A man stands naked in front of a screen lit by changing colours, facing away from the audience. He holds a series of poses, slowly walking back toward the sources of multi-coloured light – three 16mm film projectors whose images converge on the screen. It is a performance of shadows, the duration of which is variable, the setting ever-changing. Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1 (1971) is a ‘film’ which is never the same twice, and inextricable from the physical presence of its creator. Le Grice, who died late last year aged 84, was one of Britain’s most innovative and radical filmmakers. A leading figure of a distinctively British avant-garde that interrogated the material, structural and experiential qualities of film, he was also a theorist, organizer and teacher who worked to build the conceptual frameworks and institutions in which a radical film culture could flourish.
Born in Plymouth, Le Grice trained as a painter at the Slade before turning to filmmaking in the mid-1960s. An avid cinemagoer, he had a clear sense of what he didn’t want to make: ‘Though I had seen all the contemporary films of Resnais, Truffaut, Fellini and Godard, I had no desire to make films for the cinema – even Godard looked old hat compared to what I understood as radical art – Robert Rauschenberg, Ornette Coleman, John Cage. I started to make films in the same way I approached painting or improvisational music.’ His early films grew out of plastic concerns with film process and an interest in duration. ‘Location? Duration? Films Films Paintings Plus’, Le Grice’s first substantial public show held in November 1968, showcased several works that, as his friend and collaborator David Curtis recounts in A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain, were ‘unlike anything that had been seen in Britain’ at the time.
Castle One (1966), for example, was composed of discarded footage collected from the bins outside the film laboratories of Soho, and was projected onto a screen before which hung a bare light bulb. Images of a light bulb also appeared in the film, while Le Grice manually flashed the ‘real’ light bulb on and off throughout the screening. This was ‘a Brechtian device to make the spectator aware of himself’, he explained. In both aesthetic and political terms – the film presented a montage of industrial and military power – Castle One had an affinity with the found-footage work being produced by American filmmakers such as Bruce Conner. This was not a question of influence, as Le Grice had not seen Conner’s work at the time – in fact, he insisted the major influence on the work was Kafka. In this era avant-gardes often effectively worked in parallel, drawing on similar influences and philosophies but unable to see each other’s work.
That same year, Le Grice joined the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, which had been founded in 1966 by a group that included the filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin and critic Raymond Durgnat. With Le Grice, Curtis and other new members, the emphasis shifted to production. While part of an international network of like-minded groups – it was inspired by New York’s Film-Makers Cooperative established by Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage and others – the London Co-op was unique in this respect: it contained a workshop laboratory for producing new films, a distribution office and its own cinema space. Le Grice and his colleagues also steered the Co-op in a socialist direction, both in aesthetic practice and in the practical running of the organization. An often-reproduced diagram drawn by Le Grice laid out the interrelation of the Co-op’s activities: publications such as Cinim, distribution arrangements, the equipment, the premises, film stock service, marketing and so on, with ‘full membership’ at its centre. The linchpin was access to the means of production – previously the domain of professional film laboratories – which enabled them to make work free from commercial imperatives. For Le Grice, this was also a way of reproducing ‘the direct relationship to the medium’ taken for granted in painting or music.
Le Grice produced a range of pathbreaking works during this period, including the mesmerizing Berlin Horse (1970). The film is constructed from two sequences: one of a horse being exercised, filmed by Le Grice in Germany with an 8mm camera, later refilmed in 16mm, and an early Edison newsreel of horses being led from a burning stable. A hypnotic, looping soundtrack by Brian Eno plays over the footage of the horses going round and round. The subject may be a nod towards the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge, but instead of using film to deconstruct and analyse the animal’s movement, Le Grice re-filmed the horse at different speeds and from different angles, re-coloured the footage with theatrical lighting gels in the film-printer, and subjected it to multiple superimpositions. Berlin Horse was shown as a two-screen projection, a technique that ‘put the spectator in the position of having to work at it, you had to do the construction of the work for yourself”; this was part of establishing the screen as a ‘real surface’. Though the original impulses – seriality, repetition – were painterly and musical, the explosion of colour, movement and sound is undeniably cinematic.
Writing became an important activity for Co-op filmmakers in the 1970s. Le Grice wrote a regular column for Studio International from 1972 to 1977 and contributed to various other art publications. In 1977 he published Abstract Film and Beyond, a history of experimental cinema which situated the work of the contemporary film avant-garde in a genealogy dating back to the post-impressionist painters of the late 19th Century. Though primarily identifying as a filmmaker – his inclination being to ‘work-things-out, or work-things-through by making films’ – Le Grice became, as he put it, ‘a historian and theorist by default – little was known of experimental film in the UK and there was absolutely no context for film as experimental art’. The same historical contextualisation was proposed by the exhibition ‘Film as film’ held at the Hayward Gallery in 1979, whose organizing committee included Le Grice as well as other Co-op filmmakers; the history of art was also a recurring motif of Le Grice’s films at the time, including After Leonardo (1973), After Manet – Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1975) and Academic Still Life (1976).
