British Expanded Cinema and the ‘Live Culture’ 1969–79

Abstract

Expanded Cinema, a loosely knit set of practices incorporating film, video, performance and multiple screens, enjoyed its most visible period in the UK during the early 1970s. Marked by the culmination of various avant-garde movements and experiments with new media – namely video art – this was also a period of increased proliferation of live media in everyday life in the UK. But the ‘live event’, as Stuart Laing points out, was not simply the property of an increasingly televised mainstream: by the late 1960s it had become ‘the paradigmatic form of the counter-culture’. By the mid-1970s artists and filmmakers were actively combining film, video and performance as the influence of television and other media technologies on the space and conditions of perception was challenged by a branch of experimental practice rooted firmly in an ‘underground paradigm’ of liveness that emphasized process over product. Yet the meeting of experimental film and the ‘live culture’ (or the ‘pseudo-immediacy’) of television is not clearly defined. In this article I hope not only to map something of this important moment in British film and video art but also to point towards the relevance of Expanded Cinema for the continuing assessment of the relationship today between art, technology and media in UK visual culture.