Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s

(Paperback)

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The innovations and debates in experimental film in the 1970s have had far-reaching and long-lasting influence, with a resurgence of interest in the decade revealed by new gallery events, film screenings and social networks that recognise its achievements. Professor Laura Mulvey, and writer/director Sue Clayton, bring together journalists and scholars at the cutting edge of research into 1970s radical cinema for this collection. Chapters are at once historically grounded yet fused with the current analysis of today's generation of cine-philes, to rediscover a unique moment for extraordinary film production. Other Cinemas establishes the factors that helped to shape alternative film: world cinema and internationalism, the politics of cultural policy and arts funding, new accessible technologies, avant-garde theories, and the development of a dynamic and interactive relationship between film and its audiences. Exploring and celebrating the work of The Other Cinema, the London Film-makers' Co-op and other cornerstones of today's film culture, as well as the impact of creatives such as William Raban and Stephen Dwoskin - and Mulvey and Clayton themselves - this important book takes account of a wave of socially-aware film practice. Without this body of work, today's activist, queer, minority and feminist voices in cinema would have struggled to gather such impact.

Reviews

An invaluable reference source for academics, researchers and the wider public less familiar with this significant period of British film history. -- William Raban, University of the Arts London, UK
This anthology brilliantly reflects the struggles and achievements of a generation of filmmakers and film scholars outside Britain's commercial entertainment industry. Edited by two key figures from the movement and introducing texts by leading contemporary scholars on this period, this book offers new insights into a vibrant, influential and often highly contested film culture. -- David Curtis, BAFVSC, Central Saint Martins, UK
This superb collection of essays presents a very timely reconsideration of many key independent and radical films of the 1970s, their context of production and exhibition then, and their continuing importance for the aesthetics and politics of image-making in our current era of the digital and global. -- Elizabeth Cowie, University of Kent, UK
This book is distinctive in the way it gathers different threads and focuses on actual films and exhibition practices while at the same maintaining an approach that privileges critical theory. It also benefits from the editorial policy of commissioning partly from people who, like the editors, participated in the 1970s movement and partly from much younger authors. -- The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
As befits its subject, the loose network of film and video collectives which bloomed in the wake of 1968, this edited collection offers a variety of angles whose effect is cumulative. The other cinemas of the title ranged from the agit-prop Cinema Action to Black Audio Film Collective; from Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, closely associated with Screen, house journal of cine-structuralism, to the structural/materialist London Film-Makers Co-op, whose members at their most extreme rejected all forms of representation; and from the feminist Circles screening collective to the subjective documentarist Stephen Dwoskin. -- Sight & Sound

Author Bio

Sue Clayton is a screenwriter and film director, and Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Her films include The Song of the Shirt (1979), The Disappearance of Finbar (1996) and The Last Crop (1990). She has made 14 award-winning documentaries for Channel 4, BBC, and Central, and a number of music videos. Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She is the acclaimed author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (1989; second edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996; second edition 2013), Citizen Kane (1992; second edition 2012) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx(1977) and Frida Kahlo & Tina Modotti (1984) as well as Disgraced Monuments (1996) with artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis.