From: Bill Brown (email suppressed)
Date: Wed May 09 2007 - 23:52:57 PDT
To coincide with the publication of David Curtis’s A
History of Artist Film & Video in Britain, TAF (Thin
Air Films) will be staging a one-day conference and
associated screening. The conference will examine the
trajectory of post war funding for artist experimental
film & video in the UK and in particular will look at
Arts Council funding under the direction of David
Curtis and how through careful stage management funds
were restricted to a small number of filmmakers and
denied to many more. Key speakers will examine how
following the setting up of the London Film makers
Co-op and London Video Arts, the funding, making and
distribution of avant-garde films and videos in the UK
was effectively controlled for a generation by a small
London based group of men. How this same group
dominated experimental film & video in the UK for the
next 40 years both by denying funding and access to
anyone outside the group (through overt and covert
censorship) but also through controlling non
mainstream film education at institutions such as the
Royal College. The conference will also examine how
written debate and discourse on experimental film &
video in publications such as Undercut was restricted
to the same small group and finally how this group as
it nears retirement now seeks to enshrine its position
for posterity by the publication of numerous histories
of experimental film & video.
The screening entitled All The Films That Were Never
Funded will not include seminal works by Peter Gidal,
Malcolm LeGrice, Guy Sherwin. John Smith or any of the
other filmmakers whose work has been funded and
promoted by Curtis but will feature instead a blank
screen lit by a single bulb in honour of all that
films that were never funded and all the creativity
that was suppressed.
Conference to be held at the North Bank Centre on May
the 16th 2007.
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