(Corrections in progress)

Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's background in the early 1970s

I have to jump back in time to what was a very formative moment for me, when a sub-group of the New Left Review decided in the early 1970s that it was time to launch a left-wing weekly which was called, after a lot of discussions, Seven Days. And the question came up of who should be the film people. I wasn't actually involved with the editorial side of Seven Days. Peter was very closely involved with the whole project. So the question came up of who should responsible for the film. So far as I can remember, it was Peter who said that he'd recently come across two very lively young people who'd been doing film agitation at Essex during their student period, who were called Peter Sainsbury and Simon Field. I think he did ask me to have responsibility for the film area. I thought I should meet Peter and Simon, and talk to them and see what they were like.

When would that be? Early 70s?

Yes. I might even have 1970 actually. No probably '71. And I was very impressed with them, also because they not only had a very wide film culture, and they also had a very different film culture from me, in that they really came out of the kind of crisis of the late '60s, and hadn't been through the Hollywood apprenticeship that Peter and I had been through in our devout Cahiers phase. And although Peter and Simon wouldn't have been dismissive about Hollywood, it wasn't their passion. Their passion was bringing together the newly emerging onto the scene third cinema, the newly emerging onto the scene revolutionary European cinema, and the newly emerging new American cinema. It was this triangulation that they were interested in bringing into this country and seeing how it actually impacted on the film culture of this country, because these were three imports. And it was out of that conjoncture, which seemed to be very relevant to what Seven Days wanted to do as a radical left weekly. And they supposedly got involved. Now Seven Days was a very short lived project, rather like the Other Cinema. It started under-funded and really couldn’t survive without a miracle and the miracle didn't happen. And I can't remember how much Simon and Peter actually did for Seven Days. But very soon after that they founded their own journal called Afterimage, and the very first issue of Afterimage is a very beautiful profile of what their project was. I think it includes Glauber Rocha, Godard, probably Michael Snow. It seemed at the time that Peter and Simon were literally in the avant-garde of trying to affect film culture in this country. I was slightly radicalised by the women's movement, and by organising the first ever Women's Film Festival in Edinburgh in 1972, which really introduced me the first time to women's avant-garde film and made me realise how important that marginal cinema – women marginal within the margins – was. One got a good sense of the fact that the few films made in the industry in a sense were just a mark of lack rather than a mark of achievement. I mean they were fantastic achievements but it was a mark of what hadn't been achieved rather than what had… From a political point of view, from that point, for me, not only was I beginning to be interested in psycho-analytic film theory, thinking towards visual pleasure going to a crisis with Hollywood, which was already itself in crisis and wasn't the kind of great old studio system of the past. When Peter and I went to the United States in October 1972, we were turning our backs on something that seemed to be a very dynamic cultural atmosphere here, the women's movement, new things in film theory and criticism, and also Dave Curtis and others like Steve Dwoskin, Simon Hartog making the London Film-makers' Co-op into a real sizeable alternative. So there was a really new way of thinking about cinema. Peter and I went to the United States, very much under the influence of these new ideas, but never having really worked together before, because we'd been in rather different spheres. So when we were at North Weston University we decided that we would make our kind of polemical statement on film and feminism, which came out as this rather luny project called Penthesilea, a 90-minute film in four 20-minute chunks. When we came back we were obviously very keen for this film to be seen. We tried to organise screenings, most of them were absolute catastrophes. It was a pretty unwatchable film. But Peter Sainsbury and Simon Field were rather encouraging. The other thing was that either before we left or when we came back, they certainly said that we had to watch Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma, they would have organised a screening of the film for us. So there again, there was a sense of dialogue, and Peter was writing his counter-cinema piece about Godard. When did Peter Sainsbury get appointed?

He was first appointed by Mamoun Hassan as Production Supervisor in early 1974, and he worked for Barrie Gavin when Mamoun left. He had been working for the BBC for a couple of years.

Right. Then it must have been when we came back from Chicago in late '74. We had made our first film in the United States, out of our own resources, and help of using the expertise and the equipment during the holidays at the university. Because it was a production department as well as a theory department.

