THE STORY
OF 18 SCRAPBOOKS

2024

Made in The Cinema Workshop with Young People from 1979 to 1980 at FOUR CORNER FILMS in Bethnal Green in East London.

You can access 750 scanned pages of these books in

All archival material courtesy of Wilf Thust, founder member of Four Corners in 1974.
This book looks back to how the whole project came about and looks forward to what it still evokes.

It consists of excerpts and comments and as such is an assembly. These 48 pages are a shortcut of the bigger book – STARTING FROM SCRATCH – with 230 pages.

Feel free to flicker through this book and take in what appeals to you.

Anthony Davies took part in this project when he was 15. I met him again in 2013 as co-founder of May Day Rooms, an archive for social movements as well as for experimental and marginal cultures. He scanned every page of the 18 Scrapbooks from 1980 with his students of The Experimental Teaching Unit in Central School of St Martins in London because he found something in them that both interested him and, in particular seemed to resonate with the experiences and realities faced by other young people, and those far away from the East End of London. As part of a British Council project with CSM he shared the Scrapbooks in 2018 with people who opened a youth center for young people living in favelas around Sao Paulo. He wrote to me from there:
“I am still here in Brazil but wanted to let you know that we ‘delivered’ your Four Corners Scrapbooks to favela communities here in Sao Paulo who were incredibly excited to see their work reflected in the past, in London, in yours!!
I think that it’s remarkable that the work you did in London in the 1970s has such traction, and has so many connections here in Sao Paulo in 2018. We have set up a WordPress site called Reverso. Our initial contribution to this was the complete Four Corners Scrapbooks (over 750 pages!) as eBooks

http://reverso.resourceforge.org/central-saint-martins/fo ur- corners-ebooks.

THE MODEL FOUR CORNER FILMS 1974 – 78

Four people, during our two year studies in The International Film School in London 1972 – 74, decided to work together on films as a group. We created FOUR CORNERS and finished two films: RAILMAN 1975 and ON ALLOTMENTS 1976. Our work has certain characteristics: All research and all techniques were shared and executed between themselves. The interaction with people and our work included using the film-makers. The station master and his difficulties were seen, met and investigated during his duties, so were the difficulties of the film makers ourselves to get close. The people who took care in maintaining plots were under threat to loose their sites in an industrial environment but still shared their lives openly with the film makers.

The founder members of this group were Jo Davis, Mary Pat Leece, Ron Peck and Wilf Thust. We set up a workshop in a disused
double house along Bethnal Green Road in the Borough of Tower Hamlets in the East End of London. In 1978 we researched the East End Cinema culture. This resulted in THE EAST END CINEMA TAPE. In 1980 Four Corners created a 40 seat cinema and film workshop housed in a shop directly on the high street and we invited people in.

Ron Peck developed with Paul Hallam the film NIGHTHAWKS in the building involving a large community of gay people. Jo Davis and Mary Pat Leece worked, with four generations of a family living on the Isle of Dogs, on the film BRED AND BORN.

Wilf Thust as artist and teacher worked with young people in Tower Hamlets and created with Paul Hallam, Richard Taylor and Keith Cavanagh

THE YOUNG PEOPLE CINEMA WORKSHOP.

The spirit of the founder members can best be characterised with quotes from Ron Peck: “Four Corners attempted to bridge the gap between politics and art, and bring films and film making to those who had previously been excluded from the whole practise of film…”

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

is an appeal to myself to rethink and act. This book here contains a collection of excerpts from more than 750 Scrapbook pages from a workshop I did in 1979-80 and is meant to be a bridge to understand, appreciate and share the original intentions and practices of working with young people in the East End of London. The essence of my Cinema Workshops had been to respond to the impulses of young people with openness and guidance but not with any pressure on results. This approach followed no fixed pedagogy. It was intended to be a response to researchers on the politics of working class youth and the history of the East End of London at the time of the 70s. Our practice meant we took risks, working with people that we didn’t know and met almost accidentally.

Through this year-long project we touched on many elements of film making but never intended to create young filmmakers. This project might be seen as moving away from the idea of film as a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, meaning this is not a comprehensive art form that tries to put all artistic values into a one sensational product.

HERE instead the different artistic elements of a film are seen as a series of components, as a kind of building blocks that have value in their own right. You could describe this kind of filmmaking as an invitation to walk through a town that is full of activities, and by looking amongst the streets you find your own inspiration to support your work.

This is – after we 4 London Film School Students entered the empty SILVERMAN shop we made a place for our living and then for our workshop creation FOUR CORNERS in 1975.

This is the view of FOUR CORNERS in 1980 in expectation of a new ground floor with a 40-seat cinema with meeting and cutting rooms, a darkroom and a workshop for equipment as well as a show window, as you can see.

These photos were taken after our workshops in 1980 inside the 40 seat cinema of Four Corners.

The building had been refurbished and we could show and discuss what we were aiming for.