browseMurray Martin - The Album
Murray Martin was a founder member of Amber and the prime architect of the vision that continues to inform its work. These images have been selected from the many photographs that were collected and scanned for a small exhibition celebrating his life, put together by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen for Murray's funeral on 29th August 2007. The personal testimonies, below, by Sirkka and Peter Roberts formed part of the humanist service at Easington Miners' Welfare Hall. The obituary was written for the website. Anybody wishing to leave their own memories of Murray, or testimonies to his work, can do so in the Amber Forum. You need to register first.
Funeral Address by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen
Murray exercised his creativity largely through other people.
He was twenty five when I first met him at the film school in London and it was already his dream to gather a group of friends around him, who would share his vision of work and life. The vision was simple but hard to pin down into a manifesto:
Integrate life and work and friendship;
Don’t tie yourself to institutions;
Live cheaply and you’ll remain free;
And then - do whatever it is that gets you up in the morning.
Before moving to Newcastle, the embryo Amber set up home in Shepherds Bush in the house of Mai Finglas, initially surviving on Murray’s horse winnings. Mai had been an anarchist, a teacher in the Himalayas and a friend of Gandhi. Murray befriended her when she was a cleaner in an antique shop in Portobello Road. Mai was a passionate collector of dolls and everything else, filling her two houses to the point where all the doors were permanently jammed either open or close. Our kitchen was piled to the ceiling with old newspapers, leaving only narrow passages for the occupants, who also included a family of hedgehogs. Mai’s view of her decaying clutter was, ‘dirt is merely matter in the wrong place’. This twinned well with Murray’s motto that tidiness is a sign of brain damage. Mai was, at the age of 86, still passionately into life and for us a vision of lifelong creativity. She later became the subject of the first Amber film. Murray was a kindred spirit of Mai’s; a passionate collector. He collected people. Some of his collection are still sitting here today.
Everyone at Amber takes ownership of all of Amber’s work, but Murray did so more than most. When we were looking for a publisher for my Byker photographs, Murray arranged a meeting in London with the editor of Jonathan Cape. Murray did all the talking and throughout the meeting kept referring to the photographer as we. The editor found this confusing and eventually demanded: “Who is this we? Who took the photographs, Both of you?” In the truest sense, it was both of us. If it hadn’t been for Murray, the photographs would not have been taken. Similarly, when Murray did his innovative work within the Workshop Movement and fixed us up with fishing boats and pubs and chapels and horses and caravans for various projects, we at Amber took these to be our achievements.
When the British Film Institute gave Amber its 25 year Achievement Award, they invited one member of the group to attend the awards ceremony in London. We responded that it had to be all of us or none of us. After an argument they conceded, but insisted it would have to be black tie and gowns. Murray, who was scornful of any institutional silliness, declared he will not wear a clown suit for anybody. As a small concession, we trawled our local charity shops and all eight of us lined up on stage at the National Film Theatre, outshining Gerard Depardieu, who, as a slave to Hollywood fashion, was dressing down at the time and looked like a tramp next to us.
Murray’s disdain for officialdom didn’t always serve us well. A couple of years ago he and I were invited to give a presentation of Amber’s work at a photo festival in Moscow. Together we managed not to process our official invitation into a visa and were barred from entry at the Moscow Airport. Instead, we were locked up into an icy cold room for twenty-two hours - it was snowing outside - together with a group of migrant workers from Turkey and Azerbaijan. The rough looking guys didn’t speak a word of English and Murray didn’t speak a word of anything but English, but within minutes he had befriended them and in the middle of the night when we were unable to sleep for hunger, they shared their food with us. I had taken two days to pack my suitcase, which I couldn’t open because of a broken zip. This gave Murray cause for some witty observation. He had spent five minutes filling his travel bag, and when my teeth started chattering in the early hours of the morning, he emptied it out on the floor, urging me to wrap myself in its contents. He himself kept warm by pacing round the room with a book in hand. Murray’s powers of persuasion are considerable, but they didn’t get us out of this hole. Next morning, when we were marched back into the plane to the UK, Murray’s comment was: “I never liked Moscow anyway.” Well, I never got the chance to, but the trip couldn’t have been more memorable.
A few years ago Pete and I shared a holiday in Portugal with Murray, Ellie and Mattie. On one of our daytrips to a mountain village I saw a pair of gorgeous red boots in a shop window. The shop had just closed and I was duly disappointed. Murray said: “I’ll drive you back tomorrow.” And he did, all of a seventy mile round trip. We all had another memorable day out - and I got my red boots.
