In Fading Light: The Films of the Amber Collective

By James Leggott

For over five decades, the Newcastle-based Amber Film and Photography Collective has been a critical (if often unheralded) force within British documentary filmmaking, producing a variety of innovative works focused on working-class society. Situating their acclaimed output within wider social, political, and historical contexts, In Fading Light provides an accessible introduction to Amber’s output from both national and transnational perspectives, including experimental, low-budget documentaries in the 1970s; more prominent feature films in the 1980s; studies of post-industrial life in the 1990s; and the distinctive perils and opportunities posed by the digital era.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Apr 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789206517

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In 2011, the UK National Commission for UNESCO announced the addition of twenty new items and collections to its round of inscriptions to the UK Memory of the World Register, a list of documentary heritage with particular cultural significance to the country.¹ This round included such varied documents such as the 1689 Bill of Rights, the diaries of Anne Lister (1806–40) and a collection of materials pertaining to the women’s suffrage movement in Britain between 1865 and 1928. There were also three collections of cinematic and photographic material: the recently discovered Mitchell and Kenyon collection of actuality footage from the early twentieth century, the output of the much-celebrated GPO Film Unit (1933–40), which laid the foundations of the British documentary film movement, and, finally, in the words of the register, ‘the narrative created through Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photography and Amber’s films’.

This recognition for the films made by the Amber collective since their formation in 1968 was richly deserved, overdue even. As a celebratory ­document of the landscape, people and work of north-east England over a fifty-year period, they are significant enough in telling a clear story about the impact of the decline of traditional industries upon working-class communities. Yet the films are equally as important artistically, as part of a coherent, longitudinal experiment in documentary practice and an ongoing enquiry into the responsible artist’s engagement with place and with community. And the body of film work, however worthy of standalone analysis, is merely one facet of Amber’s legacy, alongside its photographic commissions and acquisitions (and exhibitions in its gallery space and tours), campaigning work, local residencies and inspirational role in the ‘workshop movement’ of the 1970s onwards. The result is a collection of material, an archive that can today be explored physically and digitally – via Amber’s gallery space and a well-maintained website – but also, in their words, a ‘living network of relationships that continues to make the group’s work possible’.² Untangling Amber’s narrative, with its density of connective threads to their own history and future, and to a variety of fascinating people, places and concerns, is in many respects a challenge for the scholar, which may partly explain why this book is the first full-length survey of their films in relationship to broader developments in British cinema and television culture. Amber deserves recognition as a unique phenomenon: a non-hierarchical artistic group that, despite some personnel changes and periods of struggle, has operated for over half a century, projecting some of the political and aesthetic radicalism of its late 1960s origins into the second decade of the twenty-first century – and likely beyond.

Amber may have been recognized as the ‘most important and enduring collective to have emerged in Britain’,³ but in an interview carried out in 2000, their key founding member Murray Martin lamented how they had hitherto flown mostly beneath the critical and historical radar:

At times we feel a bit aggrieved that our existence isn’t even recognized. If you look at the histories of British cinema, it’s not recognized and yet, fifteen years ago, Lindsay Anderson was quoted as saying to someone who was doing a history of British cinema: ‘if you don’t include Amber there is no history of British cinema’. And yet we’re never mentioned.⁴

Martin’s grievance had some justification, in that Amber have tended to be overlooked, or merely mentioned in passing, in scholarly surveys and histories of British film and television. They are conspicuously missing from general histories like Sarah Street’s British National Cinema (1997), the Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (1997), Jim Leach’s British Film (2004), Amy Sargeant’s British Cinema: A Critical and Interpretive History (2005) and Robert Murphy’s four-part British Cinema anthology (2014), and merely glanced at in Murphy’s The British Cinema Book (2009), Justin Smith and Sue Harper’s British Film Culture of the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (2012), and Paul Newland’s Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (2010). Of Amber’s noteworthy contribution to British film culture of the 1980s, there is only a brief mention in John Hill’s British Cinema in the 1980s (1999) and in Lester D. Friedman’s anthology British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (1993).

