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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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

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STRUCTURAL / MATERIALIST
Sunday 12 May 2002, at 3:00pm
London Tate Modern

WINDOW BOX
Roger Hammond, 1971, b/w, silent, 3 min (18fps)
“In the small masterpiece Window Box, Hammond sets up a situation which is mystified in its presentation, and yet at the same time demands of (and allows) the viewer to demystify the given visual impulses. The situation presented includes thus within its own premises the objective factors which determine the possibility and probability of successful analysis. The criteria one uses to evaluate, interpret, are secondary to this conceptually-determined process of working out what is. We are taken into a post-logical empiricism which realizes the sensual strength of illusion which at the same time using precisely that to refer to precision of information. The opposite of Cartesian in its in-built negation of any aspect outside of the given system. Hammond is non-atomistic, non-referential within a specific, set-up, and defined closed system. Thus, a pure attitude. Hammond is purifying the conceptual and non-psychological aspect of his work to the point where it increasingly represents his calculable mental system: the nonreferential structural obligation. He does not create a whole system, however; rather, he deciphers one.” —Peter Gidal, “Directory of UK Independent Film-Makers”, Cinema Rising No. 1, April 1972

“Roger Hammond’s movies are short studies of apparently simple subjects…they induce a tight awareness of how these relations can be radically transformed by subtle shifts in film process; shifts of light value, angle, movement, framing, etc… The illusions of cinema as they bend our consciousness, become the focus of our attention. In Window Box, a simple subject takes on multiple dimensions in a ghostly world created by the process of rephotographing projected negative footage. There is a gentle reminder in this process in the framing of the eventual image, which incorporates in its composition a horizontal bar of light from the wall from which the film is being rephotographed.” —John Du Cane, Time Out, 1971

SHEPHERD’S BUSH
Mike Leggett, 1971, b/w, sound, 15 min
“Shepherd’s Bush was a revelation. It was both true film notion and demonstrated an ingenious association with the film-process. It is the procedure and conclusion of a piece of film logic using a brilliantly simple device; the manipulation of the light source in the Film Co-op printer such that a series of transformations are effected on a loop of film material. From the start Mike Leggett adopts a relational perspective according to which it is neither the elements or the emergent whole but the relations between the elements (transformations) that become primary through the use of logical procedure. All of Mike Leggett’s films call for special effort from the audience, and a passive audience expecting to be manipulated will indeed find them difficult for they seek a unique correspondence; one that calls for real attention, interaction, and anticipation/correction, a change for the audience from being a voyeur to being that of a participant.” —Roger Hammond, London Film-Makers Co-operative distribution catalogue supplement, 1972

“The process of film-making should emphasise the imaginative, and the contact between film-maker and spectator should become more direct. Shepherd’s Bush was made through a process contrary to the generally accepted method of making a film. It was without a script, without a camera, without the complicated route through task delegation. The entity of the film was conceived through the reappraisal of a Debrie Matipo step-contact printer. Designed such that with precise control of the light reaching the print stock after having passed through filters, aperture band and the negative, it was possible to demonstrate the gradual way in which the projection screen could turn from black to white. First, a suitable image on an existing piece of positive stock was found with which to produce a master negative. The shot was only ten seconds in length but contained a range of tones from one end of the grey scale to the other. It was loaded into the printer as a loop, and subsequently a print which repeated the action was made from the negative. Only part of the viewer’s attention should be taken with the perception of the figurative image on the screen. It should however, be dynamic enough to warrant careful inspection should the viewer’s attention turn to it. A thirty-minute version was made first, but on viewing was judged too long, so for the next version half this length was judged correct. A soundtrack was made matching in audio terms the perceptible changes in visual quality not usually encountered within the environment of the cinema. This film realized total control over the making of a film, from selection of the original camera stock, through exposure, processing, printing, processing, projection, cataloguing, and distribution.” —Mike Leggett, excerpts from unpublished notes, 1972

