Annotated Bibliographies
While Rhodes’ 1979 manifesto remains a foundational text of institutional critique, an intersectional reading reveals its historical limitations. While she successfully exposes the patriarchal structures of the mainstream art world, yet her critique remains silent on the axis of race. To address this omission, this project reads Rhodes in direct dialogue with the 2015 roundtable discussion on the women of the LFMC, where practitioners like Alia Syed highlight the secondary marginalisation experienced by non-white women within radical spaces.
Furthermore, by integrating contemporary research by Rhea Storr regarding the material and racial politics of the British analogue workshop movement with Kobena Mercer’s 1988 ‘Black Film, British Cinema’, which emerged directly out of the intense political debates surrounding the 1980s British Workshop movement this bibliography maps a clear trajectory of institutional critique.
Moving from Rhodes’ early focus on gender erasure to a modern, intersectional understanding of how both race and gender were sidelined in early co-op historiography, this cross-referencing proves that the official avant-garde archive remains an incomplete text that requires constant excavation from below.
Rhodes, L. (1979) ‘Whose History?’ read alongside Danino, N. et al. (2015) ‘Roundtable discussion: The Women of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op’
Citations:
Rhodes, L. (1979) ‘Whose History?’ in Rees, A.L. (ed.) Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1975. London: Arts Council of Great Britain and Hayward Gallery, pp. 119–124 [Rhodes 1979].
Danino, N. et al. (2015) ‘Roundtable discussion: The Women of the London Filmmaker’s Co-op’, Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 4(1–2), pp. 164–179 [Danino 2015].
Annotation:
Lis Rhodes’s Whose History? functions as a historical catalyst, documenting her choice to withdraw her films from the 1979 Hayward Gallery exhibition in protest against the male-dominated, exclusionary curation of the canon. Rather than accepting history as a neutral record, Rhodes exposes the canon as a deliberate "reconstruction of events" built to enforce marginalisation [Rhodes 1979]. Reading this manifesto alongside the 2015 MIRAJ roundtable discussion, where first and second-generation LFMC women look back at the material infrastructure they built, was completely crutial in my approach to this project. The roundtable reveals how Rhodes's initial act of refusal forced a practical transformation, leading directly to the creation of independent, women-led distribution networks like Circlesand Cinenova [Danino 2015].
However, the true value of reading these texts together is the self-reflexive critique they offer regarding collective organizing. The 2015 dialogue does not romanticize the co-op, instead, the participants openly confront the internal, Eurocentric hierarchies that compromised their radical space, admitting that their universalized definition of "women’s cinema" frequently ignored the specific realities of Black and Brown filmmakers [Danino 2015, Storr 2025]. This text pairing served as a major turning point in my studio methodology. It forced me to confront that an archive cannot be treated as a passive storage vault, but must be treated as an active, ongoing political struggle [Danino 2015]. Seeing how these pioneers navigated institutional gatekeeping directly shaped how I approached my own research at the LUX archives and throughout this research journey. It pushed me to look past the surface of historical collections and instead interrogate the ethics of access : asking who decides which radical memories are preserved and which are left to fade into obscurity.
Mercer, K. (1988) ‘Black Film, British Cinema’ read together with Rhea Storr’s ‘Black Analogue: Practices is US and UK Experimental Filmmaking as Methodological Approaches for a New Black Aesthetic’ (2025)
Citation: Mercer, K. (1988) ‘Black Film, British Cinema’, ICA Documents 7. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, pp. 11–24.
Storr, R. (2025) Black Analogue: Practices in US and UK Experimental Filmmaking as Methodological Approaches for a New Black Aesthetic. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Annotation:
Kobena Mercer’s foundational text maps the institutional and aesthetic emergence of the 1980s British Workshop movement, analyzing how independent diaspora film collectives organized against cultural erasure. Mercer critiques the mainstream art establishment for its systemic blind spots, showing how seemingly radical, anti-institutional spaces can replicate exclusive, white bourgeois hierarchies if they lack intersectional awareness. [Mercer, 1988]
He argues that marginalized filmmakers could not rely on standard, transparent cinematic language, instead, they had to invent an oppositional aesthetic to break the power of the dominant gaze. [Mercer, 1988] Reading Mercer alongside Black feminist scholar Rhea Storr’s contemporary analysis of Black analogue practices in US and UK experimental filmmaking expands this critique from institutional structures to the physical medium itself Storr’s framework illuminates how the physical medium of film itself operates as a site of resistance, suggesting that analogue textures are not merely nostalgic choices but active sites of political and bodily negotiation for the diaspora. [Storr,2025] Encountering Mercer’s text, energized by Storr's focus on material praxis, provided the exact intersectional lens I needed to critique the universalist blind spots of early avant-garde film history.
Mercer highlights the danger of treating "feminism" or "radical art" as a single, uniform experience, reminding us that institutional exclusions happen even within groups that claim to be fighting discrimination [Mercer, 1988] Storr deepens this by demonstrating how standard film stocks and processes carry their own racialized histories, meaning a truly radical aesthetic must confront both the institutional framework as well as the material apparatus itself [Storr,2025]
This dual conceptual framework directly influenced my curatorial choices for this journal. Mercer and Storr together allowed me to approach my visual analysis from a structural and material standpoint, investigating how formal choices like language barriers, heavy grain textures, and broken subtitle lines, can physically document the lived reality of displacement. In light of Storr’s scholarship, the "heavy grain" is no longer just a visual metaphor for friction, but becomes an analogue assertion of presence that resists smooth, digital consumption.
Reading the works of Mercer, Lis Rhodes, Danino and Storr alongside one another creates a dialogue between different generations of resistance, while bridging the historical gap by grounding these aesthetic revolts in the tactile reality of celluloid. These texts altered my perspective on what an archive is meant to achieve. It taught me that any real research journey or collection should not just celebrate radical moments, but must actively map the internal power dynamics of recording collectives. This insight directly guided my critical reflection on my mother's tapes, giving me the tools to expose how her male peers marginalized herself and the only other female contributor to the video collective, Cara Holmes, disregarding the introspective, durational footage produced by the women in favor of sensationalised, damaged-centred "riot porn," aimed at mainstream media. These frameworks and understandings validated my instinct to rescue my mother’s vital eco-feminist record from both institutional and internal erasure
All images on this page are from my visit to the LUX Archive, shared here with permission for educational use.