Reel Rebels: the London Film-Makers' Co-Operative 1966 to 1996

REEL REBELS:

THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’

CO-OPERATIVE

1966 TO 1996

JOY I. PAYNE

AuthorHouse™ UK

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403  USA

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: 0800.197.4150

© 2015 Joy I. Payne. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  10/14/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4625-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4627-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-4626-1 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

One - The London Film-Makers’ Co-Operative 1966 To 1996

The Origins Of The Co-Op

Establishing The Co-Op

Co-Op Principles

Cinim

The Workshop

The Peripatetic Existence Of The Co-Op

Some Comparisons Between The London And The New York Co-Ops

Placing The Co-Op Within The Context Of The Political And Aesthetic Avant-Garde In Europe

Gender Issues At The Co-Op

Two - Funding Artists’ Films

Some Implications Of State Funding For Artists

The British Film Institute

The Arts Council Of Great Britain

Current Developments In Funding Artists’ Films

Three - Structural/Materialist, Expanded Cinema, Double Screen And Landscape Films, 1966 – 1979

Developing Tendencies In Artists’ Film-Making

Thematic Tendencies

Structural/Materialist Films

Expanded Cinema

Double - Screen Films

Landscape Films

Four - London Underground Films

Location - Duration

Intervention And Processing

Diversifications

Five - Undercut And A Second Generation Of Artist Film - Makers, 1981 -1996

Undercut Journal

Artists’ Films And Narrative

British Art Cinema: Expressing The Personal And Political

Six - Advertising, Distribution, Exhibition And Censorship

Advertising And Promoting Artists’ Films

Distribution

Exhibition: Screening In Alternative Venues

The Arts Labs

The New Cinema Club

The Co-Op Cinema

The National Film Theatre

The Institute Of Contemporary Arts

Art Galleries And Festivals

The Art Film Tours

Television

Censorship

Seven - Audience Participation And Critical Reception

Audience Participation

Film-Makers’ Expectations Of Their Audiences

Critical Reception

Aftermath And Conclusion

Aftermath

Conclusion

References

Bibliography

Filmography - Artist’s Films

British Art Cinema

European Art Cinema

Feature Films

French New Wave

Printed Primary Sources

Documentary Primary Sources

Unpublished Thesis

Leaflet

Secondary Sources

Screenplay

Journal Articles And Essays

Newspaper Articles

Conference Paper

Exhibition And Distribution Catalogues

Programme Notes

Web-Site Documents

Interviews

Founders of the London Film Maker’s Co-operative

(l-r) Steve Dwoskin, Andy Meyer, Simon Hartog, Bob Cobbing and Harvey Matusow.

Photograph by Town Magazine 1996, p.7.

Courtesy of the Photographer Adam Ritchie

To Peter James Payne

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank James Chapman for all his support and encouragement during my PhD studies on which this book is based. Thanks also to Stephen Ball at the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, British Film and Video Collection at Central Saint Martins’ University of the Arts, London. Many thanks to Adam Ritchie for his permission to use his photograph and to Matt Carter and staff at the LUX for their assistance.

Thanks to my children and grandchildren, Sarah, Alice, Emily, Daisy, Holly, Oliver and Brody for whom I wrote this book. My deep gratitude to Robert for his patience and encouragement.

Introduction

The London Film-makers’ Co-operative (LFMC or Co-op) was founded on 13 October 1966 by a group of painters, sculptors and others interested in exploring the possibilities of the moving image. These artists had diverted from painting and sculpture to create experimental films in order to maintain autonomy over the production, distribution and exhibition of their work. Founder members included David Curtis, Steve (Stephen) Dwoskin, Andy Mayer, who were joined by Americans Harvey Matusow, Simon Hartog and Bob Cobbing. Photographed by Town magazine in 1966 they were described as London’s leading underground film-makers.¹ They were subsequently joined by John Collins, Philip Crick, an underground concrete poet, Simon Hartog, Raymond Durgnat the critic and, in 1968, by Americans Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice. Le Grice, who taught film studies at Central Saint Martins College, became a member of the Co-op as he sought premises for the production and exhibition of his own work and that of his students. The substantial number of artists creating films at the LFMC workshop led to their works becoming known as ‘artists’ films’.