FILM NO. 1
David Crosswaite, 1971, colour, sound, 10 min
“Film No. 1 is a ten minute loop film. The systems of superimposed loops are mathematically interrelated in a complex manner. The starting and cut-off points for each loop are not clearly exposed, but through repetitions of sequences in different colours, in different material realities (i.e. negative, positive, bas-relief, neg/pos overlay) yet in a constant rhythm (both visually and on the soundtrack hum), one is manipulated to attempt to work out the system-structure. One relates to the repetitions in such a way that one concentrates on working out the serial formula while visually experiencing (and enjoying) the film at the same time. One of the superimposed loops is made of alternating mattes, so that the screen is broken up into four more or less equal rectangles of which, at any one moment, two or three are blocked out (matted). The matte-positioning is rhythmically structured, thus allowing each of the two represented images to flickeringly appear in only one frame-corner at a time. This rhythm powerfully strengthens the film’s existence as selective reality manipulated by the filmmaker and exposed as such. The mattes are slightly ‘off’; there is no perfect mechanical fit, so that the process of the physical matte-construction by the filmmaker is constantly noticeable, as one matte (at times of different hue or different colour) blends over the edge of the matte next to it (horizontally or vertically). The film deals with permutations of material, in a prescribed manner, but one by no means necessary or logical (except within the film’s own constructed system/serial). The process of looping a given image is already using film for its structural and abstract power rather than for a conventional narrative or ‘content’. But it is the superimposition of the black mattes which gives the film its extremely rich texture, and which separates it from so many other, less complex, loop-type films. Crosswaite works, in this film, with two basic images: Piccadilly at night and a shape which suggests at moments a 3-D close-up of a flowerlike organic growth or a Matisse-like abstract 2-D cutout. Depending on the colour dye of the particular film-segment and the positive/negative interchange, the object changes shading and constanyly re­-forms from one dimension to the other, while shifting our perceptions from its reality as 3-dimensional re-presentation to its reality as cutout filling the film-frame with jagged edged blackness.” —Peter Gidal, NFT English Independent Cinema programme notes, 1972

TAUTOLOGY
Mike Dunford, 1973, b/w, silent, 5 min
“Regarding the in-built tautological aspects of perceptual structuring. Since refuted.” —Mike Dunford, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977

“Each time I make a film I see it as a kind of hypothesis, or a questioning statement, rather than a flat assertion of any particular form or idea… Each film is a film experiment in the sense that the most attractive features are those that work… My films are not about ideas, or aesthetics, or systems, or mathematics, but are about film, film-making, and film-viewing, and the interaction and intervention of intentive self-conscious reasoning activity in that context.” —Mike Dunford, 2nd International Avant-Garde Festival programme notes, 1973

“Its pretty obvious isn’t it? That’s the kind of film that me and Roger Hammond talked about. It’s because we actually spent quite a bit of time hanging out in the Co-op, processing things and talking about ideas. He’d read Derrida and all that kind of stuff, and as a result I read some of it too. And that’s how I would have got to make something like Tautology, by talking to someone like him A very simple idea, simply done; it does one thing and that’s all it does.” —Mike Dunford, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

KEY
Peter Gidal, 1968, colour, sound, 10 min
“… an enclosed and progressive disembowelment of durational progression. He draws out singularities … he allows the camera only a fenced in area, piecemeal. He lets the gaze hold on objects and constantly repeats … this permits the possibilities of the discrepancies between one’s own seeing and seeing with the camera to become distinct, and this in turn allows for a completely different experience of the surroundings.” —Birgit Hein, Film Im Underground, 1971

“Structural/Materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist. The process of the film’s making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process. But by ‘deals with’ I do not mean ‘represents’. In other words, such films do not document various film procedures, which would place them in the same category as films which transparently document a narrative, a set of actions, etc. Documentation, through usage of the film medium as transparent, invisible, is exactly the same when the object being documented is some ‘real event’, some ‘film procedure’, some ‘story’, etc. An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that ‘image’ is presented. The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently, a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary. In Structural/Materialist film, the in/film (not in/frame) and film/viewer material relations, and the relations of the film’s structure, are primary to any representational content. The structuring aspects and the attempt to decipher the structure and anticipate/recorrect it, to clarify and analyze the production-process of the specific image at any specific moment, are the root concern of Structural/Materialist film. The specific construct of each specific film is not the relevant point; one must beware not to let the construct, the shape, take the place of the ‘story’ in narrative film. Then one would merely be substituting one hierarchy for another within the same system, a formalism for what is traditionally called content. This is an absolutely crucial point.” —Peter Gidal, “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film”, Structural Film Anthology, 1976

