Compilation of British avant-garde films from the 1930s. Includes Len Lye's 'The Birth of the Robot', Norman McLaren's 'Hell Unltd', Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey's 'Housing Problems', Basil Wright's 'Song of Ceylon', and Alberto Cavalcanti's 'Coal Face', as well as work by Richard Massingham, B. Vivian Braun, Humphrey Jennings, and the London Kino Group. That this collection begins with a title announcing the "Official and Unofficial Avant-Garde" suggests uneasiness with the naming of this series British Avant-Garde Film in the Thirties. With films like Basil Wright's triumphant The Song of Ceylon--which is at once ethnographic documentary, formalist art and directly political filmmaking--and Norman McClaren's agitprop and surrealist anti-military-spending Hell Untold, the BFI's collection straddles the documentary and art film traditions. This young generation of filmmakers was schooled by the film culture that was developing through Close-Up (which published writings by Eistenstein and celebrated the work of Soviet filmmakers and the emergent European Cinema), and the Film Society which ensured that these films were screened in Britain. Yet they were also becoming increasingly politically aware, partly due to the ideological effects of the First World War, the rise of fascism in Europe and the Spanish Civil War, which captured the imagination of artists and intellectuals. Both strands of influence--the aesthetic and the political--run in a rich vein throughout this compilation; from Alberto Cavalcanti's Coalface about working conditions for miners to Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey's Housing Problems, a critique of the squalid state of working class housing and Mclaren's Dali-inspired Love on the Wing. That some of this work is not available anywhere else makes this collection even more important at a time when government support for non-narrative, non-commercial work has almost dried up entirely. --Tricia Tuttle

• Trefwoorden
  film, avant-garde, beeld- en/of geluidsdrager
• Persoonstrefwoord
  Len Lye, Norman MacLaren, Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, Basil Wright