Malcolm Le Grice

An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, on 22 December 2011. A special projector was constructed for the event which allowed the actual filmstrip to be burnt at the same time as the film was shown.

Abstract art film made for gallery exhibition.

Originally the work was presented as a pre-ordered sequence of 35mm slides showing two unknown people walking around the wall of a sea-side swimming pool. Switching between positive and negative focus on the mystery of the hidden and unresolved narrative between the ‘lovers?’. On occasions, this work was shown in superimposition with sections of the film Talla. Two sound tapes were mixed in improvisation. A digital video version has been made using the original slide sequence and audio tapes.

Malcolm Le Grice - 3D.

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

A brilliantly constructed, melancholic ode to the passing of time by Malcolm Le Grice.

Originally shot as part of Finnegan’s Chin, this sequence is re-edited as a portrait of performer Jack Murray. It continues the fascination of the forever repeating folk round “I knew a man called Michael Finnegan....”.

[Originally] six virtual screens matted into three Blu-ray projections. First exhibited at the Centre Multimedia Gantner in 2011, then on an immersive 18 metre curved screen at Tate Britain in 2012. It explores an interplay between abstracted colour, personal imagery and war related newsreel, seeking a coherent set of linking themes. Perhaps an homage to Dziga Vertov. A single screen version was made in 2013 and shown in Millennium, New York and at Tate Britain.

Arbitrary Logic, an interactive audio-visual synthesiser was first presented under the working title Osnabruk at the Osnabruk festival of 1987 and later as part of an improvised and computer music performance with Keith Rowe at the London Filmmakers Cooperative, December 1989.

Rocky, granite outcrops, a derelict quarry-worker and Dartmoor prison.

"3D Video SBS (side by side) format. For viewing on 3D monitor or television" -Le Grice

Shot with two 8mm cameras then projected side by side accompanied by an audio tape of "prepared piano".

Found film sequences brought together in the paranoia of the cold war and Vietnam.

Music J S Bach digitally reconstructed by Le Grice.

‘Critical Moment One’ was an un-planned recording of a one-year old boy exploring shells and sand on a beach. Though the boy was my own grand-son, it was never seen as a ‘home-movie’ – the child’s face is never seen and it was shot over his shoulder - as close to his ‘point-of-view’ as I could get. As a young man and as my own children grew up, I was greatly intrigued by the book ‘The Construction of Reality in the Child’ by Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. Piaget made an exceptionally close observation of the changing stages of behavior of his own children which provided me with a conceptual framework for my own observations.

An encounter with a small man-made waterfall presented in a triptych format.

Two fragments of 8mm home-movie footage shot by the artist near Berlin weave together in repeating cycles of action, temporal manipulation, and colour distortion, heightening the viewer’s awareness of film-time and the film-image, and perception of colour in motion.

An impromptu portrait of Jonas Mekas shot at the Serpentine Gallery, London on the occasion of a celebration of his 90th birthday. All made in a single take whilst Mekas videos Mike Figgis playing Flugel horn and Rosey Chan plays piano.

Le Grice no longer simply uses the printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity… With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating “richness” of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. - Deke Dusinberre

In October 2009 I did a show in Prague. I returned to the Kafka house of my ‘Benefit of Mr K’ but found the whole street and Castle area had become a tourist trap – so I wandered into the back-streets at the bottom of the hill and found a little local bar for a plate of sausage, mustard and strong brown bread. Intending to drink some wine I noticed that Absinthe was included in the drinks list so ordered it. I admitted to the bar-keeper that I had never had it before and he showed me how it should be mixed and flamed with sugar – and I recorded with my pocket video camera. With a little gesture to Picasso and Degas, I became the Absinthe Drinker.

The travelogue footage that appears here – the landscape rushing by, fragments of cityscapes, figures in cafes, forests, and beaches – is reminiscent of other videos made by Le Grice since the 1990s. The sense of foreboding is unique though. It comes across in the colours of the superimposed imagery: principally cold blues, a furnace-like orange and acid tones. The sound is similarly evocative. One might hear it as a rushing waterfall, a storm, or perhaps the sound of nuclear fallout as suggested by the title. The sublime, which Le Grice has often courted in his video work, is an apocalyptic variant in Strontium.

A video work based on video8 and hi8 material shot over six years. Chronos is the Titian – the time god who rules the universe – the flux in which events are born, mature and decay. The work explores video as a creative form of memory, it moves outwards from the particular and personal images of a diary – the fragmentary and inconsistent building blocks of memory – towards their transformation into more fundamental symbols in the cycles of days, seasons, birth and death. This transforming symbolic memory is all placed in the context of the social and political events of the world – particularly China and the Balkans – as they are encountered in the personal space.

Every cheap visual effect in the editing package and a sound track made with free software from a corn-flakes packet.

Yes – just looping images of pigs on three screens with a tape sound track of a Chinese pop song.