ZOOM LAPSE
John Du Cane, 1975, colour, silent, 15 min
“If I had to compare my work with another activity, I would first point to two related musics: Reggae and certain West African music. If I had to label my work, I would choose a term radically opposed to ‘Structural’. I would say that I made ‘Ecstatic Cinema’ … I would like to think that the ecstatic is our birthright and to remember that ecstasy has many dimensions: we know that, from the Greek, we are talking about ‘a standing outside’ of oneself. This is meditation. And in the process of meditation, both rapture and a deep peace can co-exist. If my films work as intended, they will help you into ecstasy, and they will do this by satisfying in a polymorphic manner. The films are very physical, they are polyrhythmic and they are patterned in a manner designed to create a very definite way of seeing, of experiencing. I intend my films to jump out at you from their dark spaces, their gaps, their elisions, to vibrate in your whole being in the very manner and rhythm of felt experience. The magic of film for me is the possibility to portray these complex interlacings unfolding through time. You can watch one of my films, and see two films simultaneously; one of my mind and one of yours. I say film of ‘my mind’, but what I want to emphasise, because the films emphasise it, is that is a film of my being. The last thing I want my films to be is a purely mental event. This would be to deny a large part of the spectrum of the film.” —John Du Cane, “Statement on Watching My Films: A Letter from John Du Cane”, Undercut 13, 1984-85

“I was interested in film as a sculptural medium, and as a way to have the viewer be more aware of his viewing process, of his consciousness. My films were meditative at a time when that phrase wasn’t a popular term to use, but most of the films were designed to reflect the viewer back on themself. I also usually wanted my films to be very physical experiences, I wanted to make the experience work on really all of the main levels of energy; the physical, the intellectual and the aspects of awareness that we associate with consciousness. In Zoom Lapse I was also interested in working with the way we perceive time and space as it can be manipulated through the camera. Of course part of the content of this film had to do with the camera’s ability to squeeze our perspective through the process of zooming in and zooming out on a particular area. In the making of the film I actually lapsed the zoom process, so that I would shoot a single frame that had a zoom within it, and sequences in the film that were more extended zooms, so I took a very simple shot. I was living on a canal in Hamburg in a kind of romantic, old warehouse district, about all that was left after the bombing of the city. There was an old set of warehouse windows across the way and so I was interested in exploring the ways that you could squeeze space and watch the relationships between your time perception and your perception of space and how the two interact. There’s a process in the film, that happens in many of my other films, where I want the viewer to be pretty conscious that what they’re seeing is not something that exists on the celluloid, that there’s a way they’re manufacturing in the viewing process. The film should very obviously be something that if you come back and watch it a second, third, fourth, fifth time you’re not really going to see the same thing because the eye is creating sets of images that don’t actually exist.” —John Du Cane, interview with Mark Webber, 2002

LITTLE DOG FOR ROGER
Malcolm Le Grice, 1967, b/w, sound, 13 min
“The film is made from some fragments of 9.5mm home movie that my father shot of my mother, myself, and a dog we had. This vaguely nostalgic material has provided an opportunity for me to play with the medium as celluloid and various kinds of printing and processing devices. The qualities of film, the sprockets, the individual frames, the deterioration of records like memories, all play an important part in the meaning of this film.” —Malcolm Le Grice, Progressive Art Productions distribution catalogue, 1969

“The strategy of minimizing content to intensify the perception of film as a plastic strip of frames is explicitly demonstrated in Le Grice’s seminal Little Dog For Roger. Here the 9.5mm ‘found-footage’ of a boy and his dog is repeatedly pulled through the 16mm printer; the varying speed and swaying motion of the original filmstrip ironically allude to the constant speed and rigid registration of the 16mm film we are watching, and develop a tension between our knowledge of the static frames which comprise the filmstrip and the illusion of continuous motion with which it is imbued. The use of ‘found-footage’ and of repetition – which threatens endlessness, though this is a relatively short film – owe something to the ‘pop’ aesthetic then dominant, but the spectator is never permitted to complacently enjoy these found-images; the graininess and under-illumination, the negative sequences and upside-down passages are designed not so much to add variation as to continuously render those simple images difficult to decipher, thus stressing that very act of decoding. The relentless asceticising of the image became a major preoccupation in subsequent British avant-garde filmmaking.” —Deke Dusinberre, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde catalogue, 1977

