach of a ‘progressive’ film society, or in a metropolitan centre like London or New York, and then only rarely - such as E.A. Dupont's Piccadilly (UK, 1929) or Chris Marker's La Jetée (France, 1962) - can now be accessed directly online or acquired on DVD at the click of a mouse. In a reversal of conventional practice, the unexpectedly high level of sales of Greenwald's Uncovered also led a film distributor to give the film a theatrical release in the USA in the belief that the DVD sales had built up a cinema audience for the film¹⁸ - a phenomenon which was repeated with his later documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism (USA, 2004).

Easy online access has also fuelled a so-called ‘remix’ culture, with an increasing number of people - media professionals and amateurs alike - appropriating and re-editing the abundant footage now so readily available (a practice actively supported by the Creative Commons copyright licence). ‘Remixing’ as a cultural practice is of course not new - there is a long history of found footage films - nor is it necessarily radical. However, it is possible to argue that in the digital era it has facilitated a more widespread participatory approach to moving image culture. While film and media theorists have long argued that viewers are far from passive consumers, access to online moving image collections and archival material has allowed a greater degree of interaction between those viewers and moving image material. For instance, Rick Prelinger has given over 2000 films from the Prelinger Archives to the Internet Archive and he estimates there has been between 50 and 60 million downloads of the films and 20,000 derivative works produced as a result of their online availability.¹⁹ Unsurprisingly therefore, what we think of as an ‘archive’ is changing. Traditionally archives have been fairly invisible and more concerned with the preservation of their collections than with making them particularly accessible. Hence ‘archive’ has been a loaded term which effectively consigned work to a burial chamber and was quite distinct from a ‘distribution’ collection.²⁰ The latter was work that was in active circulation, promoted, exhibited and available to be watched. But this distinction is starting to collapse. As soon as material is placed on the internet, it becomes available for (in theory) anyone to view - whether it has been placed there by an archive, a distributor, a DIY practitioner or anyone else. Indeed, inasmuch as an archive collects and preserves material, the internet can at one level be viewed as one massive archive which also conveniently makes its material widely available.²¹ While the role of the traditional distributor will not necessarily disappear, the expectations ‘audiences’ have in relation to moving image culture are certainly changing. Increasingly, people now expect material will and should be readily available online and accessible via a range of platforms.²²

These developments have fuelled a fairly widespread perception that we are experiencing a moving image distribution revolution. As Greenwald has stated: ‘Frankly, I think what we've learned about distribution may be more important in the long run than the films themselves'.²³ However, this ease of access and ready availability is not the case for all films. While some work is freely available online, other work has to be purchased (as is the case with LoveFilm, Criterion and MUBI). And despite widespread perceptions to the contrary,²⁴ not all films are available online or even on DVD. Sometimes this is because of rights clearance issues, but even if they are online, there is also no guarantee they will remain so. In February 2007, for instance, Malcolm Le Grice's Berlin Horse (1970) was available on YouTube, but by the following year it had been taken down.²⁵ More recently, in October 2010, UbuWeb was hacked and its online collection of films was rendered temporarily unavailable. Similarly, many rights holders will often permit only limited online access - either in the form of taster clips or via restricted access (e.g. for educational use only, as with film footage on the Arts on Film Archive²⁶). Thus, not all work online is equally accessible all the time, with some films still difficult to see in their entirety.

Furthermore, while digitally produced films can easily be made available online or on DVD, those originated on video tape or celluloid have to be transferred. As Reframe, a new initiative to help filmmakers, distributors and others to sell their work using the internet, has asserted:

Substantial amounts of film, video and media arts remain ‘stuck on the shelf’, inaccessible to large segments of the public ... [and] often it is because of the high cost to convert to digital formats that would allow for broad circulation.²⁷

Indeed, even with current initiatives (such as Screen Heritage UK), relatively little of all available moving image material has been digitised and is thus still not widely available.²⁸ And often, time-consuming preservation work has to precede conversion to a digital format. For instance, much work originated on early video formats suffers from a phenomenon known as ‘sticky shed syndrome’ which can result in the recorded information being stripped from the tape when it is played. Tapes have to be baked at a low temperature before they can be safely played to enable transfer to a digital format.²⁹

