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Hommage / February 27, 2025

FAREWELL MALCOLM

Letter to Malcolm Le Grice (1940-2024) by yann beauvais

Malcolm

I’ll have to go on without you, which will not be easy, as you have indirectly accompanied my work since I first began making films, before we worked together on exhibitions that I would organize, as well as a book of your writings translated into French for the first time.

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered your work, or Berlin Horse in particular. I can’t recall if it was on February 27th, 1975, at "Une Histoire du Cinéma" at Centre Berrier, which hosted this Centre Pompidou exhibition before the center opened, or was it at the Robert Fripp and Brian Eno concert on May 28th, 1975, at the Olympia, where this film was looped accompanying certain songs. The use of the film with two distinct Brian Eno soundtracks – one on the optical track, and thus identical at every screening, the other played live with a second musician – turned live projection into a singular experience, which you would inflect in many ways according to the modalities of expanded cinema. This film's preeminence has often masked, at least in France, your previous works, such as Castle One, Little Dog For Roger, Talla or Castle Two.

The publication of your book Abstract Film and Beyond in 1977 was the subject of a review in Melba magazine, which I agreed to write. Your writing seemed far removed from the dominant theoretical trends, despite the translation of a few short texts on your films in a previous issue of the magazine. What became apparent in reading your book was that another history of experimental cinema could be imagined, casting doubt on P. Adams Sitney’s apriori views on structural cinema. Among other things, you and Peter Gidal rejected certain modalities that privileged the time of reception in the experience of film, beyond the simple processing of the images that make up this event: the event of the real space-time of projection – an immediate and tangible access point for the audience – must be thought of as a terrain of experience in which any recording, reference or retrospective process must be acknowledged by the viewer. This went against the status quo of cinematographic language, which turns the real space-time of projection into one aspect of a manipulated retrospective "reality"1. This production of an expanded time thus leads to an expanded cinema in its British acceptation: a cinema in the present tense, where the production and the presentation of a film come together in the same temporal framework2.

The particularity of your early work was to have prioritized an equivalence between production and presentation times, thus departing from the dominant illusionist usage. This critique of illusionism distinguished your cinema (the structural/materialist film) from American structural cinema, inscribing it into a materialist dimension at every stage of production: filming, processing, printing and screening. The times shown were that of the film, not of the events in the film.

This is how films, installations and performances left their mark on your practice, as in Castle One (1966), with its electric lightbulb blinking randomly in front of the screen as it dissolves momentarily the projected image, just as the soundtrack, with its many repetitions that do not necessarily correspond to the image, creates discrepancies in the perception of such an experience in the present moment; or Horror Film 1 (1971), in which your naked body interacts with the light beams and frames of the three projectors; or even, in a more complex way, in After Leonardo (1973) with its various versions that mix and combine different recording times.

It must have been through Rose Lowder that we were able to get several of your films early on for distribution at Light Cone, in the early '80s. We then met in London. I especially remember a very funny lunch at your place (in Dorset, with P. Adams Sitney, Rose Lowder and me), where I discovered a bon vivant who welcomed us with great kindness. A little later I came to show my work in your class at Saint Martins. Maybe that's when you asked me if we could help your daughter who was planning to spend some time in Paris. After that, we exchanged more by mail than directly, despite several encounters at festivals in various countries where you presented your work and where I had curated programs or showed some of my own films. At one of these meetings, I wished to organize a retrospective of your work in France, which seemed to be the only European country not to have done so. Alas, other priorities always got in the way, and over the years I became discouraged, until a double opportunity presented itself: an exhibition bringing together your whole body of work, from the films and installations of the ‘60s and ‘70s to the videos and digital works that had become your new tool in a logical continuation of the experiments of the ‘70s… For you, there was no betrayal in turning to new technologies. In fact, you have demonstrated this both in the works themselves and in your numerous writings, which were brought together in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age3 (2001) – whether you were speaking of working with the medium’s materiality, the duration of the cinematographic experience, or exhibition apparatuses, all contributed to challenging the ideological work of entertainment cinema by developing the film medium as a space where cinematographic thought arises, rather than as a means of expressing literary ideas4.