DECK
Gill Eatherley, 1971, colour, sound, 13 min
“During a voyage by boat to Finland, the camera records three minutes of black and white 8mm of a woman sitting on a bridge. The preoccupation of the film is with the base and with the transformation of this material, which was first refilmed on a screen where it was projected by multiple projectors at different speeds and then secondly amplified with colour filters, using postive and negative elements and superimposition on the London Co-op’s optical printer.” —Gill Eatherley, Light Cone distribution catalogue, 1997

“Deck was shot on Standard 8, black and white, on a boat going from Sweden to Finland on a trip to Russia. And then I just filmed it off the screen at St Martin’s, put some colour on it, and turned it upside-down … Just turned it upside-down and put some sound on. The sound came off a radio – just fiddling around with a radio and a microphone, just in-between stations. It was one of the longest films I’ve ever made and that kind of frightened me a little bit. I thought it would be too long, you know, 13 minutes was quite a long time. Most of my films are only three minutes, six minutes, eight minutes … but it could have gone on longer maybe…” —Gill Eatherley, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

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WARREN SONBERT
Wednesday 15 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery

CARRIAGE TRADE
Warren Sonbert, USA, 1971-72, 16mm, colour, silent, 60 min

“With Carriage Trade, Sonbert began to challenge the theories espoused by the great Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s; he particularly disliked the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction produced by Eisenstein montage. In both lectures and writings about his own style of editing, Sonbert described Carriage Trade as ‘a jig-saw puzzle of postcards to produce varied displaced effects.’ This approach, according to Sonbert, ultimately affords the viewer multi-faceted readings of the connections between shots through the spectator’s assimilation of ‘the changing relations of the movement of objects, the gestures of figures, familiar world-wide icons, rituals and reactions, rhythm, spacing and density of images.’” (Jon Gartenberg, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973)

“I think the films I make are, hopefully, a series of arguments, with each image, shot, a statement to be read and digested in turn. Each work as well is about a specific topic: Carriage Trade is about travel, transportation, anthropological investigation: four continents, four organized religions, customs; about time with its six years in the making and cast of thousands; about how the same people age and grow and change apartments … Some people are disturbed by the brevity of some of the images – particularly those that one might label ‘beautiful’ or ‘ecstatic’. They are over before one has a chance barely to luxuriate in them, they are taken away before one can nestle and coo and cuddle in the velveteen sheen of it all, so that feelings of deprivation, expectations dissolved, even sadomasochism arise. Very often a cut occurs before an action is complete. This becomes both metaphor of frustration, hopes dashed, and yet of serenity if you like – that perhaps all of this activity has been going on, will be going on, yet even all at the same time. That we are privileged viewers of many sectors of humanity, none taking precedence over the other. I believe that the nature of film lends itself to density: one can’t pack in too much, albeit with rests, breathing spaces. It isn’t necessary to have the totality of resonances immediately graspable, one should be able to return.” (Warren Sonbert, excerpt of a lecture at San Francisco Art Institute, August 1979)

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INTERVENTION & PROCESSING
Sunday 19 May 2002, at 3:00pm
London Tate Modern

SLIDES
Annabel Nicolson, 1970, colour, silent, 12 min (18fps)
“Slides was made while I was still a student at St.Martins. Like the sewing machine piece, it was one that just happened. By that time I was immersed in film and I always seemed to have bits of film around in my room, on the table, everywhere, always little fragments. I had slides of my paintings and I cut up the slides and made them into a strip. Imagine a 16mm strip of celluloid with sprocket holes: Instead of that what I had was a strip – just slightly narrower – without the sprocket holes and the slides were just cut into bits, just little fragments and stuck in with other film as well, and also sewing (this was before Reel Time). There are bits sewn with thread and some bits with holes punched in. It was a very natural way of me to work, coming from painting, just working with something I could hold in my hand was somehow less threatening than working with equipment. I think I was much more confident working with something that I could grab hold of, so I made this strip and then the film was really created in the contact printer at the Co-op. Normally you would have your raw negative and your emulsion and its literally in contact, the light shines through it and you make a copy, but I had this very thin strip, which I held in the contact printer and I just manoeuvered it. I could see what I was doing because there’s a little peephole you can look into so that you can see each image. It amazes me now that I could have ever done anything like that, I couldn’t possibly go within a hundred yards of doing it now. But I did it then and Slides was what came out of it.” —Annabel Nicolson, interview with Mark Webber, 2002

