The Yorkshire Arts Association – Foundations – Part 2 – Early Films
Title card from Ower Bit Bog Oil - (Dir. Eric Hall, 1972)
‘Mr Worsley thanked the members present to agreeing to serve on the new panel and in welcoming them said that the field of film and television offered a particularly interesting perspective in the present period’[1]
These are the opening words spoken by arts patron Oliver Worsley (Chair, Film & TV panel) held at Gylde House on Monday 19th March 1973. Other guests on the first - all male, barring Hibbin - board were Leeds cine-club member, Alan Sidi, filmmaker Alan Coulson, TV producer Stuart Josephs, Sheffield Polytechnic’s Barry Callaghan, artist / sculptor John Jones, and David Williams (formerly of the Rank Organisation and presently of Cineplex cinema Sheffield).[2] In certain respects (clearly not gender) the make-up of this panel is representative of the types of films, and wider activity, which the nascent group began to support. The very constitution of this panel is important. Because of its pluralist nature (people chosen from arts, politics, business and higher education), the filmic output was diverse. However, at this moment, it is fair to state that there was a distinct absence of any shared aesthetic, or formal principles at play - any semblance of a common film identity is largely absent.
The first film to receive funding from the YAA, Spacemen Have Landed in Leeds, remains something of an outlier in this period, and predates this first panel meeting of ‘73. The film documents a programme of ‘The Visitor’ by the Leeds Playhouse Theatre in Education Company ‘presented in a school for educational sub-normal children … and shot in two mornings a week apart, it records the spontaneous and unrehearsed reactions of children with severe learning difficulties to four actors.’[3] In some respects, Spacemen… represents a parallel to the work of Bradford Community arts pioneer Albert Hunt, that is theatre performance serving as gateway to film and video documentation. Eric Beer’s next (non-YAA) project Pebbles into Diamonds (1974) was a drama about the Joseph Lancaster Boarding School c. 1870 and it screened for Yorkshire Television. Beer went on to a successful career in documentary filmmaking before becoming a novelist. He died in 2009, in Harrogate.[4] The film, Spacemen Have Landed in Leeds, is still undiscovered.
In 1972 the YAA sponsored an 8mm amateur film about the ancient sport of ‘Knur and Spell’, an ancestor of golf. It was called Ower Bit Bog Oil (Dir. Eric Hall) and shows a match played one summer Sunday in the West Riding of Yorkshire. A pair of similar shorts, also filmed on 8mm, followed. Stainsby Folk Festival (Dir. Tony Trafford, 1974), and The Castleton Film (Dir. Peter Bell, 1974) represent the last type of this amateur production to be endorsed by the YAA; the genre of ethnographic 8mm films, documenting everyday folk customs of the region, was soon phased out for major support by Hibbin’s successor as film officer, Jim Pearse. Moreover, in its slow drift toward an incipient professionalism, the YAA soon dissolved major funding support for amateur film production (predominantly shot on 8mm film) outright, favouring 16mm and 35mm gauges.
Stainsby Folk Festival cans (c/o https://macearchive.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/1970s-film-of-stainsby-folk-festival-found/)
Nevertheless, a core member of the early Film & TV panels was a devout supporter of amateur film. Alan Sidi had been making 16mm films of family life since the early 1950s and was one of the most prolific filmmakers based in Yorkshire during the period. That he was using 16mm tells us much. As a successful local businessman Sidi had the disposable income to afford the semi-professional format as opposed to 8mm, the cheaper consumer format of choice used by many amateur cine clubs and filmmakers around the country. Sidi established a cine club of his own called Mercury Movie Makers in the late 50s alongside fellow Leeds residents, Ken Leckenby and Reg White. They were formed in 1959 as a breakaway 16mm group from a traditional 8mm club and fully realised a number of ambitious, self-funded, projects.[5] One of the group’s early 60s works even won an award at the Cannes Film Festival, XV Festival International Du Film Amateur.[6] Sidi was also renowned for his technological innovations, and he even built a device to synchronise sound with 16mm film before this was commercially available.[7] It was used on many of their productions. These works ranged from ethnographic trips around the West Riding to careering fiction films like the YAA sponsored film produced in 1974 called The Devil God.
