Radical Mainstream: Independent Film, Video and Television in Britain, 1974–90

By Colin Perry

Radical Mainstream examines independent film and video cultures in Britain from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s in the context of struggles against capitalism, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and homophobia, examining relations between counterpublics and social change. The book considers this period in order to examine the capacity for radical discourse to affect dominant cultural media forms, arguing that independent film- and video-makers helped transform television into a vital site of counterpublic discourse.

The end of the twentieth century saw the development of new social models of film and video production and exhibition alongside the formation of new alliances to campaign for changes to social practice, policy and legislature. Radical Mainstream explores the interrelation between public debate, institutions and individuals, arguing that independent film and video in Britain at this time – including activist documentary, currents of counter-cinema, avant-garde film and video art – were largely concerned with creating and circulating counterpublic discourses. The book traces the diversity of the influences on independent film and video, from socialist and liberation movements to popular radical histories and psychoanalytic and Marxist film theory. The account provides a historic backdrop to contemporary documentary and moving image work, and illuminates the heritage of critical thinking within such practices.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781789381948

Colin Perry

Colin Perry is a senior lecturer in fine art at Arts University Bournemouth. His book Radical Mainstream: Independent Film, Video and Television in Britain, 1974–90 was published by Intellect in 2020.

Book preview

1

Persuasion, Pleasure, Counterpublics

Independent film and video in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s consisted of no single culture, style or politics. How then can we best conceive of its protean and varied aspects? How can we write or speak of it as something unified enough to capture – fleetingly, incompletely – in a single book? To think of this historical situation demands an approach that can reveal both the internal differences – between socialist feminists, libertarians and Leninists, for example – and the radical drive towards social change. Broadly, we can say that independent film was a set of discourses of public persuasion and argument expressing sociopolitical experiences and desires for new ways of being. Using different formal means, from experimental or community film to guerrilla media tactics, independent producers addressed viewers to either consolidate or provoke wider commitments to radical ideals. These film and video cultures did not merely describe a situation: they wished to constitute a new reality, to invoke and produce new forms of expression for a post-patriarchal, post-capitalist or post-heteronormative world. These films constitute, in this sense, a Deleuzian minor cinema (Rodowick 1997: 139) that seeks to not simply record reality but create it anew: to summon a way of life into existence through a speech act or aesthetic gesture. To grasp the concrete manifestations of these formations, we must delve deeper into the relations between film and video set against a specific period and its turbulent politics.

A sense of the achievability of political change permeates the British independent film cultures of the early 1970s, reflecting the key political victories and struggles of the era. The function of film in a global socialist struggle was a live topic, with the Third Cinema of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas discussed in journals such as Cinema Rising, Afterimage and Ciné-tracts.¹ The London-based film distribution and screening organization The Other Cinema stocked films related to decolonization struggles from Argentina (Getino and Solanas’s influential The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) to Cuba (Santiago Álvarez’s Born of the Americas, 1972) to Senegal (Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret, 1963), and resistance movements in the West including the Black Panthers (Leonard Henny’s Black Power, 1968). Soaked in the thought of revolutionaries from Lenin to Mao, Fanon to Ho Chi Minh, this context was one in which decolonial and revolutionary struggles seemed achievable with guerrilla forces brandishing both AK-47s and 16mm-cameras (Solanas and Getino 1997). Film networks were ‘guerrilla’, with film-making and acts of revolutionary violence often aligned and overlapping in Italy’s Autonomia movement, Germany’s Red Army Faction and the USA’s Weatherman (Goddard 2018). The promise and failure of May 1968 lived on in British independent film, with Gustav ‘Schlacke’ Lamche and Anne Guedes of Cinema Action and Marc Karlin of Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Film Collective having been present in Paris during the uprising (Chanan 2015: 25; Dickinson 1999: 263). These two London-based groups found decolonial struggles closer to home with a focus on the Northern Ireland Troubles, in Cinema Action’s People of Ireland! (1971) and Berwick Street Film Collective’s Ireland Behind the Wire (1974). Another group, Liberation Films, emerged in the late 1960s, building on the momentum of the international anti-Vietnam War movement. The language of militant cinema calls for film to not just document conflict, but to actually provoke it – in the words of US Newsreel’s Robert Kramer, it should ‘explode like grenades in people’s faces or open up minds like a good can opener’ (Kramer cited in Renov 2004: 12).

