Shoot Shoot Shoot: Malcolm Le Grice & The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative
Date: 9 March 2017 | Season: Shoot Shoot Shoot 2016 | Tags: Shoot Shoot Shoot
SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: MALCOLM LE GRICE & THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE
Thursday 9 March 2017
Plymouth Arts Centre
In late 1966, a manifesto announcing the formation of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was published in the first issue of the organisation’s magazine Cinim :-
LONDON FILM-MAKERS COOP ABOUT TO BE LEGALLY ESTABLISHED STOP PURPOSE TO SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT STOP NEVER STOP NO BREAD NO PLACE TO LAY OUR HEADS NO MATTER JUST MIND IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MONEY STOP IF YOU LIKE BRYAN FORBES STOP IF YOU READ SIGHT AND SOUND STOP IF YOU WANT TO MAKE FILMS I MEAN FILMS COME ALL YOU NEEDS IS EYES IN THE BEGINNING STOP GEN FROM 94 CHARING CROSS ROAD W.C.2 PARTURITION FINISHED SCREAMS BEGIN STOP
This memo was dispatched from the LFMC’s first base at Better Books, a shop on London’s Charing Cross Road, where the organisation evolved from a film society into a distributor of experimental and non-commercial films. The ambition to stimulate the production of new work was there from the beginning, but it was to take a few more years for the Co-op to construct a workshop in which its filmmakers fashioned a radically new form of cinema.
Malcolm Le Grice played a fundamental role in this shift of focus towards production, and his participation in the organisation’s management helped to ensure its on-going survival. As one of Britain’s leading practitioners and theorists, his films and writings also helped to establish the LFMC as one of the centres of a worldwide network of avant-garde film culture in the mid-1970s.
In this illustrated talk, Mark Webber will explore the LFMC’s emergence in the underground scene and the development of its unique structure as a collectively run facility that embodied a distribution office, cinema space and film workshop.
Malcolm Le Grice, Little Dog for Roger, 1967, 12 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Threshold, 1972, 13 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Time and Motion Study, 1976, 12 min