Aislinn Evans: Community Spirit - Cinema and Filmmaking in London's Edgelands

Every old cinema in Barking is now a supermarket, a Nando’s, a Poundland. There used to be, according to tour guide Nigel Smith, five here at once – they housed thousands of viewers, grand art deco interiors, sweeping ceilings. I’m thinking about this as I stare at the Iceland. I remember when the Showcase – technically Newham but by such a thin margin that Barking claimed it – closed down. Watching its greying facade transform into an Amazon warehouse. In 2018 I watched Ken Loach classics in a self-built cinema in Dagenham. We do have a VUE, still, tucked around the back of the motorway, and you have to embark on a long climb over the road to reach the infrequent bus to Barking. These mundane specificities only matter if you’re interested in the particulars of local history. I think English people love talking about what was, what now is, what went, torn down when – once the ‘was’ and ‘is’ referred to castles and kingdoms, then factories and Goliath industry, its accompanying David unions. Now it’s about Nando’s.

Cinemas are one of the commercial-community spaces that we mourn with gravity when thinking about the changing shape of our towns and cities. Pubs get the same treatment. It’s nostalgia for a notion of time and place where leisure was a shared activity – where towns had specificity and character – where leisure was affordable at all. This nostalgia is a tantalising trap; the cinemas were beautiful, and the air thick with asbestos; the pubs warm and cheap, run by members of the National Front. The unions had a patchy history with Black workers, and the estates turned away refugees. Barking’s history, the history of every English community facing redevelopment, is a rich tapestry of uncomfortable contradictions. They’re under threat, and the defensiveness that comes up can make the past sound sweet.

I’m thinking about fringes. The edges of something, notably frayed, distressed. In textiles a fringe is a decorative thing, but here we’re talking about something marginal. Urban fringes are ugly; massive shopping centres, waste land and waste management. Fringe beliefs are illegitimate, dangerous. The fringes of society likewise. Fringes are where friction takes place; contradictions rub up against each other. The nostalgia I feel for Barking is about the edges that are being ironed out; where things feel more possible. They exist in underground radio stations, Nigerian takeaways overflowing on Sunday, town square sound systems and tamarind juice on the market. Like Marion Shoard’s rurban fringes, they are nimble, shifting, brimming with potential. Not empty, not nowhere.

Places like Barking, Ebbsfleet and Thamesmead – all documented in this screening – have their own edges. Seams of resilience form by London’s Black, migrant, queer or criminalised. In Twilight City, released at the crest of the disastrous Canary Wharf development, Black Londoners mourn a city that held no space for them. It’s a space constantly transforming itself around them, where diasporas converge to make space, find love, and lose it again amongst the bulldozers. Rootedness, here, is hard won. It’s a narrative echoed by Mary Martins, documenting Black memories of a Thamesmead that housed and hounded them, and in Shah & Aburawa’s I carry it with me everywhere. Between these and films grounded in English edgeland elders’ testimony, threads of loss stretch across a white working-class (up)rootedness and migrant re-negotiations; a sense of home which must outlive the concrete – keep rebuilding. Barking is several layers of displacement and migration, from the old East End’s Irish and Jewish proletariat to West Africans displaced by the Olympics and Albanian refugees. Each dispersal is followed by a regathering, reforming the ground. Ideas of rootedness are always myth-making, we are always getting turfed out to somewhere.

Standing on the edge of something, where do you look? In, out, at yourself? If there’s no cinemas in your ends can you make a film for them? Charlotte Ginsbourg spoke with elation about showing her films about Ebbsfleet in Ebbsfleet; in bingo halls and churches. Rather than talking about her, audiences turned back to each other. Cinema became a mirroring act. This is much older than Odeon; Medvedkin ran the Cinetrain across ‘20s Soviet Russia, filming communities in a weekend and playing it back to them from the train. Today, commissioners don’t see the working class as the target audience for films about us. Positioned on the edge, we are the ‘hard to reach’ – hard for who? Marginal communities are creative, curious, engaged. We’re reaching ourselves, we are our centres. Experimental, small, strange cinema exists here already.

I’m not mournful for Barking’s big cinemas, and I’m not particularly excited for Dagenham’s big film studios. Long before they came to town, films were shown in shopfronts and tents, it was a nimble and popular art form. We ourselves gathered in the ‘living room’ of A House For Artists, who host their own community cinema by and for local people. The same thing is happening across our city from Brixton Community Cinema to the London Community Video Archive.

Fringes are fraying edges, the place where contiguous wholes become diverging paths, scraps, blending into something beyond itself. Fringe cinema, then, is a landscape of diverging paths, where cinema stretches beyond itself. Cinema is returning to its youngest days; a widespread affair of tents and shopfronts – trucks and trains. In our towns and edges where the cinemas are overpriced or shutting down let a thousand community cinemas bloom. Every church hall and living room has space for a projector or at least decent sized television. Anyone can drape a sheet between two trees in the summer. Release yourself from licensing by inviting your community to film itself, mix it in with out-of-copyright early cinema, or films too DIY or underground to care about such things. Make cinema out of a thin crack, a tangled thread, a fraying edge. It is these threads, varied and specific, that make up the warp and weft of the whole.