What’s in a name? Though readers might be familiar with the work of the Amber Film and Photography Collective — who have documented life and work in the North East since 1968 — fewer can be expected to have considered the meaning of their name. Some might read it as an evocation of the mined natural world or the laboured romance of the earth, themes for which the collective have come to be known. In fact, their ‘amber’ has been said to refer to amber ale, or as the collective’s late founder Murray Martin described it: ‘the women’s drink.’

Though you wouldn’t know it from the critical responses that have hitherto defined Amber’s legacy, the apparently feminised pint, bubbling and golden, is an enjoyably fitting namesake. In my own writing and research, I’ve been recently trying to stress that it is working-class women, specifically, that Amber have often taken as their subject, and that have often been central to their practice. Amber’s socialist-feminist experiments are their most uniquely radical contribution to British left-wing culture, and sorely deserving of more recognition.

Amber emerged from the national wave of grassroots filmmaking known as the Workshop Movement, which saw groups such as Sankofa, The Berwick Street Collective, and the Black Film Workshop win unprecedented financial backing and support. This peaked with the 1982 ACTT Workshop Declaration (an agreement Amber helped to broker) through which Channel 4 committed to commissioning workshops on the basis of broad socially engaged work and long-term ‘integrative practices’. It was a watershed moment for left-wing British cinema, though its conditions would be short-lived. By the 1990s, funding was already being withdrawn.

Despite this, Amber have remained uniquely resilient in an increasingly hostile financial environment, still producing work into the 2010s. In 2023, Newcastle’s Side Gallery (home to the expansive collection held by the AmberSide Foundation, including work by Tish Murtha, Marketa Luscakova, and Amber’s own Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen) closed down due to cuts by Arts Council England. Now, a new team has taken the reins, determined to champion Amber’s distinctly feminist achievements.

From the beginning, working-class culture was Amber’s explicit focus. ‘Some people chose butterflies,’ wrote founding member Murray Martin; ‘I sought to reconnect myself with the working-class community which had nurtured me.’ Despite having a reputation for the standard ingredients of British social realism — work, masculinity, and landscape — their output is far from homogeneous. Their forms are often hybrid, and their process is marked by intense immersion in local communities. Yet while these elements have long been noted, no such recognition has been given for the part they have played in the collective’s unique portraits of working-class women’s lives. In particular, Dream On (1991), The Scar (1997) and the Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s Step-by-Step (1989) exemplify Amber’s radical investment in a genuinely intersectional cultural production, offering subtle reorientations of social realism itself.

The material mechanisms of Amber’s practice are just as vital as the works those mechanisms produced. In 1986, Amber bought the New Clarendon pub, operating it as a social club-cum-filmmakers’ headquarters, and beginning a five-year residency on North Shields’ Meadow Well estate. It was Mixed Feelings, the collected works of the residencies’ feminist writing group, hours of improvisatory sessions, and the local presence of a women’s darts team, that provided inspiration and script materials for the incomparable Dream On. Made by an all-female creative team, the film follows three women as the ordinary goings-on and difficulties of their lives are interrupted by extended fantastical sequences. Dinner is held in the woods with a giant swan, terrified women are chased through lighthouses, and a clairvoyant offers a hand. The film is a bewitching possession of the kitchen-sink, as unexplained phenomena blend with pop music and consciousness-raising.

The Scar came six years later. It was written by Lorna Powell, previously the collective’s administrator, and combined her experiences with those of a local (and now infamous) WAPC activist, Heather Wood. It too came from years of collaboration, grounded in intimacy and trust. The result is a film unlike any other account of deindustrialisation in Britain — one that deserves much greater audiences and acclaim. In an early scene, its protagonist, May, wrings menopausal blood from her underwear into a social club sink. The film offers a complex equivalence between the experiences of early menopause, and of a newly post-industrial landscape. At one point tangoing across the old colliery site, May struggles to come to terms with unwanted change on all fronts, attempting to reinvigorate a passion for collective action. In all, the scars of the film’s title are powerfully multiple: social, bodily, and psychic.

Similar themes have developed through Amber’s photographic work, namely that by one of their founding members, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen. Of particular significance is Step-by-Step, and an adjacent film work, Keeping Time (1983). Both document mother and daughter relationships against the backdrop of North Shields’ dance schools. In both, Konttinen developed a focus on fantasy, and the place of the ‘desire […] for glamour and grace in working-class life.’ Initially marred by a bad-faith write up in The Independent, the project is as much a vital visual archive as it is an implicit interrogation of the grim aesthetics often imposed onto working-class culture. In it, the site of the local dance school emerges as the knotty locus of self-expression, ambition, and innovation in the face of struggle.

Where and how do material deprivation, defeat, and disenfranchisement intersect with questions of longing, dream, and desire? How have those that identify as women responded to class struggle — and how is its very nature different for them? These are fairly obviously vital questions, and yet still too rarely encountered. One of the things that makes Amber’s works experimental is the attempt to do so, not only formally unconventional, but subversive in their repositioning of the working-class woman’s psychic life as central.

Though a lack of exposure might seem frustrating to contemporary viewers such as myself, Ellin Hare, director of both Dream On and The Scar, is happy to accept some responsibility for a relative absence of critical recognition. An uncompromising collective structure, which Hare tells me is precisely what facilitated her undoubtedly feminist achievements, has paradoxically also denied them proper recognition. Today, Hare is nowhere to be found in lists of pioneering female directors, and her works are similarly absent from accounts of feminist film. 

Yet there remains a bigger question at stake, concerning the still astonishing lack of attention paid to the idiosyncratic contributions of working-class women such as those integral to these works.

Though critics complained that Dream On’s ‘amazing evacuation of reality […] purged’ materialist forces, such an assessment fails to accommodate for dream and desire as political entities themselves. An underacknowledged correction of that failure runs through Amber’s work, which has now largely inspired my own. Amber’s revisionist portraits of the industrial were a huge source of inspiration in curating From the Earth Comes Light, a new exhibition running at the National Coal Mining Museum until the end of September. The show features work from AmberSide by Konttinen and Izabela Jedrzejczyk, as well as clips from The Scar. It is partly an attempt to reckon with the social reverberations of deindustrialisation, and to recognise the contributions of women in creatively articulating those reverberations over the past four decades in Britain.

That exhibition is just one part of a broader conversation now hopefully gathering pace, and much encouraged by the new, majority women, creative team working at Side. The same team are currently working to reopen the gallery, and fundraising campaigns are ongoing. This work is of vital importance, partly in recognising Amber’s contributions not only as historic, but as offering new approaches for the future. To the casual punter, it might seem as if those interested in working-class cultural production in Britain must survive on a restricted diet of heavy brown ale alone. A sorely needed supplement, Amber offers something genuinely refreshing.