Reign of the Vampire

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.

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

Abstract art film made for gallery exhibition.

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.

Documentary about British Art in the 60's produced by the BBC starting with Fraser and Kasmin, moving to the modern sculpture movement lead by Caro largely at Central Saint Martins, and finishing with political and performance art in London.

Music J S Bach digitally reconstructed by Le Grice.

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.

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

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.

This multi-image work is based on Le Grice's longer, color-field film-loop installation Joseph’s Coat (1973).

Blind White Duration is a film concerned with constructing an experience from limited perceptions. The viewer is introduced to a limited range of images (a snowy day in Harrow, walking to the Metropolitan Line station) shown in brief fade-ins and outs or quick flashes. For most of the film, the screen remains white. This is a film about the light of the projector, the white screen and the white image which emerges out of it.

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.

From the earliest point when I started to make film one of the biggest influence on my way of thinking came from Franz Kafka. In particular the titles ‘Castle One’ and ‘Castle Two’ made symbolic reference to Kafka’s book ‘The Castle’. In this book, like ‘The Trial’ the central fictitious but ‘first-person’ existential character was ‘K’ – clearly in part an oblique but intentional reference to Kafka’s own name. The short video sequence used in ‘For the Benefit of Mr. K’, was shot in the little street in Prague showing the small house in which Kafka wrote ‘The Trial’. The title is also a direct reference to the song by the Beatles. The sound track is a short sequence discovered by my son of the Beatles rehearsing this song in the Abbey Road recording studio.

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

"My experience of Monet’s large-scale panoramic paintings of his water lily garden when I was about 14 years old became a crucial artistic memory. There have been a number of versions of the material I shot in about 1984 of water lilies and reeds in a pond. This [...] is the latest version and is part of work on a larger project ‘Treatise’ still in process." -MLG