In Fading Light: The Films of the Amber Collective 9781789206517

Citation preview

In Fading Light

In Fading Light The Films of the Amber Collective

James Leggott

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 James Leggott All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Leggott, James, author.   Title: In fading light : the films of the Amber Collective / James Leggott.   Description: New York : Berghahn, 2020. | Includes bibliographical    references, filmography, and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020002402 (print) | LCCN 2020002403 (ebook) | ISBN    9781789206500 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789206517 (ebook)  Subjects: LCSH: Amber Film & Photography Collective. | Documentary    films--Great Britain--History and criticism. | Motion picture    studios--Great Britain--History. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D6 L386 2020  (print) | LCC PN1995.9.D6     (ebook) | DDC 070.1/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002402 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002403 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-650-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-651-7 ebook

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. —Gustav Mahler

Contents

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Histories of Amber

7

Chapter 2. Salvaging the Past, 1968 to 1980

31

Chapter 3. Can’t Beat It Alone: Current Affairs and Investigations, 1982 to 1988

66

Chapter 4. The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films, 1983 to 1994

96

Chapter 5. Dream On: Drama Features, 1981 to 1991

127

Chapter 6. From the Tyne to the Coalfields: Feature Films, 1995 to 2005 170 Chapter 7. Still Here: Amber in the Twenty-First Century

206

Conclusion. Amber at Fifty

235

Select Bibliography 239 Amber Filmography 248 Index 253

Illustrations

1.1 Signing Amber’s partnership agreement, 1974, Graham Denman, Graham Smith, Peter Roberts, Lorna Powell, Murray Martin and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. 8 1.2 Filming In Fading Light in 1989. 11 2.1 Still from Maybe (1969). 37 2.2 Launching of World Unicorn, Wallsend, 1973. 39 2.3 The brick-makers on their last day of work during the shoot of Last Shift (1976). 47 3.1 Murray Martin, T Dan Smith and Steve Trafford during the making of T Dan Smith (1987). 82 3.2 Peter Roberts and Ellin Hare filming From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels, Rostock, 1987. 91 4.1 Girl on a Spacehopper, Byker, 1971. 109 4.2 Whitley Bay, Aug ’80. 113 4.3 Photograph from My Finnish Routes (Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, 1990–99). 119 5.1 Still from The Filleting Machine (1981). 130 5.2 Press image for Seacoal (1985). 139 5.3 Still from In Fading Light (1989). 149 6.1 Still from Eden Valley (1995). 177 6.2 Still from The Scar (1997). 181 6.3 Press image for Like Father (2000). 193 6.4 Still from Shooting Magpies (2005). 195 7.1 Murray Martin and Bolex Camera, 1970s. 210 7.2 Gnana with her daughter Kavi, from Sri Lanka, 2003. 216 7.3 Still from From Us to Me (2016). 220 8.1 Amber, 2014. Left to right: Bryan Dixon, Graeme Rigby, SirkkaLiisa Konttinen, Peter Roberts, Kerry Lowes, Ellin Hare, Annie Robson, Peter Scott. 237

Acknowledgements

This book’s gestation has been long, stretching back to the time of my Ph.D. studies, when I first undertook a marathon viewing of Amber’s films on their premises and was encouraged deeper into their archives by the late Murray Martin. I have a recollection of an initial conversation where he held onto an electric drill the entire time, but (as he was wont to say) memory is an unreliable tool. My first acknowledgement is to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded my research for what would become In Fading Light (AH/H008217/1). I have also received research support from Northumbria University. Chapter Six contains material that was first published in Hochscherf, T. and J. Leggott. 2008. ‘From Marks and Spencer to Marx and Engels: A  Transnational DEFA and Amber Film Documentary Project across the Iron Curtain’, Studies in Documentary Film 2(2): 123–35. It is reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com. The project to write about Amber began in earnest and initially in collaboration with Tobias Hochscherf, whom I must thank for his insights and enthusiasm. Countless conversations and encouragements have fed into the development of this book: I am sorry that they are too many and various to itemise here. I would particularly like to thank the following for their practical assistance: Rupert Ashmore, Jamie Chambers, John Couzin, Kitty Fitzgerald, Richard Grassick, Ian Greaves, Pauline Hadaway, Stafford Linsley, Darren Newbury and Paul O’Reilly. Colleagues, past and present, at Northumbria University and elsewhere, have suffered a few despondent outpourings about albatrosses and the like, for which I apologize profusely. It pains me that Peter Hutchings is not around to toast completion. I am extremely grateful to members of the Amber collective (Ellin Hare, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Murray Martin, Graeme Rigby, Peter Roberts), who have not only inspired the book but granted interviews, provided resources,

x • Acknowledgements

fielded queries, proffered their reflections on the manuscript and even corrected some of my typos. My publisher has been extraordinarily patient: I am appreciative to all at Berghahn (particularly Chris Chappell, Mykelin Higham, Caroline Kuhtz, Sarah Sibley and Soyolmaa Lkhagvadorj) who have steered this to publication, and to the anonymous readers for their helpful comments. Thanks most of all to Karen and my family, who allowed me to shut the door at key moments. To Toby: sorry, maybe the next one will be about dinosaurs.

Introduction



In 2011, the UK National Commission for UNESCO announced the addition of twenty new items and collections to its round of inscriptions to the UK Memory of the World Register, a list of documentary heritage with particular cultural significance to the country.1 This round included such varied documents such as the 1689 Bill of Rights, the diaries of Anne Lister (1806–40) and a collection of materials pertaining to the women’s suffrage movement in Britain between 1865 and 1928. There were also three collections of cinematic and photographic material: the recently discovered Mitchell and Kenyon collection of actuality footage from the early twentieth century, the output of the much-celebrated GPO Film Unit (1933–40), which laid the foundations of the British documentary film movement, and, finally, in the words of the register, ‘the narrative created through Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photography and Amber’s films’. This recognition for the films made by the Amber collective since their formation in 1968 was richly deserved, overdue even. As a celebratory ­document of the landscape, people and work of north-east England over a fifty-year period, they are significant enough in telling a clear story about the impact of the decline of traditional industries upon working-class communities. Yet the films are equally as important artistically, as part of a coherent, longitudinal experiment in documentary practice and an ongoing enquiry into the responsible artist’s engagement with place and with community. And the body of film work, however worthy of standalone analysis, is merely one facet of Amber’s legacy, alongside its photographic commissions and

2  •  In Fading Light

acquisitions (and exhibitions in its gallery space and tours), campaigning work, local residencies and inspirational role in the ‘workshop movement’ of the 1970s onwards. The result is a collection of material, an archive that can today be explored physically and digitally  – via Amber’s gallery space and a well-maintained website – but also, in their words, a ‘living network of relationships that continues to make the group’s work possible’.2 Untangling Amber’s narrative, with its density of connective threads to their own history and future, and to a variety of fascinating people, places and concerns, is in many respects a challenge for the scholar, which may partly explain why this book is the first full-length survey of their films in relationship to broader developments in British cinema and television culture. Amber deserves recognition as a unique phenomenon: a non-hierarchical artistic group that, despite some personnel changes and periods of struggle, has operated for over half a century, projecting some of the political and aesthetic radicalism of its late 1960s origins into the second decade of the twenty-first century – and likely beyond. Amber may have been recognized as the ‘most important and enduring collective to have emerged in Britain’,3 but in an interview carried out in 2000, their key founding member Murray Martin lamented how they had hitherto flown mostly beneath the critical and historical radar: At times we feel a bit aggrieved that our existence isn’t even recognized. If you look at the histories of British cinema, it’s not recognized and yet, fifteen years ago, Lindsay Anderson was quoted as saying to someone who was doing a history of British cinema: ‘if you don’t include Amber there is no history of British cinema’. And yet we’re never mentioned.4

Martin’s grievance had some justification, in that Amber have tended to be overlooked, or merely mentioned in passing, in scholarly surveys and histories of British film and television. They are conspicuously missing from general histories like Sarah Street’s British National Cinema (1997), the Routledge Companion to British Cinema History (1997), Jim Leach’s British Film (2004), Amy Sargeant’s British Cinema: A Critical and Interpretive History (2005) and Robert Murphy’s four-part British Cinema anthology (2014), and merely glanced at in Murphy’s The British Cinema Book (2009), Justin Smith and Sue Harper’s British Film Culture of the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (2012), and Paul Newland’s Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s (2010). Of Amber’s noteworthy contribution to British film culture of the 1980s, there is only a brief mention in John Hill’s British Cinema in the 1980s (1999) and in Lester D. Friedman’s anthology British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started (1993). However, Murray Martin’s claim about Amber’s relative invisibility holds less weight today than it did at the turn of the century, as in the intervening

Introduction • 3

years their history and their work have been acknowledged by a number of scholars of British visual culture, albeit often in relation to discrete contexts or timeframes. For example, there has been analysis of their early ‘salvage’ films within the context of both native documentary traditions and oppositional currents,5 close textual examination of the spatial politics at work in Byker (1983),6 consideration of the enunciation of ‘trauma’ in a later project concerning deindustrialization in County Durham,7 and a project interrogating the group’s philosophies and practices as a collective from a social sciences perspective.8 Such a heterogeneity of response to Amber is in many ways commensurate with the way in which the field of British film and television studies has simultaneously proliferated and atomized, and absorbed new disciplinary approaches. In a famous essay of 1986, Julian Petley identified a ‘lost continent’ of popular cinema – such as horror, crime, melodrama and so forth  – overlooked by scholarship fixated on ‘realist’ traditions.9 More recently, a consensus has emerged that Petley’s advocacy initiated a ‘new wave of revisionism’ that has sought to dismantle canons as much as critical binaries.10 Indeed, some of the boldest claims made about Amber, such as Mike Wayne’s description of them as ‘possibly the most successful “studio” – in terms of sheer longevity – in British film history’,11 can be understood in relation to this dismantling impulse. Whilst it is thus difficult to make claims for Amber’s utter invisibility within the fields of film or documentary studies, I would argue that they have as yet been dealt with in an unsatisfactorily fragmented fashion, and that an interpretive, longitudinal history of their work is essential for a true grasp of their contribution to British film culture. Put simply, the body of scholarship around the group constitutes (as yet) an incomplete history. As the title of this book suggests, my emphasis is predominantly upon the group’s output, as opposed to, say, their organizational or political principles, or their funding strategies, despite the importance of these to an understanding of their creative methods. As we shall see, there are some problems with calling mine a straightforwardly auteurist approach, given the obvious way that the group has emphasized collective authorship, as well as their sheer variety of emphasis and artistry over fifty years. However, their work is perhaps best characterized by a tension, or dialogue, between a commitment to authentic and responsible representation of people, places and experiences, and an ongoing experiment in artistic documentation. In order to convey the development of this experimentation in creative documentary, I have taken a broadly chronological approach, but it so happens that Amber’s oeuvre falls into (reasonably) distinct operational periods that form the basis of my six central chapters. In each, I utilize the films, which range from short documentaries to longer feature works, to establish Amber’s evolving aesthetic strategies against the backdrop of wider developments or currents in

4  •  In Fading Light

British film and television culture, as well as Amber’s own reflections on their achievements (sourced from my own interviews, as well as from pre-existing written and oral documentation). So as to orientate the reader in the history and conceptualization of Amber, the next chapter begins with an overview of their development, followed by an itemization of some of the issues and concerns that dominate, and in some cases problematize, discussions about the collective and their output: for example, category dilemmas regarding their relationship with documentary and oppositional film culture, debates around their engagement with particular communities and people, their stance on vanishing places and industries, and confusion over their attitude to the crediting of authorship. The more or less chronological approach that follows in subsequent chapters is susceptible to critique, as it is predicated upon the admittedly shaky notion that Amber’s output can be coherently divided into discrete periods. The number of cross-references I give between films, and across chapters, is testimony to the manner in which many productions have developed organically out of, or in tandem with, other projects. However, my second chapter’s concentration upon Amber work up until 1980 is hopefully non-contentious, given that, by most reckonings, their first decade constituted an ‘apprentice period’, immediately followed by a phase, during the 1980s and early 1990s, of considerable expansion and a move towards longer films, including more demonstrably ‘fictional’ ones. The sheer range of experimentation during this period is the reason why I have effectively devoted three chapters to it. For organizational reasons, partly to do with the parity of chapter lengths, I will dedicate the third and fifth chapters to their respective ‘current affairs’ and ‘drama’ strands. Of course, any such division bumps up against the obvious criticism that all of Amber’s work derives from a ‘documentary’ impulse and that even their more ‘pure’ documentary work is creatively shaped or involves reconstruction. Similarly, the fourth chapter’s focus upon the films with a strong authorial connection with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen might seem to undermine the claims made elsewhere for Amber’s non-hierarchical, collectivist identity: after all, I do not devote chapters to films directed by Murray Martin, Peter Roberts or Ellin Hare, even though a claim could be made for their work having an identifiably distinctive stamp. But a certain pragmatism comes into play here: the Konttinen films (actually co-devised with Peter Roberts) are strongly associated with the photographic work that bears her name, and have enough commonality of purpose, on the whole, to warrant being bracketed off in this way. The sixth chapter considers the thematically coherent cycle of drama films made by Amber from 1995 to 2005, which consists of Eden Valley (1995) and a trio of films set in East Durham typically referred to by the collective as their ‘coalfield trilogy’: all four films offer reflections on post-industrial

Introduction • 5

society through stories of fractured family bonds or personal relationships, and move towards a gloomy assessment, in Shooting Magpies, Amber’s last fictional feature film to date, of the damage wreaked by long-term unemployment upon a working-class community. Since Shooting Magpies, released in 2005, Amber have exclusively produced documentaries with a retrospective bent, and the seventh and final chapter pays attention to these backwards glances to previous projects and portraits of deceased individuals. As I will acknowledge in the next chapter, one impediment in the way of the interested reader is that of access. Many of the works under discussion have had limited distribution, although this is hardly a unique scenario for parties interested in the histories of independent or experimental cinema beyond the commercial mainstream. My hope is that this book requires neither a passing nor a thorough knowledge of Amber’s work to date and that the contextual and textual analysis herein gives the unfamiliar reader an entry point into a body of work that is potentially intimidating in its range and diversity. This is not to suggest that it is in any way an experiential substitute, of course, and a modest but significant aim of In Fading Light: The Films of the Amber Collective is to heighten the collective’s standing within international film culture, and thereby encourage further viewing and discussion of this remarkable body of work.

Notes   1. United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO. 2011. ‘2011 UK Memory of the World Register’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.unesco.org.uk/2011-ukmemory-of-the-world-register/.  2. Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories from a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 7.  3. G. Gee. 2017. Art in the North of England: 1979–2009, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 44.   4. M. Martin. 2000. ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’ (unpublished transcript).   5. J. Chapman. 2015. A New History of British Documentary, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; J. Chambers. 2017. ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 168–85.   6. A.H. Roe. 2007. ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 4(2), 307–21.   7. R. Ashmore. 2011. ‘Landscape and Crisis in Northern England: The Representation of Communal Trauma in Film and Photography’, Ph.D. thesis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University.

6  •  In Fading Light

 8. I am referring to the project ‘The Promise of a Transformative Arts: A Political and Cultural Analysis of the Amber Collective’ undertaken by Robert G. Hollands and John Vail. The articles published out of the project were as follows. R. Hollands and J. Vail. 2012. ‘The Art of Social Movement: Cultural Opportunity, Mobilisation and Framing in the Early Formation of the Amber Collective’, Poetics 40(1), 22–43; R. Hollands and J. Vail. 2015. ‘Place Imprinting and the Arts: A Case Study of the Amber Collective’, Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, 0(0), 1–18; J. Vail and R.G. Hollands. 2012. ‘Cultural Work and a Transformative Arts: The Dilemmas of the Amber Collective’, Journal of Cultural Economy 5(3), 337–53; J. Vail and R. Hollands. 2013. ‘Creative Democracy and the Arts: The Participatory Democracy of the Amber Collective’, Cultural Sociology 7(3), 352–67; J. Vail and R. Hollands. 2012. ‘Rules for Cultural Radicals’, Antipode 45(3), 541–64.   9. J. Petley. 1986. ‘The Lost Continent’, in C. Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI, 98–119. 10. I.Q. Hunter. 2013. British Trash Cinema, London: BFI, 4. 11. M. Wayne. 2001, Political Film: The Dialects of Third Cinema, London, Sterling and Virginia: Pluto Press, 48.

Chapter 1

Histories of Amber



Amber’s formal history goes back to 1968, with the coming together of a group of like-minded students at the Regent Street Polytechnic who, the following year, decided to move to the north-eastern city of Newcastle upon Tyne to make independent films about working-class experience. However, when asked by an interviewer to describe the beginnings of Amber, Murray Martin, the group’s key founding figure, noted that ‘in a sense it starts in your history’.1 Born in 1943 in Stoke-on-Trent to a family of potters and miners, Martin studied Fine Art in Newcastle in the early 1960s before deciding to learn the craft of filmmaking. He identified that many in the group shared a similar working-class background, albeit in different places, and the experience, through education, of being ‘designed out of our background’:2 ‘there was a movement among the group I was in . . . to go back to your own roots, your own childhood and reconnect with your interests there.’3 According to Martin, the group gave themselves the rather anonymous, utilitarian name of Amber, not for its associations of preservation or precious stones but after ‘Amber Ale, which was the women’s drink, as the counterpoint of brown ale’.4 Prior to the collective’s move up north, Martin had already produced two ‘proto’ Amber student films of note: the didactic All You Need is Dynamite (1968), documenting anti-war riots, and the more gentle and Amber-like Maybe (1969), following the thoughts of an engine man on a ferry traversing the river Tyne.5 During the 1970s, the group produced a series of short documentary portraits of working-class culture. An early project to document pub-singing

8  •  In Fading Light

Figure 1.1  Signing Amber’s partnership agreement, 1974, Graham Denman, Graham Smith, Peter Roberts, Lorna Powell, Murray Martin and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

traditions did not fully come to fruition, and a film called Wallsend 72 about a brass band and a juvenile jazz band would fall into obscurity. But 1974’s Launch, with its iconic footage of a spectacular Wallsend ship launch, would become one of Amber’s signature early works. A mid 1970s cycle of films, often labelled by recent scholars, following Darren Newbury, as ‘salvage documentaries’, and mostly financed through regional arts council funding (Northern Arts), offered a record of disappearing or archaic workplaces: a drift mine in High Row (1973), a rope-hauled colliery railway in Bowes Line (1975), a recently closed brickworks in Last Shift (1976) and an industrial glass-blowing site in Glassworks (1977).6 On a surface reading, these are rather straightforward works of realist representation; the use of re-creation and staged elements in these films would anticipate Amber’s more complex and exploratory integration of factual and fictional components in later productions. With Mai (1974) and Laurie (1978), Amber produced the first entries in a sporadic series  – continuing into later decades – of portraits of individuals who had inspired their work in some way. The period also saw the first of Amber’s characteristic strategies of engagement taking shape. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, one of the group’s founder members, gained some public and press interest through her photographic documentation of Byker, a staunchly working-class suburb that had been scheduled for demolition in a slum-clearing drive, and which she chose to move into upon her arrival in Newcastle. Typical of Amber’s slow, organic approach to creativity, and their commitment to telling stories from deep within a particular community, it would take more than a decade for Konttinen’s Byker project to reach a culmination, in the form of a published book and film (both 1983). Amber’s River Project of 1974, in collaboration

Histories of Amber  •  9

with a number of other artists and writers, involved the documentation of the industries along the river Tyne and the touring of existing work to those communities. In 1977, Amber established the Side Gallery for the exhibition of humanist documentary photography both by and commissioned by the group along with work it found inspirational and wanted to explore. The gallery was part of its premises in the city’s once run-down quayside area; this district inspired the poetic Quayside (1979), made as part of a campaign led by Murray Martin himself to preserve the threatened buildings in the locality. The period of the 1980s and early 1990s was a particularly busy and fertile period for Amber but also for British oppositional film culture more generally. By this time, Amber had proved to be one of the most influential voices within what is usually termed the ‘workshop movement’ of oppositional, independent filmmakers working together in groups, albeit with differing politics, organizational structures and attitudes to exhibition. Amber had been formed around the same time as Cinema Action in London, and other key workshops founded in the 1970s and early 1980s include Liberation Films, the Berwick Street Film Collective, women-led groups such as the Sheffield Film Co-op and Leeds Animation Workshop, and black and Asian groups such as the Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa and Retake Film and Video Collective. As Margaret Dickinson summarizes: Workshops aimed to develop structures radically different from those of the film and broadcasting mainstream. Principles widely shared were collective management, integration of production, distribution and exhibition, flexible division of labour as opposed to rigid specialisms, continuity of employment as opposed to freelance working and non-hierarchical working relations, including relations between filmmakers, their subjects and audiences.7

The formation of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association (IFA) brought together individual filmmakers and workshops to promote these ideals and campaign for funding from organizations such as the British Film Institute (BFI) and regional arts associations and authorities. Following a decade of campaigning by independent filmmakers, Murray Martin and Amber played a major role in the evolution of the Workshop Declaration of 1982, a union agreement reached by the Association of Cinematograph Television and Allied Technicians (ACTT), which gave allowance for cross-grade working and an egalitarian wage structure. The IFA also battled for support from the new Channel Four television station (which began broadcasting in 1982). Amber was awarded one of a number of franchises given to independent regional workshops by the channel’s Independent Film and Video Department, who commissioned work under the ACTT agreement.8

10  •  In Fading Light

The security from this Channel Four funding gave Amber scope to expand their operations considerably. They also gained a stable exhibition platform, as the channel would broadcast much of their upcoming work throughout the decade, in addition to some of their back catalogue, in their Eleventh Hour and People to People strands, as well as their Film on Four seasons.9 Amber’s output in this period demonstrates an increasingly ambitious, experimental approach to the documentation of work practices and cultures, and a variety of creative approaches to the fusion of fictional and nonfictional elements. For example, Byker (1983), Keeping Time (1983), The Writing in the Sand (1991) and Letters to Katja (1994) were based around Konttinen’s photographic engagement with, respectively, a vanished innercity community, a dance school in North Shields, the beaches of the North East and her Finnish homeland, to which she returned for a year. Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (1986) and T Dan Smith (1987) used profiles of individuals – a boxing instructor and a notorious Newcastle council leader – as a springboard for an exploration of documentary ethics and reliability. Following 1981’s The Filleting Machine, essentially a record of an existing Tom Hadaway play, Seacoal (1985) was Amber’s first feature-length drama, although, like the more traditionally scripted In Fading Light (1989) about the fishing industry, it developed out of a long-term engagement with a particular community. Amber’s formal residency in North Shields, where they bought a pub as a simultaneous social and filmmaking location/base, also led to Dream On (1991), a film about women’s lives on the Meadow Well estate. During the 1980s, Amber also established a Current Affairs Unit, producing ‘trigger’ items to inspire debate on subjects such as the miners’ strike, pacifism and anti-nuclear movements, and the effect of Conservative privatization policy on local authority and hospital workers. A highly unusual production during this period was From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels (1988), a portrait of the town of Rostock, as part of a collaboration with DEFA filmmakers from East Germany. By the early 1990s, Channel Four’s commitment to the workshops was in decline, and the feature Eden Valley (1995), set among a harness racing community, was the last to be funded through the franchise. By this time, Amber had shifted its emphasis to the former coalfield areas of County Durham, where activity included photographic commissions, a community video project called It’s the Pits (1995) and a trilogy of feature films dealing with the geographical, economic and psychological impact of deindustrialization. The female perspective of The Scar (1997), about a former activist during the miners’ strike embarking on a tentative relationship with the manager of an open cast mining site, was followed by Like Father (2001), which considers the effect of pit closures on three generations of the same family. These last two films had received some BBC funding, but the completion of Shooting

Histories of Amber  •  11

Figure 1.2  Filming In Fading Light in 1989. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

Magpies (2005), Amber’s last feature drama to date, was enabled by a fiveyear revenue grant awarded to the group by the Northern Rock Foundation, which also funded related photographic projects. Shooting Magpies developed out of a few strands of Amber’s Durham-based work and in particular a community video project with teenage mothers. Focussing upon a young mother’s unsuccessful attempt to wean her boyfriend off his heroin addiction, Shooting Magpies is one of Amber’s gloomiest statements about communities in despair; it also marked a turn towards the use of digital video. As the collective entered its fifth decade, Amber’s attention turned increasingly to its own legacy. Their link with members of the ‘horsey’ world  – that is, those involved in harness racing or associated with the travelling community  – stretched back to the early 1980s. When the key founding member Murray Martin died in 2007, Amber decided to turn an unfinished documentary about the year in the life of a ‘horsey’ family into The Pursuit of Happiness (2008), a commemoration of Martin himself: an exploration of his life, philosophy, influence and fascination with his subjects. Today I’m with You (2010) concerned Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographic re-engagement with the Byker community she had documented in the 1970s, and From Us to Me (2016) was a follow-up to Amber’s 1988 portrait of the East German fishing and shipbuilding town of Rostock, wherein interviewees of the previous film reflected on how life had changed in the years since reunification. Later projects have been notably elegiac in tone. In a poignant foreshadowing of the impact of Martin’s passing, The Bamboozler (2007) offered tribute to a charismatic Tyneside percussionist, who had gifted his collection

12  •  In Fading Light

to a protégé upon his death, whilst Song for Billy (2017) poetically commemorated the victim of a mining accident. In response to the new century’s changing models of exhibition and distribution, Amber also gave attention to the digitization of its films and broader archive, sourcing Heritage Lottery funding for some DVD releases (some with supplementary contextualizing material) and running, for a while, a free online streaming service entitled Side TV – which at one point included Mouth of the Tyne (2009), a new cut of interview material gathered in preparation for T Dan Smith. There is a sociopolitical logic to, and a necessity for, Amber’s movement from industrial to post-industrial subjects, and towards those that many might consider as marginal, esoteric even. As The Pursuit of Happiness makes explicit, their attraction to the self-contained world of traveller communities would dovetail with elegies for missing people, industries and places. But having given thus far a necessarily sweeping overview of Amber’s history, I would acknowledge a few omissions that problematize the grand narratives. To take one example, Peter Roberts, having joined the collective in the early 1970s, contributed a short, singular work of animation entitled Jellyfish (1973). It makes an odd bedfellow with the industrial documentaries made by the group during the era, yet sets a precedent for the exploratory editing and camera techniques used to ‘animate’ photography in the later films he produced in collaboration with Konttinen, such as Byker and The Writing in the Sand. However, what emerges even from a cursory review of Amber’s work and history is a simultaneous sense of coherence and idiosyncrasy, and of it both intertwining and clashing with broader trajectories in British film and television culture. These connections, and the way that the Amber project might be grasped and evaluated, are the central concern of this book.

Approaches to Amber Before we consider Amber’s history in more detail by way of chapter case studies of particular eras and strands, it is useful to itemize some of the concerns and debates that have dominated discussion of the group so far, and which help us to characterize their unique qualities. Funding and Survival The question of how Amber managed to survive, against the odds, has been taken up by a few scholars, although there are insights to be taken from Murray Martin’s ‘rules’ for the collective that were laid down from the beginning:

Histories of Amber  •  13

Integrate life and work and friendship. Don’t tie yourself to institutions. Live cheaply and you’ll remain free. And, then, do whatever it is that gets you up in the morning.10

This manifesto is celebrated and illustrated in detail in The Pursuit of Happiness, Amber’s 2008 film commemorating Martin’s passions, creative drives and philosophies. The biographical question of how Amber members managed to integrate ‘life and work and friendship’ is not one I want to (or dare to) address directly in this book, even though it would evidently make for lively reading.11 But Martin’s edict against being tied to ‘institutions’ obviously throws illumination on Amber’s uncompromising attitude to broadcasters, funding bodies and perhaps audiences too. As we will see, Amber are often drawn to people and communities whose working practices or philosophies chime to some degree with their own: from the eccentric Mai Finglass, to the ‘alternative’ communities of sea-coalers and travellers. Some of Amber’s stories, such as Seacoal, can be interpreted in part as a rumination on the benefits and problems for those inclined to follow a version of Martin’s rules for freedom and contentment. In a consideration of Amber’s centrality within the workshop movement, Peter Thomas identifies ‘clear internal reasons for [Amber’s] durability and longevity’: not least their multiple sources of cross-subsidizing income, their community focus and commitment to collectivism.12 For an article on Amber and the evolution of regional film policy, Paul O’Reilly argues that the ‘narrative of economic survival that frames its history is as fascinating as any formulated during the development of its feature films’.13 O’Reilly traces a financial history of the group by way of its ‘encounters with a number of regional and national cultural initiatives’ and argues that, once Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist policies became economic standard, the main funding bodies eventually had to become ‘accountable and adapt to their rhetoric of commerce’.14 Given Amber’s unswervingly egalitarian ethos, so out of step with hierarchical commercial filmmaking practice, their survival is clearly a ‘remarkable achievement’.15 Journalistic coverage has also tended to be through the foci of economic struggle and that of the workshop movement more widely.16 A profile of the group published in 2001 in The Guardian even used, as its headline, a confession by Martin that he once put the entire grant given to an associated organization (Live Theatre) on a horse ‘because there was no choice’: from a three thousand bet he won ‘about 15 grand’.17 The writer Lee Hall was prompted to write a celebratory, campaigning article for The Times in 2011, following the news that the Arts Council had stopped funding Amber’s Side Gallery; he describes the gallery and the collective as ‘among the most extraordinary and influential art groups you’ve never heard of ’.18

14  •  In Fading Light

Interestingly, one of the most granular academic projects to date on Amber has also interrogated the qualities that allowed Amber to outlive the decline of the workshop movement following its ‘high period’ in the 1980s.19 Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, Robert G. Hollands and John Vail interviewed fifty-seven people with affiliations with Amber for the project ‘The Promise of a Transformative Arts: A Political and Cultural Analysis of the Amber Collective’. The resultant work has been a series of articles applying different paradigms from the fields of cultural economics and sociology to Amber’s working practices, illustrated by (anonymized) interview material. Whilst some articles deal with the early formation of the group, their longevity and sustainability are explained in terms of ‘internal organisational processes’ and the commitment to a specific vision of the relationship between the artist and the community.20 The authors take time to ponder the ‘new conditions necessary for the formation of future oppositional artistic movements’:21 they cite a telling comment from one of the current Amber members, who says: ‘I think that sense of a super narrative has always been part of Amber, much more so than most organisations. There’s a very, very strong sense of what it has done and how it fits together’.22 It is fair to say that an economic history of Amber deserves its own volume, where its entrepreneurial schemes (such as the setting up in 1971 of Lambton Visual Aids, a slide library for higher education institutions), enterprising funding strategies (such as the curious credits given to Kodak and BP Oil in two of their early documentaries)23 and internal tensions over the egalitarian wage system could all be recounted in entertaining and inspirational detail. It is obviously the case that financial opportunities and constraints have circumscribed and influenced the nature of the work produced, from the Northern Arts funding for many of the 1970s documentaries and 1980s features, to the Channel Four franchise money of the 1980s until the early 1990s, and then BBC and Northern Rock Foundation support in later years: the completion of the feature-length From Us to Me from development money alone (from the Media Programme of the European Union) shows that the group’s tenacity and independence remains undimmed after fifty years. Accessibility and Reach It is difficult to calibrate the reach of Amber’s work, in comparison with other analogous ‘independent’ filmmakers. According to Martin, in the 1970s, Amber put some effort into the distribution and exhibition of the films, whether at their own cinema, accompanying touring photographic exhibitions, or via circuits such as working men’s clubs and festivals.24 But it is obvious that Channel Four’s commitment to showing their current and prior work in the 1980s gave them their greatest exhibition platform in the UK.

Histories of Amber  •  15

Since then, aside from occasional broadcasts on the BBC channels, and a 2008 season on More4 (a digital subsidiary of Channel Four), their work has mostly reached specialist audiences via limited theatrical runs, community venues, international film festivals (resulting in a number of prizes),25 curated events, academic archives, their own cinema and gallery space, selfdistributed video tapes and DVDs, and more recently streaming and VOD via their website. At this juncture, it is worth clarifying the television broadcasting history of Amber in the UK. In the 1970s, the only TV appearance came via excerpts of High Row and Jellyfish shown on 18 May 1974 on the BBC2 arts programme 2nd House (1973–76). Amber’s work made under the Channel Four franchise agreement from 1983 onwards was mostly broadcast as part of the channel’s Eleventh Hour late-night strand (typically 11pm onwards), sometimes alongside other workshop films, although Byker was the first in the series of the People to People strand in 1983. The films broadcast were Keeping Time and Beyond the Vote (1984), Can’t Beat It Alone (1985), Seacoal, Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (twice), T Dan Smith (twice) and From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels. The channel also showed some work that predated the agreement, such as Launch and Last Shift (a double bill in 1982), The Filleting Machine (with extra ‘contextual’ material in 1983), Laurie (in 1987) and Bowes Line (1987 and 1989). In summer 1990, the channel gave a prime-time slot (9pm) to the premiere of In Fading Light, billed as ‘Film on Four presents’ (it was repeated in 1994). Similarly, Dream On, shown in 1992, was prominently positioned in a season of premieres of British films commissioned and funded by the channel’s Independent Film and Video department; an accompanying documentary on its production (Amber Dreams) was shown three days in advance. The near-midnight slot for the premiere of Eden Valley in 1996 marked the end of Amber’s relationship with the channel, whilst BBC2’s screening of The Scar in its year of release (1997) was their last broadcast (to date) on terrestrial UK television. Like Father appeared on BBC Knowledge (a precursor to BBC4) in 2002, Launch was broadcast in 2003 on BBC4 as part of a night’s schedule of Tynesidethemed documentaries, and Today I’m with You was shown on BBC4 in 2010 as the centrepiece of a themed evening of Newcastle-related programmes. In 2008, Shooting Magpies and The Pursuit of Happiness were premiered as part of a season entitled ‘The Amber Collective: A Lost World on Film’ on More4, alongside Eden Valley and Seacoal. Of course, some Amber material, such as their current affairs and trigger tapes, and campaigning and community films, was intended to circulate in different ways, and thus warrants a qualitative rather than quantitative assessment of impact. The pertinent question is whether, despite the financial and curatorial benefits of Amber keeping a tight rein upon distribution, this has

16  •  In Fading Light

placed a barrier in the way of critical and popular familiarity with their work. At the time of writing, much of it is available to stream, for a fee, on Amber’s website, but their DVDs are only available directly from their gallery and online shop. One exception is the early documentary Launch, which has been included in the 2011 compilation Tales from the Shipyards, one of a number of BFI releases focussing on Britain’s industrial heritage. Positioned last in the running order, Launch takes on a weight here as a symbolic end point to a narrative about industry and representation not of Amber’s making, however sympathetic they may be to it. The same film also appears on Amber’s own Tyne Documentaries compilation, where it is placed alongside comparable work, and within Amber’s own evolution, through a special feature showing the makers ‘exploring the story’. It may be sheer coincidence that some of the Amber titles that tend not to be discussed in scholarship on Amber – such as their ‘portrait’ films of the 1970s, and the 1980s docudrama experiments Keeping Time and Double Vision  – are ones that have not seen (as of the time of writing) a DVD release; similarly that their two Tyne Documentaries compendiums of (mostly) 1970s industrial films coincided with a spike of critical discussion of them (which can also be related to a vogue in British film studies for the excavation of more obscure cinema and television from that decade).26 Whilst I am happy to let my more detailed scrutiny of some films over others in this book imply an evaluation of their relative quality and interest, I will advocate for an democratic approach as much an auteurist one: if one of Amber’s signature features is the connectivity of their work, it stands to reason that their ‘minor’ work requires as much attention as the ‘major’, even if such categorization is often difficult. Place and Regionalism Scholarship on Amber has frequently emphasized the importance of place, both in understanding their relationship to British documentary traditions and how ‘the expression of a traditional working-class identity could take on an oppositional cultural politics’.27 Hollands and Vail have interrogated the complex relationship between art and locality in relation to Amber, evolving the idea of ‘place imprinting’ through a consideration of the ways in which ‘place helped shape Amber ideologically and organisationally’.28 They consider, among other factors, the importance of ‘immersive’ strategies of relocation  – for example, buying an old caravan on the Northumberland coast to prepare for a film about sea-coalers  – which may not have been possible had the group remained in London. The impact of Amber upon the regional cultural landscape has also been recognized, particularly the impetus and precedent it gave to the workshop sector in north-east England in the 1980s (which included groups such as Trade, Siren, Swingbridge and

Histories of Amber  •  17

A19). Indeed, Murray Martin has stated directly that he was an author of the 1982 Workshop Declaration and that it was explicitly based on the model of Amber.29 Hollands and Vail also reflect on Amber’s regional impact, noting how, ironically, their ‘catalytic effect’ on other cultural groups and endeavours may have ‘worked to contribute to the very cultural regeneration movement that they were opposed to’.30 In his New History of British Documentary, James Chapman uses a case study of Amber to identify their ‘continued commitment to the representation of regional working-class identity and social engagement with these communities’ as the reason for Amber’s work standing out as ‘one of the most unique and distinctive bodies of film in the history of British documentary’.31 There is similar recognition of Amber by Gabriel Gee in his monograph on the production and consumption of visual arts in the north of England, where he focusses particularly on the richness of their ‘aesthetic responses to social fragmentation and urban decay’ in the 1980s; for Gee, Amber’s work articulates a ‘historiographical vision’ but favours a ‘positioning of the “object” as an active agent in the construction of its representation’.32 Jack Newsinger also makes a claim for Amber as demonstrating how the ‘existence of regional documentary demands the extension of the history of British documentary cinema beyond the 1960s and Free Cinema’.33 But then the question remains of whether Amber have flown beneath the cultural and critical radar, willingly or otherwise, as a result of being perceived as ‘regional’. One brief mention of the group in a book on cinematic directing technique is perhaps symptomatic: it is observed how ‘local-issue fiction [emerged] as the equivalent of the regional novel’ in the UK, as illustrated by Amber’s engagement with the industrial north of England.34 If Amber are indeed categorized in such terms, their relative obscurity in film and television scholarship parallels the way that ‘regional’ writers such as Catherine Cookson, Sid Chaplin and Jack Common have been mostly overlooked in literary scholarship.35 Critics of British visual culture have lately given some attention to the discursive construction of the English North through ‘master narratives’ such as the shift from rapid industrialization to post-industrial decline and its consequent economic and political subordination to the South.36 With regard to representations of the North, the tendency towards modes of ‘realism’ in film and television has been attributed to a long-standing correlation between naturalism and ‘quality’ that can be traced back to the 1930s documentary tradition via the ‘kitchen sink’ wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.37 In her introduction to a 2017 collection of essays on the north of England on Film and Television, Ewa Mazierska writes: The tradition of ‘poetic realism’ casts a long shadow on the more contemporary representations of the North. Not only are artists interested in depicting this

18  •  In Fading Light

region expected to focus on its drabness, economic deprivation, the dignity of its inhabitants and their sense of belonging to their milieu, but critics and historians privilege works conforming to this stereotype. There is little research done on that part of northern literature or film which is surrealist or fantastic.38

However sweeping we might consider this overview of representational clichés to be, it is easy to imagine how a casual observer of Amber’s work and reputation might align it within the apparently regressive school of ‘northern realism’, even if some productions like Dream On have some claim to the surrealistic and fantastic. But the picture is complicated further by the question of whether the North East constitutes a distinctive subregion of the imagined North, with its own particular identity and representational history. In their anthology Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, first published in 1992, Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster, drawing upon Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, suggest that the region is ‘essentially a state of mind to do with histories and feelings about itself ’ but argue for ‘regions . . . as the best units for sustainable economic growth’.39 In his landmark book on cultural representations of northern England, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (2004), Dave Russell acknowledges discourses around North East exceptionalism but does not illustrate them at length. He cites, for example, how the historical TV drama When the Boat Comes In (1976–81) generated ideas of the area, including a profile in the Radio Times where H.R.F. Keating described the region as ‘that little nation-state that has kept its separate existence for centuries’, and as a place with a ‘tough and vital lifestyle’.40 As Russell observes, such writing simultaneously emphasizes the distinction and exoticism of the North East whilst ‘pulling it toward the mainstream as an exhibitor of classic northern/working-class virtues’.41 This conundrum may explain why the majority of other scholarship on the North tends to avoid the subject of subregional distinction and sometimes (as in the case of the essays in Mazierska’s volume) the North East completely. Perhaps Amber have been caught in a double bind here, in being categorized in some quarters as practitioners of straightforward, parochial ‘northern realism’ whilst offering a challenge to critical constructions of a monolithic North. Their perceived parochialism may also have undermined their claim as political filmmakers. For example, in his book on ‘Third Cinema’, usually understood as a type of production ‘primarily defined by its social politics’,42 Mike Wayne describes its concern with ‘social and cultural emancipation’ and mostly, although not exclusively, with the Third World.43 Although Wayne considers Amber’s immersive approach to working-class communities to be a ‘Third Cinema mode of production’, he is less sure whether this results in Third Cinema films: ‘at the risk of an unfair generalisation, the determinedly

Histories of Amber  •  19

regional focus of their work and the particularity with which they explore specific groups often militates against telling a story invested with the broader political and social significance that characterises Third Cinema’.44 In a chapter on the representation of north-east England on film and television up until the 1990s, Peter Hutchings observes that Amber’s dedication to ‘realism’, far from guaranteeing transparency, produces images that are ‘formed in the context of particular stylistic conventions and devices, with these in turn presupposing a set of beliefs about the region’.45 Hutchings’s entry point into this assessment of Amber is the extent to which the group has been able to produce a vision of the region distinct and separate from the ‘national views’ of it propagated in keynote examples such as Get Carter (Hodges, 1971), Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (1973–74) and Stormy Monday (Figgis, 1988). These and others have tended to be caught up in thematic concerns around the ‘resilience and independence of the working class male in the face of industrial exploitation and hardship’, concerns that are not necessarily exclusive to north-eastern representations but nevertheless find a recurrent articulation.46 Given Amber’s preoccupation with workingclass community and solidarity, Hutchings finds it unsurprising that their work has not entirely evaded what he tentatively summarizes as a ‘men work and women wait’ stereotype.47 Writing from a more recent perspective, Jack Newsinger has claimed Amber as an exemplar of a successful workshop operating independently from state institutions: Amber’s work explores working-class identity in the North East during a period of intense transformation in the identity of the region with old connotations persisting as well as being contested and supplanted. . . . Their films chart the response to industrial decline in the region while dramatizing a confrontation between traditional forms of working-class identity and ‘modernization’.48

Amber’s later work, in particular, can thus be understood as a gravitation away from a ‘monolithic construction of regional working-class identity based on industrial labour and masculinity, and towards more complex representations based on difference’.49 Collectivity and Authorship Another likely obstacle in the way of recognition for Amber has been their commitment to being credited, on screen and in promotional discourse, as a collective. In a 2007 interview, member Graeme Rigby suggested that ‘Amber films probably would have got a bit more noted if they were all down as being directed by Murray [Martin].’50 Indeed, Amber have acknowledged

20  •  In Fading Light

that their ‘old fashioned’ policy of collectivism has bamboozled critics and left them in a ‘marketing limbo’.51 Although Martin did direct some, not all, the speculation here is that the identification of a clear figurehead, or two, to rank alongside other noted auteurs of social or ‘poetic realism’, such as Ken Loach, Terence Davies and Lynne Ramsey, may have improved Amber’s standing. Indeed, the lack so far of interpretive readings of Amber’s work may derive from a consensus that their ‘diversity’ and lack of ‘house style’ makes this a difficult endeavour.52 According to Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen: It’s not a single auteur. There’s never been a single director who has created that in the traditional sense. When you hear of Ken Loach, you think that he’s shaped the whole look of the thing, even though he uses big crews, but nobody else gets such a credit. He doesn’t share that platform. The photofilms have been Peter [Roberts] and me. Song for Billy was Ellie [Elin Hare] as well. Although the raw material has always been my photography, I wouldn’t have made them on my own, that’s for sure.53

For their feature work, Amber have tended to a use a ‘dual’ director strategy, as explained by Peter Roberts: The Amber method of directing is not the commonly understood auteur role of a ‘director’. Instead, it is based on a close collaboration between the directing of actors and the films’ visual realisation, each carried out by separate individuals.54

Roberts has been responsible for most of Amber’s production design and has been the director of photography and camera operator on almost all of their films. It is fair to say that Amber have never themselves taken a vow of silence with regard to specific craft roles, nor obscured the truism that ‘a lot of filmmaking is autobiographical’.55 Early films do in fact bear specific credits for particular roles, and although the policy changed after 1985, in interviews and ancillary materials there has been acknowledgment that, for example, Pat McCarthy undertook key roles of producer or production manager on many films (which incorporated distribution, fundraising and ambassador work), and that Lorna Powell was co-writer of The Scar, and also production manager on many films. Although rarely mentioned in critical discussion of Amber, sound design has played an important role in their work and has mostly (if not exclusively) been the terrain of Peter Roberts. In The Pursuit of Happiness, it is made clear that Martin was the writer and director of Eden Valley and that the film’s depiction of a broken family was very much informed by his own situation in the past, just as its setting was influenced by personal interests; in other words, the film has as much claim

Histories of Amber  •  21

to autobiographical significance as Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Letters to Katja, which deals directly with her own experiences. My reasoning for dedicating an entire chapter in this book to films affiliated with Konttinen is mostly practical, as their commonalities of theme and style make it sensible, in my view, to bracket them together. However, given the historical dominance of male auteurs and perspectives in British documentary and social realist cinema, it seems right and proper to signal that Amber’s track record is more progressive than perhaps suggested by a quick thumbnail sketch of their work as ‘masculinist’ in scope (in the sense of being initially focussed around traditions and spaces of male labour). Although it would of course be reductive and inappropriate to consider Amber’s work purely through the lens of gender politics, whether at the level of representation or production, it is reasonable to speculate whether the overt acknowledgement of Ellin Hare as director of, for example, The Scar and Like Father might have prompted the inclusion of Amber in scholarship on female authorship on contemporary British cinema, such as Stella Hockenhull’s 2017 book British Women Film Directors in the New Millennium.56 Oppositional Film Culture Many commentators have related Amber’s work to traditions of documentary or social realism. However, they have also found a (limited) place in histories of oppositional film culture, given their early association with political activism, affiliation with the workshop movement, and commitment to the ‘integrated practice’ of interdependent production, distribution and exhibition. Whilst there is general agreement among scholars that the first decade of Amber’s existence was one of ‘rich diversity’ for British experimental filmmaking,57 there is also recognition that the terminology of the field is subject to contestation and clarification. Within the British context of that era, the term ‘independent’ had some currency, as shown by the formation of the Independent Filmmakers’ Association (IFA) for filmmakers working beyond the mainstream. But as an umbrella term, ‘independent’ filmmaking could cover low-budget work that was rooted in traditional documentary or narrative traditions – which was arguably the case for Amber – but also more explicitly radical approaches that sought to ‘attack the illusionism and seamless narrative structures of commercial, dominant cinema’.58 The latter approach has sometimes been defined as ‘avant-garde’ and is associated with writers such as Peter Wollen and Paul Willemen, who positioned experimental cinema within a ‘continuing European or international traditional of revolutionary art’.59 In his History of Experimental Film and Video (2011), A.L. Rees makes the case for ‘artist’s film and video’ as a ‘distinct form of cultural practice with its own autonomy in relation to the mainstream

22  •  In Fading Light

cinema’, involving filmmakers for whom ‘film is primarily an art form allied to painting, sculpture, printmaking and other arts’.60 Rees devotes half of his book to a case study of British examples, but his focus on the ‘structural tendency’61 leaves no space for Amber, who might feasibly have some claim to inclusion, given their close associations with the art form of documentary photography. Margaret Dickinson prefers to use the term ‘oppositional’ to define a particular tendency within British film culture, as it ‘implies taking a position within a struggle’:62 a definition that happily embraces Amber, who have taken an ‘alternative’ stance to the mainstream of film production, and have experimented with the documentary process and form, but whose films would not be recognized as avant-garde in the terms set out above. Indeed, in interviews, Amber members have acknowledged that their initial work was somewhat out of step with the ‘deconstructive’ turn in film theory and practice of the 1970s.63 According to Martin, the group ‘took a decision very early on that we would make things that were accessible . . . and I think that led to a certain dismissal of Amber by the people like Paul Willemen, who saw us as being too simplistic’.64 Yet, as Jamie Chambers has argued, in relation to Amber’s early documentaries, there is a misleading simplicity to the binary often drawn by leftist commentators in the 1970s between ‘a prescribed “antiillusionist” Brechtian modernism and an irretrievable, “illusion”-peddling, realist documentary practice’.65 Chambers makes a case for Amber’s early documentaries about industrial processes, such as Bowes Line, as prioritizing ‘local registers of communication’  – for example, by eschewing ‘handrail’ commentary explanation of industrial processes – in a way that could actually be perceived as ‘anti-illusionist’ in their ‘denial of easy audience purchase’.66 For Amber, the support of Channel Four television in the 1980s brought stability and a kind of credibility: Martin describes how ‘television was, and is, the only way to reach two million people at one go’.67 In her historical survey of the cultural sphere of the North East, Natasha Vall describes Amber’s shift to television work as emblematic of how the endeavours of ‘impresario activists were dependent on institutions’: for Amber, like other organizations in the region, ‘survival was often predicated upon engagement with, and sponsorship from, the representatives of “legitimate culture”’.68 For some, this was a betrayal of Amber’s background,69 but accounts of their early history by Martin suggest that a pragmatic approach to sponsorship was taken from the start. Writing in 1974, Murray describes how his initial idea for a cycle of films about working-class experience, rather than for standalone works, was rooted in the hope that it would be more marketable for television. However, he quickly realized that he was ‘interested in a special sort of film experiment which was not attractive to television or commercial sponsorship’.70 Another concern, for some commentators, was the aesthetic implications of the coming together of film and television during the 1980s, brought

Histories of Amber  •  23

about by commissions and exhibition opportunities from Channel Four’s Department of Independent Film and Video as well the Film On Four arm of more commercially oriented feature-length work. As noted by John Hill, ‘while many observers acknowledged the economic importance of television to film, they were sceptical of whether the resulting films were properly “cinematic”’.71 Hill cites a 1984 article by Penelope Houston, then editor of Sight and Sound magazine, that argued for ‘crucial aesthetic differences, as well as differences in the quality of the experience’.72 Hill counters this with the common-sense observation that the ‘quality of experience associated with cinema in the “classical period” . . . can no longer be regarded as the cinematic norm’.73 However, despite broader anxieties about ‘simplification’ or ‘betrayal’, Amber’s work of the period actually demonstrates an acceleration of sophistication, with work such as Byker and T Dan Smith attaining a level of expressive and formal complexity far beyond their 1970s antecedents. As should be evident so far, in this book Amber’s audio-visual works are uniformly termed ‘films’. This should not be interpreted as an attempt to confer prestige or legitimacy on material sometimes conceived as ‘non-theatrical’ (whether it be for television or specialist workplace or community audiences) but as a logical handling of a body of work that has been intended and exhibited variously yet shares the same impulse to speak to and from particular places and communities. Collingwood and Communities The aspect of Amber’s work that is perhaps the most idiosyncratic – and for some commentators rather problematic – is their creative relationship with communities. In their interviews and histories, Amber have prominently credited the work of the philosopher R.G. Collingwood as a foundational influence, particularly his thesis about the artist as ‘spokesman of the community’.74 The following quotation, from Collingwood’s Principles of Art (1938) was cited in the introduction of Amber’s touring River Project exhibition and again in their 2015 retrospective publication For Ever Amber: The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts. His business as an artist is to speak out, to make a clean breast. But what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets. As spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no ­community altogether knows its own heart . . .75

For Collingwood, and consequently for Amber, the individualism of most avant-garde practice is unacceptable, for the community is less interested

24  •  In Fading Light

in how artists imagine themselves than in what art has to say about them.76 This is not to denigrate the craft of the artist: far from it, the artist necessarily has to master it. Indeed, Collingwood’s thesis is based on a clear distinction between art and craft. As it happens, Collingwood was himself sceptical about photography (and by extension film) as a reproducible form, but his argument about the essential difference between art and craft still stood. In Amber’s documentary The Pursuit of Happiness, Martin is seen discussing Collingwood’s influence at length, describing how it informed his belief that ‘unless you’re discovering something yourself, you can’t get an insight into anyone else’. Amber, according to Martin, root themselves in a tradition of realism and embark upon immersive relationships with communities because ‘out of that engagement and experience comes a feeling about the people and a desire to express something about their lives, both about them and with them’. Noting that the artist can see themselves as part of a community without being born into it, in the same way that the community itself can have outsiders, Konttinen defines Amber’s role as ‘offering a voice to people, using our skills as photographers and filmmakers to partake in those statements’.77 For Amber, the social function of their work impels them to record, as ‘there’s a value in documenting, where it’s art or not, because other people can access that and utilise that’.78 A few category dilemmas have emerged from Amber’s commitment to this philosophy. In an anthology on community filmmaking, Daniel H. Mutibwa has used the group as a case study for the challenges faced by such filmmakers in responding to the ‘interaction of professional, artistic and commercial imperatives alongside the core civic function’.79 According to Mutibwa, within the workshop movement of the 1970s onwards, ‘community film production utilised documentary film as a means of recording and communicating the real-life experiences of ordinary people and as such served a clearly defined social purpose’.80 Notably, in her History of 1970s Experimental Film (2015), Patti Gaal-Holmes gives a thumbnail description of Amber  – in a table listing the workshops of the period  – as the makers of ‘community and campaign films’.81 Reductive, certainly, but a fair summary in light of the way that community filmmaking has been defined, and Amber have at times suggested that the approval by their communities as an accurate record is as important as the work’s reception as an artistic object. Their priority has not been to deliver tools to communities to enable their own expression, although a strand of their activities has involved such work (for example, a project involving refugees trained to make and exhibit work in their communities).82 Rather, in arguing for a professionalism of approach, even when projects involve ‘non-professionals’ in advisory or performing roles, Amber have remained true to Collingwood’s emphasis upon the ­necessity of the artist.

Histories of Amber  •  25

Amber have been sensitive to criticisms that their work takes a nostalgic or sentimental approach to their subjects, but Martin has argued for a difference between the two terms. Whereas sentimentality is ‘dangerous as a simple craft method for getting an effect’ (as Martin claims in The Pursuit of Happiness), nostalgia is not necessarily harmful if ‘born of genuine experience and where you actually feel emotional about that experience’; the group have much preferred the term ‘celebratory’ as a means of describing their affection and respect for what they document and as a reflection of how their subjects might perceive themselves. But in engaging with activities associated with ‘community arts’, whilst pursuing their agenda as artists, Amber have engendered some reproach. Keith Armstrong has described the group, as original outsiders to the North East, as ‘pursuing a somewhat voyeuristic approach to working-class culture’.83 For Armstrong, the ‘real power is always with [Martin] himself as Director and the Amber team, it is never devolved to local people and Amber’s skills in general remain with Amber: there seems to be little attempt to establish local people as filmmakers and thus thoroughly demystify the filmmaking process’. Whilst Amber’s history of slowly developed projects has been celebrated by some as proof of their immersive engagement with communities, this narrative could be interpreted instead as the group ‘opportunistically jumping from one idea which excites them to another, despite the length of time they commit to their projects’.84 According to John Mapplebeck, a fellow ‘regional’ filmmaker, ‘there’s very little evidence on the screen . . . that they’re anywhere near any closer a relationship [with local communities] than any other programme-makers around’.85 In a similar, albeit more nuanced assessment, Tom Jennings has argued that Amber’s work demonstrates some contradictions around ‘the material grounds upon which they enter the lives of their target networks . . . and the interpersonal co-ordinates within which film narratives then emerge’.86 Jennings recognizes that Amber’s work is distinguished from conventional ‘social realism’ through their processes of engagement but argues for their ‘impossible humble humanism’. He notes how the group’s approach has usually ‘entailed direct financial intervention to buy physical infrastructure’, such as the North Shields pub enterprise, but this sets ‘precedents of inequitable patronage in dealings with locals lacking the wherewithal to solve problems this way’. Amber’s funding by external bodies also implicates them in what Jennings calls ‘hierarchical circuits of influence which . . . militate against the clarity of horizontal mutual exchanges among equals’. Jennings acknowledges that these shortcomings never otherwise come to attention in ‘mainstream cinematic apparatuses’, so there is a value, to a degree, of Amber’s work in the foregrounding of them. If the pub or fishing boat settings of Dream On and In Fading Light, for example, provide spaces of sanctuary for some of their characters, we are reminded from ancillary material of

26  •  In Fading Light

their real-life ownership by Amber. Similarly, a number of their films concern ‘outsider’ figures intervening within a local community, in a loose acknowledgement and metaphor for Amber’s own creative processes: for some, a truthful record of the anxieties and conflictions of the artistic ‘spokesman’, for others, a problematically self-aggrandizing gesture.

An Interpretive History of Amber My purpose so far has been to establish the features and conflicts that characterize Amber’s work, and the discourses around it, as a foundation upon which to craft an interpretive history of their films. It is perhaps an inelegant and dubious analogy, but as a scholar I view my relationship with Amber’s body of work as a recalibration of Collingwood’s conceit of the artist’s relationship with the community. The films are, to admittedly stretch the analogy rather thin, a community of sorts, and my task here is to ‘reveal their secrets’. To that end, I am concerned up to a point with how they have been framed within existing scholarship, and by Amber themselves, but my aspiration is to let the work speak for and to itself; after all, as Collingwood claims: ‘no community altogether knows its own heart’. The subsequent chapters, each concerning a specific period or aspect of production, will draw out the distinctive contributions of particular films to Amber’s overall project of creative documentation of the people, places and culture of a particular region and time.

Notes   1. D. Newbury. 2002. ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture: an Interview with Murray Martin (Amber Films and Side Photographic Gallery)’, Visual Studies 17(2), 116.   2. M. Martin. 2001. ‘Documentary Poet’, in H. Beynon and S. Rowbotham (eds), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram, 160.   3. M. Dickinson. 1999. ‘Amber’, in M. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI, 248.   4. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 160. Amber ale was a ‘lighter’ version of the more famous Newcastle Brown Ale, identified by its blue rather than brown label; it was discontinued in the 1980s.   5. A note on the attribution of years to titles: I have used Amber’s website (https://www. amber-online.com/) and their For Ever Amber publication of 2015 as definitive reference points. These are sometimes at variance with previous catalogues and critical accounts

Histories of Amber  •  27

  6.   7.   8.

 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

of the group. Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories From a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side. Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices’, 114. M. Dickinson, n.d. ‘Political Film’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http:// www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/976967/index.html. For a useful overview of the Workshop Declaration, see C.M. Holdsworth. 2017. ‘The Workshop Declaration: Independents and Organised Labour’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 307–12. For information on Channel Four’s Independent Film and Video department, see Channel Four. 1986. The Work of Channel Four’s Independent Film and Video Department, London: Channel 4. For a discussion of The Eleventh Hour, see H. Andrews. 2011. ‘On the Grey Box: Broadcasting Experimental Film and Video on Channel 4’s The Eleventh Hour’, Visual Culture in Britain 12(2), 203–18. For an account of the development of Channel Four, see M. Brown. 2007. A Licence to Be Different: The Story of Channel 4, London: BFI and D. Hobson. 2008. Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy, London: I.B. Tauris. ‘Early Amber “Manifesto” for an Ideas Factory’, attributed to Martin, and cited in Amber/Side. For Ever Amber, 5. I refer here to a history that includes some ‘coupling’ between members and some personal and ideological clashes that led to members leaving the group. These are alluded to in some public and published interviews by members of the collective, but they are also dealt with in some of the articles published out of Hollands and Vail’s project ‘The Promise of a Transformative Arts’. See, for example: R. Hollands and J. Vail. ‘Creative Democracy and the Arts: The Participatory Democracy of the Amber Collective’, Cultural Sociology 7(3), 352–67. P. Thomas. ‘The British Workshop Movement and Amber Film’, Studies in European Cinema 8(3), 204. O’Reilly, P. 2009. ‘“I Will Survive”: Forty Years of Amber Films and the Evolution of Regional Film Policy’, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 1, 1. O’Reilly, ‘“I Will Survive”’, 2 and 13. O’Reilly, ‘“I Will Survive”’, 14. See, for example: J. Petley. 1990. ‘Film Cities: North by Northeast’, Sight and Sound 58(1), 13–14; T. Fitzgerald. 1993. ‘Shoptalk’, Vertigo 1(1), 163–69; J. Petley. 1995. ‘Crisis in the North East’, Vertigo 1(5), 52–56. S. Hattenstone. 2001. ‘I Once Put Our Entire Grant on a Horse’, The Guardian, 8 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/jun/08/arts​​fea​ tures. L. Hall. 2011. ‘One of the Most Influential Art Groups You’ve Never Heard Of ’, The Times, 30 April, Saturday Review, 6. Thomas, ‘The British Workshop Movement and Amber Film’, 196. R. Hollands and J. Vail. 2012. ‘The Art of Social Movement: Cultural Opportunity, Mobilisation and Framing in the Early Formation of the Amber Collective’, Poetics 40(1), 40. See earlier note (Introduction) for a list of all of the articles that were published as part of this project. Hollands and Vail, ‘The Art of Social Movement’, 40. Hollands and Vail, ‘The Art of Social Movement’, 40. Respectively for Last Shift and Glassworks.

28  •  In Fading Light

24. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 166. 25. Examples of international festival success include: the selection of The Filleting Machine and In Fading Light as outstanding films of the year for screening at the London Film Festival in 1982 and 1989; a finalist award for Shields Stories at the 1988 International Film and Television Festival of New York; the Grand Prix for Byker at the 1984 Tampere International Short Festival; the Prix de la Critique Internationale for Byker at the 1984 Leipzig Film Festival; the Grand Prix for Best Short Film for The Writing in the Sand at the 1992 Melbourne International Film Festival; the Prix Du Documentaire Européan, Cinéma Du Réel (Paris) for The Writing in the Sand in 1992; the Prix du Public and Mention Spéciale du Jury for Dream On at the 1992 Créteil International Women’s Film Festival. 26. See, for example: R. Shail (ed.). 2008. Seventies British Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; P. Newland (ed.). 2010. Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, Bristol and Chicago: Intellect; J. Smith and S. Harper. 2012. British Film Culture of the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure, Stockport: Edinburgh University Press; P. Gaal-Holmes. 2015. A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; P. Newland. 2017. British Films of the 1970s, Manchester: Manchester University Press; S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds). 2017. Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. 27. J. Newsinger. 2010. ‘From the Grassroots: Regional Film Policy and Practice in England’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Nottingham, 143. 28. R. Hollands and J. Vail. 2015. ‘Place Imprinting and the Arts: A Case Study of the Amber Collective’, Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit 0(0), 11. 29. M. Martin. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10984-F10988). 30. Hollands and Vail, ‘Place Imprinting and the Arts’, 14. 31. J. Chapman. 2015. A New History of British Documentary, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 252. 32. G. Gee. 2017. Art in the North of England: 1979–2009, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 7, 49 and 49. 33. Newsinger, ‘From the Grassroots’, 389. 34. M. Rabiger and M. Hurbis-Cherrier. 2013. Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, New York and London: Focal Press, 15. 35. For analysis of Chaplin, Cookson and Common within the English ‘regional novel’ context, see R. Colls. 1998. ‘Cookson, Chaplin and Common: Three Northern Writers in 1951’, in A. Auw (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 164–210. 36. E. Mazierska. 2017. ‘Introduction: Imagining the North of England’, in E. Mazierska (ed.), Heading North: The North of England in Film and Television, Palgrave Macmillan, 1–31. 37. Mazierska, ‘Introduction’, 7–11. 38. Mazierska, ‘Introduction’, 11. 39. R. Colls and B. Lancaster. 2005. ‘1992 Preface’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University, xiv and xv. 40. Keating cited in D. Russell. 2004. Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 194. 41. Russell, Looking North, 194. 42. M. Wayne. 2001, Political Film: The Dialects of Third Cinema, London, Sterling and Virginia: Pluto Press, 1.

Histories of Amber  •  29

43. Wayne, Political Film, 1. 44. Wayne, Political Film, 49. 45. P. Hutchings. 1996. ‘“When The Going Gets Tough . . .”: Representations of the NorthEast in Film and Television’, in T.E. Faulkner (ed.), Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North East England, London: Octavian Press, 283. 46. Hutchings, ‘When the Going Gets Tough’, 280. 47. Hutchings, ‘When the Going Gets Tough’, 289. 48. Newsinger, ‘From the Grassroots’, 147–48. 49. Newsinger, ‘From the Grassroots’, 148. 50. J. Newsinger. 2007. ‘Together We Stand’, Vertigo 11 (August). Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/issue-11-august-2007/tog​ ether-we-stand/. 51. Amber Press notes/Interview for Like Father, c.2001, accessed from Amber’s archives. 52. Wayne, Political Film, 49; Chapman, A New History of British Documentary, 249. 53. J. Leggott. 2018. ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’, 1 November, Newcastle upon Tyne. 54. Peter Roberts, personal correspondence with author. 55. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 169. 56. S. Hockenhull. 2017. British Women Film Directors in the New Millennium, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 57. Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film, 1. 58. Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film, 5–6. 59. M. Dickinson (ed.). 1999. Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI, 5. 60. A.L. Rees. 2011. A History of Experimental Film and Video (2nd ed.), London: BFI, xi. 61. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, 99. For a survey of structuralism filmmaking, see 83–101. 62. Dickinson, Rogue Reels, 4. 63. See for example, Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, 99–102; Dickinson, Rogue Reels, 50–53. 64. Dickinson, ‘Amber’, 254. 65. J. Chambers. 2017. ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 182. 66. Chambers, ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience’, 178. 67. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 166. 68. N. Vall. 2011. Cultural Region: North East England 1945–2000, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 90. I would add that the definition of Channel Four as ‘legitimate culture’ is open to debate, given the channel’s (initial) remit to commission independent filmmaking. 69. See, for example, K. Armstrong. 1998. ‘Letting All the Flowers Bloom’, Northern Review 7, 52–58. 70. M. Martin. 1974. ‘Amber – Early History’, unpublished ledger. 71. J. Hill. 1999. British Cinema in the 1980s, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 63. 72. Cited in Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, 63. 73. Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, 64 74. Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 118. 75. Collingwood cited in Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5.

30  •  In Fading Light

76. Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 118. 77. S. Konttinen. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10977-F10983). 78. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 79. D. H. Mutibwa. 2017. ‘Surfing Multiple Tides: Opportunities and Challenges for Contemporary British and German Community Filmmakers’, in S. Malik et al. (ed.), Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practices and Places, Routledge: Oxon and New York, 137. 80. Mutibwa, ‘Surfing Multiple Tides’, 139. 81. Gaal-Holmes, A History of 1970s Experimental Film, 39. 82. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography. 83. K. Armstrong. 1998. ‘The Jingling Geordie: Community Arts and the Regional Culture of the North East of England’, MA Thesis, University of Durham, 75 84. Armstrong, ‘The Jingling Geordie’, 75. 85. Cited in Armstrong, ‘The Jingling Geordie’, 76. 86. T. Jennings. 2009. ‘Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting the Working Classes’, Variant 34 (Spring). Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/hunting34. html.

Chapter 2

Salvaging the Past, 1968 to 1980



With hindsight, it seems fair to consider Amber’s first decade as an extended apprenticeship period, in which the group developed their craft, established their creative relationships with their environment and generated administrative capacity for a subsequent phase of expansion and experiment. In their article ‘Rules for Cultural Radicals’, Vail and Hollands offer what film scholars might recognize as an almost auteurist take on Amber’s formation, in their assessment of Amber’s accomplishment deriving fundamentally from the ‘tactical, strategic, and inspirational genius of Murray Martin, Amber’s founder and leading visionary’.1 Drawing upon the central conceit of American radical Saul Alinksy’s book Rules for Radicals (1971)  – a set of principles for activists committed to long-term political and social change – and Neil Fligstein’s concept of ‘social skill’ – ‘the ability to induce cooperation among others’2 – Vail and Hollands identify the strategies by which Martin could create a ‘vibrant, long-lasting oppositional cultural movement’: they include ‘imaginative daring’, a ‘commitment to a collective narrative’, visionary leadership, risk-taking, a realistic approach to craft, ‘impression ­management’ and the ability to traverse social spheres and broker connections.3 Darren Newbury has described Amber’s initial period as that of ‘salvage documentary, the making of a visual record of forms of work and ways of life in decline’.4 The films Amber produced were almost entirely short documentaries, some of which have been retrospectively compiled on two DVDs self-released under the title The Tyne Documentaries. The assembly of these DVDs might itself be considered an act of archival salvage, a rescue and

32  •  In Fading Light

contextualization of a series of films that had fallen into relative obscurity. Indeed, two films included on the packages, Wallsend 72 (1972) and Six To Midnight (1974), were effectively unreleased; the former had not been screened since 1973 and had been absent from all subsequent catalogues and critical discussion, whilst the latter was commissioned but shelved by Newcastle Council. However, there has not been as yet an equivalent release for a trilogy of ‘portrait’ films produced during the same era – Mai (1974), Laurie (1978) and That’s Not Me (1978) – which, in the case of the first two, are celebrations of influential figures upon Amber’s development and, in the case of the latter two, are interrogations of the distinctions between craft and artistry. In response to interview questions about Amber’s developing aesthetic, Murray Martin often cited High Row (1973) as an early example of creative reconstruction, stressing that the film had been carefully scripted and hence anticipated the more sustained and complex negotiations between factual and fictional elements in later work.5 Statements by Martin and other Amber members reveal a certain ambivalence with regard to the influence they took from the British documentary tradition, particularly the GPO/ Grierson school of the 1930s. In the early 1990s, Martin claimed that: ‘there is a sort of mythology within British film culture that there’s been a lot of documentary work done about British working-class life  – I don’t think that’s generally true’.6 Martin described Maybe (1969), a student work that lays some foundations for the Amber approach, as being ‘in a classic British romantic documentary style’.7 He recalled it receiving praise from Edgar Anstey, one of the stalwarts of the British documentary movement, who observed a kinship with what he and colleagues had been attempting three decades prior.8 Within two weeks of the launch of Channel Four in November 1982, a couple of early Amber films, Launch (1974) and Last Shift (1976), were screened alongside Flaherty’s Industrial Britain (1931) and a response by the fellow Tyneside workshop Trade as part of an Eleventh Hour special entitled ‘Caution! Images at Work’, concerning ‘the legacy of the British documentary tradition and its relevance to working people in the North-east’.9 The Channel Four ‘press pack’ of promotional material for that particular week invited the viewer to question whether Amber’s films were ‘within that tradition’ (i.e. of the British documentary movement) or whether recent work represented a ‘fresh documentary approach’.10 But despite the group making connections with the ‘old guard’  – the likes of Anstey and Robert Vas were invited up to Newcastle in the early 1970s to speak as part of a ‘Filmmakers Talking’ series – Martin established a few key differences between Amber’s work and the ‘classic’ GPO approach, the most significant being their respective relationship to the state: whereas the 1930s filmmakers produced ‘evidence to arm the state with the arguments for change’,11 Amber

Salvaging the Past  •  33

took an a firmly oppositional position, beyond the influence of state, sponsor or commercial imperative. According to Martin: Where we’re operating, which comes out of the late 1960s thing, it’s much more oppositional, and much more independent. It’s basically saying: we’re not beholden to the state. We will record what we want.12

Martin also noted how, by necessity of working for the state, and hence being censored by it, the 1930s filmmakers largely avoided references to unemployment.13 He does single out Humphrey Jennings for praise, for his response to the dignity of his subjects, and for the tradition of reconstruction he would influence. But Martin also lamented how, by the 1970s, the Grierson school of filmmakers were reduced to making ‘industrial corporate films’, or working within the ‘stifling’ restrictions of television.14 However, in response to Anstey’s praise of Maybe, Martin acknowledged that, with his background as an art historian, he was not ‘particularly aware’ of the Grierson tradition at the time, whilst Peter Roberts, one of the key contributors to the ‘salvage’ films (usually acting as cinematographer, and sometimes co-director and editor), was himself ‘unfamiliar with it’ altogether.15 Furthermore, Martin would query whether, come the 1970s, a robust tradition of ‘poetic realism’ was even in existence at all, if defined according to the Griersonian credo of the ‘creative treatment of actuality’, although he does cite Phillip Trevelyan and John Mapplebeck as fellow travellers during the decade. What therefore emerges from their films of the period, and Amber’s statements about the era, is a sense of the group, encouraged by Martin, following their instincts and combining an element of strategy (for example, clustering work around ‘projects’ with an eye to funding opportunities) with an intuitive response to their new environment. Martin described the group’s early aims as ‘very minimalist’ – to ‘survive and do interesting work’ and to make ‘simple documents’ of working-class culture.16 The ‘simplicity’ lay with ‘being involved with a culture that we found rich and exciting and wanting to record’.17 From a modern perspective, the films certainly have value as historical records. However, as Jamie Chambers notes, notions of ‘salvage’ currently wear a ‘pejorative cast in the discourses surrounding contemporary cultural studies’.18 The salvage paradigm, which has been critiqued extensively within the fields of the humanities, originated with the historian James Clifford, who questioned ‘the mode of scientific and moral authority associated with salvage, or redemptive ethnography’.19 According to this thinking, the outsider intervenes to record the voices of communities or practices that would otherwise be lost. Amber’s instincts, throughout this period and beyond, clearly correspond with these processes and connect their work to a lineage

34  •  In Fading Light

of ethnographic cinema most typically associated with Robert Flaherty, usually deemed to have ‘romanticized’ the subjects of, for example, Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934). For three of their films, Amber would take guidance on their choice of subject, and cues for its framing, from the industrial archaeologist Stafford Linsley, who was alive to the possibilities of using the medium of film as a recording and teaching tool. Chambers, in his analysis of Amber’s 1970s films about labour practices, comes to the conclusion that they use certain devices, such as the lack of a commentary track, to counter the ‘semi-touristic perspectives on workingclass experience’20 that are often diagnosed within social realist cinema, particularly the ‘kitchen sink’ wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.21 To that end, the Amber films present a ‘complex challenge to prevailing assumptions that Western-based salvage projects are irredeemably regressive, chauvinistic and imperious’.22 Another indicator of the intricacy of Amber’s responses to labour and environment, and the inter-relationship between the two, is the presence of two experimental animation shorts by Peter Roberts within their catalogue. Martin asked the Leeds-born Roberts to join Amber in 1971, having seen the 1969 work he made entitled A Film. Far removed from the realist documentary mode, A Film describes a blankly drawn human figure at work operating complex technology, then journeying home awkwardly through terraced streets, before undergoing a kind of imaginative transfiguration that involves exotic masks and rituals. Martin discerned a ‘working-class sensibility’23 behind its anxious atmosphere of industrial drudgery and environmental alienation, and identified a kindred spirit responding creatively to their experience of being ‘designed out of their background’.24 A similar mood of unease permeates the dense photomontage style of Jellyfish (1973), its beach setting becoming the stage for surrealistic, unsettling encounters between human figures and objects, conveyed through a range of stop-motion, photography and drawing effects. The actual specimens of jellyfish that sporadically appear are handy symbols of the kind of class displacement diagnosed by Martin, in being out of place on the shore and simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable. But in a film suffused with explosions and negative imagery, the jellyfish also take on clear associations with the nuclear threat, not least because of their expansions into atomic mushroom-cloud shapes, their throbbing, their splitting open and their unleashing of destruction. It would be a decade or so before Amber returned directly to the theme of nuclear power – as both an economic and environmental danger – in their ‘campaign’ film Can’t Beat It Alone (1985), but the theme of industry’s devastating impact upon sea and coast would become a long-term preoccupation for the group, reaching forward through In Fading Light (1989) and The Writing in the Sand (1991) to Song for Billy (2017).

