The enquiry into the material of film as film itself was an essential characteristic of the Co-op’s output. These non- and anti- narrative concerns were fundamentally argued by the group’s principal practising theorists Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal.
In explaining their (quite different) ideas in some erudite but necessarily dense texts Le Grice and Gidal have in some ways contributed to misunderstandings of this significant tendency in the British avant-garde. (For example, It is not the case, as is often proposed, that films were made to justify their theories.) Le Grice was instrumental in acquiring, installing and operating the equipment at the Co-op workshop that afforded filmmakers the hands-on opportunity to investigate the film medium. His own work developed through direct processing, printing and projection, providing an understanding of the material with which he could examine filmic time through duration, while touching on spectacle and narrative. By contrast, Gidal’s cool, oppositional stance was refined to refute narrative and representation, denying illusion and manipulation though visual codes. His uncompromising position resists all expectations of cinema, even modernist formalism and abstraction. The artistic and theoretical relationship of these two poles of the British avant-garde, who were united in opposing ‘dominant cinema’, is a complex set of divergences and intersections.
Originally intended as a test strip, the first film produced at the Dairy on the Co-op step-printer was Mike Leggett’s Shepherd’s Bush, in which an obscure loop of abstract footage relentlessly advances from dark to light. The two short films by Roger Hammond and Mike Dunford concisely encapsulate an idea; while Window Box exploits the viewer’s anticipation of camera movement and shrewdly transforms a seemingly conventional viewpoint, the permanence of the cinematic frame is the focus of Tautology’s brief enquiry. By translating footage across different gauges, Crosswaite and Le Grice explore variations in film formats: Film No. 1 uses permutations and combinations of unsplit 8mm, while Little Dog for Roger directly prints 9.5mm home movies onto 16mm stock. In Key, Gidal plays on the ambiguity of an image to challenge and refute the observer’s interpretation of it, while intensifying disorientation through his manipulation of the soundtrack. Du Cane’s Zoom Lapse comprises dense multiple overlays of imagery, vibrating the moment, while Eatherley’s Deck re-photographs a reel of 8mm film, which undergoes a mysterious transformation through refilming, colour changing and printing.
Screening introduced by Roger Hammond.
STRUCTURAL / MATERIALIST
Sunday 12 May 2002, at 3:00pm
London Tate Modern
WINDOW BOX
Roger Hammond, 1971, b/w, silent, 3 min (18fps)
“In the small masterpiece Window Box, Hammond sets up a situation which is mystified in its presentation, and yet at the same time demands of (and allows) the viewer to demystify the given visual impulses. The situation presented includes thus within its own premises the objective factors which determine the possibility and probability of successful analysis. The criteria one uses to evaluate, interpret, are secondary to this conceptually-determined process of working out what is. We are taken into a post-logical empiricism which realizes the sensual strength of illusion which at the same time using precisely that to refer to precision of information. The opposite of Cartesian in its in-built negation of any aspect outside of the given system. Hammond is non-atomistic, non-referential within a specific, set-up, and defined closed system. Thus, a pure attitude. Hammond is purifying the conceptual and non-psychological aspect of his work to the point where it increasingly represents his calculable mental system: the nonreferential structural obligation. He does not create a whole system, however; rather, he deciphers one.” —Peter Gidal, “Directory of UK Independent Film-Makers”, Cinema Rising No. 1, April 1972
“Roger Hammond’s movies are short studies of apparently simple subjects…they induce a tight awareness of how these relations can be radically transformed by subtle shifts in film process; shifts of light value, angle, movement, framing, etc… The illusions of cinema as they bend our consciousness, become the focus of our attention. In Window Box, a simple subject takes on multiple dimensions in a ghostly world created by the process of rephotographing projected negative footage. There is a gentle reminder in this process in the framing of the eventual image, which incorporates in its composition a horizontal bar of light from the wall from which the film is being rephotographed.” —John Du Cane, Time Out, 1971
SHEPHERD’S BUSH
Mike Leggett, 1971, b/w, sound, 15 min
“Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film-process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure. All of Mike Leggett’s films call for special effort from the audience, and a passive audience expecting to be manipulated will indeed find them difficult for they seek a unique correspondence; one that calls for real attention, interaction, and anticipation/correction, a change for the audience from being a voyeur to being that of a participant.” —Roger Hammond, London Film-Makers Co-operative distribution catalogue supplement, 1972
“The process of film-making should emphasise the imaginative, and the contact between film-maker and spectator should become more direct. Shepherd’s Bush was made through a process contrary to the generally accepted method of making a film. It was without a script, without a camera, without the complicated route through task delegation. The entity of the film was conceived through the reappraisal of a Debrie Matipo step-contact printer. Designed such that with precise control of the light reaching the print stock after having passed through filters, aperture band and the negative, it was possible to demonstrate the gradual way in which the projection screen could turn from black to white. First, a suitable image on an existing piece of positive stock was found with which to produce a master negative. The shot was only ten seconds in length but contained a range of tones from one end of the grey scale to the other. It was loaded into the printer as a loop, and subsequently a print which repeated the action was made from the negative. Only part of the viewer’s attention should be taken with the perception of the figurative image on the screen. It should however, be dynamic enough to warrant careful inspection should the viewer’s attention turn to it. A thirty-minute version was made first, but on viewing was judged too long, so for the next version half this length was judged correct. A soundtrack was made matching in audio terms the perceptible changes in visual quality not usually encountered within the environment of the cinema. This film realized total control over the making of a film, from selection of the original camera stock, through exposure, processing, printing, processing, projection, cataloguing, and distribution.” —Mike Leggett, excerpts from unpublished notes, 1972
FILM NO. 1
David Crosswaite, 1971, colour, sound, 10 min
“Film No. 1 is a ten minute loop film. The systems of superimposed loops are mathematically interrelated in a complex manner. The starting and cut-off points for each loop are not clearly exposed, but through repetitions of sequences in different colours, in different material realities (i.e. negative, positive, bas-relief, neg/pos overlay) yet in a constant rhythm (both visually and on the soundtrack hum), one is manipulated to attempt to work out the system-structure. One relates to the repetitions in such a way that one concentrates on working out the serial formula while visually experiencing (and enjoying) the film at the same time. One of the superimposed loops is made of alternating mattes, so that the screen is broken up into four more or less equal rectangles of which, at any one moment, two or three are blocked out (matted). The matte-positioning is rhythmically structured, thus allowing each of the two represented images to flickeringly appear in only one frame-corner at a time. This rhythm powerfully strengthens the film’s existence as selective reality manipulated by the filmmaker and exposed as such. The mattes are slightly ‘off’; there is no perfect mechanical fit, so that the process of the physical matte-construction by the filmmaker is constantly noticeable, as one matte (at times of different hue or different colour) blends over the edge of the matte next to it (horizontally or vertically). The film deals with permutations of material, in a prescribed manner, but one by no means necessary or logical (except within the film’s own constructed system/serial). The process of looping a given image is already using film for its structural and abstract power rather than for a conventional narrative or ‘content’. But it is the superimposition of the black mattes which gives the film its extremely rich texture, and which separates it from so many other, less complex, loop-type films. Crosswaite works, in this film, with two basic images: Piccadilly at night and a shape which suggests at moments a 3-D close-up of a flowerlike organic growth or a Matisse-like abstract 2-D cutout. Depending on the colour dye of the particular film-segment and the positive/negative interchange, the object changes shading and constanyly re-forms from one dimension to the other, while shifting our perceptions from its reality as 3-dimensional re-presentation to its reality as cutout filling the film-frame with jagged edged blackness.” —Peter Gidal, NFT English Independent Cinema programme notes, 1972
TAUTOLOGY
Mike Dunford, 1973, b/w, silent, 5 min
“Regarding the in-built tautological aspects of perceptual structuring. Since refuted.” —Mike Dunford, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977
