Institutional Frameworks and Organisational Strategies

Abstract

This chapter examines how a complex network of institutional frameworks and organisational strategies enabled the fragile cultural development of 1960s experimental filmmaking to become a thriving endeavour by the end of the 1970s. Filmmaker and critic Michael Mazière identified that filmmaking was ‘part of a complex web of support which include [d] education, social context, artists’ organisation, access to technology and the possibility of proper exhibition.¹ Individual funding was also, as we shall see in this chapter, ‘linked to technology, social and political context and cultural practice’.² With increased filmmaking developments in the decade it was, however, also necessary, particularly for funding bodies, to appreciate this film form as a personal statement made with a camera — ‘a world of individual inquiry’ — rather than the ‘formal world of Hollywood, with its production crews of hundreds’.³ Film workshops would be central to developments and the Independent Film-makers Association (IFA, 1974) for a time provided a kind of unifying platform for the heterogeneous modes of independent filmmaking practices in Britain. While the LFMC was one of the main workshops for the kind of filmmaking discussed here, not all experimental filmmakers were affiliated to it; and it is useful to understand its location within the wider framework of other opposi- tional/independent practices, particularly as these all sought financial recognition from government funding bodies.