Salvaging the Past  •  35

Prior to their permanent relocation to Newcastle, early members of the embryonic group produced two student films, All You Need is Dynamite (1968) and Maybe. The former, which runs at around twenty minutes, is an exploration of the inter-relationship between apathy and violence, inspired by the findings of the 1967 Dialectics of Liberation conference in London – described by David Cooper as the ‘founding event of the Antiuniversity of London’ – which had involved speakers such as the famed psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the American civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael and the poet Allen Ginsberg.25 The second is a more gentle endeavour, capturing the work and ruminations of an engine man on the ferry service crossing between the banks of the river Tyne. The ‘dialectical’ Dynamite may very much seem like a path not taken for Amber, with its inclusion of violent imagery ‘grabbed’ from television alongside actual footage of the Grosvenor Square student riot of March 1968 that arose from anti-Vietnam protests. The harsh editing, abrasive soundtrack (including numerous songs by The Beatles and other contemporary pop and rock acts), repeated motifs (such as a lift opening and closing) and overt theorizing certainly brings it closer in spirit to the kind of countercultural cinema typified by Jean Luc Godard and Jean-Marie Straub/ Danièle Huillet than the British documentary movement. Although some spaces of working-class leisure and activity do appear, such as a bingo hall, high-rise flats, a football stadium, a bulb factory and a supermarket, they are deployed here, in tandem with repetitious footage of TV advertisements, to advance a thesis about consumerism breeding an ‘underbelly of violence’, rather than with a concern for the nuances of class identity.26 Indeed, in its critique of the dehumanizing effects of the mass media and popular culture, Dynamite arguably gravitates more to the judgemental position taken by Lindsay Anderson in O Dreamland (1956), his cacophonous and bleak film describing the passivity of visitors to a gaudy funfair. Dynamite concludes, shockingly, with the infamous footage of the South Vietnamese captain Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executing a suspected Viet Cong assassin in the street.27 Amber’s gravitation towards a more observational style of documentary would not necessarily mean the suppression of the kind of agitating tendency demonstrated so overtly by Dynamite. Noting the ‘two sides’ to Amber’s body of work, Martin acknowledged that the ‘romantic, personal’ side, as personified by Maybe, was balanced by projects that got ‘involved in some kind of political analysis’.28 A number of later Amber films, and photographic projects, would emerge out of, or in response to, campaigning activities, such as the miners’ strike and the anti-nuclear movement. Although, for Martin, a ‘crude and inadequate’ film,29 Dynamite has some features we will observe in later Amber work, such as the use of fluid, graceful tracking shots: an aspiration palpable within some of the ‘industrial’ films and brought to fruition in

36  •  In Fading Light

Quayside (1979) and beyond. The collision of especially shot material and footage sourced from television is a precursor of sorts to Amber’s later mingling of dramatic and documentary elements, but the motif of the ‘filmed’ television, an uneasy presence in homes and public places, will become a familiar one throughout Amber’s oeuvre. Often this happens for structural or narrative reasons but sometimes for symbolic purpose too, such as the TV monitors pumping out lurid, populist entertainment in Tyne Lives (1980) and Byker (1983). Martin would claim that Dynamite was ‘banned for being an incitement to violence’.30 Its near ‘mythological’ status was maintained for decades as a result of the only print being retained by the Regent Street Polytechnic, rather than by Amber themselves, but its liberal use of Beatles music is reason alone for its ongoing commercial unavailability.31 Both All You Need is Dynamite and Maybe – both credited on screen as ‘A Polytechnic Film’ – are usually included in overviews of Amber’s work, despite the former’s relative invisibility. However, it is the latter which has been canonized within Amber’s own histories as their ‘first work’, even though it was made second.32 Despite being crewed by just two of the ‘embryonic’ group, Murray Martin and Graham Denman, Maybe does have a greater affinity with Amber’s output of the 1970s, and indeed was included on the second of their Tyne Documentaries DVD compilations. It makes sense therefore to consider it in relation to Amber’s cycle of documentaries with a connection to the Tyneside region.

The Tyne Documentaries Maybe (1969) The ten-minute running time of Maybe corresponds with the time it took for the Northumbria ferry to carry its passengers of ‘workers, shoppers and kids’ across the river Tyne between North Shields and South Shields.33 The first half consists of riverscape imagery of industries and streets, shots of and from the ferry sailing and disembarking, and footage of the driver. The second half focuses in particular on the elderly engine man Jimmy. We hear via voice-over his reflections upon his life and work, over shots demonstrating his labour: controlling levers, stoking the fire, oiling pistons, washing and so on. Martin described Maybe as a fundamentally ‘autobiographical’ work.34 He had been a regular traveller on the ferry (which he took to get to a second-hand market in South Shields), and the film derived from his ‘nostalgia for the area surrounding the river, and the trip on the boat’: the challenge of the exercise was to ‘find visuals which communicated my feelings about the area’.35 Murray’s nostalgic impulse was thus double-edged in being a fond recollection for his (recent) past as well as projected affection for what the river

Salvaging the Past  •  37

Figure 2.1 Still from Maybe (1969). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

and its people had once been. These sentiments determined the style of Maybe, which was shot in black and white and uses mostly static, painterly images that accentuate the timeless grandeur of the environment and the dignity of its main human subject, the engine driver. Although very much an Amber ‘urtext’ of intention, Maybe includes passages of associative montage of a kind the group would generally steer clear of; the second half contains a quite rapid flow of images – of exterior shots, close-ups of machinery and controls, the man from a variety of angles – and some, such as an interesting image of the man’s folded arms, are circled back to a few times. The film also draws upon the emotional resources of music in a way mostly avoided by Amber (although not entirely) in the coming decade. Maybe begins and ends with extracts from a soulful 1962 recording of the Gateshead-born Louis Killen singing, unaccompanied, the Northumbria folk song ‘Sair Fyeld Hinny’, a dialect-rich lament of an elderly man who compares his diminishing strength with an oak tree; the title would be used shortly as the name of the photographic studio set up by Konttinen with the help of Amber in Byker.36 The sentiments of the song, in which the narrator reflects sadly on his youthful vigour, chime with the comments made by Jimmy, who recalls hard times of past employment, his regret that his son had joined the wrong trade, his aspirations for retirement and, perhaps most poignantly, his assessment of the industries of the river Tyne now being ‘finished’. Our last glimpse of him, following a number of visual compositions emphasizing his physicality, is framed through moving pistons that dominate the screen and eventually shift to ‘erase’ him from view – as the living embodiment of the river, his fate is clear. Martin felt he had to work hard in gaining the trust of his subject

38  •  In Fading Light

so that he would not appear self-conscious when the camera was upon him. However, the experience of showing the film publically to its participants, which brought the realization that Jimmy had told the filmmakers about aspects of his life that his family may not have been aware of, would enhance Martin’s sensitivity to the ethical responsibilities of the documentarian when, in the Collingwood fashion, ‘revealing the secrets’ of the community.37 Maybe carries other autobiographical charges. Very different from the authoritatively descriptive titles of Amber’s subsequent work, the one for this film evokes multiple forms of indeterminacy: that of the ferry itself, forever shuttling between the north and south docks; the engine driver ruminating uneasily on future prospects; and Martin himself, contemplating his own future and gravitationally pulled between the industrial North East and the metropolitan capital, where he was learning the craft of filmmaking.38 One of the most arresting moments of the film depicts a ferry landing from a lowly positioned perspective, which only allows the lower bodies of disembarking passengers to be seen. At first glance, the dehumanizing effect of the composition, in robbing the crowd of any individuality and dignity, would seem to be anathema to Amber’s advocacy of respectful engagement. But the eye is quickly drawn to a young girl seemingly unsure of her direction, moving one way, then another. Comic in its own right, it is also another evocation of directional indecision, as well as a ‘hidden’ moment revealed by the camera, just as the film itself works to expose the unseen, uncelebrated labour of the industrial landscape. Launch (1974) and Wallsend 72 (1972) In an account of Amber’s early history written by Martin in 1974, he explains his initial proposal to produce five short films on different aspects of the ‘life of the working man’, recording landscapes and workplaces alongside cultural traditions.39 Although the project did not fully materialize, one of the ideas was about the ‘building of a giant ship’, which would manifest in Launch, and another was in relation to ‘brass bands and juvenile jazz bands’, which resulted in the abandoned film retrospectively titled Wallsend 72. Although perhaps one of Amber’s most famous early works, Launch is at variance with most of their other ‘industrial’ films of the 1970s in being assembled out of material shot over a two-year period in a reactive, ad-hoc manner, very different to the controlled, immersive strategies undertaken in High Row onwards. The film’s co-directors and (for the most part) camera operators were Murray Martin and Peter Roberts, who had made a visit, along with Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, to the north Tyneside town of Wallsend, home to the shipbuilder Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, then building around one ship per year and employing more than 11,000 local people. The Amber team found

Salvaging the Past  •  39

Figure 2.2  Launching of World Unicorn, Wallsend, 1973. © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/ Amber

40  •  In Fading Light

the sight of ships being constructed at the end of terraced streets to be ‘visually staggering’40 and far more impressive than ‘some installation piece’.41 Amber were of course not the first to recognize that a ship ‘accelerating down the ways makes excellent cinematic material’.42 The great shipbuilding centres of the UK  – such as Tyneside and Wearside, Belfast and the Clyde – had frequently been the subject of newsreel and documentary interest. The propagandist potential of ‘naval theatre’ had long been recognized, but as demonstrated by the variety of the films compiled on the British Film Institute’s Tales From the Shipyard DVD collection of 2011, which concludes with Launch, shipyards and shipbuilding have inspired a range of responses, from straightforwardly upbeat celebration (such as A Great Ship, 1962) to lyricism (the Kipling-quoting The Sea Shall Test Her, 1954)  – even Paul Rotha’s propagandist Shipyard (1935) acknowledges its workers going back to the dole. Aware or not of these, Amber felt that the working-class achievement under view had not been recorded in a sufficiently celebratory way, and thus set about enacting a ‘revisionist perspective upon the grand public theatre’ of the manufacture and launch of a tanker.43 The footage for the ‘largely unplanned’ film was directed jointly by Roberts and Martin, taking turns with the camera, on a ‘casual journey round the yard’,44 capturing images of ships, cranes, chains and propellers, and of men heading to work, welding, throwing ropes, being lifted on cranes, spray painting the hull and pausing for rest. The launches of the World Unicorn (1973) and Lion (1974), replete with gathering crowds and civic dignitaries, were also recorded, the latter with an extra camera operator. With the exception of one shot of the massive tanker World Unicorn disappearing from view from the perspective of a terraced street, Launch was filmed using a wind-up Bolex camera that had a maximum run of twenty seconds. This accounts for the (mostly) static framing and short shot durations in the final film, which reconstructs all the disparate material into a loosely linear narrative of a working day, followed by a launch event. Aside from some synched footage from the launches, no other audio was recorded; the soundtrack, a dense mixture of industrial cacophony, human voices and natural ambience, was re-created by Amber using objects, people and effects at their disposal. Most critical attention given to Launch has engaged with the political implications of its juxtaposition of the official launch event  – involving dignitaries, politicians and royalty (Princess Anne)  – with the labour and perspective of the workers and local community. In interviews, the Amber team have referred to the film’s immediate reception in Germany, where it was taken as, firstly, an exposé of the poor health and safety standards of the workers and, secondly, as a commentary upon the separation of the workers and the owners.45 It is indeed easy to read Launch as a polemic on how the working class are effaced from the public record, as demonstrated

Salvaging the Past  •  41

by the construction of the final launch sequence. Indistinct footage of the dignitaries filmed through obstructive glass emphasizes Amber’s outsider perspective, as does a shot taken of the event from behind the ‘professional’ news reporters; the view of the crashing champagne bottle is partly obscured by one of their cameras in a manner that deconstructs the mediation process whilst insinuating Amber’s position outside of it  – the effect is conveyed sonically too through the muffling of Princess Anne’s (off-screen) speech. These shots are contrasted with those of the local community on the streets, leaning out of the windows and occasionally looking uninterested; during the royal speech we see a man smoking with his eyes fixed downwards. The contrast is sharp against the earlier scenes of labour, which contained numerous instances of spirited banter and close-up shots suggesting humour or contentment. A concluding long take, relative to the rest of the film at least, of the ship vanishing from the horizon of the terraced street takes a perspective that draws the eye from the moving tanker to the undirected vignettes taking place at street level: a dog wandering in and out of shot, a bike arriving and people scurrying to and fro. The surrounding environment, we realize, and the people therein have as much interest and worth as the ‘naval theatre’ taking place elsewhere. Jamie Chambers argues that Launch ends ‘not triumphantly with the boat’s departure but with community members trudging back home’.46 Whilst their movement is perhaps a shade closer to ‘brisk’, it is certainly significant that we only see the tanker sliding partway into the Tyne and the chains only partially unravelling: neither the ship nor the residents get to transcend their environment. In 1974, Martin wrote of how the ‘North East more than most areas seems to embody the contradictions between established tradition and the changing urban area’.47 The conflict between the old and new, between the cultures and landscapes of traditional industry such as coal mining and shipbuilding versus those of light industry, was evidenced for Martin by way of the decline of brass bands – many only salvaged by sponsorship by the new light industries – contrasted against the rise in the North East of juvenile jazz bands and troops of young girls marching and playing kazoos. The resulting film, Wallsend 72, shows the respective leaders of a shipyard brass band and juvenile jazz group talking about background and craft, among footage of the riverscape, the groups rehearsing and then performing publically. The brass-band leader is filmed in front of a ship, and he dwells upon the ‘outsider’ status of yard bands contrasted with the dominant mining tradition. Wallsend 72 should bring a jolt of recognition to anyone familiar with Humphrey Jennings’s Spare Time (1939) and the divisive critical responses to that film’s sequence of young girls on kazoos earnestly performing Arne’s ‘Rule Britannia’ (1740). Attacked by some for condescension, or interpreted as a critique of creeping Americanization, Spare Time is usually received

42  •  In Fading Light

warmly today; Keith Beattie, for example, argues that Jennings’s ‘depiction of working-class life was a sympathetic one, sensitively attuned to issues of communal and regional identity’.48 Wallsend 72 also establishes the juvenile jazz bands – which date back to the 1930s and underwent a revival on Tyneside in the 1950s – as something of a leitmotif within representations of the North East: they also appear in Get Carter (Hodges, 1971) and Stormy Monday (Figgis, 1988), where they are similarly drawn into a nexus of concerns about the ‘old’ versus the ‘new’ North. Wallsend 72 takes a largely ambivalent stance and seems bent on placing the two traditions in tension rather than reaching resolution. The brass band rehearsal sequences are filmed using tracks and pans that ensure a more graceful, if melancholic air to that of equivalent scenes of the children, who are fragmented into close-ups of body parts, or shot from a distance. But despite the two groups being led by men with backgrounds of traditional manual labour, it is hard to avoid the disjunction in gender and age between their charges. At one stage during their public performance, the band’s music is interrupted by the slightly mocking noise and whoops of the young people who surround them, but during this sequence we also see footage of the marching juveniles overlaid with the music of the brass players. The young may be inconsiderate of symbols of heritage, but the sounds of tradition overwhelm the present too. Like Six to Midnight, the film was revisited by Amber following its digitization project, and forty years after its creation it became the trigger for some educational projects involving Wallsend schoolchildren and former members of the juvenile band shown on screen.49 High Row (1973) Among Amber’s earliest films, High Row is the nearest to a blueprint for future work, as it involved, for the first time, a period of immersion within a particular ‘community’ – here, the seven workers of a drift mine near Alston, off the South Tyne and within the North Pennines. Having licensed the mine from the National Coal Board (NCB), the men had given up better paid jobs ‘in exchange for a more independent working life’.50 After a few weeks working underground with the men, Amber produced a script in collaboration with the writer Eric Northey, which was changed in light of the miners’ complaints that it was too harsh, in emphasizing the dangerous and claustrophobic conditions of their work. The resulting film, a ‘day in the life’ portrait of the men undertaking their regular activities below and underground, was thus led by their ‘romantic’ vision of their long, physically gruelling daily work, rather than Amber’s own perspective.51 With some funding towards the film from Northern Arts, Amber negotiated to effectively purchase the mine for a week, for the sum of £1,000: High Row is therefore, unequivocally,

Salvaging the Past  •  43

a work of dramatic staging, with the men enlisted, in a sense, as actors under the direction of the filmmakers. We see them arriving and leaving work, drilling for coal, checking tracks and ceilings, hauling wagons, working compressors and generators but also bantering over their ‘bait’ and sharing tales about their drinking exploits.52 The involvement of the men in the creative process, and their individualization on screen, together with the lack of explanatory commentary or emotionally manipulative music, places High Row at some remove from the lineage of British mining documentaries stretching from Griersonian productions of the 1930s such as Industrial Britain and Coal Face (Cavalcanti, 1935) through to the cinematic output of the NCB, produced until the mid 1980s. The miners’ romanticized perception of their work is conveyed in various ways. The mine itself is never seen from a distance via customary establishing shots; instead, the camera is positioned exclusively from the mine's vantage point. The film begins with bucolic imagery of the hillside setting, and exterior shots throughout often position the men against vivid greenery or sky. Such a composition concludes the film: a low-angle shot of one of the miners leaning on a fence at the top of the mine, framed against an expansive sky, looking towards us briefly before moving down out of vision. Martin Hunt has noted that the positioning of the miners in doorways, tunnels and ­cavities is reminiscent of a John Ford western; it is true that the final shot bears comparison with the opening and concluding compositions of The Searchers (1956), aligning the men, perhaps, with John Wayne’s alienation from the domestic sphere in that film and his affiliation with the landscape.53 A curious grace note, however, is a moment where one of the men causelessly throws a stone to make a rabbit scurry away. So far, we have witnessed nature and industry in harmonious co-existence, in a fashion comparable with the fusion of the pastoral and industrial in Ken Loach’s Kes (1969). But now we have an antagonistic act that brings to mind the physical bravado and troublemaking of fellow stone-thrower Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960). It is also, according to Martin, a cheeky bit of manipulation on Amber’s part, given that the encounter was constructed in the edit without the realization of the participant.54 The strong dialect of the men challenges comprehension at times but is characterized by gruff, mutually mocking or grumbling exchanges, often in the form of weary exhortations to get going (‘well I suppose we’ll have to gan in’ and so on), and the miners often address each other directly by name. Wives and home lives are never mentioned, and the longest exchange concerns one of the men’s recollection of an afternoon of heavy drinking (involving a crate of Amber ale, in a nice authorial touch) leading to a plunge in a river. The repetition of the anecdote later in the day is a sly nod towards the men’s tendency towards self-mythologizing. Their stoicism and humour in the face of considerable

44  •  In Fading Light

danger is also typified by one miner’s underground instruction to another: ‘It doesn’t look over safe – don’t bang it or we might get fucking buried!’ It is no wonder that, following a screening of the film in Alston, and in response to the anxieties of wives who had ‘never seen the way they work’, some of the miners chose to leave their jobs.55 The mine is rendered as non-hierarchical, with every one of the seven men reliant on each other’s equal labour. The film’s shuffling between the gloominess of the mine interior and the sunlit activities outside provides respite for the viewer, but the mutuality and shared danger is emphasized by some flashes of dramatic incident. The men outside have to dash to respond to urgent calls from the miners about failing machinery, and there are repeated shots of the outside workers wiping sweat from their brow to lessen any judgement that the mining work is exponentially more taxing. High Row may be a film about how the miners regard themselves, but as a portrait of an egalitarian, independent collective endeavouring through commercial jeopardy, it also speaks to the group’s growing confidence in their craft and collaborative activities. Bowes Line (1975), Last Shift (1976) and Glassworks (1977) High Row brought Amber to the attention of Stafford Linsley, an academic who detected a kinship between the group’s compulsions and recent developments in industrial archaeology, a branch of archaeological endeavour that sought to document and analyse industrial history: not just processes involving raw materials but the role of transport, landscape, buildings and human interactions.56 The term ‘industrial archaeology’ had first been applied academically in the 1950s, and by the early 1970s it was starting to become established as a coherent field, mostly concerning the period following the Industrial Revolution although applied by some scholars in relation to preindustrial times too. This chimed with a growing popular interest in industrial heritage, as evidenced, for example, by the founding of the Beamish Open Air Museum in County Durham in the early 1970s, which sought to capture a sense of mining life and work around the late nineteenth century through a replica village, tramway and mine. The academic and popular interest in industrial history, which led to the rise of some amateur filmmaking societies as well as professional bodies such as the Association for Industrial Archaeology, coincided with the decline of the UK manufacturing industry and the recognition that many practices and traditions were liable to be lost to posterity. One pioneering amateur filmmaker in this regard was Sam Hanna, a teacher from Barnsley who set about recording the skills of craftsmen, and regional events and customs, partly because he wanted to convey to pupils ‘the vanishing ways of life of the locality in which they lived’.57

Salvaging the Past  •  45

As an industrial historian, teaching at Newcastle University, Linsley saw the potential of film as both an educational tool and historical record for the demonstration of specific processes and rituals associated with particular places and forms of labour, before the sites were closed or demolished. Seemingly inconsequential aspects of these workplaces, such as the way cigarettes were lit, the procedures for preparing and consuming food, or the manner in which people gestured to each other, were reckoned to be as historically significant as labour practices themselves.58 Linsley suggested a number of potential locations to Amber, resulting in three completed films. Bowes Line deals with the colliery railway designed to haul coal between the pits of north-west Durham and Jarrow Staithes on the Tyne river (from where it is shipped overseas). Unusually for Amber, and apparently at the request of Linsley, the film begins with a brief reference to newspaper reports of 1826 and 1842 celebrating the opening of different sections, but even these scraps of historical context do not quite convey the significance of the line, which is arguably ‘one of the world’s first modern railways’.59 Although each end of the line was worked by locomotives, the main section used ropeworked inclines, which are the central subject of the film. By the time of the filming, in August 1974, the line was restricted to the serving of one remaining colliery, which would close within a few months. The local council, inspired in part by the interest shown by Linsley and Amber, preserved a section, and from 2002 the site was granted museum status. However, even the knowledge that one can today experience the railway as a tourist attraction does not diminish the slight despondency that permeates Amber’s film. As Rupert Ashmore observes, there is an inherent nostalgia to the ‘poetic shots of solitary coal tubs creaking into the distance’.60 Bowes Line follows the precedent of High Row by presenting its activities as those of a typical day, avoiding commentary and capturing the banter of its two main protagonists, the operators Mattie and Luke, in tight close-ups that encourage us to consider their faces and gestures as much as their actual conversation (which is difficult for the untrained ear to pick up at times). Like the previous film, Bowes Line begins and ends with idyllic and quiet rural scenes; there is a slight return to the ‘heroic’ compositions of man and nature in a closing image of the men framed against the sky with their hands on their hips. The undertakings of the railway operators – oiling tracks, releasing pistons, uncoupling wagons, controlling gauges and levers – are interspersed with the equally noteworthy rituals of food preparation, kettles being filled and steam being blown from a hot drink. For Martin, the intention was to convey the perspective of the interested observer: If you spent a day going all the whole length of the line . . . and you were just using your eyes, this is what you’d learn. If you were an observant person you’d

46  •  In Fading Light

get an insight – and other people could give you the answers if you’re curious about it.61

At the same time, for Martin, the absence of a commentary motivated the filmmakers to ‘think visually’, and Bowes Line is partly an exercise in compositional variation: for example, wagon movement is shot from low and high angles, from near to far, right to left, and so forth, and there is generally a balance between long shots and close-ups and between silence and clatter. For all its visual and anthropological qualities, Bowes Line invites interpretation as a reflection upon the relative dignity and power of the working-class labourer, and such a reading reveals a less confident aura than that of High Row. The ‘day in the life’ approach encourages a conception of Mattie and Luke as everymen, and a scene towards the end of one of them attending to his pigeons emphasizes their connection to an established culture. Although their work is done with security and purpose, their conversations circle around humiliating redundancy pay-offs and their thoughts about an upcoming general election. The viewer, who perhaps lacks the ideals of ‘observation’ hoped for by Amber, might find themselves lulled by the repetitious and circular nature of the work in question: it is obvious that the wagons are in the service of a particular industrial process, but the two main men work at a remove from that. Indeed, in the middle of the film, while Mattie and Luke have a tea break, attention moves to the engine-hauled stage of the line, which takes the wagons past a stark landscape of heavy industry (including huge belching smoke towers) that is on a less human scale than the operations we have seen so far. The affiliation between Mattie and Luke and nature, as demonstrated at the start and end of Bowes Line, in tandem with the archaic nature of the rope-pulley system, strongly implies a sympathy with the pre-industrial. This positions the men at an even further remove from an uncertain, post-industrial world, which, despite their ability to vote, grants them no agency. By the time Amber came to record the Adamsez brick factory in Swalwell, it had actually closed, so its workers were reassembled and paid by the group for a week to undertake their prior work, albeit under their direction. So Last Shift is, like High Row, essentially a work of reconstruction, which helps explain the sedate pace of the men and the filmmakers’ use of more elaborate camerawork. Opening and closing ‘crane’ shots descend and ascend the roof of the factory; high-angle perspectives capture the dusty lighting effects of the interior; zooms are carefully timed to record hands shaping and rolling material; and a camera smoothly follows a horse and wagon through the factory. Whereas Bowes Line and High Row intersperse manual labour with human interest rituals (chatting, eating etc.) – in a way that both conveys the rhythm

Salvaging the Past  •  47

Figure 2.3  The brick-makers on their last day of work during the shoot of Last Shift (1976). © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/Amber.

of the working day and alleviates possible monotony – Last Shift places its only such material at the front. It begins with the group of men reflecting on their future job prospects or, for the older ones, plans for retirement: one says ‘my working days are over’. Despite some good-natured banter, the diagnosis of the current condition of the country is pessimistic. The strict separation of this discussion from the manual processes seen in the remainder of the film is connotative of a blunt division between work and unemployment, and it leaves less space than the other films for any romanticizing of labour or its associated cultures. Furthermore, by introducing the workers as a large group, and then not returning to them as named or talking people, Last Shift seems less inclined to individualize them. Linsley has noted that there are potentially interesting biographical details, of value to the historical record, that were lost through Amber’s prioritization of the visual aspect of the environments. For example, one of the men here was apparently a Methodist lay preacher, and thus a challenge to the stereotyping of northern working-class labourers as hard drinkers, as per High Row in particular.62 One of the most overtly symbolic elements of Last Shift, and of the Amber industrial cycle as a whole, is the treatment of the men’s relationship with their troublesome pony. For Linsley, this was just one aspect of the industrial experience that had eluded traditional attempts of record: ‘atmosphere, sound, the interaction between man and horse, man and materials, was [all] something I felt could only be recorded on film’.63 But the importance and behaviour of the pony called Darky was surely a gift to the filmmakers, even if its name is potentially jarring to modern sensibilities.64 Last Shift begins with the men speculating on his age (about thirty-seven), and we infer that, following a spell in the pit, he was saved from being put down and was brought to work in the factory – rescued from redundancy, like the men were

48  •  In Fading Light

unable to be. So when conversation turns to the men’s own perilous position, the affinity between his plight and theirs is obvious. The sequence in which two men have difficulty controlling the animal accentuates the humour of the situation through mostly static, long-take camerawork that shows Darky straining at the edge of the frame and then totally disappearing beyond it. The vignette is recapitulated in the concluding crane shot, lifting the viewer’s perspective upwards over the factory roof: our last sighting is of the pony wandering listlessly in circles around the man straining to rein him in. Given that a previous sequence showed one of the men displaying no exertion when carrying out one of the jobs that Darky was so resistant to doing (pushing a tub through the factory floor), one might reasonably question their loyalty to the creature. Although the antagonistic pony signifies the workers’ own spirit in the face of adversity, despite the ambience of slight inertia through the film, their inability to control it evokes, again, a submission to decisions and forces beyond their power. Viewed in light of Amber’s eventual gravitation towards ‘horsey’ culture, however (see Chapters 6 and 7), Last Shift carries more upbeat associations, implying the beginnings of one of the foremost strands within the group’s later work. Of all the industrial films, Glassworks has the greatest claim to poeticism, in being the most difficult to verbally paraphrase. Indeed, the starting point for Linsley was that the archaic processes involved in the production of handmade glass, many of which would have been recognizable to medieval practitioners of the craft, might not be believed were it not for their audio-visual documentation. Glassworks eschews exterior shots situating the factory (in Lemington) within its landscape and features no discussions or break-time activities, instead concentrating exclusively on the men’s near-balletic movements, as they purposely blow, swing and stretch pieces into life, without injuring themselves or others in close proximity. The opening sequence, showing a man breezily pausing to puff on a cigarette, before swinging a dangerously hot piece of molten material, sets the tone for the film’s celebration of the workers’ confidence and affinity with an environment that could feasibly be described as gothic in its lighting and layout. Glassworks comes nearest of all the Tyne documentaries to visual abstraction through its invitation to the viewer to marvel at the co-ordination and breathing skills on display, as well as the extraordinary setting, rather than merely follow a linear process. Lacking the other films’ conversational allusions to the past, or indeed the future, or any establishing shot situating the factory in relation to its environment, Glassworks seems to designate a place beyond time, or at least in a mode of suspension. Whilst it establishes an editing rhythm by cutting between the glass-makers and a separate loft at another site where a pot is being prepared, this has as much an experiential as a narrative impact, with the cooler hues of this second environment providing

Salvaging the Past  •  49

respite from the extreme, fiery colours of the factory floor. The film climaxes with the pot being placed in the furnace; the sight of a large group of men heaving out a massive refractory piece is a fitting conclusion to Amber’s industrial cycle, in being the embodiment of collectivity, might, achievement and spectacle  – rather than the kind of imagery of exhaustion, defeat and eradication that will come to dominate the collective’s later representations of working-class labour and identity.

The Portrait Trilogy: Mai (1974), Laurie (1978) and That’s Not Me (1978) At roughly the same time as Amber were making their ‘industrial’ films, they were also completing a trio of documentaries about the lives or work of particular individuals; in comparison, these are more autobiographical in intention. Anticipated slightly by Maybe and its focus upon one worker, Mai and Laurie are portraits of people who had strongly influenced the developing world view, if not necessarily the budding artistic vision, of the young filmmakers. Having befriended the elderly Mai Finglass, an obsessive hoarder and collector of antique dolls, Murray Martin would lodge with her at her rented flat in Shepherds Bush when studying in London, as would other early Amber members. Laurie Wheatley, born in South Shields, had worked as a plasterer at Pinewood Studios but was also a self-taught sculptor, painter and photographer. In 1970, Martin had organized an exhibition of his photographs, and the Laurie film, directed by Peter Roberts, recorded the production of his first life-size model, of a shipyard welder, commissioned by Amber for their River Project of 1974. The unreleased That’s Not Me documents the attempts by the actor Tim Healy to develop a career as a stand-up comedian on the working men’s club circuit. Healy would subsequently gain some fame among British audiences from his role in the popular television comedy Auf Wiedersehen Pet (1983–2004). His connection with Amber was through his involvement with the similarly Newcastle-based Live Theatre company, which Martin and Amber had overseen for a time.65 The three films are stylistically at variance: whereas Mai spans a numbers of locations and times and responds to its complex and eccentric subject via an impressionistic structure, Laurie takes a more straightforwardly linear approach to its recording of a specific job of work, while That’s Not Me invites its subject, the actor turned comedian, to watch footage of his performances and reflect on his developing craft. However, taken together, the three films gather coherence as a highly personal – for Martin and for Amber – celebration of craftsmanship and, in the case of Mai, of artistic collection and curation. These are also the only Amber films of the period and the sole ones prior to T Dan Smith (1987) and

50  •  In Fading Light

ultimately The Pursuit of Happiness (2008), where Martin is such a prominent figure on and off-screen: we hear him questioning Mai about her hoarding impulses, see him helping Laurie with his sculpture, and then advising Healy on his comedy delivery and content. The genesis of Mai dated back to the time when Martin, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and other early Amber members were students at Regent Street Polytechnic, and it is likely that some of the footage was recorded then. Indeed, the similarity of the titles of Maybe and Mai points towards their simultaneous conception and the idea that if Mai was the portrait of a collector, Maybe could be the first ‘collected item’.66 The Mai project was also significant in Amber’s evolution for the way it involved both filmmaking and photography. Konttinen exhibited some of her photographs of Finglass in Newcastle in the early 1970s, although no still imagery appears in the film: her ‘photofilms’ of the 1980s onwards would be characterized by the experimental integration of film and photography (see Chapter 4). Just as Amber’s ‘work’ films eschew explanations of processes, so Mai only supplies slivers of biographical information about its subject, who we know from Amber’s own supplementary accounts (in interviews and in catalogues etc.) was born in India around 1890 to Irish-Persian parents, spent time as a teacher in the Himalayan mountains, corresponded or met with the likes of Madam Montessori and Mahatma Gandhi, left her two husbands, self-educated her three children, and by the time of the documentary was working as a cleaner on the Portobello Road; her house was so crammed with her collection of antique dolls and other hoarded material that she was forced to live instead in rented accommodation.67 The film’s impressionistic collage  – comprising scenes of Mai going about her rituals of scavenging, looking at shops, rearranging and organizing her collection in her home, washing and brushing herself and entertaining guests – was partly a necessity, as, according to Amber, her ‘quixotic lifestyle didn’t lend itself to film continuity’; the length of time it took to complete the film was partly to do with technical problems affecting ‘party’ sequences, which were felt necessary to offset the potential impression of Mai as a solitary, isolated ‘bag lady’.68 This danger is also alleviated by the occasional use of expressly scored soundtrack music, an exception among Amber’s documentary films, which otherwise steer clear of any non-diegetic means of editorializing; here, the simple use of guitar and saxophone adds a layer of tonal warmth. Although the labour processes described in the Tyne documentaries have a clear purpose for the engaged viewer to determine, with each representing a stage in a well-honed operation, the less attentive or informed viewer could well experience these as abstract, inscrutable activities  – and Mai similarly requires its viewer to determine rhythm and order in activities that initially seem random or eccentric, occurring in an overwhelmingly

Salvaging the Past  •  51

chaotic environment that the camera roves slowly around. When quizzed by Martin, off-screen, about her habit for acquisition, and her ‘obsession with usefulness’, she laments on the wastefulness of most people. Her collecting of ‘junk’, as she perceives others would call it, is posited by her, and by her sympathetic young friends, as a kind of craft in itself. During a discussion on camera about the different materials that dolls can be made out of, she recalls, from her childhood in India, figures being made out of ‘cow dung’. But the claims she makes about the possibilities of ‘miniature art’ – such as a carving in her possession of the ‘smallest elephant in the world’ and her sighting of a grain of rice containing verses of the Koran visible to the naked eye – are met with incredulity by her visitor, Laurie Wheatley, the subject of Amber’s next portrait film. A slightly contrived scene not only brings together two of the group’s key mentor figures but places Wheatley’s dour practicality (‘to be honest, pet, I don’t think the carving is very good’, he teases) in counterpoint with Finglass’s idealism and transcendental vision. Mai also conveys a contradiction between the occasional squalor of her surroundings (the eye gravitates at one point towards a packet of jam tarts among her hoard of items) and her cleaning rituals: some hand-picked apples are rigorously scrubbed in close up, and her night-time hair-brushing routine is dwelled upon. Finglass herself offers a resolution of such tensions by pointing out the significance of perspective when it comes to defining dirt: ‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place. Curry on the plate is food: on the tablecloth it is dirt’. This speech takes place over a fragmentary montage of short scenes of Mai in disparate locations, including her home, the streets, a church and a beach, where she holds up some seaweed; thus, the coherence of her commentary grants order to what would otherwise be cinematically chaotic.69 A sequence showing Mai walking through an eerily quiet museum, filmed in smooth tracking shots, further juxtaposes her philosophy of curation and display with that of professional bodies. In contrast with the clutter of her home environment, the glass-cased displays of clothes she walks past are sterile and non-utilitarian. Whereas these items are held at a remove, Mai is happy for her own treasures to be demonstrated to and handled by visitors. Her own collection would likely also offend the guardians and custodians of culture on grounds of taste: one mechanical doll in her possession lifts a ‘baby’ up and down, prompting a mischievous quip from Mai about the infant not ‘having drawers on’. A whimsical early sequence where she arranges a mock ‘tea party’ for her dolls similarly demonstrates her eccentricity, but given that Amber have stressed elsewhere her status as a ‘committed Anarchist’,70 this can also be read as a gentle critique of the British establishment and its own fossilized and class-based rituals: ‘shall we ask the butler to bring in the guests?’ From an autobiographical angle, Mai’s idiosyncratic approach to collection bears comparison with Martin’s own evolving concept

52  •  In Fading Light

of Amber as an ‘ideas factory’. Certainly, Mai’s transformation of her home into a simultaneous workplace (of a kind), museum, social space and shelter (where Amber members lived for a time) is an extreme illustration of one of the tenets of Amber’s early manifesto: the command to ‘integrate life and work and friendship’.71 Furthermore, there is a kinship between Mai and Martin himself as ‘curators’ of people for both practical and artistic ends. In The Pursuit of Happiness, Konttinen says of Martin that he became a mentor to individuals that he saw ‘something special in’ and sought to ‘collect more people around him’. Martin himself acknowledged that ‘if there wasn’t a collective, I wouldn’t work’ and argued that ‘facilitating is more interesting than an individualist position’.72 The hoard of belongings that threatens to overwhelm Mai’s living space stands as a warning too for the pressures that Martin would experience as he assembled his collective: Konttinen observes, in The Pursuit of Happiness, that he would occasionally feel ‘shackled by his own creation’, which led to some tensions and a decision to temporarily leave the group in 1979. Martin makes a number of on-screen appearances in Laurie, assisting the 70-year-old Laurie Wheatley in his construction of a sculpture of a shipyard welder using a traditional waste-mould process. Wheatley often explains aspects of the method – which involves the creation, lining and reassembly of a cast – directly to the camera in affectedly professorial tones, gently cajoling and guiding the ‘little camera team’. Laurie thus becomes as much a record of Wheatley’s own personality and relationship with the Amber filmmakers as a document of the process itself. The power relationship between Amber and their subject is consciously foregrounded, for whilst the job in hand arguably derives from the collective’s patronage of a ‘non-professional’ artist, Wheatley gently chides the team, calling them pet names (George and Percy) and wondering aloud ‘where Murray is’ at a key moment. His own directorial hand emerges at times, such as when he explains that the reason he has not positioned coverings to minimize mess is so it ‘looks better for the film’. Wheatley is a self-conscious performer, simultaneously aping and mocking the language and pretention of the ‘professional’ artist or TV presenter, using phrases like ‘oh dear, calamity, boy!’ and ‘see you again another time maybe’ and exaggerating his vowels to mimic received pronunciation (a long rather than short ‘a’ in ‘craftsman’, for example). For Amber, Wheatley was a connecting tissue to the North East’s tradition of ‘worker’ art that included the pitmen painters of Ashington (of the 1930s onwards), those involved with the Spennymoor Settlement, and shipyard poets such as Jack Davitt  – the latter would eventually be remembered in Amber’s The Art of Shipbuilding (2017) film about the Wallsend shipyards (see Chapter 7).73 Throughout Laurie, as the sculpture takes shape, we hear Wheatley’s thoughtful reflections on the nature and limits of his talent as a manual

Salvaging the Past  •  53

worker, which help to explain his self-conscious ‘performance’ on screen in terms of a possible insecurity about the gulf between the craftsman and the artist. He describes his attempts at modelling as derivative and fundamentally representative but laments that his workplace did not allow his nascent talent to flourish, not least because the strict demarcations of his film studio forbade cross-grade working (which prevented him from modelling). There is obvious pathos here within the context of Amber’s own philosophy: Wheatley observes that true artists have a ‘spark’ that emerges, regardless of environment, but that he lacks the power to transcend ‘pure craftsmanship’ and create something ‘with a kind of quality outside the craft’. Whilst there may be an element of false modesty here, given that Amber had played a part in bringing his work to exhibition spaces – and Laurie ends with the image of the finished sculpture in a ‘white cube’-type gallery environment – the lingering impression is that of anxiety about the craftsman’s status, quite different from the celebratory ambience of Amber’s other industrial films.74 Laurie concludes with Wheatley addressing the camera in slightly apologetic tones: ‘That’s about it, folks: I don’t think I can get any better than what’s on there now.’ That’s Not Me takes its subject, the actor Tim Healy, even further into a process of self-analysis, by confronting him with footage showing his stand-up comedy performances receiving varying levels of appreciation by their club audience. The film was never released, most likely because of Healy’s concern about whether it would be helpful for his career.75 Like Wheatley in Laurie, Healy contrasts with the ‘workers’ celebrated in the likes of Glassworks and Bowes Line, in that he does not have a lifetime of professional expertise in the endeavour being attempted. Beginning with a quick shot of Healy and Martin sitting in Amber’s cinema space, as the lights go down, the film moves between material from the Neon club in Jarrow of Healy onstage and backstage, footage of Healy rehearsing and talking to an unseen interviewer at home, and sequences of Healy and Martin reviewing the club material in the group’s cinema. Although pubs and clubs will feature prominently in numerous Amber films from this point, That’s Not Me is a belated manifestation of one of the collective’s initial interests: the environment of the working men’s club. As already mentioned, Martin took an early interest in expressions of conflict between the old and new across the landscape of working-class Tyneside. Healy explains the predominance of references to television shows and adverts in his act as a means of ensuring audience recognition, not least because ‘television is a big part of the average working-man’s life’. This may be so, even if his impressions do not always have a positive response, but such allusions to the mass media (TV adverts, children’s cartoons and toys and so on) are so rare in Amber’s early work (this will change over time) that it is hard not to contrast them with the ‘traditional’ and self-contained pub culture glimpsed in Byker and elsewhere.

54  •  In Fading Light

The film’s deconstruction of Healy’s half-hour act of ‘non-stop patter’ serves as an illustration of an idea put forward by Martin in interviews in relation to Amber’s debt to Collingwood’s definition of art as being achieved through the gaining of insight by the artist into themselves and to others: An actor can act a play a hundred times. Ninety-nine times it can be craft. And once it could be art. It only becomes art when the actor discovers something about themselves, and in doing so, allows the audience an insight into that. So if you can tell a joke and make someone laugh, that’s craft. If you actually give an insight into the nature of laughter, that’s art.76

That’s Not Me gestures towards this process in two ways. Firstly, in showing the preparation, delivery, context and retrospective analysis of Healy’s material, it aspires towards an insight into the process of making an audience laugh. Secondly, Martin’s conversations with Healy, and projection to him of footage shot by Amber, force him into a mode of self-discovery. The process anticipates some of the methods employed by Amber in the development of later feature films, such as Shooting Magpies (2005), where (mostly non-professional) performers view and respond to documents of improvisatory and rehearsal footage. Here, Martin encourages a distinction between content and delivery, noting where Healy’s stronger material is weakened by its performance, and vice versa. The revelation that comes to Healy is also visual, and the film’s title derives from his education about what he is capable of on stage or screen: ‘I didn’t realize my eyes were so funny’. The structure of the film, however, suggests that this reflective process is a looped one, without a clear end point: it concludes with Healy, in the cinema, declaring that he’s ‘dying to see the next bit’, followed by footage of the start of another performance. Just as Mai and Laurie betray authorial concerns about curation and craftsmanship, That’s Not Me engages with the notion of how the camera can reveal ‘authentic’ behaviour, if at all, and its interrogation of performance anticipates the self-reflexive strategies of the later feature film T Dan Smith. That’s Not Me also confirms what many of Amber’s commentators have tended to miss: the centrality of humour to their films. The film hints at the problem of ascertaining where a comedian’s act begins and ends, particularly when a camera is upon it. Healy can’t resist a gag when talking in interview about his formative years (‘I always wanted to be a comic . . . The Beano’), but one of the genuinely amusing moments in the film is presumably unintentional: when, backstage, Healy makes a meal out of putting on his bow tie.77 He also claims that the presence of a camera recording his act may have, at times, exacerbated his nerves. Coming backstage after an unsuccessful performance, he unguardedly gives a V-sign to Martin and the awaiting camera, before

Salvaging the Past  •  55

venting his spleen at the unresponsive audience (‘a load of twats’ etc.) and at the prospect of being ‘paid off’ – that is, being dismissed before he completes his sets. Later, in the cinema, Healy praises the footage, shown to us previously as an unedited and ‘raw’ long take, for being ‘exactly what happened, exactly what it felt like’. This is not quite the unmediated, ‘fly on the wall’ technique of observational documentary, though, as Martin’s presence and comments evidently have an impact upon his responses, even if it is difficult to determine quite how much. But it is important that Healy recognizes this footage as ‘pretty good’ and that his consent for its inclusion in the finished film is tacitly given on screen.

Quayside (1979) One of Amber’s most tangible legacies is their leading of a successful campaign to save threatened buildings in Newcastle’s historic and visually iconic quayside area. Amber had themselves set up their premises in an old bonded warehouse there, not far from the Tyne Bridge, which features so prominently in their 1979 film Quayside. Amber members have repeatedly emphasized their visceral responses to the industrial landscape of the region. For example, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen describes how ‘Newcastle’s Quayside with its grand Victorian buildings and bridges, massive sandstone structures coated in black soot, struck me as sublimely surreal on my arrival from Finland in the late 1960s.’78 A decade later, in light of the city council’s regeneration project that had already removed parts of Byker, Amber set about photographing and filming the quayside area. Their 1979 exhibition, which was accompanied by public meetings, succeeded in its aim of provoking debate and action. A sympathetic article of the time in the city’s Evening Chronicle newspaper described the cynicism of local businesses and residents towards the city planners: All the evidence, they claimed, indicated that most councillors didn’t understand the importance of preserving the area’s historic identity at a time of increasingly characterless modern cities. As a major landlord, the council was allowing buildings to deteriorate . . . ‘And they seem,’ said Murray Martin, a Side Gallery organiser, ‘to be stuck with the great myth of the Sixties that progress means knocking down old structures and replacing them with shiny new ones’.79

Martin himself formed a clandestine action group (with Brian Mills), which, through some fortuitous contacts, resulted in the ‘listing’ (i.e. granting of preservation status) of as many buildings as they were able and, as a result, the economic and cultural rejuvenation of the area.

56  •  In Fading Light

Amber’s approach to this, and other campaigns, was consistent: to refrain from polemicism in the recording but to exert ‘soft’ influence through the celebratory, commemorative tone of the final presentation. According to Martin: When we got involved in campaigns . . . we decided from very early on, you celebrate and do things which are positive, which make people aware of things that are going to go. . . . You can spend your time dealing with the didactic, political negatives, but it doesn’t get you anywhere . . . If artists have a role, it’s to say: ‘surely we shouldn’t be knocking this down?’ It raises the question: that’s what art can do. And to give an insight into what’s there that should be preserved or supported.80

Thus, Amber’s response to the campaign against the building of a nuclear power station in Druridge Bay was to commission the photographers John Davies and Isabella Jedrzejczyk to produce striking images that spoke of the area’s natural beauty. Similarly, the Quayside project involved Konttinen and Graham Smith taking interior and exterior photography of the district, imagery which is often shared with the related film. Whereas later Amber films such as Byker and The Writing in the Sand (1991) would involve the ‘animation’ of static images, the black and white Quayside responds to the photographic work through an impression of near-constant movement through streets and within buildings. Some of these atmospheric tracking shots were achieved through the use of a rear-engine car (a VW Passat), with a camera and tripod in place of the front boot lid, permitting the camera to glide smoothly through the deserted alleys and to capture dizzying perspectives of buildings and bridges; other techniques included self-built tracks constructed from plastic drainpipe and a ‘crane’ made from a wooden building ladder bolted to a tripod, with Peter Roberts sitting at one end and Martin providing the ‘ballast’ at the other. Now and again, the camera seems to approach one of the numerous men standing alone and inert in the street, as if they are being haunted, or perhaps awoken, by a spectral presence. Unlike the other films discussed in this chapter, Quayside largely avoids temporal and geographical coherence, instead looping back to key locations (a newsagent, the Tyne Bridge) within a patchwork of shifting perspectives: aside from the vehicular tracking shots, there are low and high angles and footage taken from moving boats. However, Quayside does suggest in its movement from imagery of mostly deserted streets, or with human figures and cars pushed to the margins, to more populated milieu – such as a pub where a talkative regular plays the harmonica – a process of animation, or at least humanization of the area. Participants even seem to acknowledge the camera more as the film continues: two men wave from the shore as we pass by them on the river, as do the two representatives of the river police at the end.

Salvaging the Past  •  57

So although Quayside avoids didacticism, as per Martin’s aspiration, its construction carries implications about the re-imagination of the area and the role of the filmmakers in this construction. The ‘pub’ sequence is elaborately choreographed, involving a quite long take that implies a movement from the outside through the window, and depicts a pool player and the arrival of a jovial regular (we also note a poster for Amber’s related exhibition on the wall during this sequence). The contrivances prompt us to speculate upon the degree of authenticity held by this record of a threatened culture; Amber’s upcoming Byker film will take this project of imaginative reconstruction into even more complex territory, as we will see in Chapter 4. The film’s soundtrack, a collage of ambient noise, occasional music (a melancholy excerpt from the starkly orchestrated opening of the third movement of Vaughan-Williams’s Seventh Symphony, 1952) and overlapping voices  – giving excerpts from historical records demonstrating the area’s prosperity then decline – also directs the viewer towards a particular interpretation of the area’s ‘slow death’ (as one man describes it). The voices, spoken by a small group of people reading different material in a rather monotonous, officious, fashion, blend together so only short phrases can be discerned (‘the people responsible are the city fathers’, ‘businesses that have been forced out by their overheads’ and so forth): the effect is tonal rather than informative, and the viewer may be inclined to prioritize their eyes over their ears. The implication is indeed that, if the campaign project is to have an impact in changing opinion, its main recourse is on the level of the visual.81 Yet Quayside takes an ambivalent stance on the prospect of ‘rescue’. To the accompaniment initially of imagery of the flowing Tyne, it begins with a sailor’s meditation on the elemental impulses that might drive someone to commit suicide by drowning. Later, the same voice gives an account of how a woman who jumped from the Tyne Bridge was ‘picked up’ (presumably as a fatality) by the Bessie Surtees boat (seen in the film itself ), one of the river’s frequently seen ash-carriers that transported waste away from power stations out to sea. The mention of this particular boat carries further resonances for those familiar with the topography and folklore of the Newcastle quayside, as a few steps away from Amber’s headquarters lies a building known as Bessie Surtees’ House, named after a late eighteenthcentury resident who eloped to meet a lover disapproved of by her father by climbing out of a window.82 According to legend, Bessie escaped on horseback up another one of the area’s landmarks, some particularly steep steps towards the town known as Dog Leap Stairs; in a knowing in-joke, Quayside shows a man walking his dog up them.83 The film ends with footage of the river police, but a final speech, also accompanied by water imagery, is fatalistic:

58  •  In Fading Light

Dan Smith was such a wise man. He wanted to build houses for his grandchildren when he was knocking down houses built by his grandparents. He thought he was much better than them. He knew what his grandchildren wanted. . . . He made a right bloody mess. But Newcastle’s a mess. The whole of Tyneside’s a mess. I cannot see there’s much you can do about it.

As part of a campaigning project, this world-weary punchline was arguably necessary for the provocation of debate and, hopefully, action. However, Quayside has a unique status among Amber’s films in being part of a project that successfully pushed against the tide of history: Amber and Martin did actually manage to retrieve and rescue, rather than just record for posterity. The reference to T Dan Smith would turn out to be rather apposite though. Smith was the former council leader whose controversial vision in the 1960s would have a major impact on the physical landscape of the city and some of the communities it housed. Konttinen’s Byker project, which would come to fruition in the subsequent decade, was a response to these developments. But the blame explicitly given to Smith in the summing up of Quayside left some unfinished business for Amber. The film they would complete about Smith less than a decade later would prove to be one of the most singular and ambitious documentaries of the 1980s, a period of considerable achievement, not just for Amber but for British film and television culture as a whole (see Chapter 3). It is worth noting that Quayside was the second Amber film to focus upon Newcastle’s urban landscape, following 1974’s Six to Midnight, a ‘day in the life’ portrait of the city as the ‘market place of the region’. Directed by Peter Roberts, the film was commissioned and then rejected by the Planning Committee of the city’s county council.84 The group regarded the rejection as a lesson in the importance of maintaining independence, as they felt they had already compromised too much to get the local authority funding for it; the film was rediscovered by the group decades later when they were undertaking the digitization of their archive. Beginning with shots of empty streets and the dawn arrival of trains and lorries bringing goods to warehouses and markets, Six to Midnight continues with a collage of commuters, shoppers, workers and schoolchildren in bustling stations, streets, shops (and later revellers in pubs and nightclubs) in the centre of the city, interspersed with pleasing vistas of the quayside area and a sequence set in the council’s planning office, where workers pore over models and maps. The film begins with a statement highlighting how the ‘fabric of the city must be reviewed to keep in step with the changing climate’, which explains the recurrence of imagery of construction and renovation: diggers bore holes into the area near the council headquarters; an excerpt from the radio news refers to ongoing work on the town’s central motorway; and a number of historic buildings,

Salvaging the Past  •  59

churches and monuments are shown covered in scaffolding and tarpaulin. Although in line with the council’s remit to demonstrate the role of the planning office in maintaining the city’s role as a hub of commerce and leisure, this imagery does give the film an anxious undercurrent. Amber also show their hand through instances of juxtaposition that cumulatively undercut the film’s supposed celebration of a city at work at and play; for example, the unexplained sound of a kazoo band over images of renovation (in fact, drawn from the recently made Wallsend 73, so something of an in-joke), the disconcerting thrumming noise accompanying footage of council workers, and the newspaper headline about ‘missing children’. There is even an excerpt of radio news referencing the Watergate scandal: a possibly innocuous piece of diaristic colour, perhaps, were it not for the contemporaneous Poulson affair, a scandal that exposed a web of corruption involving numerous MPs and councillors nationwide and which famously would disgrace T Dan Smith with allegations of bribery in the awarding of council housing contracts. The allusion to one of the defining political scandals of the era, within the context of a film commissioned by a council that had been itself reputationally damaged by Smith’s dealings, clearly stands out for our consideration; particularly, as noted above in relation to Quayside, because Amber would soon commence a detailed investigation into Smith and his council’s controversial planning policies (see Chapter 3).

Conclusion: Into the 1980s and Tyne Lives (1980) In 1980, Amber made the hour-long Tyne Lives, drawing material from the brief ‘bulletin’ works they had been making that were not designed as short films as such but dealt with territory they considered important, such as the culture of pub singing and the city’s Swing Bridge. Amber have tended to regard the film, which was never officially released, as a resourceful means of gathering available material in the absence of a budget; it was also overlooked in light of new ambitions and priorities that arose as a result of the Channel Four franchise arrangement. However, in retrospect, Tyne Lives is almost uncanny in the way it captures the group on the threshold of expansion and experimentation, bridging the ‘celebratory’ industrial and portrait films of the 1970s with the self-reflexivity and more focussed political enquiry of the work to come. Repeating the ‘roving camera’ device of Quayside, the film uses footage tracked from cars and boats, implying a gradual progression down the river Tyne towards the sea, to knit together disparate material that Amber had accumulated. Coming at the end of a decade of mostly ‘salvage’ films, Tyne Lives is itself a pragmatic bricolage. A first main strand concerns a retired fish-quay worker, Arthur Thurston, seen tending to his pigeons

60  •  In Fading Light

on his allotment and speaking to camera about the stamina required in his job in years past. A second element comes from Amber’s involvement in a campaign to prevent the closure of the Vickers Armstrong armaments factory in Scotswood, which gave them footage of the marching campaigners and an interview with the union representative, Jim Murray, who places the current campaign within the area’s long-standing tradition of unionism. However, Murray also acknowledges the alienation of younger workers from the labour movement, their increased concern with family life and the problem of fighting to save fundamentally ‘shitty’ jobs. A third interviewee is Betty Hepple, a North Shields housewife, talking about her struggles to raise a family through financial hardship and unemployment (Hepple would subsequently become a fixture of Amber’s productions, performing under the name Amber Styles as a deliberate homage to the collective). A fourth strand is footage of a raucous pub-singing session. In cutting between these elements, Tyne Lives does convey something of the contradictions and uncertainties around the function of labour in the changing industrial environment. Murray’s comments about alienation resonate, for example, with Betty’s stories of ‘fiddling’ the social services and finding an escape from drudgery by attending bingo halls. However, in retrospect, we can see the film’s strands as representing quite different strategies by Amber in response to their underlying project of creatively recording a changing working-class culture. The serene footage of the elderly man at his pigeon loft has a straightforwardly observational quality, contrastingly sharply with the ‘Betty’ material, which fuses scripted and improvisatory material with overtly symbolic editing and composition. This strand includes excerpts of the Filleting Machine play, anticipating Amber’s 1981 film production of it (see Chapter 5), in which Hepple plays the mother character, so the boundaries of her own personality and that of the character are unclear; Hepple’s monologue here is based on her own life, in the way that she would similarly bring aspects of her own experience to roles played in later Amber features. The Filleting Machine sequence here is repeatedly interrupted, visually and aurally, by an extract from the popular TV game show Play Your Cards Right (1980–2003) seen on a small monitor presumed to be in the home of the characters. Contrasted with the conviviality of the pub-singing sequence, we assume a commentary upon the vacuity and commercialism of the popular media; of course, Amber will soon receive considerable support from television, albeit from the ‘alternative’ Channel Four. There is also the sense, from the organization of the material here, that the family argument we witness as part of Betty’s story, along with her trip to the bingo, somehow illustrates Jim Murray’s thesis about the shifting priorities of the young. In giving space to Murray’s nuanced diagnosis of the contemporary political landscape, Tyne Lives also points toward Amber’s upcoming commitment

Salvaging the Past  •  61

to its Current Affairs Unit, tackling this very question of how to involve people in the labour movement. There are seeds for other projects too: Tyne Lives features two sequences at the Connell-Brown Dance Studio, the setting and subject for Keeping Time (1983); pub singing will appear again in Byker; and Betty’s throwaway anecdote about being turned away for a job interview for a cook on a boat because of her gender suggests that the genesis of In Fading Light (1989) was a long one. So, whilst the integration of these elements in Tyne Lives results in a somewhat awkward collision of styles, hindsight reassures us that Amber’s forthcoming expansion will sanction them to pursue these lines of enquiry with far more rigour and purpose.

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.

J. Vail and R. Hollands. 2012. ‘Rules for Cultural Radicals’, Antipode 45(3), 542. N. Fligstein. 2001. ‘Social Skill and the Theory of Fields’, Sociological Theory 19(2), 112. Vail and Hollands, ‘Rules for Cultural Radicals’, 542, 548, 549 and 556. D. Newbury. 2002. ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture: an Interview with Murray Martin (Amber Films and Side Photographic Gallery)’, Visual Studies 17(2), 114.   5. See, for example, M. Dickinson. 1999. ‘Amber’, in M. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI, 252.   6. Martin, speaking in Amber Dreams, a documentary about the group broadcast on Channel Four on 1 August 1992, two days before the channel showed Dream On (1991).   7. Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 117.   8. Ibid. See also M. Martin. 2001. ‘Documentary Poet’, in H. Beynon and S. Rowbotham (eds), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram, 162.   9. The programme was broadcast on 15 November 1982. Channel Four began broadcasting on 2 November 1982. 10. Channel Four Press Pack for 13 to 19 November 1982, 15. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from the British Universities Film and Video Council’s Learning On Screen website, http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/c4pp. 11. M. Martin. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10984-F10988). 12. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 13. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 162. Amber’s Graeme Rigby recalls Martin often citing the claim attributed to Anstey that there would always be a representative of the security services in the cutting rooms of the documentaries being made. J. Leggott. 2018. ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’, 1 November, Newcastle upon Tyne. 14. Amber, n.d. ‘About Amber  – Part 3’ [Video Interview with Stafford Linsley, Murray Martin and Peter Roberts], Amber Online. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www. amber-online.com/collections/about-amber-part-3/.

62  •  In Fading Light

15. Amber, ‘About Amber – Part 3’. 16. Martin, speaking in Amber Dreams. 17. Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 119. 18. J. Chambers. 2017. ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 172. 19. J. Clifford. 1986. ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 113. 20. Chambers, ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience’, 178. 21. This reading of the British New Wave films is most associated with Andrew Higson. See A. Higson. 1996. ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in A. Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 113–56. 22. Chambers, ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience’, 181. 23. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 24. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 160. 25. D. Cooper. 2015. ‘Introduction’, in D. Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation, Handsworth/Baltimore: Penguin, 11. The event took place on 15 to 30 July 1967 at the Roundhouse. 26. M. Martin. 2000. ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’ (unpublished transcript). 27. The execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém took place in Saigon on 1 February 1968. The photographs and news footage made the incident one of the most familiar images of the Vietnam conflict, and of the anti-war movement. 28. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 29. Dickinson, ‘Amber’, 249. 30. Ibid. 31. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. The only public screening in recent years that I am aware of took place on 29 May 2008, at Amber’s Side Cinema. Regent Street Polytechnic, where early members of Amber studied, would in time be absorbed within the institution now known as the University of Westminster. 32. Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories From a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 7. 33. Amber/Side. 1987. Amber/Side Catalogue, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, Film 1. 34. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 35. M. Martin. 1974. ‘Amber  – Early History’, unpublished ledger. See also Dickinson, ‘Amber’, 249. 36. The title of ‘Sair Fyeld Hinny’ can be understood as meaning ‘sorely felled, my dear’, or perhaps ‘sorely failed, my honey’. Or, in more vernacular parlance: ‘I’m knackered’. It was included in Bruce and Stokoe’s Northumbrian Minstrelsy anthology of 1882. See J.C. Bruce and J. Stokoe (eds). 1965. Northumbrian Minstrelsy: A Collection of the Ballads, Melodies and Small-Pipe Tunes of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne: Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne. The Louis Killen recording was first released on the Northumbrian Garland EP (1962). According to Amber, the impenetrability of the song would be a deciding factor in the film not being shown by the regional TV broadcaster. See Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Film 2. 37. Martin, ‘Documentary Poet’, 172. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the influence of R.G. Collingwood on Amber’s artistic philosophy.

Salvaging the Past  •  63

38. The title of the film, introduced on screen with three full stops after it, also evokes that of Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . (1968), another exploration of the clash between ‘old and new’ values, made by a director moving away from the documentary/social realism tradition towards a more politicized and experimental form. 39. Martin, ‘Amber – Early History’. 40. Peter Roberts speaking in ‘The Making of “Launch”’, 2011, video produced by the BFI. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK_ZbVSK90o. 41. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 42. I. Whitehead. 2011. ‘Tales from the Shipyard’, Tales from the Shipyard DVD booklet, 1. 43. Chambers, ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience’, 178 44. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Film 5. 45. See, for example, Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 118. 46. Chambers, ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience’, 178. 47. Martin, ‘Amber – Early History’. 48. K. Beattie. 2010. Humphrey Jennings, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 40. 49. This included the documentary film production We Are The Legionnaires (2017), made as part of Amber’s Learning and Participation Programme, involving members of the former Rising Sun Legionnaires jazz band looking back on their experiences. 50. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Film 7. 51. This story is cited often in interviews. See for example: Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 119. 52. The word ‘bait’ is a Geordie term for the food or snack taken to work. 53. M. Hunt. n.d. ‘High Row’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www. screenonline.org.uk/film/id/711799/index.html. 54. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 55. Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 119. 56. For an account of the development of the field of industrial archaeology in north-east England, see S.M. Linsley. 2000. ‘Industrial Archaeology in the North East of England’, in N. Cossons (ed.), Perspectives on Industrial Archaeology, London: Science Museum, 115–38. 57. C. Sorensen. 1989. ‘Theme Parks and Time Machines’, in P. Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, Bath: Reaktion, 68. See http://www.sam-hanna.co.uk for more information on the ‘Lowry of Filmmaking’. 58. J. Leggott. 2010. ‘Interview with Stafford Linsley’, Newcastle upon Tyne, 11 November. 59. This claim comes from the official Bowes Railway website. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://bowesrailway.uk/about. For a history of the line, see C.E. Mountford. 1976. The Bowes Line, Formerly the Pontop & Jarrow Railway, London: Industrial Railway Society and Tyne and Wear Industrial Monuments Trust. 60. R. Ashmore. 2011. ‘Landscape and Crisis in Northern England: The Representation of Communal Trauma in Film and Photography’, Ph.D. thesis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University, 184. 61. Amber, ‘About Amber – Part 3’. 62. Leggott, ‘Interview with Stafford Linsley.’ 63. Amber, ‘About Amber – Part 3’. 64. Within the UK at the time, the term had connotations as an ethnic slur. 65. See Chapter 5 for information on the significance of Live Theatre for Amber’s creative history.

64  •  In Fading Light

66. I am grateful to Graeme Rigby for this observation. He notes that in the 1990s, following a series of break-ins to Amber’s headquarters, an idea developed for a film about young burglars breaking into their ‘dusty’ archive and discovering it; this resonates with a planned (but failed) shot for Mai revealing the dust emerging from the opening of a door that had been closed for years. Rigby, personal correspondence with author. 67. Biographical information about Finglass can be found, for example, in Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Film 9–10. 68. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Film 10. 69. The film’s depiction of an elderly woman of rich biography living in a seemingly rundown home amongst the clutter of her possessions inevitably invites comparison with the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975), which depicts the sometimes odd rituals (and acquisitive habits) of an eccentric mother and daughter in their decaying mansion in East Hampton, New York. 70. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Film 10. 71. Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5. 72. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 73. For an account of the Ashington group of pitmen painters, which were also the subject of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters (2011) play, see W. Feaver. 2010. Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group, 1934–1984, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria Press. For information on the ‘settlement’ movement see N. Vall. 2003. ‘Cultural Improvers in NorthEast England, 1920–1960s: “Polishing the Pitmen”’, Northern History 41(1), 163–80. Davitt’s poetry was first published as R. Cuddling. 1977. Shipyard Muddling, Whitley Bay: Erdesdun Publications. In addition to the commissions Amber gave to Wheatley, the group’s slide-making operation, Lambton Visual Aids, made transparencies of the paintings by the ‘primitive’ painter Herbert Cooper recording aspects of his life and work in a Durham pit village. 74. Martin has described, in relation to his own family background, how ‘the working-classes do value craft above art’ but are inclined to confuse the two, assuming, for example, that ‘painting has to be a likeness’. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 75. Amber have not (to date) produced an authorized version of That’s Not Me, although it was digitized as part of the MAAS Media Online project, run by the British Universities Film and Video Council. The MAAS (Managing Agent and Advisory Service) project, which is no longer active, facilitated access by UK further and higher institutions to a range of audio-visual sources, including the Amber catalogue. 76. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 77. There is a similar incident, and thus a happenstance homage, in Like Father (2001), as discussed in Chapter 6: for club performers, bow ties are clearly something of an occupational hazard. 78. Konttinen, contribution to the ‘Tyne Deck’ section of the Idea of North exhibition held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 11 May to 30 September 2018. 79. M. Jamieson. 1979. ‘Will the Quayside Live . . .?’, Evening Chronicle, 9 August. Retrieved from Idea of North exhibition, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. 80. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 81. Chris Phipps has noted that, in its use of disembodied voices, ambient sound and occasional use of music, the soundtrack to Quayside bears comparison with the format of the sequence of Radio Ballads broadcast on BBC radio between 1958 and 1964, using a format devised by Ewan MacColl, Charles Parker and Peggy Seeger. See C. Phipps. 2016. Forget Carter: Newcastle on Film and Television, Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne Bridge Publishing, 36.

Salvaging the Past  •  65

82. Bessie Surtees’ House is now a tourist attraction and events centre looked after by Historic England: see https://historicengland.org.uk/get-involved/visit/bessie-surteeshouse/. 83. The Dog Leap Stairs were also given some national fame around this time by being alluded to in ‘Down to the Waterline’, the first song on the 1978 debut album by the rock band Dire Straits, which was inspired by the singer Mark Knopfler’s memories of the quayside area. 84. According to Peter Roberts: ‘At the presentation to the council there were objections to the imagery-shots of carcasses being delivered to butchers for example’. A comment made was that ‘It may be OK for the Straw Dogs [1971] generation’, but it clearly disappointed as a PR exercise for the planning department and was shelved. Roberts, personal correspondence with author.

Chapter 3

Can’t Beat It Alone Current Affairs and Investigations, 1982 to 1988



The early 1980s were a very fertile time for Amber. Funding from Channel Four television brought opportunities for expansion and consolidation. A newly created Current Affairs Unit produced informative and issue-led material for specific audiences, but some of this activity also fed into larger-scale feature projects. From their base in Newcastle, Amber explored the processes of industrial decline in various corners of north-east England, from Byker to Hartlepool, whilst committing to a long-term residency in one specific area of Tyneside, North Shields, so as to foster a particularly deep engagement with communities there. Following their work in Byker and Lynemouth – which would feature in Seacoal (1985) – Amber felt that they needed to base themselves in a particular community, and they had already strong connections with North Shields via their liaison with the writer Tom Hadaway and photographic projects by Isabella Jedrzejczyk, Nick Hedges and Graham Smith. In 1986, they committed to a five-year residency, which involved buying the New Clarendon pub as a social base and film location, transforming a former chapel into a studio, and, for the purpose of In Fading Light (1989), purchasing a seine netter called Sally. Produced at the end of the decade, following the success of the featurelength drama Seacoal, In Fading Light was arguably Amber’s most outwardly ‘mainstream’ fictional work to date, in terms of its stylistic and structural affiliations to existing traditions of British social realist cinema (see Chapter 5). In truth, In Fading Light was no less exploratory in its creative and production process than its precedents and was merely one manifestation of an

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  67

ongoing creative experimentation with documentary practice, which would include the films made in response to Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographs and interests (to be discussed in the next chapter), as well as the investigative ‘docudramas’ Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (1986) and T Dan Smith (1987) that are dealt with in this chapter. At this juncture, it is worth acknowledging how Amber have themselves played a part in their own critical construction through published accounts of their history, interviews for print, broadcast and scholarly media, and, particularly latterly, their films, DVD extras and online presence. It is revealing to compare and contrast, for example, the three published histories that appeared in 1987, 2005 and 2015: respectively, in the Amber/Side Catalogue, the Short History booklet included in DVD releases, and the For Ever Amber: Stories from a Film & Photography Collection brochure.1 I will return to the latter two in Chapter 7, but the 1987 catalogue has a notably schematic approach, with separate sections on individual films, the Current Affairs Unit, exhibitions and other aspects (such the wording of the ACTT Workshop Declaration, according to which Amber were producing their work). Among many things, it is a historical record of an ambitiously expansive period for the collective, but there is recognition of a likely change of emphasis, given that the ‘North East is rapidly becoming a work-less class’: ‘While continuing to celebrate the people, the group’s work is inevitably becoming socially “sharper”.’2 Here there is also a firm declaration of the group’s foundations in an ‘identification with the British Documentary Movement’, with a specific reference to Grierson’s emphasis upon the ‘creative interpretation of reality’.3 Taken as a whole, Amber’s 1980s output operates as a remarkable spectrum of possibility for the integration of fiction and non-fiction and also for the entwining of method and form. The fact that four out of the six chapters in this book deal with this period underlines its importance as a time of intense flowering of ideas, commitments and, at times, some very personal preoccupations. Whilst acknowledging some of the many connecting threads between the films covered in the next three chapters, this one will focus on the work produced that aligns with the category I would loosely describe as ‘investigation’: the output of the Current Affairs Unit, the duo of Double Vision and T Dan Smith and a remarkable collaborative exchange venture with the East German state film studio.

