Introduction: Stuart Marshall thinking through television

Introduction: Stuart Marshall thinking through television

Janet McCabe

Birkbeck, University of London

Conal McStravick

Artist and Independent scholar

Female doctor: Are some symptoms easier to see than others?

Male doctor: Yes, I think that they are.

Female doctor: Which symptoms do you think are the most easily seen?

Male doctor: Those that we recognise,

those that are familiar to us, those that we’ve seen before.

Female doctor: Are they always self-evident?

Male doctor: Sometimes a symptom is invisible,

which means that it must be aggressively hunted out.

Sometimes it is visible and we do not see it…

A man dressed as a late 19th-century gentleman reading an article about the advances in photography for medical study from The Lancet published in 1893.

Photographs from Havelock Ellis’ 1890 book of ‘deviant’ bodies, labelled ‘A Group of Sexual Perverts’, ‘A Moral Imbecile’, ‘A Hysteric’.

A staged reconstruction of Magnus Hirschfeld summoned to Gestapo headquarters in the 1930s.

Images of the abandoned Nuremberg stadium, once the stage for Nazi spectacles.

A series of video interviews with those whose work involves AIDS – John Weber (doctor and AIDS research), Tony Whitehead (chair of the Terrence Higgins Trust).

These are some of the images and sounds from the 1984 essayistic documentary by Stuart Marshall (1949–1993) and produced for Channel 4, Bright Eyes (1984): interwoven fragments stitched from 19th-century still photography, contemporary tabloid newspapers, 19th-century sociological treatises and scientific understanding of sexuality, filmed interviews with experts, historical reconstructions and a play with the forms of television genre. The narrative organisation in three parts mingles the past with the present writes Martha Gever, ‘mediated by television artifice, which is likewise the object of analysis’ (1987: 115). Salacious headlines from British tabloid Sunday People about AIDS patient Kenny Ramsauer are visually intercut with excerpts from Havelock Ellis’ 1890 ‘criminal anthropological’ study, The Criminal, defining attributes of deviance read by an off-screen voice. Audial and visual material is amalgamated like so much flotsam and jetsam, generating ‘historical reverberation’ (1987: 115) in the way in which thematic correspondences and visual juxtapositions reveal the central thesis of Bright Eyes: what Gever defines as ‘an intelligent political and historical analysis of the underpinnings of the current discourse on AIDS’ (1987: 113).

Bright Eyes was broadcast amidst the initial panic and media misinformation of AIDS, while the language of HIV/AIDS was still in formation; a mid-point between the first identification and naming of the disease, in the media as ‘Gay-Related Immune Deficiency’, then as AIDS in 1981–1982 and the identification of the HIV virus as the contributory cause of AIDS in 1986. At the same time, Bright Eyes is part of the emergence of a community-led activist response to the disease by gay men in urban centres in the United Kingdom and internationally and survives as an audiovisual document of this movement. It is also part of a post-liberation gay and lesbian reckoning spurred by international cultural activism, the influence of overseas public-access television and the demand for gay and lesbian media access embedded in UK gay and lesbian liberation versus the homophobic counter-attack of ascendant right-wing politics and broadly phobic press and media in Britain under a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. This background tells the story of work forged in, and of a critique of, the media institution that originates in post-1968 politics and the UK Gay Liberation Front manifesto of 1971, which cited the media as both a phobic institution that oppresses gays and lesbians and the site for a new media alternative, initiating a nearly two-decade long campaign to deliver dedicated gay and lesbian programming. The former forged new and unforeseen audiences, activisms and publics, the latter dominated the public perception of AIDS until the step-change in AIDS activism with the formation of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the United States and Stonewall and Outrage! in the United Kingdom in 1987–1990. By this point, Bright Eyes was a touchstone in the Anglophone response to AIDS and addressed an increasingly media-literate audience in the context of a global pandemic – one which, despite the arrival of new audiences, new technologies and not least new medications, continues to speak to the present. It did so by connecting to an erudite form of historically situated cultural activism explored in the theatre of Gay Sweatshop’s As Time Goes By and the academic and archival activisms of Michel Foucault’s archaeological genealogical histories (see, Foucault, 1980; 2002) and Guy Hocquenghem and Lionel Soukaz’s 1979 essay film, Race d’Ep, as well as the critical and theoretical context of UK New Left and so-called French Theory. Last but not least, it grounded avant-garde film and video theories, to which Marshall contributed, in histories of video and television.

