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Minor Cinemas and the Redevelopment of London in the Long Sixties Jay James May PhD University of York English September 2015 ABSTRACT This thesis argues that minor London cinemas and minority cultures of the period 1956-1974 played an important role in implementing and reimagining the reconstruction of the city during the ´long sixties.´ The thesis discusses a wide range of films by immigrant directors as varied as Don Levy, Lloyd Reckord, Robert Vas, collectives such as Cinema Action, as well as the political cinema of the Greater London Council (GLC) and housing documentaries produced by the BBC. What each of these diverse, yet equally remarkable films share in common are their relative neglect in the history of London cinema and, by extension, British cinema (only Herostratus can claim any significant critical response). This thesis not only makes a case for minor cinema in the field of British film studies, but also argues for its importance to British social history. In doing so, this study considers what it meant to be represented both cinematically and politically in the long sixties, as minority narratives both flourished and suffered at the hands of the GLC, the BBC and the BFI, three of London´s central institutional powers. In tandem, the cultural and political significance of these institutions is scrutinised by considering their role in cinematic production in relation to the city´s reconstruction. Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that such issues of visibility undermined the historical significance of minor aesthetics on the social and cinematic reconstruction of London. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Acknowledgements 4 Declaration 6 Introduction: Minor Cinemas and the Redevelopment of London 7 Chapter I Minority Expression and Minority Cinema: Lloyd Reckord, Robert Vas and the Experimental Film Fund 24 Chapter II Don Levy’s London and the Politics of Art-House Cinema 54 Chapter III House and Home: the Cinema of Civic London 74 Chapter IV The BBC, Social Housing and Town Planning 100 Conclusion 130 Bibliography 136 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Numerous thanks are due. The first must go to my supervisor, Emilie Morin, who has guided this project over four long years now. Emilie has used both carrot and stick, coaxed, persuaded, supported, waited (and waited) for, advised and motivated me with a generosity that goes well beyond her obligations. I´ve always thought of the word ‘supervisor’ evoking an image of a boss gazing down through a large window onto the factory floor, or a warehouse foreman strutting around with a clipboard tucked under his arm. Emilie has been so much more than that: a collaborator and editor whose painstaking attention to detail, enthusiasm and intellectual rigour has taught me the true meaning of scholarship. I cannot thank her enough. I must also thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding this project. I would like to thank my Thesis Advisory Panel member James Boaden for his insights, invitations and clarity. Derek Attridge briefly sat on the panel in the early days and also made valuable contributions. Derek taught me to remember the human side of historical scholarship, that not only do we deal with moments, but with people, that criticism does not have to scold. I am grateful to the Department of English and Related Literature for awarding me the AHRC scholarship, without which I would not have been able to carry out this study. Thanks also to Judith Buchanan and Richard Hornsey for agreeing to be, respectively, my internal and external examiners. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Modern Studies (CModS) Postgraduate Forum (Tim Lawrence, Catherine Spencer, Dominic Shaw, Tom Wright and Andrew Stead), all those who gave papers at or attended seminars and conferences, in addition to Jason Edwards for supporting that project personally and CModS for funding it. I’m so pleased to see that what we began five years ago as a sounding board for new ideas and interdisciplinary collaboration is still going strong. I have been fortunate enough to sound out my own ideas for this thesis and beyond at the CModS Postgraduate Forum, but thanks must also go to Alex Beaumont for inviting me to speak at the Ordinary Cities conference, John David Rhodes for inviting me to lecture at the University of Sussex, 4 the organisers of Screen 2013, and Joanna Robinson and Simon Vickery, who ran the monthly City- Centric seminar at King’s College, London. This thesis would not have been possible without the assistance of a small number of dedicated archivists and librarians. Thanks go to Jonny Davies at BFI Special Collections and the staff at the Reuben Library, Kathleen Dickson and the staff at the BFI National Archive, Steven Ball and the staff at the Central Saint Martins Film and Video Archive, Louise North and the staff at the BBC