Tish

Scarborough Film Festival showed the upcoming documentary Tish at their most recent screening, Tish is an exploration of the life of social documentary photographer Tish Murtha and was shown as the opening film at Sheffield DocFest this June. The film paints a rich portrait of a hugely talented subject who was underappreciated in her time and not granted the platform and attention that her work is receiving in the years after her death.

Ella Murtha, Tish’s daughter is our access point into the film, exploring her mother’s life through interviews with family, friends, teachers, and mentors. The film also includes readings from Tish’s personal writings which are delivered in voiceover by Maxine Peake and convey the passion she had for her work and for her community. It becomes clear through interviews as well as the use of her photography archive throughout the film, that for Tish these strands of her life were inextricable from each other. Each interview has a tenderness that brings a sense of tangibility to Murtha as a subject that is really commendable, especially as Ella and her interviewees don’t shy away from the complexities and difficulties she faced throughout her life and career. Tish’s siblings share truths about their family and personal lives that grant us insight into Tish’s background and everyday experience. Of course, the rich archive of Tish’s work is omnipresent and the frankness and beauty of her photography reflects the scenes that the interviewees describe.

It is clear that Tish as a film aspires to the sensitivity and dignity with which Tish herself approached her subjects. Ella Murtha’s close involvement in the project and the filmmakers’ clear passion for their subject contribute to the way the film is able to reflect feelings evoked by Tish’s photography throughout her life. The interviews and reading of Tish’s correspondence accompanying photography from her ‘Demon Snapper’ era, aka the Juvenile Jazz Bands series conveys the tongue-in-cheek, rebellious view of Tish in this time period. Later in the film, interviews with her friends and collaborators on London By Night (1983) evokes the mood of the place and time as well as in Tish’s life as well as the precarity of her situation at the time.

Ella Murtha’s access to her mother’s archive allows us to view a huge amount of Tish’s collection that has been largely unseen. In the past few years Murtha has been able to publish book versions of Youth Unemployment, Elswick Kids, and ​Juvenile Jazz Bands, as well as the National Portrait Gallery acquiring some of Murtha’s prints. While the documentary is an often emotional journey ending with the tragedy of Tish’s sudden death, Ella Murtha’s commitment and various successes in securing her mother’s legacy in British photography lends the film a bittersweet ending. Tish’s unwavering commitment to her communities and to speaking truth through her art is demonstrated by the warmth and clarity with which she is remembered by those who knew her.

Are You Proud?

This month’s edition of Scarborough Film Festival focused on Pride, with showings of Holly Summerson’s Acceptable Face, and Ashley Joiner’s Are You Proud?, followed by a fantastic Q&A with Lel Meleyal, Joel Hague & Nathan Wackett.

The selection of Summerson’s and Joiner’s films demonstrate how progress in LGBTQ+ history may be measured and how the ways in which we envision ‘progress’ can open up new paths towards liberation but how these new frontiers can also carry the risk of erasing and speaking over history. Summerson’s Acceptable Face highlights the difficulties with visibility and queerness, the ‘clockability’ of gay and trans people has been a topic of discussion both from within and directed at the LGBTQ+ community for its entire history. The ways many young people today are able to experiment with self expression and appearing as openly queer is possible due only to the previous generations’ struggles for liberation. In its documenting of the history of Pride as a movement, Are You Proud? powerfully engages with how we think about the momentum of queer liberation movements and how each movement and generation is intrinsically linked. Son of a Tutu raises this point very clearly in their discussion of how their generation fought the battles of race which paved the way for the younger generation to focus on the issues of today, such as cultural appropriation.

Intergenerational communication was foregrounded in both Are You Proud? and the Q&A, each of which engaged with different dimensions of this theme. In Are You Proud? I was particularly struck by the section focussing on the HIV epidemic and how the way it was treated by the public wreaked destruction on the community. Michael Cashman’s discussion of how parents of AIDS victims, ‘claimed back their child […] sanitised them, heterosexualised them in their burials and their cremations, took away their history’, was a powerful moment which highlights the importance of archiving in the queer community, especially because the epidemic meant huge swathes of especially older gay men are absent and unable to speak for themselves as queer elders on today’s issues. This point was further engaged in the Q&A. An audience member brought up the fact that archiving queer history doesn’t mean only engaging with people’s personal archives but also publicly available materials - anti-gay propaganda and media such as that which spread false narratives about HIV are important to document and engage with to memorialise the challenges of the past and avoid repeating history. Lel Meleyal raised the question of ‘official’ narratives of history and how traditional educational pathways can tend towards dismissing or ignoring personal and anecdotal history, a particular problem in the history of the LGBTQ+ movement which has always existed on the margins and lacks much of the institutional infrastructure granted to many other movements and events.