Still from The Devil God (Alan Sidi) - Yorkshire Film Archive
This twenty-two-minute project is a distance removed from the folk documents of Ower Bit Bog Oil or the Stainsby Folk Festival. A car-chase thriller with a rare Chinese statue at the heart of the plot, The Devil God races along with the verve of a swinging 60s crime caper set in West Yorkshire. The synchronised soundtrack (rare in amateur production) also bristles with a confidence that belies the medium; it features Tchaikovsky, Pink Floyd and Sisyphus (a Richard Wright solo project) edited in a blur of car crash set-pieces, fireworks, and explosive sound FX. While the production was entirely self-financed (further reflection of Sidi’s economic status), the YAA provided ‘Distribution Assistance’ through its recently established Yorkshire Shorts Library service.[8] However, despite the relatively high production values (and lengthy crew list) of The Devil God, amateur film was soon discontinued from major YAA support. The Film Policy paper introduced by Jim Pearse (and discussed below) was the driver behind this strategic shift. Since his passing, Sidi has been rightly recognised as a maverick one-off in the usually low-ambition world of regional amateur production, and his collection of films have been digitised and lovingly re-contextualised by the YFA.
Two YAA film documentaries made in early 1973 were symbolic of the pre-BFI funding landscape and are cut in the mould of traditional ACGB projects – films about artists. Between 1953 and 1998 the ACGB commissioned and participated in the production of 450 documentary films which recorded all aspects of contemporary British art practice, from the spheres of visual art, architecture, poetry, and literature, captured by film-makers from the emerging to the established.[9] It is evident that the initial vision of the YAA’s embryonic relationship with the moving image was to echo the ACGB Arts on Film strand.
Stiil from Austin Wright - The Secret Middle - The Yorkshire Film Archive
The first film was Austin Wright - The Secret Middle, a conventional documentary detailing the artwork of acclaimed sculptor Austin Wright showing the methods and inspiration behind some of his most familiar pieces. It was ‘intended for fine art students and general audiences’, and according to the film-maker Harry Duffin was a product of his professional relationship with Nina Hibbin. Learning about Austin Wright’s work while at Hull art college, Duffin resolved to make a film about him - despite having never held a camera before. He contacted Wright and with his blessing applied directly to Hibbin at the YAA for a grant. The final piece is a thirty-four-minute documentary solely crewed by Duffin, and with a soundtrack notable for featuring the piano work of Jim Hawkins, who became a prominent dramatist for television and theatre. Following the film, Duffin joined the Hull Spring Street Theatre Company (founded by TV producer Barry Hanson and playwright Alan Plater) and worked as theatre designer and writer.[10] From this background, Duffin subsequently forged a successful career writing scripts for BBC Radio, ITV and the BBC Television Drama Department. His archival collections have been retained by the YFA.
The second YAA artists documentary project from 1973, Kate Bernard, also has an interesting background. Its director, John Jones, sat on the first Film & TV Panel. He was a lecturer at the Leeds University fine art department and had previously studied under William Coldstream at the Slade School, London. In 1965 he spent a sabbatical in the US on a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, interviewing artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, and Yoko Ono. In 1969 he made a film for the ACGB with a documentary on Matisse, A Sort of Paradise,[11] and a few years later collaborated on an abstract 16mm short with internationally renowned sculptor Claes Oldenberg. His project for the YAA, Kate Bernard (1973), is based on an exhibition of drawings and paintings by the artist held at the Serpentine Gallery in London, and this work is juxtaposed with life at home and in her Yorkshire studio. Jones’ clear fascination with the medium meant that he later introduced film (as theory and practice) into the Leeds University Fine Art Prospectus. Setting the educational standard for years to come, he built a private collection of books, photographs and apparatus to be used by students.[12] He eventually retired from the University in 1991. Jones’ contribution to British art as filmmaker, writer, painter, archivist and educator is a significant one - it is disappointing to find so little published about his work. A full research project into his life is necessary, yet beyond the scope of this thesis.