You mentioned the Film-makers' Co-op. What about the other, more political side of the independent movement, represented by post-1968 film groups such as the Berwick Street Collective, Liberation Films etc? Did you have any links with these groups?

Not really. Everybody knew each other really, or were beginning to know each other, to a certain extent. What it was, was that when I came back at some point – I think Peter had to stay on for an extra semester – and somebody asked me to come to a meeting at Berwick Street Collective, which then turned out to be the first meeting of the IFA. And I think that must have been late 1974. It was the IFA that really put the different strands together. And got them talking to each other. And I was very enthusiastic about the IFA. I thought it meant that we would really be a proper movement like in the old days. But to my mind it went slightly too far towards… Let me put it another way. If you want to gather a new cinema, you need various practical infrastructures in place. But you also need a huge intellectual incentive, and the presence of a movement. And that was definitely there from the left-wing workshops, from the Co-op, and from the women's movements. But I suppose what I was disappointed in was that I always thought we'd have many more conversations about ideas, theory and aesthetics. And quite soon it became much more a campaign instrument than a talking shop. And I thought the two should go hand in hand. And as we became too much of a campaign group without the intellectual debates, then the thing would go in a kind of typically British way, and slightly uneven, whereas you might say that the French might have gone in the other direction. I thought it was important to keep that balance. And that was possibly partly because of the presence of the women's movement and the importance of time of discussion. Everything had to be discussed. Like the famous joke… "How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? One, and six to write about the experience." I thought that kind of discussion should be on, and there were some very good discussions and events. It all takes a lot of organisation and time. And it would be interesting to look through the documentation on that and see who organised what. Anyway, that is just the background I wanted to build up because I think it's important to realise that when Peter arrived at the Production Board, although he'd been working for the BBC for 2 years, he certainly wasn't a blank number. He was someone who was already well-known to have an agenda, and who already had an influence on, say, Peter and me. And so when he moved into the Production Board, and he was looking around for projects, and for new cinema to encourage, and he saw Penthesilea and wasn't totally dismissive, and encouraged us to go on and think up another project.

It is interesting, because one of the important debates within the Production Board in the 1970s was whether the Board should commission projects or be passive in the selection. Sainsbury was in favour of commissioning film-makers.

I don't know if Peter ever actually crossed that line. But what he definitely did was target new areas of thought, and the cross-over between politics and experimentation in the workshop area, and theory, experimentation and aesthetics in the new feminist area. He would encourage people from those sectors to apply.

So you remember how exactly your project emerge? Did you apply for a grant first and then talked to Peter, or did you tell Peter about the project before you applied?

I'm we would have been discussing it with Peter before we applied. I mean, slightly discreetly, but not secretly either. It would have been part of the process that he would have been doing with other people as well. At that time he was probably thinking of a cross into the Co-op area, and then another very important thing that happened was Dave Curtis getting the Arts Council position, which then meant that two people who came out of these movements had then got centrally important positions in the funding bodies. Which actually meant that for the first time the movement was beginning to develop an infrastructure in terms of possible finance. And that was what made the whole thing more than just a radical aspiration. Looking back on it, Dave and Peter both getting these positions simultaneously was a huge shift. It then led of course to these demarcation problems, between the arts Council and the BFI, but I don't think it was fantastically important. What was important was that both of them signalled a huge expansion in possibility.At the same time, it is quite interesting that the 'movement', and in IFA in particular, had a very ambiguous position regarding funding by state institutions representing the dominant ideology.I think it's still under discussion today. And it will probably never be resolved. But it seems to me that there is absolutely no question that if a reactionary body is prepared, without political compromises, to support a kind of loony radical movement, then you should definitely go for it.

Do you remember being given official guidelines when you decided to apply for a grant? If so, were there any restrictive selection criteria in those guidelines? What kind of documents did you have to provide? How detailed did the synopsis and provisional budget have to be? Do you know if the Production Board viewed some of your previous film in support of your application?

