TEACHING AND LEARNING CINEMA

We, Lucas and I, are so saddened by the passing of Malcolm Le Grice. Lucas and Malcolm first met in 2003. Reconnecting in Sydney in 2010, Malcolm told Lucas he felt it was time ‘hang up his boots’ on performing Horror Film 1. Since then, we’ve been in intermittent contact with Malcolm, lots in the past couple of years. 

Malcolm was aware of the work we had been doing with his London Film Makers Co-op colleague Guy Sherwin. The output of our work with Guy was (Wo)Man With Mirror a user’s manual (2009), a fold out paper guide that steps the user through making a performance of Guy’s Man With Mirror. 

Malcolm’s Horror Film 1 has been seen by many people and as Malcolm has described it, it’s a crowd pleaser. I recall him saying he always programmed it last because he found works that followed it had a hard time making an impact. Over the past several years, Lucas and I, our data science friend in France, Raja Appuswamy, and Malcolm and his son Oliver have spent lots of time on video calls, talking about the evolving manual for Horror Film 1. We have been so lucky to roadtest this while Malcolm has been about. Performances using the evolving manual have been created by Cinzia Nistico in Europe. There have also been some in Canberra. 

Our Horror Film 1 community has gathered together around transmitting the work, making sure it can continue beyond Malcolm. He has been at the centre but other people have also been important to Lucas and I in our Le Grice history endeavours. Of course, David Curtis and Steven Ball. Also on this non-exhaustive list are Mike Leggett, Mark Williams and Mark Webber. My own view is that Mark Webber’s work in the 2000s was crucial to the visibility of these British film artists.

So fast forward to 2013, here you see Malcolm, Lucas, me and our families having dinner in Loddiswell near the Le Grices’ village in Devon. 

Enthusiastic hospitality is a quality I associate with Malcolm. That’s also a quality Lucas and I hold dear, I believe. Some qualities of enthusiastic hospitality are getting really caught up in the work and wanting to share the experience of getting caught up in the work with others.  All this adds up to empowerment – participation is a political, and therefore, vital action. Making work is one way to participate but experiencing work, being part of its audience, is another. This is quite a generous way to think about work, it factors in a relationship with an audience or a viewer from the start. This evens out the power relationships in what I think is a productive way. 

We had the good fortune to get to know Malcolm when he was thinking about legacies and how to pass them along. Of course, we have been interested in that for some time so our relationship was positive in every way. And this has been helped along greatly by Oliver, Malcolm’s son.

And here we are having lunch with Judith and Malcolm at their home in Devon. Note the impromptu furnishing of hats for everyone and a glass of wine. And in the image above at Loddiswell, you can see us with all of both our families. The Le Grice hospitality was extended not just to us but to our entourages! 

So that’s enthusiastic hospitality.

The other quality I associate with Malcolm is radical sharing. In talking through how to pass Horror Film 1 on to others over 2022-24, it’s been crystal clear that the state Malcolm wants for his work is that it circulates. The words of Malcolm’s we’ve included in the Horror Film 1 instructions are these:

“I think of [Horror Film 1] like jazz. You can have a tune and when you start to play it and improvise on it, it’s something new and it belongs to you, the performer. It’s like a skeleton around which something can happen. And I’m not precious about the copyright of it. Once you’ve performed it, it belongs in the world, right? It belongs to the world.

And there’s also the fact that what I did was very random, really, and it was very influenced by all kinds of stuff in the situation. It wasn’t just me. William Raban, Gill Eatherly, Annabel [Nicolson], we were all working together, we were messing about doing stuff together. 

And also the Film Co-op itself [the London Film Makers’ Co-op] … something that’s very different, particular, about the London Film Co-op – [is that] people were not precious about ideas … The ideas were thrashed around, they were shared, they were inter-influenced …it’s a different sort of culture that is in a discourse like jazz and improvisation. It can change and things don’t belong quite simply to one person. For me my work is part of a public discourse really. I’m not precious about it, if somebody wants to preserve it and work on it or be influenced by it or modify it, change it.

…

I should do what I need to do [to write down instructions for the work or a letter to a future user as Louise put it] to make it possible for you but after that, it’s up to you, if you want to do something different with it … – I leave that to you, it’s not up to me.” 

So now’s the time to share your Le Grices with audiences. If you have some, organise a screening. Paddy Hay at the Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne is going to do this in late Jan, using the Australian National Film and Sound Archive’s Non-Theatrical Lending Collection. Berlin Horse (1970) is not available (why is that, we wonder) but Little Dog for Roger (1967), Witchurch Down (1972) and Blind White Duration (1967) are all on Paddy’s list. 

If you do make a screening, it would be kind to share what you do on the internet and make it findable. Be a bit of a librarian and use some hashtags and include Malcolm’s name in the title. That way the Le Grice family can find what you do – I know they will be delighted to know about this activity. 

I am hoping to do more with a recent work of Malcolm’s, Eye of the Dragon. The soundtrack is by his grandson Benjamin. This is a three screen work but it does have a single channel iteration. I showed that single channel work in Canberra in May 2024 to a warm response from our small but enthusiastic audience.

For me personally as a creative person, I felt quite connected to Malcolm. He was always making work – using his phone or his iPad or drawing. When we visited in 2013, I recall he had been holidaying in Greece making iPad drawings. He’d also just made a new video work on his phone during a train trip with Mark Webber. Over this time 2022-24 when we’ve been talking regularly, Malcolm’s often been showing us new images and of course, he shared Eye of the Dragon. The conjecture I put on this and that I connect to myself is that for some of us the day is not done without a new piece of art in it. Art might be the wrong word, but some sort of creative output.

The final thing I want to say about Malcolm was that he was capable across so many fields of endeavour – he didn’t just make work, he built the early developing equipment for the London Film Makers’ Co-op, literally timber rotating tanks. (My favourite account is in Mark Webber’s Shoot Shoot Shoot published by Lux for the LFMC 50^th in 2016, check out Malcolm in his own words on page 104. Malcolm also explains his role in bringing into existence the LFMC as an organisation that did more than screenings.) He also acquired the very important Debrie printer. Those who have experience in film preservation know how precious these printers are because they can cope with shrinkage and other kinds of damage. I did have a photo of the printer taken at Now.here in 2013 in London but I can’t find that one. 

And alongside his creative and engineering feats, Malcolm was also a writer. Real TIME/SPACE (1972) is still an article Lucas and I refer to often. And many bookshelves of experimental film people have a copy of his compilation Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (2001). It was also plain to Lucas and me that Malcolm is much loved by his family, we’ve learnt this from our time spent with his son Oliver. Thank you, Malcolm, for your generous art and your generous sharing.