Four Corners Film Workshop: Independent Filmmaking and Exhibition in East London, 1975-90

Four Corners was an independent film workshop originally formed in 1974 by a group of students at the London Film School. What made Four Corners' work distinctive was its engagement with local communities in London's East End and a film practice that sought to represent marginalised lives and experiences in the workshop's immediate environment. Alongside its film productions, Four Corners organised film workshops (a practice which continues today) and an ambitious series of film screenings and discussion groups exploring issues that remain resonant and pressing today - including women's lives, representations of gender, sexuality and race, poverty and political activism.

This project will explore Four Corners' experimental film production and exhibition work in the 1970s and 1980s through an understanding of the social, cultural and political contexts in which they were making and showing films. It will explore the workshop as part of a growing independent film culture in the 1970s and alongside other collectives and workshops supported by new funding from the Greater London Council, Channel 4 and the BFI. It will pay particular attention to Four Corners' locality in Bethnal Green, East London: the quintessential site of social investigation epitomised by Michael Young and Peter Willmott's 1957 book Family and Kinship in East London, and a socio-political landscape for industrial working-class and minority ethnic communities being reshaped under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments.

Four Corners' paper archive is held in the special collections at the BFI and Bishopsgate Institute, and was digitised thanks to a 2016 Heritage Lottery Fund grant. The digital archive holds a fascinating array of production files, photographs and film screening posters, which the project will use to explore the film workshop's history. These cover Four Corners' film projects - including, for instance, On Allotments (1976), a poetic documentary about a Newham allotment site facing demise in the form of an international lorry park development, and Bred and Born (1983), a feminist documentary centring on three generations of women in the same family living in Shadwell, which was developed from a series of public workshops exploring the theme of mothers and daughters held in Bethnal Green. The posters for film seasons and programmes held in the archive are testament to the way in which film exhibition was a key part of Four Corners' practice, offering vivid evidence of the workshop's social concerns, their intersecting work with political groups and their relationships with other film collectives and workshops in this period.

Through a series of public events - including film screenings, talks and discussion groups - and publications, the project's aim is to develop a new history of the Four Corners' Film Workshop focusing on its work in East London from 1975 to 1990. Drawing on the collections held at the BFI and Bishopsgate Institute, as well as other archives including Tower Hamlets Local History Library and the LSE Women's Library, this project will contribute to a flourishing field of study exploring British independent film culture in the 1970s and 80s. It will interrogate the significance of Four Corners' work in the local area in which it was originally based; specifically, it will contextualise the workshop in relation to local, community histories, memories and issues facing audiences living in Tower Hamlets and neighbouring boroughs today.