So far as I can remember, there were practically no guidelines whatsoever. It was unbelievably informal, and we didn't even present a script, we presented an idea of a couple of pages. The synopsis and provisional budget were unbelievably rudimentary, and I hope the Production Board didn't see Penthesilea, otherwise our chances would have been nulles! But of course we did know Tony Rayns. Peter had known Tony for quite a long time. I remember going to visit him in summer '69, he was still at Cambridge, and we was editing Scorpio Rising. I don't know how Peter had met him. But we had known Tony for quite some time, and saw him again as someone who was emerging as a new thinker about film. And the point about most people on the Production Board at that time was that they kind of marginal industry people, so far as I can remember, and all very well meaning, but I think somewhat kind of shocked by the kinds the movies that were suddenly coming out of the woodwork, and coming to them for approval. And they didn't really what to make of this.

For me that's one of the big mysteries of the Production Board in the '70s. How could such a conservative body could sponsor such radical projects?

They must have known that there was more to this. They must have been told, or they must have realised that to some extent there was a new cinema there. You also have to remember, as a very important backdrop to all this, the annual Edinburgh film festivals, which in the very late Sixties-early Seventies had hosted the very highest point of the end of the affair with Hollywood. There was the very famous Douglas Sirk season, when Sirk came over and we all fell in love with him… The Sam Fuller season, the Corman season, the Walsh season… Those things, which Linda Myles organised I think with Paul Willemen and Claire Johnston. Edinburgh was also, because of that, a fantastically conflicting place. Linda had to deal with old-fashioned press, people who were on the side of the festival wondering what on earth they were doing… But Edinburgh also hosted the first Women's Film Festival and then, in '75, Peter Wollen and Simon Field organised an avant-garde event for Edinburgh. So the shift in atmosphere might not have hit the great British public, but there were certainly, within the consciousness of the film community… And totally off the record, I remember poor Linda was struggling because she had Paul Willemen and Claire Johnston pressuring her from one side, and on the other side she would have had, say, Philip French and Derek Malcolm, and trying to play off these different groups, which often left her literally speechless. So I just want to emphasise that there was a public phase to this. And Edinburgh was one of the places where it could explode more publicly than, say, the Production Board.

These liberal critics were certainly aware of these developments, but they didn't agree with it, or they were scared of the kind of cinema that was being created.

Exactly. If you were someone like Romaine Heart??, for instance, who actually ran a cinema, she wasn't going to be able to show these movies. What was going on? Was this the kind of regeneration of British cinema that was going to make a kind of New Wave in this country? No. It was just going to be a kind of marginal thing more like the Underground in the United States, or Straub-Huillet.

But subsidised Underground, and that's what scared them.

Yes. But at the same time, if the older people on the Board had wanted to make a big issue of all this, they would have had to challenge Peter's authority. They would have had to take it to the BFI's Board of Governors, and that would have been a huge responsibility. And I'm not sure, as 'good' liberal people, that they would have felt it was the right thing to do. If you'd had some really, really reactionary people, they could have made it very difficult to Peter, but he would have fought back and it would have become a major public row throughout the whole of the BFI and gone to the Governors. That was the alternative. Either they slightly fell in with the radical agenda, or they would have had to fight it.

Tell me about the production of Riddles.

I think we might have been part of a new wave of productions that came in under a new management system, in that Peter Sainsbury got Keith Griffith appointed as the kind of coal face producer. We were 99 percent sure that Riddles was Keith's first production. He was responsible for drawing up a proper budget, in agreement with Peter and me. So far as I can remember, we had to get the basis of our team first. And it was only after we'd got Diane Tammes in as cinematographer that the budget could be really be drawn up in terms of what she felt would be needed for this particular production, and how she envisaged filming it.

Who brought in the technical crew? Who came up with those names?

That was the result of discussions. There were a number of cinematographers –cameramen, as we called them in those days – who were on Peter's rota. In order to qualify to be on Peter's rota, you had to be someone with a reasonably open mind to be prepared to experiment. And there weren't a lot of camera people like that. There was one, who we nearly used, who later married Anna Ambrose, and became a very successful documentary director, winning prizes. I went through the whole phase of trying to persuade him to do it. He was someone Peter had recommended. And I think Peter also recommended Peter Harvey for sound. There were people that he trusted, and that he thought wouldn't just dig their heels in and say "well, guv, if that's what you want me to do, I'll do it".

