Experimental film and the subject/ive at the London Film-makers’ Co-op:
A series of conversations with women filmmakers by Nina Danino

Part 5 (of 6)

 

A camera of one’s own: Dramaturgy, Super 8, expressionism, chronicles of the London Film-makers’ Co-op

 

Anna Thew in conversation with Nina Danino (2020/25)

 

Still, Anna Thew filming in Poems and Constructions II – L’Isle sur Serein (2008).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

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Shaped from an online conversation and subsequent emails between the artists during and after the first COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown in the UK, this text captures an extended and ongoing conversation between Nina Danino and Anna Thew, who have known each other since the 1980s, when they were both members of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative, where Anna Thew was Distribution Organiser (1980–1982). They recorded this discussion on 10 May 2020 and later revisited their transcript in 2023/2024/2025.

 

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Anna Thew has worked collaboratively with friends, fellow artists and filmmakers on her films from the time she was in her final year at Chelsea School of Art in 1978. She likens her practice to belonging to a theatrical troupe. In her authored films there are strong group and collaborative dynamic production methods, where participants take up roles and parts in the films. There is a strong performative and live aspect, which is not scripted but invited through mise-en-scène, staging, lighting and camerawork.

Anna Thew’s films often are strongly referential of other experimental films. They follow her erudition in Italian Literature, Renaissance Art History and film knowledge, with a chronicler’s focus on detail and mapping artists around the London Musicians’ Collective and the London Film-maker’s Co-op in the 1980s. Anna Thew operates the camera and is the maker of her films but she crosses roles, also becoming a performer and member embedded in the group by appearing in her films. There is a strong aspect of being in front of, and looking through the camera, framing events and scenes, with the camera as the impetus and centre of this theatrical environment. Being a subject in the film slips into being an actor through adopting parts and roles, or being herself as a filmmaker. Roles are always interchangeable, performative.

In her works, the camera is frequently hand-held, handled and a central eye. In the context of this wider interview series examining Nina Danino’s conception of the ‘intense subject’ in filmmaking, it was not easy to find an individual subjectivity in Anna Thew’s collective movability, although the collective can and does form a body in her works. There is strong aspect of self-inscription. However, a subjective thread is discernible. In this interview discussion, the piano emerges as an instrument of solo moments of nostalgia through both Anna Thew’s playing, or playing by other pianists. Her love of piano and music emerges as a strong presence of a singular introspective activity: the path also followed by Nina Danino and Anna Thew as their discussion progresses.

Extract from an email sent by Anna Thew to Nina Danino (28 March 2020) – There's perhaps an urgency for us to get our archival act together, “Before we too into the dust descend” and the ether may not be the best vehicle – a solid tangible tablet, a desirable tangible heavy book – as if it’s as bad as the Black Death of 1348 that reduced the population of Europe by over two thirds, I doubt that anyone is going to be trawling through a little known group of experimental women film-makers' mountains of 6TB drives – not even on LTO yet – with only a 3 year guarantee – if we snuff it from the virus…

 

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This conversation is one of a series of six discussions undertaken by the filmmaker Nina Danino in 2020. They were revisited and edited in 2024/2025 when they were published online.

Please note that the opinions and information published here are those of the speakers/authors and not of LUX or the wider research team and institutions involved with their funding, transcription and publication.

Published online by LUX, London (2025)

Editing and research: Claire M. Holdsworth (2020/2025)

 

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Conversation

Edited transcript of conversation recorded remotely, 10 May 2020 (London)

Later compiled/edited via email (2020/23/25)

 

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Nina Danino:

These conversations are on the theme of inscription and the subjective rather than going into interpretations of individual works, but to take some themes in the work and the practice to gain an insight into how and where the inscriptive, or inscription might be in experimental films. Could we talk about the singing in Eros Erosion (1990). Is it you singing at the end, over the shots of the Alps from a plane?

 

Anna Thew:

It’s a friend, American beat poet, Carlyle Reedy singing My Funny Valentine. I secretly recorded her playing my piano after her wild young lover, musician, Pete Smith tragically died in a fall leaping from roof top to roof top. It’s Carlyle’s voice that you hear over the ropes and boats in Naples Port describing how she came to the mortuary and found the dead body of her lover, “and I saw the dead body and I knew it was dead”. Her voice is filled with grief. Then that Rogers and Hart song is picked up at the end of the film over the Alps.

 

Nina Danino:

It is haunting. There is piano music also over the scenes in Naples. Is that you playing?

 

Anna Thew:

I did play a little Domenico Scarlatti sonatina (Longo No.104, K.159, Allegro), over the Naples Street scene. So you play and make a mistake and then you can cut (the mistake) and join the 16mm magnetic sound. Domenico Scarlatti and his father, Alessandro Scarlatti were from Naples. So, I played this little quick Neapolitan bit. Then I play a drift of Benjamin Britten over the moors. Otherwise, what’s important in Eros Erosion, is the use of resonant abstract piano sound, which I made inside my Dad’s old Steinway upright piano. I collaged sections. Some are slowed, so you hear ‘Vroom…’. Then sometimes you hear a bright tiny tinkly sound. I actually layered them across one another, so you get a recurrence of that prepared piano sound throughout the film.

 

Nina Danino:

The piano provides the soundtrack to many of your films, you often talk about your music and what you are practising and playing on the piano.

 

Anna Thew:

The piano, my Father’s piano, has its own story that I was beginning to map on film in 2010/11. It was really going to be an installation called Stolen Time, from when I had the action restored. In music, the expression tempo rubato means stolen time… like gathering something rather rapidly. It’s not accelerando. You’re stealing time. You’re shrinking time. It’s a great phrase. I’ll send you the quadraphonic soundtrack, which was played from four speakers with a rough cut double screen at Contact Festival, Apiary Studios, London (2016). My Father was a miner’s son from Castleford and everybody in mining communities up North, almost every household had a piano, a violin (fiddle), or a flute. My Father played and sang as many working class families did in the 1930s and 1940s before television killed it all off. When he was posted to India during World War II, my Mother went out – she didn’t know anything about pianos – and bought this rather wonderful Steinway vertegrand (upright-grand) from a lady pianist in Sheffield. It’s overstrung. It’s got long strings and has a really resonant tone… a fantastic tone in the bass. When my Father could no longer play, he let me have the piano. We had it restored in the Steinway Marylebone (Lane) workshop in 2010/11 and Christopher Hughes and I documented the process over 3 months, on film and Hi-band. Dad’s piano’s been part of my life. It was always in the living room, and it has a wonderful tone. It’s a bit like the Pied Piper of Hamlin that draws you in… My Father and Mother both sang. My Father had a beautiful bass voice and my Mother was a contralto. People would get together round the piano and sing. I started piano lessons when I was very tiny. I hated the teacher so I would lock myself in the outdoor loo in this School House in Woodlesford near Leeds and kick and scream and refuse to go. Then he stopped my lessons.

 

Nina Danino:

You said you had been playing Duke Ellington’s Solitude (1934). How much is playing a part of your life as well as its role in the films.

 

Anna Thew:

I actually never stopped playing the piano. I taught myself to play from learning to sight read. It’s always been at the centre of my life, but more recently when I started having lessons, it actually became even more critical. But in all the films there is a little bit of piano music and piano sound.

 

Nina Danino:

In Hilda was a Goodlooker there is a scene with you as a cabaret singer. This is intercut with images of Sheffield, workshops and steel works. Can you talk about your role as a cabaret singer in the film.

 

Anna Thew:

Now in Hilda, I’m just doing what we used to do. I mean, at Christmas my sister and I used to dress up and put balloons down our dresses like Hinge and Bracket and we’d sing, “Who is Silvia, What is She?” (Schubert, An Silvia, 1826). So I dressed up for Hilda. It was important because Hilda was about family and home and my mother mentions Harry, my mother’s half-brother, “an’ ‘e used to croon at the piano” and “’is little dog Floss used to croon along with ‘im”. In Hilda, I play and sing, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (Cole Porter, 1936), meaning I’ve got Sheffield under my skin.

 

Nina Danino:

The wide shot of the cabaret singer is intercut with close up shots of you scratching your arm or your leg which disrupt the performance and you and the pianist, who is Martin Lugg, stop to have a cup of tea, which is comical.

 

Anna Thew:

I was spoofing. I’m scratching my arm because I’ve got Sheffield under my skin and I’m scratching my leg. So it’s just a spoof, but I’m not singing how you’d normally hear it sung.

 

Nina Danino:

How would you hear it?

 

Anna Thew:

I’m a cabaret singer in that film and the type of voice I’m using, is because I have a rough contralto voice. At the time I was a smoker and I used to be able to do and still can do a very effective Marlene Dietrich impersonation. My sister and I used to compete about how we’d do a turn from Der Blaue Engel (1930), “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuâ auf Liebe eingestellt…” (Falling in Love Again).

 

Nina Danino:

It strongly makes me think of Germany and Berlin in the 1930s?

 

Anna Thew:

I just did what we used to do at home. Martin’s Father was a pianist and organist, so Martin’s trying to look like his Dad. He’s got these spectacles. We were learning. We weren’t very good at lighting, so it looks as if the shadow of the microphone is sticking out of the top of his head [laughter].

 

Nina Danino:

The sound drops out in places and there are a series of halting phrases. The singer is also at points detached from her own voice.

 

Anna Thew:

Well, the films play with synchronisation. I hardly ever use sound synch in my films and in that scene in Hilda, there’s no-one behind the camera. We’re in the old London Musicians’ Collective. We stuck the Arri BL on the tripod. We raced in front and Martin’s pretending to play the piano. I rush over, turn the camera on, then rush and turn the sound recorder to ‘PLAY’. It was a Nagra III, not a Nagra IV with crystal synch, so the playback was out of synch. Fortunately, we’d filmed ourselves having a cup of tea and scratching my leg, just in time.

 

Nina Danino:

Were you thinking of a method of filming which is Brechtian perhaps and the results are disrupted?

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, well the use of the piano and the way in which you introduce those pieces, because you’re having to assemble them and you’re not doing a whole performance, you’re using a fragment and you drop it in and you take it back out again. I think with Hilda, what one was doing, was using and playing with all the things you like to have. It was an intentionally deconstructed narrative.

 

Nina Danino:

Cling Film (1993), you perform the role of Rose Hobart in the black and white silent film East of Borneo (1931), which is the found footage which Joseph Cornell used in his blue tinted film, Rose Hobart (1936). The tint of the film and the mannerisms of the actress are so funny. Did you want this to be a reference to early studio film within an avant-garde film within an experimental film and so on?

