MOMENTS FROM A SENSUAL CINEMA: A TRIBUTE TO MALCOLM LE GRICE.
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
17.00 – 18.30 (15 minute break) 18.45 – 20.30
Last year, BIMI rans a series of screenings inspired by the journal Afterimage, showing some of the avant-garde work it had celebrated. One English filmmaker who could well have been included sadly left us in December. Malcolm Le Grice was a towering figure in independent and avant-garde film, not only in Britain but known around the world as a driving force in the arts lab movement, and a mainstay of the London Filmmakers Co-Op during its most influential period.
Originally a painter, his first films in the 1960s were classified as ‘structural’, but this was a category that Le Grice rejected, as he had ‘underground’. His films were about perception, about the joy of making – the ‘erraticness, impulsiveness and irrationality’, as he wrote in an early Afterimage – and about challenging viewers with new sensory experiences. He spoke up for fellow-European filmmakers, when North Americans dominated critical attention, and his writing and teaching, as well as his technical and organisational skills, played a huge part in creating a distinctive English avant-garde in the ’70s and ‘80s,
It is too early to take stock of his massive output, but time to pay tribute to an extraordinary five decades of creation, moving from Super-8 through 16mm to pioneering use of computers and video, and an early embrace of digital media. Tonight’s programme will start early, at 17.00, with one of his 1970s ‘domestic trilogy’, Blackbird Descending, exploring new concepts of narrative, followed by a selection of his key works beginning at 18.45. Steven Ball from the UAL British Artists' Film & Video Study Collection will introduce the programme along with others who knew Malcolm.
Contact name:
Matthew Barrington