“Slides develops a simple and elegant tension between stasis and apparent motion, between surface and depth, and between abstract colours / shapes and representational imagery. Ironically, the material pulled through the printer this time is not found-footage posing as original material which is utilized in the way found-footage had been used by others. The film thus engages the entire concept of – in David Curtis’ phrase – ‘the English rubbish tip aesthetic’ which embraces, in part, the theory that anything that can travel through a printer and/or projector is film material for a film and for cinematic projection. The valueless becomes valued. Nicolson asserts the preciousness not only of her original material but also that material in its transformations, and by extension the potential preciousness of all perception. In this respect the film moves away from the rigorous ascetic strategy and is more indulgent of the pleasure of vision…” —Deke Dusinberre, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977

SHOWER PROOF
Fred Drummond, 1968, b/w, silent, 10 min (18fps)
“SONF SOUND TRACK SYNC? SPASH BTHA BATH GURGLE WATER – how real – pure film – or a report – situation examined by camera – but false – contrived realism is not a true record of spontaneous actuality – this could never be? enough to contrive (the camera makes every situation an arrangement), then edit out as much obvious contrivance. It is only a FILM.” —Fred Drummond, original production notes for Shower Proof, 1968

“Fred Drummond has made a series of short single and double-screen films that explore visual rhythms and the potentials of the printing process. They are non-narrative, careful orchestrations of repeated loop footage. Shower Proof is printed on increasingly high-contrast negative. The image grows from the abstract, yet plainly anthropomorphic, steadily through to the personal, yet non-specific – we see neither the man’s nor the woman’s face in detail – and back. The film explores the relation between form and movement. The visual rhythm is so strong that despite the film being silent the viewer has a strong aural impression.” —Verina Glaessner, “Directory of UK Independent Film-Makers”, Cinema Rising No.1, April 1972

AT THE ACADEMY
Guy Sherwin, 1974, b/w, sound, 5 min
“In making films, I am not trying to say something, but to find out about something. But what one tries to find out, and how one tries to find it out, reveals what one is saying.” —Guy Sherwin, Arts Council Film-makers on Tour catalogue, 1980

“At the Academy was made during a period of raiding laboratory skips for junk film. It uses a very simple and highly unprofessional homemade printer. The found-footage was hand printed by winding it on a sprocketed wheel through a light beam. Because the light spills over the sound track area, the optical sound undergoes identical transformations to the image. I programmed the printing so that the image gradually builds up in layers superimposed, slightly out of phase, moving from one up to twelve layers. This has the effect of stretching or decelerating individual frames from 1/24 sec to 1/2 sec, causing them to fuse with adjacent frames. A separate concern in the film is the game it plays with the audience’s expectations.” —Guy Sherwin, A Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1978

THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA
David Crosswaite, 1973, b/w, silent, 8 min
“Crosswaite’s Man with the Movie Camera is a particularly elegant film. By mounting a circular mirror a little before the camera, so that it only occupies the central area of the screen, and another mirror to the side, the camera and the cameraman may be seen as the central image, with the other features of the room visible around the circumference. The film is complex in spite of the simplicity of the set-up, which is only slowly grasped. Particularly succinct is the way in which the effect of manipulating the camera, like changing focus, is seen in the image simultaneously with a view of how it is brought about. There is no other ‘content’ than the functioning of the camera itself, seen to be sufficient and even poetic.” —Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond, 1977

SILVER SURFER
Mike Dunford, 1972, b/w, sound, 15 min
“A surfer, filmed and shown on tv, refilmed on 8mm, and refilmed again on 16mm. Simple loop structure preceded by four minutes of a still frame of the surfer. An image on the borders of apprehension, becoming more and more abstract. The surfer surfs, never surfs anywhere, an image suspended in the light of the projector lamp. A very quiet and undramatic film, not particularly didactic. Sound: the first four minutes consists of a fog-horn, used as the basic tone for a chord played on the organ, the rest of the film uses the sound of breakers with a two second pulse and occasional bursts of musical-like sounds.” —London Film-Makers Co-operative distribution catalogue supplement, 1972