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, that’s the reference to Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) which was the earliest found footage collage film. Throughout Cling Film there are references to avant-garde film. It’s a little game that you can play. Rose Hobart is one of my favourite films. I couldn’t afford the copyright from Anthology Archives N.Y. My performance is not really like Rose Hobart, more like Pearl White. The soundtrack is Holiday in Brazil (1957). That’s the sound track that Joseph Cornell played with Rose Hobart. It was a Latin tune that was in vogue at the time. Joseph Cornell never put it on the film. The reel-to-reel sound was always played separately from the film. So I appear as Rose Hobart, who’s a voyeuse and I’m re-acting with alarm to the action (sex scenes, crocodiles and volcanoes). Holiday in Brazil was out of copyright. I was able to purchase the rights for very little, but we’d transferred it both forwards and in reverse and that is collaged in. There’s a snatch of Bela Bartòk over the Nosferatu clip and some staggered chords dropped in from Gershwin’s The Man I Love, but infringement and playing with copyright is a game throughout Cling Film (1993).

 

Nina Danino:

More direct is the voice over of your mother in the soundtrack of Hilda was a Goodlooker where she is talking about her memories of her family.

 

Anna Thew:

My Mother would have loved to have been in the theatre and she was very good at storytelling. She was quite theatrical. She used to read poetry. Had she not been from a lowly, humble background, she probably would have been like us and she would have gone into drama. My Mother tells the story of how she dresses up in an orange coat with this (rabbit) fur collar and walks up the marble staircase like Lady Muck and she tells of her brother Harry who was dark and handsome, how she was posing as his girlfriend going to the Scala Cinema in Sheffield, which was all marble. We filmed this scene in the Cambridge Theatre on Cambridge Circus, where they were showing Les Misérables. I used the marble staircase there. We only had an hour to light it. So I waltz up the marble staircase “like Lady Muck” and I play my Mother (lighting/camera Ian Owles, Marek Budzynski).

 

Nina Danino:

You said in our e-mail exchanges prior to this conversation that the reason you made the film was because, “My Mother had always wanted to be near to the theatre […]. Now that she was retired I would help realise her dream to be near to the theatre.”

 

Anna Thew:

My mother died in 1983 during the making of the film. I play my Mother play-acting, my Mother’s dream of being a diva, of being an actress, of being in the movies.

 

Nina Danino:

Were you always going to play the part of your Mother as a young woman? There is also Hermine (Demoriane), who plays your mother’s half-sister Hilda. Hermine was herself a chanteuse in the London performance art scene which in turn mirrors you as a singer. In these female roles the real women and characters play each other.

 

Anna Thew:

No, I’d intended my Mother to re-direct scenes that I’d imagined wrongly. There’s also singing of Kurt Weill and other variety songs. At Chelsea, I was involved in this theatre group and I wrote some song music for the staging of Brecht’s The Messingkauf Dialogues, after Hans Eisler’s “Ich hab’ mein’ Sohn die Stiefeln und das braune Hemd geschenkt” [I sent my son the boots and the brown shirt].

 

Nina Danino:

Kurt Weill, you use Brechtian alienation techniques in Lost for Words (1980) and in the singing and assemblage in Hilda was a Goodlooker (1986), as we discussed, where you perform Cole Porter’s song in the style of voice of Dietrich – one of her most famous roles – the avant-garde theory of montage is invented in this period but it is also a shadowy period of history.

 

Anna Thew:

I studied German language and literature, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Heinrich von Kleist, Rainer Maria Rilke, Goethe naturally and Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder [Mother Courage and her Children] (1939) and Erwin Piscator.

 

Nina Danino:

You were studying Painting at Chelsea between 1974 and 78 but said you were involved with a theatre group. Was it part of the course? How did this influence your films?

 

Anna Thew:

There was a Brechtian theatre workshop lead by Alexei Sayle (ex Chelsea) and my old thesis tutor, Yehuda Safran. Actually the tutors were so into it that we had about four tutors and four or five students and we staged these pieces (by Bertolt Brecht and Garcia Lorca). I wrote the Hans Eisler sound-alikey tunes with impossible intervals to some of the Brecht poems. So film for me, was an opportunity to involve all those aspects. The first film that really inspired me to pick up a camera was Anne Rees-Mogg’s Real Time (1974).

 

Nina Danino:

You have called the teacher and film-maker Anne Rees-Mogg, the Great Aunt of your film family, who changed your life with her film Real Time.

 

Anna Thew:

In Real Time, she uses words. She uses accounts. She uses diary, the family and she uses direct experience. She also uses songs that she likes, like, “I would sit there in the gloom of my tiny little room, if I had a talking picture of you-ooo, you-oooo!”, as she drives Westwards and home and it’s so, so poignant. It’s like OK, you can do this. You don’t have to just do painting and because just painting was getting to be a problem… I didn’t realise that I quite liked words as well, you see, because I was steeped in literature. And then I started to do word paintings. My first word paintings, the really big diptychs (2.4m x 1.2m) were layered conversations about having Dad’s piano, Wordpaintings (1982).

 

Nina Danino:

In Eros Erosion (1990), as we said earlier, ends with the shot over the Alps and it is set in the back streets of Rome and Naples. Italy and Italian literature permeate many of your films. Eros Erosion re-tells Lisabetta’s story from Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1350–52). Italian is heard recited in quotes of poems, readings and words, in text and on the soundtrack.

 

Anna Thew:

I’ve always been interested in words. I talk all the time. I’m a chatterbox so there’s no way that I’m not going to be interested in words [laughs]. I always liked poetry and song. I wanted to be a painter all my life. I went into languages, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn’t do Art A Level at the school I ended up at, Don Valley High, where they were trying to up their Uni figures. I got into Manchester to do French and German BA Hons. I noticed that if I studied BA Hons Italian Studies, I could do Art History as well as literature. I started studying Italian in earnest and got onto the Italian Studies course.

 

Philipe Barbut as Lorenzo and Toni Dominici as the brother of Lisabetta in Anna Thew, Eros Erosion (1990).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Nina Danino:

How did you go to a Fine Art course?

 

Anna Thew:

Through Alastair Smith at the National Gallery and my old Professor Giovanni Aquilecchia at Bedford College, London. Alastair was my Italian Art History lecturer at Manchester. He later became director of Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. I was applying to the Courtauld Institute to study MA in Quattrocento (1400-1500) Italian Renaissance Art and both of them, who were going to give me a reference, said the same thing,“Why don’t you just do what you’ve always wanted to do and apply to do painting?” So, I did. I went to Chelsea and I did Foundation and then FA Painting. There were these wonderful opportunities, meeting people like Anne Rees-M on the very first day, when rather than doing any painting, we were sent out with a stills camera, a roll of Agfa Dia-Direct film and a tape recorder to document our first day at Art School. We did a slide-tape piece, which we then re-filmed on Super 8. Slide-tape and Super 8 were introduced very early on, as were film and photography. These were new things to me and there, they were offered on a plate in the Foundation year at Chelsea. When I was painting, mostly abstract very early on, I was doing collage and that collaging process is in the films and the ways in which I edit are the things that one learned and really loved. I was very into Dada (1916). I really liked the notion of chance procedures which are used almost entirely through my film/editing process. I might have a plan, but then there will always be an element in which you will have a kind of automatic writing, an automatic drawing, an automatic choreography/calligraphy of the camera. Then once I started to return to figuration in my large dancers’ paintings and chiaroscuro drawings in series, I began to film.

 

Nina Danino:

In our exchange of e-mails prior to this discussion, you write that “Playing can lead to a kind of self-fashioning and create a sense of community.” And that, “Often also the enlistment of friends and those willing to help plays a role in experimental film. Sometimes this becomes an important documentation and history in itself. Often those participating become themselves known in their own right, lending the activity validation.” Can you say more about the collaborative aspect of your practice which is very strong, like being a ‘family of travelling players’, the methods of the theatre are very forming and you also refer to your use of Brechtian acting techniques in your first 16mm film Lost for Words, “a parody on the urban wasteland film, where a little girl recites Karl Marx and the last man on earth to read and write is interviewed”. The mix of tutor performance artists and film-makers at Chelsea were part of an experience of collective practice that appealed to you.

 

Anna Thew:

Well, there were wonderful people that I met there like Keith Milow, who was one of my tutors, whom I’ve actually met up with recently again. He was doing subversive abstract reliefs with crosses at the time. He was quite important to me. Then someone like Ken Kiff who worked with the subconscious. It was more the tutors like David Medalla, Ron Bowen and of course, dear Anne. I quickly ditched out of the Manresa Road building, because I became friendly with Jock McFadyen on the MA down at Bagley’s Lane. The undergraduates’ studio was a huge empty studio. So he said, “Why don’t you come down to Bagley’s Lane?” So I went down there and I was doing huge abstract layered paintings. I mean, they were very big triptychs, around 18 foot across, washing the paint off with hose-pipes. They looked a bit Frank Stella like… and I loved Elsworth Kelly.

 

Nina Danino:

That gives a really good description of the art school experience of the 1970s. We were almost entirely self-taught. There was no pedagogy as such when I went to St. Martin’s. What was your experience of the studio?

 

Anna Thew:

I started making a Super 8 film of 35mm slides of men’s faces, called From Face to Face (1978). I’d started taking their pictures with b/w Agfa Dia-Direct (slide film). In a way, I was playing around with the idea that men actually really liked to have their pictures taken, to be desired, like women. I had three particularly handsome ex’s and then there was riveting David Medalla. So there was one gay person in there. I went to Paris to film my first love, Sandy (Spencer). His best friend Alain (André) was a clown who appears in the film. He takes the mickey out of the guys having their photographs taken. At one point, a friend (film-maker, Debbie Gillingham) and I were on the sound track, saying they weren’t really good enough, like a casting. In the end, I decided it was too mean and I wiped the track. Now the film is just faces of these men you love to look at, that look at you through the camera. In that film, it’s how men become objectified.

 

Stills (left to right) of Karel Zuvaç, David Medalla, Sandy Spencer and Martin Angel in Anna Thew, From Face to Face (1978).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Nina Danino:

In Laura Mulvey’s concept of ‘to be looked at-ness’ woman is coded as the object of the male gaze and it isn’t supposed to be symmetrical with a female gaze on a man. Some men in your films present themselves as ‘to be looked at’ like sailors – is it a queering of the look?

 

Anna Thew:

No, it’s not queering. It’s woman-ing. This was the female gaze. I wanted to show that men enjoyed being objectified… desired…

 

Nina Danino:

Films are all about positions. How did you start making films?

 

Anna Thew:

I started filming the opening scene of Lost for Words in 1978, when I was still at Chelsea. That was the wasteland scene. I had a lot of help from Anne Rees-M, of course. I was also very friendly with artist Jock McFadyen, who was making films. So was Richard Welsby, who was in the same year as me on the BA Hons course, and Ian Owles, then at the RCA. So there was a small group of us who made film and did painting. People were swapping from one to the other and there was a small community. Jock had us in his film The Case Continues… (1977) with Helen Chadwick and Giles Thomas. I was a cloud. Then I was in a film and my friend Monica (Molnar) was also in Jock’s Close Encounters of a Martian Missionary (1976) which was very picaresque. I don’t think he probably knew about the American avant-garde, James Broughton or Sidney Peterson, like The Pleasure Garden (1953) with Hatti Jacques, or Loony Tom (1951), or The Lead Shoes (1949), but there was certainly a very, very close link, because Jock did these paintings which were sort of quirky with subtitles. We were all very much into semiology, Roland Barthes and the meaning of the image and the play with word against image. That was very current at Chelsea in particular. Jock was hugely influential on me in the beginning.

