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Bert
Hogenkamp
This book is a comprehensive survey of the left's approach to films and television from the period after the second world war until the beginnings of the growth of independent cinema in the late 1960s. It charts the left's first grapplings with the new mass medium of television, the left's continuing use of film as campaigning material, and its work to show in Britain films from the socialist world.
The book covers the use of film by CND and the anti-apartheid movement (including Let My People Go and The Wargame), early party political broadcasts by the Labour Party, the use of film by unions, and work by progressive film-makers such as Lindsay Anderson. It also documents how efforts to screen socialist films led to support for the work of other film-makers from the margins, such as Satyajit Ray and Ingmar Bergman.
Hogenkamp also analyses the left's political attitudes towards film, including the pioneering work on television carried out by the New Left, and the left's early attitudes towards violence in film. In addition he discusses questions of minority access to TV and film, and the restructuring of the British film industry which took place at this time. The fascinating material collected by Hogenkamp indicates the developments that took place in the 1950s and 1960s which culminated in the flourishing of new independent cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
"Bert Hogenkamp is the doyen of the workers-film-and-history movement. Many of us have watched in awe over the past years as the Flying Dutchman has wandered the world searching out every last scrap of information about radical film movements, from Japan's ProKino, to America's Film & Photo League, via France's Amis de Spartacus and many, many more."
The Media Education Journal
Bert Hogenkamp is Professor of Film Studies at the Netherlands Audiovisual Archive in Amsterdam and author of Deadly Parallels: Film and the Left in Britain , 1929-39 (L&W 1986).