Annabel Nicolson Slides, 1970, colour, silent, 11 mins (18fps)

To mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the London Filmmaker Co-operative (on 13th October 1966) and the launch of a new LUX/Re-Voir DVD ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s & 1970s’ LUX presents a new touring programme of key British experimental films from the 60s and 70s curated by Mark Webber.

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Tour | Programme Contents | Pricing and technical details | Programme introduction | Detailed programme notes | DVD

Tour Dates and Venues

10, 11 November 2006, Tate Modern, London www.tate.org.uk/modern
3 February 2007, Mac, Birmingham www.macarts.co.uk
29 March 2007, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow www.transmissiongallery.org
25 April 2007, European Media Art Festival, Osnabrueck, Germany www.emaf.de
29 May 2007, Broadway Cinema and Media Centre, Nottingham www.broadway.org.uk (programme 2 only)
13-14 June 2007, Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, Bruxelles, Belgium www.ledoux.be
25-30 September 2007, 25 FPS International Short Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zagreb, Croatia www.25fps.hr
16 October 2007, Cinema Project, Portland, USA www.cinemaproject.org
27 October 2007, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, USA www.pghfilmmakers.org
8-9 November 2007, Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, USA www.vsw.org
24-25 November 2007, Cinematheque Ontario, Canada www.cinemathequeontario.ca
29 January & 5 February 2008, Union Theatre, Milwaukee USA www.aux.uwm.edu/Union/events/theatre
4 & 11 March 2008, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, USA www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/
2 & 16 march 2008, Los Angeles Filmforum, Los Angeles, USA www.lafilmforum.org/

Programme Contents

SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT 1
Annabel Nicolson, Slides, 1970, colour, silent, 11 mins (18fps)
Guy Sherwin, At the Academy, 1974, b/w, sound, 5 mins
Mike Leggett, Shepherd’s Bush, 1971, b/w, sound, 15 mins
David Crosswaite, Film No. 1, 1971, colour, sound, 10 mins
Lis Rhodes, Dresden Dynamo, 1971, colour, sound, 5 mins
Chris Garratt, Versailles I & II, 1976, b/w, sound, 11 mins
Mike Dunford, Silver Surfer, 1972, b/w, sound, 15 mins
Marilyn Halford, Footsteps, 1974, b/w, sound, 6 mins

SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT 2
Malcolm Le Grice, Threshold, 1972, colour, sound, 10 mins
Chris Welsby, Seven Days, 1974, colour, sound, 20 mins
Peter Gidal, Key, 1968, colour, sound, 10 mins
Stephen Dwoskin, Moment, 1968, colour, sound, 12 mins
Gill Eatherley, Deck, 1971, colour, sound, 13 mins
William Raban, Colours of this Time, 1972, colour, silent, 3 mins
John Smith, Associations, 1975, colour, sound, 7 mins

Pricing and Technical Details
UK screenings - £150 (for the two programmes) or £100 individually
International screenings - £200 (for the two programmes) or £120 individually

Prices exclude VAT and shipping

An additional expanded cinema programme can be organised to supplement the package at the request of any interested venues. The curator may be available to present the programmes subject to negotiation.

Programmes are on 16mm and are supplied ready-spooled up.

Press materials and previews are available.

John Smith Associations, 1975, colour, sound, 7 mins

Programme Introduction
The 1960s and 1970s were groundbreaking decades in which independent filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organisation that enabled filmmakers to control every aspect of the creative process. LFMC members conducted an investigation of celluloid that echoed contemporary developments in painting and sculpture. During this same period, British filmmakers also made significant innovations in the field of ‘expanded cinema’, creating multi-screen projections, film environments and live performance pieces.

The physical production of a film (its printing and processing) became integral to its form and content as Malcolm Le Grice, Lis Rhodes, Peter Gidal and others explored the material and mechanics of cinema, making radical new works that contributed to a new visual language. The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, which was established on 13th October 1966, grew from a film society at the heart of London’s sixties counterculture to become Europe’s largest distributor of experimental cinema and was recognised internationally as a major centre for avant-garde film.

“Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative & British Avant-Garde Film 1966-76” was a major research and exhibition project that toured worldwide from 2002-04. The original 8 programme package of single screen films, multiple projection works and expanded cinema performances that was shown at 19 venues including London Tate Modern, Gateshead Baltic, Basel Kunsthalle, Barcelona Fundaçio Antoní Tapies, Athens Desté Foundation, Tokyo Image Forum and the Melbourne International Film Festival.

This new package is being made available on the 40th anniversary of the LFMC to support the release of the DVD “Shoot Shoot Shoot: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s & 1970s” in Autumn 2006. The two programmes contain several films that are not on the DVD and some which were not included in the original tour.

“Shoot Shoot Shoot” is a LUX project. Curated by Mark Webber.

Detailed Programme Notes

Shoot Shoot Shoot: Programme 1
The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative was established in 1966 to support work on the margins of art and cinema. It uniquely incorporated three related activities within a single organisation – a workshop for producing new films, a distribution arm for promoting them, and its own cinema space for screenings. In this environment, Co-op members were free to explore the medium and control every stage of the process. The Materialist tendency characterised the hardcore of British filmmaking in the early 1970s. Distinguished from Structural Film, these works were primarily concerned with duration and the raw physicality of the celluloid strip.

Annabel Nicolson
Slides, 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)

Guy Sherwin
At the Academy, 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)

Mike Leggett
Shepherd’s Bush, 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)

David Crosswaite
Film No. 1, 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)

Lis Rhodes
Dresden Dynamo, 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)

Chris Garratt
Versailles I & II, 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)

Mike Dunford
Silver Surfer, 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)

Marilyn Halford
Footsteps, 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)

Shoot Shoot Shoot: Programme 2
The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video in which avant-garde filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, an artist-led organisation that incorporated a distribution office, projection space and film workshop. Despite the workshop’s central role in production, not all the work derives from experimentation in printing and processing. Filmmakers also used language, landscape and the human body to create less abstract works that still explore the essential properties of the film medium.

Malcolm Le Grice
Threshold, 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)

Chris Welsby
Seven Days, 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)

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

Stephen Dwoskin
Moment, 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)

Gill Eatherley
Deck, 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)

William Raban
Colours of this Time, 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)

John Smith
Associations, 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)

DVD
AVAILABLE NOW: “Shoot Shoot Shoot: British Avant-Garde Film of the 1960s & 1970s”. Features 13 films from the defining era of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, artists include Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice, Annabel Nicolson, Lis Rhodes and Guy Sherwin. This PAL format, region free DVD contains a 48 page bilingual English/French booklet, and is co-published by LUX and Re:Voir.
The DVD is available from the LUX Shop www.lux.org.uk/shop/video.htm