1972
In 1972, before I went to The London International Film School, I spent three weeks at the Notting Hill Gate Adventure Playground taking photos. I wanted to be part of what happened there. I had been before with Annegret N. She taught art with me at the same school in Bremen, Germany. In 1970 she researched the site with an Art Professor she knew well. Their critical assessment opened a new understanding for me about the Black community living in Britain. At that time Frank Mc Field – a writer and sociology student from the West Indies – worked at the playground. He was pivotal in helping me write a script and set up interviews to make a documentary about this place. I made this film as my second-year project in the Animation department of the film school. – using the many hundreds of still photographs I had gathered during my time at the playground.
1961 Oct
I called the film “WHERE IS THE GAIETY? – looking at the noun “happiness” from a leaflet about the playground written by the Council – which was an insult to the people who came to “play” here, particularly the teenagers who shouldn’t have been there but had nowhere else to go. I intended, after one year of film school, to go back to Germany.
‘THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL FILM SCHOOL’
But, I was drawn in and attracted by the many new activities here and by people who were on the same wavelength as me and became my friends. There were four of us from a course of 60. I decided to stay on for a second year. This meant I had to renounce my status in Germany as a civil servant – and leave any financial security behind.
1961 Oct
Here we are:
WILF THUST – it was always clear that my interests were radical interventions and innovations in education.
RON PECK – I got to know him when he helped me find a bedsit in London. He joined the course in order to learn how to make fiction films.
JO DAVIS, brought up in London and studied at Goldsmith College of Art, she had worked on an Art Project called ‘Pavilions in the Parks’, a public exhibition project that attempted to crack open the stranglehold of galleries.
MARY PAT LEECE who had studied art at the time of the Vietnam War left America and was politically engaged and open to new aesthetics and alternative approaches to filmmaking.
1961 Oct
We got on so well that through our technical exercises and the influence of our tutors, in terms of new independent approaches to film (both watching and making) we decided to create our own group, calling it Four Corner Films.
In 1974 we started on our first film. We were supported by our course director to act as producers. We decided to try and get permission to shoot on a Railway platform. The reason was to get close to the life and work of a railman.
“RAILMAN” became the title of our film. Official permission was difficult to achieve – so, we openly filmed the more factual elements of the script using actors. Filming scenes with the ‘railman’ (Alfred) was refused. We resorted to clandestine sequences using video cameras in black and white. The film includes our relationship with Alfred, even questions about his family and anticipated strike actions by his ASLEF union. I like the film because it demonstrates an approach to go ‘behind the scenes’. Technically it was difficult to hold the different elements, celluloid film and video tapes, together. But when I showed the result in MDRs 2014 people didn’t mind the lack of quality. They liked the clear intention of the film and the short length – only 20 min. That allowed time to talk about the film afterwards.
The question for us (me) was how to make money with our filmmaking. A tape slideshow for a language teaching product raised hopes, so did two films we made commercially, but it was hard, however, to see these kinds of projects sustaining us in the long run. Jo Davis inspired me. We became partners. She run a sculpture course in Brixton College and I managed to create an adult education course in the same building offering animation filmmaking with Super 8 cameras. My other income was to shoot animation commercials, at night, in Soho on a 35mm rostrum camera, frame by frame. Meanwhile, and with Jo’s contacts, we found a studio in a storage place under Euston Station. Then through Jo again we found an empty double house, an unused drapery shop along Roman Rd in Bethnal Green. We squatted that place and sublet parts to artists whilst living and working from there.
“ON ALLOTMENTS”
Again, Jo was the driving force suggesting we make a film about allotments. We all liked the idea and got involved, each in our own way. I liked the research into the history, particularly their importance during the 1st and 2nd World Wars, but also the new initiatives by Professor Thorpe from the University in Birmingham who piloted new approaches. We visited and photographed these sites. But this is ours in Newham.
Our visits to the site led us to carefully planning every shot. Slides were essential and were used to complete the picture of this community under threat. A lorry park was planned, which would destroy the site, and protests were mounted. How should we include this when essentially we wanted to appreciate the care taken by the people planting and enjoying a bit of leisure time? Mary Pat insisted on close-ups and sounds that put the viewer in a kind of dream world reminiscent of John Cage improvisations. Ron recalls serious discussions about avoiding the film becoming an ‘agitprop’ cliche. We didn’t contact anyone who was politically active.
We got involved with an approachable and relaxed man and his son, “living” in a shed and essentially ‘playing’. This led to criticism of the film in that it didn’t ‘tackle’ serious issues. But for me without that, we could have taken away the tensions between the turmoil of outside pressures and the astonishing calmness, creativity and endurance of the allotment holders.
What was special is that every member, all four of us, was respected with their opinions and remained as much as possible actively involved. For me, it was important that we worked as a GROUP. None of us was the ”director” in this film.
