Ballet Black

Article for a Dossier on filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012), special edition of Screen journal, Spring 2016.

Extract:

In the annals of British film, Stephen Dwoskin is most often associated with the emergent period of its experimental film culture. He is famously pictured alongside other founders of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, and his book Film Is …, with its international scope and at times partisan views, describes the networks of underground cinema that extended across Britain and Europe. His films serve not only as documents of the landscapes and attitudes of this countercultural milieu, seen in the dim interiors and naked protagonists of early works such as Chinese Checkers (1964) or Girl (1975), but, across his long career, have reflected what A. L. Rees refers to as a ‘psychodrama or inner life seen at the extreme’.1

Behindert/Hindered (1974) or Pain Is … (1997), for example, reflect the complexities and frustrations of his own disability, following childhood polio, through the intense and unspoken dialogues between nameless protagonists, and expressions of the thresholds of emotional and physical pain. The rigorous stare of his camera upon discomfited characters compelled the film theorist Paul Willemen to draw psychoanalytic readings from his films.2 Dwoskin, however, regularly expressed frustration about how Britain, where he had made his home when a Fulbright scholarship for design brought him from New York in the early 1960s, gave his work less acknowledgement than it received in France and Germany. The reason for this lack of interest, Dwoskin believed, rested with the confrontational nature of his films, and a use of figuration and narrative at odds with the formalist focus prevalent in British modernist film during the 1970s.

As well as being drawn to depict the psychodrama of intimate relations in his own work, Dwoskin was also interested in attempts by other artists to grapple with similar questions. For example, in Shadows From Light …

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