Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s

Presents a timely reconsideration of independent and experimental films, filmmakers and practices of the 1970s, which were characterised by radical aesthetics and radical politics

Sue Clayton is a screenwriter and film director, and Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her films include The Song of the Shirt (1979), The Disappearance of Finbar (1996) and The Last Crop (1990). She has made 14 award-winning documentaries for Channel 4, BBC, and Central, and a number of music videos.Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She is the acclaimed author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989; second edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996; second edition 2013), Citizen Kane (1992; second edition 2012) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx(1977) and Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti (1984) as well as Disgraced Monuments (1996) with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.

List of IllustrationsIntroduction - Sue Clayton and Laura MulveyPART ONE: CRITICAL CONTEXTS FOR 1970s EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING1. Semiotics and 1970s British Film Culture, Nicolas Helm-Grovas (King's College London, UK)2. Listening to Women, Sophie Mayer (Independent scholar, UK)3. Political Contexts of 1970s Independent Filmmaking, Steve Sprung (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) & Anthony Davies (University of the Arts London, UK)4. Platforms of History: Brecht and the Public Uses of Radical History in 1970s Independent Cinema, Colin Perry (University of Westminster, UK)PART TWO: INFRASTRUCTURES, TECHNOLOGIES AND 1970s EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING5. Audiences: Not an Optional Extra: Artists' Distribution Practices from the London Film-Makers' Co-op to Lux, Julia Knight (University of Sunderland, UK)6. Engaging Material Specificities: Aesthetics and Politics in the 1970s, Kim Knowles (University of Aberystwyth, UK)7. The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK, Ed Webb-Ingall (Independent scholar, UK)8. 'Whose History?' Feminist Advocacy and Experimental Film and Video, Lucy Reynolds (University of Westminster, UK)PART THREE: PRACTICES, AESTHETICS AND 1970s EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKING (THE 200 AVANT-GARDES)9. A Whole New Attitude: The London Film Makers' Co-op in the Decade of Structural/Materialism, Steven McIntyre (University of Melbourne, UK)10. The 'Salvage' of Working-Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective's 1970s Tyneside Documentaries, Jamie Chambers (Transgressive North, UK)11. Television Interventions: Experiments in Broadcasting by Artists in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, Catherine Elwes (University of the Arts London, UK)12. Britain's Black Filmmaking Workshops and Collective Practice, Daniella Rose King (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, USA)PART FOUR: CASE STUDIES13. Views of River Yar : Reconsidering Raban and Welsby's Landmark Landscape Film, Federico Windhausen (Independent scholar, Argentina)14. Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskin's Behindert and the Camera's Caress, Rachel Garfield (University of Reading, UK)15. Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair, Amy Tobin (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)16. 'On Her Devolves the Labour': The Cinematic Time Travel of The Song of the Shirt, Kodwo Eshun (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)PART FIVE: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE 1970s 17.Memories of The Other Cinema, Nick Hart-Williams (Transition Totnes Film Festival, UK)18. Organising for Innovation in Film and Television: The Independent Film-Makers' Association in the Long 1970s, Simon Blanchard (Leeds Beckett University, UK) & Claire M. Holdsworth (Kingston University London, UK)19. The International Forum on Avant-Garde Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival, 1976: Interview with Lynda Myles, Kim Knowles (University of Aberystwyth, UK)20. The Workshop Declaration: Independents and Organised Labour, Claire M. Holdsworth (Kingston University London, UK)21. Campaigning for Innovation and Experiment on Channel 4, Claire M. Holdsworth (Kingston University London, UK) & Rod Stoneman (National University of Ireland, Ireland)Notes on ContributorsChronological List of Recent EventsSelect BibliographyIndex

An invaluable reference source for academics, researchers and the wider public less familiar with this significant period of British film history.
This anthology brilliantly reflects the struggles and achievements of a generation of filmmakers and film scholars outside Britain's commercial entertainment industry. Edited by two key figures from the movement and introducing texts by leading contemporary scholars on this period, this book offers new insights into a vibrant, influential and often highly contested film culture.
This superb collection of essays presents a very timely reconsideration of many key independent and radical films of the 1970s, their context of production and exhibition then, and their continuing importance for the aesthetics and politics of image-making in our current era of the digital and global.
This book is distinctive in the way it gathers different threads and focuses on actual films and exhibition practices while at the same maintaining an approach that privileges critical theory. It also benefits from the editorial policy of commissioning partly from people who, like the editors, participated in the 1970s movement and partly from much younger authors.
As befits its subject, the loose network of film and video collectives which bloomed in the wake of 1968, this edited collection offers a variety of angles whose effect is cumulative. The 'other cinemas' of the title ranged from the agit-prop Cinema Action to Black Audio Film Collective; from Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, closely associated with Screen, house journal of cine-structuralism, to the 'structural/materialist' London Film-Makers' Co-op, whose members at their most extreme rejected all forms of representation; and from the feminist Circles screening collective to the 'subjective documentarist' Stephen Dwoskin.