Murray Martin R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

Obituary: Murray Martin

Film-maker who with the Amber Collective charted working-class life in the North-east of England

THE INDEPENDENT
24 August 2007

Murray Martin, film-maker and activist: born Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire 27 January 1943; married Diane Caple (one son), (one son with Ellin Hare); died Newcastle-upon-Tyne 14 August 2007.

Murray Martin, film-maker and committed activist, was one of the founders of the Amber Film Collective which, through an ongoing series of extraordinary films (currently around 40), as well as photographic exhibitions and books, has charted working-class life in the North-east of England from the 1970s on.

Martin, born in Stoke-on-Trent, came from a family of potters and miners. In the early 1960s he went to Newcastle to study fine art, though he did not follow the paths of either of his tutors, the abstractionist Victor Pasmore or the pop-artist Richard Hamilton. He went on to teach art history, which spurred an interest in film, and in 1968 he spent a year studying film-making at Regent Street Polytechnic.
There he met fellow Amber founders and made All You Need is Dynamite (1968), about the students who took part in the Grosvenor Square riot, and Maybe (1969), a short documentary about the Shields Ferry service across the Tyne. The one's political engagement and the other's musings on an engineman's retirement and the end of the service define Amber's concerns. Martin also started Mai, about his eccentric landlady, but it was only completed in 1974 when he was back in Newcastle with Amber.
Working closely with the local community, Amber makes documentaries, dramas and films which move between the two. Their based-on-reality dramas include Keeping Time (1983), following a dancer's life from seven to 17, Double Vision (1986), examining why men become boxers, and Seacoal (1985), about a group of coal-picking travellers.
The collective, working with local people, created a brand of British neo-realism, ironically helped by Equity's insistence that non-union actors could speak only unscripted lines. The process worked the other way with In Fading Light (1989), with actors learning how to operate the fishing boat that Martin had bought and which also very nearly transported them to and from the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain. But their most ambitious work in this vein was T. Dan Smith (1987), a complex film about the disgraced Newcastle City Council boss, questioning his claim to have been brought down by MI5, whilst setting up a parallel fictional story about council corruption.
Amber was in the forefront of resisting the assault on the mining industry in the 1980s, making films such as News From Durham (1983), with the future Labour MP Kim Howells explaining how the National Coal Board deliberately made pits uneconomic, and Can't Beat It Alone (1985), which examines the idea that the nuclear industry was a covert way of breaking the National Union of Mineworkers and supplying the weapons industry.

Another of Thatcherism's central tenets was questioned in The Privatisation Tapes (1986), which looked at the effect of the policy on workers and the public, while Where Are We Going? (1983) was used to encourage local communities to contemplate the future of the mining industry. The drama The Filleting Machine (1981) even concludes with viewers' discussions about the film.
Committed to long-term projects, Amber stays around in situations where the traditional media lose interest and move on. So the fall-out of mine closures is examined in the drama Like Father (2001), in which brass-band music is a palliative to three generations' struggles with unemployment, a bittersweet, non-saccharine counterpoint to the glib Brassed Off (1996).
Murray Martin was a daring visionary, a gambler who balanced optimism and realism. In the mid 1970s, Newcastle City Council deliberately ran the Quayside area down, preparing for redevelopment. At Martin's urging, Amber bought premises there and recorded the declining area and its population. The film, Quayside (1979), and accompanying exhibition created such a stir that the strategy was reversed and the area now has one of the highest concentrations of listed buildings in the country.
As a member of the Arts Council's photography panel, Martin typically insisted that photographic galleries should devote 20 per cent of their grants to production. Newcastle's Side gallery was the only one to achieve it, which may be why the policy was dropped.
In 1987 Martin was the prime mover in Amber's purchase of the New Clarendon pub in North Shields, planning it as a base for long-term work. But the local was counterbalanced by the international with From Marks and Spencer to Marx and Engels (1988), in which Martin introduced Tyneside to East German film-makers, to make a double-bill comparing the lives of people in Britain and the GDR.
Eden Valley (1994) was set in the world of harness-racing and, at Martin's insistence, Amber bought a horse and a field to keep it in. But it was also a personal passion for Martin: he was closely involved in the UK Standardbred Racing Association. An inveterate (and very successful) gambler, he would excuse himself from Channel 4 meetings to "catch the train home" – in reality dashing to the betting shop to collect his winnings before it closed. Working with another collective, he once put their entire grant on a horse – thankfully quintupling the inadequate £3,000.
Martin preferred artistic and editorial freedom to accepting the possible compromises attached to bigger budgets. He was instrumental in brokering the Workshop Agreement, which allowed collectives to by-pass union bans on people having more than one trade on a film, and, with Channel 4's support, life became easier for film workshops.

Under the anti-auteurist "Amber Production Team" credit, everyone, including Martin, took different tasks, though "whoever paints the wall, chooses the colour". Nevertheless, there is an identifiable style: the film critic Chris Auty summed it up, describing Launch (1973) as "a tone poem on working life with a distinct combination of loving nostalgia and political protest". Martin was instrumental in defining that ethos.

John Riley