Another prominent member present on the first Film & TV Panel was Barry Callaghan. He is discussed elsewhere in this research, but Callaghan, (like John Jones at Leeds) played a pivotal part in shaping the development of film-making education at Sheffield City Polytechnic. A key title emerged in 1974 that was a product of Callaghan and fellow lecturer Paul Haywood’s Fine Art course. It was the most ambitiously realised YAA film so far. Phillip Austin and Derek Hayes were students at the Polytechnic who collaborated on the twenty-minute animation film, Custard and successfully applied for completion funding from the YAA. The film itself is about a worker in a custard factory who is considered a pervert by his neighbours and work mates because he loves his job. Their victimisation of him eventually goads him into taking revenge and he threatens to flood the city with custard. It is loaded with a socialist politics (a reflection of the climate in mid-1970s Sheffield, perhaps), skewered by an absurdist, surreal scenario. Such was the strength of the YAA film, Hayes and Austin would be amongst the first animation students accepted at the National Film School (NFS) in London. Later, the pair founded the production company Animation City making commercials for companies like Lego and Carlsberg, BAFTA winning shorts, pop videos for Madonna, Elton John, Rod Stewart and title sequences for major television broadcast.[13] The makers behind Custard are two of the most significant Sheffield City Polytechnic alumni to date. Moreover, as the first animators to be recipients of YAA money, they also broke the mould to pave the way for future sponsorship of animated work.
Writer and director Arthur Ellis also cites Custard as a direct inspiration behind the decision to apply for YAA funding. Ellis was a National Film School (NFS) alumnus who, wanting to leave London, moved up to Sheffield. While working at the University bar, he saw the YAA Film competition advertised and applied for a grant to assist his project, Terminus. Ellis remembers the ‘exemplary’ Nina Hibbin as the key driver behind his successful application: ‘she was supportive, encouraging and had all the faith in me which I lacked. I was left alone, trusted to make the decisions which I needed to make and to take or develop the film, from the winning script, in any direction I wished to pursue.’[14] The script was awarded a small sum of £360 towards costs, and Ellis raised another £75 himself.
At the NFS, he had read Barry Callaghan’s seminal Thames & Hudson Manual of Film Making (1975) and allied himself to Callaghan and Haywood at the Polytechnic who helped in the equipment loan and production process of the film. Haywood himself was cameraman on the film, and ‘was bulwark of the project; with unflagging confidence, focused, supportive beyond any call of duty’ while students from the Polytechnic crewed on the shoot. The final film was shot at the Sheffield train station snack bar and depicts ‘a time-killing, patronising encounter between a young man and a tramp’.[15] Following Terminus, Arthur Ellis went on to a distinguished writing career, and he suggested to me that the film ‘provided lessons I didn’t learn in the classroom… and it took me many commissions to understand how I needed to write a script…’[16] Over the last forty years he has worked for the BBC, Hammer Films, Oliver Stone, and he penned the revered Alan Clarke drama, Christine (1987). It is those early creative freedoms, and collaborative relationships forged and enabled with the Polytechnic, the YAA and Hibbin that are the key touchstones here. Those filmmakers given funds by the YAA were often at an early stage of development, and to have the independence to research, develop formative experiences, make mistakes, and learn the craft of filmmaking was a crucial by-product of the YAA grant-aid project. Furthermore, both Terminus and Custard are indicative of the relationship between the YAA and the Sheffield City Polytechnic in the research period, especially in the 1970s. During this time, facilities at Psalter Lane were readily available, which enabled mature students, budding undergraduates, and YAA applicants like Ellis to come to Psalter Lane to watch films at the campus theatre, use the equipment, to help on other films, and learn from passionate and confident tutors like Callaghan and Haywood. Further, Psalter Lane acted in place of traditional exhibition platforms (i.e cinemas) an informal network of college projection rooms, community centres, pubs, and festivals became the venues at which to present work in the 1970s.
——-
Footnotes
[1] Minutes of the meeting of the Film and TV panel held at Gylde House, Leeds on Monday 19th March 1973 at 10.30 AM
[2] Ibid.
[3] Unknown
[4]Eric Beer website / Harrogate website
[5] http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/8-oclock-special
[6] http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/8-oclock-special
[7] https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-sounds-exciting-1971-online / use a highly sophisticated system of twin turntables, reel-to-reel players, a mixing desk, and a cine-synch machine designed
[8] The collection was digitised in 2007 by the University of Westminster, and its catalogue can be found here - http://artsonfilm.wmin.ac.uk/filmcollection.html
[9] http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/austin-wright-sculptor-secret-middle
[10] http://www.yorkshirefilmarchive.com/film/austin-wright-sculptor-secret-middle
[11] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/dec/23/john-jones-obituary
[12] http://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/obituaries/2010/jones_john.html
[13] https://www.falmouth.ac.uk/content/derek-hayes
[14] Ellis/Email interview.
[15] Reel Practise
[16] Ellis/Email interview