Why do you think these people agreed to work for Production Board films, and to paid £20 a week? Was it only their commitment to experimentation?

I don't know. That side I don't know. In the end, as far as we were concerned, we decided to go for a woman cinematographer. And then it turned out that there were only two in the country. One was Joan Churchill, who I think had gone to California at that point, but she wasn't our style anyway – she was much more kind of vérité style. And the other was this recent graduate from the National Film School, which was Diane. We could relate to her perhaps more because she'd been a still photographer, and had a more experimental consciousness. And also, she was quite keen to direct herself. She was quite keen to be involved with new ways of film-making, and also was influenced feminism and the concept of women's cinema. So getting Diana involved was possibly the key step. Once we got her involved, then it was a question of her and Keith trying to figure out how we could do 360 degree pans over 10 minutes and things like that. Then the production became very much a negotiation around its key motivating aesthetic ideas, and how these could be turned into a reality as a production.

Did the Production department have an active role in that? Were Keith and Peter part of such discussions?

Keith definitely would have been. Peter would have been possibly as a matter of interest, because it was a project he was excited about, and we were friends, so he would have probably kept up with what was going on and made suggestions, been interested. But I can't remember very much from a formal point of view how much he was involved. But certainly Keith was involved in the day-to-day running and management of it. And that was new for the Production Board. And so it was very important for Peter and Keith. Then, out of that, also went a careful schedule. So the Production Board was taking responsibility for budget, schedule in a kind of old fashioned producer's way. In that sense there was a shift towards professionalisation. And I think that was very good.

Some people at the time weren't too sure that this shift of the Production Board from being a patron to being a producer, was a good thing.

I don't think we would have managed this film if we hadn't had that management back-up. I really think se needed it. There is something that never cease to amaze me, which is the way you see what was once upon a time a vague idea that got written into a script, suddenly turning into a concrete reality. If it had been too much up to us, I'm not sure we'd have had the confidence to take what is actually a conceptually an enormous step, to move out the phase of an idea into a kind of material plan. And that is what I think was so important. Particularly because I'd thought of myself as a kind of intellectual, not as a very creative person. Peter was much more so, because of his background and his profile. He was always more tuned to the avant-garde than I ever had been. And more confident aesthetically. For me there is always this extraordinary moment, which sometimes is a bit too literal, of an idea becoming a material reality. "We're going to shoot it all in 360-degree pans. Well, how are you going to do that?" And the next thing, you're actually shooting the thing in 360-degree pans! So that's what I think production always does. It's probably the same in a big movie. It makes it rather different from someone who's working very much as an artist on their own, in their own time. That’s why Peter and I were always more on that side. We weren't going to hold the camera, we didn't want to. I mean some people at that time, someone like Peter Gidal for instance, or Steve Dwoskin, would do the whole thing themselves.

In that sense, the people involved in the Production department in the late 1970s must have been absolutely crucial. If they hadn't been interested or supportive, this kind of radical cinema couldn't have emerged…

Let me give you a small example. Peter and I had been sitting here in this room [Laura Mulvey's living room], and thinking about this movie, and he came up with the 360-degree pan idea. We hadn't talked about how to shoot that. And then, when we got Diane and Keith together, thinking about what it should be, it turned up that we actually needed a very expensive bit of an equipment, which was a kind of a fluid head to put on the top of the tripod. Not just something that you could pan with, but a natural thing where you >>> very, very slowly >>>, and the whole thing fluidly moved round. Now, if hadn't had a budget and a production company, that whole thing wouldn't necessarily have happened. So the fluid head was one good example of that.
A lot of the other things we did ourselves. Finding locations. There was a bit of swapping at that point, because Malcolm LeGrice wanted to find somewhere to shoot Blackbird Descending I think it was. And there was an idea that he might shoot it at our house in the country. He came down, checked out the location and actually it didn't work. But it also meant that when we wanted our kitchen we asked to use his kitchen when he lived out in Harrow, and he said yes of course. And then Steve Dwoskin was shooting what ended up being Behindert I think. >>> was working for him, and she and Ian Christie were our lodgers in our basement, and it's before we had various things done to the house. And Steve Dwoskin said that he had to evoke a really kind of down-at-hill bedsit from a kind London slum. He needed a bathroom. And >>> said "oh I know, we've got one over at 207 Ladbroke Grove, that would be perfect!". So Steven came and asked "can we shoot your slummed bathroom. Which they did, but it got left out of the movie. And when we did our last shot with the red curtains for Riddles, we shot it across the road in Steve Dwoskin's house.