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, ease of access does not mean that work will automatically be watched. As Pat Aufderheide so astutely observed as early as 2005, the very year that YouTube was launched: ‘This ability to watch digital video on command makes it ever easier to get a film to a user - but of course does nothing to solve the problem of making them want to watch it in the first place’ (our italics).³⁰ A brief look through the YouTube site, for instance, quickly demonstrates that - despite the site's promotion of lesser-known works, its hosting of British Film Institute and Imperial War Museum channels, and an occasional user-generated ‘hit’ - those videos with the highest viewing figures are usually recycled TV programming or content that already has widespread real world visibility (through, for instance, its topicality or a pre-existing public profile). For instance, in the wake of Barack Obama winning the US presidential election in November 2008, the Obama music video Yes We Can on YouTube had attracted over 15 million viewings.³¹ Similarly, with regard to DVD sales, the success of Greenwald's Outfoxed and Uncovered documentaries in the USA was also crucially dependent on the strength of public interest in the subject matter. Moreover, unlike many filmmakers, Greenwald had access to an appropriate and pre-existing network - via the progressive political action group Moveon.org who arranged the house parties -through which to promote the films. Martin Lucas and Martha Wallner have made similar observations about the importance of networking over technological developments. In Tony Dowmunt's edited anthology, Channels of Resistance, they give an account of their Gulf Crisis TV Project which aimed to communicate widespread opposition in the USA to the 1991 Gulf War via a series of TV programmes.³² As they explain, although affordable technology facilitated the project, it was their ability to network with over 300 public access stations that ensured the project's success.³³ But while DIY filmmakers can now readily exploit social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace as a means of ‘marketing’ their work to others, it doesn't necessarily mean the work will be watched.

Thus, despite the so-called ‘digital revolution’, many of the issues which determine what we as audiences end up getting to see or choosing to watch - the diversity of moving image material that we experience - remain the same. Although digital technology has made it far easier to make work available, it has not resulted in all work being equally available or accessible. Indeed, as Holly Aylett, has argued, diversity of expression in the moving image sector will still need to be fought for.³⁴ While ‘alternative’ voices can now utilise the internet, for instance, there is no guarantee they will be heard, and accessed out of context there is no guarantee they will be understood.³⁵ Through her involvement with the UK Coalition for Cultural Diversity, Aylett has been tracking the UNESCO Convention for the Protection and Promotion of Diversity of Expression. The Convention is an international instrument which came on to the statute books in March 2007 and recognised that culture is not a commodity and that national governments should have a right to determine their own cultural policy. Although there is an unavoidable tension between dealing with national governments offline and a global community online, Aylett has likened the Convention to a room which we all have to agree to enter in order to ensure that a pluralistic moving image culture will continue to exist.³⁶

In view of the potential offered by digital technology, it is possible to argue that it is now more important than ever that we understand the processes that connect moving image work to its audiences. If we are to more fully understand why we have the film culture we do - both historical and contemporary - we need to better understand the factors that shape and influence the distribution process whereby some films are more widely seen while others are not.

This is one of the main aims of this book. In the following chapters we examine particular aspects of, and highlight particular issues raised by, the distribution activities - together with their related promotional and exhibition practices - undertaken by the following nine UK organisations: the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (experimental film, founded 1966), The Other Cinema (independent feature films and political documentaries, founded 1969-70), London Electronic Arts (video art, founded 1976 as London Video Arts, subsequently changing its name to London Video Access before becoming London Electronic Arts), Cinema of Women (feature films by women and women's movement documentaries, founded 1979), Circles (feature films, shorts and experimental films and videos by women, founded 1980), Film and Video Umbrella (artists’ film and video, set up in 1983),³⁷ Albany Video Distribution (workshop, artists’ and independently produced documentaries and shorts, set up in 1985), Cinenova (launched 1991 as a successor to Circles) and the Lux (founded 1999 from a merger of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op and London Electronic Arts, and relaunched 2002). It is only by understanding how the distribution link functions - helping determine what we as audiences can get to see - that we can more fully understand the range of factors that can limit or expand the diversity of our moving image culture.

