Kirjahaku

There are few more complete examples of an artist’s record of their own life than the intimately detailed and beautifully produced handmade books that Derek Jarman created throughout his career. Seen together they reveal the story of how he gathered, shaped and made concrete his ideas. Containing poetry, drawings, pressed flowers, photographs, excerpts from scripts and notes, the sketchbooks are part autobiography and part social history, layered and bursting with the energy and creativity not only of this groundbreaking film-maker and artist, but also of London in the 1970s and 80s. Wholly private during his lifetime, these precious books are an intimate pictorial record of the relationship between Jarman’s personal and professional life, revealing the detailed planning and research, and creative and emotional engagement, behind each of his films.

Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks – Deluxe Edition. Edited by Stephen Farthing and Ed Webb-Ingall. With a preface by Tilda Swinton. Featuring contributions from Keith Collins, Christopher Hobbs, Andrew Logan, James Mackay, Jon Savage, Howard Sooley, Neil Tennant and Toyah Willcox. DELUXE SLIPCASED EDITION. INCLUDES THREE PRINTS. Containing poetry, drawings, pressed flowers, photographs, excerpts from scripts and notes, Derek Jarman’s sketchbooks are part autobiography and part social history, bursting with the energy and creativity of this groundbreaking artist. This publication collates the best of Jarman’s sketchbooks to reveal the detailed planning and emotional engagement behind each of his films in more depth than ever before. This deluxe edition is limited to 500 copies, each presented in a cloth-covered slipcase. Each numbered copy is accompanied by three prints reproduced from the sketchbooks, housed in an envelope tipped into the book. The book, which is covered in real blue cloth with gold foil blocking on the spine and in a debossed recess on the frontboard, is c.15% larger than the standard edition. 196 illustrations, 187 in colour, 31.0 x 24.0cm, 256pp, ISBN 978 0 500 517185 . £150.00 slipcased hardback + 3 prints

Richly illustrated with unique material from the BFI archive and the London Community Video Archive, The Story of British Video Activism is the first authoritative account of the history and practice of community video. Community video has been all-but ignored in histories of non-fiction filmmaking in the UK. Ed Webb-Ingall offers a renewed perspective on this aspect of British moving image practice. He traces the impact of portable video recording technology on the development of new modes of activism and self-representation produced by different community groups between 1969 and the mid 1990s. He positions community video as a moving image practice with its roots in the workers' films of the 1930s and its immediate antecedents in 1960s political filmmaking. Webb-Ingall explores how this approach developed contemporaneously with video art and community art in the 1970s. He concludes by linking the experimentation with video in the 1970s to the subsequent use of video by activists into the 1990s, and on to the explosion of digital/online activist and community filmmaking of recent years.Each chapter features a 'close up' to illustrate the theme of the chapter. Examples include video technology (The Sony Portapak, VHS and Hi-8), movements such as cybernetics, community cable television, Challenge for Change (Canada), Newsreel (the USA), and events (e.g. The Video Show in 1975).

The coming of videotape, cheaper and more flexible than film, transformed the production and distribution of moving images, and political activists were among the first to recognise its potential. The Story of British Video Activism is the first book-length account of this vitally innovative but unjustly neglected filmmaking. Ed Webb-Ingall traces the democratising impact of portable video recording technology from the late 1960s to the early 21st century. He introduces pioneering and dynamic videomakers from John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins to Liberation Films and Ceddo Film and Video Workshop, showing how video played a powerful role in local and national campaigns on issues including housing, labour struggles and racial justice. This book reveals the grassroots radicalism of generations of video activists who put cameras in the hands of campaigners and marginalised groups to equip them to challenge authority and fight for tangible change. Close-Ups highlight innovative hardware and campaigns from the miners’ strike to AIDS activism. Webb-Ingall shows that the spirit of analogue videotape lives on in today’s digital video activism.