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Roger Hammond, a member of the London Filmmakers Coop in the 1970s whose work was recently featured in LUX’s Shoot Shoot Shoot touring project, died after a long illness in December 2004.

Roger Hammond

Roger is fondly remembered by many of those who knew and worked with him during his years with the Coop, and below we reproduce an open letter written by his friend and contemporary Peter Gidal. Also below is an extract from an interview with Hammond conducted by Mark Webber for Shoot Shoot Shoot and a filmography of his work.

Peter Gidal on Roger Hammond

... just to let you know roger died last friday night....brain tumor got worse....one day chemo therapy the prev week was more to lower pain...was also on morphine....last 2 days didnt regain consciousness but they said could hear whats going on just not speak etc and not all un-aware so his mum and i over lunch in the lovely room he had talked of everything knowing he'd catch bits of it...i saw him every thursday for about ten weeks, the previous week he was weaker than prev but mentally fully aware, remembered and talked of stuff easily and some of the time just rested whilst i read for the hour i stayed each time...but for all the 6 or 7 prior visits he was fine, wandering around, going downstairs with me to the lunchroom, walking a few hundred yards outside and having a fag... talked of everything from co-op stuff to people to food to iraq war to collective absence of the old brain power and talking together as usual much fun, the room was great, lots of light, he talked with lots of people in the lunchroom and in the hallways whilst endlessly wandering around before he got too weak, made friends there, but even that second to last time, i.e. 8 days before he died, whilst pretty weak and having to stay in bed, he wolfed down my homemade big piece of marzipan covered delia smith christmas cake which i made in three stages her book saying its easy it was bloody difficult and much fun first week soaking all the raisins etc 2nd week making the cake-proper (folding everything in by hand no machines) third week icing and marzipan, made with irish whiskey (not paddys which i do like but used becketts favourite black bush) anyway he gulfed down the piece though he was already week...he really was impressive in how he dealt with everything those last few months, i guess at that level one is also a different person dealing with different facts of life so it was kind of a real lesson, he was so good about it all....out in penge east which i got to know the walk of quite well....anyway, on 17th he died and it was fun spending time with him the last weeks, and he had his dylan basement tapes, wagner's ring, and harry smith folkways collection of music...also had some dowland on radio 3 once when i came in, his room there the last 2 and a half months was a single for himself, really nice, sky, trees, roomy, he even liked the godawful food "chef" made for him (and everyone else) the staff needless to say were wonderful....... in early 70s roger and i ran the coop cinema, together every wednesday or thursday at 4 ish to get the place ready and retype the list of what was showing which always differed from the listing in time/out....cleaned the floors rearranged the mattresses set up the films or brought them in from wherever took the money at the door counted it afterwards on the 31 bus from the roundhouse when we both lived in W 14 more or less....saturdays in 1972 we ran a crèche at the co-op in the afternoons for local kids between 4 and ten years of age making films with an 8mm bolex with zoom these kids were brought in by their mums who thereby got the afternoon free at least from their kids and we had about ten kids making films and each following week or two weeks thereafter showing the results as one sent in the 8mm to kodak and got it back by mail....one four year old girl and one 7 year old boy both actually set out to make films though narrative we didn’t impose co-op ideology completely! they were filming with roger and me on the roof of the old dairy at chalk farm, loveliest kids totally excited by all this, and the mothers would drop them by and in those days totally trusting these two guys to take care of their kids (which we did)....roger and i also travelled to europe, brussels, amsterdam, showing work....in the antwerp markets looked at cloth, he particularly liked fabrics....took photos which he did marvellously all his life, heavy late night moon lit english romantic dark photography traditional fox at night, frogs reflected by moonlight in some water on some marshes godknowswhere, his own enlargements, scribbled on, tinted blue or gold or both, ideosynnchratic.....they’d arrive crumpled in the mail with my address and a stamp on them, ....in the 70's had read his wittgenstein and others, though also conversely had another side very different from my puritanical attempts at rigour which he both liked a lot but it wasn't him...so he had friends who were close to him but not to each other and it allowed him various lives....he was to me marvellously fun to be with and we had unstated understanding of each others thinking and being....once we were filming around chalk farm and i for once (the only time) used a bolex not my arri-s, and walked straight into a lamppost whilst filming (the shot's in upside down feature from 1972....) and i recall his laughter as it exemplified more than just the empirical (which he was a wonderful critic of....)... some of the stuff he wrote at the time more than just jottings, was truly precise, and one we did a little artist’s book/pamphlet called bathtime reading, he had written some hilariously erudite pseudo tristram shandyish notes on something or other and i wrote stern footnotes discussing the scholastic dialectical meanings of each, and together it was quite uproarious, we made ten xerox copies each with a photo polaroid in back of us together sitting in chairs late night at the co-op office and signed and numbered each and gave each other a few and the rest got lost, went the way of all flesh.....but in the hospital about 2 weeks before he died we looked at it again and remembered it, told the social worker at the hospital who dropped in to see how roger was that that was made when we both still had brains....both laughed in memory of long ago laughter....very moving to say the least......