The Current Affairs Unit (1983 to 1987) The financial security that came with Channel Four’s support prompted Amber to establish their Current Affairs Unit in 1983, as a means to develop film and photographic work in quick response to local and current issues

68  •  In Fading Light

and to explore alternative strategies for production and distribution. A former trade union journalist (Richard Grassick) and sound recordist (Elaine Drainville) were employed full-time to lead the project; both became Amber members/partners shortly thereafter, with Drainville bringing a feminist perspective to the group’s work. Pat McCarthy took some part in establishing distribution and exhibition, and other members of Amber were involved in the development and crewing of their productions. The majority of the work was made to inspire debate around campaigning issues: namely, the outlook for the mining industry, the participation of Labour supporters in the movement during and beyond elections, the impact of privatization on hospital and local authority workers, the historic pacifism movement and the anti-nuclear movement. That they speak from a position on the Left, and demonstrate a sympathy with trade unions and the Labour movement, is hardly surprising. However, Amber have stressed that they have ‘never been party political’ nor affiliated themselves collectively with the Labour Party.4 Given that these films were necessarily made speedily, not all of ‘broadcast standard’, and targeted at specific audiences, it stands to reason that they require a mode of analysis that prioritizes function over aesthetics. As Sean Cubitt has noted, ‘the machinery of auteurism clearly breaks down at the junction with process video, where the purpose of the work involved is not to end with a product but to provide a mode of access and engagement in cultural practice for as many people as possible’.5 To bracket this body of work away from Amber’s broader output is to risk overlooking the significant threads that connect the two. For example, the films anticipating and responding to the miners’ strike of 1984–85 sit chronologically between the 1970s shorts celebrating the places and people of traditional industry and the later ‘coalfield’ feature films that reflect on the long-term impact of Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of the miners: as ‘present tense’ statements of current concern, they stand in contrast with the retrospection and creative framings of the others. Other connections come via reused and repurposed footage. For instance, archival newsreel footage of Lord Robens, chairman of the National Coal Board, arriving by ‘basket’ at an undersea boring tower off the coast of County Durham is first introduced by Richard Grassick as a piece of ‘nostalgia’ in Where Are We Going (1983).6 It then reappears, twice, in Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (1986): however, its mockery there by the TV journalist character Ray  – ‘­unemployment kept on going up, and so did Alf ’  – does not impress his producer, who eventually pulls the plug on Ray’s overly partisan approach. Material gathered by the Unit relating to women’s support groups for the striking miners, which appears in Why Support the Miners (1984) and Can’t Beat It Alone (1985), would have a prominent role in the feature The Scar (1997), in which its main protagonist, May, watches this archival footage

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  69

with real-life campaigners, who recognize themselves on screen: typical of Amber’s blurring of drama and documentary, The Scar includes some ersatz video material among the images and sounds familiar from the previous films as a way to insert a fictional character within the historical record (see Chapter 6). An early project for the Unit was the researching of the life and family history of the Tyneside pacifist Jack Sadler (1887–1960), which culminated in The Sadler Story (1985) but also fostered a working relationship with the former politician T Dan Smith, who is credited as one of the advisers on the film. Interviews carried out during this period with Smith and his former council colleagues would provide the research spine for the docudrama T Dan Smith (1987) and later be included in detail in the documentary Mouth of the Tyne (2009). The Unit’s output would take a range of forms, from short ‘trigger’ videos designed to stimulate public discussion, to longer documentaries that would be aired on television and, as a final project, a ‘soap’ series of interlinked dramas. But considered in isolation, the Unit’s work coheres around the question of how best to tailor production to audiences with an interest in actively using it. A key early film, News From Durham (1983), uses footage from that year’s Durham Miners’ Gala and a weekend school held shortly after in Durham where speakers raised concerns about closures of ‘uneconomic’ pits. Twelve minutes in length, and using excerpts from a contemporary pop song (Heaven 17’s ‘Crushed by the Wheels of Industry’, 1983) over an archival sequence of coal mining, News From Durham was ‘designed for an audience of young mineworkers’.7 An expanded version, Where Are We Going (1983), of thirty-five minutes duration, assumes a greater level of patience for speeches and historical facts and uses a commentary by the industrial sociologist Huw Beynon to explain the key discussion points of the weekend school. At the beginning, Richard Grassick introduces himself and notes that the summer school raised more questions than answers, and he directly addresses his viewers, as members of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), to enter into a dialogue with the film. For Grassick, a key concern when devising and delivering this work had been how to ‘bring together the sharpness of inquiry with grass roots activity’.8 By the early 1980s, as Julian Petley observes, trade unions and pressure groups were beginning to ‘discover the potential of film and video for informational and agitation purposes’,9 and debates emerged around the possibilities for oppositional media activities through connections between organized labour and independent film and programme makers.10 Examples such as Leeds Animation Workshop’s Council Matters (1983), commissioned by Sheffield City Council as part of a campaign against government cuts, and Trade Films’ Under the Law (1983), about the history of legal constraints on the labour movement, evidence how ‘a network of independent film

70  •  In Fading Light

and video workshops had come to constitute a quite distinct, alternative media sector’.11 The principles of Amber’s Unit took shape partly against this backdrop of workshop activism and in light of the distributional possibilities afforded by accessible video production, but also in relation to the intellectual analyses of mainstream media perhaps most associated with the Glasgow Media Group, which had formed in 1974 and had gained some reputation by the early 1980s for their ongoing analysis of the values and biases shaping television news.12 By their nature, the Unit films work to counter the discourses of the mainstream print and broadcast media; Why Support the Miners, for example, offers some challenges to criticisms made of the miners and their strike. Although not usually categorized by Amber as a production by the Unit, the animation The Box (1986), made by Judith Tomlinson, considers how sensationalist crime drama and reportage – the ‘bad news’ of violence, terrorism, riots etc. – can exacerbate feelings of isolation and worry; it depicts an elderly woman making her way through an overwhelmingly hostile urban landscape of repetitious shapes and abrasive tones and radio bursts. The purpose of Behind the Vote (1984), made in collaboration with Swingbridge Video, about the successful campaign by Tony Benn to win the Chesterfield by-election of 1984, was to educate Labour Party members about election campaigning, and it includes some elucidation strategies used to deal with and circumnavigate an unsympathetic media (the video originally came accompanied with a set of User’s Notes, with discussion questions). The series of trigger material known as the Privatisation Tapes (1986), a set of bespoke videos warning of the local consequences of privatization, includes one entitled ‘The Awareness Campaign’, which gives an overview of the project in question but also documents how Amber’s videos were used to initiate debate. Although framed as a ‘contribution to the debate about the use of video by trade unions’,13 ‘The Awareness Campaign’ now also leaves for posterity a record of the Unit’s own developing strategies. The level of authorial self-reflection creeping into Amber’s feature films of this period, which would often dramatize processes of research and intervention, would naturally have been inappropriate within the work of the Current Affairs Unit. It is interesting that Double Vision and T Dan Smith are predicated around conflicted journalist characters, albeit ones working for the mainstream media, and to observe that Amber’s increased turn towards self-reflexivity in their feature work occurred simultaneously with the Unit’s directives towards increasing media and political literacy. In the spirit of transparency, and of opening their archives as a historical resource, Amber’s website today hosts some of the ‘rushes’ or research material that certain Unit films took shape out of. For example, there is plentiful footage of the miners’ summer school presentations and discussions of 1983 and 1984.

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  71

For the latter, there is a record of a session on the failings of the media in reporting the industrial dispute then taking place, in which Amber’s own Richard Grassick addresses a sceptical audience of NUM members with a diagnosis of possibilities and constraints for any alternative voice.14 Even within this material, though, there are reminders that even the rawest of audio-visual record does not always escape editorializing. During one of the school presentations that might charitably be described as enervating, the camera operator – usually an impartial observer directing attention towards speakers – alights upon an audience member falling asleep and holds upon him in tight close-up until his eyes dart open. Mischievous, yes, but very much in line with the suggestion, often found in Amber’s work, that humour can co-exist with desperation and struggle. The ‘trigger’ tapes produced by Amber were in line with an established tradition, particularly among makers of community videos, for ‘non-didactic presentations of situations’ that speak outside of a predetermined moral position and which, ‘through screening, create a space to question the status quo’.15 Julian Petley has calculated that there were upwards of forty films and videos produced during the miners’ strike alone.16 Indeed, the most famous, garlanded and critically discussed trigger films of the period were the socalled Miners’ Campaign Tapes, a series of six videos made during the time of the strike. A deliberately partisan response to the lack of impartiality on the part of the National Coal Board (NCB) and the mainstream media (with the exception of Channel Four, one should say), and to promote the case of the NUM, they were initiated, and then overseen, by Chris Reeves and Platform Films, who edited the tapes out of material supplied by a nationwide network of regional film and video workshops, including Amber, Trade Films (Gateshead), Open Eye Film and Video Workshop (Liverpool), Birmingham Film and Video Workshop, and others. Accounts suggest that somewhere between four and five thousand copies of each of the three tapes (each had two films on it) were in circulation in the UK;17 their international distribution to Europe, US, Japan and Australia also helped raised donations for the cause. According to Amber, their News From Durham served as a template for the form taken by the Miners’ Campaign Tapes, which, aside from the two dealing directly with the topic of media bias (‘Straight Speaking’ and ‘The Lie Machine’), are arranged in a similarly collage-like style, using some music, graphics and archival footage but otherwise are geared towards ‘talking head’ testimony from miners and women. Material from Amber, including footage used in News From Durham, was incorporated into the second (particularly) and third of the tapes: the former closes with Peter Heathfield’s rhetorical question ‘which pit is safe?’, also heard in News, and borrows from that film’s use of specific pop music. The formal and philosophical alignment between the Tapes and the work of the Current Affairs Unit, at least in its early stage,

72  •  In Fading Light

can thus be tested by way of the scholarly consensus that the Tapes stand as ‘much as a part of a strike as a representation of it’18 and were ‘documents, not news’19, their standard ‘not that of information, but of participation’.20 As the flagship works of the era’s ‘alternative media’ activism, the Tapes have tended to be placed in a continuum between the Soviet agitprop cinema and Workers Film and Photo League activities (in the UK and US) of the 1930s and the ‘kinds of radical and alternative journalism which today finds a home largely on the Internet’.21 For David E. James, the preoccupation with ‘speech’ would invest the Tapes, and hence Amber’s work under discussion here, with the ‘traditional orality of popular culture and vivacity of miners’ language’ whilst opening them up to charges of ‘naive and artless realism’.22 Katy Shaw argues that, rather than being ‘low key’, the style of the Tapes ‘provides the impression of great drama and high tension’.23 Indeed, News From Durham, despite being far cruder technically than other Amber work, shows some sensitivity to the generation of mood and interest in its prophecy of the upcoming dispute. It begins with a low-angle static image of an isolated man in an ordinarylooking red-brick housing estate, accompanied by the first few seconds of the Dire Straits song ‘Private Investigations’ (1982), a disquietingly sustained, low synthesized note. The tension is broken by the flooding of a lively crowd into shot, followed by a brass band, whose evocatively organic, traditional music is now heard instead, thus conveying the appeal and heritage of labour traditions. Later, in a piece of associative editing reminiscent of Soviet montage, footage of crowds at the Durham Gala is interrupted by ‘flashes’, almost subliminal at first, of a bulldozer destroying a pithead, before the footage is fully shown, now replacing the brass band background with the drones and abstract mechanical noises from the beginning of the Heaven 17 song. In this way, the ‘threat’ is rendered visually and sonically in anticipation of an upcoming speech by Kim Howells warning of the ‘tricks’ pulled by the NCB to identify ‘uneconomic’ pits. Although evidently instrumental in the evolution of the Miners’ Campaign Tapes, the later output of the Unit demonstrates a shifting approach to the ‘trigger’ strategy. The ten-minute-long Why Support the Miners was designed to be used at public collecting points organized by support groups during the strike. It is fast-edited and attention-grabbing, using the testimonies of supporters to persuade the directly addressed ‘unsure’ viewer, who may share some of the concerns and criticisms. However, the two films that were shown on Channel Four television, Beyond the Vote and Can’t Beat It Alone have the broader remit of encouraging active involvement in Labour or campaigning movements.24 Beyond the Vote derives from Amber’s documentation of the 1983 Chesterfield by-election, but whereas the affiliated film Behind the Vote concentrates on Labour’s campaigning strategy, this film follows the spirit

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  73

of it, by moving beyond the ‘media circus’, which has focused around Tony Benn as political personality, and instead concentrating mostly on ‘ordinary’ voters and active participants in the movement. Divided into subsections, and with a consistency of tone, not least through Grassick’s measured voiceover, and regular bursts of upbeat blues music, Beyond the Vote is an authoritatively constructed report that makes the case, in the words of one of its contributors, that ‘politics is people’. In contrast, Can’t Beat It Alone, which considers how a disparate range of activist groups are united around a resistance to the ‘nuclear underworld’ (as described by one participant), avoids the ‘journalistic’ elements of voice-over and archival packages in favour of an anthology-like approach of different campaigns and concerns being considered in turn, including: women protestors at Greenham Common, a CND rally in Newcastle, women’s support groups for the striking miners, environmental campaigners against the planned Druridge Bay power station and a Billingham group protesting against nuclear dumping. The separate sections are quite variable in terms of shooting quality. The occasionally shaky Greenham Common material is obviously more ‘grabbed’ than, for example, the footage of the CND march, which includes an artful pan from a showroom dummy in a shop window to the marchers in the street: there are similarly contrived ‘reflection’ devices in Byker (1983). With its forty-five-minute duration, Can’t Beat It Alone is democratically able to give equal platform to all its parties, but it resists the danger of becoming a compilation of discrete material through two means in particular. Firstly, it begins with footage of a pop concert where a band sings a punky, uplifting anti-nuclear song, which includes the title of the film as its chorus, followed by a discussion among a group of young people in a bar, the continuation of the song underneath implying that they are or were audience members. Shot in tight close-ups, the young people, of student age, introduce the key theme of the film that ‘everything is inter-linked’ through the connections they make between the ‘floating battleship’ of Britain, the coal industry and the achievements of women’s campaign groups. The second device, which visually confirms this thesis, is to link the sections by way of zooms or cuts to television sets in the different locations covered showing footage from previous or upcoming sections. So, for example, an image from the CND march we have just seen is shown on a small screen in a shed on the picket line for Easington Colliery. There is also a structural logic at work in the film’s movement away from less overtly strident or well-known campaigns, such as Greenham Common, towards less obvious and formerly more modest pockets of resistance, like the ‘quiet, suburban people’25 leading the Billingham anti-nuclear group. In 1985, Amber decided to revise its approach to video production so as to target specific local audiences via already established exhibition and

74  •  In Fading Light

distribution networks. The Privatisation series of tapes were initiated through an approach to Tyneside Borough Council’s Joint Trade Union Committee, who were launching a campaign against the likely introduction of compulsory privatization of the local authority and hospital service. After two trigger tapes were made for discussion, a series of related ones, drawing upon the same well of material, were produced for other regional campaigns. Amber claimed some success for the project in raising awareness among workers of the issues under discussion and how they would affect their specific job and workplace. The Shields Stories project of 1987 had an equivalently local focus in addressing inhabitants of North Shields, where Amber had by now established a residency. The series of ten interlinked mini-dramas (of around ten minutes in length)  – featuring the group’s repertory of performers26 and scripted by writers (Tom Hadaway, Kitty Fitzgerald, Steve Trafford) involved concurrently with other feature-film projects  – dealt with issues of community concern such as debt and the benefits of credit unions, adult and child literacy, teenage pregnancy, unemployment, truancy, solvent abuse, school dinner subsidy and hospital closure. The episodes are very attentive to geographical, cultural and linguistic accuracy whilst dramatizing moral dilemmas and promoting strategies for activism and self-improvement. In ‘Hot Dogs’, for example, a recurring character called Betty (Amber Styles), forced by a loan shark to sell food outside a school, is confronted by a friend who works in the school kitchen: Betty’s actions could result in the loss of her job. The solution is for Betty, her friend and her colleagues to push the van into the river. In ‘Accident’, an elderly woman (Gwen Doran) falls in the street, leading to a heated exchange between her friend (Tom Hadaway) and an ambulance driver about the ‘rules’ under which he has to operate. Cracking a joke that requires some local knowledge to unpick, the driver (Brian Hogg) comments that following the closure of the hospital in the neighbouring Whitley Bay (considered by some North Shields residents as demographically alien) ‘all you get there now is a gold-plated luxury limousine’. In defence of criticisms of the ‘boss state’, he notes: ‘if you and folks like you had made your gobs go when we had a public enquiry, Whitley Bay station might not be closed.’ The episodes often dramatize, in this manner, the tensions between the individual and the state, and between self-interest and the wider good, not always finding clear solutions to the difficulties faced by characters faced with debt, unemployment or ill health. For the exhibition of the Shields Stories, there was a plan for the local authority to invest in a video circuit for venues such as waiting rooms at unemployment centres. However, the strategy was undone by a new law preventing local authorities from being involved in ‘political activity’, although some workplace showings were arranged through trade unions.27 Whilst it is therefore hard to assess their success as ‘trigger’ works, they have

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  75

retrospective value as miniaturist sketches towards later feature films, and Dream On (1991) in particular, in placing emphasis upon the supportive bonds of intergenerational female friendship, and, in the style of all the British soap operas of the era, exploiting the symbolic as well as practical potential of the pub (Amber’s own New Clarendon) as community hub: the last episode, ‘Pregnancy’, includes extensive sequences of singing, a motif that connects Dream On with Byker and a few other Amber works. There are extra-textual pleasures too in seeing familiar locations and members of the Amber company, some performing roles that echo or anticipate others; for example, Art Davies’ landlord/loan-shark figure here will reappear in Dream On. Shields Stories was the last work badged as a Current Affairs production. The closure of the Unit as a discrete entity was bound up with various factors, including the stalling of a plan for a Europe-wide workshop agreement, but perhaps most significantly the group’s retreat from their expansive trajectory of the early 1980s. Describing the period following the end of the miners’ strike, Murray Martin said that ‘there wasn’t a lot of work to be done . . . and the group were in serious debates about pulling back from that amount of energy and work . . . and we agreed that we would spend more time domestically’.28 From the late 1980s, Amber’s more streamlined approach would result in a focus upon, firstly, their North Shields residency, Martin’s own interest in the ‘trotting horse’ community, and then later an engagement with the former coalfield areas of County Durham.

Investigative Docudrama: Double Vision (1986) and T Dan Smith (1987) In the mid 1980s, Amber made a related pair of films as part of their ongoing, if sporadic, cycle of profiles of individuals who had either inspired them or fascinated them in some way. These works share an interest in people closely identified with a particular place: in Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool, the boxing coach George Bowes, ‘Mr Hartlepool’, famed for training successful professional fighters from the Teesside area, and in T Dan Smith: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Utopia (to give the film its full if rarely used title) the eponymous disgraced politician, known to many as ‘Mr Newcastle’. Both are framed as investigations by journalist characters (played by members of the Amber team) with ambivalent attitudes to their subjects and comparably fuse documentary and dramatized elements in a way that raises questions about impartiality, representation and ethics. In Double Vision, the journalist character, instructed by his boss to merely ‘skim the surface’ of the subject of the Hartlepool boxing community, sarcastically vows not

76  •  In Fading Light

to ‘jeopardize anything by any attempt at being profound’. Ultimately, T Dan Smith emerges as the more ‘profound’ of the two films, with its longer running time, more complex structure, more charismatic (or at least loquacious) subject and more thorough engagement with Amber’s previous work and preoccupations. However, Double Vision is in many respects a pathfinder for the second film’s self-reflexive strategies, and in its diagnosis of the limited avenues for working-class masculinity in the age of deindustrialization it anticipates some of the key concerns of British film and television culture of the forthcoming decades, including work by Amber themselves. Double Vision also warrants recognition as one of the surprisingly rare examples of British films about boxing, given the sport’s popularity, and the number of well-known examples relating to other sports and athletic achievements, from Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1981) to Bend it Like Beckham (Chadha, 2002). The most significant of these have made ‘connections to class, poverty and social realism’, 29 with Shane Meadows’ Twenty Four Seven (1997), about a coach inspiring the improvement of unemployed youths, very much in consort with Double Vision’s multi-angled investigation of the sport’s potential for cultivating communal identity. Double Vision Double Vision was developed by Peter Roberts and Murray Martin with the writer Tom Hadaway. Its title refers to one of the numerous occupational hazards for boxers mentioned during the course of the film but also acknowledges its main character’s ambivalence towards the sport, as well as Amber’s tactic of creatively narrativizing documentary material. In what we might take as a loose re-creation of Amber’s own history of engagement with the Hartlepool boxing fraternity, Double Vision begins by showing its fictional journalist, Ray (Ray Stubbs), watching archive footage of mining and marvelling at the physicality of the men. As he gets the train from Newcastle to Hartlepool, notebook in hand, we hear via voice-over his diaristic sketches for a possible report: ‘So, in the beginning there is fascination for what may be achieved by the physical man. Like the bridges of Tyne, hammered and riveted into their monumental elegance. But what to do with redundant men? Bloody hell, boxing!’ This line of commentary  – an amalgam of the philosophical, the prosaic and literary (there are references to Eugene O’Neill, for example) – is sustained throughout the film, and a slight self-indulgence creeps in when Ray congratulates himself for an apposite turn of phrase; observing the training methods of George Bowes, he muses that the art of management is to ‘convince the ordinary talent that it is capable of extraordinary achievement, and being prepared to live for disappointment. And a preparation for disappointment is a belief in tomorrow . . . that’s not bad!’

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  77

Ray’s investigation follows the kind of process, in miniature, that Amber would characteristically undertake in their exploration of a place, a person or a skill. Beginning with ‘fascination’ for masculine environments, Ray’s contacts lead him to an ex-boxer called Ron (played by Sammy Johnson, an Amber regular and before that a co-performing musician with Ray Stubbs). As a gateway to the community, Ron provides access to the gym where George Bowes trains young boxers, some with enthusiasm for the sport, others in the hope of financial security. The film weaves together footage of matches and rigorous instruction with more obviously scripted and schematic scenes of dialogue between Ray and Ron, set against backdrops of dereliction and dying industry. Ron warns Ray that his line of enquiry with the men may be too invasive and that his preordained thesis about boxing as being an outlet for wasted, redundant ‘muscle’, and an inevitably exploitative and pointless endeavour, is demeaning and wide of the mark. A keynote sequence involves the two men in a loaded conversation at a coastal spot that looks onto the Blackhall Colliery where Bowes formerly worked. As Bowes leads his group of lads in a rigorous jogging session past them, Ray talks about the confluence he sees between the ‘Peter Pan’-like Bowes, the ‘unluckiest man not to be world champion’, and Hartlepool itself, which ‘could have been the greatest seaport in Europe’: ‘When you’ve done everything to deserve success, it’s like hope never dies.’ Ron, for his part, has a more entrepreneurial, quasiThatcherite take on the sport as an illustration of the ‘survival of the fittest’. He elaborates on this argument by taking Ray to visit a fisherman friend (the Amber member Tom Hadaway in a brief cameo) who corroborates a story of a fish-filleter who carved off a crooked finger to increase productivity; Ray is more concerned with what becomes of the rejected fish parts. As a surrogate for the Amber team, Ray cuts an ambiguous figure. A sympathetic reading of his ‘heightened’ prose style is that, like the film itself, it lends interest and complexity to a work and/or leisure activity that is generally stereotyped in more simple, demotic terms. Ray excavates the language of the sport for its figurative potential, noting that words such as ‘eliminator’ and ‘knock out’, as connotative of the worlds of education and industry as they are of this particular sport, denote the ‘currency of power’. But if Ray’s poetically inclined commentary fosters a sense of aloofness from his subjects, it is also noticeable that he rarely shares the frame with them. For example, in one gym sequence, Ray and Bows share an un-characterful exchange while the latter uses a punchbag; we then see them standing together briefly before attention turns to Ray alone musing (via the voice-over) on old match posters on the wall. If the fictional and ‘documentary’ elements stand slightly at variance at times, one might make the same claim for the film more generally within the Amber oeuvre: despite the involvement of some of the Amber ‘repertory company’ of recurring performers in minor and major

78  •  In Fading Light

roles, Double Vision has fewer connective strands to other projects than the majority of Amber films (although there would be boxing scenes in Shooting Magpies, 2005). In placing Amber’s ‘surrogate’ character somewhat perpendicular to the environment under scrutiny in the film, Double Vision does acknowledge its makers’ conflicted attitude. However, this also generates a set of dialectical tensions, ultimately left unresolved, between language and embodiment and between reflection and action. Significantly, the film itself tends to detach the bodies of George and his protégées from their speech. Some of the speakers are introduced and identified via preceding comments made by Ron or Ray, with their voices separated from their visual representation. Furthermore, like the voice-over comments by Ray, many of these ‘testimonies’ have a slight ‘echoing’ resonance, with no ambient noise around them, suggesting that they have been recorded ‘professionally’ rather than in situ in home or training places; the credits indicate that these are actually the voices of other performers, rather than the men themselves. From the very start, with Ray’s ‘fascinated’ response to imagery of traditional masculine work and endeavour setting him on his journey to Hartlepool, the film asks a question that cuts to the very heart of Amber’s entire project: how can the artist, or the documentarian, understand and represent physical labour? Accused by Ron of being fundamentally disapproving of the sport of boxing, Ray claims that ‘he’s not a judge but a witness’, but even though he considers what he’s seen through a shifting lens (for example, reflecting upon the quasi-parental role of the trainer, or the religious aura of the sport’s rituals), it is doubtful whether he achieves true objectivity. Double Vision concludes with Ray and Ron in attendance at a highly formal match some distance from Hartlepool, a ‘boozy night’, according to Ron, where ‘blokes come . . . to see heads get cracked’, but which offers money, experience and potential fame. They repair to an otherwise empty bar for their final discussion. Disgusted by the ‘elite’ audience, Ray argues that, for the fighters who may be already tired from their day jobs, the work, despite its remuneration, is exploitative and dangerous. Sensitive perhaps to the exclusively male terrain of the film’s subject, Double Vision gives its final word of wisdom to a female waitress (Annie Orwin), in the upstairs bar, who comments wryly that she ‘thought the fights were downstairs’. In response to Ray’s reading of this corporate event as an emblem of class repression, she echoes what Ron has already said: ‘it’s just people’ – an echo of the ‘politics is people’ idea cited earlier from Beyond the Vote. This final summing-up has the air of a credo: yes, Double Vision has considered the Hartlepool boxing community from a number of interpretive angles, but it returns to the creative starting point of a group of individuals and their stories. As Ray exits the frame, he passes two well-dressed men who make a reference to Martin

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  79

Scorsese’s boxing biopic Raging Bull (1980) and then boozily impersonate a bull and toreador. It is curious that Double Vision should make a cinematic allusion so near its end, but as the credits roll over victory footage from the match we are left with a cluster of evocations of stylized, ritualized violence. Although this concluding passage alternated between Ron and Ray’s discussion, and footage of a real match, it is clear that the most significant adversarial bouts here are not those in the ring but taking place around it. Earlier in Double Vision, the boxer George Feeney is quoted as saying that he ‘boxes for Hartlepool’ – that is, his career offers pride and inspiration to those in his town. However, by the end of the film, we see another meaning to its subtitle: that of an ongoing tussle by commentators, including a riven Amber themselves, over how to judge the town’s status as a breeding ground for successful boxers in relation to broader socio-economic and political forces. There is a battle over representation and media visibility too; Ray and his editor have squabbled over the ‘poetical’ approach, and the inclusion of politically sensitive material, but the upshot is that the film is pulled from broadcast in favour of one concerning Tunbridge Wells. ‘It’s the two nations’, says Ray, resignedly: ‘I can understand that’. T Dan Smith When T Dan Smith died in July 1993, his obituary in The Guardian led with the following thumbnail assessment: T Dan Smith, who has died aged 78, was a political upstart from the regions who bucked the system and then conned it to good measure. He also possessed a genuine vision of social change and regional development, and it is a tribute to his boundless energy that the image of rat-infested tenements is no longer synonymous with the Scotswood Road, Newcastle.30

Born in Wallsend in 1915, this ‘socialist entrepreneur’31 identified himself in early years (and indeed throughout his life) as a Trotskyite, but his decidedly capitalist activities, particularly his decorating activities, led to the sobriquet ‘One Coat Dan’, which stuck well into his political career, along with other nicknames deployed by both friends and foes, such as ‘Mr Newcastle’, ‘Mouth of the Tyne’ and ‘The Man with the Plan’. By the early 1950s, Smith had become a Labour councillor; his party gained control of Newcastle in 1957, and for the next few years, as leader of the council, as well as chairman of Housing and Planning committees, the charismatic Smith became a major figure on the regional and national stage. His planned transformation of an industrial landscape into a modern metropolis, by way of tower blocks, precincts and motorways was, in effect, a ‘conjur[ing] of the North

80  •  In Fading Light

as modernity’.32 Exhaustively profiled by the media, the all-powerful Smith even provoked comparisons with Mayor Daley of Chicago.33 However, his downfall came through his involvement with the newly emerging field of public relations and his links with the architect John Poulson. In 1974, Smith was jailed on corruption charges for six years; the bankruptcy of Poulson had revealed a web of bribery, involving money paid by Poulson into Smith’s companies being used to entice a number of councillors nationwide into awarding building contracts to Poulson. Also leading to the resignation of the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, formerly chairman of some Poulson companies, the scandal had the makings of ‘another Watergate’.34 Writing their contemporaneous account of the Poulson affair in 1981, the journalists Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor said of Smith that ‘as a socialist hero, he had so much to offer and yet sold out for cash, for equity shares and the rest of the pickings from the capitalist system’.35 Yet they quote an un-repentant Smith’s rebuttal that his work with Poulson was intended as a vehicle for his grand projects to ‘to build up the economy of the North East; to try to establish provincialism and regionalism’.36 The readers’ letters published in The Guardian in response to the obituary quoted above – which cite conspiracy theories about Smith as fall-guy to the Establishment, and argue how his ‘back-handers’ of the 1970s would be considered legitimate entrepreneurialism in the 1980s  – are easy proof of his contested reputation. A ‘visionary rogue’ of received wisdom,37 Smith’s achievements as ‘combative moderniser’ understandably continue to stir debate.38 His vision of Newcastle as a potential ‘Brasilia of the North’ – for T.E. Faulkner, a ‘phrase surely born out of the very parochialism and insularity which it purported to oppose’ 39 – captured the popular imagination at the time. With hindsight, his plans for science and educational quarters, and the transformation of the city by ‘signature architects’, to some degree anticipated recent transformations, such as the redevelopment of the city quayside.40 Revisionist profiles, such as Chris Foote-Wood’s biography of 2010, have concurred with Smith’s claims of honest motivations and emphasized how, in a short timeframe, he ‘transformed Newcastle upon Tyne from a backward-looking, decaying and neglected city into a dynamic, modern metropolis’.41 Owen Hatherley has summed up Smith as the ‘missing link between Marxism and Mandelsonism’, the ‘ultimate political curate’s egg: fascinating and charismatic, creator of an impressive but often despised landscape . . . a corrupt mandarin who intended to create a decentralized socialist Britain’.42 As the ‘legendary embodiment of the betrayal of working-class hopes and aspirations’, 43 the Smith/Poulson corruption scandal was also the prime inspiration for Peter Flannery’s highly regarded ‘state of the nation’ drama Our Friends in the North, broadcast in nine episodes by the BBC in 1996, and with the character of Austin Donaghue (Alun Armstrong) as a thinly

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  81

disguised Smith. Fitzwalter and Taylor conclude their Web of Corruption (1981) with the doleful thought that the scandal was likely to ‘undermine public confidence in Britain’s elected leaders’.44 According to Michael Eaton in his book on Our Friends in the North, Flannery, whose grandfather had been one of the Jarrow Marchers, had been ‘frustrated by what he saw as his own father’s lack of activism and disillusionment with the political process’ and set out to dramatize this trajectory from idealism to disillusionment and explore the psychological fallout from corruption, initially in a ‘Brechtian’ stage play (1982) and then via a more expansive and naturalistic television series taking its characters through the Thatcherite and New Labour eras.45 Amber’s interest in Smith, and in unravelling the myths around him, came about during their Byker and Quayside projects, which dealt directly with the impact of his slum-clearing and architectural vision.46 Over a three-year period, Amber interviewed the post-prison Smith at length, after having involved him in the research for The Sadler Story (1985). The relationship forged with Smith, who saw the process as ‘redemptive’,47 became that of ‘mutual respect’ tinged with ‘healthy scepticism’,48 as Amber retained ‘doubts and anxieties’ about Smith’s testimony and how to document it.49 And thus the multilayered, ‘self-reflexive’ 50 form of the resulting feature-length film, acclaimed as ‘one of the most innovative and challenging documentaries to have been broadcast in Britain’,51 was chosen not as an intellectual exercise in postmodernism but as the ‘most effective way of creating insight into what [Smith] represented as a phenomenon, personally and politically’.52 In T Dan Smith, Amber’s Murray Martin and Steve Trafford (a writer associated with the radical theatre group Red Ladder, and brought in for his dramatic expertise) play versions of themselves, programme-makers debating Smith’s innocence and how to construct a documentary profile of him. We see them in the editing room looking at archival material, including Amber’s own interviews with Smith and former colleagues, but also showing and discussing the material with Smith himself and making their way to visit their interviewees. As the film progresses, attention turns towards Smith’s interpretation of the ‘privy council’ as a power above parliament reaching into all aspects of British public life, the likely reasons for his prosecution, and the contemporary abuse of privilege by MPs. A final strand, or layer, of the film is a ‘schematic’ drama53 about a Smith-like figure called Alan Deal (Art Davies), a council leader in contemporary Newcastle whose dodgy dealings are exposed in a corruption scandal involving a crooked architect and a local MP. Although T Dan Smith is arguably no more elaborate in its fusion of fictional and non-fictional forms than other work of the era such as Byker (1983) or Seacoal (1985), it is likely that its reputation as ‘one of Amber’s most ambitious and experimental projects’54 derives from its overtly deconstructive tactics, in asserting to the viewer that any portrait of Smith,

82  •  In Fading Light

Figure 3.1  Murray Martin, T Dan Smith and Steve Trafford during the making of T Dan Smith (1987). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

including its own, has no claim to impartiality. Smith is even captured on screen (in response to vox-pop footage of Newcastle residents disagreeing on the nature of his guilt and legacy) acknowledging that ‘the complexity of the role I played is one I wouldn’t expect anyone to understand simply’. The sequences showing ‘Murray’ and ‘Steve’ (I will henceforth use these first names to differentiate these performances from the ‘real’ Martin and Trafford) constructing their documentary quickly establish that the former has greater ambition than the standard ‘investigative’ approach to a story of ‘crooks and corruption’, speculating on Smith being ‘fitted up’ by MI5 and encouraging an exploratory attitude to their interviewing of their subject. Stressing that this story is not just about innocence or guilt, Murray implores Steve to ‘let it rove, see where it takes us: let him talk’. This organic approach is naturally familiar to anyone cognisant with Martin’s own philosophy of establishing dialogue and keeping an open mind. We can also see here an accelerated depiction of Martin’s own apparent fascination with Smith  – a pariah figure among the Left following his disgrace who he nevertheless praised in a short obituary published in The Independent as a ‘working-class hero’.55 It is evident that Smith was, in a similar way to Warren Coulson in The Pursuit of Happiness (see Chapter 7), an autobiographical metaphor for Martin, at the ‘height of his wheeling, dealing and politicking’.56 T Dan Smith certainly invites the informed viewer to locate parallels between Smith and Martin, both ‘leader’ figures gathering tight-knit bands of comrades – according to Smith’s famous formula, it only takes ‘ten men’ – or possibly just six – for a project to succeed. Indeed, Martin himself seemed to suggest that splitting the difference was ideal: I once in my vague past . . . read a book on collectives which said . . . no group over eight ever survived, because of communication problems. And the one

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  83

time we expanded beyond eight and became quite big . . . we then departmentalized . . . and we thought this is not how we want to work.57

Similarly, Smith’s decision, despite apparent opportunities for a role in central government, to be a ‘provincial who would stay at home and make regionalism work’ 58 has a very loose artistic equivalent in Amber’s commitment to the North East. In pursuit of their story, Steve and Murray at one point go to the Houses of Parliament to interview the MP Dennis Skinner and are shown pacing a little self-consciously through an atmospherically sun-dappled Westminster Hall, making glancing and watch-checking movements. According to Trafford, this was shot ‘guerilla-style’, without permission, hence the nervous energy.59 But it is tempting to see these corridors of power as stand-ins for the actual funders of the film, the British Film Institute and Channel Four, symbolic spaces of ‘power’ that are invaded and utilized by the canny ‘outsider’ filmmakers. Martin has described the ‘film within a film’, depicting the days leading up to the arrest of the surrogate Smith character, as being in the form of a ‘stylised TV thriller’ and in a ‘television noir style’.60 These sequences, with their heightened performances, dialogue, lighting schemes and composition, do resort to ‘thriller’ shorthand, in a manner that frustrates easy interpretation of their meaning within the film as a whole. The character names emphasize their schematic function: the corrupt politician Deal, the duplicitous architect Jack Cross (Dave Hill) and the patrician MP granted immunity by the powers-that-be Jeremy Maudsley-Long (Christopher Northey). The ‘hardboiled’ dialogue (‘He’ll open up the cesspit . . . and we’ll all be in the shit’ etc.) teeters on the edge of parody at times, as if critiquing the ‘generic’ television drama or docudrama’s resort to sensationalism and flattening out of complexity. On the other hand, the inclusion of these scenes works to break up the potential monotony of ‘talking head’ material to convey the contemporary relevance of the Smith story and, through an emphasis upon Deal’s queasy experience of a ‘tightening net’, to (in Martin’s words) evoke sensations of ‘fear, secrecy, suspense and danger, whilst at the same time engaging them in a more objective consideration of the “serious” issues at the centre of the film’.61 Furthermore, if the film is to be taken as a serious portrait of its subject, who allegedly told Peter Flannery that a drama about his career would need to be ‘of Shakespearean proportions’,62 then the lightly fictionalized re-creation of it here might be regarded as an expression of Smith’s own self-dramatization and tendency for ‘overblown rhetoric’.63 By giving prominence to the impact of Deal’s downfall upon his wife (Kay Wright), these scenes also emphasize the domestic implications of disgrace, a subject only hinted at elsewhere in the film: Amber were aware of Smith’s feelings about the effect of his downfall upon his wife Ada. To some extent,

84  •  In Fading Light

these also alleviate concerns that this is, at a time when Amber are becoming increasingly sensitive to gender politics, a story about the exclusively ‘male’ sphere of public office. In a further complication, the sequences of Murray/Steve constructing their documentary are equivalently stylized, conjuring up a noir-like atmosphere from their mostly nocturnal settings, accentuating the murk and ambiguities of their (unreliable) interviewee’s world of corruption and conspiracy. An early moment, set in the editing room, where the camera frames Murray – supposedly on the telephone to Smith – through horizontal window blinds, is an overt nod to the kind of composition and chiaroscuro effects found in ‘classic’ detective dramas. Indeed, given that it is not explicitly stated who the men are making the documentary profile for, they carry rather the air of private detectives, roaming on foot or by car the equivalent ‘mean streets’ of Newcastle: dingy underpasses, crumbling tower blocks and the brutalist central motorway initiated by Smith’s planners. This imaginative transfiguration of the industrial city, also seen in the ‘Alan Deal’ sequences – which make striking use of the riverscape and the vertiginous architecture of the quayside area – does not quite match Smith’s vision of urban transformation. But it chimes interestingly with some of the era’s most noteworthy representations of the city, which balance a certain aesthetization of the urban landscape with a cynicism about endemic corruption: the ghost of Dan Smith casts a long shadow, it would seem. Made around the same time, Mike Figgis’s Stormy Monday (1988) parallels its (comparable) story of a villainous American businessman promoting his company’s transformative potential upon the region, with a ‘cinematic’ treatment of the city landscape that was aspirational rather than ‘authentic’. The BBC detective series Spender (1991–93) similarly brought a ‘designer-gloss to representations of the north-east’,64 perhaps sharing Smith’s own impulse to get rid of the ‘Andy Capp conception’ of the region.65 At the same time, despite its ‘parochial’ subject matter and its raking over a history that some might want to forget, T Dan Smith marks a rare occasion when Amber’s creative techniques overtly align with the decade’s prevailing trends in exploratory documentary, namely a turn towards deconstruction and an interrogation of performance. One of the most cited works of the time in this regard, Errol Morris’s ‘true crime’ feature The Thin Blue Line (1988), makes an interesting partner to Amber’s film: both hinge upon the reliability (or otherwise) of their witnesses, insinuate degrees of endemic corruption, use stylized recreation, and explicitly reference noir texts in their challenge to the notion of objective truth being representable. Furthermore, both circumvent the danger of viewer disengagement in mostly ‘talking head’ material through stylization and tonal manipulation. In Morris’s film, a pulsating, hypnotic soundtrack by minimalist composer Phillip Glass carries some of the burden

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  85

of generating an ambience of doubt and anxiety whilst endowing the documentary form with the sonic consistency and grandeur of a ‘fictional’ film. In T Dan Smith, Ray Stubbs’ score, with its prominence of mouth-organ riffs loosely based on the nineteenth-century Geordie music hall song ‘Keep Your Feet Still Geordie Hinney’, provides similar consistency. Its rooting in a blues/folk idiom may well be appropriate for the film’s ‘urban’ ambience, but in looking to past rather than contemporary trends in music, it echoes the way that its protagonists, like the city of Newcastle, cannot expunge their problematic history from the record. The ‘editing room’ sequences of T Dan Smith, showing Murray and Steve working on their documentary, offer a creative solution to the problem of how to construct a profile around archive and interview material. Murray himself expresses criticism of the ‘traditional’ format seen in process at the start of T Dan Smith. Steve records his journalistic ‘voice-over’ in a sound booth whilst Murray locates illustrative archive material: ‘OK if you like that sort of thing,’ he says. T Dan Smith repeatedly uses the device of a long-take camera shot moving across a bank of monitors in the editing room, alighting upon one screen for a while, before moving to another, with different footage cued; on occasion, the audio track of the first continues over the second. As well as a ‘meta’ strategy for exposing the labour and editorial decisions that go into documentary construction, this might seem to offer an alternative approach to the ‘associative’ manipulations that derive from more traditional editing methods (i.e. a cut from one thing to another). In this instance, temporally and geographically disparate video material  – typically, Smith being interviewed at different locations and times – shares the same space, although the viewer is still impelled to determine connections or contradictions between the testimonies, albeit in a more Brechtian way, in being alerted to the ‘work’ involved in their juxtaposition. On a more straightforward level, though, the position of multiple screens within the same diegetic space alerts the viewer to the inherent convolutions and contradictions in Smith’s self-narrative. At the same time, the ‘screen within a screen’ device is by now becoming a minor leitmotif of Amber’s production, witnessed in Tyne Lives (1980), Byker, Seacoal, Can’t Beat It Alone and beyond. In a similar fashion, the film also makes self-conscious sport out of finding ways to bridge the ‘Murray/Steve’ and ‘Alan Deal’ strands, whether through self-reflexively ‘manipulative’ editing or by placing the characters fleetingly within the same frame or diegesis. In one telling example, Murray is greeted in the pub (as it happens, the one owned by Amber in North Shields) by a ‘local’ who tries and fails to sell him a radio; a radio that is used by the man to tune into a news report of the ‘Alan Deal’ affair. There is a mordant sort of humour in the fact that Murray and Steve, despite their desire to find contemporary relevance in the Smith scandal, remain oblivious to events

86  •  In Fading Light

unfolding (literally) around them. Characters from the ‘Deal’ story drive past, below and behind them at different points: a disarming cut surprises the viewer by showing Murray and Steve entering a lift and then Alan Deal exiting one; a cut moves from a video screen in the editing room to a full-screen shot of the same location; and a ‘match cut’ transports us from a Newcastle council building to the Houses of Parliament (both have prominent clocks). One of the most audacious examples of this ‘bridging’ occurs when Murray and Steve visit Smith’s home and play him footage of an old interview about his sentencing in 1974. In a bravura single take, the camera pans from a close-up of the TV screen to Smith in his chair; as Smith pontificates on the impossibility of fair trial, the camera continues to move beyond him to where Murray and Steve are sitting and then finally rests on a (fake) newspaper with a headline from the ‘Alan Deal’ story. Although obviously a contrived shot, Smith was not actually delivering from a preordained script but had been apparently tasked with ‘extemporising’ within a set timeframe.66 This is a negotiation familiar from other Amber films of the period, where union rules necessitated that ‘non-professional’ performers within a scripted scene could not be prompted but had to improvise their responses to the ‘professional’ players. Here, the result is a showcase for Smith the expert ‘performer’, in a sequence that places within the same space and time the constituent parts of the documentary we are watching: the historical archive (the 1970s TV interview), the subject (Smith), the filmmakers (or versions of them) and a fictionalized mediation. Within this long shot, none are granted privilege or authority over the others, so it is not obvious where ‘contrivance’ and ‘authenticity’ are demarcated. Smith’s voice predominates, of course, but in gliding past the subject, and towards the interviewers (also the film’s actual creators) and then away from them too, the camera can locate no source of stability or truth. A highly loaded interaction between Smith and Murray/Steve occurs when they discuss the slum-clearing and rehousing initiative that is critiqued in Amber’s Byker film and book for the devastation it heaped upon existing ­communities. In response to a video of a ‘high-rise’ resident complaining about the quality of his living arrangements, Smith accuses the man of nostalgia and of a selective memory of what conditions actually used to be like. Smith is then shown a montage of images of Byker and Scotswood (identifiably the work of Amber-associated photographers Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Jimmy Forsyth) accompanied by the quotation from Smith’s chief planning officer, Wilf Burns, taken from the soundtrack of Amber’s 1983 Byker film (discussed in detail in Chapter 4). Burns is quoted as describing the slum residents as a ‘separate race of people’ who require their ‘groupings’ to be broken up, but a visibly rattled Smith refuses to concur that this is a patronizing and

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  87

dangerous attitude; instead, he insists that these words were taken out of context and that ‘history’ was on Burns’ side. It’s an extraordinary moment in the Amber catalogue, albeit something of an ambush by Steve and Murray, or should that be Trafford and Martin, throwing off their ‘performances’ of otherwise cool detachment to make a spirited defence of Amber’s hypothesis (as to be discussed in the next chapter in relation to Byker) about misjudged housing policy. A faltering Smith, swinging awkwardly on his chair, prevented from delivering his usual self-defending ‘script’, nevertheless conjures up the kind of accusations that Amber have historically been susceptible to: the reliance on nostalgia, and the recontextualization of material. T Dan Smith steps back from resolving the argument, but Martin’s 1993 obituary of Smith might be taken as a final word on the matter, when he argues that ‘Smith’s greatest flaw was his belief in experts, be they Le Corbusier or Wilf Burns, his chief planner. It was I believe, a classic case of a working-class man trusting in those better educated than himself.’ 67 The film supports this premise in its presentation of Smith at his most vulnerable when trying to defend his appointment of Burns. The film concludes with another staged scene at the New Clarendon pub, where Murray and Steve are drinking socially with Smith amidst other members of the Amber repertory company. It is unclear whether Amber Styles, who approaches them to play dominoes, is playing the same ‘character’ who, in the ‘Alan Deal’ strand, discovered the dead body of an architect and berated her Tory MP; or whether Ray Stubbs, who sells Smith a newspaper here, is repeating the role of the ‘unhappy resident’ seen earlier, playing himself, or another character altogether. It doesn’t necessarily matter: the key point is that Smith is only briefly seen here as part of the Amber ‘family’ – he quickly makes his apologies to leave, saying he’ll continue the discussion another time: he is simultaneously one of the ‘gang’ and the social pariah who has to leave. As he departs, he buys a newspaper announcing the arrest of the ‘fictional’ Alan Deal by the fraud squad and then disappears out of shot. As a reverse of the film’s opening, which begins with a crane shot of riverside industry eventually moving towards and inside the window of the building (the pub, in real terms) where Murray and Steve are constructing the film, the final shot is a crane upwards, above the pub, the river behind it and into the sky. These book-ending crane movements bring to mind their equivalents at the beginning and end of Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), not a fanciful comparison, given that both films are about the rise and fall of an inscrutable self-mythologizer. If so, the North Shields pub here is a rather prosaic counterpoint to the wire-fenced estate of Charles Foster Kane, although the public house in general, and this one specifically, is rendered throughout Amber’s films as a place of community, refuge and escape. In being reminded that the events of the film have been effectively ‘constructed’ in the pub, given that it

88  •  In Fading Light

is topographically plausible that Steve and Murray are based there, perhaps we can liken Smith to one of its stock characters: the teller of tall tales that leave everyone, as Steve says himself here, ‘none the wiser’.

Strangers in Paradise: From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels A running joke frequently acknowledged by Amber is that their decision to document a place or an industry often denoted its death knell: none more so than their involvement in a transnational project with filmmakers in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) not long before the fall of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of the country.68 The exchange involved Amber making a portrait of the East German town of Rostock, while filmmakers from DEFA, the GDR’s nationalized production company, which made more than 700 feature films between 1946 and 1989, made an equivalent portrait of Amber’s own Newcastle. Amber and DEFA were not ridiculous bedfellows. Although tainted with the dogmatic ideological imperatives of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, DEFA maintained its commitment to humanistic principles, producing work typified by a ‘mixture of cultural ambition and political compliance, social critique and aesthetic convention’.69 Furthermore, Amber’s close involvement with communities chimed with the approaches taken by DEFA documentarists such as Jürgen Böttcher, Volker Koepp and Winfried Junge, the latter being best known for Lebensläufe (1981–2008), a longitudinal portrait of the East German village of Golzow.70 This project originated in a coincidental encounter between Murray Martin, Ellin Hare and Barbara Junge in Leipzig, in the aftermath of a film festival. According to Martin, Winfried Junge had been looking for a chance to film in the UK but had lacked financial backing, although Junge reported to the GDR press that they had been invited by Amber.71 The Junges came to Newcastle first, and their film is quite straightforwardly propagandistic: the impact of Thatcherism and the decline of the traditional industries in the north of England provided an opportunity to illustrate the official state position that the West might have an overwhelming supply of goods but that the distribution of these was unequal, and workers were treated unfairly (as evidenced by the response to the miners’ strike). Their film concentrates on images of decaying grandeur, forlorn industries and unloved housing projects being dismantled, and shots of destroyed council houses and anti-drug campaign posters and ‘For Sale’ signs on industrial and commercial buildings are both literal and metaphorical representations of the destruction of Labour’s welfare state by the Conservatives. In the filmmakers’ judgemental and often

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  89

patronizing commentary, there is some guile to their proclamation of bewilderment when introduced to certain aspects of Tyneside life that would supposedly be unfathomable to East German audiences, such as the existence of unemployment centres. Even considering that the filmmakers were working within political restrictions, Amber felt that the Junges had lacked curiosity about their subjects, and their own film, despite being edited simultaneously, can be read as a response of a kind. For Amber, the experience of shooting for only two weeks in Rostock, which they chose as a subject because its fishing and shipping industries would provide a counterpoint to Tyneside, gave limited scope to earn the trust of their interviewees, let alone socialize with them, but in keeping with their commitment to respectful engagement, they only began filming in their second week. According to Martin: We decided to make a simple portrait. Here’s six people on top of a crane. Let’s do what we can. People said we’re naive. But we made a conscious choice. We thought we were guests, and we were not going to rip apart what we had seen for sensational reasons.72

Although under close surveillance, Amber were given freedom to choose their own interviewees and locations as well as the dispensation, via a ‘magic visa’, to move at will). The self-reflexive approach adopted by their counterparts is quickly dispensed with in the film’s opening section, which introduces the filmmakers and their anxieties about the freedom to choose their subjects freely but concludes with their decision to avoid commentary so as to ‘let the people speak’. Compared with the suggestive questions of the Junges in their film, their straightforward interviewing style betrays no obvious political agenda. However, the decision to use English actors with regionally specific accents to dub the voices of the participants suggests a bond between the working class in the GDR and the UK. The dubbing practice has an unsettling effect, to British audiences at least, such is the unlikelihood of hearing politically informed voices with a Geordie accent declaring their contentment with job security, child-care provision and the role of women in the workplace. Although the Amber crew are heard questioning some of the subjects about their loyalty to the Party, their position under dictatorship is not interrogated. Amber did not regard themselves as investigative journalists, so would turn their cameras off whenever their subjects were at risk of being compromised or endangered. The film goes some way to challenge aspects of life in the GDR, which had troubled Westerners dealing at one point, for example, with the apparent relaxation of travelling restrictions. But the longstanding impulse to celebrate working-class experience leaves Amber open to

90  •  In Fading Light

accusations of naivety in their portrait of a socialist utopia that never actually existed. Recalling the project in 2006, Martin acknowledged the appeal of life in the Eastern Bloc to those of his and his parents’ generation: In many ways, there was much to admire in the Eastern Bloc. I come from a working-class background, and it was my parents’ dream country: guaranteed employment, extremely good healthcare, wonderful childcare, state provision. You could say this can be dulling and repressive, and for some people it certainly was, and the intelligentsia found that. . . . But all states are police states. This one is too. The police don’t work for you, they work for the state.73

There are certainly some notable gaps in Amber’s representation of the GDR, such as its negligence of the Wall and of the dictatorial political system with its close surveillance and practice of imprisoning or denaturalizing critical voices. However, their selective account of East Germany was far from unusual, as many Western commentators failed to notice the political and economic instability of the time.74 However, the film also contains moments of ambiguity, with sequences that capture the slipping of a mask  – a telling moment of inarticulacy or silence from a people who have ready answers to enquiries about the meaning of socialism. An example of this can be found when a female crane driver gives a nervous explanation of why she is not involved with the Party, whilst her colleague – who is – looks on critically. Despite the consciously upbeat tone of the film, accounts of overwork, restricted family life and loneliness maintain a melancholy undertow, which even the repetition of a jolly pop song called ‘Mexico’ – an ironic reminder of the enforced insularity of the Rostock inhabitants – does little to dispel. There may well be some sympathy for socialism here, but the film also goes some way to contest Cold War notions of perceiving the world in clear-cut dichotomies. The two films were broadcast together on UK television on 22 May 1989, as Amber’s last contribution to the Eleventh Hour strand, under the respective titles of From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels and, appropriately enough, From Marx and Engels to Marks & Spencer. This would contrast with the theatrical release in East Germany, where the films were jointly titled Diese Briten, Diese Deutschen (These Britains, These Germans). Amber and the Junges evidently spent some time negotiating possible titles. According to the latter: Amber . . . wanted to call their part ‘Strangers in Paradise’, but we had reservations, as we don’t regard our country’s social policies, much admired by our partners, as a proud achievement preceding a Fall, such as Britain seems to be experiencing with the dismantling of its welfare state. And anyway, irony is probably not one of our strong points.75

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  91

Figure 3.2  Peter Roberts and Ellin Hare filming From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels, Rostock, 1987. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

According to Martin, a senior official, most likely the culture minister, expressed his pleasure after a screening of Amber’s film: ‘he wished his filmmakers were as skilled in making films about socialism!’76 Furthermore, newspaper reviews in the GDR were mostly sympathetic to the perceived messages of the films. In her pre-release article for the Filmspiegel journal, Gisela Harkenthal dwells upon the 26 per cent unemployment rate in the north-east of England as indicative of the failure of capitalism, whilst noting that the British working classes are nonetheless not completely disheartened.77 Given the disparity between the quality of working conditions of the UK and East Germany, it would seem that Amber’s suggested title of ‘Strangers in Paradise’ was not without irony.

Conclusion There is a temptation to categorize the productions discussed in this chapter as outliers within the Amber canon. The current affairs output was mostly conceived and distributed beyond the mainstream broadcast/theatrical system and has a utilitarianism and ephemerality that contrasts sharply with the more considered, densely produced work discussed elsewhere. Yet the Unit’s early experimentation provided the impetus for one of the most important and celebrated instances of oppositional film culture of the period: the Miners’ Campaign Tapes. In a similar fashion, to emphasize the metatextual playfulness and sophistication of Double Vision and T Dan Smith would be to risk overlooking their power as documentary record and their connective

92  •  In Fading Light

tissues with past and future Amber films and projects. Then there is the Rostock project, which involved an engagement with a community that was not only fleeting but circumscribed by the limits of political (self-) censorship: the difference between this brief relationship and the long-gestating connections that underpin contemporaneous projects could not be greater. And yet, this chance encounter, when revisited more than twenty-five years later in the follow-up documentary feature From Us to Me (2015), would result in a work of emotional power and sociopolitical complexity, as we shall see in Chapter 7.

Notes   1. Amber/Side. 1987. Amber/Side Catalogue, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side; Amber/ Side. 2005. A Short History, booklet with DVD releases, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/ Side; Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories from a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side.   2. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, History 9.   3. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, History 9.   4. Graeme Rigby cited in J. Newsinger. 2007. ‘Together We Stand’, Vertigo 11 (August).   5. S. Cubitt. 2004. Timeshift: On Video Culture (2nd ed.), London and New York: Routledge (italics in original), 140.   6. The footage comes from the second edition (dated October 1961) of Mining Review, the NCB’s monthly film ‘magazine’.   7. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Current Affairs (n.p.).   8. Grassick speaking in interview on Amber website. Amber. n.d. ‘Current Affairs Unit’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.amber-online.com/collection/amber/.   9. J. Petley. 2012. ‘The Struggle Continues: The Miners’ Campaign Video Tapes’, in I.W. Macdonald and S. Popple (eds), Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 93. 10. C. Reeves. 2009. ‘Redressing the Balance: Making the Miners’ Campaign Tapes’, The Miners’ Campaign Tapes DVD booklet, London: BFI, 11. 11. Petley, ‘The Struggle Continues’, 93. 12. For an example of the group’s work relating to the miners’ strike see G. Philo. 1995. ‘Audience Beliefs and the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike’, in G. Philo (ed.), Glasgow Media Group Reader, Volume 2: Industry, Economy, War and Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 37–44. 13. Amber/Side, Amber/Side Catalogue, Current Affairs 12. 14. Amber, ‘Miners’ W/E School 1984’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.amberonline.com/collection/miners-weekend-1984/. 15. E. Webb-Ingall. 2017. ‘The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 130. 16. Petley, ‘The Struggle Continues’, 93.

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  93

17. J. Knight and P. Thomas. 2011. Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image, Bristol: Intellect, 112. 18. K. Shaw. 2012. Mining the Meaning: Cultural Representations of the 1984–5 UK Miners’ Strike, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 168. 19. Cubitt, Timeshift, 138. 20. D.E. James. 1997. Power Misses: Essays Across Unpopular Culture, London: Verso, 207. 21. Petley, ‘The Struggle Continues’, 96. 22. James, Power Misses, 203 and 204. 23. Shaw, Mining the Meaning, 167. 24. Both were shown in Channel Four’s Eleventh Hour slot as part of themed seasons. Beyond the Vote was broadcast on 1 October 1984 immediately after Trade Film’s Who Will Keep the Red Flag Flying, about a group of Tyneside voters, as part of a series dealing with the international Labour movement. Can’t Beat It Alone was shown on 6 May 1985 together with the Edinburgh Film Workshop Trust’s Site One: Holy Loch within a ‘nuclear season’ considering the entwined issues of nuclear power and warfare. 25. Grassick speaking on Amber website, ‘Current Affairs Unit’. 26. I touch upon Amber’s casting strategies in relation to Like Father in Chapter 6, but their work is notable for its redeployment of certain performers, the most prominent in terms of central roles perhaps being Brian Hogg and Amber Styles/Betty Hepple, but other recurrent faces include Art Davies, Ray Stubbs, Sammy Johnson, Maureen/Mo Harold, Anna Gascoigne and Darren Bell, as well as members of the Amber group in cameo appearances. 27. Murray Martin cited in M. Dickinson. 1999. ‘Amber’, in M. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI, 254. 28. M. Martin. 2000. ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’ (unpublished transcript). 29. C. Newland. 2018. ‘Can Paddy Considine’s Journeyman Land a Knockout Blow for British Boxing Movies?’, The Guardian, Film Blog, 13 March. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2018/mar/13/journeyman-paddy-co​ n​sidine-british-boxing-films-knockout. 30. R. Waterhouse. 1993. ‘Obituary: T Dan Smith  – Fallen Hero of the North’, The Guardian, 28 July, 11. 31. R. Lomas. 2009. An Encyclopaedia of North-East England, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 430. 32. G. Rigby. 2010. ‘T Dan Smith’, North East Free Thinkers series, BBC Radio 3, 30 August  2010. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b00nhmcf. 33. R. Fitzwalter and D. Taylor. 1981. Web of Corruption: The Story of J. G. L. Poulson and T. Dan Smith, London, Toronto, Sydney and New York: Granada, 35. 34. Fitzwalter and Taylor, Web of Corruption, 7. 35. Fitzwalter and Taylor, Web of Corruption, 7. 36. Fitzwalter and Taylor, Web of Corruption, 49. 37. Lomas, An Encyclopaedia of North-East England, 430. 38. T.E. Faulkner. 1996. ‘Conservation and Renewal in Newcastle upon Tyne’, in T.E. Faulkner (ed.), Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North East England, London: Octavian Press, 140. 39. Faulkner, ‘Conservation and Renewal in Newcastle upon Tyne’, 136. 40. See Rigby, ‘T Dan Smith’, and M. Fisher. 2007. ‘The City Has Become Its Vision’, The Guardian, 11 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2007/oct/11/theatre.

94  •  In Fading Light

41. C. Foote Wood. 2010. T Dan Smith: ‘Voice of the North’  – Downfall of a Visionary, Bishop Auckland: Northern Writers, 4. 42. O. Hatherley. 2010. A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, London and New York: Verso, 181 and 182. The ‘Mandelsonism’ reference is to Peter Mandelson, one of the key architects of the rebranding of the Labour party as New Labour prior to the 1997 general election victory. 43. M. Eaton. 2005. Our Friends in the North, Somerset: BFI, 5. 44. Fitzwalter and Taylor, Web of Corruption, 274. 45. Eaton, Our Friends in the North, 4. 46. Murray Martin’s account of the making of the film is given in Foote Wood, T Dan Smith, 187–88. 47. Steve Trafford speaking in ‘The Making of T Dan Smith’, on the DVD of the film. 48. Martin in Foote Wood, T Dan Smith, 188. 49. Trafford, ‘The Making of T Dan Smith’. 50. M. Wayne. 2001. Political Film: The Dialects of Third Cinema, London, Sterling and Virginia: Pluto Press, 49. 51. M. Hunt. n.d. ‘T Dan Smith’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www. screenonline.org.uk/film/id/503909/index.html. 52. Trafford, ‘The Making of T Dan Smith’. 53. Trafford, ‘The Making of T Dan Smith’. 54. Hunt, ‘T Dan Smith’. 55. M. Martin. 1993. ‘Obituary: T Dan Smith’, The Independent, 31 July, Gazette, 48. 56. Graeme Rigby, personal correspondence with author. 57. Martin, ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’. Martin is referring here to the expansion of the group in the early 1980s, and then its retraction in the 1990s onwards. 58. Foote Wood, T Dan Smith, 53. 59. Trafford, ‘The Making of T Dan Smith’. 60. Martin in Foote Wood, T Dan Smith, 189. 61. Martin in Foote Wood, T Dan Smith, 189. 62. Eaton, Our Friends in the North, 5 63. Faulkner, ‘Conservation and Renewal in Newcastle upon Tyne’, 139. 64. P. Hutchings. 1996. ‘“When The Going Gets Tough . . .”: Representations of the NorthEast in Film and Television’, in T.E. Faulkner (ed.), Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North East England, London: Octavian Press, 274. 65. Smith cited in Faulkner, ‘Conservation and Renewal in Newcastle upon Tyne’, 139. Andy Capp is the workshy, Hartlepool-dwelling character (devised by Reg Smythe) in the comic strip of the same name. It has been published in The Daily Mirror (and Sunday Mirror) newspapers since 1957, and also syndicated internationally. 66. Trafford, ‘The Making of T Dan Smith’. 67. Martin, ‘Obituary: T Dan Smith’, 48. 68. For a more detailed account of the project than given here, see T. Hochscherf and J. Leggott. 2008. ‘From Marks and Spencer to Marx and Engels: A Transnational DEFA and Amber Film Documentary Project Across the Iron Curtain’, Studies in Documentary Film 2(2), 123–35. 69. S. Hake. 2002. German National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 119. 70. For a discussion of Lebensläufe, see N.M. Alter. 2002. Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema 1967–2000, Michigan: Michigan University Press, 196–210.

Can’t Beat It Alone  •  95

71. T. Hochscherf and J. Leggott. 2006. ‘Interview with Murray Martin’, Newcastle upon Tyne, 6 September; W. Junge. 1989. ‘Erfahrungen anderer Art’/‘ Experiences of a Different Kind’, Film und Fernsehen 10, 9. 72. Hochscherf and Leggott, ‘Interview with Murray Martin’. 73. Hochscherf and Leggott, ‘Interview with Murray Martin’. 74. See K. Larres. 2001. ‘Germany in 1989: The Development of a Revolution’, in K. Larres (ed.), Germany Since Unification: The Development of the Berlin Republic (2nd ed.), Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 37. 75. Junge, B. and W. Junge. n.d. ‘Thoughts on a Rare Occurrence’. Correspondence held in Amber archive. 76. Hochscherf and Leggott, ‘Interview with Murray Martin’. 77. G. Harkenthal. 1989. ‘Winfried Junge: Vor der Premiere’/‘Winifried Junge: Before the Premiere’, Filmspiegel 9, 26–27.

Chapter 4

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films, 1983 to 1994



On 11 April 1974, the BBC broadcast the documentary ‘A Finn on Tyneside’, as part of It Takes a Stranger, a four-part series in which, according to the listing in the Radio Times, ‘individuals from abroad who have chosen to live here take a foreigner’s look at Britain and the British way of life’.1 The episode was concerned with the ‘chance’ arrival of the Finland-born Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in the suburb of Byker in Newcastle upon Tyne, having left her studies in London five years previously, to develop films with Amber on the subject of working-class culture. She had been a founding member of Amber prior to their move north, and by the time of the documentary she was also nearing the end of a Northern Arts/Northern Gas Board fellowship in creative photography (awarded for 1972–74). Although it curiously fails to mention Amber by name, ‘A Finn on Tyneside’ has some claim to prescience in its anticipation of the eventual fame of Konttinen’s Byker photography project and its identification of tensions between her own creative vision and that of the collective. To the accompaniment of footage that would appear to be of the group working on the Launch (1974) film, she is seen clarifying that the production of independent films was their main purpose and that ‘filmmaking is the only thing we do together’. She also describes in the programme how she generally tended to search for the ‘more bizarre details, whereas the others [i.e. other Amber members] set out to record things perhaps more objectively’. Retrospectively, Konttinen realizes that by ‘bizarre’ she meant something along the lines of ‘whimsical, surprising, humorous, incongruous’,2 and the programme seems to corroborate this,

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  97

to a degree, with sequences of Konttinen photographing activities such as a ‘medieval banquet’, bodybuilding and ‘pie-eating competitions’. Some of this photographic activity shown in the programme came about as a result of the terms of her fellowship grant, which required her to carry out work for the Gas Board; she asked if she could provide stories/images about Gas Board workers for their in-house magazine. However, some of the sequences in the programme were ‘faked’ at the insistence of the director (Dennis Marks), who apparently deemed that Byker alone would not be of adequate interest to the viewers;3 some of this material certainly does pander to negative stereotypes about north-east culture. But in this apparent (if rather inaccurately represented) commitment to the documentation of leisure pursuits, as opposed to the work-based practices that dominate Amber’s films of the 1970s, there are seeds of two of Konttinen’s other major durational projects, which, like the Byker residency, resulted in audio-visual work as well as publications and exhibitions: the concern with beach landscapes and activities that culminated in The Writing in the Sand (1991) and the documentation of dance studios for girls and young women. The latter is covered in ‘A Finn on Tyneside’, and the evolution of this work would include the production of the ‘docudrama’ Keeping Time (1983). Taking, as this chapter does, an auteurist perspective on Konttinen’s body of work may seem anathema to Amber’s ethos of collectivism. The Byker film, for example, needs to be considered as a broader Amber project and was edited by Ellin Hare (prior to her joining the collective). But there is rationality in noting that a subset of Amber films – including Byker (1983), Keeping Time, The Writing in the Sand, Letters to Katja (1994), Today I’m with You (2010) and Song for Billy (2017)  – are strongly associated with her photographic work and/or her personal history. The security of the workshop context, and the capacity for Amber to work on various productions simultaneously and on cross-grade roles, allowed for the slow, organic development of projects of the kind favoured by Konttinen – and for creative experimentation: ‘I would not have done what I’ve done outside of the group’, she has said.4 Whilst Amber’s larger-scale dramas have required a larger crew, and hence more consensus, their documentaries could be driven by just two key people, and the films under discussion here (which are mostly around fifty minutes in length) have been produced in collaboration with Peter Roberts. Although her ongoing mission to ‘combine a political purpose with a personal vision’ very much chimes with that of other Amber members, Konttinen observes that, even though others might consider themselves ‘outsiders’ to a degree, she has been particularly sensitive to the ‘business of roots’, even devising an entire film, Letters to Katja, around her year-long attempt to reconnect with her homeland.5 Konttinen has also acknowledged that ‘my driving force has always been to follow my own stages in life’; thus, for example, her own

98  •  In Fading Light

motherhood and increasing sensitivity to gender politics informed Keeping Time’s examination of mother-daughter relationships and the escapist fantasies of young women.6 This chapter will focus on her work during the 1980s and early 1990s. The later films Today I’m with You and Song for Billy will be considered as part of Chapter 7, within the context of Amber’s work in the twenty-first century.

