Amateurism and Experiment: The British Film Institute's Experimental Film Fund (1952-1966)

There has been quite a lot of talk among filmmakers, scholars, and curators in recent years that we are currently witnessing a revival of interest in avant-garde and experimental film. In Britain, a number of exhibitions, conferences, and publications have recently provided important opportunities for reflecting on a rich history of British experimental filmmaking.¹ The way for this revival has very much been paved by the close association that the term "experimental" has had with terms like "avant-garde film" and "art film," but especially with the now more widely used term, "artists' film and video." The idea that experimental film is film made by artists—made outside of the commercial film industry and very often single-handedly—has a long history, dating back to writing on the modernist experiments of futurist, abstract, Dada, and surrealist film in the first few decades of the last century. However, alongside this way of thinking about experimental film, there has been another tradition of thought, one that has regarded experimental film to be film made by artists, but artists working within the film industry itself and concerned, through experiment, with preventing commercial film from succumbing to stultifying convention and banal entertainment. While both ways of thinking about experimental film jostled for attention in British film periodicals such as Close Up and Film Art in the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was the need for commercial experiment that actually drew the most spirited commentary in these publications. Not until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the filmmakers, writers, and teachers associated with the London Filmmakers' Co-operative (established 1966) began to articulate their own aesthetic practice, did the term "experimental film" begin to take on its contemporary specificity.

The success of the movement to make the history of experimental filmmaking in Britain synonymous with the history of artists' film and video has been both politically and pragmatically motivated, engaging all those involved in a historical enterprise aimed, as Malcolm Le Grice once put it, "at aiding the development of contemporary practice."² Along with the London Filmmakers' Co-operative and London arts colleges, the Arts Council of Great Britain can very much be seen as one of the institutional prime movers of this historical enterprise. In 1972, an Artists' Films Sub-Committee was established in order "to provide subsidy for avant-garde/experimental film within a fine art/modernist context."³ Over the next five years, committee members included Stuart Hood, David Curtis, Simon Field, Tony Rayns, Colin Young, Ian Christie, and Laura Mulvey. At the time, the other major source of public funding for independent, nonfeature film production was the British Film Institute's Production Board, which began life in 1952 as the Experimental Film Fund. Although the Production Board would itself go on to provide both indirect and direct forms of subsidy for artists' film and video in the 1970s, the Artists' Films Sub-Committee sought to develop a definition of film practice supported by the committee, which would clearly differentiate its selection policy from that of the BFI. In terms that still resonate with contemporary attempts to articulate an experimental film practice, artists' film was broadly conceived as "an 'artisan-based' film practice," derived from a background in the fine arts, and addressed to "a series of [specialist] audiences rather than a notional general public."⁴ To be eligible for a bursary from the Arts Council, applicants needed, in fact, to have some form of art school training (but could not be students). It was this aspect of the committee's selection policy that most clearly distinguished it from the BFI's Production Board, which did accept applications for funding from amateurs and film school students.

The films funded by the BFI between 1952 and 1966, when the Experimental Film Fund became the Production Board, covered a wide range of styles and genres, but...