The Rio Cinema, Hackney

The Rio, located in Hackney, serves as an example of how the GLC funded explicitly political and agonistic cultural and media spaces. It formed one node in the wider council funded ecology of local cultural, political and industrial projects. Whilst I use the Rio as an example here, the cinema was a part of a much larger movement of community building, solidarity and organising for social and cultural change, large parts of which were funded and supported by the GLC. In 1983 the Rio worked with Cinema of Women, Centerprise, Hackney People’s Press, Hackney Unemployed Media Scheme, Sheba Feminist Publishers, Theatre of Black Women – to name a few. Other GLC funded projects also figure prominently – including GLC Peace Year, the work of the Ethnic Minorities Unit, Save Hackney Campaign, the Roach Family Support Committee.¹² The GLC were funding a host of mutually supportive cultural groups, organisations and campaigns, all working in and around the borough of Hackney. The Rio, particularly as it was a physical building and a space for entertainment, was well placed to support and bring together a wide range of people and communities.

Located on the Kingsland Road between Stoke Newington and Dalston, the Rio Cinema had re-opened its doors under a local management committee in 1979. As a self-described ‘community cinema’ the Rio aimed to become “a cinema that serves the community and has a positive value in terms of the social and cultural needs of that community”.¹³ The cinema was a space in which people could come together and create alternative narratives of the city: both in their physical being there, in Hackney; and by sharing locally produced media – films, videos and slides – which directly countered the stories offered in the tabloid media and by Thatcher’s government. The GLC played a critical role in funding and supporting the Rio, along with many of the other cultural projects and campaigning organisations they worked with.

A significant part of the Rio as a community cinema was the work of a ‘traditional’ cinema – the showing of newly released feature films, selling popcorn, special performances for OAPs and the unemployed. However, alongside this the cinema produced a programme in conjunction with local organisations, trade unions, campaigns and individuals. The August/September programme of 1985, for instance, offered – alongside Desperately Seeking Susan – a multitude of events aimed at and organised with community groups in Hackney. The Rio Women’s Cinema in association with Black Audio Film Collective screened Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 film Black Girl. On the anniversary of the Turkish revolutionary and artist Yilmaz Guney’s death his film The Wall (1983) was shown in association with the Campaign for Defence of Democratic Rights in Turkey, followed by speakers, an exhibition and a bookstall. There were a number of screenings with the Women’s Media Resource Project (WEFT) who worked in the basement.¹⁴ Screenings like these, and the regular discussions, fundraising and organising which went on around them, were an important aspect of the Rio’s involvement with the communities in Hackney, and their striving to become a cinema that served their ‘social and cultural needs’.

One example of the way in which the Rio worked with local groups was through their engagement with campaigns around the death of Colin Roach. The death of Colin Roach in the entrance to the infamous Stoke Newington Police Station on 12 January 1983, was the latest in a long line of injustices experienced by the black population of Hackney at the hands of the police. The incident sparked protests on the streets of Hackney, calling for an inquest into the suspicious death, and for an investigation into the actions of the police on the night in question. The Rio was geographically located at the centre of this. Utilising their status as a cinema, the Rio showed Isaac Julien’s 1983 film Who Killed Colin Roach? As a part of the normal programme before films, and in special one-off screenings. By screening Julien’s film, in the centre of Hackney, right down the road from Stoke Newington Police Station, the Rio offered up a different narrative of Hackney, policing, and deaths in police custody. Offering the film for free, and for community groups seeking to initiate discussions and agitate around the issues, the cinema became a valued community resource and physical hub. Julien’s film explicitly aimed to show a different narrative relating to the death of Colin Roach to that being offered in the media. As Julien recalled: “in Who Killed Colin Roach?, I made it a priority to create a space for them to articulate an alternative point of view to the official reconstructions which were being pronounced by the dominant media…it was a question of defining a different set of priorities”.¹⁵ The Rio’s connection with the Roach Family Support Committee did not end there: the cinema’s Slide Reel Group covered the justice campaign in their short newsreel shown at the beginning of commercial features and, when the Committee and Hackney Community Action broke links with the police in Hackney, the Rio also broke links in solidarity. In creating space for different narratives of Hackney, in fostering discussions, and supporting such campaigns, the Rio — funded by the GLC and working with an ecosystem of GLC funded groups — was a place where agonistic politics could occur.

Another clear example of the Rio’s community and political work can be seen in the Slide Tape Reel Group.¹⁶ The group offered a space for young and unemployed people from the local area – the very same targeted in articles related to ‘no-go zones’ and urban unrest – to create their own media, to offer up their own narratives, and document their own histories. Through the group, the Rio truly began to fulfil their aim of a community cinema which began to help local people begin to challenge assumptions about control of the media.

The Slide Reel Group used their equipment and their platform to empower local communities. Violent and excessive policing of local black communities was commonplace in Hackney during the 1980s. Alongside this, mainstream press and Conservative government narratives framed these actions as necessary reactions to violent, uncontrollable youth. Formed of young people from the local area, the Slide Reel Group reported on policing from another angle. In 1983 the group documented one case of violent policing on camera — “On July 28^th 1983, an incident took place opposite the Rio, involving the arrest of young black people and the use of Police dogs. The Rio Slide Newsreel caught this incident and had it up on the screen 24 hours later.”¹⁷ In documenting this –– right outside the doors of the Rio, in the centre of Hackney –– the Slide Reel group used their community-powered media to hold the police to account. The images captured were later used by local MP Brian Sedgemore in his campaign to remove dogs from local policing.¹⁸ In calling out police tactics in this way, the Slide Reel project became a site of power and legitimacy for young people so often positioned at the other side of the camera, with no control over the ways they were represented in the media. As one article in City Limits described it, “the Rio is the kind of enterprise that consciously straddles the difficult divide between the screen and the street”.¹⁹

With the Rio – London’s first ‘community cinema’ – this combination of both physical space, and providing the tools for creating and sharing local, political media was important in creating spaces for community discussion and agitation. In doing this, the GLC were not simply fulfilling some civic function. They were actively promoting some level of disorder, friction and agonism in the city. Unlike so many recent ‘Creative City’ policymaking narratives, the GLC’s agonistic cultural policies were not intended to boost the desirability of certain areas for outside investors, or regenerate and bring a sleek happy exterior to public spaces. Quite the opposite. As with the case of the Rio Cinema, the Council supported organisations who agitated in the street, who proactively campaigned against change that was not led by communities, who agitated in the street.

In looking to the GLC, I hope we can reimagine what might be done with local cultural policy not only on a higher level of how policy is shaped, but on how we might be able to create cultural ecologies to empower and support communities to resist gentrification. Viewing the GLC’s community arts policies as agonistic, can open up questions of the possibility of radical cultural policy for transforming community’s relationships to their city. In enacting a cultural policy which fostered spaces of agonism, the GLC strengthened and gave space to increasingly disenfranchised communities, not only to express and share their emotions, to imagine different futures, but to build community resilience in a period of increasing economic inequality.

I think the GLC’s cultural policies can offer us a glimpse into what could have been if the British Left, and the Labour Party, had embraced local cultural funding as a means to empower and engage citizens in complex discussions around history, power and race in urban areas. Their cultural policies give us an idea of what might be possible if future left (Labour) councils do the same. Too often, cultural policy is about creating cohesion in cities; we need to think more about creating challenging, agonistic spaces for culture – creating complex ecologies – and allowing local radical media and cultural forms to become mediators and tools in these discussions. It is this kind of imagination, both in (cultural) policymaking and fostered by it, which might begin to open us up to different futures.