ChristieBooks Videos
Posted by Jack on March 31, 2008
[Update, 5 February 2009: after rising costs meant that the archive almost disappeared from the web, I'm happy to say that ChristieBooks films are now hosted here. The links below are now redundant, but the videos are being re-encoded and uploaded gradually. Hopefully all the material I mention below will become available again on the new site in due course.]
I’ve been checking out just some of the many excellent films now being hosted by ChristieBooks via Brightcove.TV. While particularly strong on the history of anarchism (often in the context of Spain or Latin America), the subject-matter is highly eclectic. There’s a lot for us hispanophiles, including footage and newsreels from the Spanish Civil War and material on the wonderful Chilean singer Victor Jara (one of the first victims of Pinochet’s 1973 coup, and a hero of mine since I first conjugated the verb ‘recordar’). But there really is something for everyone with an interest in twentieth-century and contemporary history. I recommend a leisurely browse through the whole menu.
Here are direct links to just a handful that particularly caught my eye:
- a verite-style contemporaneous film on the 1972 Dockers’ Strike in response to the 1971 Industrial Relations Act. This was made by ‘Working Class Films – Cinema Action’ and ‘presented by Educational and Televisions Films Limited’. [Update on who these collectives/organizations were: information on 'Cinema Action', their other films of the time, and 'film as an ideological weapon' is available at the BFI website. Hat-tip to ChristieBooks for the link.]
- a documentary on Huey Newton, ‘presented by American Documentary Films in cooperation with the Black Panther Party’.
- ‘Lindsay Anderson — A Celebration!’. Recorded at the Royal Court Theatre, London, 20th November 1994.
- the oustandingly good BBC Four programme Baader-Meinhof: In Love With Terror (from 2004?), which contains some extraordinary interviews with, amongst others, Astrid Proll, Margrit Schiller, Horst Mahler and Helmut Schmidt.
- the reissue of Gordon Carr’s 1973 documentary on the Angry Brigade. Anyone interested in this subject and the way in which it has been represented since should watch this. It is available as a DVD directly from ChristieBooks, who also re-published Carr’s long-out-of-print 1975 book The Angry Brigade: The Cause and the Case (which seems to still be available from the London Review Bookshop). This is essential reading for anyone with a genuine interest in British politics, policing and the role of the state at that time; and – as I mentioned to my undergraduates when discussing post-2000 ‘Civil Liberties and the relationship between State and Citizen’ – now. None of my students under the age of 21 (i.e., 95% of them) had even heard of ‘internment’, the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Powers) Act (oh the irony of that title), or the ‘Guildford Four’ or ‘Birmingham Six’, let alone the trial of the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’. I wonder why not? ‘Whose conspiracy?’ They’ve heard of them now.
Gavin Robinson said
Wouldn’t 21 year olds have been about 3 when the Four and the Six were finally released? If you compare them with how much I know about 1977 (deducting everything I learned retrospectively from getting interested in punk – I wonder if “nu-gaze” will have a similar effect for the early 90s?) it’s probably not much different. I seem to remember you mentioning students being incredulous about Jesus Christ Superstar. I expect this age group would be just as incredulous about Miami Vice: “how can this have existed? Did people really watch it?”.
Jack said
I agree with you completely about age being a factor, Gavin. (And there is a lot of incredulity and many blank faces about a lot of events and subjects…) But I’ve always found the simple ‘it was before my time’ defence a particularly feeble one amongst anyone, at any level, who claims to have any interest in history, ‘contemporary’ or otherwise. As I’ve said before – wasn’t 1066 or the Schlieffen Plan before our time? Isn’t that the whole point?
I think it is worth pointing out that, for example, I was born the year ‘Superstar’ was first released; I was 4 when the Guildford and Birmingham pubs were bombed, and I was 7 when the Grunwick Dispute was at its peak (although I vividly recall the strike footage on the news). And I wasn’t even born when Harold Wilson devalued in 1967. But I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t at least vaguely aware that someone important in the late 1960s had said something about ‘the pound in your pocket’.
So I’m not relying, ‘merely’ (as it were), on the history of my own lifetime (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that). I’ve always been interested in recent history. Of course, that perhaps just makes me a bit weird. And, as you say about punk, there is usually a trigger which sparks anyone to investigate further. But the current ‘incredulity’ gap only seems to be fully apply to the period between 1945 and the beginning of ‘Year Zero’ on 4th May 1979. That’s not a figment of my imagination. In terms of _domestic_ social/cultural history (call it what you will), I’ve spotted a huge gap in basic knowledge and chronology between VE Day and the Thatcher government (when the sun came out and the modern world began…) That has to be due to a combination of a huge number of factors which undoubtedly include the media, prevailing political discourse, and the school curriculum.
Of course, I wouldn’t dream of ‘blaming’ anyone for having ‘done’ The Nazis or Henry VIII but not the Wilson Government. And, again, I’m not so far removed in generational terms that my school curriculum was drastically different from nowadays (I didn’t ‘do’ Attlee, Macmillan, Wilson or Heath at school during the 1980s). But, I ask yet again, which subjects have the greater ‘citizenship training’ value here and now? And when (if ever?) do we ‘contemporary historians’ have to stop explaining/justifying that?