Films created at the LFMC are often referred to as artist, experimental or avant-garde films, but in their books Gidal, Le Grice, Curtis and Dwoskin refer to their films as ‘structural film’, ‘abstract film’, ‘experimental film’ and ‘free cinema’, respectively.¹ A diverse range of books, articles and essays have been written about avant-garde film-making in general and works exploring artists’ films during 1966 to 1996 include those by early Co-op film-makers’ including Malcolm Le Grice’s Abstract Film and Beyond (1977), Peter Gidal’s Structural Film Anthology (1976) and Materialist Film (1989), and Stephen Dwoskin’s Film Is…(1975). More recent publications include: The British Avant-Garde Film, 1926 to 1995: An anthology of Writings, edited by Michael O’Pray (1996), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90, edited by Margaret Dickinson (1999), A.L. Rees’s A History of Experimental Film and Video (1999), Nicky Hamlyn’s Film Art Phenomena (2003) and David Curtis’ A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (2007).

Although these publications provide much information about the history of the London Co-op, the work of Co-op film-makers is discussed in tandem with the work of British video artists, as well as within the context of experimental film-making in Europe and the U.S.A. None of the publications are solely concerned with the history of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative, although Hamlyn’s book discusses a wide selection of Co-op artists’ works. Clearly, the numerous and diverse range of artists’ films created in many different and imaginative ways suggests that the history of the London Film-makers’ Co-op is a topic worthy of recording in its own right. The Co-op was established in the historical context of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, a period of social and political changes with liberating influences such as the Beatles’ pop music, the mini-skirt introduced by Mary Quant and Pop Art by Bridget Riley. Political policies were those of a social democratic consensus, adhered to over three decades at different times by both Labour and Conservative governments from 1945 to 1974.

The 1963 Robbins Report on Higher Education led to changes in education which offered opportunities to young middle-class, and increasingly working-class men and women to study diverse subjects at universities and colleges. Government policies allowed state subsidies to become available for mainly middle-class cultural activities which were financially supported by the British Film Institute, the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Regional Arts Associations of the 1970s. The diverse range of subjects available for study in cultural spheres encouraged experimentation in all the arts, including film-making. Students expressed their political opinions by taking part in CND protest marches and staged sit-ins at educational institutions. The introduction of female contraception and the rise of feminism fostered optimism that women would experience greater personal freedom and equality in the work-place. Equal opportunities legislation in educational policies encouraged large numbers of women to attended universities and colleges, of whom many chose film-making as their subject. This is evident in the number of women creating films at the LFMC during three decades.

Through time, the London Film-makers’. Co-op attracted artists trained at the Slade, Chelsea and Central Saint Martins College and other institutions, who were gravitated to the LFMC where they were able to create films, and to contribute to the daily running of the Co-op. The London Co-op’s relationship with the New York Co-op reveals, through articles and letters in Cinim, the different functions of the two co-ops and tensions that existed between them. Despite both working to promote the work of experimental film-makers, at the London Co-op film-makers were involved in the production, distribution and exhibition of their work. The New York Co-op, however, was solely an artist-led distribution centre for American Underground films.

The Co-op’s position within the context of European avant-garde film-making is defined by Peter Wollen who identifies two avant-gardes in Europe; an aesthetic avant-garde with which the Co-op was associated, and a political avant-garde of film-makers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Danielle Hailed, Marcel Hanoun and Miklos Jansco. However, the evidence illustrates that Co-op film-makers were aware of political issues and, indeed, regarded themselves as political. Politics at the London Co-op, such as gender issues, offer intriguing insights into relations between male and female artists during a period of increasing feminist consciousness. Tensions between male and female artists led to a walk-out by women film-makers at the Arts Council sponsored Film as Film exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1979. The women protested at what they perceived to be preferential choices of films for the exhibition made by male artists over that of the work of their female counterparts.

Although their films were not stridently or overtly political, artists nevertheless expressed their political attitudes by electing to create non-narrative films rather than films containing conventional narrative structures associated with mainstream cinema. Artists perceived the latter as supporting the dominant ideology in society through passive viewing, as opposed to the mental stimulation they sought to encourage in audiences by presenting them with films which were radically different in format and content and often difficult to decipher or comprehend. Thus, in artists’ films loop/repetition may have led some spectators to experience boredom and incomprehension during screenings. However, some artists regarded such reactions as positive in comparison to the passive viewing experiences, as they perceived it, of audiences attending mainstream cinema.

