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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8MM FILMS FROM THE LONDON CO-OP
Wednesday 29 May 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery

IN CELEBRATION OF 8MM

“What first attracted me to 8mm film in particular was its materiality and the way it produced tangibility problematics on all levels: the acquiring and setting up of increasingly scarce, quality projection equipment, the physicality of the sound made by the film strip running through the projector gate continuously reminds the viewer of the machine’s presence in the room, the attention to projection speed (variable fps), and the frequent act of projecting camera originals (the horror!) instead of film prints. And then there is the film itself – the sensuous texture of the projected image, the subtlety or sumptuousness of gradations in black-and-white or the discriminating use of colour, the graininess of the image (as emotionally satisfying and particular as the actual silver sparkles on 35mm nitrate stock), the unpredictability of the sound stripe, and the fragility and fleeting sense of the image’s presence on the screen. All these qualities contribute to the intimacy created between the projected films and any group able to give themselves over to the act of actually seeing.” (Jytte Jensen, Museum of Modern Art, in the exhibition catalogue “Big As Life”, 1999)

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT CONDENSED: PROGRAMME 1
November 2006—May 2008
International Tour

SLIDES
Annabel Nicolson, 1970, colour, silent, 11 mins (18fps)
“A continuing sequence of tactile films were made in the printer from my earlier material. 35mm slides, light leaked film, sewn film, cut up to 8mm and 16mm fragments were dragged through the contact printer, directly and intuitively controlled. The films create their own fluctuating colour and form dimensions defying the passive use of ‘film as a vehicle’. The appearance of sprocket holes, frame lines etc., is less to do with the structural concept and more of a creative, plastic response to whatever is around.” (Annabel Nicolson, LFMC catalogue 1974)

AT THE ACADEMY
Guy Sherwin, 1974, b/w, sound, 5 mins
“Makes use of found footage hand printed on a simple home-made 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 sound track area, the picture and sound undergo identical transformations.” (Guy Sherwin, LFMC catalogue 1979)

SHEPHERD’S BUSH
Mike Leggett, 1971, b/w, sound, 15 mins
“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, LFMC catalogue supplement, 1972)

FILM NO. 1
David Crosswaite, 1971, colour, sound, 10 mins
“Film No. 1 is a 10-minute loop film. 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 colours, 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, LFMC catalogue 1974)

DRESDEN DYNAMO
Lis Rhodes, 1971, colour, sound, 5 mins
“This film is the result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film. It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is ‘read’ by optical sound equipment. The final print has been achieved through three separate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer. Colour was added, with filters, on the final run. The film is not a sequential piece. It does not develop crescendos. It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially, flat, graphic, raw material.” (Tim Bruce, LFMC catalogue 1993)

VERSAILLES I & II
Chris Garratt, 1976, b/w, sound, 11 mins
”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 1-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, LFMC catalogue 1978)

SILVER SURFER
Mike Dunford, 1972, b/w, sound, 15 mins
“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.” (Mike Dunford, LFMC catalogue supplement 1972)

FOOTSTEPS
Marilyn Halford, 1974, b/w, sound, 6 mins
“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, LFMC catalogue 1978)

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT CONDENSED: PROGRAMME 2
November 2006—May 2008
International Tour

THRESHOLD
Malcolm Le Grice, 1972, colour, sound, 10 mins
“Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity … With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating ‘richness’ of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image.” (Deke Dusinberre, LFMC catalogue 1993)

SEVEN DAYS
Chris Welsby, 1974, colour, sound, 20 mins
“The location of this film is by a small stream on the northern slopes of Mount Carningly in southwest Wales. The seven days were shot consecutively and appear in that same order. Each day starts at the time of local sunrise and ends at the time of local sunset. One frame was taken every ten seconds throughout the film. The camera was mounted on an Equatorial Stand, which is a piece of equipment used by astronomers to track the stars. Rotating at the same speed as the earth, the camera is always pointing at either its own shadow or at the sun. Selection of image (sky or earth; sun or shadow) was controlled by the extent of cloud coverage. If the sun was out the camera was turned towards its own shadow; if it was in the camera was turned towards the sun.” (Chris Welsby, LFMC catalogue 1978)

KEY
Peter Gidal, 1968, colour, sound, 10 mins
“Slow zoom out and defocus of …” (Peter Gidal, LFMC catalogue 1974)

