Page 24 - Studio International - November December 1975

ENGLISH AVANT-GARDE

FILM: AN EARLY

CHRONOLOGY

David Curtis

An account of the development of avant-garde film and Kandinsky. Accompanying Losey's The Servant at
culture in England involves the origination at intervals the Bleecker is Bruce Conner's A Movie, which appears as
of new native film-makers, a chronology of the English a revelation. Instantly the Russians are put in perspective.
experience of significant imported films, and the changes Montage can involve Pop Art's taken imagery (Vertov
apparent in the perceptions of critics and audience. knew that, I later discovered). More important, film is
As a participant in the movement, my own activity as simply a material-to-be-used as in any other art. At the
an exhibitor of the underground film at the Drury Lane Cinematheque, with Jacobs' and Smith's Blond Cobra,
and Robert Street Arts Laboratories, London, was at the apparent lack of organization is mystifying (but I took
least in part prompted by the belief that a strong native copious notes) ; Breer's Eyewash, which I read as a
cinema could be stimulated into existence by repeated stand, an affirmation of film's right to differ frame from
exposure to the best international work available, frame ; jokey films by Nelson and the Kuchar brothers;
'international' for the first few years of this chronology and Brakhage's Loving which sinks from memory
being virtually synonymous with 'American'. Yet the without a trace.
evidence gathered by Deke Dusinberre for his (as yet September '66. Back in London, I start frequenting
unpublished) study of the English avant-garde, and Better Books. The weekly underground film screenings
my own experience in reconstructing this history, both there are part of an extraordinarily rich series of events
strongly suggest that the extent to which American work arranged by Bob Cobbing : the first Peoples' Shows
has been a catalyst to English production tends to be in environments by Jeff Nuttall, Nuttall's own
greatly overestimated. On the contrary, the trends that performances, the DIAS events (Metzger, Kren,
seem to have endured are precisely those that sprang Latham), readings by Ginsberg, Fainlight, Trocchi,
from original and distinctly English impulses—in Horowitz and the Liverpool Poets. In this context film is
significant cases before the film-makers concerned a curiously second-hand experience, encumbered by the
had any direct experience of New American Cinema. need to black out the shop, the projector's noise and
This is particularly true of the film-makers involved in stray light, and the lack of the presence of an author.
the earliest phase of English film-making, Jeff Keen, What it gains is a sense of belonging to a wider cultural
Malcolm Le Grice and Scotty (Anthony Scott). In one movement ; a homogeneity that diminishes in direct
respect, however, none of them could claim to have proportion to the emergence of the film co-op's separate
come to film in complete ignorance/innocence, for as identity.
artists already at work during the period of English The repertory shared by Cobbing's screenings, the
painting's infatuation with the New York school and co-op's first screenings, the famous International Times
American Pop, they must without exception, and with launching party, the 'Spontaneous Festival of
whatever reaction, have been aware of the accounts of Underground Film' at the Cochrane Theatre (organized by
Warhol's film activities that were reaching even the /7" and the 2-week-old co-op), reveals an astonishingly
Sunday colour magazines by the mid-sixties. But catholic interpretation of the word 'underground'. The
significantly none of the three I've mentioned would film-makers represented are worth listing, in order of
appear to have attended the sole exhibition of New diminishing legitimacy : Anger (Fireworks, Scorpio
American Cinema held in England before 1968, Rising), Kren, Conner, Keen, Dwoskin, (James) Whitney,
P. Adams Sitney's week-long series of programmes at Emshwiller (Relativity), Balch/Burroughs (Towers
the ICA, rover Street in 1964. Open Fire), Goldman ; American work from the forties
As a painter at the Slade at the time, already more than and fifties by Breer, Brakhage (Shadow Garden period),
politely interested in film, my own sole reaction to Deren, Broughton, Hirsch, Harris, Tourtelot (all residue
Sitney's show is probably symptomatic. Somehow I in Europe from the 1949 and '58 Knokke Festivals) ;
heard that an event was taking place at the London and Hugo (Gondola Eye), Pike, the animators Kuri and
School of Film Technique in Charlotte Street. Having Sens, Bartell, and Richard Bartlett. That we, the co-op,
got there I sensed a feeling of antipathy to whatever actually went out of our way to purchase works by the
was going on, and decided not to stay. I missed the only last six mentioned is a measure of our collective
complete screening of Warhol's Sleep ever held in ignorance at the time.
England. To me the year 1964 was the year of Johns The common denominator shared by the films we
and Rauschenberg at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, as watched, and one to which we already attached great
'65 was the year of Noland and Louis at the Kasmin importance, was their emanation from a single
Gallery. But by '66 the Sunday magazines had done their imagination.
work : I knew about Warhol, and was even prepared to 13 October '66. The London Film-makers' co-op
go to New York to try and see what he was on about. announces its formation and intention to 'shoot, shoot,
How far a distant knowledge of Warhol's operation in shoot' in a telegram to Jonas Mekas. This combined act
the area of film could itself provoke serious consideration of optimism and loyalty is inspired by the presence of
of the medium by English artists is a question likely to Harvey Matusow, Steve Dwoskin and Andy Meyer, three
remain uncertain ; that the English point of departure New Yorkers with films to their names now resident in
bore little relation to Warhol's is indisputable. What London. (Meyer's Match Girl gives us our first movie-
follows, then, is a skeletal diary of events from 1966 image of Warhol's silver factory). Significantly, Keen,
onwards, with the bias and inevitable inaccuracies and Le Grice and Scotty are not members, but the notion of
omissions of any account based upon one participant's film-making as an activity within the co-op is established.
notes and records. Dwoskin, Mayer, Hartog, Cobbing and Matusow are
August '66. To New York. I fail to see Warhol in any photographed for Town as 'some of London's most
shape or form, but have my fill of the New York school active underground film-makers' — not one of them has
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