LONDON UNDERGROUND
Sunday 5 May 2002, at 3:00pm
London Tate Modern

TOWERS OPEN FIRE
Antony Balch, 1963, b/w, sound, 16 min
“Towers Open Fire is a straight-forward attempt to find a cinematic equivalent for William Burroughs’ writing: a collage of all the key themes and situations in the books, accompanied by a Burroughs soundtrack narration. Society crumbles as the Stock Exchange crashes, members of the Board are raygun-zapped in their own boardroom, and a commando in the orgasm attack leaps through a window and decimates a family photo collection… Meanwhile, the liberated individual acts: Balch himself masturbates (“silver arrow through the night…”), Burroughs as the junkie (his long-standing metaphor for the capitalist supply-and-demand situation) breaks on through to the hallucinatory world of Brion Gysin Dream Machines. Balch lets us stare into the Dream Machines, finding faces to match our own. “Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.” So the film is implicitly a challenge to its audience. But we’re playing with indefinables that we don’t really understand yet, and so Mikey Portman’s music-hall finale is interrupted by science-fiction attack from the skies, as lost boardroom reports drift through the countryside…” —Tony Rayns, “Interview with Antony Balch”, Cinema Rising No.1, April 1972

“Installations shattered – Personnel decimated – Board Books destroyed – Electronic waves of resistance sweeping through mind screens of the earth – The message of Total Resistance on short wave of the world – This is war to extermination – Shift linguals – Cut word lines – Vibrate tourists – Free doorways – Photo falling – Word falling – Break through in grey room – Calling Partisans of all nations – Towers, open fire” —William Burroughs, Nova Express, 1964

GLOUCESTER ROAD GROOVE
Jonathan Langran, 1968, b/w, silent, 2 min

“A film for children and savages, easily understood, non didactic fantasies. Urban landscapes…Strolling single frames.” —Jonathan Langran, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977

“I felt really high with all these people around. I was kind of a provincial film student and the youngest of everyone and there were fashion photographers, David Larcher who was very glamorous, there was Simon Hartog who was kind of intellectual … all sorts of people, wonderful women that would come around, friends, and I was always in awe of them and we used to go out to restaurants and that was all a very big thing for me. So one evening we went to Dino’s in Gloucester Road and I took the camera. I think I’d been using it all day, I just liked cameras and I filmed us going to eat, and we came back again, and I still kept filming! Gloucester Road was kind of cosmopolitan, late at night… it was exotic, very exotic, it wasn’t your dour kind of thing shot at 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock, Gloucester Road was buzzing.” —Jonathan Langran, interview with Mark Webber, 2002

MARVO MOVIE
Jeff Keen, 1967, colour, sound, 5 min
“Movie wizard initiates shatterbrain experiment – Eeeow! – the fastest movie film alive – at 24 or 16fps even the mind trembles – splice up sequence 2 – flix unlimited, and inside yr very head the images explode – last years models new houses & such terrific death scenes while the time and space operator attacks the brain via the optic nerve – will the operation succeed – will the white saint reach in time the staircase now alive with blood – only time will tell says the movie master – meanwhile deep inside the space museum…” —Ray Durgnat, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1968

“I was never part of the early 70s scene among the independent filmmakers – very much anti-American, anti-Hollywood. ‘Industrial Cinema’ they used to call it, which is true, but I never felt that antipathy towards commercial cinema. It was awful being a fucking misfit, I can tell you. I’d done my footsoldiering for the communist party and everything in those days – factory gates and all that shit, “ban the bomb”… So by the time of 1970, I’d got out of that. As for sexual liberation, I’d been happily married! And the drug scene didn’t mean anything to me because I’m puritanical. I’m a misfit.” —Jeff Keen, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

SPEAK
John Latham, 1962, colour, sound, 11 min
“Latham’s second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lye’s films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. Speak is animated in time rather than space. It is an exploration in the possibilities of a circle which speaks in colour with blinding volume. Speak burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, “it will live in your mind.”” —Ray Durgnat, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1968

