Producer, Filmmaker and Researcher
This is a resource for film historians or those interested in the history of East London. A catalogue from 1985, listing significant films, documentaries and clips, related to East London, compiled by Hilary Dunn, Karen Hamilton, Ric Mann and John Wallett at Tower Hamlets Arts Project (T.H.A.P) Books, in 1985.
Blog from The Radical History of Hackney website on ‘Caribbean House, Hoxton’ 1976-1988. Check out the film and blog here.
Source: The Radical History of Hackney Website.
This is a list I am compiling of films and filmmakers making works relating to, featuring or set in East London, made from 1955-2012. The list is very much a work in progress, so do get in touch if you have other films which should be added to this. It would be very much appreciated.
**Searching for amateur and independent film footage of East London in this period. If you have such footage, I’d like to hear from you. If it’s still on film I can help digitalise it and make it available**
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Amateur Footage, Spring in Hackney. London’s Screen Archives (1956)
Stephen Hearst, BBC, The More We Are Together (1958)
Pathe Newsreel, Poplar Boys Club (1960)
Pathe Newsreel, Pearly King Crowned (1963) – at the Kings Head, Hoxton
GLC Documentary, Somewhere Decent to Live (1967) – available through the London Met Archives
BBC, ‘One Pair of Eyes: Georgia Brown. Who are the Cockneys Now? (1968)
Ron Peck, Nighthawk (1978) [made with funding by Four Corners Film]
Dennis Marks, ‘Lively Arts: Whitechapel’, BBC Bristol Arts Unit (1979)
Amateur Footage, Tower Hamlets Carnival. London’s Screen Archives (1979)
Ruhul Amin, A Kind of English, (Channel 4, 1986) [Funded by Four Corners Film, the first Bangladeshi feature film made in Britain]
BBC, Heading Home (1991) – script by David Hare, filmed in Albion Square
Mayyasa Al-Malazi, Life in the Fast Lane (1995) – about the M11 link road protests
The Battle for the Docklands: The Story of London Docklands, One of the World’s Greatest Regeneration Projects. London’s Screen Archives (1998)
Ben Hopkins, The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz (2000)
Marc Issacs, Lift (2001) – with thanks to Professor Laura Vaughan.
Patsy Palmer’s Real East End, BBC Choice (2001)
Lift, ALT-TV, Channel 4 – footage of Denning Point, Commercial Street (2001)
To Kill and Kill Again. Executive producer, Brian Lapping – ITV, 23rd January (2002)
Emma-Louise Williams, Under the Cranes (2011)
As part of the archive research and interviews I’ve been working on for On-the-Record’s oral history project, ‘A Hackney Autobiography’, I’ve come across this fantastic short independent film ‘Somewhere in Hackney‘, made by Ron Orders in 1980. The film is available free from the BFI website here. It features many of the key workers at Centerprise in the 1970s, and community projects across Hackney at that time.
In May this year, I worked alongside Sami Jalili of Eros Press, and the artist Sharon Kivland, to film an evening of performances at Senate House Library, entitled ‘Their Eyes Travel Across the Page, and Their Hearts Search Out Meaning’.
This is republished with many thanks to Eros Press, and to the film’s editor Sally Mumby-Croft.
In June 2014, I curated and co-hosted a small film festival at Birkbeck Cinema, in collaboration with the Birkbeck Institute of the Moving Image and the Derek Jarman Lab.
The festival, ‘East London on Film’, arose from a number of conversations and my own research into the filmic history of East London, and the representation of particularly Stratford, in light of the recent Olympic Games and the rapid subsequent redevelopments around Hackney Wick.
Many of the films we were able to show came from independent filmmakers, using film as a documentary tool, but also as a political and personal response to the sweeping changes with the Olympic park brought. We screened Hilary Powell’s important film ‘The Games’, parodying past Olympic films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia’. But also Saint Etienne and Paul Kelly’s ‘What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?’, part of their London Trilogy; alongside a short film by Birkbeck student and filmmaker Sally Mumby-Croft, featuring Iain Sinclair. We were able also, to compare these recent films with older representations of the East London landscape in flux, including Barney Platts-Mills’ fantastic ‘Bronco Bullfrog’ (1969), and Lorenza Mazzetti’s post-war ‘Together’ (1955), which was part of the Free Cinema collective set up by Lindsey Anderson.
For the second day of the festival, we were able to look closely at an important pair of documentaries. The first, ‘Vince, Paul, Lawrence and Richard’, broadcast by the BBC, considered the lives of four young children in Stepney in 1971, and the impact of the area on their futures. While the second, a filmic response to this initial documentary by artists Chris Dorley-Brown, revisited the boys featured in the BBC Documentary and critiqued the ethics and role of documentary, not only in these children’s lives, but also in the wider historical representation of East London. It was fantastic to have Chris Dorley-Brown at the festival to discuss his film, and his wider photographic ‘Re-Shoots’ series, considering the elements of time-travel and the photographic moment. The short film above, was filmed and edited by Jeongmin Kang and Fiona Baihui at the Derek Jarman Lab, featuring Chris in discussion with Bruce Eadie, who co-organised the festival.
I have lots of people to thank for helping me curate and put on this festival, firstly the Derek Jarman Lab and key people like Bartek Dziadosz, Jeongmin Kang, Fiona Baihui, Alistair Dunlop, and of course Bruce Eadie. I have to thank all the filmmakers who were involved, Hilary Powell, Sally Mumby-Croft and of course Chris Dorley-Brown. Also, everyone at Birkbeck, particularly Sarah Joshi, for all her help.
Over the past year I’ve had the great opportunity of working with the Derek Jarman Film Lab on a number of projects and filming opportunities at the ICA and with Birkbeck College. I have also been involved in the filming of a series of films entitled ‘Four Seasons in Quincy’ about the British writer and thinker, John Berger. The films have been made in collaboration with Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth and Colin MacCabe. The series is due for release in February 2015.
See more details on the Derek Jarman Lab website: http://www.jarmanlab.org/four-seasons-in-quincy.html
‘In 1973 Berger abandoned the metropolis to live in the tiny Alpine village of Quincy. He realized that subsistence peasant farming, which had sustained humanity for millennia, was drawing to an historical close. He determined to spend the rest of his life bearing witness to this vanishing existence, not least by participating in it. Berger’s trilogy Into their Labours chronicles the peasant life of this Alpine village and its surrounding countryside. Our portrait places Berger in the rhythm of the seasons of Quincy.
The project consists of four short films (between 15 and 40 minutes in duration), one for each season. Each addresses different strands of Berger’s life and work. The winter film, Ways of Listening (directed by Colin MacCabe) deals with fathers and friendship. Animals (directed by Christopher Roth), is shot in spring and considers Berger’s writing on our relationship with animals in juxtaposition with the animals that surround him in the Haute Savoie. In July 2014 Tilda Swinton will direct the summer film, as Berger and his son Yves participate in the village harvest. The autumn film, directed by Colin MacCabe and Bartek Dziadosz, will reflect on politics through a conversation between Berger, Colin MacCabe and the novelist and poet Ben Lerner.’
