Reaching Audiences

Peter Thomas, Julia Knight

Description

 

From Hollywood blockbusters to art films, distributors play an important role in getting films in front of audiences and thus in shaping the nature of film culture. Of central concern to Reaching Audiences are the distribution practices developed to counter Hollywood’s dominance of the marketplace, designed to ensure audiences have access to a more diverse moving image culture. Through a series of case studies, the book tracks the inventive distribution and exhibition initiatives developed over the last forty years by small companies on the periphery of the United Kingdom’s film industry—practices now being replicated by a new generation of digital distributors. Although largely invisible to outsiders, the importance of distribution networks is widely recognized in the industry, and this book is a key contribution to our understanding of the role they play.

Foreword by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

 

Introduction: So Much More than Meets the Eye

 

Chapter 1: DIY, Counterculture and State Funding: The London Film-Makers’ Co-op

 

Chapter 2: Exhibition, Political Agendas and Access to Audiences: The Other Cinema and Cinema of Women

 

Chapter 3: Technology, Television and Seeking Wider Audiences: London Video Access/London Electronic Arts and Albany Video Distribution

 

Chapter 4: Promotion, Selection and Engaging Audiences: Circles, Film and Video Umbrella, London Video Access and London Film-Makers’ Co-op

 

Chapter 5: Changing Conditions, Under-Resourcing and Self-Sustainability: Cinenova

 

Chapter 6: Questions of Strategy, Policy and Agency: The Lux Saga

 

Chapter 7: Understanding Distribution

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Película fotográfica
• Reference
• Telecommunications engineering
• General officer
• General
• Film
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 27 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841506029
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reaching Audiences
To Lance, Sam and Jake, and to Maisoon, Heather and Pamela. Our most sincere thanks for all your support and patience.
Reaching Audiences
Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image
Julia Knight and Peter Thomas
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Front cover: Portraits of the Flat Iron , New York 2010 and Portraits of Spitalfields , London 2010, Terry Flaxton (Photo: Charlotte Humpston) Light Music (2 screen version), Lis Rhodes, Paris 1975 (courtesy of the artist) Video sharing website interface, 2010 (courtesy of Peter Thomas)
Cover designer: Sarah Newman Copy-editor: Macmillan Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-157-4
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK.
Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: So Much More than Meets the Eye
Chapter 1: DIY, Counterculture and State Funding: The London Film-Makers Co-op
Chapter 2: Exhibition, Political Agendas and Access to Audiences: The Other Cinema and Cinema of Women
Chapter 3: Technology, Television and Seeking Wider Audiences: London Video Access/London Electronic Arts and Albany Video Distribution
Chapter 4: Promotion, Selection and Engaging Audiences: Circles, Film and Video Umbrella, London Video Access and London Film-Makers Co-op
Chapter 5: Changing Conditions, Under-Resourcing and Self-Sustainability: Cinenova
Chapter 6: Questions of Strategy, Policy and Agency: The Lux Saga
Chapter 7: Understanding Distribution
Appendix: Research Sources
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements

T his book is one of the outcomes of two research projects undertaken between 2002 and 2005 with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Full details of the projects can be found at alt-fv-distribution.net . We gratefully acknowledge the AHRC s support, without which the research would not have been possible.
For their various assistance in helping with the research on which this book is based, and with the accompanying Film and Video Distribution Database at fv-distribution-database.ac.uk (which was also AHRC funded), we would like to offer our sincere thanks to the following: Tom Abell, Karen Alexander, Dominic Angerame, Steven Ball, George Barber, Eddie Berg, Simon Blanchard, Steven Bode, Elaine Burrows, Jo Cadaret, Ian Christie, Ben Cook, David Critchley, David Curtis, Larry Daressa, Peter Dean, Helen de Witt, Tony Dowmunt, Mark Duguid, Mick Eadie, Deb Ely, Andi Engel, Sonali Fernando, Terry Flaxton, Alan Fountain, Rudolph Frieling, William Fowler, Chris Garratt, Peter Gidal, Clive Gillman, Jane Gowman, David Hall, Sue Hall, Liane Harris, Sylvia Harvey, Jackie Hatfield, Emma Hedditch, Gill Henderson, Judith Higginbottom, John Hoppy Hopkins, Sophie Howarth, Laura Hudson, David James, Mick Kidd, Edith Kramer, Mike Leggett, Steve Littman, Abina Manning, Paul Marris, Murray Martin, Michael Maziere, Steve McIntyre, Eileen McNulty, John Mhiripiri, Karen Mirza, Peter Mudie, Laura Mulvey, Kate Norrish, Mike O Pray, Jane Parish, Stephen Partridge, Richard Paterson, Jim Pines, Rick Prelinger, Duncan Reekie, AL Rees, Maisoon Rehani, Lucy Reynolds, Lis Rhodes, Graeme Rigby, Chris Rodrigues, Peter Sainsbury, Philip Sanderson, Erich Sargeant, Nancy Sarre, MM Serra, Guy Sherwin, Caroline Smith, Mark Smith, Felicity Sparrow, Mike Sperlinger, Rod Stoneman, Geoff Stow, Mike Stubbs, Bronwyn Tarrier, Mike Taylor, Anna Thew, Gary Thomas, John Thompson, Albie Thorns, Margaret Trotter, Sarah Turner, Marion Urch, Mark Webber, Jeremy Welsh, Sandy Wieland, Irene Whitehead, John Wyver and Debra Zimmerman.
Foreword

