LOCATION: DURATION
Tuesday 21 May 2002, at 6:30pm
London Tate Modern

LEADING LIGHT
John Smith, 1975, colour, sound, 11 min
“Leading Light evolves a sense of screen depth and surface through the simple agency of light. The film is shot in a room over the period of a day and records the changes in light through the single window. The image is controlled through manipulation of aperture, of shutter release, of lens, but the effect is more casual than determined and the spectator is aware primarily of the determining strategy of following sunlight. Smith has commented that, “…the film is not intended as an academic exercise – I wanted to make a film of light cast by the sun largely because I found it beautiful. At the same time, I did not want to make an illusionistic narrative film about the sun moving around a room, but instead to employ these events within an essentially filmic construction. Because the images are so seductive, there is a conflict in the film between the events which occurred and the way in which they were recorded. This is quite intentional – for this reason I chose a very romantic piece of music for the soundtrack, which is mechanistically manipulated. The sound (which only occurs when an image of a record player appears on the screen) alters in level in relation to two variables – the apparent distance from the camera to the apparent source of the sound, and the exposure of the individual shots (bright=loud, dark=quiet). The manipulations according to distance are merely an extension of an accepted illusionistic code (source of sound seems further away, therefore the sound is quieter, etc.), whereas the manipulations according to brightness are materialist – a new code, but just as valid as the other in the film’s terms”.” —Deke Dusinberre, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977

“Leading Light uses the camera-eye to reveal the irregular beauty of a familiar space. When we inhabit a room we are only unevenly aware of the space held in it and the possible forms of vision which reside there. The camera-eye documents and returns our apprehension. Vertov imagined a ‘single room’ made up of a montage of many different rooms. Smith reverses this aspect of ‘creative geography’ by showing how many rooms the camera can create from just one.” —A.L. Rees, Unpacking 7 Films programme notes, 1980

FOCUS
Peter Gidal, 1971, b/w, sound, 7 min
“Taking the relocating enumerative placement of ‘static’ reality in Bedroom to its ultimate conclusion; a film whose ‘repetitions’ are as close to mechanistic processes (loops) as the human camera-operator can get, with the help of a Bolex-16 pro. With an overwhelming, complex, deep, beautiful soundtrack by Anthony.” —Peter Gidal, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1971

“Gidal’s ultimate goal is the viewer’s head: he’s interested in the way that the viewer comes to terms with what he sees, the analytic process of working out the true nature of the experience. Like other ‘structuralists’, his distrust of content in films verges on an all-but-paranoid fear of human emotion… and since his films define their own rhythms (rather than matching life-rhythms, as in Eisensteinian montage) they presuppose the viewer’s willing surrender to the task of watching them. At their best, as in Bedroom or Focus (the latter a series of backward-and-forward zooms through an open indoor space, the elements within the shot at once seemingly arbitrary and precisely defined), they are sufficiently strong conceptually to capture the viewer into participating in the experience, consciously or not. One of the few genuine ‘originals’ at work in Britain.”—Tony Rayns, “Directory of UK Independent Film-Makers”, Cinema Rising No. 1, April 1972

“Film cannot adequately represent consciousness any more than it adequately represents meaning; all film is invisibly encumbered by mystificatory systems and interventions which are distortions, repressions, selections, etc. That a film is not a window to life, to a set of meanings, to a pure state of image/meaning, ought to be self-evident. Thus, the documenting of an act of film-making is as illusionist a practice as the documenting of a narrative action (fiction). And consciousness is as encumbered by the illusionist devices of cinema, if one is attempting to document ‘it’, as anything else. Filmic reflexiveness is the presentation of consciousness to the self, consciousness of the way one deals with the material operations; film relexiveness is forced through cinema’s materialist operations of filmic practice.” —Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film”, Structural Film Anthology, 1976

SHEET
Ian Breakwell & Mike Leggett, 1970, b/w, sound, 21 min
“Sheet is concerned with redefining boundaries, affirming that old Gestalten thing that elements in a field are always subordinated to the whole, the composition of it – an aggregate of episodes – is such that what finally emerged was a somewhat soft mesmeric movie, the repetitions and symmetries setting up moods in which one became immersed.” —Roger Hammond, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative catalogue supplement, 1972

