From personal montage through to exploration of the cinematic process, the work was sensuous and playful. As a creative group, the Co-op covered vital aesthetic ground and resisted categorisation. This programme does not pursue a single theme or concept, rather it demonstrates the broad range of work that was produced during this time.
DIVERSIFICATIONS
Sunday 26 May 2002, at 3pm
London Tate Modern
SHAPES
Annabel Nicolson, 1970, colour, silent, 7 min (18fps)
“I tried to make a kind of environment in the room where I lived in Kentish Town and to make a film within it. There were pieces of paper and screwed up, transparent gels hanging from the ceiling; it was quite dense in some parts. I wandered through it with a camera and then other parts were filmed on the rooftop at St Martins. I think I was just very much trying to find my way in a whole new area of work. I remember it involved a lot of re-filming, which was the part I liked. The process was very fluid, similar to painting. I got quite interested in the specks of dust and dirt on the film and the re-filming gave me a chance to look at that more closely. Probably the thing that attracted me to film was the light … the kind of floating quality you can get, images suspended in light. Looking at it now, the kind of paintings I was doing before were floating shapes. It seems to me that the kind of things I was looking for I should be able to do with film. When I make a film, I’m not sure what I’m ever trying to achieve … it kind of gets clearer to me as I’m doing it.” —Annabel Nicolson, interview with Mark Webber, 2002
“Compassion; care; love; appreciation; attention. Quietude; silence; slowness; gentleness; subtlety; lyricism; beauty. It is terms like these that Annabel Nicolson’s films can be discussed in (exploratory would be another), if they are to be discussed at all; and perhaps they are best left to themselves, and to the receptive eye, mind, and soul of the viewer. They are humble, unpretentious, searching, and thoughtful films: they are reverent, after a style, and should be seen with a similar sort of reverence. The ephemeral thing, by this compassionate attention, is given the aspect of timelessness which transcends mere nostalgia: the thing is seen ‘under the aspect of eternity’.” —David Miller, Paragraphs On Some Films by Annabel Nicolson Seen in March 1973
FOOTSTEPS
Marilyn Halford, 1974, b/w, sound, 6 min
“Footsteps is in the manner of a game reinacted, the game in making was between the camera and actor, the actor and cameraman, and one hundred feet of film. The film became expanded into positive and negative to change balances within it; black for perspective, then black to shadow the screen and make paradoxes with the idea of acting, and the act of seeing the screen. The music sets a mood then turns a space, remembers the positive then silences the flatness of the negative. I am interested in the relationship of theatrical devices in film working at tangents with its abstract visual qualities. The use of a game works the memory, anticipation is set, positive film stands to resemble a three-dimensional sense of time in past/future. Then negative holds out film itself as the image is one stage further abstracted and a disquiet is set up in the point that the sound track ends, whilst the picture track continues.” —Marilyn Halford, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film exhibition catalogue, 1977
“We’d just got one of these Russian film developing tanks, that you can load 100 feet of black and white film into and develop it yourself, which is very appealing because it means you haven’t got all the palaver of going to labs. Footsteps is based, obviously, on a game. Now whose early work would I have seen that prompted that? I think the image itself came from René Clair. That slightly rough black and white image I like very much – the idea of it not mattering if it’s got speckly and dusty. It had a certain degree of antiquity built into it which, to me, was quite liberating because it’s hard to keep it all dust free and so forth. Anyway, that’s how I wanted it, I wanted it to look old even before it started, like old footage. Consequently it’s got the Scott Joplin soundtrack, “The Entertainer”; just because it’s amusing and also to add that aged thing to it. The first time it goes through it’s in negative so you wouldn’t necessarily see what was going on, so you would have a lot of questions and curiosity as to what was happening. And then when all is revealed the right way round, it is just so simple, it’s just such a simple game. I suppose the performance part of it just grew out of that, to extend it really, it was another way of presenting it – to take part and to play the game with the film image itself.” —Marilyn Halford, interview with Mark Webber, 2001
TALLA
Malcolm Le Grice, 1968, b/w, silent, 20 min
“Talla is the most narrative/subjective film I have yet made. Because all the material was shot by me in a week or so it has location continuity, which becomes very important in the film. The pace of the cutting is still fast and images still work from perception to conception or perhaps in this film – to ‘feeling’. However, there is no consistent building up of pace and the fast-cut pieces are held within pauses so that there are often ‘clusters’ of images diving out of a mainly calm field.” —Malcolm Le Grice, Interfunktionen 4, March 1970