 

Nina Danino:

What made you decide to perform in your own films? In Behind Closed Doors (1988) you are in front of the camera and also director, where you become the Christ-like figure from the Raphael painting, The Deposition (1507), where you are carried around naked like a corpse. There are quite a few people, film-makers involved as dramatis personae including Derek Jarman, Kenny Morris, Julie Osborne, Adam Elliott, Steve Farrer, Emina Kurtagic and Richard Heslop (James Mackay was camera operator and Christopher Hughes was lighting camera for that scene).

 

Still from the final ‘Deposition’ scene, Anna Thew, Behind Closed Doors (1988).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Anna Thew:

It was just an automatic thing to become involved. If you’d actually been involved in language and you played the piano and you used your voice and you performed, because I’ve always been a bit of a performer, so you do that and then you use yourself, where it is too difficult for others… to be a naked corpse being dragged over a pile of rubble.

 

Nina Danino:

Was theatre and performance also part of early expanded film experiments ‘somewhere between theatrical and performance art’?

 

Anna Thew:

Well, yes, with Anne, we went up to the Co-op. We went to see Jock’s film. I think it was Close Encounters of a Martian Missionary in which I was in jumping in and out from behind a tree and there was a chase around Battersea Park… a cupboard with its doors opening and closing so that it looked like a human being, and it was very silly. Yes, we’d go up to the Co-op with Anne in her Ford Cortina. So I had a few little sessions where I went to see other people’s films at the Co-op, when it was at the Piano Factory in Fitzroy Road, Camden. That would’ve been in 1977. It was Anne who introduced us to the Co-op. She introduced every student of hers, Chris Welsby, Richard Welsby, Renny Croft, David Pearce, Ian Owles, Jenny Okun, Guy Sherwin, Willi Keddell, Tony Potts, Nick Gordon-Smith, Mark Greaves, Mark Sheehan, me, Jock. All of those people were at Chelsea and they were all posted off up to the Co-op by Anne, who believed in the Co-op, still (from 1966). 

 

Nina Danino:

You say that before 1980, there was almost no theatrical performance at the Co-op. Can you talk about the overlaps between the LMC and LFMC? In On Leonardo (1977) you combined your performance and slide/tape projection of the Mona Lisa with “burning screens and readings from Leonardo Da Vinci’s Trattato della Pittura [Treatise on Painting]”. Did you engage with expanded screen and collaborative work with artists in other fields like music or theatre in the context of the Co-op?

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, there was David Medalla and his Artists for Democracy, Whitfield Street (squat, 1976–1979), where I did my first performance in 1976…. and where I met Tina Keane (from London Video Arts), Harriet the stripper, beat poet Carlyle Reedy, musicians and performers Anne Bean, Stephen Cripps (from the London Musicians’ Collective), dancer Atilio Lopez from the Lindsay Kemp troupe, and at the Co-op, Paul Burwell who was on the London Musicians’ Collective Exec. and was Annabel Nicholson’s ex.

 

Nina Danino:

The Co-op was based on16mm, did you use the workshop?

 

Anna Thew:

My very first film, From Face to Face, was Super 8, with sequences re-filmed from b/w slides, but my first 16mm film was Lost for Words. I filmed the first wasteland scene and Ra, my daughter, reading from Marx’s Communist Manifesto when I was at Chelsea, as I said, but then I carried on making that film at the Co-op in 1979-80. When you worked at the Co-op, you made a cup of coffee and you chatted to people, then you were stuck in your edit room with your pic synch, which wasn’t even a motorised one. It was just a winding pic synch. You got really bad eyesight after you’d finished looking at the tiniest little screen with one eye and so I edited Lost for Words there. It was when I was at the Co-op editing that I met James Mackay, who was doing the Cinema, and Mick Kidd (BIFF cartoons), doing the Distribution. They then persuaded me, along with Jock, who was in and out of the Co-op at that time too and living in our house, that “it’s about time you got a job and there’s a job going in Distribution”. So they persuaded me, these three guys, to apply for the Distribution job.

 

Nina Danino:

Can you give a window into that context of your time distributing? When in distribution were there particular initiatives that you set up? You launched the annual Distribution Preview Show in 1981 and were involved in the Summer Show in 1982. The Summer Shows were so important to artists. I showed my RCA film First Memory (1981) at the 1982 Summer Show, it made all the difference to have a cinema exhibition context for your work.

 

Anna Thew:

I started working in distribution in 1980 and that’s when I met Peter Gidal. I wrote about it in Between The Lines for the 20 years of the Co-op catalogue, LIGHT YEARS (1986). He was sitting next to me at the 1980 AGM and he put forward the motion that was voted in, that at least 50% of women should be on the Co-op Executive Committee. Yes, that was my first AGM.

 

Nina Danino:

The LFMC as a feminist structure that’s very good. There had been a split and Felicity Sparrow, Lis Rhodes and Mary Pat Leece founded Circles in 1979, but Peter Gidal was very feminist and both he and Malcolm Le Grice proposed 50% women, as you say. In another interview I have done for this series, Barbara Meter quotes Annabel Nicolson, who said the men at the Co-op were natural allies. The men founders were central in bringing the structure to 50% representation in the organisation. 

 

Anna Thew:

At that time, in Cinema, you were only there for a year. At the 1980 AGM, they voted Steve (Farrer) in for the Cinema. I was voted into Distribution and Jeanette Iljon was voted into Workshop with Nicky Hamlyn. The two workshop organisers would be there for only two years and would overlap. So each year they were voting in new organisers. I started working with Steve in 1980, but interestingly there had been an anti-feminist débacle over the Susan Stein affair the year before and almost the whole executive had resigned, like Deke (de Dusinberre the IV). It was quite interesting because Susan, who had a crush on Steve, had been at the Royal College (of Art) and she wanted to do the Workshop job, but she’d also started as a student at St. Martin’s and the men said she couldn’t hold down the workshop job and be at college at the same time. She replied that Steve had done the workshop when he was at the Royal College. Guy Sherwin did the workshop when he was at the Royal College and William Raban! “There are men that are allowed to do the workshop when they’re at college, so why can’t I? It's only a part-time job.”

 

Nina Danino:

Susan Stein recently posted (on Facebook) a portrait of herself at this time at the LFMC in front of the Debrie contact printer holding folds of film like a bouquet of flowers.

 

Anna Thew:

So, the whole thing blew up and most of the executive had resigned. So, when Steve and I started, there were only two people (film-makers) on the executive. There was a woman called Serena Rule from the Royal College, and I think Paul Botham.

 

Nina Danino:

Can I say something about her because she was friends with my friend Tony Mucklow, when we were at the Royal College. The RCA film school was factionalised into camps, feminists, Carolyn Spry, Robina Rose, the structuralist film-makers led by Peter Gidal, and the independents such as Steve Dwoskin, the political activist film-makers such as Chris Reeves, whom I had come across at St. Martin’s Painting Department and the fiction directors. I was surprised when I met Serena Rule at the Co-op (she was on the Executive) because she was in the fiction and documentary camp, like Tony Mucklow I think.

 

Anna Thew:

She was the treasurer. She was a treasure. Anyhow, at that time, all the people who were on the Co-op Executive were film-makers. As we didn’t have really a functional Executive, we didn’t have a boss. We got on like a house on fire. So, there was me, Nicky [Hamlyn], Steve [Farrer], Jeanette [Iljon] and Mick Kidd.

 

Nina Danino:

We kept the Undercut bits and pieces, galleys etc., in the Distribution office. We used to meet there on Saturday mornings, when it was unoccupied. Nicky Hamlyn who was in the Workshop, was also on the Undercut editorial collective. I joined in 1982 at the same time as Michael O’Pray and A.L. Rees.

 

Anna Thew:

Nicky would go, “Roland Barthes, the silly old fart!” He had a very sort of anal sense of humour and he used to chuckle. Nicky and Mick Kidd, who was a truly co-operative person (BIFF with Chris Garrett), he was doing t-shirts and fanzines from the start and he made Standard 8 films and he loved Kurt Kren. A lot of folklore came down to me through Mick Kidd, who was a great storyteller, and we all worked together very happily. He was a very nice guy. He was so honest.

 

Nina Danino:

Undercut published Mick Kidd (BIFF)’s lampoons, ‘Understanding Media Part Four’ and ‘Win a Fabulous Holiday’ – Undercut also had writing by and about artists.

 

Anna Thew:

I wrote about Sandra Lahire’s films for Film Waves – Art in Sight (2002) after she died in 2001. I was asked to write about Anne [Rees-Mogg] and George Saxon and Steve Farrer for the Arts Council British Film and Video Artists Directory (1995). Then I got very annoyed, because they only allowed such a short text. Then when it came to Johnny Maybury, they (David Curtis) allowed him to have three pages and everybody else had a piffling little amount. But anyhow, yes, I wrote also about David Larcher’s Eetc., (1987) and Granny’s Is (1989) for Eyeball magazine in 1998.

 

Nina Danino:

Writing was very much part of artists’ film practice. But probably out of necessity because as Sarah Pucill says, feminist film scholars were not writing about women’s experimental film. They were writing about Hollywood, and neither were art critics. The structuralist filmmakers of the seventies wrote about each other. Materialist Film has become almost the only record of the theory, through which to approach the practices. It is structuralist film-makers writing about each other. This ethos was carried forward into Undercut.

 

Anna Thew:

I was asked by Stephen Thrower, a writer and musician, now with Ossian Brown as Cyclobe, and also an authority on horror films, particularly Dario Argento and he’s a very clever guy. He’s good on theory and on almost everything. He was with Coil and appeared in Derek Jarman’s Imagining October (1984). Steve wanted me and Ron Peck to start doing a section in Eyeball [magazine] on avant-garde film. I did two things. One was ‘Notes from the Underground’. The other was, ‘A Profile: David Larcher’ (Issue No.5, 1998). In ‘Notes from the Underground’, I talk in some detail about the importance of Lis Rhodes’ abstract films Dresden Dynamo (1971) and double screen Light Music (1975) and the pulsating rhythm as bands of different widths travel into the optical sound track… the physical sexual energy that’s in those films. You know, because she was in her youth when she made those films and somehow or other, everybody’s going to respond to those films from a physical point of view.