Even taking this into account, it remains hard to imagine the degree of mass media hysteria around AIDS in the 1980s, how at that time it was publicised as a major public health crisis, a medical epidemic out of control and a disease without cure translated into the politics of representation (see Sturken, 1997: 145–182). As Gever astutely puts it,

what the mass media has produced [in its fear of AIDS] reveals its complicity in constru cting the very fears it presumes judiciously to mediate. From the beginning, when it was announced that AIDS was a syndrome that primarily affected gay men, the full machinery of homophobia – a particular sexual fear characterized by denial – went into action. (1987: 110)

It is this story of figures with AIDS bearing an imaging legacy of disease and (moral) deviance told through the very forms mediating the AIDS crisis that Marshall set out to explore in Bright Eyes; it implicates images and media practices in the producing of public discourses of morality and (social) illness, while simultaneously providing reflexive criticism in how the video-essay puts a history of photographs in dialogue with contemporary forms of mediation (television, newsprint). Nora M Alter contends that, ‘historically, essays tend to appear in times of crisis’ (2018: 15); and it is in that spirit that this dossier seeks to suggest how Stuart Marshall used television forms (its artifice) and production practice for critical thought in the wake of a profound sense of medical catastrophe and cultural upheaval rooted in a particular historical moment of emerging identity politics.

As a way to manage the different threads of his thinking through the institutional and creative practice of television, the dossier uses Bright Eyes with its thesis of the AIDS crisis as a crisis of images and imaging as its hook. This video-essay was first broadcast on Channel 4 in December 1984 as part of the ‘Eleventh Hour’ series, named for its late-night time slot, and designed to showcase the work of independent film and video artists like Marshall. As Gabriele Bock and Siegfried Zielinski write,

The Eleventh Hour…overseen by Alan Fountain as commissioning editor… [provided] audiovisual producers (like the independent filmmakers who earlier fought for the ‘publisher concept’) with opportunities to create their own programmes. They include a range of producers and experimentalists in video and cinema films, as well as some quite radical political groups, who all share a sense of disapproval of established television culture and aesthetics. (2014: 431).

What Bock and Zielinski identify is how in many ways the ‘Eleventh Hour’ made visible the institutional mission to address small minorities in and through works like Bright Eyes, which ‘were considered non-classifiable borderline programmes between documentary and fiction and were thus left out’ (2014: 425–426). In this regard the video-essay, as it is claimed in this dossier, appears at moments when a channel – in this case, the pioneering mission of the public service minded-Channel 4 – make an effort with new types of programming, new and innovative content, as it seeks in the process to define its cultural agenda and make important statements about what exactly that might look and sound like.

After its initial broadcast Bright Eyes was never repeated on the UK’s fourth public service channel. Instead it was seen in what Gever calls ‘closed-circuit’ screenings (1987: 114; for further details, see Curriculum Vitae, Stuart Marshall). Its subsequent existence at film festivals, in museums and art galleries (including leading surveys of AIDS art), in academic and activist settings, and on minority cable channels around the world, despite, as Gever notes, ‘the conditions of its original exhibition, as well as the sources of production funds for Bright Eyes, place the tape within the boundaries of the mass media’ (1987: 114). Nonetheless, Bright Eyes was recognised as part of the first wave of cultural activism of AIDS (1987: 15). It mounted a challenge to the various stigmas attached to the disease, to influence a new generation of AIDS activists and offer ways to support and inform those worst affected; where arguably the ephemerality of media activism was part of its legacy.

This idea of crossing boundaries – of being interdisciplinary, of intellectual activity in thinking across different media practice, of entangled narratives and the mixing of synchronic and asynchronic sound with image to produce a thesis, of erasing boundaries in the production process to perform what Alter describes as ‘a kind of estrangement’ (2018: 7) – emerges as a working definition of the TV essay in this dossier on Marshall. In many ways, Bright Eyes is an absence in what follows, visible only in production stills, which, in turn, speaks to its fragility as a material object, of its material presence at the margins of the Channel 4 schedule and later its archive, but also within television memory and cultural practice (few repeats, no official video release, archived as personal home VCR recordings). Still, the reason for its selection is to allow us to trace Marshall’s thinking in and through television, before and after Bright Eyes, as a way to put into question the last line of the epithet: ‘Sometimes it is visible and we do not see it’.

This dossier explores the layered activities of Stuart Marshall’s thinking about television as a core form of public activism and critique. It testifies to the continual changes and refinement in his thinking about television in and through his media practice, but also as a theorist and activist rooted firmly in that very process. No one would claim Marshall as a TV essayist. He was far too much of a protean character and polymath: a composer, artist and media practitioner, with interests in experimenting with sound, video and performance, producing installations, films and video essays for television, a writer, teacher, curator and activist (see Curriculum Vitae, Stuart Marshall). He defies easy categorisation, but in this way he draws together different areas of media, sound and musical composition and video art in his work to make visible the essayistic in his thinking through practice.