Le Grice was a major proponent of ‘Structural/Materialist Film’, as it was first termed by his friend Peter Gidal. This provided a theoretical framework for the Co-op’s innovations: anti-narrative, anti-illusionist, intent on ‘the demystification of the film process’ and opposed to the dominant, commercial cinema. This conceptualization was a response to the idea of ‘structural film’ set out by P. Adams Sitney, the American avant-garde’s quasi-official theorist. In a 1969 essay, Sitney used the term to define an emerging body of work ‘in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film’. Sitney outlined four major characteristics – a fixed camera position, the flicker effect, loop printing and re-photography off the screen – which have since been widely disputed. Le Grice and others also felt Sitney neglected the work of many filmmakers, notably Europeans, as well as developments in the other arts such as Minimalism. In Abstract Film and Beyond, Le Grice remarked that Sitney’s term had ‘stuck, in much the same way that the critics’ reaction to the planar simplicity of certain pictures by Braque and Picasso left us with the equally inadequate term Cubism’.
Peter Wollen’s landmark essay ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’ (1975) drew a distinction between a formalist avant-garde, as exemplified by the Co-op movement, and the more expressly political work of the likes of Godard and Straub-Huillet: ‘at the extreme, each would tend to deny the others the status of avant-garde at all’. The London Co-op however was more explicitly political than its New York cousin; like many radical organizations it was under surveillance, and was even raided by the police during the 1970s. For Le Grice, radical politics and radical form were inseparable. I recall a screening of Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers (1968) at a festival in Germany in 2008, where it was shown alongside Castle One. Le Grice was present, and during the discussion said that he could now appreciate the documentary value of Varda’s work but that at the time would have disapproved of its conventional film language. For how could one challenge the status quo without also challenging the status quo of the cinema?
In Le Grice’s view, ‘the only art which deserves the term realist is that which confronts the audience with the material conditions of the work. Work which seeks to portray a “reality” existing in another place at another time is illusionist’. One of his key concepts was what he termed ‘Real TIME/SPACE’: while narrative cinema could try to produce an illusion of real time, it was much rarer for it to attempt the illusion of ‘real space’, for a film to be experienced by the viewer in the space where it was produced. This theorisation underpinned Le Grice’s ‘expanded cinema’ works such as Horror Film 1. Together with William Raban, Gill Eatherley and Annabel Nicolson, Le Grice presented a series of expanded cinema events under the name Filmaktion in 1972-73. Rather than film theatres, these works were presented in gallery spaces, though without any commercial relationship with the art market; the idea of film as an art object and the commercialization of conceptual art arose from a completely different tradition.
This phase of Le Grice’s work was followed by a trilogy of feature-length films: Blackbird Descending – Tense Alignment (1977), Emily – Third Party Speculation (1979) and Finnegan’s Chin – Temporal Economy (1981). Influenced by feminism, semiotics and film theory, in particular the writings of Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz, these films experimented with the structures of narrative form. Blackbird Descending, which features feminist avant-garde filmmaker Lis Rhodes, took Le Grice away from the Co-op facilities into domestic space. The ritualised actions of daily life in a suburban house gradually unravel through repetition, fragmentation and other forms of filmic manipulation.
As the 1980s progressed, video and computer technologies would become Le Grice’s primary tool. Chronos Fragmented (1995) is an accumulation of diaristic material shot on video8 and hi8 over six years, exploring video as a creative form of memory. In the 2010s he embraced digital 3D with his characteristic passion for technological developments, revisiting familiar motifs in Marking Time (2015) and the autobiographical Where When (2015). I watched both at the time and remember the feeling of being immersed, not in narrative so much as the film’s visual and sensory world, in layers of colour in Marking Time, as if inside a Rothko painting, in the weather elements (sun, rain) in Where When.
Defending the interests of independent filmmakers was another aspect of Le Grice’s work; throughout his career he was involved in a range of committees and lobbying efforts. Le Grice’s generous spirit and joie de vivre were great assets here. This was also true of his role as a teacher. He had begun teaching at St Martins School of Art almost directly after graduating from the Slade, establishing an experimental film unit there. Many artists including Cerith Wyn Evans, Sandra Lahire and Isaac Julien came through the programme. He went on to hold various positions at Harrow College, later part of the University of Westminster, before returning to Central Saint Martins, where he remained until retiring in 2001, leaving behind the British Artists’ Film & Video Study Collection, a research facility which he co-founded with Curtis.
In the early 2000s, there was a critical rediscovery of the avant-gardes of the 1960s and 70s, and Le Grice found himself travelling far and wide to screenings and discussions of his oeuvre, and to perform his early works again. This brought overdue recognition from the art world as well as from a new generation of cineastes. I last saw him at the S8 festival in La Coruña in June 2019, where he performed Horror Film 1, no longer nude but shirtless, still committed to sharing his work with an audience. His last solo exhibition was held in Autumn 2024 at the Velarde Gallery in Devon, close to the village where he lived for many years after his retirement. He leaves a huge legacy.
Read on: Peter Wollen, ‘Cinema: The New Wave’, NLR 142.