However, Murray Martin’s claim about Amber’s relative invisibility holds less weight today than it did at the turn of the century, as in the intervening years their history and their work have been acknowledged by a number of scholars of British visual culture, albeit often in relation to discrete contexts or timeframes. For example, there has been analysis of their early ‘salvage’ films within the context of both native documentary traditions and oppositional currents,⁵ close textual examination of the spatial politics at work in Byker (1983),⁶ consideration of the enunciation of ‘trauma’ in a later project concerning deindustrialization in County Durham,⁷ and a project interrogating the group’s philosophies and practices as a collective from a social sciences perspective.⁸ Such a heterogeneity of response to Amber is in many ways commensurate with the way in which the field of British film and television studies has simultaneously proliferated and atomized, and absorbed new disciplinary approaches. In a famous essay of 1986, Julian Petley identified a ‘lost continent’ of popular cinema – such as horror, crime, melodrama and so forth – overlooked by scholarship fixated on ‘realist’ traditions.⁹ More recently, a consensus has emerged that Petley’s advocacy initiated a ‘new wave of revisionism’ that has sought to dismantle canons as much as critical binaries.¹⁰ Indeed, some of the boldest claims made about Amber, such as Mike Wayne’s description of them as ‘possibly the most successful studio – in terms of sheer longevity – in British film history’,¹¹ can be understood in relation to this dismantling impulse.

Whilst it is thus difficult to make claims for Amber’s utter invisibility within the fields of film or documentary studies, I would argue that they have as yet been dealt with in an unsatisfactorily fragmented fashion, and that an interpretive, longitudinal history of their work is essential for a true grasp of their contribution to British film culture. Put simply, the body of scholarship around the group constitutes (as yet) an incomplete history.

As the title of this book suggests, my emphasis is predominantly upon the group’s output, as opposed to, say, their organizational or political principles, or their funding strategies, despite the importance of these to an understanding of their creative methods. As we shall see, there are some problems with calling mine a straightforwardly auteurist approach, given the obvious way that the group has emphasized collective authorship, as well as their sheer variety of emphasis and artistry over fifty years. However, their work is perhaps best characterized by a tension, or dialogue, between a commitment to authentic and responsible representation of people, places and experiences, and an ongoing experiment in artistic documentation. In order to convey the development of this experimentation in creative documentary, I have taken a broadly chronological approach, but it so happens that Amber’s oeuvre falls into (reasonably) distinct operational periods that form the basis of my six central chapters. In each, I utilize the films, which range from short documentaries to longer feature works, to establish Amber’s evolving aesthetic strategies against the backdrop of wider developments or currents in British film and television culture, as well as Amber’s own reflections on their achievements (sourced from my own interviews, as well as from pre-existing written and oral documentation).

So as to orientate the reader in the history and conceptualization of Amber, the next chapter begins with an overview of their development, followed by an itemization of some of the issues and concerns that dominate, and in some cases problematize, discussions about the collective and their output: for example, category dilemmas regarding their relationship with documentary and oppositional film culture, debates around their engagement with particular communities and people, their stance on vanishing places and industries, and confusion over their attitude to the crediting of authorship.

The more or less chronological approach that follows in subsequent chapters is susceptible to critique, as it is predicated upon the admittedly shaky notion that Amber’s output can be coherently divided into discrete periods. The number of cross-references I give between films, and across chapters, is testimony to the manner in which many productions have developed organically out of, or in tandem with, other projects. However, my second chapter’s concentration upon Amber work up until 1980 is hopefully non-contentious, given that, by most reckonings, their first decade constituted an ‘apprentice period’, immediately followed by a phase, during the 1980s and early 1990s, of considerable expansion and a move towards longer films, including more demonstrably ‘fictional’ ones. The sheer range of experimentation during this period is the reason why I have effectively devoted three chapters to it. For organizational reasons, partly to do with the parity of chapter lengths, I will dedicate the third and fifth chapters to their respective ‘current affairs’ and ‘drama’ strands. Of course, any such division bumps up against the obvious criticism that all of Amber’s work derives from a ‘documentary’ impulse and that even their more ‘pure’ documentary work is creatively shaped or involves reconstruction. Similarly, the fourth chapter’s focus upon the films with a strong authorial connection with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen might seem to undermine the claims made elsewhere for Amber’s non-hierarchical, collectivist identity: after all, I do not devote chapters to films directed by Murray Martin, Peter Roberts or Ellin Hare, even though a claim could be made for their work having an identifiably distinctive stamp. But a certain pragmatism comes into play here: the Konttinen films (actually co-devised with Peter Roberts) are strongly associated with the photographic work that bears her name, and have enough commonality of purpose, on the whole, to warrant being bracketed off in this way.

