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Women's Film and Video Collectives
 

Feminist filmmakers get organised

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In the 1970s and '80s, feminist film practice was foregrounded with the emergence of groups like the London Women's Film Group as the 'putting into action' of feminist film theory and attitude. Meanwhile, a new regionalism challenged the metropolitanised and patriarchal institutions of British culture. Groups developed in Cardiff, Leeds, Sheffield, London and across the country.

The desire to work collectively on films about the lives of women, and in particular working-class women, was facilitated by existing community organisations and a shared engagement with feminist politics. Such groups engaged in the politics of representation and social organisation and committed themselves to an integrated practice of production, exhibition and distribution, and to a collective or co-operative approach.

In the Workshop Declaration of 1982, the trade union ACTT (now BECTU) agreed to approve properly funded and staffed non-commercial and grant-aided film and tape work if made by a 'workshop', defined as a non-profit organisation of at least four members, with equal participation in control of the undertakings. This created the conditions for the funding of workshops like the Sheffield Film Co-op and Video Vera, recognising the social and political contribution of their work as an alternative to mainstream and commercial products.

With their own distribution apparatus and access to national television - particularly with the arrival of Channel 4 in 1983 - such groups possessed a guerrilla mobility through all points in a media system that, while ultimately dominated by state and corporate broadcasting, was nevertheless multiple, diffuse, and capable of many different organisational forms.

Emma Hedditch

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