DOUBLE SCREEN FILMS
Saturday 4 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London Tate Modern

RIVER YAR
William Raban & Chris Welsby, 1971-72, colour, sound, 35 min
“The camera points south. The landscape is an isolated frame of space – a wide-angle view of a tidal estuary, recorded during Autumn and Spring. The camera holds a fixed viewpoint and marks time at the rate of one frame every minute (day and night) for three weeks. The two sequences Autumn and Spring, are presented symmetrically on adjacent screens. The first Spring sunrise is recorded in real time (24 fps) for 14 minutes, establishing a comparative scale of speed for the Autumn screen, where complete days are passing in one minute. Then both screens run together in stop-action until the Autumn screen breaks into a 14 minute period of real time for the final sunset into darkness. Recordings were made of landscape sound at specific intervals each day. Each screen has its own soundtrack which mixes with the other in the space of the cinema.” —William Raban & Chris Welsby, NFT English Independent Cinema programme notes, 1972

“Chris found the location.which was an ex-water mill in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, owned by the sons of the historian A.J.P. Taylor. We managed to get it for an astonishing rent of £5 a week. One of its upstairs windows happened to look over this river estuary, it was the kind of view we were looking for, so it was ideal in many ways. We’d worked out the conceptual model for the film, how we wanted it to look as a two-screen piece, more or less entirely in advance. We also knew what camera we wanted. There was really only the Bolex camera that would be suitable for filming it on. I made an electric motor for firing the time-lapse shots that was capable of giving time exposures as well as instantaneous exposures. Unknown to us of course, the first period of shooting coincided with the big coal miners’ strike, in the Ted Heath government, so the motor was redundant for most of the time; we had to shoot the film by hand. And it was quite interesting because we weren’t just making River Yar, we were down there for six weeks in the autumn and three weeks again the following spring, so we were also making other work. I was doing a series of tree prints in a wood nearby. And we invited people down to share the experience with us, so Malcolm, Annabel and Gill all came to stay.” —William Raban, interview with Mark Webber, 2001 

PLAY
Sally Potter, 1971, b/w & colour, silent, 7 min
“In Play, Potter filmed six children – actually, three pairs of twins – as they play on a sidewalk, using two cameras mounted so that they recorded two contiguous spaces of the sidewalk. When Play is screened, two projectors present the two images side by side, recreating the original sidewalk space, but, of course, with the interruption of the right frame line of the left image and the left frame line of the right image – that is, so that the sidewalk space is divided into two filmic spaces. The cinematic division of the original space is emphasized by the fact that the left image was filmed in color, the right image in black and white. Indeed, the division is so obvious that when the children suddenly move from one space to the other, ‘through’ the frame lines, their originally continuous movement is transformed into cinematic magic.” —Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3, 1998

“To be frank, I always felt like a loner, an outsider. I never felt part of a community of filmmakers. I was often the only female, or one of few, which didn’t help. I didn’t have a buddy thing going, which most of the men did. They also had rather different concerns, more hard-edged structural concerns … I was probably more eclectic in my taste than many of the English structural filmmakers, who took an absolute prescriptive position on film. Most of them had gone to Oxford or Cambridge or some other university and were terribly theoretical. I left school at fifteen. I was more the hand-on artist and less the academic. The overriding memory of those early years is of making things on the kitchen table by myself…” —Sally Potter interviewed by Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3, 1998

MECHANICAL BALLET
David Parsons, 1975, b/w, silent, 8 min
“… I began to forge ideas that explored the making of the work and the procedure of events and ideas unfolding in space and time. Inevitably, this led to the consideration of the filmmaking apparatus as an integral element within the construction of the film. Taken literally of course, this applies to the making of any film, but I am referring to processes that do not attempt to hide the means of production and make the technique transparent, rather the very opposite. There are many parallels in other creative fields: the improvisational aspects of modern jazz, and Exercises in Style by the wonderful French writer Raymond Queneau. These examples spring to mind as background influences upon what I see now as an essentially modernist project, in that I was attempting to assert the material aspects of making, over what was depicted. So, to turn to the camera to attempt exhaust all the possibilities of its lenses, the film transportation mechanism, the shift of the turret, hand holding or tripods mounting, as conditioning factors within the films became the challenge. The project broadened out with seemingly endless possibilities offered by the film printer, the projector, and the screen.” —David Parsons, “Picture Planes”, Filmwaves No. 2, November 1997

“Several areas of interest intersect in the making of Mechanical Ballet: an interest in ‘found’ footage (relating to collage, assemblage), the manipulation of the film strip and the film frame, time and duration, projection and the screen, and the film printing process, to highlight some of the main concerns. In the early ’70s I began a series of experiments with ways of refilming and improvising new constructions with different combinations of frames. Thus new forms emerged from the found material that I had selected to use as my base material. In one work I extended the closing moments of the tail footage of a film, consisting of less than a second of flared out frames, stretching it into two minutes forty five seconds, 100 foot of film. In another I used some early documentation of time and motion studies of factory workers performing repetitive tasks on machinery. A speedometer mounted in the corner of the frame monitored the progress of their actions in relation to the time it took to perform their tasks. I found the content both disturbing and absurd and sought to exemplify this by exaggerating the action and ‘stalling’ the monitoring process by racking the film back and forth through the gate. The original material that formed the basis for Mechanical Ballet was an anonymous short reel of film of what appeared to be car crash tests. In the original these tests are carried out in a deadpan and somewhat cumbersome manner. Reworked into a two-screen film and divorced from their original context they take on both a sinister and humorous quality. Using similar techniques to the aforementioned films, the repetitive refilming of the original footage in short sections emphasised the process of film projection. Somewhat like a child’s game of two steps forward and one back, the viewer is made aware of the staggered progress of the film through the gate. In sharp contrast to the almost stroboscopic flicker of the rapid movement of the frames that alternate in small increments of light and dark exposures, the image takes on new meanings; the distorted reality of two heavy objects (the cars, one on each of the screens) ‘dancing’ lightly in space.” —David Parsons, 2002

