<\/p>\n
LONDON UNDERGROUND
\n<\/strong>Sunday 5 May 2002, at 3:00pm
\nLondon Tate Modern<\/p>\nTOWERS OPEN FIRE<\/strong>
\nAntony Balch, 1963, b\/w, sound, 16 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cTowers Open Fire <\/em>is a straight-forward attempt to find a cinematic equivalent for William Burroughs\u2019 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\u2026 Meanwhile, the liberated individual acts: Balch himself masturbates (\u201csilver arrow through the night\u2026\u201d), 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. \u201cAnything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.\u201d So the film is implicitly a challenge to its audience. But we\u2019re playing with indefinables that we don\u2019t really understand yet, and so Mikey Portman\u2019s music-hall finale is interrupted by science-fiction attack from the skies, as lost boardroom reports drift through the countryside\u2026\u201d \u2014Tony Rayns, \u201cInterview with Antony Balch\u201d, Cinema Rising No.1, April 1972<\/p>\n\u201cInstallations shattered \u2013 Personnel decimated \u2013 Board Books destroyed \u2013 Electronic waves of resistance sweeping through mind screens of the earth \u2013 The message of Total Resistance on short wave of the world \u2013 This is war to extermination <\/em>\u2013 Shift linguals <\/em>\u2013 Cut word lines<\/em> \u2013 Vibrate tourists<\/em> \u2013 Free doorways<\/em> \u2013 Photo falling<\/em> \u2013 Word falling<\/em> \u2013 Break through in grey room<\/em> \u2013 Calling Partisans of all nations<\/em> \u2013 Towers, open fire<\/em>\u201d \u2014William Burroughs, Nova Express, 1964<\/p>\nGLOUCESTER ROAD GROOVE
\nJonathan Langran, 1968, b\/w, silent, 2 min
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cA film for children and savages, easily understood, non didactic fantasies. Urban landscapes\u2026Strolling single frames.\u201d \u2014Jonathan Langran, London Film-Makers\u2019 Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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 \u2026 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\u2019s in Gloucester Road and I took the camera. I think I\u2019d 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\u2026 it was exotic, very exotic, it wasn\u2019t your dour kind of thing shot at 5 o\u2019clock or 6 o\u2019clock, Gloucester Road was buzzing.\u201d \u2014Jonathan Langran, interview with Mark Webber, 2002<\/p>\n
MARVO MOVIE<\/strong>
\nJeff Keen, 1967, colour, sound, 5 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cMovie wizard initiates shatterbrain experiment \u2013 Eeeow! \u2013 the fastest movie film alive \u2013 at 24 or 16fps even the mind trembles \u2013 splice up sequence 2 \u2013 flix unlimited, and inside yr very head the images explode \u2013 last years models new houses & such terrific death scenes while the time and space operator attacks the brain via the optic nerve \u2013 will the operation succeed \u2013 will the white saint reach in time the staircase now alive with blood \u2013 only time will tell says the movie master \u2013 meanwhile deep inside the space museum\u2026\u201d \u2014Ray Durgnat, London Film-Makers\u2019 Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1968<\/p>\n\u201cI was never part of the early 70s scene among the independent filmmakers \u2013 very much anti-American, anti-Hollywood. \u2018Industrial Cinema\u2019 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\u2019d done my footsoldiering for the communist party and everything in those days \u2013 factory gates and all that shit, \u201cban the bomb\u201d\u2026 So by the time of 1970, I\u2019d got out of that. As for sexual liberation, I\u2019d been happily married! And the drug scene didn\u2019t mean anything to me because I\u2019m puritanical. I\u2019m a misfit.\u201d \u2014Jeff Keen, interview with Mark Webber, 2001<\/p>\n
SPEAK<\/strong>
\nJohn Latham, 1962, colour, sound, 11 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cLatham\u2019s second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lye\u2019s films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. Speak <\/em>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 <\/em>burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, \u201cit will live in your mind.\u201d\u201d \u2014Ray Durgnat, London Film-Makers\u2019 Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1968<\/p>\n\u201cIn 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<\/em> 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 \u2013 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<\/em>: 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.\u201d \u2014John A. Walker, John Latham \u2013 The Incidental Person \u2013 His Art and Ideas<\/em>, 1995<\/p>\nDIRTY<\/strong>
\nStephen Dwoskin, 1965-67, b\/w, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cDirty<\/em> 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\u2019s response to the girls\u2019 sensual play is matched by the spontaneity of his response to the film of their play. The rhythms of the girls\u2019 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.\u201d \u2014John Du Cane, Time Out<\/em>, 1971<\/p>\n\u201cThe 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.\u201d \u2014Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is\u2026<\/em>, 1975<\/p>\nCLOCKTIME TRAILER<\/strong>