Murray was an enabler. He enabled us and others to flourish, and by this talent of his, he flourished himself. He was the best of travelling companions. I’ll not say goodbye to you, Murray. You’ll be always be travelling with us.
Funeral Address by Peter Roberts
Murray first entered my life, out of the blue, some 38 years ago.
I was living in Manchester, working by day at the University and in the evenings and spare time, trying to make my own animation films.
One day I got a letter from this bloke up in Newcastle: he had actually seen a little film of mine at an obscure festival in the Lake District, and would I like to meet for a chat? I replied ‘Sure, that would be good, we’ll keep in touch,’ and I thought that would be that.
Two or three days later a parcel arrived containing a few rolls of 16mm film! This was like gold dust to me at the time and seemed such a remarkable act of generosity from a complete stranger that as soon as I could I went up to Newcastle to have a look at this benefactor. We met and walked around Newcastle all afternoon talking about architecture and the cities we knew. We went drinking in the Bigg Market and talked about films and football – Stoke and Leeds – a conversation that was to be picked up season in season out, a kind ritual of touching base. But the most significant thing of all was the vision he presented of a way of working, creating and living that was so persuasive, so appealing and so right, that a few weeks later I had abandoned the security of my job and was back in Newcastle, a member of the fledgling Amber. Salary: nil.
He had no interest in qualifications or CVs, there were no references and very little to show in the way of experience, only an instinctive sense that we might just respond in a similar way to the world around us.
I thought this was extraordinary, but of course it turned out to be Murray’s way and there were to be many others who would benefit from his belief and encouragement and who, like me, owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
Another thing I am grateful for were the people who came into our lives through Murray, and who became the best and dearest of our friends too: Laurie Wheatley – South Shields plasterer, self-educated sculptor, painter, photographer, craftsman, philosopher. A man of such self-effacing wisdom and wit and skill – he was the sum of everything Murray admired in a human being – a working class hero of the old school. I think Murray spent much of his life in search of people of Laurie’s qualities, and found them too in different ways in people like Brian Laidlaw ,Spike Bostock, Warren Coulson and many others and a celebration of such lives was at the heart of Murray’s creative life and because of that, of Amber’s as well.
Tom Hadaway also. Over the past couple of weeks while I have been thinking about Murray, a memory keeps jumping into my head of a night spent in a flea pit of a B & B on a trip through Ireland. Tom, Murray and me sharing a bed – one of the most uncomfortable nights I have ever spent, me sandwiched between two world class snorers. But what warm feelings I have of many such trips, funny little adventures, full of incident with the best of companions.
Always on the cheap, not just through lack of money, although that was often the case, but mainly through Murray’s complete disdain for the bland and the corporate – a paper of fish and chips in the street always preferable to the sit down dinner.
It might be Warsaw or Wallsend, it made little difference, Murray was never happier than when he was out and about, because out and about was where people were, and people were his passion and inspiration. Just a couple of days ago Ellie said that the film making for him was just an excuse to go adventuring, to go sniffing around and meeting people and I think she is right.
And there is Amber.
A few years ago a young man came from some Satellite TV arts programme to do a piece on Amber. I think Ellie and I must have been the only people in the office at the time so we got to do the interviews. But he insisted on interviewing us separately. Afterwards we got together to check what each of us had said. We had both been asked more or less the same questions and one of them was something like – “Amber has survived for a long time, how have you managed it and what advice would you say to young film makers just starting out?” To our surprise we found we had answered almost word for word:
“Find a bunch of people you really like and stick with them!”
This has been the heart of Amber’s Business Plan – its true manifesto. Murray’s gift tous. Because whenever there were personal fall outs, you knew that publicly he would always be standing right beside you. And there were rows and walk outs – too many – and many bitter words. But always the door was left open, the hand of reconciliation offered, and always taken. Because it was that important. For Murray an unresolved conflict was an open wound.
So I’m so grateful that when we met for the last time in the hospital we were still talking about ideas and the future, still talking about the fairness or otherwise of the deduction of penalty points from Leeds for the start of this season.
Still the best of friends.
Obituary
A founder member of Amber film & photography collective, Murray was the key visionary behind its coming together at Regent Street Polytechnic in London in 1968 and its coming to Tyneside the following year.
From a family of potters and miners in Stoke on Trent, he first came to Newcastle in the early sixties, studying Fine Art, oppositionally, under both Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton. Teaching art history at Newcastle Polytechnic he became interested in film and went down to London to study filmmaking. The student film Maybe (1968), a documentary portrait of the Shields ferry, in many ways set the creative territory Amber developed over the years that have followed: a consistent exploration and celebration of working class and marginalised lives and landscapes.