“In 1966 Pink Floyd were playing their free-form, experimental rock at the Talbot Road Tabernacle (a church hall), Powis Square, Notting Hill Gate. On several occasions, Latham projected his film Speak as the group played. Since the film had a powerful flicker effect, the result was equivalent to strobe lighting. Film and music ran in parallel – there was no planned synchronization. Thinking to combine movie and music more systematically, Latham asked Pink Floyd to supply a soundtrack. The band agreed and a recording session took place. The artist explained that he wanted music that would take account of the strong, rhythmical pulse of the film. This the acid rock group proved unable or unwilling to provide; consequently, the association was terminated. A soundtrack was eventually added to one print of Speak: Latham placed a contact mike on the floor to pick up the beat of a motor (rhythm) driving a circular saw (musical note) while it was being used to saw up books (percussion and bending note). The film reaches a tremendous climax as the increasingly harsh whine of the electric saw combines with the frenetic sequence of images and flashes of light.” —John A. Walker, John Latham – The Incidental Person – His Art and Ideas, 1995

DIRTY
Stephen Dwoskin, 1965-67, b/w, sound, 10 min
“Dirty is remarkable for its sensuousness, created partly by the use of rephotography which enables the filmmaker a second stage of response to the two girls he was filming, partly by the caressing style of camera movement and partly by the gradual increase of dirt on the film itself, increasing the tactile connotations generated by rephotography. The spontaneity of Dwoskin’s response to the girls’ sensual play is matched by the spontaneity of his response to the film of their play. The rhythms of the girls’ movements are blended with the rhythms of the primary and secondary stage camera movements and these rhythms relate to the steady pulse emanating from the center of the image as a result of the different projector and camera speeds during rephotography. The soundtrack successfully prevents the awareness of audience noise (the inevitable distraction of silent cinema) by filling the aural space, but not drawing attention to itself. You tend not to notice it after a while and can therefore concentrate on what is most importantly a visual-feel film.” —John Du Cane, Time Out, 1971

“The refilming enabled the actions of the two girls to be emphasized to convey the tension and beauty of such a simple and emphatic gesture as a hand reaching out: frozen, and then moving slowly, then freezing, then moving again, and all the while creating tension and space before the contact. The refilming was done on a small projector and this enabled me to capture the pulsing (cycles) of the projector light, which gave off a throbbing rhythm throughout, and increased the mood of sensuality.” —Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is…, 1975

CLOCKTIME TRAILER
Stuart Pound, 1972, colour, sound, 7 min
“A time truncation film trailer for the rather long film called Clocktime. Film made as a totally systematic stream of hitherto unrelated events welded together into a colour interchange frame i.e. image (1), image (2), image (3)… repeat time cycle. 6 frames, 1/4 second, then images move further along their original time base; a very linear film.” —London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977

“I wasn’t particularly interested in making films about poetry but films that had got quite a strong sexual charge. For instance, in Clocktime Trailer there’s a woman in it who used to work for the Other Cinema years ago – Julia Meadows. I was absolutely fascinated with her, it was almost like having sex through the lens of the camera. I have now seen Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, but I’d not seen that at the time. It came out about 1960, here was such a hoo-hah about it and I was only about 16. Subsequently when I saw it I was: “Oh my god”. I could see how I was a real menace!” —Stuart Pound, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

SOUL IN A WHITE ROOM
Simon Hartog, 1968, colour, sound, 3.5 min
“Films are not bombs. No cultural object, as such, can have such a direct and measurable effect on the physical universe. Film works in the more ambiguous sphere of art and ideas. It cannot change the world, but it can change those who can change it. Film makes use of values that exist within a culture, and a society’s culture is more pervasive than its politics. The alteration, or even the questioning of existing value is the alteration of society. The established cultural hierarchy maintains itself by protecting and enforcing the ideas that keep it in power. Anything that attacks, questions, or provides new values is a threat. The culture allows only that which will not challenge its assumptions; everything else must be forced underground. Film, as a cultural and social activity, contains within itself a potential for change. Besides the great reporting and recording qualities of film, which provide it with a direct reference to the culture, it also provides the sense of magic. It possesses this sense in its ability to capture life; to capture movement and to fracture time and space. The main characteristics of magic are its indirect reference to the culture, and to the past and its derivation from very specific emotional experiences. Magic’s base is those emotional experiences where the truth of the experience is not revealed by reasoning, but by the interplay of these emotions on the individual human…” —Simon Hartog & Stephen Dwoskin, “New Cinema”, Counter Culture: The Creation of an Alternative Society, 1969