 

Nina Danino:

The clatter of the film passing through the projector, the beams of light which the viewer can walk in front of and interrupt, casting shadows and so on. It feels very contemporary as an interactive installation also because the image and sound are abstract.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, but in some ways that’s the point. That’s what I’d call feminist.

 

Nina Danino:

Apart from editing Lost for Words, did you make other work at the Co-op workshop? 

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, Blurt and Shadow Film (1983) were processed, contact and optically printed there. Behind Closed Doors, Hilda were edited there. Scenes for Hilda, Behind Closed Doors, Eros Erosion, Cling Film, Broken Pieces for the Co-op, were filmed there. Sound transfers, cameras, rostrum, through to optical printing (1979 - 2001). I didn’t really start making films properly, until I’d left Co-op Distribution in 1982 and started teaching on the Film and Video at St. Martin’s. I was doing a lot of drawing in my time off - big influence on Steve (Farrer) because as an ‘organiser’ you worked two and a half days a week. Mick Kidd and I had a fantastic scheme where we did a week on and a week off. That meant that I spent the whole week off painting and drawing. In 1981, I won a prize at the Cleveland International Drawing Biennale and it was a rather nice amount of money for a piece of paper that only cost 7p. I got £500 and so I bought a Super 8 camera, a Bauer with a Schneider lens. It was one of the ‘top of the range’ cameras. What was actually very important, were the films that you saw and the people you came into contact with.

 

Nina Danino:

What films did you see?

 

Anna Thew:

All the films deposited in Co-op Distribution, 1980 – 1993 and beyond… Stan Brakhage’s Murder Psalm, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, Deus Ex and Love Making I and II, Chick Strand’s Waterfall, Anselmo, Kulu Se Mama, Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux and Castro Street, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, Scorpio Rising, Eaux d’Artifice, Derek Jarman’s Home Movies I and II and B2 Movie, Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses and In Quest of Meat Joy, Margaret Raspé’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Cordelia Swann’s Passion Triptych and Der Engel [The Angel], Jo Comino’s Spleen, Anne Rees-M’s In Grandfather’s Footsteps, Alle Macht der Super Acht [All Power to Super 8], Dore O’s Frozen Flashes, Manuel de Landa’s Itch Scratch Itch Cycle, Robert Breer’s Swiss Army Knife and Pigeons, Michael Maziere’s Cézanne’s Eye and The Bathers and The Red Sea, Moira Sweeney’s Imaginary I and II, Richard Heslop’s Death Comes Creeping Through the Door, Ian Kerr’s Persisting, Post Office Tower Re-Towered, Sally Potter’s Thriller, Nicky Hamlyn’s Guesswork, Paul Sharit’s Episodic Generation, T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G and Razor Blades, Kurt Kren’s Baüme im Herbst [Trees in Autumn], Tree Again, Mama und Papa and Selbstverstümmelung (Self-Mutilation), Georges Rey’s La Vache Qui Rumine  [The Cow Chewing], Chick Strand’s Kulu Se Mama, Anselmo and Waterfall, Martha Haslanger’s Circus Riders, Ron Rice’s Chumlum, Ken Jacobs’ Little Stabs at Happiness, Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour, Andy Warhol’s Kitchen, Couch, Chelsea Girls. Sydney Peterson’s The Lead Shoes, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks, George Saxon’s The Emperor’s Mother, David Larcher’s Monkey’s Birthday and Eetc., Marie Menken’s Dwightiana, Vanda Carter’s Mothfight, Peter Kubelka’s Adebar und Schwechater, Matthias Müller’s Aus der Ferne [The Memo Book], Michael Brynntrup’s Liebe, Eifersucht und Rache [Love, Jealousy and Revenge]… How many pages can you give me? We had over 2,000 titles in Distribution from 1966/7 (to 1999) and I programmed some 500 films at Chelsea from 1985 to 2006 and FLUX from 1994 and on.

 

Nina Danino:

I’m sure you have lots of stories about the Super 8 scene in London. Nights and events at B2 Gallery, Metropolitan [Wharf] and Butlers Wharf and Derek Jarman etc. You had cameo parts in some of this Super 8 scene. Super 8 were also associated with the post-punk context of the nightclubs and music videos like in the work of John Maybury. What was your experience of it? Super 8 hit strongly in the middle of the 1980s, didn’t it?

 

Anna Thew:

No, no, no, no, absolutely not. It started in earnest in the UK in 1981. Jo Comino, who was running the Co-op Cinema (1981–82), made Super 8 films herself. She made Spleen (1982) and she made a documentary feature about Super 8 (shown on Channel 4). In Art Schools from the early 1970s, Super 8 was common currency. We had Super 8 cameras and projectors at Chelsea. They had Super 8 projection at St. Martin’s.

 

Nina Danino:

As I recall, at St. Martin’s in 1976, there were no Super 8 cameras in the film unit that Malcolm Le Grice had set up with William Raban in the basement of the main building at Charing Cross Road. They were working with 16mm.

 

Anna Thew:

By 1982 (in Long Acre), that had changed. Derek Jarman was using Super 8 at the Slade and Anne was using Super 8 as diary film in 1972 (at Chelsea). So the use of Super 8 was nothing in particular. It was cheaper than using 16mm. You could have sex scenes in Super 8. You could do all sorts of naughty things because no-one in the lab sees it. It's automatically processed, so there were certain things that you could do with Super 8 that you certainly couldn’t do with 16mm. So you see some scenes with boys cuddling in John Maybury’s films and post punk chest slashing films so on and so forth. Those wouldn’t have been so easy to get through laboratories if they had been on 16mm. Super 8 had this kind of privacy for the person making it. I used Super 8 and 16mm. Anne Rees-M made a triple screen Super 8 film, Red Green Blue, which was shown in the 1981 Summer Show. She also documented a nephew of hers, Little James, on Super 8.

 

Nina Danino:

Super 8 became a group identity for some artists.

 

Anna Thew:

That is just something which is written about in a certain way, but the actual reality of it, is that a group called Alle Macht der Super Acht [All Power to Super Eight] came over to the Co-op in 1981, invited by Jo Comino and they showed their films. They stayed at the Goethe-Institute and there was a great debate. The programme, Alle Macht der Super Acht, was touring. It went to the United States, courtesy of the Goethe Institute and Padeluun stayed in my house. He and I had a little, sort of, thing. Then he met Derek Jarman and he appears in Derek’s SUPER 8 book, looking into a crystal ball. There’s a link there with British Super 8 and Padeluun then invited me to go to Berlin and to programme Filme der Mitarbeiter an der London Film-makers’ Co-op (Films of the Workers at the LFMC) in the Counter Film Festival (1982) and Padeluun is then in my Berlin Meine Augen (Berlin, My Eyes), double screen (1982). So, that whole Super 8 thing at the Co-op started with Padeluun and with me and Jo Comino, Thomas Mutke and Bruno de Florence, when we came back from Padeluun’s Counter Film Festival in Berlin. We were full of it. Double, triple screen. That’s when Super 8 began as a movement…at the Co-op!

 

Nina Danino:

Could you say more about what you think is the post-interpretation? Everything is to some extent post-interpretation including our talk right now.

 

Anna Thew:

There are certain things that have been written in books. When something gets written by somebody who’s not even necessarily been there, they contextualise it in the terms of what they’ve read, or heard elsewhere. So the history of this period depends entirely on who scrivened what at the time, not on what actually did happen.

 

Nina Danino:

What, in particular, do you think has been misinterpreted about the Super 8 camp?

 

Stills, Darren Birch (left) and Etruscan arch in Perugia (right) from Anna Thew, Fragments for Eye Drift double screen, Super 8 blown up to 16mm, 2005).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Anna Thew:

Well, the start of Super 8 as a movement in Britain, in London, was to do with Padeluun. It was completely and directly to do with Padeluun. Padeluun came over. He’s an incredible character. He’s still very, very active and he’s doing things about Big Brother (in the Orwellian sense) and about surveillance. We’re still in touch. As said, he invited me to do a programme of films at his Counter Film Festival at Café Mitropa in Goltzstraße, Berlin. At that point I was lent a Bolex Super 8 camera and some money for stock by George Stamkovski who’d been James Mackay’s boyfriend but was now bi, and I made Berlin Meine Augen (Berlin My Eyes), as a double screen film. At that point my double screen and triple screen came, not from any knowledge of expanded cinema at all. I was working on drawings and on paintings in series at home, so I took the triptych and diptych in painting to film. The 100ft 16mm loops in Blurt, were projected onto two painting stretchers suspended from the ceiling in the London Musicians’ Collective in the 1983 Co-op Summer Show. So expanded, multi-screen work is directly related to painting and collage works in series.

 

Nina Danino:

Can you talk more about Alle Macht der Super Acht from Berlin?

 

Anna Thew:

The Super 8 influence as a movement, came from Alle Macht der Super Acht, which literally means “All Power to Super 8”. They had a manifesto. This camera is light. You can hand hold it. You can run around with it. It’s got time-lapse. It’s got zoom and it’s got macro and you are free with Super 8! And it only costs you a fiver. That was as much as a couple of drinks in the pub. You can get that film processed the next day. If you were using Kodak 40 the processing was included so you would get your film back the following day (from Holborn). They did this manifesto and there was a huge Super 8 movement in Germany and France and Greece (Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki, yes?) and Japan and Hong Kong and Australia. The Super 8 thing in London was big when we came back from Berlin in 1982. I showed Berlin Meine Augen in Café des Alliés, Centre Charles Peguy, Leicester Square, and as Split City Rushes (1982) in Women Live, I did a performance with it. That was the first time that Super 8 films that we brought back from Berlin were shown. Jo Comino at the same time was making the double screen, Spleen.

 

Nina Danino:

Super 8 was felt to have a home movie relationship at the Co-op which was founded on 16mm film-making. James Mackay says that Super 8 wasn’t taken as a serious medium.

 

Anna Thew:

Well, that was just the stuffies. That was the problem with that.

 

Nina Danino:

Some work was in Super 8, and some was not – what was important was whether the work was good, or not.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, absolutely. But we acquired a Super 8 Steenbeck at the Co-op, because of that.

 

Nina Danino:

Super 8 was shown in LFMC cinema programmes. It was pretty impossible to edit Super 8 other than very basically. Super 8 had single frame and vari-speed, which when projected at 3fps, slowed down the image and created a dreamy effect also often re-filmed off the wall. Kodak film stock also had beautiful, saturated colours and grain. I shot Stabat Mater (1990) on Agfa Super 8. The format leads the aesthetics. It was also a light camera to handle, and artists used it like a diary film and recorded their own social scenes. It had single frame, time lapse, vari-speed and most importantly - a macro lens, and automatic light meter, which could be switched to manual.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, and we also had three GS-1200 Xenon Super 8 state of the art sound projectors with a 50 foot cinema throw. Cordelia (Swann) unfortunately ought to have a mention somewhere here, as she started Experimenta at the London Film Festival with single and multi-screen Super 8 in 1985 and I showed Sailor Trailer and the Tinkling Laughter of Little Girls (triple screen, 1984) and then she started Pandaemonium at the ICA, 1996 and then at Lux, 1998, with Michael Mazière.

