Four Films by Malcolm Le Grice (Patreon)

For a good long while, the films of the British structuralists were seldom seen, in part because of their bad reputation. There are various reasons for this, among them national chauvinism as well as a broader backlash against formalist experimentation, as a different ethos (part punk, part Godardian) became momentarily dominant in avant-garde circles. 

But the most common rap against British structuralism was that it was a theory-first, aesthetics-second kind of practice. This perception was largely due to the fact that Peter Gidal (an American émigré, incidentally) became a de facto figurehead for the "movement." His Marxist-Lacanian treatises were widely lambasted in the academy and among other filmmakers. (Brakhage was particularly unkind.) And while Gidal could seem strident, his films were often interesting, a combination of Warholian duration and Eno-style ambiance, describing spaces and events by merely suggesting they were there, teasing the viewer with illusionism in order to thwart it.

Fortunately, the restoration work of the BFI, and the promotion of these films by Mark Webber, particularly in his "Shoot Shoot Shoot" program, have brought this work back into the conversation. And this allows us to disarticulate the "British structuralism" monolith. We can now see just how different most of these filmmakers actually were. Gidal's films often focused on eliminating event(s) in favor of an all-over texture. By contrast, Malcolm Le Grice's work was driven by a different set of concerns, mostly having to do with the establishment of illusionism as merely one thing that cinema could do, among many others that were just as compelling. 

Many of his films either begin with recognizable imagery and deform it, or start out on a purely abstract plane and gradually let pictorial content back in. Not only did this provide the chance for viewers to consider the cognitive processes through which we impute "reality" to a set of flat photographic traces. It also connected structural film's minimalist impulses with earlier forms of artistic rhetoric. The suggestion of imagery in Le Grice is sometimes pointillist, often Cézannean, but always working in the gap between high modernist perception and minimalist surface effect. 

Although most all of the U.K. experimental filmmakers of the 70s and 80s are worthy of rediscovery and reappraisal, it seems clear to me that two of them, Le Grice and Lis Rhodes, are the most important, and I still have a lot of catching up to do.

Spot the Microdot (1969)

At first Spot the Microdot appears to be Le Grice's simplest film. It starts out as a fairly conventional flicker film, comprised of black leader into which the filmmaker has punched holes at various intervals, producing a bright white circle. The thrum on the soundtrack, generated by the presence or absence of information on the optical strip, resembles a tamer version of Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer. But Le Grice is just getting started.

About three minutes in, Spot the Microdot begins filling the punch-holes with colored gels or colored leader (hard to tell which), resulting in red and green circles replacing the white ones. This alone would not be so exceptional, since it reads like a less adventurous Paul Sharits experiment. But then, Le Grice cuts in forest green leader along with the black, and the holes are filled with different kinds of material. Some of it comes from a strip of photographic imagery, featuring a tree in a landscape. But at other times, Le Grice uses the empty space as a peephole through which we can see parts of another filmstrip -- frame lines, sprocket holes, and the like. 

So Spot the Microdot opens up a process that is at first merely digital (dark/light, presence/absence), and then evolves into a wider set of options, the hole becoming a free zone for considering illusionism itself, as well as the materiality of the filmstrip. Le Grice's structuralism isn't a closed system, but one that earns its meaning through difference. It's worth mentioning, of course, that a microdot is a method of transmitting secret messages among spies, in which a full text message is reduced to the size of a typical period / full stop. Microdots must be read through special magnifiers, which could also be said of the images on a strip of film.

Yes No Maybe Maybe Not (1967)

This early effort is one of Le Grice's least interesting films, in part because it tends to do one thing and one thing only. Using double projection, Le Grice shows positive and negative versions of the same images. But he also bi-packs the projectors, so that positives and negatives are sandwiched atop one another, producing a vibrating penumbra around the image. The single shot that appears most often in YNMMN is an ocean wave rushing against a concrete seawall, and it's clear Le Grice thinks of the water as a way to play on the edge of figuration and pure abstract form. (The title similarly suggests this uncertainty.) However, once the film's primary point has been articulated, there's not much left for it to do.

Little Dog For Roger (1967)

This is a film that presages some of the performative elements that Ken Jacobs will undertake while making Tom, Tom the Piper's Son, using a particular length of film in order to show the strip racing across the screen, its illusion of movement frequently halted to display the edges and the sprocket holes. Le Grice uses optical printing to bring us sometimes closer, sometimes further away from the image, which goes in and out of focus, often appearing to be a "picture" of pure, abstract velocity. The soundtrack is odd: mostly scratching and thumping, with intrusions of a show tune from the 1950s. Le Grice seems to imply that nostalgia is itself a quantifiable effect. The fact that Little Dog is made up of his own family's home movies (Le Grice and his mother are partially visible, and the dog was his) is of as much consequence as the viewer chooses to make it. 

Threshold (1972)

The most complex of Le Grice's short films I've seen, Threshold is openly Sharits-like, although Le Grice layers a number of different effects into the film, some of which collide and interfere with one another. At the start, Threshold consists of bright red and green leader, alternating at a medium pace. What's notable about this opening section is that the frames are so saturated with piercing neon color that they are a bit painful for the eye to observe. Gradually, Le Grice obviates this assault by blacking out large portions of the middle of the frame. (It looks as though the filmmaker is moving his cupped hand in front of the optical printer, dodging and burning the final image.) The title, Threshold, seems to be a pun, since the film is about relations between the center and the edges of the frame (the threshold of cinematic space), and the human eye's capacity to look at some things and not others. But there is a further paradox at work here. The less there is to see in Threshold, the more we are able to engage with it. So Le Grice reverses the terms of both conventional film (which demands a spectacle) and avant-garde film (which is usually about taxing the eye with pure form). Instead, Le Grice has made a chamber work that is primarily composed of rests.

All of the Le Grice films I've mentioned here can be viewed on Ubuweb.