What was British independent film? Part 5: Stuart Marshall

Colin Perry
Journal of the Plague Year by Stuart Marshall, 1986

Two forms of desire intersect in Stuart Marshall’s video art and documentary work. Firstly, there is the desire of attested to by Marshall’s position as a gay man and his interviewees, voicing subjectivities that for much of the twentieth century had gone unheard: a desire to be with other men openly and without censure. Secondly, there is a desire for knowledge, for ‘the real’, that is according to Elizabeth Cowie, a fundamental aspect of the audience’s relationship to the documentary project (Cowie, 2011).

These two elements are not, however, necessarily complimentary. Ideally, a film or video (whether art or documentary, or both) that wishes to relay a cause or subjectivity to an audience must engage with a viewer’s desire to know, whilst not simply presenting the subject as Other – as a stable identity that confirms the viewers own normalcy. In the history of documentary, this has been a rarity.i

Marshall (1949–1993) was an elder statesman in a generation of gay film and video-makers in the UK (along with Joy Chaimberlain, Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar and others) who reintroduced problems of pleasure into artists’ film and video.ii His route to issues of identity and documentary was, however, not straightforward. Marshall studied sound art with Alvin Lucier in the early 1970s, and was a founding member of London Video Arts in 1976 (which along with the London Film-makers’ Co-op was one of the precursors to the LUX).iii His first short video works examined formal relations between speech and image, investigating the failures of and constructed nature of synch sound (Go Through the Motions, 1975, 6 mins; Arcanium, 1976, 7 mins; Mouth Room, 1976, 8 mins). In the late 1970s, he began to make longer video works that explored how television drama constructs identity, narrative continuity, authority and audience identification, examining its ideological underpinnings (Distinct, 1977, 38 mins; The Streets of…, 1979, 26 mins; The Love Show, 1979, parts 1–3, 46 mins in total).

None of these early works seeks to manifest as pleasurable, although all can be read in such terms.iv From the early 1980s until his death, Marshall was also a committed documentarian, giving voice to the gay community in the UK and abroad.v The most obvious of Marshall’s works to address the subject of gay pleasure is Desire (1988), a documentary made for Channel 4 about pre-war Germany, and its ‘body culture’ (exercise regimes, youth clubs, naturism).vi It does so through a discursive form, in which interviewees are allowed space to voice their own subjectivity. Indeed, one of the enduring qualities of Marshall’s videos is their exploration of desire through a muted presentation of the erotic that largely eschews the camp, masquerade and lyricism that would so dominate the work of, say, Derek Jarman or (rather differently) Julien and Cerith Wyn Evans in the 1980s.vii

Bright Eyes (1984) Marshall’s startling, intelligent and angry documentary about the medias reaction to AIDS is deconstructive in its approach to televisual modes of address, media stereotyping and the history of exclusion, persecution and murder to which gay people have been subjected.viii While it critiques the over-reach of reason and scientific objectivity that has sought to classify homosexuals as Other (Gever, 1987, p.117), it ultimately appeals to the viewer through reasoning and sense of reasonableness. Thus, the press is shown to be homophobic in its taunting and venom, whereas the gay men and women interviewed at the end of the programme are shown to be articulate, clear and level-headed. In the same year, Marshall also made Journal of the Plague Year (1984), a video installation featuring meditative footage of a man asleep in a bed mixed with other footage also used in Bright Eyes of homophobic newspaper headlines and verité-style images of Flossenbürg concentration camp, where the Nazis imprisoned and murdered homosexuals, political prisoners and others. The work reminds us of the slippery zone between documentary and other forms of the moving image that use actuality footage.ix

Who was Bright Eyes made for? Clearly, in the first instance, for gay men and women.x Its pleasure lies partly here. As Marshall notes:

I find an enormous perverse pleasure as a gay man in seeing the ideological structures of our society undermined and subverted. I have a grudge that is being played out. (Marshall et al., 1993, p.45)

But this is not a pleasure only for a gay audience; indeed, anyone dissatisfied with the ‘ideological structures of our society’ might find such a work as fulfilling a desire within them. In watching a film about workers, a socialist might fulfil a desire for solidarity; in watching a film about identities other to oneself, one might fulfil a desire to be an open-minded member of a discursive community. Or, indeed, a film may fail to garner such a reaction. It is important to note here that Marshall was deeply engaged in socialism, and his archive contains a number of texts that fuse gay identity and socialism, as represented by the Gay Left newsletter and the Gay Socialist Conference of 1980. Part of the operations of Marshall’s works is its implied sense of solidarity.

