Moving On: British Avant-Garde Film in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s

Having championed the ‘new romantic’ filmmakers such as John Maybury, Holly Warburton and Cerith Wyn-Evans that emerged at the end of the 1970s, Michael O’Pray was asked in 2002 to write on the development of British avant-garde film in the years that followed the LFMC’s first decade. That essay, along with three others commissioned at the time, was left unpublished when plans for book were abandoned during final preparations for the original “Shoot Shoot Shoot” tour. In early 2016, Mike gave permission for its belated publication in relation to the Co-op’s 50th anniversary. He died several months later, following a stroke, on 12 August 2016. 

The latter half of the 1970s witnessed quite profound changes in the film avant-garde established in Britain over the ten years since the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was founded in 1966. In the early 1980s, many of these changes were consolidated in response to shifts in the political and cultural climate, and to new developments in moving-image technology and media in general.

Paradoxically, these transformations in film practice took place against a backdrop in which the original avant-garde’s ideas had hegemony in art schools, funding institutions (especially the Arts Council of Great Britain) and film journals like Screen and Undercut. Of course, this paradox is commonplace at times of change in art, for it is often in reaction to dominant ideas and practices that change occurs. As we shall see, this was very much case in the British avant-garde.

By the mid-1970s, the political and cultural optimism and idealism born of the 1960s counter-culture in Britain had been almost totally eclipsed. The early 1970s had seen increasingly high unemployment, a civil war in Northern Ireland in which the IRA extended its bombing campaign to the mainland, the oil crisis, a three-day week, rising inflation, a miners’ strike and an active militant Left. Punk, an oft-cited cultural watershed for the post-war period, emerged around 1976 and seemed to represent, in its anarcho-nihilism, a nightmare pantomime of the decade’s most deep-seated fears. The hippy became a universal figure of fun.^[i] It was an anxious decade of unrest and crisis extending into the 1980s of the Brixton riots (in 1981), the Falklands War (1982) and the traumatic miners’ strike of 1984.

The 1980s was to prove more pluralist with different responses; aesthetic strategies more often than not used to further the interests of social issues especially those around gay and women’s sensibilities. The decade also witnessed the impact of new video technology and cheap Super-8 technology (which had been introduced onto the market in the mid-1960s as a domestic format). The few years spanning the cusp of the two decades were ground-shifting.[ii]

Perhaps typically, the formal film explosion of the late 1960s and early 1970s was only consolidated after its moment had passed: Gidal and Le Grice published their books in 1976 and 1977 respectively;[iii] the influential avant-garde film issue of Studio International appeared in late 1975 and two large-scale avant-garde film exhibitions took place in 1977 and 1979 at the Hayward Gallery.[iv] In 1972 Le Grice was referring to ‘underground’ film, but by 1974 ‘avant-garde’ was the preferred nomenclature denoting perhaps a more confident sense of identity among the British filmmakers, separating it, as it seemed, from the American ‘underground’.[v] Students of this generation of filmmakers would attempt to retrieve the idea of the underground cinema from their mentors. Around the same time, the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Film Institute were beginning to award grants to individual filmmakers, as well as to the Co-op as an organization, placing the latter on a firmer financial footing. This all led to an upsurge of younger filmmakers who readily adopted and developed the formalist aesthetic.

In the mid-1970s, significant developments occurred which would lead to a more complex avant-garde sector. By 1979, women filmmakers including Lis Rhodes and Felicity Sparrow had left the Co-op to set up their own distribution organisation Circles (later Cinenova) and created their own gender-based cultural space. This was to be the most profound and almost the only really lasting dissension within the Co-op movement’s long history. Its long-term effect can be seen in the survival of women-based film organisations through to this day. If there was a defining moment for this ‘feminist’ impulse, then historically it is usually identified as the release of Lis Rhodes’ film Light Reading in 1978. Its formal assurity was expressive perhaps for the first time in the British avant-garde of an interiority, provided by a first-person voice-over which immediately placed it in a narrative aesthetic. The film’s combination of enigmatic image and voice was ground-breaking and reflected the ‘personal-is-political’ clarion-call of the burgeoning feminist movement.