WIND VANE
Chris Welsby, 1972, colour, sound, 8 min
“At that time, the automatic gyros on sailboats were run from a wind vane that was attached through a series of mechanical devices to the rudder. The wind vane actually set itself to the wind and you adjusted all the gear and that then steered the boat in the particular orientation to the wind. On various sailing trips, I’d been looking at this thing thinking, “Hmm, that’s really interesting … I wonder if I could set a camera on something like that?” Because, for me the idea of a sailboat travelling from A to B was an interesting sort of metaphor for the way that people interacted with nature. In sailing, as you may know if you’ve done it, you can’t just go from A to B, you have to adjust everything to which way the tide is going, which way the wind’s going and so on and so forth. Hopefully, eventually, you would get to B but, really, in between time there would have been all sorts of other events that would affect that: speed of tides, speed of wind, no wind, etc. So that seemed to me to be an interesting metaphor, so then I started building wind vanes and attaching cameras to them…” —Chris Welsby, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

 “The spatial exigencies of twin-screen projection become of primary importance in this film because the adjacency of the screen images is related to the adjacency of the filming technique: two cameras were placed about 50 feet apart on tripods which included wind vane attachments, so that the wind direction and speed determined the direction and speed of the pans of the two freely panning cameras. The landscape images are more or less coincident, and the attempt by the spectator to visually conjoin the two spaces (already conjoined on the screen) sets up the primary tension of this film. As the cameras pan, one expects an overlap between the screens (from one to another) but gets only overlap in the screens (when they point to the same object). The adjacency of the two spaces is constantly shifting from (almost) complete similarity of field to complete dissimilarity. And within the dissimilarity of space can be more or less contiguous. The shrewd choice of a representational image which exploits the twin-screen format is Welsby’s strength.” —Deke Dusinberre, “On Expanding Cinema”, Studio International, November/December 1975

CHOKE
David Crosswaite, 1971, b/w & colour, sound, 5 min
“Choke was made from 8mm footage that I had blown up to 16mm. It was colour film I took of the Coca-Cola sign in Piccadilly Circus, which is now vastly different. I think that it was the fact that this expanded film thing was happening, and Malcolm would’ve said, “Well, aren’t you going to make any double screen films, then?” and I said “Can do, yeah”! I just had this idea of using this image that I had, and again started painstakingly sello-taping little cuttings onto film so it tracked across the screen in certain parts. I must have been an absolute glutton for punishment at the time.” —David Crosswaite, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

“… But nevertheless you get characters like Crosswaite, whose films I find absolutely magical, I think they’re the most seminal works of the whole Co-op period. He certainly didn’t engage in the arguments that were going on, he stood aloof from it. In fact he would the erode attempts of that hierarchical thing, his presence eroded it. He never really engaged in the theoretical arguments, the polemics, at all, but nevertheless he produced the most seminal, the most beautiful work probably of the period. He certainly wasn’t excluded, and he was always there to deflate this idea of exclusivity. He refuses to engage. He would just say, “Here’s my film” … and yet they are beautifully polemical, they’re just extraordinary pieces or work.” —Roger Hammond, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

CASTLE TWO
Malcolm Le Grice, 1968, b/w, sound, 32 min
“This film continues the theme of the military/industrial complex and its psychological impact upon the individual that I began with Castle One. Like Castle One, much use is made of newsreel montage, although with entirely different material. The film is more evidently thematic, but still relies on formal devices – building up to a fast barrage of images (the two screens further split – to give 4 separate images at once for one sequence). The images repeat themselves in different sequential relationships and certain key images emerge both in the soundtrack and the visual. The alienation of the viewer’s involvement does not occur as often in this film as in Castle One, but the concern with the viewer’s experience of his present location still determines the structure of certain passages in the film.” —Malcolm Le Grice, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative catalogue, 1968

“Le Grice’s work induces the observer to participate by making him reflect critically not only on the formal properties of film but also on the complex ways in which he perceives that film within the limitations of the environment of its projection and the limitations created by his own past experience. A useful formulation of how this sort of feedback occurs is contained in the notion of ‘perceptual thresholds’. Briefly, a perceptual threshold is demarcation point between what is consciously and what is pre-consciously perceived. The threshold at which one is able to become conscious of external stimuli is a variable that depends on the speed with which the information is being projected, the emotional charge it contains and the general context within which that information is presented. This explains Le Grice’s continuing use of devices such as subliminal flicker and the looped repetition of sequences in a staggered series of changing relationships.” —John Du Cane, Time Out, 1977

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