Core Programme 2023
Albany Video
From Albany Video to the London Community Video Archive
From Albany Video to the London Community Video Archive
A showreel of films by members of Albany Video, produced by London Community Video Archive for Deptford X 2023. The showreel includes clips from:
Pepys Estate Repairs Campaign, Childers St + DEPFA, Aug 13: What happened?, Us Girls, Netful of Holes, Beyond Our Ken, Being White, Downham – A Home in the Country, Disabling Council, Step Forward
This showreel is accompanied by a screening and talk by London Community Video Archive, with Geoff Stow (Albany from ‘70s to early ‘80s – films include ‘Childers St Deptford’ and ‘Downham – A Home in the Country’); Carol Stevens (Albany Video in the early ‘80s – produced ‘A Netful of Holes’), Carol Jacobs (Albany Video, late ‘80s – produced ‘Step Forward’ for Channel 4), Pax Nindi (volunteered with Albany Video late ‘80s then set up Paxvision video facility at the Albany when it folded).
The event will take place at Lewisham Arthouse on 14th October.
The Albany Video Project
Albany Video, first known as the Albany Video Project, was founded in the early 1970s. It was a community video project based in The Albany that equipped communities with the skills and equipment to make documentary films about topics relevant to their lives. The films of Albany Video form a document of Deptford and South East London from the perspective of those who lived there.
The Albany Video Project’s initial work consisted mainly of videos with local housing activists and with young people and play campaigns. Later in the decade the project began to make videos with a distribution potential beyond the local area, and work on the Blair Peach Campaign with Belt and Braces theatre. In July 1978, there was an arson attack on the Albany Theatre. The National Front were the prime suspects; it was believed that the attack was a response to the Albany’s increasingly high profile anti-racist work.
In the 1980s, Albany Video developed as a national distributor of alternative video productions – including international work. Albany Video won a grant from Channel 4 in 1983 to buy colour production equipment, and became a Channel 4 Franchised Workshop in 1984, making a number of productions for the channel, at the same time as maintaining an open access workshop, and making locally based tapes that were not primarily aimed at Channel 4 broadcast: for instance Being White (made for Racism Awareness training) or Downham – A home in the country (made with the estate’s Tenants Association).
The project’s franchise funding was withdrawn after two to three years. Albany Video continued making productions for clients and keeping the access workshop open as long as possible. However, by 1990 the production arm had closed, leaving only the distribution work which struggled on for a couple of years in Battersea Studios.