Byker (1983) If the Newcastle suburb of Byker holds a privileged place, perhaps even that of ‘notoriety’,7 within the popular imagination – as a contested emblem of urban working-class community under renewal – it is difficult to assess how much Konttinen’s own work has played a part in this. She describes being ‘put under a spell’ by the place upon her arrival in Newcastle in 1969 to continue work with Amber and develop filmmaking skills: . . . the vision began from the hill, sweeping down along the steep cobbled streets with row upon row of terraced flats, into the town, over the river and the bridges and beyond. The streets of Byker, serene in the morning sun with smoking chimney pots, offered me no Paradise; but I was looking for a home.8

Konttinen’s photographic engagement with Byker took some time to develop, beginning with the taking of snapshots as a way of ‘communicating the excitement I felt about the place’ before more formal projects took shape. Supported by her fellowship grant, she established a portrait studio in an empty hairdressing salon, where she gave away portraits to residents whilst accumulating their old photographs and poems.9 She subsequently attempted to photograph all the households in her street but says that: ‘by the time I developed the skills to photograph anything, any situation, Byker was gone, practically’.10 The densely arranged Victorian terraces, as documented in Konttinen’s photographs, had been designated for the growing workforce of the area’s expanding shipbuilding and heavy engineering industries, which by the 1960s were well in decline. As with other cities, the 1954 Housing Act enabled the council to embark upon the clearance and replacement of ‘slum’ homes considered unfit for habitation. Konttinen’s arrival coincided with a rolling phase of demolition and construction, which included the Ralph Erskine-designed Byker Wall, a continuous block of maisonettes. Although the input of local residents had some impact on housing policy directives, Konttinen’s ‘photo essay’ book publication and film of the same name offer strong criticism of the planners’ attempts to maintain communal bonds, citing figures to suggest that, by 1983, only 20 per cent of the area’s previous

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  99

inhabitants had been rehoused.11 Byker thus points to how the ‘goal of retaining the old neighbourhood communities . . . had been sacrificed to the provision of a prestigious showcase architectural development’.12 Byker is today a ‘Mecca for touring architects, a byword for multiple deprivation’, as well as being the subject of a 2* listing for architectural and historical importance by English Heritage.13 As a ‘poignant record . . . and reminder of life in the “old” Byker of the imagination’, Konttinen’s work is commonly cited (or used as pictorial illustration) in the support of analysis, both positive and negative, of the Byker urban clearance scheme .14 To give a flavour of how Byker has become a lightning rod for debates around architecture, community and consultation, one might look to Ben Farmer’s judgement of Erskine’s redevelopment, in the Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought (1993), as ‘without doubt the most comprehensive and convincing example of community participation and community response in England’; Farmer noted the special scenario of its architects setting up an on-site office to canvass and respond to the concerns of the residents.15 In a 1988 episode of the BBC2 television series Building Sights devoted to the Byker Wall, Bea Campbell similarly praised ‘one of the best examples of modern council housing’, echoing the sentiments of an editorial in The Times of 1981 that cited the Wall as an exemplar of architecture that might revive a sense of civic pride.16 On the other hand, Robin Abrams has condemned the ‘rigidity of the architect’s preconceived vision for the community’, which unintentionally fostered a ‘medieval degree of separation’.17 In an article for The Guardian, Anna Minton’s categorization of the project as a ‘noble failure’, revealing that it is ‘rarely in the interest of communities to demolish the homes they live in’, is closely aligned with the argument set forth in Konttinen’s film.18 However, even before her project reached culmination, the redevelopment of Byker, and the implications for its community spirit, had gained some attention in the British media. The BBC had aired documentaries entitled ‘Byker Will Not Die’ (1971), ‘I’ll Die in Byker’ (1979) and ‘Roses Grow in Byker Now’ (1981), the latter two dealing with the experience of elderly residents during the transitional period and their mixed emotions in their new homes. Within a decade of Konttinen’s film, Byker was approaching the status of household recognition, exemplified by the 1993 BBC2 documentary series Off the Wall, which involved residents selecting national works of art for an exhibition in the area, and the popular ‘soap’ for teenagers Byker Grove (1989–2006). As early as 1989, one TV critic, writing in response to a documentary series about the politics and design of British housing, wearily opined that ‘the good people of Byker . . . must be fairly sick by now of television crews roaming their estate’.19 These representations and analyses of Byker suggest how it is simultaneously framed in terms of the universal – in how it shares issues and challenges

100  •  In Fading Light

with other localities  – and in terms of the particular, as a ‘special kind of place’.20 If Byker has, even within Tyneside, a reputation for ‘raucousness and rough living’,21 and for being one of the ‘least prepossessing’ parts of Newcastle,22 it has also enjoyed national fame, as demonstrated by the wellknown and variously recorded eighteenth-century folk song ‘Byker Hill’, a proud affirmation of place by the ‘collier lads’ of Byker and the adjacent Walker shore. However, within this context, Konttinen’s project might also be grasped as an attempt to particularize familiar or indeed regressive stereotypes and to challenge the way that, in the collective imagination, workingclass stoicism in the face of struggle had become a representational cliché. In an interview around the time of the Byker publication and film, she lamented how recollections of poverty in the 1930s, of the kind memorialized in her work – testimonies of ‘self sufficiency and survival on absolutely nothing’ – had now been transformed into kinds of ‘Monty Python jokes about eating newspapers for breakfast’.23 Working within a ‘tradition of obsolescence and sadness’, Konttinen’s memorializing of Byker may seem, on a surface level, to be perpetuating such stereotypes, with its ‘grim’ images of decaying houses, recollections of shoe-less childhoods, and sentimental pub songs.24 However, any claim to nostalgia is complicated, particularly in the Byker film, by an acknowledgement of the constructed and subjective nature of its narrative. Robert Colls describes Konttinen’s photography as ‘fated by a sense of what Byker had been, compared to what it was when she lived there’; indeed, the film uses resources of editing and sound design, in particular, to reconstruct a ‘Byker’ of the imagination that may, or may not, have a basis in lived experience.25 For Konttinen, the individual photographs taken as part of her Byker residency could not alone convey her own relationship with the place, not least because of the possibility of being interpreted in ways beyond her control. According to Paul Jobling, her book Byker  – which includes an autobiographical prologue, a factual post-script and 126 images interspersed with vernacular-rich recollections from older residents – draws its readers into a ‘kind of game in which meanings are sometimes made clear for us while on other occasions we are left to work things out for ourselves’.26 Connections between images on facing pages, and between images and text, are sometimes straightforward, sometimes implicit, such as the incongruous pairing of a picture of a young bride trying on her dress and the bleak recollection of a doctor’s indifference to a dead newborn child. In addition to creating temporal confusion, in blurring distinctions between the past and present, such juxtapositions work to ‘transcend any claim to literal objectivity’ and demonstrate a Griersonian ‘creative interpretation of reality’.27 Indeed, whilst Jobling identifies precursors to Konttinen’s photographic arrangement methods, such as Bill Brandt, Humphrey Spender and the periodical Lilliput,

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  101

his reference points for her ‘realist documentary’ style are notably cinematic: the immersive technique of Flaherty and the montage effects of Vertov. But if, in Jobling’s words, ‘editorial control and creative autonomy have been paramount in conveying and constructing meaning’ for Konttinen,28 it is notable that she would express frustration with the limitations of the photographic and published record: I still find even that falls short of what I wanted to say about Byker. There is a limit to photography and words, that’s why I ended up making a film about Byker because I felt there were many things which couldn’t be done without the music and without the sound of voices and the further step of juxtaposing what was gone in the community with what has replaced it.29

The Byker film weaves together black-and-white photographic images, often ‘animated’ through zooms and pans, with newly filmed material depicting Byker past and present, and footage of pub singers already accumulated by Amber (and in fact shot in North Shields); the soundtrack features Konttinen’s own recollections of her time in Byker, stories about the past and present by residents (cleanly recorded as re-enactments by actors) and some field recordings of voices and geographical ambience. In her essay on Byker’s ‘construction of a community’, Annabelle Honess Roe observes how: . . . the film constitutes a spatial realm outside the existence of the physical place, Byker. The effect of the various elements of the film is to create a space of imaginary resistance to the destruction of the actual streets and houses of Byker. This imaginary resistance finds a physical form in the film itself as we watch it playing on the screen.30

Roe argues that the film’s ‘dialectical production of space particularises and humanises’ its setting, in particular through the use of roving camera and the audio track.31 The manipulation of Konttinen’s source images through implied camerawork, zooming in or out of particular elements of the frame, as well as their narrativization and contextualization via the broader structure of the film, could be ‘interpreted as an attempt to gain a form of spatial control over a situation in which the residents of this place had been denied any actual control over their lived environment’.32 It is thus necessary to consider some of the main ways in which the raw material is translated into a personal narrative and how these devices simultaneously lead and complicate viewer engagement. At a casual glance or listen, Byker might seem to be striving for a ‘stream of consciousness’ effect, using a constant flow of associated images and overlapping sounds and voices that experientially conveys how an individual might recollect past times or places. Although the film’s main source material is

102  •  In Fading Light

static photographs, these are often ‘zoomed’ and ‘tracked’ in a way that is paralleled by the use of slow dollying or mobile handheld camerawork in some of the newly shot film material, thus emphasizing the circular rather than linear nature of memory. However, the viewer is also being guided through a firmer narrative of the different stages in Konttinen’s own relationship with Byker. Thus, her early description of falling under a spell by Saturday shopping activity is accompanied by images and sounds of commerce, which leads to a section dealing with material wealth (or the lack of it). Her account of a local matriarch (Mrs Dunn) ‘tuck[ing] me to her bosom’ triggers a section on female bonding, and then her embrace by the people of the ‘Hare and Hounds’ pub introduces footage of pub singing. A segment on Konttinen’s increasingly formalized creative response to the area (her setting up of a studio, and later her strategy to comprehensively document her street) includes some of the resulting portraits, with a particular focus on the experience of the elderly. Konttinen’s own creative and professional maturation, and indeed her own budding relationship with Byker, is paralleled in a sequence dealing with adolescence, courtship and weddings, which is then abruptly curtailed by her recollection of her own house being demolished, leading to a final section about the rehousing of residents. Byker’s flow of image and sound is also disrupted at regular intervals by moments that overtly collide the past with the present, and cause the viewer to reflect on the relationship between the two. This happens within the first few seconds, when a ‘zoom out’ from a static image of terrace rooftops fades into colour film footage showing the New Byker, in essence an overture foreshadowing the film’s gradual movement towards a final sequence showing the isolation of an elderly relocated woman. The initial ambient street noise laid over the first image  – birds, shouts in the distance, children  – begins to fade as a male voice, subsequently revealed to be voicing the words of ‘Wilfred Burns, City Planning Office in Newcastle, 1963’, speaks in ‘received pronunciation’ tones about slum dwellers being ‘almost a separate race of people’. As the bygone image – redolent of poverty and homogeneity but also of close-knit community – turns into the ‘present’ film footage, the human noises are replaced by an anonymous city thrum dominated by an overhead plane, which vaguely evokes what Konttinen has called elsewhere a ‘second blitz’ by officialdom of careless rehousing policy.33 The moving camera comes to rest behind the balcony of an external walkway of the new high-rise Byker housing, in a composition that leaves much of the frame in relative darkness. For Roe, the camera movement and compositions of the film generally work to ‘draw us into the “community”’, and thus contrast with the use of long master shots that Andrew Higson has identified with the British social realist movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which involve

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  103

‘an external point of view, the voyeurism of one class looking at another, an identification with a position outside and above the city’.34 Higson argues that the reoccurrence of ‘That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’ in films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960) and A Kind of Loving (Schlesinger, 1962) typify how the spectator is placed in a distanced, voyeuristic position, ‘the real living city . . . transformed into a surface . . . which does not need to be penetrated, but which can be gazed at precisely as image’.35 Significantly, Byker withholds such a vantage point until the very end, when we finally see a photograph (‘Carville Road at Night’) that anchors the rowed Victorian terraces against a broader backdrop of the city centre, including church steeples, office and residential buildings, and the iconic Tyne Bridge. The effect is startling: the viewer has by now gained such intimacy with Konttinen’s ‘constructed’ Byker that it may be a jolt to be reminded, or informed, of the suburb’s geographical position in relation to a recognizable city landscape. However, in a reversal of Higson’s paradigm, it is the modern, ‘real’ city in the background that is ‘unknowable, impenetrable’, as opposed to the ‘represented’ Byker constructed in the film.36 There are a number of occasions in Byker when spatial disorientation of the viewer is used to encourage identification with the dislocation of elderly rehoused residents. Early on, there is an abrasive cut between an ‘historic’ photograph of a resident leaning out the window of an end terrace covered with advertising hoardings, and a close-up of what is eventually revealed as a television set showing a rendition of ‘The Money Song’ on a children’s TV programme.37 The camera pulls back to show a child in a shopping precinct passively gazing through a window at a display of television sets. During this, a male speaker on the soundtrack tells an anecdote about having to give, as a young child, a pair of new but ill-fitting shoes to a brother. As the voice continues, we see an older man, roughly in the same position of the child, also looking emotionlessly at the screens. The main implication is fairly easy to grasp: actual poverty replaced by a kind of spiritual poverty.38 As a replacement for communal bonds, television itself comes under fire too; when the resident of New Byker takes her walk back to her flat at the end of the film, her corridor and walkway takes her past rooms with televisions playing but no human noises or interaction. But the shop sequence does not clarify the actual relationship between man and child, or whether the voice-over commentary relates specifically to either. It also introduces a recurrent motif: that of the reflective surface, which offers loose allegory for Konttinen’s own representational strategies. Here, man and boy are seen as reflections in the shop window, possibly of each other, in keeping with how the film’s ellipses create a temporally and spatially indeterminate version of Byker. A similarly liminal space, and existence, is suggested in another sequence, filmed on the Byker station, here devoid of other passengers, on the Tyne and Wear

104  •  In Fading Light

Metro, a light rail system that had been operating since 1980. An elderly man laboriously negotiates a ticket machine (his face reflected in the computerized display screen), barrier and stairwell to a platform, to the accompaniment of a voice-over anecdote in which a cobbler boasts of his memory expertise in matching shoes to their owners. The only discernible diegetic noise is the (possibly manipulated) reverberation, appropriately, of the man’s shoes on the station floor. The scene ends with the man exiting towards the side of the frame, yet the lingering impression is of him being entombed in yet another iteration of a non-Byker: compared with other settings in the film, this is almost futuristic – a sterile, mechanized environment devoid of any signifiers of locational specificity. A later section contrasts the atomized existence of current-day residents with the intergenerational female bonds of yore by way of two specially filmed sequences: firstly, black-and-white footage of women (many are familiar from the Amber ‘repertory’ group of performers) bantering with each other in a communal wash-room, and secondly, colour footage of despondent, non-communicative women in a launderette. Again, the juxtaposition has a clear conceptual logic. In the first, there is, quite unusually for the film, a synching of image and sound, a cacophonous but companionable interchange of jokes and questions shot in a ‘fly on the wall’ style. The second features a slow, graceful tracking shot, passing the women sitting glumly on their own and coming to rest upon the reflection in a washing machine of the individual who we assume (rightly or wrongly) to be the ‘speaker’ we hear on the voice-over, talking about the death of her first baby. However, any straightforward interpretation of the two scenes as objective representations of ‘past’ and ‘present’ is problematized by their obvious stylization. The first has no obvious signifiers to suggest it is not set in the present, whilst the second features exaggerated poses of distress and a moment when the camera appears to ‘wake up’ one of the participants as it glides past. The reflection of the woman’s face in the glass of the washing machine is an evocative image of entrapment and also conveys the psychic implications of traumatic stories, such as the one heard on the soundtrack, going unshared; but it is also a distorted and stylized reflection, in the same way that the preceding ‘banter’ scene has no claims to authenticity, just because of its vérité filming style. Indeed, Byker incorporates into its complex texture a minor strand acknowledging ways photographic and audio veracity might be disputed. For example, Konttinen’s voice-over reveals that one of her subjects, seen in a series of mannered tableaux, could hold a ‘frozen pose for a quarter of an hour’ and insisted on being pictured with a violin he could not play; when we hear a mouth organ on the soundtrack, accompanying verbal and visual testimony that he played the instrument, we may assume this is an actual recording of it – it may well not be. Elsewhere, a seemingly re-created piece

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  105

of dialogue on the soundtrack involves a woman disputing that she appears in one of Konttinen’s photographs; the viewer makes the imaginative leap that this is based on a real discussion captured by her and relates to the image we see on screen. The concluding sequence of the film, presenting lonely elderly residents in the New Byker development, shows one woman in a living room seemingly dominated by reflective surfaces. The space is introduced by way of some inscrutable static images of a table and a light fitting reflected in mirrors, before a panning camera reveals the physical source of the voice-over lamenting the ‘different class of people in Byker now’. Through the woman’s direct address to the camera, the first instance of this in the film, Byker finds a way to resolve, to some degree, its various tensions between sound and image, past and present. However, rather than ending at this point of direct testimony, Byker concludes by returning to the pub singers seen and heard at various times throughout the film. Indeed, music, and particularly song, plays a central role in the film’s construction of a utopian ‘Byker’. In her voice-over, Konttinen relates key moments in her budding relationship with the place to the music or song heard at the time, and the film uses a mixture of (possible) field recordings (particularly of young people, and of pub singers) and more ‘professionally’ recorded a cappella singers. In keeping with the implied age of some of the residents who tell their stories in the film, many of the songs, typically sentimental or nostalgic American numbers, are associated with singers and recordings from the 1930s and 1940s: they include the likes of ‘If I Had My Way’, ‘Sweetheart, We’ll Never Grow Old’, ‘Mistakes’ and ‘Forever and Ever’. Often, the marriage of music and image is tonally sympathetic, such as the use of the mawkish ‘Memories’ and ‘Mistakes’ (‘I made the greatest mistake of all, when I said goodbye to you’) to accompany film of derelict interiors and exteriors. Similarly, the first explicit mention of the demolition project, and its associated melancholia, comes by way of an echoing piano thud. But at other points, overlapping musical cues are used to conflate generational as well as cultural difference: there is mention of a pub where local dialect song (‘Sally Gee’) can be heard alongside a popular song, and a children’s skipping song blends into an older woman’s rendition of ‘Barefoot Days’. Threaded throughout Byker is footage of pub singers and performers filmed previously by Amber in a pub in North Shields, rather than Byker itself; the ‘sequel’ film Today I’m with You actually dates one particular sequence to 1976, shown there in colour in contrast to the more conceptually appropriate black-and-white here. To condemn this sleight of hand as a betrayal of authenticity, however, would be to miss the point of the film’s projection of a (re-)imagined Byker. The participants picked out for our attention give characterful but informal performances, and the pub, wherever it is or

106  •  In Fading Light

was, becomes a utopian space where the empathetic bonds between singers, musicians and audience collapse distinction between the individual and the community, and effaces differences of age and gender. Towards the end of the film, a relatively young male singer’s relaxed but soulful rendition of ‘I Talk to the Trees’ gets a warm reception but is undercut by the piano accompanist’s comment – quite possibly directly at the film crew – that ‘you should hear him when he’s drunk!’ If this throwaway comment demonstrates the playful banter of a group who know each other well, it also reminds us, to a degree, of our own remove: we won’t be there to witness this. Byker’s documentation of (often unaccompanied) group singing, in particular, places the film in a tradition of British fiction and non-fiction cinema where communal singing figures explicitly as a stoical response to trauma – a trope that connects 1930s musicals such as the Gracie Fields vehicle Sing as We Go (Dean, 1934) and war-time propaganda like Millions Like Us (Launder and Gilliat, 1943) and Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain (1942) with the ‘memory’ films of Terence Davies. Byker identifies a sentimental tendency in its participants’ choice of songs, but potential mawkishness is avoided at the end via a gleeful, ribald parody of ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ (famously recorded in 1960 by Elvis Presley) by a group of women, who sing in their ‘own’ (i.e. native Geordie) accent a version that explains why the protagonist might indeed be lonely; for instance, ‘do you keep up your knickers with a safety pin?’ etc. Rather than being passively inhabited, the Presley song is ripe for appropriation and mockery, its chaste, generalized sentiments personalized and, apparently, localized. Significantly, the song is answered by the customary ‘throwing out’ call of a landlady – ‘have you no homes to go to?’ – reinforcing the film’s notion of music as a site of both resistance and refuge.

Keeping Time (1983) Whereas Byker represented the culmination of a long-term project, Keeping Time, shown on Channel Four in the same year (1983), was more of a midpoint in Konttinen’s similarly longitudinal exploration of the culture of Tyneside dancing schools. In the 1974 ‘Finn on Tyneside’ documentary about her, Konttinen describes her fascination at seeing young children learning to ballroom dance, which she identifies as a ‘symptom of a desire for something which isn’t really part of working-class culture, which is glamour and grace: a kind of fantasy becomes real for a moment’. Early photographic documentation of the Abela Dance School in Wallsend, including some montage experiments included as part of the group’s River Project (of 1974), proved unsuccessful at capturing the ‘dream-like’ quality of these environments,39 but Amber would eventually build a relationship with a

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  107

particular school in North Shields, one of six in the area, and of about sixty in Tyneside.40 Combining documentary footage and scripted scenes, Keeping Time is a ‘semi-fictional diary’41 of one of the young women attending the Connell-Brown Dancing School, narrated in the most part by her mother: the scripted dialogues were a composite of the recordings Konttinen had made with mothers and daughters involved with the school. Following the film, Konttinen continued to photographically document the school, as part of a continued attempt at ‘putting a finger on the troublesome, but compelling nucleus of female experience, with both personal and political echoes and implications’.42 She describes, during this period, and as a young mother herself, how the ‘feminism’ she discovered with a ‘big walloping crash’ 43 inflected her contextualizing decisions. A subsequent exhibition placed photographic images from the studio and its pupils alongside collages of text and images from popular media (such as advertisements and women’s magazines), to suggest the oppressive ‘function of mass media in determining the kinds of choices open to mothers and daughters at the school and afterwards’.44 Not entirely happy with the reception of her ‘billboard politics’,45 Konttinen reworked the material up until the publication of the Step by Step book in 1989. However, the project was dogged throughout, and beyond, by a thorny dilemma, namely: how to explore processes of sexual exploitation without being exploitative. In her review of the 1984 Step by Step exhibition, which, like Keeping Time, included images of modelling classes, Penny Florence described her unease at the ‘sexual politics of women photographing each other in situations which I would find exploitative if the photographer were male’.46 The photographer’s anxieties that individual images might be vulnerable to decontextualization – ‘photographs tell you how things look, and at best how they are, but they can’t tell you why’47 – were sadly proved right when Amber later discovered that a Russian website drawing attention to art-related bodies of work featuring children included links to Konttinen’s images, and thus drew viewers into considering them in ‘dubious’ ways.48 Given this context, Keeping Time invites appreciation for its use of cinematic resources, as with Byker, to suggest the construction of an ‘imagined’ place and to give nuance to the broader project’s engagement with sexual politics. Unlike the previous film, still photographs from Konttinen’s collection are included very sparingly. Following an ‘overture’ section of footage of girls and young women performing in the dance studio, the film settles into a chronological pattern of staged sequences of an ageing Lisa (played by Lisa Hynes) with her family and footage of Lisa and other pupils practising and then taking examinations at the school. The family scenes are consciously contrived in their mise en scène and performance and usually involve Lisa’s (un-named) mother (Amber Styles) speaking directly to the camera, outlining her hopes and fears for her daughters. The first such sequence contains a

108  •  In Fading Light

subtle joke of editing by following an initial shot showing the mother in the foreground of a living room with Lisa watching television behind her, with a shot from the reverse angle revealing a wall where the previous camera position would logically have been. It is clear that the claustrophobic staging of these domestic scenes speaks of wider societal, indeed patriarchal, constraint. This is echoed in the restrictive framings of the characters in outside spaces (for example, Lisa and mother are filmed through a murkily reflective window of a fish and chip shop), and the use of a tracking shot of their housing estate that swerves past them quickly to suggest, in tandem with some sinister ‘TV thriller’-type music continued from a preceding scene, how they are dwarfed by their environment and inheritance. The appeal of the dancing school as a means of escape and self-betterment is clear, but it is also, significantly, a predominantly female space, with only a few men seen, and none seen making judgement. When Lisa’s father reminds the family of his status as ‘paymaster in this house’, and sarcastically implores them to ‘go on, pretend I’m not here’, the school goes some way to being such a male-free space. Not entirely, however: the film begins with a dancer moving to music from the James Bond film Thunderball (Young, 1965) (a cut-away shot explicitly identifies a record sleeve), the otherwise sparse studio room is furnished, oddly, with a shrine of sorts to the singer Engelbert Humperdinck, and the teacher makes a throwaway joke to pupils about ensuring that ‘if you do go off the catwalk, make sure you fall into the lap of a nice gentleman’ – a comment that causes great amusement to former pupils (now adults), who revisit the film in Amber’s Still Here (2018) and quickly pick up on the gender politics at work (see Chapter 7). Men – whether the alpha males of popular culture, or more abstracted personifications of the gaze – exert control from the fringes. The passing of time, as well as Lisa’s own progression from passivity to confidence – but also conformity, to a certain degree – is conveyed through clearly marked changes in costume and décor: we note how the doll-patterned wallpaper of her bedroom becomes covered with posters of pop stars (around the time she starts looking at magazines with adverts for sanitary products, and talking about fashion) and then disappears altogether. Lisa also becomes more talkative as the film progresses, slowly overtaking her mother as the storyteller of her own career development. However, the film ends with her mother alone in Lisa’s vacated, poorly lit bedroom, talking about her daughter moving with her husband away from the region because of his career and becoming a parent herself; her hope is that she will maintain her aspiration to start her own dancing school. The question thus posed by Keeping Time is the extent to which Lisa has control over a narrative that is in many respects predetermined. Her mother is adamant that her children have ‘no need to repeat my mistake’ and to be married before they ‘have an aim in life first’. There is constant mention in

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  109

Figure 4.1  Girl on a Spacehopper, Byker, 1971, used in Byker (1983). © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/Amber.

110  •  In Fading Light

the dialogue of Lisa’s never otherwise seen sister, Julie, who also showed early aptitude for dancing, and moved towards modelling, but has left home and, it would seem, dropped plans for a related career. Lisa is at times aligned with certain ‘tomboy’ characteristics, such as preferring boys’ toys and being sarcastic about her sister’s inevitable motherhood. There is also some resistance to the deportment and elocution skills learned at the dancing school. At two times at different ages, she performs a parodically overemphasized ‘smile’ pose, perhaps in defiance of the teacher we see criticizing her for her limited facial expressions. And despite her mother’s claim that she can ‘speak nice when she wants to’, her final long monologue in the film is delivered in an authentically unpolished Geordie accent; for instance, she seems to take particular pleasure in stretching out the vowels of the otherwise non-genteel word ‘streaky’. Although some of the sequences set in the dancing school, such as Lisa’s exuberant ‘disco’ dance to Susan Fassbender’s pop song ‘Twilight Café’ (1980), convey the liberatory potential of ‘doing “Art” in ordinary places’,49 the majority are framed in a way to expose the relations of power between teacher, pupil and us, as viewers. Dance and performance sequences are never included without some element of layering or disruption, whether through voice-over, perspective alteration, juxtaposition, or reminder of their constructedness. We are told, via voice-over, of Lisa’s discomfort with her modelling classes, which gives a voyeuristic edge to the subsequent footage of a class where a flushed, awkward-looking Lisa and (more comfortable-looking) fellow pupils pose in turn on a catwalk in relatively revealing clothing, and are then given feedback by the teacher and each other. Their individual turns are placed together in a montage to the same piece of uninterrupted music, suggesting an element of interchangeability; similarly, a subsequent ‘interview practice’ class shows the women’s highly individual clothing choices (one dons a sparkly blue wig) but rapidly cuts between them in the same position in the frame (sitting on a seat dead centre) to convey their uniformity. One might argue that such devices, alongside the brief cutaway shots of a male member of staff rolling the catwalk carpet and blowing up a beach ball used by one of the women, diminish the potentially exploitative force of the footage. A subsequent scene in which a docile-seeming Lisa is seen being given posing instructions by a male photographer eventually switches its perspective to show the photographer lying in a peculiar, unflattering position on the floor. Similarly, when the women undertake their examination, the camera eventually shifts from the performers to the female examiner, who has been issuing instructions throughout with notably ‘patrician’ enunciation; her deskbound hand movements and commands, detached from the performance, take on a surreal, dislocated quality. The invisible labour behind the dancing performances is also conveyed through footage of pupils and mothers in a

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  111

(presumably) adjacent room; one girl scowls in pain as her mother attends to her hair, whilst another applies make-up in a mirror – another static shot shows a cluster of legs practising steps. The film is alive to the contradiction of these ‘documentary’ (i.e. undirected) scenes being as ‘constructed’, in their enactment of ritual activities on the part of pupils and examiners, as the more overtly fictionalized elements elsewhere. This is neatly illustrated when the examiner asks one of the women if the presence of the ‘cameras’ (i.e. Amber themselves) had left her a ‘little bit worried’ and acknowledges: ‘me too!’ The events culminate in the examiner’s presentation of certificates and medals, but the solemnity of the occasion is undermined by her confusedly getting her comments ‘out of order’ and accidentally addressing the wrong pupil: ending the sequence in this way sustains the film’s subtly satirical undertone. Keeping Time also utilizes the power of associative editing in a montage sequence of shop-window fashion dummies wearing increasingly scanty and sexualized clothing, and then no clothes at all; the juxtaposition of this ‘strip tease’ with a voice-over account by mother and daughter of Lisa enjoying a school trip to a monastery, and toying with the idea of being a nun, sets up an obvious dichotomy between regressive female archetypes. The film’s ambivalence towards the dancing schools as zones of both escape and indoctrination is also expressed through a symbolically charged use of motifs relating to space and movement. Keeping Time moves towards a choreographed display by Lisa (to the music of OMD’s 1981 song ‘Joan of Arc’), shot in the dance studio, seemingly purely for the ‘camera’ –that is, with no on-screen judge or audience and with more stylized dollying  – and bright flaring lights evoking the ambience of a pop music video or programme. On the soundtrack, we also hear Lisa’s anecdote initiated by recollection of a newspaper profile citing one of her hobbies, erroneously, as ‘parachuting’; she speaks of the one time she dared to attempt a leap from a plane at an air show and describes the ‘terrific’ feeling of losing control and the ‘peaceful’ quality of the air. During the performance, there are flashes of aerial footage of a parachute descent to the ground, explaining, retrospectively, the brief sonic and visual excerpts of this throughout the film. On a visceral level, the sequence offers some pleasure: in the skill of the performer enhanced by camerawork and lighting, the enthusiasm of Lisa’s excited voice-over, and the visual interest of the falling camera. On an interpretive level, it allows various readings – and not entirely positive, if judged as a predestined, foreshadowed ‘fall to reality’ by the character marking the end of her childhood freedom; the song title and lyrics, with their nods to martyrdom and religion, are apposite too. Gender comes into play too, naturally, as Lisa notes wistfully that she would be too frightened to parachute again, unlike her brother; the expulsion of women from the frame of action and aspiration is also hinted at by her mother’s final words in the film about hoping her next grandchild

112  •  In Fading Light

is a ‘little lad this time’. Fittingly, for a film primarily about bodies learning to move in space and time, Keeping Time enunciates a tension between the ‘circularity’ of processes of indoctrination and predestination, and the ‘linearity’ of aspiration and self-improvement. As we have seen, these tensions are expressed as much spatially as narratively, and the final monologue from Lisa’s mother, conveying both hope and despondency, leaves its characters, and the viewers, in suspension between the two.

The Writing in the Sand (1991) Deriving almost exclusively from black-and-white photographs taken by Konttinen on beaches in north-east England (roughly between Druridge Bay and Sunderland) since the mid 1970s, and audio recordings of seaside sounds and tourists made immediately prior to the film’s creation, The Writing in the Sand is arguably one of Amber’s most technically virtuosic experiments; in Konttinen’s own words, ‘a crazy thing to attempt’.50 The film was constructed from around 400 individual photographs that are ‘animated’ mostly by way of the ‘track’ and ‘zoom’ effects already familiar from Byker and Keeping Time. These were created laboriously via a process of sticking blown-up prints on a wall then filming them (on 16mm) with ‘live’ camera movements using a trial movement video as a guide. Early in the development of the project, the plan had been to arrange the visual material to accompany a rendition of Dylan Thomas’s autobiographical ‘talk’ for radio, ‘A Holiday Memory’ (1946), drawing upon his memories of childhood jaunts to the seaside in Wales.51 Failure to secure the rights to the Thomas text resulted in the project being shelved for a while, but as the 1980s progressed, the looming threat of North Sea pollution, and specifically the (eventually abandoned) plans for a nuclear power station in Druridge Bay, gave impetus to Konttinen and Roberts to finalize The Writing in the Sand as ‘not just a simple celebration of the beach, the culture and the people, but as a reminder of what was at stake’.52 Thus the finished film’s impressionistic ‘life in a day’ structure, of thematically clustered images and sounds relating to seascape and recreational activity, also moves gradually towards an unsettling warning about the mistreatment of the sea. This sequence includes eerie inverted footage of stormy seas, illustrating a preacher’s speech about the world being upside down with the ‘cork’ leaking. The Writing in the Sand is hardly unique in British visual culture in its recognition of, in the words of cultural historian John Walton, ‘the consensually liminal nature of the seaside as “place on the margin”, where land and sea meet, the pleasure principle is given freer reign, the certainties of authority are diluted, and the usual constraints on behaviours are suspended, however

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  113

provisionally. . . .53 Reflecting here specifically on the role of the seaside resort for British tourists in the twentieth century, Walton notes how, in popular films of the pre-war era such as The Good Companions (Saville, 1933), Bank Holiday (Reed, 1938) and Sing As We Go, seaside locations offered an ‘opportunity to depict people outside their usual social settings, advancing the plot with recourse to attractive surroundings connotative of pleasure . . . whilst offering scope for the comedy of (cultural and sexual) embarrassment and the deflation of pretension and pomposity’.54 However, by the 1960s, films such as The Entertainer (Richardson, 1960) and The Punch and Judy Man (Summers, 1963) were dwelling upon the more tawdry aspects of the resort experience, and thus pointing towards the declining appeal of the old-fashioned seaside holiday in the era of cheap ‘package’ opportunities in warmer climes abroad. Within the history of British photography, this perspective is perhaps most associated with Martin Parr’s divisive yet influential photo series The Last Resort (1986), taken between 1982 and 1985 in New Brighton. Parr’s gaudy colour images, typified by rubbish-strewn beaches and seagulls squabbling over chips, have been read variously as a patronizing account of working-class vulgarity and as politically astute commentary on Thatcherite Britain.55 Konttinen’s monochrome photographs, in their published and cinematic incarnations, might reasonably be taken as a humanist riposte to the way Parr’s work invites ridicule or despair at his subjects and what they represent: she has described his ‘detached way of looking at people’ as signalling a ‘big change in how we perceive each other’.56

Figure 4.2  Whitley Bay, Aug ’80, used in The Writing in the Sand (1991). © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/Amber.

114  •  In Fading Light

Writing more generally on what he terms the ‘British holiday film’ – which has largely, although not exclusively, been set at the seaside – Matthew Kerry argues that this sub-strand of popular indigenous cinema has ‘ideologically constructed a sense of Britishness through the narrative process’.57 Citing Benedict Anderson’s famous conception of nationhood as a social construct, Kerry describes how these films ‘reinforce a sense of history, tradition and “imagined community” through their representations of the cultural practice of the holiday’. Of late, though, some of the most discussed seaside-related British films have been those using ‘resort’ settings as a prism through which to explore questions of otherness, hybridity and displacement; most notably, Bhaji on the Beach (Chadha, 1993), in which a group of first- and second-generation BritishAsian women experience degrees of self-exploration and liberation through a trip to Blackpool, and Last Resort (Pawlikowski, 2000), about a Russian asylum seeker held in a bleak tower block overlooking an out-of-season resort, where the ‘beach is denied both a tourist gaze and a liminal potential’.58 As a non-fictional film, The Writing in the Sand is clearly quite different in form to the comedies and dramas that constitute the interlocking ‘holiday’ and ‘seaside’ canons of British film and television culture: as an impressionistic documentary, it has more affinity with the experimental technique, for example, of Andrew Kötting’s densely textured Gallivant (1996), following members of his family on a journey around the UK coastline. Furthermore, it is focussed less on the traditional iconography of seaside culture – ice-cream vendors, seagulls, bingo halls and arcades and so on – than on the beach itself as a site for physical interactions between bodies, sand and sea. In fact, there is a notable darkening of tone whenever the images and sounds begin to stray from the beach: sounds of rain and thunder lead to a morose representation of a bingo hall with boredlooking customers, and an image of a child in a games arcade prefigures the film’s ‘nightmare’ sequence of an aggressive ocean.59 Nevertheless, the film does connect with the ‘mainland’ of seaside representation through its evocation of the holiday experience as, in Matthew Kerry’s words, an ‘imagined event’.60 For Konttinen, the beach is ‘one of the few remaining areas of access that actually belongs . . . to the nation’.61 In this sense, it is an ‘imagined’, democratic community without hierarchies of age, class, gender or ethnicity, even of man and animal (there are plentiful dogs). Identifiable local landmarks (such as the St Mary’s lighthouse off the coast of Whitley Bay) appear in the background, but despite the coastal areas of the region being, in Konttinen’s own words, ‘all quite different in character’, the film flattens out these differences via a thematic arrangement of images and sounds; the elision of specificities of season, year and geography is in some respects comparable with Byker’s conflation of particularity and (working-class) universality.62 As with Byker, sound and music play a key role in the re-imagining of the beach as communal space. Although Dylan Thomas’s ‘Holiday Memory’,

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  115

despite its importance in the early development of the project, is only briefly referenced, via three short excerpts, the film does achieve some comparable effects to the original radio broadcast. According to Ann Elizabeth Mayer, the ‘Holiday Memory’ moves from being a ‘short story with a first-person narrator’ into ‘dramatic presentation’ in moments of extended dialogue between the author’s cast of holidaymakers; ‘fragments of voices from the past mingle in memory’, turning the listener (or reader) into an ‘eavesdropper’.63 The collagistic soundtrack of The Writing in the Sand is predominantly drawn from beach recordings made by the filmmakers, sometimes surreptitiously, on occasion through attaching themselves to a group carrying out an activity. In comparison with the retrospective anecdotes and memories of the narrators in Byker, the speakers here, old and young, are very much caught in the moment: popular songs are raucously sung, dogs and children are called to or reprimanded, children spy rock-pool creatures, and so forth. By placing us fleetingly within private exchanges, albeit in a public space, these raw vocal ‘fragments’ – often difficult to discern clearly – certainly promote a sense of intimacy. Although the audio recordings, made during the final stages of the film’s creation, have as much worth as historical documents as Konttinen’s photographs, they work to diminish the temporal, seasonal and geographical discrepancies between the images, and thus to universalize the beach experience. That said, and appropriately for a film about leisure habits, The Writing in the Sand takes a playful attitude to the synchronization of sound and image. The relationship is often literal and illustrative: for instance, photographs of families are accompanied by conversational snippets of parents talking to children, and a group of young people striking poses is matched to voices excitedly singing a pop song. On occasion, it is evident that the juxtaposition of images has been determined by the sourced audio material, such as in the sequence illustrating a rendition of The Drifters’ ‘Under the Boardwalk’ (1962): the line ‘we’ll go walking above’ is amusingly cut to a shot of an old couple strolling on top of a cliff while a young couple canoodle on the sand below. There are jokes to be made too from disjunction between sound and image: at one point, it is revealed that the squeals of disgust heard by children on the soundtrack, seemingly to the image that we see of a kissing couple, is actually in response to the sighting of jellyfish. Again, like Byker, collective singing comes to epitomize the formation of the ‘imagined’ community: the music hall favourite ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ – arguably the ‘national anthem’ of the British seaside – is particularly prominent. The Writing in the Sand also raises anxieties about humanity’s relationship with the sea through the idea of the ‘imprint’, introduced from the very start via a photograph of the words of the film’s title inscribed, over a large space, on a stretch of beach. Within scholarship on the ‘holiday film’, with which

116  •  In Fading Light

we can find a reasonable parallel here, the ‘transportative’ nature of leisure activity has been paralleled with the experience of cinema-going itself.64 The deployment of some classical music on the soundtrack, when alternated with various popular songs (some famously ‘naff’, such as the ‘The Birdie Song’),65 provides some variation for the viewer and gestures towards the transcendental potential of the beach, but also confuses codes of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Of course, the film’s very existence, and its artful, deliberate treatment of the subject matter, emphasizes the poetic possibilities of the seemingly quotidian. A sequence utilizing Elgar’s ‘Where Coral Lies’ (1899)66 moves between sand patterns caused by tide formation, a shell-like pattern drawn by human hand and then a ‘noughts and crosses’ board marked on the shore. The movement from a ‘natural’ phenomenon to an artistic attempt of a sort, and then finally to the use of the beach for gaming recreation, foreshadows a later sequence where references to bingo and arcades, and the voice of a preacher railing against pollution (in fact, the familiar Amber actor Brian Hogg re-creating the words of the preacher seen in photographs), trigger the aforementioned ‘nightmare’ vision of a pained sea. This includes images of children ‘buried’ (willingly, one presumes) in sand, as well as sand sculptures of bodies lying prostrate on the ground.67 The sequence suggests a response by nature to the mistreatment of the sea, a theme that connects the film with Tyne Lives (1980) and In Fading Light (1989) – which deal with ash-dumping and debates around over-fishing; Song for Billy (2017) also moves toward a cathartic ‘reclamation’ of the coast after a period of industrial disfigurement (see Chapter 7). It is hard to miss the apocalyptic connotations of these latter images of vulnerable bodies in the context of concerns around the nuclear industry and the planned nuclear plant for Druridge Bay, and these also connect with the themes of Peter Roberts’s Jellyfish (1973) animation (discussed in Chapter 2). Pulling these various strands together, The Writing in the Sand accomplishes an impressive complexity in its nexus of associations between play, art and the dangers posed to (and possibly by) the sea.

Letters to Katja (1994) Although Amber members have often acknowledged the way that their own backgrounds and perspectives have shaped their work, Letters to Katja was an unusually personal project, in dealing with Konttinen’s decision to return to Finland for a year, following a ‘very deep crisis of identity’.68 Konttinen had experienced a sense of being too long in exile, of forgetting her native language, exacerbated by the passing away of family members, the realization that her life choices had ‘repercussions’ and also that, during a time of ‘working-class fundamentalism’ for the group, she could ‘never be a

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  117

working-class Geordie’.69 She spent a year in Finland, her daughter Katja came for four months, and her partner and collaborator Peter Roberts came for short periods. The resulting film, Letters to Katja, was an attempt to convey her ‘feeling of a deep sense of loss and how to try to rebuild that identity’.70 Constructed around the diaristic correspondence between Konttinen and her daughter, heard throughout on the soundtrack, the film continues and augments the collagist style of Byker by intertwining even more different elements: grainy home movie footage of Konttinen with family members and travelling, 16mm footage of significant moments, old family photographs, and the black-and-white tree-scape photographs of her own, which would later become the punningly titled ‘My Finnish Routes’ project. The film was co-produced by Finnish television and the Finnish Film Foundation. As with the previous films, the impressionistic quality of Letters to Katja, which is as concerned with ambience as much as descriptive detail, belies the way it is carefully crafted around ideas, images and sounds in rhyme or discord with each other, and it is structured to suggest a progression towards a kind of personal clarity or catharsis. The image of a shaken snow globe at the start is richly suggestive of the exilic experience but also of the film’s initial textural sensation of ‘shaken’ components taking a while to settle into order. Although not obviously schematic on a first viewing, the film is segmented into differently focussed sections that are not necessarily chronological, despite the diaristic implications. An opening sequence introducing Konttinen’s family at their idyllic summer residence, enjoying meals, music and sauna rituals, is halted abruptly by intimations of the traumatic impact of the military conflict between Finland and Russia: Konttinen recalls her first nightmare in relation to it and the impact upon her father. The film then shifts focus to Helsinki and reflections on the impact of modernity on the country, before footage of a wedding prompts thoughts on the ‘progressive social conditions for mothering and parenting in Finland’.71 There follows a rural interlude showing Konttinen and family enjoying a peaceful holiday in Lapland, but some interviews with people involved in the region’s tourist industry (the ersatz ‘Santa Claus’ experience compared to the ‘real’ one of family members dressing up in the role) expose some concerns about what it takes for indigenous reindeer herders to survive economically in the modern world and moves the film towards an angst-ridden sequence set in the city. Katja declares her desire to go home, and Konttinen experiences alienation and creative stasis, culminating in another nightmare about being to find her way homeward. But the experience of taking some photographs of a snowy wood – where the ‘landscape is the negative of my soul’, and where she can lose herself in nature – seems to represent a creative breakthrough, and the remainder of the film depicts others managing, like her, to transfigure questions of place and identity into art: firstly, a group

118  •  In Fading Light

of women making a film interrogating female self-image and, secondly, an ‘outsider’ artist living on the border with Russia who has filled his home and land with statues of himself and visitors (actual and imaginary) in yoga poses; unlike Konttinen, this man, who works in a local paper mill, has never left the area, and has effectively brought the world to himself. The film ends with a return, in memory, to Konttinen’s parents’ and family’s summer cottage, corroborating an earlier statement that, of all the places in her year away, this is the one she will find herself thinking of the most. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that Letters to Katja moves straightforwardly to a celebration of art, or of memory. Konttinen makes a few observations about the difficulties of encapsulating her surroundings, or her experience of it. Of her family gatherings at the summer cottage, she says she finds it ‘hard to put in words what all this means to me’, in the sense of one’s inability to fully fathom the meaning of a place in one’s psyche, whilst she regrets that when experiencing the scent of fir trees: ‘I’ll never put that in a photograph’. Nor is the past always accessible to enquiry or re-imagining: her mother at one point refuses to talk about the difficult times of her past. The overall framing of the film, which begins with Konttinen and daughter arriving in Finland, and concludes with imagery of leave-taking, may imply a linear ‘travelogue’ approach, but the ‘narrative’ actually skips around in time: for example, the Lapland holiday (identified as August) is shortly followed by diaries dated as (the following) February. Furthermore, Konttinen’s daughter challenges her nostalgia for the Finland of her youth, suggesting that she has failing memory, or simply that the country of her childhood no longer exists. The film ends with a view, from a moving boat, of her family members standing in a group pose on the shore. Given that we have previously seen some of these people in highly animated poses – talking, dancing, playing music and so forth – the formality of their arrangement here speaks of the way that memory works to freeze people and places in time; their waving goodbye to Konttinen, and to us, as we slide away from them, captures well the melancholic sensation of departure and loss. Letters to Katja also bears comparison with the other films discussed in this chapter so far in the way that it explores the notion of place as an imagined construct. On the one hand, it is very specific in its references to key signifiers of Finnish identity: for example, the rituals of the sauna (depicted in a detailed sequence that is reminiscent of Amber’s ‘process’ films of the 1970s), the impact of war, the significance of ‘freedom’ (cited by a number of participants), the landscape, Helsinki’s signature nationalistic architectural styles, the pull of ‘Lapponia’ and so forth. Konttinen’s film explicitly addresses the way that globalizing forces might have an impact on indigenous culture. For example, the Helsinki-set section includes a sequence that draws together imagery of noted architecture such as the Pohjola Insurance Building with

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  119

Figure 4.3  Photograph from My Finnish Routes (Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, 1990–99), used in Letters to Katja (1994). © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/Amber.

120  •  In Fading Light

that of American cars and a fast-food outlet advertising ‘fish and chips’. In an aural equivalent, an excerpt on the soundtrack from the nationalistic ‘Finlandia’ hymn (1899/1900) by Jean Sibelius fades into some glossy contemporary pop songs. Konttinen’s comments about the anonymity of the urban landscape are echoed by her daughter’s barb that the ‘Finland of your childhood sounds lovely, but it’s not like that any more: it’s just like anywhere’. When she meets the group of filmmakers making their politically charged film about female identity, we hear their derisive mention of the US soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful (1987–) as an example of a malign cultural influence. It so happens that Konttinen had earlier admitted to a new obsession with the programme; the insinuation is that it has been a form of bonding with her daughter, but there is an acknowledgement here of her complicity. A drunken Russian man riding on a late-night train rants to Konttinen about Americanization, but the mood of this segment is darkened by suggestions of anti-refugee feeling, and her conversation with a victim of it. The much vaunted ‘freedom’ of Finnish society does not apply to all, including ex-patriots like Konttinen: she is seen attending a celebration for ex-patriot Finns (marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the country’s independence) near the start of the film but later discerns how a worsening economic situation has overturned the former encouragement of their return. As the juxtaposition of pop and ‘Finlandia’ demonstrates, music plays an important role in conjuring up Konttinen’s attitude to the country, in all its contradictions. The significance of music to the family get-togethers – we see solo and group performances in folk and classical idioms – is replicated by the film’s dense aural collage. This includes extracts from recordings by folk, classical and pop musicians, the sound of children singing, street performers, club blues performers, inoffensive cruise-ship entertainment, a specially recorded score for piano and kantele (an indigenous variant on the zither) – and, appropriately, given Finland’s unlikely status as the ‘tango capital of the world’,72 a few examples of what is reckoned to be ‘the most authentic, and still popular form of Finnish music’.73 Although some of the songs used are strongly patriotic, and a reminder of the importance of composers such as Sibelius for the enunciation of national identity in the early twentieth century, they also have a melancholic, sometimes sentimental charge that transcends their immediate context; in this way they function in similar ways to the evocative songs in Byker, which avoid sentiments of nationalism (or regionalism for that matter) but invoke a bygone community. As with Byker, the impact of the music often derives from its specific positioning. The sight of Konttinen’s father defiantly singing a patriotic song in his sauna might be indulged as an act of eccentricity were it not for the preceding archive footage of war-destroyed Finland and the detail that he ‘still screams in his sleep’. We have noted the conflation of Sibelius and

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  121

contemporary pop, but when Konttinen visits the ‘yoga’ sculptor at the end of the film, the sudden switch from a Finnish choral work to a piece of Indian music carries the more positive aura of a countryman looking outward for inspiration, despite never leaving the country (the artist actually piped the Indian music into speakers within the sculptures). The camera observes two street performers delivering a spirited, slightly mock-dramatic rendition of a song called ‘Lapponia’, the Finnish entry (by Monica Aspelund) to the Eurovision Song Contest of 1977; this is followed by Konttinen conspiratorially singing the song to her daughter as they make their own way to Lapland. But if music can be the vehicle for family bonding, it can also divide them. She cites The Beatles as one of the reasons she originally moved to England, and a lively scene of her jiving to an American-style blues number is accompanied by her recollection of feeling ‘so at home’ there; there is corroboration for this in the BBC’s 1974 documentary (mentioned at the beginning of this chapter), which ended with her getting up to dance to a band in a lively working men’s club in Byker. Given that Letters to Katja is rooted in Konttinen’s own story, it is notable that she is not an overriding presence on screen. She appears throughout, but there is proportionately more footage of landscapes, cityscapes and family members, and the fragmentary, restless visual style precludes shots that allow her to dominate the frame. However, the intimate quality of the voice-over, delivered in her calm, measured tones, only pulls the viewer deeper into the film’s dense circuit of ideas and impressions. In being simultaneously there, and not quite there, Konttinen is of course conveying the liminality of the person separated from their roots, but the analogy works also to describe the relationship between Konttinen’s films and the Amber canon. Letters to Katja is arguably no more a ‘personal’ film than, say, Byker or Eden Valley (1995), even if it deals with family relationships and circumstances very individual to Konttinen. But the films discussed in this chapter do share a concern with how particular places – a region, a dance school, the beach, a country – might be imagined, remembered and reconstructed. It is not hard to identify a shared sensibility, too; namely, an attentiveness to the textural possibilities of both the image and the soundtrack. There is indeed a musicality at work: not just a sensitivity to the emotive effects of sound and music but a capacity to weave motifs and ideas  – most typically about identity, heritage and belonging – into a dense, poetic web of associations. The films discussed in this chapter appeared within an eleven-year period, even though their roots stretch back towards the earliest days of Amber. Following Letters to Katja, it would be over fifteen years before the emergence of another film with a strong link to Konttinen and her photography. Today I’m with You (2010) represented Konttinen’s return to a Byker immeasurably different from the one she had documented three and four decades prior. Although an

122  •  In Fading Light

obvious companion piece to Byker, the film largely eschews the ‘collage’ style that characterizes much of the earlier work produced in collaboration with Roberts. I will return to it in Chapter 7, not just in the context of Konttinen’s revived Byker project, but in relation to the broader turn to retrospection in Amber’s work in the twenty-first century.

Conclusion: Amber Film and Photography There has historically been little in the way of sustained audio-visual analysis of Amber’s output; that is, work opening up specific examples to nuanced, conceptualizing study. Konttinen’s Byker project has arguably been the exception, having been excavated in some detail in articles by Annabelle Honess Roe and Paul Jobling in terms of their creative ‘construction’ of place, which encourages speculation upon the qualities that crowned this work as particularly worthy of attention. One possibility is that the film’s emphasis upon Konttinen’s life, work and perspective opens up scope for auteurist analysis in a way frustrated by the majority of Amber’s output. Indeed, this chapter stands guilty of doing the same in a manner unsympathetic to Amber’s project of collective authorship, so I would stress once more the key creative role of others in the films discussed here. But one is also tempted to conclude that Byker’s privileged place within the Amber project is due to its associations, via Konttinen’s work, with the more ‘rarefied’ world of artistic photography. Curiously, however, Roe’s article makes little reference to the artistic and reception contexts of Konttinen’s photography, which is so central to the film’s artistic strategy, whereas Jobling’s article on her images barely acknowledges the film or how the photographs are ‘animated’ to particular effect.74 There is proof here that Amber’s joint engagement with photographic and filmmaking enterprises is intimidating for the specialist in either, and although some scholars have considered the links between the two,75 this schism in approaches to Byker is more indicative of the challenge at hand. Konttinen has herself observed the way that the relationship between her film and photographic work has often been misunderstood: Obviously my work has been part of Amber’s progression, but the photography has been written about separately in photographic magazines. I’m better known as a photographer than a filmmaker even though I’ve been less visible on the scene. I don’t go to photography festivals whereas I go to film festivals. In the early years I was taken up by the photography media, and every exhibition was reviewed. But when documentary went out of fashion, I went sort of invisible to a certain extent. And now that the Tate has a permanent collection

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  123

of my work, it’s re-emerging. I’ve become more active, personally  – taking opportunities to go and talk, at conferences etc.

The history of Amber’s integration of film and photographic projects does not stop with Konttinen, however, as we will see in the next chapter in relation to projects such as Seacoal, and then in Chapter 6 concerning the ‘coalfield’ trilogy of films about East Durham.

Notes   1. Programme information from the Radio Times of that week, taken from the BBC Genome website. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/ b768c76f51664a35bd5ae8ec00caea1b.   2. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, personal correspondence with author.   3. Konttinen, personal correspondence with author.   4. S. Konttinen. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10977-F10983).   5. S. Konttinen. 1983. ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, Creative  Camera 227, November, 1161; Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography.   6. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography.   7. E. Clavering. 2010. ‘Betwixt and Between: Mapping Marginalised Classed Identities’, in Y. Taylor (ed.), Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges, London and New York: Routledge, 123.   8. S. Konttinen. 1983. Byker, London: Jonathan Cape, 5.   9. Konttinen, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, 1160. 10. Konttinen, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, 1160. 11. Research by Peter Malpass, cited in Konttinen, Byker, 125. 12. Jobling, P. 1993. ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen: The Meaning of Urban Culture in Byker’, History of Photography 17(3), 254. 13. S. Glynn. 2011. ‘Good Homes: Lessons in Successful Public Housing from Newcastle’s Byker Estate’, conference paper, The Housing Crisis: Experience, Analysis and Response, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, London, 18 November. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/research/Glynn.pdf. 14. Clavering, ‘Betwixt and Between’, 123. 15. B. Farmer. 1993. ‘Client, Community and Climate: Byker – A Case Study’, in B. Farmer, H. J. Louw, H. Louw and A. Napper (eds), Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought, 130. 16. Anon. 1981. ‘The Architecture We Deserve’, The Times, 27 June, 13. 17. R. Abrams. 2003. ‘Byker Revisited’, Built Environment 29(2), 117–31. 18. A. Minton. 2015. ‘Byker Wall: Newcastle’s Noble Failure of an Estate’, The Guardian, 21 May. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/21/ byker-wall-newcastles-noble-failure-of-an-estate-a-history-of-cities-in-50-buildingsday-41. 19. P. Waymark. 1989. ‘Homes Sweet Homes’, The Times, 27 June, 23.

124  •  In Fading Light

20. S.K. Yarker. 2014. ‘Belonging in Byker: The Nature of Local Belonging and Attachment in Contemporary Cities’, Ph.D. Thesis, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, 2; Radio Times listing for ‘Byker Will Not Die’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?adv=0&q=Byker+will+not+die& media=all&yf=1923&yt=2009&mf=1&mt=12&tf=00%3A00&tt=00%3A00#search. 21. Bill Lancaster speaking in The Battle of Byker, BBC Radio 4, 1 July 2011. 22. L. Hall. 2009. ‘Foreword’, in S. Konttinen, Byker Revisited, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria Press, vi. 23. Konttinen, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, 1162. Konttinen is likely thinking here of the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch, associated with the Monty Python group, although actually first performed on At Last the 1948 Show (1967): the humour hinges on the men trying to outdo each other with progressively ridiculous accounts of their deprived childhoods. 24. R. Colls. 2005. ‘Born-Again Geordies’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 24. 25. Colls, ‘Born-Again Geordies’, 24. 26. Jobling, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’, 254. 27. Jobling, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’, 260. 28. Jobling, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’, 260. 29. Konttinen, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, 1162. 30. A.H. Roe. 2007. ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 4(2), 311. 31. Roe, ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, 318. 32. Roe, ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, 317. 33. Konttinen, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, 1163. 34. Roe, ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, 314; A. Higson. 1996. ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in A. Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 152. 35. Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’, 156. 36. Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’, 155. 37. The satirical song, from the musical Cabaret – first performed on stage in 1966 and made into a 1973 film – is sung here by the Grotbags character (a witch) in the ITV children’s show Emu’s World (1982–84) in an episode first aired 16 March 1983. 38. As noted elsewhere (particularly in the next chapter), television screens figure prominently in Amber’s work from this period and hereafter, for a combination of narrative, aesthetic and symbolic purposes. 39. S. Konttinen. 2010. Side Talks: Byker Revisited, interview streamed in September 2010 on Amber website. 40. S. Konttinen. 1989. Step by Step, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 6. 41. Konttinen, Step by Step, 5. 42. Konttinen, Step by Step, 5. 43. S. Konttinen and P. Roberts. 2016. ‘Keeping Time Talk: 27.11.16’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.amber-online.com/collection/keeping-time-talk-27-11-16/. 44. P. Florence. 1985. ‘Step by Step: Photographs, Text and Collage’, Creative Camera 242, February, 28. 45. Konttinen and Roberts, ‘Keeping Time Talk’, 29. 46. Florence, ‘Step by Step’, 29. 47. Florence, ‘Step by Step’, 29. 48. Graeme Rigby, personal correspondence with author.

The Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Films  •  125

49. Hall, ‘Foreword’, xi. 50. S. Konttinen and P. Roberts. Unknown Date. ‘Interview’, The Writing in the Sand DVD. 51. ‘A Holiday Memory’ was, according to the BBC Genome Project database of Radio Times listings, first broadcast on the Third Programme on 25 October 1946. 52. S. Konttinen. 2003. ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in Conversation with William Feaver’, transcript of event at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 14 August 2003, held in Baltic archive. The campaign against the planned power station at Druridge Bay was covered in Can’t Beat It Alone (1985) (see previous chapter). 53. J.K. Walton. 2000. The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 3. 54. Walton, The British Seaside, 8. 55. G. Badger. 2009. ‘A Good Day Out: Reflecting on Last Resort’, in M. Parr, The Last Resort: Photographs of New Britain, Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 6. In 2018, the British Maritime Museum ran a photographic exhibition entitled ‘The Great British Seaside’ (23 March to 30 September): Parr’s work was prominent in the exhibition as was the publicity material around it. 56. Konttinen, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in Conversation with William Feaver’, n.p. An incident that took place during the collection of audio material from beaches for the film would also mark a sea change in public and state attitudes towards the free-roaming photographer. Reported to the police by members of the public, Konttinen was arrested for ‘suspicious behaviour around children’. This was a time of heightened anxiety stemming from a wave of suspected child abuse cases in the (former) county of Cleveland, in northeast England. Whereas her previous encounters with subjects had been ‘spontaneous and good humoured’, now parental permission would be necessary before taking photographs of children. See S. Konttinen. 2009. Byker Revisited: A Portrait of a Community, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University, 28. 57. M. Kerry. 2010. The Holiday and British Film, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 6. 58. S. Allen. 2008. ‘British Cinema at the Seaside: The Limits of Liminality’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 5(1), 62–63. 59. The bingo hall imagery is comparable here with that used across Tyne Lives (1980) and the broadcast version of The Filleting Machine (1981). 60. Kerry, The Holiday and British Film, 2. 61. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography. 62. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography. 63. A.E. Mayer. 1995. Artists in Dylan Thomas’s Prose Works: Adam Naming and Aesop Fabling, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 138. 64. Kerry, The Holiday and British Film, 2. 65. Most famous in the UK via its incarnation as the 1981 novelty hit ‘Birdie Song’ by The Tweets, the song has a complicated international history stretching back to the 1950s. 66. The same piece of music is used in The Filleting Machine (1981). 67. According to the account in the Writing in the Sand photo-book, Konttinen’s photographs of the sand sculptures on an empty beach were the ‘disquieting after image’ of a fundraising day as part of the campaign against the Druridge Bay power station. S. Konttinen. 2000. Writing in the Sand: On the Beaches of North East England, Stockport/ Newcastle upon Tyne: Dewi Lewis Publishing/Amber/Side, 11. 68. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography. 69. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography. 70. Konttinen, An Oral History of British Photography. 71. Konttinen, personal correspondence with author.

126  •  In Fading Light

72. See, for example, P. Culshaw. 2004. ‘Finland: Home of the Tango’, The Telegraph, 7 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618574/Finlandhome-of-the-tango.html. 73. Konttinen, personal correspondence with author. 74. Jobling, ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’, 253–62. 75. See, for instance, R. Ashmore. 2011. ‘Landscape and Crisis in Northern England: The Representation of Communal Trauma in Film and Photography’, Ph.D. thesis. Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University; D. Newbury. 1999. ‘Photography and the Visualization of Working Class Lives in Britain’, Visual Anthropology Review 15(1), 21–44; G. Gee. 2017. Art in the North of England: 1979–2009, Oxon and New York: Routledge.

Chapter 5

Dream On Drama Features, 1981 to 1991



The division of work by any artist or filmmaker into discrete periods or types will always face reproach for being too straightforward, reducing the complexities of creative evolution and experimentation to simple chronology and categorization. In the case of Amber, any notion that their engagement with drama began squarely in the 1980s, or happened as a sudden transition, can be easily contested: there is, after all, an element of reconstruction in many of their previous films. Nevertheless, The Filleting Machine (1981), their short film of Tom Hadaway’s existing play of the same name, did herald a step towards a cycle of productions that on a (conjectural) spectrum between ‘documentary’ and ‘drama’ could comfortably be placed nearer the latter in terms of the increasing emphasis they place upon storytelling and characterization. So, whilst Seacoal (1985), In Fading Light (1988) and Dream On (1991) draw richly from Amber’s relationships with particular communities, they are also feature-length dramas that fit relatively comfortably within the tradition of British social realist cinema. Seacoal came about through the encouragement of Channel Four, and whilst it would be unfair to denigrate Amber’s other work during the period as less ‘cinematic’ or significant (an impression the surrounding chapters to this one will surely dispel), it remains the case that the feature-length drama is, to many, the gold standard of production. It would be misleading, though, to insinuate that Amber underwent any kind of linear mainstreaming process. Of all the films discussed here, Seacoal is the most loosely plotted, devoting most of its time to its main characters’ integration within a circle of sea-coalers and incorporating some

128  •  In Fading Light

observational footage of real people. In contrast, In Fading Light and Dream On are richer in incident and character and rely more on professional actors, but they all utilize ‘real’ experiences and places in different ways. I have already established that the 1980s was a time of considerable expansion for Amber, who were given financial stability through Channel Four funding, and the creative narrative unfolding in this chapter is one of incrementally increasing ambition. The Filleting Machine had been in gestation since the early 1970s, and its completion represented a breakthrough in self-assurance and resourcing. The subsequent features Seacoal and In Fading Light continue a trajectory of confident experimentation in documentary drama in the 1980s. By the time of Dream On, early in the next decade, the decision to use an exclusively female creative team to produce a film about female solidarity and empowerment spoke not only of the group’s capacity at this point but also of a robustness that permitted a certain degree of selfawareness and critique of their work and emphases to date.

The Filleting Machine (1981) Given that Tom Hadaway effectively became Amber’s dramatic writer in residence during the 1980s, there is a retrospective logic to their decision to make a record of his stage play The Filleting Machine. It had been broadcast live on television on 17 March 1973, as part of BBC2’s Full House (1972–73) arts magazine programme, and was subsequently toured by the Newcastlebased Live Theatre company on a double bill with Hadaway’s The Pigeon Man (1974). The histories of Live and Amber were starting to entwine around that period, not least because Murray Martin managed Live for a short time, drawing Amber members into writing, directing and publicity activities.1 Founded in 1973, Live Theatre was dedicated to the staging of new dramas in community spaces, such as social clubs, as a means of reaching working-class audiences. Subsequently based near Amber’s headquarters on the Newcastle quayside, Live would become associated with a demotic style of drama engaging directly with local concerns, typified by writers such as Alan Plater, C.P. Taylor, Lee Hall and Peter Flannery; under Amber’s wing in the mid 1970s, the company were steered away from their initial ‘agit prop’ tendencies towards productions with more appeal to their intended audiences. Indeed, the company’s tour of Hadaway’s The Filleting Machine and The Pigeon Man had been suggested by Martin as a means of shifting the  company towards productions that would engage working-class audiences. Hadaway offered The Filleting Machine to Amber around this time, but they as yet did not have the capacity to produce drama. Furthermore, a number of Amber’s eventual repertory company of actors, such as Brian

Dream On • 129

Hogg, Sammy Johnson and Amber Styles, had previously performed with Live. The North Shields-born playwright and life-long fish-quay worker Tom Hadaway would in time be recognized as a ‘father figure’ and ‘elder statesman’ of Live Theatre and was a major creative influence for Amber too during the 1980s, not only leading the scriptwriting of Seacoal, Double Vision and In Fading Light but also appearing occasionally as an actor and becoming formally a member of the collective for a while.2 Although not particularly well known nationally, Hadaway has tended to be ranked alongside writers such as Sid Chaplin and Alex Glasgow, who collectively fostered the ‘evolution of a recognizable North East drama’ during the 1960s and 1970s.3 Landmark productions included Close the Coalhouse Door (a 1968 play on Tyneside, and broadcast by the BBC in the Wednesday Play (1964–70) strand in 1969) and the BBC’s serial period drama When the Boat Comes In (1976–81). As Alan Plater observed, the ‘non-metropolitan piece’ had become an established subgenre of British film and television in the early 1960s, but Tyneside (and the North East generally) had remained a ‘largely unexplored patch within the larger landscape of the fictional “North”’.4 Hadaway’s achievement at gaining a series of writing commissions for the BBC in the 1970s was thus a considerable one; as well as an episode for When the Boat Comes In, these included the period drama God Bless Thee Jacky Madison (1973) and a contribution to Play for Today (1970–84) entitled The Happy Hunting Ground (1976), the story of a charismatic man inveigling himself into a position of authority in the North Shields fishing business.5 Writing authentically about a world he knew keenly, but also with a gift for structure and thematic succinctness, Hadaway was a fitting collaborator for Amber as they made their tentative steps towards longer dramas. Just as Amber had taken a celebratory perspective on their industrial subjects, so Hadaway’s writing spoke lyrically of hard lives and places. The integration of a writer with an already established ‘voice’ within Amber’s ongoing experimentation with creative documentary was not without practical difficulty. For Seacoal, for example, the use of nonprofessional actors in key scenes was bound up with union requirements that their performances could not be scripted but could be reactive to the lines of the professional actors. No such difficulties were presented, however, by Amber’s 1981 film of The Filleting Machine. Like the original play, it confines its action to a single household on the Ridges (later renamed Meadow Well) estate in North Shields. In narrowing the setting to one family dinner time, following a day of manual work, housework and school respectively for the (un-named) Ma (Betty Hepple/Amber Styles) and Da (Tom Hadaway) and their teenage children Alice (Lynn Crosland) and Davey (David Heads), Hadaway’s screenplay strikes a balance between ‘slice-of-life’, real-time verisimilitude and dramatic

130  •  In Fading Light

trajectory. After a brief sequence of the quay market early in the morning, the film quickly establishes through conversations between the mother and her two (on-screen) children that Alice, outside of school, is reluctant to venture outside the home, whereas the fifteen-year-old Davey, much to his mother’s disapproval, has already found a job on the quayside. It is gradually revealed that Davey has a chance to work with ‘no experience needed’ on the ‘filleting machine’: the mechanical, cost-saving device that ultimately dooms the craft skills of his father’s generation to obsolescence. The inevitable confrontations over the dinner table between mother and father, parents and children, function on one level as a miniaturist rendering of the rhythms of the fish-quay worker’s life of early morning shifts and pub socializing in the afternoon. Da’s arrival home in a leery, antagonistic mood, lecturing one and all on the irrelevance of formal education is evidently – from the habitually dismissive yet wary response of his family – a commonplace event. The very title and refrain of the song he boozily serenades his family with – Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’ (1964)  – reiterates the repetitiousness of this family ritual. But Davey’s revelation transforms a prosaic squabble into an exceptional moment of reflection by Da upon his life and family relationships. Davey breaks his news as means to intervene in a physical tussle between his parents, and this abrupt moment of enlightenment is also conveyed stylistically, via a series of disorientating zooms that break with a hitherto unobtrusive framing technique. Hadaway’s screenplay conveys succinctly how working life and environment determines a worldview; and in particular, attitudes towards education and betterment. Smelling the tainting aroma of her husband’s profession on her son’s clothes, Ma firstly assumes he has accompanied his father to the pub. She expresses her disappointment at his missing of an opportunity for a ‘town clerk’ job, with its prospects for him escaping the ill-reputed Ridges; she also chastises him for the colloquialisms that doom him to his

Figure 5.1  Still from The Filleting Machine (1981). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

Dream On • 131

place in the social order. The gendered demarcation of domestic/public space and of attitudes towards social improvement are thus established well before the film’s final sequence, where Ma reads Alice’s positive school report and encourages her to make use of her various ‘aptitudes’, not merely for her own sake but as a duty to the world at large. In contrast, Da’s attitude is that those who are trying to ‘be upstairs and downstairs at the same time . . . get stuck on the bloody landing’. The film’s standpoint upon the issues of education and craft explicitly raised by Da is highly ambivalent. At least until he realizes the implications of his son’s job, Da is supportive of his desire for ‘real’ work in the ‘fresh air’ and ‘sunshine’. Significantly, only the two male characters are seen outside the confines of the home, in brief exterior shots of their arrival and departure respectively. The opening documentary section showing men at work – often in dramatic silhouette – on the quayside is accompanied by a musical excerpt of the mezzo-soprano Janet Baker singing ‘Where Corals Lie’, from Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures song cycle (first performed in 1899). The choice of this melancholic music, which eventually fades into the ambient noise of the dock, gives the endeavour and landscape the kind of grandeur and romanticism that Amber had striven for in their earlier industrial documentaries. It chimes with Da’s own description of his knife skills as ‘poetry in motion’ and makes a sharp contrast to the unedifying output of the television set that dominates the domestic space, and which the introverted Alice seems keen to watch (her brawny brother is more content to flex his muscles in front of the mirror).6 Indeed, the film ends with a close-up of the television, showing (it would seem) an old film involving a man and woman talking fruitlessly to each via a telephone. The man’s repeated ‘hello?’ – the last spoken word in the film – echoes Ma’s irritable ‘hallo!’ response to her daughter’s shout at the beginning; it is thus unclear whether a line of communication has been opened between mother and daughter or whether Alice’s adult ‘voice’ will be heard or not. However, the use of a female singer in the opening sequence – and a highly trained, operatic one at that  – complicates a straightforward dichotomy of gendered spaces and attitudes. At the end of the film, Ma learns of her daughter’s musical skills, emphasizing a connection between creativity and non-masculinity and also between deindustrialization and emasculation, which has been explored in other British realist films such as The Full Monty (Cattaneo, 1997) and Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000). In this light, Da’s comment, in relation to his own craft, that ‘there’s not a writer born that can put that doon’ can be taken as an expression of ironic self-reflection on the part of both the filmmakers and the writer, who – in the role of the father – speaks these very words himself, and hence defies the challenge of authentic representation. Hadaway’s script, as performed by actors with some degree of cultural and/or geographical connection to the content,

132  •  In Fading Light

is extraordinarily rich in a dialect that he has described elsewhere as the ‘community short-hand’, which allows for ‘spontaneity: direct, forceful and expressive’.7 Ma’s exhortation to her son to avoid vulgar ­colloquialisms – such as the Tyneside pronunciation of ‘school’ as ‘skuel’ – is just one expression of her wish for him not to ‘end up like your Da’, who clings to the philosophy that ‘there’s nee changing us’. Yet the screenplay derives much of its authenticity and specificity from tapping a rich vein of dialect expression. At the same time, Hadaway’s writing acknowledges the danger of such representation in perpetuating stereotype. Ma presses the point to her son that opportunities to escape the Ridges are to be firmly grasped, as to outsiders ‘we’re just a bloody joke: we’re the ones that keep the coal in the bloody bath’. Ma’s frequent negative allusions to dirt reiterate her wish to avoid the contamination of the home by her local environment: the seagulls that denote the freedom of outside work to her son and husband are, to her, ‘dirty, shitty things’, and she rails against those ‘living like pigs’. The film introduces the interior space of the household through a sequence in which Alice informs her Ma that the ‘bairn is covered with baked beans and tea-leaves’; Ma’s youngest child, left out in her pram in the outside yard, has been strewn with waste as the result of the ‘dirty bugger next door throwing his rubbish out the window’. Her colourfully colloquial denunciation of the neighbour somewhat contradicts her later discrediting of the use of dialect: ‘Geet lazy good for nowt! Got the place covered with your filth. Aye, and there’s none as deef as doesn’t want to hear. Fancy having to live under dorty buggers like you!’ This strikingly bleak image of a baby covered in what Alice subsequently summarizes merely as ‘shit’ does indeed run the danger of being a parodic exaggeration of social deprivation. Within the film’s gendered framework, however, it speaks of the distinction between the (now fragile) comradeship of the male workforce and the fractured bonds of community; Ma is unfulfilled and isolated within the estate and is expected to be grateful for being ‘given’ children. In contrast to her containment – and also that of Alice, seemingly intimated by neighbourhood delinquents into staying at home – Da defines himself in terms of adaptable mobility: ‘have knife, will travel’. Transforming his living room into an alternative school of life lessons for his wife and children, Da is antagonized most about not being ‘listened to’. His devastation, at the end of the film, about his redundancy is exacerbated by the indirect communication of the fact to him (a message via his daughter). His claims about education being ‘no good to the working class’, purely making someone ‘fit the job’ in hand, chime faintly with some of the autobiographical comments made by the (named) director, Murray Martin, with regard to his anxieties about being ‘designed out’ of his background;8 as apparent as Da’s obsolescence is to the audience – and finally to him too – he is also a charismatic monologist, with a worldview and turn of phrase as

Dream On • 133

important to posterity as the working practices captured in preceding Amber work. When The Filleting Machine was acquired for transmission by Channel Four Television in 1983, the broadcaster requested the incorporation of contextual material. The resulting version  – which addends an extra thirty minutes of footage involving the characters, statistical information and responses from audience groups  – was in itself an important milestone in Amber’s ongoing experimentation with the fusion of dramatic and documentary strategies. Before the original film is shown, there are approximately ten minutes of the Ma and Da characters talking directly to the camera about their different daily routines, and then being seen at play in the pub and bingo hall respectively (some of this material was utilized in Tyne Lives, 1980). The film is immediately prefaced and followed by documentary footage of a teacher introducing the cast and the film to a group of teenage children and then inviting questions to the cast in ‘character’ about what they (and us) have just seen. The subsequent section shows specific audience groups  – community workers, teenagers and mothers  – responding (sometimes prompted by the filmmakers off-screen) to the questions raised in the film about the difficulties faced by housewives and unemployed schoolleavers. Interspersed throughout are tracking shots (from a moving car) of the Ridges estate accompanied by a voice-over giving a mixture of objective data and political and social analysis; the expanded film concludes with some assertive statements about the current ‘period of new industrial revolution’, where the ‘struggle between the owners of wealth and the mass of the population threatened with declining living standards is becoming critical’. The introductory section uses sequences filmed beyond the family home to render explicit the play’s implicit enunciation of gendered spaces of work and leisure and undercut the potentially static impact of its single setting. When giving an account of his daily rituals, the ‘Da’ character, seen outside in the process of fish-filleting, addresses the camera but also his (off-screen) bantering, occasionally laughing, work colleagues. Whilst his jokey monologue, delivered in rhythm with his physical work, is as much an address to them as to us, his wife’s matching account of her daily housework and childrearing routine takes place in the comparatively private, even claustrophobic space of her kitchen, where she seems to be alone. There are also symmetrical anecdotes about those unfortunate enough to be rejected at job interviews; Da remembers a disgruntled gypsy at the fish quay, whilst Ma recalls applying to be a boat’s cook, to be told it was not appropriate for a woman (this vignette anticipates the storyline of In Fading Light). In both cases, a force field deflects outsiders from a traditionally male domain. There is a further discordancy to Ma and Da’s respective leisure rituals, strikingly conveyed here through ambient sound. Da is seen in a crowded, convivial pub (mostly male,

134  •  In Fading Light

with only one woman seen, drinking alone), where snatches of conversation do not make much sense in isolation but are meaningful as an expression of collectivism. In the bingo hall, Ma does have a brief, jolly exchange with a friend upon entry, but the indelible impression is of atomized figures in a comparatively gloomy space, overwhelmed  – anesthetized even  – by the monotonous, repetitious voice of a bored-sounding caller. In its final section, following the broadcast of the original film, the programme is dominated by female voices and perspectives. Among a group of North Shields housewives, there is recognition of the ‘hard’ life of the fisherman but also of the roles and exploitation of women. Elsewhere, some young adult women give their thoughts on the choices made by the younger characters. There is a comedic moment when the off-screen interviewer (Murray Martin) follows up their thoughtful answers by asking the hitherto unseen ‘lads’ in the room – a possible surprise to the viewer – for their perspective; the camera quickly pans right away from the women to reveal some awkward-looking young men, who respond monosyllabically. The conversations with specific audience groups, together with the central sequence showing the film’s cast fielding questions ‘in character’ from a school class, work as a demonstration of how a work such as The Filleting Machine might, whilst avoiding didacticism, have utilitarian value for those such as community workers or teachers. There is an obvious parallel here with the contemporaneous output of Amber’s Current Affairs Unit (discussed in Chapter 3), including ‘trigger’ videotapes related to campaigning activities and instructive films about their effective use. For example, the group of school-leavers are asked on camera whether the Davey character made the right decision to take a job controlling the filleting machine, resulting in a discussion about the limited job opportunities for young people. But whilst the trigger tapes produced by Amber and others were by necessity straightforward in their address, the extended Filleting Machine programme encompasses a loop of encounters between ‘authors’, characters and audience; characters speak to the camera, to each other in the diegetic world of the play, and to the particular audience in the school. The filmmakers ask questions of audiences, and a disembodied voice makes provocative statements encouraging the viewer to reflect upon the programme’s integration of fictional drama, on-screen audience responses and political commentary. An exemplary moment in this highly complex series of simultaneous addresses comes when the author of the screenplay, in character as Da, becomes shorttempered when the school children in the audience ask questions about his domination of the family. He goes on to declare that the school they are all currently sitting in did ‘nothing’ for him. Although there is no space within the programme for direct discussion of the artistic and political relevancy of The Filleting Machine nearly ten years after its inception, the final artefact

Dream On • 135

offers a model of creative documentary that does not merely combine dramatic and documentary elements but places them in balance, refusing to concede the primacy of one particular method of amalgamation.

