Peter Gidal

Peter Gidal’s starting point for his 16mm film was a soundtrack that consists of three lines from a 1,000 word story written by Gidal in 1971, read by William Burroughs.

Includes 'portraits' of Marianne Faithfull, Thelonious Monk and 28 others, some known, some less so.

Clouds 1969 by the British filmmaker Peter Gidal is a film comprised of ten minutes of looped footage of the sky, shot with a handheld camera using a zoom to achieve close-up images. Aside from the amorphous shapes of the clouds, the only forms to appear in the film are an aeroplane flying overhead and the side of a building, and these only as fleeting glimpses. The formless image of the sky and the repetition of the footage on a loop prevent any clear narrative development within the film. The minimal soundtrack consists of a sustained oscillating sine wave, consistently audible throughout the film without progression or climax. The work is shown as a projection and was not produced in an edition. The subject of the film can be said to be the material qualities of film itself: the grain, the light, the shadow and inconsistencies in the print.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Volcano, half hour, silent, shot on 16mm on a volcano in Hawaii, the film attempts to deal with those questions of representation that persist as problematic, for me, for the basic questions of aesthetics, what it is to view, how to view the unknown as to view the known is not possibly a viewing. The question of recognition, the impossibility of recognition or, better said, the impossibility o f a viewer viewing at all if it is predicated up on recognition... at that moment, you the viewer I the viewer am no longer part of a process, a material however metaphysical or not process of making meaning through the conflicts of perception of something...

Gidal describes the film’s ‘so-called imagery’ as ‘a complex of barely visible cuts in space and time, the opposite of erasure, but nothing so much as visible’

Objects in the world given luminousness, light, are here less apprehensible to knowledge than that which has less light.

Peter Gidal’s starting point for his 16mm film was a soundtrack that consists of three lines from a 1,000 word story written by Gidal in 1971, read by William Burroughs. Gidal describes the film’s ‘so-called imagery’ as ‘a complex of barely visible cuts in space and time, the opposite of erasure, but nothing so much as visible’.

The practice of Structural/Materialist Film is defined in...process, construction, displaced reflexively...not displaced uniformly into the pattern of a narrative bound up for the stable subject-centred image. Structural/Materialist film has no place for the look, ceaselessly displaced, outphased, a problem of seeing, it is anti-voyeuristic.

"This film is a consequent continuation and contraction of my film work, research which began with Room (1967). The film is not a translation of anything, it is not a representation of anything, not even of consciousness."

Structuralist film collage consisting of 8mm film "notes" printed directly on 16mm stock. The images include people and landscapes and the technical difference between the two film formats are emphasised by the presence of perforations, Kodak company marking, spacing, and leader.

The film deals with levels of reproduction. The repetitious camera movements over successive photographs are intended to function as distancing devices relatable to mechanical repetitions such as film loops. The 'subject' of the film is the material operation or, rather, it is a film in its own right and an explication of the mechanisms and technique inherent in its making. It is not a documentary of those mechanisms and techniques. Film as anonymous production, wherein (exhaustively) certain techniques are utilized, does combat with film that represents the (absent) subject, the filmmaker (forever repressed ever-present, ever-represented). Film as presentation, not re-presentation.

Early short by Peter Gidal.

A film by Peter Gidal

Loop ended up being a film that also 'ended' Upside Down Feature (1967-72) and was a negative upside down portrait as well....in negative, the person moving, or blinking, or smiling, or not smiling, become gestures distanced whilst simultaneously apprehendable perceptually...a kind of conscious objectification of the subject and subjectification of the object, the abstract as the real, and at the same time a dissolution through repetition, no more an identifyable 'it' after all due to both the reification and no less dissolution through repetition...

"first film in 5 years, tempted to say different yet the same, but not." peter gidal/london/2014

Demystified reaction by the viewer to a demystified situation; a cut in space and an interruption of duration, through (obvious) jumpcut editing within a strictly defined space. Manipulation of response and awareness thereof: through repetition and duration of image. Film situation as structured, as recorrective mechanism.

The most inclusive so far of my film preoccupations; zooming panning focussing to constantly redefine reality and the process of seeing/filming...also; demystification of the subject/object relationship and an attempt to create awareness of manipulation, rather than deny its filmic existence. A structured film in pre and post filming conceptualisation. The situation within the film is the process of making the film as such; the technical events of the filmmaking process are the film experience.

Assumption is a virtuosic personal tribute, a glimpse at history and a celebration of independent film culture. Gidal's short film was assembled round a recording of the voice of Mary Pat Leece, who worked at the London Filmmakers' Co-op in the mid-1970s, and later became a much loved lecturer at St Martins School of Art. She died suddenly in 1997. The film's rapid-fire montage of images and sounds encapsulates her politics, her Catholicism and her intellectual passion.

Made from the same footage as Epilogue but in a different order: 1. pan, 2. dissolve-crossfade, 3.freeze.... as opposed topan, freeze, crossfade-dissolve......very different in terms of filmic expectation, recognition, assumptions of anti-narrativity, all whilst watching these small fragments (each film only a few minutes long, each made from the (repeated) opticals of the same very short fragments of several seconds each....)....P.G.