 

Nina Danino:

These conversations are about subjective inscription through film language as we’ve been saying.

 

Anna Thew:

The Super 8 thing was diverse. There was a whole movement, S8 at B2 at B2 Gallery, Met [Metropolitan] Wharf; Women Live (1982) at the LMC [London Musicians’ Collective] and LFMC; Leicester Super 8 Film Festival (1984 onwards). The Arts Council/Film Video Umbrella New British Super 8 Film (1984), with single and multi-screen touring programmes curated by Mike O’ Pray and Jo Comino; The New Pluralism (1985) curated by Mike O’Pray and Tina Keane at the Tate, then House Watch and on and on. It’s never all been documented.

 

Nina Danino:

Would you say that Super 8 is a big part of your film-making identity then?

 

Anna Thew:

Absolutely. Super 8 was actually being focused by the film-makers who were working at the Co-op. There was Steve Farrer (Cinema 1980-81), Bruno de Florence (now B de F), Thomas Mutke aka von Schulemberg (Co-op Directors 1981-85), Roberta Graham and James MacKay (Cinema 1979-80), Christopher Hughes, Cordelia Swann, Jim Divers and Jo Comino. There was Marek Budzynski, John Maybury, Cerith Wyn Evans and Plume Tarrant. Bruno de Florence launched a big Super 8 event in 1982 with performance artist Charlie P (then Charlie Pig) skinning a rabbit and with a rock band. We programmed a Long Night of Super 8 and an All Day Super 8 on the Saturday in the 1982 Summer Show. And with all those other people who I was working with at the time, when Cordelia (Swann) did the shows at the Salon of 83 and 84 at the ICA, there was no 16mm. It was entirely Super 8, slide tape or video. There was a group of people, George Saxon, myself, who were in each other’s’ films. George played Tom banging his head against the wall in Hilda was a Goodlooker (16mm). Gina Czarnecki, D John Briscoe and I played in Pig of Hearts (S8 to 16mm, 1993).

 

Nina Danino:

There were different experiences of the Co-op in the 1980s and that’s fine.

 

Anna Thew:

I mean, yes, and that’s absolutely fine. But what is not really correct in my view, is this idea that Super 8 was just about John Maybury and the New Wave invention. That is complete and utter tosh because some of the biggest influence was Super 8, internationally. We did have Derek Jarman’s Super 8 films blown up to 16mm from Dark Pictures in Co-op Distribution at the time (thanks to Berlin ZDF). We had In the Shadow of the Sun (1981), Home Movies I and II (1972-77) and TG Psychic Rally in Heaven. The home movie genre also linked to Anne Rees-Mogg who was terribly, terribly strong. She was very active at the Co-op. She was Co-op director and chair through the whole of that period until her death in 1984. We had a Super 8 section in Distribution with Super 8 films by Stan Brakhage and Helen Chadwick, so there’s a lot of filling in to be done.

 

Nina Danino:

The Co-op to me were the conversations you could have with other film-makers, it was exciting and engaged as well as critical and this was also after screenings. But some of the so-called ‘New Romantics’ didn’t discuss the work, so to me this seemed to miss the purpose of the Co-op.

 

Anna Thew:

But it wasn’t only Super 8, you used whatever medium. When you got a grant for 16mm, you used 16mm. I mean, for me, I would swap from one to the other from 1980–2001, but regarding Super 8, when I showed at Interfilm in Kino Eiszeit, Berlin; Hamburg Lo-Budget Film Festival and Super 8 Festival in Holland and France, there were Italian Super 8 film-makers, Hungarian Super 8 film-makers, Hong Kong Super 8 film-makers. Jo Comino’s documentary film for Channel 4 was about the use of Super 8 internationally, and in North Africa and Venezuela, it was for political reasons. There were also touring programmes of the New British Super 8 Film (1984). Jo and Michael O’Pray took those all around the world literally. They went to South America, Venezuela, Brazil, North America, Hong Kong, Japan, Hungary and so on and so forth.

 

Nina Danino:

Of course, many artists used it as a medium. They also transferred enlarged/blew up Super 8 to 16mm on the optical printer like I did in Stabat Mater and re-filming. Barbara Meter also talks about this. But we’re talking about the experience of Super 8 as a movement, as an identity scene for some artists in the 1980s. You are right is it also post-interpreted particularly by Mike (Michael) O’Pray, who championed it through his writing and curating.

 

Anna Thew:

You used Super 8, because it was cheap. You used Super 8 as a diary medium rather than 16mm.

 

Nina Danino:

Is there an aspect of your film language that you want to pick up on as a final question?

 

Anna Thew:

Well, my way of editing and collage and my notions about editing? You said here, “your films are highly crafted and laboured”. I wouldn’t use the word ‘laboured’ because that goes against something that I would be trying to do. I work and work and work at something until it turns out OK, using collage and chance procedures. Some things you work on for a long time, like Eros Erosion (1988–1990). Some things, like Terra Vermin, double screen 16mm (1998), I filmed in an afternoon, assembled and screened for Flux Projections at Free Radicals, a dance, music and film season at Riverside Studios, the same week.

 

Nina Danino:

I was thinking about 16mm and that it’s not easy to make this work, not just the skill it needs but of having to work at it and of film as a struggle. I don’t mean laboured in a pejorative sense. On the contrary, I mean it as an intense type of engagement with film as a language.

 

Anna Thew:

Ok. No, well, it’s just that probably it’s not the right choice of word, because if something’s ‘laboured’, it means that it might have had the spirit worked out of it.

 

Nina Danino:

I can see how it can be interpreted like that, although sometimes experimental work can be laboured in that sense too. It’s in the nature of it that one is discovering these limits.

 

Anna Thew:

Anyhow, one of the things I think that is key to my work, is how I’m thinking about editing. I will go to Hilda and to the idea about the absurd, the subconscious, the oneiric properties of film, chance procedures and Dada and the idea of automatic writing, drawing and filming, which applies to my whole process.

 

Nina Danino:

The narrative in experimental films such as Eros Erosion composed of short shots and fragments, fleeting images and come together in a collage in the editing. Perhaps you can say how chance procedures relate to how you edit or how you film?

 

Anna Thew:

There’s a piece that I wrote about my practice. I would very rarely write a script. I would normally start from drawings, sketches, notes. Collage is there. It’s key. It’s the way in which I was making drawings, making paintings. Doing collage, collage with paper, collage with words. This is a practice that started a long time ago, influenced by graffiti, slogans, peeling walls and torn posters in Rome. You’re using those things that you’ve learned about and that you believe in. I believed in the idea of eliciting from the subconscious. Rather like if you think about Henri Michaux, or about Joan Mirò, or someone who’s making marks like Jackson Pollock and out of those marks come an image and an idea…that you’re intuitively accessing your subconscious. In Hilda, as with Eros Erosion, I would have a plan of what I would film, but I would always film something else when I was filming. Because I’m filming it myself. I’m seeing through the lens myself and I’m not giving the camera to somebody else with a list. I can do whatever I like. I got into the habit of doing a series of drawings and then those drawings would be shuffled around and then I would decide the order in which we would film certain scenes. Then you would always film/record/do something which you hadn’t anticipated doing, like the sailor looking longingly through the frosted glass at George [Saxon] and John [D Briscoe]’s house. It was only because when Juan Lastera turned to the glass, he looked so wonderful that I had to film him touching the glass. There are things that are constructed, but at the same time there were things that were captured through the lens, because you were using the camera yourself.

 

Nina Danino:

That’s something we have discussed in the other conversations, the difference between handing over the camera and looking through the camera and how that’s also the difference between experimental film practices and artists’ moving image.

 

Anna Thew:

It also secures a different response from the subject. The guy in Eros Erosion (Toni Dominici) was a boxer.  He couldn’t read or write. He was terrifying in action. I just showed him what I wanted him to do… pounce on Lisabetta’s lover Lorenzo and kill him – and he (Toni) was much better at it, than if I’d have tried to demonstrate. He looked fiercely straight into the camera. You’re behind the camera. You’re talking to him, so he looks at you through the lens. I never forget when Eros Erosion was first premiered by the BFI in the Metro Cinema, off Leicester Square. People were being a bit funny because it had had a bad review from Geoff Andrews in Time Out. When my film came on there were people in the audience muttering, “Oh, this is the arty auteur film with the portraits that he says you shouldn’t like.” Then, when the stunning boxer, Toni Dominici comes up and he turns towards the camera and blows smoke through his nose, the whole place went quiet. What a find! I don’t think you can imagine or get an image like that if you ask a cameraman to do that. You’ve only got that because there’s a relationship with the film-maker, camera person/woman and the subject.

 

Nina Danino:

Do you think that this moment where there is a connection with the viewer can only happen when the film-maker is behind the camera? 

 

Anna Thew:

Yes. There’s something about observing through the camera lens… when you look at people and people look at you at me as the woman, the personality that I am. You actually capture their glance through the camera. You see it in Anne’s films, in George’s films, in Derek’s films, in Warhol, in Brakhage, in Schneeman, in Robert Cappa, in Victoria Mayer, in Pasolini. Pasolini used this phenomenon in Oedipus Rex (1967). He has a second camera and hand holds it… with Jocasta and Edipo, cross cut, eye to eye, in POV (Point of View), “I killed my Father!”, straight into the camera, straight at you. Not, “I slept with my Mother…”, but the critical irreversible destiny bit, “I killed my FATHER!”.

 

Nina Danino:

Pasolini worked with a cameraman and big crews. To see him sitting pensively in a big production like a director. He was not an experimental filmmaker as such.

 

Anna Thew:

He used POV in Oedipus Rex. It’s not just a fake point of view. You’re not having somebody looking out over here. It’s not somebody like Michael Caine looking with one eye at the camera and one eye at the director, as Caine explained in a documentary, but you’re just looking through the lens. That’s also why you have difficulty with a video camera. The video camera has a little flap at the side, so they’re not looking through the lens anymore, they’re looking slightly to the side. This, direct personal relationship, is like somebody you know. I will never forget seeing Derek Jarman’s B2 Movie at the Co-op Summer Show 1982. Jean-Marc Prouveur, whom I later got to know very well, is slowed down. He looks into the camera at you and you see his eyelashes moving up and then he looks away. You felt that this was somebody you knew, because he’s looking straight into the camera at Derek, now at you, at me… I think that’s something that’s very powerful. Think of Window Water Baby Moving (1962) where Jane takes the Bolex and films Brakhage seeing the birth, the instance…

 

Nina Danino:

The actor looking at the camera and appearing to connect with the viewer could be a rhetoric of connection, like with slow-motion where the movement is magnified. These effects can be overused not just in Super 8, but special FX in post-production that became available to artists, could they be clichés – at-hand languages?

