Subversion

By Duncan Reekie

Subjects: Independent filmmakers, counterculture, underground cinema, History, Subversive activities, Experimental films, artists film

Description: Over the last decade there has been a phenomenal international resurgence of interest and activity in the field of Underground film and video. In Britain and North America there has been a new wave of highly influential Underground, Microcinema and Protest Video groups, and there are now established Underground film festivals in cities across Europe and the U.S, including New York, Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Washington DC. Augmenting this activity has been the development of an international web culture of Underground cinema enthusiasts and the publication of a series of related books, journals and magazines. However, despite this resurgence there has, until now, been no attempt to either document the cultural origins of Underground Cinema or to contextualise it into the broader theory and history of experimental media. Subversion is the first study which specifically redefines and relocates Underground Cinema as a discrete radical subculture with a history and practice which is subversive and alternative to both commercial mainstream cinema and Avant Garde Art. Since the mid 1970’s Anglo-American experimental film theory has been dominated by the ideas of a key group of British academics including Peter Wollen, Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice and Al Rees. Under this hegemony, Underground Cinema was dismissed as an adolescent phase of the Avant-Garde film movement that developed in London and New York in the early 1970s. Experimental film theory developed around a binary opposition between commercial ‘Mainstream’ popular cinema which was considered repressive, and film and video Art which was held to be radical. This binary separation was in turn an element of a deeper historical separation between popular culture and the official and legitimate culture of Art. Although there have been complex Postmodernist sophistications of this binary, the essential opposition persists. Subversion challenges this binary and tracks the development of a hybrid and radical popular Counterculture, from the illegitimate fairbooths of Mediaeval London to the Bohemian Cabarets of 19th century Paris and into the first wave of Underground media in the late 1950's. Because this new history is written by a leading activist and filmmaker from the contemporary London Underground Cinema movement, its significance is systematically contextualised into contemporary situations, problems and potentialities. And because it transgresses the Art/Mainstream binary it empowers activists, students and enthusiasts of experimental media to move beyond the institutional dead end of contemporary experimental theory. Based on comprehensive research and incisive critique Subversion reopens the history of experimental cinema to discover the revolutionary potential of the Underground, why that potential was suppressed and how to realise that potential in practice. Subversion is a provocative reclamation of media history that will become an essential text for all independent and guerrilla filmmakers.