The work of Annabel Nicolson and Gill Eatherley in the Filmaktion group (Le Grice and William Raban were the other members) had already expressed women’s concerns. For example, Nicolson’s film-performance piece Reel Time (1973) stressed traditional female skills and occupations which pointed to a future focus of women artists.[vi] Eatherley’s multi-projection Pan Film (1972) depicted a woman’s room with a quiet sensitivity not apparent in other male work of the time.^[vii] More in the vein of Light Reading, Tina Keane’s Shadow of a Journey (1980, originally shot in 1976) used voice-over and song with a continuous image of the filmmaker’s own shadow on the sea’s surface. Again, as in Light Reading, formal devices are countered by a women’s account of the plight of Scottish crofters, in what is decidedly a politically-inflected feminist film.

 

Malcolm Le Grice’s experiments in narrative space and time in his late 1970s work did not confront ‘subjectivity’ or the unambiguous ‘personal’ in the way that Light Reading did. His ambitious trilogy of feature-length films developed a visual formalism which did not stress print processing and colour but an analysis of his own environment in which ‘narrative’ elements, however minimal, were incorporated. Blackbird Descending (Tense Alignment) (1977), Emily – Third Party Speculation (1979) and Finnegans Chin – Temporal Economy (1981) promised, in their critical engagement with narrative forms, an experimental art-cinema akin to one developed in (a better-funded) Germany by Klaus Wyborny and others. Finnegans Chin – Temporal Economy extended Le Grice’s interest in his own environs (a portrait of a neighbour, with a strong nod to James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake). Playful and sensuous, it also employed a strong Irish folk music soundtrack. Raban and Marilyn Halford also ventured into experimental features with Black and Silver (1981) an ambitious interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s short story The Birthday of the Infanta through filmic strategies based on those of Velazquez in his famous ‘self-reflexive’ painting Las Meninas.

Interestingly, at the same time, Derek Jarman’s own experimental ‘poetic’ long-film In the Shadow of the Sun, comprising richly layered Super-8 footage opened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980.[viii] Jarman alone was able to sustain an experimental feature-film practice (as opposed to Peter Greenaway’s art cinema productions) with The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1988).[ix]

To some extent, these issues, less theoretically burdened perhaps, emerged with a younger generation which included Nicky Hamlyn and John Smith. Hamlyn’s Guesswork (1979) and Not to See Again (1980), for example, dealt with illusion in film representation through an evocative exploration of domestic space using intense close-ups and focus to render ordinary objects near-abstract. But the influence in Hamlyn’s work was two-fold – minimalist colour-field painting and Peter Gidal’s steady subversion of film representation as the site of meaning. In a quite different vein, John Smith was developing a refreshing wit as a means of exploring filmic-illusion thus pushing ideas incorporated in his classic The Girl Chewing Gum (1976).

Michael Maziere, Joanna Millett, Lucy Panteli and Rob Gawthrop, who all graduated in the early 1980s, were strongly influenced by Gidal’s Structural/Materialist aesthetic, while evolving their own approach to formalist experiments.[x] Some had been taught by Gidal, who by then was at the Royal College of Art (as was Stephen Dwoskin). What often set them apart was their lyricism, as demonstrated in Panteli’s Across the Field of Vision (1982), a film which used an elaborate montage of 800 shots of seagulls to achieve a memorable ‘poem’ of bird-flight. Similarly, Maziere’s stress on film-process never overshadowed exquisite photography and his later a use of almost voluptuous colour.

This group in some ways replaced the dropping-out of 1970s filmmakers like Eatherley, Crosswaite, Du Cane and others,[xi] but the later group were less interested in expanded work, as was Gidal himself. In fact, there was a significant collapse in the 1980s of the expanded film work of Welsby, Eatherley, Le Grice, Raban, Nicolson (the latter four comprising the Filmaktion group formed in the 1970s) which had culminated in the ICA Expanded Cinema show in 1976. It could be argued that much of the impetus of such work found its way into the burgeoning performance art that became a key feminist art practice in the work of Mona Hatoum, Tina Keane and others. Also, multi-projection pieces using Super-8 were made by Cordelia Swann, Jo Comino, George Saxon and Anna Thew.

The fragmentation of the avant-garde in the late 1970s and early 1980s can be seen as determined by the changing political and cultural landscape at the time: the collapse of the Left, the rise of Right-wing politics and the emergence of women, gays and blacks on the broader cultural scene. Left-wing politics also began to collapse into ‘issues’ politics, while the emerging post-punk generation were sceptical of the Left’s idealism and opposition to capitalist institutions, especially the media. The rapid growth of the pop-video, domestic VCRs, and the appearance of Channel 4 in 1982 with its initially ‘radical’ brief heralded changes in technological and socio-politico-cum-cultural possibilities which had not existed for the earlier avant-garde.

