DAVID LARCHER: MARE’S TRAIL
Sunday 15 January 2017, at 7pm
London Close-Up Film Centre

MARE’S TAIL
David Larcher, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound, 143 min

“Mare’s Tail is an epic flight into inner space. It is a 2 and 3/4 hour visual accumulation in colour, the filmmaker’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 filmmaker 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

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OP
Monday 23 January 2017, at 6:30pm
Glasgow CCA

BERLIN HORSE
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm, colour, sound, 7 min
“Berlin Horse is an exploration of the film medium. It is also concerned with making certain conceptions about time in a more illusory way than I have been inclined to explore in many other of my films. It attempts to deal with some of the paradoxes of the relationships of the ‘real’ time which exists when the film was being shot, with the ‘real’ time which exists when the film is being screened, and how this can be modulated by technical manipulation of the images and sequences.”

HALL
Peter Gidal, UK, 1968-69, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
“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)

AT THE ACADEMY
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1974, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 min
“Makes use of found footage, hand printed on a simple homemade contact printer and processed in the kitchen sink. At the Academy uses displacement of a positive and negative sandwich of the same loop. Since the printer light spills over the optical soundtrack area, the picture and sound undergo identical transformations.”

FOOTSTEPS
Marilyn Halford, UK, 1975, 16mm, b/w, sound, 6 min
“Footsteps is in the manner of a game re-enacted, 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.”

DRESDEN DYNAMO
Lis Rhodes, UK, 1974, 16mm, colour, sound, 4 min
“It was perhaps the question of sound – the uncertainty of any synchronicity between what was seen and what was said that began an investigation into the relationship of sound to image. Dresden Dynamo is a film that I made without a camera – in which the image is the soundtrack, the soundtrack the image. A film document.”

 ASSOCIATIONS
John Smith, UK, 1975, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min
“Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by the American psycholinguist Herbert H Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together/against each other to destroy/create meaning.” (John Smith)

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FILMAKTION: EXPANDED CINEMA AND FILM PERFORMANCE
4 & 5 March 2017
London Raven Row

Having been asked to show his films at Gallery House, Malcolm Le Grice in turn invited David Crosswaite, Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson and William Raban – all colleagues at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) – to join him in staging a weekend of “film action and installation”. The subsequent event, which took place from 16-18 March 1973, was an important moment in the development of ‘expanded cinema’, featuring a variety of works that incorporated improvisation, multiple screens, live performance and looped projections. The radical formalism and rough, artisanal qualities of the films made in the LFMC workshop were here further enriched by unique ‘film actions’ that emphasised the primacy of the projection event and questioned the role of the spectator.

In the same year, this informal collective (often including other filmmakers) would also show their work at the Scottish Arts Council Gallery (Edinburgh), Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), The Place and the ICA (London). The flexibility of open exhibition spaces prompted the development of installations in which film loops were orchestrated over extended time periods, and projected works that eschewed cinematic conventions. Though the word ‘Filmaktion’ was only used in this period as the title of the Walker Art Gallery show, writers and curators have since adopted it as a collective name for the core group of Eatherley, Le Grice, Nicolson and Raban.

Saturday 4 March 2017

11am
Gill Eatherley, Chair Installation, 1972, loop

12pm
Malcolm Le Grice, Gross Fog, 1973, loop

1pm
Gill Eatherley, Clod Argument, 1973, loop

2pm
William Raban, Take Measure, 1973, 2 min
Gill Eatherley, Aperture Sweep, 1973, c. 6 min
Gill Eatherley, Pan Film, 1972, 8 min
Gill Eatherley. Hand Grenade, 1971, 8 min
William Raban, 2’45” (Bristol 1975), 1973, 8 min
William Raban, Surface Tension, 1974-76, b/w, sound, 14 min
William Raban, Angles of Incidence, 1973, 8 min
William Raban, Diagonal, 1973, 6 min

4pm
Gill Eatherley, Sicherheits, 1973, loop

5pm
Malcolm Le Grice, Four Wall Duration, 1973, loop

6pm
break / set up screen & props

7pm
Malcolm Le Grice, Horror Film 2, 1972, c. 25 min
Annabel Nicolson, Shapes, 1970, 7 min
Annabel Nicolson, Frames, 1973, 8 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Pre-Production, 1973, c. 15 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Blue Field Duration, 1972, 6 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Whitchurch Down (Duration), 1972, 9 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Horror Film 1, 1971, 14 min

Entrance Hall (monitor)
William Raban, Filmaktion Timelapse, 1973, 7 min (digital loop)

Sunday 5 March 2017

11am
Gill Eatherley, Sicherheits, 1973, loop

12pm
Malcolm Le Grice, Four Wall Duration, 1973, loop

1pm
break / lunch / set up screen & props

2pm
Malcolm Le Grice, Horror Film 2, 1972, c. 25 min
Annabel Nicolson, Shapes, 1970, 7 min
Annabel Nicolson, Frames, 1973, 8 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Pre-Production, 1973, c. 15 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Blue Field Duration, 1972, 6 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Whitchurch Down (Duration), 1972, 9 min
Malcolm Le Grice, Horror Film 1, 1971, 14 min

4pm
Gill Eatherley, Chair Installation, 1972, loop

5pm
Malcolm Le Grice, Gross Fog, 1973, loop

6pm
William Raban, Take Measure, 1973, 2 min
Gill Eatherley, Aperture Sweep, 1973, c. 6 min
Gill Eatherley, Pan Film, 1972, 8 min
Gill Eatherley. Hand Grenade, 1971, 8 min
William Raban, 2’45” (Bristol 1975), 1973, 8 min
William Raban, Surface Tension, 1974-76, b/w, sound, 14 min
William Raban, Angles of Incidence, 1973, 8 min
William Raban, Diagonal, 1973, 6 min

Entrance Hall (monitor)
William Raban, Filmaktion Timelapse, 1973, 7 min (digital loop)

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: MALCOLM LE GRICE & THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE
Thursday 9 March 2017
Plymouth Arts Centre

LITTLE DOG FOR ROGER
Malcolm Le Grice, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 12 min
“Little Dog for Roger was made from some fragments of 9.5 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 medium of celluloid and various kinds of printing and processing devices. The qualities of film – the sprockets and the individual frames – and the deterioration of records like memories all play an important part in the meaning of this film.” (MLG)

THRESHOLD
Malcolm Le Grice, 1972, 16mm, colour, sound, 13 min
“The work is based on a small number of component sequences. It begins with abstract colour fields filling the whole screen, then develops through other simple abstract images created by accidental exposure of film stock (edge fogging). The main image of the film is of border guards at a frontier post. The film explores a range of film printing techniques using colour filtering, mattes and multiple superimpositions. It also includes a short section of computer generated abstract animation made by Le Grice at the Atomic Energy Research Laboratory in Britain in 1969. The title is intended to imply various forms of threshold or edge when significant transformations occur or are inhibited – the border of a state – the perceptual points when one optical experience transforms to another – the point at which an image becomes an abstraction of its shape or movement.” (MLG)

ART WORK SERIES, PART TWO: TIME AND MOTION STUDY
Malcolm Le Grice, 1976, 16mm, colour, sound, 12 min
“The film explores continuity of time in two levels of work. The first of these is the simple domestic task of washing dishes, and the second is the aesthetic task of filming the first task. I, the filmmaker, am the protagonist in both acts, controlling the two cameras, which record the action.” (MLG)

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