“Scientific or objective reality is based on repetition or frequency of observed data. It has been postulated that any unusual event which occurs only once cannot be observed. Organisation of space is determined by a continuous reference to the relationships between the observer and the observed data. ‘Objectivity’ is a function of frequency, continued frequency implies permanence and therefore objectivity. Frequency is determined by the organism. The perceptual threshold of a human being is approximately 1/30th of a second. Perception is a product of frequency which is a product of perception.” —Mike Dunford, “Conjectures and Assertions”, Filmaktion programme notes, 1973

STILL LIFE
Jenny Okun, 1976, colour, silent, 6 min
“Still Life moves towards later stages of transformation than the earlier films and substitutes positive for negative camera stock in the conventional negative-positive process of filming and printing: the filmmaker then attempts to reinstate some sort of representation of reality by painting the fruit in front of the camera its negative colours; but the burnt-out shadows and black highlights consistently prevent any illusionistic interpretation of the space within the frame while also asserting the processes involved.” —Jeremy Spencer, “Films of Jenny Okun”, Readings No. 2, 1977

“My films, photographic constructions, and paintings all stem from similar concerns. They are attempts to integrate the structural aspects of an event/landscape with the structural aspects of the medium involved. This integration of structures is aimed at creating a balance with no one element overstated, no one part dominant. My own participation is emphasised in this process – just as scientists now acknowledge that their own existence cannot be ignored in the calculation of experimental data. The subjects that I choose are not those that most easily suggest a filmic structure but are subjects which cannot be verbalized. For me, film is a language with which we can study our own visual thought processes. Each new film can create its own language for this visual discussion and can be explored and contained within its own terms.” —Jenny Okun, Arts Council Film-Makers on Tour catalogue, 1980

DRESDEN DYNAMO
Lis Rhodes, 1971, colour, sound, 5 min 
“The enduring importance of Lis Rhodes as artist and film-maker is attributable to her quiet and powerful radicalism. Rhodes’ work juxtaposes an artistically and theoretically rigorous practice with passionate commitment. She has developed a mode of film-making inspired but not enslaved by feminism, which has sustained and grown regardless of fashionable trends in art and representation.” —Gill Henderson, A Directory of British Film and Video Artists, 1996

“Sounds are affective. Images are instructive. In reversing, turning over, the notation, or perhaps the connotation of images and words, it becomes alarmingly apparent that words (and not only in their relationship with sentences) are to be believed, or not, and are therefore emotional. This is why lots can be said and nothing happens, or nothing is said and a lot happens. One person’s word against another’s. The answer and the question occupy the same space. They are already familiar if not known to each other. Emotionally they live within the same political order, that is, of manipulation and persuasion. Images do not ‘say’. They are instructive. They are said to ‘speak for themselves’. And I think they do. Seeing sense is a rare occurrence, in itself. There is little space for reflexive meaning in reflection. The one is the other, if not in geometry, certainly in time. The values of a social system are continuously displayed and reproduced. Repetitive distribution re-enforces acceptance, protectionism masquerades as ‘free’ choice. But the explicit nature of images always remains implicit. You can look at them. They are made to look at you. Even chance cannot avoid recognition. Abstract or configured instruction is within the image. Even nothing much is something. Meanwhile the needle goes round and round the record irrespective of the recording. Tape wraps round the head and the disc spins. “Read my lips’, he said. Hopefully, we didn’t bother. Seeing is never believing, or lip sync a confirmation of authenticity. But the combination of instruction and affectivity is very effective. Anything can be sold in between, anything that necessitates the political construction of emotion. In a series of films and live works I have investigated the material connections between the film image and the optical sound track. In Dresden Dynamo, the one was the other. That is – what is heard is seen and what is seen is heard. One symbolic order creates the other. The film is the score is the sound.” —Lis Rhodes, “Flashback from a Partisan Filmmaker”, Filmwaves No. 6, 1998

