When looking back to that decade the London Filmmakers' Co-op remains in my mind as a unique organisation in the 1970s art scene. While I do not intend to give an overview of the history of the LFMC, (for this see Duncan Reekie's excellent overview in Filmwaves issue 1), I would wish to lay emphasis upon what I feel to have been one of its most important achievements, that is the establishing of a co-operative venture that not only provided workshop facilities but also a distribution centre and the means for its artist-filmmakers to exhibit their work. Amongst its members there was a clear understanding of the relationship between these areas as the mechanism for a truly independent practice. It seemed to me at the time the only place that had got its act together in an art world that was fragmented, shot through with introverted bohemianism and fundamentally believed that art was something you made but did not talk about, let alone theorise around. At the Co-op, groups met regularly to discuss and present their films. A huge variety of work was presented, often as mixed screenings of theme related work and the enterprising notion of one-person presentations by filmmakers with whom the audience could engage in the development of the makers' practice in an after screening discussions. I recall that often those events were volatile affairs, where the audience, many of whom were by no means partisan, fired well informed questions at the filmmakers resulting in an exchange that was a real learning curve for everyone. To suggest that this era was dominated by a group of hard line didactic structuralist filmmakers I fear would be to over simplify the complexities of what was being produced at that time. Some of the best and strongest theoretical and polemical work was being developed by Peter Gidal, who on reflection perhaps was the only filmmaker of the period to invent a radically new form. But the divergent paths of artists such as the late Ann Rees-Mogg, (whose poetic and personal films surely had more in common with the American Marie Menken), and the anarchic, playful film/performances of Annabel Nicholson could not be further from Gidal's ...

Full article published in Filmwaves - Issue 2, November 1997. Subscribe now!