Category: Video

Cinema Action – UK Radical Film Collective films available to buy and stream

Cinema Action was among several left-wing film collectives formed in the late sixties. The group started in 1968 by exhibiting in factories a film about the French student riots of that year. These screenings attracted people interested in making film a part of political activism. With a handful of core members – Ann Guedes, Gustav (Schlacke) Lamche and Eduardo Guedes – the group pursued its collective methods of production and exhibition for nearly twenty-five years.

Cinema Action‘s work stands out from its contemporaries’ in its makers’ desire to co-operate closely with their working-class subjects. The early films campaigned in support of various protests close to Cinema Action‘s London base.  Not a Penny on the Rent (1969), attacking proposed council rent increases, is an example of the group’s early style.

By the beginning of the seventies, Cinema Action began to receive grants from trades unions and the British Film Institute. This allowed it to produce, in particular, two longer films analysing key political and union actions of the time. People of Ireland! (1971) portrayed the establishment of Free Derry in Northern Ireland as a step towards a workers’ republic. UCS1 (1971) records the work-in at the Upper Clyde Shipyard; it is a unique document, as all other press and television were excluded.

Both these films typify Cinema Action‘s approach of letting those directly involved express themselves without commentary. They were designed to provide an analysis of struggles, which could encourage future action by other unions or political groups.

The establishment of Channel Four provided an important source of funding and a new outlet for Cinema Action. Films such as So That You Can Live(1981) and Rocking the Boat (1983) were consciously made for a wider national audience. In 1986, Cinema Action made its first fiction feature, Rocinante, starring John Hurt.

via BFI

UK independent filmmaker Chris Reeves has made a selection of Cinema Action’s films available to stream and download on his Vimeo On Demand page.  See them all here.

 

Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015: Death to the Selfie

In 2012 the filmmaker Chris Marker died having just created a photo essay framing faces encountered in the claustrophobic spaces of public transport. After a lifetime of storytelling often best evoked as a blend of documentary and personal reflection, the quality of self-effacement that permeates Marker’s practice sometimes characterized as capturing ‘life in the process of becoming history’, raises questions of authorship in current culture. In particular, to make ‘documentary’ must we seek to become less present; more invisible?

With speakers Garth Twa (Ravensbourne), Poppy Stockell, Ulrike Kubatta (Filmmaker) and Daisy Asquith (Filmmaker).

Sponsored by Ravensbourne.

Filmed by Sheffield Hallam University students and edited by Matt Sturdy.

Utopias (1989)

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V/O (Marc Karlin) Everyone speaks about socialism as if we all know what it is –  for it or against it. When people are saying farewell to socialism, this is a film about what it is they are saying farewell to, a series of portraits of individuals and their ideas one might encounter on a journey through the life of socialism in Britain today. The film is not about definitions it is more an invitation to see whether there is still a place for the word us in the current political vocabulary.

Militant Image: Screening of In the National Interest? (1986) 16/05/2013

From over two years ago now –  as part of the Iniva’s Keywords exhibition and programmed by The Otolith Collective – the Militant Image presents Penny Stempel’s rarely screened film In the National Interest? (1986). (16/05/2013)

Penny Stempel’s seminal film, co-directed by Chris Rushton, looks at those sections of British society targeted by the government, the judicial system and the police in the name of the national interest in Britain in the 1980s. The film assesses the legitimation crisis of the British state by exploring the connections between trade union struggles, racial attacks and processes of criminalisation.

In the National Interest? was produced by Cardiff based Chapter Video Workshop, co-founded by Stempel and Rushton, a franchised workshop under the ACTT Workshop Declaration – an act that facilitated the funding of film and video workshops to produce work for television. This allowed the groups, already working on directly politically and socially engaged film-making, to consolidate their activities. During the Miners’ Strike of 1984/85, Stempel had worked closely with Wales’ mining community, recording testimonies that contributed to the widely distributed Miners Campaign Tapes. Upon viewing this, Alan Fountain, the Commissioning Editor of Channel 4’s Independent Film and Video Department (IFVD), approached Chapter to make a film for Channel 4’s People to People strand.

In the National Interest? was made in a unique and unprecedented cooperation with other independent film and video workshops including ABSC Film and Video, Activision Studios, Albany Video, Another View, Belfast Independent Video, Biased Tapes, Black Audio Film Collective, Derry Film & Video Collective, Faction Films, Films at Work,Open Eye, Sankofa, Sheffield Asian Film and Video, Trade Films, TUTV and Women in Sync. Seemingly galvanised by the Miner’s Strike, these workshops donated film and video material from their own campaigns to Chapter for integration within In the National Interest?

In the discussion that follows, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Collective, remark on this ‘cinema of coalition’ that links up other struggles within Britain’s ‘geography of resistance’ at the time. The discussion also explores the complex and controversial production history of In the National Interest?, the formation of the workshop movement in 1980s Britain, the struggles of the workshops to invent a new language for television, the role played by the Independent Film and Television Department at Channel 4 and the legacies of oppositional film in Britain in the present.

This was a Militant Image event, an ongoing programme in which Iniva investigates radical film practice in association with the Otolith Group and with the support of the Department of Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

 

There Goes the Neighbourhood

Critic Jonathan P. Watts takes a cross-generational look at how artists have survived in London from the 1970s until the present, and why they continue to stay.

‘There Goes the Neighbourhood’ is the first in a three-part series of film and essay projects titled ‘Page and Screen’, supported by Arts Council England, exploring the relationship between art writing and the moving image. Read the accompanying article in the November-December issue here

via Frieze

Film is Fragile – Film needs your help! Donate to the BFI

The BFI looks after one of the most important collections of film in the world – films from as early as 1895 to the latest British features just released in cinemas. But film is fragile. And restoring and preserving it is expensive.
As a charity we rely on the generosity and support of film-lovers such as you to continue this culturally important work.
Any donation, large or small, makes a huge difference, and if you give today every donation we receive up to £400,000 will be matched by a generous supporter – so your gift will be worth twice as much!

Help protect our nation’s film collection. Donate now: https://www.bfi.org.uk/filmisfragile/

Here, director Carl Addy explains how Mill+ approached the project as a whole and the inspiration behind the burning film motif.

Q&A with Joshua Oppenheimer hosted by filmmaker Adam Curtis, ICA

Q&A with Joshua Oppenheimer hosted by filmmaker Adam Curtis.

The Look of Silence is Joshua Oppenheimer’s powerful companion piece to the Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, which was screened at the ICA for 52 weeks. Through Oppenheimer’s work filming perpetrators of the 1965 Indonesian genocide, a family of survivors discover how their son was murdered and the identity of the men who killed him.

The documentary focuses on the youngest son, an optometrist named Adi, who decides to break the suffocating spell of submission and terror by doing something unimaginable in a society where the murderers remain in power: he confronts the men who killed his brother and, while testing their eyesight, asks them to accept responsibility for their actions. This unprecedented film initiates and bears witness to the collapse of fifty years of silence.

Via ICA and Dogwoof