“Shrouding or hiding belong both to death as the mysterious unseen killer, and to the corpse. Sheet has all these feelings. The uncertainty and surprise: where will it appear next? The sheet appears in odd places, making familiar objects look strange and uncanny. The party goes on with everybody pretending it isn’t there, embarrassed, ashamed of it, it is eventually kicked into a corner. This sums up our present approach to death. As the film proposes: the more we pretend it isn’t there, the more it pursues us. Then, in the final sequence in the valley there seems to be a feeling of resolution. Perhaps that the earth will eventually claim us, but also gives us birth, growth, and protection. So, as we realize that the sheet and the valley go together, so the sheet can go off to a more bearable distance.” —Extract from a letter to the filmmakers from a member of the audience, circa 1970

WHITCHURCH DOWN (DURATION)
Malcolm Le Grice, 1972, colour, sound, 8 min
“This film is the beginning of an examination of the perceptual and conceptual structures which can be dealt with using pure colour sequences in loop forms with pictorial material. In this case, the pictorial material is confined to three landscape locations and the structure is not mathematically rigorous.” —Malcolm Le Grice, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1974

“The first general point about Le Grice’s work is that the eventual structure of his films is not normally the result of an adherence to a rigorously formulated initial concept. The films are better understood as events that emerge from his plastic concerns with film process. In other words, the meaning of Le Grice’s films stems principally from a direct exploitation of film’s physical properties; film can be physically manipulated, for instance, not merely in the act of exposing it to light in a camera, but also through direct control of its developing and printing. It is easy to be misled into thinking that such concerns with the technical properties of film necessarily result in a certain dehumanization of the film activity. The confusion results from an inability to see that the filmmaker is also an actor; i.e. a man who acts with film. By making explicit the materials and processes of the film, the film maker allows us to see his film not just as a finished object but as one event (and not always the culminating event) in a whole series of events that make up a continuum of film activity. And this is a remarkably courageous and personal thing to do: for, in a sense, if you have the eyes to see, everything is revealed, and technique is no longer a means of alienation between observer and actor, or between the actor and his activity. From this point of view, Malcolm Le Grice exhibits an unusual honesty and integrity of intention. If Le Grice’s heart is in technique, then his concurrent concern with the context within which an observer assimilates and directly experiences his structured time/space events, is a way of wearing his heart on his sleeve.”—John Du Cane, Time Out, 1977

FFOREST BAY II
Chris Welsby, 1973, colour, silent, 5 min
“Each of my films is a separate attempt to re-define the interface between ‘mind’ and ‘nature’. Although specified or at least implied in any one piece of work, this delineation is constantly changed and adapted both as a definition, at a material level, and as a working model, at a conceptual level, to each unique situation or location. Without this essentially cybernetic view of the relationship between ‘mind’ and ‘nature’, a view in which the relation between the two operates as a homeostatic loop, ‘nature’ becomes nothing more than potential raw material at the disposal of ‘mind’ acting upon it. This raw material is most visibly manifest in that subdivision of ‘nature’ termed ‘landscape’. The wilder and more remote this landscape is, the further it is removed from, and the less it exhibits those signs which mark the activities of ‘mind’. Technology is both a subdivision of ‘nature’ and an extension of ‘mind’. Viewed within these terms of reference, the camera, as a product of technology, can be seen as a potential interface between ‘mind’ and ‘nature’.” —Chris Welsby, Arts Council Film-makers on Tour catalogue, 1980

“The idea that I was thinking of with Fforest Bay was sort of the way that if you changed the ‘sampling rates’, you were able to capture different types of events. One sampling rate would do certain things with the waves, and other sampling rates would start to register the activity of people in the scene. With another sampling rate, you’d be able to see the clouds moving. The idea was to start with a really rapid sampling rate and then slow it down, and then reverse the process. So the fastest sampling rate was one frame per position. I divided the rotation circle of sixty degrees into eight segments: rotated the camera, took a frame, rotated it again, took a frame, etc. Second time round, I took two frames, and so on up to about thirty frames, I think. At the fastest sampling rate, you can’t really see much because it’s going too fast; you’re more aware of the circular motion of the camera itself. Then as it starts to slow down, you can see individual waves break on the shore. As it slows down some more you can see people and, eventually, clouds and changes of light. Then, the whole process returns. Also, the image flattens when it’s going very fast, so you may become aware of the film surface itself rather than the surface through the screen.” —Chris Welsby, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