Do you remember being in post-production and using the Production department's facilities at the same time as other film-makers, sharing the equipment and exchanging ideas?

We certainly didn't exchange ideas. I'm a bit confused between when we were editing Riddles and when we were editing Crystal Gazing. I wish I could remember more clearly. In the end, to do the sound, we got Larry Seider, who had worked on Penthesilea at North Weston.

And also worked on a number of Production Board films…

Bringing Larry over contributed to the pool of expertise. So to a certain extent, although we were prepared to work with the Production department as much as we could, to a certain extent we were quite responsible for our own crew. And Larry edited as well as going sound. We had total artistic freedom. There was an extraordinary atmosphere of enabling and not creating barriers. Not making difficulties. And always trying to solve problems when they emerged.

I don't think I've spoken to one film-maker who's ever said to me that they were not free while making a film for the Production Board.

They even incorporated childcare into our budget. We were using Diane's daughter Riana as our 2-year old star. But Dina (?), who was playing the mother, had her own 2-year old daughter who had to be looked after. So childcare was very important. In fact there's one sequence in the movie where you can see the young woman who's doing the childcare.I can't remember working simultaneously with other film-makers. I do remember at one point, that we were editing at the same time as Bill Douglas I think. But we kept very much apart. We didn't feel there was very much in common. And certainly in the little mews, Cedric [Pheasant] was there. But I'm not sure if Cedric made the move to Whitfield street. So we finished shooting in September, Peter would have had to go back to work in October, and we would have been editing during that October, November, December period, with the film finished some time in early 1977. That was where Cedric was. He was so kind to Chad, and let Chad make his own movies. I've got that fixed now.

What about the contracts, and the IFA's campaign to improve the film-makers' rights?

I thought that the Production Board wages were very, very fair. £20 a week for everybody without differentiation, so the childcarer got the same as we did. So there was this kind of utopian side which kind of utopian side which carried over from the workshops and atmosphere of the time. Everybody thought it was a good idea, nobody objected. When we made Riddles, there wasn't a code of Practice. Riddles was made under a category that was called "shorts and educational films" or something like that. And so, although this wasn't a short, the ACTT said "do what you like, we don't care". So that was OK, and then Peter [Sainsbury] wanted to put the whole thing onto a proper footing with the Union. About the IFA, I personally found the negotiations between Peter Sainsbury and the IFA extremely painful. I really hated it, because I thought that what had been achieved by the Production Board was such a huge, massive step in only 2 years. It seemed to me that although it was possibly sensible in the long run to campaign for copyright control, and it didn't seem to me to be worth it turning it into a vindictive personal campaign denouncing Peter Sainbury. People in the IFA could be hanging out with him and having drinks with him and calling him Peter, within months they were denouncing 'Sainsbury'. I found that unpleasant. But that's my kind of English bourgeois upbringing. I thought it was 'infantile leftism'. They wanted something to campaign about. That was also when I thought we should have all been sitting around drinking bottles of wine and having important chats about theory, rather than denouncing Peter Sainsbury.
The fact that the IFA won the thing in the end, seems to me to be neither here nor there. But what I remember is more the kind of friction it caused, and how it transformed the IFA from this kind of comradely body into this high pressure group, more like a conventional trade union, where what mattered was what you achieved in conflict rather than what you talked about in political terms.

In a way it became a bit like the AIP.

Yes, which it wasn't supposed to be. I think Peter and I felt rather the same on that question.