Our first document from the archive is a ‘Statement of Intent’ written by Marshall as part of his application to The Arts Council of Great Britain and Brighton Polytechnic for a residency, submitted on 16 March 1979. This is a piece of practice-as research realised through public funding, where a critical question arises from one’s creative practice – in this case, a lack of opportunity to broadcast the work of video artists – that, in turn, changes the practice: or in the words of Marshall ‘to elaborate an “alternative” practice’. Central to his thinking is the politics of the institution, whereby ways of thinking about the televisual are institutionalised and embedded deep into its very forms of address, content and delivery. Such thinking about the role of an institution to situate an artist and their work within specific socio-political conditions of production and consumption are ones with which we’ve become familiar, primarily through the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1993) and the conceptual and post-conceptual practices known as ‘Institutional Critique’. In 1979, when Marshall is preparing his application, UK broadcast television was restricted to the three established broadcast channels, BBC1 and 2 and ITV, resulting (to his mind at least) in limited forms of television; where could the ‘informed’ interventions into the media thus be seen? In reading through the application his way of thinking through the artifice of television starts to emerge, in which the artist evolves as a practitioner through their intervention into the very materiality of the content. In putting Marshall’s thinking into context, the article by Colin Perry, which appears almost as a companion piece, traces Marshall’s work as indebted to the avant-garde, political counter-cinema trends of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Perry positions Marshall within a radical, counter discourse of criticism and forms of defiance that would later become embedded in the very materiality of his media practice.

Our next document is a pamphlet originally written in 1975/1976 by Marshall called the Images of Authority but reprinted in the Eye to Eye catalogue for Tamara Krikorian’s exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1979. (This is the version included.) It is essentially an Althusserian reading of ideology, but a characteristic of Marshall’s essayistic practice also comes into focus in terms of what Timothy Corrigan calls ‘a kind of editorial intervention in the news of the everyday history’ (2011: 154). Marshall’s interest is in the authority of the news – what it ‘sounds’ like, how its ‘voice’ is communicated, of how its forms of presentation hide political subjectivities and ideological positioning. These ideas translates into Bright Eyes, where intervention is made in making transparent the subjective agencies of the authorities – of science and medical discourse, of government and the State, of the mass media. In this way, Images of Authority presents the theory for the practice of Bright Eyes, giving contours to what Corrigan has to say about the editorial essay film.

Reporting history as current event thus spreads itself through a living experience that critically moves around and through events as different voices, places, and faces, insisting that those events are or should be a product of a creative critical intelligence that response to history especially as a series of crisis. (2011: 156)

Institutions affecting the production, circulation and exhibition of the work of video artists, which Marshall identifies as a problem in his 1979 application, is an issue addressed in the conversation between Rebecca Dobbs and Caroline Spry. What emerges here is the importance of Channel 4 in the 1980s as a key platform for independent film and video artists (albeit briefly, but still institutionally motivated). It is where experimentation takes on a public service sensibility in terms of giving greater institutional recognition and visibility to different voices, but also in terms of how the self-reflexive video essay like Bright Eyes draws attention to the process of making visible a form of representation in the making, giving representation before history is written. Channel 4, as discussed by Spry and Dobbs, is that institution imagined in Marshall’s application but, more importantly, reveals the transformations taking place within the British broadcasting landscape at this time through the promise of Channel 4 to renew television culture and revitalise the televisual form. Alter argues that ‘the essay film functions as a genre of socio-political critique that uses sounds and images in unpredictable ways to produce theory’ (2018: 10). Our last document is the treatment for what Marshall provisionally titled ‘The Archive’, which would later becomes A Bit of Scarlet, made by Andrea Weiss and produced by Rebecca Dobbs in 1997, after his untimely death from AIDS in 1993. The Archive delves further into the archive, as the project becomes a vehicle to imagine new political narratives. His thinking through the project recognises the persistent invisibility of queer histories in the archive. In thinking through absence, Marshall is giving rise to different ways of thinking about the archive as it mobilises other literary and artistic practices, such as photography, postcards, cartoons and so on. In configuring a concept of queer temporality, Jack Halberstam proposes a queer archive that contributes a ‘deep archive for future analysis’, a floating signifier that connects to other networks and archives as stimulus to ‘a theory of cultural relevance, a construction of collective memory and a complex record of queer activity’ (2005:170). Such an archive of Marshall’s Bright Eyes seems apt.

In our attempt to reconstitute a fragile archive around the idea of the essayistic in television – an application for funding, a treatment for essayistic documentary typed on an Amstrad computer, combined with a conversation of remembered time and a critical essay, this dossier has revealed to us a form of queer activism (see Cvetkovich, 2003), an archival activism that reconnects queer temporal responses to the AIDS past, present and future.