\nStuart Pound, 1972, colour, sound, 7 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cA time truncation film trailer for the rather long film called Clocktime<\/em>. 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)\u2026 repeat time cycle. 6 frames, 1\/4 second, then images move further along their original time base; a very linear film.\u201d \u2014London Film-Makers\u2019 Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1977<\/p>\n\u201cI wasn\u2019t particularly interested in making films about poetry but films that had got quite a strong sexual charge. For instance, in Clocktime Trailer<\/em> there\u2019s a woman in it who used to work for the Other Cinema years ago \u2013 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\u2019s Peeping Tom<\/em>, but I\u2019d 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: \u201cOh my god\u201d. I could see how I was a real menace!\u201d \u2014Stuart Pound, interview with Mark Webber, 2001<\/p>\nSOUL IN A WHITE ROOM<\/strong>
\nSimon Hartog, 1968, colour, sound, 3.5 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cFilms 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2026\u201d \u2014Simon Hartog & Stephen Dwoskin, \u201cNew Cinema\u201d, Counter Culture: The Creation of an Alternative Society<\/em>, 1969<\/p>\n \u201cSoul in a White Room<\/em> was filmed by Simon Hartog around autumn 1968. Music on the soundtrack is \u201cCousin Jane\u201d by The Troggs. The man is Omar Diop-Blondin, the woman I don\u2019t recall her name. Omar was a student active in 1968 during \u201cles evenement de Mai et de Juin\u201d at the Faculte de Nanterre, Universite de Paris. Around this time, Godard was in London shooting Sympathy for the Devil \/ One Plus One<\/em> 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 \u201971 or \u201972. I believe his fate is well known to the Senegalese people.\u201d \u2014Jonathan Langran, interview with Mark Webber, 2002<\/p>\nHALL<\/strong>
\nPeter Gidal, 1968-69, b\/w, sound, 10 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cHall<\/em> 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.\u201d \u2014Gordon Gow, \u201cFocus on 16mm\u201d, Films and Filming, August 1971<\/p>\n\u201cDemystified 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)\u201d \u2014Peter Gidal, London Film-makers\u2019 Co-operative distribution catalogue, 1974<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Hall<\/em>, 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.\u201d \u2014Stephen Heath, \u201cRepetition Time\u201d, Wide Angle, 1978<\/p>\nREIGN OF THE VAMPIRE<\/strong>
\nMalcolm Le Grice, 1970, b\/w, sound, 11 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cIt 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 <\/em>title. I suppose it said to me and to other people, \u201cMake your barb against the C.I.A.\u201d 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<\/em> \u2013 people were<\/em> having their telephones tapped though I don\u2019t suppose for one minute that my telephone was interesting enough to tap. Reign of the Vampire<\/em> is that kind of paranoid film. It\u2019s a hovercraft that comes in, but it could easily be a tank with the army getting out of it \u2026 The idea of a military force that can sneak in somewhere, and the computer images. Threshold<\/em> is in similar territory, about the borders and so on but very abstract. It\u2019s about that hidden sense of force.\u201d \u2014Malcolm Le Grice, interview with Mark Webber, 2001<\/p>\n\u201cThe 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.?<\/em> series; it draws on pieces of film from the other films, and combines these with the most \u2018disturbing\u2019 of the images which I have collected. It also relates to the \u2018dream\u2019\/fluid association sequence in Castle Two<\/em>; 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\u2019s awareness undergoes a gradual transformation from the semantic\/associative to the abstract\/formal, even though the \u2018information\u2019 undergoes only limited change. The sound has a similar kind of loop\/repetition structure.\u201d \u2014Malcolm Le Grice, How to Screw the C.I.A. or How to Screw the C.I.A.?<\/em> programme notes, 1970<\/p>\nBack to top<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON UNDERGROUND Sunday 5 May 2002, at 3:00pm London Tate Modern As equipment became available for little cost, avant-garde film flourished in mid-60s counter-culture. Early screenings at Better Books and the Arts Lab provided a vital focus for a new movement that infused Swinging London with a fresh subversive edge. Antony Balch, Towers Open Fire, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[111],"tags":[118],"class_list":["post-3520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shoot-shoot-shoot","tag-shoot-shoot-shoot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}