Seacoal (1985) For their first feature-length film, Amber chose to tell the story of a community of sea-coalers working in the Northumberland coastal town of Lynemouth, which has a coal-preparation plant that washes the coal from the adjacent Ellington Colliery. Seacoal opens with a statement explaining the process by which waste coal from plant and pit is washed and filtered naturally by the sea, then brought by wind and tide to the beach, where it is collected by ‘coalers’ – carried away by many by horse and cart – and sold to a local contractor for recycling.9 The opening statement also clarifies that the beach at Lynemouth had been bought by a firm called Thompson Brothers in 1979. By narrowing their canvass even further to the subset of gatherers who identify themselves as part of the travelling community, Amber were able to convey the particularities and politics of a fringe lifestyle that many would regard as exotic  – a harsh yet self-sufficient existence  – whilst also demonstrating how ‘the more specific, local instance can often provide the most significant illumination of the human predicament’.10 The film begins with Ray (Ray Stubbs), a former factory plant worker, persuading Betty (Amber Styles) and her daughter Corrina (Corrina Stubbs) away from an abusive relationship in Sunderland and into a new life as sea-coal collectors on Lynemouth beach. While Betty and Corrina become slowly accustomed to the travelling community, finding (female) support and an alternative to an unattractive urban life, Ray’s selfishness and venality causes tensions that bring about his eventual departure from the camp. The latent symbolism of this admittedly niche form of labour was also recognized by one of Amber’s few precedents in this terrain, Tom Scott Robson’s short documentary drama Low Water (1965), albeit in a way that dehumanizes the archetypal ‘Seacoal Man’ as a selfish, preening, violent, non-marriable, libidinous force of nature, but only until he prematurely ages at forty. Following a similar structure and attitude to its young protagonist as the almost contemporaneous Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Reisz, 1960), and using a strident voice-over narration, Robson’s film describes a couple of days in the life of Joe (Joe Coatman), locating coal from underwater seams. His labour on the shore, which includes a fight with a co-worker when the delicate ‘code of the beach’ is broken, is sandwiched between two evenings of drinking, fast driving and womanizing, and a surprisingly sexually explicit end sequence suggests that the town-based Joe has taken his romantic

136  •  In Fading Light

conquest to one of the caravans on the beach. Low Water’s description of the sea-coaling life as self-sustaining yet subject to societal persecution has echoes in Amber’s own treatment of the topic, as does its suggestion of the shore as a site of brute capitalism: ‘once on the beach, it’s every man for himself ’. But whereas both Robson and Amber seek to give their characters and landscape a mythological grandeur, Low Water’s forceful final proclamation that ‘Satan’s collecting seacoal for a quickly ageing man’, accompanied by treated sounds of laughter and sexual intercourse, betrays a perspective that is ultimately detached and judgemental. Seacoal evolved out of some Amber-affiliated photographic projects, as well as a request by Channel Four for the production of a longer feature film, but its origins lay with a desire to respond to the ‘staggering visual location’ of its setting: ‘the industrial landscape of power station and pit framing the blackened beach of Lynemouth’.11 The story of how Amber came to document a particular group of sea-coaling families is of relevance here, as it illustrates a slow process of trust-building, research and shooting that would become their preferred method of creation, but it is a process that raises questions about the relationship between their photographic and filmmaking work and, in this case, about creative ownership. Murray Martin traced the origins of Seacoal to a discussion about the Lynemouth sea-coaling ‘mob’ with the photographer Chris Killip, who had been closely involved with Amber and the Side Gallery (which he also ran for a while) since the 1970s.12 Killip would subsequently gain renown as a chronicler of Thatcher’s Britain, most famously with his 1988 photo-essay book In Flagrante and as the producer of ‘some of the most powerful and widely disseminated visual records of working class life in this period’.13 Killip described his first encounter with the beach in 1976 as follows: I recognized the industry above it but nothing else I was seeing. The beach beneath me was full of activity with horses and carts backed into the sea. Men were standing in the sea next to the carts, using small wire nets attaches to poles to fish out the coal from the water beneath them. The place confounded time; here the Middle Ages and the twentieth century intertwined.14

Having originally met hostility (unsurprisingly) to the ‘snooping’ of outsiders, Martin and Killip were granted entry to the sea-coaling community when an influential figure  – Trevor Critchlow, a subsequent presence in Amber photography and films  – recognized that the Side had financially supported the photographic work of his nephew, Mik Critchlow. Martin bought a caravan on their site, a subsequent photographic base for Killip and then later for Amber during the filming of Seacoal. According to Martin, the venture had been initiated as an Amber project, with Killip acting as an

Dream On • 137

‘advance guard’, getting the community accustomed to imagery and assisting the development of relationships with those such as the Laidler family, who would feature prominently in both In Flagrante and the Seacoal film (and later Eden Valley, 1995).15 This process also built upon the foundations of Mik Critchlow’s own documentation of the camp between 1981 and 1983, in response to the sea-coalers’ tussles with the private contractor who had erected concrete bollards on the beach; Amber also produced campaign videos in response to threats of their eviction.16 In relation to their Seacoal work, Martin would allude to a ‘distancing’ between himself and Killip that was partly territorial but also an ideological clash over how his belief that Killip’s imagery of the sea-coaling community had been problematically decontextualized as illustrations of poverty in later projects.17 A selection of these had been shown, to critical interest, in a joint 1985 exhibition with Graham Smith of pictures of north-east England, and the title – Another Country – was taken as a commentary on a growing underclass ‘hit by the severest effects of recession and monetarist harshness’.18 In response to the belated publication of his book Seacoal in 2011, consisting of many hitherto unpublished photographs of Lynemouth taken in 1983–84, Clive Dilnot identified, retrospectively, a ‘last collective portrait of the working class’.19 While these images were from a vanished world, they were also a prefiguration of post-industrialization, an essay about ‘work as a means of survival once it is pushed out of the formal workplace’.20 Whilst this of course chimes with Amber’s own interest in the material, the kind of documentary ‘realism’ practised by Killip is inevitably subjective and selective. Fionna Barber uses a case study of his photograph ‘Rosie and Rocker Returning Home’ (1983)  – showing a weather-beaten woman and her son on a horse and trap laden with coal, in front of a harsh, stony beach  – to demonstrate its dependence upon an emotional response from the viewer: ‘one which also depends on these two figures being recognized as passive objects of the camera’s gaze, with the implication that they are victims rather than being active individuals with complex lives’.21 The image evokes the timelessness associated with rural work but also the dispossession of those marginalized in Thatcher’s Britain – the barrenness of the composition reinforces the apparent signs of poverty. Martin argued that Killip’s complicity in such readings, through the way in which his work was exhibited and contextualized (or not), was irresponsible and – above all – untruthful. For Martin, Seacoal dealt with hardship but not poverty, which the participants would not have claimed or recognized. According to text produced by Amber to accompany a 1995 exhibition: The irony of Chris Killip’s seacoal photographs being used nationally, to illustrate poverty in the UK, shows metropolitan culture’s inability to read some of

138  •  In Fading Light

this work. They are images of capitalism in the raw, of a kind of freedom at the edges of our civilization, but they are not about poverty.22

Indeed, the woman in the photograph Barber discusses, Rosie Laidler, far from identifying herself as a victim of landscape or circumstance, is shown on screen in Seacoal making a case for the irrelevance of money to her lifestyle. Furthermore, in dramatizing the freedoms and restrictions of the coaling existence through the developing perspective of two new arrivals to the camp, the film grants agency  – the power of choice  – to the community being documented. Killip’s photographic response to a shared subject is particularly interesting for the light it sheds on Amber’s own attitude to the material. Newbury identifies a highly personal visual sensibility in Killip’s work and an attraction towards subjects that ‘provided a link to a pre-industrial past, and also a link with his own background in the peasant culture of the Isle of Man’.23 If Amber, like other documentarists concerned with the politics of workingclass culture during the era, regarded it as their duty to engage with the processes and effects of de-industrialization, Killip’s work might be understood in terms of a disavowal of industrial landscapes and experiences and a fascination with extreme or isolated communities: this was quite different to Martin’s attraction to the warmth and richness of certain working-class cultures, as evidenced in much of Amber’s work. Although there are individual images in Amber’s Seacoal that are the equivalent of Killip’s ‘pre-industrial’ evocations of timeless toil, these are framed within a narrative that situates its protagonists within the milieu of modern industry; for example, in one scene the sea-coalers, in response to seeing Arthur Scargill on the television, contemplate the impact of the miners’ strike, and hence their dependency upon local industry. Another short scene of late-night drunken riding shows Ray and Betty speeding past a National Coal Board (NCB) sign, emphasizing the circumscription of their ‘freedom’ by the state and by business. For all that, Ray’s story suggests a trajectory from industrialization to primitivism (for example, he sells his car to buy a horse to pull a wagon), Seacoal is ‘no celebration of labour in a pre-industrial context’.24 This example also conveys some of the ways in which Amber’s photographic and moving-image work, even when emanating from the same terrain, assumes a different constituency and mode of reception. Whilst individual photographs, viewed in a gallery setting, allow for a greater degree of ‘contemplation’ yet can be presented in a way that decontextualizes, filmmaking can be equally manipulative in its constant referencing and guiding yet – as is the case with Seacoal – allow for the ‘structure and politics of the operation’ to be embodied and dramatized through character.25

Dream On • 139

Figure 5.2  Press image for Seacoal (1985). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

The process of this dramatization presented Amber with a few practical problems. Whereas some subsequent feature films were more substantially scripted in advance, and tended to incorporate a broader range of characters, Seacoal used dramatic elements principally to support its documentary essence, through a mixture of scripted re-enactment, improvised scenes between actors and non-actors, and straightforward documentary footage. Having built relationships with the camp during the development period, Amber recognized that dramatic strategies were needed to give voice to perspectives that coalers were reluctant to publically state, and to tell their story more clearly, so Amber contracted Tom Hadaway as chief screenwriter and the main two actors (Amber Styles and Ray Stubbs) as researchers. The resulting story, about two outsiders who assimilate themselves, with some difficulty, into the sea-coaling community, was therefore a partial reenactment of the actors and filmmakers’ own integration. Just as Amber’s own entry to the community had been facilitated through a fortuitous encounter in a pub, and the purchase of a caravan (and later a horse), so the story begins with a car journey away from metropolitan Tyneside and the characters of Ray and Betty fraternizing – and in Ray’s case, negotiating – with members of the community at a social function. It is not fanciful to identify the Ray character – nicknamed ‘reckless’ by fellow travellers – as a surrogate not just for the Amber team but for Martin himself. Towards the end of the film, Ray gambles away his stash of coal in a ‘trotting’ road-race in a manner that recalls Martin’s confession in a 2001 interview that he once (successfully) placed the ‘entire grant’ of the Live Theatre collective on a horse: ‘we only got three grand, and three wasn’t going to sort us out, so we either put it on a horse or went down’.26 Ray’s nemesis turns out to be his co-worker Joe

140  •  In Fading Light

(Benny Graham), whose association with gambling is established from his first appearance by a pub fruit machine; his hoodwinking of Ray with a pub trick foreshadows his later tempting of him to gamble away the proceeds of weeks of hard toil. Identified early in the film by Joe as a ‘dealer’, Ray’s downfall also stems from his antagonism of some members of the community through his selfishness in refusing to ‘share a line’ – that is, permit others to share his place on the shore; one cold night he instructs his wife not to ‘make a noise or you’ll have every bugger down here’. There are faint echoes here of the occasional tensions arising, among Amber members, from the collective’s code of pooling the external earnings of individual members into the collective wage and of Martin’s own admission that ‘there were times he won on a horse and didn’t put the winnings back into Amber’.27 Aside from the fictitious Ray and Betty, the most significant presence in the film is the aforementioned Rosie Laidler, whose off-screen bond with the actress playing Betty, and amenability to being filmed, led to a greater focus upon their relationship, and thus more thematic prominence was given to the role of women in the camp. For the making of the film, Amber had needed to broker an arrangement with Equity (the actors’ union) about the participation of non-professional performers. Whilst the actors could say scripted lines, the sea-coalers’ replies had to be undirected and genuine, which created logistical problems for scenes that were consequential within the plot yet also required the verisimilitude of happenstance.28 At the end of the film, Rosie gives the character of Betty advice not to rely on men in response to improvisations and what she had learned about Betty throughout the development of the film.29 The sequences of Betty and Rosie (and sometimes their fellow worker Val (Val Waciak)) in conversation provide plot details and character information but also digressive information – such as the discussion of a ghost legend – which adds colouristic detail to the film’s portrait of a community in time. Furthermore, at some points, Rosie asks questions directly of Betty, requiring the actress to extemporize in a fashion similar to the hitherto discussed ‘school’ sequence of The Filleting Machine. The film’s density of texture also derives from the use of regional dialect and of colloquialisms specific to the sea-coaling/trotting community: a strategy ‘more in common with neo-realism’ than documentary traditions.30 Amber themselves saw their working method as ‘rooted in the tradition of [Robert] Flaherty’ yet deviating from his strategies of reconstruction, wherein real people acted out a performance of their lives devised by the director, by including the community in the writing process and then using actors to dramatize aspects of their lives.31 However, in striking a balance between plot development and expository material  – whether emerging through contrived drama or through improvisation  – the film does leave certain contextual background ­

Dream On • 141

unexplained, not dissimilar to the way Amber’s industrial films of the preceding decade encouraged an active, questioning mode of viewing. For example, through its focus upon specific families, and its references to trotting (a topic picked up in later Amber films), Seacoal does not distinguish between traditional coalers and those from the travelling community or give detailed explanations of the complex currents of power between the NCB, the Thompson Brothers and the coalers themselves. Despite its minimal plot, and inclusion of apparently extraneous material as documentary texture, Seacoal is tightly organized around a set of aesthetic, narrative and thematic binaries. As Jack Newsinger observes, Seacoal explores a ‘dualism between the “brutalisation” and “humanism” that Martin describes as central to the identity of the region from the 1980s’.32 Although a political standpoint of a sort does ultimately emerge in relation to the damage wreaked by privatization, the film otherwise leaves its various tensions unresolved, thus producing a ‘complex documentation of a regional community’.33 Early scenes in the film establish the camp, through the different perspectives of Ray and Betty, as a place of opportunity, beauty and order, on the one hand, and of restriction, dirt and anarchy, on the other. It is a place of elemental appeal and visual interest, but any romanticism is undercut by the emphasis upon deprivation and toil: night shifts in freezing weather, the lack of running water, the proximity to a waste tip and so forth. When a hungover Betty wakes up for the first time in the caravan, still in her fur coat, she recoils at the ‘rubbish’, the ‘bugs . . . all over the shop’, and the ‘gypsies’, who are ‘living like pigs’. Ray diverts her attention away from one window looking onto a rubbish dump towards a more enticing view of nature and harmonious, lucrative labour. After a disturbing encounter with some hens that have strayed into the caravan, Betty’s instinct is to clean and bring order to the space; Ray only half apologizes for bringing in his muddy shoes, with a reference to the saying ‘where there’s muck!’ (i.e. there’s brass). Later, Rosie discusses the prejudices the travellers face from local residents when they do not have the opportunity to wash before picking up children from school: ‘they look at you as if you’re muck’. Initially, the film’s gendering of attitudes mirrors that of The Filleting Machine, with Ray lecturing Rosie on the responsibility of women and querying the need of formal education for young Corrina. However, as the story progresses, The Filleting Machine’s relatively straightforward politics of domestic/exterior roles and spaces is complicated by Betty’s joint labours with Ray, her solo expeditions with other women, the sharing of ‘domestic’ duties such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, and finally her stoical responses to an increasingly despondent Ray. However, the film’s depiction of Corrina’s assimilation into the community as unproblematic (at least to her) suggests a

142  •  In Fading Light

cautiousness by the filmmakers in handling a character without any agency. While Betty is still adjusting to her new life, Corrina makes friends with children on the camp and asks to play outside with them; a scene where Betty castigates Ray for letting her play with matches is used to convey contrasting attitudes to parenting, rather than signpost a developmental stage for Corrina (although Rosie’s later discussion of the perils of trailers being accidentally set alight does imply the possible dangers of children being left to their own devices). A montage sequence in the middle of the film, scored to upbeat folk music, cuts between Corrina at a height and the various endeavours of the coalers – Ray on a trap, workers on the beach, Rosie deconstructing a caravan and men from Thompson Brothers on a digger erecting a blockade – that she is (presumably) observing at a distance. This is partly a device to knit together a montage of documentary material as a simultaneous event that furthers the story, but Corrina is hereby suggested as a model for a non-judgemental, inquisitive audience. She subsequently asks Ray a series of naïve yet incisive questions about the process of sea-coaling and the ownership of coal but also about whether he will be her ‘dad’. There is also a deep ambivalence to the notion of sea-coaling work as ‘capitalism in the raw’.34 For Ray, a former employee of the ICI manufacturing plant in Billingham (close to Lynemouth), the beach is ‘like a little Klondike out there, and I’m getting a stake’, and he is dismissive of Betty’s claim that his negotiation with sellers is ‘bloody slave labour’. His optimism  – ‘we’re in business!’, ‘from now on it’s gonna be different!’ – is short-lived. If Amber’s 1970s industrial documentaries tended towards a romanticism of their subject, in line with the participants’ own attitudes, here the hyperbole and myth-making comes from outside rather than within the sea-coaling community. Indeed, the coalers speak matter-of-factly and occasionally harshly about their lives, and Ray’s optimism is debunked through his own storyline, just as the ‘emotional banality’ of the country-and-western songs on the soundtrack expose the ‘irony of talk of Klondike and nuggets’ (Eden Valley similarly affiliates ersatz country music with economic exploitation).35 But Ray is gradually disillusioned by being beholden to the vagaries of the tide, which requires him to claim unemployment benefit to sustain himself, and by being unable to successfully circumvent a system whereby coalers sell at a fixed price to the local entrepreneurs, rather than hoarding and selling separately. The sea-coaling enterprise may be beyond the mainstream economy and have, says Ray, ‘no expenses, no overheads’, yet it is subject to its own internal hierarchies. Competition for resources generates rivalry and suspicion; as Newsinger notes, ‘capitalist production relations are . . . integral to the internal life of the community as opposed to an insidious outside force.’36 The coal Ray stockpiles may be as ‘good as money in the bank’, but until it is traded, it is fundamentally worthless. Business is also ultimately

Dream On • 143

contingent on the health of the regional industries  – hence the anxieties caused by the miners’ strike of 1984–85, which began during the shooting period. Violation of the ‘code’ of the beach results in whisperings about Ray’s selfishness and his being reported to the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS). Although it is not clear whether the ‘snoop’ was a member of the camp, the film does not ignore what Chris Killip has described as its ‘tribalism’ and atmosphere of gossip and suspicion.37 Also, Ray’s credo of ‘get it while it’s there’ resonates with concurrent Amber projects in response to declining industries, most relevantly the upcoming In Fading Light, which incorporates some reflection on the legacy of short-term attitudes to the supply of fish. The character of Ray’s friend Ronnie (Sammy Johnson) is used, somewhat schematically, to represent an alternative trajectory of career ambition and material aspiration. Ronnie recommends the sea-coaling work to Ray in a flashback (which we presume is relatively recent) in tones that bring to mind the famous phrase attributed to Norman Tebbit about the unemployed needing to ‘get on their bike’.38 But he subsequently ‘comes to terms with life’, most likely through a need to support a family (despite having warned Ray about the dangers of bringing a partner with him to the camp) and takes an (arguably) exploitative job with Thompson Brothers, thus becoming Ray’s effective ‘boss’, albeit one who he refuses to recognize. The film contains a number of scenes where Ronnie is shown standing in a raised position over the beach and the workers, commanding and resolute yet also lonely and detached from social bonds. Certainly, within the context of Amber’s founding ‘rules’ for practitioners (as discussed in Chapter 1), Sammy Johnson’s intense, stern performance embodies a warning against the dehumanizing effects of ‘tying yourself to institutions’.39 Indeed, as the story progresses, it is Betty who comes to adopt the other key tenets of Amber’s (or rather, Murray Martin’s) manifesto: the necessity to ‘integrate life and work and friendship’ and ‘live cheaply [so] you’ll remain free’.40 Verina Glaessner describes Betty’s developing relationship with Rosie and the women of the camp as ‘tentative rather than realized’,41 but her final decision to stay with the group surely suggests a degree of solidarity and an embrace of camp sociality. The dualism of Ray’s attraction (initially) to the work practices against Betty’s to the communality around them is paralleled by the film’s fluctuation between sequences of industrial description (processes of sifting, shovelling, transportation and negotiation) and of social interaction and leisure; on an organizational level, the film certainly obeys the mantra of integrating ‘life and work and friendship’. Furthermore, a sequence in the (real) home of the Laidler family covers a discussion of ‘trotting’, a leisure pursuit associated with the travelling community. But Ray’s conversational interest only leads to his planned exploitation of an

144  •  In Fading Light

upcoming race for financial gain; here, ‘life and work and friendship’ are not so much integrated as woven into difficult knots. The footage of the race and its aftermath shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Amber’s integrated methods: the events are observed like documentary but their deployment as a plot mechanism (to hasten Ray’s departure) has an overdetermined quality. The sequences showing Betty’s socializing maintain a greater degree of naturalism than the equivalent involving Ray, whose encounters with Ronnie and Joe in pubs carry an undercurrent of distrust or manipulation, and also have more consequence to the plotting. Betty’s conversations with Rosie and Val, sometimes heard only on the soundtrack, are looser: less expository and determined. Furthermore, Betty is seen dancing and interacting – quite possibly drunkenly  – with the sea-coalers, firstly at the social club at the start of the film, then later around a night-time campfire; during the former, Ray is more concerned to exploit the scenario for business deals, and his presence is diminished in the latter. At the fire, Betty joins in with a ribald take on a 1959 Jim Reeves song  – ‘He’ll have to fucking go!’  – that obviously anticipates Ray’s eventual expulsion. Living on her own would require her, as Rosie advises, to ‘go on the social’ (i.e. social services) for ‘shopping money’ and to use money from coaling for modest ‘extras’ such as clothing. In a previous conversation, Betty had questioned Rosie’s indifference towards being allocated wages and her contentment with money purely for ‘tabs [cigarettes] and drinks’: ‘what else do you want money for?’, she asks Betty. Rosie’s argument is that this can only be an improvement for Betty upon her previous life, with ‘nobody hitting you or pushing you about’. Above all, she must ‘stand on your own two feet: don’t rely on men’. Although Seacoal is skilfully organized so as to maintain a conflicted stance on its different perspectives on the sea-coaling life and its symbolism for a capitalist society, it inevitably warms towards Betty’s final embrace of the community, not least because it reflects Amber’s own budding relationship with it – one that would lead to future films and projects. However, the film concludes with a written announcement – concerning events subsequent to its completion – that makes a more explicit and political statement concerning new threats to the community. We are told that the coalers are soon to be moved by the council to a traveller’s site on a nearby waste tip. This would result in the end of their traditional access to the beach, greater control by the NCB and Thompson Brothers over their livelihood, and thus, like the Enclosures of the sixteenth century,42 accelerate the erosion of social structures. According to the film’s end matter: ‘For centuries local people and travellers held common rights to collect seacoal from the Lynemouth shore. The destruction of their campsite ensures that what little remains of these rights will now pass exclusively into private hands.’ In the film, one of the sea-coalers expresses frustration at the legal protection enjoyed by the

Dream On • 145

proprietor of Lynemouth beach, given that only a fraction of UK beaches are privately owned; the filmmakers clearly share his desire to ‘piss up his back’, and they have some sympathy towards Ray’s proclamation that ‘he’s getting nowt off me’. As discussed in Chapter 3, the impact of privatization was a concurrent concern for Amber’s Current Affairs Unit, resulting in the production of some ‘trigger’ tapes for campaigning and instructive purposes. As with Byker (1983), which leads towards a comparable assessment of the wrong-headedness of rehousing policy in untangling the social fabric, Seacoal resolves on a lament for a vanquished community. However, such is the leeway given to the viewer to navigate contradictory viewpoints that Seacoal ultimately ‘transcends its narrow political statement’43 and even permits a resistant ­interpretation of the need for change rather than preservation.

In Fading Light (1988) In Fading Light was Amber’s first attempt at a fully scripted and professionally acted drama. The story concerns a commercial fishing expedition on an anchor seine netter being disrupted by the unexpected arrival of the skipper’s daughter, causing consternation and rumours on board and within the community onshore. The decision to focus upon the fishing industry of North Shields was a logical extension of Amber’s residency in the area, their ­relationship with the writer Tom Hadaway (who had lived and worked as a fish trader there all his life) and their ongoing interest in documenting declining industries and the ecological concerns around them. Murray Martin claimed that the film, like much of Amber’s work to date, was fundamentally driven by an exploration of work practices otherwise unfathomable and unprofitable to the casual observer: We lived in North Shields. The boats went away, and what did they do? What was their life? . . . You can go to sea, work two weeks and be in debt  – you borrow money to go and catch fish, and what if you don’t catch any?44

Here was a non-unionized industry that commonly left its workers in debt upon their arrival home: an economic ‘madness’.45 As noted by some contemporary reviewers, In Fading Light connected with a small but significant corpus of documentaries and dramatized documentaries about the British fisherman’s noble battle against the elements. It is perhaps not surprising that filmmakers have been repeatedly drawn to images and stories of commercial fishing, given the dramatic and visual richness of stories about those in peril on the sea. In the Times, Geoff Brown praised a

146  •  In Fading Light

‘briny air’ that rendered the likes of Flaherty’s Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934) as ‘almost like drawing-room comedies’ in comparison, whilst Sheila Johnston, in the Independent, summarized it as an ‘unsentimental contemporary voyage into [Grierson’s] Drifters territory’.46 In his Monthly Film Bulletin review, Julian Petley discerned echoes of the films of Michael Grigsby, who had documented trawlermen in his television films Deckie Learner (1965) and A Life Apart (1975) with an ‘anti-establishment political edge’.47 These evocations of Flaherty and Grierson, the undisputed pioneers of documentary form, and of the more polemical Grigsby, suggest how representational realism can be understood in relational as well as aesthetic terms; in other words, for all its narrative and stylistic debts to the films cited, In Fading Light’s claim to verisimilitude derives in no small measure from its complication of previous cinematic visions of man’s relationship to nature and industry. So, whilst the canon of fishing films is a useful microcosm for the range of strategies available to filmmakers for the blending of actuality and fiction, these works are also characterized by a sustained interest in the impact of modernization upon the industry – and form a backdrop for Amber’s own ambivalent take on the subject. For example, an early film from the Mitchell and Kenyon collection, filmed directly in Amber territory, highlights how (proto) documentary had an inauthenticity from the very start. North Sea Fisheries, North Shields (1901) includes a scene of aggressive dock-side bartering that is evidently staged. Interestingly, in the context of In Fading Light’s depiction of a community  – both of men and women  – suspicious of a female interloper among the fishing crew, North Sea Fisheries begins with a glimpse of the local women who followed the Scottish fleets filleting and selling the catch; the women of North Shields were apparently ‘renowned for their independent nature’.48 The bustling quayside captured on film  – described by one late eighteenth-century observer as ‘narrow, dirty, populous and noisy’  – is commensurate with (near) contemporary accounts of the regional fishing industry.49 For example, writing in The Magazine of Art in 1882, Aaron Watson contrasted the cosmopolitanism of a rapidly developing North Shields with the pre-industrial, primitive appeal of the neighbouring coastal village Cullercoats, ‘untouched by the waves of change’ and well known at the time to national readers through images and tales of the ‘quiet heroism’ of its fishermen.50 John Grierson’s Drifters (1929) celebrates a modernized, internationalized herring industry fully transformed, as the opening titles declare, from ‘an idyll of brown sails’ to an ‘epic of steam and steel’ and is poles apart from Robert Flaherty’s (somewhat contested) account of pre-modern coastal life in rural Ireland in Man of Aran. Its narrative structure is almost identical to In Fading Light, in describing the preparation, departure and arrival home of a vessel on an increasingly stormy expedition. Clearly influenced by Eisenstein’s

Dream On • 147

use of typology and associational montage, Grierson’s film is more a poetic exploration of nature versus modernity – with sequences juxtaposing images of fish, birds, waves and pistons – than an observational account of the crew’s attitude to their work. Although there is a degree of ambivalence towards modernization, in keeping with the subsequent work of Grierson’s documentary units, there is no acknowledgment of economic uncertainty – a repeated complaint that Murray Martin made of the 1930s movement as a whole.51 Looking back on Amber’s work from Seacoal onwards, Martin identified an ‘agricultural lilt’ and an alternation between ‘landscape’ and ‘seascape’ films that clearly engaged with industrial cultures but were fundamentally about the interaction of man and nature and exploited the ‘visual grandness of that’.52 In this sense, fishing can be understood as an agricultural rather than industrial enterprise. Indeed, according to Martin, the notion of the North East as defined by the ‘heavy’ industries of Tyneside was erroneous, as these were sustained by the mining cultures of small villages. Crudely put, In Fading Light occupies a middle ground between the pre-industrial romance of Flaherty and the more progressive view of fishing as an international industry found in the British documentary movement. For example, the popular GPO film North Sea (Watt, 1938) – an early example of the Unit’s adoption of the ‘dramatised documentary’ format under the leadership of Alberto Cavalcanti – describes how a Scottish fishing vessel in peril is rescued through the intervention of post office radio stations that call out to the ports and ‘ships of the world’. Following the Flaherty tradition, North Sea uses real fishermen acting out (rather stiltedly) a script that places emphasis upon their cheerfulness and grit in the face of adversity  – including the making of a ‘pot of tea’ at a particularly stormy moment. Attention is paid to the anxieties and prayers of their wives and families at home, but the relationship between the men, the town and other ports is expectedly harmonious and quite different to In Fading Light’s more nuanced depiction of suspicions and tensions between the crew and the shore, and between the inhabitants of different UK ports. The similarly upbeat Caller Herrin’ (Harper, 1947) describes a balance of modernity and tradition in the current-day fishing industry; the science of freezing technology and the rationalization of selling systems represent improvement, but the industry still relies on ‘traditional craft and wisdom’. However, despite the sense of plenitude from the drifter expedition on camera, a brief image of a ‘no fish today’ sign onshore acts as a reminder of scarcer times and of the interdependence of the local economy. In Fading Light is thus rooted in an established tradition of fishing docudramas and adopts a familiar tripartite structure of a perilous journey bookended by calmer, shore-set scenes. As already noted, the film departs from the Flahertian method, and to an extent from that of Amber’s previous films, in using mostly professional actors. However, Tom Hadaway’s script was

148  •  In Fading Light

informed by his own local knowledge of the industry, as well as the experiences of the actors during an orientation period aboard the vessel Amber bought specifically for the purpose of making the film.53 In their recollections of the film, members of the creative team have described their integration within the fishing community in terms of a blurring between reality and fiction. For example, the actor Brian Hogg (playing Micky) was offered a job on a boat, Joanne Ripley (playing the teenage interloper Karen, following her father from Grimsby) describes a hostility to her presence in North Shields that mirrored the suspicions aroused by her character, Dave Hill (in the role of the skipper Alfie) talks of being mistaken locally for a real fisherman, and Amber Styles (Betty) brought to her part real experience of factory work. But unlike Seacoal, the film contains only marginal glimpses of non-simulated work activity, such as the few seconds of quayside fish-gutting captured at the end of an otherwise expository scene showing Karen being introduced to her father’s girlfriend. The emphasis upon re-creation or simulation of manual work is not entirely new territory for Amber and can be traced back to Last Shift’s (1976) documentation of factory workers directed by the filmmakers rather than their (former) employers (as discussed in Chapter 2). Yet the balance of plot development and documentary-like material of sailing preparation and fishing procedures still posed a dilemma for the filmmakers, which was solved in part by the use of descriptive montage sequences set to upbeat, folk-style instrumental music and – at key points – two songs by the popular band The Waterboys.54 And whilst the Amber crew’s determination to take out their boat into a ‘force nine gale’ to capture the film’s dramatic centrepiece undoubtedly bolstered their reputation for a fearless, even reckless dedication to realism, they have noted themselves that this was a far from naturalistic response to the weather conditions, given that actual crews had judged the conditions too risky. As with Seacoal, the film’s claim to realism does not derive merely from its commitment to representational accuracy but from its complex, multi-perspective depiction of a work practice and the community around it. In Fading Light draws out issues that were either missing from, latent within or only dealt with fleetingly in the catalogue of aforementioned fishing-themed films and programmes: namely, the symbiotic relationship between those on sea and shore, the strained relationship between the fishermen and their families, the power and fragility of the unit at sea, and the economic and ecological realities of a declining industry. In Fading Light emphasizes the physical perils of those in the fishing industry through its accumulation of incidents of bodily injury as well as its narrative trajectory towards increasingly stormy sea conditions. Even before the crew sets sail, the vessel’s cook Micky loses a finger in a gearbox accident, and at the height of the storm, crew member Dandy (Sammy Johnson) receives a major head blow; even Betty, onshore, pricks her finger – an occupational

Dream On • 149

Figure 5.3  Still from In Fading Light (1989). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

hazard  – peeling shrimps. At one point, at the end of a dialogue scene in the quayside mission, the camera lingers momentarily upon a wall poster warning: ‘The cost of fish: one fisherman loses his life every 8 days.’ However, these evocations of physical peril are counterbalanced by stoical attitudes by the characters and moments of gallows humour in the script; Micky’s torn finger is eaten (off-screen) by a dog in the quayside mission, and despite a further crush to his hand, he perseveres with playing snooker in the pub. This philosophy is captured in an unplanned moment of real-life endangerment, when the actor playing Dandy is seen being nearly swept overboard during one of the storm sequences. The reaction from fellow actors/characters (it is hard to discern whether the performers are ‘in character’ here) is shocked laughter, and the incident passes without further comment. Knowledge that the scene was unscripted – it is discussed, for example, on the ‘making of ’ feature on the DVD  – may enhance for some viewers the film’s claim to verisimilitude, although, ironically, the absence of dramatic context (whether anticipation or consequence) anchoring the scene arguably undercuts its impact. These moments of injury or risk, which are merely one component of the film’s general atmosphere of imperilment and failure, are further counterbalanced by a structure that manages to convey something of the inexorable pull of the sea for the men (and for Karen too). Although figuratively and literally the calm before the storm, the first twenty-five minutes have an expository denseness that makes the first glimpse of an open sea as welcome to us as it is to the fishermen. Shortly afterwards, the Celtic-tinged Waterboys song ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ (1988)  – despite its title, a musically upbeat folk-rock song that romanticizes the lonely fisherman through lyrics such as ‘I wish I was a fisherman, tumbling on the sea, far away from dry land and its bitter memories’ – is used to accompany a series of descriptive, unhurried shots of the crew undertaking their respective roles. Later scenes will describe tensions

150  •  In Fading Light

amidst this makeshift community and disappointments at their endeavours, but for now, there is order, optimism for the first catch and camaraderie in shared craft. The song is then revealed as diegetic, playing on the kitchen radio, to be firstly turned up by Yopper (Joe Caffrey), an aspiring fisherman in training, sympathetic  – like Karen  – to its romantic vision, but then turned off abruptly by Micky, the most cynical and physically scarred fisherman on board. The song is heard again, towards the end of the film, now as a siren calling the listless, disorientated crew from their pub back towards the sea. This is appropriate to the film’s structural logic, which is governed less by dramatic dictates of disorder and restoration than by cyclical ebb and flow. Although a glum thesis about the decline of the industry gathers momentum as the film progresses, in a fashion typical of social realist practitioners like Ken Loach, whose films tend to depict characters entrapped by social and political forces beyond their capacity to change, In Fading Light bestows a degree of agency and spatial fluidity upon some of its protagonists. It begins with Karen’s arrival to Tyneside by train and ends with her decision to join Mickey – an advocate for keeping on ‘travelling’ so as to meet a world ‘full of lovely folk’ – on an expedition to Galway; the camera dollies backwards from their street conversation, its roving restlessness matching that of the characters. In an advance of ambition upon Seacoal’s dualistic tension between Ray and Kathy’s conflicting attitudes to their environment, In Fading Light calibrates its far larger ensemble of characters by way of their different perspectives upon, or experience of, the fishing industry. The skipper Alfie experiences the disorientation of being a respected authority figure at sea but beholden to the boat’s entrepreneurial owner (Art Davies), with whom he has humiliatingly pleading conversations with onshore. At the end of the film, he can only look powerlessly through a window while the owner signs away the boat to – in a neat metatextual gesture – a character played by the director, Murray Martin, who had, in fact, brokered a deal himself to buy the vessel from Denmark for the purpose of making the film. The character’s arc of development is that of increasing self-awareness about his personal failures and a realization that the expedition is only netting insubstantial catches, the presumed result of the humanizing, educative presence of his daughter. Near the film’s end, a composition showing Alfie, on the quayside, dwarfed by a far larger mechanical trawler passing by succinctly conveys both his own increasing professional irrelevance and his disenfranchisement onshore. In the final scene, Micky’s hope that ‘small’s gotta come back one day’ seems highly optimistic. Micky is another self-identified ‘traveller’, with a broken family, not a ‘Shiely’ (i.e. a native of North Shields) but hailing from Maryport, where he saw the impact of nuclear waste upon the sea. Conflating his doomed industry and relationships – ‘the sea broke up, we broke up’ – the character becomes

Dream On • 151

the voice of ecological prophecy and conscience, persuading the skipper that a final catch of a handful of fish and a seal is to be read as a warning of ‘how it’s gonna be on the last day’. Both Micky and Dandy are initially hostile to Karen, but whereas Micky is more concerned with breaches of hierarchy – as exemplified by Karen serving food to the crew in the wrong order and fashion  – the superstitious Dandy considers her a malign presence on the boat, at one point sweeping a lit rag over the vessel to ward off evil spirits. His superstition is shared by his wife Irene (Mo Harrold), who declares and displays an intuitive recognition of those in peril on the sea. The youngest man aboard is Yopper; still in training, lacking the physical prowess and stomach for the job, and uncomprehending of the limited wages received, he eventually finds employment in a fishmongers and is last seen polishing a plastic fisherman sign. Just as the boat owner tells Alfie that his future is best served in a ‘marina-world’, presumably a pseudo fishing role in a touristic environment, so the future for the young men of North Shields would appear limited to the service industry. That said, the flirting that Yopper enjoys at the end of the film with a group of local women suggests that the figure of the fisherman – he implies that he owns his own boat – still has erotic and economic capital among the local community. Upon her return to shore, Karen attempts to broker a friendship with Betty, her father’s girlfriend, by noting their shared subservience to the men, or rather the men’s own subservience to the sea, ‘the bitch we all play second fiddle to’. Betty sneers at what she interprets as a glib parroting by Karen of one of her mother’s sayings and is similarly defensive when Karen berates her for allowing Alfie to pollute her home with the smell of fish. Karen’s mother had made Alfie change in her garage so as to prevent traces of his profession breaching the domestic realm, but Betty lacks such a space, and the higher social status associated with it. This is commensurate with the film’s nuanced take on the romanticizing of the fishing industry, stratifications of class and the complexities of female solidarity. By beginning the story with Karen’s arrival on Tyneside, In Fading Light clearly positions her within a continuum of intervening ‘outsider’ figures in Amber’s work, acting as a surrogate for both the filmmakers and for the viewer, who is invited to be intrigued yet challenged by aspects of the fishing life and community. Her gradual acceptance by the men at sea, despite their initial prejudice, is dramatically satisfying, but her truce with the womenfolk is less confident. Betty is not particularly sympathetic to Irene’s claim that ‘it’s a good job women have women’, but she does intervene when Karen is attacked by a group of young women, apparently for her transgression of being a ‘Grimmy [Grimsby] whore’ on board with one of their boyfriends. As such, In Fading Light refrains from sentimentalizing the North Shields community, or representing it monolithically as a character in itself. There

152  •  In Fading Light

is a tacit acknowledgement that this community on screen is a constructed, indeed ‘imagined’, one in the inclusion of brief audio ‘borrowings’ from previous Amber films. In a couple of exterior scenes, extracts from Amber’s pub-singing documentation (which also found their way into Tyne Lives and Byker) are heard in the background, as if emanating diegetically from the pub featured in the story; Amber often use sonic and visual ‘throwbacks’ to previous work, sometimes for thematic or narrative purpose but sometimes in the spirit of authorial playfulness (I pick out a few examples in preceding and successive chapters). Furthermore, visually interesting scenes of quayside activities  – testimony to North Shields’ history of cosmopolitan bustle  – play in counterpoint to a sequence of deprived-looking back streets, where Irene muses on suicide rates and upon how this is ‘no place to be old in’. A degree of insularity is displayed in Irene’s wish not to involve the police in Karen’s apparent disappearance as well as in the aggressive responses to the young woman’s integration within the fishing crew. In a complication of The Filleting Machine’s more straightforward binaries of gender, In Fading Light does not exclusively associate its female characters with domestic roles or spaces; the North Shields women are also seen at work (in the prawn factory), in leisure spaces (a pub, a club, a café) and in exterior spaces (the streets). However, the insularity and possessiveness of the women does contrast with the cross-regional crew on the ship, which includes only two ‘natives’, the others being from Grimsby and Maryport. Betty’s dismissive response to Karen’s pithy assessment of the power of the sea is very different to Alfie’s proud appreciation of the short self-penned poem that lends the film its title: ‘In fading light, they homeward came; windy, dispossessed and ravaged drove the darkened world; and all the lovely oceans sigh in grief; for some calamity unknown to men’.55 Of course, the parallel between her imaginative transformation of this environment and the filmmakers’ own response to the same material is self-evident, and like them she brings with her an awareness of representational histories, even of stagecraft, if also a tendency to disrupt them. This is demonstrated by her response to Micky’s fumbled attempt to light a cigarette using his one, noninjured hand, an act she recognizes from ‘cowboy’ films; the implication is that the wounded, emasculated Micky is now far removed from the idealized masculinity of the stereotypical Western hero. In the same scene, she disarms him from his disinclination to speak to her by noting that ‘every silence has a climax’, as if stating a stage direction. And yet Karen’s trajectory from literature student and library worker to – at the end of the film – a manual worker in the fishing industry brings to mind Murray Martin’s above-mentioned account of the alienation brought on by being educated out of one’s class. As noted already with regard to the 1970s industrial films, Amber’s documentation of certain working environments offered opportunities to some of the

Dream On • 153

group for accessing the kind of spaces their education had ‘designed’ them away from. Through the varied responses to her ‘artistry’, the film takes an ambivalent stance on the potential of art to capture lived experience, reminiscent of the comment made by the father character in The Filleting Machine – also written by Tom Hadaway – about how no writer could ever capture the world of the fisherman. In Fading Light has a persistent emphasis upon corporeal imagery and descriptions of consumption and excretion – the words ‘piss’, ‘shit’ and ‘shite’ recur frequently in the dialogue  – the symbolism of which speaks to the themes already discussed but also provides an indirect commentary on the future prospects of the fishing industry. This emphasis is of course apt for a film about workers serving the food industry and is established in the opening montage showing Alfie and Dandy eating ice creams, Alfie throwing a shaken-up Guinness can to Micky (which duly explodes) and Alfie drinking from a hip flask and then entering a grocery shop  – and this is followed by a sequence in the prawn factory and scenes throughout of food preparation and consumption. Before anxieties are introduced in the dialogue about depleted stock, the ambience is of plenitude and of camaraderie. This ‘appetite’ is later couched in terms of sexual virility, when Irene expresses an understanding of how her husband’s infidelities were the inevitable result of carnal offers being handed ‘on a plate’. But consumption is elsewhere associated with emasculation or fears relating to it. In the ship’s kitchen, Karen’s role as cook (taking over from an indisposed Micky) unleashes displays of sexual aggression and confusion; Dandy refuses to eat what she has prepared and flaunts a pornographic magazine picture, and the sudden lurching of the craft, ruining the foodstuff and soiling the kitchen, only reiterates the transgression of – as one character says – a ‘slag aboard’. As suspicions swirl through the community that Karen is not in fact Alfie’s daughter, the quay master (Brendan Healey) describes him as a ‘dirty bugger’. In a particularly grotesque vignette of emasculation, Micky’s severed finger is eaten by a dog belonging to a man shown slowly applying ketchup to a bacon sandwich in the mission restaurant. Urination is similarly bound up with gender politics, as typified by Micky’s exhortation to Dandy not to do so in sight of ‘the lass’ and Karen’s own amusement at Yopper’s embarrassment at being caught in the act. Back in Shields, Karen is physically intimated by a group of women in a pub toilet, accused of being a ‘willy watcher’ on the boat, watching ‘my lad having a piss . . . disgusting!’ But if Karen is regarded as a contaminating presence at times by men and women alike, this rhymes with the film’s rich conversational imagery of mud and excretion, of ‘matter out of place’, as Mai Finglass puts it in Mai (1973) (see Chapter 2), but also of exhaustion and scarcity. Fed up with ‘dredging mud’, Alfie rails at the boat owner for his part in the ruination

154  •  In Fading Light

of the ­industry  – ‘shits like you are running the world’  – befitting his philosophy that ‘people are shite’. When the catch turns out to be mostly a dead seal, Micky makes a doom-laden speech about the ‘last day’ of fishing, when they will be ‘staring at that pile of shite and muck’, an image of physical confusion on a par with his own assessment of Alfie as having ‘brains all fish’. Beyond their symbolic resonances, these repeated invocations of bodies and bodily functions also lend the film a fleshy, artisanal quality. A fruitful distinction can be made with the contemporaneous ‘state of the nation’ film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Greenaway, 1989), which involves a similarly explicit thematic emphasis upon consumption and excretion but in the purpose of a deconstruction of Thatcherite capitalism as vulgar gangsterism. Where Peter Greenaway’s film is satirical and spatially abstract, In Fading Light’s nexus of corporeal imagery emphasizes tactility, lived experience and a celebration of manual craft. It is fitting that one of the last words in the film goes to Mickey’s optimistic prophecy, in relation principally to the fishing industry, but surely also to Amber’s hopes for their future within the film industry, that ‘small’s got to come back some day’.

Dream On (1991) Amber’s next major feature film, Dream On, was conceived as a gravitation away from the depictions of male-oriented work practices and spaces that had come to characterize their output so far. The film was set in a housing estate with 80 per cent unemployment, and in accordance with the lead writer Kitty Fitzgerald’s comment in an interview near the time of the film’s release that ‘this is much more about people than work because the work just isn’t there’, the film does not dwell upon issues of employment or the lack of it.56 However, its genesis from lived experiences, and rootedness within a clearly delineated community, was very much within the Amber tradition of documentary involvement. The film originated from the Cedarwood Project, a women’s writing group overseen by Fitzgerald on the Meadow Well estate in North Shields, where Amber had established a residency. Following the publication of a book of the women’s writing, a development group consisting of three members of the collective (Kitty Fitzgerald, Ellin Hare, Lorna Powell) and the three main actresses (Anna Gascoigne, Maureen Harold and Amber Styles) began research on a feature film inspired by some of the women’s lives and stories.57 The women also took a role in workshop discussions about the characters, viewed filmed auditions for the actors, and eventually had on-screen roles in the film.58 According to Ellin Hare:

Dream On • 155

The women’s writing group did not allow men in and it was quite an issue for the women involved that they felt safe to tell their stories. So when we decided to work with them on a film we thought we should replicate that. We workshopped the characters and story line with the women and did a lot of improvisation. We did bring male actors in during the improv process but only ever one at a time. The script was developed from these improvisations. The whole group played in the darts team along with some of the women from the writing group. We played for a whole season, and many of the stories and incidents also came from that experience.59

Whereas the characters of In Fading Light and Seacoal give voice to differing perspectives on a particular working life, the three main protagonists of Dream On are characterized by their lack of agency, which is bound up with problematic or abusive relationships with men. Like In Fading Light, the film includes an outsider figure who intervenes within a potentially static set of relationships, but this time to generate narrative resolution as much as dramatic incident. Indeed, Dream On resolves the stories of its three central characters relatively positively and concludes with an upbeat sequence communicating the strength of female solidarity, the therapeutic benefits of self-expression, and the constructive outcomes of an outsider’s intervention. Shortly after the film’s release, it was praised for being one of the rare contemporary films to convey a ‘sense of lived reality, of day-to-day experience’.60 Although its arguably more ‘commercial’ and affirmative style of storytelling apparently caused some debate among the Amber team,61 the film’s experimentation with register, and its universalizing of specific experiences, renders it a rather unusual contribution to British social realist cinema. The film is bookended by sequences showing the arrival, and then departure, of the intervening outside figure, Peggy (Pat Leavy), who is Irish. She is revealed to be the mother of Bert (Art Davies), a loan shark and landlord of the Meadow Well pub where Rita (Maureen Harold), her friend Kathy (Amber Styles) and Kathy’s daughter Julie (Anna Gascoigne) are part of a darts team. In separate sequences near the start, Rita, Kathy and Julie talk directly to the camera about their respective problems. Housewife Rita has financial security but an emotionally undemonstrative husband (Larry, played by Ray Stubbs) and is later revealed to be alcohol-dependent and possibility suicidal. Kathy craves a ‘bit of loving’ but is perpetually drawn to abusive partners, and the film describes her victimization by the violent, controlling Sharky (Brian Hogg). Whilst showing his verbal and physical abuse in unflinching detail, the film also includes sequences of shared playfulness and humour between them that go some way to explaining her attraction to him. Her daughter Julie has an eating disorder that she diagnoses in terms of needing to take control of her body; she later reveals that she was sexually

156  •  In Fading Light

abused in childhood by her father, unbeknownst to her mother, the trauma of which has affected her current relationship with her boyfriend Baz (Derek Walmsley). The three monologue sequences, which were filmed before the final script was completed, take place in domestic bathrooms and emerge out of ritualistic yet private grooming activities. Suddenly catching sight of their reflection in the mirror, the women address their implied audience (which is both themselves and us as viewers) as a newfound confidant. The device is not entirely new for Amber, with similar ‘fourth wall’ addresses occurring in Keeping Time (1983) and the contextual material around The Filleting Machine: the device would also be used in Shooting Magpies (2005). The repetitious use of private spaces here  – in tandem with the inclusion of lengthy dream sequences, as well as the multiple scenes showing characters looking into mirrors  – establishes not only an emphasis upon interiority and processes of self-knowledge but also the film’s ambition to foster a close intimacy between character and audience. Significantly, there are no further monologues in the film; as a consequence of Peggy’s guidance and occasional interaction, they no longer ‘talk to the wall’ (as Kathy at one point says she feels she does with her daughter) but to each other and, indeed, to a section of the audience who might take comfort or inspiration.62 These monologues are matched to corresponding dream sequences, ripe with readily interpretable symbolism as well as compensating for the film’s rather drab colour palette and (by necessity) lack of visually arresting imagery to match the sea scenes in Seacoal and In Fading Light. In these, Kathy is chased by Sharky across the causeway to a nearby lighthouse (its phallocentric and literary associations not requiring much elucidation) and is trapped there on the staircase, as a warning of her partner’s perpetual grip; Julie imagines herself as a child confronting her sexual abuser before sharing a Jacuzzi with her female acquaintances and then experiencing a baptismal lake ‘rebirth’ that represents a newfound ability to confront and share her past; and Rita’s absurdist vision of a band of familiar faces performing a grotesque waltz in a forest unlocks memories of her own professional career as a singer. Although the character of Peggy herself is not given a monologue or dream sequence, she is quickly established as having an enhanced perception of her environment and some sort of psychic or clairvoyant power to control (or give the impression of controlling) certain events. One character even calls her, with a degree of affection, a ‘witch’ for her uncanny knowledge of information about the characters’ past and private lives, whilst another, as if aware of a higher force guiding events with a degree of contrivance or exceptionality, describes a ‘strange night’ in the pub as one like ‘being in a play’. Once Peggy has introduced herself to the (mostly female) pub-goers as the landlord’s mother, a power struggle ensues between Burt’s coldly venal,

Dream On • 157

business-oriented control of the space – commensurate with his wider activities as a loan shark, exploiting the financial insecurities and desperation of the community  – and Peggy’s transformation of it into a place of colour, communality and of feminine expression and refuge. On the morning after an evening of female revelry partly orchestrated by his mother, Burt discovers Kathy and Rita waking up in the bar and castigates them for ‘turning the bar into a bloody front room’, a neat summary of the characters’ function in blurring distinctions between private and public spaces. Moments beforehand, Kathy affirms her re-established bond with her friend by attending to her hair, doing it ‘the way we used to do it’, representing the new role of the public house as a place of sisterhood and reparation. Burt is similarly disarmed by Peggy’s transgressively ribald banter with locals about ‘sexually active grannies’ and the licence given by customers to disrespectfully name him ‘dirty Burty’; there is also an element of emasculation when she successfully ‘wills’ him to miss the target while throwing darts. Peggy’s ‘direction’ and intuition of events in the pub works partly to protect its women from malign influences, such as when she intervenes in Burt’s financial exploitation of Rita and effectively expels an aggressive Sharky when he comes to find Kathy, by spooking him with a mysterious whispered message in his ear (not revealed to the audience) and calling a taxi for him. Peggy also stages the recuperation of fractured female bonds, introducing moments of conviviality when Kathy and her friend Rita are squabbling. In contrast, the women’s partners are depicted as uncomprehending of the pub’s status as a place of mutual respect; Sharky barges in unwelcome and steals drinks, Baz cruelly brings a girlfriend to taunt Julie, and Larry prefers to drink alone at home. However, Peggy’s most significant interventions are defined as catalytic rather than merely controlling. This chimes with her own (rather sketchy) backstory, which seems to involve a regret for a lost love, left behind in Ireland when she moved to England. Throughout the film, she communicates with a figure that one assumes to be an apparition, or trick of memory, given that it goes unseen by others. When he chastises her for ‘starting things you have to finish’, she replies: ‘I don’t have to finish them . . . they do’. Thus, Peggy’s interventions with Kathy, Julie and Rita are framed in terms of equipping them with literal and figurative tools to enact change for the better. Her cryptic suggestion to Julie that ‘anger’s a strange thing’ results in her revelation to her mother about her father’s sexual abuse; in keeping with the film’s topography of intimate spaces as sites of confession, this occurs in the pub lavatories. She encourages Kathy to play a game of snooker with Sharky as a means of communicating to him her wish to break free from cycles of subservience; his emotional mastery is often expressed in terms of game-playing (an example being his playing of chess). And with Rita, she

158  •  In Fading Light

comes to her house when she senses endangerment to her and her son (via drunken suicidal thoughts and a drug-fuelled threat respectively), but her most symbolically charged act is to encourage Rita to sing in the pub and reawaken a lost aspect of her personal and professional identity. In contriving a space for self-expression and communality, and urging them not to ‘aim for the gutter when you can reach for the stars’, the Peggy character is inescapably a surrogate figure for the writer, and the creative team more generally, in the same way that the pub setting in the film was Amber’s literal space of refuge and creativity, given that they strategically bought the New Clarendon to serve as a ‘meeting place, a social centre and regular film location’.63 Just as the women of the Cedarwood writing project were directed towards an outlet – and later played a part in the shaping of the film itself – so Julie, Rita and Kathy find expression or catharsis in, respectively, journal-writing, public performance and sport. Although the inclusion of the Peggy character can be understood as an honest dramatization of the material generated through the evolution of the film project, this of course also runs the risk of authorial self-aggrandizement, even despite Peggy’s proclamation about the characters ultimately having agency to determine their own lives. This is anticipated and countered, to some extent, by the lack of resolution in Peggy’s own storyline and hints of flawed behaviour in the past that might explain her estrangement from her son; in short, she does not advise or pass judgment, not least because she does not claim to have the experience or moral authority to didactically instruct, but rather she constructs a framework to encourage processes of recuperation. Her acuity of vision derives, it would seem, from being unburdened by a historical or personal relationship with this particular community and place, and thus she is free from the cycles of victimhood or dependency that affect the other characters – and perhaps too from associations of class. The film consistently stresses her placelessness, such as in the opening and closing scenes showing her travelling down a country road and – most extravagantly – the sequence where Burt disbelievingly catches her levitating upon her bed. At the same time, some of this fluidity becomes transferred to the other characters. In sharp contrast to the opening tracking shot of Rita, Sue and Bob Too (Clarke, 1987)  – ­arguably one of the few other films of the era to deal with working-class female ­experience  – where the young protagonists are introduced striding confidently through their neighbourhood, Dream On introduces the Meadow Well estate via a short dolly shot of Larry returning home to his housebound wife. Subsequent scenes establish exterior spaces as hostile and threatening to its female characters; Julie is disturbed by a car displaying a misogynistic slogan, and Kathy is chased to the riverside by Sharky (a sequence that reoccurs, even more disturbingly, in her dream). Some visual compositions

Dream On • 159

showing, respectively, a ship moving on the river behind the pub and a Metro train glimpsed through house-blinds reinforce a tension between immobility and transcendence of space. However, by the end of the film, the three main characters are seen strolling confidently in public, successfully rebuffing a male character who tries to interrupt them. If Dream On makes a case for the significance of superstition for workingclass communities, this is based on the observation by the filmmakers that in times of economic difficulty people are more likely to seek spiritual comfort and that ‘a clairvoyant can be more effective than a social worker’ in offering scenarios of possible change for the better.64 However, the ‘mystification’ of the creative coordinator of Dream On as a ‘working class older woman tied organically to the community, rather than being parachuted in as a paid middle class expert’ laid Amber open to criticism for a ‘manoeuvre that allows all of the social and economic relations of production of the film to be denied’.65 Tom Jennings noted how ‘all signs of the institutional networks and forces that plague the real life community have been purged from the film’s narrative’.66 This is not entirely fair, but the rare scenes that do make reference to wider economic and political forces shaping the lives of the residents mostly illustrate the film’s emphasis upon self-originated strategies of empowerment and are primarily ways of deepening characterization. Balancing at least a couple of jobs, Julie is warned off complaining to the union about an unfair employer by a friend, although she is less passive when affronted by a car bumper sticker with an offensive slogan. In one scene, Rita briefly chats on her doorstep to a female neighbour, who encourages her to ‘get out and fight’ against the Conservative government and the introduction of the Poll Tax (anti-Poll Tax posters are also seen in the background of another scene).67 Declaring that ‘we manage to keep our head above water in this house’, her husband oppressively places his body in the doorway to disrupt the conversation and to bar his wife from the ‘public’ arena of political engagement. His gleeful presentation of a baking tin to Rita as a birthday present  – which she later burns accidentally, with no symbolism lost  – is as much an act of gendered oppression as Sharky’s physical domination of Kathy. A separate sequence set in the DHSS office involves Sharky challenging his rate of unemployment benefit, but his subsequent actions – declaring his intent to ‘complain to the highest authority’, donning a fox mask (which Kathy also does) and writing ‘the New Berlin Wall’ on the counter glass – seem self-consciously futile gestures, pranks designed successfully to generate applause from other residents and perhaps also win the affection of Kathy.68 The DHSS officer’s (Mike Christie) position as lowly representative, beyond which there are no ‘higher authorities’ touching the lives of those on the estate, is subtly conveyed by his humanizing reappearance as an entertainer in the New Clarendon pub, singing to a seemingly uninterested

160  •  In Fading Light

group of locals: another performance reaching a limited audience. When on the run from Sharky, Kathy does not turn to the police but entices a security guard in a shop to arrest her for shoplifting; an ironic turn of events, given that Peggy had previously intervened to stop her apprehension following a genuine theft. Tellingly, the only character to be aligned with the mainstream economy is the loan shark Burt, but as satirically conveyed by his castigating of Sharky for offering to sell him stolen telephones when he actually has ‘shares in British Telecom’, the privatization of national industries and the black economy where Sharky operates have similar moral dubiousness. This disinterest in institutional ‘forces’ cannot be divorced from the film’s strategies of communicating to its audience. A brief review in Class War magazine praised it for showing the ‘way that working class people overcome difficulties with honour and anger’.69 In response to the film’s winning of the public prize at the Créteil International Women’s Film Festival, Cathy Fowler and Lena Nordby noted its presentation of marriage and familial relations as ‘no longer liberating, or loving’ and observed how Amber’s emphasis upon collectivism was mirrored by the film’s structure, with ‘each of the women in turn supporting/being supported by the other, and finding strength through this union’.70 However, as Jennings points out, the film’s recourse to ‘fairy tale’ scenarios and solutions offers a ‘paradoxical realism’, conveying how ‘contradictory and crucial creative fantasy may be in working class culture and politics, as a key factor in its resilience’.71 Observing the fusion of comic and tragic registers, and of realism and fantasy elements, Dickinson et al. identified a form of homegrown ‘magic realism’ describing how ‘sticking together’ through adversity is not only a means of survival but of changing lives.72 Dream On has indeed been described by Amber as ‘social magical realism’, with its use of the ‘fairy godmother’ trope having roots in the literary tradition of magic realist writers such as Angela Carter and Gabriel García Márquez.73 Despite the contradictions inherent in an observationally grounded film about the role of fairytale narratives and supernaturalism in allowing people to transcend their environment, Dream On moves towards an unambiguously confident ending demonstrating the importance of collective performance to the lives of the women in the film. The final sequence occurs following the (off-screen) victory of the pub darts team and shows the three main characters involved in a celebratory event at a large hotel. At this point, there is a conflation between the fictional and documentary elements of the film, with the female darts team – a real group, and seen throughout the film as supporting cast – being heard receiving their victory prize and Kathy, Rita and Julie last seen, in freeze-frame, smiling and applauding this. Although the fictional characters have played in this team, it is implied that plot developments have frustrated their involvement in later stages, so the final image

Dream On • 161

of the women is readable – for those aware of the film’s gestation at least – as the actors giving acknowledgement to the people who have lent support and inspiration to the project. During this final sequence, Rita performs on stage the 1978 disco anthem ‘I Will Survive’ (by Gloria Gaynor), a song well known as a ‘feminist dance classic’ through its association with female performers and social spaces.74 For example, Tara Brabazon cites the song as an example of how popular music may not have the capacity for structural change but may be used by women to ‘think through the battlefields and disappointments of their lives’, thus shifting ‘the meanings granted to these activities’ and opening up potential for contesting hegemony.75 Rita’s final delivery of the song is the culmination of a series of fragmentary rehearsals that move progressively towards public spaces. At the start of the film, she is seen tentatively singing some of the opening phrases of the song when having a bath. Later, she sings whilst cleaning, but this is ended by her husband, who replaces the sound of vacuum and voice with the music he plays for the benefit of his pet fish; the tank subsequently becomes the site of marital battle when Rita replaces his choice of music with the main theme of Jaws (Spielberg, 1975).76 Larry’s utilitarian attitude to music  – as a means to entertain his pets  – naturally contrasts with its empathetic function for the female characters. Rita’s subsequent performance in the pub, coaxed by Peggy and the pub-goers, who sing along supportively, is similarly interrupted by Larry, with news of their son’s apparent alcoholism. It is only in the final sequence that Rita is able to perform the song, now backed by a professional band to an audience, without disturbance. Her invitation of her husband to perform a brief solo on mouth organ – after which he shuffles off stage embarrassedly – suggests an element of reconciliation but also a newfound ability to contest power relationships.77 Appropriately, he is replaced on stage by Kathy and Julie, more confident fellow performers, thus bringing to a head the film’s frequent allusions to pop music being a site of power and meaning. The songs that are played on the jukebox in the pub – which are sometimes chosen and sung to by the female characters, and which Burt threatens to turn off – often carry vague lyric resonances with the plot; for example Sandie Shaw’s ‘Girl Don’t Come’ (1965) is played at a moment when the arrival of one of the characters is in doubt. Being entirely from the early 1960s, and thus realistically contemporaneous with the childhood or teenage years of Kathy and Rita at least, the songs also close off the pub as a cocoon of safe nostalgia – an ambience reinforced by the mostly closed curtains blocking any reference to exterior space – and of escapism to their romanticized representations of courtship.78 The ritualistic function of the music is stressed further by the multiple play of one particular song – Joe Brown’s ‘That’s What Love Will Do’ (1963).

162  •  In Fading Light

Although pop music and scoring had been used utilized in previous Amber features, Dream On deploys non-diegetic music and manipulated sounds (particularly in the three dream sequences) far more empathetically to accentuate particular emotional states. Furthermore, its opening theme song not only clarifies one possible application of the title – ‘Dream on: dream away your fears’ – but foregrounds an expressive and enunciated female vocal line; at other points in the film, the ambience of this song is continued via wordless, treated voices. In tandem with its thematic and structural emphasis upon music, Dream On also gives diegetic and conceptual prominence to laughter and the function of comedy. The sound of Peggy’s laughter, un-contextualized and acoustically treated, is heard at the start and end, and then more naturally, if similarly obtrusively, elsewhere in the film. Her jokes and generous banter are politically charged, illustrating the film’s thesis about comedy as a tool as well as a coping strategy. For example, Peggy’s joke about why women are ‘so bad at parking cars’, at the expense of menfolk bragging about penis size, is transmitted by Rita to her husband as a retaliatory weapon against the witless jokes he tells to belittle his family members. Kathy’s final rejection of Sharky’s dominance is also articulated in terms of laughter: in the final sequence, the three women convey their collective strength by merely laughing and walking on by, when he stops them in the street. The film’s more whimsical, digressive moments – such as Rita’s amusement at two people in duck costumes at a cash machine, Peggy’s own donning of a pantomime cow costume to thwart Sharky in his pursuit of Kathy, the arrival of a meat seller in the pub at a tense moment, a security guard’s secretive consumption of sweets in his shop and Rita’s dream of friends and neighbours playing fantastic music instruments – are clearly intended by the filmmakers as surrealistic juxtapositions to balance the more serious material, but they chime with the overall messages about imaginative, creative strategies for transcending an environment. Dream On’s positive ending, and its occasional incorporation of sequences that lead towards ‘gags’ or humorous resolution, can also be described in terms of satisfying a comedic narrative framework, but one which, ironically, has greater affinity with some later male-centred British social realist films, such as Brassed Off (Herman, 1996) and, in particular, The Full Monty (Cattaneo, 1997), which similarly describe empowering ‘performance’ strategies for their characters (the ‘masculinity in crisis’ cycle of the 1990s will be discussed in the next chapter). Ironically, given the film’s underlying message about transcending one’s environment, and strategies of universalizing its characters’ experience, Dream On was released shortly after a night of rioting on the Meadow Well had brought national attention to this ‘problem’ estate. The night of looting and arson in September 1991 had seemingly been triggered by the deaths of

Dream On • 163

two young men who had been chased in their stolen car by the police. In the context of a series of similar occurrences in other UK cities at the time, the Meadow Well riots generated much journalistic attention, and ‘almost any disturbance small or large, through 1991 to 1993, was to become a “Meadow Well”-style riot’.79 Only a few weeks later, a news report about the film’s exhibition in the UK by the Odeon chain included a statement by one of the collective stressing that ‘the film does not set out to glamorize Meadow Well but is a universal story . . . and has a very positive, optimistic ending’.80 A feature on the film’s making in the Independent began by noting how many of the residents had ‘already been in front of the cameras for the best part of a year’, long before the ‘world’s press focussed on their burnt-out community centres and looted shops’.81 The estate has since become an emblematic case study for (sometimes divergent) analyses of housing failures and youth criminality, and for discourses around the ‘underclass’, urban breakdown and apathy.82 Two of the most cited works dealing with the riots and their contexts, Dennis and Erdos’ Families Without Fatherhood (first published in 1992) and Bea Campbell’s Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places (1993), examined this social unrest in terms of gender roles and spaces. Whilst Dennis and Erdos’ controversial sociological analysis explored possible causal relations between fractured community and changing patterns of family life (such as lone-­ parenting), Campbell – who was living in north-east England during the time of the riots – described the arrival by the late 1980s of a ‘large cohort of young men and women’ who ‘found themselves not only on the edge of politics, but the social world’, neither ‘legitimate citizens nor consumers’.83 In particular, Campbell emphasizes the disempowerment of women on estates that were not just on the ‘edge of a class and the edge of a city’ but had an intrinsically gendered split between private and public spaces.84 For Campbell, they had ‘no agency, supported by the state, to share their grievances about the hazards of everyday existence’, and she discusses examples of women trying to win back communities, to re-create a shared and collective welfare of family and community life in spaces synonymous with male crime.85 Dream On clearly chimes in various ways with such analysis, although to excavate the film for didactic commentary on the links between family, gender, social deprivation and criminality would be a disservice to its intentions and unplanned topicality. Furthermore, unlike In Fading Light, where one of the female characters is a mouthpiece for a wholly unflattering description of the estate, and The Filleting Machine, where the mother alludes to its reputation for deprivation, none of the characters in Dream On make assessments of their environment, or acknowledge its ‘problems’. The Meadow Well riots were mostly framed at the time as the work of ‘despondent, aggressive, lawless young men’.86 Yet the film has no strong interest in explaining

164  •  In Fading Light

the psychology of male violence or criminality, other than, perhaps, the notable absence of a male network of mutual respect and support equivalent of those of the women. It is indeed the case that the only youthful character in the film, Rita and Larry’s teenage son Colin (Wayne Buck), is shown to be responding to his parents’ fractured relationship and awkward family rituals by finding solace in video games, glue-sniffing and petty theft. His overdose in an dilapidated area that could possibly be disused industrial grounds does vaguely gesture towards the psychic damage of unemployment  – a theme taken up more centrally in later Amber films. His ‘redemption’ comes via a respectful appreciation of his mother, telling her that she looks like a ‘film star’ before her performance, an act with more kinship with the supportive gestures of the women, such as Julie’s gifting of her clothes to Rita. Otherwise, the film’s concentration upon older characters, and use of non-contemporary signifiers such as pop music from the 1960s, can be taken simultaneously as a ‘universalizing’ strategy by the filmmakers, a deliberate evasion of the economic and political forces analogous with the characters’ own exhortations to ‘dream’ and as an illustration of Campbell’s description of an estate closed off from the social world. However, Campbell’s stress upon female agency, and gendered spaces, is deeply germane to the film, and the processes of claiming back female solidarity depicted in the film are possibly suggestive of initial steps towards a broader reparation of community, if not family (given that the film’s portrayal of traditional family relationships is far from positive).87 In certain circumstances, the film’s title might be taken as a cynical disbelief at the potential for change, but ultimately Dream On avoids any ambivalence in its hopeful conclusion about the potential for the individual to be empowered by the group.