The sixth chapter considers the thematically coherent cycle of drama films made by Amber from 1995 to 2005, which consists of Eden Valley (1995) and a trio of films set in East Durham typically referred to by the collective as their ‘coalfield trilogy’: all four films offer reflections on post-industrial society through stories of fractured family bonds or personal relationships, and move towards a gloomy assessment, in Shooting Magpies, Amber’s last fictional feature film to date, of the damage wreaked by long-term unemployment upon a working-class community. Since Shooting Magpies, released in 2005, Amber have exclusively produced documentaries with a retrospective bent, and the seventh and final chapter pays attention to these backwards glances to previous projects and portraits of deceased individuals.

As I will acknowledge in the next chapter, one impediment in the way of the interested reader is that of access. Many of the works under discussion have had limited distribution, although this is hardly a unique scenario for parties interested in the histories of independent or experimental cinema beyond the commercial mainstream. My hope is that this book requires neither a passing nor a thorough knowledge of Amber’s work to date and that the contextual and textual analysis herein gives the unfamiliar reader an entry point into a body of work that is potentially intimidating in its range and diversity. This is not to suggest that it is in any way an experiential substitute, of course, and a modest but significant aim of In Fading Light: The Films of the Amber Collective is to heighten the collective’s standing within international film culture, and thereby encourage further viewing and discussion of this remarkable body of work.

Notes

1. United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO. 2011. ‘2011 UK Memory of the World Register’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.unesco.org.uk/2011-uk-memory-of-the-world-register/.

2. Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories from a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 7.

3. G. Gee. 2017. Art in the North of England: 1979–2009, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 44.

4. M. Martin. 2000. ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’ (unpublished transcript).

5. J. Chapman. 2015. A New History of British Documentary, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; J. Chambers. 2017. ‘The Salvage of Working-Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 168–85.

6. A.H. Roe. 2007. ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 4(2), 307–21.

7. R. Ashmore. 2011. ‘Landscape and Crisis in Northern England: The Representation of Communal Trauma in Film and Photography’, Ph.D. thesis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University.

8. I am referring to the project ‘The Promise of a Transformative Arts: A Political and Cultural Analysis of the Amber Collective’ undertaken by Robert G. Hollands and John Vail. The articles published out of the project were as follows. R. Hollands and J. Vail. 2012. ‘The Art of Social Movement: Cultural Opportunity, Mobilisation and Framing in the Early Formation of the Amber Collective’, Poetics 40(1), 22–43; R. Hollands and J. Vail. 2015. ‘Place Imprinting and the Arts: A Case Study of the Amber Collective’, Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, 0(0), 1–18; J. Vail and R.G. Hollands. 2012. ‘Cultural Work and a Transformative Arts: The Dilemmas of the Amber Collective’, Journal of Cultural Economy 5(3), 337–53; J. Vail and R. Hollands. 2013. ‘Creative Democracy and the Arts: The Participatory Democracy of the Amber Collective’, Cultural Sociology 7(3), 352–67; J. Vail and R. Hollands. 2012. ‘Rules for Cultural Radicals’, Antipode 45(3), 541–64.

