The 2009 London International Documentary Festival

The John Sampson Retrospective at the LIDF

The fourth London International Documentary Festival takes place in the capital from March 28th to April 4th, and promises a programme of exceptional docs from a wealth of talented film-makers.

This year is the festival's strongest line-up to date, featuring films from over 100 countries, forums and symposiums in venues including the Curzon Soho, the Renoir, the British Musem, the Barbican Centre and the Roxy Bar and Screen. For a full line-up, check the festival's official website http://www.lidf.co.uk/ - and keep your eye on Roll Credits for some of the highlights as the festival unfolds...

John Samson Retrospective

One of the real gems of the 2009 LIDF has to be the John Samson Retrospective - The Complete Films, to screen at The Horse Hospital on Sunday March 29th.

Samson was born in 1946, in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, and later moved to Glasgow. Leaving school at 16, he became an apprentice in the Clyde shipyards and became a spokesperson in the first apprentice's strike. This brought him into contact with Stuart Christie, and the pair became involved in the anarchist movement Scots Against the War.

After he met his future wife Linda, however, Samson gave up his apprenticeship and began working on the Easterhouse project, set up to help disaffected youth who roamed the vast cultureless estates thrown up in the 50s on the East side of Glasgow.

In the early 70s Samson decided to make a film, with the help of David Thompson and other friends. The result was Charlie, a film about a local busker, which he entered into a BBC short film competition — and won second prize. One of the judges was Joseph Losey who recommended that John talk to Colin Young, the director of the newly opened National Film School (NFS) in Beaconsfield, and he gained a place to study film at the NFS in 1973. He went on to make many well received documentaries.

Mike Wallington worked as a producer on Samson's major projects; Tattoo, Dressing for Pleasure, Britannia and Arrows, as well as making his own films including Champions and Arcade Attack. Roll Credits caught up with Mike before the Samson retrospective, to discuss their collaboration and the unique films they made together.

Mike, how did you meet John Samson?

I first met John Samson at the NFS [National Film School, now the National Film & Television School] in 1973, when we both applied as students for the second year’s intake. John brought along to his Maryhill photo portfolio and a homemade no-budget film about a Glasgow street musician, Charlie Williamson [Charlie]. I brought along some borrowed East African natural history footage shot on a wind-up Bolex camera and some Joseph Cornell styled ‘boxes’ I’d made using the craniums of monkeys.

John got a place, I got turned down! But Colin Young (director of the NFS) did phone me up the next day and said he wanted me 'on board'. So I didn’t become a student and my first pay-check at the NFS was as its part-time Research Librarian.

Were there many documentaries made at NFS?

Documentaries are cheaper to make than drama and the students made hundreds of them. There were three groups. The NFS made historic interventions : Steve Morrison’s ground-breaking open-ended film ‘documents’ with the aim to get Catholics and Protestants to engage a dialogue on camera [for example]. In the best sense, these were all political documentaries – they said something’s wrong here and it needs putting right.

A second group of documentary filmmakers was led by Colin Young, who promoted an aesthetic of non-intervention. Colin had run the USC [University of Southern California] film department in Los Angeles as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas were coming through. We learnt a lot about anthropological film-making from Colin, and there wasn’t a student enrolled who couldn’t thread the argument of a story together without commentary. In fact, I’d be more provocative and say that these years in the mid-70s were the golden age of the documentary without commentary.

Then there was another smaller group of documentary film-makers at the NFS whose work was neither overtly political nor ethnographic. These students were immersed in popular culture, they had fairly acute narrative sensibility and they liked to experiment with form and content. I guess I “belonged” to this group. And John Samson was its primary exponent.

How do you remember John?

John was a determined defender of the creative possibilities of the working class : he knew about dry stone walling, about pie-making, about Warhol and he boasted of an aunt who was an unreconstructed Stalinist. Unlike some of his fellow students, he had lived a bit, too. He was a social worker in Easterhouse (razor-gang capital and one of the few police no-go areas in Glasgow at the time), and a leading figure in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. After a few beers he could quote extensively from the poetry of Robbie Burns, and, after a few beers more, from Bakunin or any number of anarchists.

What would you say made yours and John’s films unique?

The aesthetic perhaps. This aesthetic that John and some of these other fellow students developed at the NFS wasn’t entirely new, but it borrowed wisely. It was pioneering, in the sense that it was slap bang in the middle of the debate we started at the NFS [and later continued on Channel Four] about the authoritarian nature of voice-over commentary.

All the films I made with John intentionally avoided voice-over. They breathe easily, they’re natural in exposition and development. Anyone who’s been working in TV recently – let’s say the last decade – will know of the enormous pressure to conform and they will have seen the creative role of documentary film-makers diminish because of it. They treat the audience as if it were stupid.

John and me used to talk about the cat and the cream. The cat is your audience, the cream is in a bowl in front of it. The cream is your film’s subject. What happens when you point at the bowl? Anyone who owns a cat will tell you, it stares at your finger. The commentary is the pointed finger. It just gets in the way, it’s counter-productive and manipulative. And it keeps the cat from the cream. But most programme commissioners today are too stupid to know this.

Another reason why they are pioneering is because they achieve full resonance and they reflect deeper meanings because each has a central metaphoric device at its core. Tattoo is about the body as canvas, a hugely popular notion today but one that was barely indulged and certainly never celebrated 35 years ago. Dressing For Pleasure is about fashion as sexual gratification, not a wild idea today but one that could hardly be talked about in the 70s.

Interview by Kamila Kuc
Content Developer and Website Editor, London International Documentary Festival
Film reviewer for Screenonline, Sight & Sound, ArtsEditor