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Exploring the dynamic artists’ and experiential moving image work of 1970s Britain, Towards Other Cinemas is a series of screenings and discussions, exploring the renewed interest in diverse strands of experimental film and video works made in this period. Curated by Laura Mulvey, Sue Clayton, and Claire M. Holdsworth and featuring Steve Presence, Lucy Reynolds, and Kodwo Eshun, we bring together works made in 1970s Britain and explore how younger generations are re-activating this recent past.
The series coincides with the publication of Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017), edited by theorist Laura Mulvey and writer and director Sue Clayton.
In partnership with LUX, London.
11.00 – 11.30 Registration
11.30 – 13.00 Activated Spaces
with Sue Clayton and Steve Presence
Amber Films, Last Shift (1976)
Ian Breakwell, The News (1980)
Cinema Action, Arise ye workers (the dockers’ fight) (1974/5)
Esther Ronay, Mary Kelly, Mary Capps, Humphrey Trevelyan, Margaret Dickinson, Brigid Seagrave, Susan Shapiro, Women of the Rhondda (1972)
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch break
14.00 – 15.30 Listening In
with Claire M. Holdsworth and Lucy Reynolds
Lis Rhodes, Light Reading (1978)
Anthony McCall, Andrew Tyndall, Claire Pajaczkowska and Jane Weinstock, Sigmund Freud’s Dora: A Case of Mistaken Identity (1979)
Stuart Marshall, Go through the Motions (1975)
15.30 – 14.00 Afternoon break
16.00 – 18.00 Time and Place
with Laura Mulvey and Kodwo Eshun
Isaac Julien / Sankofa Film/Video, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1982)
William Raban, Angles of Incidence (1973)
Chris Welsby, Anemometer (1974)
David Crosswaite, Man with a Movie Camera (1973)
Screening followed by an overview/discussion of the Other Cinemas project.
Sue Clayton is a UK feature and documentary film writer and director. Her films include The Song of the Shirt (1979), The Last Crop (1990), The Disappearance of Finbar (1996), Hamedullah: The Road Home (2012) and Calais Children: A Case to Answer (2017). She has made award-winning documentaries for Channel 4 and ITV including How to Survive Lifestyle, Japan Dreaming, and Turning Japanese. She is a Professor and founding Director of Screen School at Goldsmiths (University of London), and co-author with Laura Mulvey of Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film the 1970s (IB Tauris, 2017).
Dr Steve Presence is a Research Fellow in Film and Television Studies at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol. He is a founder member of the Bristol Radical Film Festival, and founding member and convenor of the Radical Film Network (RFN) – an international network of organisations involved in politically-engaged and aesthetically innovative film culture, which has claimed the IFVA Independent Film and Video Makers’ Association, formed in the 1970s) as one of its formative influences. Steve is also Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Sustaining Alternative Film Cultures’.
Dr Claire M. Holdsworth is an archivist and writer. A Research Fellow at Kingston School of Art (Kingston University London) specialising in British artists’ moving image (1970s/1980s), her research explores sound, the voice, authorship and oral histories in relation to archives and historiography. Holdsworth assisted with research and editing of the anthology Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s (eds. Sue Clayton and Laura Mulvey, IB Tauris, 2017), to which she also contributed as an author.
Dr Lucy Reynolds is Senior Lecturer and researcher at Westminster University. She has published extensively and curated exhibitions and programmes for a range of institutions, most particularly focused on questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collective practice, and is currently editing an anthology on Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (IB Tauris, 2018). As an artist Reynolds’ films and installations, which include the ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus, have been presented in galleries and cinemas nationally and internationally.
Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989, new edition 2009) Fetishism and Curiosity (1996, second edition 2013) 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 and Tina Modotti (1984), as well as Disgraced Monuments (1996) with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.
Kodwo Eshun is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths University London, Visiting Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of the Otolith Group. He is the author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998) and co-editor of Post Punk Then and Now (2016), Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom? (2010) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998 (2007).
Launching their series Towards Other Cinemas, Laura Mulvey and Sue Clayton will present some of their early works at Close Up on Saturday 16 September 2017, 6 – 10pm.
