Page 28 - Studio International - November December 1975

all the film-makers who surfaced during the next two
years did so as a result of meeting existing film-makers,
either in teaching situations or through the newly
important film co-op workshops. During early '68 the
Drury Lane Arts Lab had attempted to establish a film-
making group based on the rudimentary workshops and
equipment-sharing co-op organized by Malcolm, Ben
Yahya (an LSFT student) and a number of professionals
and amateurs. But the only (and incomplete)
achievement of the group was a collective record of the
Grosvenor Square demonstration of that year (partly sold
to the BBC and partly impounded by the lab responsible
for the colour processing). Subsequently the beautifully
Heath Robinson developing and printing equipment,
designed and largely built by Malcolm, was moved from
the Arts Lab to his home in Harrow, where the stalwarts
who continued to use it increasingly tended to be
Malcolm's own students from Goldsmith's and St.
Martin's. Fred Drummond, Gill Eatherley, Annabel
Nicolson and William Raban were amongst those who
later emerged from that group.
November '68. Withdrawal from the Drury Lane
Arts Lab. During the year before the second Arts Lab
opened in Robert Street, the co-op's office moves from
Covent Garden to Bit's premises in Ladbroke Grove, and
(Carla Liss) organizes occasional shows at the newly
independent 'Electric Cinema' there.
February '69. Alfredo Leonardi shows an Italian
programme at the Electric, only notable for his own
lyrical Book of The Saints of Eternal Rome.
March '69. The first Hamburg Filmschau is organized
by the co-op there. Despite these signs of activity in
Europe, the programmes I put together for Derek Hill's
New Cinema Club are still exclusively of New American
Cinema.
August/September '69. The co-op organizes two
weeks of programmes at the Edinburgh Festival ; again
predominantly of NAC works, but Gidal, Hartog, Scotty,
Drummond, Larcher and Le Grice are represented. Also
curiously Peter Whitehead (Benefit of the Doubt) and
'Exit' — 'a radical group of artist film-makers from
Glasgow'. Bill Moritz, in Edinburgh, shows a programme
of West Coast movies including new work by the
Whitneys (which sends Malcolm off into the Elysian
Fields of computer-assisted film-making —the original
subject of his forthcoming book) and David Lourie's
Project One, which introduces the notion of re-filming
from the screen into the English experience.
September '69. PAP mount a show with Gimpel
Fils at the ICA. Gimpel's announce that they're to sell
films as art works from now on (but nothing further is
heard of the venture.) The Heins come to show
Reproductions and meet Malcolm for the first time.
(Immediate rapport). Other works in the show include
Markopoulos' Political Portraits, new works by Kren, and
Brakhage's Scenes from Under Childhood Pt 1 —the
first 'new' Brakhage seen in England.
4 October '69. The New Arts Lab opens in Robert
Street with David Larcher's Mare's Tail. Like Kren,
Le Grice and Scotty, Larcher made his first films in
virtual isolation (as he still does), but unlike them he
came to film already an accomplished photographer.
(A photo-essay shot in New York in '66 for Image
magazine includes a portrait of Andy Warhol
projecting his light-show at the DOM theatre—but no
reference to film-making work there per se.) His first
film, KO, was made while he was at the RCA in '67/8
(a fellow student being Hartog), and Mare's Tail
contains some sections shot at that time that bear the
distinct RCA-student stamp. But elsewhere the amount
of local interest he is able to concentrate upon the
screen/image through distortion, scratching and
painting on the emulsion and so on is unlike the work
of any other English film-maker. (Dunford's one
exercise in the Brakhage idiom, Weeds, and the work
of Larcher's own 'students' Gary Woods and Jonathan
Langren are the only possible parallels that come to mind).
Brakhage is the obvious root-source of both the
technique and the epic-form of Mare's Tail (its attempt
to bring birth, life and death together with the elements
in one great construction), but as an epic it is ultimately David Larcher Mare's Tale 1969
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