Stephen Neale draws distinctions between spectators of avant-garde films who seek more challenging, alternative works and audiences of non-avant-garde, or mainstream, films. To Neale distinctions between ‘high art’ or avant-garde film and popular culture or mainstream cinema, rest on the ‘conditions of creativity’, on the ‘degree of contact’ between artists and audiences, and the ‘degree of autonomy and/or control’ in relation to the art work and it materials; criteria with which most artists’ films appear to conform.

Funding proved to be artists’ greatest obstacle in their chosen sphere of work as grants were difficult to obtain from the two main funding bodies, the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Film Institute. The criteria adhered to by each body for granting money to artist film-makers is revealed in ‘The Attenborough Report’ of 1973. Short leases on rented premises frequently expired, leading to the Co-op’s peripatetic existence as it was forced to move, fairly regularly, into inexpensive, deserted and dilapidated buildings such as the Piano Factory and the Dairy, in which to house the workshop and cinema. Through lack of funds, artists worked on mundane tasks to ensure the continuation of the Co-op, for example when, moving heavy equipment into new premises. The shortage of finances was evident in the cinema at the Dairy for which no seats could be provided and audiences sat on mattresses on the floor. In the Co-op workshop, without grants to purchase new equipment, artists were compelled to modify and use the Co-op’s dilapidated printing and processing machinery. In addition, they administered membership and financial matters and, during the early years of the Co-op, contributed essays and articles to the Co-op’s own in-house magazine, Cinim.

Lack of funding meant that a large number of film-makers were mostly self-funded, apart from rare, small grants from the Arts Council or the BFI. However, they were ingenuous in applying novel solutions to their lack of resources. Without money to buy new film stock they re-used old film stock or discarded footage found in dustbins, or on the streets, with which to create new films. They used a hand-made printer and experimented with the printing gate and projector, with which they created novel effects for their films. Despite their struggles, they refuted the commercial ethos of mainstream cinema, creating films not for profit, but for aesthetic reasons. Money gained through renting films, for example, was used to create more films.

The methods and materials artists’ employed to create films from 1966 to 1979 illustrate various emerging tendencies in experimental film-making in Britain which include ‘expanded cinema’, ‘landscape’, structural/materialist’, ‘location/duration’, ‘intervention and processing’ and ‘performance’ works. Films created during this period were largely abstract works where form took precedence over content. Scratches, dirt-marks, superimposition, out-of-focus, shaky hand-held shots and other faults were retained. This renders artists’ films difficult to comprehend or interpret as, in addition, their films lack conventional narrative content such as clear story-lines, iconic stars, beginnings, middles and endings. Therefore, during discussions of artists’ films it is sometimes necessary to quote the artists’ comments about their films in order to gain a deeper understanding of their aims and film-making techniques.

Advertising, exhibition, distribution and censorship were of great concern to artists. Alterative films clearly required alternative exhibition venues, provided initially by underground venues such as the arts labs, the UFO club, the Round House and various other film clubs. Subsequently artists’ films entered the public domain through ‘Artists on Tour’ screenings, as well as screenings at universities and colleges and in public spaces such as the Tate and Hayward Galleries. Screenings were advertising in a number of small underground publications, including: Afterimage, Film, Time Out, IT (International Times), Oz and Frendz/Friends. Films were distributed by the Co-op itself which also distributed films on loan from the New York Co-op. Most artists were present during screenings of their films, often becoming part of the process of production in front of spectators. At other times spectators were expected to be active participants in the production process.

Information about audience and critical reception of artists’ films are gleaned from a number of underground, and other more widely distributed publications of the time. Artists claimed an awareness of their audiences and harboured expectations of them, which were as important as the expectations of audiences attending screenings. Film-makers commenting on the work of fellow-artists include John Du Cane and Annabel Nicolson, who both wrote reviews for Time Out. Raymond Durgnat, a previous experimental film-maker-turned-critic, contributed articles to various magazines such as Film, Studio International and Films and Filming. Critics’ opinions varied, with some expressing negative or conflicting views on artists’ works. However, their comments may have had the effect of drawing audiences to screenings, rather than discouraging a curious public, or possibly a new following for artists’ work.

