What was British independent film? Part 1

Colin Perry

‘Independent’ from what/for what?

Of all the epithets for what is now called ‘artists moving image’, the term ‘independent film and video’ seems to me to be the most latent and unexplored. In the UK in 1970s, as the Underground of the previous decade faded and the resurgent avant-garde established itself from its base at the London Film-makers’ Co-op, another conception of oppositional or non-mainstream film and video emerged. ‘Independent film and video’, has, however, suffered the vicissitudes of art and film history. There are a number of possible reasons for this: ‘independent’ is a fairly humdrum name (today, it sounds entrepreneurial rather than revolutionary); it labels no single style or medium (it encompassed artists, activists and documentarists using film and video); and, until recently, it has had very few champions among art and film historians.i

This has certainly been an oversight: the independent ‘sector’, as it emerged in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, represented one of the most vital currents of Left culture.ii Independent films were shown at film festivals and discussed in journals such as Screen, Afterimage and Jump Cut (to name a few), and it had a forceful representative organisation in the Independent Film-makers Association (IFA).iii The IFA was a quasi-umbrella organisation for the avant-garde, with members drawn from the London Film-makers’ Co-op (Malcolm Le Grice, Mike Leggett, Simon Hartog), left documentary makers (Hartog again, Maurice Hatton, Peter Whitehead), radical collectives (Cinema Action and the Berwick Street Film Collective), and others (for example, Margaret Dickinson and Laura Mulvey).iv With the launch of Channel 4 in 1982, IFA members’ films even reached a mainstream audience (largely on the channel’s Eleventh Hour series).

So what exactly did ‘independent’ mean to those who used it at the time? The term appears to have gained currency in the early 1970s as a means of broaching an increasingly fragmented avant-garde (split conventionally between art and political activism) in order to campaign on a united front for access to BFI, Arts Council and BBC funds.v

The IFA admitted that their use of the term ‘independent’ was somewhat contradictory: in asking for state funding, they were, in effect, asking for financial dependence. However, the anonymous authors of an IFA paper insisted that they were seeking ‘… to develop an independence beyond the mere absence of financing by big capital’ (IFA, 1976).vi ‘Independence’ was thus not to be understood in economic terms; rather, it was a cultural, aesthetic and political conception. In 1976, an IFA paper insisted that, above all, ‘independence can be defined as the preservation and development of critical thought’ (IFA, 1976). In this way, the Association re-defined its independence from state patronage, while admitting to its partial dependence upon it.vii

By 1977, members of the IFA were able to position this dependence as itself a political value:viii

“… a materialist practice can proceed only on the basis of analysing dependent relations and identifying the institutions which affect that practice. The practice of the IFA, therefore, consists of intervening in the institutions… such as the BFI, the Regional Arts Associations, the Arts Council, SEFT etc, and more widely in the area of ideological structures… “(Curling and McLean, 1977, p.108)

This seems to me a good way to understand the role of the relations between moving image practice, activism and institutions. The very notion of independence, like that of ‘freedom’ forever threatens to implode – yet its potential to transform ‘ideological structures’ remains explosive.


i A few publications have sustained an interest in the ‘independent’ field of the 1970s, notably Margaret Dickinson’s Rogue Reels, which provides an excellent history of the IFA. A second major source of IFA material is Julia Knight and Peter Thomas’s Film & Video Distribution Database (http://fv-distribution-database.ac.uk)

ii One of the more significant champions of Independent work is Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group, who has helped to assemble screenings of a number of key works from the period, such as Jonathan Curling and Sue Clayton’s Song of the Shirt, 1979.

iii It’s name was subject to two further changes in the 1980s: the Independent Film and Video Association (IFVA), then the Independent Film, Video and Photography Association (IFVPA).

iv The IFA further elaborated the terms of the struggle as being based on (1) inclusivity (it represented film producers, distributors, exhibitors, film teachers, critical workers and film technicians); (2) a cultural struggle with the intention of transforming all aspects of ‘dominant film practice’; (3) access to areas of film production and distribution (IFA, 1976).

v In Bristol, Independent Cinema West (ICW) – a key group of independent makers who had been responsible for organising the National Festival of Independent British Cinema in Bristol in 1975 – indicated that the strength of independent cinema lay within its heterogeneity of members: ‘ICW is not the province of a group of film makers who are concerned with any one particular type of film; its very heterogeneity is the foundation of its ability to develop and respond’ (Furse et al., 1975)

vi In the same document, the IFA also to claim that its members’ films were ‘politically innovatory in form and content’: a clear anticipation of the legal requirement for Channel 4 to ‘encourage innovation and experiment in both form and content’ (Broadcasting Act 1981, 1981 Section 11, 1C.).

vii The IFA’s redefinition of independence was, perhaps, a semantic slight of hand: the title of their organisation came about in 1974, two years before its defendants arrived at the above definition.

viii The IFA did not fabricate this oppositional position out of thin air. It drew its politics from established commitments to what it called cinema as ‘social practice’. This ‘… notion of ‘ social practice’ demands the exhibition of films in locations which are precisely not assimilable into the art-house film culture.’ (Curling and McLean, 1977, p.117)

Bibliography:

Anon (1981) Broadcasting Act 1981.

Curling, J. & McLean, F. (1977) The Independent Film-makers Association – Annual General Meeting and Conference. Screen. [Online] 18 (1), 107–118.

Furse, J. et al. (1975) Application For Grants To Cover The Capital Cost Of Developing A System For Independent Film Production At Independent Cinema West In Bristol.

IFA (1976) Independent Film-making in the 70s: An introduction discussion paper from the Organising Committee of the IFA Conference held in May 1977.


Colin Perry is an art writer and editor. He has written for a number of publications including Art Monthly and Frieze, and is the editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal.

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