VERSAILLES I & II
Chris Garratt, 1976, b/w, sound, 11 min 
“For this film I made a contact printing box, with a printing area 16mm x 185mm which enabled the printing of 24 frames of picture plus optical sound area at one time. The first part is a composition using 7 x one-second shots of the statues of Versailles. Palace of 1000 Beauties, with accompanying soundtrack, woven according to a pre-determined sequence. Because sound and picture were printed simultaneously, the minute inconsistencies in exposure times resulted in rhythmic fluctuations of picture density and levels of sound. Two of these shots comprise the second part of the film which is framed by abstract imagery printed across the entire width of the film surface: the visible image is also the sound image.” —Chris Garratt, London Film-Makers’ Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977

“I was motivated originally by the prospect of being able to compose sound and visual images in units of fractions of seconds and by the tremendous ratio of magnification between the making and projection of sound and picture images. The content is not really the figurative subject matter as in some superimposed concept, but the here and now of the raw material, in making and in projection, and in the relationship between these two events in which nothing is hidden, propped up, decorated, representative or representable. (The choice of the material used was largely a matter of chance, but it is significant that (1) the original footage deals with ‘art’ and ‘culture’ in a very clichéd way, (2) we instantly relate to this whole genre of documentary rather than to the particular subject, (3) it contains virtually no subject or camera movement at all, and (4) there is an optical soundtrack, identifiable during editing only in the abstract, i.e. visually).” —Chris Garratt, “Directory of Independent British Cinema”, Independent Cinema No. 1, 1978

WINDOWFRAME
Roger Hewins, 1975, colour, sound, 6 min
“Windowframe is an investigation of the way in which we may perceive a specific image – that of two people, seen through a window, involved in some activity. This is the image seen at the opening of the film. Subsequent sections of the film present to the viewer differing juxtapositions of the four segments of this image which are created by the cross-bars of the window. Tensions are created between what we expect to see, and what we do see. We see the original image as a single whole. Do we perceive the manipulated sections in the same way, or are we drawn to investigate each pane separately? Can we make ourselves see the manipulated sections in the same way we see the original sequence? In the section in which the image is split simply horizontally or vertically are we able to re-establish/re-construct the original image in our minds so that the image we see differs from that on the screen? Perhaps this film answers some of these questions; perhaps it merely raises them.” —Roger Hewins, Derby Independent Film Awards catalogue, 1976

“For the best part of ten years Windowframe was exhibited as a silent film. I had, however, always ‘seen’ it as a film with sound. Indeed a magnetic stripe to facilitate this had been added to the original print of the film at the lab. However, I was unable to decide exactly what the soundtrack should be. A simple music track seemed inappropriate, too much like background music for its own sake with little relationship to the structure of the visuals, whilst attempts at a more constructed rhythmic track introduced extraneous ‘off-screen’ information taking the viewer outside of the experience of simply watching the film itself. I was looking for a soundtrack that provided an equivalence for the visuals themselves. The soundtrack on the existing print is the “Missa Pange Lingua’” by Josquin des Pres. It was combined with the visuals in 1982. This music was in fact recorded for a later film. During the editing of this film I became interested in the ‘out-takes’, where singers had made mistakes injecting sudden interruptions in the four-part medieval harmonies. Not only did the religious music resonate the stained glass quality of the images, but also the four-part structure and its interruptions provided the auditory equivalence for the overall structure of the film.” —Roger Hewins, 2002

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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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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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THE EPIC FLIGHT: MARE’S TAIL
Tuesday 28 May 2002, at 6:30pm
London Tate Modern

MARE’S TAIL
David Larcher, 1969, colour, sound, 143 min

“Now you see it, now you don’t. Waiting room cinema from the mountain top to the car park, an alternative to television. The good, the bad and the indifferent. Some consider it self-indulgent but me has a duty to itself. Bring what you expect to find. Not structural but starting in the beginning from the beginning…organic…prima materia…impressionable massa confusa…out of which some original naming and ordering processes spring…they are not named, but rather nailed into the celluloid. “Please don’t expect me to answer the question I’m having a hard time not falling out of this chair” syndrome.” —David Larcher, Arts Council Film-Makers on Tour catalogue, 1980

