Professor Roger Shannon, of Edge Hill University, reflects upon the Birmingham Film and Video Workshop (BFVW).
The Workshop began in December 1979. I'd recently completed an MA at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. My role was that of facilitator, enabler, founding Producer, and fund raiser - part animateur, part organic intellectual. I was also obsessive about cultural politics and policies - a policy 'wonk' before that term was coined, and a vocal partisan for regional non-metropolitan culture.
The Birmingham Arts Lab was the home for the Workshop, and for the first two years or so, I ran the Workshop much like the London Film Makers Co Op. That is, there was a bank of film equipment admittedly very limited in this period, which film makers could use on their 16mm films. Two active film makers were Brian Byrne and Yugesh Walia. Brian Byrne made two Workshop films, 'Mr Skipper' and 'Medium Slice of Life', energetically reflecting artistic life in bohemian Moseley.
A number of films emerged in the period 1980/82 which began to get the Workshop in Birmingham noticed, notably Yugesh Walia's trilogy of films, 'Mirror, Mirror', 'Sweet Chariot' and 'African Oasis.' These films garnered a number of film festival invitations to Edinburgh, Newcastle, and London. Both 'Sweet Chariot' and 'African Oasis', part funded by the Arts Council, were produced in association with cultural organisations in Handsworth.
In the run up to the launch of Channel 4 in 1982, the Workshop had begun to play a role regionally in the West Midlands, but also nationally with both the British Film Institute and the film/Tv union, ACTT. The Workshop profile at this point also shifted from a Co Op model to that of a Workshop model (that is, from a loose assembly of individual film makers to a small group of film makers working together on shared projects.)
The ACTT and BFI both played a key role in arguing that the new television channel, Channel 4, play a significant part in supporting regionally based independent film making; and via this set of cultural alliances the notion of the 'Workshop Declaration' was formulated. From the very first days of the new channel - Autumn 1982- Birmingham Film and Video Workshop was annually financed to develop and produce a 'programme of work.'
A number of Steering Committee members joined the Channel 4 backed Birmingham Film Workshop in 1982/3 embarking on 'programmes of work' that linked education, exhibition and production, and reflecting the core ambitions of this growing group of film makers at the Workshop - Rob Burkitt, Carola Klein, Alan Lovell, Heather Powell, Roger Shannon and Jonnie Turpie. These programmes of work were pitched annually to both Channel 4 and the BFI and became the Workshop's creative identity and niche.
The Channel 4 finance, coupled with funding from the BFI and West Midlands Arts, and backed by ACTT's negotiating muscle, enabled the Workshop to grow into a collective of film makers working full time together across a range of films and videos. With Jeremy Isaccs at the helm of Channel 4, and Alan Fountain heading up Channel 4's Department of Independent Film and Video, the Workshop benefited from a deliberate policy of wanting to reflect a much broader set of cultural experiences than the duopoly of UK television had hitherto presented on the BBC and ITV.
The Workshop's output in the 1980's amounted to over 25 films, including documentaries (for example, 'Traces Left', 'African Oasis', 'Giro : Is This The Modern World ?', 'Girl Zone', 'Paradise Circus'); dramas ('Sweet Chariot', 'Property Rites'); shorts ('Medium Slice of Life'); feature film ('Out of Order'); series for television ('Turn It Up'); campaigning films and tapes ('Put People First', 'Miners Tapes'); debates on media policy ('Are You Being Served Well ?', 'Black and White Pirate Show').
BFVW's films were broadcast by Channel 4, and were also distributed theatrically by the Workshop. The films were invited to international film festivals - London, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Berlin, Locarno, Hamburg, Sydney, New York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Copenhagen and Paris.
All were developed and produced in a spirit of collaboration and participation, involving many individuals and organisations across the city and the West Midlands. Three key themes emerged in BFVW's 'programme of work' and are represented comprehensively in its filmography of over 25 films : culture and politics; collaboration with young people; the rights of women.
The Workshop's films were umbilically linked to an integrated activity of education and exhibition, sometimes growing out of a programme of screenings, sometimes providing a context for collaboration and participation. For example, a series of screenings titled 'News and Newsreels' which drew on the film work of radical groups from the 1930's to the 1960's led to research into the work of the neglected Scottish film maker and animator, Helen Biggar, whose collaboration with Norman McLaren had produced in 1936 the blistering satire of the 1930's arms race, 'Hell Unltd.'
