Page 69 - Studio International - November December 1975

ironic thrust : that the cinema is a valid metaphor for
modern consciousness only so far as melting plastic is a
metaphor for the condition of the overheated modern
brain. Hence Keen's mania for what David Curtis has
called "graphic image destruction,'4 also becomes the
graphic destruction of our ability to assimilate that
imagery.
But Keen's assault on word and image remains the
product of conspicuous excess, and he is outside
the main tradition of expanded cinema efforts here.
For although the beginnings of that tradition can be
found in an early type of performance piece roughly
related to Keen's work, the more purely interpolative
efforts substitute abstraction for distraction. Malcolm Le
Grice, for example, had done several performance works
in the sixties before he became involved in film, and his
first film — Castle I— was known as the 'light bulb film'
because the light bulb which figures in the film was also
in the theatre where the film was screened, pulsing on
and off, alternately obliterating and reconstituting the
screen. The images — mostly 'found' images of political/
military/industrial institutions —are, of course,
annihilated by light identical to the light by which they
were inscribed as images. Le Grice commented in his
notes to the film that 'The awareness of the audience is
returned to their actual situation (viewing a film) by
reference to the bulb and the perceptual problems which
its flashing creates.'5
Some of Le Grice's later work refined the notion of
the presence/absence of an image and at the same time
extended his concerns to the articulation of the screen
space. Matrix, for instance, is a six-screen film
comprising six film loops of optically printed colour
frames. Each screen is further split in half by the use (in
printing) of an 8mm mask, and the colours are
interspaced with black frames, creating twelve areas of
rhythmic, visual pulsation. But the twelve areas do not
remain discrete, because in the performance Le Grice
manipulates the projectors so that the images overlap
entirely or by half : he starts from a normal single-screen

Tony Hill Point Source 1973 Malcolm Le Grice Matrix (first performed 1973)
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