MOMENT
Stephen Dwoskin, 1968, colour, sound, 12 mins
“One single continuous shot of a girl’s face before, during and after an orgasm. A concentration on the subtle changes within the face – going from an objective look into a subjective one and then back out … Moment is not a woman alone, but with her ‘in person’. Have you ever really watched the face in orgasm?” (Stephen Dwoskin, Other Cinema catalogue 1972)

DECK
Gill Eatherley, 1971, colour, sound, 13 mins
“During a voyage by boat to Finland, the camera records three minutes of black and white 8mm film 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 positive and negative elements and superimposition on the London Co-op’s optical printer.” (Gill Eatherley, Light Cone catalogue, 1997)

COLOURS OF THIS TIME
William Raban, 1972, colour, silent, 3 mins
“Whilst working on previous time-lapse films, I found that colour film tended to record the actual colour of the light source rather than local colour when long time exposures were used. Using this phenomenon, Colours of this Time records all the imperceptible shifts of colour temperature in summer daylight, from first light until sunset.” (William Raban, LFMC catalogue 1974)

ASSOCIATIONS
John Smith, 1975, colour, sound, 7 mins
“Text taken from ‘Word Associations and Linguistic Theory’ by Herbert H. Clark. Images taken from magazines and colour supplements. 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, LFMC catalogue 1978)

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SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: EXPANDED CINEMA
Wednesday 23 May 2007, at 7PM
Wrexham Arts Centre

EXPANDED CINEMA at the LONDON FILM-MAKERS’ CO-OPERATIVE

Expanded Cinema is a term used to describe works that do not confirm to the traditional single-screen cinema format. It could mean having two (or more) images side-by-side on the screen, films that incorporate live performances or are projected in an unorthodox manner without a screen. Even light pieces that do not use any film at all. Some work demands that the filmmaker interact with the projected image, or be behind the projectors to alter their configuration throughout the screening.

The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was an artist-led organisation formed in 1966, and uniquely incorporated a distribution office, workshop laboratory and screening room. Expanded Cinema continued the analytical exploration of the material that was conducted by filmmakers in the workshop, and emphasised the transient nature of the medium.

The Co-op’s cinema space was a flat, open room with no fixed seating. Filmmakers were free to experiment with projectors, demonstrating that the moment of exhibition can be as much a part of the work as the original concept, filming, editing and processing. The technology that puts the illusion of movement onscreen was no longer hidden away in a projection booth behind the audience, but placed amongst them.

In questioning the role of the spectator, Expanded Cinema challenged the conventions of the cinema event and introduced elements of chance and improvisation. Sometimes, what happened across the room was more important than what was up on the screen. With such work no two projections were ever the same: each screening was a unique, social, collective experience for the assembled audience.

This drive beyond the screen and theatre inevitably took the work into galleries, but only as a practical measure since open spaces and white walls were ideal for unconventional projection. The filmmakers made no attempts to commodify their work by producing editions, for many it was against their socialist principles. Though Expanded Cinema anticipated many recent trends in gallery-based moving image works and installations, there was little acceptance from the art world in the early years, or acknowledgement of this groundbreaking work today.

Mark Webber

CASTLE TWO
Malcolm Le Grice, 1968, b/w, sound, 32 min (2 screens)
“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

PLAY
Sally Potter, 1971, b/w & colour, silent, 7 min (2 screens)
“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

DIAGONAL
William Raban, 1973, colour, sound, 6 min (3 screens)
“Diagonal is a film for three projectors, though the diagonally arranged projector beams need not be contained within a single flat screen area. This film works well in a conventional film theatre when the top left screen spills over the ceiling and the bottom right projects down over the audience. It is the same image on all three projectors, a double-exposed flickering rectangle of the projector gate sliding diagonally into and out of frame. Focus is on the projector shutter, hence the flicker. This film is ‘about’ the projector gate, the plane where the film frame is caught by the projected light beam.” —William Raban, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977

“The first great excitement is finding the idea, making its acquaintance, and courting it through the elaborate ritual of film production. The second excitement is the moment of projection when the film becomes real and can be shared with the audience. The former enjoyment is unique and privileged; the second is not, and so long as the film exists, it is infinitely repeatable.” —William Raban, Arts Council Film-Makers on Tour catalogue, 1980