Conclusion: Into the 1990s The development of Dream On may have caused some divisions among the Amber team, some of whom apparently questioned its unapologetically strident gender politics. But from the perspective of the early 1990s, the film was surely evidence that the group were responsive to the accusations of masculinist bias or nostalgia that inevitably came with their documentation of industrial decline in the Tyneside region. My analysis of Amber’s fusion of documentary and drama in this chapter has foregrounded their antecedents, evolution and artfulness, but these films also need to be understood within the context of the simultaneous projects discussed in the previous two chapters, and thus the Amber project as a whole. By the time of Dream On, Amber were at the vanguard of a lively culture of independent regional film production, particularly in north-east England, where their example

Dream On • 165

and encouragement galvanized fellow workshops. To take one example, the Gateshead-based Trade Films, similarly ‘franchised’ by Channel Four Television, produced a range of broadcast and non-broadcast output during the period, often with a very different sensibility to Amber. This included Stuart Mackinnon’s (partly) Tyneside-set drama Ends and Means (1983), which took a cerebral, Brechtian approach to its discussion of capitalism and power, and Penny Woolcock’s divisive and tonally complex When The Dog Bites (1987), a documentary drama about post-industrial Consett that consciously challenged ‘traditional’ social realist representative strategies.88 The fact that such diverse and complex work had been given a broadcasting platform at all was of course due in no small measure to Amber’s catalytic effect on the workshop movement and Channel Four’s subsequent funding of independent film culture in Britain. Without Channel Four’s support for film production – which also benefitted other directors such as Terence Davies, Stephen Frears, Peter Greenaway, Horace Ové and Sally Potter – it is debatable whether Amber would have made the transition from small-scale work to feature-length dramas such as Seacoal or In Fading Light. From Dream On onwards, however, Amber’s story takes a turn towards retrenchment and precarity. Eden Valley (1995) would be the last work produced under the auspices of the Channel Four agreement, ushering in a phase of alternative funding. As the next chapter will demonstrate, Amber’s subsequent period of production would be less fertile in terms of the number of outputs but more streamlined in its tighter focus on a particular environment and the stories, perspectives and themes emerging from it.

Notes   1. For a history of Live Theatre, see N. Vall. 2011. Cultural Region: North East England 1945–2000, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 84–90.   2. A. Plater. 1995. ‘Obituary: Tom Hadaway’, The Guardian, 11 March. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/mar/11/guardianobituar​ ies.artsobituaries1; Lee Hall cited in H. Whitney. 2011. ‘The Artsdesk Q&A: Lee Hall’, The Arts Desk, 2 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theartsdesk.com/ theatre/theartsdesk-qa-dramatist-lee-hall.   3. A. Plater. 2005. ‘The Drama of the North East’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 76.   4. Plater, ‘The Drama of the North East’, 73 and 74.   5. For a detailed discussion of Hadaway’s television writing career in the 1970s see J. Leggott. 2017. ‘Fair Do’s: Tom Hadaway and the Regional Voice in 1970s British Television’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37(4), 683–702.

166  •  In Fading Light

  6. The use of the television in The Filleting Machine as a symbol of passivity and consumption also connects the film with Tyne Lives (1980) and Byker (1983): television screens (and later tablet screens) in general play a significant role in Amber’s drama, documentary and current affairs work, and I draw attention to a few examples in this course of the book.   7. T. Hadaway. 2005. ‘Comic Dialect’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism (2nd ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 85.   8. M. Martin. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10984-F10988).   9. For an account of the history of the term ‘seacoal’ and its association with north-east England, see J.U. Nef. 1932. The Rise of the British Coal Industry Vol II, London: George Routledge & Sons, Appendix P. 10. D. Robinson. 1986. ‘Credit to the Film Workshop’, The Times, 8 July, 15. 11. Amber/Side. 1987. Amber/Side Catalogue, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, Film 31. 12. For an account of the film’s origins see D. Newbury. 2002. ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture: An Interview with Murray Martin (Amber Films and Side Photographic Gallery)’, Visual Studies 17(2), 119–20. 13. D. Newbury. 1999. ‘Photography and the Visualization of Working Class Lives in Britain’, Visual Anthropology Review 15(1), 27. 14. Killip cited in C. Dilnot. 2012. ‘Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class’, Afterimage 39(6), 17. 15. Martin in Newbury, ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture’, 119. 16. This information about Critchlow comes via his website. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.mikcritchlow.com/home. 17. M. Martin. 2000. ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’ (unpublished transcript). 18. R. Cork. 2003. New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980s, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 59. 19. C. Dilnot. 2012. ‘The Gleaners’, New Left Review 77, September/October, 1. 20. Dilnot, ‘The Gleaners’, 5. 21. F. Barber. 1996. ‘Shifting Practices: New Trends in Representation Since the 1970s’, in L. Dawtrey et al. (eds), Investigating Modern Art, Florence: Yale University Press, 165. 22. Text from Amber/Side. 1995. Unremembered Lives: North East Communities and the Documentary Photographer, Newcastle: Side Gallery, cited in Newbury, ‘Photography and the Visualization of Working Class Lives in Britain’, 26. 23. Newbury, ‘Photography and the Visualization of Working Class Lives in Britain’, 26. 24. V. Glaessner. 1986. ‘Seacoal Review’, Monthly Film Bulletin, May, 158. 25. Martin, An Oral History of British Photography. 26. S. Hattenstone. 2001. ‘I Once Put Our Entire Grant on a Horse’, The Guardian, 8 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/jun/08/artsfeatures. 27. Hattenstone, ‘I Once Put Our Entire Grant on a Horse’. 28. Press notes for Seacoal, accessed from Amber’s archive. 29. A. Lipman. 1986. ‘Seachange’, City Limits, 3–10 April. Retrieved from Amber archives. 30. Glaessner, ‘Seacoal Review’, 158. 31. Press notes for Seacoal. 32. J. Newsinger. 2009. ‘The Interface of Documentary and Fiction: The Amber Film Workshop and Regional Documentary Practice’, The Journal of British Cinema and Television 6(3), 400.

Dream On • 167

33. Newsinger, ‘The Interface of Documentary and Fiction’, 400. 34. Amber/Side, Unremembered Lives, 26. 35. Glaessner, ‘Seacoal Review’, 158. 36. Newsinger, ‘The Interface of Documentary and Fiction’, 401. 37. Killip speaking in ‘Chris Killip: Seacoal’, YouTube. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y_or43ZixE. 38. In 1981, the Secretary of State for Employment Norman Tebbit spoke at the Conservative Party Conference (on 15 October) about his father ‘getting on his bike’ to seek work. 39. Manifesto cited in Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories From a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 5. 40. Manifesto cited in Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5. 41. Glaessner, ‘Seacoal Review’, 153. 42. The process of enclosure was the legal means of consolidating small landholdings into larger farms from the thirteenth century onwards, but which became particularly widespread in England during the sixteenth century: the term is associated with the transition from the traditional system of arable farming in open fields to the entitling of land to one (or more) owners. 43. C. Day Lewis. 1986. ‘Cause to Celebrate’, The Telegraph, 22 January. Retrieved from Amber archives. 44. Martin in N. Young. 2001. ‘Forever Amber: An Interview with Ellin Hare and Murray Martin of the Amber Film Collective’, Critical Quarterly 43(4), 73. 45. Martin, ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’. 46. G. Brown. 1990. ‘Breaking the Family Budget’, The Times, 8 February; S. Johnston. 1990. ‘Life Under the Microscope’, The Independent, 8 February, 15. 47. J. Petley. ‘In Fading Light’, Monthly Film Bulletin 57(674), 71; P. Russell. n.d. ‘A Life Apart’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/ id/588949/index.html. 48. Quotation from Vanessa Toulmin’s commentary on the film on the DVD Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon. For further information on the significance (and under-reporting) of women ‘hawkers’ in coastal villages of the North East, see V.G. Hall. 2013. Women at Work 1860–1939: How Different Industries Shaped Women’s Experiences, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, particularly Part II: ‘Women in Inshore Fishing Communities’, 81–122. 49. This quotation is from the historian William Hutchinson, published in his View of Northumberland (1776–78). It is cited in H. Berry. 2010. ‘Landscape, Taste and National Identity: William Hutchinson’s View of Northumberland (1776–8)’, in T. Faulkner et al. (eds), Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of North-East England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 256. For a history of the fishing industry of north-east England up to the early twentieth century, see G.J. Milne. 2006. North East England, 1850–1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime-Industrial Region, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Milne describes the consolidation of the industry in the late nineteenth century around North Shields, which consequently became a ‘specialist focus for the industry, offering a market, ice stores and a dedicated waterfront space separate from the coal trade and other commercial activity of the Tyne’ (36). A tangential quirk of film history is that the scene caught for posterity in North Shields Fisheries is likely to have been extremely familiar to the comedian Stan Laurel (born in 1890), who spent some of his early childhood living near the North Shields quayside; see D. Lawrence. 2011. The Making of Stan Laurel: Echoes of a British Boyhood, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company

168  •  In Fading Light

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

for a sustained analysis of the formative influence of North Shields and the fishing industry upon his life and work. These quotations are from L. Newton. 2010. ‘Cullercoats: An Alternative North-Eastern Landscape?’, in T. Faulkner et al. (eds), Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of North-East England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 298 and 297. Newton’s article offers a useful account of the place of Cullercoats in the national consciousness of the late nineteenth century. The distinctive clothes and baskets of the fisherwomen of Cullercoats also gained international fame through the paintings of Winslow Homer, who lived there between 1881–82. See, for example, M. Martin. 2001. ‘Documentary Poet’, in H. Beynon and S. Rowbotham (eds), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram, 162. See Chapter 2 for more on Amber’s connections with, and distinctions from, the 1930s documentary movement. Martin cited in K. Armstrong. 1998. ‘The Jingling Geordie: Community Arts and the Regional Culture of the North East of England’, MA Thesis, University of Durham, 69. The process is discussed in detail in the ‘making of ’ documentary on the DVD of the film. The songs ‘Strange Boat’ (an original working title for the film) and ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ appeared on the Fisherman’s Blues album released in 1988. I have been unable to identify the source of this quotation, but Amber’s Graeme Rigby understands it to be ‘either misremembered or adapted from a couple of lines of prose. I have a vague memory that the original is about sheep and nothing to do with the sea’. Rigby, personal correspondence with author. B. Norden. 1991. ‘Women: Natural Talents’, The Guardian, 10 January. The book was published as Cedarwood Project. 1998. Mixed Feelings: Writings from the Cedarwood Centre Woman’s Group, North Shields: The Cedarwood Trust. Kitty Fitzgerald, personal correspondence with author. Ellin Hare, personal correspondence with author. M. Dickinson, A. Cottringer and J. Petley. 1993. ‘Workshops: A Dossier – Introduction’, Vertigo 1(1). Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/ver​ tigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-1-spring-1993/workshops-a-dossier/. Fitzgerald, personal correspondence with author. For an account of the debates around the development and distribution of the film see K. Fitzgerald. 1993. ‘Diary of Distribution’, Vertigo 1(1). Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.closeupfilmcen​ tre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-1-spring-1993/diary-of-distribution/. See Fitzgerald, ‘Diary of Distribution’, for an account of some specific audience engagements with the film. Amber/Side. 2005. A Short History, booklet with DVD releases, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 18. Norden, ‘Women: Natural Talents’. T. Jennings. 1994. ‘The Hidden Injuries of Theory’, Here and Now 14 (July), 22. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://libcom.org/files/here-now-14.pdf. Jennings, ‘The Hidden Injuries of Theory, 22. The Poll Tax, officially known as the Community Charge, was the flat-rate tax system introduced in England in 1990; it was replaced by the Council Tax in 1993. As noted by Tom Jennings, the Mixed Feelings collection of writing that triggered the film’s evolution concludes with a letter written to Margaret Thatcher, the writers having ‘no illusions’ about their power to affect change. Jennings, ‘The Hidden Injuries of Theory’, 21.

Dream On • 169

69. Anon.1992. ‘Dream On’, Class War 53, 15. 70. C. Fowler and L. Nordby. 1992. ‘The 14th Créteil International Women’s Film Festival 10–20 April 1992’, Screen 33(4) (Winter), 433. 71. Jennings, ‘The Hidden Injuries of Theory’, 21. 72. Dickinson et al., ‘Workshops: A Dossier – Introduction’. 73. Graeme Rigby, personal correspondence with author. 74. L. Van Zoonen. 2005. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge, Lanham etc.: Rowman & Littlefield, 48. 75. T. Brabazon. 2002. Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women, Sydney: University of New South Wales, 32. 76. The melody line is not quite the familiar John Williams theme from Jaws but close enough to suggest it within the context of scene. 77. The final scene has extra-textual complications, given that Rita and Larry are played by actors with separate careers as club performers: Maureen/Mo Harold and Ray Stubbs. The cheers that accompany Stubbs’ appearance on stage may well be due to audience recognition of him. A 2001 newspaper profile of Amber indicated that the group were considering a documentary in relation to his ‘celebrity’ status. S. Hattenstone, ‘I Once Put Our Entire Grant on a Horse’. 78. It is also worth noting that the diegetic songs played in the pub, with the exception of Rita’s a cappella rendition of ‘I Will Survive’, are entirely by UK artists (Sandie Shaw, the Honeycombs, The Fortunes, Joe Brown), indicating the potency of indigenous pop culture for characters such as those in the film. 79. S. Brown. 2005. Understanding Youth and Crime: Listening to Youth?, Maidenhead: Open University Press, 59. 80. B. Unwin. 1991. ‘Commercial Break for Troubled Estate’s Film of Hope’, Press Association, 18 September. 81. C. Beck. 1991. ‘Same Location, Different Script’, The Independent, 7 October, 14. 82. See, for example: M. Barke and G.M. Turnbull. 1992. Meadowell: The Biography of an Estate With Problems, Aldershot: Avebury. 83. B. Campbell. 1993. Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, London: Methuen, 95. 84. Campbell, Goliath, 319. 85. Campbell, Goliath, 66. 86. Brown, Understanding Youth and Crime, 59. 87. As noted earlier, activism occurs only on the margins of Dream On and does not impinge directly upon the lives of the main protagonists. Although the film’s representative of tenant activism is prevented from access to Rita’s house, the same actress, the real-life campaigner Nancy Peters, is granted more visibility in the 1991 photographic exhibition Meadow Well: An English Estate, a project by Steve Conlan linked to the making of the film. 88. For a detailed discussion of When the Dog Bites see J. Corner. 1996. The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 139–54.

Chapter 6

From the Tyne to the Coalfields Feature Films, 1995 to 2005



At the start of Eden Valley (1995), a juvenile delinquent from Newcastle is given a non-custodial sentence for the robbery of a chemist’s shop and is sent to live with his estranged father in rural County Durham. The drama begins with Billy looking decidedly nonplussed on the train sliding away from his familiar city and its iconic bridges, to meet a father so embedded in the ‘horsey’ culture of the countryside that he arrives to pick him up from the station with a horse and a trap. Eden Valley’s opening scenes may not quite be Amber’s farewell to Tyneside – there will be some documentary projects and an abandoned drama still to come – but they clearly establish the shift of the group’s creative focus to County Durham, the setting of their subsequent three feature films. Amber’s gravitation to County Durham began formally in the early 1990s, following the end of their North Shields residency. Richard Grassick took on a role of ‘photographer/activist’, documenting the area himself visually and co-ordinating international workshops. Following the closure of East Durham’s last coalfields, Amber produced three drama films explicitly engaging with the ‘post-industrial experience’, which would come to be known as the ‘coalfield trilogy’: The Scar (1997), Like Father (2001) and Shooting Magpies (2005).1 Following a decision to revive photographic production, a wave of activities took place around the genesis of Like Father, which led to the Coalfield Stories project, a series of commissions between 1998 and 2006 that were assisted by regional funding from the National Lottery; stories and concerns from this project in turn inspired Shooting Magpies, a film about the impact of heroin upon the community.

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  171

Although Eden Valley shares a regional setting with The Scar, Like Father and Shooting Magpies, it lacks their explicit engagement with the problems facing communities and individuals in former pit villages. However, when placed together, the four films resonate thematically, and all push their characters towards a crisis that tests the redemptive power of family or sexual relationships. An evolving strategy of naturalism is also evident in the gradual de-professionalizing of the performers on screen. Although The Scar had its basis in the experiences of real people, the two lead roles were played by professional actors, in contrast with Like Father, where the central character was based on the life of its non-professional actor. But whereas two of the lead roles in Like Father were taken by people with some experience of ­performing – as public entertainers or as teachers – Shooting Magpies gives more prominence to actors without that background. The timespan between Eden Valley and Shooting Magpies, which we now know in retrospect to be that of Amber’s final cycle of feature dramas (at least for now), coincided with two significant developments: the rise of New Labour as a political entity and the renaissance of the UK film industry in the late 1990s, which gave an increased visibility to filmmaking inspired by the social realist tradition. These developments have tended to be yoked together, and the films produced in the era have been compared with the ‘vibrant renewal and awakening’ of realism in the 1980s, catalysed by antagonism towards the Conservative government and the funding opportunities from Channel Four for diverse, politicized content.2 The sense of retrenchment and readjustment that pervades Amber’s activities of the early 1990s is in some respects in keeping with the transitional phase of British film culture during that period between the resignation of Thatcher in 1990 and the New Labour government of 1997 onwards. As the last of Amber’s films to be funded through the Channel Four workshop franchise, Eden Valley decisively marks the end of a purple patch of economic stability. This chapter will consider the extent to which that film, and the ‘coalfield’ cycle that followed it, chimed with the new political mood and with the developments shaping British film culture during the period. Amber’s output during this much discussed era of film production does exemplify some of the characteristics observed at the time by scholars attentive to the apparent spike in realist production, exemplified by the likes of The Full Monty (Cattaneo, 1997) and the films of Shane Meadows, Lynne Ramsay and Ken Loach (himself experiencing a cinematic ‘revival’ from the early 1990s).3 Writing around the turn of the century, Julia Hallam, for example, noted how, in light of the decline of traditional industries, there was a turn towards domestic, individualistic concerns: ‘working-class identity is depicted not as the collective political unity of a group in society but as a site for exploring . . . personal stagnation, alienation and social marginalisation.’4 By this time, Amber were giving more attention to what Murray Martin

172  •  In Fading Light

described as the ‘internal landscape’,5 although their films also engage head on with the shift from political unity to ‘social marginalisation’. In the latter part of the 1990s, a small but significant cycle of films – the most notable being Brassed Off (Herman, 1996), The Full Monty and Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000)  – demonstrated the popular appeal of emotive, ‘feelgood’ stories about working-class struggle and transformation. These uplifting films have been identified as hybrid works, leaning heavily on comedic structures and suggesting a ‘manipulation of social realist form within an ultimately classical structure’.6 As with Ken Loach’s films of the period, they focus on the lives of those who have been affected most from the decline of traditional industry. But whereas Loach dramas like My Name is Joe (1999) and Sweet Sixteen (2002) are mostly pessimistic about the prospects for the ‘underclass’ (or ‘post-working class’), the likes of The Full Monty offer optimistic narratives of characters reversing, even if just temporarily, their dire financial and social position. With their recurring stories about men and boys from communities associated with manual labour undertaking new ‘performances’ – a strip-act in The Full Monty, ballet dancing in Billy Elliot – these films have also been read as fantasies of working-class reinvention and regeneration.7 Amber’s work of the period is clearly responding to the same concerns that motivate these films. According to Claire Monk, the ‘feel-good’ films celebrating resourcefulness and self-empowerment are ‘symptomatic of the drift away from social analysis, commitment or action which typified the 1990s’.8 However, Amber’s films, particularly The Scar and Like Father, are characterized by an ambivalence towards the redemptive, empowering possibilities of ‘creative’ regeneration, as we shall see. A related criticism of the ‘social realist comedy’ cycle has been the way films like The Full Monty diagnose masculinity in crisis but locate regressive solutions through the rehabilitation of homosocial spaces like the working men’s club, wherein the male strippers of The Full Monty do their act in front of appreciative women.9 Again, Amber’s films, being set within a comparable northern, working-class landscape to those dramas, and being rooted in the same realist tradition, inevitably have topographical similarities: Like Father, for example, is predicated, like The Full Monty, on the idea of men exiled from domestic spaces and from those associated with working-class culture. However, The Scar bucks the wider trend for masculinist stories of alienation and/or reclamation by taking the perspective of a woman with a deep affinity to the former mining industry and the landscape associated with it. The northern, ex-industrial settings of Amber’s films help to push them towards the mainstream of the British realist tradition; a case could also be made for their commitment to East Durham, a mostly rural area of relative unfamiliarity within the national imagination, being in line with the tradition’s aspiration to representational extension: that is, the location of

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  173

environments and experiences hitherto ill-serviced in visual culture.10 Indeed, in some notes produced in relation to Like Father, the group argued that their commitment to regional particularity placed them within an international as much as national context: We are distinctly marginal, particularly in the current increasingly commercially driven climate, where there is less and less support for a notion of alternative small scale ‘cultural’ practice and consequently less and less opportunity to access audiences who would have an interest in such work. Although we could be seen as carrying on in the tradition of British cinema from the British documentary and Free Cinema Movements, through to the working class cinema of the 60s and then Loach, it would be perhaps more appropriate to be regarded as part of an umbrella of a regional cinema, whose explorations into the specificities of cultural life of our region has resonances for others be it the Rhondda or the Ruhr.11

As it happens, Like Father would share a location, as well as the broad theme of troubled masculinity in the aftermath of the miners’ strike, with Billy Elliot, one of the keynote British films of the Tony Blair years; the coincidence of their release prompted a reviewer in Sight and Sound magazine to judge Like Father a ‘genuine treasure, worth ten’ of Stephen Daldry’s more commercially driven film.12 John Hill has analysed Billy Elliot in terms of how its story of a young boy escaping his restrictive environment by becoming a professional ballet dancer evokes the political and economic project of regeneration: ‘in a loose allegory of the transition from a manufacturing to a service-based economy, Billy becomes an emblem of economic rejuvenation through participation in the “creative industries”’.13 Amber’s response to ‘creative conversion’ is far more ambivalent, and at times downright scathing. By the time of 2005’s Shooting Magpies, the ‘masculinity in crisis’ cycle had petered out, and the terrain of realist filmmaking was being recognized in terms of both stylistic hybridity and representational diversity. On the one hand, filmmakers such as Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold and Pawel Pawlikowski were displaying a poetic sensitivity to place and landscape, but not necessarily a continuing affinity with the realist mode. On the other hand, the ‘fragmentation and complication of sociopolitical binaries and discourses in contemporary British society’14 were being reflected by the range of productions with a claim to realism: for example, the cycle of ‘urban’ films dealing with inner-city criminality, such as Bullet Boy (Dibb, 2004), the ‘hoodie horrors’ typified by Eden Lake (Watkins, 2008), Joanna Hogg’s films about middle-class malaise, and the various dramas concerned with the experience of immigrants and refugees like Last Resort (Pawlikowski, 2000), Dirty Pretty Things (Frears, 2002) and Loach’s It’s a Free World (2007).15 Had Amber’s planned follow-up drama to Shooting Magpies come to fruition, it would have

174  •  In Fading Light

corresponded with the shift in representation observed by Samantha Lay in 2007, by which, despite still being central to stories, working-class people were ‘increasingly seen juxtaposed with “others” whose situations are also characterised by their powerlessness’.16 The unfinished ‘Between the Mud and the Farthest Star’ film (which is discussed in more detail in the next chapter) was a love story concerning a Tyneside woman and a Sudanese refugee. The situation and characters developed out of the photographic revisitation of Byker communities early in the new century by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Following on from the documentary Today I’m with You (2010) – which dealt with the transformation of this traditionally white, working-class area into a far more multicultural environment  – the unfinished ‘Mud/Star’ aimed to ‘reflect both the hopes and tensions inherent in a community in transition’.17 The incompletion of the project (to date) does leave Amber vulnerable to criticism for not dramatizing the experiences of those who find themselves ‘othered’ within traditional, white, north-east communities, although Amber would retort that this is symptomatic of the UK’s film funding structures being hostile to a ‘regional’ production exploring such territory. However, it must also be recognized that Amber’s dedication to the people and stories of the region’s pit villages places their films at considerable variance with the majority of British social realist cinema, which has historically focused upon urban, industrial landscapes; contemporary, countryside-set dramas along the lines of God’s Own Country (Lee, 2017) remain exceptional, on the whole. Furthermore, Eden Valley is a rare instance of a sympathetic take on a way of life strongly associated with that of the gypsy or travelling community, unrivalled until Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant (2013), which concerns two young boys being drawn into the activities of a scrap dealer who is involved, like the characters in Eden Valley, with horses and harness racing; Barnard’s film also features a troubled young man who develops an affinity with horses. Writing in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw praised its ‘crusading social realism’ and proclaimed directors like Barnard, Amma Asante, Sally El Hosaini and Tini Gharavi as the current keepers of the realist flame. Bradshaw observed the film’s commitment to naturalism, perhaps illustrated most startlingly in an authentic ‘road race’ sequence, as traceable back to Loach’s Kes (1969) – possibly unaware that this was familiar territory for Amber, with Eden Valley as the obvious missing link (road races would also feature in Shooting Magpies and The Pursuit of Happiness).18

Eden Valley (1995) In The Pursuit of Happiness (2008), it is made clear that Eden Valley was a highly personal film for its main scriptwriter Murray Martin. As well as

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  175

being a celebration of the ‘horsey’ community of trainers and harness-racers, who he and his family had become immersed within, it also draws from his own experiences in reconnecting with a son from a previous marriage for its redemptive story about an estranged father and son slowly gaining respect for one another. Appearing sporadically in a cameo role as the assistant to an exploitative gangster-type figure, Martin is literally woven into the film’s texture of fictional and non-fictional elements. Indeed, the story about a young tearaway gradually becoming embedded within the horsey world is formally paralleled with the film’s integration of observational footage and dramatic elements. Eden Valley’s plot about Billy (Darren Bell), an urban teenager forced to stay with his father, Hoggy (Brian Hogg), in rural County Durham, is mapped onto the seasonal landscapes and rituals of the horsey year. A number of sequences involving the main characters and members of the real-life Laidler family (who had featured in Seacoal, 1985) do not have an obvious narrative purpose, yet their positioning in the film conveys how Billy is drawn by degrees into the lifestyle. At the start of the film, the sullen young man arrives into a bleak, snowy gale, sliding and shivering in his inappropriate clothing. But as spring approaches, with its flowers and verdant grasses, he concedes to his father’s claims about the beauty of the landscape and gradually becomes drawn into activities of birthing, training, riding and racing. By the time of the summer Appleby horse fair, a popular annual gathering in Cumbria of the travelling and Gypsy communities, Billy is responding gratefully to the gift of a colt from his father and starting to gain expertise as a rider. By this time, the relationship between father and son, initially that of near hostility, has thawed to the point where Hoggy can open up about why his relationship with Billy’s mother failed: ‘I was young, mad, wild like you: I wanted to feel the wind in my face.’ The mood darkens, and the plot tightens, as the film heads towards autumn and winter in its final stages. An opportunity arises for Hoggy to buy the land he rents for his planned business partnership with Billy, but competition by wealthy ‘townies’ at the auction pushes his winning bid beyond what he can afford, forcing him to conspire with the shady entrepreneur Danker (Mike Elliott) to rig the result of a trotting race involving Billy. Against expectation, Billy is victorious, incurring the wrath of Danker, who sets fire to their caravan and poisons their horses. Although a far from happy ending, Eden Valley does conclude with the image of the son wordlessly reaching out to comfort his father, thus emphasizing that, if nothing else, their shared experience of the horsey world has restored their bond. If the story of Billy’s gradual absorption into a new, alternative community is effectively a dramatic compression of Amber’s own longer-term engagement with the horsey world, and with East Durham, it is also analogous with

176  •  In Fading Light

the film’s integration of observational documentary elements within a narrative framework. These include scenes of farm activities, horse training and harness races. Billy first encounters the ‘trotting’ race culture via the home videos that his father watches excitedly in his caravan and which seed his eventual enthusiasm for the real thing. We have seen already how television screens tend to have overt symbolic purpose in Amber’s work, and the ritualistic rewatching of these tapes by Billy’s father accentuates the self-enclosed quality of the horsey community along with the broader lack of signifiers of the world outside of it. On a metatextual level, the leap from Billy watching the videos to becoming an active participant encapsulates the way that the raw materials of documentary observation are used creatively by Amber. As with Amber’s 1970s industrial films discussed in the second chapter, there are few ‘handrails’ to guide the curious viewer through the particular rituals and pursuits of the horsey world. Billy’s initial churlishness is matched by the terseness of his father, who seems more inclined to educate his son through demonstration than explanation. A pivotal moment comes quite early in the story, when Billy witnesses a horse being castrated, an act that he considers cruel, regardless of his father’s explanation that gelding is necessary for the maintenance and value of the creature. The film depicts the act being undertaken in an uncompromising, unyielding close-up, which becomes a litmus test for the (non-farming) viewer as much as Billy for the capacity to overcome prejudice and squeamishness towards the unfamiliar. This sequence is merely one example of the many visceral evocations of toil, imperilment and dirt that give Eden Valley a claim to authenticity. The wintry scenes that begin the film are particularly stark and elemental, exhibiting the pinched skin and breath of the performers and accentuating the primal requirements of the caravan residents, in the words of Hoggy, to ‘keep the fire going and keep the kettle full’; within moments of his arrival, a pratfall lands Billy deep into mud. Similarly, the word ‘shit’ (or its variant ‘shite’) appears with some regularity in the dialogue, mostly in relation to people or places; father and son both use the epithet ‘shithole’ to describe their respective environments at times. Such language is indicative too of the script’s tendency towards bluntness and brevity, although might equally be explained by the involvement of some amateur performers with a limited capacity for complex speeches. Billy’s indoctrination into the horsey community comes as much through his dealings with members of the Laidler family as his father. As in Seacoal, the performers Brian and Rosie Laidler effectively play themselves, and their pastoral guidance of the Hoggs naturally echoes what they have given to Amber members themselves, and thus their part in the evolution of Eden Valley. Not long after the castration scene, there is a sequence in which the benevolent familial role of the Laidlers is highlighted. Rosie instructs Billy to

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  177

Figure 6.1  Still from Eden Valley (1995). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

turn down the music on his Walkman so as not to disturb a nearby horse, but then caringly enquires about whether he is missing his mother. Her gift to him of a ‘nice warm coat’ is highly symbolic, given the importance of coats (or the lack of them) in the film generally. Billy had of course arrived to meet his father wearing an inappropriately flimsy (but appropriately urbansignifying) ‘shell suit’ jacket, so Rosie’s offering is most welcome. However, later on, a contrastingly malevolent quasi-parental figure, the unsympathetic Danker, makes a similar gift, this time of a more fashionable jacket, as a devious means of making Billy indebted to him. In comparison with the venal, exploitative Danker, bent on involving the Hoggs in his race-fixing scams, the Laidlers are the clear moral centre of the story. It is stressed that, unlike the Hoggs, they are incorruptible, and their enfolding of the Hoggs into their world is demonstrated by their support for Billy when he races at the end of the film, even though it is against their own son Rocker. Rosie’s maternal role extends to Billy’s father too, who she tells to ‘grow up’ during one of his periods of despondency; she also encourages him to go into formal business with Billy, which initiates the plot developments in the latter part of the film. If the Laidlers are the moral centre of Eden Valley, Billy’s gravitation towards their world is plotted through stages of appreciation for horses. In the film’s opening scenes, the unfortunate victim (Amber Styles) of a mugging by Billy’s gang screams after them that they are ‘bloody animals’, and when Billy much later mocks his father about his supposed knowledge of ‘breeding’, it is hard to avoid the idea that Billy himself has undergone a process of taming. Upon his arrival to Eden Valley, he is twice scolded for frightening the creatures, but one of the signs of his growing appreciation for them is when he himself chastises one of his visiting mates for doing the same. His father’s decision not to take Billy back to urban Tyneside is influenced by seeing a small child on a dismal-looking estate there launch into an

178  •  In Fading Light

attack upon an animal, and a sharp dichotomy emerges between the ‘rural’ mindset of respect and the feral behaviour of city youth. Billy’s subsequent experience of looking after his own colt accelerates his own maturation, which is demonstrated at the end of the film when he seems to forgive his father for a calamity that is partly his doing. Indeed, once Billy has started to integrate within the community, Eden Valley takes a more dramatic turn. At first the impediments are relatively slight and mostly to do with the cultural gravity pulling Billy back to the world of ‘raves’ and to his former mates, who get high and trash his father’s caravan when they pay a visit. But a symbolic duel between the Laidlers and the entrepreneurial Danker soon develops over the moral direction of Hoggy and son. The portrayal of Danker veers towards the stereotypical: he wears an oversize ‘cowboy’ hat, and he rides in his car to the accompaniment of an ersatz country-and-western song, which is presumed to be coming from his radio but has the air of a ‘theme tune’ announcing his presence to the local residents. The fact that one of his ‘fixers’ is played by none other than Murray Martin, as already mentioned, is a sly acknowledgment by Amber of the contrivances involved in the film’s progression towards melodrama. However, any sense that the heightened character of Danker is at all comical is undercut by his brutal poisoning of the Hogg horse at the story’s conclusion. Still, the implied clash between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forces of authority and guidance mirrors the film’s structural and creative tensions between documentary ‘truth’ and the necessary requirements of dramatic plotting. To criticize Eden Valley for not always being seamless in its fusion of unscripted and scripted elements is thus to overlook some of the interesting outcomes of the antagonisms between them. To take one example, a relaxed campsite party sequence of inconsequential banter among the trotting fraternity has little bearing on the plot, other than to further exemplify Billy’s absorption into the community (there is a similar scene in Seacoal). Its contribution to the film overall is that of colouristic detail thickening the overall texture of trustworthy, realistic representation. But it is followed by an element of pure plotting: the revelation of a ‘For Sale’ notice on the Hogg residence. This is a betrayal of sorts for Hoggy, who was expecting an estate agent friend to have warned him of this taking place, and it sets in motion his desperate attempts to raise funds, and in turn the destructive acts of the film’s final act. The situation is worsened by the land cost being pushed up beyond his means at auction because of competitive bidding by a ‘townie’ family, who are represented as a caricature of affluent, ‘toff’ outsiders who price local residents out of the market. The coincidence of the campsite sequence and the sighting of the ‘For Sale’ notice present well the inescapability of capitalist forces and the insinuation of economic realities into any subcultural or ‘alternative’ community or endeavour. There are echoes here of Loach’s Kes (1969), where

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  179

a school-leaver’s fascination with nature (the training of a kestrel) offers a tantalizing but unaffordable glimpse of an alternative future to a life of coal mining. Just as the boy’s passion is brutally curtailed by his brother killing the bird in revenge for him failing to place a bet on his behalf, so Danker’s anger at Hoggy ruining his race-fixing plan leads to violence; in both cases, the brute realities of capital triumph over all. Although the Hoggy character is not prone to long speeches, the words of wisdom he passes to his son as they pass through a quarry on their horse and trap are worth quoting in full: I know a man who bought a car to go to work in. He goes to work now to pay for the car he bought to go to work in. It’s the same here. This whole place has been dug up to build roads. For what? So they can carry the rubbish to fill up the hole they’ve made in the first place. That’s what I call shite.

It is revealed in The Pursuit of Happiness (2008) that the maxim here about the car owner was inspired by the wisdom of Brian Laidler, and it certainly presents a compelling argument for the attractiveness of marginal, non-­mainstream communities. When Hoggy finally admits his mistakes to his son, and declares ‘I blew it’, the sense of failure is acute. These particular words have a rich heritage, though, as a variation on the last words spoken by the ‘hippy’ Wyatt (Peter Fonda) in Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969) before he is shot dead. The ambiguous ‘we blew it’ line of Easy Rider has been much analysed but is commonly taken to signify a failure that is not financial but personal, ideological, cultural or even national.19 On Hoggy’s lips, the meaning is a little more secure: he is talking about the events that led to Danker’s violent revenge upon his property and animals but also his deficiencies as a father, not just in relation to recent events but in the course of Billy’s life. It is possible too that he is thinking of his relationship with the horsey world or his commitment to an alternative lifestyle more generally. But the experiment undertaken on Billy to socialize or ‘steady him’ (as Rosie says at the start of the film), through his entanglement with a supportive community, can actually be qualified as a success, if one reads the final shot of Billy and father walking across a field as an image of resilience and reconciliation. And if this is so, then Eden Valley works towards a positive statement about the restorative powers of homosocial bonding at a time where the decoupling of young men from traditions of labour has, as the early scenes of the film diagnose, resulted in delinquency and drug dependency. Eden Valley is vulnerable to criticism that it is too in thrall to this notion of recuperation, or that its binary of the ‘urban’ against the ‘horsey’ worlds is too simplistic and overlooks the specific problems facing rural areas of County Durham following deindustrialization. The film derived from a sense among

180  •  In Fading Light

the team that traditional working-class culture in the city (i.e. of Newcastle upon Tyne) was disappearing and that some of its qualities could be located in the marginalized culture of the horsey community: the collective has always been ‘drawn to the strength of cultural expression in communities’.20 Amber’s next three features – the so-called ‘coalfield trilogy’ – would directly address and dramatize these very concerns.

The Scar (1997) An early sequence of The Scar, set in Easington Colliery Officials Club, introduces many of the film’s main themes. The story, inspired in part by the experiences of its co-writer Lorna Powell, is told from the perspective of the middle-aged May (Charlie Hardwick), separated from her ex-miner husband and undergoing early menopause. At the club, the character meets up with a group of women who, like herself, were involved in groups supporting striking miners during the 1984–85 conflict. Among them is her close friend Jenny, played by Amber Styles, a familiar face from the Amber repertory. But the other women are playing themselves, and as they watch a videotape of footage from the miners’ strike, their reaction changes from humorous banter to silence and tears, as they relive the trauma of the event: seeing one of the ‘scabs’ on the TV screen, one woman says that ‘I used to have nightmares about that driver with the hood over his face’. Their reactions are clearly undirected and naturalistic and range from embarrassment at seeing their younger selves to delight at identifying people they know on screen. We have seen already, in Eden Valley, how ‘real’ footage, in the form of the trotting videos that intrigue young Billy, plays an important role in plot development; there will be a similar moment in the upcoming Like Father, where one of the main characters takes creative inspiration from a documentary about mining he sees on television. The idea of using historical artefacts to generate reflections upon the past will also be pivotal to some of Amber’s later documentary work, such as From Us to Me (2016) and, in particular, Still Here (2018). When May’s teenage children have a conversation in their living room, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their television is showing scenes from Amber’s own film Laurie (1978), we can interpret it as an authorial in-joke but perhaps also as a sign of a generation’s disengagement from past histories and cultures. There is a twist with the videotapes watched by May and her group in The Scar, however. Included among the footage shown via a TV screen within the frame are falsified scenes that purport to show May and Jenny at some of the events and of May giving forceful speeches, including one that mentions ‘Morland’, a fictional company that will play a major role in the film’s plot. The cynical viewer may well wonder, when witnessing

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  181

Figure 6.2  Still from The Scar (1997). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

reactions from the other ‘real’ women to this footage, where the creative sleight of hand begins and ends.21 There is a similarly deceptive yet playful use of editing during May’s visit to the Durham Gala, when there is a cut between an image of the character waving to someone off-screen and footage of the MP Tony Benn seemingly waving back: it is of course possible within the diegesis of the story that they happen to be greeting each other, given what we learn about May’s political activism.22 But such scenes do not necessarily undermine the film’s claim to authenticity; if anything, they constitute an upfront statement that whilst The Scar is rooted in real experiences, it is nevertheless a fusion of documentary veracity and dramatic structure. Furthermore, the cinematic playfulness of the Tony Benn montage, in particular, is appropriate for the film’s story about two people being romantically involved and becoming open to ‘play’: whether going in search of childhood haunts, or spontaneously bursting into dance or song. What is just as significant about the initial club sequence of the women watching videotapes is that, in the final moments of the film, the women’s group are seen together for the second time, this time having a street party. In between, the plot is dominated by a romance story involving May and her eventual realization that this short-lived affair has reignited a passion and fighting spirit exhausted through family difficulties and her approaching ‘change of life’ (as she puts it). May’s romance, with someone who works for a company with interests antithetical to her own political and moral ideals, is posited as a journey of self-discovery. As we will see, there is a schematic quality to the film’s plotting and characterization, but in its eventual return to a women’s group at the end, and thus to the ‘source’ of the material in the first place, The Scar makes a strong justification for its use of dramatic contrivance as a means of getting at truths about the legacy of the miners’ strike and the closure of the East Durham pits. In other words, the narrative takes May through the ‘drama’ of romance as a means to relocate the ‘realism’ of her political passions.

182  •  In Fading Light

The romance between May and Roy (Bill Speed) begins, unfortuitously, when he accidentally interrupts the meeting of the women’s group and is rebuked by May for violating the privacy of their get-together. Roy is a self-described ‘muck shifter’ on an open-cast mine, working for the Morland company, which is in the business of ‘creative convergence’: the transformation of former industrial sites such as the coalfields of East Durham to places of leisure and tourism. Although coming himself from a mining family, Roy is an outsider in the sense of not being from the North East (his accent suggests Liverpool) and displaying an insensitivity to why passions might run high locally about his line of work. He receives a sarcastic response from the barman in the club (Jimmy Killeen), who refuses to explain the distinction between the quite separate ‘Colliery Club’ and ‘Colliery Officials Club’ and inserts an incongruously elaborate parasol into his orange juice as if intuiting that Roy represents the march of regeneration and gentrification. Roy goes on to successfully woo May, and following the consummation of the relationship in his work cabin, they have a holiday at the ‘Highland Haven’, a health farm with a stereotypically snooty restaurant. Both the cabin and the hotel figure as sites of retreat or escapism from ‘everyday’ concerns of work or family, as well as spaces for exploratory performance of identity. Outside the cabin, May and Roy dance an impromptu moonlight tango to the strains of ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’, and in the hotel they encourage each other in a spirited duet of ‘There Once Was a Man’: these songs, both from the musical The Pajama Game, permit the couple to channel gender roles and representations that do not necessarily chime with May’s political stridency in other areas.23 Indeed, these charming, spontaneous moments, showing characters gaining affection for each other as they progress through the early stages of courtship, are without precedent in Amber’s work. But their inclusion here, in some detail, is fundamental to the film’s analysis of the implications of the growing ‘leisure industry’ for areas such as East Durham. Roy and May’s intimacy during the trip to the Highland Haven seems initially to suggest that May has accepted the nature of Roy’s work, despite misgivings, but there is a portent of ideological clash when she rejects his offer to book her into a private clinic for a hysterectomy operation: ‘everyone deserves the best, not just me’, she insists, clinging to her socialist principles. There then follows a confrontation with two of Roy’s work supervisors, one of whom justifies ‘creative conversion’ as ‘trying to be open to people’s needs’. She responds with a stingingly satirical rebuke towards their strategy of buying and transforming former working sites: Maybe I could propose some heritage-style plans, eh? How about mining theme parks? Sort of Pits R Us. Why not? There’s any number of dead pits around just right for conversion. The ghost train 400 feet down. The jolly

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  183

pitman wine bar. And cheap labour no problem. Unemployed miners reenacting the strike. Creative converters, my arse, you’re the bloody demolition squad, you lot!

This keynote speech marks the turning point for May and Roy’s relationship, as she realizes it has overturned her fear that she had ‘lost the ability to feel deeply about anything’. She goes on to tell her friend Jenny that love can ‘help you see where you belong’ and that having been ‘rooted to the spot waiting for a miracle’ she now understands that ‘we have to take charge of things’. The character’s name is of course highly loaded: it harks back to tumultuous events of that month in France in 1968, around the time of the birth of Amber, but also to the homophonic titles of two foundational Amber films, Maybe (1969) and Mai (1974): there is a clear match between May’s re-politicization and Amber’s re-engagement with aspects of its own history, particularly in relation to campaigns and to the miners’ strike. May’s stridency also seems to lead Roy to an epiphany: he resigns from his job with a decisive flourish, scrawling the word ‘bollocks’ over a business plan he has been asked to oversee, and concurring with May over his company’s problematic ‘leisure’ vision for the region. The characters in The Scar are defined predominantly through their relationship with the (post)-industrial landscape and through their attitude to the past  – and these are tightly yoked together. With May, these are also bound up with the physical changes she is experiencing through her early menopause. She is introduced in the film as someone who has figuratively lost her voice: in the opening sequence, she bangs fruitlessly on a window to get the attention of a daughter leaving on a motorbike, and the aforementioned ‘club’ sequence shows her watching a video of her old rallying speeches. This dovetails with the unruliness of her body. In a scene that has a structural equivalency of the ‘castration’ scene in Eden Valley, May rinses out her bloody knickers in a sink in a public lavatory; a nearby woman pulls a face of judgement and disgust, and viewers may be similarly tested in their squeamishness or preparedness to be taken into uncomfortable territory. Later sequences accentuate the idea of May’s symbiotic connection with the ‘traumatized’ landscape around her, as if she has internalized the damage done to the mining industry and community. When visiting the mine site where Roy works, she seems haunted by a crack in the ground, and then the sight of an exposed tunnel where miners would once have worked unleashes a ‘nightmare’ sequence: this incorporates flash footage of pit demolition, exaggerated sound, discordant music and a surrealistic point of view of her home furnishings falling to the ground as she helplessly reaches towards them. Her disorientation in such moments is aesthetically rendered through a roaming camera that matches the instability of her viewpoint, so it is

184  •  In Fading Light

noteworthy that The Scar concludes with a graceful crane shot that positions May securely within a group of (mostly) women and children enjoying a celebratory get-together in public: the camera rises above sloping terraces to reveal the sea and rural areas beyond. May has just indicated that she has decided not to have a hysterectomy, and thus her reclamation of power over her own body mirrors her social reawakening and suggests a newfound security in her relationship with her environment. As mentioned already, there are noteworthy differences between the two gatherings that bookend The Scar. The first was a private, bounded meeting among the former members of the support group; the second is a public event that bridges generation and gender. The final sequence begins with May wearing a false moustache in a parody of traditional waiter garb, raising the possibility that the film will lead towards an expression of female solidarity in the vein of Dream On (1991): the subtext being that men are not required here. However, the street party turns out to be inclusive, ‘utopian’ even: its participants include an elderly man who talks about a colliery disaster and shows off an artistic rendition of it and a young man who responds with interest to the picture – rather against the grain of the film’s depiction of the area’s youth as mostly disengaged from its industrial heritage. Although chiefly concerned with May’s story, The Scar portrays its other main characters as similarly affected by their troubled relationship with the past. May’s would-be lover Roy is motivated in his career by a rejection of any sentimentality towards the life and work of his miner father, and thus to any particular community: his credo that ‘if you want something, you’ve got to go out there and get it’ certainly carries something of the Thatcherite ethos of entrepreneurial self-improvement displayed by Ray in Seacoal. In contrast, May’s ex-husband Tony (Brian Hogg), another ex-miner, has retreated into a position of hopelessness and detachment, taking up home in his allotment cabin amongst a curious collection of gleaned debris, including a bus stop sign. The sight of a brass band playing an evocative piece of music in the street prompts him to mock the prospect of a ‘Miners Gala with nee miners’ and to question, to May, whether class solidarity still exists. For Tony, the strike marked the line in the sand, after which: ‘they treated us like shite, bastards – after all we’d been through together.’ His self-imposed exile from the community is expressed cogently in a scene in which he is shown playing a melancholic trumpet lament at his allotment. On a couple of occasions during the film, we see him looking down over the village from his allotment vantage (at one point even with binoculars), and the solo trumpet playing, in contrast with the communal music-making of the Gala bands, demonstrates the bleakness of his isolation. The bitterness of the character is sketched in broad strokes, but there is poignancy to his awkward body language when he visits May’s home, and pathos to the way he instinctively places protective

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  185

paper between himself and her sofa before he sits down. The Scar does not afford much time to the reasons for his eventual burning of his allotment, but the ritualistic manner in which he liberates the one remaining pigeon he owned from his mining days orientates the act as a cathartic one. Just before the film’s final crane shot, with its upbeat associations of transcendence and communal integration, there is an uneasy scene of Tony’s mother Belle (Madeleine Moffatt), who has dementia, singing the refrain of the Northumbrian folk song ‘The North Country Maid’ and placing her hand on the window of her nursing home, which we see from the outside, as if she is physically and figuratively imprisoned in past memory.24 Belle has occasional bursts of lucidity when she sees May, who works as a nurse in the home, and her highly emotional outbursts of remembrance are analogous with the traumatic flashbacks experienced by May herself. The characters of Dale (Darren Bell) and Becky (Katja Roberts), the teenage children of May and Tony, provide a further variant on the conflicts of the older generations. Unsympathetic towards his father, disconnected from the narrative of class betrayal, and pessimistic about the future, Dale has no qualms working for the Morland company and even takes delight in the rare prospect of manual work until he is sacked over a machinery accident; it is implied that his willingness to accept responsibility for his girlfriend’s pregnancy may be a positive sign of maturation. His sister is instinctively supportive of her father but comes to recognize his nihilistic attitude as contradictory and self-indulgent. The key point is that both Dale and Becky are incorporated, smilingly, into the film’s final neighbourhood party sequence, allowing The Scar to conclude with a more optimistic perspective on the future than Amber’s next two dramas. But if The Scar generates any sense of catharsis or optimism (up to a point) for the viewer through plotting and characterization, this is likely to be strengthened through the film’s striking visualization of the East Durham landscape. In 2018, reflecting on the preconceptions some people might have of Amber’s work being ‘dreary’ and ‘gritty’ in its representation of the industrial North, Peter Roberts said: The destructive thing is that people who live in the region get to believe it. I always talk about The Scar. When we showed it in Durham people said: thanks for showing us what a beautiful place we live in. There’s disbelief, they don’t see it, as they’ve been bombarded with lazy phrases.25

Graeme Rigby has also stressed that ‘the places where Amber have made films are extraordinarily beautiful, in a way that engages with what’s going on.’26 There is certainly much to please the eye in The Scar, which appealingly frames the vertiginous pit-village terraces that trail towards the natural

186  •  In Fading Light

beauty of the coastline and denes. There is a recurrence of beach or countryside views with dramatically looming skies, but the range of landscapes also includes the stark Northumbrian vistas on the way to the ‘Highland Haven’ and the cavernous strip mines on the coast. The scene where Tony and May dance the tango upon the mine site is bracketed off as a moment of aesthetic and musical pleasure, in the manner of a Hollywood musical, but a contrasting sequence of exuberant, lairy teenagers causing a public nuisance around sunset (or sunrise even) with loud techno music is just as compelling in its colour and lighting. In 1999, The Scar was included in a package of eleven contemporary British films presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A reviewer in the New York Times heralded Amber’s film as the highlight of the ‘Changing the Guard’ series, which also included The Full Monty and Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996) and argued that it encapsulated a current trend of films indebted to the ‘kitchen sink’ tradition of social realism but displaying a very different social outlook: Where the angry young Britons gazing into a stagnant industrialized landscape saw only the oppression and hopelessness of the economically pinched British welfare state, the new British films acknowledge the social and economic dynamism of post-Thatcherite England. True, the agents of that change might be coldly cynical developers like the ones who appear briefly in “The Scar”, but there is no denying that the country is on the move.27

Whilst it is counterintuitive to interpret The Scar as a representation of ‘social and economic’ dynamism, May’s journey towards self-awareness and renewal, in tandem with the film’s aesthetic response to an easily dismissed landscape, does open the film to a positive reading. The implication, from this particular reviewer, that the film itself is an exemplar and advocate of the very ‘creative conversion’ that May so astutely critiques on screen is troubling, however, and fails to comprehend how Amber were very much positioning their work in opposition to a prevailing trend in British cinema, and public discourse more generally, for upbeat narratives about post-industrial ‘regeneration’. This was certainly the case for their subsequent film, Like Father, which elaborates on the previous film’s excavation of the legacy of deindustrialization but now from a predominantly male perspective.

Like Father (2001) Near the start of The Scar, a pivotal scene takes place at a club, where the audience members dance to pop and rock songs played by a live band:

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  187

this is indeed where Roy invites May to dance for the first time. We have seen already how the organic development of Amber’s work, together with their redeployment of particular settings and performers, typically results in films that hark back to past productions whilst simultaneously sowing the seeds for future projects. The club scene in The Scar offers a neat example of this in practice, as eagle-eyed viewers are likely to spot among the dancing crowd a cameo appearance from Brian and Rosie Laidler, who had figured prominently in Seacoal and Eden Valley. The central musician on stage during this scene in The Scar is played by Joe Armstrong, who also had a role in the composition and performance of the film’s musical score. Armstrong would go on to play the main character of Joe in Like Father, which was very much based on his own experience of being a former miner and then of juggling jobs as a club singer, trumpet player, music teacher and agent for club acts. His brief appearance in The Scar, in the same room as the Laidlers, works effectively to imply that Amber’s involvement with a community is so rooted that they could easily direct their interest towards any of the participants in this or any scene and derive a valuable story from them. With Like Father, Amber turn their gaze towards the articulation of masculinity in the aftermath of pit closures in East Durham. Joe Armstrong plays Joe Elliott, a forty-year-old ex-miner and musician who is given a commission to write a brass band suite by a former schoolmate, David Hylton (Deka Walmsley), who is now working for a development agency overseeing ‘creative conversion’ (to cite the phrase used in The Scar) in the region. This regeneration process requires the demolition of the allotments used by Joe's father Arthur (Ned Kelly) and his friends, and thus an intergenerational conflict emerges that also draws in Joe’s young son, Michael (Jonathon Dent). As with The Scar, the film considers the human cost of regeneration, defined here as the cleansing of the region’s industrial past with the aspiration of making it more attractive for tourists and investors. Amber’s interpretation of such processes as fundamentally antagonistic to certain working-class cultures is expressed visually in Like Father through editing juxtapositions: for example, two sequences of flying pigeons are followed sharply by, respectively, shots of a planner’s map and a promotional video for the ‘Phoenix Project’ of beach clearance. Launched at a public event, the video combines archival footage of industrial waste and clearance with the following commentary: With this prosperity, came pollution. We’ve been living with it for decades. The blackened beach. The filthy sea. The coastline littered with a century’s colliery waste. The Phoenix project gives us a chance. Once and for all, we can get rid of the eyesores of the past. On the beaches, clearance work has already begun. Change isn’t always popular. There are no quick fixes. But our children, their grandchildren, deserve a stake in a better future.

188  •  In Fading Light

This film is interrupted at one point by a cut to young Michael Elliott playing a martial arts video game, which accentuates the textural equivalence of the similarly artificial representations of landscape. At the launch event, Joe is introduced to the grandiose chair of the ‘Arts and Leisure Committee’, but an opportunity to ingratiate himself with this establishment figure is lost, as he needs to answer a phone call concerning a work-related problem. It is tempting to read the disgruntlement of the committee chair as he walks off as Amber’s acknowledgement that their own funding opportunities may have been curtailed by their emphasis upon certain work practices, not least a commitment to the representation of cultures of labour. In typical Amber fashion, Like Father was grounded in real experiences. Aside from Joe Armstrong’s autobiographical input into his character, the plot line concerning the older men standing firm against the planned demolition of their allotments was rooted in reality: as part of the development of the film, Amber gave three men who had been served notice to leave their allotments video cameras to record their experiences.28 The film concludes in dramatic fashion with Arthur Elliott taking Hylton hostage, an act that one of Amber’s other interviewees told them he wished had actually happened in real life.29 In response to the suggestion that such a plot development could be perceived as melodramatic, Amber noted that the scenario recalled the 1992 incident in which a man named Albert Dryden shot dead a Derwentside planning officer in a dispute over his bungalow.30 If Arthur’s criminally violent response to his desperate situation can be understood as a kind of wish-fulfilment scenario on the part of the men who inspired Amber to take up the story (some of whom appear as themselves in the film), there is arguably equivalence with the way the filmmakers have been guided by how their subjects view their own working lives: the ‘romanticization’ of the pit life in High Row (1973), for example, was prompted by the workers, who objected to Amber’s initial script emphasizing negative aspects of their labour. A number of scenes in Like Father were filmed before the script was finalized, and there are some observational sequences involving Joe at work, Arthur’s world of bird-rearing and pigeon racing, and Michael at school that communicate a high level of validity through their digressive, unhurried quality, yet are still pertinent to the film’s plotting and characterization. The sequences of Joe, in particular, convey his warmth, wit and adaptability to different environments. When singing at the Victory Club, his graceless removal of a bow tie prompts some extemporization with the song lyrics; the song (famously performed in 1958 by Neil Sedaka) happens to be called ‘Oh! Carol’, the same name as his wife (Anna Gascoigne), who is currently aggrieved by his prioritizing his work portfolio over his family responsibilities. His ability to entertain and involve a club audience, who are inspired to

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  189

sing and dance along with him, finds an equivalent in his inspirational skills as a music teacher, drawing out a trumpet composition from the suggestions of a group of adults with learning disabilities. Interestingly, these various ‘performances’, as teacher or musician, emit a greater warmth than the very early scene where Joe leads a juvenile band practice and castigates his own son for playing a wrong note: as sympathetic as Joe’s character may be, we intuit that he has not managed to integrate his ‘professional’ expertise with his paternal duties of care. Unlike his father and son, whose behaviours suggest that they are processing or intuiting past traumas, Joe is characterized by a workaholic drive that necessitates a response to the present moment above all else. Contrastingly, Arthur is characterized in relation to the leisure activities associated with mining culture; the undirected sequences of pigeon training, auctioning and racing in Like Father define a world of rich but disappearing culture and ritual.31 There are times when the film’s digressions function mostly as interesting, humorous grace notes, such as the shots of idiosyncratic dance moves by audience members at Joe’s club performance. But at other times they are quietly devastating: a fairly functional scene of plot progression involving Joe buying a birthday card and spying a poster for his upcoming concert takes a different turn when the camera pans away from the newsagent to a sunken pit wheel nearby. Joe has left the frame, so we are left to gaze long enough at the young children playing upon it to process the satirical point being made about the steady erasure or reappropriation of the area’s mining heritage. It might also be observed that the kinds of ‘performers’ that populate the more descriptive scenes are those who might be understood as less susceptible to direction in the traditional sense: young people, animals and adults with learning disabilities. Their commendable presence in Like Father is not lessened by the way they also function as guarantors of Amber’s avoidance of manipulation in their strategies of representation, which extends outward towards the other characters and situations too. With regard to the casting of the main roles in Like Father, both Joe Armstrong (Joe) and Ned Kelly (Arthur) were new to acting but confident as public entertainers. Just as Armstrong had experience as a club performer, so Kelly had a career in stage comedy, with Amber seeing potential in his ‘misanthropic routine’.32 The actor’s ease with the landing of a comedic line is evidenced, for example, by his sardonic delivery of a response to what he hears said about the region’s likely future: ‘last time we had bloody tourists round here, man, was when the Vikings invaded’. However, the Like Father script, like Amber’s work in general, tends to avoid demonstrably witty comments or interchanges, and the instances of Joe bantering with audiences or friends are bracketed off to demonstrate aspects of the character rather than foregrounded as explicitly humorous moments per se. In this way, Like Father invites comparison with the integration of comedy and more serious

190  •  In Fading Light

elements in Ken Loach’s contemporaneous films, such as My Name is Joe or Sweet Sixteen. As John Hill has discussed, Loach’s films belong more to a ‘music-hall’ than literary tradition of comedy in ‘relying upon “entertainers” rather than skilled actors and comic interludes rather than a clearly structured narrative’.33 Furthermore, whilst Loach, like Amber, has perhaps looked towards ‘club’ entertainers in order to escape from ‘established British traditions of acting associated with the theatre and “heritage” cinema, he also seeks to import the sense of a shared working-class culture with which club comedians are associated’.34 Loach’s narratives tend to involve a progressive darkening of tone signalled by the diminishing levels of humorous situations or dialogue, whereas Amber integrate elements of comedy and tragedy in more complex ways. Furthermore, they often draw a distinction between what the characters might consider humorous and what the audience might: as I will discuss shortly, the ending of Shooting Magpies, arguably Amber’s most despairing film, has a claim to absurdity, in significance if not ­necessarily in execution. Other aspects of Amber’s casting strategy have an impact on the ambience of Like Father. The ‘David and Goliath’ story of the Elliott family being manipulated and bullied by representatives of the development agency is paralleled by a contrast between the more naturalistic performances of the nonactors and the slicker, more gesturally and verbally confident performances of the professional actors, who embody the encroaching wave of regeneration. There is also symbolism in how the role of Brian, an ex-miner turned ‘middle man’ trying to negotiate between the threatened allotment holders and the people wanting to demolish them, is taken by Brian Hogg, an actor known for his ‘craggy features and under-rated style’.35 Described by Ellin Hare as the ‘face of Amber’, who had an ‘amazing facility to become part of the world that his character was in’, Hogg had featured prominently in all of Amber’s major dramatic features but had worked professionally beyond the group too, including a number of roles in popular television dramas.36 So his role as a ‘go between’ here, with divided loyalty between the ex-miners and the apparent forces of progress, is befitting for an actor who bridges the independent and ‘professional’ worlds and who has a strong association with Amber but not a confinement to it – unlike some other recurring Amber performers (such as Amber Styles and Anna Gascoigne, who also appear in the film). As ever, the casting of familiar members of the Amber company in cameo roles is a pleasurably auteurist gesture, in a similar way to the almost subliminal placement of an advertisement for ‘Amber Ale’ in a ‘flashback’ scene to the 1950s and a living-room sequence showing a character and sewing machine in an ‘impossible’ position (i.e. with a camera placed where another shot tells us there should be a wall) that is a throwback to a similar moment in Keeping Time (1983). But Amber also made a curious but poignant casting choice

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  191

for the role of Arthur’s friend Willie, who, in a pivotal revelation of ‘backstory’, explains to Joe how Arthur was traumatized by the death of his child Michael – the unexpected namesake of Joe’s own son. The actor Willie Ross, who was born in Bishop Auckland (in County Durham), appears for this scene only, and his presence may be jolting to audiences aware of his lugubrious delivery and ‘cock-eyed, stiff-legged imitation of inebriation’ across a range of important British films, including those directed by Alan Clarke, Peter Greenaway and Ken Loach.37 The despondent quality of his character’s speech is heightened by the knowledge that Ross died in 2000 before the film was released, and hence that he connects with an endangered tradition of northern (and perhaps north-eastern) humour and representation. These aspects of casting are particularly significant for a film that takes an interest in how ‘practices and representation are implicated in each other’, although this was unlikely the rationale behind Joe’s decision to call his talent agency the highly apt ‘Class Acts’.38 In their analysis of Like Father, Katy Bennett and Richard Lee identify how the ‘performances’ of gender by the main male characters are shaped by their relationship to mining culture. In this regard, Arthur Elliott can be understood as the embodiment of the coalfield landscape, in opposition to the ‘new hegemonic masculinity’ of the senior management official Hylton. As the ‘lackey’, Brian tells Hylton: ‘once a pitman, always a pitman.’ As Arthur and his fellow allotment holders consider their stand-off with Hylton to be in the spirit of the miners’ strike, it makes sense that they would denounce Brian as a ‘scab’ or that Arthur would turn against his son for his affiliation with the Phoenix Project. In contrast with Arthur’s firm grasp of identity, Joe’s more problematic relationship with mining culture typifies the way that men in post-coalfield landscapes face ‘changes in their households and places and interact with others and alternative masculinities’.39 Arthur ‘performs’ his identity as miner by continuing his ‘labour’ via the leisure pursuits and spaces associated with the role. Joe instead locates new, adaptive forms of work – such as teaching and club entertaining – that are alternative to the norm in mining towns, and hence emasculating by that standard. At the same time, he has not quite intuited his wife’s expectations of him as ‘new man’ taking equal responsibility as a parent, resulting in his expulsion from the family home and his relocation to a caravan on a picturesque but wind-swept site. With its suitably liminal location on a clifftop, the caravan site neatly encapsulates Joe’s awkward position on the fault line of the industrial and post-industrial. It is a space of leisure, temporarily acting as a domestic refuge but quickly transforming into a site of labour too. Once Joe has been commissioned to write a brass band suite in response to the ‘past, present and future’ of the region, there are sequences showing him finding rhythmic, melodic and tonal inspiration from the landscapes and people around him.

192  •  In Fading Light

During his caravan exile, he watches, distractedly at first, an educational documentary about the gendering of pit culture. Over sequences of archive footage of manual labour, a female commentator speaks of how pit villages continue to observe ‘rigid divisions of labour, long after the second wave of feminism’. We hear that ‘coal mining defined gender primarily, but not totally, through the nature of the work’ and that ‘not all miners’ sons wanted to follow their fathers down the mine, but there was little choice, so most did.’ Joe is less interested in such academic analysis, however, than in the industrial sounds used in the accompanying clips: reminded of the pit rhythms, he is awakened out of his despondency and inspired to translate them into musical form. In subsequent scenes, we see Joe being creatively stimulated by relatively mundane yet symbolic aspects of his environment, such as a washing machine in the community centre and a bulldozer demolishing a street; he also refers back to the ‘chance’ composition produced out of suggestions from his class of adults with learning disabilities. In foregrounding the process by which memory and lived experienced are creatively transfigured, Amber expose and legitimize their own methodology. It is telling that Joe’s response to the rather drily presented mining documentary is a visceral reaction to the accuracy of its observational footage, not the accompanying thesis about the performance of gender: a reminder by the filmmakers that their priorities lie with people rather than polemicism or overt interpretation. Joe’s commission is only partly successful within the context of the plot: there is a slight suggestion that it may help to restore his marriage, but he is warned that his father’s failure to surrender his allotment peacefully could lead to the withdrawal of funding – and the events of the film’s finale render this highly likely. An undercurrent of critique in Like Father pertains to the manipulative way that Hylton uses financial patronage as a tool to silence and cajole: his veiled threat to Joe about the commission renders his seemingly altruistic offer of a donation to the village’s community centre (where we see Joe teaching) less benevolent. Although Hylton here is only doing the bidding of faceless, unnamed superiors, he becomes the ‘face’ of regeneration in the film, and thus the characterization carries the broader insinuation that high-profile creative projects and ‘conversions’ – which around the turn of the century on Amber’s native Tyneside would include Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ sculpture, the Millennium Bridge and Baltic Gallery – might be interpreted as a kind of cultural and political manipulation, drawing attention away from the more uncomfortable currents of deindustrialization behind them.40 Yet because the music we hear being composed, rehearsed and performed in Like Father is the work of the ‘real’ Joe Armstrong, and thus the result of Amber’s own patronage, we might be inclined to consider it in more positive terms.41 If Arthur and Joe personify, respectively, the industrial past and post-­ industrial uncertainty, the prepubescent Michael is characterized by a

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  193

Figure 6.3  Press image for Like Father (2000). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

bellwether sensitivity to communal and family tensions and an estrangement from ‘traditional’ codes and behaviours of masculinity. His father’s multiple work commitments require him to accompany his mother at a late-night shift altering costumes in a fancy-dress shop, prompting scenes of him trying on various outfits, mostly ghoulish in nature. Whilst conveying the fluid, exploratory quality of his childhood play, they also present an inclination towards the morbid, which foreshadows his hysterical reaction to the discovery of a gravestone bearing his own name (which is actually that of his uncle). Evidently disturbed by his quarrelling parents, Michael is drawn to his grandfather, and curious about his pigeon hobby, but has limited success ‘performing’ the required levels of hegemonic masculinity to gain acceptance by his peers at school: he is mocked for his poor footballing skills and is forlorn when others arrange a trip to a game without him. One reading of the film is that Michael’s difficulties with conforming to cultural expectations of homosociality stem from the lack of fatherly guidance. As mentioned already, it is hard not to bring up comparisons with the contemporaneous Billy Elliot when discussing Like Father, given that the coincidences do not stop with the East Durham location (Easington is used in the Amber film for the allotment settings) and the surname of the characters: both films are thematically concerned with the problems of ‘performing’ masculinity in the post-industrial landscape.42 There is certainly cross-textual potency in the scene in Like Father where Michael engages in a spontaneous dance with his mother, inspired by scenes of ballroom dancing on television; seeing his son dressed in a glittery costume, Joe makes a tactless quip about renaming him ‘Michelle’. Yet the simple dichotomies in Billy Elliot between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ performances of class and gender are largely avoided in Like Father, which is more concerned with the confusion and disaffection that occur during eras of transition.

194  •  In Fading Light

Although the violent conclusion of Like Father invites criticism for stretching credulity, Ellin Hare has maintained that the film’s trajectory towards ‘grand drama’ is justified by the way ‘ordinary people do have extraordinary things happen to them’.43 Only occasionally seen together beforehand, the ending brings the three generations of Elliott family members into intense collision, following Arthur’s decision to take the developer Hylton hostage in his allotment. Joe and Arthur vent their anger towards each other for their respective disloyalty and parental failure; Joe confronts his former schoolmate Hylton for betraying him; and in the melee, a fired gun causes Michael to fall from the roof from where he has been surveying the scene. Comparing their film with Billy Elliot, Amber argued that the underlying message of that film was that: . . . fulfilment can only be found through a rejection of background and family, which offer nothing but a brutal philistinism. Our film takes the very different position, that despite tensions and difficulties, reconciliation can be reached through a process of acceptance and understanding, and within the community.44

It is not clear whether Michael’s injuries are severe, but an overhead shot of the three generations tearfully embracing and apologizing to each does raise the possibility of catharsis on both the familial and community level.

Shooting Magpies (2005) Near the start of Shooting Magpies, a man in his late thirties called Barry (Barry Gough) says the following directly to the camera: It seemed to hit the villages at the time when the pits were closing. It seemed to get a foothold. But they’ve never shook it. In fact it gets deeper or worse.