 

Anna Thew:

I don’t think they’re cliché. This is not a cliché.

 

 

Nina Danino:

How do you distinguish between when it is a cliché or a moment where the look is active and conveys something that doesn’t have words? How do you know what distinguishes the use of slow motion or other special FX from a cliché?

 

Anna Thew:

I think there are very, very big similarities in the way that the work was happening in the little group that we belonged to.

 

Nina Danino:

The practice of ‘coming out’ was a big part of the 1980s. You say that “in the ‘coming-out’ films of Steve [Farrer] and Jeanette Iljon, there had to be the gay subject and camp, obviously so, with dressing up, using dancers or performers”.

 

Anna Thew:

I think there’s a confusion about the idea, about camp and gay, because to me it was just something where we’re theatrical. I think there’s something that is very much misunderstood about the dynamic at that time.

 

Nina Danino:

What do you feel has been misunderstood? There was a feminist critique of how women are marginalised by parts of gay subcultures which parodied women. But the way that this scene worked at the LFMC is that perhaps that it offered an exit from the austerity of structural film, flamboyance was perhaps a sort of way out, a reaction.

 

Anna Thew:

You have to understand, that say when in Split City Rushes, which became Berlin Meine Augen (1982), I sang in front of the film, but when we did it at the Summer Show, we cut a hole in the (Co-op) ceiling and I was lowered in front of the film on a rope, with little blue boots and red leopard-skin tights. I’m not gay but the people who liked that performance most of all, were people like Bruno de Florence and Thomas (Mutke) and big Steve. They adored those types of things. They might have liked what they considered to be camp in what you do. Just being “near to the theatre” was something that I and my Mother always liked.

 

Still of Anna Thew and Filme der Mitarbeiter catalogue from Anna Thew, Berlin Meine Augen (double screen, Super 8, 1982).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Nina Danino:

Camp is over theatrical and is it problematic if it veers into pantomime? I see excess as something different. The ‘feminine’ which is in ‘excess’ is something that cannot in fact be represented. It exceeds representation in symbolic language, so it is a different direction. The Super 8 scene connected to extravagance that’s far away from the inscription and the subjective that we are talking about. Perhaps we can look more for inscription in your solo self in the 16mm films.

 

Anna Thew:

I’m not sure… Well, I did love Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947). There’s no doubt about the sailor in Hilda, Juan Lastera being gay, or undecided. I’m making a direct reference to Kenneth Anger, because I swap their hats. One of them has an American sailor’s hat in one scene, which is then swapped for a British Navy hat.

 

Nina Danino:

In Fassbinder’s Querelle?

 

Anna Thew:

Oh, Querelle? I hate Querelle for its suffocating hyper-bourgeois mise en scène and actually Jean Genet refused ever to have any of his novels used for film, after that film.

 

Nina Danino:

Un Chant d’Amour (1950) in distribution at the Co-op. It was so often programmed and shown there that you said that he made quite a bit of money from the film, and you paid him royalties directly to his Paris address. That’s quite amusing to think of that today when it has become such an icon of avant-garde cinema. 

 

Anna Thew:

I only knew who Jean Genet was because my Mother introduced me to The Journal of a Thief (1949), which she considered to be a masterpiece, but backed it in brown paper so Daddy wouldn't know what she was reading, like the Kama Sutra and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). I think she was explaining to me, “I know it’s really naughty to actually really like this, but you see…” and she said, “I suppose women look at men, like gay men do,” and this is what she was saying.

 

Nina Danino:

You say, “We were beyond feminism” and describe yourself as “an androgen tomboy”. Can you say more about this?

 

Anna Thew:

Not like gay men, but that women look at men… they’re desirous of men, like gay men are, no more. We had Un Chant d’Amour in Distribution and the dynamic at the Co-op at that time was gay and ‘polymorphous’. Steve was gay and Jeanette Iljon was a lesbian. Mick Kidd (BIFF) was into the Co-op and loving everybody. George was gay or bi. It was Steve who started up the Women Only screenings, not Jeanette. He made it possible. Many of the women who were part of Co-Option, Channel 4 mega funded women’s only project, became very badly behaved and tried to take over the Co-op and cut men out. Thomas and Bruno organised the first Gay and Lesbian Festival at the Co-op in 1981. We were all involved, as they were with the first Distribution Preview Shows and the Summer Shows (1981/2). This was very typical of the time, like in Isaac Julien’s film Young Soul Rebels (1991) and he’s telling a story of his childhood. There were three/four friends at school, a straight guy, a gay guy and two girls, and they were all really great friends. It was only when they get into the outside world, that separations begin to be unnaturally forced on them.

 

Nina Danino:

Do you think your films are also a record of this scene, people, artists from the gay subculture of the eighties including Derek Jarman and others?

 

Still from Anna Thew, Cling Film (1993).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Anna Thew:

We had the Thompson Twins playing. We had parties. We went clubbing. We were very naughty. There was the first gay and lesbian festival in 1981 and September in the Pink in 1983. When Thomas (Mutke) was running The Fridge night club and Daisy Chain in Brixton, he used to give us money to do 16mm loops. Thomas and Bruno did Network 21, Pirate TV. They did the first Scratch Video shows at the ICA, the first multi monitor Video Lounge and the first video wall at the Fridge night club. Some of my films, like Cling Film (1993) were shown on the Fridge video wall for weeks.

 

Nina Danino:

Yes, the Super 8 scene was connected to venues outside the LFMC. There were nights and events. There was a group around Derek Jarman and B2 at Metropolitan Wharf. Were you involved in that grouping around Jarman? He had a cameo in your film Behind Closed Doors (1988), did you have cameos in other films? Perhaps this is a form of inscription in a collaborative group.

 

Anna Thew:

Well, I would say that a film like Berlin Meine Augen, first shown as a (double screen) film at S8 at B2 and my performance of Split City Rushes (1982), set off a thing or two about multi-screen 16mm, Super 8, and performance with film. There are a few things that I’ve done, that have sparked other people to do. I think some of George’s early performative films like Wall Support (1977), which he made when he was at the Royal College, where he just bangs his head against the wall for 10 minutes, had the same effect on me, so George was the obvious candidate to play Tom, who bangs his head against the wall in Hilda. Steve, George and I were the Three Musketeers.

 

Nina Danino:

Would you like to talk as a solo film-maker about your narrative in experimental films using 16mm? Eros Erosion and Hilda was a Goodlooker?

 

Still of Juan Lastera as Billy the sailor in Anna Thew, Hilda was a Goodlooker (1986).

 

Anna Thew:

It was all supposed to be very mixed up and deconstructed. George was in my film and he’s dressing up. Then I’m in his film and I dress up, but was George influenced by me making those films, or me by him? I’m coming slightly from German (Brechtian) theatre. I’m into Garcia Lorca. We dress up. That’s the difference, the dressing up. There is something which connects our theatrical films to the films of somebody like Jack Smith, or Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, or Manuel de Landa’s The Libidinal Economy of Filmus Interruptus (1980), or the kind of scene in American cinema that you get very little of in the British, rather reformative avant-garde. So there was this helping of each other. I think that more than our filmmaking, or at least my film-making, when it’s got more than one person in it, it’s a collective effort. You have somebody suggesting that you do something in a certain way when you’re filming. So somebody might suggest, “If you do it like this… ” There was a really, really active group of people, who actually supported each other’s work, and I would say someone like Nick Gordon-Smith, like Carole Enahoro. The people who were working at the Co-op and making films, like Alia Syed’s early work, trying to use words, trying to use sound, trying to use text.

 

Nina Danino:

Your multi-media expanded work like Blurt (1983) and On Leonardo (1977) hovered between experimental theatre, super 8, performance and live events, which differed from structural expanded film. There was the structuralist work still going on at the LFMC in the 1980s.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, but at that time, it (structuralist work) was really quite secondary, frankly. BLURT was about words, that as Leonardo da Vinci said, language cannot be universal. Marcel Duchamp said, “Language is no damned good. It has to be translated from one to another.” For the Blurt video, I was reading all male texts in six different languages, (two that I don’t know), untranslated and changing my hair style and clothes and delivery for each language and text. It was a comment on talking head videos and reparative voice over, on film. This video was on two monitors kicked on their sides on the floor. There was a colour film with superimpositions of blabbing lip-sticked mouths. Yes, straight men with lip-sticked mouths too, on one screen and language in all forms, handwritten, wood block printed, Gothic script in rhythmic patterns using varied factors of 24, so you would never tire of watching it though you couldn’t understand a word. Word as image in black and white. But if you don’t understand, you fall out. I trained to weave (a boxing term) at the Tabernacle with a black heavy weight boxer and kids in stitches all around, with me in red silk Lonsdale boxing shorts and I terrified my drag queen friend Charlie P with my convincing movements… and in Osnabrück (Experimental Film Workshop, 1987), it was re-staged with Padeluun and then with Caspar Stracke and me and Lukas Schmied doing the fox trot. So deadly earnest, but absurd.

 

Stills from Anna thew, BLURT (double screen, 16mm, with live performance, 1983).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Nina Danino:

It (structuralism) did remain in place at the Co-op.

 

Anna Thew:

It’s definitely very much to do with the kind of religion that we had in Britain. It goes right back to how Voltaire thought it was terribly funny when they had the Quakers and everybody was wearing grey and they all trembled. This idea about people wearing grey and the lack of the use of colour.

 

Nina Danino:

There were also strands which came from the formal rigour of structural film, but which then combined with personal and subjective forms of elliptical narrative.

 

Anna Thew:

Well, as far as I know, there was Peter Gidal… he was all structuralist and at Chelsea we had two of the master structuralists. Chris Welsby was a student of Anne’s at Chelsea and Renny Croft. Richard Welsby and Jenny Okun, also. But in the eighties, structuralism was no longer dominant.

 

Nina Danino:

Yes, it was a reaction against structural film, possibly also anti-theory?

 

Anna Thew:

What do you mean?

 

Nina Danino:

Outside of the LFMC it connected to the music around MTV and associated with that industry.

 

Anna Thew:

I’m not sure that I agree with your comment on “that industry”.

 

Nina Danino:

I wasn’t part of that scene, although I did show in festivals such as Pandaemonium (1996).

 

Anna Thew:

Tell me which pieces you’re thinking about.

 

Nina Danino:

I’m not talking about individual pieces.

 

Anna Thew:

What work are you talking about? Give me some names, some titles.

 

Nina Danino:

As I said, it’s not about individual works because they were very seductive. I remember fragments. That’s the point. It was a sort of genre.

 

Anna Thew:

I think that Richard Heslop’s work is quite remarkable, and he worked with [the band] 23 Skidoo. If you look again at some of John Maybury’s early work that went into the BFI This is Now, Film and Video after Punk (1978–1985) touring programme, it’s extraordinary. There’s a beautiful piece of his, full of nuance and meaning, conveyed visually, not reliant on word.

