Andy Robson: To Interrogate the images while being an 'active' witness to the events
Andy Robson, who co-founded the Marc Karlin Archives, talks to us about the importance of this little-known director's work, his radical vision of film and his committed life. He looks back on an edifying documentary project devoted as much to the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua as to the ethics of documentary photography. A film-manifesto produced in close collaboration with Susan Meiselas.
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Zoé Isle de Beauchaine: Who was Marc Karlin and why does his filmography deserve to be known?
Andy Robson: In an obituary for Marc Karlin in 1999, one of his television producers, John Wyver, described Karlin as Britain's most significant, unknown filmmaker. Much like other filmmakers working collectively across the preceding three decades, Karlin’s filmography was not widely acknowledged. Karlin made films independently in the 1980s and 90s but his filmmaking development was forged working collectively. Sadly, there is a tendency with collectively produced films, focused on grassroot or working class campaigns to go missing both in a physical sense and from historical record. These films are generally distributed outside of conventional film distribution channels and by design go without individual credits, evading the conventional storage categorisation, and the wider appreciation in academia. To be honest, I was unaware of Karlin’s work but I had the fortunate opportunity to explore Karlin’s film and paper archive first hand. Encountering over 3000 moving image and paper assets in an underground storage facility near King Cross station in London in 2011. His cultural significance found inside those 50 cardboard boxes was abundantly clear.
Karlin was present in Paris during the events of May 68. It was there he formed a friendship with Chris Marker that led to a series of collaborations over the following years. Back in London he joined Cinema Action - one of the key film collectives of the post-war era - and then formed Berwick Street Film Collective going on to produce the seminal exploratory Nightcleaners and its sequel ‘36 to ‘77, with James Scott, Humphrey Trevelyan, Mary Kelly, and John Sanders. During the late 1970s, Karlin was a key voice within the UK independent film and video sector that campaigned for the creation of Channel 4, before being commissioned by the channel’s Independent Film and Video Department, producing seven films across the 1980s and early 1990s - and Karlin’s last two films were backed by the BBC. At their heart, Karlin’s films are essays on memory and history, with a strong commitment to interrogate the trauma of the Left in face of the advancement of capitalism and dangers of cultural amnesia. These overarching themes were articulated through the Miners’ Strike, the Sandinista Revolution, the heritage-dominated output of the British film industry, the impact of Rupert Murdoch on the British press, the paintings of Cy Twombly and the arrival of Blairism.
Karlin had ten films broadcast on British television between 1985-1999 but unlike his contemporaries - Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and John Akomfrah - who were similarly supported by Channel 4 and the BBC to reach a wider audience, Karlin’s output remained relatively obscured in comparison. The Marc Karlin Archive was formed in 2011 by Marc's widow, Hermione Harris, and academic and filmmaker, Holly Aylett, and myself to address this lack of awareness and bring visibility to his body of work.
ZB: His work about Nicaragua was one of the few instances of him exploring a subject outside of the UK. How did he get to do it?
AR: The opportunity to film in Nicaragua was indeed out of character for Karlin and it largely occurred out of romantic reasons, coupled with the new budgets afforded to independent producers by the emergence of Channel 4 and its Independent Film and Video Department. Outside of May 68, Nicaragua was the only location that relocated Karlin’s attention away from the UK. He rarely traveled, he had a fear of flying and he welcomed the stability of a rooted London postcode after being born stateless in a Swiss refugee camp after his family fled Nazi persecution during WW2. For many on the British left, who had grown disillusioned with the growing popularity and policy surge of Thatcherism, the Nicaraguan Revolution offered a beacon of hope against capitalist imperialism and the encroaching ‘there is no alternative’ mantra.
However, the main reason why Karlin travelled to the country was through the influence of his future wife, Hermione Harris. Since 1978, Harris had been working as a field coordinator in Honduras and Nicaragua for a development NGO. Upon Harris’ invitation, Karlin travelled to Nicaragua and experienced a new nation coming to terms with its buried past. Alongside Harris’ established network of Sandinista and institutional contacts, Karlin found solidarity with the Nicaraguan people. His chief concerns of cultural amnesia and historical preservation were observed through a new lens of immediacy as the Nicaragua people navigated their hopes, fears of their fragile new horizon. Between 1983-84, Karlin was joined by his regular Lusia Films collaborators; cinematographer, Jonathan Bloom (then Collinson), grip Glyn Fielding and sound recordist, Melanie Chait, to draw sensitive, still and quiet portraits of a nation in development: the rediscovery of a previously redacted past, led by the Nicaraguan Historical Institute; the internal politics and daily editorial decisions of Barricada, the Sandinista newspaper; and a picture of life in a rural area just before the 1984 general election.
The Nicaragua films were broadcast in Channel 4’s The Eleventh Hour slot in consecutive weeks across October 1985, commissioned by the Independent Film and Video Department, led by Alan Fountain, and his deputy commissioners, Rod Stoneman and Caroline Spry. The department was positioned as a radical answer to the aesthetic and political conservatism of the BBC and ITV (the UK’s only other broadcast channels at the time). Directly responding to the new channel’s inception ethos of providing experimental and innovative programming, the department platformed new independent filmmakers to explore questions of race, class and gender, internationalism, and formal experimentation.