“Each time I make a film I see it as a kind of hypothesis, or a questioning statement, rather than a flat assertion of any particular form or idea… Each film is a film experiment in the sense that the most attractive features are those that work… My films are not about ideas, or aesthetics, or systems, or mathematics, but are about film, film-making, and film-viewing, and the interaction and intervention of intentive self-conscious reasoning activity in that context.” —Mike Dunford, 2nd International Avant-Garde Festival programme notes, 1973
“Its pretty obvious isn’t it? That’s the kind of film that me and Roger Hammond talked about. It’s because we actually spent quite a bit of time hanging out in the Co-op, processing things and talking about ideas. He’d read Derrida and all that kind of stuff, and as a result I read some of it too. And that’s how I would have got to make something like Tautology, by talking to someone like him A very simple idea, simply done; it does one thing and that’s all it does.” —Mike Dunford, interview with Mark Webber, 2001
KEY
Peter Gidal, 1968, colour, sound, 10 min
“… an enclosed and progressive disembowelment of durational progression. He draws out singularities … he allows the camera only a fenced in area, piecemeal. He lets the gaze hold on objects and constantly repeats … this permits the possibilities of the discrepancies between one’s own seeing and seeing with the camera to become distinct, and this in turn allows for a completely different experience of the surroundings.” —Birgit Hein, Film Im Underground, 1971
“Structural/Materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist. The process of the film’s making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process. But by ‘deals with’ I do not mean ‘represents’. In other words, such films do not document various film procedures, which would place them in the same category as films which transparently document a narrative, a set of actions, etc. Documentation, through usage of the film medium as transparent, invisible, is exactly the same when the object being documented is some ‘real event’, some ‘film procedure’, some ‘story’, etc. An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that ‘image’ is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently, a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary. In Structural/Materialist film, the in/film (not in/frame) and film/viewer material relations, and the relations of the film’s structure, are primary to any representational content. The structuring aspects and the attempt to decipher the structure and anticipate/recorrect it, to clarify and analyze the production-process of the specific image at any specific moment, are the root concern of Structural/Materialist film. The specific construct of each specific film is not the relevant point; one must beware not to let the construct, the shape, take the place of the ‘story’ in narrative film. Then one would merely be substituting one hierarchy for another within the same system, a formalism for what is traditionally called content. This is an absolutely crucial point.” —Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film”, Structural Film Anthology, 1976
ZOOM LAPSE
John Du Cane, 1975, colour, silent, 15 min
“If I had to compare my work with another activity, I would first point to two related musics: Reggae and certain West African music. If I had to label my work, I would choose a term radically opposed to ‘Structural’. I would say that I made ‘Ecstatic Cinema’ … I would like to think that the ecstatic is our birthright and to remember that ecstasy has many dimensions: we know that, from the Greek, we are talking about ‘a standing outside’ of oneself. This is meditation. And in the process of meditation, both rapture and a deep peace can co-exist. If my films work as intended, they will help you into ecstasy, and they will do this by satisfying in a polymorphic manner. The films are very physical, they are polyrhythmic and they are patterned in a manner designed to create a very definite way of seeing, of experiencing. I intend my films to jump out at you from their dark spaces, their gaps, their elisions, to vibrate in your whole being in the very manner and rhythm of felt experience. The magic of film for me is the possibility to portray these complex interlacings unfolding through time. You can watch one of my films, and see two films simultaneously; one of my mind and one of yours. I say film of ‘my mind’, but what I want to emphasise, because the films emphasise it, is that is a film of my being. The last thing I want my films to be is a purely mental event. This would be to deny a large part of the spectrum of the film.” —John Du Cane, “Statement on Watching My Films: A Letter from John Du Cane”, Undercut 13, 1984-85