 

Nina Danino:

Yes, Nick Gordon Smith’s Sermon (1988) had wonderful colours made on the optical printer. But we’re talking about authorship and inscription, not as a group, but mainly a solitary activity.

 

Anna Thew:

I don’t agree that just because something is visual, that it’s sensual.

 

Nina Danino:

No, I didn’t say it wasn’t. I like sensual work. Seduction is something different.

 

Anna Thew:

What you’re talking about wasn’t Co-op work. That was coming from the not just gay club scene.

 

Nina Danino:

Perhaps you need to tell that the story, because you were more part of it. Mike O’Pray dubbed this movement The New Romantics and championed it through London Film and Video Umbrella touring programmes and The Elusive Sign (1987) screenings at the Tate. Michael Mazière as well in Pandaemonium.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, but Mike O’Pray’s the person who switched over from landscape film to New Wave Super 8 in five minutes! Read Michael Mazière and my critiques of The Elusive Sign in Independent Media magazine (c.1987). It eluded, rather excluded five years of Arts Council funded work, Co-op film-makers’ work, women film-makers’ work, black film-makers’ work. Lis Rhodes and Tina [Keane] were the only women featured. I did a cartoon of the selection process by the triumvirate, David Curtis (from the Arts Council), Mike O’Pray and Al Rees (from the Royal College of Art), and there was a protest with a manifesto for the launch at the Clore (Auditorium) at the Tate (now Tate Britain).

 

Nina Danino:

Yes, that’s right we did the Landscape double issue of Undercut. Mike O’Pray was central in presenting and validating the work critically. There was beginning to be a shift to curators, but Mike was a film scholar. Mike must have seen that the avant-garde was fracturing. He also curated the show The New Pluralism (1985) at the Tate with Tina Keane.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, I was in that show at the Tate (Sailor Trailer, Super 8, triple screen). I think The New Romantics as a label, is really sick. I never really had very much time for that title.

 

Nina Danino:

Mike also curated Synchronisation of the Senses at the ICA. He invented and brought it all together as a movement.

 

Anna Thew:

And they used to slap Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, or Kinder Toten Lieder on, or Wagner, and we used to make fun of it. I mean, there’s no way you could clear the copyright, like Douglas Gordon having to recompose the Vertigo music for his Hitchcock plagiarisation.

 

Nina Danino:

It was widely toured, programmed and promoted and it had a very good writer in Mike O’Pray so it doesn’t need to be defended because it was highly visible and had backing. I’m interested in what didn’t fit into this trend was in a way about the subjective, which wasn’t written about.

 

Anna Thew:

I think when you’re trying to do an analysis of somebody’s work, or a group of people’s work, sometimes it’s rather complicated, if you haven’t seen the work and the activity, internationally, like say Rosa von Praunheim’s film, Ich bin meine eigene Frau [I Am My Own Woman] (1993) featuring Charlotte von Mahsdorf, or Yann Beauvais’s SID A IDS (1992), or Wilhelm Hein’s film with Ichgola Androgyn as a mermaid in a pond making love to a pair of false teeth, referencing the opening scene in Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1963), or the Super 8 documents of the performances of Michel Journiac, who trained as a priest, Messe pour un Corps [Mass for a body] (1969), or the work of Harun Farocki.

 

Nina Danino:

Yes, I agree there are so many overlaps. But can we talk about your 16mm work? For me the story about the piano is really at the centre, also what you’ve said about dressing up and how you talk about the subconscious in your method of editing and looking through the camera. There are many insights into film as a visual language.

 

Anna Thew:

That was the end of it, if you look at it very carefully. But we couldn’t just stay in the same place.

 

Nina Danino:

The problem was that the space for collectives then closed down. The commercial gallery world became dominant in Britain with the YBAs (Young British Artists) and the art markets around 1988. That work really then lost contact with looking and making, with the subject. Popular culture and conceptual work became more important. The Super 8 scene was itself overtaken by digital media and the concept of artists’ moving image, which linked to a new super commodification. Compared to this, the Super 8 scene still had the vestiges of the subject – nevertheless a subject overwhelmed by ‘abstract subjectivism’ as Paul Wallace puts it. Anna, can I ask you then the last question, about being ‘a woman with a movie camera’, or how has ‘a camera of one’s own’ been important to you? Do you want to choose one of those?

 

Anna Thew:

A “camera of one’s own” is good, because I’ve got two or three (cameras).

 

Nina Danino:

OK, choose that one.

 

Stills (from left to right) of George Saxon, Steve Farrer’s rotating 35mm Machine and Cristiano Campus (Gambee Isterix) from Anna Thew, Machine Parts and Portraits – Broken Pieces for the Co-operative (multi-screen, 1988–2001).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Anna Thew:

I mean, I had a big fight to do my own camera when it came to getting the funding released for Eros Erosion (1990), which was with a BFI New Director’s grant. I had to persuade Ben Gibson there was no way that I could have somebody else filming for me, because I film better than they do. I’m a moving camera person. I like filming. I can get performances out of people that others can’t, when I’m filming in this way. I do mise en scène. I light. I make sound. I edit. I colour grade. I do everything, but not without help. I do have people supporting me, popping in and out, like when the sound was done for Cling Film (1993). I had a great friend, Andy Cowton, who was with Test Department (band). He did these tracks for me that were the length of a piece of film, a scene. I had to say, “Sorry, I can’t work this way.” I was into [John] Cage, [Merce] Cunningham, [Isamu] Noguchi and “Chance, chance, chance…” Then I met avant-garde musicians IDENTICAL, Gavin Mitchell, Orlando Harrison and Stephen Thrower who used to be with COIL, at Franko B’s, and we started talking about sound and sound recording. I told them how I’d climbed out over the girders of a Thames bridge to get a particular kind of echo on a voice over the water. They’d done also various kinds of very adventurous sound recordings. I described the film and the sounds and they sent me this cassette tape of them jamming in Orlando’s front room. It’s amazing that that’s the music we ended up using… from a cassette! They came along to the edit and they would sit there and I’d say, “Do you mind if I transfer this bit of sound of yours in reverse, or shuffle it around?”, “Oh no, no, brilliant!” So, we were actually suggesting and working like a group of musicians, or sound image makers. I think that’s the difference between somebody like Malcolm Le Grice, or Peter Gidal, or Nicky Hamlyn, or Guy Sherwin making a film, where they don’t have to have people, and that’s it.

 

Nina Danino:

A camera of one’s own gives you independence.

 

Anna Thew:

Cling Film was a collective action. There’s no way that anyone can make a film like that on their own. If you look at Fassbinder’s films, there’s no way Fassbinder, on his own, could make any of those films, or that Brecht could’ve done any of his plays without the whole troupe of people.

 

Nina Danino:

You fought to find new premises [in 1990/91] and not let the LFMC and its culture close down in 2000/01 when Lux (an amalgamation of the LFMC and London Electronic Arts, LEA, formerly London Video Arts/Access) went into liquidation. These conversations are a way of revisiting and reconstructing what you call “this haven of practice” with reference to the loss of space when that iteration of Lux closed, but also when the former Gloucester Avenue site in Camden was demolished and you made Broken Pieces for the Co-operative (double screen, 2000/1) and LFMC Demolition (2004). These refer to how the Co-op sublet and shared the British Rail building in Gloucester Avenue with the London Musicians’ Collective (LMC, 1977 until 1988) and LFMC Demolition features sound recordings by LMC founder members, your own recordings of railway sounds along with sounds by IDENTICAL, Stephen Thrower, Orlando Harrison, Gavin Mitchell, Len Lye and beat poet Carlyle Reedy. How did you feel about making that film? Let’s say we’ve also discussed the LFMC as feminist space and a (maternal) space/structure of inscription, the open access collective structure of the Co-op as a haven for women, for a woman with a movie camera. It’s a great interpretation of the structure – although some people found the LFMC intimidating too.

 

Stills from Anna Thew, LFMC Demolition – Broken Pieces for the Co-op (double screen, 16mm, 2001).
Copyright Anna Thew. Courtesy of the artist.

 

Anna Thew:

Yes, we fought to save the London Film-makers’ Co-op, irrespective of race, gender, sexual identity, class. Annabel Nicholson, Nick Collins, and I were on the Executive/Cinema and Building Committees with Steve Farrer, Patrick Keiller, Ilios Pantos (both architects) and Martin Lugg (civil engineer), joined (in action) between 1999 and 2001 by Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa, Cinema Action, LVA/LEA (London Video Access, formerly London Video Arts, latterly London Electronic Arts) and with young artists, Franko B, James Hutchinson, Paul Rogers on the Co-op Executive. It was the beginning of the end of collectives and the BFI, Arts Council and GLA (Greater London Council) arts funding of co-operative spaces – a seismic shift. It is too long and tragic a story to tell here. We found a wonderful practical building in Saffron Hill with lift and fire escape, round the corner from Farringdon Tube, within walking distance late at night to Tottenham Court Road. The BFI Regional Development Fund, and then non film-maker, non artist admin at the LFMC were mis-guided by corrupt property consultants, RCA, at huge cost, to accept an impossible building, the old hat factory, Dunn & Co. in Kentish Town, which would have cost a tidy half a million to convert. It was a scandal. I wrote about it in Independent Media editorial, ‘A Letter!’ (1991). There was a rift. We pulled our films out of Distribution. The débacle spelled the equally corrupt final demise of the Film Co-op in 1999 (as a registered charity by forced withdrawal of BFI annual funding), and the financial liquidation of the newly formed Arts Council funded/LEA amalgamated ‘Lux’ in Hoxton in less than one financial year, in 2001, saw the hierarchical administrative takeover of the LFMC Distribution Archive, the film collection, in my view, an institutional scam, the loss of the Workshop, the Cinema and the open access Distribution, the entities most cherished by the creative ‘makers’. We lost control of our wares and our creative freedom and co-operative independence to the property market, the construction industry and the commercial gallery takeover. We lost a Cinema of our own.

 

Nina Danino:

Yes, but it’s always in relation to the collaborative, in relation to others.

 

Anna Thew:

Yeah, yes. So it’s like you’re with a troupe. Like in the theatre, you can’t have a theatre piece without anybody acting and you can’t have music unless you’ve got people playing the instruments and you can’t have our kind of film without a camera and a screening space.

 

Nina Danino:

But in a way we have also ended with you playing the piano and doing your own camera, as yourself, solo, you, looking through it yourself. Thank you.