In 1981, John Maybury and Cerith Wyn Evans ushered in the brief few years when the New Romantic film movement held sway and helped popularise the Super-8 format with their joint-show at the ICA.[xii] Super-8 film festivals sprang up across Europe as well as Britain (notably in Leicester). Amateurism reigned as young filmmakers experimented with the fairly cheap 50-foot S-8 cassettes, breaking away from the older generation’s tendency towards longer 16mm films and their seeming sophistication and professionalism. As had happened before, the younger artists claimed their own ground zero, technologically speaking.

If the films were shot on a cheap gauge, the content of Maybury, Wyn Evans, Steve Chivers and Holly Warburton’s films was rich and attracted the label of ‘decadent’.[xiii] They used the artifice of elaborate hand-made props and scene-designs, costume, body paints, slow-motion, superimposition, all in sumptuous colour, often with operatic soundtracks (manually synched on accompanying tape machines). The avant-garde’s spare, pure formal work was rejected for a melange of various art forms which included dance, performance, music, photography and fashion. Maybury and others also rejected the avant-garde nomenclature preferring a return to that of ‘underground cinema’. The Arts Labs and counter-cultural conceits of the 1960s found a parallel in the ‘Blitz’ culture of the new club scene, and the hegemony of a highly gay-inflected culture.[xiv] However, in Maybury’s film Tortures That Laugh (1983), repetitive circling shots of carefully composed figures, overlaid with a Velvet Underground-like soundtrack was not too far removed from the formalists, owing more to a Warholian performance-based aesthetic. Wyn Evan’s Epiphany however, using video processing incorporated into 16mm showed its film roots in Cocteau and Anger and its intellectual ones in Bataille, Barthes and poetry. Such richly textured superimpositions, overwrought and erotically-charged tableaux and ‘special effects’ was a highpoint of the New Romantic film movement.

As would be expected, the sources of influence also changed and those filmmakers who had been excluded from the huge Film as Film show at the Hayward Gallery in 1979 – Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Andy Warhol – became the reference points for New Romantics whose films were more often than not ‘gay’, theatrically artificial, performance-derived and focussed on the sensual body (often nude and male). This was to be the last recognisable film avant-garde movement in Britain, forming a fairly cohesive group of artists with an identifiable aesthetic, who worked on each others films and constituted a ‘shock’ to their elders, even if often in terms of what seemed their reactionary politics. On the other hand, New Romantic filmmaking was seen, by the formalists especially, to be regressive; experimental film in decline, and thus anti-‘avant-garde’. Instead of advancing film, they were adopting old modes of figuration, drama and content. Fascinatingly, Holly Warburton reworked film installation as spectacle and tableau using props, theatrical drapes and opera in her remarkable The Reflected Portrait: The Petrification of Transience (1983). For many of these filmmakers, time was linked to death and sexual desire, and not to narrative structure. Their films were overwhelming, drawing in the spectator in a way that ran counter to the Brechtian-cum-Godardian ideas of the alienation effect that were influential at the time.

In something of a return to a ‘poetic’ avant-garde cinema, Jayne Parker explored symbolist and quasi-narrative modes in I Dish (1982), which controversially included shots of a nude man bathing in a kitchen sink. In retrospect, we can see how this ‘poetic’ impulse was shared in different ways by Patrick Keiller, who made Norwood in 1982, and Guy Sherwin in his film Messages released a year later. Keiller rendered strange the suburban world of northwest London through the surrealist antics of his voice-over narrator, while Sherwin documented his young daughter’s response to the world, raising issues of communication, language and the ambiguity of things. All three worked in monochrome and took content as important while not neglecting the demands of form. The modernist aesthetics of Le Grice et al were giving way to a more pluralist set of references – surrealism, art cinema, documentary and, in the case of Parker, the ‘personal cinema’ of Maya Deren rendered more subjectivist.

