CINEMA DESPITE: Celebrating Scottish artists' moving image

Scotland’s rich history of experimental film and artists’ moving image work will be celebrated at CINEMA DESPITE, a one-off, three-day festival that’s been long in the making. “There hasn’t been any concerted attempt to survey the histories of artists’ film and video or experimental production in Scotland for almost 15 years,” explains Marcus Jack, the festival’s curator, who's spent the last five years digging into the archive as part of a research project with the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities and the Glasgow School of Art. First and foremost, the festival aims to make this work visible and accessible. “There are very few resources available for people who want to see or engage with this rich cultural legacy," says Jack. "[CINEMA DESPITE] hopes to start a conversation about the fate of this work.”

In the UK, the history of artists' moving image work has, for the most part, been dictated from London and shaped by London tastes. In looking specifically at work made in Scotland, CINEMA DESPITE will be asking what shape the avant-garde takes here.

“The Scotland in question is not one of symphonic landscapes and ancient custom,” Jack says of the work featured in CINEMA DESPITE, “but of a context where homosexuality was only partially decriminalised in 1980, where public subsidy for film production was first made available in 1982, where the Poll Tax was piloted in 1989, where successive independence campaigns have failed, where colonial wealth shapes the urban environment, where film and video are underrepresented in national and civic art collections and have no private market. In these respects, a review of artists’ film and video made in Scotland aims to situate, recognise, and advocate for a cinema which survives despite.”

The programme hasn’t been arranged chronologically and draws on a broad selection of media from different periods and contexts, allowing artists with similar focuses to speak to each other across generations. “These focuses allow different recurring threads to be picked out: how artists have negotiated the strong documentary tradition in Scotland; enquiries into Scotland’s imperial legacy; the film as a kind of protest; challenges to tropes of Scottish cultural identity; and the way sexualities have been explored within long histories of social conservatism. This is by no means exhaustive but hopes to offer certain means of approaching a field of practice which is vast and wonderfully unruly.”

Still from Invocation (1984) by Lesley Keen. Image courtesy of the artist.

The festival features work by 29 artists, filmmakers and collectives working across a 70-year period. Some of them will be at Tramway to take part in conversations around the screenings. “I’m very excited to have these different generations in the room together – that just never happens!” says Jack. There will also be a publication featuring five essays from writers Fiona Anderson, Seán Elder, Tomiwa Folorunso, Ruth Gilbert and Sarah Neely. “This documents the project but will also outlive it, providing a resource long into the future.”

Putting a festival like CINEMA DESPITE together has taken years of digging. “It’s a bit like being a private investigator: following paper trails for people or works, trying to track them down,” says Jack. It has also involved working directly with artists to have their reels and tapes digitised, which is clearly one of Jack's favourite part of the research process. “Often trapped on unplayable, obsolete formats, it’s amazing to see these punchy, ambitious things made visible again after 30 years or more languishing in cupboards and attics,” he says. “People surprise themselves with what is unlocked!"

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CINEMA DESPITE, Tramway, Glasgow, 1-3 Sep; day tickets £1.50-£3