9. J. Petley. 1986. ‘The Lost Continent’, in C. Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI, 98–119.

10. I.Q. Hunter. 2013. British Trash Cinema, London: BFI, 4.

11. M. Wayne. 2001, Political Film: The Dialects of Third Cinema, London, Sterling and Virginia: Pluto Press, 48.

Chapter 1

HISTORIES OF AMBER

Amber’s formal history goes back to 1968, with the coming together of a group of like-minded students at the Regent Street Polytechnic who, the following year, decided to move to the north-eastern city of Newcastle upon Tyne to make independent films about working-class experience. However, when asked by an interviewer to describe the beginnings of Amber, Murray Martin, the group’s key founding figure, noted that ‘in a sense it starts in your history’.¹ Born in 1943 in Stoke-on-Trent to a family of potters and miners, Martin studied Fine Art in Newcastle in the early 1960s before deciding to learn the craft of filmmaking. He identified that many in the group shared a similar working-class background, albeit in different places, and the experience, through education, of being ‘designed out of our background’:² ‘there was a movement among the group I was in … to go back to your own roots, your own childhood and reconnect with your interests there.’³ According to Martin, the group gave themselves the rather anonymous, utilitarian name of Amber, not for its associations of preservation or precious stones but after ‘Amber Ale, which was the women’s drink, as the counterpoint of brown ale’.⁴ Prior to the collective’s move up north, Martin had already produced two ‘proto’ Amber student films of note: the didactic All You Need is Dynamite (1968), documenting anti-war riots, and the more gentle and Amber-like Maybe (1969), following the thoughts of an engine man on a ferry traversing the river Tyne.⁵

During the 1970s, the group produced a series of short documentary portraits of working-class culture. An early project to document pub-singing traditions did not fully come to fruition, and a film called Wallsend 72 about a brass band and a juvenile jazz band would fall into obscurity. But 1974’s Launch, with its iconic footage of a spectacular Wallsend ship launch, would become one of Amber’s signature early works. A mid 1970s cycle of films, often labelled by recent scholars, following Darren Newbury, as ‘salvage documentaries’, and mostly financed through regional arts council funding (Northern Arts), offered a record of disappearing or archaic workplaces: a drift mine in High Row (1973), a rope-hauled colliery railway in Bowes Line (1975), a recently closed brickworks in Last Shift (1976) and an industrial glass-blowing site in Glassworks (1977).⁶

Figure 1.1 Signing Amber’s partnership agreement, 1974, Graham Denman, Graham Smith, Peter Roberts, Lorna Powell, Murray Martin and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

On a surface reading, these are rather straightforward works of realist representation; the use of re-creation and staged elements in these films would anticipate Amber’s more complex and exploratory integration of factual and fictional components in later productions. With Mai (1974) and Laurie (1978), Amber produced the first entries in a sporadic series – continuing into later decades – of portraits of individuals who had inspired their work in some way.

The period also saw the first of Amber’s characteristic strategies of engagement taking shape. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, one of the group’s founder members, gained some public and press interest through her photographic documentation of Byker, a staunchly working-class suburb that had been scheduled for demolition in a slum-clearing drive, and which she chose to move into upon her arrival in Newcastle. Typical of Amber’s slow, organic approach to creativity, and their commitment to telling stories from deep within a particular community, it would take more than a decade for Konttinen’s Byker project to reach a culmination, in the form of a published book and film (both 1983). Amber’s River Project of 1974, in collaboration with a number of other artists and writers, involved the documentation of the industries along the river Tyne and the touring of existing work to those communities. In 1977, Amber established the Side Gallery for the exhibition of humanist documentary photography both by and commissioned by the group along with work it found inspirational and wanted to explore. The gallery was part of its premises in the city’s once run-down quayside area; this district inspired the poetic Quayside (1979), made as part of a campaign led by Murray Martin himself to preserve the threatened buildings in the locality.

The period of the 1980s and early 1990s was a particularly busy and fertile period for Amber but also for British oppositional film culture more generally. By this time, Amber had proved to be one of the most influential voices within what is usually termed the ‘workshop movement’ of oppositional, independent filmmakers working together in groups, albeit with differing politics, organizational structures and attitudes to exhibition. Amber had been formed around the same time as Cinema Action in London, and other key workshops founded in the 1970s and early 1980s include Liberation Films, the Berwick Street Film Collective, women-led groups such as the Sheffield Film Co-op and Leeds Animation Workshop, and black and Asian groups such as the Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa and Retake Film and Video Collective. As Margaret Dickinson summarizes:

Workshops aimed to develop structures radically different from those of the film and broadcasting mainstream. Principles widely shared were collective management, integration of production, distribution and exhibition, flexible division of labour as opposed to rigid specialisms, continuity of employment as opposed to freelance working and non-hierarchical working relations, including relations between filmmakers, their subjects and audiences.⁷

The formation of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association (IFA) brought together individual filmmakers and workshops to promote these ideals and campaign for funding from organizations such as the British Film Institute (BFI) and regional arts associations and authorities.

