Independent curator, Mark Webber, discusses his many projects, their development and management as well as challenges posed to free-lance curators of film. The interview covers the following curatorial projects: Little Stabs at Happiness [Page 1], Underground American and The American Century [Page 2], the international touring programme Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative & British Avant-Garde Film [Page 3], Essential Frame [Page 4] and international touring programme Reverence: Films of Owen Land and book Two Films by Owen Land [Page 5] among other projects.
Biography: Mark Webber is an independent curator of artists’ film and video who has been responsible for screenings and events at institutions including Tate Modern, National Film Theatre, ICA and Barbican Centre (London), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Kusthalle Basel, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne) and many international museums, art centres and film festivals. Selected curatorial projects include: To The Winged Distance: Films by Robert Beavers, Tate Modern, London, February 2007; Robert Nelson: RAN with Movie Camera Oberhausen Internationale Kurzfilmtage, Germany, May 2006; and Expanded Cinema: Space/Time/Structure Stuttgart Württemburgischer Kunstverein, Germany, December 2006.
In addition to special curatorial projects, he has presented the annual avant-garde weekend as part of The Times BFI London Film Festival since 2001, and maintains the Secret Cinema email list for announcements of artists’ film and video events and screenings in London.
LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS
George Clark:
Shall we start by talking briefly through your different projects? The first thing I’m aware you did was the Little Stabs of Happiness night at the ICA.
Mark Webber:
That’s correct. Little Stabs of Happiness started, I think, in October or November ’97. It was a film and music club at the ICA in the theatre started by me, Gregory Kurcewicz, Ben Wallers, and Zoë Miller. The reason I wanted to do it was because I’d been living in London for a long time and there wasn’t anywhere that I wanted to go out socially, and so we thought we should organise something ourselves.
I was already interested in avant-garde cinema and I guess had been for about ten years but still hadn’t seen very much. And when I would go to screenings, I’d find it a bit depressing that there’d be me, the person who organised it and about four or five other people. It just seemed like it was dying… a dying art. And so one of the ideas with the club would be to get people to face up to watching some experimental cinema and realise that it wasn’t all totally boring or a scary prospect or stupid and amateur and all these things. The concept of the club was that it would open, and for the first hour and a half we would play quiet experimental contemporary classical music. It would be quiet so that people could talk to each other and be sociable…
GC:
This was all in the main theatre space?
MW:
Yes, in the theatre. And this would be interspersed with screenings of three experimental films with their own soundtracks. And then after that section of the evening was over we’d show a feature film, usually a kind of left-field feature most often from the 60s and 70s and I guess sometimes from the 80s too – films that would be rarely shown. The Beast (Walerian Borowczyk, France, 1975) was the first film we showed, and that was hardly ever shown at that time. We also showed a whole range of things, even Jaws (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1975) once, Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, USA, 1955), The Tenant (Roman Polanski, France, 1976), Blue Sunshine (Jeff Lieberman, USA, 1976) and Two Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, USA, 1971), films of that kind. After the film had finished, then the audience –who were basically kids – would be rewarded with a disco. So all these kids would come because they liked the disco, but to get to the disco they’d have to watch some films. That was Little Stabs of Happiness and it ran every month for three years, for better or for worse, at the ICA.
GC:
The other space that you mentioned where you would see films, would that be the Lux Centre at that time?
MW:
The Lux Centre must have been open at that time because I’m sure I remember going there to pick the films up. I remember going to screenings in the ICA Cinema 2, but they would not be very regular. The Scala and the Filmmakers Co-op Gloucester Avenue were the first places where I would go to see films at the end of the 80s. I don’t know where else there would have been screenings in the mid 90s. There weren’t many, that’s why I had to do a film salon.
GC:
For me, because I wasn’t in London at that time, it feels like I missed most of the Lux Centre’s activities. And that’s the same period you’re talking about, so it's interesting for me, because I think, ‘wouldn’t it be good if the Lux Centre was still going’. But maybe it wouldn't?
MW:
Not with that cinema! Well, the problem with the Lux Centre cinema was that people didn’t like to go there. I guess Hoxton wasn’t as accessible or considered a destination like it is now, but still once you’re inside the cinema, the projection room was fantastic, but the actual audience area was just awful. So even when they had good programmes, people wouldn’t go there. Or you’d go once and then not go back.
GC:
When did you get involved with the London Filmmakers, Co-op collection and seeing work there?
MW:
Well, that would have been around that time, it would have been 1997 when Beth Copley was doing distribution, she was lovely. I would just go in there for a day or for an afternoon and watch stuff that I’d picked out of the last LFMC catalogue and they wouldn’t charge me. It was kind of useful, they didn’t have film checkers in those days, so I would be checking the prints for them whilst I was discovering the films, and out of that I chose the films to show for Little Stabs of Happiness.
GC:
And what experimental films did you show? You say that the features you showed were of the 60s and 70s. Where the experimental films you showed from the same era?
MW:
The majority would be from that time. Not too many recent films, maybe a John Smith film or something. When I first started going to screenings, if I’d go to a show of old films I would like most of them, and if I would go to a show of contemporary films, I’d find it pretty depressing. So I kind of stopped going to see new films – no point if you’re not enjoying it. And also when I first became interested, I bought loads of books like Visionary Film, David Curtis’s book, Steve Dwoskin’s book, Sheldon Renan’s book – they were all old books and they were writing about old films. That was the only kind of access to information that I had. It’s nearly still the case for most people.
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There seemed like there was no interest out there, people wanted to know what happened to all that work that hadn't been seen for a long time and that they were reading about in books.