Given that this follows a scene showing an ill-looking man, Darren (Darren Bell), aggressively demanding money from a young woman, Emma (Emma Dowson), effectively barricaded in her bedroom with two small children, it is safe to say that Barry is talking about the devastating impact of drugs, particularly heroin, on the youth of East Durham. Significantly, this is the solitary verbal reference to colliery labour or culture in Shooting Magpies; there are not many visual reminders either. One exception is a pit wheel seen briefly from the point of view of a passing car. Another is a scene showing Barry walking over colliery debris embedded on a beach; this imagery relates directly to Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Coal Coast project of photographs exposing the ‘terrible beauty’ of a coastline scarred by reminders of its industrial

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  195

Figure 6.4  Still from Shooting Magpies (2005). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

past.45 For the characters in the film, caught in the double grip of drug culture and the town’s black economy, day-to-day survival is the foremost motivation. The main plot line concerns Emma’s last-ditch attempt to wean her partner Darren off his addiction by relocating to an isolated caravan on the Tees estuary. She is supported in this endeavour by her friend Barry, but a charitable deed on his part unleashes a chain of events that ultimately leads to trouble with the powerful gold dealer and black marketeer Ray (Brian Hogg). Emma’s efforts with Darren are unsuccessful, and the final scene shows him negotiating to leave her for the price of another heroin fix. Much of the inspiration for Shooting Magpies came out of Amber’s Coalfield Stories project of photographic commissions between 1998 and 2006. Coalfield Stories, a response to the post-industrial experiences of East Durham, had grown out of the making of Like Father and was enabled by new streams of funding from the National Lottery and the Northern Rock Foundation (which also gave Amber a five-year revenue grant for filmmaking in 2004). As outlined in the ‘Making of Shooting Magpies’ documentary included on the DVD release, Amber had identified the potential of the two main performers, Barry Gough and Emma Dowson, via their contribution to earlier video projects. Dowson took part in an educational film about teenage pregnancy called We Did It Together (2003), whilst the youth worker Gough had maintained a connection with Amber since the making of the fundraising video It’s the Pits (1995) and being one of the subjects of Peter Fryer and Graeme Rigby’s Fathers project (1998–2000) about single parents. In the ‘making of ’ feature, members of the Amber team explain how they worked with Dowson to dramatize elements of her own life story, through a process of videoed research and improvisation. In the eventual film, her perceived ability to ‘reproduce her emotional life’ was placed against Gough’s ‘intellectual’ overview of community problems.46 The integration of direct-to-camera testimonials from Gough and Dowson throughout Shooting

196  •  In Fading Light

Magpies re-creates this tension between the experiential and the analytical to a certain degree, but it is not obvious on an isolated viewing whether these addresses to the audience (or an implied interviewer) are in character or not. However, the viewer paying close attention to the ‘paratextual’ information on the DVD copy may conclude that the final words in the film spoken by (a notably more ‘made up’ and healthier-looking Dowson) are those of the performer not the character. Furthermore, over the credits there are a number of images from the Coalfield Stories project, including one of Gough and his son (who also appears in the film as Barry’s son Callum) and then finally Dowson in what could be interpreted as a wedding dress: it is revealed in the ‘bonus’ material that Dowson ended her relationship with her real-life addict partner and developed a romance with the actor (Darren Bell) playing her fictional partner on screen, and that they subsequently married. Unlike the previous two coalfield dramas, and in a considered repudiation of the UK’s economic and political trajectory, Shooting Magpies makes no reference to the mission of regeneration or ‘creative conversion’: these are never mentioned and have no bearing on the day-to-day existence of the characters. The pressure upon Amber from observers or potential funders to engage with the ‘mainstream’ narrative of post-industrial change only strengthened their determination to focus upon a geographical region and experience that could easily be dismissed as irrelevant. According to Graeme Rigby: They were deliberately creating these dominant visual things that were telling the story. That’s the whole thing with public art or contemporary art galleries or [Norman] Foster designs: they’re the cheapest signifier of modernity you can have, so that’s why you get them. It tells the story they want you to hear. And if they want you to hear it, you look elsewhere.47

As Rupert Ashmore has observed, Shooting Magpies portrays a ‘community that has been undermined in every economic, social, cultural and physical respect, so that everyday actions constitute an individual struggle, and an overwhelming condition of inertia means that any sense of the future has been eclipsed by the demands of the day-to-day’.48 The film is explicitly concerned with the way that former community structures, predicated upon cross-generational respect, have been superseded by black marketeering and a pernicious drug culture. The challenge for Amber was how to convey the vibrancy and storytelling prowess of their subjects whilst dealing sensitively with the social and economic abyss left by the disappearance of industry and the cultures around it. One of Amber’s key strategies for Shooting Magpies was to conflate the improvisatory skills of the performers with those of the characters they play. Individual scenes in the film took shape around the extemporizations of the

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  197

performers, who were often (and particularly in the case of Dowson) drawing upon autobiographical detail. As Graeme Rigby explains: All the scenes were based in some way on the stories we were being told. An actual script with lines was written from these but not as something the actors learnt, more as a basis for improvisation. The scenes had to take you from and to certain narrative points, and they knew what needed to happen, but getting there wasn’t a fixed process. As the scenes were usually taken from their own lives or reflected their sense of things, they knew better than us what felt right.49

The plot is driven by characters having to make morally difficult choices, often in the form of a compromise between competing interests. Emma has to persuade Barry of the worth of a loan to help her partner treat his addiction and then finally to break free from Darren once he has betrayed her yet again. When Barry gives a loan to the young addict Deano (Sanchez Coulson), he is paid back in gold items stolen by Deano from his intimidating father, the dealer Ray; Barry’s decision to give these items to Emma sets off a succession of events affecting all the characters. There is some ambiguity about the level of motivation Darren has with regard to his recuperation. Barry’s own dealings with addicts in the past convinces him that Darren is following a standard script of manipulation and deceit, and Emma eventually comes to this view herself. When Darren steals a gold bracelet from Emma in order to source another fix, it is both an act of opportunism and thoroughly predetermined. In a similar fashion to some other social realist dramas dealing with the ‘underclass’ experience of the black economy, such as Raining Stones (Loach, 1993) or Tina Goes Shopping (Woolcock, 1999), the plot of Shooting Magpies revolves around the rotation and exchange of certain commodities: drugs, items of gold and a pair of trainers. For example, gold objects belonging to Ray, which act as an alternative banking system for the community, pass through the hands of all the main characters, from the suicidal Deano to Barry, then to Emma, Darren and back to Ray. The mechanistic nature of the plotting befits the film’s concern with the circularity of the town’s network of debts and favours, which now stands in place of former community structures. The cyclical passage of the gold throughout the film, eventually returning to the powerful Ray, also works to query the agency of the characters, caught in a deterministic spiral of events. There is an irony in how the film’s narrative strategy binds the fates of the characters together but in an environment where a sense of social collectivity has largely vanished. Life experiences in the town are also defined as dangerously accelerated. Barry speaks of seeing the names of children who he used to know as a

198  •  In Fading Light

social worker appearing in newspaper obituaries (as a consequence of their addiction), and an early victim in the story is Ray’s addict son Deano, who jumps to his death from a cliff top; one of Darren’s mates falls prey to an unpleasant vendetta punishment from Ray, by being wrapped in barbed wire. Barry’s young son Callum is within the orbit of peers already drinking and (it is implied) engaging in sexual activity. But the film’s main exemplar of the fatalistic slide to the abyss is what happens in the story to Rocky, an eccentric figure whose home is set alight by addicts and who is exiled to a cave on the beach; he is unwittingly drawn into the ‘vendetta’ narrative and viciously attacked by Ray’s thugs.50 The film’s diagnosis of behavioural cycles, and characters with limited agency in situations with predicable outcomes, is supported by the recurrence throughout of short, interstitial sequences that might at first be interpreted as flashbacks, given their slowed-down, wordless and thus dreamlike quality; they also tend to be accompanied by unsettling music with components played backwards. A number of Amber’s dramas feature dreams or ‘visions’ to convey, in the conventional cinematic manner, the thoughts and concerns of individual characters. In The Scar and Like Father, there are visions by May and Joe that evoke the industrial past and their alienation from it, but Shooting Magpies takes a more elliptical approach, as it is unclear at first whether we are seeing glimpses of the past or the future. Near the start, Emma explains in voice-over her concerns about ‘cracking up’ when discovering that her difficulties are ‘bottomless’: the images that follow of her and her partner exchanging warm looks in an amusement arcade might logically be taken as a flashback to a happier time, but they are in fact a flash-forward to a later sequence in the film. If these dislocated moments of ‘frozen’ time that punctuate the film offer some respite from the mechanics of narrative, they offer more room for interpretation than the subjective elements of Amber’s previous work: there is a degree of hope in their emphasis upon human interaction, but the confusion about their temporal status is redolent of the way the characters are defined as living purely in the moment, with consideration neither of the past or the future. There is also a narrative circularity between the opening scene of Darren requesting a ‘tenner’  – in other words the going rate for a bag of heroin – from Emma and the same demand being made at the end of the film, efficiently sketching out cycles of deprivation and dependency. An even more significant aesthetic and technical development was Amber’s decision to shoot on digital video for the first time. Although Amber had used video in their current affairs and community/educational work, and had edited Like Father digitally, Shooting Magpies marks their decisive shift from film to DV. Some positive aspects of this, for the making of the film, were reduced set-up times (helpful for non-professional actors even if it gave the

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  199

filmmakers less time to hone their craft), easy access to people’s homes, and a greater mobility overall, but this was counterbalanced by the loss of lighting as a ‘storytelling tool’ and a degree of saturation that makes colours (such as green grass and blue skies) particularly vivid and heightened.51 A related development in Shooting Magpies is the use of direct-to-camera address by the performers. There are numerous precedents for this in Amber’s work, particularly where it has developed out of real-life testimonies and experiences, but when characters in Keeping Time or Dream On, for example, break the ‘fourth wall’, it is mostly in domestic settings and with the effect of placing the viewer in a position of confidant. Most of the ‘interviews’ with Barry and Emma in the film follow this tradition, although Barry’s take place in exterior or public spaces, and in one scene he responds to a surprising plot development by turning to address the camera: ‘it’s not every day you get your money back off a smackhead, is it?’ The presence of humour in the unlikeliest of situations is suggested, but the self-reflexive quality of the moment involves simultaneous engagement and distancing of the viewer: either way, it is, like the ‘flashbacks/forwards’ that punctuate the story, a means of rupturing the passivity of the characters with regard to the forces of social decay. An equivalent moment of incongruity comes via a sequence showing Barry and Emma’s family watching the Queen pass through the town in a motorcade. As with the royal visit in Launch (1974), there is political capital to be made from the visible contrast between the high-society grandeur of the elite and the living (or working) experiences of the monarch’s subjects in north-east England. The sequence was opportunistic on the part of Amber, who recorded the actors against the backdrop of the visit at an early stage of the film’s production and then wove it into the plot when it was finalized. But it is also deeply playful, again providing the film with an instance of creative guile that cuts against the bleakness of its prognosis for the town and residents. Like the equivalent scene with May and Tony Benn in The Scar, the manipulation of editing to suggest that Emma’s family and the Queen are directly waving at each other is a self-consciously humorous gesture. Shooting Magpies takes an ambivalent stance on strategies of social and behavioural intervention, whether by the characters or by the filmmakers themselves. In the accompanying ‘making of ’ documentary, Ellin Hare speaks candidly of giving financial assistance to the performer Emma Dowson during the genesis of the film to help get her partner off heroin, and of the problems of being implicated within complex personal situations. The film’s plot line conveys how Barry’s equivalent assistance, first to the addict Deano (who he lends fifty pounds) and then to Emma, results in developments, albeit beyond his control, that are injurious to himself and others. Furthermore, all the strategies of recuperation attempted in the film have limited or no success. Cognisant from his own youth-work experience of the

200  •  In Fading Light

limited horizons for the town’s teenagers, Barry strives to pass on his own passion for ferret-rearing to his son. But the last time we see them undertaking this together there is a squabble between father and son and an implication of the inevitable rupture of a family tradition. As Rupert Ashmore notes, in the world of Shooting Magpies, the ‘maintenance of idealising working class culture provides only a partial buffer’ against the forces of social deterioration.52 Barry also accompanies his son to a youth boxing match, and there are some digressive, observational scenes of young people training, but the optimistic notion that the boxing world might offer a haven of homosociality is undercut by a squeamish comment by Callum and the juxtaposition of an image of boxers fighting with one of Deano’s clenched fist as he injects himself with heroin in (presumably) the toilets of the venue. Similarly, in an echo of Eden Valley, it is suggested that the ‘kingpin’ Ray is keen to embed his son in the horsey world of harness racing as a means to steer him away from heroin use. In the Pursuit of Happiness documentary, Brian Hogg (who plays Ray) jokes that Murray Martin and Amber managed to ‘shoehorn’ a relatively extraneous plot line about a harness race into Shooting Magpies, in keeping with their sustained interest in the culture – which would shortly result in an attempted documentary about the Coulson family. Indeed, the inclusion of scenes in the film involving the Coulsons and their extended circle can be interpreted as Amber’s response to the limited subject matter and stories derivable from atomized, post-industrial communities, especially young people. But whereas Eden Valley works towards a positive conclusion on the recuperative potential of the horsey world for a delinquent youth, Shooting Magpies closes down this possibility early in the film through the suicide of Ray’s son. When Emma and Darren embark on their restorative sojourn to the Tees estuary, they are seen placing bets on a horse-racing game in an amusement arcade: these imitation versions are clearly the nearest they can hope to get to this particular culture, or indeed any culture associated with labour. The main story of attempted recovery in Shooting Magpies is Emma’s fruitless attempt to wean Darren off his addiction. Many of Amber’s dramas position their characters in relation to a space of refuge, recuperation or transformation that is loosely allegorical for Amber’s own strategies of intervention: the boat and pub in In Fading Light (1989) and Dream On come easily to mind. As seen throughout this chapter, caravans or, in the case of The Scar, a holiday home carry a similar function in the dramas from Eden Valley onwards in helping the characters reach varying degrees of socialization (Billy), self-awareness (May) and creative achievement (Joe). In Shooting Magpies, the cottage setting on ‘The Gare’, an area around the mouth of the Tees river, brings Emma and Darren in direct sight of the region’s heavy industry: in a number of scenes, they are framed against its smoky chimneys and blasts of fire. Darren’s separation from this, or any industrial culture, is

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  201

clear from statements such as ‘where on earth am I gonna go around here?’ Nor is he willing to partake in any of the proffered leisure pursuits (such as a trip to a cinema), such is his – and by extension his generation’s – complete detachment from historic structures of working-class labour and recreation. Whilst the trip is a failure for Darren, it does bring Emma to a positive decision about ending their relationship. The conclusion of Shooting Magpies is of Emma involving a policeman in the removal of Darren from her home: Darren strikes a deal to leave for a ‘tenner’, which the policeman (played by Joe Armstrong, a familiar face from Like Father) persuades Emma is a ‘bargain’. According to the filmmakers (speaking in the ‘making of ’ documentary), this scene was based on a real incident in the life of the actor and had been conceived as an absurdist denouement to the story, but the intensity of its re-creation drained the anticipated humour out of the scene. Whereas the other films discussed in this chapter moved towards climaxes of violence (Eden Valley and Like Father) and self-awakening (The Scar), Shooting Magpies eschews any sense of catharsis, just as its title is the most inscrutable one given to any Amber film: it relates to a scene showing Ray explaining his delight in using a caged magpie to attract others that he can shoot. Within the context of a menacing scene, this may seem to be a senseless, vicious endeavour, but it also symbolizes a desire, by many within such a community, to eradicate the ‘scumbag’, thieving addicts (like Darren and his junkie friends) who are seen as destroying the community and its values. We do not see what happens when Barry incurs the wrath of Ray, and there is no dramatic showdown between Emma and Darren. Their negotiation to separate for the cost of ten pounds is anticlimactic and not a little sad: a complex human relationship is traded in the same way as the bartered goods that drive the local economy. Simultaneously absurdist, tragic and pathetic, this ending is typical of the film’s tonal and formal complexity.

Conclusion: A Turn to Retrospection For Amber, accessibility has to be prioritized over intellectual experiment and analysis, but this is not to suggest that work such as Shooting Magpies is straightforward or resistant to multiple readings. The film offers decisive proof of Amber’s respect towards their audience, who they understand as fully capable of responding to the emotional and social accuracy of material they comprehend as a combination of verisimilitude and contrivance. Yet Shooting Magpies, like the other dramas covered in this chapter, is no less experimental in its attitude towards creative documentation than, say, Keeping Time (1983) or T Dan Smith (1987).

202  •  In Fading Light

Although Eden Valley has some differences of style and emphasis to the subsequent ‘coalfield’ cycle of The Scar, Like Father and Shooting Magpies, we have seen how it encapsulates Amber’s gravitation away from urban Tyneside towards the East Durham coalfields, and also how it anticipates some of the group’s twenty-first century preoccupations (which will be discussed in the next chapter). These films also articulate, in microcosm, a wider political and cultural understanding of working-class experience (particularly in north-east England) in terms of a shift towards the post-industrial. For those familiar with Amber’s work and philosophy so far, Shooting Magpies is a bracing watch, interpretable as a despairing statement about vanishing industries and the communities and culture associated with them. It is not entirely surprising that Amber’s work should take a ‘retrospective’ turn from this point, with future projects mostly glancing back to previous places, people and creative activities. But Shooting Magpies, like much of Amber’s work, is also a celebration of humour and resilience in the face of despair. The next chapter deals with how Amber have continued to creatively innovate, even when gesturing back towards their past work and engagements.

Notes   1. Amber/Side. 2005. A Short History, booklet with DVD releases, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 22.   2. D. Forrest. 2013. Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 167.   3. See for example S. Lay. 2002. British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit, London: Wallflower.   4. J. Hallam. ‘Film, Class and National Identity: Re-imagining Communities in the Age of Devolution’, in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 261–74.   5. M. Martin. 2001. ‘Documentary Poet’, in H. Beynon and S. Rowbotham (eds), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram, 171.   6. Forrest, Social Realism, 177. See also J. Hill. 2000. ‘From the “New Wave” to “Brit-Grit”: Continuity and Difference in Working-Class Realism’, in. J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 249–60.   7. See, for example, J. Hill. 2004. ‘“A Working-Class Hero is Something to Be?” Changing Representations of Class and Masculinity in British Cinema’, in P. Powrie, A. Davies and B. Babington (eds), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, London: Wallflower, 100–9.   8. C. Monk. 2000. ‘Underbelly UK: The 1990s Underclass Film, Masculinity and the Ideologies of New Britain’, in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 286.

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  203

  9. See C. Monk. 2000. ‘Men in the 90s’, in R. Murphy (ed.), London: BFI, 156–66; S. Godfrey. 2010. ‘Nowhere Men: Representations of Masculinity in Nineties British Cinema’, Ph.D. thesis. East Anglia: University of East Anglia. 10. See Hill, ‘From the “New Wave” to “Brit-Grit”, 250–58. 11. Amber Press notes/Interview for Like Father, c. 2001, accessed from Amber’s archives. 12. R. Kelly. 2001. ‘Like Father’, Sight and Sound 11(7), 44. 13. Hill, ‘“A Working-Class Hero is Something to Be?”’, 108. 14. Forrest, Social Realism, 199. 15. See, for example, S. Lay. 2007. ‘Good Intentions, High Hopes and Low Budgets: Contemporary Social Realist Filmmaking in Britain’, New Cinemas 5(3), 231–44. 16. Lay, ‘Good Intentions, High Hopes and Low Budgets’, 243. 17. D. Whetstone. 2012. ‘Capturing a Change in North East Culture’, The Journal, 20 November. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/film-tv/ capturing-change-north-east-culture-4400934. 18. P. Bradshaw. 2013. ‘The Selfish Giant – Review’, The Guardian, 24 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/24/the-selfish-giantreview. However, Jonathan Romney did cite Eden Valley in his Sight and Sound review of the film: J. Romney. 2015. ‘The Selfish Giant’, Sight and Sound 23(11), 89–90. 19. Neatly, in Easy Rider, the ‘we blew it’ line is addressed to a character called Billy (Dennis Hopper), just as its equivalent is in Eden Valley. 20. Graeme Rigby, in correspondence with author. 21. However, it is evident that May’s speech at the end of the strike is a verbatim re-creation of one given by real-life campaigner Heather Wood and previously shown in Amber’s Current Affairs Unit film Can’t Beat It Alone: in The Scar, she is shown watching the recreation of this speech and crying. 22. Having appeared in the Behind the Vote and Beyond the Vote films (both 1984) produced by Amber’s Current Affairs Unit, Tony Benn might reasonably be considered a ‘friend’ to the collective. 23. The Pajama Game is a musical (based on a novel by Richard Bissell) that was first staged in 1953 and made into a film in 1957. It is an appropriate reference point, as its story of a romance between a factory superintendent and a worker who is also closely involved with the union has loose parallels with the story of Roy and May here. 24. Sometimes known alternatively as ‘The Oak and the Ash’, the ‘North Country Maid’ is a frequently recorded folk song, evoking the longing of a young woman in London for her native countryside and, more generally, a nostalgia towards the pre-industrial. Its rendition here by a victim of dementia gives the lyrics a number of relevancies to the film’s concern with personal and historical memory and the difficulty of the transition to the post-industrial. The tune is also incorporated into the music playing over the end credits. 25. Peter Roberts in J. Leggott. 2018. ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’, 1 November, Newcastle upon Tyne. 26. Graeme Rigby in Leggott, ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’. 27. S. Holden. 1999. ‘Air of Change, Not Despair, in New Films from Britain’, New York Times, 16 April, E13. 28. The two men who appear in the film as Arthur’s allotment friends had actually been involved in a successful campaign to save their lofts in Ryehope, which resulted in them being given ‘listed’ status: an incident that the Hylton character refers to witheringly in Like Father.

204  •  In Fading Light

29. Ellin Hare cited in N. Young. 2001. ‘Forever Amber: An Interview with Ellin Hare and Murray Martin of the Amber Film Collective’, Critical Quarterly 43(4), 67. 30. See K. Bennett and R. Lee. 2007. ‘Amber and An/other Rural: Film, Photography and the Formal Coalfields’, in R. Fish (ed.), Cinematic Countrysides, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 249–50. The incident was a significant news story in north-east England, not least because it was filmed via a live television news crew. See S. Doughty. 2018. ‘Famous Planning Row Killer Albert Dryden Dies after Prison Release’, Evening Chronicle, 18 September. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/albert-dryden-dead-killer-planning-15165296. 31. The actor playing the part of Arthur happened to be a ‘fanatical pigeon man’, which helped with the authenticity of these scenes. Press notes/Interview for Like Father, c. 2001. 32. S. Hattenstone. 2001. ‘I Once Put Our Entire Grant on a Horse’, The Guardian, 8 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/jun/08/arts​fea​ tures. 33. J. Hill. 2011. Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 181. 34. Hill, Ken Loach, 181. 35. D. Whetstone. 2009. ‘The Face of Amber Films Brian Hogg Dies at 60’, The Journal, 24 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-eastnews/face-amber-films-brian-hogg-4472076. 36. Whetstone, ‘The Face of Amber Films Brian Hogg Dies at 60’. 37. Kelly, ‘Like Father’, 44. 38. Bennett and Lee, ‘Amber and An/other Rural’, 250. 39. Bennett and Lee, ‘Amber and An/other Rural’, 261–62. 40. Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ statue in Gateshead was completed in 1998 and quickly became a nationally recognized landmark of the North East, as did the Millennium Bridge, opened in 2001 for pedestrians and cyclists crossing the Tyne. Converted from an old flour mill on the Gateshead bank of the river Tyne, The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art opened in 2002. In 2003, the Baltic hosted Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s The Coal Coast exhibition (see n. 45 and Chapter 7). 41. The brass band suite composed by Joe Armstrong (and by Joe Elliott in the story) was also submitted by the actor as coursework for an A Level music exam, and thus had a further positive use and outcome. Press notes/Interview for Like Father, 2001. 42. Members of Amber have expressed ambivalence towards Billy Elliot, acknowledging the importance of stories about working-class life and the appeal of the film to audiences in Easington, but Ellin Hare argues that its message about the area was fundamentally negative and that ‘using the Miners’ Strike as a backdrop to what was really a kind of fairytale comedy was actually quite offensive, in a way’. Hare cited in Young, ‘Forever Amber’, 62 43. Hare cited in Young, ‘Forever Amber’, 67. 44. Press notes/Interview for Like Father, c. 2001. 45. Konttinen’s introductory comments in S. Konttinen. 2003. The Coal Coast, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber Side, n.p. The Coal Coast photographs were foundational to the later Amber film Song for Billy (2017), discussed in the following chapter. 46. Murray Martin speaking in the ‘The Making of Shooting Magpies’ documentary on the DVD release. 47. Rigby in Leggott, ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’.

From the Tyne to the Coalfields  •  205

48. Ashmore, R. (forthcoming) ‘Amber in East Durham: Film, Photography and the Trauma of Social Change’, unpublished article. 49. Rigby, personal correspondence with author. 50. The character was played by a real-life cave dweller, who Amber chanced upon and involved in the film. 51. Peter Roberts speaking in the ‘The Making of Shooting Magpies’ documentary on the DVD release. 52. Ashmore, ‘Amber in East Durham’.

Chapter 7

Still Here Amber in the Twenty-First Century



When Amber produced their Short History booklet in 2005, included in subsequent DVD releases, there was some reflection on Amber’s transition into the new century. Unlike the Amber/Side Catalogue of 1987, written at the height of their expanded activities of that decade, there is no reference to documentary antecedents. Instead there is an emphasis upon Amber’s ‘richly detailed social realism’, along with other ‘deeply unfashionable’ qualities that made the group’s survival a ‘mystery to many’.1 The continued importance of ‘integrated practice’ is stressed, and there is a rebuttal to critics who have expressed frustration at Amber’s decision not to detail production team credits, as well as an admission that the ‘scale of the operation in the 1980s put severe strain on the ability to function as an integrated collective’, requiring a practical scaling down to a group (at that time) of around ten people.2 The group’s 2015 For Ever Amber publication was issued at the time of a major retrospective of Amber/Side at Newcastle’s Laing Gallery.3 It is a glossier, more confidently written affair that gives equal weighting to film production and photographic projects, makes more overt the founding role and vision of Murray Martin, who had died in 2007, and, rather than emphasizing precedents or struggles, celebrates the coherence of Amber as a ‘collection’. It begins by attributing to Martin the interpretation of ‘documentary as the act of a collector’ and observing that he ‘collected the people through whom he felt the vision could be articulated’.4 In relation to their ongoing processes of fostering engagement with their archive, Amber state that the ‘interconnected complex of narratives the group continues to produce and

Still Here • 207

collect has always been recognised as a cultural responsibility’, and the book ends with an overview of the Amberside Trust, registered as a charity in 2015 to secure the ‘integrity of the collection’.5 This chimes with the layout today of Amber’s website, which entices the user to draw connections between films, photographic collections and other items (including archive material of interviews) through suggested ‘related works’. Similarly, some DVD releases of older films have included ‘making of ’ features explaining the process of their construction but also their relation to other projects and productions. Despite being a response to an unanticipated event, Amber’s 2008 memorial to Martin, The Pursuit of Happiness, can be understood as part of this selfreflective process, in constructing, for the first time, an explicitly biographical interpretation of Amber’s history and working methods. The films produced by Amber since Shooting Magpies (2005) brought the ‘coalfield trilogy’ to a close are certainly characterized by a degree of retrospection, in that they typically reflect back on previous Amber projects. But they can also be understood as honouring the commitments made by the group to the communities, places and stories that enabled that work to happen in the first place. In their For Ever Amber publication of 2015, they describe their collective as a ‘living network of relationships that continues to make the group’s work possible’. Their twenty-first century work can be loosely grouped into three categories. The Bamboozler (2007) and The Pursuit of Happiness (2008) are portraits of individuals; Today I’m with You (2010) and From Us to Me (2016) involve a return to communities in Byker and Rostock; and The Art of Shipbuilding (2017), Song for Billy (2017) and Still Here (2018) are a trio of short ‘photofilms’ that take a variety of formal approaches to Amber’s appreciation of their standing as a ‘living archive’.6 After considering these, I will end the chapter with discussion of a film project that never came to realization, not least because of the spotlight it throws upon the group’s evolving creative strategies and aspirations as they approached their fiftieth anniversary.

Two Memorial Films: The Bamboozler (2007) and The Pursuit of Happiness (2008) Hindsight gives an eerie symmetry to the consecutive release of two Amber documentaries about the lives and legacies of inspirational creatives. Completed in 2007, The Bamboozler celebrates the Tyneside percussionist Bruce Arthur, who died in 2002 at the age of forty-nine. The film focuses upon Arthur’s posthumous gift of his extraordinary collection of instruments to Brendan Murphy, one of his former pupils, and culminates in a concert performance (in March 2007) of Murphy playing a ‘sound sculpture’ that

208  •  In Fading Light

Arthur had ‘commissioned’ but did not live to see completed. Within only a few months of that performance, Amber’s own founder, Murray Martin, was to pass away. Released in 2008, The Pursuit of Happiness was in part the completion of a documentary project about a ‘horsey’ family that Martin and the group had recently been working on. In this way, The Bamboozler describes processes of succession and baton-passing that The Pursuit of Happiness was too early to address directly in relation to Martin’s legacy but which would frame Amber’s work and activity of the next decade. In its recording of the construction of the complex bamboo and brass sound sculpture that gives the film its name, The Bamboozler gestures back to the ‘process’ films Amber made in the 1970s. The film moves between the story of how the late Arthur came to be a mentor figure, and ultimately benefactor, to the young Murphy and diaristic sequences of the sculptor Adrian Sander in his studio. Speaking to the camera, Sander describes his working relationship with Arthur and his realization that the time has now finally come to complete the Bamboozler. Testimony from Sander, Murphy, and Arthur’s wife Sue, is integrated with footage of Sander constructing the sculpture and scenes of Murphy rehearsing with his group in his studio, in preparation for a concert at the Sage music venue in Gateshead, where the Bamboozler is to be unveiled. If the documentation of an artistic commission coming to fruition harks back to Amber’s early film about Laurie Wheatley, a clear parallel is drawn between Wheatley and Arthur in the way that the musician is posited as a professional (he was a touring performer with theatrical productions, for example) but with additional self-taught skills. The first words we hear in The Bamboozler are from Arthur’s wife, who describes his need to prove to people ‘he wasn’t thick’ and his desire to ‘bamboozle people with his knowledge of things’. The Bamboozler itself is the synthesis of craftsmanship and artistic vision; its maker observes that it is simultaneously an experiment and a prototype. The Bamboozler also signals Amber’s increasing interest in the cathartic and communal potential of music. Throughout the film, there are punctuating shots of no more than a few seconds duration of Murphy deriving sounds from a variety of percussive instruments. These highly tactile moments emphasize the craftsmanship and artistry involved, but they also demonstrate the art of ‘plate spinning’, which Arthur had described to Murphy as the proficiency of the professional percussionist. The percussive ‘stings’ gain accumulative traction, communicating something of Arthur’s acquisitive tendency but also how his beloved collection of instruments has been posthumously put to use in Murphy’s studio. As the film progresses, the rehearsal sequences involve more people, more instruments and more intricate musical textures, although the final concert performance in the film gives prominence to a solo by Murphy on the Bamboozler. A sequence showing the rehearsal,

Still Here • 209

and then performance, of ragtime music (inspired by Arthur’s passion for the composer George Hamilton Green) in a church concert, and then as part of a children’s stage show, emphasizes the egalitarian, cross-cultural aspect of music, uniting its performers and audience across time and across very different stages. In The Bamboozler, it is conveyed that, following Arthur’s death, both Murphy and Sander felt weighted down by a responsibility to his collection and his legacy. Speaking of his Rumba Palace studio, Murphy told a newspaper: ‘it’s extremely emotional in a way because Bruce has passed away but on the other hand it’s a business and we have to make it work.’7 Amber’s next film, The Pursuit of Happiness, was a tribute to their own visionary ‘collector’, of people and ideas as much as artefacts, as well as a work of salvage, bringing Murray Martin’s last project to completion. Amber had started work on a documentary on the Coulsons, a ‘horsey’ family deeply involved in harness racing, who had recently bought a farm in Craghead, a former mining village in County Durham; the plan was to record their activities over a year. The resulting film, of feature length, brings together material from that unfinished work, remembrances of Martin by members of his professional, horsey and actual families, some occasional glimpses of previous Amber films and footage of Martin being interviewed by Elaine Drainville in 2004. The opening section of the film jolts the viewer with imagery and ideas that require some processing, in a comparable way to how the 1970s industrial documentaries avoided explanatory ‘handrails’. Interview footage of Martin shows him musing on why a filmmaker might be ‘driven to this bizarre activity of taking images of people’ and emphasizing the importance of curiosity towards a particular culture, as well as the confrontation of prejudices. This is juxtaposed with scenes filmed at the 2007 funeral of Gina Coulson, including a startling pan across a living room revealing her body lying in an open coffin. Her son, Warren, is seen watching and reflecting on video footage of the funeral service, and there is a brief shot of Peter Roberts operating a camera to record him. These intimate, probing and self-reflexive scenes certainly test the ‘curiosity’ of the viewer and clearly signal that The Pursuit of Happiness will directly confront death and the emotions aroused by it. Martin died from a heart attack brought on, somewhat incredibly, by the contracting of an equine bacterial infection known as ‘strangles’ (streptococcus equi). In the film, his teenage son dwells upon the irony of this ‘spectacularly unlucky screw-up that could only have happened to Murray: it’s tough and it’s stupid – it’s also what happened’. Although any film made by Murray’s colleagues (and in one case, life partner) under the circumstances is likely to have been emotionally charged, The Pursuit of Happiness does not spare the viewer scenes of Murray’s partner and friends losing their articulacy and

210  •  In Fading Light

poise when remembering him or direct suggestions of portents and grim ironies. In footage shot when Martin was alive, Warren Coulson describes his extraordinary appetites, including a compulsion for raw meat that could well have given him ‘mad cow disease’. It’s a throwaway remark, but a prescient one given Martin’s fate and also the way the filmmakers identify, on screen, how Martin perceived Coulson as a surrogate figure – another risk-taking, entrepreneurial, slightly fearsome family ‘head’ with no apparent interest in material acquisition. The film follows this moment with Ellin Hare’s account of an event that seemed to prefigure Martin’s passing: their horse’s delivery of a stillborn foal on a night with a near-full moon, which prompted an ‘overwhelming feeling of grief ’. On the following day, the body was dug up and its skin used to cover a foal that required adoption; Martin himself took ill shortly afterwards at the silver wedding for Ada and Warren Coulson. The evocation of these events tallies with Martin’s own critique, again via interview footage, of passion-free films that ‘are dead as a dodo’ and ‘don’t connect in an emotional way’. The importance of humour, in the face of absurdity or tragedy, is also stressed; the film concludes with a joke told by Ray Stubbs (a former member of the Amber acting and creative ensemble) at the end of Martin’s humanist funeral service. In a similar way, the revelation of Martin’s infection is matched to a scene of Martin and Coulson sharing a joke over their respective health and the danger posed by viruses.

Figure 7.1  Murray Martin and Bolex Camera, 1970s. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

Still Here • 211

One the one hand, The Pursuit of Happiness emanates rawness, both of feeling and of style. There is an inelegant, rough-hewn quality to both the East Durham landscape and the footage shot there. The folky musical score for violin and accordion is homely but minimalist, and the Coulsons are engaging yet un-ingratiating participants. Had the intended documentary about the Coulsons been completed, it would have likely found richer, more crafted ways to convey Martin’s interest in their lifestyles and enterprises than The Pursuit of Happiness allows for. The film does show, however, Amber members reflecting on Martin’s fascination with the horsey community. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen relates this to a time in the 1980s when the decline of traditional industries meant he was ‘running out of things to make films about’, hence a gravitation to marginal communities who were ‘part travellers, hunter gatherers’. For Ellin Hare, the Coulson project was about Martin seeking out rarities of ‘extremity’ and ‘wildness’, whether of landscape, situation or character. Martin himself is a somewhat shambolic, evasive presence in the material from the Coulson shoot. Hare describes on screen her struggle, during the editing process, to find footage of him where he is anywhere but at the edge or beyond the frame, as a consequence of her blocking him out during shooting. This discussion is followed by a freeze-frame of Martin within this footage, demonstrating the difficulty of finding and defining this mercurial character who straddled multiple worlds; as one of his close ‘horsey’ friends puts it, he moved seamlessly between ‘posh and rough’ environs. Hare’s comments about locating Martin in the edit lend a poignancy to the glimpses we do see of him, whether getting involved in the farm activities or putting questions to members of the family. But they also mark an interesting point in Amber’s relationship to its archive: there will follow some films such as From Us to Me and Still Here that consciously return to former projects, with a view to teasing out fresh understandings through hindsight. At the same time, the sidelined Martin from the Coulson footage is compensated for in the film by regular excerpts of the 2004 interview, where he speaks with passion, intensity and articulacy about his creative approach and background. Indeed, whilst The Pursuit of Happiness might initially seem leisurely paced and loosely organized, it is as carefully crafted as any other Amber film and works to honour Martin’s philosophy of life and art through a construction that demonstrates one of the main tenets of his early ‘manifesto’: the integration of ‘life and work and friendship’.8 This is done literally though a line of narrative that blurs the distinction between Martin’s creative and personal life and happens to illustrate Amber’s trademark organic approach to producing art. For example, scenes from Seacoal (1985) are overlaid or accompanied by commentary that explains how Martin and his family were drawn into the sea-coaling community that featured in the film. Similarly, aspects of

212  •  In Fading Light

Eden Valley (1995) are traced back to their inspiration: Brian Laidler reveals himself as the source for a key piece of dialogue given to the main character, and Hare describes the film’s story of an estranged father and son as being very personal to Martin. These examples of ‘integration’ speak of the immersive nature of Amber’s working methods, which are also conveyed through the film’s exclusive focus on the world inhabited by Martin at the time of his death. The Pursuit of Happiness offers insights into Amber’s history, personalities and art but makes no attempt at a broad summary of Martin’s life or achievements. Tributes mostly come from those associated with the horsey endeavours, and only the films directly relevant to these are cited and shown. This narrow perspective, however, brings the viewer closer to the world view apparently shared by Martin and Coulson: that is, their belief in existing squarely in the moment – or, as Konttinen puts it in the film, in living on their ‘wits’ and from their ‘pocket’. The film is loosely structured around particular themes, which are often elucidated by Martin’s statements in the interview material, as if he is still shaping and guiding the project in his absence. For example, he describes Amber as a ‘family’ of mutually supportive individuals but with a need to be ‘craft-based’ so as to prevent the collective from being dismissed though any lack of aptitude. There follows discussion from other Amber members about how their shared backgrounds of families involved in manual craft influenced a response to people and work that was both ‘humanist’ and ‘aesthetic’, with glimpses of the 1974 Launch film to illustrate this in practice. The way that this is intercut with Martin talking to Warren Coulson about the latter’s plans to build ‘top of the range’ wagons from complex plans makes a clear point about how Amber’s work celebrates craft through craft: there is parity in their commitment to creating artefacts of beauty as well as of function, and an equal passion too. In a tellingly self-referential moment, Martin asks Coulson whether his enterprise is ‘something to get up for in the morning’. The answer is yes, thus proving the broader applicability of the final commands of Martin’s early manifesto: ‘do whatever it is that gets you up in the morning’.9 Proudly showing off the intricate carvings on one of his carts, Coulson admits that whilst he may lack the ability to produce them himself, he has the clout to direct others to do so. The notion that Murray is probing and communing with his surrogate is hammered home when the conversation turns to Coulson’s role as head of the family: ‘Can’t sail a ship without a captain. Keep everyone happy or they’ll all kill each other. It’s true, isn’t it Murray?’ When Martin asks if there are any ‘captains in waiting’, Coulson replies in the negative. Martin’s interview comments about the Amber ‘family’ also underpin scenes that allude to his role as a ‘collector’ of people and talent. But they also refer to the way that the Coulsons and the horsey community offered,

Still Here • 213

for Martin, an appealing philosophy of family life, whereby children were very much involved in their parents’ working lives and not insulated from the ‘wildness’ of their lifestyle or environment. In the film, the actor Brian Hogg – whose role in Eden Valley as a father figure gradually bonding with his son was undoubtedly inspired in part by Martin’s own feelings and ­experiences – describes Martin encouraging his young son to roll in mud as a way to build up his immune system. The Pursuit of Happiness foregrounds other aspects of Amber’s approach to filmmaking. Two scenes of the group gaining permission from their subjects for their role in the planned documentary are placed close to each other: Martin telling the Coulsons of the initial idea to film them over the course of a year, and the remaining Amber members later seeking permission to complete and reorientate the project as a tribute to him. These are important within the context of Martin’s comments, inspired by R.G. Collingwood’s writings, about the artist’s role in revealing the ‘uncomfortable truths’ of a community, rather than their own ‘secrets’, which is instead the terrain, for Martin, of the avant-garde.10 In the film, Martin’s explanation of this philosophy is followed by a sequence of Coulson telling an abrasive and slightly incoherent story about attacking a man in a toilet with an axe. As made clear by the opening images of the funeral casket, the film stays true to Martin’s espousal of the ‘warts and all’ approach to documentation. This applies to Martin himself, for The Pursuit of Happiness avoids hagiography by acknowledging the more complex aspects of his relationship with Amber or those in the filmmaking community. Alan Fountain, a key commissioner of independent filmmaking for Channel Four television in the 1980s, refers to Martin’s ‘puritanical’ streak, and there is mention of his ‘famous walk-outs’ from the group, tempestuous outbursts that Konttinen interprets, in the film, in terms of his conflict between wanting the collective to ‘grow up very badly’ whilst at the same time not wanting it to develop independently of him. When the patriarchal Coulson tells Martin, with a gleeful and slightly mischievous air, about how he has reached a position of such power over his children that only the slightest glance will terrify them into submission, one can only guess at the level of amusement and recognition felt by the ­filmmaker just beyond the edge of the frame.

From Byker to Rostock: Returning to Changed Communities Today I’m with You and From Us to Me share more than the suggestive use of pronouns in their titles. Both concern Amber returning to locations featured in previous work and reflecting upon a reality of lived experience that complicates our understanding of the relationship between the past and the

214  •  In Fading Light

present, and between the provincial and the universal. To paraphrase one of the contributors to Today I’m with You, the new multiculturalism of the hitherto predominantly (if not exclusively) white area of Byker in Newcastle upon Tyne has brought the ‘world to her doorstep’. The residents of the German town of Rostock, who give their own testimonies in From Us to Me, have arguably experienced something similar – in that their lives and stories are in many ways a microcosm of the grand sweep of Western history and politics. Today I’m with You (2010) Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen began a re-engagement with the communities of Byker in 2003, following a suggestion made by the manager of an educational project that she should return with her camera, in response to the great changes the area had undertaken since her documentation of it in the 1970s: not least the influx of such a variety of refugees following the introduction of the government’s asylum seeker distribution policy that there were reckoned to be now at least twenty-eight languages spoken there.11 As Konttinen records in the Byker Revisited photobook collection (published 2009) of portraits taken over the next five years, the landscape had changed to the point that ‘I might as well be on the moon’.12 Produced in tandem with the photobook, Today I’m with You documents Konttinen’s method of working with the residents of the new Byker housing estate to produce domestic, Renaissance-style portraits that capture their own sense of identity. The film is more diaristic than its obvious predecessor Byker (1983), foregrounding Konttinen’s creative processes and eschewing the ‘staged’ elements of the previous film (as discussed in Chapter 4). She makes new contact with a handful of the subjects featured in her 1970s photographs, and the film occasionally invokes the idea of a continuity between past and present; for example, one man’s eightieth birthday party takes place in the same venue where Konttinen is shown dancing in an excerpt of the ‘Finn on Tyneside’ documentary of 1973 (also discussed in Chapter 4). Towards the start of the film, Konttinen shows her original Byker book to Maryam, from Somalia, whose reaction to the black-and-white images of sloping terraces is that of disbelief: ‘shit!’, she says, ‘it’s changing’. But whereas Byker proposed a contrast between the communal bonds of the old Byker and the alienated residents of the new Byker, Today I’m with You refrains from such dichotomy and judgement. In his introduction to Byker Revisited, Lee Hall makes a perceptive comment that captures one of the complications that is also illustrated in the film: ‘it is perhaps intriguing that, in the old book, which clearly celebrates community, there are so many images of isolation, and in the new book, so many isolated and dislocated people appear to be at home’.13 Konttinen

Still Here • 215

herself has also conceded that ‘black and white photography is too readily taken as depicting deprivation now that we look at the world through colour photography’.14 Both the book and Today I’m with You make clear, perhaps paradoxically, that the new Byker is a simultaneous place of atomization and community, of entrapment and freedom, and of despair and hope. The title is a reference to the comments made in the film by Gnana, from Sri Lanka, about her mixed experiences of living in Byker: on the one hand, attacks upon her home have left her worried about the safety of her daughter; on the other, she has discovered a new sense of independence in her ability to move freely. Today I’m with You begins with Gnana against an inscrutably single-coloured backdrop speaking directly to the camera. She says: ‘I feel I don’t want to talk about the past, is it OK?’, to which we hear Konttinen off-screen reply gently in the affirmative. Konttinen respects this, and indeed we learn no more about Gnana’s background, which we may assume to be traumatic. Gnana’s words imply that a focus upon the present time and place, and a certain privacy with regards to personal trauma or difficulty, is one of the coping strategies of the refugee or asylum seeker. But within the context of Amber’s work, this is a very striking statement, given that the group have consistently diagnosed historical and community ‘amnesia’ as problematic. However, Today I’m with You can be taken as a respectful response to Gnana’s request, with Konttinen’s assent (she says ‘that’s OK’ off screen) demonstrated by a film that does not romanticize the past or strongly advocate the importance of remembering but, for the most part, maintains a ‘present-tense’ perspective on its subjects. Furthermore, Today I’m with You draws parallels between the chaotic and reactive living experiences of many within the new Byker and the art of photography, particularly its reliance on being responsive to the ‘moment’. It also exposes the craft, labour and philosophy behind Konttinen’s photographic work whilst accentuating her status as an outsider. The film begins with scenes, bordering on the comical, of Konttinen arriving by car at the Byker housing estate then struggling to locate the flat belonging to her subject, who has left home by the time she arrives. During another shoot, there is a tussle with a reflector strand that almost hits a glass lampshade and, adding another layer of ‘amateurism’, the camera recording this falls shakily to the ground. At other points, Konttinen expresses frustration at having missed ‘all the nice moments’ and responds to a child’s question by joking that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Even Konttinen’s previous work is held up as fallible, rather than monolithic in its meaning or certainty, when Konttinen finds out that a teenager with a close haircut was wrongly captioned in the Byker book as a ‘skinhead’. These instances of self-deprecation or failure have a role to play in shifting the power dynamics between artist and subject, in accordance with Konttinen’s intention: as she says in a voice-over, the ‘relationship gets to the

216  •  In Fading Light

Figure 7.2  Gnana with her daughter Kavi, from Sri Lanka, 2003, used in Today I’m with You (2010) © Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen/Amber.

point where they invite me into their lives, and they offer me whatever they want to offer.’ Konttinen’s human eye is contrasted with the less benevolent gaze of the CCTV camera that patrols the perimeter of the estate. She is shown at one point on a surveillance screen, and this will in time take on a more sinister association with the apparatus of power and government when a few of her subjects speak of unsympathetic treatment by the Home Office. The respect afforded by Amber to the community is also expressed when an expositional shot of Konttinen outside the Byker Wall is interrupted by a passer-by, who jokily informs the camera operator that Konttinen is not properly in shot. This might have been considered a ‘ruined’ take, but it works in the final edit as a fortuitous example of the subject (presumably a Byker resident) ‘directing’ the filmmakers. As a textbook example of good-humoured ‘banter’, the man’s intervention is also a residue from the ‘old’ Byker of friendliness, warmth and occasional quirkiness conjured up in Konttinen’s previous work. This is not to suggest that Today I’m with You positions Konttinen as bumbling or anything other than highly professional in her craft. In keeping with its claim to transparency, the film includes examples of the photographer

Still Here • 217

carefully gaining consent from the residents for how they are presented, such as when she questions whether the revelation of someone’s religious belief is too ‘private’ for the record. The film features a sequence in which Konttinen and the Byker native Krystal have a difference of opinion as to which of the photographs taken of her is the most compelling and thus deserving of a place in the planned book/exhibition; Krystal’s preference is for a ‘modelling’ shot that Konttinen considers to show ‘just a pretty girl in nice clothes’ in contrast with her own choice for a more ‘intriguing’ representation that ‘shows the beginning of a story’. Konttinen’s persuasion of Krystal is warm, but firm, and her aesthetic judgement wins out as an illustration of the familiar Collingwood maxim relating to the role of the artist in revealing ‘secrets’ to the community.15 As the film progresses, the shambolic quality of Konttinen’s earliest encounters falls away, and her voice-over commentary reveals a sense of gathering purpose and of confidence in the worth of the project as it builds momentum. An elderly resident who talks about his childhood experiences of poverty passes away during the period of recording, and at his wake the camera focusses upon the photograph that Konttinen had recently taken of him, proudly displayed on the mantelpiece and which he had apparently ‘shown to everyone’. Similarly, a Mongolian couple are so impressed with her picture of their son that the father declares it will ‘stay in his life forever’. It is at this point where Konttinen reveals that her initial feeling that her subjects were making a ‘gift’ to her has been overtaken by a ‘feeling that it was me who was making the gift’. Konttinen’s project turns out to share a similar impulse to that behind the original Byker book and, in particular, the 1983 film: the creation of a ‘virtual community’, in this case by using portraiture to introduce members of the neighbourhood to each other: as she says, ‘each time I met a new person I would open this box [of photographs already taken] and say “look, these people are living here too”’. Today I’m with You concludes with a mobile tracking shot through an exhibition of the portraits, itself a virtual community of disparate imagery bound through Konttinen’s curation as much as a shared location. Although her subjects rarely share the same diegetic space – one exception being footage for an asylum-seekers group, where a handful of familiar faces interact  – the film locates some means to connect them artistically, most notably through the recurrence of music. The footage of pub singing in Byker drew symbolic power from its positioning against narrative and visual evocations of demolition and loss. Some of the same footage reappears here (now in colour), but is now in juxtaposition with a very different sequence: a montage of the current residents playing and singing in multiple languages and styles. Whilst Byker ended with a ‘singalong’, a rendition of a ribald song by a group of female residents, Today I’m with You concludes with a musical

218  •  In Fading Light

‘mash up’ in which fragments of song performance by different residents are ‘sampled’ over a simple musical backing. The latter demands interpretation as a celebration of the multicultural richness of the new Byker, particularly in light of Amber’s later documentary We Are All Survivors about a musical group for asylum seekers, and that film’s seeding of the uncompleted ‘Mud/ Star’ (which will be discussed later in this chapter).16 In keeping with its commitment to the ‘present tense’ representation of artistic and refugee experience, Today I’m with You is generally unconcerned with tracing a line of narrative from the old to the current Byker. There is visible evidence of the new diversity, which is partly explained through it becoming one of the major reception areas for asylum seekers in the UK from Africa and neatly illustrated by the account of a Byker-born woman Olya, who speaks positively of the richness of having, for example, a Kurdish neighbour and others from Chechnya, the Congo and Angola; other participants in the film come from Bosnia, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia, Sri Lanka and The Ivory Coast, to name but a few places. Konttinen’s own absorption into the new Byker arguably comes to personify the changes occurring there: she becomes involved with community groups and supports the Mongolian family in their fight against deportation. In comparison with the related Byker Revisited publication, which includes detailed accounts of racist incidents directed towards the ‘foreigners’, Today I’m with You glosses over any tensions deriving from the influx of those seeking refuge or asylum. But the experience of its residents is in no way posited as utopian. There is also an acknowledgement that the native community is riven with social and economic problems, such as teenage gang violence, and also that, for those like the mother from Lebanon, with a young son traumatized by the violence of his homeland, a new country does not entirely mean freedom or refuge. From Us to Me (2016) In 2012, Amber members Peter Roberts and Ellin Hare returned to the former East German city of Rostock, twenty-five years after their visit as part of a filmmaking exchange with DEFA filmmakers (see Chapter 3). The resulting film, From Us to Me, was a collaboration between Amber and the Bremen-based Moving Films, a partnership between Beatrix Wupperman and Richard Grassick, who had been part of the Amber team visiting in 1987.17 Although From Us to Me incorporates plentiful footage from the original film From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels (1988), it only briefly acknowledges the extraordinary story of the exchange itself. Their former ‘trading’ partner, Winfried Junge, who produced the matching film about Newcastle, appears briefly to note that Amber’s status as ‘left Labour’ would have

Still Here • 219

reassured the authorities that their representation would be fair. However, Junge’s affirmation that Amber would still have been closely watched by the Stasi is placed in juxtaposition with a slightly different account from Kathy Vanovitch, the original DEFA translator on the project. Vanovitch dismisses the ‘Hollywood-style’ suggestion of surveillance and points instead to the likelihood of self-censorship on the part of the interviewees. Her interpretation is generally supported by the rest of the film, and her implied criticism of some of the more sensational renderings of life behind the Iron Curtain is very much in sympathy with the human emphasis of From Us to Me, in which only one participant makes a direct reference to the Stasi. However, the varying accounts from Junge and Vanovitch about the degree of scrutiny Amber would have received are also in keeping with the film’s strategy of emphasizing the diversity of perspectives and experiences of reunification among the sample of two groups of Rostock workers who had featured in the previous film: those in a fishing co-operative and a brigade of female crane drivers. From Us to Me begins with thumbnail sketches of the personal and employment histories of the interviewees. Some, like the ‘skipper’ Karl-Heinz Rushau and the crane drivers Cornelia Ulbricht and Silke Nohr, soon lost their jobs and (it is implied) never worked again. The former fish-filleter Sylvia Putzki’s life was changed through the birth of a brain-damaged son, who she continues to look after. Others adapted to new opportunities, such as Britta Kitzerow-Klakow, who qualified as a childminder and opened a crèche, and Simone Pawlitz, who established a travel agency. Another woman, Dorothea Hillier, was made redundant but found a way back to her beloved job as a crane driver. There are then four sections dealing respectively with their recollections of ‘Die Wende’ or ‘The Change’, their relationship with the ‘party’, the economic impact of reunification upon Rostock and their final reflections on what had been lost or gained in the transition from socialism to capitalism. The lack of any shared history of the reunification process is exemplified by the broad spectrum of expectation for it: some were aware of rumours, or paid attention to political developments, whilst others claim to have been utterly surprised. By clustering together varying testimonies in sections around a specific theme or question, the documentary strives to move beyond a binary interpretation of ‘winners and losers’ of The Change. However, there are juxtapositions that draw out glaring differences, such as when Sylvia’s disavowal of material goods, such as cars, bumps against Simone’s husband Ralf ’s roll call of his expensive holidays and possessions, including motorbikes. Whereas Sylvia cuts a melancholy figure, in light of her story of struggle, walking alone on a beach, the Pawlitz family are filmed enjoying the hospitality box at a football match; an overtly editorialized shot shows them leaving via the ‘VIP’ entrance of the stadium.18

220  •  In Fading Light

Figure 7.3  Still from From Us to Me (2016). © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

The film also places the past and present in a nuanced dialogue through the integration of footage from Amber’s 1986 visit. Some of the resulting combinations do reveal obvious differences in the cultural and economic landscape: the shops and supermarkets now offer richer choices, a modernday crèche lacks the drabness and uniformity of its earlier counterpart, and sequences of the fishing industry collide with those of the Warnemünde tourist industry (boardwalks, restaurants and so forth) that effectively took over. Impressions are also generated from the aesthetic differences between the previous and current footage: the former’s boxy ‘academy ratio’ inherently suggests a more limited scope than the standard ‘widescreen’ of the present, but it so happens that many of the Rostock town sequences in the first film tend to be visually subdued. Indeed, From Us to Me reuses the opening part of From Marks & Spencer suggesting the ‘point of view’ of a worker (or filmmaker perhaps) roused at 6am by a monotonous radio channel (piano music for physical exercises) and then opening a window to see a tram moving through a dull, anonymous-looking urban landscape. In contrast, the interiors and exteriors captured on Amber’s return visit are notably more colourful and variegated and shot in higher definition. The performative aspect of some of the original interviews is also stressed through scenes showing participants watching themselves on a tablet computer; Simone and Britta in particular recollect that their respective comments about party allegiance and housing quality were part of a strategy for advancement or avoiding trouble with the authorities. However, past and present footage is intermittently joined together so as to suggest a quality of timelessness or at least of how aspects of human

Still Here • 221

work and leisure transcend the grand sweep of political history. The high incidence of ‘bridging’ shots of trams, trains or water craft can be understood in part as a means to alleviate the verbal bias of a film heavily reliant on the ‘talking head’ interview. But when shots of new trams follow shots of old trams, the effect is not just to portray the modernization of transport systems but to convey that facets of working life do not fundamentally change. This is strongly felt in the sequence concerning the elderly Magdalena and Gerhard Junge, seen riding their bicycle then and now in the exact same locations. Early in the film, Grassick and Hare appear to flag Magdalena down as she rides down a town high street, prompting a pleasingly warm reunion (particularly considering Amber spent only three weeks in Rostock twenty-five years ago) and a comment from Magdalena that her bicycle is a relic from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) era. Similarly, footage of the Amber crew in 1986 joining the Junge family for al fresco refreshment in their garden is spliced together with a self-conscious re-creation of the event, with participants arranged loosely in the same positions. When Karl-Heinz Rushau takes the filmmakers on a motorboat tour of the estuary bridging Rostock and Warnemünde, he points out the venue where his fishing co-op was filmed having a party in 1986. Some judicious editing transports the viewer from their current perspective to a matching 1986 view from inside the venue, looking out towards the water, in a pleasurable demonstration of the power of cinema to collapse differences of time and space. The dominance of water imagery is no surprise given Rostock’s (former) status as a fishing and shipbuilding town, a factor that piqued Amber’s interest in the location in the first place; the previous film also made much of the irony that the residents, for all their access to open water, had limited freedom to follow it. The new film takes up the story of Simone – seen in the first film aspiring towards foreign travel – by cutting between old footage of lapping water and a close-up of a glossy ocean photograph outside the travel agency she now runs. From Us to Me aspires towards objectivity in its treatment of the working experience of its Rostock subjects yet often finds visual means to convey the discrepancies between their viewpoints. A good example is the comparable depiction of Dorothea and Cornelia. The former is shown operating a crane from a high vantage point; the camera swivels from a position behind and above her to take in the sunset colours she speaks so highly of. Cornelia, who lost her job following reunification, is shown handling similar equipment but in a box that is fixed to the ground: again, the camera sweeps leftwards, but this time to reveal she is in a heritage site, where symbols of declining industry, such as propellers and anchors, are arranged in displays in concrete. These two sequences are not placed immediately together, but their shared use of leftward ‘panning’ and their obvious difference of perspective

222  •  In Fading Light

offer poignant commentary upon the women’s vastly different experiences of, respectively, survival (against the odds) and alienation. There is pathos, too, as the film nears its end, from ghostly shots giving a roaming perspective from the interior of a derelict, vandalized tram, abandoned on a site with other vehicles. The most affecting sequences, though, are those concerning Sylvia’s commitment to her severely disabled son, born around the time of reunification. As an interviewee, Sylvia is notably more hesitant than the others, whose articulacy might be interpreted as preparedness, honed over many years, for the questions they expect to face about life in East Germany. Her comments about radically changed priorities, in light of her focus upon her son, underpin her claim that she no longer ‘plays the game’ of social conformity, and thus she is positioned at a remove from any rhetoric of ‘winners and losers’ of either socialism or capitalism. By choosing to conclude From Us to Me with shots of her walking alone on a beach away from the camera, the filmmakers might seem to be situating her story beyond the restrictive binaries of political discourse. Yet it ends with her acknowledgment that, were it not for the intervention of Western medical skill, her son may not have lived – and thus the political and human become entwined once more. This also challenges any easy judgement on what the film’s title seems to imply about a shift from collectivism to individuality. A reviewer of From Us to Me from the German regional newspaper Norddeutsche Nueste Nachrichten reflected on the title’s significance: It also becomes clear that ‘From Us to Me’ is interpreted very differently. For a woman from Warnemünde it means to develop and make free decisions. The Englishwoman Ellin Hare, on the other hand, asks: if individuals only look to themselves, where is the community?19

Ultimately, From Us to Me is haunted by the question of whether the traumas or adaptive successes encountered by the filmmakers are unique to those who happened to undergo the bumpy transition from socialism to capitalism in a particular place and time. The director Hare observed that: I don’t think this is just about Germany . . . It’s maybe more dramatic, as it happened to them in the course of two years. But the same thing has been happening in the north east of England: . . . the loss of industry, and the writing out of people’s histories, and the forgetting of people’s lives and identities.20

The film’s diagnosis of communities fissured through the decline of the industries that historically bound them together, even if sometimes rather oppressively, certainly has commonality with Amber’s treatment elsewhere of post-industrial Tyneside and County Durham. Some detail is given of the exploitative ‘asset-stripping’ intervention of foreign companies that resulted

Still Here • 223

in the accelerated decline of the Rostock fishing co-operative, and the ‘cleansing’ of the past through heritage and tourist attractions bears comparison with the processes critiqued in films such as The Scar (1997) and Like Father (2001). Yet the narrative here is complicated further by an engagement with the complex relationship between The Change and gender politics. The perspectives given in From Us to Me are predominantly female, but there is ambivalence regarding the progressiveness of the GDR era compared to the present day. Western prejudices seemingly resulted in many of the female crane drivers losing their jobs, but others found new business and training opportunities. An image of Dorothea atop her crane, firmly in control of levers and with a bird’s-eye vista of the shipyard, was used prominently in publicity for the film, including on the cover of the DVD release. Within the context of Amber’s oeuvre, for all its commitment to female experience, there is still something bracing about hearing, as we do from Dorothea, a passionate affirmation of the dignity and achievement of manual labour from a female rather than male perspective.

The Art of Remembering: Three Photofilms Between 2016 and 2018, Amber completed a trio of short films drawing upon past film and photographic projects. Although Song for Billy (2017), The Art of Shipbuilding (2017) and Still Here (2018) developed separately and organically out of different projects and opportunities, when placed together they represent a spectrum of creative possibilities not just for the remembrance of the past but for the use of the archive in doing so. In their coverage of the gamut of Amber’s geographical and thematic engagements, they also happen to provide a neat distillation of the group’s work to date. Devised by Peter Roberts, The Art of Shipbuilding is in part an expansion of Amber’s previous Launch (1974), encompassing poetry, art, photography and personal memories into a portrait of Wallsend shipbuilding culture. The participation of the plater and amateur painter Peter Burns and the former welder John Bridgewood came about through Amber community engagements, and the film was initially shown as part of an exhibition at the Side Gallery of photography by Bruce Rae.21 The punning title of the film refers to its celebration of the amateur traditions of industrial art represented here by Burns, who guides the viewer around some of his artwork in his studio, and by Jack Davitt, who published poetry under the amusing pen name of Ripyard Cuddling. Fragments of Davitt’s poems, including ‘The Bulbous Bow’ and ‘Meditations of an Unlucky Welder’, are recited in the film by the poet Keith Armstrong, who initially published them in 1977 and assisted in the making of the film.22 The title also conveys the way that

224  •  In Fading Light

Amber themselves had formerly responded to the Wallsend shipbuilding industry, and the famous launches that united the local community, as both a visual spectacle and as an emblem of working-class pride in collective manual labour. Davitt’s poetry typically combines accounts of harsh conditions with a self-mythologizing emphasis upon the scale and grandeur of the endeavour. This is exemplified by the excerpt given in The Art of Shipbuilding from ‘Tanker on Ice’, which includes this couplet: Yes, it’s cruel on a tanker in the winter, when a man must do his best to earn a wage. He’s an actor in a shipyard melodrama, and a tanker in the winter is his stage.23

These words are illustrated in the film by some slowed-down footage from Launch, artwork by Burns, and photographs by Rae and Konttinen; they are also overlaid by a soundtrack of percussive music. This typifies the film’s egalitarian approach to representation: photography, art, poetry and filmmaking, all of varying levels of ‘professionalism’, are used to enrich and verify each other. The mutuality of representation is also stressed in moments where art forms overlap, such as when photographs of launches are matched with material from the Launch film, or when a painting we’ve seen in Burns’ studio is shown on the front cover of a published book of Davitt’s poetry. The Art of Shipbuilding also acknowledges that a visually oriented portrait of an industry such as Launch has certain limitations as a historical document. In the film, testimonies from the former welder (and also poet) John Bridgewood are used to give factual information about the shipyards, including the way that workers would be ‘paid off’ after a launch, but also to convey the kind of sensations that would evade artistic representation, such as the experience of the massive ‘draft’ felt by observers as a ship departed the docks. As with Launch, the film concludes with the spectacular event itself, but the footage in the original documentary of residents making their way back home is augmented here with suggestive images of houses undergoing demolition and a brass-band rendition of Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ (1916) hymn that can be read either as suitably bombastic for the occasion or as an ironic commentary on the closure of the shipyards. The assembly of the material that makes up The Art of Shipbuilding might itself be described as artful, particularly in the way that emotional, visceral effects are created through the combination of images and sounds, which include ‘ambient’ noises from the shipyards and streets and a subtle percussion score that moves from discordant clangs towards a more tonal musical texture. The film also exploits the suggestive power of the manipulated image, such as when archival footage is slowed down or frozen. The film begins with such an example, with progressively slow and eventually faded footage of

Still Here • 225

workers leaving a shipyard, as if fleshly figures are transforming into ghostly ones. At another point, a close-up shot of a worker from the Launch film is immobilized and turned black and white. The way in which this ephemeral moment is sustained and recontextualized is redolent of the opportunities open to filmmakers interested in the affective qualities, as much as the ­historical import, of testimony or archival material. In the UK, a number of artistic documentaries have lately been made (and are often premiered with a live soundtrack) using material from the British Film Institute (BFI) or other archives: these include Penny Woolcock’s From the Land to the Sea Beyond (2012), Virginia Heath’s From Scotland With Love (2012), Martin Wallace’s The Big Melt (2013) and Paul Wright’s Arcadia (2017). They deal respectively with the UK’s coastline, Scotland, the Sheffield steel industry and rural Britain and share a ‘hauntological’ concern with the textural, experiential impact of imagery in combination with a continuous musical score. Amber themselves provided some of the material used in The Miners’ Hymns (2010), a ‘collage’ documentary made by avantgarde filmmaker Bill Morrison, best known for films such as Decasia (2002) that engage with the materiality and fragility of celluloid itself. An emotive celebration of the County Durham mining community, The Miners’ Hymns consists mostly of slowed-down archival footage clustered thematically and set to a score by the contemporary composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Although it would be mistaken to consider Amber’s Song for Billy, also dealing with the legacy of the East Durham mining industry, as a direct response to this trend for affective archival documentary, its emphasis upon music, and upon the cathartic possibilities of sound and visuals, does intimate a different avenue for filmmakers looking simultaneously towards the past and the exploitation of the archive. Song for Billy continues a line of Amber ‘photofilms’ made by Konttinen and Roberts in response to the former’s longitudinal photography projects. Between 1999 and 2002, she immersed herself in the ‘terrible beauty’ of the East Durham coastline between Seaham and Hartlepool.24 Her vivid photographs, her first to use colour, capture the impact of over 150 years of coastal collieries tipping their waste onto the beaches on the presumption of it being swept to sea. In her introduction to the published book that accompanied her resulting Coal Coast exhibition at the Baltic Gallery (Gateshead) in 2003, Konttinen vividly describes how ex-miners, with their ‘uncommonly strong bond with the environment’  – their working lives spent underground and their leisure time digging allotments above – were easily and proudly able to identify the ‘fossils’ of industry:25 I begin to see narratives in this blighted landscape. Glistening black sands of fools’ gold, purple rocks of burnt shale, pebbles glowing with iron sulphate.

226  •  In Fading Light

Embedded in fused colliery spoil, among the emerald green seaweed, the nuts and bolts of a deposed industry are rusting into riotous colour.26

The Coal Coast photographs were part of Amber’s ongoing Coalfield Stories project of engagement with the post-industrial landscape of East Durham. Song for Billy emerged, fifteen years later, out of a long-standing desire by Konttinen to make a film based around the photographs but also a concern to find, according to Graeme Rigby, ‘a more visual approach to filmmaking again’, following a period of text-oriented productions.27 However, as with Amber’s previous photofilms, Song for Billy developed organically and without preconception as to the desired style. It is constructed around a story told by an ex-miner, Freddie Welsh, who witnessed the brutal death of a colleague, Billy Hogg, thrown into a girder by a jack-knifing track. Seen in the film telling the anecdote in his allotment shed, Freddie had come to Amber’s attention as a charismatic storyteller through an educational project funded by the Hamlyn Foundation.28 The soundtrack for Song for Billy, which includes extensive ‘sampling’ and distortion of Freddie’s voice, was devised with the New York-based So Percussion ensemble, who specialize in experimental and contemporary classic repertoire as well as multimedia performances. Amber’s material relating to Freddie was used as the concluding part of the group’s multimedia From Out a Darker Sea piece, on the subject of the Durham mining industry, which was first performed in Seaham in August 2016; the film version of Song for Billy was then shown as part of an exhibition of Konttinen’s Coal Coast photographs at the Side Gallery in 2017.29 An awareness of the complex creative backdrop to Song for Billy – however typical of Amber’s long-term, organic approach to filmmaking, and of their pragmatic response to funding opportunities (particularly of late)  – is not essential to an appreciation of its exploratory combination of imagery, words and sound. Loosely segmented into clusters of related photographic material, it begins with some disorientating close-ups of desiccation cracks in grey clay, into which unexpected items are embedded: a bird’s skeleton and disintegrating boots. Over these photographs, a native Durham voice intones a series of words, including some very specific dialect terms, describing types of coal, clay, shale and other formations associated with the mined Durham coast; thus, an equivalence is drawn between the uncanny, violent repositioning of familiar objects and the defamiliarization of language itself. Freddie’s harrowing tale of the accident he witnessed, and its effect upon onlookers and then Billy’s father, is sometimes shown in vision but is otherwise accompanied by other groups of photographic material, including close-ups of rusty, decomposed colliery waste cemented together, wider shots of the beach landscape and blocks of concrete covered by green seaweed. The soundtrack

Still Here • 227

establishes early a hypnotic percussive rhythm over which eerie washes of electronic sounds regularly break: the sonic equivalent to the cyclical waves that dominate the film’s imagery in its final stages. One of the film’s more radical gestures is the ‘musicalization’ of Freddie’s testimony in the sections between and following his main narrative. Phrases we have heard are electronically processed into jagged musical phrases, sometimes overlapping, and often treated to the extent where their origin is unclear. When Freddie describes being unable to forget the ‘screams’ of the dead man’s father, there follows an appropriately violent screech that manages to convey something of the trauma. But the manipulation of Freddie’s recollections into violent, constantly evolving bursts of echoing sound is analogous with the Coal Coast imagery of a fluid landscape where signifiers of a past, lost process fuse and mesh with each other and with the environment that predated it. Once Freddie has concluded his story, Song for Billy moves to a final section that emphasizes the cathartic power of the sea and the relative impermanence of ‘man’s vast but vanishing efforts’.30 Konttinen’s Coal Coast photobook includes an essay by the geologist Brian Young, who notes that the ‘coal’ age, which dates around 310 million years, is but a fraction of the 4,600 million year age of the earth itself.31 When some brief, grainy video footage of the mining industry (underground trains and overground coal heaps) is included, it has a startling, almost surrealistic effect: rather than merely signifying the memory of a vanquished form of labour, as it might reasonably be expected to do, this footage also, within the context of the surrounding imagery, emphasizes its transience. There follows a final sequence dominated by lapping, churning water, seen in photographs, video footage and two time-lapse cycles of tides: the first shows waves on a beach; the second is from the interior perspective of a cave, rapidly filling with water as night descends. During the latter cycle, an optical zoom effect fills the screen entirely with frothing water, whilst the soundtrack bears decreasing traces of Freddie’s voice – or at least, his vocal is now as worn down and rounded as the rock formations on the beach are by the tides. Konttinen has described these accelerated scenes as an ‘allegory for the whole historical period on the coast’: the period of mining is but one brief turbulent phase before it recedes into history. After calamity comes regeneration, although there is perhaps a despairing quality to the final fade to black, as night descends upon the cave, and the soundtrack also ebbs away to silence; indeed Konttinen has spoken of ‘losing the argument’, during the film’s creation, for retaining a final chink of light on screen, which may have better suited the intended narrative of catharsis after trauma.32 In Still Here, perhaps the most structurally straightforward of the three ‘memory’ films made by Amber, some of the subjects of Konttinen’s previous photographic projects are presented with images of themselves and

228  •  In Fading Light

others, triggering anecdotes and reflections upon their past lives.33 In the first section, ‘Gleaners’, a group of men connected with a second-hand furniture shop in Heaton (a neighbouring area to Byker), thumb through a copy of Konttinen’s Byker book from 1983. One of the men is identified as one of the children pictured in a particular photograph amidst a variety of scrap items upon a piece of wasteland. The photographs that appear on screen throughout this section, from Konttinen’s archive of Byker images, are exclusively those of children positioned among scrap material, or of derelict properties being stripped for parts, which illustrate the nostalgic stories told by the present-day men about the practicalities and codes of gleaning in the old Byker community. The most talkative of the men, who has strong praise for Konttinen’s book, did not actually feature in it, unlike his younger brother; in an amusing reference to her Byker history, he jokes that he was too busy robbing her studio (which was indeed raided by scrap men) to have time to play outside. Furthermore, he speaks of seeing the ‘wifey’ Konttinen taking photographs at the time.34 In this way, there is validation for her photographic project, verified as an authentic record of the past and of feelings towards it. At the same time, there is a neat parallel between the ‘recycling’ work of the men and Konttinen’s own repurposing of her archive for this particular film. But this is not mere plundering, for the confrontation between subject and artefact itself generates new memories and understandings of the past. To give one rather fortuitous example, one of the men is inspired by the presence of a television in a photograph to tell the story of his father ‘transforming’ a black-and-white set into a ‘colour’ one by placing a wrapper from a Lucozade bottle over the screen; followers of Konttinen’s own career are likely to be aware that she did not make her own move into colour photography until the late 1990s. If this first section of Still Here acts as a coda of sorts for Konttinen’s original Byker project, the second section, ‘Dancers’, does the same for her documentation of North Shields dance studios, which led to the Keeping Time (1983) film and Step by Step photobook of 1989. The majority of this part is devoted to the reactions of a cross-generational group of women, sitting together in a kitchen, as they watch scenes from Keeping Time involving some of them in their teenage years. Just as the ‘Gleaners’ section demonstrates Konttinen’s thesis, in the original Byker book and film, about the (de)construction of community, so the participants here engage directly with the questions about gender, power and family raised by Keeping Time – again, confirming how Amber’s work speaks to and for its subjects. In addition to being amused by the changes of fashion and behaviours (such as the dance instructor smoking in the studio and the risqué or inappropriate outfits worn by some of the young women in the modelling class), the former dancers speculate on whether they would have pursued the hobby in light of their

Still Here • 229

current wisdom and on whether the girls were coerced by their mothers. As well as being witty, perceptive commentators, the women, like the men in the ‘Gleaners’ section, demonstrate a bond of familiarity in the way that they banter playfully with each other. One of the dancers, Ella, speculates that, with hindsight, ‘I would have said no at fourteen’, to which her mother replies: ‘And I would have had a ruddy mansion!’ The film’s final section, ‘Dangergirl’, visits the elderly Sara Wisby, who had featured in some of Konttinen’s early 1970s photographs of the ‘Hoppings’, a travelling fair that comes to Newcastle yearly and is reckoned to be the largest of its type in Europe.35 She describes the sideshow skills that led to her being known as ‘Danger Girl’, including fire-eating, eating lightbulbs and being ‘buried alive’ and her memory of how a particular performing tradition – of dangerous, novelty or ‘freak’ acts – was superseded by television. Although not a native of north-east England, her recollections evoke, along with the trinkets and photographs that festoon her home, a variant on the notion of a vanished community. Her final comments, about her continuing love of life, and her gratitude for being alive, conclude Still Here on a note of defiant resilience.