“I was interested in film as a sculptural medium, and as a way to have the viewer be more aware of his viewing process, of his consciousness. My films were meditative at a time when that phrase wasn’t a popular term to use, but most of the films were designed to reflect the viewer back on themself. I also usually wanted my films to be very physical experiences, I wanted to make the experience work on really all of the main levels of energy; the physical, the intellectual and the aspects of awareness that we associate with consciousness. In Zoom Lapse I was also interested in working with the way we perceive time and space as it can be manipulated through the camera. Of course part of the content of this film had to do with the camera’s ability to squeeze our perspective through the process of zooming in and zooming out on a particular area. In the making of the film I actually lapsed the zoom process, so that I would shoot a single frame that had a zoom within it, and sequences in the film that were more extended zooms, so I took a very simple shot. I was living on a canal in Hamburg in a kind of romantic, old warehouse district, about all that was left after the bombing of the city. There was an old set of warehouse windows across the way and so I was interested in exploring the ways that you could squeeze space and watch the relationships between your time perception and your perception of space and how the two interact. There’s a process in the film, that happens in many of my other films, where I want the viewer to be pretty conscious that what they’re seeing is not something that exists on the celluloid, that there’s a way they’re manufacturing in the viewing process. The film should very obviously be something that if you come back and watch it a second, third, fourth, fifth time you’re not really going to see the same thing because the eye is creating sets of images that don’t actually exist.” —John Du Cane, interview with Mark Webber, 2002
LITTLE DOG FOR ROGER
Malcolm Le Grice, 1967, b/w, sound, 13 min
“The film is made from some fragments of 9.5mm home movie that my father shot of my mother, myself, and a dog we had. This vaguely nostalgic material has provided an opportunity for me to play with the medium as celluloid and various kinds of printing and processing devices. The qualities of film, the sprockets, the individual frames, the deterioration of records like memories, all play an important part in the meaning of this film.” —Malcolm Le Grice, Progressive Art Productions distribution catalogue, 1969
“The strategy of minimizing content to intensify the perception of film as a plastic strip of frames is explicitly demonstrated in Le Grice’s seminal Little Dog For Roger. Here the 9.5mm ‘found-footage’ of a boy and his dog is repeatedly pulled through the 16mm printer; the varying speed and swaying motion of the original filmstrip ironically allude to the constant speed and rigid registration of the 16mm film we are watching, and develop a tension between our knowledge of the static frames which comprise the filmstrip and the illusion of continuous motion with which it is imbued. The use of ‘found-footage’ and of repetition – which threatens endlessness, though this is a relatively short film – owe something to the ‘pop’ aesthetic then dominant, but the spectator is never permitted to complacently enjoy these found-images; the graininess and under-illumination, the negative sequences and upside-down passages are designed not so much to add variation as to continuously render those simple images difficult to decipher, thus stressing that very act of decoding. The relentless asceticising of the image became a major preoccupation in subsequent British avant-garde filmmaking.” —Deke Dusinberre, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde catalogue, 1977
DECK
Gill Eatherley, 1971, colour, sound, 13 min
“During a voyage by boat to Finland, the camera records three minutes of black and white 8mm of a woman sitting on a bridge. The preoccupation of the film is with the base and with the transformation of this material, which was first refilmed on a screen where it was projected by multiple projectors at different speeds and then secondly amplified with colour filters, using postive and negative elements and superimposition on the London Co-op’s optical printer.” —Gill Eatherley, Light Cone distribution catalogue, 1997
“Deck was shot on Standard 8, black and white, on a boat going from Sweden to Finland on a trip to Russia. And then I just filmed it off the screen at St Martin’s, put some colour on it, and turned it upside-down … Just turned it upside-down and put some sound on. The sound came off a radio – just fiddling around with a radio and a microphone, just in-between stations. It was one of the longest films I’ve ever made and that kind of frightened me a little bit. I thought it would be too long, you know, 13 minutes was quite a long time. Most of my films are only three minutes, six minutes, eight minutes … but it could have gone on longer maybe…” —Gill Eatherley, interview with Mark Webber, 2001
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