Following a decade of campaigning by independent filmmakers, Murray Martin and Amber played a major role in the evolution of the Workshop Declaration of 1982, a union agreement reached by the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), which gave allowance for cross-grade working and an egalitarian wage structure. The IFA also battled for support from the new Channel Four television station (which began broadcasting in 1982). Amber was awarded one of a number of franchises given to independent regional workshops by the channel’s Independent Film and Video Department, who commissioned work under the ACTT agreement.⁸

The security from this Channel Four funding gave Amber scope to expand their operations considerably. They also gained a stable exhibition platform, as the channel would broadcast much of their upcoming work throughout the decade, in addition to some of their back catalogue, in their Eleventh Hour and People to People strands, as well as their Film on Four seasons.⁹

Amber’s output in this period demonstrates an increasingly ambitious, experimental approach to the documentation of work practices and cultures, and a variety of creative approaches to the fusion of fictional and non-fictional elements. For example, Byker (1983), Keeping Time (1983), The Writing in the Sand (1991) and Letters to Katja (1994) were based around Konttinen’s photographic engagement with, respectively, a vanished inner-city community, a dance school in North Shields, the beaches of the North East and her Finnish homeland, to which she returned for a year. Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (1986) and T Dan Smith (1987) used profiles of individuals – a boxing instructor and a notorious Newcastle council leader – as a springboard for an exploration of documentary ethics and reliability. Following 1981’s The Filleting Machine, essentially a record of an existing Tom Hadaway play, Seacoal (1985) was Amber’s first feature-length drama, although, like the more traditionally scripted In Fading Light (1989) about the fishing industry, it developed out of a long-term engagement with a particular community. Amber’s formal residency in North Shields, where they bought a pub as a simultaneous social and filmmaking location/base, also led to Dream On (1991), a film about women’s lives on the Meadow Well estate. During the 1980s, Amber also established a Current Affairs Unit, producing ‘trigger’ items to inspire debate on subjects such as the miners’ strike, pacifism and anti-nuclear movements, and the effect of Conservative privatization policy on local authority and hospital workers. A highly unusual production during this period was From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels (1988), a portrait of the town of Rostock, as part of a collaboration with DEFA filmmakers from East Germany.

By the early 1990s, Channel Four’s commitment to the workshops was in decline, and the feature Eden Valley (1995), set among a harness racing community, was the last to be funded through the franchise. By this time, Amber had shifted its emphasis to the former coalfield areas of County Durham, where activity included photographic commissions, a community video project called It’s the Pits (1995) and a trilogy of feature films dealing with the geographical, economic and psychological impact of deindustrialization. The female perspective of The Scar (1997), about a former activist during the miners’ strike embarking on a tentative relationship with the manager of an open cast mining site, was followed by Like Father (2001), which considers the effect of pit closures on three generations of the same family. These last two films had received some BBC funding, but the completion of Shooting Magpies (2005), Amber’s last feature drama to date, was enabled by a five-year revenue grant awarded to the group by the Northern Rock Foundation, which also funded related photographic projects. Shooting Magpies developed out of a few strands of Amber’s Durham-based work and in particular a community video project with teenage mothers. Focussing upon a young mother’s unsuccessful attempt to wean her boyfriend off his heroin addiction, Shooting Magpies is one of Amber’s gloomiest statements about communities in despair; it also marked a turn towards the use of digital video.

Figure 1.2 Filming In Fading Light in 1989. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

As the collective entered its fifth decade, Amber’s attention turned increasingly to its own legacy. Their link with members of the ‘horsey’ world – that is, those involved in harness racing or associated with the travelling community – stretched back to the early 1980s. When the key founding member Murray Martin died in 2007, Amber decided to turn an unfinished documentary about the year in the life of a ‘horsey’ family into The Pursuit of Happiness (2008), a commemoration of Martin himself: an exploration of his life, philosophy, influence and fascination with his subjects. Today I’m with You (2010) concerned Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographic re-engagement with the Byker community she had documented in the 1970s, and From Us to Me (2016) was a follow-up to Amber’s 1988 portrait of the East German fishing and shipbuilding town of Rostock, wherein interviewees of the previous film reflected on how life had changed in the years since reunification.

