LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT

Microfiche, microfilm and microcosmic stories and settings

 Forming a Living Newspaper Unit at the British Library

I applied for the Eccles Institute Creative Fellowship at the British Library because the emphasis in the call on both popular print and a specific US research focus enabled me to dig deep into an interest that began as research for my recent, collaborative project POWER STATION – a work spanning art, infrastructure and film. This began with a question: ‘Could we turn our East London street into a renewable POWER STATION?’ and was directly inspired by the writings of US activist and author Ashley Dawson.

In Dawson’s book ‘Power to the People: Reclaiming the Energy Commons’ Dawson references the era of the New Deal (1933-1938) where, under President Franklin D Roosevelt dramatic social, political and economic reforms were implemented in response to the Great Depression. Democratic administrator Harry Hopkins led major federal relief programmes focused on employment and these included the WPA (Works Progress Administration) which authorised federal employment for thousands of artists (he is famously quoted as saying ‘Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.’) This mass mobilisation and investment in society and particularly the value placed on the arts is interesting in itself in our current time of big transition and, as seen in the push for a Green New Deal more recently, relevant to how we address the big challenges of our era.

These questions circulate as, helped by a comprehensive blog survey by Eccles Institute bibliographic editor Jean Petrovic, I then focus in further on a sub programme of the WPA – the Federal Theatre Project or ‘FTP’ (one of multiple acronyms in the nicknamed ‘Alphabet Agencies’ of the New Deal).  The Federal Theatre Project set out to employ theatre workers from writers to actors (around 10,000 people in its short life from 1935-1939). It was led by Hallie Flanagan who encouraged an experimental and successful network of regional theatres. The FTP generated political tension and eventual censorship and cancellation as it pushed against segregation and was accused of communist influence. Amid wide ranging theatrical productions the most contentious (and popular) of the works produced were those of the LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT.  This was a specific unit that produced plays based on critical issues of the time. Each production was rigorously researched for historical context in collaboration with out-of-work journalists and support from the American Newspapers Guild. They honed in on current affairs moving beyond reportage to critical questioning and the proposition of solutions to current injustices. ‘One Third of A Nation’ (1938) was based on a famous quote by Roosevelt (“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished...The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little”). It was subtitled ‘A Living Newspaper about Housing’. ‘Triple A-Ploughed Under’ (1936) critiqued the Agricultural Adjustment Act of that year and highlighted the plight of farmers in the Dust Bowl and ‘Injunction Granted’ (1937) championed the cause of Labour rights. ‘Ethiopia’ on Haile Selassie v Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was cancelled even before its first performance and ‘Liberty Deferred’ staging a history of slavery and lynching in the South never made the stage.

Those productions that briefly met an audience were a rejection of the bourgeois theatre of, as Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan put it, the polite whispers of ‘small triangular love stories in small, rectangular settings’ and they were more than reductive political theatre or propaganda. For their time and beyond, they were cutting edge, informed by the epic theatre of Brecht and Russian constructivist theatre (hence the communist suspicion by the House of Un-American Activities Committee).

The LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT captivates me. I studied Scenography in Prague in the early 2000s. It was just over a decade since the fall of the Wall and those who taught and inspired me had taken part in the Velvet Revolution and worked alongside Vaclav Haval. The very idea of a dissident, poet president formed my political, critical imagination and the fusion of politics, poetry and performance that would remain with me. This was my own introduction to Brecht, to the montage of attractions of Eisenstein, the biomechanics of Meyerhold and to works that expanded beyond white cube or black box and looked behind the scenes of society’s ‘structures of enchantment’. From the baroque theatre to site specific performance in the city I examined forms of staging and scale that have influenced my practice from surreal film mis-en-scene in contested landscapes to a participatory and performed pop-up book (www.hilarypowell.site). This book of miniature, moving landscapes of London’s Olympic zone is now held in the British Library collections thanks to Curator of Contemporary British Collections and champion of the artist book in many forms, Jeremy Jenkins.

I understand the work I already undertake within our CIC (community interest company) and production company Optimistic (www.optimisticproductions.co.uk) as a form of LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT in that it aims to tackle big and often abstracted social issues (from money and debt to energy) and make their structures and power relations visible and therefore open to change. In the same way the plays of the LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT of the 1930s didn’t just aim to educate or expose – they aimed to empower and propose action.  We often work on ambitious productions that involve deep research and committed action that can take years – from Bank Job (2021 film release date) to POWER STATION (2025 film release date). They always involve the production of film and print and other artefacts of the action but here, within the shorter timescale of this fellowship, is a chance to experiment and play with testing this out in microcosmic form.