“Mare’s Tail is an epic flight into inner space. It is a 2 and 3/4 hour visual accumulation in colour, the film-maker’s personal odyssey, which becomes the odyssey of each of us. It is a man’s life transposed into a visual realm, a realm of spirits and demons, which unravel as mystical totalities until reality fragments. Every movement begins a journey. There are spots before your eyes, as when you look at the sun that flames and burns. We look at distant moving forms and flash through them. We drift through suns; a piece of earth phases over the moon. A face, your face, his face, a face that looks and splits into shapes that form new shapes that we rediscover as tiny monolithic monuments. A profile as a full face. The moon again, the flesh, the child, the room and the waves become part of a hieroglyphic language… Mare’s Tail is an important film because it expresses life. It follows Paul Klee’s idea that a visually expressive piece adds “more spirit to the seen” and also “makes secret visions visible”. Like other serious films and works of art, it keeps on seeking and seeing, as the film-maker does, as the artist does. It follows the transience of life and nature, studying things closely, moving into vast space, coming in close again. The course it follows is profoundly real and profoundly personal: Larcher’s trip becomes our trip to experience. It cannot be watched impatiently, with expectation; it is no good looking for generalization, condensation, complication or implication.” —Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is: The International Free Cinema, 1975

“A film that is almost a life style. Long enough and big enough in scope to be able to safely include boredom, blank-screens, bad footage. The kind of film that is analogous in a symbolic way to something like the ‘stream of life’ – no one would ever criticize looking out of the window as being boring sometimes. It’s not a film – more like an event composed of the collective ideas and attempts in film of several years. Like a personal diary: humorous, wry, sad, ecstatic. Concerned with texture, with seeing and not seeing, light and darkness, even life and death. Monumental not in size alone, but in its breadth of concept. Relaxed enough to be able to let one idea run on for twenty minutes before switching to another. The exact opposite of most film-making which attempts to keep the audience ‘interested’ by rapidly changing from one form or idea to another, to exclude boredom and participation. A ‘super-Le Grice’ in that it has inherent sensitivity and humanity, as well as superlative and highly inventive technique. It opens up film-making by including such self-conscious ethics as those propounded by Warhol etc. as a natural part of the film ethic as a whole.” —Mike Dunford, Cinemantics No. 1, January 1970

“Mare’s Tail is one of the finest achievements in cinema. It is a masterpiece that everyone in the country should get to see. To write about it is about as difficult as conveying the essence of magic, the meaning of existence, the quality of love or the shadows of a receding dream. For the film is pure myth, a living organism in its own right, a creation whose infinite complexity makes criticism of it a shallow irrelevancy (or at best a crude mythology). The achievement is that the film never looks like a mere catalogue of special effects – the vision is integrated, relaxed, spontaneous and too fluid for there to be any sense of contrivance in this staggering display of inventive curiosity. The immense diversity of technique runs hand-in-hand with a sustained simplicity of treatment. You’re aware of a mind that is open and loving toward everything: and this loving openness of response transfigures every image in the film, as it eventually transfigures the viewer too…” —John Du Cane, Time Out, 1972

“A film that is undoubtedly one of the most important produced in this country and that stands comparison with the best from the United States. It’s as if it were the first film in the world. When Mare’s Tail first appeared it was compared to Brakhage’s Art of Vision, as an examination of ways of seeing. The comparison can be taken further: as Brakhage is to the New American Cinema, it seems to me, so Larcher should be considered to the New English Cinema… Mare’s Tail is not only about vision but proposes an epistemology of film, particularly in its first reel: revealing basic elements of film in an almost didactic fashion: grain, frame, strip, projector, light. We see a film in perpetual process, being put together, being formed out of these attitudes. The first reel is a ‘lexicon’ to the whole film – to film in general – holding together what is essentially an open-ended structure to which pieces could be continually added and offering us a way to read that film. It is at once a kind of autobiography and a film about making that autobiography.” —Simon Field, “The Light of the Eyes”, Art and Artists, December 1972

“Pierre Boulez came to a screening of Mare’s Tail at Robert Street once. Simon Hartog said, “Oh, I sent my father to see Mare’s Tail”, his father was an impresario for people like Joan Sutherland and Pierre Boulez, and it turned out that Boulez came and was sat behind us. I’d been living in trucks and I’d just come up and it happened to be the same day. I went along and found this old tramp called Eric – this famous character who was around in those days, early ’70s – and took him along. We were sitting there and then I suddenly realised Boulez was behind. After half an hour he said, “C’est le perfection,” and walked out with Simon’s father!” —David Larcher, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

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