Le Grice, Malcolm,
Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age.
London: British Film Institute, 2001.
ISBN 0 85170 873 0
484pp
UK£7.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing)

Uploaded 20 September 2002

In Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, Malcolm Le Grice is sparing in his use of the term “new media”. For me, this wins undying gratitude, and in this revealing and thorough book there is much else to challenge such tropes associated with the tools of expression and communication. His engagement with the institutions of cinema and the visual arts has infected many others over the years but he is far from obsessive about the “features” that media technologies, new or old, can offer to the “creative” person. He is intent upon re-examining the exchanges that occur, the economy that can exist, in the spaces that we call the filmic or cinematic experience.

Throughout a production period from the early 60s to the present, as a film-maker, television program maker and painter, Le Grice has kept a track of his thoughts and expressed them through a series of published articles and an earlier book (Abstract Film and Beyond 1976) [1] . Collected together for the first time, the articles provide access to a series of discourses that excited and stimulated, for many of us, the production of a group of films which, eventually, became known more widely as structural materialist. This term however risks misleading audiences: structure, structural, structuralism and material, materialist and materialism are all terms used by engineers, script-writers, anthropologists and philosophers and are irrelevant to its use in this context, though convergence of meanings and uses, often encouraged by various authors, have been temptingly apt – hence the misleading usages.

The discourse this work produced was not based on criticism but the polemics concerning film. Thoughts into action was the rhetoric put into practice by the group in the face of a film and cinema industry run by Hollywood, television dominated by ratings and a gallery culture still coming to terms with the “conceptual and art”.

Le Grice was able to maintain a sense of investigation, an air of the provisional. The articles he produced during this time fed the minds of the magazine and journal readers in publications including Studio International, Art & Artists, Afterimage, Millenium Film Journal, Undercut, Time Out, Screen, Screen Education, along with those of fellow film-makers at the Co-op and elsewhere, in the USA, Europe and Australia. The common intention was the pursuit of a rational creative process separated from narrative form, at best, and Hollywood melodrama, at worst. The articles on film appeared between 1970 and 1980 – most are re-printed here with only minor editing, providing the background that progresses towards the major summarising article, “Towards temporal economy”. It was

…an ambitious attempt to synthesise a range of concepts and ideas at the same time promoting the debate about experimental film practice among the – largely hostile – critical academics then in the ascendancy within the British Film Institute and Screen. (“Introduction” p.7 )
Fittingly it was published by Screen in 1980.

Almost by habit now I begin an article with a health warning. The reader should know that firstly I am a film, video and digital artist. My theoretical work is almost completely based on the issues I have encountered in analysing my work and understanding its relationship to other artists, culture, technology and society. (Chapter 24, p.297)

Written in the first person, the anthology of essays, (with one excerpt from his previous book), are organised by theme, (History, On Other Artists, Debates, General Theory) and therefore places material out of chronology for those wishing to follow the processes that make up the ontological whole. With effort, this can be reconstructed using several pre-chapter sections -there is also a full index. The last section (Digital Media) will aid the following of the essential lines of the issues that were established before the early 80s. From this point, the character of the presentation changes. Speculation and analysis are eclipsed by reiteration and summation. This is by no means negative but becomes a more pedagogic approach that enables different entries to the discourse.

My own assessment of the period, the films and the polemics, on paper and in person, is that whilst it was the institution of cinema that was addressed, the strategies (theorised but unplanned) emerged from the modernist project of Twentieth Century visual artists described by Le Grice. The traditional cinema audience were unprepared for the importation of rigorous and reductive codes, an experience and education which was largely eclipsed by the significant simultaneous development and establishment in the tertiary sector of courses in cinema history and media studies. The long running arguments with Screen are referred to in Le Grice’s excellent Introduction.

The traditional visual arts audience, though engaged, further confused wider acceptance of the work by celebrating a (false) appearance coinciding with the “minimalist” visual art aesthetic of the time, together with a reluctance by gallery spaces to manage the different demands of time-based and technology presented work. In short, the polemics and much of the work arising from an ontological project beginning back in the 20s, for much of the time was hung out to dry between the two cultural pillars. Only recently has it been re-appraised by a new generation less provoked by the contemporary media landscape but more attuned to the transparency of the apparatus, helping to develop some level of wider acceptance of the hybrid and cross-disciplinary artform.

Beginning a three year world tour, several of Le Grice’s films and expanded cinema performances were screened at the Brisbane International Film Festival in July 2002 (Melbourne in the following week) as part of the Shoot Shoot Shoot retrospective of eight programs of films made at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op between 1966-76. Whilst the ample newsprint catalogue provided a mass of contextual material, this could only hint at the rationale, the polemics, the theoretical substructure of the work that Le Grice’s book addresses so whole-heartedly.

Mike Leggett

Endnotes:

[1] Le Grice, Malcolm, Abstract Film and Beyond. Studio Vista 1977 (Also MIT Press 1977; MIT Press paperback ed.1981)