‘Between the Mud and the Farthest Star’: An Unfinished Film In October 2012, Amber posted some work-in-progress material from their latest drama production onto their YouTube channel.36 The footage gives a tantalizing glimpse of the main characters, settings and themes of ‘Between the Mud and the Farthest Star’, which tells the story of Jamal (Abdulrahman Abuzayd), a Sudanese refugee in Newcastle who enters into a relationship with the local-born Shar (Krystal Spencer), a young mother whose friends are hostile to multiculturalism. We see Shar explaining some Tyneside idioms to Jamal and Jamal explaining the significance of the Saint George’s Cross to his fellow non-native musicians, but the majority of the footage is of counterdemonstrations against the real anti-Islam rallies held by the far-right English Defence League (EDL) organization in Newcastle. The plot of ‘Between the Mud’ (hereafter ‘Mud/Star’) concerns, in part, Shar becoming a singer for Jamal’s musical group and culminates with her performing an upbeat song of hope underneath Grey’s Monument, a traditional city centre focal point for public gatherings and demonstrations. In the footage uploaded by Amber, Shar performs, along with two other female characters, an anthemic song with the chorus ‘Together we are stronger, united as one’ against the backdrop of EDL protestors shouting racist slogans and waving the St George’s flag.37 To comment on the likely influence and significance of ‘Mud/Star’, had it been successfully financed and completed, is of course to enter the

230  •  In Fading Light

realm of conjecture.38 However, there is some precedence for scholarly case studies of unrealized or unfinished films, particularly within the context of British cinema; Dan North, for example, has argued that the absence of a finished artefact can result in a deeper understanding of the non-visual, non-photographic elements of cinema, shifting attention to the ‘intricacies of the creative process and to the context in which that creativity began’.39 In the case of Amber, an awareness of the intentions of ‘Mud/Star’ also frames an appreciation of associated work and of the group’s broader narrative of engagement with specific communities and places. As discussed earlier, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s project around her creative ‘return’ to Byker, which culminated in the Byker Revisited book and Today I’m with You film, had drawn attention to the new ethnic diversity of the suburb, now home to diverse refugees and migrants. Amber then made a film about The Crossings Band, a community music ensemble involving Newcastle-based asylum seekers and refugees; We Are All Survivors (2011) interweaves profiles of individual members of the band with sequences of them collaborating on the creation of the song that gives the film its title. A version of the band would have been central to ‘Mud/Star’, which cast one of its musicians in a lead role and others in smaller parts. Another lead role was taken by one of the more charismatic and photogenic residents of the Byker Wall housing estate picked out by Konttinen and her camera in Today I’m with You. As mentioned, that documentary contains a sequence where Krystal, who was to play the Shar character, enters into an involved discussion with Konttinen about which of her images best captures her idea of her own personality and thus deserves exhibition/publication. In their casting of their main characters, Amber were following an established precedent of locating potential actors and seeding ideas via smaller-scale documentary or community projects. But treating the unmade ‘Mud/Star’ as canonical lends greater significance to Krystal’s spirited argument with Konttinen in Today I’m with You, as it implies a progression from being a (relatively) passive subject of Konttinen’s camera to an active participant in the evolution of a multifaceted dramatic character. The completion of the ‘Mud/Star’ film is likely to have had an impact upon Amber’s narrative in other ways, not least in being the first feature drama made without the involvement of founder member Murray Martin, who died in 2007. Their uploading of footage online in 2012 was part of an exploratory campaign to ‘crowdfund’ (i.e. via public donations) the production of ‘trailer’ material so as to help secure the full £300,000 budget, with anticipated financers being the likes of the BFI, the BBC, Sky Arts and Channel Four (the latter seemingly unlikely, given their drift away from their public service remit).40 Perhaps more significant, though, was Amber’s creative response to the ‘radical changes that were beginning take place in Tyneside’s cultural sense of itself ’.41 Put bluntly, ‘Mud/Star’ would have

Still Here • 231

been the first Amber feature film to feature non-white characters and in doing so may have warded off criticism that the group, at least in its feature work, has not been as responsive to multiculturalism (and its tensions) as other notable practitioners of social realism such as Ken Loach and Shane Meadows. Although it is fair to observe that the places and communities explored by the collective so far have offered limited terrain for these kind of concerns, their recent gravitation towards (post)industrial Tyneside has allowed for greater scope to address the topic of immigration/asylum, which has of late been at the forefront of British politics and bound up for many with the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU. When Shar, according to the script, tells Jamal that her experience of ‘being a Geordie’ is that ‘everything you’re proud of is gone’, there are insinuations of how such alienation might have politically toxic consequences (such as the racism stirred by the EDL and pro-Brexit campaigns). At the same time, ‘Mud/Star’ offers an antidote of sorts to the coalfield trilogy’s emphasis upon the disappearing traces of the past and the concomitant unravelling of traditional communities. According to the planned script, the film has as upbeat an ending as the subject matter could allow. Jamal undergoes some unpleasant treatment at the hands of the UK Border Agency but is ultimately granted leave to stay, and a UK passport, allowing him to travel home safely. By the end of the story, it is left unresolved whether Shar will be reunited with the young son who has been removed from her by social services, but her integration within the musical group, and her finding of her own creative voice, suggests a degree of personal empowerment, as well as hope for the region. The final scene is of Shar singing, at the EDL counterdemonstration, a self-penned song that includes lyrics such as: And the past won’t go away. It’s inside us, it will stay. We will take it where we go. When we change and when we grow.

There are echoes here of the group rendition of ‘I Will Survive’ that concludes Dream On (1991), but the script acknowledges that ‘there’s a sense of how fragile the band’s utopianism is, the small audience and the band protected by a ring of policemen’. The stylistic hybridity of the band’s music – which spans continents and traditions – mirrors the egalitarianism of its processes; its leader (the real-life leader of The Crossings Band, as featured in We Are All Survivors) is a facilitator rather than director. Amber’s acknowledgement of the band’s frail utopianism is the equivalent of the self-conscious use of an ‘interventionist’ outsider figure in Dream On and other dramas. Furthermore, the band is not free from personal tensions and prejudices, and a keynote discussion between Jamal and his friend Jo hinges on the difference

232  •  In Fading Light

between literal and figurative definitions of ‘refugee’ and ‘outsider’. When Jo, who harbours a romantic interest in Jamal, makes a case for the equivalencies of their experience, he uses the analogy of the distance between the ‘mud and the farthest star’ to make a distinction between his illegal status and her ability, as a Saudi Arabia-born woman with two passports (one American), to travel freely. Among a cast of otherwise non-professional performers, the character of Jo was to be played by a professional actor, Anisa George (also a director and producer in her own right). In positioning Jo, by implication an ‘outsider’ by choice, as another one of its near-surrogate figures, Amber would seem to be acknowledging that its attraction towards refugee ­experience – just as the character has a possessive attitude towards Jamal – might be harshly judged as a touristic detour into ‘exotic’ territory.

Conclusion: A Living Archive To lament the incompletion of ‘Mud/Star’ (to date) is to risk underestimating Amber’s achievements within an increasingly challenging economic context. Opportunities for revenue funding for production had dwindled in the early 1990s, but a generous grant from the Northern Rock Foundation sustained production for a five-year period up until 2009. Since then, Amber have struggled to locate a means of funding revenue and have relied on development money or charity grants (such as the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) to support small-scale production.42 The experience of ‘coming away with nothing’ from the abandoned ‘Mud/Star’ also impressed upon Amber the need to make work they could ‘control within the very limited resources’.43 That film’s development had involved a script advisor, who had advocated having a central protagonist with a clear narrative arc, which went against Amber’s instinct towards ensemble storytelling. The expectation that the film would thus be more ‘conventional’ meant that, according to Graeme Rigby, the group ended up ‘compromising on their organic approach . . . rather than working with improvisation’.44 As Amber approached the fiftieth anniversary of their beginnings, and of their move to Newcastle upon Tyne, it was perhaps inevitable that their output took a ‘retrospective’ turn. This was simultaneously a reflection upon the changing sociopolitical landscape, a consideration of their own evolution and legacy and a celebration and promotion of their own ‘living’ archive of films, photography, stories and people. Amber’s project continues, though. At the time of completing this book, the core creative team are mindful of legacy and succession but also that there is still work to do in preserving and enhancing their body of work. By way of a conclusion, the next section turns to some of the existing Amber members for their thoughts on the future.

Still Here • 233

Notes   1. Amber/Side. 2005. A Short History, booklet with DVD releases, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 1.   2. Amber/Side, A Short History, 29.   3. The For Ever Amber exhibition ran at the Laing Art Gallery 27 June to 19 September 2015.   4. Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories from a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side, 7.   5. Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 71 and 93.   6. Amber variously use the term ‘living archive’ to describe their project on their website. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.amber-online.com/about/history/.   7. Anon. 2007. ‘Get Ready to Rumba’, The Journal, 17 March. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/get-ready-to-rumba-4534414.   8. Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5.   9. Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5. 10. Collingwood cited in Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5. See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the importance of Collingwood’s philosophy of art within Amber’s thinking. 11. S. Konttinen. 2009. Byker Revisited: A Portrait of a Community, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 8. The Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 enshrined a policy of dispersing those seeking asylum accommodation in the UK. 12. Konttinen, Byker Revisited, 8. 13. Hall in Konttinen, Byker Revisited, vii. 14. Konttinen, personal correspondence with author. 15. Collingwood cited in Amber/Side, For Ever Amber, 5. 16. It is worth noting too that Brendan Murphy, one of the key figures in The Bamboozler, is one of the subjects of Konttinen’s photography; the Rumba Palace features briefly in Today I’m with You, which also involved Murphy, and his percussive talents, on the musical soundtrack. 17. A shortened version of From Us to Me (of 52 minutes rather than 90) was broadcast on regional channels of NDR, the German public broadcasting channel (14 December 2016 and 9 November 2017). 18. Amber have acknowledged that the Pawlitz family were ‘set up’ in the film to a certain degree, for schematic purpose, but have maintained that Ralf Pawlitz was pleased with the film and appreciative of Sylvia’s ‘heroism’. 19. S. Schubert. 2018. ‘Filmemacher Im Warnemünde Dock Inn: Leben und Arbeitin im Sozialismus’/‘The Filmmaker in the Warnemünde Dock Inn: Life and Work in Socialism’, Neuste Norddeutsche Nachrichten, 26 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.nnn.de/LOKALES/ROSTOCK/LEBEN-UND-ARBEITEN-IM-SO​ZI​ ALISMUS-ID21455882.HTM. I am thankful to Tobias Hochscherf for this translation. 20. Ellin Hare speaking in ‘From Us to Me  – Q&A with Director Ellin Hare’, YouTube. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EZqD-z__gk. 21. The Shipbuilding on the Tyne exhibition of photographs taken by Bruce Rae in the early 1980s of shipyards ran from 22 July to 8 October 2017 at the Side Gallery, Newcastle. 22. Davitt’s poetry was first published in 1977. See R. Cuddling. 1977. Shipyard Muddling, Whitley Bay: Erdesdun Publications. There was a second volume in 1980, and then two anthologies were published c. 1993 and 2001. 23. ‘Tanker on Ice’ was published as part of Cuddling’s Shipyard Muddling collection of 1977.

234  •  In Fading Light

24. S. Konttinen. 2003. The Coal Coast, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber Side, n.p. 25. Konttinen speaking in ‘Coal Coast Talk’, recorded at the opening of a (second) exhibition of photographs from the project at the Side Gallery, Newcastle on 13 May 2017, available on Amber website. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.amber-online. com/collection/coal-coast-talk/. The exhibition ran from 13 May to 9 July. 26. Konttinen, The Coal Coast, n.p. 27. J. Leggott. 2018. ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’, 1 November, Newcastle upon Tyne. 28. The educational project brought pupils at Easington Colliery Primary School into contact with Amber’s archive and with the stories of local people, including Freddie Welsh. 29. So Percussion’s From Out a Darker Sea project was commissioned by East Durham Creates, as part of the Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme. It was produced by Forma, who brought So Percussion and Amber together on the project. 30. Konttinen, The Coal Coast, n.p. 31. Brian Young in Konttinen, The Coal Coast, n.p. 32. Leggott, ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’. 33. Still Here was first shown at the Side Gallery as part of the retrospective exhibition About the North: Imagined Dialogues, which took place 22 June to September 2019. The exhibition was part of the ‘Exhibition of the North’ that took place in various venues in Newcastle and Gateshead in summer 2018. 34. ‘Wifey’ is a Geordie dialect word for woman. 35. For an example of the claim made about the Hoppings being the largest event of its type in Europe, see, for example, L. Hall. 2012. ‘The Hoppings: The Myths and Mud of Europe’s Biggest Travelling Fair’, The Guardian, 28 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/the-northerner/2012/jun/28/newcastle-thehoppingsfairground-rides-amuseuments. 36. The footage is available on YouTube. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.you​ tube.com/watch?v=RzYHOXnrQu0. 37. I am basing this plot summary on the script kindly provided to me by Amber. 38. The film had to be abandoned for economic reasons but also due to the ill health of one of the core creative team. 39. D. North, ‘Introduction: Finishing the Unfinished’, in D. North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Film, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 8. 40. Channel Four had been actively involved in securing the development funding in what was anticipated as a partnership with the BFI. Developments at Channel Four discontinued their involvement. 41. Konttinen cited in D. Whetstone. 2012. ‘Capturing a Change in North East Culture’, The Journal, 20 November. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/ culture/film-tv/capturing-change-north-east-culture-4400934. 42. From Us to Me was completed with a 9,000 euro development grant from Media, whilst The Art of Shipbuilding and Song for Billy received funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. 43. Graeme Rigby in Leggott, ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’. 44. Ibid.

Conclusion Amber at Fifty



It is no small irony that Still Here was first exhibited in the fiftieth year of Amber’s existence and concerned the photographic and film work of the one founding member (Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen) still working as part of the core creative team  – who in 2018 were, along with Konttinen, Peter Roberts, Graeme Rigby and Ellin Hare. Amber’s survival is no small achievement, but as the half-century anniversary of their arrival in Newcastle in 1969 approached, the key members were looking to the future with a mixture of pragmatism and optimism. Peter Roberts acknowledged that: Some of us are withdrawing slowly. The whole environment is different, economically, and people’s lives are at different stages. All the tenets we had for many years have to be abandoned. The idea of egalitarian wages and that kind of sharing of everything can’t happen economically: the pressures on people are very different. We’re having to adapt. We are trying, still, to retain some notion of collective practice.1

According to Konttinen, the economic situation meant that the group now had to strategize separate plans for their film production work and their activities around photography (whether commissioning, exhibition or acquisition): We’ve become more isolated from one another now because the funding sources have forced us to departmentalize here again. The funding is made to specific applications and ambitions and nobody will any longer fund an overall organisation.

236  •  In Fading Light

At the time of writing, the group were contemplating possibilities for reviving the ‘Mud/Star’ project as a documentary portrait of the actors involved in its making, whilst also working on Of Whole Heart Cometh Hope (2019), a film about a Durham Gala banner celebrating women’s role in the miners’ strike, and considering more stories from the East Durham coalfields. But as Graeme Rigby noted, resources had to be built in to enable future work by successors: The other way you can look at it: what happens when people are no longer physically able to lift up a camera? It’s about creating an opportunity for new production. The system we’ve set up is to use the collection, and its exploitation, to generate funding for new production. In theory that can work long term. You can use it for a small thing, or to attract other money. It might be that there are other people within the collective who wish to take the filmmaking forward.

Amber have of late positioned their collection  – of photographic and film work and acquisition  – as a ‘living archive’ and have always stressed their responsibility in terms of leaving it in the best possible state (through digitization of materials and so forth) and ensuring that it is not curated or exploited in ways that go against the promises made to captured subjects about its respectful use. According to Rigby: People come into that collection and cannot deny what an extraordinary thing it is, what an amazing achievement. It’s one of the most beautiful collections in the last fifty years of the culture of the North East, and in documentary.

Amber have not just survived but done so with the evidence. As Konttinen says: Photographers who work internationally say there’s nothing like it in the rest of the world in terms of scale, commitment and the continuity of narratives within it. It’s true in terms of filmmaking as well. We are very well known locally and we’re very well appreciated internationally.

Konttinen’s comment about Amber’s local and international reputation carries the implication that they have struggled to receive their due on a national level, and my own analysis of their work has been predicated on the notion that it has left only occasional and vanishing traces within the scholarly histories of British film and documentary culture. As already noted, Amber may have been hamstrung by misconceptions that they were ‘community’ artists, in the sense of handing over the tools of production to their subjects (which was not their philosophy), or that they were in the business of

Conclusion • 237

Figure 8.1  Amber, 2014. Left to right: Bryan Dixon, Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Peter Roberts, Kerry Lowes, Ellin Hare, Annie Robson, Peter Scott. © Amber Film & Photography Collective.

merely recording social and industrial history rather than creatively responding to it. More damaging still has been a perception, whether locally or nationally, that Amber’s commitment to traditional working-class culture of the industrial North is dangerously retrograde, an accusation that Konttinen strongly rebuts: ‘History matters. Without that, you’re in an amnesia state.’ Amber remain hopeful about their future and their legacy. They have recently put energy and resources into their Learning and Participation wing, using their archive to inspire and inform a new generation of filmmakers and photographers and bring them into contact with their own histories. They have observed a cultural shift in attitudes towards the kind of work they have for many years commissioned and exhibited in their gallery: the tradition of humanist documentary photography. If there is indeed a current hunger for that tradition, with its visible evidence of authenticity, it may play to Amber’s advantage in the funding of future film projects. But their archive and future production of documentary and feature films may also benefit from the legitimization of ‘realist’ visual culture. As Graeme Rigby suggests, in relation to the current cultural landscape: It’s archives, it’s documentary: that’s absolutely at the heart of what people’s concerns are. We’re in a shift. I’m an optimist!

238  •  In Fading Light

In its interpretive history of the collective’s films, this book has also taken an optimistic stance on the continuing relevance of the Amber project to historians, audiences and filmmakers. Amber’s work sustains an auteurist approach because of the coherence of this project: despite personnel changes, financial struggles and political upheavals, the group have remained true to the principles of creative documentation and community engagement they began with. In their demonstration of the robustness and importance of filmmaking cultures beyond the commercial and geographical mainstream, Amber prompt us to reconsider areas of filmmaking activity that can be too easily dismissed as marginal, or as straightforward in their method, style and attitude. Amber’s non-hierarchical approach to production, in tandem with the traditional etiquette of scholarly objectivity, has encouraged on my part an egalitarian response to their output, although the way that some titles received a more detailed discussion here than others does imply a stance on which are the most interesting, or at least most fruitful for analysis. Although I have sought to avoid direct value judgements on which films I happen to think are more successful or effective, I would hate the reader to lose sight of the multiple pleasures that come from a deep engagement with Amber’s work: the identification of connecting threads, the slow evolution of ideas in a longitudinal fashion, the playful in-jokes of casting and dialogue that reward close attention, and the almost encyclopaedic sweep of reference that embraces industrial history, popular culture, literature, music and more beyond. Amber’s project of creative documentation has confronted them, and their audiences, with eccentricity, happenstance and the wisdom and humour that come through resilience and tragedy: my hope is that this book has conveyed at least some of these qualities.

Note 1. J. Leggott. 2018. ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’, 1 November, Newcastle upon Tyne. All subsequent quotations in this chapter from Rigby, Konttinen and Roberts are from this interview.

Select Bibliography

Abrams, R. 2003. ‘Byker Revisited’, Built Environment 29(2), 117–31. Alinsky, S. 1971. Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, New York: Vintage Books. Allen, S. 2008. ‘British Cinema at the Seaside: The Limits of Liminality’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 5(1), 53–71. Alter, M. 2002. Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema 1967–2000, Michigan: Michigan University Press. Amber/Side. 1987. Amber/Side Catalogue, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side. Amber/Side. 1995. Unremembered Lives: North East Communities and the Documentary Photographer, Newcastle: Side Gallery. Amber/Side. 2005. A Short History, booklet with DVD releases, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side. Amber/Side. 2015. For Ever Amber: Stories from a Film & Photography Collection, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber/Side. Andrews. H. 2011. ‘On the Grey Box: Broadcasting Experimental Film and Video on Channel 4’s The Eleventh Hour’, Visual Culture in Britain 12(2), 203–18. Anon. 1981. ‘The Architecture We Deserve’, The Times, 27 June, 13. Anon. 2007. ‘Get Ready to Rumba’, The Journal, 17 March. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/get-ready-to-rumba-4534414. Armstrong, K. 1998. ‘Letting All the Flowers Bloom’, Northern Review 7, 52–58. Armstrong, K. 1998. ‘The Jingling Geordie: Community Arts and the Regional Culture of the North East of England’, MA Thesis, University of Durham. Ashmore, R. 2011. ‘Landscape and Crisis in Northern England: The Representation of Communal Trauma in Film and Photography’, Ph.D thesis, Northumbria University. Ashmore, R. (forthcoming) ‘Amber in East Durham: Film, Photography and the Trauma of Social Change’, unpublished article. Badger, G. 2009. ‘A Good Day Out: Reflecting on Last Resort’, in M. Parr, The Last Resort: Photographs of New Britain, Stockport: Dewi Lewis. Barber, F. 1996. ‘Shifting Practices: New Trends in Representation Since the 1970s’, in  L.  Dawtrey et al. (eds), Investigating Modern Art, Florence: Yale University Press, 155–73. Barke, M. and G.M. Turnbull. 1992. Meadowell: The Biography of an Estate With Problems, Aldershot: Avebury. Beattie, K. 2010. Humphrey Jennings, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Beck, C. 1991. ‘Same Location, Different Script’, The Independent, 7 October, 14.

240 • Select Bibliography

Bennett, K. and R. Lee. 2007. ‘Amber and An/other Rural: Film, Photography and the Formal Coalfields’, in R. Fish (ed.), Cinematic Countrysides, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 249–68. Berry, H. 2010. ‘Landscape, Taste and National Identity: William Hutchinson’s View of Northumberland (1776–8)’, in T. Faulkner et al. (eds), Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of North-East England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 247–60. Beynon, H. and S. Rowbotham (eds). 2001. Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram. Brabazon, T. 2002. Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women, Sydney: University of New South Wales. Bradshaw, P. 2013. ‘The Selfish Giant  – Review’, The Guardian, 24 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/24/the-selfish-giantreview. Brown, M. 2007. A Licence to Be Different: The Story of Channel 4, London: BFI. Brown, S. 2005. Understanding Youth and Crime: Listening to Youth?, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bruce, J.C. and J. Stokoe (eds). 1965. Northumbrian Minstrelsy: A Collection of the Ballads, Melodies and Small-Pipe Tunes of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne: Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne. Campbell, B. 1993. Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, London: Methuen. Cedarwood Project. 1998. Mixed Feelings: Writings from the Cedarwood Centre Woman’s Group, North Shields: The Cedarwood Trust. Chambers, J. 2017. ‘The “Salvage” of Working-Class History and Experience: Reconsidering the Amber Collective’s 1970s Tyneside Documentaries’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 168–85. Channel Four. 1986. The Work of Channel Four’s Independent Film and Video Department, London: Channel 4. Chapman, J. 2015. A New History of British Documentary, New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Clavering, E. 2010. ‘Betwixt and Between: Mapping Marginalised Classed Identities’, in Y. Taylor (ed.), Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges, London and New York: Routledge, 117–36. Clayton, S. and L. Mulvey (eds). 2017. Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Clifford, J. 1986. ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, in J. Clifford and G. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 98–121. Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The Principles of Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colls, R. 1998. ‘Cookson, Chaplin and Common: Three Northern Writers in 1951’, in A. Auw (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland: 1800–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 164–210. Colls, R. 2005. ‘Born-again Geordies’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 1–34. Colls, R. and B. Lancaster. 2005. ‘1992 Preface’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University. Cooper, D. 2015. ‘Introduction’, in D. Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation, Handsworth/ Baltimore: Penguin, 7–12. Cork, R. 2003. New Spirit, New Sculpture, New Money: Art in the 1980s, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Select Bibliography • 241

Corner, J. 1996. The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cubitt, S. 2004. Timeshift: On Video Culture (2nd ed.), London and New York: Routledge. Cuddling, R. 1977. Shipyard Muddling, Whitley Bay: Erdesdun Publications. Culshaw, P. 2004. ‘Finland: Home of the Tango’, The Telegraph, 7 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3618574/Finland-home-of-the-tango. html. Day Lewis, C. 1986. ‘Cause to Celebrate’, The Telegraph, 22 January. Retrieved from Amber’s archive. Dennis, N. and G. Erdos. 2000. Families Without Fatherhood (3rd ed.), Trowbridge: The Cromwell Press. Dickinson, M. (ed.). 1999. Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI. Dickinson, M. n.d., ‘Political Film’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www. screenonline.org.uk/film/id/976967/index.html. Dickinson, M. 1999. ‘Amber’, in M. Dickinson (ed.), Rogue Reels: Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945–90, London: BFI, 247–62. Dickinson, M., A. Cottringer and J. Petley. 1993. ‘Workshops: A Dossier  – Introduction’, Vertigo 1(1), https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-1-s​ p​ ring-1993/workshops-a-dossier/. Dilnot, C. 2012. ‘The Gleaners’, New Left Review 77, September/October, 1–5. Dilnot, C. 2012. ‘Chris Killip: The Last Photographer of the Working Class’, Afterimage 39(6), 15–18. Doughty, S. 2018. ‘Famous Planning Row Killer Albert Dryden Dies after Prison Release’, Evening Chronicle, 18 September. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/albert-dryden-dead-killer-planning-15165296. Eaton, M. 2005. Our Friends in the North, Somerset: BFI. Farmer, B. 1993. ‘Client, Community and Climate: Byker – A Case Study’, in B. Farmer, H.J. Louw, H. Louw and A. Napper (eds), Companion to Contemporary Architectural Thought, 130–36. Faulkner, T.E. 1996. ‘Conservation and Renewal in Newcastle upon Tyne’, in T.E. Faulkner (ed.), Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North East England, London: Octavian Press, 123–50. Feaver, W. 2010. Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group, 1934–1984, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria Press. Fisher, M. 2007. ‘The City Has Become Its Vision’, The Guardian, 11 October, https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2007/oct/11/theatre. Fitzgerald, K. 1993. ‘Diary of Distribution’, Vertigo 1(1). Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-1-issue-1-spring-1993/ diary-of-distribution/. Fitzgerald, T. 1993. ‘Shoptalk’, Vertigo 1(1), 163–69. Fitzwalter, R. and D. Taylor. 1981. Web of Corruption: The Story of J.G.L. Poulson and T. Dan Smith, London, Toronto, Sydney and New York: Granada. Fligstein, N. 2001. ‘Social Skill and the Theory of Fields’, Sociological Theory 19(2), 105–25. Florence, P. 1985. ‘Step by Step: Photographs, Text and Collage’, Creative Camera 242 (February), 28–29. Foote Wood, C. 2010. T Dan Smith: ‘Voice of the North’ – Downfall of a Visionary, Bishop Auckland: Northern Writers. Forrest, D. 2013. Social Realism: Art, Nationhood and Politics, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

242 • Select Bibliography

Fowler, C. and L. Nordby. 1992. ‘The 14th Cretéil International Women’s Film Festival 10–20 April 1992’, Screen 33(4) (Winter), 429–33. Friedman, L.D. (ed.). 1993. The British Cinema and Thatcherism: Fires Were Started, London: UCL Press. Gaal-Holmes, P. 2015. A History of 1970s Experimental Film: Britain’s Decade of Diversity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gee, G. 2017. Art in the North of England: 1979–2009, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Glaessner, V. 1986. ‘Seacoal Review’, Monthly Film Bulletin, May, 157–58. Glynn, S. 2011. ‘Good Homes: Lessons in Successful Public Housing from Newcastle’s Byker Estate’, conference paper, The Housing Crisis: Experience, Analysis and Response, Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, London, 18 November, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/research/ Glynn.pdf. Godfrey, S. 2010. ‘Nowhere Men: Representations of Masculinity in Nineties British Cinema’, Ph.D thesis. East Anglia: University of East Anglia. Hadaway, T. 2005. ‘Comic Dialect’, in R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism (2nd ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 85–92. Hake, S. 2002. German National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge. Hall, L. 2009. ‘Foreword’, in S. Konttinen, Byker Revisited, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria Press, vi–xi. Hall, L. 2011. ‘One of the Most Influential Art Groups You’ve Never Heard Of ’, The Times, 30 April, Saturday Review, 6–7. Hall, L. 2012. ‘The Hoppings: The Myths and Mud of Europe’s Biggest Travelling Fair’, The Guardian, 28 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/uk/thenortherner/2012/jun/28/newcastle-thehoppings-fairground-rides-amuseuments. Hall, V.G. 2013. Women at Work 1860–1939: How Different Industries Shaped Women’s Experiences, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Hallam, J. 2000. ‘Film, Class and National Identity: Re-imagining Communities in the Age of Devolution’, in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 261–74. Harkenthal, G. 1989. ‘Winfried Junge: Vor der Premiere’/‘Winifried Junge: Before the Premiere’, Filmspiegel 9, 26–27. Hatherley, O. 2010. A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, London and New York: Verso. Hattenstone, S. 2001. ‘I Once Put Our Entire Grant on a Horse’, The Guardian, 8 June. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/jun/08/artsfea​ tures. Higson. A. 1996. ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in A. Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, London: Cassell, 113–56. Hill, J. 1999. British Cinema in the 1980s, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hill, J. 2000. ‘From the “New Wave” to “Brit-grit”: Continuity and Difference in WorkingClass Realism’, in. J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 249–60. Hill, J. 2004. ‘“A Working-Class Hero Is Something To Be?” Changing Representations of Class and Masculinity in British Cinema’, in P. Powrie, A. Davies and B. Babington (eds), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, London: Wallflower, 100–9. Hill, J. 2011. Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television, Basingstoke: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Hobson, D. 2008. Channel 4: The Early Years and the Jeremy Isaacs Legacy, London: I.B. Tauris.

Select Bibliography • 243

Hochscherf, T. and J. Leggott. 2008. ‘From Marks and Spencer to Marx and Engels: A Transnational DEFA and Amber Film Documentary Project Across the Iron Curtain’, Studies in Documentary Film 2(2), 123–35. Hockenhull, S. 2017. British Women Filmmakers in the New Millennium, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holden, S. 1999. ‘Air of Change, Not Despair, in New Films from Britain’, New York Times, 16 April, E13. Holdsworth, C.N. 2017. ‘The Workshop Declaration: Independents and Organised Labour’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 307–12. Hollands, R. and J. Vail. 2012. ‘The Art of Social Movement: Cultural Opportunity, Mobilisation and Framing in the Early Formation of the Amber Collective’, Poetics 40(1), 22–43. Hollands, R. and J. Vail. 2015. ‘Place Imprinting and the Arts: A Case Study of the Amber Collective’, Local Economy: The Journal of the Local Economy Policy Unit, 1–18. Hunt, M. n.d. ‘High Row’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.screenon​ line.org.uk/film/id/711799/index.html. Hunter, I.Q. 2013. British Trash Cinema, London: BFI. Hunter, I.Q., L. Porter and J. Smith (eds). 2017. The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Hutchings, P. 1996. ‘“When The Going Gets Tough . . .”: Representations of the North-East in Film and Television’, in T.E. Faulkner (ed.), Northumbrian Panorama: Studies in the History and Culture of North East England, London: Octavian Press, 273–90. James, D.E. 1997. Power Misses: Essays Across Unpopular Culture, London: Verso. Jamieson, M. 1979. ‘Will the Quayside Live . . .?’, Evening Chronicle, 9 August. Retrieved from Idea of North exhibition held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 11 May to 30 September 2018. Jennings, T. 1994. ‘The Hidden Injuries of Theory’, Here and Now 14 (July), 18–22. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://libcom.org/files/here-now-14.pdf. Jennings, T. 2009. ‘Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting the Working Classes’, Variant 34 (Spring). Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.variant.org.uk/34texts/hunting34.html. Jobling, P. 1993. ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen: The Meaning of Urban Culture in Byker’, History of Photography 17(3), 253–62. Junge, W. 1989. ‘Erfahrungen anderer Art’/‘Experiences of a Different Kind’, Film und Fernsehen 10, 6–10. Kelly, R. 2001. ‘Like Father’, Sight and Sound 11(7), 44. Kerry, M. 2010. The Holiday and British Film, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Killip. C. 1988. In Flagrante, London: Secker & Warburg. Killip, C. 2011. Seacoal, Göttingen Steidl. Knight, J. and P. Thomas. 2011. Reaching Audiences: Distribution and Promotion of Alternative Moving Image, Bristol: Intellect. Konttinen, S. 1983. ‘Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen Interviewed by Murray Martin’, Creative Camera 227, November, 1160–63. Konttinen, S. 1983. Byker, London: Jonathan Cape. Konttinen, S. 1989. Step by Step, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. Konttinen, S. 2000. Writing in the Sand: On the Beaches of North East England, Stockport/ Newcastle upon Tyne: Dewi Lewis Publishing/Amber/Side. Konttinen, S. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10977-F10983).

244 • Select Bibliography

Konttinen, S. 2003. The Coal Coast, Newcastle upon Tyne: Amber Side. Konttinen, S. 2009. Byker Revisited: A Portrait of a Community, Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press. Larres, K. 2001. ‘Germany in 1989: The Development of a Revolution’, in K. Larres (ed.), Germany Since Unification: The Development of the Berlin Republic (2nd ed.), Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 33–59. Lawrence, D. 2011. The Making of Stan Laurel: Echoes of a British Boyhood, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Lay. S. 2002. British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit, London: Wallflower. Lay, S. 2007. ‘Good Intentions, High Hopes and Low Budgets: Contemporary Social Realist Filmmaking in Britain’, New Cinemas 5(3), 231–44. Leach, J. 2004. British Film, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leggott, J. 2010. ‘Interview with Stafford Linsley’, Newcastle upon Tyne, 11 November. Leggott, J. 2017. ‘Fair Do’s: Tom Hadaway and the Regional Voice in 1970s British Television’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 37(4), 683–702. Leggott, J. 2018. ‘Interview with Graeme Rigby, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Peter Roberts’, 1 November, Newcastle upon Tyne. Linsley, S.M. 2000. ‘Industrial Archaeology in the North East of England’, in N. Cossons (ed.), Perspectives on Industrial Archaeology, London: Science Museum, 115–38. Lipman, A. 1986. ‘Seachange’, City Limits, 3–10 April. Retrieved from Amber archives. Lomas, R. 2009. An Encyclopaedia of North-East England, Edinburgh: Birlinn. Martin, M. 2000. ‘Interview with Murray Martin by Darren Newbury’ (unpublished transcript). Martin, M. 2001. ‘Documentary Poet’, in H. Beynon and S. Rowbotham (eds), Looking at Class: Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, London: Rivers Oram, 159–72. Martin, M. 2002. An Oral History of British Photography, British Library Sound Archive (catalogue number F10984-F10988). Mayer, A.E. 1995. Artists in Dylan Thomas’s Prose Works: Adam Naming and Aesop Fabling, McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mazierska, E. 2017. ‘Introduction: Imagining the North of England’, in E. Mazierska (ed.), Heading North: The North of England in Film and Television, Palgrave Macmillan, 1–31. Milne, G.J. 2006. North East England, 1850–1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime-Industrial Region, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Minton, A. 2015. ‘Byker Wall: Newcastle’s Noble Failure of an Estate’, The Guardian, 21 May. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/21/bykerwall-newcastles-noble-failure-of-an-estate-a-history-of-cities-in-50-buildings-day-41. Monk, C. 2000. ‘Underbelly UK: The 1990s Underclass Film, Masculinity and the Ideologies of New Britain’, in J. Ashby and A. Higson (eds), British Cinema Past and Present, London and New York: Routledge, 274–87. Monk, C. 2000. ‘Men in the 90s’, in R. Murphy (ed.), London: BFI, 156–66. Mountford, C.E. 1976. The Bowes Line, Formerly the Pontop & Jarrow Railway, London: Industrial Railway Society and Tyne and Wear Industrial Monuments Trust. Murphy, R. (ed.). 2009. The British Cinema Book (3rd ed.), London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, R. (ed.). 2014. British Cinema (Volumes I to IV), New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Mutibwa, D.H. 2017. ‘Surfing Multiple Tides: Opportunities and Challenges for Contemporary British and German Community Filmmakers’, in S. Malik et al. (ed.), Community Filmmaking: Diversity, Practices and Places, Routledge: Oxon and New York, 137–54. Nef, J.U. 1932. The Rise of the British Coal Industry Vol II, London: George Routledge & Sons.

Select Bibliography • 245

Newbury, D. 1999. ‘Photography and the Visualization of Working Class Lives in Britain’, Visual Anthropology Review 15(1), 21–44. Newbury, D. 2002. ‘Documentary Practices and Working-Class Culture: An Interview with Murray Martin (Amber Films and Side Photographic Gallery)’, Visual Studies 17(2), 113–28. Newland, C. 2018. ‘Can Paddy Considine’s Journeyman Land a knockout Blow for British Boxing Movies?’, The Guardian, Film Blog, 13 March. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2018/mar/13/journeyman-paddy-considinebritish-boxing-films-knockout. Newland, P. (ed.). 2010. Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the 1970s, Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. Newland, P. 2017. British Films of the 1970s, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Newsinger, J. 2007. ‘Together We Stand’, Vertigo 11 (August), https://www.closeupfilmcentre. com/vertigo_magazine/issue-11-august-2007/together-we-stand/. Newsinger, J. 2009. ‘The Interface of Documentary and Fiction: The Amber Film Workshop and Regional Documentary Practice’, The Journal of British Cinema and Television 6(3), 387–406. Newsinger, J. 2010. ‘From the Grassroots: Regional Film Policy and Practice in England’, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Nottingham. Newton, L. 2010. ‘Cullercoats: An Alternative North-Eastern Landscape?’, in T. Faulkner et al. (eds), Northern Landscapes: Representations and Realities of North-East England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 293–308. Norden, B. 1991. ‘Women: Natural Talents’, The Guardian, 10 January. North, D. 2008. ‘Introduction: Finishing the Unfinished’, in D. North (ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Film, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 1–18. O’Reilly, P. 2009. ‘“I Will Survive”: Forty Years of Amber Films and the Evolution of Regional Film Policy’, Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 1, 1–14. Petley, J. 1986. ‘The Lost Continent,’ in C. Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema, London: BFI, 98–119. Petley, J. 1990. ‘In Fading Light’, Monthly Film Bulletin 57(674), 70–71. Petley, J. 1990. ‘Film Cities: North by Northeast’, Sight and Sound 58(1), 13–14. Petley, J. 1995. ‘Crisis in the North East’, Vertigo 1(5), 52–56. Petley, J. 2012. ‘The Struggle Continues: The Miners’ Campaign Video Tapes’, in I.W. Macdonald and S. Popple (eds), Digging the Seam: Popular Cultures of the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 87–97. Philo, G. 1995. ‘Audience Beliefs and the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike’, in G. Philo (ed.), Glasgow Media Group Reader, Volume 2: Industry, Economy, War and Politics, London and New York: Routledge, 37–44. Phipps, C. 2016. Forget Carter: Newcastle on Film and Television, Newcastle upon Tyne: Tyne Bridge Publishing. Plater, A. 2005. ‘The Drama of the North East’, in. R. Colls and B. Lancaster (eds), Geordies: Roots of Regionalism (2nd ed.), Newcastle upon Tyne: Northumbria University Press, 71–84. Rabiger, M. and M. Hurbis-Cherrier. 2013. Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, New York and London: Focal Press. Rees, A.L. 2011. A History of Experimental Film and Video (2nd ed.), London: BFI. Reeves, C. 2009. ‘Redressing the Balance: Making the Miners’ Campaign Tapes’, The Miners’ Campaign Tapes DVD booklet, London: BFI, 5–11. Robinson, D. 1986. ‘Credit to the Film Workshop’, The Times, 8 July, 15.

246 • Select Bibliography

Roe, A.H. 2007. ‘Spatial Contestation and the Loss of Place in Amber’s Byker’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 4(2), 307–21. Romney, J. 2015. ‘The Selfish Giant’, Sight and Sound 23(11), 89–90. Russell, D. 2004. Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Russell, P. n.d. ‘A Life Apart’, Screenonline. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/588949/index.html. Russell, P. and J.P. Taylor. 2010. Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain, London: BFI. Sargeant, A. 2005. British Cinema: A Critical and Interpretive History, London: BFI. Schubert, S. 2018. ‘Filmemacher Im Warnemünde Dock Inn: Leben und Arbeitin im Sozialismus’/‘The Filmmaker in the Warnemünde Dock Inn: Life and Work in Socialism’, Neuste Norddeutsche Nachrichten, 26 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.nnn.de/LOKALES/ROSTOCK/LEBEN-UND-ARBEITEN-IM-SO​ ZIALISMUS-ID21455882.HTM. Shail, R. (ed.). 2008. Seventies British Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, K. 2012. Mining the Meaning: Cultural Representations of the 1984–5 UK Miners’ Strike, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Smith, J. and S. Harper. 2012. British Film Culture of the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure, Stockport: Edinburgh University Press. Sorensen, C. 1989. ‘Theme Parks and Time Machines’, in P. Vergo, The New Museology, Bath: Reaktion, 60–73. Street, S. 1997. British National Cinema, London and New York: Routledge. Thomas, P. 2011. ‘The British Workshop Movement and Amber Film’, Studies in European Cinema 8(3), 195–209. United Kingdom National Commission for UNESCO. 2011. ‘2011 UK Memory of the World Register’. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.unesco.org.uk/2011-ukmemory-of-the-world-register/. Unwin, B. 1991. ‘Commercial Break for Troubled Estate’s Film of Hope’, Press Association, 18 September. Vail, J. and R.G. Hollands. 2012. ‘Cultural Work and a Transformative Arts: The Dilemmas of the Amber Collective’, Journal of Cultural Economy 5(3), 337–53. Vail, J. and R.G. Hollands. 2013. ‘Creative Democracy and the Arts: The Participatory Democracy of the Amber Collective’, Cultural Sociology 7(3), 352–67. Vail, J. and R.G. Hollands. 2012. ‘Rules for Cultural Radicals’, Antipode 45(3), 541–64. Vall, N. 2003. ‘Cultural Improvers in North-East England, 1920–1960s: “Polishing the Pitmen”’, Northern History 41(1), 163–80. Vall, N. 2011. Cultural Region: North East England 1945–2000, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Van Zoonen, L. 2005. Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Walton, J.K. 2000. The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Waterhouse, R. 1993. ‘Obituary: T Dan Smith – Fallen Hero of the North’, The Guardian, 28 July, 11. Waymark, P. 1989. ‘Homes Sweet Homes’, The Times, 27 June, 23. Wayne, M. 2001. Political Film: The Dialects of Third Cinema, London, Sterling and Virginia: Pluto Press.

Select Bibliography • 247

Webb-Ingall, E. 2017. ‘The Technologies and Practices of 1970s Community Video in the UK’, in S. Clayton and L. Mulvey (eds), Other Cinemas: Politics, Culture and Experimental Film in the 1970s, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 121–37. Whetstone, D. 2009. ‘The Face of Amber Films Brian Hogg Dies at 60’, The Journal, 24 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/news/north-eastnews/face-amber-films-brian-hogg-4472076. Whetstone, D. 2012. ‘Capturing a Change in North East Culture’, The Journal, 20 November. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from http://www.thejournal.co.uk/culture/film-tv/capturingchange-north-east-culture-4400934. Whitehead, I. 2011. ‘Tales from the Shipyard’, Tales from the Shipyard DVD booklet, 1–4. Whitney, H. 2011. ‘The Artsdesk Q&A: Lee Hall’, The Arts Desk, 2 October. Retrieved 1 August 2019 from https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/theartsdesk-qa-dramatist-lee-hall. Yarker, S.K. 2014. ‘Belonging in Byker: The Nature of Local Belonging and Attachment in Contemporary Cities’, Ph.D Thesis, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University. Young, N. 2001. ‘Forever Amber: An Interview with Ellin Hare and Murray Martin of the Amber Film Collective’, Critical Quarterly 43(4), 61–80.

Amber Filmography

Amber Filmography

All films here are Amber productions unless otherwise stated. Items indicated with DVD are available to purchase from Amber’s website: https://www. amber-online.com. Items indicated with an asterisk are currently available to stream (some free, some for a rental fee) on Amber’s website. Items indicated with M are currently available to view for free via the BFI’s London and UK regional Mediatheque digital service: see https://www.bfi.org.uk/archive-collections/ introduction-bfi-collections/bfi-mediatheques. Items indicated with BFI are available to view (either free or for a fee) via the online BFI player: see https://player.bfi.org.uk/. A note on the attribution of years to titles: these are sourced from Amber’s website and their For Ever Amber publication of 2015 as definitive reference points. These are sometimes at variance with previous catalogues and critical accounts of the group. All You Need is Dynamite (1968, 20 mins) Student film by early Amber members concerning anti-Vietnam demonstrations. Maybe (1969, 10 mins) Student film by Murray Martin and Graham Denman documenting the Shields ferry on the Tyne. On The Tyne Documentaries 2 DVD.* A Film (1969, 8 mins) Animation by Peter Roberts brought to Amber upon his joining in 1971.* Wallsend 72 (1972, 11 mins) Documentary about Swan Hunter’s brass band and juvenile jazz band (unreleased at time). On The Tyne Documentaries 2 DVD.* Jellyfish (1973, 8 mins) Surrealistic animation by Peter Roberts.* High Row (1973, 33 mins) The day in the life of a drift mine near Alston, above the South Tyne Valley. On The Tyne Documentaries 2 DVD.* Mai (1974, 30 mins) Portrait of Mai Finglass, eccentric collector and landlady of some Amber members.* Launch (1974, 10 mins) Documentary based around the launch of World Unicorn from Swan Hunter’s, Wallsend. On The Tyne Documentaries DVD, and the BFI’s Tales From the Shipyards DVD.* M

Amber Filmography • 249

Six to Midnight (1974, 25 mins) Commission from city council about a day in the life of Newcastle upon Tyne (unreleased at time). On The Tyne Documentaries 2 DVD.* Bowes Line (1975, 28 mins) Documentary about rope-hauled colliery railway between Kibblesworth Colliery and Jarrow Staiths on the river Tyne. On The Tyne Documentaries DVD.* Last Shift (1976, 17 mins) Documentary recording work at Adamsez brickworks, Swalwell. On The Tyne Documentaries DVD.* Glassworks (1977, 20 mins) Documentary about industrial glassblowing at Lemington, on the Tyne. On The Tyne Documentaries DVD.* Laurie (1978, 25 mins) Portrait of South Shields artist Laurie Wheatley as he makes a life-size sculpture of a shipyard welder.* That’s Not Me (1978, 33 mins) Documentary about the actor Tim Healy attempting a career as a stand-up comedian (unreleased). Quayside (1979, 16 mins) Portrait of Newcastle quayside area, made as part of campaign against demolition. On The Tyne Documentaries 2 DVD.* Tyne Lives (1980, 60 mins) Documentary/drama hybrid concerning various people and places along the industrial Tyne. BFI The Filleting Machine (1981, 45 mins) Adaptation of Tom Hadaway’s play about North Shields fish quay worker and family.* Keeping Time (1983, 57 mins) Experimental drama about mother-daughter relationships and a North Shields dance school, drawing from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photography.* Byker (1983, 53 mins) Celebration of working-class community in Newcastle, developed out of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s engagement and photographs. DVD.* News From Durham (1983, 12 mins) Current Affairs Unit (CAU) film exploring issues behind coalfield dispute.* Where Are We Going (1983, 35 mins) CAU film exploring issues behind coalfield dispute.* Behind the Vote (1984, 31 mins) and Beyond the Vote (1984, 22 mins) Interlinked CUA films concerning campaigning activities, produced in collaboration with Swingbridge Video.* Why Support the Miners (1984, 10 mins) CAU trigger tape.* Seacoal (1985, 83 mins) Feature-length drama about sea-coaling community on Lynemouth Beach, Northumberland. DVD.* M Can’t Beat It Alone (1985, 45 mins) CAU video exploring links between miners’ campaign, anti-nuclear and peace groups.* The Sadler Story (1985, 23 mins) CAU video about 1930s Tyneside peace campaigner.*

250 • Amber Filmography

Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool (1986, 60 mins) Documentary drama concerning George Bowes’ boxing gym.* The Box (1986, 10 mins) Animation by Judy Tomlinson about fear and inner city alienation.* The Privatisation Tapes (1986, 90 mins) Series of CAU trigger tapes made with NUPE trade unionists.* T Dan Smith: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to Utopia (1987, 85 mins) Documentary thriller made with and about the disgraced politician. DVD.* M Shields Stories (1987, 10 x 10 mins) ‘Soap’ dramas around issues affecting the Meadow Well Estate in North Shields.* From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels (1988, 57 mins) Portrait of Rostock industries, part of exchange project with East German documentary studio DEFA. DVD.* In Fading Light (1989, 103 mins) Feature drama concerning the North Shields fishing industry. DVD.* M Dream On (1991, 115 mins) Feature drama about women’s lives on North Shields Meadow Well Estate.* BFI The Writing in the Sand (1991, 45 mins) Photofilm mostly constructed from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographs of north-east beaches. DVD.* Letters to Katja (1994, 57 mins, Amber/Studio Neitoperho, Finland) Poetic documentary following Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s return to Finland.* It’s the Pits (1995, 32 mins) Video documentary about young people in East Durham, made with youth workers. Eden Valley (1995, 95 mins) Feature drama about an estranged father-son relationship, set in Durham’s harness racing community. DVD.* The Scar (1997, 114 mins) Feature drama about lives of women who had been active in miners’ strike and now dealing with domestic and community fallout of pit closure. DVD.* M Like Father (2001, 95 mins) Feature drama exploring men’s lives in East Durham after pit closure. DVD.* M We Did It Together (2003, 32 mins) Video for schools about teenage parenthood made for peer education project Teentalk. Shooting Magpies (2005, 80 mins) Feature drama about the impact of heroin and unemployment on former coalfield communities in East Durham. DVD.* The Bamboozler (2007, 47 mins) Documentary about an inspirational percussionist and his collection of instruments. DVD.* The Pursuit of Happiness (2008, 90 mins) Documentary tribute to Murray Martin, developed out of project about ‘horsey’ family in Durham. DVD.* Mouth of the Tyne (2009, 135 mins) New cut of the interviews undertaken with T Dan Smith and others in the 1980s that developed into the T Dan Smith film. Today I’m with You (2010, 54 mins) Photofilm following Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s re-engagement with Byker, produced in tandem with Byker Revisited exhibition and book. DVD.*

Amber Filmography • 251

We Are All Survivors (2011, 49 mins) Documentary about a community music ensemble involving asylum seekers and refugees in Newcastle. From Us to Me (2016, 86 mins, Amber Films/Moving Films) Feature-length documentary following up the post-reunification experiences of the Rostock participants of From Marks & Spencer. DVD.* Song for Billy (2017, 20 mins) Photofilm about the post-industrial landscape of East Durham, drawing from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s photographs. The Art of Shipbuilding (2017, 20 mins) A remembrance of the Wallsend shipyards and the communities and art produced around them.* We Are The Legionnaires (2017, 25 mins) Former members of the Rising Sun Legionnaires jazz band look back on their experiences; made through Amber’s Learning and Participation Programme.* Still Here (2018, 28 mins) A revisiting of three of Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s previous photographic projects. Of Whole Heart Cometh Hope (2019, 42 mins) Documentary about a women’s banner group presenting at the Durham Gala.

Index

Index

2nd House, 15 A Film, 34, 248 Alinksy, Saul, 31 All You Need is Dynamite, 7, 35–36, 248 Amber and authorship, 3–4, 16, 19–21, 31, 97, 122, 190, 238 and the British documentary movement, 17, 32–34, 43, 67, 100–1, 146–47 and British social realist cinema, 17, 21, 34, 66, 102–3, 127, 131, 150, 155, 162, 165, 171–74, 186, 197 campaigning activities, 2, 9, 24, 34, 35, 55–58, 60, 67–75 casting strategies, 74, 77, 87, 104, 128, 180, 188–91, 195–97, 203n28, 204n31, 230 ‘coalfield trilogy’, 4, 123, 170, 180, 207, 231 (see also Like Father, The Scar, Shooting Magpies) on cultural regeneration, 17, 55, 172–73, 182, 186–88, 190, 192, 196 on deindustrialization, 3, 10, 76, 131, 137, 179, 186–87, 192 engagement with East Durham coalfield communities, 4, 170–202, 209–13, 225–56, 236 (see also Amber, ‘coalfield trilogy’) engagement with North Shields, 10, 25, 36, 60, 66, 75, 85, 87, 101, 105, 107, 129, 134, 145–46, 148, 150–52, 154, 167n49, 170, 228 (see also Dream On, The Filleting Machine, In Fading Light, Still Here)

funding strategies, 3, 8–10, 12–14, 25, 33, 42, 58, 66, 128, 165, 170, 171, 174, 188, 192, 195, 226, 230, 232, 234n42, 235–37 and ‘horsey’ culture, 11, 48, 170, 174–76, 179–80, 200, 208, 209, 211–12 (see also Eden Valley, The Pursuit of Happiness, Shooting Magpies) and humour, 41, 43, 48–50, 53–55, 71, 74, 85, 100, 104, 108, 113, 115, 124n23, 133, 149, 155, 172, 189–91, 199, 201–2, 204n42, 201–2, 210, 216, 238 industrial documentaries, 7–8, 12, 16, 22, 31–34, 38–49, 59, 131, 141, 152, 176, 209 legacy, 235–38 and magic realism, 160 and music, 36, 37, 42–43, 50, 57, 64n81, 71–73, 85, 101, 105–6, 108, 110–11, 114–18, 120–21, 124n37, 125n66, 131, 142, 148–49, 161–62, 164, 177, 182–87, 189–90, 192, 198, 203n23, 203n24, 204n41, 207–9, 211, 217–18, 220, 224–25, 227, 229–31, 233n16, 238m, 251 and nostalgia, 25, 36, 45, 68, 86–87, 100, 105, 118, 161, 164, 203n24, 228 and oppositional film culture, 21–23 photofilms, 20, 50, 207, 223–39 (see also The Art of Shipbuilding, Byker, Keeping Time, Song for Billy, The Writing in the Sand, Still Here) portrait documentaries, 5, 8, 16, 32, 49–59, 75–88, 207–13

254 • Index

Amber (cont.) relationship with communities, 23–26 and regionalism, 13, 16–19, 22, 25, 173–74 retrospective turn, 5, 201–2, 206 and the salvage paradigm, 3, 8, 31, 33–34, 59, 209 Anderson, Benedict, 18, 114 Anderson, Lindsay, 2, 35, 63n38 Another Country, 137 Anstey, Edgar, 32–33, 61n13 Armstrong, Joe, 187–89, 192, 201, 204n41 Armstrong, Keith, 25, 223 Art of Shipbuilding, The, 52, 207, 223–25, 234n42, 251 Arthur, Bruce, 207–9, 233n16 Bamboozler, The, 11, 207–9, 233n16, 250 Barnard, Clio, 174 BBC, 10, 14–15, 80, 84, 96, 99, 121, 128–29, 230 Beatles, The, 35–36, 121 Behind the Vote, 70, 72, 249 Benn, Tony, 70, 181, 199, 203n22 Beyond the Vote, 15, 72–73, 78, 249 ‘Between the Mud and the Farthest Star’, 174, 218, 229–32, 236 Bhaji on the Beach, 114 Billy Elliot, 131, 172–73, 193–94, 240n42 Blair, Tony, 173 Bold and the Beautiful, The, 120 Bowes Line, 8, 15, 22, 44–46, 53, 249 Bowes, George, 75–77 Box, The, 70, 250 Bridgewood, John, 223–24 British Film Institute, 9, 16, 225, 230 Building Sights, 99 Burns, Peter, 223–24 Burns, Wilf, 86–87, 102, 159 Byker, 55, 228. See also ‘Between the Mud and the Farthest Star’, Byker (book), Byker (film), Byker Revisited Byker (book), 8, 11, 58, 66, 86, 100–101, 215, 217, 228

Byker (film), 3, 8, 10, 12, 15, 23, 28n25, 37, 53, 56–57, 61, 73, 75, 81, 85–87, 98–107, 112, 114–15, 117, 120–22, 145, 152, 214, 217, 249 Byker Revisited, 214, 218, 230 Caller Herrin, 147 Campbell, Bea, 99, 163 Can’t Beat It Alone, 15, 34, 68, 72–73, 85, 125n51, 203n21 Cedarwood Project, 154, 158, 168n68 Channel Four, 9–10, 14–15, 22–23, 27n9, 29n68, 32, 59–60, 61n9, 66–67, 71–72, 83, 93n24, 106, 127–28, 133, 136, 165, 171, 213, 230, 234n40 Citizen Kane, 87 CND, 73 Coal Coast (exhibition), 194, 225–27 Coalfield Stories, 170, 195–96, 226 Collingwood, R.G., 23–24, 26, 38, 54, 213, 217 Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, The, 154 Coulson family, 82, 200, 209–13. See also The Pursuit of Happiness County Durham, 4, 170–202, 209–13, 225–56, 236. See also Amber, ‘Coalfield Trilogy’ Critchlow, Mik, 136–37 Crossings Band, The, 230–31 Current Affairs Unit, 4, 10, 15, 61, 67–75, 91–92, 134, 145, 198, 203n21, 203n22 Davitt, Jack, 52, 223–24, 233n22, 233n23 DEFA, 10, 67, 88, 218–19 Denman, Graham, 8, 36 Dialectics of Liberation conference, 35 Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool, 10, 15–16, 67–68, 70, 75–79, 91, 129, 250 Drainville, Elaine, 68, 209 Dream On, 10, 15, 18, 25, 28n25, 75, 127–28, 154–65, 169n87, 184, 199–200, 231, 250 Drifters, 146 Durham Gala, 72, 181, 236, 251

Index • 255

Easington, 73, 180, 193, 204n42, 234n28 Easy Rider, 179, 203n19 Eden Valley, 4, 10, 15, 20, 121, 137, 142, 165, 170–71, 174–80, 183, 187, 200–2, 203n18, 203n19, 212–13, 250 Eisenstein, Sergei, 146 Eleventh Hour, 10, 15, 32, 90, 93n24 Elgar, Edward, 116, 131 Ends and Means, 165 Fathers, 195 Feeney, George, 79 Filleting Machine, The, 10, 15, 28n25, 60, 125n59, 125n66, 127–35, 140–41, 153, 156, 163, 166n6, 249 Finglass, Mai, 13, 49–52, 64n67, 153, 248. See also Mai Finland, 55, 96, 115–22, 250 ‘Finlandia’, 120 ‘Finn on Tyneside, A’, 96–97, 121 ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, 149, 168n54 Fitzgerald, Kitty, 74, 154 Flaherty, Robert, 32, 34, 101, 140, 146–47 Flannery, Peter, 80–81, 84, 128 Ford, John, 43 Forsyth, Jimmy, 86 Fountain, Alan, 213 From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels, 10, 15, 88–91, 218, 220, 250–51 From Marx and Engels to Marks & Spencer, 90 From Out a Darker Sea, 226, 234n29 From Us to Me, 92, 180, 207, 211, 213–14, 218–23, 233n17, 234n42, 251 Full House, 128 Full Monty, The, 131, 162, 171–72, 186 Gallivant, 114 Glasgow Media Group, 70 Glassworks, 8, 27n23, 48–49, 53, 249 GPO Film Unit, 1, 32, 147. See also Grierson, John Grassick, Richard, 68–69, 71, 73, 170, 218, 221 Greenaway, Peter, 154, 191 Grierson, John, 32–33, 43, 67, 100, 146–47 Grigsby, Michael, 146

Hadaway, Tom, 66, 74, 76–77, 127–32, 139, 145, 147, 153, 165n5 Hanna, Sam, 44 Happy Hunting Ground, The, 129 Hare, Ellin, 91, 97, 154, 190, 194, 199, 204n42, 210–12, 218, 221–22, 235, 237 Hartlepool, 66, 75–79, 94n65, 225. See also Boxing for Hartlepool Healy, Tim, 49–50, 53–55, 249 Hedges, Nick, 66 High Row, 8, 15, 32, 38, 42–47, 188, 248 Hogg, Brian, 74, 93n26, 116, 128–29, 148, 155, 175, 184, 190, 195, 200, 213 ‘Holiday Memory, A’, 112, 114–15, 125n51 Howells, Kim, 72 In Fading Light, 5, 10, 11, 15, 20, 25, 28n25, 34, 61, 66, 116, 127–30, 133, 143, 145–56, 163, 165, 200, 250 In Flagrante, 136–37 Independent Filmmakers’ Association, 9, 21 Industrial archaeology, 34, 44, 63n56 Industrial Britain, 32, 43 It Takes a Stranger, 96. See also ‘A Finn on Tyneside’ It’s the Pits, 10, 195, 250 ‘I Will Survive’, 161, 169n79, 231 Jedrzejczyk, Isabella, 56, 66 Jellyfish, 12, 15, 34, 116, 248 Jennings, Humphrey, 33, 41–42, 106 Johnson, Sammy, 77, 93n26, 129, 143, 148 Junge, Winfried and Barbara, 88–90, 218–19, 221 Keeping Time, 10, 15–16, 61, 97–98, 106–112, 156, 190, 199, 201, 228, 249 Kes, 43, 174, 178 Killen, Louis, 37, 62n36 Killip, Chris, 136–38, 143 Konttinen, Sirkka-Liisa, 1, 4, 8, 10–12, 20–21, 24, 37–39, 47, 50, 52, 55–56, 58, 67, 86, 96–123, 124n23, 125n56, 194, 204n40, 211–18, 224–30, 235–38, 249–51

256 • Index

Labour party, 68–70, 72, 79, 81, 88, 94n42, 171, 218–19 Laidler family, 137–38, 140, 143, 175–79, 187, 212 Last Resort, 114, 173 Last Resort, The (book), 113 Last Shift, 8, 27n23, 32, 46–48, 148, 249 Launch, 8, 15–16, 38–42, 96, 199, 212, 223–25, 248 Laurie, 8, 15, 32, 49, 52–54, 180, 208, 249 Letters to Katja, 10, 21, 97, 116–22, 250 Like Father, 10, 15, 21, 64n77, 170–73, 180, 186–95, 198, 201–2, 203n28, 204n41, 223, 250 Linsley, Stafford, 34, 44–8 Lion, 40 Live Theatre, 13, 49, 128–29, 139, 165n1 Loach, Ken, 20, 43, 150, 171–74, 178, 190–91, 197, 231 Low Water, 135–36 Lynemouth, 66, 135–37, 142, 144–45, 249. See also Seacoal Mackinnon, Stuart, 165 Mai, 8, 32, 49–52, 54, 64n66, 153, 183, 248 Man of Aran, 34, 146 Mapplebeck, John, 25, 33 Martin, Murray, 2, 4, 7–9, 11, 13–14, 17, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 31–38, 40–41, 43, 45–46, 49–58, 75–76, 81–83, 87–91, 128, 132, 134, 136–41, 143, 145, 147, 150, 152, 171, 174–75, 178, 200, 206–13, 230 McCarthy, Pat, 20, 68 Meadow Well estate, 10, 129, 154–55, 158, 162–63, 169n87, 250. See also Dream On, The Filleting Machine, The Ridges estate Meadows, Shane, 76, 171, 231 Miners’ Campaign Tapes, 71–72 Miners’ Hymns, The, 225 Miners’ strike (1984–85), 10, 35, 68, 71, 75, 88, 138, 143, 173, 180–81, 183, 191, 204n42, 236, 250. See also The Scar

Mitchell and Kenyon filmmakers, 1, 146, 167n48 Morris, Errol, 84 Morrison, Bill, 225 Mouth of the Tyne, 12, 69, 250 Murphy, Brendan, 207–9, 233n16 Murray, Jim, 60 ‘My Finnish Routes’, 117 National Coal Board, 42–43, 71–72, 138, 141, 144 National Lottery fund, 12, 170, 195 National Union of Mineworkers, 69, 71 New Clarendon pub, 75, 86–87, 158–59, 200 Newcastle upon Tyne, 7–8, 10, 15, 26n4, 32, 35, 49–50, 55–58, 66, 73, 76, 79–86, 88, 96, 98, 100, 102, 128, 170, 180, 206, 214, 218, 229–30, 232, 234n33, 235, 249, 251. See also ‘Between the Mud and the Farthest Star’, Byker, Quayside, Six to Midnight, T Dan Smith, Today I’m with You News From Durham, 69, 71–72, 249 ‘North Country Maid, The’, 185, 203n24 North Sea, 147 North Sea Fisheries, North Shields, 146, 167n49 Northern Arts, 8, 14, 42, 96 Northern Rock Foundation, 11, 14, 195, 232 Northey, Eric, 42 O Dreamland, 35 Of Whole Heart Cometh Hope, 236, 251 Our Friends in the North, 80–81 Pajama Game, The, 182, 203n23 Parr, Martin, 113, 125n55 People to People, 10, 15 Pigeon Man, The, 128 Platform Films, 71 Poulson affair, 59, 80. See also T Dan Smith and T Dan Smith Powell, Lorna, 8, 20, 154 Principles of Art, 23 Privatisation Tapes, The, 70, 74, 250

Index • 257

Pursuit of Happiness, The, 11–13, 15, 20, 24–25, 50, 52, 82, 174, 179, 207, 208–13, 250 Quayside, 9, 36, 55–59, 64n81, 249 Rae, Bruce, 223–24, 233n21 Raging Bull, 79 Red Ladder, 81 Reeves, Chris, 71 Regent Street Polytechnic, 7, 36, 50, 62n31 Ridges estate, 129–30, 132–33. See also Meadow Well estate Rigby, Graeme, 19, 61n13, 64n66, 168n55, 185, 195–97, 226, 232, 235–37 Rita, Sue and Bob Too, 158 River Project, 8, 23, 49, 106 Roberts, Peter, 4, 8, 12, 20, 33–34, 38, 40, 49, 56, 58, 65n84, 91, 97, 112, 116–17, 122, 185, 209, 218, 223, 225, 235, 237, 248 Robson, Tom Scott, 135–36 ‘Rosie and Rocker Returning Home’, 137 Ross, Willie, 191 Rostock, 10–11, 88–92, 207, 214, 218–223, 250–51. See also From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels, From Us to Me Rules for Radicals, 31 Sadler Story, The, 69, 81, 249 Sadler, Jack, 69 Sander, Adrian, 208–9 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 43, 103, 135 Scar, The, 10, 15, 20–21, 68–69, 170–72, 180–87, 198–202, 203n21, 223, 250 Sea Pictures, 131, 125n66 Seacoal (Amber film), 10, 13, 15, 20, 66, 81, 85, 123, 127–29, 135–45 Seacoal (Killip book), 137 Searchers, The, 43 Selfish Giant, The, 174 Shields Stories, 28n25, 74–75, 250 Shipyard, 40 Shooting Magpies, 5, 11, 15, 54, 78, 156, 170–71, 173–74, 190, 194–202, 207, 250

Sibelius, Jean, 120 Side Gallery, 2, 9, 13, 55, 136, 223, 226, 233n21, 234n25, 234n33 Skinner, Dennis, 83 Smith, Graham, 8, 56, 66, 137 Smith, T Dan, 58–59, 69, 75–76, 79–87. See also T Dan Smith So Percussion, 226, 234n29 Song for Billy, 12, 20, 34, 97–98, 116, 204n45, 207, 223, 225–27, 234n42, 251 Spare Time, 41–42 Step by Step, 107, 228 Still Here, 108, 180, 207, 211, 223, 227–29, 234n33, 235, 251 Stormy Monday, 19, 42, 84 Stubbs, Ray, 76–77, 85, 87, 93n26, 135, 139, 155, 169n77, 210 Styles, Amber, 60, 74, 87, 93n26, 107, 129, 135, 139, 148, 154–55, 177, 180, 190 Swingbridge Video, 16, 70, 249 T Dan Smith, 10, 12, 15, 23, 49, 54, 67, 69, 70, 75–6, 79–87, 91, 201 Tebbit, Norman, 143, 167n38 Thatcher, Margaret, 13, 68, 77, 81, 88, 113, 136–37, 154, 168n68, 171, 184, 186 Thin Blue Line, The, 84 Third Cinema, 18–19 Thomas, Dylan, 112, 114 Today I’m with You, 11, 15, 97–98, 105, 121, 174, 207, 213–18, 230, 233n16, 250 Tomlinson, Judith, 70 Trade Films, 16, 32, 69, 71, 165 Trafford, Steve, 74, 81–83, 87 Trevelyan, Phillip, 33 Twenty Four Seven, 76 Tyne Lives, 36, 59–61, 85, 116, 125n59, 133, 152, 166n6, 249 Vas, Robert, 32 Vertov, Dziga, 101 Wallsend, 8, 38, 42, 52, 79, 106, 223–24, 248, 251. See also The Art of Shipbuilding, Launch, Wallsend 72

258 • Index

Wallsend 72, 8, 32, 38, 41–42, 248 Waterboys, The, 148–49, 168n54 We Are All Survivors, 218, 230–31, 251 We Are The Legionnaires, 63n49, 251 We Did It Together, 195, 250 Welsh, Freddie, 226, 234n28 Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, 19 Wheatley, Laurie, 49, 51–53, 64n73, 208, 249. See also Laurie When the Boat Comes In, 18, 129 When the Dog Bites, 165

Where Are We Going, 68–69, 249 Why Support the Miners, 68, 70, 72, 249 Wisby, Sara, 229 Woolcock, Penny, 165, 225 Workshop movement, 2, 9–10, 13–17, 19, 21, 24, 32, 67, 70–72, 75, 97, 154, 165, 170–71 World Unicorn, 39–40, 248 Writing in the Sand, The (book), 125n67 Writing in the Sand, The (film), 10, 12, 22, 28n25, 34, 56, 97, 112–16, 250