Responses to
Institutional Support for Artists' Film and Video in England 1966 - 2003
(read the paper here)
We have received the following responses to the paper from David Hall and Michael Zyrd.
I'm particularly unhappy with Michael's 'Institutional Support..' and some attendant interviews. I was on the brink of detailing my complaints at length when I remembered, from past experience, this would be pointless. However, suffice it to say that in his 'pre-funding' 1966-73 period I received Arts Council funding in 1969, BFI in 1969, SAC in 1971, AC again in 1972, and none were artist 'documentaries'. Later, certain art school efforts are glaringly omitted, and, though constantly speaking of 'film & video', his coverage of the latter is painfully minimal and occasionally cynical. This does not have the democratic overview I would expect of such a set-up 30+ years on. Rather, partisan bias still prevails.
However I'll be drawn enough to say, for example, it is inaccurate of Malcolm Le Grice (in an attached interview) to say "from my records, from '73 they [the Arts Council] started funding experimental film". As early as '69 my film Vertical was the first 'experimental' film to be AC supported. And in my experience the BFI PB were not averse to experimentation at that time either.
As to art schools. Michael's long paragraph on the linear origins and development in film/video education is also misleading. Yes, work was being done by Malcolm at St M's, but I also taught there in the late 60s (in sculpture not painting) with students such as Tony Hill and David Dye. Equally important, video teaching was first introduced in the country when I started the Maidstone workshop in 1972 (totally ignored except in a quote from Steve Hawley) which soon offered AC bursaries for artists as well as developing into the Time Based Media option for undergraduates. There is absolutely no connection here with the linearity suggested in the report.
Equally there's no mention of work by Dave Parsons who ran Wolverhampton very early on, Ron Haselden at Reading, or Steve Partridge who set up Coventry and later Dundee. There are other examples. Quite evidently there was an ambience around to push this work in art schools but it came from more diverse sources than claimed here.
On video 'cynicism', the quote from Mike Dunford '86 on his view of differences of 'political' operation, geography etc between LFMC and LVA should not have appeared without a contrasting account outlining the struggle to initially set-up LVA from my living room in Brixton, with no support! And of course there is far more video 'history' that should be included here......
Thanks for link to the British Artists' Film and Video Collection. Michael Maziere's remarkable institutional history of artists's film, including a substantial section on the importance of education, is an amazing resource, and makes me wish anew that I could move outside the North American context in this essay. He points out that Sitney did a tour of Exp films in 1968, and that there was a massive 300-film festival of Underground film in 1970; indeed, as you say, Co-op activity starts in the late 1960s (with some activity, esp by LeGrice, earlier). But compared to the US, there is still a 4-5 year lag (the FMC is established in 1962, the LFMC in 1966, etc) and the visibility of A-G film outside the art schools seems to come mainly after 1968/1970.
But it's clear that the UK is way ahead of North America in its metacritical attention to education and insitutional analysis in general. SEFT precedes both the American Society of Cinematologists (later the SCS) and the University Film Producers Association (later the University Film & Video Assn), and a study like Maziere's is way ahead of what we have here.