The sanitisation and commercialisation of the LGBTQ+ movement and Pride as an event are issues that are brought up in Are You Proud?, the film engages with the difficulties of handling what was and in many ways still is a radical political movement that has become popular and profitable to support. The commercialisation of Pride, i.e. the event being attended and supported by a huge number of major companies, is interesting in the light of the discussion of how we think about queer archives and history that was raised in the Q&A. There is a danger of pinkwashing and sanitising of queer history and issues, as the public is more comfortable with certain parts of the LGBTQ+ community, however in integrating with and educating the straight community it is important not to cut out the parts that may cause discomfort. As the slogan says, ‘Pride is a protest’, and it is critical that the community retains its radical potential. However, the fact that in England today Pride as a movement has the huge platform and mainstream appeal that it has gained is important and allows for freedom for LGBTQ+ folks in many ways. Joel and Nathan reminded us of the importance of queer-defined spaces. In discussing their project The Queer Infoshop, they highlighted the question of queer spaces as claimed by the community versus purpose-made queer spaces, and the lack of the latter in the local Scarborough area. This reflects back the discussion of the place of queer people in the UK prior to the GLF and the Pride movement, early in Are You Proud? the ‘gay world’ is discussed as an ‘underworld, a twilit place’ which the speaker ‘hated’ upon coming out. Joel and Nathan raised the importance of having LGBTQ+ owned and operated spaces which allow for open and honest inter- and cross-generational engagement in the community. They highlighted the limits of ‘unofficial’ queer spaces which the community may claim as their own, but within which we cannot claim full ownership and freedom. The Pride movement has progressed so far since the narrowly defined allowances for gay relationships as outlined in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, we can trace the need and demand for public LGBTQ+ spaces within which to build open and strong communities that have always been central to the Pride movement through to today with projects such as The Queer Infoshop.

At the end of Are You Proud?, the filmmakers draw attention to some of the issues in the ongoing fight for LGBTQ+ rights and freedom, despite its many achievements there is still far to go in the struggle for queer liberation. Early in the Q&A discussion, Lel raised the issue of the North-South divide as a problem in the UK LGBTQ+ community. She acknowledged the Southern-bias displayed in Are You Proud? and recalls how at the time while many of the events depicted in the documentary were taking place in London, the access for northern LGBTQ+ people was limited due to difficulties in finding people willing to transport them to London to participate. She recounted that a member of the community ended up borrowing a coach from the bus company to take a group to Pride in 1982. She acknowledged the fact that the South and London in particular is more densely populated which contributes towards there being more spaces and activity in these areas - however, there were and continue to be extra resources and access available to affluent young, often white and cisgender gay men in London that fail to reach the North of England. By drawing attention to the struggles of the past, Are You Proud? further emphasises how far we still have to go - participants discuss the homophobia present in the Global South, and issues with immigration and queerness, citing that in 2010 almost 99% of LGBTQ+ asylum seekers were denied asylum. It is important to view this film as a piece of media that occupies a place within the queer archives in its own right. As Martha suggested, in archiving it is important to ask ‘who compiled this and what is missing’. Looking back in 2023 using this film as a lens, we may be prompted to look at the way Pride as a political movement and the queer community along with it has changed, evolved, and has even been forced backwards since the 1960s (where Are You Proud? picks up). The increased levels of anti-LGBTQ+ radicalisation in online spaces and the rise of institutionalised transphobia in the US and the UK in particular are alarming developments in the intervening years, and compiling and archiving the struggles and victories of the past holds the power to inspire in the ongoing fight for liberation.

Blog, the first...

This June, Scarborough Film Festival showed shorts from a variety of genres to explore the many ways we experience being in water. Within the selection there is a diverse range of themes both within and across individual pieces as well as as a curated group.

Swimming in the Archive, Yorkshire and North East Film Archive (2023): these archive film clips set a fun and nostalgic tone, showing familiar places for those hailing from Scarborough and setting the tone with a strong focus on the community aspects of swimming which complement many of the subsequent shorts.

Maike Koller’s Swim (2018) follows an individual’s journey of learning to swim later in life. Koller’s fantastical animation style depicts all levels of the sea and swimming, reflecting the swimmer’s internal journey in their surroundings: from the shallows to the deep, from fear and apprehension to freedom and joy.

Dulce (2018) explores a community’s interactions with the sea as a way of life, following a mother teaching her daughter to swim. In this short understanding the power and danger of the sea is central. Dulce’s mother draws attention to the precarity of living right on the shore and the dependence on boats, the vital need to survive, to travel and to be able to follow their daily life cycles and routines, both work and leisure.

Dulce, Guille Issa, Angello Faccini 2018

In Finegan’s The Swimming Club (2016), the filmmaker visually evokes the cleansing and ritual dimensions that are historically linked with water though its religious connotations, alongside commentary and talking heads documenting the history of the Club and some of its members’ personal histories. The visual language of baptism evoking rebirth and freedom reflects the testimonies of the swimmers returning to swimming within this safe space after periods of feeling uncomfortable with or unwelcome in public bathing spaces.

