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So That You Can Live developed from a project called The Social Contract,
which Cinema Action began in the mid-1970s, with funding from the British Film
Institute's Production Board. The group's first work in colour, The Social Contract was not completed as a single film but parts were shown during
screenings. Some of the footage is now at the National Film and Television
Archive and even these few reels demonstrate the breadth of the concept.
When filming for The Social Contract in 1976 in Treforest, South Wales, the
filmmakers met Shirley Butts. She was union convenor at the GEC factory and was
leading a strike by women for equal pay. Ann Guedes, founder member of Cinema
Action, has recalled that "from the start we were making a different film."
However, since Cinema Action itself was a communal filmmaking collective perhaps
it is not so strange that they should have drawn such moving and sharp parallels
between Shirley's work and family and her country's industrial history.
So That You Can Live is a reflective film. It contains many shots
of people looking at the landscape and remembering changes or wondering what has
lead to it looking the way it does. Cinema Action's campaigning films had
stressed the interconnection of workers and their communities, notably The
Miners' Film (1975) and UCS1 (1971), but So That You Can Live is different
because of Shirley's presence. As a woman and mother, Shirley's reflection on
union structures pose more searching questions perhaps than those of the male
shop stewards heard in the earlier films. As Cinema Action said of the film, her
story is "a continuous, conscious effort to grow, to learn and to teach, to work
and to love".
This is Cinema Action's masterpiece. Growing from The Social Contract, it
also seems a basis for Rocinante (1986), Cinema Action's first
fiction film. It must also, of course, be reckoned as a major Welsh film, Wales
being not just clichéd 'raw material' but an active participant.
Kieron Webb
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1. Our demands (4:52)
Production stills
