The Cinematheque

“In the 30 years since acid house exploded into the UK’s consciousness, its myth as a sui generis phenomenon, dominated by a small vanguard of London-centric tastemakers, has become entrenched. With Everybody In the Place, artist Jeremy Deller turns this received wisdom on its head, situating rave and acid house at the very centre of the seismic social changes upending 1980s Britain.”

Ed Gillet, Frieze

Originally aired on BBC Four, Everybody in the Place is a documentary by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller. It summarizes the explosion of acid house and rave in the UK as a reaction to wider and deeper fault lines in British culture, cutting across class, identity, and geography. Rare and unseen archive materials map this journey of protest, from abandoned warehouses to chaotic release on the dance floor. We join a group of students in an A‑level politics course as they discover these stories for the first time, viewing the history of acid house from the perspective of a generation for whom it is already the ancient past. Rave culture is not merely a cultural gesture, but the fulcrum for a generational shift, linking industrial histories and radical action to the expanses of a post-industrial future.

Programmed by Tobin Gibson.