[end of zoom recorded material]

_____________________________________________________

 

Biographies

Anna Thew, linguist, painter, writer, turned film-maker, performer, studied F.A. Painting at Chelsea School of Art (1974–78), Italian Studies and German at Manchester University (1968–72), working with the LFMC Distribution Archive in the 1980s and co-curating FLUX projections (1994–2025). Her works have shown widely in international film festivals including, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Rotterdam, Locarno, Sydney, Kiev and NY; in galleries, XCentric Cinema, CCCB, Barcelona (2017); Weaving Time, Tate Britain; Real to Reel, Tate Modern (2016); Intersections, New Art Projects (2015); Palazzo Visconti, Milan (2014); Galleria Pack, Milan; Lipanje Puntin, Rome; Frieze, London (2005); Mot: Dites, Image, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1988), and Charting Time, Serpentine Gallery, London (1986), with solo shows including; Kino Armata, Prishtina, Kosovo (2022); M.S. Stubnitz, Amsterdam (2005); MM Centar, Zagreb (2002); Villa Capriglio, Torino (2000); Anna Thew – Retro-prospective, Lux Cinema, London (1999); and tours including: This Is Now, Film and Video after Punk (2015/16); with commissions from the Arts Council, BFI, Channel 4, La Sept Arte and the first Montez Press Artist's Publication Award (2017). She worked as Associate Lecturer in F.A. Film/Alternative Media and Visual Arts at Central Saint Martins, Chelsea College of Art, Goldsmiths and Westminster universities, and ran the Chelsea Experimental Film seminar screenings series (1984–2016).

 

Nina Danino was born in Gibraltar. She is a Reader in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studied Painting at St. Martin’s School of Art and Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art, London. She was a member of the London Film Makers’ Co-operative in the 1980s, a member of the editorial collective of Undercut: The Journal of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative (1981-1990) and co-editor of The Undercut Reader (Columbia University Press, 2003). Her films have been shown worldwide and premiered at film festivals and broadcast on television and a retrospective of her work took place at Close Up Cinema, London in 2016. MARIA (2023) is her fifth feature-length film. Her soundtracks feature vocals, singing, readings, narration and music in her own voice and in collaboration with singers and musicians. Her recent work crosses into stand-alone audio, live performance and studio recording.

 

_____________________________________________________

 

Select Bibliography

Beauvais, Yann. 2006. “Comme un air, ou le cinéma d’Anna Thew,” Yann Beauvais ecrits, June, accessed 9 February 2025. https://yannbeauvais.com/?p=198. “Like a Song [Translation by Philippa Langlois],” Luxonline, 2006, accessed 9 February 2025. https://luxonline.org.uk/artists/anna_thew/essay(1).html

Close Up Film Centre. 2024. “Flux at the Minema 1994 / 2024 [7–14 December 2024],” Close Up programmes, accessed 9 February 2025. https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2024/flux-at-the-minema-1994-2024/.

Danino, Nina. 2003. The Intense Subject. In The Undercut Reader: Critical Writings on Artists’ Film and Video, 8–12. Wallflower.

De Witt, Helen. 1999. Anna Thew Films – A Retrospective. In Anna Thew Retrospective [programme] (July). The Lux Centre.

Della Casa, Stefano. 2000. English Film-maker Anna Thew – Two Evenings at the Villa Il' Capriglio [review]. LA STAMPA [newspaper] (21 July).

Fowler William, Mackay, James and Thew, Anna (2016). Even Malcolm Became A Feminist, Part II – The Renegades. SALT. #7 – Heterophobia. Montez Press catalogue, accessed 9 February 2025. https://www.montezpress.com/catalogue/salt/heterophobia.

hooks, bell. 1996. Cling Film by Anna Thew [live presentation, unpublished], Museum of Moving Image, BFI Southbank (now NFT 3), London, (Autumn).

Jacquin, Maud (curator), LUX and Tate Film. 2016. “From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-makers’ Co-operative (Tate Modern), 19, 23–25 September,” Tate Film, accessed 9 February 2025. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/film/reel-real-women-feminism-and-london-film-makers-co-operative.

Kurtagic, Emina. 1997. A Matter of Life and Death. In Anna Thew – A Retrospective [programme catalogue]. Split International Film Festival (October).

Lawson, Deborah. 1995. Sexual Grace – Body Positive. In Anna Thew’s Cling Film with Derek Jarman's Angelic Conversation [catalogue]. City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand.

Mazière, Michael. 1988. Illuminated. Independent Media, No.75 (March).

Nadal, Laia. 2022. ‘Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Winter and Spring and Summer’ (2003) dir. Anna Thew. Ultra Dogme, 8 March, accessed 15 April 2025. https://ultradogme.com/2022/03/08/autumn-rush/.

Stoneman, Rod. 1996. Anna Thew. In Curtis, David (ed.) A Directory of British Film and Video Artists, 194–195. Arts Council of England.

Thew, Anna. 2024. Reflections on Mare’s Tail [essay, sleeve publication]. In Moore, Anthony. Mare’s Tail: From the Film by David Larcher [album]. Bandcamp, accessed 15 April 2025. https://anthonymoore1.bandcamp.com/album/mares-tail.

Thew, Anna. 2024. Experimental Film-making. In Froy, Claire (ed.) The Spaces Between – Richard Welsby Selected works 1972-2022 [catalogue]. The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, 2024.

Thew, Anna. 2024. What I meant to say was…. In Chan, Wing and Morris, David (eds.) Precarious Solidarities, Artists for Democracy 1974-77. Afterall.

Thew, Anna. 2021. A Train in the Night Passing (Schrift for the Liberated Nacht). In Schtinter, Stanley (ed.) The Liberated Film Club, Tenement Press #2. Tenement Press. “Tenement Press – Liberty,” accessed 9 February 2025. https://tenementpress.com/Liberty.

Thew, Anna. 2019. Anna Thew – Lost for Words. RAB-RAB magazine, Boynik, Sezgin (ed.) (Issue 5). “Rab Rab Press, Rab-Rab Journal # 5,” accessed 9 February 2025. https://www.rabrab.net/shop/p/rab-rab-journal-6-b4bek-mndn6.

Thew, Anna. 2002. By Way Of An Elegy – On Sandra Lahire's Uranium Films. FILM WAVES magazine. 

Thew Anna. 2001. Curating Cultural Imperialism or Vibrant Moving Image Culture? VERTIGO magazine (Spring).

Thew Anna. 2001. Film's Lascivious Surface – Film is the Future. FILM WAVES magazine (Issue 14, Spring).

Thew, Anna. 1998. A Profile: David Larcher. EYEBALL magazine (Issue No.5, Spring).

Thew, Anna. 1998. As The Mainstream Flicks the Underground Flickers. EYEBALL magazine (Issue No.5, Spring). Republished in Thrower, Stephen Edward (ed.) 2003. Eyeball: Compendium 1989–2000. FAB Press.

Thew, Anna. 1991. A Letter! On the demise of the London Film Co-op [editorial]. Independent Media.

Thew, Anna. 1988. Against The Steady Stare. In Steve Farrer's Machine [catalogue]. Oxford Museum of Modern Art.

Thew, Anna. 1986. The Last Sweat of Youth: On David Medalla at the Daylight Club (Review). Performance magazine, No.44/45 (Nov–Feb), accessed 8 February 2025. https://www.performancemagazine.co.uk/pdf/issue-4445-nov-feb-1987/. 

Thew, Anna. 1986. Between the Lines. In Mazière, Michael (ed.) Light Years, 20 Years of the LFMC. (October). London Film-makers’ Co-operative.

Turner, Sarah and Rashid, Ian. 1995. Hygiene And Hysteria – Groupe á Risque [touring programme catalogue]. Arts Council of England.

 

Anna Thew Filmography (2025)

From Face to Face (Super 8, 18 minutes, 1978)

Lost for Words (16mm, 27 minutes, 1980)

Berlin Meine Augen (Super 8, double screen, 23 minutes, 1982)

BLURT  (2 x 100ft 16mm loops, video / Super 8  performance, 30 minutes, 1983)

Mourning Garden Blackbird (Super 8 blow up to 16mm, double screen, 8 minutes, 1984)

Sailor Trailer and the Tinkling Laughter of Little Girls (Super 8, triple screen, 7 minutes, 1984)

Hilda was a Goodlooker (16mm, 60 minutes, 1986) Major Arts Council Award.

Blurt Roll 2 (16mm, DV, 10 minutes, 1987)

Behind Closed Doors (16mm, 14 minutes, 1988) Illuminations/Channel 4 Commission for ‘Ghosts in the Machine’.

Eros Erosion (16mm, 45 minutes, 1990) British Film Institute ‘New Directors’ Award.

Dominica Diary (16mm, 20 minutes, 1991)

Cling Film (16mm, 23 minutes, 1993) Arts Council/Channel 4 Commission for ‘Midnight Underground’.

Jocasta’s Giant Clasp (five screen 16mm projection with performance, 30 minutes, 1995)

Bartok Budapesten (DV from Super 8, 15 minutes, 1996)

Terra Vermin (16mm double screen, 10 minutes, 1998)

Machine Parts and Portraits, Homage to Kenneth, Kummer (double and triple screen Super 8 blow up to 16mm, 1999/2000)

Thew, Anna

Assemblage for Eye Drift/Broken Pieces for the Hospital (video, 16 minutes, 1998/2000)

Broken Pieces for the Co-operative  (16mm double screen, 35minutes, 2000/2001)

Zhensheena Minskaya – Minsk Girl (Super 8 blow up to 16mm, 6 minutes, 2002)

Autumn Rush for Kurt Kren and Spring, Winter and Summer (16mm, double screen, 6 minutes, 2003)

L.F.M.C. Demolition (16mm, 10 minutes, 2004)

Fragments for Eye Drift (Super 8 blow up to 16mm, double screen, 12 minutes, 2005)

Hrvatski Framed (16mm, 14 minutes, 2005)

Back Tor (16mm, six screen projection, 15 to 30 minute cycle, 2006)

Poems and Constructions, I - Trastevere, II - L’Isle (16mm, 6 minutes, 2008)

Temenos 2008 (16mm, 14 minutes, 2008)

When Kenneth Anger Signed My Arm I Didn’t Wash for a Week (16mm, 3 minutes, 2009)

Paul’s Poem (DV assembly from 35mm, 16mm and Super 8, 12 minutes, 2010)

Lao’s Scroll (16mm /DV, 60 minutes, 2011 – present)

Frozen Frames (3 screen 16mm projection with video and live performance, 2015)

Temenos II (16mm, 6 minutes, 2016)

Prometheus– Stolen Time (16mm double screen, quadraphonic sound, 2016)

Tamarind Trove (16mm, 11 minutes, 2018)

George Snow – Thoughts on the Fall of the House of Usher (16mm, 15 minutes, 2019)

Traces, L’Isle sur Serein - La Fin (The End) (16mm, 12 minutes, 2023)

Teatro – The Olive Grove I, II (16mm, 30 minutes, 2019/2025)

III – Melagrana, IV – Bird Song (16mm, 12 minutes, 2022/2025)