Or, more simply, how come the news over the last 5 years or so has been completely dominated by ‘terrorist’ legislation, ‘terrorist’ acts and ‘Civil Liberties’ issues, but so few connections have been made (by the media) with the historical precedents of only three decades earlier? Perhaps more surprisingly, in this supposedly ‘media-savvy’, internet-dominated age, how come so few of those who do not have a living memory of those events (as you don’t have about punk and I don’t have about, say, Northern Ireland in 1972) seem to have the desire we had to make those connections for themselves?
I’m genuinely confused about all of this at the moment. Dejected? Yes, just a tad. (Maybe because I have bad ‘man flu’, but I think it runs deeper than that.) Perhaps, as Roy Jenkins once put it, I’m simply ’stirring up apathy’. But I’m more intrigued to keep trying to get to the root of what gets written ‘in’ and what gets written ‘out’. I agree about sniggering at ‘Miami Vice’ (which I’m not averse to, particularly as I wore the rolled-up sleeves and espadrilles myself). But the key question is: why do some events become worthy of general sniggering, while some do not? I’d really like to hear all thoughts and responses.
Gavin Robinson said
I completely agree with you about the terrorism thing. We were dealing with the Provisional IRA as recently as 1997, and in my opinion they were an awful lot better at it that Al Qaeda or whoever, and yet lots of people who definitely are old enough to know better seem to swallow the idea that we’re facing a completely new threat which can only be dealt with by taking away civil liberties. Own goals like Bloody Sunday, internment, Death on the Rock, Guildford Four, Birmingham Six etc should have taught everyone that overreaction doesn’t get you anywhere. I think by the mid-90s it was increasingly recognised that indifference was a powerful weapon, but that seems to have been forgotten again.
I think a key thing to remember is that most things get forgotten very quickly by most people. The question is which few events and people get elevated to popular myths, and how, and why? How many people will remember Tony Blair, or Princess Diana or Noel Gallagher in 10 years time? Will any of them become legends, or will it be someone we think is really obscure? Who would’ve thought the Velvet Underground or the MC5 or Nick Drake would become so influential on the music of later decades?
A sudden thought about prejudice against contemporary history: is it because the very recent past is so real that it threatens established ways of doing history? If it’s too long ago for any of us to have experienced, we can easily conceive of the past in terms of whatever historiographical trend happens to be dominant, whether it’s about social and economic forces, or progress towards democracy, or consensus and deference, or whatever. Contemporary history won’t obey that kind of classification because it’s too obviously more messy and complicated than any of the abstractions historians have traditionally offered to explain the past. How many historians would be comfortable explaining their own lives in the same way that they explain the lives of people who died a long time ago?
Jack said
You are right that most things do get forgotten quickly by most people. John Major is already a near-example, and I, too, have a feeling that may soon happen with ‘Dianamania’ (but only time will tell). Perhaps, as I said, the fact that I do recall very early political events surprisingly clearly does just make me a bit weird. But why events of 50 years or 500 years ago should engage younger historians, while events of 15 or 30 years ago seem utterly alien and ‘not quite _real_ history’ still eludes me.
And yes, some very unlikely things which were ‘minority pursuits’ at the time subsequently achieve ‘mythic’ or ‘canonical’ status at the expense of that which was truly popular (which is, in a long-winded way, the point I’m trying to make about ‘Hair’ in my post above.)
But perhaps you hit the nail on the head in your third paragraph. It is the very messy and contested nature of contemporary history and the process of attempting to analyze it which does make it drastically different from earlier periods. As _none of it_ has yet ’settled’ into any agreed form, it all still remains to be fought over. It is underpinned more by individual human agency than any other trend which we might seek to impose on it, precisely because so many of the individual agents involved are still alive and fully operational in society today. For that reason, it perhaps appeals to those of us who, as the saying goes, may be seeking ‘a better yesterday’, because it addresses the _last_ (i.e., most recent) ‘wrong turning’ which society took (and in which some involved in the discipline may be implicated, either politically, culturally or academically), rather than one so far in the past that alternatives cannot be contemplated (let alone imposed) by the prevailing, contemporary mind-set.
Or something like that. I haven’t expressed it very well. You put it much better. But I’d like to hear more opinions from you and others. I’d then like to attempt to synthesize all of this into a (semi-)coherent post. Contemporary History (particularly if one adds ‘Cultural’ into that mix) is different from ‘History’ (as conceived by the majority, both outwith and within the discipline). That has become increasingly clear to me over the last three and a half years. _I’m_ no longer sure that it is quite ‘real’ or ‘proper’ History at all. Or that it should even aspire to be. And I rather like that. Maybe I’m not ‘A Historian’ at all. I just examine things in the recent past which still live and breathe in the present. There isn’t a shorthand term for that, and perhaps that’s a good thing. If labels, like theories, are restrictive or not informative we should simply chuck them away. As Tim Rice said about the term ‘Rock Opera’, ‘you can call it a plate of egg and chips if you like – it’s still the same thing’.
Btw – I’ve added a link to your blog, which I’ve been meaning to do for some time.
Investigations of a Dog » Glenn Burgess On Revisionism said
[...] being contemporary problems that we have to deal with in our own lives? (The discussion over at Smashing the Window about the tension between history and contemporary history is particularly relevant [...]