THE POLITICAL AVANT-GARDE: OPPOSITIONAL DOCUMENTARY in BRITAIN SINCE 1990 STEVE PRESENCE a Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilmen
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THE POLITICAL AVANT-GARDE: OPPOSITIONAL DOCUMENTARY IN BRITAIN SINCE 1990 STEVE PRESENCE A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol February 2013 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................................. III ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... IV INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................. 1 1 VIDEO-ACTIVISM IN THE 1990S: DESPITE TV, CONSCIOUS CINEMA, UNDERCURRENTS ............................................................................................................................ 42 2 VIDEO-ACTIVISM IN THE 2000S: THE CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE ........................ 79 3 OPPOSITIONAL FEATURE DOCUMENTARY IN THE 1990S: CHANNEL 4 AND OPPOSITIONAL AUTEURS ............................................................................................................ 130 4 OPPOSITIONAL FEATURE DOCUMENTARY SINCE 2000: LIBERAL-HUMANISTS AND RADICAL ACTIVISTS ..................................................................................................................... 168 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................... 203 FILMOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................ 211 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................... 217 ii Acknowledgements First and foremost I want to acknowledge my Director of Studies, Dr Mark Bould. Without his support and encouragement I would not have started, let alone finished, and he has been a source of more guidance and inspiration than he knows. Sincere thanks are also due to the colleagues and friends of my supervisory team, Dr Kathrina Glitre, Dr Lee Salter and Dr Greg Tuck, for showing me what academia can and should be about. That thanks should also be extended to all those who have taught me ever since I arrived at the University of the West of England in 2006, without a clue that it would lead me here. In particular, that list includes Dr Josie Dolan, who also happens to be the best office partner ever; Alastair Oldham, for convincing me to study documentary in the first place; and Humberto Perez-Blanco, initially for those Currents in Film Theory seminars but for everything else since. For helping me discover it, I also want to acknowledge the filmmakers, activists, artists and scholars of the political avant-garde who took the time to answer my questions and discuss the topic. That list includes Adrian Arbib, Liz Banks, Hamish Campbell, Michael Chanan, Tim Cowen, Shaun Dey, Margaret Dickinson, Jon Dovey, Ben Edwards, Mick Fuzz, Neil Goodwin, Julia Guest, Sylvia Harvey, Richard Hering, Pat Holland, Dylan Howitt, Emily James, Paul Light, Paul O’Connor, Dee O'Neill, Chris Reeves, Mandy Rose, Mark Saunders, Caroline Spry, Rod Stoneman, Mike Thomas, Dave Tinham, Mike Wayne, and Zoe Young. Finally, I want to acknowledge the love and support of my family. In particular, my three sets of parents, Shelagh Presence and Mick Etherington, Keith and Anne Presence, and Caroline New and Norman Freeman, and my two pairs of brothers and sisters, Mike Presence and Emily Reynolds, and Lydia and Jason Brown. Above all, this thesis is dedicated to my partner, Debbie Freeman. You make this, and everything else, worthwhile. iii Abstract This thesis explores radical left-wing documentary produced in Britain since 1990. Despite constituting a lively and diverse part of contemporary British film culture, oppositional documentary has been overlooked by film and media scholars for much of the last twenty-five years. Indeed, the last book-length study of radical British filmmaking was Margaret Dickinson’s Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90 (1999). The lack of subsequent research on the topic suggests that a politicised documentary film culture in Britain is now all but non-existent. Yet, on the contrary, the thesis reveals oppositional documentary to be a thriving aspect of alternative British culture, albeit one that has undergone significant changes as it has adapted to the major technological, socio- economic and political developments that have taken place since 1990. As well as recovering this history, this thesis also suggests some reasons for its neglect in the first place. Asserting an admittedly problematic yet necessary distinction between the aesthetic and the political avant-garde, I claim oppositional documentary as a manifestation of the latter: an explicitly partisan and committed kind of filmmaking in which the need for aesthetic innovation is subordinate to the communication of political ideas. The legacy of a trend dominant in political film theory since the 1970s, I argue that the values and priorities of the aesthetic avant-garde have become the benchmark of political film practice such that the very existence of the political avant-garde has been effaced altogether. Exploring both the video-activist and feature-length efforts of oppositional documentary filmmakers over the last two decades, this thesis re-claims the political avant-garde as an important part of contemporary radical filmmaking in Britain. iv Introduction One of the most straightforward reasons for researching oppositional documentary in Britain is simply to assert its existence. Left-wing filmmaking in Britain has received scant attention in Film Studies (or anywhere else, for that matter) since Margaret Dickinson’s book, Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90, was published in 1999. Picking up largely where she left off, I argue not only that this kind of filmmaking still exists in Britain, but that it constitutes a lively and diverse aspect of our film culture. Furthermore, the contemporary landscape of oppositional documentary has strong genealogical ties to previous cultures of radical British filmmaking. I want to unearth these ties, making clear that the films and filmmakers of the left today are a continuation of the rich tradition of radical filmmaking in Britain, despite the continued marginalisation of that tradition by those hegemonic histories and ideologies that dominate our culture. This thesis is organised into two parts which correspond to two broad typological categories: video-activism and feature films. These parts are then subdivided by decade. So, Chapter One looks at video-activism in the 1990s, while Chapter Two looks at video-activism from 2000 to 2010. Chapters Three and Four then investigate then feature documentary from 1990 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2010. Like all histories, however, this is a partial and incomplete account, and I make no claims to comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, the many films I do discuss have hitherto largely been ignored or obscured (with the exception of a handful of oppositional auteurs or liberal-humanist filmmakers, discussed in Chapters Three and Four), and those I have not mentioned (or have yet to discover) demonstrate the amount of research that remains to be done on the topic.1 Given the historiographical nature of the thesis, dividing the chapters according to decade is appropriate, although of course such a structure belies the more organic and complicated ways in which film cultures develop. For example, the anti-summit video-activist films of the early 2000s are discussed in Chapter Two but are 1 The one omission that I should like to acknowledge at the outset is that of Marc Karlin, one of the few British oppositional feature filmmakers who attempted to combine radical aesthetics with radical politics in the 1990s. When I began researching this thesis none of his work was available, though a separate project had just begun the process of rescuing it from obscurity. Entitled The Spirit of Marc Karlin, the project is led by his former colleague, Holly Aylett, and is ongoing, but included a major retrospective of his work at the Arnolfini gallery in Bristol in 2012. 1 part of a trend that began in the 1990s, while my discussion of Franny Armstrong’s career in the 1990s in Chapter Three culminates in 2005 with the second version of McLibel. Furthermore, the categories ‘video-activism’ and ‘feature documentary’ are themselves contingent. Very broadly, here video-activism denotes shorter, often ephemeral,2 audio-visual works, typically in the form of radical newsreels, such as Undercurrents in the 1990s or Reel News today but which also draw on such traditions as agit-prop and access television, Scratch and the remix video.3 Of course, my definition of ‘feature’ documentary can also include those influences, but refers to works with longer running times usually designed to have more lasting life-spans. That said, many films described as ‘features’ here are shorter than the more conventional 90 minute mark – most works discussed in this category are around an hour, with a few running thirty minutes either side of that. So, while these categories and temporal boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, they nevertheless provide a necessary structure with which the thesis can be organised