Undercut (1981-1996), a journal which received financial assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain, was important to avant-garde film makers as it was a medium in which avant-garde film-makers, working in a wide variety of genres, including experimental animation, were able to discuss their own work and that of others in essays and articles and critiques. The publication of Undercut coincided with the emergence of a second generation of artists working at the Co-op during the 1980s and 1990s. Taught at colleges and universities by the first generation of artist film-makers, their interest in structuralism declined. This new generation’s films illustrate their return to the use of narrative elements, albeit a form of narrative far removed from that associated with mainstream cinema. However, their idiosyncratic uses of narrative to express their personal and political ideas were juxtaposed with stylistic elements associated with earlier film-makers, such as structuralism. Prominent members of this group were Steve Farrer and Michael Maziere who, like Guy Sherwin, Nicky Hamlyn and Anne Rees-Mogg, not only engaged in film-making, but were involved in the daily organisation and running of the LFMC during this period.

A significant aspect of artists’ work during the 1980s and 1990s is in the introduction of British Art Cinema by experimental film-makers who worked at the Co-op during its early years. Thus, in their feature-length films Derek Jarman (The Garden, 1990), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and her Lover (1992) and Sally Potter (Orlando, 1992), expressed their personal and political views in films where narrative structures appeared closer to mainstream cinema. Jarman, Greenaway and Potter’s films engaged with contemporary social issues such as homosexuality, excessive consumer consumption in the Thatcherite era and the property rights of women, respectively.

Questions often posed in relation to the LFMC include why film-makers found it necessary to establish the London Co-op? What were their aims and how did they achieve them? How were their films advertised, distributed and exhibited? How were they received by audiences and critics? The most pertinent question, however, was whether the demise of the London Co-op was inevitable or whether it could have survived with more support and funding by the BFI, the Arts Council and the National Lottery? ((1. David Curtis, A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain (London: BFI Publishing, 2007), p. 26.). The following chapters attempt to discover and explain answers to these questions.

One

The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative

1966 to 1996

The aims of artist film-makers at the London Co-op were to control all aspects of the practical applications of film-making, not only in production, but in the distribution and exhibition of their work. A lack of resources compelled them to undertake numerous mundane tasks to ensure the success and smooth-running of the Co-op. At the various premises they occupied during the three decades of production they maintained the workshop, found new locations when leases expired and moved heavy equipment in and out of buildings. Artists also administered membership and financial aspects, and contributed articles and interviews to the Co-op’s in-house magazine, Cinim, three issues of which were printed in 1967, 1968 and 1969 respectively, and supported the journal Undercut from 1981 to 1990.

THE ORIGINS OF THE CO-OP

P. Adams Sitney believed that, ‘Without the sudden injection of European Modernism, there would have been no avant-garde art upsurge in America in the late 1940s’. He argued that the influence of European Modernism, directly inspired a new generation of film-makers ‘clustered around the Art in Cinema film society in San Francisco and Cinema 16 in New York’, where, initially, older avant-garde films were screened.¹ Cinema 65 and the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, were modelled on Cinema 16 and the New York Film Co-operative, founded by Jonas Mekas and the New American Cinema Group on 28 September 1960, the latter intended as a distribution centre for American Experimental films.² Cinema 16 led the way as an outlet specializing in contemporary experimentalists’ films and, at its peak, it operated as a Film Library club with 7,000 members. Its collection was the first exclusive library of contemporary avant-garde films for distribution and exhibition, including the work of Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage. Amongst those supporting Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 were the avant-garde film-maker, Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943) and Frank Stauffacher who organized Art in Cinema exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1947.³ Cinema 16 operated for sixteen years, finally succumbing to ‘rising exhibition costs’ in 1963 when it was sold to the Grove Press.⁴

