Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema

by W. Duncan Reekie

The Definitive History of Underground Cinema is the indispensable history of underground cinema, an untold story that includes the British independent and French avant-garde cinemas of the 1920s, the counterculture film movements of the 1960s, the microcinema resurgence of the 1990s, and beyond. Dispensing with simplistic "art versus commerce" discourses, Subversion not only discovers the cultural roots of underground filmmaking in bohemian cabarets of nineteenth-century Paris and the fairbooths of medieval London, but situates the underground as a radical and popular subculture separate from mainstream cinema and avant-garde film.

Genres: Media Tie In, Film

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2007

Reviews

[Stefan Szczelkun · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book may be badly titled – in the sense that the title does not give much clue as to its much wider significance. But maybe this is how it sneaked through some of the publishing industry’s gate-keepers. It is not just about underground film... it is a defence of popular culture more broadly. What this book does more powerfully than any I’ve read is to hack through the weedy and tangled field that is the study of popular culture and come up with a radical reclaiming of the term. However, in the course of making a new case for the vitality and innovation of the popular as a category it also sets about the category of Art, which the establishment sets above popular culture as a means to devalue it. But, again, it’s not so much about artwork as about the discourses and theories which prop up the systemic ideology.

“Cultural theory has become for the British state a crucial bureaucracy for the negotiation and maintenance of the border between the art and the popular. The function of theory is to convert the incoherent, chaotic, vulgar collective and popular into an authorised, academic and legitimate culture. This is not simply a textual strategy, it is an educational process since state education is the institution developed by the bourgeoisie to convert the illegitimate popular culture of studious working class youth into art...” (p167)

As a working class artist / thinker I have been waylaid, confused and thwarted throughout my life by trying to read about popular culture – something I grew up immersed in. Subversion does an excellent job of going through all the books that I either turned away from perplexed, went to sleep reading or couldn’t see the point of. It outlines the key landmarks of this material and summarily gives a voice to, and explains, the multiple intuitive turn-offs I experienced. Subversion is essential reading for anyone like me.
I had found a path through some of this tedious stuff in conversation with Howard Slater, Graham Harwood and others in the ‘80s, and self-published my own conclusions in the early ‘90s with Working Press. However, there was much that I just didn’t have the energy or time to approach. Reekie has filled many gaps for me in a way that is forthright, concise and incisive. He has certainly done a lot of reading to expose middle-class aspirational leadership in the mechanisms and rituals of cultural legitimation. Often masquerading as Socialist or Marxist, the line that is missing from these tracts is that ‘the revolution’ will be televised and managed by the middle class and their wannabee allies and turned into a charade.
The book may be easy for reviewers to dismiss just because it is so wide ranging. A large part of it is a critical and selective literature review of a mass of secondary material, much of which is known to cultural studies academics. But the discourse is both re-assembled and given pragmatic orientation by Reekie’s experiences of working as an experimental filmmaker. There are also areas that are based on original new research, like the chapter that draws an outline history of the burgeoning amateur film scene in the UK from the ‘30s to the ‘60s. This is derived from the magazines that were a regular part of the British amateur film scene. The close relationships between amateur filmmaking and the underground are, according to Reekie, about “alternativity and experimentalism.” (p112) It is astounding to realise that this amateur movement, at its height in the ‘60s, was:

“The most successful integrated autonomous film movement in British Cinema history.” (p115)

Reekie comments that the most convincing evidence of the autonomy of the amateur movement is its very obscurity within film history. This is true of many other art forms: the very fact of not being observed by state cadres contains the frustration and pain of not having the recognition one’s effort deserves, but it is also a liberation from having one’s life funnelled into a meaningless careerist path or being extracted from one’s organic community. As Reekie argues:

“The ruling culture of the bourgeoisie [...] represses, appropriates and enervates all radical projects designed to democratise and liberate cultural production.” (p123)

Reekie roots the history of underground cinema here in the class blurring history of 19th century bohemian cabaret. As the technology of movies burst onto the urbanised market places in the early 20th century, film was, for a while, a ‘cinema of attractions’, a visual spectacle.

“As cinema superceded popular theatre and music hall, so it became the crucial site of the border conflict between the popular and bourgeois art, the inevitable target of bourgeois licensing, sedation, gentrification and appropriation. This conflict has two discrete fronts: the first was an initiative within the nascent film industry which was stimulated and guided by state intervention; the second was a movement which sought to appropriate cinema for autonomous art.” (p72)

The story of the underground is then woven through Dada cabaret to the British underground in the late ‘60s, itself the progeny of the US beat/hippie film scene. Here, attention is put onto the London Filmmakers Co-op (LFMC) which was modeled on Jonas Mekas’s earlier Film Maker’s Co-op, with its ‘no selection’ policy. Reekie traces how the early counter-cultural approach gives way to a split between underground film and a banal, abstract but heavily theorised structuralist film. The latter becomes dominant as the LFMC became mired in state subsidy and institutionalised within British academia:

“The demand for cinematic purity is not the trajectory of modernist abstraction or the drive for medium specificity, it is the demand of an autonomous art cinema which will correct an historical aberration: popular cinema. The aberration is that a dynamic creative culture could emerge from outside the legitimate sphere of bourgeois art.” (p78)

Subversion is counter theory coming out of sustained radical praxis in and beyond the London based collective Exploding Cinema.
(a longer version of this review was published in Variant magazine #31 which can be found online)

Notes
1. See: William Uricchio & Roberta E.Pearson’s 'Reframing Culture', Princeton, UP (1993)
2. Gans, Herbert J., 'Popular and High Culture: an analysis and evaluation of taste', Basic Books, New York (1974)
3. Szczelkun, Stefan. ‘The Value of Home Movies’, Oral History Society Journal, Autumn 2000 (V28 No 2 pp94/98)

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I knew Duncan from back in the days when I was programming a festival that brought him to the US. He was a nice guy, although I remember thinking his film was silly and not very good. This book reminds me of that movie, but I'm still interested because how often does someone write a book like this these days?

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

took me awhile to get started, but once I was over the foreword really really enjoyed it. Amazingly informative & hugely inspiring. Excellent take on the early art vs nonArt and how this relates to cinema. The stuff on Britain avant garde LFMC was great (brought back my experience of visiting their space in Camden and not feeling it had any connection to me).

[Mira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in bits and pieces. Amazingly informative.

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great history of underground cinema, very detailed and very clear - my only caveat was that it is a bit polemical.

[Mike Everleth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takes an extremely different tact than most film books by tying its key arguments to pre-cinema history. Opens up whole new modes of thinking of the avant-garde film arts.