Malcolm Le Grice (1940-2024)

An expanded film piece, where the film is interrupted by random flashes from a light bulb which is hung in front of the screen. 

I don’t like to think of an audience in the mass, but of the individual observer and his behavior. What he goes through while he watches, is what the film is about. (Malcolm Le Grice)

Castle One combines found footage gathered from bins outside Soho’s film labs and a solitary light bulb suspended directly in front of the screen itself. At intermittent points during the film, the light bulb is switched on, obliterating the projected image and illuminating the space around it. Inspired by the writing of Franz Kafka (the title refers to Kafka’s novel Castle), and the painting/​installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Castle One produces an alienating effect upon the audience, provoking in them an awareness of the cinema space and a feeling of distance from the projected image. (James Harding)

“I certainly thought Castle One was the most powerful film I’d seen, ever…” (Peter Gidal)

Berlin Horse assembles a poetic carousel of images which overlap and transform into a brightly colored finale of two sequences — one of a horse running in circles, being exercised in a village near Hamburg, the other an early Edison newsreel of horses being led from a burning stable. Both were visually transformed and colored on the printer at the London Film Makers Cooperative. The music was made for the film by Brian Eno who at the time was exploring, in sound, a similar use of loops.

The first part is made from a small section of film shot by me in 8mm color, and later re-filmed in various ways from the screen in 16mm black and white. The second part is made by treating the black and white newsreel – The Burning Stable (1896) – in the same way.

There was no initial plan to the work – it developed as I responded to the processes of transformation – rather in the manner of a Jazz improvisation on a theme. It is a kind of visual poetic drama. (Malcolm Le Grice)

“A color-poem of immense lyricism” (Michael O’Pray)

There exists a single-screen and a lesser-shown two-screen version of the film. In its expanded form, the second screen has a black and white version of the film, stressing the color transformations for the viewer and highlighting the color print process that has taken place.

A picnic staged and shot in one day with four performers who also shoot the film with four cameras. The film is then projected from four projectors creating a developing comparison between the actions of the protagonists. (Malcolm Le Grice)

Filmed on four cameras, Le Grice had each camera operated by one of the actors appearing in the film: Annabel Nicolson, Gill Eatherley, William Raban and Le Grice himself. The artist becomes a performer and the performers become stakeholders in creating the final piece. This playful film is partly a record of a performance, documenting a lunch on the grass, after Manet’s famous painting of 1863, and the Giorgione/​Titian 1509 painting before that.

There is a set of rules and a prearranged sequence of color, black and white, negative and positive film. Each camera had sixteen 100-foot rolls of 16mm film in boxes which were taped together in a column in the order they were to be used. (Nicky Hamlyn)

After Manet was exhibited at the Festival of Expanded Cinema at the ICA in London in 1976 and subsequently at Tate Modern’s exhibition ​‘A Century of Artists’ Films’ in 2003/4.