ABSTRACT
Yes. Very briefly my political background is formed in part by coming from this part of the world [south-west England/Northern Hemisphere], but I went to university in the early 1970s when the bow-wave of 1968 had its effect and politicized culture. By the time I began to study English literature at the University of Kent and a postgraduate diploma in film at the Slade School of Art (University College, London), there was already a sense that a new agenda had been created, emanating from the punctual moment of 1968 and that a key component of that agenda was the realization – even if I hadn’t any direct experience of it – that there was a rather large part of the world which was not properly mapped onto or connected with the northern part, the West, where we were; and, worse than that, that there were the continuing legacies of imperialism (of which Vietnam was the obvious example at that time). After graduating from the Slade, I became involved on the board of [the British film studies journal] Screen, wrote articles for that magazine and others like Afterimage and Undercut. Then there was a short time on the dole, freelancing, and then running a cinema within an arts center in Bristol called the Arnolfini. All of those things were quite speedy and short-term, so after doing the Slade’s postgraduate course I had two or three years back in the south-west of England and began some independent filmmaking and, indeed, a part-time assignment as a consultant for Channel 4.
