SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: THE LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OP
Friday 4 November 2016, at 7pm
Cambridge Harvard Film Archive

FRAMES
Annabel Nicolson, UK, 1973, 16mm, 18fps, color, silent, 8 min
“The original was standard 8mm material that I’d shot in a village in Italy. The material had gone through a process of deterioration. I’d used it in performing and taken it through an old Russian slide projector. I took the lens out of this projector so I could pull the film strip through it, and that meant the image could be focused on different surfaces. Instead of the image falling onto a screen I could direct it around the room with the lens in my hand. In the process it got very torn and scratched and it was that material I eventually put in the contact printer and made into the 16mm film Frames.” (Annabel Nicolson)

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.” (Marilyn Halford)

SHEPHERDS BUSH
Mike Leggett, UK, 1971, 16mm, 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.” (Roger Hammond)

FILM NO. 1
David Crosswaite, UK, 1971, 16mm, b/w & color, sound, 10 min
“The systems of super-imposed loops are mathematically inter-related in a complex manner. The starting and cut off points for each loop are not clearly exposed, but through repetitions of sequences in different colors, in different ‘material’ realities (i.e. a negative, positive, bas-relief, neg-pos overlay) yet in constant rhythm (both visually and on the soundtrack hum) one is manipulated to attempt to work out the system structure … 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).” (Peter Gidal)

 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)

BROADWALK
William Raban, UK, 1972, 16mm, color, sound, 12 min
“Originally, this was a four-minute time-lapse film which was shot continuously over a twenty-four hour period. The camera was positioned on a busy pathway in Regent’s Park, and recorded three frames a minute. The shutter was held open for the twenty-second duration between exposures, so that on projection, individual frames merge together making the patterned flows of human movement clearly perceptible. The time-lapse original was then expanded by various processes of re-filming to reveal the frame-by-frame structure of the original.” (William Raban)

REIGN OF THE VAMPIRE
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1970, 16mm, b/w, sound, 11 min
“This film could be considered as a synthesis of the ‘How to Screw the CIA’ series. It is formally based on the permutative loop structure, superimposing a series of three pairs of image loops of different lengths with each other. The images include elements from all the previous parts of the series. The film sequences which make up loops, are again chosen for their combination of semantic relationships, and abstract factors of movement. The soundtrack is constructed for the film, but independently, and has a similar loop structure.” (Malcolm Le Grice)

– intermission –

LIGHT MUSIC
Lis Rhodes, UK, 1975-77, 2 x 16mm, b/w, sound, 20 min
“The film is not complete as a totality; it could well be different and still achieve its purpose of exploring the possibilities of optical sound. It is as much about sound as it is about image; their relationship is necessarily dependent as the optical soundtrack ‘makes’ the music. It is the machinery itself which imposes this relationship. The image throughout is composed of straight lines. It need not have been.” (Lis Rhodes)

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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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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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