He had an instinct in recognising the particular qualities in individuals he gathered around him, some of whom became part of the collective, many of whom have associated themselves in the work. The scale and coherence of that work has been remarkable. In Amber’s documentaries of the 1970s, such as Launch (1973), Edgar Anstey recognised a successor to the British documentary movement. Side Gallery and Cinema opened in 1977 and the expanded commitment to production, exhibition and touring has built an extraordinary photographic collection based around whole bodies of work rather than individual images.
When he was on the Arts Council photography panel, he pushed through the decision that all photography galleries should devote 20% of their grants to production. Only Side ever achieved it and, while the Arts Council’s commitment was quietly dropped, Amber continued with the policy until Side Gallery’s own funding was savagely pared back, following its refusal to become a generalist ‘Key Strategic Organisation’. It’s an illustration of his principles and priorities, but it’s also an indication of how he worked. And he could work incredibly quickly. His instinct for people was matched by an instinctive eye: he could curate an exhibition in a morning and it would have greater depth, coherence, richness and impact than most of the ones by those who have encouraged the cult of the curator.
In the late seventies he was central to Amber’s largely successful campaign against the planned demolition of much of the Newcastle’s Quayside. He always lamented the disappearance of a wooden café that came down overnight in response to the listed status it had acquired through the efforts of a clandestine action committee he set up. His involvement with the Film Workshop Movement and with ACTT led to a pivotal role in developing the Workshop Agreement between the film technicians’ union, the regional arts associations and the newly-established Channel 4. The access it opened up allowed a flowering of regional, black and radical filmmaking in the eighties, in which he was justly proud of having played a part.
The Channel 4 franchise enabled Amber to develop feature length, documentary rooted dramas. Rejecting the idea of the auteur, he saw filmmaking as a collective process in which he would argue the toss as an equal. Production meetings have often been lively. Importantly, the process has also always been opened to participants and people from the communities in which the films were being made. His particular concerns and interests can be seen in Seacoal (1985), T Dan Smith (1987), In Fading Light (1989) and Eden Valley (1994): each film bold in its experimental exploration of the possibilities between documentary, community and fiction.
In the early nineties his involvement with the Workshop Movement was opening up on the possibility of a Europe-wide funding programme for regional film production. In the change of direction that eventually gave us Big Brother, Channel 4 pulled the plug and it fell through, but the films stand as examples of what can be achieved and what was lost. The honesty of the work mattered most. He always argued for making the film you wanted on a small budget, rather than taking the bigger one with strings.
Murray was a gambler. He loved the deal and wasn’t worried about the money. In the mid seventies, when Newcastle Quayside was being abandoned by one and all and the group was being evicted, his was the leading voice arguing for buying the premises and encouraging the idea of cultural quarter a bit before its time. When the group made a five year commitment to North Shields, Amber bought a pub, The New Clarendon, as a social centre for its work and as a location. When it decided to make a film on the fishing industry, on screenwriter Tom Hadaway’s advice he went to Denmark and bought an anchor seine boat, which the group ran for a couple of years – until it started taking on water on a doomed voyage to the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Road racing with trotting horses came into Seacoal and for Eden Valley Amber bought a field in County Durham and a horse. Murray’s involvement with the harness racing community became a major passion. He helped to set up the UK Standard-bred Racing Association, organising race meetings, doing the newsletter and writing a tipster’s column as well as training and racing his own horses. The horsey world fed into the making of Shooting Magpies (2005) and was central to a documentary Amber is currently making. No job was ever beneath him. He was happy putting newsletters in envelopes. He spent hours, days, weeks sorting out horse passports for people. When Amber recently took over the running of Side Café, he became the King of Breakfasts for a while, quickly learning the art of presentation. When somebody complained about being served by a man dressed like a builder, he happily took to wearing smarter t-shirts.
Murray was an infectious visionary, but he was also an imaginative pragmatist, who could think laterally, coming at solutions to problems with quite radical strokes. One of the joys of working with him was simply in the way he thought about things. He wasn’t party political, but he never wavered in his humanist and socialist principles. He had an instinctive distrust of institutions and authority which extended to hospitals and doctors. As often was the case, his instincts were justified. A great man, who will be greatly missed, he touched many lives and his influence will live on. He is survived by his partner Ellin Hare, their son Mattie and, from an earlier relationship, his son Young.