While the legacies of national-revolutionary movements and decolonization were significant, British independent cinema also operated within the context of powerful union action and cultures of mass protest and resistance. These collective movements were often less concerned with revolution than with building social movements and forcing through significant changes in laws or altering conditions of employment, pay and welfare. Union power was indeed significant: from 1973 to 1974, industrial strikes by the National Union of Miners led to a three-day week and the eventual downfall of Edward Heath’s Tory government. This is captured in Cinema Action’s Miners’ Film (1975), an activist documentary that conveys the voices, experiences and arguments of workers whose views were routinely excluded from the mainstream news media. Also paradigmatic was the political pressure wrought by the Women’s Liberation Movement. The London Women’s Film Group produced numerous works that documented and fostered the struggle of working-class women, such as the role of women in the miners’ strikes (Betteshanger Kent, 1972; Women of the Rhondda, 1972), or the women who had occupied and cooperatively operated a shoe factory in Norfolk in defiance of forced redundancies (Fakenham Occupation, 1972). The WLM campaigns had political impact at the level of legislative and judicial power, and independent film-makers were often present as part of the process of consciousness-raising and promulgation of ideas. For example, the National Abortion Campaign, which successfully rallied against proposed amendments to the 1967 Abortion Act that would have seen women’s rights curtailed, was documented in the Newsreel Collective’s An Egg is Not a Chicken (1975) and was also the basis for Sheffield Film Co-op’s A Woman Like You (1976).

Radical independent film-makers were frequently aligned tacitly or directly with political groups whose relatively modest membership numbers were in inverse proportion to their political ambitions. The Newsreel Collective, for example, was dedicated to autonomous workers’ struggles with transnational implications. A film like An Egg is Not a Chicken was not merely a document of a local protest, but connected to wider feminist action in Italy, the United States and elsewhere. Other films by Newsreel such as Stand Together – Grunwick (1977), document the major industrial dispute at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in North London led by Asian-African women workers, again drawing attention to autonomist ideals. Newsreel’s politics drew from groups such as Big Flame, a nation-wide affiliation that began in Merseyside in the early 1970s that was inspired by workers’ movements in Chile and Portugal, and by radical Italian groups such as Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio. Big Flame was one of the many groups of the fragmented left at the time (Rowbotham et al. 1979); its appeal was an inclusivity and responsiveness to self-organized action and identity politics that contrasts with the more traditional Left party-political formations such as the Communist Party, the International Socialists (later renamed the Socialist Workers Party) and the International Workers’ Party.

This sense of the achievability of widespread social change, brought about through the actions of small groups, was also evident in the conception of avant-garde film. The British counter-cinema and elements of the artisanal-artistic experimental co-op movements of the late 1960s to early 1980s assert themselves as at once minor and world-making in a very specific sense. Rather than directly stirring the masses, such films were conceived as intellectual or experiential tools for tackling root problems of ideology, for seeing or existing in new ways. In doing so, these cultures took up the mantle from the previous twentieth-century artistic and literary avant-gardes, particularly those of the early Soviet Union, that had conceived of themselves as small but advanced forces that would lead to broader social change. Echoing the language of Vladimir Lenin (Lenin 1961), Peter Wollen spoke of a ‘cadre’ audience for his and Laura Mulvey’s Penthesilea (1974), one that would function as a cultural catalyst to subsequent political action. Their next film, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), explores issues of gender and patriarchy, drawing on feminist theorists from Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Juliet Mitchell to re-think gender relations and cinematic language. The audience for such a work is certainly specialist, but its political claims are meant to extend out into society as a whole: as Julia Kristeva wrote in her influential essay on semiotics and feminism, such work is a gesture, inspired by a concern to make intelligible, and therefore socializable, what rocks the foundations of sociality’ (Kristeva 1986a: 32).

