Historiographic Returns: Reviewing British Avant-Garde Film of the 1970s

Abstract

If the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) was still “one of the great unrecognised success stories of British film culture” when Michael O’Pray characterized it as such in 2002, five years later it appears to be enjoying the benefits of a recent spike in curatorial and scholarly interest. 3 Those who witnessed the development of the LFMC firsthand might be surprised or amused by the rhetoric of historiographic recovery employed within some of these institutional and academic projects, given that the Co-op seems to have always been narrating its own history. Before turning to two particularly important contributions—namely, the LUX/Re:Voir DVD compilation entitled Shoot Shoot Shoot: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s and 1970s and David Curtis’s new survey book A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain—a review of a few key issues and debates can give us a clearer sense of why the contemporary projects matter. 4