There are a number of reasons for the very specific focus on the above organisations. As is evident, we are writing from a UK perspective, and in the UK, as Sylvia Harvey explains, ‘[t]he origins of the modern independent film movement can be traced to the founding in 1966 of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative'.³⁸ The Co-op, as it became known, opened up an important cultural space where interested parties could develop a critique of the mainstream film industry. Starting with a distribution service, it gradually expanded to include a production workshop, an exhibition space and eventually its own magazine, Undercut. In the following years it was joined by a number of radical film production collectives which emerged from the political context created by the New Left in post-war Britain and the growing instances in the UK and elsewhere of'challenges to established order and authority', such as the student uprisings in France in May 1968, the women's movement, the birth of black political activism, and the beginnings of a lesbian and gay rights movement.³⁹ Harvey includes in this group of collectives Cinema Action (founded 1968, making films for the labour movement on a range of topics), Amber Films (founded 1968, films documenting the lives of working people in the North East of England), Liberation Films (founded 1970, films on community action), the Berwick Street Collective (founded 1972, films about Ireland and the unionisation campaign of women night cleaners), the London Women's Film Group (founded 1972, films about women's historical and contemporary campaigning activity) and the Newsreel Collective (founded 1974, films about various socio-political issues).⁴⁰

Due to the way in which arts funding policies developed in the UK at both regional and national levels, the work of such groups enjoyed a relatively high level of state support during the latter half of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. This support came from a range of funders including: national bodies with a remit to support cultural activity, particularly the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Film Institute (BFI), together with their regional counterparts in the form of regional arts associations; local Government, particularly the Greater London Council, its investment wing - the Greater London Enterprise Board mentioned above - and the Metropolitan County Councils; and television, primarily Channel 4 (launched in 1982) with its initial remit to support experimental and innovative work. While the Co-op and most of the early production collectives were based in London, this network of public funding also helped spawn a large number of film and video workshops across the UK which functioned to support both artists’ and political/ community activist film and video work.⁴¹ It was in this context that London Video Arts was set up, initially - like the Co-op - as a distribution service, but expanding fairly quickly to collaborate with established exhibition spaces and set up its own production facilities. Conversely, Albany Video had been set up in the early 1970s as a grassroots community video project but quickly began informally distributing its own and others’ videos. As they accessed the growing network of public funding, however, they were able - among other things - to launch a formalised distribution service.

Thus, this ‘movement’ experienced a period of intensive activity during the 1970s and 1980s and, although increasingly grant-aided, evolved into what became termed an ‘independent film and video sector'. Indeed, such was the level of activity that as early as 1974 it formed its own umbrella organisation - the above mentioned Independent Film-Makers’ Association (IFA) - to represent and further the disparate interests encompassed within the sector. As a result of this activity there was a substantial supply of'alternative’ moving image product that needed to find its way to audiences, and a number of dedicated distribution initiatives and groups - including The Other Cinema, Cinema of Women and Circles - also arose to help meet this need. Indeed, such was the desire to ensure that ‘alterative’ work found its way to audiences that the Arts Council also set up its own initiative, the Film and Video Umbrella. Thus, as part of that sector, the organisations that form the focus of this book offer a very rich source of material for study.