The mid-1970s also witnessed an avant-garde impulse which aligned itself with the post-1968 revolutionary cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. For example, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen made Penthesilea (1974), a feature-length film that approached notions of myth and iconography from the theoretical standpoint of feminism and psychoanalysis. Their next film Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) was located in contemporary London and explored the mother and child relationship, again using psychoanalytic theory and Godardian formal techniques (360 degree pans and long-takes). A few years later, in 1979, Sally Potter released her influential film Thriller which, in a similar vein to Mulvey and Wollen, took inspiration from Godardian political modernism to forge a more feminist cinema, but one that stressed performance, memory and paranoia. Derek Jarman was working in parallel to Mulvey, Wollen and Potter, and released his homoerotic Sebastiane in 1976, though that owed more to Pasolini than Godard. In 1978, he followed up with the fractured postmodern punk-collage-film Jubilee, a much more radical film in its aims and formal devices.

The film avant-garde became a pluralist practice in which the hegemony of the Gidal-Le Gricean notions of Structural/Materialism and formalist progress began to be jostled aside by competing interests, in which issues relating to sexuality, gender and cultural iconography began to take centre stage. One of the most influential movements emerging in the early 1980s was the Black independent film. Some of its leading proponents came out of art schools (Isaac Julien was in Le Grice’s film department at St Martins College of Art and Design), but like the New Romantics they rejected formalism for a more imagistic sensibility. Julien’s Territories (1985) also grounded some of its visual strategies in a Godardian address to the audience. The black film collective Sankofa made Passion of Remembrance in 1986, the same year as the Black Audio Film Collective made Handsworth Songs. The latter film’s lyricism, passion and poetics in its general feel was not too far removed from the work of the New Romantics or Derek Jarman’s erotic, polemical work Imagining October, made with Super-8 and video, and completed in 1984 shortly after a visit to the then Soviet Union.

Overall, the early 1980s witnessed a pluralist experimental film sector in which the aims and aesthetic stance of the founding members of the British avant-garde were but one strand. The old rigid division between film and video began to breakdown as content gradually took precedence over the integrity of the film medium itself. A new generation had no allegiance to what they saw as a hopelessly elitist and ‘academic’ film practice which too often seemed to illustrate high theory. In that Oedipal rejection, the new ‘avant-garde’ turned towards spectacle, performance and social, sexual and cultural politics, at a time, when they thought such elements were apt.

 

Michael O’Pray, 2002

 

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Michael O’Pray was the author of The British Avant-Garde Film: 1926-95 (1996), Derek Jarman: Dreams of England (1996), Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (2003) and The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film 1916-1989 (with Kamilla Kuc, 2014). He was the founding director of Film and Video Umbrella, a professor at UEL, and a frequent contributor to Afterimage, Undercut, Art Monthly and Monthly Film Bulletin.

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Footnotes

[i] See my essay in British Film and Video 1980-1985:The New Pluralism, Tate Gallery, 1985.

[ii] For an earlier account of the period between mid-70s and 1980s, see my essay “From Asceticism to Aestheticism” in The Elusive Sign: British Avant-Garde Film and Video 1977-1987, Arts Council of Great Britain/British Council Catalogue, 1978 and “The British Avant-Garde and Art Cinema from the 1970s to the 1990s” in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views, Cassell, 1996. See also A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, BFI, 1999.

[iii] Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond, Studio Vista, 1977; Peter Gidal, Structural Film Anthology, BFI, 1978.

[iv] Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film (1977) and Film as Film (1979). See my introduction to The British Avant-Garde Film 1926 to 1995: An Anthology of Writings, Michael O’Pray (ed.), University of Luton Press/Arts Council of England, 1996.

[v] See the first two essays in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, Malcolm Le Grice, BFI, 2001.

[vi] See Laura Mulvey, “Film Feminism and the Avant-Garde” in O’Pray (ed.) op. cit.

[vii] See Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2000.

[viii] See my Derek Jarman: Dreams of England, BFI, 1996.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] On the Gidalian influence on these filmmakers and others see Nicky Hamlyn’s essay “Structural Film and After” in O’Pray (ed.) op. cit.

[xi] On the impact of these filmmakers see Peter Gidal, Materialist Film, Routledge, 1989.

[xii] For a fuller account of the New Romantic film movement see my essay “New Romanticism and the British Avant-Garde Film in the Early 80s” in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, BFI, 2001.

[xiii] See Donald Kuspit The Dialectic of Decadence: Between Advance and Decline in Art, Allworth Press, 2000.

[xiv] On the influence of the gay scene on 1970s pop culture see Peter York’s Style Wars, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980.