To go back to Riddles, when you applied for the grant a few months earlier, did you already talk to Peter about the way in which the film would be promoted?

Not in the slightest. What happened was that while Riddles was in production, distribution became a big issue and the BFI decided that if they were making all these crazy films that could be shown in any cinema, then they would have to find other ways of promoting them. They would still try to get them into cinemas if they could, but if they couldn't, they were going to have to make sure that they didn't just sit on a shelf, and never get out. This was a very important moment in that it was the beginning and end of an era almost simultaneously. If you could imagine that in this country, like in France and many other countries, for as long as you can remember, they had been film societies and people using 16mm, and what the Production Board was doing in distribution was the very last gasp of 16mm, trying to build up this alternative 16mm circuit, hardly using the kind of film society model perhaps. I mean I'm not sure that that was conscious. But when I was sent on my tour, with Riddles, which must have been summer 1977, you could get a good sense of how alternative distribution was being cobbled together out of very different existing models. So I would have gone, say, to a film society in Exeter town hall, or I would have gone Farnmouth College, or I would have gone to the Arnolfini. And perhaps Portsmouth Polytechnics… No, I think they might have had a Regional Film Theatre. Anyway, it was just trying to cobble these venues together, and of course within 10 years that kind of circuit had more or less come to an end. So to a certain extent I feel very convinced that one of the interesting things about this period of film-making that you are looking, was that it could only possibly have existed in that very short time frame, say between '74 and '84. To my mind I can measure my period from '72 to '82, dating it from the Women's Film Festival in Edinburgh, which was a huge shift of consciousness and also a sense of possibility, through to '82 which was when we did The Bad Sister. And the key-moment was really 1979. Margaret Thatcher was elected, and that was a matter of enormous depression, not only for the left in general, but very much for women's movement. I think that the fact that our first woman prime minister was this kind of reactionary enemy was a bit of a blow. And at the same time, the way in which we thought that the lunatic films we made during the '70s actually really would change the way in which people related to the screen and to the film image was a conviction. It was a kind of utopian idealism. And I think we got kind of distracted, and we weren't looking at the politics of the country in general. And that's another matter which I can talk to you about later. But the impact of Thatcher was almost immediate. The funding bodies came under pressure, and it became more difficult to get that sense openness, which closed down pretty quickly. Then at same time, in 1979 was the core of the campaign around Channel 4. And in a way it's very interesting in terms of thinking about politics. You can see the lack of synchness of politics and culture. Because while Thatcher won her extraordinary victory in 1979, there was another victory, which was a victory, as it were, of the cultural left, which got Channel 4 set up as an experimental, innovative thing, which the IFA had lobbied for extremely successfully. So the way I look at it is that in '79 you see one good thing and one bad thing. But both totally transformed the independent film world beyond recognition. The coming of Channel 4 changed it in a way which I think was positive. And the coming of Thatcher changed it in a way that was very negative. At the same time, Channel 4 signalled the way in which – even though we weren't aware of it – 16mm was a thing of the past. And new technologies and new thinking about making images were going to come in, and Peter and I wanted to be part of that when we shot The Bad Sister on one-inch videotapes. We thought working for an electronic medium we should try and use electronic production. Of course lots of people went on to shooting on film, and in 16mm, but it no longer had this kind of precious quality to it, which had been a very important part of the infrastructural system of the 1970s, where our infrastructure was the funding in the one hand, 16mm and technicians who could use it imaginatively. There was a sense that 16mm was an aesthetics of its own, that it had its own specificity.

Would you say that on the whole the Production Board played a significant role in British film culture in that period?

I would, wouldn't I? Of course. But what I was trying to evoke just now, was the fact that the conditions in which it could then changed. Now what would had happened if the late70s-early 80s had been a phase one, an early period out of which this cinema could have gained more confidence and done other things. That I don't know. I think that Sally Potter's film was the last of this wave, to my mind. When Geoff Andrew arrived at the NFT as a programmer a few years ago, the first thing he did was to organise a season of Production Board films. He invited Peter and me. There were three people in the cinema, two of whom were friends of ours. It was an absolute disaster.

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