In the LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT’s productions form followed content – for example ‘One Third of A Nation’ (about housing) used more physical, traditional constructed sets whereas POWER (about electricity) used experimental and dramatic lighting effects and multimedia shadow play. All used the layering of sound and chorus and a narrator’s voice – the voice of the Living Newspaper that became the voice of the people asking questions about and challenging the status quo. It is POWER I concentrate on here. I aim to create a series of Living Newspapers that tackle issues not so different from those of these 1930’s plays (from Land to Labour, Waste and War) but I start with POWER – a production originally structured for the stage around 17 Acts moving from the invention of electricity to specific case studies of public power versus private profit.  This is not a stage revival of LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT of the 1930s. It is a form of reinvention in miniature rooted in the same principles and process but with different outputs. Their rigorous process moved from assignment, through research and transcription to production and it is the same sequence I have adopted and adapted.

ASSIGNMENT. In this case delving into Britain’s energy history and focusing on current challenges, protest and prospects on a journey through invention to nuclear, nationalisation, privatisation and people power.  Recruiting a Living Newspaper Unit from the British Library’s Youth Collective to join me in this.

RESEARCH. Working from this assignment brief with the remit of analogue only – conducting and filming this research on the microfilm readers in the Newsroom and collectively amassing headlines, images and text to print.

TRANSCRIPTION. Focusing in on this physical print research material to cut and paste, collage, adapt and construct a narrative and prepare for print production with sessions at Rabbits Road Press in Newham – a specialist and community focused open access riso print studio.

PRODUCTION. Prepare a newspaper with accompanying microfilm and stage a print launch- playing with scale and the light and shadow and montage used so effectively on the 1930s stage. But, whereas they presented plays for stage I play with the stage of the microfilm machine, with the light and magic of combining print, projection and performance.

 ‘Thinking through making’ is a key part of my artistic process so there are many elements of this in process. I came to this fellowship knowing the LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT was my focus but being in the British Library in the wake of the 2023 cyber-attack has also influenced how I think about the archive and how fragile the storage systems of our collective memory really are. Thanks to Laura Caderera (Programme Curator for Research and Scholarship at the Eccles Institute) and Phillip Abrahams (Eccles Programme Lead Curator) I have been treated to fascinating tours of the vast basements of the Kings Cross site and the massive, constantly growing storage facilities in Boston Spa, Yorkshire. Sometimes incendiary words and histories stored in former military explosives storage sites. Rows and rows of parliamentary committee records, newspapers amid the legal deposit of everything ever published in the UK.  

Amid the aftermath of digital disruption, the value of index card, paper and microfilm records have been foregrounded and the form of the work has been fuelled by the materiality of the archive. The Newsroom became my favourite spot with its oversized bound volumes on trolleys, giant perspex reading stands, walls lined with front pages and rows of microfilm machines.  Introduced by Karen Waddell (News Media Reference Team Leader) to the ‘Gideon 1000 Reader’ the physical ‘act’ of scrolling through reels of microfilm, the ff and reversal of time and the vertiginous physical scale of the archive (from fading paper to miniaturised text on acetate) was overwhelming. 

Knowledge does not simply persist – it requires infrastructures of care and money, labour and protection. Even the collections I draw on here carry their own precarious history. The LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT archives were almost destroyed in the 1950s as the delayed reaction to them ‘as spewed from the gutters of the kremlin’ (North Carolina Senator Reynolds) gained more influence. Hearing about such censorship led to an introduction to the British Library’s Lord Chamberlain’s archive by Alex Locke (Modern Archives and Manuscripts Curator). This archive contains all the stage productions in the UK between 1824 and 1968 that to be approved by the Lord Chamberlain and a team of mainly retired colonel readers. It requires a specifically non digital search process - looking up P for POWER in rows of solid wooden index cabinets. It was highly unlikely that POWER had ever made it to Britain after its short US run but there it was. POWER. Performed in 1947 in a church hall in St Albans. Scant notes from the censorship board, some scenes not included and reference to ‘Nationalisation?’ with a question mark.  It was extraordinary to leaf through the delicate pages of this script that had travelled across time and ocean, speculating about radical vicars and amateur dramatics groups taking on the mantle of people power.

All marks made on these scripts were in blue pen, which, coupled with an introduction to the intricate colour coding of the British Library’s acquisition stamping team has influenced the colour scheme of this print project where lines of censored or redacted text mirror the appearance of microfilm and microfiche frames.  What is preserved and what is deleted? What becomes the headline of the day and what is overlooked or suppressed?  These are questions that permeate the production of a work that looks at the way we consume the news, the way we ‘read’ information and stories, the idea of ‘legacy’ in relation to media and stories and how we understand scale and time.  Many artists have intervened in the print newspaper format because of its immediacy. In 1912 the Futurists took over the front page of Le Figaro in declaring their manifesto. In 1960 Yves Klein created his own single issue newspaper of one day (Dimanche) in an early fusing of actionism, conceptual art, photomontage and performance. If a newspaper and specifically a LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT is ‘of the moment’ how do past, present and future intertwine and call to each other in the living archive?  How does this LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT create a story of future POWER and possibility erupting from between the lines and behind the decades of headlines? How does this future become something material and how do we hold that in our hands and vision?

This Creative Fellowship at the Eccles Institute at the British Library has enabled the time to think, go deep into the archives and ask these questions and now, to think through the making of this happen – the beginning of a new LIVING NEWSPAPER UNIT.