Later projects have been notably elegiac in tone. In a poignant foreshadowing of the impact of Martin’s passing, The Bamboozler (2007) offered tribute to a charismatic Tyneside percussionist, who had gifted his collection to a protégé upon his death, whilst Song for Billy (2017) poetically commemorated the victim of a mining accident. In response to the new century’s changing models of exhibition and distribution, Amber also gave attention to the digitization of its films and broader archive, sourcing Heritage Lottery funding for some DVD releases (some with supplementary contextualizing material) and running, for a while, a free online streaming service entitled Side TV – which at one point included Mouth of the Tyne (2009), a new cut of interview material gathered in preparation for T Dan Smith.

There is a sociopolitical logic to, and a necessity for, Amber’s movement from industrial to post-industrial subjects, and towards those that many might consider as marginal, esoteric even. As The Pursuit of Happiness makes explicit, their attraction to the self-contained world of traveller communities would dovetail with elegies for missing people, industries and places. But having given thus far a necessarily sweeping overview of Amber’s history, I would acknowledge a few omissions that problematize the grand narratives. To take one example, Peter Roberts, having joined the collective in the early 1970s, contributed a short, singular work of animation entitled Jellyfish (1973). It makes an odd bedfellow with the industrial documentaries made by the group during the era, yet sets a precedent for the exploratory editing and camera techniques used to ‘animate’ photography in the later films he produced in collaboration with Konttinen, such as Byker and The Writing in the Sand. However, what emerges even from a cursory review of Amber’s work and history is a simultaneous sense of coherence and idiosyncrasy, and of it both intertwining and clashing with broader trajectories in British film and television culture. These connections, and the way that the Amber project might be grasped and evaluated, are the central concern of this book.

Approaches to Amber

Before we consider Amber’s history in more detail by way of chapter case studies of particular eras and strands, it is useful to itemize some of the concerns and debates that have dominated discussion of the group so far, and which help us to characterize their unique qualities.

Funding and Survival

The question of how Amber managed to survive, against the odds, has been taken up by a few scholars, although there are insights to be taken from Murray Martin’s ‘rules’ for the collective that were laid down from the beginning:

Integrate life and work and friendship.

Don’t tie yourself to institutions.

Live cheaply and you’ll remain free.

And, then, do whatever it is that gets you up in the morning.¹⁰

This manifesto is celebrated and illustrated in detail in The Pursuit of Happiness, Amber’s 2008 film commemorating Martin’s passions, creative drives and philosophies. The biographical question of how Amber members managed to integrate ‘life and work and friendship’ is not one I want to (or dare to) address directly in this book, even though it would evidently make for lively reading.¹¹ But Martin’s edict against being tied to ‘institutions’ obviously throws illumination on Amber’s uncompromising attitude to broadcasters, funding bodies and perhaps audiences too. As we will see, Amber are often drawn to people and communities whose working practices or philosophies chime to some degree with their own: from the eccentric Mai Finglass, to the ‘alternative’ communities of sea-coalers and travellers. Some of Amber’s stories, such as Seacoal, can be interpreted in part as a rumination on the benefits and problems for those inclined to follow a version of Martin’s rules for freedom and contentment.

In a consideration of Amber’s centrality within the workshop movement, Peter Thomas identifies ‘clear internal reasons for [Amber’s] durability and longevity’: not least their multiple sources of cross-subsidizing income, their community focus and commitment to collectivism.¹² For an article on Amber and the evolution of regional film policy, Paul O’Reilly argues that the ‘narrative of economic survival that frames its history is as fascinating as any formulated during the development of its feature films’.¹³ O’Reilly traces a financial history of the group by way of its ‘encounters with a number of regional and national cultural initiatives’ and argues that, once Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist policies became economic standard, the main funding bodies eventually had to become ‘accountable and adapt to their rhetoric of commerce’.¹⁴ Given Amber’s unswervingly egalitarian ethos, so out of step with hierarchical commercial filmmaking practice, their survival is clearly a ‘remarkable achievement’.¹⁵ Journalistic coverage has also tended to be through the foci of economic struggle and that of the workshop movement more widely.¹⁶ A profile of the group published in 2001 in The Guardian even used, as its headline, a confession by Martin that he once put the entire grant given to an associated organization (Live Theatre) on a horse ‘because there was no choice’: from a three thousand bet he won ‘about 15 grand’.¹⁷ The writer Lee Hall was prompted to write a celebratory, campaigning article for The Times in 2011, following the news that the Arts Council had stopped funding Amber’s Side Gallery; he describes the gallery and the collective as ‘among the most extraordinary and influential art groups you’ve never heard of’.¹⁸