 “Soul in a White Room was filmed by Simon Hartog around autumn 1968. Music on the soundtrack is “Cousin Jane” by The Troggs. The man is Omar Diop-Blondin, the woman I don’t recall her name. Omar was a student active in 1968 during “les evenement de Mai et de Juin” at the Faculte de Nanterre, Universite de Paris. Around this time, Godard was in London shooting Sympathy for the Devil / One Plus One with the Stones and Omar was here for that too, appearing with Frankie Y (Frankie Dymon) and the other Black Panthers in London … maybe Michael X too. After returning to Senegal, Omar was imprisoned and killed in custody in ’71 or ’72. I believe his fate is well known to the Senegalese people.” —Jonathan Langran, interview with Mark Webber, 2002

HALL
Peter Gidal, 1968-69, b/w, sound, 10 min
“Hall manages, in its ten minutes, to put our perception to a rather strenuous test. Gidal will hold a static shot for quite a long time, and then make very quick cuts to objects seen at closer range. There is just a hallway and a room partially visible beyond, pictures (one of Godard) on a wall, fruit on a table, and so forth. The commonplace is rendered almost monotonous as we become increasingly familiar with it from a fixed and sustained viewpoint, and then we are disoriented by the closer cuts and also by the sudden prolonged ringing of an alarm. But even at the point of abrupt disorientation we remain conscious of the manipulation applied.” —Gordon Gow, “Focus on 16mm”, Films and Filming, August 1971

“Demystified reaction by the viewer to a demystified situation; a cut in space and an interruption of duration through (obvious) jumpcut editing within a strictly defined space. Manipulation of response and awareness thereof: through repetition and duration of image. Film situation as structured, as recorrective mechanism. (Notes from 1969) Still utilizing at that time potent (signifying, overloaded) representations. (1972)” —Peter Gidal, London Film-makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1974

“In Hall, extremely stable, normally reproduced objects are given clear from the beginning, the editing, moreover, reducing the distance from which they are seen, cutting in to show and to detail them, repetition then undercutting their simple identification; the second time around, a bowl of fruit cannot be seen as a bowl of fruit, but must be seen as an image in a film process, detached from any unproblematic illusion of presence, as a production in the film, a mark of the presence of that.” —Stephen Heath, “Repetition Time”, Wide Angle, 1978

REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE
Malcolm Le Grice, 1970, b/w, sound, 11 min
“It was about trying to get a mental position which defied the way in which the then-C.I.A. was kind of intervening in the world. But it was more, not a joke, but an icon title. I suppose it said to me and to other people, “Make your barb against the C.I.A.” A lot of my early work, all that aggressive work, has a political paranoia about it: the idea that there are hidden forces of the military-industrial establishment, which are manipulating us from within that power. Obviously, they were – people were having their telephones tapped though I don’t suppose for one minute that my telephone was interesting enough to tap. Reign of the Vampire is that kind of paranoid film. It’s a hovercraft that comes in, but it could easily be a tank with the army getting out of it … The idea of a military force that can sneak in somewhere, and the computer images. Threshold is in similar territory, about the borders and so on but very abstract. It’s about that hidden sense of force.” —Malcolm Le Grice, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

“The film is made from six loops in pairs (simple superimposition, but made by printing through both loops together rather than in two runs following each other, the effect of this is largely to eliminate the transparent aspect of superimposition). In content, the film comes near to being a synthesis of the How to Screw the C.I.A. or How to Screw the C.I.A.? series; it draws on pieces of film from the other films, and combines these with the most ‘disturbing’ of the images which I have collected. It also relates to the ‘dream’/fluid association sequence in Castle Two; it is a kind of on-going under-consciousness which repeats and does not resolve into any semantic consequence. One of the factors of the use of the loop, which interests me particularly, is the way in which the viewer’s awareness undergoes a gradual transformation from the semantic/associative to the abstract/formal, even though the ‘information’ undergoes only limited change. The sound has a similar kind of loop/repetition structure.” —Malcolm Le Grice, How to Screw the C.I.A. or How to Screw the C.I.A.? programme notes, 1970

Back to top