An interview with Roger Hammond by Mark Webber

The following excerpts are from an interview with Roger Hammond that was conducted as part of the research for the Shoot Shoot Shoot project. Roger’s film “Window Box” was included in the Shoot Shoot Shoot touring programme. See www.lux.org.uk/projects/shootshootshoot.html for more details. The interview was originally transcribed by Cassie Yukawa and recently edited into this form by Mark Webber.

RH: Roger Hammond
MW: Mark Webber

MW: How did you first become involved in film and the London Coop?

RH: Well, I was running the university film society at Cambridge and I saw the P. Adams Sitney American avant-garde programmes when he toured in 1968, and I made contact with the Coop after that. John Du Cane was sort of half-contemporary with me there. He was younger saw him around, and I think he took over the film society after me. The society was very rich – it had Bolex cameras and that’s how I first got my hands on equipment and materials. David Larcher used to come up occasionally; he’d left about three or four years earlier. I quit Cambridge after two years and never completed the degree. The first time I went to the Coop, it was in Robert Street. I can’t remember what I saw, but I’ll tell you what impressed me at the time: the Mekas Diaries. I was sort of making very solipsistic diary stuff at first. I started making film only because they’d just got a black and white printer and developer and it was access to that that allowed me to really crack on.

MW: Were there any particular events or moments that you remember from that period?

RH: The most important thing was getting the black and white printer and developer ready, that’s where I hung out most. I think that Malcolm and myself really applied ourselves to getting that going. There was no ‘seminal moment’, I don’t think. I think my seminal moments had gone when I saw the first Sitney programmes. And of course there was Peter Gidal, insisting on rigor because he wouldn’t tolerate any solipsism or sloppy thinking. I think Peter’s probably a solitary figure who actually stands away from it all, he’s just so determined and rigorous and critical.

MW: What about David Larcher? He was certainly quite separate from it all.

RH: Yes, he was separate but he was there. Larcher was a very attractive figure, he really was, you know, ‘freewheeling’. He’d come up with his van and he’d been away making films in public toilets in bars in Scotland and then he’d develop the film in the toilet bowl and stuff like that. It was a sort of mythic thing at that period, extremely attractive. He turned up at the Coop on Prince of Wales Crescent and bashed up a boiler room – he’ll probably die from the asbestos – and somehow he made an editing room and sat there for a summer making Monkey’s Birthday.

MW: Was the Coop really an exclusive group to be part of?

RH: The Coop wasn’t ‘exclusive’, it was just rigorous. But you get characters like David Crosswaite – whose films I find absolutely magical, I think they’re the most seminal works of the whole Coop period. He certainly didn’t engage in the arguments that were going on, he stood aloof from it. In fact he would erode the attempts of this hierarchical thing that were going on, his presence eroded it. He never really engaged with the polemics at all, but nevertheless he produced probably the most seminal work of the whole period. And he certainly wasn’t excluded, and he was always there to deflate this idea of exclusivity. He would just say, “here’s my film” … and yet they are beautifully polemical, they’re just extraordinary pieces of work.

MW: How much were the discussions part of the Coop experience?

RH: It was peripheral, really, there was no party line. It really was a conversation after the screening at the falafel house and that was it. There was no theoretical bashing up at all. There was probably a period where it took itself a little too seriously but like I said, people like Crosswaite just subverted all that. He did a wonderful piece … did you see his film with the dildo? David turned up one day turned up with this film – his new film – and consisted of a dildo stuck on the end of a camera, and this woman being fucked by a dildo, right? So the whole camera angle was subjective and this was an awaited film by David and we were all there and I think that was David’s love letter to our pomposity, I really do. I thought it was a mature piece actually. That was when the place was splitting up, I suppose ’81-82.

MW: Didn’t you perform this rarely seen, extraordinary work by Malcolm Le Grice, called Love Story 3?

RH: I was the original! I was supposed to screw my own image, so first he filmed me naked and I had to mime butt-fucking someone. But you couldn’t see any penile action at all, so I remember he substituted a broom handle or something. I was naked, I had this broom between my legs and I had to mime butt-fucking someone. Then second time around I had to mime being butt-fucked and he filmed that too and projected a shadow … There was the shadow play of the projectors coming together, but in the full piece someone had to mime in live action as well. I think the ‘shadow me’ would come along and butt-fuck the ‘real me’ or the other way round … it was totally mad.

MW: So when did you begin to make films yourself?

