February 21, 2025 at 3pm 

https://www.newberry.org/calendar/tyler-talbott

Channel 4 Workshops and the Death of the Director

Tyler Talbott, Assistant Professor of 20th/21st-century British Literature, Creighton University

Aimed at providing integrated film educational, production, and distribution work experience for British creatives outside of the mainstream – with a particular focus on ethnic diversity – the ACTT Workshop Declaration of 1982 brought about a boom of Black British independent filmmaking aired through Channel 4. This article revisits this cultural history to reconstruct the origins and radically de-centered filmmaking practices of groups like the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), Sankofa, and Ceddo in the postcolonial and Thatcherite 1980s. It argues that the unique institutional form of workshop collectives mirrored the diverse ways their hybrid narrative and documentary films thematized multiplicity and collectivity, authorship, and the relationship between cultural workers and broader political movements.