What exactly is the nature of this appeal? In documentary, the viewer is situated in terms of a desire for knowledge or ‘epistephelia’ (Nichols, 1991, pp.178–179). Of course, there is no such entity as ‘the viewer’ in general, but rather viewers in the plural – individuals marked by their location within class, gender and nationality (among others). The desire of the audience for knowledge here is key: in taking the time to watch such a work, he or she stakes a claim as a viewer-citizen, one who identifies through the act of viewing as part of the discourse of the public or counter-public sphere.xi

Marshall’s work is imbricated within discourses of art, documentary, socialism and gay culture. In many respects, Bright Eyes refutes the narrativising tendency in observational or direct cinema, reality television and docusoaps. Yet, taken as a whole, it does structure itself as a narrative – as a problem (mainstream media representation of the other with AIDS) that is partly solved through its final chapter (the talking heads sequence that closes the video). While Bright Eyes addresses the problems of televisions modes of address, it ultimately cannot escape them.

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

Bibliography

Cowie, E. (2011) Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. University of Minnesota Press.

Gever, M. (1987) Pictures of Sickness: Stuart Marshall’s ‘Bright Eyes’. October. [Online] 43108.

Gunning, T. (1986) The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. Wide Angle. 8 (3-4), 63–70.

Kracauer, S. (1995) The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Lipman, A. (1984) Revolt in Style. City Limits

Marshall, S. et al. (1993) ‘‘Filling the lack in everybody is quite hard work, really…’ A roundtable discussion with Joy Chamberlain, Isaac Julien, Stuart Marshall and Pratibh Parmar’, in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video. Routledge. pp. 41–60.

Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. John Wiley & Sons.

 

i This is particularly true of recent hybrid or ‘post-documentary’ forms. Most docusoaps and reality television, for example, are at best ambivalent about their subject.

ii Marshall gets to the core of this problem when he notes:

One of the reasons why our work has been at the cutting edge is because that whole project of deconstructive practice which bloomed in the late seventies and early eighties collapsed when the problem of pleasure came up. There was so much suspicion of cinematic pleasure. […] Now that’s the point where we-lesbian and gay filmmakers-took off, because our pleasures had never been
spoken about. We wanted to speak about our pleasures in a way which was very difficult, say, for heterosexual feminist filmmakers. And I think for me that’s been the most problematic issue that I’ve been trying to negotiate: how to make work that is still politically critical […], but would produce pleasure, a pleasure that is very confirming for lesbian and gay audiences. (Marshall et al., 1993, p.43)

iii For a fuller examination of Marshall’s thought, see Ian White’s important essay at LUX Online: http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/stuart_marshall/essay%281%29.html (Accessed 3 April 2014)

iv The intimacy of the mouth in his early video tapes, for example. However, the discourse of the 1970s film theory was resolutely against such an investment. See footnote 2.

v Bright Eyes was broadcast on Channel 4 in December 1984. It was later screened in video festivals and gay film and video festivals in the USA and Canada. All his other documentary work is concerned with gay issues.

vi In his essay ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927) Siegfried Kracauer had called this culture ‘one example among many other equally hopeless attempts to reach a higher life from out of mass existence’ (Kracauer, 1995, p.86). Nevertheless, its regimentation of physicality and valorisation of the male nude offered an ambivalent pre-history to fascism’s own concern for the mass ornament as seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935).

vii Julien’s video This is Not an AIDS Advertisement (1987) is in marked contrast to Bright Eyes. Julien’s video features music from Bronski Beat and is edited in a rapid loop style that owes something to Scratch video and MTV. For more information see: http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/isaac_julien/this_is_not_an_aids_advertisement.html (Accessed 12 April 2014).

viii For a fuller analysis of Bright Eyes, in particular its relationship to other documentaries on AIDS, see Gever, M. (1987) Pictures of Sickness: Stuart Marshall’s ‘Bright Eyes’. October. [Online] 43108.

ix Early cinema before 1907, which has been defined by Tom Gunning as a ‘cinema of attraction’ is a case in point (Gunning, 1986). More contemporary examples of non-diegetic actuality footage can be found every day on Youtube. Cowie reminds us that Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), was similarly a hybrid of factual and non-factual: of ‘the essayist, the epistolary and the dramatic’ (Cowie, 2011, p.22)

x Marshall noted in an interview with Andy Lipman that:…I wanted to make a programme which was clearly directed at gay viewers, but which straight viewers would find interesting too. Only, this time they’d feel like eavesdroppers. (Lipman, 1984)

xi For more on the counter-public sphere, see Negt, O. & Kluge, A. (1993) Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. University of Minnesota Press.

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