The principles of the new department were perfectly expressed in Voyages, the first film broadcast in the Nicaragua series. One connection developed by Karlin and Harris in Nicaragua was with the US photographer, Susan Meiselas. Meiselas captured the two insurrections that led to the overthrow of fifty years of dictatorship by the Somoza family in Nicaragua and in 1981 published her images in Susan Meiselas: Nicaragua - June 1978-July 1979. Karlin wanted to use Meiselas’ images but contrary to the developing use of the rostrum effect, popularised by Ken Burns in the US and Ken Morse at the BBC at the time, Meiselas’ images were instead blown up and strategically mounted in a studio space in London. Jonathan Bloom’s camera would then glide around the images in five long takes, with Steve Sprung alongside himoperating the rehearsed and precise focus pulls. In post-production, an epistolary voice was placed over the unedited shots articulating Meiselas’ complex relationship as a photographer to the history and events she recorded. For Karlin, before taking the audience to Nicaragua through the four film series, he felt they needed to interrogate the images coming out of the country first. The relationship with the voice-over and images needed to be distancing, so that the audience could interrogate the images while also experiencing the same complex dynamic Meiselas was experiencing as an ‘active’ witness to the events. The uninterrupted tracking shots, a device used across the whole Nicaragua series (including on the side of a volcano in Nicaragua), provide the audience with an unbroken and continuous movement to contemplate the events.
2025 marks the 40th anniversary since the film's broadcast and Mesielas’s Nicaragua collection will receive a 4th edition reprint as well. The streaming collaboration with Darkroom provides an opportune moment to revisit this work and draw comparisons to present-day journalistic and documentary coverage of conflicts.
ZB: What is his legacy on today’s films? How is his work relevant today? Could you tell us about the life of his archives today?
AR: We founded the Marc Karlin Archive at a time when there was a growing network of early career researchers, curators and exhibitors who were keen to revisit this recent media history and interrogate many of the parallel concerns between the 1980s and early 2010s. As the UK culture sector faced increased austerity measures, there was a heightened interest to resurface alternative models of independent media production, so the archive aimed to highlight not just Karlin’s films but also the many ideas and campaigns in the collection that could inspire similar contemporary debates. The channel’s Independent Film and Video Department commissioned a very significant body of work between 1982-1994, yet these titles are still under-researched. The Workshop Declaration for instance, supported by Channel 4 and the BFI at the time, was unprecedented, allowing film production groups to work collectively under an egalitarian wage structure, and outside of a traditional commissioning timeframe in order to nurture radical work with their chosen community. This arrangement led Karlin and others being commissioned on a regular basis, but its impact should be reconsidered in any future debate on building sustainable independent production with broadcasters.
I regularly produced a blog on Karlin throughout this period to spotlight the various production assets from the archive including the correspondence, scripts, set stills, concept ideas, and treatments, and the stories behind them. It was named by the founders as ‘In the Spirit of Marc Karlin’, a title that equally aimed to raised the profile of his film output, as well as platform arguments from Karlin and his contemporaries for greater representation and support for independent production - a key concern for many filmmakers, curators, exhibitors and academics today.
After securing funding from the Lipman and Miliband Fund, we digitised the films and commenced collaborations with exhibitors and film festivals including: Arnolfini and Picture This,(Bristol, April 2012), Open City Docs (London, June 2012), INIVA (London, March 2013), Vivid Projects (Birmingham, June 2013), PAMI, (London, September 2013), Whitechapel Gallery (London, May, 2014), DMZ Documentary Festival (South Korea, September 2014), Birkbeck (BIMI) Essay Film Festival, (London, March 2015) and BFI Southbank, (London, April 2015), Lussas Documentary Festival (Ardèche, June 2015), Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University (November 2015), AV Festival (Newcastle, March 2016), Courtisane Festival (Gent, March 2016).
But our main and lasting output was the publication Marc Karlin - Look Again edited by Holly Aylett and published by Liverpool University Press. Designed by Roland Brauchli, the volume visually celebrates the multi-strands found within the collection, and includes articles from both from Karlin’s close collaborators and film theorists including John Akomfrah, Sally Potter, and Sukhdev Sandhu. Karlin’s audio visual and paper archive was officially donated to the British Film Institute in 2017 for preservation but the Marc Karlin Archive continues to nurture publication, research, and screening collaborations with partners to continue his legacy. Collaborating with Darkroom and by programming Voyages with other essay and documentary filmmakers and titles, we will look forward to new audiences and interest in Karlin’s output.
Interview conducted in February 2025
The photo is taken from the film Voyages
directed in 1985 by Marc Karlin
Traditional Indian dance mask from the town of Monimbo, adopted by the rebels during the fight against Somoza to conceal identity, Nicaragua, 1978 © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos
