Victoria Russell: Why choose to explore this alternative side of 80s cinema?
James Bell: It’s an era of American cinema that been forgotten, or mis-represented through recent things like Stranger Things or Ready Player One and this commodified nostalgia of the 80s, all of which are great, but have kind of got a narrow idea of what the 80s were, and refer to the same few films as references. There are a lot of films that tell a slightly different story about what was actually going on in America behind the facade of Reaganism. What appealed to me was the chance to bring some of these films and filmmakers back to light – this sense of rediscovery.

VR: It’s also a chance for 80s fans to discover something new?
JB: Absolutely. This season was something that excited me because I’d been watching some of these films again and realised that no one talks about them. Half of them are not even available on DVD or Blu-ray – in an age of abundance, how do you find stuff that has perhaps been forgotten? So this season is really an opportunity for people to discover or rediscover them again.

VR: What do you mean by the “other side of Reagan’s 80s”?
JB: There’s a double meaning in it really. All these films deal with social subjects and characters that sit apart from what we understand to be the mainstream narratives of Reagan’s 80s: “greed is good”, Cold War patriotic bluster, yuppies, the rise of neo-liberalism and so on. Yet these films show another side to that. So, you’ve got suburban punk kids in Suburbia (1983) or Out of the Blue (1980), and you also have a film such as Parting Glances (1986), which is one of the first feature films to deal with the emerging AIDS crisis – which Reagan’s administration were slow to act upon. So, these films show the marginalised groups, the outcasts and oddballs that didn’t quite fit this mainstream America.

And the second meaning has to do with these films sitting apart aesthetically from the mainstream American cinema of the time. The 80s were the era of the high concept blockbuster, the John Hughes teen movie, the Stallone and Schwarzenegger action film, and these films don’t fit into any of those moulds. I thought of them more as continuing to fly the flag for the tradition of what was called the ‘New Hollywood’ cinema of the 1970s, which was more concerned with experimentation, with characters over spectacle, and with exploring the interesting nooks and crannies of American society. That spirit supposedly died out in American cinema at the end of the 1970s, and was only revived again with the rise of Sundance and the indie cinema of the 1990s, and while there’s an aspect of truth in that, these films show that it’s not the whole story.

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