These questions were not confined to cinema alone, but spilled over into, contaminated, irrigated other fields of practice, such as drawing, music, video and digital art, through investigations into the processes and components of these media. As early as the '70s, you began to take an interest in digital video (Your Lips 3, 1971), but you found that these formats were still tedious and inefficient at that time, so you came back to them only a few years later. It wasn’t until the mid-‘80s, with Arbitrary Logic (1984-86), after a detour into longer and more narrative works (Blackbird Descending, 1981; Emily – Third Party Speculation, 1979; Finnegans Chin, 1981), that you would radically renew your work. In the ‘90s, you used sequences of film journals and portraits, introducing a poetic and lyrical dimension that had previously been overlooked. This is also when you returned to expanded cinema, reviving works such as After Manet (four screens showing four points of view of four protagonists picnicking in a park, like in Manet’s painting) or Chronos Fragmented (1995), an imposing work that interweaves filmed sequences arranged in relation to the war in Bosnia, which focuses simultaneously on the human and the planetary dimensions and the consequences of such a conflict. The richness of the chromatic palette and the multiplication of frames give this film both the appearance of a recapitulation and an opening onto an elsewhere in the practice of flux and the moving image. We will surely recall Travelling with Mark (2003), which worked with digital manipulations through the mosaic coding of video sequences filmed during a train journey with Mark Webber. The transformations are slow, recolored and placed in perspective against landscapes that merge or appear as fragments. The film fresco (three screens) found in numerous works of this period (Cherry, 2003; After Monet Water Lilies, 2008), is imposed and renewed in Finiti (2011), one of the first installations of which we presented at the Gantner space in the exhibition I organized around your work.

These explorations of the digital tool expressed themselves in – or alimented – a formidable critical commentary, which you compiled mainly in Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age. This collection of texts shows us both the persistence of questions regarding media and the relationship, one might even say filiation, between experimental cinema and digital cinema, echoing in many aspects a later text by Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media5. In this book, you put in perspective your research and experimentation with various media – film, computer, video and the digital image – which you had been working on since the ‘70s in order to go beyond painting, demonstrating the ways in which each medium’s specificity was essential to you: from Computer Film as Film Art (1974) to A Non-Linear Tradition – Experimental Film and Digital Cinema (1997), without forgetting Real TIME/SPACE (1972)6. A more personal dimension and a certain lyricism burst forth in works made from the mid-‘90s onwards, strangely blurring the distance between your cinema and that of Stan Brakhage, all the while avoiding a plunge into subjectivism.

The experimentation at the core of your practice showed itself early on through your association with the Arts Lab, where, together with David Curtis, you founded a filmmaking workshop that allowed to hand-process and strike 16mm prints. In 1968, this lab merged with the London Film-makers’ Co-op, where you designed and installed a laboratory that would become one of the driving forces behind experimental production in London. Your commitment to experimental cinema also extended to your teaching at Saint Martins and Goldsmiths College.

Your musical practice should also be mentioned, as well as drawing and painting, which you continued alongside your filmmaking activities. But above all, we should remember the warmth and generosity you showed to the younger artists you met over the years. One of my last memories of you is the lecture in Recife during the exhibition that Edson Barrus Atikum and I had organized at the Bcubico space. I remember the exhanges you had with everyone, stimulating a wide audience to discover other ways to think or act cinema, whatever its medium.

Thank you Malcolm

yann beauvais, February 25, 2025

1. Malcolm Le Grice, "Real Time/Space", Art and Artist, December 1972, p. 156.
2. William Raban, "Reflexivity and Expanded Cinema : A Cinema of Transgression?", in Expanded Cinema, Art Performance Film edited by Al Rees, Duncan White, Steven Ball et David Curtis, Tate Publishing, London, 2011.
3. Published by the BFI in London in 2001, and translated in part in Le Temps des images, écrits de Malcolm LeGrice, edited by yann beauvais, Les Presses du réel/ Espace Multimédia Gantner, 2015.
4. Edward S. Small, Direct Theory Experimental Film / Video as Major Genre, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, p. 85.
5. The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001.
6. A French translation of these texts can be found in Malcolm Le Grice, Le Temps des images, écrits de Malcolm LeGrice, edited by yann beauvais, Les Presses du réel/ Espace Multimédia Gantner, 2015.