HAND GRENADE
Gill Eatherley, 1971, colour, sound, 8 min (3 screens)
“Although the word ‘expanded’ cinema has also been used for the open/gallery size/multi screen presentation of film, this ‘expansion’ (could still but) has not yet proved satisfactory – for my own work anyway. Whether you are dealing with a single postcard size screen or six ten-foot screens, the problems are basically the same – to try to establish a more positively dialectical relationship with the audience. I am concerned (like many others) with this balance between the audience and the film – and the noetic problems involved.” —Gill Eatherley, 2nd International Avant-Garde Film Festival programme notes, 1973

“Malcolm Le Grice helped me with Hand Grenade. First of all I did these stills, the chairs traced with light. And then I wanted it to all move, to be in motion, so we started to use 16mm. We shot only a hundred feet on black and white. It took ages, actually, because it’s frame by frame. We shot it in pitch dark, and then we took it to the Co-op and spent ages printing it all out on the printer there. This is how I first got involved with the Co-op.” —Gill Eatherley, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

LIGHT MUSIC
Lis Rhodes, 1975-77, b/w, sound, 20 min (2 screens)
“Lis Rhodes has conducted a thorough investigation into the relationship between the shapes and rhythms of lines and their tonality when printed as sound. Her work Light Music is in a series of ‘moveable sections’. The film does not have a rigid pattern of sequences, and the final length is variable, within one-hour duration. The imagery is restricted to lines of horizontal bars across the screen: there is variety in the spacing (frequency), their thickness (amplitude), and their colour and density (tone). One section was filmed from a video monitor that produced line patterns on the screen that varied according to sound signals generated by an oscillator; so initially it is the sound which produces the image. Taking this filmed material to the printing stage, the same lines that produced the picture are printed onto the optical soundtrack edge of the film: the picture thus produces the sound. Other material was shot from a rostrum camera filming black and white grids, and here again at the printing stage, the picture is printed onto the film soundtrack. Sometimes the picture ‘zooms’ in on the grid, so that you actually ‘hear’ the zoom, or more precisely, you hear an aural equivalent to the screen image. This equivalence cannot be perfect, because the soundtrack reproduces the frame lines that you don’t see, and the film passes at even speed over the projector sound scanner, but intermittently through the picture gate. Lis Rhodes avoids rigid scoring procedures for scripting her films. This work may be experienced (and was perhaps conceived) as having a musical form, but the process of composition depends on various chance operations, and upon the intervention of the filmmaker upon the film and film machinery. This is consistent with the presentation where the film does not crystallize into one finished form. This is a strong work, possessing infinite variety within a tightly controlled framework.” —William Raban, Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1977

“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 sound track ‘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, A Perspective on English Avant-Garde Film catalogue, 1978

LINE DESCRIBING A CONE
Anthony McCall, 1973, b/w, silent, 30 min (1 screen, smoke)
“Once I started really working with film and feeling I was making films, making works of media, it seemed to me a completely natural thing to come back and back and back, to come more away from a pro-filmic event and into the process of filmmaking itself. And at the time it all boiled down to some very simple questions. In my case, and perhaps in others, the question being something like “What would a film be if it was only a film?” Carolee Schneemann and I sailed on the SS Canberra from Southampton to New York in January 1973, and when we embarked, all I had was that question. When I disembarked I already had the plan for Line Describing a Cone fully-fledged in my notebook. You could say it was a mid-Atlantic film! It’s been the story of my life ever since, of course, where I’m located, where my interests are, that business of “Am I English or am I American?” So that was when I conceived Line Describing a Cone and then I made it in the months that followed.” —Anthony McCall, interview with Mark Webber, 2001

“One important strategy of expanded cinema radically alters the spatial discreteness of the audience vis-à-vis the screen and the projector by manipulating the projection facilities in a manner which elevates their role to that of the performance itself, subordinating or eliminating the role of the artist as performer. The films of Anthony McCall are the best illustration of this tendency. In Line Describing a Cone, the conventional primacy of the screen is completely abandoned in favour of the primacy of the projection event. According to McCall, a screen is not even mandatory: The audience is expected to move up and down, in and out of the beam – this film cannot be fully experienced by a stationary spectator. This means that the film demands a multi-perspectival viewing situation, as opposed to the single-image/single-perspective format of conventional films or the multi-image/single-perspective format of much expanded cinema. The shift of image as a function of shift of perspective is the operative principle of the film. External content is eliminated, and the entire film consists of the controlled line of light emanating from the projector; the act of appreciating the film – i.e., ‘the process of its realisation’ – is the content.” —Deke Dusinberre, “On Expanding Cinema”, Studio International, November/December 1975

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