The 1970s Project

I am currently on an AHRC studentship researching 1970s British avant-garde film as part of the '1970s British Cinema' project (and enjoying this immensely, I might add). My research on the project is involved in mapping the field of 1970's British avant-garde film across the decade and contextualising this within the social, historical and theoretical context. My thesis aims to construct an historical assessment of 1970s British avant-garde film. The socio-political, technological, cultural and theoretical contexts will be examined in their relation to and influence upon filmmaking. In the first instance a selection of primary sources, the films themselves, will be analysed in order to establish the diversity of production. Archival documentation and relevant texts will be evaluated in order to determine the extent of production, distribution and exhibition. These will be considered in both their national and international context, yet as a distinctively British type of filmmaking.

Extensive exhibitions, festivals, journals and publications provide information about 1970s British avant-garde film, yet no specific historical and critical summation of the decade has yet been made. My proposed method is to construct a map of the field of 1970s British avant-garde film and track the divergence of filmmaking: from the tight nexus of activity related to a few individuals and collectives at the beginning of the decade to a veritable explosion of diverse and fragmented activity by the end of the decade. I will be examining two sorts of evidence, the written and the visual, and will contextualise these within relevant theoretical and critical contexts.

Due to the fact that avant-garde films were screened in small and diverse locations, often as one-off performances with the filmmaker involved in screening, these exist as rather ephemeral events which were rarely documented. Usually only a few copies, or sometimes only a master copy, exist of a particular film. Accessing copies for viewing on video or DVD is not always easy and possible, although recently a few DVD's have been made available. The British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection is an invaluable resource for my research. A fairly extensive collection of films from the decade exist which can be viewed on site. Filmed and audio interviews with key individuals from the 1970s (filmmakers and writers), are held there, some recorded in the 1970s and others, more recently. An extensive paper collection, books, journals, exhibition catalogues, research projects and personal files on filmmakers are available to forage through.

My background is in Fine Art, producing and researching, amongst other things, experimental films for both my degrees. I continue with my practice working with film, photography, drawing and performance. My initial interest in experimental film came about by stumbling into it, rather fortuitously, rather than within a determined path of study: I was given a Super8 camera whilst living in Cyprus. On arrival in England I purchased some film and began to explore & research the medium during my undergraduate and MA degrees. A long-term interest in photography, love of the darkroom, and a necessity to be able to work from home motivated me to get into hand-processing my black-&-white films. Hand-processing invariably brings to it an element of chance or a space where things can possibly 'go wrong' ' which has determined an ongoing interest in the dialogue between image and structure that insists upon some given measure of subconscious working. Working with both celluloid (Super 8 and recently 16mm) and digital film, I am interested in how these two very different ways of working intersect, can support, disrupt or alter one another.