The Lost World of Twemlow and Kent-Watson: Mancunian Exploitation Film in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

Films which have been exclusively distributed and exhibited outside the traditional conception of the film theatre or cinema have gained very little critical attention within film and media studies. In the case of domestic formats such as VHS this can be partly explained by the fact that, as Barbara Klinger notes, ‘film exhibition via television in the casual setting of the home still appears to constitute a break with the quality and mesmerizing power of cinema in the motion picture theatre’ (2006: 63). While this attitude to domestic exhibition may be slowly changing, largely due to HD formats and digital cinema projection bringing the two spheres closer together in the twenty-first century, in the 1980s the terms ‘straight to video’ and ‘direct to video’ were, when it came to mainstream films, widely accepted to indicate low-budget, poor-quality products not worthy of theatrical distribution. The negative connotations of the term ‘direct to video’ have meant that the work of a number of innovative film-makers, producing what might be described as broadly mainstream work and designed to be consumed domestically on video, has been omitted from the various histories of cinema. Indeed, the only really sustained attempts to explore video film production and distribution in Britain during the 1980s have focused on organisations and film-makers associated with alternative and avant-garde practice. In this article we want to redress this imbalance by focusing on the almost forgotten video film-making of Manchester-based Cliff Twemlow and David Kent-Watson. Between 1982 and 1992 this enthusiastic duo took notice of the newly available video technology and used it to build an unlikely career within, or rather on the outer fringes of, the British film industry. These two men were musician, actor, writer and one-time nightclub bouncer Cliff Twemlow and recording studio owner, soundman, cameraman and, latterly, film director David Kent-Watson. In this