RH: I first did some diary films around 1970, and then there was one called Knee High. That was probably the first film I made that had any structure to it but it’s a piece of juvenilia, just a steal from a Michael Snow film really. High Stepping is about the same period, maybe a little earlier.

MW: And what’s going on in that film? I’m sure it must be a lot less sordid than it looks!

RH: It was sort of an Arts Lab thing and I was filming these two people screwing and stuff. I wanted a ‘hot content’, you know …

MW: Did it ever have a soundtrack?

RH: Yes, most of my films have had a soundtrack at some point. For High Stepping I used a Terry Riley piece called “Poppy Nogood’s All Night Flight (The First Ascent)” that came out in that multiple edition SMS box. I think everyone used the SMS tape during that period. It was handed all round, that tape; I remember it frayed to pieces. It wasn’t a steal from Terry Riley, it was a sampling from Terry Riley. It had the same sort of structure as the film. It tried to – not exactly mirror the looping of the image – but it tried to work against the image to distract from allowing the reading of the image. It was sort of … what do you say? … ontologically incorrect … to subvert the image, to subvert the person from identifying and getting too comfortable with the structure of the thing that was working against it.

MW: Which of your films do you think remain the most interesting?

RH: Of mine? … Window Box is a very simple piece, it’s a zoom out of a window. I think it’s a real feedback system on that film. There’s anticipation and you have to correct it, anticipation and you have to correct, and it forms a loop with the viewer. The viewer becomes active in anticipating the next zoom. I think its pretty successful for just a tiny film, it also looks very beautiful. Some Friends and Kerb Drill, I could sort of defend still … and High Stepping … Oh, and Cat Perturbations.

MW: That’s the one with the dog isn’t it? A film I had a lot of trouble with watching was The Ehrlanger Programme …

RH: I think that was made in my most florid theoretical period and that’s probably the period where I deserved to be deflated. I was reading Saussure and Piaget. The film had a pseudo-mathematical structure that I adhered to this rigorously without any element of mistake or improvisation, and I think that’s why it fails. It’s far too didactic and epistemological, it tries to teach you how to see and how to see film, I think that’s why it fails… Some Friends is hard for me to talk about. You might have the same problem as you did with Ehrlanger because it does have a pseudo-mathematical structure to it but that that structure is subverted as it goes along. I was trying to deal with content – a film reality two-dimensionality, and film three-dimensionality. I tried to push the two dimensions together and I used a still image in front of a filmed image so you get the flat dimension of the still image against the film’s dimension. Did you see the Mike Snow piece where he scratched a ball? He uses the depth of the actual film itself. I was trying to do the same thing… the real dimension of the actual layer of the film and showing that against the pseudo-dimension of film depth and trying to bring them together.

Roge6r Hammond Filmography

- Cosmetic, 1970 (8mm)
- Blow The Man Down, 1970, b/w, sound, 4m
- High Stepping, 1970, b/w, silent, 13m (colour filtered print made in 1974)
- Instamatic Series: Reel 1, 1970, b/w & colour, sound, 42m
- Instamatic Series: Reel 2, 1970-71, colour, sound, 30m
- Instamatic Series: Reel 3, 1970-71, b/w & colour, sound, 42m
- Kiss My Box, 1971 (8mm)
- Rose Flavoured Duche, 1971 (8mm)
- Cosmetic, 1971 (8mm)
- Banana Vibrator, 1971 (8mm)
- Peiloctomy, 1971 (8mm)
- Film Trailer, 1971, b/w, sound, 3m
- Kodachrome Superfoeated, 1971, colour, sound, 15m
- Cademe, c.1971, colour, silent, 6m
- Centre, c.1971, colour, silent, 6m
- Window Box, 1971, b/w, silent, 3m
- Knee High, 1971, colour, silent, 6m
- SW3 Garden, 1971 (destroyed)
- "Clockwise" (Accept No Substitute), 1971, colour, sound, 6m
- Venetian Blind and Tap Water, 1972, b/w, silent, 3m
- The Ehrlanger Programme, 1972, colour, sound, 29m
- Some Latitudes / Paralysed, 1972, colour, silent, 26m
- Film Strips, 1973, b/w, silent, 12m
- Slamming Door, 1973, b/w, silent, 8m
- Diagram Retrieval, 1973, colour, sound, 7m
- Cat Peturbations, 1973, b/w, silent, 10m
- Cause of Death, 1973, b/w, sound, 10m
- Audition-Phonation, 1973 (destroyed)
- Some Friends, 1973, colour, silent, 20m
- Kerb Drill, 1974, b/w, sound, 6m
- The Pelagian Heresy, 1974, 20m (destroyed)
- Counting, 1976 (lost)
- Dido In One Act, 1976, b/w & colour, sound-on-tape, 30m

Selected films by Roger Hammond are available for hire from LUX.