Vital for the hope and ambition of such artistic cultures was the existence of global socialist struggles in the West and in former colonial territories. As Alain Badiou has outlined, the ‘communist hypothesis’ – that the logic of class can be overcome – was still a conceptual and real possibility until around the mid-1970s (Badiou 2008). This context can be seen to have functioned as an imaginative terrain for socialism, not only in its statist forms, but also as it intersects with feminism, black or gay struggles. The struggle for Black rights, for example, was cut through with anti-colonial and socialist thought. In the United Kingdom in the 1970s this intersection was articulated in periodicals such as Race & Class and Race Today, and in films by Franco Rosso (Mangrove Nine, 1973) and Horace Ové (Pressure, 1975). In Mangrove Nine, for example, protesters chant ‘Black Power, People’s Power!’, as a verbal articulation of the socialist base of race struggle. A similar intersection is evident in Blacks Britannica (1978), a polemical film on the unrest during the primarily Afro-Caribbean Notting Hill Carnival in London that was produced by David Koff, a US film-maker with socialist convictions. The film is informed by the revolutionary Marxist discourses of the Brixton-based Race Today Collective and figures such as Darcus Howe, who was in turn influenced by the subaltern Trotskyist politics of his uncle, C. L. R. James.² Another conjunction emerged in the Anti-Nazi League’s Rock Against Racism project from 1976, which sought to harness youth power and music against the rise of far-right groups, and in films such as Newsreel’s Divide and Rule – Never! (1978), where white and black teenagers attest to their experiences in a celebration of multicultural identities.

Within a global context of decolonization and anti-imperialism, and a national context of union power, and of feminist, black and gay activism, the radical film culture of the early 1970s had much to draw on. By contrast, the context of the late 1970s and 1980s was increasingly fraught, with the dramatic right-shift (Hall 1979) in British politics consolidated in Thatcherism and the rise of global neoliberalism. In contrast to the coal miners’ political influence in the early 1970s, by 1984–85, the unionists were on the back-foot, with the government sending in shock troops to break nationwide strikes. These forces were, however, resisted vociferously by many film and video-makers who rallied to action, producing The Miners’ Campaign Tapes (dir. various, 1984), a series of video-tapes recording the striker’s experiences and desires that were routinely left out from television, newspaper and radio reports. Another emblematic event of the 1980s that dovetailed with independent and artistic media practice was the occupation by women protesters of land adjacent to the US cruise missile base at Greenham Common. Despite the ascendency of Thatcherism, the 1980s was therefore not merely a time of stagnation and loss for the left: Greenham witnessed an evolution in feminist politics as it fused with environmentalism, and politically motivated artists working in film and video such as Tina Keane, Joanna Davis, Lis Rhodes and Annabelle Nicholson increasingly foregrounded these issues in their artistic practice (Reynolds 2015).

By 1982 with the launch of Channel 4, radical film-makers and video artists in the United Kingdom could also be hopeful about access to television. The 1980s was in this sense a contradictory time for the Left, where it was at once the subject to attack from the political Right while also achieving a greater visibility in the mainstream. Channel 4 played an ambiguous role in fostering and financially supporting independent film and video cultures, while at the same time coming under the jurisdiction of regulatory bodies such as the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). Certainly, some films and videos were censored and not broadcast; see for example Ceddo’s The People’s Account, 1986, on institutional racism, police brutality and riots in the early 1980s, or Tina Keane’s and Joanna Davis’s series of artist’s films Hang on a Minute (1983) on the Greenham protests (Reynolds 2015: 98). Yet Channel 4’s funding was also key to organizations such as Ceddo, and to funding and commissioning works by diverse radical groups. Censorship on television was also not the end of a film or video work: there remained other modes of distribution, including the alternative screening opportunities offered by radical grassroots cultures, community spaces and film and video festivals. Moreover, Channel 4 did broadcast some significant films on the riots and police brutality (the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs, 1986), and on the US’s nuclear programme in the United Kingdom (Amber’s Can’t Beat it Alone, 1985) (see my discussion in Chapter 2).

Experience and Counterpublics

Such historical contexts can illuminate the social and political influences and horizons of independent film, but they do not fully reveal their power to influence or produce change. One possibility is given in D. N. Rodowick’s analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema II: The Time-Image (trans. 1989): ‘Rather than being based on a unified or unifying discourse, minor cinema must produce collective utterances […] whose paradoxical property is to address a people who do not yet exist and, in so doing, to urge them toward becoming’ (1997: 154). As Rodowick notes, this is of necessity an ideal, gestural proposition. It does, unfortunately, leave too much unexplained. How can a minority group create its own audience? How might we go beyond this utopian yearning to a more practical politics? And how does a minor cinema – say a feminist one – change social behaviour, or prevent ongoing abuses of power and the persecution of disenfranchized groups? For, while Deleuze’s theory may insist on a politics of ‘becoming’ and the possibilities of ‘the virtual’, a political art must also contend with embedded ideologies within a wider society, as well as invested interests in state and legislature power. To break such forces, one must change consciousness among diverse social groups, monitor and hold to account the powerful, and alter and re-write legislation.