“NIGHTHAWKS”
At first Ron hesitated to move into the building at Four Corners. But being with us as a group – working on films – gave him a feeling of togetherness and family, so I read in a letter from him to Jo in 1978 after he died in Nov 2022. He felt supported to come out as homosexual and to encourage others to take part in his film to represent his intentions. Hundreds of people went in and out of F.C. to be interviewed. The letter to Jo states his vision of Four Corners as a well-spring of ideas about film that will leave their mark on the ‘history of filmmaking!’ ‘It would be an almost too perfect place’, he writes. I think he was right to say this. It certainly was THAT, F.C. building itself up to almost a too perfect place to be. But – could it last
Ron in a letter to me in 2011: “The highlight of last year was the trip to Moscow and a paper reporting the screening of NIGHTHAWKS. And the Russians I’ve got to know give me hope.”
The other side of RON was being thoughtful and calm. That he always was.
To keep our group together Jo and Mary Pat were the frontrunners applying for money from The British Film Institute, from the GLC (the Greater London Council led by Ken Livingstone), from Channel 4 and the Workshop Agreement and from the Local Tower Hamlets Council and the Arts Project. Through that the potential of a local film workshop group with open access to other film-makers and local people grew. I felt very excited but not confident enough to live through this expansion with very little money. Therefore, I applied for jobs in Germany to teach photography and film. The ‘dream’ of Four Corners was over for me, but, similar to Ron, the seeds of possibilities stayed with me.
“THE OBERSTUFEN KOLLEG”, the so-called “OS” in BIELEFELD, a new UNIVERSITY in the state of Nordrhein Westfalen in Germany, enabled me to get my kind of ‘dream job’, based on my time in Four Corners and my past. I was accepted as a member of four (why was it again the four?) to work in the art department within a completely new teaching approach in a building that covered everybody under one roof (like a factory hall). The concept was designed to teach mainly working class students who, after an apprenticeship, would be accepted on a four-year course leading them into University to THEN study their chosen subjects. The idea was to bypass any foundation courses. That was an affront to the state that had agreed to it! The ‘experiment’ was part of a completely new concept in Germany that needed research. It was the brainchild of the educationalist Hartmut von Hentig.
The project was opposed by almost all Universities and art schools in the Education Department of the State of Nordrhein Westfalen and Germany. We, as a staff and student body, were employed and accepted, to research this practise. It was up to us to react and act and to decide, in defence, on courses of action. The building became a ‘debating chamber’. How could we best protest? Should we call a strike? Strike debates replaced the carefully designed curricula and lasted for half a year. I took that in as part of my “research”. For me what happened was a valuable process and a lesson in democratic decision making. My students and I took part as photographers in the unfolding narrative.
Later I used the photos and documents to make a film – again entirely constructed from still pictures – as in my ‘Where is the Gaiety’ film – but here with handwritten subtitles for an English audience. The original film is called ‘SAVE THE OS’ and a video film, an extension made 40 years later, is called ‘THE SCHOOL STRIKE’. These films raise questions about the role of art, politics and education. The mix of theory and practise in that served MY abiding interests, but what about Jo, my partner?
Our son was born in 1978 in London. After that we stayed for a year in a caravan on a Campsite in Bielefeld and didn’t settle. Then Jo decided to go back to London. I HAD to follow and negotiated a sabbatical year to work on Ron’s film. He was about to finish ‘NIGHTHAWKS’, and employed all of us original Four Corner members. I became a lighting cameraman, Jo a camera operator, Mary Pat an editor – by this time Four Corners had become a group of six as PAUL HALLAM ( co-writer and director with Ron) and RICHARD TAYLOR, working alongside Mary Pat as editor, became members of the group.
I was lucky enough to get a teaching job for 2 days a week at the International German School in Richmond West London. Commuting from East London was a massive drag though – and Four Corners was packed with people living there and working in the same narrow double house that we had left in 1967, but now had become a building site. Jo and Mary Pat were developing ideas for a public cinema. A feminist film distributor had moved in as well, and we hired equipment to other filmmakers. Jo and Mary Pat worked on their film called ‘MOTHER and DAUGHTERS’. Then the “cinema” part of ‘Four Corners’ opened to the public and Cinema Seasons and screenings and discussions by independent filmmakers began to happen.
It was a SHOCK for me to have lost my job that I really liked and my secure income. But despite all, Jo and I with Bob lived in one room back in Four Corners, on top of the building site, before moving to a Council flat in Hackney.
“CINEMAS IN THE EAST END OF LONDON”
I was most engaged in a ‘tape/slide’ programme we devised about the history of cinemas and cinema-goers in the East End of London. Remnants of many of the luxurious cinema buildings remain and photos of these, plus pictures from the archive, were compiled and the voices added of cinema-goers that we interviewed, remembering their experience of film in its heyday! This project led perfectly into the opening of our 40-seat public cinema at Four Corners, which quickly established a reputation for discussion, performance, guest speakers and curated film seasons and which attracted a growing and lively audience. Ron wrote at one point, before he moved out of this chaos: ‘Perhaps there was naivety in Four Corners’ aims…an almost philanthropic desire – etc, etc – to bring film to the people’. He might well have been right – but I remain still really proud of these attempts as they were not only in our heads but a reality.
Next – 80s