“I think Talla is a hard film for most people. It’s a very psychological and mysterious film. It starts out, in one primitive way, from the interplay of the black and the white. I was interested in this white screen on which things appear black. It’s highly orchestrated, in terms of the black and white qualities of the image. There’s something that’s coming out in this work, in the mythological kind of subject – Chronos Fragmented and the Cyclops and all of that stuff – that Talla is playing on. The shot material is actually on a very obscure bit of Dartmoor, and Dartmoor Prison and the warders there. So there’s that element of the threatening, mysterious bit of society which is something that you can’t get into, the dark side of the social. It’s also very mythical, in that the gods and ghosts of that landscape are floating around there in the mist. It was completely edited directly on 16mm using a magnifying glass, I didn’t edit it at all through a viewer. I thought of it symphonically, in terms of the lengths and orchestration. There’s an element of propheticness in there…” —Malcolm Le Grice, interview with Mark Webber, 2001
WHITE LITE
Jeff Keen, 1968, b/w, silent, 2.5 min
“Watch the ghost of Bela Lugosi decay before your very eyes. A sequel to Plan 9 From Outer Space.” —Jeff Keen/Deke Dusinberre, “Interim Jeff Keen Filmography with Arbitrary Annotations”, Afterimage No. 6, 1976
“Keen is indebted to the Surrealist tradition for many of his central concerns: his passion for instability, his sense of le merveilleux, his fondness for analogies and puns, his preference for ‘lowbrow’ art over aestheticism of any kind, his dedication to collage and le hazard objectif. But this ‘continental’ facet of his work – virtually unique in this country – co-exists with various typically English characteristics, which betray other roots. The tacky glamour/True Beauty of his Family Star productions is at least as close to the end of Brighton pier as it is to Hollywood B-movies… The heroic absurdity and adult infantilism that are the mainsprings of his comedy draw on a long tradition of post-Victorian humour: not the ‘innocent’ vulgarity of music hall, but the anarchicness of The Goons and the self-lacerating ironies of the 30s clowns, complete with their undertow of melancholia.” —Tony Rayns, “Born to Kill: Mr. Soft Eliminator”, Afterimage No. 6, 1976
MUYBRIDGE FILM
Anne Rees-Mogg, 1975, b/w, silent, 5 min
“I started making films in 1966, and teaching filmmaking in 1967. Before that I had been painting and drawing and exhibiting at the Beaux Arts Gallery and other places. My first film was a painterly study of interference colours and structures of soap bubbles (Nothing is Something). At the same time I made a 16mm home movie of my nephews which was called Relations. I realized two things, one that film is not about movement, and that the figurative and narrative possibilities of the second film were what I wanted to explore. Eight years later I made the film I should have made then, a small film called Muybridge Film in which I explored all the filmic possibilities of someone turning a cartwheel.” —Anne Rees-Mogg, Arts Council Film-Makers on Tour catalogue, 1980
MOMENT
Stephen Dwoskin, 1968, colour, sound, 12 min
“Moment presents a continuous, fixed gaze by the camera at a girl’s face. The fixity, although paralleling the spectator’s position, nevertheless marks itself off as ‘different’ from our view because it refuses the complex system of movements, cuts, ‘invisible’ transitions, etc. which classic cinema developed to capture our ‘subjectivity’ and absorb it into the filmic text. In this way, the distinction between the looks of the camera at the profilmic event and of the viewer at the image is emphasized. Moreover, the sadistic components inherent in the pleasurable exercise of the ‘controlling’ gaze (a basic fact without which no cinema could exist) are returned to the viewer, as it is he/she who must construct the ‘scenario’ by combining a reading of the image (slight movements of the woman, colour changes in her face, facial expressions, etc.) with an imagined (but suggested) series of happenings off-screen. The result is a narrative: the progressive excitement of a woman who masturbates.” —Paul Willemen, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977
“In one long take, a girl whose face we see in close-up throughout, smokes and excites herself, her eyes resting at moments on the camera as if in a supplication which is also an utterly resigned accusation of film-maker and spectator alike. Not for their curiosity, which may after all be far from devoid or reverence for the human mystery, but for a willful self-withholding which is the standard human relationship. Here are three solitudes, and the film’s climax occurs after the girl’s, in her uneasy satiety, a convulsion returning her, and us, to an accentuation of the nothing from which she fled.” —Ray Durgnat, Sexual Alienation in the Cinema, 1972
WINDMILL II
Chris Welsby, 1973, colour, sound, 10 min