BFVW research culminated in the creative documentary 'Traces Left' (1983) which portrayed the sculptor, film maker and set designer Biggar, and traced her work with Norman McLaren, the Glasgow Unity Theatre Group and the independent film production group, Glasgow Kino, amidst the political and cultural ferment of Glasgow in the 1930's and 1940s.
Collaboration with a quartet of teenagers in Telford - the Dead Honest Soul Searchers, aka DHSS - led initially to a sequence of documentaries, beginning with the home taping inquiry, 'What They Telling Us It's Illegal for ?', later on to the production of a feature film, 'Out of Order', and subsequently a television series for Channel 4, 'Turn It Up.' This creative collaboration with young people was innovative in its application of graphics, video technology and the form of the documentary, and clearly had an influence on the direction that youth television on Channel 4 and BBC took in the 1980s.
Elsewhere, the BFVW film, 'Property Rites' experimented with drama and documentary forms combining both in its re telling of a 19th century Birmingham historical event - the case of Mary vAshford. The film investigated assumptions underlying common attitudes to sexual violence, and by using a mixture of fiction and documentary material unravelled a version of history, previously hidden.
The Workshop from its very beginning embarked on an educational and exhibition strategy that led to films being screened in unusual venues, linking in to audiences familiar to those places - eg, Star Club in city centre Birmingham, Tindal St school in Balsall Heath, Carrs Lane Church Centre, Birmingham Arts Lab, Digbeth Civic Hall, SPAM in Saltley, and Handsworth Cultural Centre. BFVW involved itself with communities spread across Birmingham, far away from the city's traditional bohemian centres. These screenings introduced little seen films to new audiences, drawing on film traditions from Latin America, independent cinema in USA, the UK, India and Africa, representing the power and impact of non mainstream cinema.
In recognition of such 'outreach' educational work the Workshop was the recipient of the first Paddy Whannel Educational Award in 1981, named in honour of the film educationalist, who had been a key figure in the BFI's educational work throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
The Workshop's educational activities were influenced by the presence in the city of and at the University of Birmingham of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies - CCCS - which under the inspirational leadership of Stuart Hall had revolutionised the understanding of popular culture and the media. The deconstruction of cultural and media forms embarked on by CCCS - news, realism, soaps, television, cinema - from Marxist and feminist perspectives was mirrored in the wider educational ambitions of BFVW.
As it emerged across the UK, the Workshop Movement represented a new type of mutual (film) society. Productions by one Workshop in one city were supported by Workshops in other cities and regions. An example of such mutuality was BFVW's assistance and contribution to the making of 'Handsworth Songs' by Black Audio Film Collective in Birmingham in 1986. Film and Video Workshops across the whole of the UK, including BFVW, also came together to collaborate on the production of the ground breaking 'Miners Tapes' which represented and gave voice to the striking miners, as they challenged the politics of Thatcherism in the 1980's. This pan regional experiment in factual film making received the BFI's Grierson Award for Documentary in 1984.
The Workshop Movement was not an aesthetic monolith but represented a diversity of cultural and political approaches - the campaigning films of Sheffield Film Co Op, the Brechtian inspired Trade Films in Gateshead, the Griersonian themes in the Newcastle based Amber Films, the politics of deconstruction in Black Audio Film Collective, and the attention to sexuality and masculinity in the films of Sankofa.
BFVW also played a key role in kick starting both Birmingham's wider engagement with the creative industries and the city's recognition of the part that the media can play in urban regeneration. BFVW conferences and events in the 1980's - on the new Channel 4, on Cable Tv, on Images of Young People, on Boys from the Black Stuff introduced to both Birmingham City Council and West Midlands County Council pioneering strategies for regional creative economies.
The Birmingham International Film and Television Festival, colloquially known as the 'Birminale' and of which I was the Founding Director, began in 1985 developing out of BFVW. Its debate centred profile mirrored much of the discursive spirit of the Workshop. The Festival annually premiered and showcased UK and international cinema, drawing heavily on the city's cultural and ethnic diversity. Its 'Media and the City' forums fostered firstly the growth of the UK City Film Commissions and later on in 1989 the setting up of Birmingham's Media Development Agency, which I chaired. Subsequently, this Agency was folded in 2000 into Screen West Midlands.
A local legacy of BFVW lies in the attention it paid to regional media policy. With the Birmingham Film Festival and the Media Development Agency it is possible to see in the lineages of film production, cultural expression, economic regeneration and the creation of regional media policy, the paving stones for the more formal and institutional role that the UK Film Council established for the regional screen agencies, when they emerged at the start of the 21st century.