SCREEN (FOUNDED IN 1959, RELAUNCHED IN 1971)

Mark Nash

THE MOMENT OF SCREEN - Dedicated to Claire Johnstone

I am presenting a series of artefacts here at the Secession—issues of the film journal Screen, as well as “film culture” ephemera from the period 1971 to 1984.

1971 marked the beginning of the “new” Screen re-launched under the editorship of Sam Rohdie. At this time I began post-graduate film studies at the Slade School of Fine Art Film Unit, University College London, where Noël Burch, whose work is also featured in this exhibition, was a visiting lecturer. Noël’s influence was immense. He focussed our attention on detailed analysis of sequence, shot and frame, on-and-off-screen space, and probably did more than anyone to keep us focussed on the materiality of the cinematic experience. (That his students should have subsequent theoretical differences with him was only natural). 1984 marked the beginning of Channel 4 Television—a new fourth terrestrial British broadcasting channel inaugurated during the first term of Margaret Thatcher’s Government, that was to have an immense influence in supporting radical work from home and abroad. It also consolidated a move from theory to theoretically informed practice that myself and many friends and colleagues made at that time. The 1984 Workshop Declaration enabled newly established film groups such as Sankofa (of which Isaac Julien represented here at the Secession, was a founder member) to make work which challenged both the existing form and content of film and tv production but also reasserted the importance of group and collective practice, important in the co-operative and oppositional film movements in pre-WW2 Britain.

The documents exhibited here bear witness to the vitality of those times—discussion groups and weekend schools proliferated. I dedicate my presentation here to Claire Johnstone, founder member of the Women’s Film Group, feminist film theorist and cultural activist, with whom I collaborated on many projects at this time and whose handwriting is scrawled across some of the documents here. Claire studied at the London School of Economics, where she learnt a style of polemical argument that stood her in good stead in those argumentative and fractious times.

This was the time of the typewriter and the Roneod or cyclostyled document. Photocopying was too expensive and too ephemeral, and none of us had personal computers. These wax-coated carbon sheets would be lovingly or despairingly typed and then somehow attached to these complex Gestetner machines which would spit ink but somehow produce all the copies one needed for one’s meeting or dayschool presentation. These documents are presented here as a contribution to an archaeology, so to speak, of film theory, and as a witness to the range of connections being made between film theory and practice at this time—the London Women’s Film Group, The Other Cinema, the Newsreel Collective, the Edinburgh Festival, the Independent Film-Makers Association, and so on.

In terms of discussion the following are also emblematic of the times: “Politics and the Production of Theoretical Journals;” “Art-Politics Theory-Practice;” “Cinema as a Social Practice”; “Why Theory? Notes on the Idea of an ‘Independent Cinema,’” and so on. I have chosen to feature some moving image material as a visual counterpoint, films that were the subject of debate and discussion in the pages of Screen, presented here in extract form. In the 1970s the extract was the privileged mode of film teaching. The British Film Institute had an extensive library of such extracts which could indeed be shown as film. Whether we like it or not we are moving into a digital age in which film has become a difficult exhibition medium. However, we are able to screen a number of avant-garde and experimental films from those times at the Film Museum and the Secession. In a parallel move I’m showing a documentary on Jacques Lacan to reference the over-riding influence of psychoanalysis in the 1970s. My presentation oscillates between the archaeological— specimens from a past era laid out in glass cases—and an attempt to show the ongoing vitality of these ideas and these images through the movement of film itself and the movement of contemporary spectators through the exhibition.