So how can radical social groups communicate with civil society in order to change opinions, norms and even legislature? In an era dominated by television, one obvious answer is to gain access to the airwaves; but as outlined above, it is evident that television’s relationship with radical culture is fraught and contradictory. To unpick this tension, it is important to examine how distributive media such as film and video can communicate and become meaningful to constituencies of various dimensions. A key resource here is public sphere theory, which was most significantly developed by Jürgen Habermas in the early 1960s, and has roots in eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse, particularly Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay ‘An answer to the question: What is enlightenment?’. Kant argues that an Enlightened society must be built upon the free exchange of ‘letters’ in print form. For Kant, the public discourse of eighteenth-century liberal print culture enabled ‘mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’ (1996: 58), enabling a public discussion that bypassed ecclesiastical and executive restrictions. Kant’s Enlightenment centres on the distributive media of print culture circulated freely between citizens – ‘the entire public of the reading world’ (1996: 60, original emphasis). It was to this conception that Habermas turned in his influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) in order to explain the rise and fall of bourgeois-liberal ideals of publicity in the modern era.

For Habermas, the liberatory potential of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ collapsed with the consolidation of mass society at the end of the nineteenth century. The concentration of media ownership in the hands of press barons, corporations and nation-states in the early twentieth century decisively undoes, Habermas argues, the independent rational-critical discourse of the early liberal press, which had assumed itself as a ‘fourth estate’. Borrowing from Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry (2002), Habermas understands this as a fatal compromise: corporations run amok, and the bourgeois conception of independent critical thought becomes an illusion. Horkheimer and Adorno were not alone in these criticisms. A range of somewhat hysterical reactions to the developments of mass urban society can be seen in writing from Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd, 1895), Sigmund Freud (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921) and Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933). In these texts, the public is reduced to herd-like behaviour, an assessment that would reach its cynical apotheosis in Walter Lippmann’s technocratic visions in Public Opinion (1922) and Phantom Public (1925), against which John Dewey set his pragmatist defence of democracy in The Public and its Problems (1927). From the early twentieth century, through to Habermas and Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (1977), the notion of a discursive public sphere appeared to many writers and intellectuals as an ideal that had, tragically, failed in the face of the mass media, demagoguery, irrationalism and herd mentality.

If this were the case, we could pack our critical bags and leave it at that. However, it is evident that since at least the 1960s (and almost certainly much earlier), new forms of public critical debate have deeply rocked society in direct contradiction to the corporate media. Discourses of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, feminisms, gay rights and other discourses have proliferated, changing widespread views of the rights of different constituencies at the very moment of the domination of radio, cinema and television. In her influential feminist re-appraisal of public sphere theory, Nancy Fraser points out that both Kant and Habermas assume a male readership and a bourgeois rational-critical form of address, leading to a dismissal of the agencies of multiple publics such as women or the working classes (Fraser 1993).³ Fraser asserts that there have in fact been numerous counterpublics, such as that of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, whose political agency was partly realized through flourishing alternative presses, printed materials, journals and magazines. Radical independent film and video can similarly be seen as counterpublics, grounded in alternative networks of distributive media, including pamphlets, posters, journals, films and videos. It should be noted here that I am applying the terms ‘public’ and ‘counterpublic’ retrospectively: independent film and video-makers did not speak of themselves in these terms (Habermas’s text was only translated into English in 1989).

Unlike the Habermasian and Kantian account of a unitary bourgeois public sphere, Frasers’ is fractured, split and polyvocal. Her intention, then, is not to collapse radicalism into a single rational discourse, for she notes that ‘deliberation can serve as a mask for domination’ (1993: 119). This process is evident in the ways in which rational-critical discourse subdues other modes of speech (working class or women’s speech, for example, which might reflect alternative logics and desires). Against this normativity, she usefully addresses the possibility of multiple ‘subaltern’ counterpublics that allow subordinated groups to discuss their own concerns, consolidate ‘social identities’, and speak ‘in one’s own voice’ (1993: 125–26). The resonance here with independent film and video in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s is again in its irreducible multiplicity, the sense that radical movements are composed of a patchwork of opposing positions, dissonant voices and