Interestingly, one of the most granular academic projects to date on Amber has also interrogated the qualities that allowed Amber to outlive the decline of the workshop movement following its ‘high period’ in the 1980s.¹⁹ Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Robert G. Hollands and John Vail interviewed fifty-seven people with affiliations with Amber for the project ‘The Promise of a Transformative Arts: A Political and Cultural Analysis of the Amber Collective’. The resultant work has been a series of articles applying different paradigms from the fields of cultural economics and sociology to Amber’s working practices, illustrated by (anonymized) interview material. Whilst some articles deal with the early formation of the group, their longevity and sustainability are explained in terms of ‘internal organisational processes’ and the commitment to a specific vision of the relationship between the artist and the community.²⁰ The authors take time to ponder the ‘new conditions necessary for the formation of future oppositional artistic movements’:²¹ they cite a telling comment from one of the current Amber members, who says: ‘I think that sense of a super narrative has always been part of Amber, much more so than most organisations. There’s a very, very strong sense of what it has done and how it fits together’.²²

It is fair to say that an economic history of Amber deserves its own volume, where its entrepreneurial schemes (such as the setting up in 1971 of Lambton Visual Aids, a slide library for higher education institutions), enterprising funding strategies (such as the curious credits given to Kodak and BP Oil in two of their early documentaries)²³ and internal tensions over the egalitarian wage system could all be recounted in entertaining and inspirational detail. It is obviously the case that financial opportunities and constraints have circumscribed and influenced the nature of the work produced, from the Northern Arts funding for many of the 1970s documentaries and 1980s features, to the Channel Four franchise money of the 1980s until the early 1990s, and then BBC and Northern Rock Foundation support in later years: the completion of the feature-length From Us to Me from development money alone (from the Media Programme of the European Union) shows that the group’s tenacity and independence remains undimmed after fifty years.

Accessibility and Reach

It is difficult to calibrate the reach of Amber’s work, in comparison with other analogous ‘independent’ filmmakers. According to Martin, in the 1970s, Amber put some effort into the distribution and exhibition of the films, whether at their own cinema, accompanying touring photographic exhibitions, or via circuits such as working men’s clubs and festivals.²⁴ But it is obvious that Channel Four’s commitment to showing their current and prior work in the 1980s gave them their greatest exhibition platform in the UK. Since then, aside from occasional broadcasts on the BBC channels, and a 2008 season on More4 (a digital subsidiary of Channel Four), their work has mostly reached specialist audiences via limited theatrical runs, community venues, international film festivals (resulting in a number of prizes),²⁵ curated events, academic archives, their own cinema and gallery space, self-distributed video tapes and DVDs, and more recently streaming and VOD via their website.

At this juncture, it is worth clarifying the television broadcasting history of Amber in the UK. In the 1970s, the only TV appearance came via excerpts of High Row and Jellyfish shown on 18 May 1974 on the BBC2 arts programme 2nd House (1973–76). Amber’s work made under the Channel Four franchise agreement from 1983 onwards was mostly broadcast as part of the channel’s Eleventh Hour late-night strand (typically 11pm onwards), sometimes alongside other workshop films, although Byker was the first in the series of the People to People strand in 1983. The films broadcast were Keeping Time and Beyond the Vote (1984), Can’t Beat It Alone (1985), Seacoal, Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (twice), T Dan Smith (twice) and From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels. The channel also showed some work that predated the agreement, such as Launch and Last Shift (a double bill in 1982), The Filleting Machine (with extra ‘contextual’ material in 1983), Laurie (in 1987) and Bowes Line (1987 and 1989). In summer 1990, the channel gave a prime-time slot (9pm) to the premiere of In Fading Light, billed as ‘Film on Four presents’ (it was repeated in 1994). Similarly, Dream On, shown in 1992, was prominently positioned in a season of premieres of British films commissioned and funded by