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1970s British Cinema, Film and Video Art: Mainstream and Counter-Culture


Funded by the AHRC, the aim of this three year research project is to establish whether the 1970s (as it has frequently been argued) was a tasteless and undistinguished interregnum between the vibrant 1960s and the entrepreneurial 1980s, or whether it made substantial innovations in the area of film which have not been recognised hitherto.

The project is led by Professor Sue Harper, with Dr Dave Allen, Dr Justin Smith, Dr  Laurel Forster, Ms Karen Savage and other members of the School.

Of course, neither cultural nor social history is organised in neat decades; such periodisation may be a convenient device for historians who wish to impose coherence onto a specific period. We want to argue that it is possible to posit a "long 1970s" from the events of 1968 to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

It seems clear that there was a crisis in confidence in the centre of British culture in this period - largely as a consequence of the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s - and that there was, as the 1970s progressed, a shift in energy from the centre to the periphery of cultural production. This is one way of accounting for the range and variety of experimental film and video in the period, and of the growth of new kinds of authorship in mainstream cinema.

We want to ask how, and to what extent, the intellectual, aesthetic and technical innovations of the 1960s permeated film culture of Britain in the 1970s, and we want to investigate the ways in which cinema, selected, represented and reconstituted key moments of social change. We also want to consider the ways in which the rarefied, elite and entrepreneurial innovations of the 1960s were filtered into cinema of the following decade.

British cinema of the 1970s comprised far more than Bond and Confessions films. With the demise of government support and international finance arrangements, directors such as Tony and Ridley Scott, Alan Parker and Stephen Frears had to go to independent producers such as David Puttnam.& Maverick directors such as Nicolas Roeg and Ken Russell had to make different arrangements.

The project will address the constraints on directorial authorship in the 1970s, and it will also focus on the way British films such as Performance (1970), A Clockwork Orange (1971), That'll Be the Day (1973), Jubilee (1978), and Quadrophenia (1979) engaged with post-war youth culture while developing or refusing a new aesthetic approach. This relationship between representations of youth culture and aesthetic strategies is one which is investigated throughout the project, and will be extended into, for example, the commercial "pop" video which developed rapidly in the late 1970s before the launch of MTV.

Experimental film will be examined in its own right as a distinctly British aspect of an international practice. There are a number of key moments which need to be addressed - the rise of the London Film Maker's Co-op, key exhibitions at the ICA in 1976 - as well as the 1975 BBC TV Arena broadcast on video art.

We will address the way in which some visual artists worked with the media of photography and video, and the growth of British conceptualism and its presence in the work of those artists who had emerged from (and sometimes still worked in) art colleges. Occasionally someone like Derek Jarman, or Peter Greenaway would be able to inhabit both the world of the visual artist and the world of the film-maker with equal ease.

Two areas in particular have been under-researched in 1970s mainstream and experimental film, and two PhD students have been appointed to address these. The first, Sian Barber is studying the economic and legislative constraints on British cinema of the decade. The 1960s had been a relatively buoyant period in British cinema, and it had been shored up by substantial American investment. When this was withdrawn in some haste at the end of the 1960s, crisis ensued. Sian will examine the industry's response to changing economic conditions, and will consider the effect of changes in censorship and legislation. She will examine the reasons for decline in cinema audiences, and the effect of television and video on film consumption.

The second, Patti Gaal-Holmes is focussing on 1970s British experimental film and video. She will analyse its aesthetic and political features as practices that were often considered oppositional to mainstream cinema. This will focus on particular contradictions that emerged through the decade between formal/aesthetic approaches and the political and social interest of particular groups, such as women filmmakers and academics who felt disenfranchised by the 1979 Hayward Gallery exhibition.

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