“A reflexiveness using the camera shutter as a technical referent can be seen in Welsby’s Windmill II. The camera is placed in a park. The basic system involves a windmill directly in front of the camera, so that as the blades pass by the lens they act as a second shutter, as a paradigm for the first shutter. The blades are covered in melanex, a mirrored fabric. The varying speeds of the blades present the spectator with varying perceptual data which require different approaches to the image. When moving slowly, they act as a repoussoir, heightening the sense of deep space. At a moderate speed, they act as an extra shutter which fragments ‘normal’ motion, emphasizing movement within the deeper plane and critiquing the notion of ‘normality’ in cinematic motion. When moving quite fast, the blades act as abstract images superimposed on the landscape image and flattening the two planes into one. And when the blades are stopped (or almost so) a completely new space is created – not only does the new (reflected) deep space contain objects in foreground and background to affirm its depth, but these objects are seen in anamorphosis (due to the irregular surface of the melanex) which effectively re-flattens them; the variations in the mirror surface create distortions which violate (or at least call attention to) the normal function of the lens of the camera.” —Deke Dusinberre, “St. George in the Forest: The English Avant-Garde”, Afterimage No. 6, 1976
“Formalism has grown up in parallel with the development of an advanced technology. The medium of landscape film brings to organic life the language of formalism. It is a language shared by both film-makers and painters. In painting, particularly American painting of the 1950s, formalistic thinking became manifest in the dictum ‘truth to materials’, placing the emphasis on paint and canvas as the subject of the work. In film, particularly the independent work done in England, it manifests itself by emphasizing the filmic process as the subject of the work. The synthesis between these formalistic concerns of independent film and the organic quality of landscape imagery is inevitably the central issue of contemporary landscape film. It is this attempt to integrate the forms of technology with the forms found in nature which gives the art of landscape its relevance in the twentieth century.” —Chris Welsby, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film exhibition catalogue, 1977
THE GIRL CHEWING GUM
John Smith, 1976, b/w, sound, 12 min
“I am writing this with a black ‘Tempo’ fiber-tip pen. A few months ago, I bought fifteen of these pens for sixty pence. Unfortunately, because they are so common, other people pick them up thinking they are theirs, so I don’t have many left now. I bought the pens from a market in Kingsland Road in Hackney, about a hundred yards from where the film was shot. The film draws attention to the cinematic codes and illusions it incorporates by denying their existence, treating representation as absolute reality.” —John Smith, “Directory of Independent British Cinema”, Independent Cinema No. 1, 1978
“In relinquishing the more subtle use of voice-over in television documentary, the film draws attention to the control and directional function of that practice: imposing, judging, creating an imaginary scene from a visual trace. This ‘Big Brother’ is not only looking at you but ordering you about as the viewer’s identification shifts from the people in the street to the camera eye overlooking the scene. The resultant voyeurism takes on an uncanny aspect as the blandness of the scene (shot in black and white on a grey day in Hackney) contrasts with the near ‘magical’ control identified with the voice. The most surprising effect is the ease with which representation and description turn into phantasm through the determining power of language.” —Michael Maziere, “John Smith’s Films: Reading the Visible”, Undercut 10/11, 1984
PERSISTING
Ian Kerr, 1975, colour, sound, 10 min
“Thee gap in between, perception and awareness of perception of moment is Persisting. To put it in context, it works like this, like these. Acceleration of senses in TV culture makes for rash decisions. Momentary vision. Speed kills. Speed lies. Very fast glimpses of one image mean you learn more in a time period, in a sense speed slows down our attention. Very fast glimpses of different images mean we absorb subliminally a little of many things. Speed is speeding up our attention. So time is material. Can be manipulated. Can exist an one or more speeds simultaneously. Subject. Where is camera, is camera present. Are we aware of camera, who is being looked at, what is happening, are we learning. Is it good to expect to learn. Is there actually such a thing as a valid subject. Does it matter. To be aware is to exist on levels simultaneously trusting none as finite.” —Genesis P. Orridge, “Three Absent Guesses”, Edinburgh Film Festival programme notes, 1978
“persist vb. (intr.) 1. (often foll. by in) to continue steadfastly or obstinately despite opposition or difficulty. 2. to continue to exist or occur without interuption: the rain persisted throughout the night. bridge n. 1. A structure that spans and provides a passage over a road, railway, river, or some other obstacle. 2. Something that resembles this in shape or function: his letters provided a bridge across the centuries. subtitle n. 1. an additional subordinate title given to a literary or other work. 2. (often pl.) Also called: caption. Films. a. a written translation superimposed on a film that has foreign dialogue. b. explanatory text on a silent film. ~vb. 3. (tr.; usually passive) to provide a subtitle for. –subtitular adj. soundtrack n. 1. the recorded sound accompaniment to a film. Compare commentary (sense 2). 2. A narrow strip along the side of a spool of film, which carries the sound accompaniment … Wave Upon Wave of Wheatfield.” —Ian Kerr, 2002
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