BROADWALK
William Raban, 1972, colour, sound, 12 min
“This film reiterates some of the concerns of Raban’s earlier work: the manipulation of time and the role of light/colour in landscape representation. The opening and closing sequences of the film, shot at regular camera speed (24 frames per second) establish a tension with the predominant time-lapse/time-exposure sequence (each frame exposed for a full twenty seconds). The original hundred feet or so which were exposed during a period of 24 hours in Regent’s Park were then refilmed (off a projection screen) resulting in a film over 400 feet long. This technique of rephotography further abstracts the process of landscape representation and offers greater possibilities for variation and control over certain aesthetic effects. Raban’s established motif of the light/colour variations of landscape imagery is here radicalized into white/black sequences, which operate in similar ways despite their polarity. White-outs constantly flatten the deep space of the original image. Black ‘bars’ – parts of irregularly exposed (rephotographed) frames – are seen rolling across the screen emphasizing its surface nature. And the black ‘night’ sequence serves to assert a strong identity between film and landscape, in so far as blackness is first felt as absence of landscape, and only then as absence of light – inverting causal order. The fundamental aspect of this film is the interpretation of actual time and actual landscape into filmic time and filmic landscape. But the process of reinterpreting a rigorous time-lapse system of recording into an intuited one of re-recording might suggest that Raban has some reservations about the hegemony of any system and feels the need to insert a measure of spontaneous experience.” —Deke Dusinberre, British Avant-Garde Landscape Films programme notes, 1975

“Initially, the scale of screen speed was determined by the intermittency of frames. Within this broad framework, which reduces the whole daylight period to minutes, the film studies a more specific minor scale of speed changes occurring inside the twenty-second frame interval. In order to make this more apparent, I refilmed the original from the screen at a speed which was high enough to slow down the speed changes and show the build up of individual frames. The intermittent light sections of the film were made by filming directly into the projector gate, sometimes ‘freezing’ individual frames and repeating sections of the darker film. By using freeze frames, bleached images, under-exposure and inclusion of the frame line, the film asserts both its physical and illusionistic realities.” —William Raban, programme notes, 1972

PHASED TIME²
David Hall, 1974, colour, sound, 15 min
“Constructed on a pre-determined progressively self-defining ‘phased’ score and lens-matting procedure, Phased Time2 consists of six sections, each out of a 100 ft. roll. All work was done in camera except for linking with black spacer between sections. Apart from the first, each section is subdivided according to logical cyclic procedures. Each division (take) is a fixed position shot. At every consecutive take the camera is ‘pre-panned’ half a frame’s width to the right. Effectively, the camera is revolving in a ‘static pan’ around a room throughout the film. Also, each consecutive take is partially superimposed over its predecessor (by rewinding after each take) and consequently phases the half-frame moves. The first section is a single continuous take, with the whole frame exposed. The second commences the phased divisions; in each, the whole frame is exposed. In the third, alternative takes are matted half a frame’s width, progressively left and right of the frame. In the fourth, takes are progressively matted by quarter frame widths and cycle twice; once through whole frame exposure; quarter matte (right); half; three quarters; half; quarter, and back to whole. Then, quarter matte (left); half; three quarters, etc. In the fifth, the same procedure is taken using multiples of a one-eighth matte, but this time proceeding through only one complete cycle. The sixth, and last, proceeds through one-sixteenth mattes from whole frame to black (left). The second section (the first to comprise a multiple of takes) has its number of divisions determined by the number of half-frame moves necessary to complete a 180 degree linear ‘pan’ (eight using a 10mm lens). Subsequent sections progressively increase their numbers (according to matte cycles) until the last which completes a 360 degree pan, with all takes simultaneously superimposed in the center of the section in sixteen takes (concurrent with the one-sixteenth progressive mattes). The comparative ‘panning’ pace is apparently accelerated or decelerated according to the relative matting procedure and number of frame divisions, working from left to right and back from right to left and back, since the camera is at all times moved to the right. The sound phases and eventually superimposes synchronously with the picture, and was produced on a synthesizer and electric organ.” —David Hall, First Festival of Independent British Cinema catalogue, 1975

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