Written Archives, as well the staff at the British Library, the Tate Archive, the Bishopsgate Library and the old and new Newspaper Libraries (in Colindale and then at the British Library). To my friends and family I give not only thanks, but love, respect and admiration: my parents, Phil and Sally, for their unconditional support and grounding, and my extended family for their curiosity and charming ambivalence (especially my uncle Alan, who is convinced I’m some kind of poet). Beyond that, an assortment of wonderfully odd characters: my friend, colleague and part-time editor David Wylot, a truly magical human being; my partner-in-crime Wil Smith, chef, biker, voice of reason; Sarah Jevons, teacher, midwife and pool shark; my good friend Andrew Webber, who now nearly twelve years ago made possibly the single biggest impact in my life with his evening classes at Gillingham Adult Education Centre; Jane Elliott for her energy and support; Nico Gonzalez, with whom I never fail to laugh; Jorge Rubio Sanchez, for the barbeques and mountain wisdom; Kyle Canning, for the walks and talks; Leilani Franklin-Apted for the encouragement and adventures; Miguel Borrero Diez, for the gin and tonic and, finally, thanks to Mia Brun, for her patience and belief. 5 DECLARATION I declare that this thesis is a presentation of original work and I am the sole author. This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, University. All sources are acknowledged as References. 6 INTRODUCTION: MINOR CINEMAS AND THE REDEVELOPMENT OF LONDON IN THE LONG SIXTIES This thesis traces interactions between the policies and civic experience of housing in London during the ‘long sixties’ and the responses of London-based filmmakers to post-war discourses of social reorganisation, reconstruction, movement and migration.1 I argue that there is a deep and inextricable link between London’s moving image culture and the policies and politics of housing and social reorganisation in the city in this period. The deep political and social tensions that beset the city underline a diverse body of non-commercial ‘minor’ cinema that focussed upon marginal narratives of migration and inequality in London. Little has been written about the emergence of these minor cinemas and the films I discuss in this thesis have been forgotten to a large extent. Many of them now belong to the realm of the archive and cannot be seen outside of its viewing rooms. Those individual directors who made this ‘minor’ cinema—for example, Lloyd Reckord, Robert Vas and Don Levy—had distinctive trajectories, as either Commonwealth migrants or migrants displaced by war. In the first two chapters of the thesis I pay close attention to five films made by these directors, which were all supported to some extent by the British Film Institute’s (BFI) Experimental Film Fund: 1 Marianne Dekoven coined this term, in a different yet related context. In doing so, she challenges the rigid demarcation of a decade that connects the moments of modernism and post-modernism through political and aesthetic transformations in 1960s United States. The North American ‘long sixties’ extends ‘from the late fifties to the early seventies; from the heyday of the Beat Movement and the rise of popular youth culture to Watergate.’ Notably, Dekoven is concerned in principle with the ‘representative’ literature of this moment, in which she discusses the work of figures such as Herbert Marcuse, William S. Burroughs and R.D. Laing in the context of ‘the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the New Left, antiwar and student movements, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation’ in order to argue that sixties radical politics and counter- cultures ‘embodied simultaneously the full, final flowering of the modern and the emergence of the postmodern.’ Historical studies of 1960s culture (by Fredric Jameson and Pamela M. Lee, among others) figure this period as a deep rupture in the terrain of twentieth century political thought, wherein enshrined notions of spatiality, temporality and identity collide with emergent, hybridised social, aesthetic and philosophical forms. It is worth noting here that the specificities of DeKoven’s project do not map neatly onto mine, yet her periodisation is both useful and relevant. See Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: the Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 3-4, Fredric Jameson ‘Periodizing the Sixties’, in Social Text 9/10 (Spring/Summer 1984), pp. 178-209, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(London: Verso, 1991), Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: on Time in the Art of the 1960s(Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2006) and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 7 Herostratus (Don Levy, 1968), Ten Bob in Winter (Lloyd Reckord, 1963), Dream A40 (Lloyd Reckord, 1965), Refuge England (Robert Vas, 1959) and The Vanishing Street (Robert Vas, 1962).