Lynne Ramsay’s The Swimmer (2012) evokes a more individual and isolated personal experience of open water swimming following the odyssey-like journey of a swimmer through various waterways of Britain. Ramsay imbues the film with a timeless quality through the visual and audio choices: the use of black and white, music snippets, and dream-like half seen fragments of shore-based interactions which we seem to experience from the swimmer’s point of view contribute to the overall peaceful but sometimes unsettling tone.

Swimming Pool (2016), throws us back into the whimsical realm through animation that places the swimming pool as a sanctuary at the heart of the urban space. This short depicts a beautiful love story that highlights the ability for water to bring together and connect people despite their apparent differences.

Swimming Pool, Alexandra Majovà, 2016

Lili Dixon’s Immersion (2022) gives us a glimpse into the ties of friendship and joy a community has found through sea swimming combining documentary footage with talking heads of the swimmers discussing their personal journeys and experiences.

The Floater (2023) brings us face to face with the reality of mass sewage dumping by water companies and the havoc this has wreaked on communities of swimmers and surfers. The film serves as a call to action and unveils ‘the floater’, a surfboard made from the sewage being dumped into our waterways.

Themes of ownership and property, with the filmmakers exploring various ways in which water as a public space holds importance in various peoples lives comes through strongly in many of the films presented in the line up. For example, Dulce’s mother’s urgent insistence on her learning how to swim for survival. This film depicts the most indistinctly drawn lines between home and the sea, as they depend not only on the sea for leisure, but for transport, income and livelihood in general. In contrast, Alexandra Majova’s Swimming Pool approaches this theme from a more whimsical angle, the pool in this instance is implied to not be a public space, but the film revels in the main character’s gleeful journey to the pool and his meeting the other character. We are left to question whether it is the characters’ bodies or the private nature of the pool that would prohibit them from entering the space. The Swimming Club engages further with questioning narratives of which bodies are welcome within public bathing spaces and the effects of building inclusive spaces for trans- and gender nonconforming people to enjoy swimming within a community. The Floater foregrounds questions about the waterways as public assets, the rights we have to enjoy safe and clean seas and rivers, and the abuses by sewage companies of natural spaces which have become unsafe and unsanitary through their waste dumping in recent years.

Both Koller’s Swim and Ramsay’s The Swimmer explore swimming from a more individual perspective. The swimmers in both films embark on odyssey-esque journeys which explore ways we engage with water as a hostile environment or a liminal space. The Swimmer in particular leans into a timeless or out of time-ness quality that we may experience in the water. As raised by Steve Crawford in the Q&A, swimming and especially wild swimming during which we are subject to the whims of natural temperatures, tides, and currents, forces us to take time out of our land-based lives and switch off from the devices that we are constantly connected to. Ramsay portrays the titular swimmer as the constant presence running throughout an otherwise seemingly disconnected series of snippets of events on the banks of the waterways. We adhere closely to the perspective of the swimmer, Ramsay focuses mainly on extracting the maximum beauty of the landscapes and the movement of the swimmer with the water surrounding them through the cinematography, rather than providing any substantial narrative. The feeling of enjoying the beauty of nature and the environment that one is in when swimming seems to be the basis for this film. Koller’s Swim follows a lone swimmer experiencing the sea, but through the animation style and soundtrack provides a more lighthearted approach to swimming than The Swimmer or Dulce which also tells the story of its subject learning to swim. Koller manages to portray the vastness of the sea and hint to the danger present, while maintaining a light and fantastical tone through the colourful visuals and classical music choices.

The Swimmer, Lynne Ramsay, 2012

While there is a strong focus on how swimming affects us as individuals, ways in which it binds us and opens up connections within communities come through as perhaps the strongest themes, further discussed in the post-film Q&A. The Swimming Club in particular highlights how the strong community formed in the pool has the ability to provide sanctuary for its members who may otherwise feel unsafe in such spaces. The swimmers highlight the freedom and ‘serene power’ granted by swimming and bathing that they may have previously not felt able to engage with. Dulce in particular calls attention to the need to be able to swim in order to function as a member of the community in which she lives. We begin to see echoes of the environmental messages that will be foregrounded in The Floater, with Dulce’s mother reminding her of the rising sea levels which could endanger their home. However, the focus is on Dulce's journey to learn how to swim and the ways in which her fear and apprehension affect her mother who understands how vital swimming is in allowing her to navigate the community and eventually work and sustain herself. Immersion brings us back to home within direct-to-camera testimony from Scarborough-based swimmers about the friendship and joy they have found and fostered through sea swimming. Placing The Floater in dialogue with Dixon’s film intensifies the political message Surfers against Sewage voice. The emotional testimonies of the swimmers in Dixon’s film are shown directly before The Floater’s hard hitting message of the dangers many wild swimmers now face, which lends both films all the more impact, leaving us with an important message about our responsibilities to the natural world.