Making the History of Promoting Artists’ Moving Image Visible

In the late 1980s I worked for Albany Video Distribution (AVD). Although we specialised in equal opportunities material made in the workshop sector and by independent producers, we also distributed a range of artists’ film and video. The experience of working for a small independent distributor was a genuine eye-opener for me. I joined AVD out of a passionate interest in independent film and video, but with very little idea of what the work of a distributor entailed. It proved a sharp learning curve – audiences aren’t just there waiting to watch non-mainstream films – and a decade or so later, the experience triggered what turned out to be a monster of a research project, excavating the histories of several UK artists’ and independent film and video distributors and their promotional initiatives.

Some of the results of that research can be seen on the Film & Video Distribution Database, which presents a selection of documents from the London Film-makers’ Co-op, London Video Arts/Access (LVA), Circles, Film and Video Umbrella, Cinenova, LUX and other related organisations. For instance, the artist-led origins of LVA can be seen in a letter that Stephen Partridge, Anna Ridley and David Hall sent out to 21 other artists – including Tamara Krikorian, Stuart Marshall, David Critchley, Brian Hoey, Mike Leggett, Roger Barnard, Tony Sinden and Ian Breakwell – in June 1975, immediately following The Video Show at the Serpentine Gallery. The Serpentine show had been held the month before and for the letter’s signatories ‘proved beyond doubt that there is a substantial amount of video art activity in Britain’. In the letter they identify the need for tape distribution, workshop facilities, and public showings of tapes, performances and installations. By the end of 1976, LVA had been set up as an artist-run distribution library and was already applying to the Arts Council for funding.

Browsing through the documents on the database also brings to the fore the way distributors constantly juggle multiple activities and challenges – something which I had found from my own experience is invisible to anyone else. Two letters (1), (2) written by Felicity Sparrow when she was working in the Distribution Office at the London Film-makers’ Co-op during the late 1970s, are particularly vivid in their detail. In them she addresses the problem of print scarcity, how to offer previewing of film prints to potential hirers, the ongoing need for up to date publicity material, and the Co-op’s involvement in arranging exhibition programmes both at home and abroad, as well as the stresses of moving to new premises and the impact on Co-op Distribution of competition from the Arts Council’s new Filmmakers on Tour scheme.

For me, one of the things doing the research so clearly demonstrates is that distribution is about reaching audiences, which is closely bound up with access to exhibition spaces or screening venues and heavily dependent upon persuading audiences to engage with what can be challenging and unfamiliar work. Two very detailed accounts on the database of what it can take to build audiences come from 1979 and 1986. The first, written by Rod Stoneman, is an 8-page report of the South West film tour he organised in 1978 which spells out the level of organisation required, the necessity for funding to enable venues to book the programmes at much subsidised rates, the need to provide programme notes for audiences and the vital role of publicity to draw in wider audiences. The 1986 account is by Cordelia Swann, reporting on touring a package of women’s experimental films, A Camera of One’s Own, around the UK. She gives a vivid account of audience responses to the work, emphasising how little known it is outside London, and explains the importance of the running order of the films and having a speaker in helping viewers new to the work to engage with it. The fact that these two accounts are separated by seven years also points to the fact that the need to build audiences for non-mainstream work is a never-ending one, just as necessary now as it was then. Indeed, that need also underpinned the Arts Council’s setting up of the Film and Video Umbrella. As is noted in the minutes of the Arts Council’s Artists’ Film and Video Sub-Committee in April 1983, the Umbrella was designed to replace an earlier scheme which had ‘no real sense of targeting towards particular audiences’.

Although the database’s coverage will become more comprehensive as further material is added, at the moment there is significantly more material from the period 1988–92. This was a period of enormous change in the independent film and video sector as the arts funding landscape that had supported it changed dramatically and paved the way for the demise of some of the organisations we studied. One of the casualties of that period was Cinema of Women (COW) who, along with Circles, were informed by the BFI in 1990 that they would receive a substantial funding cut. Correspondence on the database from Spring 1991 demonstrates that while the two women’s distributors had been negotiating for a year to merge their organisations, contrary to popular perception the merger did not actually take place. One exchange of letters (1), (2) in particular between COW and Circles details how quite suddenly during April 1991 the BFI withdrew support for the proposed merger, forcing COW to close down while Circles was given funding to relaunch as Cinenova.

Another important aspect in the history of promoting artists’ moving image that becomes visible on the database and has its origins in the same period is the merger of the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC) and LVA to form Lux. In 1988 three London funders had commissioned what became known as the Boyden Southwood report to address the diminishing availability of revenue funding for arts organisations. In the wake of that report a Joint Funders Strategy Group conducted a series of visits with their clients to discuss how their future funding would change. The mi nutes from a joint meeting with the LFMC and LVA  in December 1989 optimistically note that ‘[a] merger between the two organisations might prove beneficial’. While not all the ensuing history is yet documented on the database, a briefing note emanating from the Arts Council’s Visual Arts Department in 2001 summarises the sorry history that led to the eventual merger in 1999.

The above is only taster of the several hundred documents that the Film & Video Distribution (FVDD) currently makes available. Nevertheless, as noted above its coverage is currently uneven, with more documents from some organisations or periods than others. However, a programme to add new material on an ongoing basis will commence in Autumn 2013.


Julia Knight is Professor of Moving Image at the University of Sunderland. The Film & Video Distribution Database (FVDD) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and University of Sunderland, carried out with research fellow Peter Thomas and in collaboration with the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection.

 

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