More importantly though, the organisations discussed in this book were committed to distributing as widely as possible work that has not interested conventional film distributors because the low level of financial return usually makes it economically unviable and certainly commercially uncompetitive - work that has been broadly characterised as the aesthetic and political avant-garde.⁴² Indeed, as indicated above, their distribution operations were set up specifically to promote and build audiences for that kind of work. Other groups and workshops that formed part of the growing independent film and video sector also undertook distribution activities - such as the above mentioned Liberation Films, Amber Films and the London Women's Film Group, as well as Leeds Animation Workshop (founded 1976, animated films on social issues) and Sankofa Film and Video (founded 1983, films on the Black experience of British culture) - but their focus tended to either be exclusively on their own productions, very narrow or shift over time to other concerns. In fact a number of film and video workshops undertook the distribution of their own work as a conscious strategy to connect directly with their audiences. The organisations we have studied, however, undertook over sustained periods of time to distribute work made by a wide range of film and video makers, and helped establish national - and often international - profiles for that work. As a result they have not only been a significant source of'alternative’ information, viewpoints and visions, but have also been highly influential as distributors, doing much to ensure that audiences have been able to enjoy a wider range of moving image material. As former Cinenova worker Helen de Witt, in commenting on how she saw their role, has observed: ‘[It's] basically giving audiences ... a choice about what they can see, it's sort of making an intervention into the mainstream and saying there are other things that you can see'.⁴³ Thus it is possible to argue that understanding how this particular sector has functioned is crucially important if we wish to nurture a more diverse moving image culture. However, while the growing literature cited above has explored and documented the workings of the mainstream commercial industry and has started to highlight particular instances of'alternative’ practice, the distribution practices of the UK's ‘independent sector’ have not to date been the subject of an in-depth study.

Although other independent or ‘alternative’ distributors were operating in the UK during this period - such as Contemporary Films, Plato Films, Concord Film Council (now Concord Media), Harris Films and the British Film Institute's own distribution wing - the organisations that form the focus of this book are also of particular interest because they were all set up by or benefited from the active involvement of the film and video makers themselves.⁴⁴ Artist-run film and video organisations have always been particularly active and inventive with regard to establishing their own distribution and related exhibition initiatives in order to deliver work to audiences. This has largely been a matter of necessity in that the visibility of the work depended upon it, but they have usually had access to relatively minimal resources to support such activities and have frequently had to adapt to rapidly changing cultural, political, and technological conditions. Artists and independent filmmakers have also often been among the first to start experimenting with new emerging moving image technologies and to explore their potential. In this context it is difficult not to recall Nam June Paik's much-cited declaration used to announce his first video tape screenings in New York in 1965: ‘Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back'.⁴⁵ More recently, however, artists and independent filmmakers have been quick to start exploiting the DIY distribution possibilities offered by digital technologies.⁴⁶ This willingness to experiment and be pro-active has meant that artists’ and independent film and video organisations have also been keen to develop new markets and audiences for their work, often exploring not only the traditional art market or opportunities for theatrical releases, but also the educational sector, the community sector, the film festival circuit, the video sell-through market and more recently of course the internet. Thus, an examination of these kinds of organisations can tell us a great deal about what strategies for reaching audiences are most successful.

Moreover, in some cases the experience gained in the organisations discussed in this book has been carried into the more mainstream film and broadcast sectors, at both national and international levels. Stephen Woolley, the international film producer, for instance, worked for The Other Cinema in the late 1970s before co-founding Palace Pictures and producing such films as Michael Caton-Jones’ Scandal (1989), as well as Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), Interview with a Vampire (1995) and Michael Collins (1996). Jane Root, former BBC2 Controller and Head of Discovery Channel, and Caroline Spry, a former Channel 4 commissioning editor, both worked for Cinema of Women in the early 1980s, playing a key role in acquiring feminist feature films for theatrical release. Likewise, after helping set up The Other Cinema in 1969, Peter Sainsbury moved on to become Head of the BFI Production Board in the mid-1970s where he supported the funding of Co-op filmmakers alongside producing work by directors such as Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman.⁴⁷ Others have taken such experience into subsequent roles at funding agencies. After working at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, David Curtis went on to become Film and Video Officer at the Arts Council of Great Britain, while Felicity Sparrow later became Head of Film, Video and Broadcasting at Greater London Arts. In a similar vein Paul Marris moved on to become Film and Video Officer at the Greater London Council after a spell working for The Other Cinema, while Nigel Algar began working at the BFI after serving on The Other Cinema's Council of Management. And still others - such as Jeremy Welsh (London Video Access, Film and Video Umbrella), Michael O'Pray (London Film-Makers’ Co-op, Film and Video Umbrella) and this book's co-author Julia Knight (Albany Video Distribution, Cinenova) - have moved into higher education, passing on experience to subsequent generations of moving image artists, practitioners and researchers. Thus, it is possible to argue that the influential role played by the distributors studied for this book has been particularly far reaching.

The other main aim of this book