Channel 4 Workshops and the Death of the Director
Tyler Talbott, Assistant Professor of 20th/21st-century British Literature, Creighton University
Aimed at providing integrated film educational, production, and distribution work experience for British creatives outside of the mainstream – with a particular focus on ethnic diversity – the ACTT Workshop Declaration of 1982 brought about a boom of Black British independent filmmaking aired through Channel 4. This article revisits this cultural history to reconstruct the origins and radically de-centered filmmaking practices of groups like the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), Sankofa, and Ceddo in the postcolonial and Thatcherite 1980s. It argues that the unique institutional form of workshop collectives mirrored the diverse ways their hybrid narrative and documentary films thematized multiplicity and collectivity, authorship, and the relationship between cultural workers and broader political movements.
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The British Studies Seminar brings together scholars to discuss work that addresses the history of Britain and the British Empire from the early modern period to present day. The seminar is co-sponsored by the Graduate Cluster in British Studies at Northwestern, Northwestern History, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.