How to describe Malcolm Le Grice, who has died aged 84, and who leaves a highly significant body of work and art and countercultural legacy in his wake? When any friend and/or member of a community dies, the loss can be hard to make sense of. Memories zoom in and out of focus, bringing on a form of vertigo.
In 1998, Le Grice made a deeply evocative, highly worked, surprisingly gothic experimental video called Even the Cyclops Pays the Ferryman, about his father who had then recently died. His dad had just one eye, yet most people assumed the title was about film and video, the single eye – the camera that takes in light and in turn puts our lens upon the world.
Even the Cyclops Pays the Ferryman wasn’t really about light, however, more darkness, and fire, a surprising reference to end points and cycles, of a phoenix like re-birth, at once accepted yet laced with a resistance, or trauma, and a reference to the anti-narrative shapes he had already pursued over the last 30 years, and which he continued to practice.
Layers of superimposition puncture the open darkness of the cinema frame, sometimes crossing the threshold of the aspect ratio, breaking out of the letterbox top and bottom as a way of changing, challenging, the frame of reference – the mode of containment. Abrasive thunder and lightning peel through the work as if marking the passing of time in ways more existential than modernist. The piece is haunted and haunting.
Despite being made more than 25 years ago, many now consider Cyclops a ‘late work’. Le Grice had already done so much. More than 70 films were made in nearly 60 years, with these dispersed across numerous international cinema organisations and art museums, including the BFI National Archive – which holds all his original cut negatives, along with several restorations – and Tate.
Yet he was also a campaigner and an educator, introducing and pushing the notion that film might be considered a fine art alongside painting and sculpture. He taught the first ever film course in an art college context, as far back as 1965, at St Martins College of Art, and wrote regularly about developments and events in a regular art magazine column in the 1970s, seeking to take cinema away from the literary, theatrical traditions it had been lumbered with since the advent of sound in the 1920s.
His first proper film work was the two-screen 8mm projection China Tea, about both serving the drink and the material of the teacups. What might have been a drawing or painting study was transposed to film and highlighted framing and the passing of time, and hence ritual and repetition. Drawing on vanguard ideas in contemporary art and first practicing as both jazz improviser and painter, he quickly generated radical new ways to think about filmmaking, from the mid-1960s onwards. Performance, musicality, the experiential qualities of colour all fed in by way of the London counterculture and underground film screenings in DIY, flexible spaces.
Very often, through the late 1960s and into the mid-1970s, he’d work on found material: 16mm strips of film, literally found in the dustbins of Soho. Imposing colour fields, loops, early computer animation and extensive superimposition, he sought to simultaneously highlight the codes of moving image language while embracing ideas drawn from the ‘junk art’ of Robert Rauschenberg and the burgeoning field of cybernetics.
Channeling nuclear war paranoia and new thinking about subliminal imagery and control, which he then inverted, he presented some of these works under the series title How to Screw the CIA at the era-defining 1970 International Underground Film Festival at the National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank). Multi-projection work, a practice developed at the Arts Lab, kept these works continually alive and in the present, but also uncanny, eerie and out of time too.
He could be at once showman and magician – words distinctly out of keeping with the time but which evoke at least something of the presence and feel of extraordinary performance pieces Horror Film (1971) and Joseph’s Coat (1973), even with their seriousness of intent. There was a sense of things being revealed, the guts of cinema and art being reformulated, just as he attempted to break things down and demystify their underlying structures in the pursuit of a radical, genuinely exploratory, experimental film practice.
His film studies staple Berlin Horse (1970) considered these notions and looked at change and dissonance within a repeating, if elliptical, structure. It also included a unique experimental score provided by Brian Eno, then exploring similar, post-John Cage, post-serial composition motives but through music and magnetic tape. As with many other works, Berlin Horse could be experienced single-screen; double-screen; however many screens you want.
An erudite thinker and writer, and a painter, but ultimately a filmmaker, Le Grice used the passage of time and the act of playback to elucidate concerns and formal ruptures in traditional filmmaker aesthetics and language construction. Nevertheless, there were phases, changes in mood, mode and approach. It’s odd to consider his work in retrospect. All too often his films really came into being at the point of projection, or “the project event” as he called it in his seminal, oppositional, 1972 essay ‘Real TIME/SPACE’.
Le Grice shared minimalist, conceptual preoccupations with other artists yet his work remained fiercely grounded in craft, using unique, custom-made film printing equipment at specialist, alternative film centre, the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, which he helped to shape as a leading figure and campaigner for the field, going on to extract supporting funds from the BFI. His influence at the BFI extended to sitting on the board of the BFI Production Board (a precursor to the current Filmmaking Fund), viscerally challenging long-standing industry veterans to overhaul their thinking.
He was at once outspoken yet stoic; warm yet busy with thought. His move from formalist, anti-narrative, yet poetic 16mm filmmaking, to more overtly expressionistic, even diaristic video fractured assumptions about his work, and maybe even his own ideas, bringing change and development. Symbolism suddenly assumed more significance as he moved to consider memory and the passing of time far beyond ‘the projection event’.
It turns out he wasn’t against ‘spectacle’ per se – as I discovered once during a Q&A – just the heavily pro-normative, stultifying strictures of literary-based narrative. Colour, direct manipulation of material, lyricism, and raw experience: these all excited and preoccupied him and he continued to make and show work until virtually the very end. Across his life, he made shadow performances; multi-screen work; 3D films; features – see the excellent Black Bird Descending (1977); portraits; and diary videos.
His was, and remains, an imagistic practice, a practice predicated on engaging, sometimes challenging, the audience, while simultaneously exploring ideas, and asking questions. He helped so many other filmmakers and belonged to a far larger economy and ecosystem of practice that continues to this day. He would, I’m sure, urge you to experience these other works too.