In their support of American experimental film-makers, Vogel and Mekas appear to have set a precedent for those wishing to support British artist film-makers during the 1960s. The formation of a London Film-Makers’ Co-operative occurred when Mekas required a base for a European Satellite and, as New York film-makers Steve (Stephen) Dwoskin and Andy Meyer were already making films in London, Bob Cobbing was urged by Mekas to manage film distribution in London, which was the London Co-op’s original purpose. The London Co-op was therefore initially based on the New York model with the idea that Mekas would donate a collection of American work for the London Co-op to distribute.⁵ Further developments in Britain leading to the formation of the LFMC include the first Notting Hill Festival in 1966 which devoted one day to experimental films. The Better Books shop was an alternative outlet where members of the underground gathered and where, in a ‘mini arts lab featuring poetry, plays and an experimental film society called Cinema 65 flourished under the direction of Paul Francis (a painter), Simon Hartog and Harvey Matusow’.⁶ David Curtis, the Co-op’s film-programmer at the time, recalls ‘the curiously second-hand experience of viewing films at Better Books because of the necessity to black-out the shop, the noise of the projector, and stray light and the lack of the presence of an author’. These disadvantages were offset, however, by ‘a homogeneity that diminishes in direct proportion to the emergence of the film co-op’s separate identity’.⁷

The origins of Cinema 65 may be traced back to 1953 when Cobbing co-founded the Hendon Arts Together club, known as the HAT club. The HAT club featured presentations and critical discussions of film and originally screened classic silent cinema such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and René Clair’s Le Million (1931). In the late 1950s the HAT club began to screen avant-garde films such as Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or (1930-31) and Un Chien Andalou (1928). In 1961 Cobbing re-launched the club as Cinema 61, which referred both to that year and to Vogel’s Cinema 16, but he re-named it Cinema 65 when it began operating at Better Books in 1965. It can be argued, therefore, that the HAT club was a ‘blueprint’ for the LFMC as it was the ideas and practices of the HAT club which ultimately led to the formation of the Co-op with which Cinema 65 subsequently merged.⁸

At this time, Curtis screened film and video works at the UFO Club ‘within the kind of lightshow context’, while Cobbing was showing underground films at Better Books’.⁹ When the management of Better Books ejected both Cobbing and underground artists because of their alleged association with drug-taking, the ‘second phase’ of the LFMC began. Without its own cinema at this ˊtime, Curtis screened artists’ films in the basement of the Drury Lane Arts Lab in Covent Garden. However, Curtis withdrew from the Drury Lane Arts Lab in November 1968 and was instrumental in establishing the Robert Street Arts Laboratory, Institute for Research in Art and Technology (IRAT, 1969-71), on 4 October 1969.¹⁰

Coincidentally, Malcolm Le Grice required premises for the production and exhibition of his own work and that of his students at Central Saint Martins College. He therefore joined the Robert Street Arts Lab group, taking his hand-built equipment with him to the Co-op workshop which had merged with the Robert Street Arts Lab.¹¹ Le Grice and Hartog proposed a new structure for the Co-op in 1968 and the group were joined by Dwoskin and another American, Peter Gidal, who had recently arrived in London and was introduced to the Co-op group after attending a screening at the Arts Lab. Thereafter, as illustrated by the history of the LFMC, British and London-based American artist film-makers worked together to facilitate the smooth-running of the London Co-op.

Changes in the British education system contributed to the growing number of film-makers who gravitated to the LFMC. In 1963 the Robbins Report on higher education widened educational opportunities by decreeing that every student had the right to a place at university.¹² This resulted in an increase in the number of male and female middle and working-class students who studied art at universities, art colleges and art schools. Presented with multiple choices of subjects, they were encouraged to experiment in diverse disciplines, including film-making, and were educated in modernist techniques, styles and theories. In addition to the above educational institutions, Curtis notes: ‘Artists film and video first became the specialist subject of an art/film-school course with the setting up of Fine Art Film at Central Saint Martins School of Art in London in 1972.’¹³ He adds that previously, during the 1960s, only the London School of Film Technique (LSFT, founded in 1956) was ‘devoted to practical film-making’. As a private institution, however, it did not provide grants or scholarships, and its stance towards film-making was ‘conservative, based on workshops led by freelance and retired industry technicians’.¹⁴ The Royal College of Art (RCA) offered grants and scholarships for post-graduate and MA practical courses in film-making, but these were aimed at those wishing to work in the mainstream cinema industry. Curtis states: ‘But the presence of Peter Gidal on the staff from 1972, and Steve Dwoskin and writer/film-maker Noël Burch from 1973 – all under the leadership of Stuart Hood - attracted artists and other progressive film-makers.’¹⁵

Film-making therefore became part of many fine-art courses during the 1960s at art colleges; although it was only later that film courses became known as film or ‘Time-based media’.¹⁶ The result of the increase in film courses offered to students was a marked increase in art-school trained artists wishing to use their creativity in a medium, such as avant-garde film making, where they were able to wield total control over the production, distribution and exhibition of their own work. They engaged with issues raised in painting and sculpture such as ‘the autonomy and materiality of the art object, the contextualization of art and its process of production’.¹⁷ Therefore, once established, the Co-op gained a group of enthusiastic art-school trained film-makers whose training was very often reflected in their films and videos, leading them to become known as ‘artist film-makers’.