C ommodities, Karl Marx observed 150 years ago, do not go to market all on their own. Someone has to take them there. Goods must be moved, prices agreed, and only after a long and complicated process will the commodity in question be there for the end-user to enjoy. This applies to films and videos as much as it does to any other commodity, and it applies even in that sector of the film and video business that likes to think of itself as remote from and even antagonistic to the regular processes of commodity exchange. But perhaps because of this aversion, the process by which commodities get to market - generally referred to in the film trade as distribution - is the least studied of all the aspects of cinema and other forms of moving image. A lot is written about film and video production, about the films and videos produced and about how they are perceived/ received by the spectator, but very little about the intermediate stages between production and consumption. Sometimes it seems as if, in the world of cinema and the moving image, commodities do indeed mysteriously get to market all on their own.
Now admittedly films and videos are quite special commodities and sometimes may appear not to be commodities at all, particularly in those parts of the art world which manage to hold vulgar economics at a comfortable distance, cushioned by patronage, subsidy and the like. They are special because the needs and desires they satisfy are spiritual rather than material. Their field of operation is cultural rather than (or as much as) economic. Again Marx anticipated this objection, remarking right at the beginning of Capital that it makes no fundamental difference whether the need the commodities in question satisfy is that of the belly or the fantasy. Something circulates, and at some point in its circulation it becomes subject to the laws of commodity exchange.
To some extent this is received wisdom. The notion of cultural industries (or in the New Labour variant, creative industries) is now widely accepted and with it the notion of films or videos as commodities, or culture-goods as I would prefer to call them. What is striking about this book is that it extends the analysis of the two-faced nature of these goods - at the same time economic and cultural - into the rarely trodden and generally held to be arid field of distribution. For, unlike the mainstream film industry, in the world of artists film and video it was distribution where cultural interchanges were at their most intense. The artist might perform a solitary labour (in extreme cases, just him/herself, a camera and a landscape), reception might be no less solitary (particularly with the advent of video), but the intermediate world where films were assessed and ways devised to bring them to prospective audiences was one throbbing with collective life and political-cultural debate. Of course the mechanics were important, since the life of a small organisation could depend crucially on whether it could send films out to customers in a cost-effective way. But the mechanical parts of the operation were only carried out because workers in the field had a passionate commitment to the type, or types, of film and video for which they were finding an audience.
As Julia Knight and Peter Thomas point out in their Introduction to this volume, the types of film and video grouped together under the generic heading of independent were indeed many and varied, ranging from the most practically political to the most aesthetically refined. They shared what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein called a family resemblance rather than any form of doctrinally defined unity. Although some might have a fringe relationship to the world of commercial cinema, what they most crucially had in common was a need to locate audiences outside the world of mainstream cinema-going. This externally conditioned common cause was not without effects of its own, fascinatingly documented in the book. On the one hand it led to internal arguments, often incomprehensible to the outside world. But on the other hand it could also contribute to a genuine unity of purpose in a counterculture which did not merely co-exist with but actively opposed the values of the mainstream. Film and video distribution was vital to this counterculture throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s and beyond, and the lessons of that period are of continuing relevance even in a world where films and videos are distributed via the internet rather than by cyclists carrying cans of film from venue to venue.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
List of Abbreviations ABW Association of Black Workshops ACE Arts Council England and Arts Council of England ACGB Arts Council of Great Britain ACTT Association of Cinematograph Television and allied Technicians AFC Art Film Committee and Artists Films Committee AFSC Artists Films Sub-Committee AFVC Artists Film Video Committee AFVSC Artists Film Video Sub-Committee AVD Albany Video Distribution BAFTA British Academy of Film and Television Arts BAFVSC British Artists Film and Video Study Collection BFI British Film Institute BOD Board of Directors CoRAA Council of Regional Arts Associations COW Cinema of Women DCMS Department of Culture, Media and Sport DNH Department of National Heritage EGM Extraordinary General Meeting ERDF European Regional Development Fund EVE Espace Vid o Europ en FACOP Friends of the Arts Council - Operative FMC The Film-Makers Cooperative (New York) FMOT Film-Makers on Tour FMVAoT Film-Makers and Video Artists on Tour FVU Film and Video Umbrella GLA Greater London Arts GLAA Greater London Arts Association GLEB Greater London Enterprise Board GLC Greater London Council GOL Government Office of London ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts ICW Independent Cinema West IFA In