Artists involved in teaching film and video at different institutions were Clive Latimer and John Bowstead who set up a Light Sound Workshop at Hornsey College of Art in the mid-1960s where students could use Super 8 film. Latimer lost his position when he sided with the students during the uprising of May 1968 in France. He moved to the North East London Polytechnic (NELP) which became the University of East London, where he and Guy Sherwin ‘established film-making in the Communication Design course in 1971’.¹⁸ NELP and Saint Martins School of Art became the most consistent nurturers of artists’ film-making in Britain. Students at NELP were John Smith, Lis Rhodes, Tim Bruce and Ian Webb, followed by a new intake including Steve Farrer, Cordelia Swann and Penny Webb. Le Grice taught film and video at Goldsmiths College while he was employed there, as well as ‘Destruction in Art’ performances. Sheffield Polytechnic offered film courses from 1967, Chelsea School from 1968, David Hall’s Audio Visual Workshop at Maidstone from 1972, and film in Fine Art, offered at Reading University in 1974, was taught by Ron Haselden and William Raban.¹⁹

Leading figures in the history of the Co-op include David Curtis, Malcolm Le Grice, and many of Le Grice’s students such as Fred Drummond and Roger Ackling, who were succeeded by new generations of artists, including William Raban, Gill Eatherly, Annabel Nicolson and others. At the Slade School Film Unit, Thorold Dickinson, who was appointed as a lecturer and later became the first British Professor of Film, encouraged artist film-making, although he was not an enthusiast. Students graduating at the Slade were the author Charles Barr, the writer/critic Raymond Durgnat, as well as film-makers Peter Whitehead and Don Levy. They were followed by the critics Simon Field and Deke Dusinberre, the scholar Annette Kuhn, artist Ken McMullen ‘and Channel 4’s commissioning editor for Independent Film, Rod Stoneman’.²⁰ Clearly, Curtis, Le Grice, Gidal and other film-makers at the Co-op not only played pivotal roles in its history, but fostered enthusiasm for experimental films in new generations of artists in film and video production to their students, which continues into the twenty-first century.

ESTABLISHING THE CO-OP

In October 1966, a telegram was sent from the founders of the London Co-op to Jonas Mekas at the New York Co-op stating:

LONDON FILM-MAKERS COOP ABOUT TO BE LEGALLY ESTABLISHED STOP PURPOSE TO SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT STOP NEVER STOP NO BREAD NO PLACE TO LAY OUR HEADS NO MATTER JUST MIND IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY STOP IF YOU LIKE BRYAN FORBES STOP IF YOU READ SIGHT AND SOUND STOP IF YOU WANT TO MAKE FILMSI MEAN FILMS COME ALL YOU NEED IS EYE IN THE BEGINNING STOP GEN FROM 94 CHARING CROSS ROAD W.C.2 PARTURITION FINISHED SCREAMS BEGIN STOP²¹

Founder members David Curtis, John Collins, Philip Crick, Bob Cobbing and the film-maker and critic Raymond Durgnat were joined by American underground film-makers Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice, Steve (Stephen) Dwoskin, Andy Meyer and Harvey Matusow.²² Michael O’Pray states: ‘Interestingly, the most influential critic and historian of the British avant-garde in the 1970s was another American émigré Deke Dusinberre’.²³ The first generation of Co-op filmmakers were motivated by: ‘The issue of censorship, and the desire to maintain control over every stage of the filmmaking process - not to allow others to determine what was acceptable – was equally important in the European context’.²⁴ Film-makers were mostly self-funded but, in rare cases when they obtained funding, they worked on very small budgets, with low-cost equipment which they often constructed themselves. Unique, innovative films were created by using not only the actual film-stock but by incorporating random effects and faults created accidentally, or by the